Ways of Translation: Part 2, Language as Imposition

The telling strategy assumes that people are guided by reason.... Telling often leads to resistance. The forcing strategy assumes that people are resistant and must be coerced into changing.

--Robert E. Quinn, Change the World : How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results

כִּי כְּמֹו־שָׁעַר בְּנַפְשֹׁו כֶּן־הוּא אֱכֹל וּשְׁתֵה יֹאמַר לָךְ וְלִבֹּו בַּל־עִמָּֽךְ׃
פִּתְּךָ־אָכַלְתָּ תְקִיאֶנָּה וְשִׁחַתָּ דְּבָרֶיךָ הַנְּעִימִים׃

--Solomon, Proverbs 23:7

I must have told you a thousand times. You know better than that. Since you're obviously not capable of hearing what I said, kid, let's see if you can't feel my belt. Now, bend over.

--my father

Part 1: Review

In part 1 of this series on ways of translation, I noted how many linguists follow Aristotle in conceiving of Language (or "logos") as Proposition (or as "logic," as purely defined binary categories or sets of oppositional features, as naturally-ordered statements toward conclusions). It may be Noam Chomsky's divisions of Language vs. languages, of Competence vs. Performance, of plus / minus features - or it may be Relevance Theorists' divisions of explicatures vs. implicatures with respect to propositions and divisions of types within those two different and distinct categories and divisions of the message that's delivered and processed and the message that is not. The conclusion, therefore, about translation (given Language as Proposition) is generally that there is a transfer of the relevant categories or features of the source language (especially the intended message or proposition of the speaker or writer) into the target language. The more the binary categories match, the better the transmission of the proposition. The more equal the features on both sides of the equation, the better the translation. The Language-as-Proposition Problem is that the logos falls by the wayside. The seed emitted never gets transmitted. In the bible, Mark's translation of Jesus's parable of the sower (in Mark 4) starts with this problem. Mark hearkens back to the LXX translation of the story of spilled seed, of the sin of Onan in Genesis 38. The function of language as Proposition requires that it is either a successful transmission of the message or it is not.

Part 2, Language as Imposition

In part 2, we come to the post-proposition problem. Language does not always have the effect the speaker or writer wants. Language, at that point, then, is viewed less as propositional and more as impositional.

Jesus speaks to this (as Mark translates him in Mark 4, in the parable of the sower).  After he notes the problem of sown seed falling by the way side and after he gets to the explanation of the proposition heard but lost on deaf ears and stolen from the heart, he gets to problems of force.  He says: "5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away." And the explanation speaks to other difficulties of force: "16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. 17 And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away."  I've given this to you in the forceful ESV translation, but I might as well have given it to you in Mark's forceful Greek translation.  The nature of force reminds us of things Gorgias wrote in original Greek when he tried to excuse Helen for leaving the men of Greece for barbarians.  He wrote, playing with language without translating:

εἴτε λόγῳ πεισθεῖσα
εἴτε βίᾳ ἁρπασθεῖσα

either she was by proposition seduced
or else she was by imposition induced

In Genesis 38, as translated into Greek, we see something similar.

9 γνοὺς δὲ Αυναν ὅτι οὐκ αὐτῷ ἔσται τὸ σπέρμα ἐγίνετο ὅταν εἰσήρχετο πρὸς τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐξέχεεν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν τοῦ μὴ δοῦναι σπέρμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ

9 But Onan had birthed knowledge that the sperm-semen seed would not be born to him. So whenever he went in to his brother’s birthing wombman he would waste it on the ground of birth, so as not to give the sperm-semen seed to his brother.

10 πονηρὸν δὲ ἐφάνη ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ, ὅτι ἐποίησεν τοῦτο,
καὶ ἐθανάτωσεν καὶ τοῦτον

10 It was wicked, in fact, appearing in the face of God, this mess that was created,
and so he put him to death and so that was that.

At this point, no one using language is thinking about making it easy. We're thinking about what happens when propositions emitted fail. There usually comes force afterwards, an imposition like a rock or heat or judgment and death. George Steiner, in his little essay "On Difficulty" in his book by the same title, gets at this some. He first talks about the information gaps in poetry first as a difficulty. When a poet uses a proposition and the reader or listener doesn't get it, there's a problem. But then there's more: Steiner mentions how the poet sometimes will make a poem difficult because of authorly decisions to slow the reader down or to force a reader's eyes one way or another on a page or to impose a particular rhyme and rhythm on the reader's ears or to put in metaphorical rootlessness or rhetorical tribulation in the mix.

Language as post-proposition Imposition is beginning to sound a bit literary. And yet it's much more profound than that. Aristotle created "logic" but, for Alexander the Great, it wasn't enough. There was the move from Nature to human nature, and I want to suggest that the human condition is gendered. I'm suspecting that "logic" (for Aristotle and his students) gives way to "phallo-logic." So a little later in this post, we'll get to that suspicion with some observations from Nancy Mairs. But first, I want to go back to the beginning of the post and to the quotations there from three men, Robert E. Quinn, Solomon, and my dad.

My epigraphs to start this post get at just how deep Language as Imposition can be.

Quinn: Two Conceptions of "Language," for Change

Quinn is an expert in human change, especially in the context of businesses and organizations. After surveying the literature in his disciplines, he found that there are a very limited number of reasons adults change. Similarly, there are just a few respective strategies that CEOs and leaders of businesses use to effect corporate change. In the quotation above, only two are mentioned: the telling strategy and the forcing strategy. Does that sound familiar? We might as well call these "the propositional strategy" for change and the "impositional strategy." These two, Quinn says, are most common both in the literature of business scholarship and in the practice of business change. A CEO who employs the "telling" strategy might propose a "mission statement" or might send a directive by official memorandum. When the strategy fails, then language becomes force. The CEO will likely next engage in the "forcing" strategy. Let me include half of Figure 1.A in Quinn's book Change the World because I'd like you to see how Aristotelian the notion of "telling" and how Alexandrian the concept of "forcing." And then we can talk more about language and translation - as imposition.

In the world of business, and this is the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western world, the telling strategy owes much to Aristotle. There's the emphasis on facts, the method of rational persuasion (i.e., logical rhetoric), and logical argumentation among other things. In addition, the forcing strategy in our day looks much like it did in the day of Alexander the Great. The bit about "controlling the context and flow of information" is what jumps out at me with respect to language.

Now, when a context and flow of information has authority, then I tend to think of discourse and of texts such as Aristotle's Organon. And I think of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Christian Bible, and the Qur'an of Islam. The purists and fundamentalists who most prize these texts resist their translation. That is, the authority who possess the texts preserve them rigidly in untranslated and original form.

For example, expert and authoritative Aristotle scholar, Thomas M. Conley, works against rhetoric students reading Aristotle's Rhetoric in anything but Aristotle's original Greek. And in a published article entitled "The Greekless Reader and Aristotle's Rhetoric," Conley disparages all rhetoric teachers and students of rhetoric who would read Aristotle in translation; and he disparages all English translations, and one in particular. The force of Aristotle, in language, is in his original, so argues the authority. Ironically, Conley must resort to making his arguments by proposition, and by proposition in English. However, if he could force such a thing, Conley might ban all English translations of Aristotle's Greek works.

One of my own rhetoric professors, Richard Leo Enos, has written a fine rebuttal to Conley's argument, calling it a "country-club mindset." (The article's entitled, “The Classical Tradition(s) of Rhetoric: A Demur to the Country Club Set.”) I think Enos is on to something, that Conley's emphasis is "authority" and by it his method is what Quinn sees as "leveraging behavior." Enos says further that "The entire point of translations . . . is to put wisdom in the hands of readers who have an expertise other than philology, so that their insights can enrich our understanding in another dimension . . . . Aristotle’s Rhetoric can continue to enrich our discipline [of rhetoric]." But I believe that not all translators have such a point of enrichment. In fact, it seems to me that most Christian Bible translation publishers tend, at times, to employ a forcing strategy. There is, in many cases, a political reality for the translation teams.

If you hang around the biblioblogosphere for any time at all, you get the sense that there are Bible translation fights over methods (i.e., formal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence), arguments about approaches (i.e., "theological" vs. "linguistic"), vigorous disagreements about gendered language (including not only male vs. female language but also straight vs. gay language), disputes about the sort of English to be used (i.e., biblish vs. natural vs. poetic, etc.), and contentions about resources (particularly whether the English bible is getting way too much attention when the bible is not available yet in translation in many, many, many other languages). Of course, there is the telling strategy - the use of propositional language - to build the case for one's cause(s). And yet, there is the forcing strategy - the use of impositional language - to force agenda for particular translation teams and companies and the like. Many of you would be better prepared to cite specific examples than I am. The snobbish "country club" mentality that appears to me to have set in among several Bible bloggers makes me unhappy to mention anybody. (This blog of mine catches enough unhappiness from bible bloggers already, I'm afraid).

Solomon:  The "Logos," Vomitted with Force

So that brings me to the second epigraph. Whew! Some wisdom, finally. It's Solomon. His proverb is translated: "For as one that hath reckoned within himself, so is he: 'Eat and drink', saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.   The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words." If I read that well enough, Solomon at least means that proposition and imposition go hand in hand.  

In English, the traditional propositional understanding has been from the KJV - "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he" - focusing on the first part of the first verse (and ignoring the last part of the previous verse and anything else following here).  Whatever is rational is part of the agency of power of a human.

In Hellene, the Jews translating in Alexander the Great's great city of Alexandria rendered the proverb with force, especially toward the end of the last verse - ἐξεμέσει γὰρ αὐτὸν καὶ λυμανεῖται -- τοὺς λόγους σου τοὺς καλούς, which means something like "It will, in fact, be vomited out and rottenness imposed on -- that proposition of yours, that sweet emission."

In either language, there's a profound connection between Language as Proposition and Language as Imposition.  Kenneth L. Pike's Tagmemics, with his emphasis on Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior - about which I may say more in another post sometime because Pike knew and published in both rhetoric and composition, where the force of language is important - and John R. Searle's "Speech Acts" theorizing are examples of Language as Imposition. (And Language as Imposition is part of the human condition, and the human condition is gendered.)

Dad:  Language as Imposition

If you've read some of my blog before, then you've heard me talk some about my birth father.  He's a changed and changing man.  But when I was younger, he was more abusive, with language as proposition and as power (as imposition).  Sometimes the difference blurred for me between what he did and what he said.  He was, I must clarify, a very logical man (and boasted that his mark in a college "logic" course was slightly higher than mine -- three decades apart, we'd had the very same professor of logic as undergraduate students).  He was also a very forceful man.  The change began for my father, in part, when he realized what his language and his behavior was like for my mother and for their children.  The first time I ever heard him apologize to her was when I was home from college my first year; he'd just come home too from a conference for evangelical Christian pastors (which he was) in which there was a look on the inside and not just at words and actions on the outside.  The proverb I heard him repeating all week, the week I was home, was this:  "We practice daily what we believe.  All the rest is religious talk."

Now, here's a turn, a change, for me.  When I was doing a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition a couple of decades after getting an M.A. in linguistics, I was most startled by Nancy Mairs.  My formal language background hadn't prepared me for her.  However, my life with Dad had.  I read one of Mairs's books for a course my very first semester:  Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

I'd already read lots of Aristotle, had already read lots of Paul (because my reading of him was imposed by my father).  We read Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold first, and I was unprepared for the things she heard Aristotle and Paul say in their silences that I'd never listened to.  Then we read Mairs.

I'd like to read some of Mairs's sentences right here at the blog.  And yet I have to warn you, you might not be ready.  It's not just that there's sexual language, metaphorical stuff.  (Which reminds me when, a few courses later in the program, I began giving an oral presentation on Helene Cixous for the required Literary Criticism course.  The professor, a male, interrupted me by saying, "No dick jokes," and everyone laughed.  So please let's continue, if you will look and listen only).  There's language here that betrays the impositions of the propositions.  After reading "dominate" and "force" and "imposition" and "phallus" and "father" and the "male human", -- here's a father's proposition and imposition, from page 41:

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Reading Mairs is a bit different from reading Quinn only in the fact that the former suggests, like Solomon and Jesus and their translators do, that proposition does not need necessarily to come before imposition.  In fact, for many men, Language as Proposition IS Language as Imposition.  Alexander is a good, rational student of Aristotle, who is just as forceful.

If I ever have time for blogging again, we just might look together at Language as Transposition and Language as Ap(p)osition.  In other words, we might think together about ways Language and Translation might be differently conceived, different from how Aristotle tells us it is and would force it to be.

But Esau I hated

"But Esau I hated" is the other half of what the Lord says, in a binary and contrastive statement, to Malachi - in the spoken literature of Malachi (1:3).

"Type B translations, to the idiosyncrasies of the target language and the felt needs of a particular demographic for whom the translation is designed" is the other half of what John Hobbins says as he begins a binary and contrastive blog series (so very ironically) on the two types of "gender-sensitive translation."

"[R]eading the Hebrew Bible as you'd peruse the newspaper . . . [and as] an isolated literary classic . . . as you'd read a novel" is the other half of what David Klinghoffer says, in a binary and contrastive rule, about reading the Bible (which is akin to reading the Quran).

Too many students "in the classroom . . . assume what is said by these authors [in recording miracles] is what actually happened, could have happened, might have happened, or should have happened," is the other side of April DeConick's definite definitive conclusion to the binary and contrastive question Should a reader say YES or NO "to the miraculous as history"?

"'scholars' of literature, who could never get away with their kind of thinking in science, in history, or even in theology," is the other side of Peter Kirk's ostensibly objective opinion about observers of the language of the Bible, his binary and contrastive point.

"[T]hese writers in English," is the other side of the pronouncement of Rich Rhodes - yes a binary and contrastive pronouncement - on what "literature" is and what it canNOT be..

"It is well known that in biblical dialogue all the characters speak proper literary Hebrew, with no intimations of slang, dialect, or idiolect," is the other side of Robert Alter's absolute statement - yes binary and contrastive.

Alter's statement, I was trying to say, is the binary and contrastive alternative to Rhodes's statement (as if there must be these two and these two only). As if these two Berkeley scholars (one the Hebrew scholar, the other the language scientist) have all there is to say here. As if the one speaks for one side, and the other side once sided against, THEREFORE, is the lesser.

(Thankfully, Theophrastus gives Alter's entire statement.) So I'm tempted here to add Alter's wonderful footnote to his incredible translation of Genesis 25:30. Just as I was tempted to go ahead with the actual example in the actual point of Alter's statement. (Theophrastus asked - confessed actually - "I don’t know why J.K. put the ellipses in his quote of Alter — suggesting a word that was a bit untoward." Quite an interesting suggestion, I must add.)

Is it important exactly what Esau said?
Is it important exactly what Moses wrote that Esau said, and exactly how?
Is it important exactly how different the quotation of Esau is from the quotation of Jacob?
Is it important exactly how different what Moses wrote that Esau said is from what Moses wrote that Jacob and everyone else speaking in the Hebrew Bible said?
Is it important exactly how different what Moses wrote that Esau said is from what is written in the Hebrew Bible by Moses and by absolutely any other author (including the author of Job)?
Is it important that the LXX translator(s) use δὲ when rendering the high Hebrew of Malachi 1:3 into homeric Hellene?

Are we not getting the issue with, the problem with, the patriarchy propped up by, Aristotle's binary method?

Shall we call Aristotle God when he stands over and objectively, with his binary and contrastive statements? "But the female I hated," said Aristotle.

Which begs the rhetorical question: "whom and what do you hate?" "what and whom do I?"

Which returns us to how easy it is for any of us to read and to translate (as if objectively, merely logically) the difficult spoken literature of Malachi (1:3).

Wordplay in Numbers 5:1 - "God and Moses" busting male binaries

David Ker has made quite a stir with his post the LORD makes me crazy. Two dozen responses at last count, mostly only men (if no women at all) commenting.

But far fewer noticed when Rachel Barenblat read with us "one paragraph from the Sefat Emet" during "the lead-up to Purim" to begin accepting "the highest Torah." Let's ask: who paid attention to "the facility with quotations, the wordplay and punnery; . . . the richness of these texts, how words become hyperlinks connecting one idea with another. . . to spiritually connect ourselves with the spice of revelation in order to rise to a level of spiritual discernment where binaries cease to exist because everything is Go(o)d."?

Do we get that?! Where binaries cease to exist?! Where the Velveteen Rabbi herself is playing with the word(s), "Go(o)d"?!

And does anyone else care about that "instruction" of hers this week, in which she points us to "a tiny bit of wordplay which may not be immediately obvious: in Hebrew, the name most commonly used for the presence of God (Shekhinah) shares a root with the word for neighborhood (shekhunah / שְׁכוּנָה)"?!

So we're looking at and listening to allusions to God. And I'd like us to extend that to Numbers 5, especially verses 1, 5, and 11 (aka א
and ה and יא). Each of these verses is the following thrice repeated sentence:

וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר.

Actually, the exact sentence shows up in the Torah first in Exodus 6:10. (But then not again until Exodus 13:1, then 14:1, then 16:11. Then not again until Leviticus 4:1, then 5:14, then 6:1 and 6:8 and 6:19 and 6:24, then 7:22 and 7:28, then 8:1 and 10:8 and 12:1 and 14:1 and 17:1 and 18:1 and 19:1 and 20:1 and 21:16 and 22:1 and 22:17 and 22:26 and 23:1 and 23:9 and 23:23 and 23:26 and 23:33 and 24:1 and 24:13 and 25:1 and 27:1, then Numbers 3:1 and 3:5 and 3:44 and 4:21 - until we come back to Numbers 5:1, 5:5, and 5:11. In general, these are discourse or narrative section markers or markers of the intensification of the climax of a story. Pedantic stuff, but maybe interesting to translators sensitive to stuff above the sentence level. Certainly it should validate the decisions of the traditional chapter and verse number-ers; and it should unnerve the documentary hypothesizers with their J.E.P.D.).

Anyways,...

There are several binaries that get busted by this single sentence. Let's begin trying to work through some of the binaries here. And we'll look at the wordplay. We should look at these binaries at least:

the orality / literacy binary
the God talking / Moses writing binary
the God's un-speakable name / God's actually-written name binary
the emic insider's viewpoint / etic outsider's viewpoint binary
the original text / translated text binary
the male origin / fe-male origin binary

We are suspicious of binaries. And we are suspicious not because binaries cannot or do not exist in nature. But we are suspicious of binaries because the binary is the fundamental structure of patriarchy. The would-be pure and precise division of the binary helps and has helped and will continue to help males to be dominant over fe-males. In contrast, there's feminine discourse, which tends not to be reduced to the "either / or" but, rather, tends to be "both and" and "more." In linguistic terms, Kenneth Pike called this "the N-dimensionality of language" in which the person speaking, the person writing, the person listening, and the person reading all have agency over "logic" and "formalism." The most brilliant astrophysicist can choose many ways (and is not constrained by any one way) of looking at and talking about "light": light is a particle; light is a wave; light is in relation to time or space or its observer.

So we come back to the story of Moses in Exodus (in chapter 6 particularly). Orality seems primary and sharply different from literacy. Ostensibly, this story was told before it was written. And God speaks with Moses. He tells his name to Moses, saying it in a way that Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob never heard. He says:

יְהוָה.

וָאֵרָא, אֶל-אַבְרָהָם אֶל-יִצְחָק וְאֶל-יַעֲקֹב--בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי; וּשְׁמִי יְהוָה, לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם.

The Jewish Publication Society has translated that into English as this:

I am the LORD;

and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name YHWH I made Me not known to them.

The JPS translation finds some of the meaning but loses much too by not showing the wordplay. The funny thing here is what God says to Moses is that he tells his name (at the end of verse 2) before actually telling his name (again, in the middle of verse 3). We get that as an artifact of writing primarily, but not so much as a product of God's speaking orally first. This is especially true today when, for centuries now, the name of God, to the Jews, is not to be spoken orally, and is intended not to be pronounced aloud. But these are the scriptures meant to be read (aloud too) after all. Which has primacy, the oral tradition of the Torah or the literate tradition? And don't both orality and literacy have overlapping dimensions for listeners and readers? Does the wordplay of the Hebrew support or play down the orality / literacy binary?

So we move on to more wordplay in the first sentence of Numbers 5. More disruption of another binary: the supposed God talking / Moses writing binary. Who's really talking here? Is it God to Moses? But isn't Moses allegedly writing all of this down, as if God were talking? So it's Moses' God talking with Moses' Moses (the way Plato's Socrates speaks with the other characters in his dialogues)? Or has God, in the end and at the beginning too, inspired the whole story: God's Moses being talked to by the story-inspiring story-telling God himself? These questions remind me a little of how Alan Lightman has to get around his being a science writer / but a novelist too. Lightman claims scientists write to name (and "use their heads" to understand), which artists write ("using their stomachs and hearts") to ring true in their story telling. Lightman also confessed (when I asked him as he visited the campus where I work): he wants the translators of his novels - translated already into 30 some languages - to be both scientists (understanding the science of language) and artists too (understanding the art of telling a believable story). It's not either God speaking or Moses writing, is it? And a good translator will show how the Hebrew plays that way. And haven't we already discussed enough the binary of either God's un-speakable name / or God's actually-written name?

So we come to another binary and more wordplay. We get to "the emic insider's viewpoint / etic outsider's viewpoint binary." I think we might as well begin talking also more about the "the original text / translated text binary" as well as "the male origin / fe-male origin binary." Or we could be here all day.

I want us to go back to Egypt again. Who's an outsider and who's the insider. The story of Moses is Egypt confuses these two things. In fact, there's an animated DreamWorks film called "The Prince of Egypt" that helps suggest (even by its title) that Moses is more of an insider to Egypt. The book of Exodus, in the Hebrew language, suggests that the name of Moses is perhaps Egyptian. There is the suggestion that the daughter of the Egyptian king used an Egyptian play on words that the Hebrews (namely Moses) borrowed right into the Hebrew language:

וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמֹו מֹשֶׁה וַתֹּאמֶר כִּי מִן־הַמַּיִם מְשִׁיתִֽהוּ

"And she called his name Moses, and said: 'Because I delivered him out of the water [of the Nile].'"

She also claims him as her own son. The Hebrew baby becomes an Egyptian; delivered out of a Hebrew basket in the Egyptian river, his playful Egyptian name gets drawn back into Hebrew. In fact, he's the very one to deliver the Hebrews out of Egypt. Funny stuff, ironic, not very "either / or" binary.

Some centuries later, there are Jews back in Egypt, living under an Egyptian King, who is set in place by a Hellene conqueror, Alexander the Great, once a pupil of Aristotle. According to legend, that Egyptian King wanted an insider copy the Hebrew scriptures. Here's from a blurb from the New Encyclopedia of Judaism:

According to the "Letter of Aristeas," it was composed in Alexandria. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BCE), who was a bibliophile, heard from his librarian, Demetrius, that the Jewish Bible was worth translating for the king's archives. The king wrote to the High Priest in Jerusalem, asking him to send scholars who would be able to translate the Pentateuch into Greek. The High Priest sent 72 wise men, whom the king lodged in a building on the island of Pharos, near Alexandria. Each translated only a part of the Pentateuch and after 72 days, at the conclusion of the work, the Greek translations were read before the Jewish community and before the king. All lauded the Jewish Bible and its wisdom and praised the work of the translators.

A humorous thing here is that the translators seem to write their Greek as outsiders to the "Exodus paradigm" and as outsiders to the aristotelian "Alexandrian paradigm" but as insiders to the "Homeric paradigm" (and this, according to University of Tel Aviv Historian Sylvie Honigman in her history of the "Letter of Aristeas"). This is funny because it seems the Jews, back in Egypt under an Egyptian king, are playing with language, as if trying to keep themselves out of Egypt.

So it's worth now comparing Numbers 5:1, 5, & 11 in Hebrew and in translated Greek:

וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמֹו מֹשֶׁה וַתֹּאמֶר כִּי מִן־הַמַּיִם מְשִׁיתִֽהוּ

καὶ ἐλάλησεν κύριος πρὸς Μωυσῆν λέγων

The translation is nearly equivalent Hebrew-to-Hellene -- and even the name "Moses" sounds the same. In other words, the translators were very careful to make משה /Mo-sheh/ transliterated so that it is pronounced alike in Greek Μωυσῆς as /Mou-ses/. Perhaps this is still an Egyptian word meaning "Delivered," and serves as a reminder to Greek readers in Egypt who also speak Egyptian that this is the hero of the Hebrews who delivered them out of Egypt, a sort of Trojan Horse job from the insider of Egypt himself, the one delivered out of the Nile by the daughter of the king of Egypt herself. Funny stuff.

But the translation appears to break down with the use of κύριος for that unspeakable name of God written as יהוה. The Greek word κύριος /kurios/ is the same word the translators use for Potiphar, the official of the Egyptian king, who was the "master" of Joseph, when he was a "slave" in Egypt. Greek readers of the Hebrew scriptures in Egypt will know that the God of the Jews is to be called "master." He, and not any Egyptian king or king's official or king's conqueror called Great Alexander, is the "master" of Moses and the "Master" of all masters.

So which text is primary? The "original" Hebrew or this quite original Greek version (including the Ex-Odys, the Odys-sey of the Jews) -- a text also targeting the Hellene conquerors and the Egyptian monarchy?

And are the males really first in the story? Moses is named by a woman, by a daughter, by an Egyptianness. She delivers him and conspires with other daughters and mothers to save him, to save them, male and fe-male.

(And the God who names himself seems to be interested in the motherly birth of himself. But we've gone on far too long for one post to talk about the Greek translation of the Hebrew of Numbers 5:3, where the translators hint at an incarnation, a translation of the deity into a mortal human birth: "ἀπὸ ἀρσενικοῦ ἕως θηλυκοῦ... ἐν οἷς ἐγὼ καταγίνομαι ἐν αὐτοῖς." But it's either god / or human, and the human either male / or fe-male, right?)

What I've wanted us to do in this post is to begin to look at and to listen in on the ways the Hebrews in Egypt (whether the original Moses in the masoretic text or the translators by their Hellene "original" text) engaged in productive, generative word play. And the binaries we all know so well, the unmarked male borders and boundaries, get blurred.

Obama Talk: Why I like him

Deborah Siegel has up an interesting post XY FILES: Presidential Masculinity (as part of her on-going series on “myths and facts about a new generation of men”). She gets us thinking again about “masculinity / femininity” constructs with respect to Hilary Clinton / Sarah Palin but more with respect to John McCain / Barak Obama.

(UPDATE: Check out Virginia Rutter's astute comment on "hybrid gender performance" and "multiple statuses all at once... for race as well as gender... not androgynous in that misfit, uncomfortable “Pat” sense (remember, Pat on [SNL])... [but with a] repertoire...wide, and... using all sorts of masculine and feminine skills." Esteban Vasquez makes a similar, usually clever point in his comment below. Why the "either/ or" binary?)

That's a lot to work through. Let me focus right in on Obama, and then I'll come back to some of the things Deborah is getting at.

---------
One reason I like Barack Obama is this: the people who want to box him into some this or that just can't. It's usually their negative box they want to cram him into:

• his middle name is Hussein, and therefore . . . (he's gotta be Muslim or at least antiIsrael)
  
• his associates are terrorists and black-racist-Christians, and therefore . . . (he has to be dangerously extreme like them)
• he voted down a partial-birth abortion bill in Illinois, and therefore . . . (he is a baby killer and wants to increase the number of abortions--never mind the number of abortions has increased during the 'prolife' GWB presidency)
• he has relatively little 'experience,' and therefore . . . (he is the unknown, bad candidate even if the other is a known bad candidate)
• his supporters are 'Obam-bots,' and therefore . . . (he is a charmer who can be 'soft' or 'waffle' on the issues)
  
• he is 'nuanced' in his speech, and therefore . . . (he is a sissy woman or some new kind of black man)

I could go on. You've heard this stuff before, and more. Let me offer a few reasons why I'll vote for Obama a second time:

1. Obama is a candidate who has, not because of a war or fighting, spent time in other countries and among peoples of other cultures dear to him; the world is not a threat to him, and peoples of the world seem to respect that about him.
2. He is a listener and a learner, someone who profoundly identifies himself with a minority group in America; and he learns from those in Honolulu, in Chicago, and in Washington.
3. He wants fairness and equality and equal rights, for his daughters too.
4. He's been already too much in government but much less than the other candidate.
5. He is his own person, yes African American, but neither Alan Keyes nor Jesse Jackson.
6. His speech.

------------------
So let me say a bit more about Obama's speech, his 'rhetoric.' Obama does not use patriarchal, masculinist language. His discourse is not about 'power' and 'bullying.' He does not fall into abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic talk. So what's his discourse style? I'll say again once more, it's womanly discourse.

The “masculinity / femininity” construct seems to vary depending on who's talking, especially when talking about Barack Obama.

Jackon Katz says this (in a UCSF Today piece that Deborah cites):

“It’s just white masculinity versus person-of-color masculinity.” And, “With Obama, you have a new kind of masculinity. . . his [ethnic] heritage, but also his style. He shows that strength can be about brains, making good decisions – not just physical force.”

Katz (at HuffPo) illustrates a different construct from Rush Limbaugh:

“Limbaugh's . . . latest anti-Obama line . . . is . . . 'I don't think Barack Obama is half the man Sarah Palin is.' . . . 'He can't take a punch, he's weak, and he whines,' Limbaugh says of the Democratic nominee. 'I'm sure some women find that attractive because they would look at him as a little boy and would want to protect him...But it embarrasses me as a man.'”

I just hope Katz isn't letting Limbaugh set the agenda. In other words, Katz is right to show how ridiculous Limbaugh's “femininity” construct is for Obama. But, really, is that Obama's only choice? Doe he have to EITHER possess (A) Limbaugh's “femininity” OR (B) Katz's “person-of-color masculinity,” which is “a new kind of masculinity”?

Why can't Obama have good feminine discourse without being like Limbaugh's “girl”?

He can. He does. After the Saddleback Civic Forum, pundits were rightly exclaiming how “nuanced” Obama's speech is. For the Muslims and Christians out there, let me just throw in this zinger: Jesus's speech is as nuanced, as feminine. In contrast, McCain's discourse is abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic too.

So more questions for Katz, who I really like anyway:

Since when is “person-of-color masculinity” “new”? Isn't “person-of-color masculinity” painting with a big brush stroke? And what binary is assumed when “masculinity” is “strength” that is also “about brains, making good decisions”?

Is “femininity” not “strength” and is “femininity” not “about brains, making good decisions”?

What's interesting is Limbaugh's calling Palin a “man” with respect to Obama. Her lipstick shtick, her whole male-fantasy “femininity” is what lets her get away with using abrupt, agonistic, antagonistic (masculine) speech. (April DeConick has a great post on that). Hilary Clinton was in a double bind. She was not the male-fantasy feminine but was still required to talk like a man--and was ridiculed for her public tears. Biden choked up in the debate with Palin--no ridicule for that man.

The double standard is that women cannot have legitimate womanly rhetoric: “feminine discourse.” Clinton cannot be a woman and use such discourse; Palin a fantasy woman won't use a woman's speech style, even though or maybe because she's the Republican man's “man woman” (as Charlotte puts it at Far From Ole's) .

But then Biden (showing some emotion in public) and Obama (nuanced and irenic), as men, cannot get real credit for their “feminine discourse.”

(y)our part in sexism

If you read my blog post yesterday, or even just the title, what did you mean by “fingernails”?

Yes, I’m playing with “language” here again. But, seriously. No, very seriously, let’s ask ourselves to be careful to reflect on our part in how we use language.

Are fingernails sexy or sexist? Is the English word “fingernails”? Well, this much is for sure: if you don’t know that the answer to those questions could be Yes, then you haven’t yet experienced or imagined sexism around that word or its uses. This is real subtle stuff, as ephemeral perhaps as a little child’s experience, in a much more positive way, of “joy.”

Your language. Our language. If we don’t “intend” to offend anyone with it, isn’t it the other person’s fault if our language harms them?

The cleverest blogger in the universe gave us, yesterday, an example of sexism in language. Unintended sexism, I’m quite sure. Then after he sees it, and points it out to us, he asks a very polite and equally rhetorical question. Here’s Esteban Vázquez:

And for a wholly speakeristic aside: in this later post, he [the blogger whom Esteban is blogging about] speaks of "the mass of men who are leading lives of quiet desperation and would like to dabble in the original languages." I [Esteban] wonder: is it really only men who sink into quiet desperation due to their inability to read Hebrew and Greek?

Now, I think every one of you reading this blog understands the answer to Esteban’s question. It’s this: NO, not only men have the experience the other blogging man is blogging about. And YES, women are left out again, very subtly.

Aristotle left women out (although he wrote about females). That is, although he did include them in his most scientific writings, Aristotle left girls and women out of his world of men and boys. This is very very subtle stuff. We often don’t imagine or admit when we’re doing what Aristotle did. We don’t like to think of ourselves hurting another, with sexism particularly, especially when we never ever intended harm.

(And the historian F. A. Wright can't be more right when he says this, after reviewing all the Greek writings from Homer to Aristotle: "the Greek world perished from one main cause, a low ideal of womanhood and a degradation of women which found expression both in literature and in social life.")

I’ll end this post there, except just to add this:

Yesterday, at the rhetoric conference, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, prolific researcher and teacher of many for over fifty years, spoke with us as the keynote speaker. What she said indicted us all, even if you weren’t in the room. She asked if we were ready for a woman president (and you don’t have to be American to be ready for a U.S. president who’s a woman, to be ready or not). And very like Christine de Pizan, Campbell reviewed the neglected women of history, but women in our United States, who have made us more ready (but clearly not enough yet—see Esteban’s “wholly speakeristic aside”). This deserves another blog post, for we really have neglected many who have impacted us much and positively. Sexism is subtle until you reflect on it. As the time allotted her yesterday ran out, Campbell reminded us of de Pizan’s advice to women (and men) not to slander women (even especially Hillary Clinton). Why not? Because (and Campbell explicates de Pizan’s explication of the multiple answers), because it harms the other and contributes to (y)our part in sexism. Every vitriolic and now well publicized slam of Hillary Rodham Clinton that we’ve tolerated may be a glimpse at the kind of sexism your great grandmothers, your grandmothers, your mother, your daughters, (or you if you’re a woman) have had to endure from time to time. To glimpse and not to reflect. To glimpse and still not to include. Subtle speakeristics indeed.

Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step

Feminist Binary: Eleventh Step

Sought through prayer and meditation
to improve our conscious contact with God
as we understood Him,
praying only for knowledge of His Will for us
and the power to carry that out.
-- Anonymous Alcoholics
(Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith)

הלאה הטמהו םיליתפהו תמתחה ימל
-- Tamar
(Moses?)

Think I broke the wings off that little song bird
She's never gonna fly to the top of the world right now
Top of the world
I don't have to answer any of these questions
Don't have no God to teach me no lessons
-- “a man who has passed on,
having a lot of regrets”
(Natalie Maines)

I wish I’d listened to my mother. We may all wish that Aristotle had listened to his mother, for a different reason. More on that in a second.

THE IRONY OF A “FEMINIST BINARY”

First, I want us now to contemplate and, if possible, to enjoy the feminist binary. (That should help us in several ways better appreciate Aristotle’s story, and mine, of ignoring mom.) But a “feminist binary”?! Many feminist scholars explain “the binary” as purely masculinist. Some even, rightly, blame our Western “either/or” ways of knowing all on Aristotle. So it sounds really strange to hear anyone claim that good feminisms use a binary method.

Aristotle would laugh at us, saying: “See what you’ve done? When you feminists try to imagine reality without my binary, then you’ve used it. Ironically, you say: EITHER Aristotle’s binary OR something different. Ha!” We would have to give Aristotle some credit for recognizing irony. But in reply to Aristotle, I’d say (1) there really is a feminist binary and (2) that the feminist binary is neither Aristotelian (i.e., masculinist) nor really such a limited and pure binary at all. This takes some thinking. But stay with me.

Initially, let’s review how feminist scholars can and must characterize Aristotle’s masculinist binary. Then, let’s hear how different feminism is. But we can and must enjoy the twists in the plot. (We’ll even let C. S. Lewis talk some again, as he tells his story of escaping Aristotle). And maybe then, if you’re still with me, we can tell on me, and on Aristotle.

THE MASCULINIST BINARY

Nancy Mairs articulates the feminist binary best. She starts by contemplating how we’ve learned to enjoy (or to tolerate in experience) the masculinst binary. Here’s what Mairs says:

The masculinist binary is “the language of opposites,” which we understand as “the fundamental structure of patriarchy” and as “the dominant discourse” of our Western culture ever since Aristotle.

The masculinist binary, we should understand, works like this:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world. (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 41)

Michelle Ballif has written something similar on the masculinist binary. Ballif, on the one hand, makes clear Aristotle’s part:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle . . . [which] he [himself] provides us with. . . Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves. ("Re/Dressing Histories: Or, On Recovering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze" 93)

Ballif is saying that Aristotle pushes the dominant binary method in his epistemology. He recreates for us (no, he distorts--imposes upon us) the way a good story is to be told (hang the epic poets his teacher had been saying), and the Aristotelian method has become for us the only way of telling stories, even our stories. Now the rhetorician-philosopher-scientist dominates literature.

HOW DIFFERENT THE FEMINIST BINARY

Ballif, on the other hand, presses us to imagine this:

“[What i]f there were no binaries, no either/or alternatives?” (96)

And she finds a feminist binary answer in Helene Cixous:

What if Truth were a Woman (Nietzsche)—that is, a counterfeit coin—what then?
Cixous replies,

Then all stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies, another thinking, as yet not thinkable, will transform the functioning of all society. (“Sorties” 93) (97)

Cixous and Ballif say that Aristotle’s method has consequences which exclude good story telling by any other means but his. And the way we tell our stories, or allow them to be told, has dire consequences for the functioning of all society. This is a grand statement, teetering ironically on the edge of the modern metanarrative. But maybe Mairs is a little easier to understand than Ballif in her postmodern musings and than Cixous in somebody else’s bad translation of strange French into stranger English.

Mairs discusses the feminist binary (in cogent English) this way:

[The masculinist Aristotelian binary] speaks the language of opposites.

Which is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. Some theorists would claim that all subjects function thus. But as Julia Kristeva points out, female subjectivity, traditionally linked to cyclical and monumental time rather than to linear time, lies outside “language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb, topic – comment, beginning – ending).” Possessing an “irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,” a woman may be driven “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.”

The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces “woman to man’s opposite, his other, the negative of the positive.” No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman’s immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: “Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on.” Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy. (40-42)

Notice here Mairs’ repeated use of “not”: especially not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse and not the language of opposites but. An opposing is not The opposite that Aristotle insists it is. Rather, a difference emerges, the very difference of a woman enfolds the other, and that difference is simultaneously dual: it’s a developing, creative, “both-and” now. Re-read that last sentence of Mairs above to get the absolute and radical alterity of the feminist binary. Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

Now let’s look at an exemplary piece of (feminist) scholarship that works the feminist binary. It’s Patricia Bizzell’s article, “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” In the final paragraphs, what has emerged are Bizzell’s (personal, passionate) statements about how feminist research methods enfold traditional, masculinist (binary) research methods into the feminist (binary) duality of simultaneity. She says it so much better than I (so re-read the article, or at least this bit before her conclusion):

Have [afra-feminist Jacqueline Jones] Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition [especially Aristotle’s taken-for-granted dominant binary]? Yes and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric . . . working within this [dominant, masculinist] tradition and enriching it, rather than constituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at the activities of these new rhetors [i.e., the women silenced by traditional histories of rhetoric], researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work. (16)

Here’s the summary so far. The masculinist binary method articulated by Aristotle and perfected since by men in the Western world is our dominant discourse. The method is the way of knowing that is part and parcel of the divide-and-conquer and subject-and-dominate approach. Feminists, good feminists at least, have no problem with the masculinist (mere dimorphic) epistemology AS LONG AS a different, an-other binary is employed. Good feminists must differentiate between the masculinist binary (“either / or”) and the feminist binary (“yes, there’s that either / or and yet there’s also the both / and”). Good feminists may see some value, for example, in some uses of Aristotelianism, in some appropriations of traditional and archaeological historiography, in some adaptations of the plus/minus feature-dependent mechanistic Transformational-Grammar of Noam Chomsky, in some dominant rhetorical critical methods, in some aspects of Sigmund Freud’s psychology on the sub-conscious (which Ballif blasts as soundly as she blasts forceful Aristotelianism), in some story telling. Good feminists do see value in the dominant discourse of men, AS LONG AS the masculinist binary does not dominate the other. Aristotle’s mother was not the one who said to him, “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.”

ABUSES OF THE FEMINIST BINARY (WHICH LOOK AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE MASCULINIST BINARY)

So far, I’ve been talking about either the masculinist binary of Aristotle or the feminist binary of good feminists. You’ve caught my implication: there is bad feminism. I’m guilty of it, and my mother may have warned me of it (and we’re getting to my story soon enough here). And others are guilty of bad feminism.

Bad feminism often resorts only to the mere masculinist binary, usually in the futile effort to abandon or to denigrate the masculinist binary. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed how Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie have felt they needed to abandon the feminist personal and to resort to masculinist methods “beyond the personal.” In doing so, they cannot easily allow a feminist student to re-conceive her own feminism within her new found Christianity. And I’ve pointed out how the wonderful Cheryl Glenn retreats to the male tradition when she fails inclusively to recognize African and Asian rhetorics as rhetoric. In both cases, we see feminists in the dominant positions of power (i.e., teaching professors and a researching scholar) as trying to hold on to limited notions of “feminism” (i.e., something that can neither include nor be included by Christianity) and of “rhetoric” against what emerges in students and other outsiders.

Bad feminism, then, often lords it over those who challenge feminism (or rhetoric) in rather authoritative senses. Like the bully on the playground, this kind of bad feminism takes it’s ball and goes home, not letting anyone else play. But there’s another kind of bad feminism, which is purposefully snobby. It keeps playing just to keep others from playing. I’ll try to explain. Let’s look at some notions in the life and writings of C. S. Lewis.

FEMINIST TOOLS OF C. S. LEWIS

C. S. Lewis, not exactly a feminist much less a good feminist, uses the feminist binary nonetheless. And Lewis gives us related feminist tools such as “second meanings” and the two orders of consciousness, “contemplation” and “enjoyment.”

We get “second meanings” from Lewis’s chapter title by the same name in his Reflections on the Psalms. Now, Lewis reads and writes as a lowly novice, as a simple outsider. He confesses from the get go that he’s no Hebrew scholar, and yet he reads second meanings in the Hebrew poetry. He’s seen such second meanings, unintended meanings, in texts authored by Greek and Roman men. The text, Lewis rightly observes, does not contain only the author’s intention that only insider-readers can apprehend. No. Even the marginal, especially the low outsider, gets more. The text is not: either what the author intends or nothing. No. Out of the outsiders’ readings emerges more that enfolds the original intentions into “a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.” Yes, of course, you recognize Mairs and not Lewis as the original author of that quotation here. But in my “feminist” readings of Lewis and Mairs, I see second meanings, not theirs only, but also theirs and mine together. Lewis goes on to say that original authors may or may not want to concede the second meanings when confronted with them. But the good authors will allow for both.

We get “contemplation” and “enjoyment” as two experiences of consciousness from Lewis as he tell us his own life story of conversion in Surprised by Joy. Here’s how Lewis puts it:

These are technical terms . . . ; “Enjoyment” has nothing to do with pleasure, nor “Contemplation” with the contemplative life. When you see a table you “enjoy” the act of seeing and “contemplate” the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating seeing and enjoying the thought. In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved’s death and . . . “enjoy” the loneliness and grief but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology. We do not “think a thought” in the same sense in which we “think that Herodotus is unreliable. When we think a thought, “thought” is a cognate accusative (like “blow” in “strike a blow”). We enjoy the thought (that Herodotus is unreliable) and, in doing so, contemplate the unreliability of Herodotus.

I accepted this distinction [between “enjoyment” and “contemplation”] at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought. A moment later its consequences—for me quite catastrophic—began to appear. It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman [for me as her lover] is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course, the two activities [enjoyment and contemplation] can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible. . . In introspection we try to look “inside ourselves” and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by this very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by-product for the activities themselves. That is how men may come to believe that thought is only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collection of mental pictures, when these in reality are what the thought or the appreciation left behind—like the swell at sea, working after the wind has dropped. Not, of course, that these activities, before we stopped them by introspection, were unconscious. We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of the twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a threefold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated. (217-19).

Lewis here has been showing us the problem of Freud in a way that Ballif shows us the problem of Freud. To reduce human mental activity to either the Subsconscious or the Conscious is problematic. One must not dominate. But if we go beyond this "either / or" masculinist binary, then what emerges is an other way of thinking about and even experiencing consciousness. Only one sort of consciousness (either “contemplation” or “enjoyment”) must not be exclusive to the other; and how must either be dominant over the other?

Lewis does not connect “second meanings” with “consciousness,” but I want to. With “second meanings” we see that the marginalized outsider can observe more than the original author and his insider audience does. Likewise, with “enjoyment,” we can see that there is profound subjectivity; just as in “contemplation” there is the intended objectivity. We need both. That is, we need both an author’s intentions in the text and all the unattended second meanings. And we need subjectivity if we need objectivity. In this kind of (good) “feminism,” there is the “both and,” but there is NOT only subjectivity or only objectivity. Not only the masculinist binary. Not only a feminism that refuses to contemplate the masculinist binary (if that feminism seeks to enjoy the masculinst binary).

I realize this is very complex. I’m trying to bring together some very complicated things that relate to my translation project. Translation is a feminist move, if done right. Translation involves the “both and” not just the “either / or.” Translation, if done right, gets at the second meanings, and new meanings emerge. Scholars such as Thomas Conley (in his article “The Greekless Reader”) may suggest that no translation is really worth much in the study of Greek texts. But Conley just doesn’t understand translation, and its value. Translation, if done right, is both contemplation and enjoyment. Translation, if done right, is what Mikhail Epstein calls interlation. Especially when the translation is lined up with the original text, there is interlation, or a “stereotext.” Translation, if done right, allows the scientist writer to use his or her “head” to name precisely in either-or (as science writer Alan Lightman puts it); and translation, if done right, allows the artist writer to use her or his “heart” and “stomach” actually to unname, to get after the readers’ belief (as novelist Alan Lightman puts it). Lightman actually confessed to me that he wants the translators of his English language novels (now translated into 30 some languages) to be both scientists (concerned with the Aristotelian binary) and artists (concerned with much more).

This is not how Aristotle wants us to do translation. The male-authored Greek text with its original meaning is dominant for Aristotle. Everything else is excluded. Aristotle does not want to do translation.

WHAT MOTHER SAID

In my last post, I tried to say that Aristotle had no translation theory, that he in his position of power, didn’t really need and consequently didn’t even want to translate. At some point in his life, Aristotle looked at his mother as a biologically botched human being. Aristotle looked at his wife and at his daughter in the same way. They talked differently from males. They were not males. Since males are naturally more perfect than females, then why should a man listen to a woman? Why should Aristotle listen to the female who is his mother, the female who is his wife, the female who is his daughter? And how? What he (and Socrates and Plato) says and writes matters most. The categorical difference makes all the difference. And the difference, the consequential difference, is the one of the “man who has passed on, having a lot of regrets.” Look at that third epigraph above; did you know Dixie Chick’s Natalie Maines is singing about Aristotle when she sings his song, “Top of the World”?

Maybe translation is required for a male to listen to a female. Maybe Aristotle thought that. But had he listened to Phaestis, his mother, (or to Pythias his wife, or Pythias his daughter), what he would have heard would be an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, including the man Aristotle.

Now I’ll end this post by telling the story of me not listening to my mom. My mom wanted me to translate something, to interpret something for the guests when my wife and I were married. Mom wanted me to help them contemplate the part of the wedding ceremony that was in another culture, in another language, other than the dominant culture and language of the guests. I refused. I just wanted to enjoy the ceremony. (Besides, my mother, my dad, my aunt, and my parents-in-law-to-be had offered my fiancée and me already too much unsolicited advice about our wedding.) You see, the people of two Karo Batak tribes of North Sumatra had woven a special wedding cloth for my fiancée and me to be used in the ceremony. (My parents had been adopted into the tribes and the people of the tribes wanted, very far away, to contribute to the marriage of my parent’s son, me.) Although the meaning of this textile was quite apparent to all living in that part of that island in Indonesia, my fiancée and I were married in the United States, where even the Javanese visitors and missionaries would not have understood the Batak custom. Mom simply requested I both enjoy the Batak marriage ritual and also help the wedding guests contemplate (in translation on a written program) the custom. My refusal was snobby. But I rationalized in a (bad) “feminist” way by refusing to be part of the binary.

So now I repent. But I did leave (snobbishy) untranslated the second epigraph above. So let’s contemplate it and then enjoy it together. Please let me translate and make some applications. The quotation is from Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-law Judah into having sex with her so that she could get pregnant, conceive, and have a baby. Because there was no DNA testing back then, she took his signet, cords, and staff from him during the sex act to prove later that he’d slept with her. But to add insult to injury not only does she trick him, she makes him figure out that he was duped. She does not even bother to explain. She says: “Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and the cords, and the staff” (Genesis 38:25). This kind of snobbishness is bad feminism, that leaves the other hanging alone. In my own story, of course, I did not have Tamar’s cause but I used her method: make the others figure it out. I’m afraid that’s been my practice all too often through the doctoral program also: I’m going to write how I’m going to write; hang the reader who can’t translate that for herself or himself. (My fiancée did have a voice, and a very good one, in how our wedding went, but that’s another story. It’s our anniversary today.)

SUMMARY

I’ve not tried to be linear in my story telling here. You see that. I confess it. I do think Michelle Ballif is on to something in her observations that Aristotle imposes too much order on us (i.e., “either tell your story this way, or it’s a bad narrative”).

However, I think feminists need not retreat, simply, to the abandon of Aristotle. Good feminists recognize that and insist on the inclusion of the masculinist binary just as long as it does not dominate and silence the absolute and radical alterity of other kinds of discourse. The recognition by good feminists is a “both and” that requires difference. For example, good feminists recognize good translation. For good translation recognizes value in both the original text with the author’s original intentions and second meanings both in the original text and in the translated text. Good translation is contemplation and enjoyment.

So, there’s one last epigraph to enjoy and to contemplate: the first one. It’s the eleventh step of the famous Twelve Steps. I think it’s good feminism. The eleventh step of Alcoholics Anonymous gets beyond the addict, goes beyond just me down here and the higher power over there. Taking this step requires inclusivity that neither Aristotle (by his binary method) nor the deadbeat and now dead daddy that Natalie Maines sings about has. Taking the eleventh step also requires the inclusivity that neither Tamar nor I (by retreating to a “you figure it out” enjoyment) have. The eleventh step, following the feminist binary, requires better and more. (Now, back to translation, both enjoyment and contemplation).

update, cross-ref: First Step: Translation in Recovery, Hyperbole, and Parab(o)le