Translating translation

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In favor of a dialogue between political science and Science Studies

I remember meeting Bruno Latour for the first time. It was in the kitchen of an old friend and colleague in San Francisco. What I remember most distinctly on that occasion, besides Latour’s modest yet grand presence, is that he liked to play with the English language. In the middle of some highly theoretical, abstract conversation about science, he said to my friend: “You are sitting in obscurity, let me enlighten you.” I expected him to then say something important or even profound. What he did was turn toward the window and raise the blinds. This is, and was, to me a double entendre and meditation on the meaning of the English word, “enlighten” and a lovely play on a Latourian theme of moving between poles of an apparent dichotomy, in this case the discursive and the material, complementing, in a way, John Austin’s ordinary language penchant for philosophizing about “doing things with words”: Latour was doing things alongside words as a way of “doing words with things.” This moving between theoretical poles has another associated double entendre word: “translation.”

On one hand, translation can mean a putting-into-correspondence two texts (words, sentences, paragraphs, essays, books). We often think of translation as putting texts in different human “natural” languages into correspondence. Most often, the work of translation is taken to be the generation of a text in one language that the translator intends to correspond in a certain way with a text in another language: to capture the meaning or spirit of the “original.” ‘Correspondence’ can be taken to have its own set of “entendres.” Other modes of translation include the discursive translations someone used to working with certain technical language (scientists, engineers, technicians, clinicians, …) presents in words designed for audiences from other social worlds who have different technical languages (the public, citizens, lay people, policy makers, …). Translations of this sort might characterize “the upshot,” “meaning,” “significance,” “economic impact,” “political consequences,” of something the target audience in one world might otherwise not notice or interpret differently because the idea, finding or product came from another world speaking different technical language.

On the other hand, translation can mean a certain sort of motion while preserving a property, structure or organization. As Wikipedia aptly puts it (by translating the idea from its original mathematical context in words designed for the encyclopedia’s “broader” audience): “In Euclidean geometry, a translation is a geometric transformation that moves every point of a figure, shape or space by the same distance in a given direction.” The figures before and after such a transformation, we might say, correspond with one another, though they are in different (mathematical or physical) places. So there is deep connection between the doubled senses in the entendres of translation. Latour played with these senses in his 1988 essay: “A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity.”

In the sense I aim to use the word in this editorial, ‘translation’ takes on yet another, additional sort of theoretical meaning for Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well. Translating translation can itself be a project, moving from these contexts of meaning and movement in and among social worlds, into STS work. Latour’s essay on a “dialogue” between political science and science studies is translated for this issue of Tapuya by Luis Reyes-Galindo. Latour’s essay is a meditation on many, different meanings of “politics” and “science” in the fields of political science and science and technology studies. Latour writes of “calibrating” definitions rather than translation: holding up a definition of politics or science from one field against one from the other to reveal places where a collaboration rather than a competition or opposition might be possible if genuinely explored. Latour thus unwinds the opposition of “political” to “scientific” apparent from superficial uses of each in both disciplines, as he has tried to do in unwinding problematic juxtapositions of “social” with “scientific.” Reyes-Galindo’s translation of Latour’s French prose into English, along with his translator’s footnotes explaining word choices might be an occasion to raise STS issues, using natural language and technical language translations as opportunities to pursue further forms of STS dialogue.

Translation may put words into correspondence or move a figure or an object in such a way that it is “recognizable” in a different language or a different physical location in a “Euclidean space,” but it may also be to translate one world’s project into another. Here, I use the occasion of Reyes-Galindo’s translation of an essay written and published in French by Bruno Latour into English to translate the project of translation into a possible STS project of translating translation. The translation before you of Latour’s essay, “In Favor of a Dialogue between Political Science and Science Studies” in this issue of Tapuya, is also, presumably doubled already, as Reyes-Galindo is a “native speaker” of Spanish, working in English (and in this case, French) for his job as an STS scholar in The Netherlands and his job as Associate Editor of Tapuya, speaking to and about STS in, of, and from Latin America. It is also doubled because Latour aimed to address political scientists in an argument designed to translate the problems and projects of politics into Science Studies (the discipline).

Latour’s essay extends his writing about what, to him, has been a core text of science studies: Shapin and Schaffer’s, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). Latour here focuses on the way Hobbes and Boyle mixed the categories of science and politics. Shapin and Schaffer wrote about politics for science studies. Latour wrote about science/politics for political scientists. Latour historicizes the history of science studies as Shapin and Schaffer historicized the history/philosophy of science. In doing this, Latour changes what science studies potentially is (again), at least as presented to political scientists: science studies is “the study of the politics of science and technology” (p. 3). This resituation of the relation of the political and the scientific, which Latour pulls into science studies, is an opening, an invitation to political scientists to enter the domain of science studies or rather, to recognize the intersection of the two previously separate domains of science studies and political science as “political epistemology.”

As with many of his essays, Latour uses translation (between languages) as a way to think with the activities, actions, and agencies of actors engaged in science/politics. He uses the vehicle of translation to show how mixing the words “science” with “politics” in political science is different from the mixture that happens in science studies, implying that the “political chemistry” of ideas is complex and various depending on how the reagent concepts are brought together through translation. The “science” in “political science” is a stabilized empirical method. The “politics” and the “science” in “science studies” are destabilized objects of study and even the notion of empirical method itself is questioned.

To see the artistry and potential uses of translation as a means of doing STS, see Reyes-Galindo’s important footnote 17, as but one example of his translation of translation into STS (see also footnotes 21, 22). There, he translates one of Latour’s examples, regarding cosmopolitical sovereignty over and under the Alps in Europe, into an example of the translation of “citizen” into “illegal alien” across the Mexico/US border. Latour writes (p. 12): “A spatial translation will have the same effect as a temporal one: we will find across the world, in all political states, apparently similar “causes” for local views on water supply, public transport, sewage, the protection of species, renewable energy, and humanity – displacement transforms the same person from a “citizen,” … .” Reyes-Galindo translates the “ … ” as follows: “for an institution South of the Rio Bravo, into an “illegal alien,” for one North of the Rio Grande.” He adds a translator’s footnote, #17, writing: “Translator's note: in the original, Latour drives the coda of this sentence with an impossibly difficult metaphor referring to sovereignty across and under the Alps. It seemed to me that, with its publication in Tapuya, the definition of humanity across migratory borders would be much easier to grasp.”

We can argue about how this translational movement of Latour’s text from the Alps of Europe to the Mexico/US border might support Latour’s claim of the scope of his thesis, extending “across the world, in all political states,” but also about how that translation affects what science studies and political science scholars alike might mean by “sovereignty” in the juxtaposition Reyes-Galindo has created in his translation of examples as well as of words. This is something different, something new, something beyond capturing the meaning or spirit of Latour’s words: it is a theoretical translation, into doing STS work by means of translating translation. I find this quite exciting and invite readers of Tapuya to engage in dialogue with and around Latour’s and Reyes-Galindo’s contributions through the medium of the latter’s translation of Latour’s French into not only English but also into STS in a different key, singing a music that sounds different, depending on where in the worlds one works.