Europe: A zone of translation?

Abstract

For one to imagine Europe as a zone of translation is in the first place to put oneself as an outsider into a space called Europe, who needs his/her ideas, thoughts, and practices to be translated into what is regarded as European. But equally importantly, it also requires one to think of Europe as a collection of many spaces, of other spaces, where the subjects of Europe are thus both insiders and outsiders at the same time, and therefore requiring translation to communicate and to be communicated and to exist and be cohabitated by others. In such a Europe as a social space, the immigrant, who may be a citizen or a non-citizen, is the classic outsider caught in a process of self-reflexivity. A perpetual dynamic of translation of ideas, practices, and arguments is the only way through which the immigrant can access this social space. But if that is the case, in other words, if only through translation is the social constituted, one can then re-locate the question of the figure of the outsider and mark it as instrumental in the constitution of the social. The idea of citizenship still animates Europe and the debates on European citizenship feature this social space of the insiders and outsiders who are in Europe while at the same time being in some way out of it. This variegated field of citizenship of a continent (as distinct from a state) with different nuances, emphases, histories, and structures suggests that the social indicates something beyond citizenship. What is this supplement, needed to constitute this social? Two factors are suggested here: The phenomenon of immigration and the practices of translation. This article is about these two constituents of the social space called Europe.

Keywords:

• Citizen
• immigrant
• labour
• translation
• social spaces

Acknowledgements

Some of the views expressed in this article are results of my long discussions with Etienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra. However, the responsibility for these is entirely mine.

Notes

On the link between citizenship and the social, see Isin (2008).

In this connection, also see Boedeltje (2012).

For a comprehensive discussion on this, see Sassen (2006).

Classic is the story of Adelaide's Destitute Asylum (1852–1915), now a part of the Migration Museum, Adelaide. Visit www.historysa.gov.au; also Geyer (1994), published on the occasion of Women's Suffrage Centenary, South Australia, 1894–1994.

The world system theory has been generally inadequate in explaining the significance of heterogeneity of labour in capitalist world market. A crucial exception, from which I have learnt a lot, is the work of Hungarian sociologist Borocz (2010).

The idea of the ‘vanishing mediator’ has a long lineage. Besides Althusser, Jameson (1973) analysed the concept, which denotes the function of mediating between two opposing ideas, as a transition occurs between them. At the point where one idea has been replaced by the other, and the concept is no longer required, the mediator vanishes. In terms of the idea of dialectics particularly as propounded by Hegel, the conflict between the theoretical abstraction and its empirical negation (through trial and error) is resolved by a concretion of the two ideas, representing a theoretical abstraction taking into account the previous contradiction, whereupon the mediator vanishes. In political history, we have seen social movements operating in a particular way to influence politics, until these movements are forgotten or they change their purpose. Jameson (1973, p. 78) wrote

… Protestantism assumes its function as a ‘vanishing mediator’. For what happens here is essentially that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of inner worldly life to take place, it has no further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene. It is thus in the strictest sense of the word a catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms; and we may say that with the removal of the brackets, the whole institution of religion itself (or in other words what is here designated as ‘Protestantism’) serves in its turn as a kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over. This is the point at which to observe that such a picture of historical change—however irreconcilable it may be with vulgar Marxism—is in reality perfectly consistent with genuine Marxist thinking and is, indeed, at one with the model proposed by Marx himself for the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. In the former it was Jacobinism which played the role of the vanishing mediator, functioning as the conscious and almost Calvinistic guardian of revolutionary morality, of bourgeois universalistic and democratic ideals, a guardianship which may be done away with in Thermidor, when the practical victory of the bourgeoisie is assured and an explicitly monetary and market system can come into being. And in that parody of 1789, which is the revolution of 1848, it is similarly under the cloak of the traditions and values of the great revolution, and of the empire which followed it, that the new commercial society of the Second Empire emerges.

On this, see Anderson (2005), particularly the ‘Introduction’.