THEORIZING THE SOCIAL
One of the most gratifying turns translation theory has taken over the past two or three decades is the turn into the social: the increasing awareness that translation is not an abstract equivalence game, divorced from real people’s actions in a social context, but a richly social process involving not only telephone, fax, and modem contact with a wide variety of employers and clients and other commissioners as well as friends and acquaintances who might know some word or phrase you can’t find in your dictionaries—this is the territory explored so brilliantly and systematically by Justa Holz-Mänttäri in Translatorisches Handeln (1984) and a dozen articles—but also large-scale sociopolitical forces such as ideology and power. Translation has been mystified for so long as a set of technical transfer processes performed on texts, on words and phrases, that the veritable explosion of socially attuned translation theory has felt like a release from prison, a liberation of theory to explore the fullest implications of translation, without fear of transgressing some taboo. There are, of course, still people who consider translation studies exclusively a branch of contrastive linguistics, and derogate any approach to translation that exceeds the purview of linguistic equivalence studies as “not really about translation at all”; but those people are increasingly finding themselves in the minority, and many of them, in order to go on being heard in the translation studies community, have been expanding their theoretical frameworks to include the social and the ideological.8
The difficulty in moving from the linguistic to the social, of course, is that the relevant data multiplies exponentially and becomes enormously more complex—thus creating numerous methodological crises in the field, which have been negotiated by individual social theorists of translation in a variety of ways. How do you bring the vast social realm in which translation takes place into the relatively narrow confines of a single book or article? By what method or methods do you impose order—patterns, regularities, structures—on a field that seems to defy such reductions at every turn? Even linguistic methodologies are constantly thwarted by the complexity of actual spoken and written language; how much greater the power to thwart translation scholars, then, do the complexities of whole societies have, whole cultures, whole civilizations over hundreds and even thousands of years?
What I want to do here in part two is explore some general trends in the methodological management of this complexity, through close methodological readings of four recent books that I believe illustrate those trends in exemplary ways. The books are André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992a), Anthony Pym’s Epistemological Problems in Translation and Its Teaching: A Seminar for Thinking Students (1992), Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991), and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz’s Translating Poetic Discourse (1985). The four pair up tidily, but also complexly: Lefevere is as intent upon stabilizing systems structurally as Pym is on unraveling them semiotically; Levine and Díaz-Diocaretz both theorize (from) their own practice as translators, Levine as a North American translator-into-English of Latin American texts, Díaz-Diocaretz as a Latin American translator-into-Spanish of North American texts, Levine translating sexist males, Díaz-Diocaretz the radical lesbian feminist work of Adrienne Rich; Lefevere and Díaz-Diocaretz are the more systematic thinkers, Pym and Levine the more personal and anecdotal.
I’m noticing that polysystems theorists aren’t using that term much any more; it seems to be losing its currency, modulating into the broader and better established field of systems theory—quite rightly, I think, because systems theory accounts for that multiplicity of systems signaled by the “poly” that Itamar Even-Zohar stuck on the approach and the school that has followed it since the mid-seventies. Systems theory is a striking application of the Kantian notion that we can never know the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, raw reality, and that we only think we know it because we are so adept at imposing representational systems on it, psychosocial systems that condition or constitute virtually every aspect of our perception and understanding. Kant thought that the understanding (Verständnis) constituted “reality” through operations with four innate “categories,” quality, quantity, manner, and relation; radical systems theory would call those categories just another system imposed on human behavior, which the categorist then claims to “know.”
Systems theory also has an Achilles’ heel, however: the survival within it of a pre-Kantian objectivism, aspiring to the status of empirical science, which leads systems theorists to believe precisely what Kant did, that the one Ding an sich that can be truly known is the object of their own theorizing—in this case, systems. What most people think of as realities are in fact all socially generated systems—all except that system called systems theory, which is a science, an accurate representation of the systematicity of external reality.
That Lefevere’s argumentative heel is vulnerable to this accusation as well shouldn’t be held against him; the tendency to reify one’s own beliefs, opinions, perceptions as reality is one of the oldest impulses in Western thought, or what Lefevere would call “the Western system,” and is incredibly hard to shake. I don’t know anyone, regardless of his or her radical philosophical pretensions, who isn’t constantly falling into the objectivist trap—and I’m not excluding myself, either. In fact, to claim immunity to the trap is to fall into it. The instant you think you’re out of it and are never going to fall in it—you’re in it. (As Anthony Pym pointed out when I sent an earlier draft of this chapter and the next to him, in grouping people such as Lefevere, Even-Zohar, and Toury together as “polysystems theorists,” I am myself falling into the trap of systemic reification.) For Westerners (and, nowadays, anyone who has been significantly influenced by Western thought, which is just about everyone), reification is one of the cognitive tics that make cognition possible.
But none of that makes it any less useful to explore the many ways in which we continue to reify our perceptions as reality, our opinions as truth, our feelings as atmosphere or mood. One of the great things about Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame—as about most systems theories of translation and related phenomena—is its insistence on prying back the covers behind which we repress the process of “naturalization,” the process of making the artificial (seem) natural, the imagined (seem) real. Lefevere’s concept of rewriting not only brings together social activities that have been kept separate and variously respected or neglected—translating, criticizing, editing, anthologizing, writing histories, and so on—but also shows patiently, painstakingly, with abundant closely examined examples, the extent to which our literary universe is the ever-shifting product of such activities.
Constructivist theories of canon formation—the insistence that qualities of literary greatness or ephemeral trash reside not inside individual texts (where critics simply recognize them and point them out) but in social acts of construction, of system building—are not exactly new, of course. They have been in the air at least since the late sixties, fed by Derridean deconstruction, Michel Foucault and the New Historicism, various poststructuralist Marxisms (Louis Althusser’s, for example) and psychoanalyticisms (Jacques Lacan’s), and the linked differences of German Rezeptionsästhetik and American reader-response theory. But Lefevere is one of a fairly small but well-placed group of theorists who have been working to articulate the full implications of constructivist systems theory for translation studies, which they tend to imagine as a branch of comparative literary and cultural studies; and the implication that he explores most fully here is the profound functional similarity between translation and the other acts of rewriting by which cultural systems are created, maintained, and changed. In so doing he places rewriting at the very constructivist heart of system building, at the source of systems—an exciting and flattering place for translators and other socially ignored or neglected rewriters to find themselves.
Moreover, he illustrates his theoretical points with rich excursions into literary and cultural encounters not often experienced by Eurocentric translation scholars, especially “the Arabic system”—especially the pre-Islamic poetic form of the qasidah—and “the African system,” but also, in passing, various other non-Western and often nonliterate literatures. That there are serious problems with this Western claim to know the non-Western other should be clear, of course, from recent postcolonial or subaltern studies (including those dealing with translation, by Cheyfitz, Niranjana, and others). In seeking to provide “a neutral, non-ethnocentric framework for the discussion of power and relationships shaped by power” (1992a, 10), Lefevere can really only seek to neutralize his ethnocentrism rhetorically as much as possible through self-awareness and study of the other—can never actually eradicate that ethnocentrism, which, as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989, 2.2.2.1B) says of prejudice, is the condition of his (or anyone’s) seeing anything at all; and his attempt “to make this book free from the symptoms of literary provincialism” (Lefevere 1992a, 10) isn’t exactly the same thing as finding a cure for that dread disease. But at least Lefevere is making gestures of goodwill—gestures that have required enormous research efforts, far beyond what most of us are typically willing to undertake for a 160-page book.
What I want to focus most closely on in Lefevere’s book, though, is system, his systemic conception of system, specifically as an inroad into the systemic approach to social translation studies today. This seems like a heavy burden for a single book to bear, and of course it is; but like a good rewriter—like Augustine in one of Lefevere’s more sardonic examples (7)—I’m planning to allegorize it, to treat it as a sign or symptom of an entire set of assumptions and approaches in recent translation theory, and thus to make it signify beyond its author’s intentions. In the spirit of Lefevere’s book, I’m going to undertake this rewriting as neutrally as I can manage, without holding either the book or its (rewritten) allegorical significance up for praise or blame. Like Lefevere, I’m interested in exploring the systematicity of what I study—which in this case is the rewriting performed not by translators (editors, anthologists, etc.) but by translation theorists—not in evaluating it.
But this immediately raises a problem, which Lefevere helps me put my finger on: “It is not my intention here,” he writes at one point, “to evaluate the different translations. Nor is it my task to do so: evaluation would simply reveal the hidden prescriptive assumptions with which I approach the translations. Since I have tried to describe, not prescribe, there is no reason why I should evaluate. That task is better left to the reader” (109). This signals a fairly representative turn among systemic theories of translation as a social act or process, away from the prescriptive and evaluative bias of most earlier translation theories, which were centrally concerned to determine the ideal translation or translation model and to evaluate existing or possible translations by reference to that ideal. Typical of the newer social approaches (as well as some newer linguistic and literary approaches) is a refusal to normatize translation, an insistence on describing the processes by which translations come to be commissioned, made, and disseminated with complete indifference to the question of which translations are better or worse than others. (The significant exceptions to this are the explicitly political theorists in the foreignist/postcolonial camp, who fiercely attack translations that seem to be complicit with or overt instruments of various sociopolitical hegemonies, especially patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.)
But I wonder: “evaluation would simply reveal the hidden prescriptive assumptions with which I approach the translations” (109)? Lefevere’s hidden polemic is directed specifically against the essentialist notion that evaluation is an objective representation of quality or value residing somehow intrinsically within a translation, and with that much I agree wholeheartedly. But his choice of the word “simply”—as opposed, say, to “merely” or “only”—makes me wonder whether the revelation of hidden assumptions is ever simple. The revelation of hidden assumptions, along with the systemic explanation of the origin and nature of those assumptions, is one of Lefevere’s most significant tasks in the book. In fact this is by and large what constructivists do: explain behavior that the behaver thinks of as autonomous (“I wanted to do it!”) by reference to a higher level of control or constraint, which is systemic. Is he suggesting here, then, that the only hidden assumptions that should not be revealed are his own?
If he is—and I can’t imagine what else he could be implying—he is pointing tacitly toward a major area of disagreement between systematizers of his stripe and more personal theorists such as Anthony Pym and Jill Levine, who, believing that it is impossible ever to conceal (let alone eradicate) personal biases and prejudices, would rather be as up-front as possible with them. For the “personalizers,” this is a question of honesty, and ultimately of self-awareness, which the theorist develops in her/himself and encourages in others. For the systematizers it is another kind of issue altogether, one controlled by “the theoretical system” to which Lefevere and most other systems theorists “belong,” or attach themselves, the ethos of neutral, unbiased, objective, empirical science, an ethos that seeks to convince readers by repressing personal bias. “I have constructed the argument of this book,” Lefevere writes, “on the basis of evidence that can be documented, and is” (10): he isn’t just making this up, it’s an accurate representation of the systemic nature of social reality. To support this evidentiality he has also “had liberal recourse to quotations from sources generally regarded as authoritative” (10). Lefevere is just as honest in his empiricist rewriting of translation (and other forms of rewriting) as the translators he discusses in their moralist (etc.) rewriting of the texts they translate: just as the literary system of pre-World War II Anglo-American culture did not allow translators of Aristophanes even to consider calling a penis a penis, a vulva a vulva, so too will the theoretical system of empirical science not allow Lefevere to reveal (let alone explore) his own hidden assumptions in rewriting the translations he reads. It is simply inconceivable. To become self-reflexive would be to step outside of the system that enables him to perceive what he perceives; in that sense self-reflexivity would be almost literally blinding.
Most helpful of all in Lefevere’s book, it seems to me, is the openness and comprehensiveness with which he defines his conception of system— largely because few systems theorists of translation outside the polysystems group have ever foregrounded their implicit systems model as articulately as they. This is one reason, in fact, for choosing Lefevere’s book for close analysis here: it not only exemplifies but also explicitly theorizes system, systematization, a systemic approach to the field. Lefevere’s first definitional task is negative, in fact, doubly negative in that he must negate the negative connotation “the system” has picked up in ordinary nontechnical English: “When I use the word ‘system’ in these pages,” he writes, “the term has nothing to do with ‘the System’ (usually spelled with a capital S) as it increasingly occurs in colloquial usage to refer to the more sinister aspects of the powers that be, and against which there is no recourse. Within systems thinking the term ‘system’ has no such Kafkaesque overtones. It is rather intended to be a neutral, descriptive term, used to designate a set of interrelated elements that happen to share certain characteristics that set them apart from other elements perceived as not belonging to the system” (12). One doesn’t have to have read very much Freud to suspect that something is going on here that Lefevere isn’t telling us about, perhaps that he isn’t exactly aware of himself: we have a nightmarish Kafkaesque scene, which we are to banish from our imaginations (“the jury,” to quote a similar impossible request, “will please disregard the witness’s last remark”), and a reassuringly neutral scientific scene, which we are to embrace.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of this negation (Verneinung), except that its significance is probably nothing so simplistic as the exact opposite of what Lefevere says it is—that is, he says it’s not Kafkaesque, so that’s precisely what it is. No, it’s more complicated than that. Like the foreignists and the postcolonialists, Lefevere is concerned throughout with power; unlike them, he is concerned here to distinguish his analysis of power rhetorically from Kafkaesque nightmares: he wants to analyze the systemic functioning of power, but he doesn’t want his analysis to be (mis) taken for an indictment, so he scientizes it, descriptivizes it, portrays it as value-free inquiry. To give that impression he must here, in the early definitional stages of his book, euphemize systems far more than his actual analysis would warrant: “a set of interrelated elements that happen to share certain characteristics that set them apart from other elements perceived as not belonging to the system” (12). No power? Just interrelated elements sharing characteristics?
“Literature is not a deterministic system,” he goes on, “not ‘something’ that will ‘take over’ and ‘run things,’ destroying the freedom of the individual reader, writer, and rewriter. This type of misconception can be traced back to the colloquial use of the term and must be dismissed as irrelevant. Rather, the system acts as a series of ‘constraints’” (12). As Lefevere portrays it, “the” literary system does determine, control, regulate a good deal of what most readers and rereaders, writers and rewriters like to think of as their personal autonomy, and in that sense it is deterministic; it is just not deterministic in an absolute sense, leaving no room at all for freedom. His conception of system is bureaucratized, steeped in what Nietzsche called the internalization of mastery, what I, in The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991c), called ideosomatics: it lacks a despot, no one tells you what to do, but it does regulate nearly every aspect of social life; it does condition the actions we like to think of as our own, even though it can never control our behavior perfectly. It is also bureaucratized rhetorically, in Lefevere’s determination not to rail against it (or sing its praises), to remain perfectly neutral, descriptive, scientific about it.
On the other hand, the bureaucratized or systemically internalized “constraints” repeatedly fight their way back up to the surface in Lefevere’s own rhetoric, as here when he declares a certain understanding of system a “misconception” that “must be dismissed as irrelevant.” More effectively repressed, this “constraint” would have been less personal, less obviously the product of individual insistence: not must be dismissed as irrelevant, is irrelevant. Even in the strongest bureaucratic regimen the rules keep embodying themselves in individual despots who lay them down and tell people what to do, what to dismiss, what to accept.
Less effectively repressed, of course—for example, more insistently personalized—this constraint would have told us more about Lefevere’s own ideological agenda, the origins of his systematism not only in desire, will, and need, but also in the collective inclinations of his group and background as well.
Implicit in Lefevere’s conception of literary systems (probably of other systems also) is that they have coherent and well-marked beginnings. This is, in fact, an important component of most systems theory: without a clear beginning, and presumably a clear end as well, it is difficult to pace off any sort of boundaries, to distinguish one system from others, or from the nonsystemic swirl surrounding it (if, indeed, there is such a swirl). This is an interesting paradox at the heart of systems theory: in order to set the stage for the dynamic study of change within a system, the theorist has to build static walls around the system, saying, in effect, all I’m really interested in is what happens inside these four walls, and I’d rather not think of the walls at all, except to posit their presence and their relative permanence. Needless to say, a systems theory of translation is forced to deal also with incursions from one system into another, and this forces Lefevere to focus more attention on the problem of systemic boundaries, interfaces, permeabilities than systems theorists in many other fields; but like other systems theorists, Lefevere still, despite the transformations wrought by translation, retains a primary belief in the stability of systemic boundaries.
This is particularly clear in his repeated references to the beginnings of literary systems: “Once a poetics is codified …” (26), “Codification takes place at a certain time, and once it has taken place …” (38), “Once a literary system is established …” (38), “Once a culture has arrived at a canonized image of its past…” (112), and so on. The cumulative impact of these remarks is strong: systems start at specific moments in time, and once they have started, once they are in place, certain laws apply, certain patterns derived from systems theory can be discerned. This assumption at least loosely ties our interpretive hands in the strangest of these remarks, in which Lefevere tells us that “practice precedes theory when the poetics of a literary system is codified. Codification occurs at a certain time …” (27): here, but for Lefevere’s repeated emphasis on “at the moment that,” we might be tempted to read “when” to mean “if” or “whenever,” that is, “in all cases in which the poetics of a literary system is codified,” allowing for a greater temporal diffusion of codifications. The strange thing about the remark is that it seems to be saying that “practice precedes theory” at the historical moment when the system begins. Is there some mystical instantaneity here, some massive convergence of energies into the moment at which a system is born, a systemic poetics is codified, so that at that moment practice is given precedence or priority over theory?
The real problem that I see from Lefevere’s own point of view is that it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish codification (and thus systematicity) from theorization, which places practice in an uncomfortable middle ground between system and nonsystem, order and chaos. If theory is the codification of practice, which precedes theory at the moment of codification, what is the systemic nature of practice? Is practice a presystemic directionality that is then theoretically codified at a certain moment? If so, does “presystem” belong proleptically (or, less insistently idealized, retroactively) to system? Can a system, once theoretically codified and thus officially in place, be expanded backward to cover the loose (chaotic or disordered) odds and ends that preceded and in some sense also preformed it? We speak of the “preromantics,” the “premoderns”—does the retroactive codification of their presystematic directionality in effect incorporate them into the system, extend the system to cover them too?
The other temporal problem I see in this conception of a literary system as bounded by theoretical codification is that there are numerous horizons of theoretical codification—in fact, an endless series of them, beginning, theoretically, with the theoretical beginning of the system (though it could also be argued that Herder is a preromantic theorist who helps to theorize romanticism, Henry James is a premodern theorist who helps to theorize modernism, etc.) and continuing long past the official or unofficial end of the system. (Is romanticism over? Is modernism over? These are favored topics of debate among literary historians.) Ironically enough, it seems likely that the official beginning of a literary system is something that can only be codified or theorized after the system is officially codified (often, in fact, when it is in decline or officially over). The system-beginning act of codification can’t codify its own originary moment. That is left to later codifications, theorists who come along and say, “Look, folks, right there was the place this or that all started.”
And then, of course, other theorists will argue that some other moment was in fact the originary one. There must be a clear boundary in order for the thing to be thematized as a system, but clear boundaries in human events are notoriously hard to come by; usually they have to be declared by fiat, usually by a group of theorists powerful enough to enforce the fiat, usually by denying various institutional goodies (recognition, publication, hence also directly or indirectly promotion and tenure) to dissident theorists who refuse to toe the party line. (This is a nascent systems theory of systems theory—something I want to do more of in a moment.)
A corollary of this is that systems typically overflow their codifications, contain far greater complexity and diversity than any of the successive theories that purport to codify them. A systems analysis might show that some systems theorists operate within a pre-Freudian system that coaches them implicitly or metaphorically to conceive systems as rational beings (or forces) that know exactly what they’re doing and articulate that knowledge as a theory or code that leaves no unconscious or other irrational residue, whereas others operate within a Freudian system for which the code is only the rational tip of a monstrous unconscious iceberg. How conscious does a system have to be, how thoroughly or exhaustively codified, in order to be called a system? It depends on the theoretical system the systems theorist works in. Compared to the work of Foucault, for example, Lefevere seems to be working in a pre-Freudian system, implicitly believing as he seems to that every detail in a literary system is available to systematic articulation by a properly objective scientific thinker like himself.
It is, in any case, highly likely that the literary system of a given period overflows the bounds of the contemporary codification, so that the system someone such as Lefevere identifies today is significantly different from the system codified by those who lived in it. The next systemic step beyond that formulation is to say that there is a significant difference between all collective regularities, hegemonic social patterns, which exert a largely unconscious or ideosomatic power over the people who live in and through them, and systemic or theoretical codifications of those patterns, which are usually ex post facto attempts to generalize the patterns they discern to cover all variability. In other words, codification occurs not at a single but at a never-ending succession of “certain times,” whenever someone such as Lefevere (i.e., any theorist) decides to collate regularities and impose some sort of overarching explanation on them.
But this is essentially the duplicity in systems theory that I mentioned earlier: the systemic tendency to see all systems but one’s own as social fictions. Like most systems theorists, Lefevere (32) wants the systems he identifies to exist in reality, beginning at a specific point (when they are codified) and continuing, with minor variations (“There are local variations in both cases, to be sure, but the general picture is clear”), until they are superseded by new systems; he wants his description of those systems to be objective in the sense of merely representing a stable object outside his imagination. Hence the importance to Lefevere of differentiating the process of “rewriters creat[ing] images of a writer” (5) from the realities they represent: “These images existed side by side with the realities they competed with” (5). You have systems, codified at specific historical moments and susceptible to stable objective description, and you have representations of those systems.
Hence also the importance of referring to these systems with the definite article: “The situation is different in Egypt and the Maghreb because they belong to the Islamic rather than the African system,” “This last statement points to a similarity with the Western system that is not easy to overlook” (31–32), etc. There is one whole coherent literary system whose geographic boundaries roughly coincide with those of the Roman church around 1000 A.D.; another whose boundaries coincide with the Islamic countries; a third that more or less covers the African continent, with the exception of those northern countries that belong to “the Islamic rather than the African system.” These are enormously complex geopolitical entities to be subsuming under the concept of a single system.
And Lefevere generally recognizes that complexity: “A poetics, any poetics, is a historical variable: it is not absolute. In a literary system the poetics dominant today is quite different from the poetics dominant at the inception of the system” (35). The problem, of course, is how you can ever tell when two historical horizons dominated by quite different poetics are part of the same system. If the poetics change dramatically, is the system still the same? How can you tell? Or do you just assume it from the continuity of other systems within the same geographical area, such as language? In Lefevere’s formulation the extension of literary systems is in fact controlled more by linguistic than by political boundaries; does this mean that every Anglophone country is part of the same system for as long as it goes on speaking English? Well, no, because literary periods are systems too: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, romanticism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and so on. Also, every Anglophone country has tended to develop in quite different ways and directions; so have different regions in each country, different groups (the “professional” and “non-professional” readers Lefevere talks about), and so on. There is a good deal of slippage among language families as well, as Lefevere unconsciously signals when he refers to “Turkish, a Finno-Ugrian language” (31)—most scholars would say that Turkish is a Turkic-Altaic language, but then there are Finnish scholars who claim that Finnish itself is more Indo-European than Finno-Ugric. The whole notion of language families was the German romantics’ systemic projection, the construction of enormous historical and geographical and linguistic systems to fit and support their self-image—a projection whose dangerous political implications, made all too clear in the Nazi era, were present from the start: the German association of the imaginary Indo-Europeans with blond Scandinavians was explicit in Indo-European philology from near the beginning of the nineteenth century.
How big or small can a system be? Could we imagine all the literature ever produced by human beings as part of the same system? I don’t see why not, although it would probably only be useful by contrast with “the literary system” of some other planetary race. Could we imagine, with the formalists, that a single literary work forms its own coherent system (especially encyclopedic works such as Sakuntala, La divina commedia, Paradise Lost, Faust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Finnegans Wake)? Critics often speak of the “system” of William Blake or William Butler Yeats—is that enough? Or would Lefevere resist that sort of atomization of systems theory?
A more radically constructivist systems theory would insist that in all these cases “system” is mainly a useful way of thinking about, and thus retroactively organizing, certain lines of force we see flowing through various thens and nows, heres and theres—and that a system can be as big or as small as the systems theorist needs it to be for specific contextual explanatory purposes. If we want to explain certain regularities we perceive in, say, literary works written (down) in several African nations or linguistic areas or periods, it may prove useful to posit not only “the African system” but also “the Islamic system” and “the Western system”; if we discover a Martian literature and want to explore its regularities, it may be useful to posit “the Martian system” and “the Earth system.” Or we may be more interested in smaller systems, “the literary system” of a certain café in Paris or New York in 1936, for instance. Depending on how attached we are to descriptive stability, we may or may not want to go on and draw up rigid boundaries for the systems we posit, beginnings and ends in time, geographic limits—but in a constructivist context these are all calculi, useful explanatory fictions, not accurate representations of external reality.
That Lefevere never makes this leap into radical constructivism is almost certainly due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, he himself as rewriter stands within a system, the academic system of (poly) systems theory; that theoretical system enables him to see many things that other theorists outside that system can’t see, and also blinds him to certain other things that outsiders can often see better. This is, again, not an accusation; it’s a neutral fact of systems theory, which I have promised to follow as closely as possible. Systems are powerful lenses for seeing and experiencing the things that they recognize (or project) as real, but extremely ineffective lenses for seeing and experiencing things that lie beyond their purview. Systems naturalize their own belief structures as the sum total of reality and expect people to enter wholeheartedly into their projections in order to see what they see; to outsiders it often looks like mumbo-jumbo, largely because they have been conditioned by other systems to see things in other ways. In chapter 5 we’ll see Anthony Pym arguing that translators, who live between systems, are the people best situated to break down those barriers; Lefevere, on the other hand, seeing things through the lenses of systems theory, tends to see translators as more or less entirely in the service of a single system, specifically the target-language literary system.
But more of that in a moment. I think it’s interesting to note that Lefevere too seems to conceive polysystems theory as a kind of closed system, with insiders who are in the know and outsiders who are not, but should be. I get this impression from his tendency throughout the book to assume familiarity with the categories by which polysystems theory organizes or systematizes the translational world—in fact, one of those categories is a thing called “the categories,” a kind of Kantian operating system that enables polysystems theorists to make taxonomic sense of the cultural field they study. “The categories” also provided Lefevere with his thematic units in Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (1992b), his anthological companion volume to Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame; in the latter they appear (without explanation of their significance or origin) in his chapter titles after the colons: patronage, poetics, the categories (which is, as I say, itself one of the categories), ideology, Universe of Discourse, and language. Later he calls “the personal” a category also, though I have never seen that in a chapter title: “These can be said to belong to three categories: some changes are of a personal nature, some are ideological, and some belong in the sphere of patronage” (1992a, 61). The categories are systemic calculi, the polysystems conceptual lenses that impose systemic regularities of various sorts not only on the social field but also on all polysystems thinking about that field—and Lefevere’s use of the word “belong” suggests that they do so specifically by assigning the phenomena they “observe,” and can only observe through the categories, to separate categories.
“Universe of Discourse” is apparently like the categories in not needing to be defined: it appears for the first time in this book on page forty-eight, without comment, and forty pages later gets its own chapter, but again without definition, almost certainly because it has been defined a hundred times before in previous polysystems books and articles. I’m not quite sure why Universe of Discourse (which is usually referred to without a definite or indefinite article, like God) is capitalized and the other key words are not—why don’t polysystems theorists refer to Patronage, Ideology, Poetics, and so on? In any case it is clear that it forms part of polysystems theory’s liturgical ritual, which is not mere ornamentation, as the Calvinists claimed about Catholic rituals, as grammarians claimed about rhetoric, but a virtually subliminal shaper of perception, an inverted retinal image that precedes and informs the act of seeing (or else, as Eric Cheyfitz suggests, that’s what ornamentation is). With many of the other polysystems categories, notably ideology and poetics, Lefevere works hard to bring newcomers up to speed; the categories and Universe of Discourse, for some reason, remain subliminal.
A systems theory approach to Lefevere’s book, and thus more generally to systems theories of the social act of translation, requires one to see it (and them) too through the lenses of these categories: to ask what ideology lies behind it, what patronage systems support and maintain it, what poetics and Universe of Discourse inform it. Here it is necessary to tread carefully, or risk giving the impression that I am attacking the book, or the systems theory that drives it. I hope I have made it clear how impressed I am by the book, how convinced I am that the questions I have been asking about it are evidence of its productivity, its fruitfulness as an approach. But I want very much to explore the significance of Lefevere’s approach in the spirit of that approach, and that requires asking some tough questions, questions that are often perceived as demystificatory and thus as debunking. I do believe there are mystifications in polysystems theory, as in all theories, my own included; but I don’t consider it bunk, and hence have no need to debunk it.
The easiest categories to cover concern the poetics and Universe of Discourse of polysystems theory: the poetics are roughly constructivist, grounded in the belief that “value” is never something that lies in a poetic or theoretical text but is always something that is assigned to it or constructed for it by an institution, a system, an ideologically saturated power structure; the Universe of Discourse is roughly scientistic, grounded in the belief that “reality” lies outside the individual and his or her experiences and is best described in a rhetorically cool, neutral, objective way. I have discussed the obvious clash between these two categories above; no need to pursue them further here, except to note that the clash between them is precisely why polysystems theorists are not given to doing systems analyses of their own systems analyses, and why my insistence on doing one might well (though falsely) be considered a hostile act.
The question of ideology is a more difficult one, though it is clearly tied in here. Lefevere himself notes that “even such bastions of ‘objectivity’ as dictionaries might have some kind of ideology behind them” (52), and it should go without saying that such bastions of objectivity as polysystems theory do as well—though the rhetorical dominance of a scientistic Universe of Discourse makes it go without saying, unsaid. But what ideology? I suppose it would depend on the extent to which we take the demystificatory impulse behind systems theory to be repressed or disguised hostility: the more hostility toward systems that Lefevere and other polysystems theorists feel but repress or rhetorically suppress or displace in their work, the more strongly their ideology would lean toward the oppositional, the antinomic, the counterhegemonic (and thus toward solidarity with the foreignists and the postcolonialists); the less hostility they feel, the less hostility they need to repress in order to remain within their scientistic Universe of Discourse, the more strongly their ideology would lean toward the authoritarian, the idealized defense of state and other systemic power (and thus more solidarity with the hegemonic systems the foreignists and postcolonialists attack). I have no firm evidence one way or the other, though Lefevere occasionally allows his biases to surface rhetorically, as when he claims that “the rhyme and meter rule … has been responsible for the failure of many a translation to carry its original across into the Western system. This situation, in turn, greatly obstructed the process of assimilation” (36). This still has the patina of neutrality, but the dualisms implied by “failure” (as opposed to success) and “obstructed” (as opposed to facilitated) suggest here that Lefevere is on the side of assimilation, and thus, if Lawrence Venuti is right, of state power, systemic authority, capitalism, and so on. Elsewhere, as in his discussions of Aristophanes and Anne Frank, he is clearly disgusted with assimilative translations. So I don’t know. Set side by side with the overt political (left-leaning) polemics of Venuti, Lefevere’s neutrality looks unmistakably like a whitewash of systemic hegemony, a refusal to indict political power wherever it appears; set next to the work of Eugene Nida or Peter Newmark, it looks more like Venuti. Again, like Lefevere, I pass the evaluative buck on to the reader—and rhetorically suppress my own take on these matters.
The question of patronage is a much more involved matter, one that would properly require a massive and daunting research effort that I am not inclined to undertake, but that might make a good dissertation topic for some ambitious graduate student: who (or what) supports polysystems theory (or any given systems theory of the social act of translation) institutionally? The easy answer is “academia”: all of the polysystems theorists are entrenched in university jobs, are paid not only a salary but also various forms of research support (including travel to conferences and archives) by their academic employers, and their access to those monies is partly determined by objective assessments of their publication records, which is to say by their success in disseminating polysystems theory. But virtually every translation theorist, indeed virtually every theorist period, is employed by some university that “patronizes” or supports financially a wide variety of theoretical approaches; is there any sense in which the institutional patronage of polysystems theory is “undifferentiated,” which according to Lefevere means that economic success follows directly from the propagation of a specific ideology? Or is it “differentiated,” so that the economic success of the various theorists is independent of the ideology they support?
I just got through saying, of course, that polysystems theorists work hard not to propagate any ideology—their public ideology, as their more overtly political colleagues in the postcolonial camp would insist, is that scholars shouldn’t have a public ideology, that true scholarship is value-free—so it may be difficult in this case to differentiate “differentiated” from “undifferentiated” patronage. What’s more, “value-free inquiry” is such a widespread academic ideology that it would be extremely difficult to talk about its interrelations with economic success (jobs, promotions, raises, teaching loads, travel money, etc.) in the specific case of polysystems theory, or even of systemic theories of social translation in general—to differentiate its patronage status from that of other theories. In addressing this issue fully, therefore, one would need to look closely at the specific power relationships between various polysystems theorists and their departments, their deans, and so on; but one would also want to explore other forms of patronage, such as publishing and translator organizations. What journals support polysystems theory, to what extent do they mainly or exclusively support polysystems theory? Until recently, Lefevere and Susan Bassnett were general editors of one of “the English-speaking system’s” most prestigious book series in translation studies, at Routledge, the publisher of the two Lefevere books I have mentioned here. One would want to study the list of books published in that series, the extent to which it is exclusively or mainly or even loosely a polysystems series— also the relationship between the general editors and the Routledge editorial office, which had, presumably, ultimate say over what got published. How much autonomy did Lefevere and Bassnett have? If they said “publish this,” would Routledge obey? Did they have to persuade the Routledge acquisitions editor and editorial board to publish the books they liked? If so (and that is likely), what form did that persuasion take? A description, written by Lefevere and/or Bassnett, of the book’s virtues? One external evaluation, two external evaluations, three?
An even more difficult question concerns the extent to which polysystems theory, in accordance with its scientistic Universe of Discourse, attempts to build a patronage system in less overt ways, to encourage in readers and students the internalization and thus bureaucratization of their authority, so that the school’s systemic success doesn’t depend on, say, the capricious favor of a powerful dean or editor. In what ways, for example, is polysystems theory presented to the translation theory community as the fullest or most comprehensive approach to the topic, or the most scientific, or the most pedagogically sound or effective? Patronage, as Lefevere hints throughout Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, can come from above or below: from an elite group of professional readers (the precapitalist model) or from the large book-buying public (the capitalist model). If translators and translation instructors, and thus translator training programs in general, around the world declared fealty to polysystems theory, that would constitute a powerful form of patronage: look, translators need us! Translation studies programs need us! One would also want to study polysystems theorists’ institutional behavior in terms of the more negative forms of academic empire building: convincing students to take classes from you and your allies rather than those other professors, whose thinking is not as progressive as yours; ostracizing or otherwise punishing in-group members who stray from the fold; disparaging theorists from rival groups at conferences (both in sessions and at the bar or over dinner) and in various printed remarks, and so on. Without undertaking the massive research effort this would require I can’t say which if any of these practices (which all academics see around them every day and often participate in themselves) are found within the system of (poly) systems theory, and I certainly don’t want to be understood as merely insinuating unsavory activities without evidence; all I’m saying is that these are some of the directions systems-theoretical research into the polysystems school would have to take in order to establish patronage.
Systems thinking is attractive largely because it promises a universal key to understanding, and thus mentally controlling, large quantities of external data. Part of this, too, is the hegemonic status of systemic thinking in the West, where systemic thinking is in fact a kind of tautology: presystematic or unsystematic thinkers are often portrayed as people who don’t think at all, because thinking is either system (at)ic or no thinking at all, blind uncritical practice. As I noted earlier, feminists have underscored the ways in which this narrow systemic conception of thought arises out of, and helps maintain, patriarchal norms of masculinity in the West, where men are supposed to be more spiritual, more intellectual, more abstract thinkers— closer to God the Systemic Father, God the Creator of Paternal Logic through his Son, the Logos—than carnal, emotional women.
On the other hand, systemic thinking is more than just a male fantasy of mental control; it is also a powerful tool for analyzing (and indicting) recurring social patterns that bind not only our ability to act as freely as we’d like but also our ability to analyze and indict them. In a theoretical system shaped by Marx and Freud and their many brilliant followers, it is difficult not to believe in systemic collective forces, partly conscious but largely unconscious, working through both institutions and individuals to control our lives in fine detail—and partly failing, due to the complexity of the human nervous system, but largely succeeding. Systems thinking has proved invaluable not only to Marxists and other leftists analyzing and indicting capitalism and postcolonial subjects analyzing and indicting colonialism, but also to feminists analyzing and indicting patriarchy. Mary Field Belenky (1986) and other personalizing feminists to the contrary, systems theory has been an essential rung on the feminist ladder to liberation.
Systems theory has many serious flaws, of course, and I have covered some of them above: the need to invent and stabilize boundaries around systems in order to account for dynamic change within them; the high level of abstraction, which necessarily neglects the variety and creativity of personal experience; the illusion that the systems a theorist “sees” actually exist and function in the way the systems theorist imagines. But the many methodological benefits may make it worth the candle. What does a translator do in the day-to-day process of accepting, researching, completing, and sending off translation jobs? What implications does this process have for translation pedagogy? What are the social forces that control the selection of texts for translation, translators to translate them, methods to translate them by, publishers to publish them, readers to read them, and so on? It is difficult to imagine any answers at all to these questions without systems thinking—partly, perhaps, because systems thinking is so endemic to “the” Western philosophical tradition, partly also because it is so incredibly useful, such a powerful method for tracing (maybe partly inventing) large-scale patterns in the midst of the confusions of everyday living.