Borders-Translations-Norms. The Medium Matters. Materialism And (Artistic) Media

Since the 1960s there has been an interest in (artistic) media from (tending towards) the technologically deterministic of Marshall McLuhan, to critics on the left such as Raymond Williams (Contact: Human Communication and Its History, 1988) and Galvano della Volpe (Critica del gusto, 1960 [Critique of Taste, 1978]), the latter acknowledging the, more normative, precedent of G.E. Lessing’s Laokoon, which also discussed the properties of different artistic media.

In all cases we are dealing with the complex relationships of communication, the material properties of the media an (art)work is created in, and the senses involved in the reception of the work (of art) itself (both the combination, intensity, and relation to feeling/emotion vs. reason involved). Which could be designated as problems of inter-media translation.

The “postmodern” era has come to question most of the norms associated with artistic and critical activity, practice, tradition, transmission, and reception. Canon, tradition, author, authoritativeness, genre, form, completion/finished status, and on and on one could go.

While the “digital” allows for an unprecedented spectrum and diffusion of conversions, translations, hybridizations, and therefore the ‘coming together’ that translation at its best allows, what could often be overlooked, discounted, or misunderstood is the path that has lead to or leads to these conversions of artistic media, art forms and artistic expression and communication. It is or can be in many ways a very liberating telos and ‘environment’, but it also can lead to the forgetting, erasure and even intentional cancellation of all sorts of different kinds of memory and history (and not only be a means of preserving them).

If we think even in fairly banal terms of what happens to realities of the object “book”, and what happens to our use, interpretations, enjoyment of this product/object, in its old(er) material form, of a bound number of pages with a cover, vs. the new digital e-books, we can come to realize how the senses involved are very different: most of the dimensions associated with touch and smell (which one could classify with taste, in its gustatory meaning, as ‘proximity senses’) associated with paper books vanish, and instead the senses of sight and sound become even more dominant. To the extent that touch is operative, it is in the repetitive operations of interacting with the digital machines.

Though nowadays even the very literal sense of taste, in gastronomy, is more and more subject to forms of cuisine that have internalized a wide variety of (contemporary) artistic standards from the other arts (which are mostly visual and/or related to ideas of uniqueness/originality, including the recreation of food’s ingredients to resemble the forms and textures of different foods), the sense of touch (perhaps also in a very tangible, symptomatic, way given the political, social and economic context) is one of the senses that overall is becoming more and more suppressed and deformed, along with the suppression of creative (also artisanal) manual labor. Some sculpture museums now do invite guests to special exhibits where they are encouraged to touch, but this ‘violation’ is precisely another confirmation of how dominant the norm(s) and trends currently are.

So while the liberatory potential of many digital means and teloi is indeed great, we would do ourselves a great disservice if we discounted the enormous amount and complexity of interconnections and past practices that also tend to get “lost in translation” in the process.

In Fortini e il nichilismo di massa (Allegoria, 63) Daniele Balicco gives a very persuasive account of the French adoptions/translations of the Heideggerian tradition (cf. Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables) and its consequences for an understanding of our present circumstances. And he quotes a wonderful Fortini allegory contained in the essay that opens the collection Insistenze, entitled Il muro del rischio. Essentially Fortini is trying to describe some of the political peculiarities of contemporary Italy, and compares the situation to what he is doing to an ant crawling on his desk. Fortini continuously blocks the ant’s path with a pencil, and instead of climbing over this obstacle (with the effort and “thinking outside the box” this would require) the ant simply continuously tries to avoid the constantly repositioned obstacle in its path(s), ultimately becoming completely disoriented. It is an allegory about capitalism, about how individuals, frequently even at their most creative, aspiring to overcome ‘conformity’, actually are often at their most ‘conformist’ and ‘collectivist,’ and simply in some sense surrender and deviate (not in a (neo)Stalinist sense), allow “detournement” to become their new normal, incapable of thinking that it is ultimately always the same pencil they are facing, and all the “detournements” in the world will not make up for the effort, or the real constructive work on the building and sharing of new, actually shared, norms and their foundations. So the question is: will “detournement(s)” be able to become “translations”? Will there be an actual shared construction between media and between disciplines, translation in its best, highest and most enduring sense, or will we be going round in circles, chasing our own tails, trapped in endless diversionary “detournements”? Will we and reality be completely “out of touch”?