The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/South

The oddity of the locution East/West is that it refers both to the Cold War and to an imperial divide of race and civilizational conquest. If translation is an East/West problem in the latter sense, it is also embedded in the ideological divide of communism and capitalism. To say, for example, that "East is East and West is West" is to assume the sort of noncommunication among human types that has a long tradition in the work of Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, and other novelists of empire. By contrast, seeing communication as a problem of substance is not typically granted to the "East/West conflict," a phrase belonging to a war that was popularly thought to be ideological alone. In that particular sense, "East/West" has always been thought of as a mere struggle over programmatic spoils. And yet, just as much as the imperial divide, the Cold War divide involved differences in aesthetic taste and social value--in intellectual excitement and moral intention--not just differences in the more regulatory contests of administration, hierarchy, and sovereignty over land.

An imaginative geography, in other words, governs the cultural differences related to civilizational contests and national or ethnic divisions (the East/West as Kipling understood it), as well as the world political contests of the Cold War, as perhaps Nikita Khrushchev or later Ronald Reagan rendered them. Soviet and Euro-American cultures of position are today overlaid upon more well known imaginative geographies that were first developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourses, and they extend to affiliative networks that were neither Soviet nor Euro-American. As a consequence, the political is not seen as having a cultural life with its own affective and varied practices or styles.

I am interested in how this conjuncture of the colonial and the ideological affects translation. As in Nietzsche's observation that etymologies bear the historical meanings of terms dulled by repetitive use, East/West is a linguistic tick that assigns hemispheres to social types as it betrays an ambiguity that reflects the double duty it performs. World socialism in the mid-1960s, when it was at its apogee, enlisted primarily nonwhite peoples in agrarian settings in the eastern and southern zones of the inhabitable earth. This attention to a key term like East/West, then, lets us see how language itself associates the racial with the socialist other.

A further merging is ushered in along with this association of the syntagm racial/socialist: that of the temporal and spatial entanglements of the backward- and forward-looking. At the center of two overlapping debates on the Cold War and the "periphery" lie problems of historical time: the "future in the present" as C. L. R. James put it. ¹ Throughout the Cold War, in other words, it was unclear to many people whether socialism in places like Tanzania, Kerala, or Vietnam was merely a throwback fueled by peasant resentments or (in a political counterpoint) the snapshot of a future in which "natives" now represented something like the cultural and social avant-garde--the classic Maoist theory of encirclement, in which the wretched of the earth would surround, and eventually vanquish, the metropolis in the act of bringing it kicking and screaming into a collectivist future.

That the supposed triumph of the market makes this particular socialist desire unthinkable is also a matter of translation, for the space between one and the other view represents an inaccessible dimension--one that would remain unimaginable without positing an act of conversion to think it. I use this word conversion with a certain sense of risk. My reference is not to religion, but to the fact that there is no real semantic contact between the two lifeworlds of communism and capitalism. Typically, there are no grounds even for persuasion. One can only find oneself to either universe of belief by way of indoctrination or revelation, even though, in practice, this alterity is...