Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

the
Manuela Hötzl: In the process of analysing a
linguistic term your book also describes the
mood in Europe at present. From your point of
view, what questions does the language problem
in Europe raise?
Boris Buden: The main question in my book is
about the future of Europe. One of my theses is
that there is no European language per se, and
that none of the national European languages
can take over this role. But how can a Europe,
which wants to unify, communicate in future?
What common language – which is necessary,
if Europe wants to be truly democratic – should
the European public speak? The language of
Europe can only be understood as a kind of
translation practice, a linguistic communication
that takes place as a process of constant
reciprocal translation. At present there is no
real awareness of this challenge. But in the future
neither intellectuals nor politicians will be
able to avoid this problem.
In the course of your search for the “true goal
of translations” you also look for the “lost social
emancipation”. Could this be the “new
ideological start of Europe” that Slavoj Žižek
writes about on the flyleaf to your book?
The main thesis of my book is that in our postmodern
era all spheres of social life but above
all the political one are translated into culture,
or, if you prefer, into the language of culture.
Today culture has become a kind of ultimate
translation. We can no longer manage to escape
the all-embracing notion of culture. This
is the point where it must become clear that,
unlike what some people believe, we cannot
expect global emancipation through cultural
translation alone. The “new beginning”, which
Žižek calls for, means nothing less than a repoliticisation
of our historical experience and
the economic sphere. The first step towards
this new beginning is the recognition that there
is also experience lying outside of the field of
culture and that this experience can only be
made as a result of practical change. Previously
this change was called revolution, but today we
have to reinvent it.
Do you believe that a Europe which wishes to
define itself through a common cultural identity
is on the wrong track?
Of course Europe is on the wrong track if it
believes that cultural development alone can
decide its destiny. This belief is even very dangerous,
as it makes us blind to political contradictions
and the new, as yet unknown, antagonisms
that the project of European unification
will inevitably bring with it. My book is directed
precisely against this political blindness. Or,
to put it more precisely, against the naïve belief
in a new cultural identity, an identity that is
supposed to develop outside of the old concept
of the European nations' fundamental identities,
as a kind of “cultural hybridism”. This is
supposed to spare us giving an answer to the
equally decisive question about Europe's future,
i.e. whether Europe should develop into
a kind of federal nation state. Sooner or later
the sovereignty of the existing nation states
will have to be abolished, or, contrariwise, Europe
must try out a completely different form
of democracy.
“Even if we don’t talk and
understand languages perfectly,
we should use them
and savour the taste of them
in our mouths.”
What form of democracy might that be?
It could be something that refers back to the
tradition of the European revolutions or, to be
more precise, to the experiences of the revolutionary
soviet republics.
But surely the German soviet republics quickly
collapsed due to constant internal disagreement?
I myself don't feel so badly in this kind of perennial
dispute – out of which my book too developed.
But, to put joking aside: what we are
talking about here is a different experience of
democracy, an alternative concept of democracy.
Just as my own cultural identity, if I have
one, no longer fits into the conceptual framework
of a national culture. But precisely this
can no longer be translated into the political
realm and there is, as yet, no democracy outside
of the nation state. In this area I am both
politically and culturally a nobody, a wageearner,
whose rights are far fewer than those
of the working classes a hundred years ago, I
am, as a Croatian nationalist once said about
a nation without a state, “like a piece of shit in
the rain”.
How did you personally experience the changes
in Croatia?
Croatia is today still dreaming of its area of
cultural sovereignty and is consequently working
towards the self-isolation of its culture. Although
the Croatians have essentially the same
language as the Serbs and the Bosnians they
are attempting to radically distinguish their
version from the other two. This means that
they are doing their own language untold damage.
The consequence of this linguistic autism
is a situation reminiscent of the position in the
19th century, when Croatia was still part of the
einventing
Boris Buden, the author of the book “Der Schacht von Babel – Ist Kultur
übersetzbar” (The Pit of Babel – is Culture Translatable?) , explains in
the conversation with „Report“ why he finds the belief in a new cultural
identity naive and why society should not confuse politics with culture.
Buden speaks of Europe as a translation community.
— Manuela Hötzl in conversation with Boris Buden —
evolution
Habsburg monarchy. At that time most of the
elite studied in Vienna and spoke German, the
language of knowledge, intellectual communication
and sophisticated culture. The mass of
the people had to make do with their completely
autistic native tongue, Croatian, which was
incapable of serious cultural and intellectual
production.
Has German been replaced by a new “language
of the elite”?
The language of the elite nowadays is English.
This elite studies abroad, mostly at American
or British university faculties, where intellectual
communication takes place primarily in
English.
Could English not take over the role of a common
European language?
The French philosopher Etienne Balibar has
pointed out that English is “more or less” the
European language. But English is also the
language of global communication and exists
in many different forms. On the other hand
English is the language of only two of the European
nations. Why should this language in
particular take on the role of the language of
Europe?
You take as your starting point Wilhelm von
Humboldt's understanding of language, which
ultimately defines a nation exclusively in terms
of language. Have the Eastern and South-eastern
European countries perhaps too readily
adopted this concept?
The idea of a homology between language and
culture, which ultimately implies that there can
be no European culture per se, or that European
culture is only a kind of summation of European
national cultures, is based on Humboldt's
understanding of language as a self-contained
totality and the expression of a self-contained
community. The nations of Eastern and Southeastern
Europe also experienced the romantic
phase of nation building, mostly in the 19th
century. This happened although most of them
did not immediately succeed in crowning this
cultural “revival” with the founding of their
own nation state. If their aim today is to bring
this process to its final conclusion by political
means, then this seems a kind of anachronism
Does the same kind of thing happen in the
West?
Here one has only to think of all the institutions
of so-called national culture that still
continue to enjoy official support, both in Eastern
and Western Europe, and which dominate
cultural life in the whole of Europe. Therefore
institutionally European culture and the educational
systems of the European peoples (that
are based on national languages) still remain
at the same stage of development as in the 19th
century.
More and more countries, including Austria,
are compelling foreigners to learn the language
of the country they live in. Do you think this is
right?
This kind of compulsion is contra-productive.
And furthermore it is motivated by the same
conservative historical perspective, i.e., the
conviction that national culture forms the ultimate
horizon of modern culture and whoever
doesn't possess it is without culture or primitive.
Etienne Balibar, whom I referred to earlier,
believed that the future of European culture
lies with those people who have gone beyond
the horizon of national culture.
What translation methods do you think should
be used in the EU?
I can't answer this question. But one thing
should be emphasised: translation is increasingly
more than a merely linguistic process. It
is always also a cultural, political and social examination
of what is foreign. As I see it the socalled
linguistic or literary translation is only a
part of “translation practice”.
In the future ought all of us speak more languages?
Yes, even if we don’t talk and understand them
perfectly, we should use them and savour the
taste of them in our mouths.
Boris Buden, who was born in Croatia in 1958, studied
classic and modern philosophy in Klagenfurt, Zagreb
and Ljubljana. Since 1984 he has worked as a freelance
journalist and writer. Buden regularly publishes
philosophical and political essays as well as cultural
criticism in German, English and French. While an activist
in the Croatian peace movement he founded the
journal “arkzin” in 1993.
Boris Buden, “Der Schacht von Babel – Ist Kultur übersetzbar?”,
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2004
Boris Buden/Stefan Nowotny, „Übersetzung: das Versprechen
eines Begriffs“, Turia + Kant, Vienna 2008
The unabridged interview was published in “Report”
1/2005
65