Back to Babel

Growing up, I had a particular habit with much-watched movies. When I got to the point where I could basically recite the lines along with the actors, I would start watching them in other languages for fun—Spanish, usually, or French if the mood struck me. It wasn’t that I was trying to actively teach myself another language, though I’m sure I picked up phrases here and there; it was more about how the movie both changed and stayed exactly the same. The story was the story that I knew so well, but by switching languages, it also felt like I was watching things unfold for the first time.

It was the same, later, when I was learning Latin (an ever-practical choice) in college. I’d read the Aeneid previously, in English, but it wasn’t the same; the essence wasn’t the same—the feeling of the words as they hung aloud in the room was markedly different.

It’s natural while thinking about technology to think about language; technology is often utilized in the service of communication, after all. It’s natural, I think, to question how technology can be made universal when the practicalities of language and location are not. I’ve seen eloquent arguments for the value of this universality; technology itself is sometimes the language that allows this type of engagement. And it does seem, when we take a wide view of things, that a swiftly-moving blanket of interconnectivity is spreading itself out; it is challenging to keep it from slipping over our heads; the buzz of the global is a distinct layer of sound that runs under everything else.

So in the midst of this, it is perfectly right that Donna Haraway should ask the question: is a common language actually what we want? What is lost when the narrative becomes universal?

She gets to this question—among others—in the delightfully provocative “A Cyborg Manifesto.” First, she crystallizes something about technology that I think is paramount to the way things crack things open later on. Observe:

Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move — the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language.

I am completely taken with the idea of technology acting as a preservative for a social moment. It’s the “why” behind the incredible nostalgia of outdated pieces, but I hadn’t ever had the wherewithal to conceptualize it that way. The beauty is this: now that technology—the churning, buzzing behemoth—gets forced into a moment of stillness, we can lay hands on it. To continue with the metaphor of freezing, it’s simple work to shatter something made of ice—and shatter it does. Haraway’s summation comes to this:

This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Questioning the effect of universality becomes a move of power, rather than one of weakness. To embrace a cyborg’s mentality is to seek friction between previously bounded dichotomies—not to eliminate it, but to capture what sparks may form. So, what might it mean to study like an infidel? To create meaning like a cyborg?

These are questions that all disciplines can ask of themselves. For me it means, among other things, looking towards blended media rather than away. When it comes right down to it, the book has always been a cyborg—first birthed from the oral tradition and the inception of the alphabet; then from the alphabet and the revolution of printing; now it stands reborn as the child of print and digital. The mutable boundaries are what clue us in to its definitive properties, if we look.

A common language—literally, technologically—would allow for one dialogue, it’s true, but would we in fact be saying less? Can we instead harness what comes of cacophony?