Microsociology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

It is an enormous pleasure to introduce this collection of es- says and interviews translated from English to Spanish by Ana Fabbri and published by Rizosfera. Ana emailed me in July 2021, suggesting a “potential” Spanish translation of my work. The fact that we kept this conversation going throughout the second summer of COVID-19, and actually began the process by early autumn, showed the extent of Ana’s serious intention. As I was soon to discover, her intent was equally matched by a rigorous engagement with this material and insistence on a very high quality threshold. I’ve had previous work translated into various languages, but my involvement in the process has always been fairly minimal. Working with Ana has been an altogether different proposition. It has, indeed, changed my perspective on the entire translation process. Coincidently, just as we started this project, I was reading a short article about how, in the world of fiction writing, translators are often speciously mistrusted by readers and authors, who, in short, see the translation process as an impure filter, through which original words pass through, becoming polluted with banal lexical equivalents and misguided connotations (Croft, 2021). Along these lines, the Israeli author, Etgar Keret, cited in Jennifer Croft’s article, claims that “translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.” There are two main reasons why Keret’s notion of originality is utter boloney. Firstly, as Croft contends, choices made about connotation are not simply about the exchanging of one word for another. Translation concerns a word’s positioning in an etymological orbit, consisting of adjacent words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, whole books, and wider sources. It is the translator’s job to build what Croft describes as a “flourishing lexical community” that offers a “profound relation” to the original by co-existing in what we might call a lexical constellation. Secondly, we need to (re)consider the role of the author and reader in relation to the translator. I do not mean to regurgitate the poststructuralist death of the author spiel
here. The author has not expired (certainly not this one, yet), or disappeared from these texts. There are in fact a multitude of authors very
much alive and kicking in every text. Not that the author has read all of them! There is another constellation at work here: a social constellation. The author has read some of these texts, but others have been read by the author’s sources, and others by the source’s sources; ad infinitum. This is by no means a postmodern simulacrum either. The original has not vanished under the accumulated weight of simulation. It is more the case that some originals have simply slipped out of sight for a while; temporarily abandoned, discarded, distanced; only to resurface, or re-
appear in some other text. Similarly, if we consider the process of translation in light of Gabriel Tarde’s Laws of Imitation thesis, then, to translate means the reinvention of invention, or indeed the repetition of difference, leading to an adaptation (a point E. C. Parsons, Tarde’s translator, might have attested to, I think). Ana’s translation work is marked by her profound grasp of these etymological and social constellations in which texts emerge and change over time. Ultimately, I hope Ana’s translations will provide a glimpse into a continuing project I have tried to encapsulate under the heading of Experience Capitalism. This term stress- es the importance of a political inclination toward the management and intensification of the so-called user experience. The outcome of this tendency is twofold: (a) it draws attention to a neurological-somatic shift from the management of efficient cognition (perception, attention, memory etc.), toward previously marginalized affects, feelings
and emotions, and (b), necessitates a critical theory and philosophy of experience, alert to such trends in digital labour. The first text is taken from The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (Minnesota UP, 2016). It sets out a theoretical frame intended to trace the trajectory
of Experience Capitalism from ergonomics and cognitive science toward the intensification of the collective dynamic of user experience. The second text, taken from A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media (Polity, 2020), extends this critical frame by sketching out a Whiteheadian philosophy of experience. In addition to these two chapters, there is an interview with Jernej Markelj, currently based at the University of
Amsterdam. This text was first published in The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (2020) and provides a rangy discussion on contagion theory, interestingly captured in the context of the first COVID-19 lockdown. There is also a dialogue with N Katherine Hayles, initially published in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (2018). This conversation locates the Assemblage Brain thesis in a converging and diverging spiral of relation to Hayles’s Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (University of Chicago, 2017). We have also included some somnambulist illustrative diagrams by the artist Mikey Georgeson, extracted from A Sleepwalker’s Guide.