MEDICAL MYSTERY FOR CHAPTER 7 HER STORY Caroline’s pri.docx

MEDICAL MYSTERY FOR CHAPTER 7
HER STORY
Caroline’s primary complaint was a cough that hadn’t let up
since a bout of influenza 18 months earlier. She sometimes
woke up coughing, making it difficult for her to get a good
night’s rest. Caroline works as a customer service rep, and
her supervisor has commented that she sometimes sounds
breathless and wheezy on the phone. Because she had little
energy and felt short-winded, Caroline had given up her nightly
walks and had subsequently gained weight. Also, her
eyes sometimes felt itchy and watery, and she was experiencing
rhinorrhea. Recently, Caroline had experienced some
chest pain, and she wondered whether she had a heart problem.
Concerned about the chest pain, Caroline went to see a
cardiologist. After performing an electrocardiogram (EKG)
and an echocardiogram, he had ruled out heart disease. Still,
Caroline was worried about her coughing and her
breathing difficulties. Her grandmother—a lifelong smoker—
had died of emphysema, and Caroline was haunted by
memories of her gasping for air.
Since Caroline wasn’t a smoker, the cardiologist thought that
emphysema was unlikely but that some of her
symptoms might be the result of allergic rhinitis. He suggested
that she see an allergist and referred her to my office.
THE EVALUATION
I thought Caroline might have allergies as well as adult-onset
asthma. I performed a spirometer test and did scratch

tests to see whether Caroline was allergic to dust mite allergens,
pollen, pet dander, grass, or other common allergens.
The scratch tests revealed that Caroline was in fact allergic to
all these allergens, and the pulmonary function test
using a spirometer showed that she wasn’t able to achieve full
exhalation, which often indicates asthma.
THE DIAGNOSIS
At that point, I was fairly certain that Caroline had asthma,
though diagnosing asthma in adults is complicated
because the symptoms mimic chronic obstructive pulmonary
diseases such as emphysema or chronic bronchitis. In
order to confirm the diagnosis, I needed to see how Caroline
responded to asthma medications: An improvement in
her symptoms would enable me to make a definitive diagnosis.
THE TREATMENT
The fact that Caroline periodically had tightness in her chest
and breathing trouble made it likely that she had been
suffering mild asthma attacks without realizing it. I wanted to
help her feel better on a regular basis and avert a life-
threatening attack. As I explained to Caroline, asthma is
characterized by constriction of the airways as well as
inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
To reduce the inflammation, I prescribed two drugs: an inhaler
containing a drug called fluticasone (Flovent) and a
pill called montelukast (Singulair). I also prescribed albuterol
(Proventil), a short-acting drug that, when inhaled,
opens the airways. I also suggested that Caroline lose some
weight. Although being overweight does not cause
asthma, it can make symptoms worse by limiting lung capacity.

In addition, I recommended regular exercise. To do that, I
suggested that Caroline use the albuterol 5–20 minutes
before exercising on days when she felt asthmatic. I also
suggested that she stay with low-impact activities, such as
walking on an indoor track, away from allergens, or swimming.
I advised her to use a HEPA (high-efficiency
particulate air filter) air purifier in her bedroom and to sleep
with the windows closed.
CASE CLOSED
When Caroline came back to see me a month later, she was no
longer wheezing, coughing, or experiencing
tightness in the chest, so I told her that the asthma diagnosis
was on target. Although she was initially shocked at
this diagnosis (like many others, Caroline never knew that
asthma can strike adults), she was pleased to be able to
resume her nightly walks, with help from the albuterol. When I
saw Caroline again 3 months later, she had lost 5
pounds, and her asthma was under control.
Discussion Questions
1. What is emphysema?
2. What did the spirometer measure?
3. What is bronchorrhea?
4. Albuterol is a short-acting spray that expands the opening of
the passages into the lungs. What is the medical
term for this type of medicine?
The Translation Studies Reader

Edited by
Lawrence Venuti
Advisory Editor: Mona Baker
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simulataneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2000 This collection and editorial matter © Lawrence Venuti;
individual essays © individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Translation studies reader/edited by Lawrence Venuti.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting. I. Venuti, Lawrence.
P306.T7436 2000
418'.02–dc21 99–36161
CIP
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ISBN 0-415-18746-X (Hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18747-8 (Pbk)
Chapter 14
George Steiner

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION
THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION, the act of elicitation and
appropriative transferof meaning, is fourfold. There is initiative
trust, an investment of belief,
underwritten by previous experience but epistemologically
exposed and
psychologically hazardous, in the meaningfulness, in the
“seriousness” of the facing
or, strictly speaking, adverse text. We venture a leap: we grant
ab initio that there
is “something there” to be understood, that the transfer will not
be void. All
understanding, and the demonstrative statement of
understanding which is
translation, starts with an act of trust. This confiding will,
ordinarily, be
instantaneous and unexamined, but it has a complex base. It is
an operative
convention which derives from a sequence of phenomenological
assumptions about
the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in
very different, perhaps
formally antithetical semantic systems, about the validity of
analogy and parallel.
The radical generosity of the translator (“I grant beforehand that
there must be
something there”), his trust in the “other”, as yet untried,
unmapped alternity of
statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the
human bias towards
seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in
which “this” can stand
for “that”, and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be
meanings and
structures.

But the trust can never be final. It is betrayed, trivially, by
nonsense, by the
discovery that “there is nothing there” to elicit and translate.
Nonsense rhymes,
poésie concrète, glossolalia are untranslatable because they are
lexically non-
communicative or deliberately insignificant. The commitment of
trust will,
however, be tested, more or less severely, also in the common
run and process of
language acquisition and translation (the two being intimately
connected). “This
means nothing” asserts the exasperated child in front of his
Latin reader or the
1975
THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION 187
beginner at Berlitz. The sensation comes very close to being
tactile, as of a
blank, sloping surface which gives no purchase. Social
incentive, the officious
evidence of precedent—“others have managed to translate this
bit before you”—
keeps one at the task. But the donation of trust remains
ontologically
spontaneous and anticipates proof, often by a long, arduous gap
(there are texts,
says Walter Benjamin, which will be translated only “after us”).
As he sets out,
the translator must gamble on the coherence, on the symbolic
plenitude of the

world. Concomitantly he leaves himself vulnerable, though only
in extremity and
at the theoretical edge, to two dialectically related, mutually
determined
metaphysical risks. He may find that “anything” or “almost
anything” can mean
“everything”. This is the vertigo of self-sustaining metaphoric
or analogic
enchainment experienced by medieval exegetists. Or he may
find that there is
“nothing there” which can be divorced from its formal
autonomy, that every
meaning worth expressing is monadic and will not enter into
any alternative
mould. There is Kabbalistic speculation, to which I will return,
about a day on
which words will shake off “the burden of having to mean” and
will be only
themselves, blank and replete as stone.
After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator
is incursive
and extractive. The relevant analysis is that of Heidegger when
he focuses our
attention on understanding as an act, on the access, inherently
appropriative and
therefore violent, of Erkenntnis to Dasein. Da-sein, the “thing
there”, “the thing
that is because it is there”, only comes into authentic being
when it is
comprehended, i.e. translated.1 The postulate that all cognition
is aggressive,
that every proposition is an inroad on the world, is, of course,
Hegelian. It is
Heidegger’s contribution to have shown that understanding,
recognition,

interpretation are a compacted, unavoidable mode of attack. We
can modulate
Heidegger’s insistence that understanding is not a matter of
method but of
primary being, that “being consists in the understanding of
other being” into the
more naïve, limited axiom that each act of comprehension must
appropriate
another entity (we translate into). Comprehension, as its
etymology shows,
“comprehends” not only cognitively but by encirclement and
ingestion. In the
event of interlingual translation this manoeuvre of
comprehension is explicitly
invasive and exhaustive. Saint Jerome uses his famous image of
meaning brought
home captive by the translator. We “break” a code:
decipherment is dissective,
leaving the shell smashed and the vital layers stripped. Every
schoolchild, but
also the eminent translator, will note the shift in substantive
presence which
follows on a protracted or difficult exercise in translation: the
text in the other
language has become almost materially thinner, the light seems
to pass
unhindered through its loosened fibres. For a spell the density
of hostile or
seductive “otherness” is dissipated. Ortega y Gasset speaks of
the sadness of the
translator after failure. There is also a sadness after success, the
Augustinian
tristitia which follows on the cognate acts of erotic and of
intellectual possession.
The translator invades, extracts, and brings home. The simile is

that of the
open-cast mine left an empty scar in the landscape. As we shall
see, this
despoliation is illusory or is a mark of false translation. But
again, as in the case
of the translator’s trust, there are genuine borderline cases.
Certain texts or
genres have been exhausted by translation. Far more
interestingly, others have
188 GEORGE STEINER
been negated by transfiguration, by an act of appropriative
penetration and
transfer in excess of the original, more ordered, more
aesthetically pleasing.
There are originals we no longer turn to because the translation
is of a higher
magnitude (the sonnets of Louise Labé after Rilke’s
Umdichtung). I will come
back to this paradox of betrayal by augment.
The third movement is incorporative, in the strong sense of the
word. The
import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in
or into a
vacuum. The native semantic field is already extant and
crowded. There are
innumerable shadings of assimilation and placement of the
newly-acquired,
ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness at the
core of the kind
which cultural history ascribes to, say, Luther’s Bible or
North’s Plutarch, all the

way to the permanent strangeness and marginality of an artifact
such as
Nabokov’s “English-language” Onegin. But whatever the degree
of
“naturalization”, the act of importation can potentially dislocate
or relocate the
whole of the native structure. The Heideggerian “we are what
we understand to
be” entails that our own being is modified by each occurrence
of comprehensive
appropriation. No language, no traditional symbolic set or
cultural ensemble
imports without risk of being transformed. Here two families of
metaphor,
probably related, offer themselves, that of sacramental intake or
incarnation and
that of infection. The incremental values of communion pivot on
the moral,
spiritual state of the recipient. Though all decipherment is
aggressive and, at one
level, destructive, there are differences in the motive of
appropriation and in the
context of “the bringing back”. Where the native matrix is
disoriented or
immature, the importation will not enrich, it will not find a
proper locale. It will
generate not an integral response but a wash of mimicry (French
neo-classicism
in its north-European, German, and Russian versions). There
can be contagions
of facility triggered by the antique or foreign import. After a
time, the native
organism will react, endeavouring to neutralize or expel the
foreign body. Much
of European romanticism can be seen as a riposte to this sort of
infection, as an

attempt to put an embargo on a plethora of foreign, mainly
French eighteenth-
century goods. In every pidgin we see an attempt to preserve a
zone of native
speech and a failure of that attempt in the face of politically and
economically
enforced linguistic invasion. The dialectic of embodiment
entails the possibility
that we may be consumed.
This dialectic can be seen at the level of individual sensibility.
Acts of translation
add to our means; we come to incarnate alternative energies and
resources of
feeling. But we may be mastered and made lame by what we
have imported. There
are translators in whom the vein of personal, original creation
goes dry. MacKenna
speaks of Plotinus literally submerging his own being. Writers
have ceased from
translation, sometimes too late, because the inhaled voice of the
foreign text had
come to choke their own. Societies with ancient but eroded
epistemologies of ritual
and symbol can be knocked off balance and made to lose belief
in their own identity
under the voracious impact of premature or indigestible
assimilation. The cargo-
cults of New Guinea, in which the natives worship what
airplanes bring in, provide
an uncannily exact, ramified image of the risks of translation.
This is only another way of saying that the hermeneutic motion
is dangerously
incomplete, that it is dangerous because it is incomplete, if it
lacks its fourth stage,

the piston-stroke, as it were, which completes the cycle. The a-
prioristic movement
of trust puts us off balance. We “lean towards” the confronting
text (every translator
has experienced this palpable bending towards and launching at
his target). We
encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus
again offbalance, having
caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away
from “the other” and
by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our
own. The system
is now off-tilt. The hermeneutic act must compensate. If it is to
be authentic, it must
mediate into exchange and restored parity.
The enactment of reciprocity in order to restore balance is the
crux of the métier
and morals of translation. But it is very difficult to put
abstractly. The appropriative
“rapture” of the translator—the word has in it, of course, the
root and meaning of
violent transport—leaves the original with a dialectically
enigmatic residue.
Unquestionably there is a dimension of loss, of breakage—
hence, as we have seen,
the fear of translation, the taboos on revelatory export which
hedge sacred texts,
ritual nominations, and formulas in many cultures. But the
residue is also, and
decisively, positive. The work translated is enhanced. This is so

at a number of
fairly obvious levels. Being methodical, penetrative, analytic,
enumerative, the
process of translation, like all modes of focused understanding,
will detail, illumine,
and generally body forth its object. The over-determination of
the interpretative act
is inherently inflationary: it proclaims that “there is more here
than meets the eye”,
that “the accord between content and executive form is closer,
more delicate than
had been observed hitherto”. To class a source-text as worth
translating is to dignify
it immediately and to involve it in a dynamic of magnification
(subject, naturally,
to later review and even, perhaps, dismissal). The motion of
transfer and paraphrase
enlarges the stature of the original. Historically, in terms of
cultural context, of the
public it can reach, the latter is left more prestigious. But this
increase has a more
important, existential perspective. The relations of a text to its
translations,
imitations, thematic variants, even parodies, are too diverse to
allow of any single
theoretic, definitional scheme. They categorize the entire
question of the meaning
of meaning in time, of the existence and effects of the linguistic
fact outside its
specific, initial form. But there can be no doubt that echo
enriches, that it is more
than shadow and inert simulacrum. We are back at the problem
of the mirror
which not only reflects but also generates light. The original
text gains from the
orders of diverse relationship and distance established between

itself and the
translations. The reciprocity is dialectic: new “formats” of
significance are initiated
by distance and by contiguity. Some translations edge us away
from the canvas,
others bring us up close.
This is so even where, perhaps especially where, the translation
is only partly
adequate. The failings of the translator (I will give common
examples) localize,
they project as on to a screen, the resistant vitalities, the opaque
centres of specific
genius in the original. Hegel and Heidegger posit that being
must engage other
being in order to achieve self-definition. This is true only in
part of language which,
at the phonetic and grammatical levels, can function inside its
own limits of
diacritical differentiation. But it is pragmatically true of all but
the most rudimentary
acts of form and expression. Existence in history, the claim to
recognizable identity
(style), are based on relations to other articulate constructs. Of
such relations,
translation is the most graphic.
190 GEORGE STEINER
Nevertheless, there is unbalance. The translator has taken too
much—he has
padded, embroidered, “read into”—or too little—he has
skimped, elided, cut out
awkward corners. There has been an outflow of energy from the

source and an
inflow into the receptor altering both and altering the harmonics
of the whole
system. Péguy puts the matter of inevitable damage definitively
in his critique of
Leconte de Lisle’s translations of Sophocles: “ce que la réalité
nous enseigne
impitoyablement et sans aucune exception, c’est que toute
opération de cet ordre,
toute opération de déplacement, sans aucune exception, entraîne
impitoyablement et irrévocablement une déperdition, une
altération, et que cette
déperdition, cette altération est toujours considérable.”2
Genuine translation will,
therefore, seek to equalize, though the mediating steps may be
lengthy and
oblique. Where it falls short of the original, the authentic
translation makes the
autonomous virtues of the original more precisely visible (Voss
is weak at
characteristic focal points in his Homer, but the lucid honesty
of his momentary
lack brings out the appropriate strengths of the Greek). Where it
surpasses the
original, the real translation infers that the source-text
possesses potentialities,
elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself. This is
Schleiermacher’s notion of a
hermeneutic which ‘knows better than the author did” (Paul
Celan translating
Apollinaire’s Salomé). The ideal, never accomplished, is one of
total counterpart
or re-petition—an asking again—which is not, however, a
tautology. No such
perfect “double” exists. But the ideal makes explicit the demand
for equity in the

hermeneutic process.
Only in this way, I think, can we assign substantive meaning to
the key notion of
“fidelity”. Fidelity is not literalism or any technical device for
rendering “spirit”.
The whole formulation, as we have found it over and over again
in discussions of
translation, is hopelessly vague. The translator, the exegetist,
the reader is faithful
to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he
endeavours to restore the
balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative
comprehension has
disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense,
economic. By virtue of tact,
and tact intensified is moral vision, the translator-interpreter
creates a condition of
significant exchange. The arrows of meaning, of cultural,
psychological benefaction,
move both ways. There is, ideally, exchange without loss. In
this respect, translation
can be pictured as a negation of entropy; order is preserved at
both ends of the
cycle, source and receptor. The general model here is that of
Lévi-Strauss’s
Anthropologie structurale which regards social structures as
attempts at dynamic
equilibrium achieved through an exchange of words, women,
and material goods.
All capture calls for subsequent compensation; utterance solicits
response, exogamy
and endogamy are mechanisms of equalizing transfer. Within
the class of semantic
exchanges, translation is again the most graphic, the most
radically equitable. A

translator is accountable to the diachronic and synchronic
mobility and conservation
of the energies of meaning. A translation is, more than
figuratively, an act of
doubleentry; both formally and morally the books must balance.
This view of translation as a hermeneutic of trust (élancement),
of penetration,
of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the
sterile triadic
model which has dominated the history and theory of the
subject. The perennial
distinction between literalism, paraphrase and free imitation,
turns out to be wholly
contingent. It has no precision or philosophic basis. It overlooks
the key fact that a
fourfold hermeneia, Aristotle’s term for discourse which
signifies because it
interprets, is conceptually and practically inherent in even the
rudiments of
translation.
Notes
1 Cf. Paul Ricœur, “Existence et herméneutique” in Le Conflit
des interprétations
(Paris, 1969).
2 Charles Péguy, “Les Suppliants parallèles” in Oeuvres en
prose 1898–1908
(Paris, 1959), I, p. 890. This analysis of the art of poetic

translation first appeared
in December 1905. Cf. Simone Fraisse, Péguy et le monde
antique (Paris, 1973),
pp. 146–59.
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65-88
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466493
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Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism
FREDRIC JAMESON
Judging from recent conversations among third-world
intellectuals, there is
now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the
name of the country
that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention
to "us" and what
we have to do and how we do it, to what we can't do and what
we do better than
this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to
the level of the
"people." This is not the way American intellectuals have been
discussing
"America," and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is
nothing but that
old thing called "nationalism," long since liquidated here and
rightly so. Yet a

certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world (and also
in the most vital
areas of the second world), thus making it legitimate to ask
whether it is all that
bad in the end.' Does in fact the message of some disabused and
more experienced
first-world wisdom (that of Europe even more than of the
United States) consist in
urging these nation states to outgrow it as fast as possible? The
predictble remin-
ders of Kampuchea and of Iraq and Iran do not really seem to
me to settle
anything or suggest by what these nationalisms might be
replaced except perhaps
some global American postmodernist culture.
Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of
non-
canonical forms of literature such as that of the third world,2
but one is peculiarly
self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary:
the strategy of
trying to prove that these texts are as "great" as those of the
canon itself. The
object is then to show that, to take an example from another
non-canonical form,
Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoyevsky, and
therefore can be admitted.
This is to attempt dutifully to wish away all traces of that
"pulp" format which is
constitutive of sub-genres, and it invites immediate failure
insofar as any passion-

ate reader of Dostoyevsky will know at once, after a few pages,
that those kinds of
satisfactions are not present. Nothing is to be gained by passing
over in silence the
radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel
will not offer the
satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than
that, perhaps, is its
tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-
world cultural de-
velopment and to cause us to conclude that "they are still
writing novels like
Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson."
A case could be built on this kind of discouragement, with its
deep existential
commitment to a rhythm of modernist innovation if not fashion-
changes; but it
65
Fredric Jameson
would not be a moralizing one-a historicist one, rather, which
challenges our
imprisonment in the present of postmodernism and calls for a
reinvention of the
radical difference of our own cultural past and its now
seemingly old-fashioned
situations and novelties.

But I would rather argue all this a different way, at least for
now3: these
reactions to third-world texts are at one and the same time
perfectly natural,
perfectly comprehensible, and terribly parochial. If the purpose
of the canon is to
restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and
subtle perceptions
which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but
choice body of texts, to
discourage us from reading anything else or from reading those
things in different
ways, then it is humanly impoverishing. Indeed our want of
sympathy for these
often unmodern third-world texts is itself frequently but a
disguise for some
deeper fear of the affluent about the way people actually live in
other parts of the
world-a way of life that still has little in common with daily life
in the American
suburb. There is nothing particularly disgraceful in having lived
a sheltered life, in
never having had to confront the difficulties, the complications
and the frustra-
tions of urban living, but it is nothing to be particularly proud
of either. Moreover,
a limited experience of life normally does not make for a wide
range of sympathies
with very different kinds of people (I'm thinking of differences
that range from
gender and race all the way to those of social class and culture).
The way in which all this affects the reading process seems to

be as follows: as
western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed
by our own
modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel
tends to come before
us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense,
between ourselves and
this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other
reader, for whom a
narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a
freshness of information
and a social interest that we cannot share. The fear and the
resistance I'm evoking
has to do, then, with the sense of our own non-coincidence with
that Other reader,
so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in any
adequate way with
that Other "ideal reader"-that is to say, to read this text
adequately-we would
have to give up a great deal that is individually precious to us
and acknowledge an
existence and a situation unfamiliar and therefore frightening-
one that we do
not know and prefer not to know.
Why, returning to the question of the canon, should we only
read certain
kinds of books? No one is suggesting we should not read those,
but why should we
not also read other ones? We are not, after all, being shipped to
that "desert
island" beloved of the devisers of great books lists. And as a

matter of fact-and
this is to me the conclusive nail in the argument-we all do
"read" many different
kinds of texts in this life of ours, since, whether we are willing
to admit it or not,
we spend much of our existence in the force field of a mass
culture that is radically
66
different from our "great books" and live at least a double life
in the various
compartments of our unavoidably fragmented society. We need
to be aware that
we are even more fundamentally fragmented than that; rather
than clinging to this
particular mirage of the "centered subject" and the unified
personal identity, we
would do better to confront honestly the fact of fragmentation
on a global scale; it
is a confrontation with which we can here at least make a
cultural beginning.
A final observation on my use of the term "third world." I take
the point of
criticisms of this expression, particularly those which stress the
way in which it
obliterates profound differences between a whole range of non-
western countries
and situations (indeed, one such fundamental opposition-

between the traditions
of the great eastern empires and those of the post-colonial
African nation states-
is central in what follows). I don't, however, see any
comparable expression that
articulates, as this one does, the fundamental breaks between
the capitalist first
world, the socialist bloc of the second world, and a range of
other countries which
have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism.
One can only deplore
the ideological implications of oppositions such as that between
"developed" and
"underdeveloped" or "developing" countries; while the more
recent conception of
northern and southern tiers, which has a very different
ideological content and
import than the rhetoric of development, and is used by very
different people,
nonetheless implies an unquestioning acceptance of
"convergence theory"-
namely the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States are
from this perspec-
tive largely the same thing. I am using the term "third world" in
an essentially
descriptive sense, and objections to it do not strike me as
especially relevant to the
argument I am making.
In these last years of the century, the old question of a properly
world litera-
ture reasserts itself. This is due as much or more to the
disintegration of our own

conceptions of cultural study as to any very lucid awareness of
the great outside
world around us. We may therefore-as "humanists"-
acknowledge the perti-
nence of the critique of present-day humanities by our titular
leader, William
Bennett, without finding any great satisfaction in his
embarrassing solution: yet
another impoverished and ethnocentric Graeco-Judaic "great
books list' of the
civilization of the West," "great texts, great minds, great
ideas."4 One is tempted
to turn back on Bennett himself the question he approvingly
quotes from Maynard
Mack: "How long can a democratic nation afford to support a
narcissistic minor-
ity so transfixed by its own image?" Nevertheless, the present
moment does offer a
remarkable opportunity to rethink our humanities curriculum in
a new way-to
re-examine the shambles and ruins of all our older "great
books," "humanities,"
"freshman-introductory" and "core course" type traditions.
67
Fredric Jameson
Today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States
demands the
reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago

theorized as "world
literature." In our more immediate context, then, any conception
of world litera-
ture necessarily demands some specific engagement with the
question of third-
world literature, and it is this not necessarily narrower subject
about which I have
something to say today.
It would be presumptuous to offer some general theory of what
is often called
third-world literature, given the enormous variety both of
national cultures in the
third world and of specific historical trajectories in each of
those areas. All of this,
then, is provisional and intended both to suggest specific
perspectives for research
and to convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly
neglected literatures
for people formed by the values and stereotypes of a first-world
culture. One
important distinction would seem to impose itself at the outset,
namely that none
of these cultures can be conceived as anthropologically
independent or autonom-
ous, rather, they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-
and-death struggle
with first-world cultural imperialism-a cultural struggle that is
itself a reflexion
of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by
various stages of
capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of
modernization. This, then,

is some first sense in which a study of third-world culture
necessarily entails a new
view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are
(perhaps without
fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work on the
remains of older
cultures in our general world capitalist system.
But if this is the case, the initial distinction that imposes itself
has to do with
the nature and development of older cultures at the moment of
capitalist penetra-
tion, something it seems to me most enlightening to examine in
terms of the
marxian concept of modes of production.5 Contemporary
historians seem to be in
the process of reaching a consensus on the specificity of
feudalism as a form
which, issuing from the break-up of the Roman Empire or the
Japanese Shogu-
nate, is able to develop directly into capitalism.6 This is not the
case with the other
modes of production, which in some sense must be
disaggregated or destroyed by
violence, before capitalism is able to implant its specific forms
and displace the
older ones. In the gradual expansion of capitalism across the
globe, then, our
economic system confronts two very distinct modes of
production that pose two
very different types of social and cultural resistance to its
influence. These are
so-called primitive, or tribal society on the one hand, and the

Asiatic mode of
production, or the great bureaucratic imperial systems, on the
other. African
societies and cultures, as they became the object of systematic
colonization in the
1880s, provide the most striking examples of the symbiosis of
capital and tribal
societies; while China and India offer the principal examples of
another and quite
different sort of engagement of capitalism with the great
empires of the so-called
68
Asiatic mode. My examples below, then, will be primarily
African and Chinese;
however, the special case of Latin America must be noted in
passing. Latin
America offers yet a third kind of development-one involving
an even earlier
destruction of imperial systems now projected by collective
memory back into the
archaic or tribal. Thus the earlier nominal conquests of
independence open them at
once to a kind of indirect economic penetration and control-
something Africa
and Asia will come to experience only more recently with
decolonization in the
1950s and 60s.

Having made these initial distinctions, let me now, by way of a
sweeping
hypothesis, try to say what all third-world cultural productions
seem to have in
common and what distinguishes them radically from analogous
cultural forms in
the first world. All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to
argue, allegorical,
and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will
call national allegories,
even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their
forms develop out of
predominantly western machineries of representation, such as
the novel. Let me
try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one
of the determinants
of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist
and modernist novel,
is a radical split between the private and the public, between the
poetic and the
political, between what we have come to think of as the domain
of sexuality and
the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the
economic, and of
secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx. Our
numerous
theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm
its existence and its
shaping power over our individual and collective lives. We have
been traiAed in a

deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private
existences is
somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic
science and politi-
cal dynamics. Politics in our novels therefore is, according to
Stendhal's canonical
formulation, a "pistol shot in the middle of a concert."
I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and
for analysis
such categories as the subjective and the public or political, the
relations between
them are wholly different in third-world culture. Third-world
texts, even those
which are seemingly private and invested with a properly
libidinal dynamic-
necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national
allegory: the story
of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the
embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society. Need I add that it is
precisely this very
different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such
texts alien to us at
first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional
western habits of
reading?
I will offer, as something like the supreme example of this
process of allegori-
zation, the first masterwork of China's greatest writer, Lu Xun,
whose neglect in
western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses
based on ignorance
69

Fredric Jameson
can rectify. "Diary of a Madman" (1918) must at first be read by
any western
reader as the protocol of what our essentially psychological
language terms a
"nervous breakdown." It offers the notes and perceptions of a
subject in intensify-
ing prey to a terrifying psychic delusion, the conviction that the
people around him
are concealing a dreadful secret, and that that secret can be
none other than the
increasingly obvious fact that they are cannibals. At the climax
of the development
of the delusion, which threatens his own physical safety and his
very life itself as a
potential victim, the narrator understands that his own brother is
himself a canni-
bal and that the death of their little sister, a number of years
earlier, far from being
the result of childhood illness, as he had thought, was in reality
a murder. As befits
the protocol of a psychosis, these perceptions are objective
ones, which can be
rendered without any introspective machinery: the paranoid
subject observes
sinister glances around him in the real world, he overhears tell-
tale conversations
between his brother and an alleged physician (obviously in
reality another canni-

bal) which carry all the conviction of the real, and can be
objectively (or "realisti-
cally") represented. This is not the place to demonstrate in any
detail the absolute
pertinence, to Lu Xun's case history, of the pre-eminent western
or first-world
reading of such phenomena, namely Freud's interpretation of the
paranoid delu-
sions of Senatsprasident Schreber: an emptying of the world, a
radical withdrawal
of libido (what Schreber describes as "world-catastrophe"),
followed by the at-
tempt to recathect by the obviously imperfect mechanisms of
paranoia. "The
delusion-formation," Freud explains, "which we take to be a
pathological pro-
duct, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of
reconstruction."7
What is reconstructed, however, is a grisly and terrifying
objective real world
beneath the appearances of our own world: an unveiling or
deconcealment of the
nightmarish reality of things, a stripping away of our
conventional illusions or
rationalizations about daily life and existence. It is a process
comparable, as a
literary effect, only to some of the processes of western
modernism, and in particu-
lar of existentialism, in which narrative is employed as a

powerful instrument for
the experimental exploration of reality and illusion, an
exploration which, how-
ever, unlike some of the older realisms, presupposes a certain
prior "personal
knowledge." The reader must, in other words, have had some
analogous experi-
ence, whether in physical illness or psychic crisis, of a lived
and balefully trans-
formed real world from which we cannot even mentally escape,
for the full horror
of Lu Xun's nightmare to be appreciated. Terms like
"depression" deform such
experience by psychologizing it and projecting it back into the
pathological Other;
while the analogous western literary approaches to this same
experience-I'm
thinking of the archetypal deathbed murmur of Kurtz, in
Conrad's "Heart of
Darkness," "The horror! the horror!"-recontains precisely that
horror by trans-
forming it into a rigorously private and subjective "mood,"
which can only be
70
designated by recourse to an aesthetic of expression-the
unspeakable, unname-

able inner feeling, whose external formulation can only
designate it from without,
like a symptom.
But this representational power of Lu Xun's text cannot be
appreciated prop-
erly without some sense of what I have called its allegorical
resonance. For it
should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by
the sufferer in the
attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbors is at one and
the same time being
attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole: and
if this attribution
is to be called "figural," it is indeed a figure more powerful and
"literal" than the
"literal" level of the text. Lu Xun's proposition is that the
people of this great
maimed and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-
imperial period,
his fellow citizens, are "literally" cannibals: in their
desperation, disguised and
indeed intensified by the most traditional forms and procedures
of Chinese cul-
ture, they must devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. This
occurs at all levels
of that exceedingly hierarchical society, from lumpens and
peasants all the way to
the most privileged elite positions in the mandarin bureaucracy.
It is, I want to
stress, a social and historical nightmare, a vision of the horror
of life specifically
grasped through History itself, whose consequences go far
beyond the more local

western realistic or naturalistic representation of cut-throat
capitalist or market
competition, and it exhibits a specifically political resonance
absent from its
natural or mythological western equivalent in the nightmare of
Darwinian natural
selection.
Now I want to offer four additional remarks about this text,
which will touch,
respectively, on the libidinal dimension of the story, on the
structure of its allegory,
on the role of the third-world cultural producer himself, and on
the perspective of
futurity projected by the tale's double resolution. I will be
concerned, in dealing
with all four of these topics, to stress the radical structural
difference between the
dynamics of third-world culture and those of the first-world
cultural tradition in
which we have ourselves been formed.
I have suggested that in third-world texts such as this story by
Lu Xun the
relationship between the libidinal and the political components
of individual and
social experience is radically different from what obtains in the
west and what
shapes our own cultural forms. Let me try to characterize this
difference, or if you
like this radical reversal, by way of the following

generalization: in the west,
conventionally, political commitment is recontained and
psychologized or subjec-
tivized by way of the public-private split I have already evoked.
Interpretations, for
example, of political movements of the 60s in terms of Oedipal
revolts are familiar
to everyone and need no further comment. That such
interpretations are episodes
in a much longer tradition, whereby political commitment is re-
psychologized and
accounted for in terms of the subjective dynamics of
ressentiment or the authorita-
71
Fredric Jameson
rian personality, is perhaps less well understood, but can be
demonstrated by a
careful reading of anti-political texts from Nietzsche and
Conrad all the way to the
latest cold-war propaganda.
What is relevant to our present context is not, however, the
demonstration of
that proposition, but rather of its inversion in third-world
culture, where I want to
suggest that psychology, or more specifically, libidinal
investment, is to be read in
primarily political and social terms. (It is, I hope, unnecessary

to add that what
follows is speculative and very much subject to correction by
specialists: it is
offered as a methodological example rather than a "theory" of
Chinese culture.)
We're told, for on thing, that the great ancient imperial
cosmologies identify by
analogy what we in the west analytically separate: thus, the
classical sex manuals
are at one with the texts that reveal the dynamics of political
forces, the charts of
the heavens at one with the logic of medical lore, and so forth.8
Here already then,
in an ancient past, western antinomies-and most particularly
that between the
subjective and the public or political-are refused in advance.
The libidinal center
of Lu Xun's text is, however, not sexuality, but rather the oral
stage, the whole
bodily question of eating, of ingestion, devoration,
incorporation, from which
such fundamental categories as the pure and the impure spring.
We must now
recall, not merely the extraordinary symbolic complexity of
Chinese cuisine, but
also the central role this art and practice occupies in Chinese
culture as a whole.
When we find that centrality confirmed by the observation that
the very rich
Chinese vocabulary for sexual matters is extraordinarily
intertwined with the
language of eating; and when we observe the multiple uses to
which the verb "to

eat" is put in ordinary Chinese language (one "eats" a fear or a
fright, for
example), we may feel in a somewhat better position to sense
the enormous
sensitivity of this libidinal region, and of Lu Xun's mobilization
of it for the
dramatization of an essentially social nightmare-something
which in a western
writer would be consigned to the realm of the merely private
obsession, the vertical
dimension of the personal trauma.
A different alimentary transgression can be observed throughout
Lu Xun's
works, but nowhere quite so strikingly as in his terrible little
story, "Medicine."
The story potrays a dying child-the death of children is a
constant in these
works-whose parents have the good fortune to procure an
"infallible" remedy.
At this point we must recall both that traditional Chinese
medicine is not "taken,"
as in the west, but "eaten," and that for Lu Xun traditional
Chinese medicine was
the supreme locus of the unspeakable and exploitative
charlatanry of traditional
Chinese culture in general. In his crucially important Preface to
the first collection
of his stories,9 he recounts the suffering and death of his own
father from tuber-
culosis, while declining family reserves rapidly disappeared
into the purchase of
expensive and rare, exotic and ludicrous medicaments. We will

not sense the
72
symbolic significance of this indignation unless we remember
that for all these
reasons Lu Xun decided to study western medicine in Japan-the
epitome of some
new western science that promised collective regeneration-only
later to decide
that the production of culture-I am tempted to say, the
elaboration of a political
culture-was a more effective form of political medicine.10 As a
writer, then, Lu
Xun remains a diagnostician and a physician. Hence this terrible
story, in which
the cure for the male child, the father's only hope for survival in
future genera-
tions, turns out to be one of those large doughy-white Chinese
steamed rolls,
soaked in the blood of a criminal who has just been executed.
The child dies
anyway, of course, but it is important to note that the hapless
victim of a more
properly state violence (the supposed crimihal) was a political
militant, whose
grave is mysteriously covered in flowers by absent sympathizers
of whom one
knows nothing. In the analysis of a story like this, we must

rethink our conven-
tional conception of the symbolic levels of a narrative (where
sexuality and politics
might be in homology to each other, for instance) as a set of
loops or circuits which
intersect and overdetermine each other-the enormity of
therapeutic cannibalism
finally intersecting in a pauper's cemetery, with the more overt
violence of family
betrayal and political repression.
This new mapping process brings me to the cautionary remark I
wanted to
make about allegory itself-a form long discredited in the west
and the specific
target of the Romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
yet a linguistic
structure which also seems to be experiencing a remarkable
reawakening of in-
terest in contemporary literary theory. If allegory has once
again become somehow
congenial for us today, as over against the massive and
monumental unifications of
an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is
because the allegorical
spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and
heterogeneities, of the
multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous
representation of
the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory-based, for
instance, on
stereotypes of Bunyan-is that of an elaborate set of figures and
personifications

to be read …
The Translation Studies Reader
Edited by
Lawrence Venuti
Advisory Editor: Mona Baker
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simulataneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2000 This collection and editorial matter © Lawrence Venuti;
individual essays © individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Translation studies reader/edited by Lawrence Venuti.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting. I. Venuti, Lawrence.
P306.T7436 2000
418'.02–dc21 99–36161
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Chapter 8

Roman Jakobson
ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF
TRANSLATION
AC C O R D I N G T O B E RT R A N D R U S S E L L , “no
one can understandthe word ‘cheese’ unless he has a
nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.”1 If,
however, we follow Russell’s fundamental precept and place
our “emphasis upon
the linguistic aspects of traditional philosophical problems,”
then we are obliged to
state that no one can understand the word “cheese” unless he
has an acquaintance
with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code of
English. Any
representative of a cheese-less culinary culture will understand
the English word
“cheese” if he is aware that in this language it means “food
made of pressed curds”
and if he has at least a linguistic acquaintance with “curds.” We
never consumed
ambrosia or nectar and have only a linguistic acquaintance with
the words
“ambrosia,” “nectar,” and “gods”—the name of their mythical
users; nonetheless,
we understand these words and know in what contexts each of
them may be used.
The meaning of the words “cheese,” “apple,” “nectar,”
“acquaintance,” “but,”

“mere,” and of any word or phrase whatsoever is definitely a
linguistic—or to be
more precise and less narrow—a semiotic fact. Against those
who assign meaning
(signatum) not to the sign, but to the thing itself, the simplest
and truest argument
would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted the meaning of
“cheese” or of
“apple.” There is no signatum without signum. The meaning of
the word “cheese”
cannot be inferred from a nonlinguistic acquaintance with
cheddar or with
camembert without the assistance of the verbal code. An array
of linguistic signs is
needed to introduce an unfamiliar word. Mere pointing will not
teach us whether
“cheese” is the name of the given specimen, or of any box of
camembert, or of
camembert in general or of any cheese, any milk product, any
food, any
refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents.
Finally, does a word
1959
114 ROMAN JAKOBSON
simply name the thing in question, or does it imply a meaning
such as offering,
sale, prohibition, or malediction? (Pointing actually may mean
malediction; in
some cultures, particularly in Africa, it is an ominous gesture.)
For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word-users, the

meaning of any
linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative
sign, especially a
sign “in which it is more fully developed,” as Peirce, the
deepest inquirer into the
essence of signs, insistently stated.2 The term “bachelor” may
be converted into a
more explicit designation, “unmarried man,” whenever higher
explicitness is
required. We distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal
sign: it may be
translated into other signs of the same language, into another
language, or into
another, nonverbal system of symbols. These three kinds of
translation are to be
differently labeled:
1 Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of
verbal signs by
means of other signs of the same language.
2 Interlingual translation or translation proper is an
interpretation of verbal
signs by means of some other language.
3 Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation
of verbal signs
by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.
The intralingual translation of a word uses either another, more
or less
synonymous, word or resorts to a circumlocution. Yet
synonymy, as a rule, is not
complete equivalence: for example, “every celibate is a
bachelor, but not every

bachelor is a celibate.” A word or an idiomatic phrase-word,
briefly a code-unit
of the highest level, may be fully interpreted only by means of
an equivalent
combination of code-units, i.e., a message referring to this
code-unit: “every
bachelor is an unmarried man, and every unmarried man is a
bachelor,” or
“every celibate is bound not to marry, and everyone who is
bound not to marry
is a celibate.”
Likewise, on the level of interlingual translation, there is
ordinarily no full
equivalence between code-units, while messages may serve as
adequate
interpretations of alien code-units or messages. The English
word “cheese” cannot
be completely identified with its standard Russian heteronym “
,” because cottage
cheese is a cheese but not a . Russians say: “bring
cheese and [sic] cottage cheese.” In standard Russian, the food
made of pressed
curds is called only if ferment is used.
Most frequently, however, translation from one language into
another substitutes
messages in one language not for separate code-units but for
entire messages in
some other language. Such a translation is a reported speech;
the translator recodes
and transmits a message received from another source. Thus
translation involves
two equivalent messages in two different codes.
Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language

and the pivotal
concern of linguistics. Like any receiver of verbal messages, the
linguist acts as
their interpreter. No linguistic specimen may be interpreted by
the science of
language without a translation of its signs into other signs of
the same system or
into signs of another system. Any comparison of two languages
implies an
examination of their mutual translatability; widespread practice
of interlingual
ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 115
communication, particularly translating activities, must be kept
under constant
scrutiny by linguistic science. It is difficult to overestimate the
urgent need for and
the theoretical and practical significance of differential
bilingual dictionaries with
careful comparative definition of all the corresponding units in
their intention and
extension. Likewise differential bilingual grammars should
define what unifies and
what differentiates the two languages in their selection and
delimitation of
grammatical concepts.
Both the practice and the theory of translation abound with
intricacies, and
from time to time attempts are made to sever the Gordian knot
by proclaiming
the dogma of untranslatability. “Mr. Everyman, the natural
logician,” vividly

imagined by B.L.Whorf, is supposed to have arrived at the
following bit of
reasoning: “Facts are unlike to speakers whose language
background provides
for unlike formulation of them.”3 In the first years of the
Russian revolution there
were fanatic visionaries who argued in Soviet periodicals for a
radical revision
of traditional language and particularly for the weeding out of
such misleading
expressions as “sunrise” or “sunset.” Yet we still use this
Ptolemaic imagery
without implying a rejection of Copernican doctrine, and we can
easily transform
our customary talk about the rising and setting sun into a
picture of the earth’s
rotation simply because any sign is translatable into a sign in
which it appears to
us more fully developed and precise.
A faculty of speaking a given language implies a faculty of
talking about this
language. Such a “metalinguistic” operation permits revision
and redefinition of
the vocabulary used. The complementarity of both levels—
object-language and
metalanguage—was brought out by Niels Bohr: all well-defined
experimental
evidence must be expressed in ordinary language, “in which the
practical use of
every word stands in complementary relation to attempts of its
strict definition.”4
All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in
any existing
language. Whenever there is deficiency, terminology may be

qualified and amplified
by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic
shifts, and finally, by
circumlocutions. Thus in the newborn literary language of the
Northeast Siberian
Chukchees, “screw” is rendered as “rotating nail,” “steel” as
“hard iron,” “tin” as
“thin iron,” “chalk” as “writing soap,” “watch” as “hammering
heart.” Even
seemingly contradictory circumlocutions, like “electrical horse-
car”
( ), the first Russian name of the horseless street car, or “flying
steamship” (jena paragot), the Koryak term for the airplane,
simply designate the
electrical analogue of the horse-car and the flying analogue of
the steamer and do
not impede communication, just as there is no semantic “noise”
and disturbance in
the double oxymoron—“cold beef-and-pork hot dog.”
No lack of grammatical device in the language translated into
makes impossible
a literal translation of the entire conceptual information
contained in the original.
The traditional conjunctions “and,” “or” are now supplemented
by a new
connective—“and/or”—which was discussed a few years ago in
the witty book
Federal Prose—How to Write in and/or for Washington.5 Of
these three
conjunctions, only the latter occurs in one of the Samoyed
languages.6 Despite
these differences in the inventory of conjunctions, all three
varieties of messages
observed in “federal prose” may be distinctly translated both
into traditional English

and into this Samoyed language. Federal prose: 1) John and
Peter, 2) John or Peter,
116 ROMAN JAKOBSON
3) John and/or Peter will come. Traditional English: 3) John and
Peter or one of
them will come. Samoyed: John and/or Peter both will come, 2)
John and/or Peter,
one of them will come.
If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its
meaning may be
translated into this language by lexical means. Dual forms like
Old Russian ?para
are translated with the help of the numeral: “two brothers.” It is
more difficult to
remain faithful to the original when we translate into a language
provided with a
certain grammatical category from a language devoid of such a
category. When
translating the English sentence “She has brothers” into a
language which
discriminates dual and plural, we are compelled either to make
our own choice
between two statements “She has two brothers”—“She has more
than two” or to
leave the decision to the listener and say: “She has either two or
more than two
brothers.” Again in translating from a language without
grammatical number into
English one is obliged to select one of the two possibilities—
“brother” or “brothers”
or to confront the receiver of this message with a two-choice

situation: “She has
either one or more than one brother.”
As Boas neatly observed, the grammatical pattern of a language
(as opposed
to its lexical stock) determines those aspects of each experience
that must be
expressed in the given language: “We have to choose between
these aspects, and
one or the other must be chosen.”7 In order to translate
accurately the English
sentence “I hired a worker,” a Russian needs supplementary
information, whether
this action was completed or not and whether the worker was a
man or a woman,
because he must make his choice between a verb of completive
or noncompletive
aspect— or —and between a masculine and feminine noun—
or . If I ask the utterer of the English sentence whether the
worker was male or female, my question may be judged
irrelevant or indiscreet,
whereas in the Russian version of this sentence an answer to
this question is
obligatory. On the other hand, whatever the choice of Russian
grammatical forms
to translate the quoted English message, the translation will
give no answer to
the question of whether I “hired” or “have hired” the worker, or
whether he/she
was an indefinite or definite worker (“a” or “the”). Because the
information
required by the English and Russian grammatical pattern is
unlike, we face quite
different sets of two-choice situations; therefore a chain of
translations of one and

the same isolated sentence from English into Russian and vice
versa could entirely
deprive such a message of its initial content. The Geneva
linguist S.Karcevski
used to compare such a gradual loss with a circular series of
unfavorable currency
transactions. But evidently the richer the context of a message,
the smaller the
loss of information.
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not
in what they may
convey. Each verb of a given language imperatively raises a set
of specific yes-or-
no questions, as for instance: is the narrated event conceived
with or without
reference to its completion? Is the narrated event presented as
prior to the speech
event or not? Naturally the attention of native speakers and
listeners will be
constantly focused on such items as are compulsory in their
verbal code.
In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on
the grammatical
pattern because the definition of our experience stands in
complementary relation
to metalinguistic operations—the cognitive level of language
not only admits but
ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 117
directly requires receding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any
assumption of

ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a
contradiction in terms. But in
jest, in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call
everyday verbal mythology
and in poetry above all, the grammatical categories carry a high
semantic import.
In these conditions, the question of translation becomes much
more entangled and
controversial.
Even such a category as grammatical gender, often cited as
merely formal,
plays a great role in the mythological attitudes of a speech
community. In Russian
the feminine cannot designate a male person, nor the masculine
specify a female.
Ways of personifying or metaphorically interpreting inanimate
nouns are prompted
by their gender. A test in the Moscow Psychological Institute
(1915) showed that
Russians, prone to personify the weekdays, consistently
represented Monday,
Tuesday, and Thursday as males and Wednesday, Friday, and
Saturday as females,
without realizing that this distribution was due to the masculine
gender of the
first three names ( ) as against the feminine gender
of the others ( ). The fact that the word for Friday is
masculine in some Slavic languages and feminine in others is
reflected in the folk
traditions of the corresponding peoples, which differ in their
Friday ritual. The
widespread Russian superstition that a fallen knife presages a
male guest and a
fallen fork a female one is determined by the masculine gender
of “knife”

and the feminine of “fork” in Russian. In Slavic and other
languages where
“day” is masculine and “night” feminine, day is represented by
poets as the
lover of night. The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why
Sin had been
depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that
“sin” is feminine
in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (Γpex).
Likewise a Russian
child, while reading a translation of German tales, was
astounded to find that
Death, obviously a woman (Russian , fem.), was pictured as an
old man
(German der Tod, masc.). My Sister Life, the title of a book of
poems by Boris
Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where “life” is feminine ,
but was
enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his
attempt to translate
these poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine
z∨ ∨ ∨ ∨ ∨ ivot.
What was the initial question which arose in Slavic literature at
its very
beginning? Curiously enough, the translator’s difficulty in
preserving the symbolism
of genders, and the cognitive irrelevance of this difficulty,
appears to be the main
topic of the earliest Slavic original work, the preface to the first
translation of the
Evangeliarium, made in the early 860’s by the founder of Slavic
letters and liturgy,
Constantine the Philosopher, and recently restored and
interpreted by A.Vaillant.8

“Greek, when translated into another language, cannot always
be reproduced
identically, and that happens to each language being translated,”
the Slavic apostle
states. “Masculine nouns as ‘river’ and ‘star’ in Greek, are
feminine
in another language as and in Slavic.” According to Vaillant’s
commentary, this divergence effaces the symbolic identification
of the rivers with
demons and of the stars with angels in the Slavic translation of
two of Matthew’s
verses (7:25 and 2:9). But to this poetic obstacle, Saint
Constantine resolutely
opposes the precept of Dionysius the Areopagite, who called for
chief attention to
the cognitive values ( ) and not to the words themselves.
In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of
the text. Syntactic
118 ROMAN JAKOBSON
and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and
their components
(distinctive features)—in short, any constituents of the verbal
code—are confronted,
juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the
principle of similarity
and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification.
Phonemic similarity is
sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more
erudite, and perhaps
more precise term—paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and
whether its rule is

absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only
creative
transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from
one poetic shape
into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language
into another, or
finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs
into another, e.g.,
from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.
If we were to translate into English the traditional formula
Traduttore, traditore
as “the translator is a betrayer,” we would deprive the Italian
rhyming epigram of
all its paronomastic value. Hence a cognitive attitude would
compel us to change
this aphorism into a more explicit statement and to answer the
questions: translator
of what messages? betrayer of what values?
Notes
1 Bertrand Russell, “Logical Positivism,” Revue Internationale
de Philosophie,
IV (1950), 18; cf. p. 3.
2 Cf. John Dewey, “Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs,
Thought, and Meaning,”
The Journal of Philosophy, XLIII (1946), 91.
3 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality
(Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), p. 235.
4 Niels Bohr, “On the Notions of Causality and
Complementarity,” Dialectica,

I (1948), 317f.
5 James R.Masterson and Wendell Brooks Phillips, Federal
Prose (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1948), p. 40f.
6 Cf. Knut Bergsland, “Finsk-ugrisk og almen språkvitenskap,”
Norsk Tidsskrift
for Sprogvidenskap, XV (1949), 374f.
7 Franz Boas, “Language,” General Anthropology (Boston,
1938), pp. 132f.
8 André Vaillant, “Le Préface de l’Évangeliaire vieux-slave,”
Revue des Études
Slaves, XXIV (1948), 5f.
Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory"
Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad
Source: Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 3-25
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466475
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Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the
"National Allegory"
AIJAZ AHMAD
In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson's "Third-
World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capital,":' I find myself in an
awkward position. If I were
to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today

whose work I generally
hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson.
The plea that gener-
ates most of the passion in his text-that the teaching of
literature in the US academy
be informed by a sense not only of "western" literature but of
"world literature"; that
the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary
pleasures of domin-
ant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of
heterogeneity-is of course
entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the
range of sympathies, he
brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands.
Yet this plea for syllabus reform-even his marvelously erudite
reading of Lu
Xun and Ousmane-is conflated with, indeed superseded by, a
much more ambitious
undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is
explicitly announced only in
the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of "a
theory of the cognitive
aesthetics of third-world literature." This "cognitive aesthetics"
rests, in turn, upon a
suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among
and within both the
advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations.
We have, instead, a
binary opposition of what Jameson calls the "first" and the
"third" worlds. It is in

this passage from a plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation
of a "cognitive
aesthetics" that most of the text's troubles lie. These troubles
are, I might add, quite
numerous.
There is doubtless a personal, somewhat existential side to my
encounter with
this text, which is best clarified at the outset. I have been
reading Jameson's work now
for roughly fifteen years, and at least some of what I know
about the literatures and
cultures of Western Europe and the US comes from him; and
because I am a marxist, I
had always thought of us, Jameson and myself, as birds of the
same feather even
though we never quite flocked together. But, then, when I was
on the fifth page of this
text (specifically, on the sentence starting with "All third-world
texts are necessar-
ily. . ." etc.), I realized that what was being theorised was,
among many other things,
'Social Text #15 (Fall 1986), pp. 65-88.
3
Aijaz Ahmad
myself. Now, I was born in India and I am a Pakistani citizen; I
write poetry in Urdu,
a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals.

So, I said to myself:
"All? . . . necessarily ?" It felt odd. Matters got much more
curious, however. For, the
farther I read the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the
man whom I had for
so long, so affectionately, even though from a physical distance,
taken as a comrade
was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a
good feeling.
I
I too think that there are plenty of very good books written by
African, Asian
and Latin American writers which are available in English and
which must be taught
as an antidote against the general ethnocentricity and cultural
myopia of the
humanities as they are presently constituted in these United
States. If some label is
needed for this activity, one may call it "third-world literature."
Conversely, however,
I also hold that this phrase, "the third world," is, even in its
most telling deployments,
a polemical one, with no theoretical status whatsoever. Polemic
surely has a promi-
nent place in all human discourses, especially in the discourse
of politics, so the use of
this phrase in loose, polemical contexts is altogether
permissible. But to lift the phrase
from the register of polemics and claim it as a basis for
producing theoretical knowl-
edge, which presumes a certain rigor in constructing the objects
of one's knowledge,
is to misconstrue not only the phrase itself but even the world to
which it refers. I

shall argue, therefore, that there is no such thing as a "third-
world literature" which
can be constructed as an internally coherent object of
theoretical knowledge. There
are fundamental issues-of periodisation, social and linguistic
formations, political
and ideological struggles within the field of literary production,
and so on-which
simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an
altogether positivist
reductionism.
The mere fact, for example, that languages of the metropolitan
countries have
not been adopted by the vast majority of the producers of
literature in Asia and Africa
means that the vast majority of literary texts from those
continents are unavailable in
the metropoles, so that a literary theorist who sets out to
formulate "a theory of the
cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature" shall be
constructing ideal-types, in the
Weberian manner, duplicating all the basic procedures which
orientalist scholars
have historically deployed in presenting their own readings of a
certain tradition of
"high" textuality as the knowledge of a supposedly unitary
object which they call
"the Islamic civilization." I might add that literary relations
between the metropoli-
tan countries and the imperialised formations are constructed
very differently than
they are among the metropolitan countries themselves. Rare
would be a literary
theorist in Europe or the US who does not command a couple of
European languages

other than his/her own; and the frequency of translation, back
and forth, among
4
European languages creates very fulsome circuits for the
circulation of texts, so that
even a US scholar who does not command much beyond English
can be quite well
grounded in the various metropolitan traditions.
Linguistic and literary relations between the metropolitan
countries and the
countries of Asia and Africa, on the other hand, offer three
sharp contrasts to this
system. Rare would be a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa
who does not know at
least one European language; equally rare would be, on the
other side, a major
literary theorist in Europe or the United States who has ever
bothered with an Asian
or African language; and the enormous industry of translation
which circulates texts
among the advanced capitalist countries comes to the most
erratic and slowest possi-
ble grind when it comes to translation from Asian or African
languages. The upshot
is that major literary traditions-such as those of Bengali, Hindi,
Tamil, Telegu and

half a dozen others from India alone-remain, beyond a few texts
here and there,
virtually unknown to the American literary theorist.
Consequently, the few writers
who happen to write in English are valorized beyond measure.
Witness, for example,
the characterization of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in
the New York Times
as "a Continent finding its voice"-as if one has no voice if one
does not speak in
English. Or, Richard Poirier's praise for Edward Said in Raritan
Quarterly which
now adorns the back cover of his latest book: "It is Said's great
accomplishment that
thanks to his book, Palestinians will never be lost to history."
This is the upside-down
world of the camera obscura: not that Said's vision is itself
framed by the Palestinian
experience but that Palestine would have no place in history
without Said's book! The
retribution visited upon the head of an Asian, an African, an
Arab intellectual who is
of any consequence and who writes in English is that he/she is
immediately elevated
to the lonely splendour of a "representative"-of a race, a
continent, a civilization,
even the "third world." It is in this general context that a
"cognitive theory of
third-world literature" based upon what is currently available in
languages of the
metropolitan countries becomes, to my mind, an alarming
undertaking.
I shall return to some of these points presently, especially to the

point about the
epistemological impossibility of a "third-world literature."
Since, however, Jameson's
own text is so centrally grounded in a binary opposition
between a first and a third
world, it is impossible to proceed with an examination of his
particular propositions
regarding the respective literary traditions without first asking
whether or not this
characterization of the world is itself theoretically tenable, and
whether, therefore, an
accurate conception of literature can be mapped out on the basis
of this binary
opposition. I shall argue later that since Jameson defines the so-
called third world in
terms of its "experience of colonialism and imperialism," the
political category that
necessarily follows from this exclusive emphasis is that of "the
nation," with
nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology; and, because
of this privileging of
the nationalist ideology, it is then theoretically posited that "all
third-world texts are
5
Aijaz Ahmad
necessarily ... to be read as ... national allegories." The theory
of the "national

allegory" as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger
Three Worlds Theory
which permeates the whole of Jameson's own text. We too have
to begin, then, with
some comments on "the third world" as a theoretical category
and on "nationalism"
as the necessary, exclusively desirable ideology.
II
Jameson seems aware of the difficulties in conceptualising the
global dispersion
of powers and populations in terms of his particular variant of
the Three Worlds
Theory ("I take the point of criticism," he says). And, after
reiterating the basic
premise of that theory ("the capitalist first world"; "the socialist
bloc of the second
world"; and "countries that have suffered colonialism and
imperialism"), he does
clarify that he does not uphold the specifically Maoist theory of
"convergence"
between the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest of the
difficulty in holding
this view of the world is elided, however, with three assertions:
that he cannot find a
"comparable expression"; that he is deploying these terms in "an
essentially descrip-
tive way"; and that the criticisms are at any rate not "relevant."
The problem of
"comparable expression" is a minor matter, which we shall

ignore; "relevance," on
the other hand, is the central issue and I shall deal with it
presently. First, however, I
want to comment briefly on the matter of "description."
More than most critics writing in the US today, Jameson should
know that when
it comes to a knowledge of the world, there is no such thing as a
category of the
"essentially descriptive"; that "description" is never
ideologically or cognitively neu-
tral; that to "describe" is to specify a locus of meaning, to
construct an object of
knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that shall be bound by
that act of descriptive
construction. "Description" has been central, for example, in the
colonial discourse.
It was by assembling a monstrous machinery of descriptions-of
our bodies, our
speech-acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics,
our socialities and
sexualities-in fields as various as ethnology, fiction,
photography, linguistics, politi-
cal science-that the colonial discourse was able to classify and
ideologically master
the colonial subject, enabling itself to transform the
descriptively verifiable multiplic-
ity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value.
To say, in short, that
what one is presenting is "essentially descriptive" is to assert a
level of facticity which
conceals its own ideology and to prepare a ground from which

judgments of classifi-
cation, generalisation and value can be made.
As we get to the substance of what Jameson "describes," I find
it significant that
first and second worlds are defined in terms of their production
systems (capitalism
and socialism, respectively), whereas the third category-the
third world-is defined
purely in terms of an "experience" of externally inserted
phenomena. That which is
6
constitutive of human history itself is present in the first two
cases, absent in the third
one. Ideologically, this classification divides the world between
those who make
history and those who are mere objects of it; elsewhere in the
text, Jameson would
significantly re-invoke Hegel's famous description of the
master/slave relation to
encapsulate the first/third world opposition. But analytically,
this classification leaves
the so-called third world in a limbo; if only the first world is
capitalist and the second
world socialist, how does one understand the third world? Is it
pre-capitalist? Transi-

tional? Transitional between what and what?
But then there is also the issue of the location of particular
countries within the
various "worlds." Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is
nostalgically rehashed
on US television screens in copious series every few months,
but the India of today has
all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalised
commodity production,
vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agriculture
and industry but also
between Departments I and II of industry itself, technical
personnel more numerous
than that of France and Germany combined, and a gross
industrial product twice as
large as that of Britain. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism,
and the conditions of
life for over half of the Indian population (roughly 400 million
people) are considera-
bly worse than what Engels described in Conditions of the
Working Class in England.
But India's steel industry did celebrate its hundredth
anniversary a few years ago, and
the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the
fastest growing in the
world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam
to Nigeria. This
economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary
rule of the
bourgeoisie since independence in 1947, a record quite
comparable to the length of

Italy's modern record of unbroken bourgeois-democratic
governance, and superior to
the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of
the oldest colonising
countries. This parliamentary republic of the bourgeoisie in
India has not been
without its own lawlessnesses and violences, of a kind and
degree now not normal in
Japan or Western Europe, but a bourgeois political subjectivity
has been created for
the populace at large. The corollary on the left is that the two
communist parties (CPI
and CPM) have longer and more extensive experience of
regional government, within
the republic of the bourgeoisie, than all the eurocommunist
parties combined, and the
electorate that votes ritually for these two parties is probably
larger than the com-
munist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world.
So, does India belong in the first world or the third? Brazil,
Argentina, Mexico,
South Africa? And .. .? But we know that countries of the
Pacific rim, from South
Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastest growing region within
global capitalism.
The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary
opposition which
Jameson constructs between a capitalist first world and a
presumably pre- or non-
capitalist third world is empirically ungrounded.
7

Aijaz Ahmad
III
I have said already that if one believes in the Three Worlds
Theory, hence in a
"third world" defined exclusively in terms of "the experience of
colonialism and
imperialism," then the primary ideological formation available
to a leftwing intellec-
tual shall be that of nationalism; it will then be possible to
assert, surely with very
considerable exaggeration but nonetheless, that "all third-world
texts are necessarily
... national allegories" (emphases in the original). This
exclusive emphasis on the
nationalist ideology is there even in the opening paragraph of
Jameson's text where
the only choice for the "third world" is said to be between its
"nationalisms" and a
"global American postmodernist culture." Is there no other
choice? Could not one
join the "second world," for example? There used to be, in the
marxist discourse, a
thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was
neither nationalist nor
postmodernist. Has that vanished from our discourse altogether,
even as the name of

a desire?
Jameson's haste in totalising historical phenomena in terms of
binary opposi-
tions (nationalism/postmodernism, in this case) leaves little
room for the fact, for
instance, that the only nationalisms in the so-called third world
which have been able
to resist US cultural pressure and have actually produced any
alternatives are the ones
which are already articulated to and assimilated within the much
larger field of
socialist political practice. Virtually all others have had no
difficulty in reconciling
themselves with what Jameson calls "global American
postmodernist culture"; in the
singular and sizeable case of Iran (which Jameson forbids us to
mention on the
grounds that it is "predictable" that we shall do so), the anti-
communism of the
Islamic nationalists has produced not social regeneration but
clerical fascism. Nor
does the absolutism of that opposition
(postmodernism/nationalism) permit any
space for the simple idea that nationalism itself is not some
unitary thing with some
pre-determined essence and value. There are hundreds of
nationalisms in Asia and
Africa today; some are progressive, others are not. Whether or
not a nationalism will
produce a progressive cultural practice depends, to put it in

Gramscian terms, upon
the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it
and utilises it, as a
material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony.
There is neither
theoretical ground nor empirical evidence to support the notion
that bourgeois
nationalisms of the so-called third world will have any
difficulty with postmodern-
ism; they want it.
Yet, there is a very tight fit between the Three Worlds Theory,
the over-valoriza-
tion of the nationalist ideology, and the assertion that "national
allegory" is the
primary, even exclusive, form of narrativity in the so-called
third world. If this "third
world" is constituted by the singular "experience of colonialism
and imperialism,"
and if the only possible response is a nationalist one, then what
else is there that is
8
more urgent to narrate than this "experience"; in fact, there is
nothing else to
narrate. For, if societies here are defined not by relations of
production but by
relations of intra-national domination; if they are forever
suspended outside the

sphere of conflict between capitalism (first world) and
socialism (second world); if the
motivating force for history here is neither class formation and
class struggle nor the
multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender,
nation, race, region
and so on, but the unitary "experience" of national oppression
(if one is merely the
object of history, the Hegelian slave) then what else can one
narrate but that national
oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all. Formally, we are
fated to be in the
poststructuralist world of repetition with difference; the same
allegory, the nationalist
one, re-written, over and over again, until the end of time: "all
third-world texts are
necessarily. . ."
IV
But one could start with a radically different premise, namely
the proposition
that we live not in three worlds but in one; that this world
includes the experience of
colonialism and imperialism on both sides of Jameson's global
divide (the "experi-
ence" of imperialism is a central fact of all aspects of life inside
the US from ideologi-
cal formation to the utilisation of the social surplus in military-
industrial complexes);

that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much
constituted by the
division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist
countries; that socialism
is not restricted to something called the second world but is
simply the name of a
resistance that saturates the globe today, as capitalism itself
does; that the different
parts of the capitalist system are to be known not in terms of a
binary opposition but
as a contradictory unity, with differences, yes, but also with
profound overlaps. One
immediate consequence for literary theory would be that the
unitary search for "a
theory of cognitive aesthetics for third-world literature" would
be rendered impossi-
ble, and one would have to forego the idea of a meta-narrative
that encompasses all
the fecundity of real narratives in the so-called third world.
Conversely, many of the
questions that one would ask about, let us say, Urdu or Bengali
traditions of literature
may turn out to be rather similar to the questions one has asked
previously about
English/American literatures. By the same token, a real
knowledge of those other
traditions may force US literary theorists to ask questions about
their own tradition
which they have heretofore not asked.
Jameson claims that one cannot proceed from the premise of a

real unity of the
world "without falling back into some general liberal and
humanistic universalism."
That is a curious idea, coming from a marxist. One should have
thought that the
world was united not by liberalist ideology-that the world was
not at all constituted
in the realm of an Idea, be it Hegelian or humanist-but by the
global operation of a
9
Aijaz Ahmad
single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the
global resistance to this
mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in
different parts of the globe.
Socialism, one should have thought, was not by any means
limited to the so-called
second world (the socialist countries) but a global phenomenon,
reaching into the
farthest rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America,
not to speak of indi-
viduals and groups within the United States. What gives the
world its unity, then, is
not a humanist ideology but the ferocious struggle of capital
and labor which is now
strictly and fundamentally global in character. The prospect of a
socialist revolution
has receded so much from the practical horizon of so much of
the metropolitan left

that the temptation for the US left intelligentsia is to forget the
ferocity of that basic
struggle which in our time transcends all others. The advantage
of coming from
Pakistan, in my own case, is that the country is saturated with
capitalist com-
modities, bristles with US weaponry, borders on China, the
Soviet Union and Af-
ghanistan, suffers from a proliferation of competing
nationalisms, and is currently
witnessing the first stage in the consolidation of the communist
movement. It is
difficult, coming from there, to forget that primary motion of
history which gives to
our globe its contradictory unity: a notion that has nothing to do
with liberal
humanism.
As for the specificity of cultural difference, Jameson's
theoretical conception
tends, I believe, in the opposite direction, namely, that of
homogenisation. Difference
between the first world and the third is absolutised as an
Otherness, but the enormous
cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called
third world is sub-
merged within a singular identity of "experience." Now,
countries of Western Europe
and North America have been deeply tied together over roughly
the last two hundred

years; capitalism itself is so much older in these countries; the
cultural logic of late
capitalism is so strongly operative in these metropolitan
formations; the circulation of
cultural products among them is so immediate, so extensive, so
brisk that one could
sensibly speak of a certain cultural homegeneity among them.
But Asia, Africa, and
Latin America? Historically, these countries were never so
closely tied together; Peru
and India simply do not have a common history of the sort that
Germany and France,
or Britain and the United States, have; not even the singular
"experience of colonial-
ism and imperialism" has been in specific ways same or similar
in, say, India and
Namibia. These various countries, from the three continents,
have been assimilated
into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural
ensemble but highly
differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal)
exchange with the me-
tropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations.
Circuits of exchange
among them are rudimentary at best; an average Nigerian who is
literate about his
own country would know infinitely more about England and the
United States than
about any country of Asia or Latin America or indeed about
most countries of Africa.
The kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of the
advanced capitalist

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