Michel de Certeau and Marcel Mauss

In The Practise of Everyday Life, de Certeau conceives of the Expert as a subject of modernity whose
rhetorical self-legitimation is a jurisdiction which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The Expert,
whose competence is transmuted into social authority, is becoming commonplace. The common slips into
a rationalisation of exclusion and difference. Since the critic cannot find a truly objective place from which
to interpret common language, and since the interpretations which do exist are illusory, the fact remains that
there is no outside from which to exteriorise ‘alien-ness’ itself. As noted below in the survey of an article
by Marcel Mauss, the tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it
being a practise of daily ritual. In order to legitimate itself, “every ‘strategic’ rationalisation seeks first of
all to distinguish its ‘own’ place” (36), from which it is able to define and authorise itself.

         And yet power is not static, for users and consumers of that power equally adapt to the circumstances
of engagement akin to gameplay. Perhaps the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, the century during
which the aristocratic institutions of Europe slowly transmuted into the bureaucratic processes and
institutions of the modern age as they hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the
importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, de Certeau explains, is a game signalling a self-producing
adaptation to circumstance and the exchange and accumulation of social authority by means of a speech act.
Adaptations on the part of those who engage with language are crucial to the negotiation of power dynamics
within a cultural economy, and over time they come to determine ‘style’. De Certeau’s text allows the
conception of a geography of play within culture. Countercultural movements, positioned at the cracks and
fissures of dominant culture, involve a deconstructive gameplay in which users ‘bricolent’ a transformation
signalling a simultaneous critique of and inscription within a field of discourse which marginalised them.
The violence inherent to this struggle is assumed within the fabric and textures of daily life.

         Techniques of the Body by Marcel Mauss serves exemplary in this context. His methodological
strategy is to synthesise a few brief ethnographic surveys with examples from his personal life in order to
outline a system of knowledge which understands and categorises the motions of the body as enacted within
the field of culture. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, is “man’s first and most
natural technical object” (56). As the style of the movements of the body are the circumstantial adaptations
of an individual agent as articulated within the biological and cultural systems which circumscribe any
meaning elicited as a result of their expression, Mauss forwards the notion that psychology should be
introduced as an equal participant within a discursive tetrarchy that includes biology and sociology. To the
modern scholar raised on the critical discourse of poststructuralism, his study reads as the miscellaneous and
archeological remainder of colonialism, to abuse the term ‘remainder’ which Mauss himself invokes in
relation to the initial evaluation of his project to define the techniques of the body. After all, the collection,
sorting, and deployment of bodies for the mutual projects of understanding and industry served as the
intellectual foundation for colonialism.

         One could suggest that the instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology which ritualises
expression and produces and transmits knowledge and discourse, was begun, long before Marcel Mauss,
with the rationalisation of human consciousness by means of a tactical deployment of Cartesian philosophy
articulated through the culture and technologies related to empire. Indeed, for many critics of colonialism
the silently productive body of the colonised was the site of inscription from which the technique of empire
was itself articulated. The voices of the colonised are displaced, and through their silence Mauss can speak
as expert on their behalf.

          Mauss begins by suggesting that his earlier work signalled his rejection of the commonplace, but
quickly posits the body to itself be a technology of the common. In the second chapter of his essay, he
elaborates the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section
that the essay is most problematic while at the same time so very useful. When one reads of the many
examples Mauss provides which essentialise instances of a gesture into a common behavioural tendency
related to a characteristic, one can see in this methodology the articulation of power as conceived by de
Certeau: “The “proper” .... is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible
a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that
can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision” (36). And
so we find in the sexual division of techniques of the body an explanation of how women and men hold their
thumbs differently, with the Freudian semantic composition of a man with his thumb on the outside and a
woman with her thumb inside. We also get a “biographical list of the techniques of the body” in the third
chapter, which examines the mundane techniques of the body that are common to all humans as they
progress through life; this section is a rhetorical device modelled on the riddle of the Sphinx.

          Interestingly enough, Mauss reflects the silence of his ethnographic subjects when on page sixty-five
he states under the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” that “Here I could list innumerable facts for
you” and then proceeds to censor himself entirely. Here we get the incongruous, self-legitimating, and
transcendent category which functions akin to the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ from Jorge Luis Borges’s
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins as interpreted by Foucault in his preface to Les Mots et les Choses. Much like the various fantastical classifications of the animals belonging to the Emperor, whose overlapping and exclusive categories signal not the power of reason but rather the power to reason, the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” contains no content except for the authoring power by which the category itself came into existence. Mauss provides no techniques of expressing the production and containment of shit or urine, and we can understand the “hygiene” of this category to be self-censorship.

         These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they foster a critical discourse which examines how specific deployments and intersections of the biological, the psychic, and the social come to render meaning for the human bodies who invoke meaning through the expression of common and mundane
activities. More importantly however, the precise examples which Mauss uses serve to demonstrate the answer to a question fundamental to scholarly activity in general: has the object of a critical inquiry been altered by the enunciation which creates it and speaks in its name? De Certeau is explicit in defining this process, this power of knowledge, as the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” in order to “make knowledge possible and at the same time determine its characteristics” (36). It is
this violence which sits, sublimated but deterministic, at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday

Marcel Mauss: the body postcolonial

I must say that I felt as though I would be forced to perform an autopsy upon a corpse when first presented with a text as quaint and relatively antediluvial as Marcel Mauss’s 1934 essay 'Techniques of the Body'. Both Erika and myself had wanted to focus our attentions on Michel de Certeau’s work instead. Despite getting the short end of the stick, as it were, I will retain for Mauss’s text the sense of play and gamesmanship inspired by de Certeau. In this spirit, I wish to state that my initial reaction that he is unfashionably old remains with me. The various contemporary discourses invoking a politics and economics of identity can be seen to support my somewhat infantile claim that by talking about people of different national backgrounds in the manner in which he does, Mauss sounds like my grandfather. I may love him in the understanding that he is part of my extended family, but his stories bore me to tears, and thus my disapproval of the taste of his rhetoric. Due to my own psychological impulses, I tend toward playful subversion when confronted with an authority to whom I do not in all respects defer.

Mauss’s methodological strategy is to briefly interrogate disparate ethnographic surveys along with a few examples from his own personal life in order to outline a system of knowledge which understands and categorises the motions of the body as enacted within the field of culture. As the style of the movements of the body are the circumstantial adaptations of an individual agent as articulated within the biological and cultural systems which circumscribe any meaning elicited as a result of their expression, Mauss forwards the notion that psychology should be introduced as an equal participant within a discursive tetrarchy that includes biology and sociology. To the modern scholar raised on the critical discourse of poststructuralism, his study reads as the miscellaneous and archeological remainder of colonialism, to abuse the term ‘remainder’ which Mauss himself invokes in relation to the initial evaluation of his project to define the techniques of the body. After all, the collection, sorting, and deployment of bodies for the mutual projects of understanding and industry served as the intellectual foundation for colonialism. One could suggest that the project of instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology ritualising expression and producing and transmitting knowledge and discourse, was begun, long before Marcel Mauss, with the rationalisation of human consciousness by means of a tactical deployment of Cartesian philosophy articulated through the culture and technologies related to empire. Indeed, for many critics of colonialism the silently productive body of the colonised was the site of inscription from which the technique of empire was itself articulated.

Much like the habit and technique of mountain climbing, to invoke one of Mauss’s examples, and one which incidentally like the rest of the examples contextualized in his essay I would wish to see dehabiller – sans vêtements, the project of colonialism changed rapidly during the author’s lifetime. Like the colonial project, mountaineering was a technique inscribed with the silence of the voices of the indigenous whose bodies were shaped by their efforts. If, as he says on page fifty-six, that “there is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition”, I wish to know under whose tutelage and by whose name did Mauss come to understand the practise of sleeping while standing on a mountain. Gayatri Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason articulates the discourse of colonialism as including the silence of the colonised, and so I must remain frustrated in my desire to understand silence itself as an absence of tradition, for Mauss prefaces this example on page sixty-one with an important proximity which glosses the entire psychology and geography of empire: “The Masai can sleep on their feet. I have slept standing up in the mountains”.

This statement is a direct vindication of de Certeau’s conception in The Practise of Everyday Life, on page eight, of the Expert as person or discourse which, having “successfully submitted to [an] initiatory practise ... can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socio-economic order”. The Expert is a subject of modernity whose rhetorical self-legitimation is a quasi-poetry which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it being a practise of daily ritual. And so we come to a slightly different evaluation of Mauss’s statement that education dominates every field of the body.

Unlike my attempt to stretch an outline of the contingencies inhabiting both mountaineering techniques and imperial discourse without breaking the original metaphor, the larger colonial project was a technique which became increasingly hidden. This is true despite de Certeau’s claim that power brings attention to itself by means of its very visibility. For power has learned to hide itself within the common. The discourse as well as the bodily articulations of colonialism became increasingly occluded after the Second World War, as the horrors of warfare allowed a critical dialogue which examined the consequences of an articulation of human reason which historicised the bodies of certain human subjects as always-already excluded, and whose gait, and here I wish to remind you of Mauss’s love of this particular turn of speech of the English, is traced in the expressions of the dominant. The techniques of the body related to consumerism have rendered silent new bodies – some made necessarily poor and others necessarily ill – within the order of things as we bear witness to the full expression of a sublimated colonial process.

Perhaps it is a bit cheeky to mention here that I am getting slightly ahead of myself and should return to the beginning.

Mauss begins his essay by suggesting that his earlier work signalled his rejection of the commonplace, but quickly posits the body to itself be a technology of the common. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, becomes the site where humanity articulates and emotes. Indeed, to further the quotation from page fifty-six, he states that the body is “man’s first and most natural technical object”. I do wish to call attention to the gendered use of language in this statement, as I will return to it momentarily.

He provides numerous examples to indicate and categorise the various techniques of the body, for example poise at the dinner table, the different modes of walking, jumping, and running, and the different styles of swimming. Of course, in relation to this latter practise, we must take note of Mauss’s reflection on page fifty-one that his “generation has witnessed a complete change in technique” by remembering, as Goethe does in his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, that swimming was a newly-discovered novelty more or less exclusive to the leisure classes only a few generations prior to Mauss’s birth. While it was known to be practised among other cultures such as the Ancient Egyptians, in early modern Europe swimming represented a new technique of articulating the body: a body moving through the water and made mobile by means of a ritualised articulation witch exploited the principles of buoyancy – I should note here as a rather purposeful and distracting aside that buoyancy was a law systematised by Archimedes, whose texts had been redeployed by scientific discourse in the early modern period. This understanding was historically contingent with the development of swimming as a technique. The change to which Mauss refers as happening within his lifetime is the development of the front crawl by John Arthur Trudgen, who named the technique after himself after copying it from Native Americans during a trip to South America. Out of this colonial history of mimicking and displacing the silenced subject comes a space for the articulation of political agency, as we can witness the social capital authored upon those men and women who undertake extreme and heroic articulations of the technique – one could gain the prestige of becoming, for example, the first woman to swim across all five Great Lakes (the CBC posted an article on August 25 of this year celebrating the second completion of this feat by a thirty-year old woman from Belleville).

In the second chapter of his essay, Mauss elaborates on the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section that I find the essay to be most problematic while at the same time so very useful. When one reads of the many examples Mauss provides which essentialise instances of a gesture into a common behavioural tendency related to a characteristic, one can see in this methodology the articulation of power as conceived by de Certeau on page thirty-six: “The “proper” .... is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision”. And so we find in the sexual division of techniques of the body an explanation of how women and men hold their thumbs differently, with the Freudian semantic composition of a man with his thumb on the outside and a woman with her thumb inside. We also get a “biographical list of the techniques of the body” in the third chapter, which examines the mundane techniques of the body that are common to all humans as they progress through life; this section is a rhetorical device modelled on the riddle of the Sphinx. Interestingly enough, Mauss reflects the silence of his ethnographic subjects when on page sixty-five he states under the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” that “Here I could list innumerable facts for you” and then proceeds to censor himself entirely.

Here we get the incongruous, self-legitimating, and transcendent category which functions akin to the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ from Jorge Luis Borges’s The Analytical Language of John Wilkins as interpreted by Foucault in his preface to Les Mots et les Choses. Let me quote the first paragraph at length, as Foucault states that his book

"arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Please allow the joy experienced through Borges to signal your anxiety about the legitimacy of his taxonomy. I also hope to quel any worries you may have by stating that the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” contains no content except for the authoring power by which the category itself came into existence. Mauss provides no techniques of expressing the production and containment of shit or urine, and we can understand the “hygiene” of this category to be self-censorship. While it might be a stretch a suggest that the hygiene of the colonial instinct at the heart of Mauss’s ethnographic project involved the erasure of human bodies excluded and silenced by the colonial body, I would like to Puckishly state that the individual who taught Mauss how to sleep while standing on a mountain probably had a technique of bodily excretions whose articulations were as informed by mountain life as were his patterns of sleeping. Indeed, these excretions were productive of more than culture for Mauss’s silenced Masai, for human and animal shit and urine were ingredients in the cement with which the Masai built their houses.

These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they do indeed foster a critical discourse which examines how specific deployments and intersections of the biological, the psychic, and the social come to render meaning for the human bodies who invoke meaning through the expression of common and mundane activities. More importantly however, the precise examples which Mauss uses serve to demonstrate the answer to a question fundamental to scholarly activity in general: has the object of a critical inquiry been altered by the enunciation which creates it and speaks in its name? On page thirty-six, De Certeau is explicit in defining this process, this power of knowledge, as the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” in order to “make knowledge possible and at the same time determine its characteristics”. It is this violence which sits dormant at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday.

Perhaps we can assume the Mauss essay itself to reflect the fact that scholarship is a technique of the body, and since Mauss describes education as dominating every field of the body, this articulation is quite literally specific to a body academic. If critical discourse is an activity which is as mundane as walking or swimming, and I mean by mundane the terms of their being activities which are bound to and articulated through the body, are there parallels in terms of the fashionability of their articulation? In this capacity and with the intention of provoking discussion, I propose a slight of hand wherein critical discourse is analogised to de Certeau’s conception of gameplay as fundamental to cultural expression. Scholarship is a tactical deployment which is not simply an organization of possible moves and responses but also a dialogue about itself, and thus we can define criticism and metacriticism respectively as scholarship about objects of study and objects of study which are scholars. Much as walking involves a particular habit which constitutes movement in pursuit of a destination or goal, scholarship involves a particularly self-reflexive gait in pursuit of the ordering of understanding.

I, for one, do not find tasteful Mauss’s particular fashion of rhetoric – neither the gender essentialism of the girl who can’t throw, nor the ethnographic tourism which invokes an 18th century travelogue of wondrous foreign people with faces on their chests combined with the quasi-science of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not exhibition – and thus I struggle with the fact that I can find his conclusions academically useful. Perhaps the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, the century during which the aristocratic institutions of Europe slowly transmuted into the bureaucratic processes and institutions of the modern age as it hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, as de Certeau explains, is a game signalling a self-producing adaptation to circumstance and the exchange and accumulation of social authority by means of a speech act. Scholarship is a self-producing institution which prides itself on a search for truth and the betterment of the human condition and justifies its existence by means of speech acts which render to academics institutional and social authority, and it is possible in this capacity to witness remuneration by means of public funding and private wealth for this properly ethical project. Critical discourses of identity politics, the ethics of science and human inquiry, and cultural relativism are flourishing in a postmodernity during which the trend of increasing corporatisation and privatisation of the academy, and this reality seems to reflect the domination of consumer activities over the critical articulations which respond to them.

Can we therefore interpret the changes in scholarship over the years to be any more politically progressive in terms of achieving the goals of academia (new SSHRC funding is increasingly tied to business-related research projects, as the institutional and intellectual fundamentals of economics are themselves increasingly under critical suspicion), than is walking (people walk much less than they did in the past, and for different reasons) or learning how to hunt for food (once the communal ritual of the hunt and the harvest, now the private ritual, enacted in a public space, of the packaged meat and processed meal made hygienic by the supermarket)?

         I desire for a politics within this space which we have designated as confession class and so I ask the following in conclusion: is the body of the animal, a body silenced as it is articulated by the technologies and techniques of contemporary agricultural practise which render it fit for the market, is this body the final and most brutal articulation of the colonial?

Cinema Babel: translation, subtitles, dubbing

Due to a variety of reasons interior and exterior to film, foreign film viewership increased dramatically in the North American market during the three decades after the second world war. Despite the fact that Hollywood enjoyed hegemonic control of the market, foreign films increasingly found North American audiences over the course of the twentieth century. On a fundamental level, film has always been about spectacle and visual tourism. The audience bears witness to the previously unseen, the voyeuristic, and the fantastic, and every image is always-already presented in a manner which makes it exotic. It should be little surprise that viewership of foreign films is informed by numerous market concerns which have come to define what is visible as foreign, as well as the development of a critical and production discourse of national cinema as a commercial export item. Cinema production became a more widely accessible means of cultural expression as the development of increasingly affordable camera technology has allowed film cultures to develop within economically marginalised groups and countries. This process has spawned fertile cinemas representing and advocating for the liminal and transgressive spaces within the dominant Western culture which self-identify as necessarily political – African-American cinema, queer cinema, feminist cinema, the numerous diasporic cinemas, punk and DIY cinema, etc – as well as the emergence of domestic film production in developing nations. Each of these marginal cinemas enjoys a similarly exotic relationship to mainstream cinema audiences as do foreign films. Furthermore, each of them renders their subjects into an object of resistence to the oppressive gestures of identity interpellation contingent with mainstream culture. The development of affordable production equipment allowed the proliferation of these cinematic voices while the development of affordable home viewing systems fertilised a market for their consumption, which would not have been possible when film viewing was limited to theatrical exhibition. Regardless of the means of dissemination, the drive for representational authenticity remains fundamental for audiences and critics of foreign films. Much of the critical discourse concerns the process of authentically presenting a foreign film to a domestic audience, and issues of language translation and distribution tend to be understood within a framework of market influences and institutional power structures.

Several critics highlight the fact that there is no standard manner of translation for the importation of foreign films, and there is ultimately no critical consensus as to which method produces the best results. If film as a visual medium is itself a language, how does the process of subtitling or dubbing a film alter its reception? Technological processes for translation, with the result of either subtitling or dubbing the film, further complicate syntactic and aesthetic difficulties inherent to language translation. The dubbing of a film is typically a process as technologically and logistically complicated as the initial sound recording. In addition to a script translation, voice actors and directors are required to interpret the script within the visual framework of another actor’s performance. If executed properly, a dubbed film can retain the narrative coherence and performative nuance of the original while allowing for a larger viewing audience. Of course, due to the expense and level of production value required to achieve a good dub, most distributors of foreign films produce dubs of markedly lesser quality. Indeed, English-language dubs of foreign films were often of such poor (and laughable) quality that many critics prefer foreign-language films to be subtitled rather than dubbed. Subtitling a film is relatively easy and inexpensive to accomplish, but the process did present its own technological challenges. With a few notable exceptions, such as anime and arthouse audiences, most theatrical film markets demonstrate a preference for films which have been dubbed. Contingent with the ‘tourist’ conception of foreign film consumption which I outline above, these exceptions suggest that part of the pleasure of experiencing subtitled foreign films comes from the exclusivity attached to viewing the ‘correct’ version of the film.

A further element which rendered foreign films as ‘attractions’ for the marketplace was the fact that many of them were scandalously received, typically due to a controversy of representation.[1] When judged against their Hollywood counterparts, films from some foreign (principally continental European) cinemas presented controversial images and themes with a greater degree of naturalism and complexity. Foreign films were produced outside of the production codes which censored Hollywood efforts, and were often marketed for their sensational elements. The conception of foreign cinema as an agent which transgresses puritanical local moralities was perhaps most visible in films involving sexual themes and images, which by their nature inherently tend toward the spectacular in visual representation. Their consumption also represents the expression of an increasing cosmopolitan sophistication on the part of the well-educated and upwardly-mobile urban dwellers who were the typical customers of such exoticism.[2] As a result, the popular reception of most foreign films which were not easily sensationalised was largely limited to the arthouse market. For perhaps obvious reasons, the distribution system imported certain films which could be financial successful and excluded others which presented greater financial risk. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the financial inputs required to distribute foreign-language films served as an agent which cultivated a particular conception of ‘foreign’ in domestic film audiences.

We should not attribute a negative evaluative gesture to the fact that, at a reductive level, foreign films are interesting to many audiences for their depiction of locations, actors, and cultures which are themselves exotic and thus pleasurably experienced as a spectacle. Certainly, the degree to which Otherness has itself been theorised within the rubric of pleasure has been well documented in many critical literatures.[3] Indeed, in this respect Abé Mark Nornes argues in Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema that the pleasure of experiencing Otherness is akin to “the ‘attractions’ of the early cinema” (22). Viewing pleasures associated with voyeurism and cultural tourism were certainly at play in bringing audiences to foreign film exhibitions. The exotic could be viewed from a safe distance and with a uniquely objective cleanliness which packaged certain national and cultural characteristics while excising others. However, we must put this rendering of the exotic into a historical perspective which allowed European film to dominate North American experiences with foreign film. Other national cinemas would only hesitantly be received by North American viewers, and remain in limited distribution largely through diasporic immigrant communities situated in large urban centres. The discursive project of the politics of identity are indeed allowing an increasing number of marginalised cinemas to become visible, and at least within specific interpretive communities the Otherness of the foreign is being mediated. Importantly, however, the ideation of Otherness is not itself without issue. As Bhaskar Sarkar points out in Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives, the danger inherent to such discursive models in relation to cinema is that they can often present Hollywood codes of production and reception as the normative mean against which all other cinematic practises are adjudicated and calibrated.  Indeed, national difference itself has been rendered into a product for export, as “national or regional cinemas are being globalised, not just in terms of financing and distribution, but also through the performance ... of national distinction as exotic otherness for a global audience” (136). A field of cinematic national stereotypes is continually ritualised and presented as cultural artefacts and character tropes.[4] Sarkar demonstrates that at times such stereotypes enter into the critical discourse as some critics are not able to see beyond their Eurocentrism. He calls for a discursive context for film studies in which cross-cultural analysis becomes truly relative and self-critical, and warns that “as long as the anxious discourse about cross-cultural analysis is predicated on the self/other dichotomy, film studies cannot hope to move beyond its implicit orientalism” (132). Film studies should indeed be self-conscious about its voyeuristic and ‘tourist’ tendencies by challenging the conception of a modernity which has already excluded and circumscribed the identities of non-Western subjects.

Thus in Sarkar, as well as in the work of many other critics of national cinemas, we can locate a desire to bear witness to the authentic. At the critical level, if not perhaps also at the level of the viewing public for foreign films, Sarkar implicitly rejects as inauthentic the process by which cinematic subjects are objectified and made into a viewing spectacle. It is the conceptual task of film studies to rationalise the ideation of film as spectacle with the fact that the process of rendering human subjects as spectacles is somewhat antithetical to the representational challenges forwarded by critics of identity politics. Rey Chow’s argument in A Phantom Discipline that cinema produces humans as phantom objects allows some degree of compromise in this matter. She argues that “the visual is no longer a means of verifying certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically” (1391). It is impossible for film to avoid its tendency for spectacle, and film studies must therefore examine the ontology of representation for the discipline to properly legitimise itself as a critical school and not simply be marginalised as a pedagogical or demonstration tool for other disciplines. The turn to identity politics in film studies is politically retrogressive, for “by insisting that artificial images somehow correspond to the lives and histories of cultural groups, identity politics implicitly reinvests such images with an anthropomorphic realism” (1393). One should not read into Chow’s iconoclasm a return to a position of ethical relativism which would allow racist or stereotypical representations of cultural difference to proliferate. Rather, her point that film images are always-already artificial and that human subjects depicted on film are phantom objects rather than real people is important in that it highlights an ontological legitimacy for film studies that was lessened by the fact that film had often been instrumentalised to service other critical projects.

In order for foreign films to be viewed, they must be imported. This process involves securing the legal rights for distribution and a financial investment in order to translate the film into the local language. Translation presents several conceptual difficulties to the critic. Most prominent is the fact that any translation, even an exceptionally accurate one, is a violence against the original text. The violence enacted is one of circumscription and alteration, as the semiotic play inherent to the original language is lost in translation. I wish presently to leave the methodological arguments about language translation aside and focus on one ideation of the violence of subtitling as stressed by Nornes in Cinema Babel. The fundamental project of his book is to suggest a translation process which plays with language in a manner akin to the original and for a translation to exist not instead of the other, original film but “in the other’s place” (178). Nornes suggests that the idea of an objective and accurate translation is a critical misrepresentation which feigns “completeness in [its] own violent world” (156). Fundamentally, translation is a negational enterprise, as the subtexts, inferences, and semantic games at play in a language are often excised to favour a clear, and often literal, interpretation of the text. Nornes uses examples from Japanese translations of American films to demonstrate that some translations ignore the political dynamics inherent to speech, while others focus on narrative movement at the expense of character development or thematic issues. We must however separate the violence of inadvertent meaning which precipitates from lesser translations from the premeditated violence which comes from attempts to render controversial films culturally acceptable. Nornes argues that many translations of English-language films censor content from the original film in order to render them more palatable to different markets. As was the case with many Hollywood films produced after the 1970s, it was “the whole flowery range of human speech” (216) which most often bore the mark of censorship. Fundamentally, Nornes posits that translation is a corrupting force, largely due to market forces which compel most producers to achieve less-than-optimal results. He favours subtitling over dubbing, implicitly due to the fact that the lesser production expense of the subtitling process allows more resources to be deployed to produce an acceptable textual translation of the script. His argument that dubbing is distracting due to the fact that it renders actors into ventriloquist dummies has merit, even though it avoids the support of an obvious critical parallel. In addition to its often comic effect, dubbing signifies an ontological difference with the original film. The ventriloquist act of replacing one voice for another renders the actor onscreen into a parody of the real. The viewer is placed into an abject and uncanny relationship with the cinematic human subject, who continually reminds the viewer of the illusory nature of the medium. The dubbed actor exists in a transitional space between human and non-human, life and death, subject and object.

Nornes’s suggestion that when properly produced the dubbing process can avoid this aesthetic weakness may be valid.[5] However, he fails to account for the use of dubbing as a sound production technique regularly deployed in domestic cinema, often to ‘punch in’ other non-synchronous acting takes or when the action depicted onscreen precluded a ‘clean’ recording of dialogue.[6] Highlighting the entirely negative qualities that result from an audience being distanced from dubbed actors does not allow for the fact that some poorly dubbed films enjoyed a great deal of popular success, although Nornes does point out that the massive popular success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is partially predicated on the fact that an English dub of the film was distributed as widely as was the subtitled version. Additionally, some films purposefully utilise sound dubbing to distance the viewer from the actor[7] or for comedic effect.[8] The pleasure experienced by devotees to certain genres such as the various Italian horror subgenres, Japanese monster films, and Asian martial arts films can partially be interpreted as a self-reflexive one. As these genres represent cinemas which have largely been provincialised as direct-to-video releases catering to niche interests outside of the dominant film and video distribution channels, many such films were hastily or poorly translated (usually dubbed). It is possible to suggest that a certain amount of viewing pleasure comes from the reception of these films in what Nornes would describe as a corrupt state. Indeed, part of the sense of exclusivity which serves to define fan allegiance to many cult subgenres involves the discovery of a transgressive pleasure hidden from or occluded by mainstream tastes. Many of the films in the subgenres listed above have lower-than-average production values, so a mediocre dub might not detract from a film but rather add a gloss of kitsch to it. Audience reception of a film might in this capacity be inadvertently improved by a poor translation rather than by an accurate rendition of the original script. In this context, a critical extension of Ien Ang’s suggestion in Living Room Wars that “communicative practices do not necessarily have to arrive at common meanings at all” (167) would allow the pleasure experienced by experiencing certain films by means of poor translations to be adequately conceptualised. It is therefore possible to require that part of Nornes’s critical project account for the taint of translation not solely within a negative evaluation as a compared to an authentic original, but also within a rubric which allows the taint itself to positively contribute to meaningful interpretation.

The international popularity of film dubbing, which more thoroughly damns Nornes’s claim that dubbing must by its nature render actors as ventriloquist dummies to the detriment of the film, is implied by Ravi Vasudevan’s analysis of Indian cinema in National Pasts and Futures: Indian Cinema.[9] Domestic distribution of Indian cinema presents a unique difficulty in that there is not a single unifying language in the country. Indian films undergo a translation process even before they are exported to other national markets. Vasudevan posits that dubbing is commonplace in India and allows films to be popularly disseminated across linguistic boundaries. Until the Indian film consumer, along with those of every other national and cultural context, is interrogated as to whether or not they view dubbing as a negative or inauthentic process, we must ultimately reserve subscribing to the universalising idea that dubbing inherently lessens a film. If, for example, we are to forward a criticism which accounts for the acceptance of subtitles and film dubs in certain film markets and not others, is it possible to locate preference for either along class divisions?[10] If dubbing is allowed within parody as well as within certain genres and film practices, should not its origination but rather its deployment be the chief concern for theorists of film translation? As a final critique of his work, Nornes fails to account for the fact that his arguments against dubbing remain valid only for live-action films. International viewers do not interpret dubbing to be an issue for animated films, attested to by the global popularity of certain animated characters[11] and animation companies such as Disney. It is possible that as computer animation becomes increasingly used in (especially non-action) films, audiences will come to normalise and accept film dubs.

To its credit, the point of Cinema Babel is not to deny the mantle of authenticity from films which are translated by being dubbed. Rather, Nornes wishes to promote the idea of a subversive practise of subtitling which seeks to dislocate itself from the conveyance of simple narrative information. Extrapolating from his argument about market compulsions, unique anomalies, such as Life is Beautiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Amélie, which achieve financial success in North America despite retaining the language track of their original production, signify for their audience a fashionable interest in a ‘more authentic’ form of another culture rendered exotic rather than a structural change in the consumption of foreign films, and that a conception of authenticity was of importance for the success of these particular films and not for a dubbed film such as Ong-Bak. Nornes’s analysis of the subculture of anime fan translations points to a utopia where translation, when developed outside of market compulsions, can achieve a pure hybridisation with the original. The basis for this logic is sound, but one must question why this democratic, ‘open-source’ process – which would ultimately free film producers and distributors from the labour and expense of translation and simultaneously allow the viewing of foreign films not yet subject to the market for translated films – is not more widely visible in cinema appreciation. Nornes’s argument does indeed have merit, but it must be interpreted within the limitations of its scope. Translation can often involve more than just audio cues and dialogue interpretation. While not within the scope of this present review, it should be noted in conclusion that more overt forms of censorship do indeed take place to render a film acceptable to a given market. Typically, scenes depicting acts of violence or sex deemed to transgress local obscenity laws are excised or altered.[12] Other forms of implicit censorship abound in productions which seek an international audience, and often take the form of removing or changing traces of locality such as distinct accents, geography, or architecture. It is likely that all of these elements in addition to linguistic translation serve equally to render films palatable to different markets, and they should therefore be included in a critical discourse of the conceptual interplay between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’.

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[1]         Regarding representation, I do not wish to suggest an ontological controversy but rather a moral one.  A comprehensive listing of the numerous transgressions made by foreign films would indeed be long, so the                    reduction of the field of controversy to scenes of nudity and the depiction of sex and violence will have to                    suffice. A short list of films which were notoriously received in North America include I Am Curious                           (Yellow), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Romance, and In the Realm of the Senses.

[2]         One can see a parallel between the popularity of many sexually-themed and visually titillating foreign films of the 1970s with the acceptance of pornography into the mainstream during the same period.

[3]         See, for example, Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge.

[4]         Witness, for example, the long cinematic history of coupling American action heros – brash and      charismatic individualists who persevere through physical effort – with reserved and intellectual British ‘sidekicks’, who often play professionals (often professors or doctors) or elders. Such Apollo and Dionysus figurations are common in adventure and fantasy films produced in America and Britain in the decades following the second world war.

[5]         For Julia Kristeva, the abject is situated outside of the symbolic order. Viewer anxieties elicited by                                       poorly dubbed films signal the trauma experienced by bearing witness to the violent removal of                                                 subjectivity from the actor rendered as object by the loss of his or her own voice. Thus, an effective dub                                 might allow a viewer to overcome this problem by returning to the viewer the illusion of the actor’s subjectivity.

[6]         A further example highly related to the theme of this present survey involves the importation into          Hollywood of foreign-language actors who are not fluent in English. Actors such as Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jet Li, and Arnold Schwarzenegger often redubbed their dialogue in studio with the help of vocal coaches and phonetically-written scripts.

[7]         See, for example, Felini’s Satyricon, which dubbed all of the dialogue and effectively alienated the viewer from the actors onscreen and thus problematised the representation of historical subjects.

[8]         Usually, these films are parodies of foreign film genres, such as Kung Fu Hustle.

[9]         I wish to invoke this article despite exorcising a reservation about the author’s ideation of “a woman’s                        film” (121) as an essentialised interpretive category.

[10]       This question is contingent with a reversal of class expectation, wherein the audience for subtitled films which tends to come from urban middle-class intellectuals and professionals demands a far less capital-                        intensive process of translation than the populist and more expensive dub. 

[11]       The popular American sitcom The Simpsons has been translated and exported to many global audiences, including a version of the show whose content is localised for the Québécois market.

[12]       Notable examples include the censored North American releases of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999 and Breaking the Waves in 1997.