Friday 25 November 2022

Homo Baba on cultural translation

Almost 40 years Homo Baba wrote a foolish essay on 'the trials of cultural translation' quite forgetting that his own people had faced no great difficulty in translating their Persian culture first into Gujerati and then English. 

He begins with a translation from German. 

'Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity. " Walter Benjamin

Hermeneutics may work that way. But Google can do translation using purely 'extensional' means in a mechanical fashion. But the Germans knew this already. They had plenty of savants who translated ancient Hindu, Zoroastrian and Chinese texts. Long dead languages written in forgotten scripts were deciphered. This was done through discrete steps not 'continua of transformation'.  Hermann Grassmann is now recognized as a great mathematician. In his own day he was better known for his translation of the Rg Veda. By introducing the concept of a vector space, Grassman showed that there was nothing special about three dimensions. They could be infinite or uncountable. But this meant that transformations and translations had to be discrete and of limited dimensionality. By contrast, identity was fundamental to mathematics and, indeed, any protocol bound cognitive process. 

It is radical perversity, not sage political wisdom, that drives the intriguing will to knowledge of postcolonial discourse.

Post colonial savants are all perverts. Good to know. But there is no fucking will-to-knowledge among those tenure craving charlatans.  

Why else do you think the long shadow of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness falls on so many texts of the postcolonial pedagogy?

It was only on the curriculum coz it was short. Also kids could watch Apocalypse Now instead. Chinua Achebe fulmined against Conrad, but- in Reagan's America- this confirmed his place in the canon.  

 Marlow has much in him of the anti-foundationalist, the metropolitan ironist who believes that the neopragmatic universe is best preserved by keeping the conversation of humankind going.

Nope. Marlow is the mouthpiece of a Pole grieving over Tzarist oppression. Similarly, Roger Casement- who exposed the atrocities occurring in the Congo under King Leopold- grieved for Ireland. The Brits executed him. Neither Casement, nor Conrad, wanted to preserve the enslavement of their countries. No amount of pragmatic amelioration would help. Those who tried it would end up like Kurtz.  

And so he does, in that intricate end-game that is best known to readers of the novel as the ’lie' to the Intended.

Gibberish. What Conrad didn't say was that suppressing the slave trade meant that African potentates could no longer preserve their independence. Conrad belonged to the Polish aristocracy. His message was not lost on his older, male, readers. Bluestockings and idealistic Liberals paved the way for hearts of darkness. Catherine the Great was terribly Enlightened.  

Although the African wilderness

it isn't a wilderness to the Africans who live there. It is a wonderful home. Sadly, its rich resources keep bringing in horrible people. Otherwise it would be an earthly paradise for its handsome and artistic people.  

has followed him into the lofty drawing-room of Europe, with its spectral, monumental whiteness, despite the dusk that menacingly whispers ’the Horror, the Horror’, Marlow’s narrative keeps faith with the gendered conventions of a civil discourse where women are blinded because they see too much reality, and novels end because they cannot bear too much fictionality.

Nonsense! Women are like men. They want to hear that their fiancee lurves them.  

Marlow keeps the conversation going, suppresses the horror, gives history the lie - the white lie — and waits for the heavens to fall.

Conrad published his novella about 4 years before his pal Casement blew the whistle on King Leopold's merry band of thugs.  

But, as he says, the heavens do not fall for such a crime.

Leopold had to give up control of the Congo. Apparently, he showered all his ill gotten gains on some hooker.  

The global link between colony and metropolis, so central to the ideology of imperialism,

meaningless gibberish! Obviously, a colony is linked to the colonizing country by the movement of goods and people between the two. If there is no link there is no Empire. This is a plain fact of geography. It has nothing to do with 'ideology'.  

is articulated in Kurtz’s emblematic words - 'the Horror, the Horror!'

Fuck off. Britain had a huge Empire. British Civil Servants or Civilians weren't repeating this mantra. The point about the Congo Free State was that it wasn't a proper colony. That's what it became thanks to Casement. The Belgian Government had to take the place over.  

the unreadability of these Conradian runes

which aren't unreadable at all. Kurtz was a dying man. He had committed horrible cries. The guy was headed to the bad place- indeed, had entered it already.  

has attracted much ‘interpretive“ attention,

from cretins 

precisely because their depths contain no truth that is not perfectly visible on the ’outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.’

Coz that's how truth works.  

Marlow does’not merely repress the ’truth’ —

he tells Kurtz's fiancee that the last word he uttered was her name. That was the polite thing to do. Homo would probably have told her that her beloved's last words were 'at least I won't have to marry that frigid bitch.'  

’however multivocal and multivalent it may be - as much as he enacts a poetics of translation that (be)sets the boundary between the colony and the metropolis.

Nonsense! There is no problem of translation here. The Whites were able to understand each other perfectly. As for the Africans- nobody was listening to them.  

The name of a woman - the Intended —

represents Kurtz's intention to make money abroad so as to return home and set up a nice cozy home with his sweet-heart. But that's exactly what did happen to the many traders- including Marwari or Parsi or Sindhi traders- who went to Africa at about this time.

to mask the daemonic ’being of colonialism

But the Congo Free State wasn't a Colony. It was the personal possession of King Leopold. It only became a colony in 1908 

 Between the silent truth of Africa

what truth? That ending slavery harmed West Africa and delivered it into European hands?  

and the salient lie to the metropolitan woman,

Your fiancee loved you. He didn't think you were a frigid bitch. Also, he didn't eagerly suck my cock.  

Marlow, returns to his initiating insight- the experience of colonialsm is the problem of living in the midst of the incomprehensible.

Bhabha's ancestors had done very well under the Brits. Far from finding Inglis 'incomprehensible', they became very good at speaking it. By 1857, there was a Parsi baronet. By 1892, there was a Parsi MP sitting in Westminster.  

By contrast, Toni Morrison and Sir Wilson Harris, whom Baba mentions next, had to live with the heritage of slavery and intense color prejudice. The Parsis, who grew rich in the opium trade and then yet richer trading in cotton during the Civil War, had it easy. What Baba is indulging in is akin to 'stolen valor'. He is equating himself with people descended from slaves. Yet, he reveals his own contempt for the 'primitive' African whose architectural achievements are limited to piling up skulls. 

Baba swiftly turns to licking the arse of Whitey. 

Writing of the notion of the ’self in moral space’, in his recent book Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor sets temporal limits to the problem of personhood: ’the supposition that I could be two temporally succeeding selves is either an overdramatized image, or quite false. It runs against the structural features of a self as a being who exists in a space of concerns.’

Baba, like Sen, wants to have a multiple identity- one that is White but which still qualifies for Affirmative Action coz Whitey enslaved Indians and forced them to pluck cotton in Southern plantations where the trees bear strange fruit.  

Such 'overdramatized’ images are precisely my concern as I attempt to negotiate narratives where double-lives are led in the postcolonial world, with its journeys of migration and its dwellings of the diasporic.

Baba turned into a werewolf when he landed in Engyland. In America, however, he is Spiderman.  The plain fact is that Imperialism made the movement of goods and people easier. Migrants could choose to 'assimilate' or they were welcome to maintain a wholly separate identity. Nationalism made it more difficult. Communism erected walls to prevent the proletariat escaping. 

These subjects of study require the experience of anxiety to be incorporated into the analytic construction of the object of critical attention: narratives of the borderline conditions of cultures and disciplines.

Very true. I feel very anxious because I have been passing myself off as the Duchess of Balderdash for many decades now. What if the Daily Mail discovers I'm not actually a natural blonde? My psychiatrist- whose hobby it is to run a wig shop- tells me not to worry so much.  

For anxiety is the affective address of ’a world [that] reveals itself as caught up in the space between frames; a doubled frame or one that is split’, as Samuel Weber describes the symbolic structure of psychic anxiety itself.

Which, however, most migrants don't experience. On the other hand there are plenty of people who are plagued with anxiety though they and their ancestors had stayed put.  

And the long shadow cast by Heart of Darkness on the world of postcolonial studies is itself a double symptom of pedagogical anxiety:

Black students might protest against having to read that shite. But then, they might also protest against being taught by cretins like Baba.  

a necessary caution against generalizing the contingencies and contours of local circumstance, at the very moment at which a transnational, ’migrant’ knowledge of the world is most urgently needed.

It has already been supplied by America- a nation of migrants if you exclude the First Nations.  

Any discussion of cultural theory in the context of globalization would be incomplete without

saying it is shit repeatedly and then micturating mightily upon those who argue otherwise. Baba is pointing to 'Secondary elaborations' by Fredric Jameson  which, ludicrously, thought there would be a 'conflict' between Modernism and Postmodernism. The problem was that Jameson thought Marxism was 'modern'. It wasn't. It was a fucking fossil. Still, I must admit, he wrote well. But then he was White. Baba was a migrant werewolf with multiple identities and lots of anxieties. 

Jameson did point out that migration changes demographics and 'phenomenology'- but this has always been true since apes descended from the trees in the African Savannah. Jewish emigration into the Roman Empire fundamentally changed Europe. Sadly, Jewish emigration into South India had little impact on Hinduism. 

The postmodern’, for Jameson, is a doubly inscribed designation.

only inscribed by drooling imbeciles or Gallic geeks who had finally gotten the message that Communism stinks.  

As the naming of a historical event — late multinational capitalism

which only capitalists understand. They spoke of globalization because supply chains and lines of control were increasingly 'off shore' and beyond the control of either Governments or Trade Unions.  

— postmodernity provides the periodizing narrative of the global transformations of capital.

It failed to do any such thing because only low IQ pedants babbled about it. If they really understood capitalism they would have been billionaire hedge fund managers.  

But this developmental schema is radically disrupted by the postmodern as an aesthetic-ideological process of signifying the 'subject’ of the historical event.

These guys are so fucking stupid that they need to get a PhD in garbage before they can understand that the 'subject' of a historical event is the guy who is affected by it.  

Jameson uses the language of psychoanalysis

because Marx wasn't enough of a charlatan for him. He had to buy into Freud as well.  

(the breakdown of the signifying chain in psychosis)

there is no such breakdown in Freud who avoided psychosis like the plague because the genuinely mentally ill can't pay quacks big bucks. This shite is Lacanian. 

Jameson was stupid not mad. He said 'Schizophrenia is a breakdown in the signifying chain, creating a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers: a linguistic malfunction. This schizophrenic disjunction is a form of écriture–writing–or a cultural style.' No psychiatrist will endorse this view.  There is some reason to believe that certain language disorders are at the opposite end of the spectrum from schizophrenia. However, some 'psychotomimetics' produce both language disorder and symptoms similar to schizophrenia. But so would being bashed repeatedly on the head. 

to provide a genealogy for the subject of postmodern cultural fragmentation.

As the Duchess of Balderdash I can tell you that postmodern cultural fragmentation's daddy was a coal miner and its mummy was an actual Egyptian mummy. For a small payment I can give anybody a better genealogy. You too could discover that you are the heir to a European crown.  

Inverting the influential Althusserian edict on the 'imaginary‘ ideological capture of the subject,

Althusser was genuinely mad though he did kill his wife.  

Jameson insists that it is the schizoid or ’split’ subject that articulates, with the greatest intensity,

world salad of the following sort 

the disjunction of time and being

which are always disjunct unless they start bumming each other 

that characterizes the social syntax of the postmodern condition:

language has syntax and is social. If you can write books about the post modern condition there can't be anything very special about it.  

the breakdown of temporality

occurs when Being starts bumming Time and refusing it a reacharound 

[that] suddenly releases this present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis engulfing] the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming. . .. This present of the world or material signi■er comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a 

vast turd in its mouth- right? At any rate, it is on that hopeful note that I bid adieu to Homo Baba- the boy from Bombay who didn't get that going West meant getting smarter or at least richer, not talking illiterate bollocks.  

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