Translation: Michel de Certeau Vocal Citations

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen, by Edvard Eriksen, 1913

This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of Vocal Citations from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text, Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses the evanescence of vocal interventions within a codified system of language and writing by taking inspiration from Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and the protagonist's first encounter with Friday. Whose voices are we going to hear? This argument is especially pertinent in the current social-media- commentary-dominated landscape where anyone can create their own glose but an invisible algorithm chooses which ones become prevalent.   

Citations de voix, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici

Vocal Citations

Robinson Crusoe indicates himself how a fault was introduced into his scriptural empire. In fact, for a period of time, his enterprise was interrupted and haunted by an absence that returns to the island’s shores, a man’s naked footprint on the beach. The border line cedes to the stranger: the instability of the marker. On the margins of the page, the trace of an invisible fantom (an apparition) comes to upset the order built by a capitalizing and methodical labor. It makes Robinson experience “fluttering thoughts, whimsies, and a terror.” The bourgeois conquerer is transformed into a man who is “beside himself,” becoming a savage himself by way of this “wild” index that reveals nothing. He dreams and his dreams are nightmares. He loses his certainty in a world governed by the great clockmaker. His reason abandons him. Ousted from the productive asceticism that stood for meaning, he experiences diabolical days on end, possessed by the cannibalistic desire to devour the stranger or by the fear of being devoured himself.

So a stain appears on the written page—like the scribble of a child on the book that represents the authority of a place. A lapsus insinuates itself into language. The appropriated territory is altered by the trace of something that is missing and is placeless (like the myth). Robinson will reassume the power of dominion when he has the ability to see, that is to say to substitute the index of a lack with a tangible being, a visible object, Friday. Then he will find himself within his order again. The disorder is due to the index of a past and passing thing, to the “near nothing” of a passage. The violence that oscillates between the impulse to devour and the fear of being eaten, according to Hadewijch d’Anvers, is born out of our ability to name “the presence of an absence.” Here, the other does not constitute a system that is hidden below the one written by Robinson. The island is not a palimpsest where it is possible to reveal, decrypt or decode a system covered by an order superimposed upon it, but that’s of the same type. The passing trace does not have its own text. We cannot enunciate it other than through the discourse of a proprietor, and it does not live anywhere else but in his space. The only language of difference is Robinson’s own interpretive delirium—dreams and “whimsies.”

The novel dating from 1719 already points to the non-place (a trace that eats away at the edges) and a fantastic modality (an interpretive insanity) of that which will interject as a voice in the field of writing, even though Daniel Defoe deals with the silent marking of the text by a body part (a naked foot), and not the voice itself, which represents language marked by the body. A name is already given to this form and these modalities: they speak, says Robinson, of something “wild.” The naming, here like everywhere else, is not a mere depiction of reality: it’s a performative act that organizes what it pronounces. It means in the same way that we mean for someone to go away. It does what it says, and constitutes the savageness that it declares. Since we excommunicate by naming, the name “savage” simultaneously creates and defines that which the scriptural economy situates outside of itself. And its essential predicate immediately comes to affect it: the savage is evanescent; he is marked (by stains, lapsus, etc.) but he cannot be written. He changes a place (he upsets it), but he does not establish one.

In such a way, the “theoretical fiction” invented by Daniel Defoe points to a form of alterity as it relates to writing, a form that will also impose its identity upon the voice, since, later, when he appears, Friday will be faced with an alternative due to a long history: either cry out (a “wild” outbreak that calls for the interpretation or the corrective action of a pedagogical or psychiatric “treatment”) or turn his body into an instrument of the dominant language (by becoming “his master’s voice,” a docile body that implements the order, embodies a reason and obtains the status of being the substitute of enunciation, no longer the act but the doing of another’s “saying.”) As for the voice, it will also insinuate itself as a trace in the text, as an effect or a metonymy of the body, a fleeting citation like the “nymph” of G. Cossart—Nympha fugax, a passing fugitive, an indiscreet revenant, a “pagan” or “wild” reminiscence in the scriptural economy, an unnerving noise from another tradition, and supplying a reason for the production of interminable interpretations.

We still need to define some of the historic forms imposed upon orality as they relate to its ousting. Because of this exclusion, for reasons relating to neatness and economic efficiency, the voice essentially appears as the figure of citation, which is analogous, in the field of writing to the trace of the naked foot on Robinson’s island. In the scriptural culture, the citation unites effects of interpretation (it allows for the production of a text) with effects of alteration (it disturbs the text). It plays between these two poles that, in turn, characterize these two extreme figures: on the one hand, the pre-text-citation, that serves to produce text (a presumed commentary or analysis) from relics chosen from an oral tradition that functions as an authority; on the other hand, the reminiscence-citation that traces within language the unusual and fragmented return (like a breaking voice) of structuring oral relationships but which are suppressed by writing. It would seem these are borderline cases outside of which we can no longer speak of the voice. In the first case, citations become the means of the proliferation of the discourse; in the second case, they escape it and cut it up.

If we were to only keep in mind these two options, I would call one of them the “science of the fable” (from the name that has so often been attributed to it during the 18th century), and the other “returns and turns of the voice” (since its returns, like swallows in springtime, are accompanied by subtle modalities and procedures, in the same way as the turns and tropes of rhetoric, and can be translated into paths that squat in unoccupied places, into “movies for voices” says Marguerite Duras, into ephemeral tours—“a little walk and then we’ll go.”) The sketch of these two figures can act as an introduction to the examination of oral practices, while specifying some of the aspects of the framework that allows for voices to still speak.

Translation: Michel de Certeau The Machinery of Representation

Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863

This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of The Machinery of Representation from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses how the law and customs write themselves on other bodies only to reproduce themselves and make believe. In seeking a socially acceptable identity, people become signs and sacrifice their bodies to these systems of representation that precede them. I am not yet sure if this discussion is useful in order to describe a reality that is inescapable or if it hints at a system of transmission that we can transcend. The tone of the passage certainly seems critical but it seems to ignore the human aspect of this experience. Stay tuned for Les machines célibataires, a commentary on Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.   

La Machinerie de la Representation, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici

The Machinery of Representation

Two main operations characterize these interventions. The first one aims at removing from the body a superfluous element, deemed unhealthy or not aesthetic; the other adds to the body what it is missing. Therefore, the instruments in question can be distinguished according to the actions they carry out: cutting, pulling out, extracting, removing, etc. or inserting, placing, attaching, covering, assembling, sewing, articulating, etc.—not to mention those that substitute missing or defective organs, such as valves, pacemakers, limb prosthetics, screws implanted in the femur, artificial irises, bone substitutes, etc.

Either from the outside or from the inside, they correct an excess or a deficit, but compared to what? Just like when we remove leg hair or paint our eyelashes, cut or implant hair, this subtractive or additive activity goes back to a code. It keeps bodies within a norm. In this sense, clothing itself could be considered the instrument thanks to which a social law secures bodies and limbs for itself; it regulates and trains them through changing fashion trends as in military maneuvers. Cars, just like corsets, mold bodies and make them conform to a postural model. These are orthopedic as well as orthopraxic instruments. The foods a cultural tradition chooses to sell in a given society’s markets model just as much as they nourish bodies; they impose a form upon them, a tonality that has the value of an ID card. Glasses, cigarettes, shoes, etc. in their own way reconstitute a physical portrait. Where do we draw the line between the machinery through which a society’s living members represent themselves and when they become its representations? Where does this disciplinary apparatus that displaces and corrects, adds to and removes from malleable bodies, subjected to the instrumentalisation of so many laws, end? In reality, bodies become bodies only when they conform to these codes. Because in what circumstances does a body exist when it is not written upon, reconstituted, cultivated, identified by the instruments of a social symbolic? Perhaps, at the extreme confines of these indefatigable writings, punching holes in them through lapsus, there remains only the cry: it escapes us, it escapes them. From the first to the last cry, something else bursts out, which makes up the other of the body, at times badly brought up and in-fans, which we find intolerable in the child, the possessed person, the madman or the mentally ill—a lack of self-control like the baby’s shouting in Jeanne Dielman or that of the vice-consul in India Song.

This first operation of removing or adding is therefore just the corollary of another, more general one, which consists in making the body say the code. As we have seen, this work “realizes” (in the English sense of the term) a social language; it gives it effectivity. What a great task it is to make bodies spell out an order through “machinization”! The liberal economy is no less efficient than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law through bodies. It just uses other methods. Instead of oppressing groups in order to better mark them with the hot iron of a single power, first it atomizes them and then multiplies the tight exchange networks which make individual units conform to the rules (or the “trends”) of socio-economic and cultural contracts. We can ask ourselves why this works, whether in one instance or in the other. What desire or what need leads us to make our bodies into the emblems of a law that serves to identify? The hypotheses that respond to this question demonstrate in yet another way the strength of the bonds that tools construct between our childish “natures” and social discourses.

The credibility of a discourse is what makes believers get going. It produces practitioners. Making believe is making do. However, through a curious circularity, the ability to make—to write and mechanize bodies—is precisely what makes believe. Because the law is already applied through and on bodies, “incarnated” in physical practices, it can be approved and make believe that it speaks in the name of the “real”. It becomes believable in saying, “Reality itself dictates this text to you”. We believe what we think is real, but this “real” is assigned to the discourse by a belief that provides it with a body marked by the law. The law constantly needs an “advance” of bodies, a capital of incarnation, in order for it to make believe and be practiced. Therefore, it becomes inscribed because of what has already been inscribed: it’s the witnesses, martyrs or examples that make it believable to others. It imposes itself in this way as the subject of the law, “The ancients have practiced it,” or “others have believed it and done it,” or “you already carry my signature in yourself.”

In other words, the normative discourse does not “work” unless it has already become a narrative, a text articulated upon a reality and speaking in its name, that is to say, a storied and historicized law, told by bodies. Its implementation as a narrative is the necessary presupposition for it to produce other narratives and make believe. And tools ensure the passage from discourse to narrative through interventions that embody the law by making bodies conform to it, and in such a way, accredit it with the ability to be recited by the real itself. From initiation to torture, all social orthodoxy makes use of instruments in order to give itself the form of a history and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies.

Another dynamic completes the first and becomes entwined with it, that which pushes living beings to become signs, to find in a discourse the means by which to become a unit of meaning, an identity. From this opaque and scattered flesh, from this outstanding and murky life, transitioning finally to the clarity of a word, becoming a fragment of language, a single name, readable to others, citable: this passion lives in the ascetic who is armed with instruments against his flesh, or the philosopher who does the same through language, “losing his body,” as Hegel used to say. But everyone is a witness, thirsty to have or to finally be a name, to remain one who is called, to transform into a saying, even at the cost of his life. This textualization of the body corresponds to the incarnation of the law; it supports it, it even seems to be its foundation, at any rate it serves it. Because the law puts it into play: “Give me your body and I will give you meaning, I will make you the name and the word of my discourse.” The two problems are related, and maybe the law would have no power if it did not rely on the obscure desire to exchange one’s flesh with a glorious body, to be written, even if mortally, and to be transformed into a recognized word. Only the cry, apart or ecstatic, rebellion or inner fire of that part of the body that escapes the law of named things, stands in opposition to this passion for becoming a sign.

Perhaps all experience which is not a cry of joy or pain can be assembled under an institution. All experience which is not displaced or undone by this rapture is captured by the “love of the censor, “ collected and used by the discourse of the law. It is channeled and instrumentalized. It is written by the social system. We ought to also look at cries in order to find that which is not “reconstituted” by the order of the scriptural toolbox.

Translation: Salvatore Quasimodo, Alleyway

Alleyway in Talin, Estonia by Bora Mici

This is Bora Mici's original translation from Italian into English of the 20th-century Italian poet, Salvatore Quasimodo's poem Vicolo, or Alleyway. I chose to translate this poem because of its evocative imagery, which I found to be almost painterly in its choice of descriptive elements. I also enjoyed its simplicity, which is characteristic of Quasimodo. He marries an emotional rendering with a visual one, which all great artworks achieve. The alleyway is both typical and personal in this poem. We can all imagine what it is like to have been there. 

Salvatore Quasimodo, Vicolo by Bora Mici

Alleyway

Sometimes your voice calls me back,
and I don’t know what skies and waters
awaken within me:
the sun’s web that comes apart
on your walls which at evening were
a swinging back and forth of lamps
from the shops open late
full of wind and sadness.

Another time: a canvas cloth flapping in the courtyard
and at night a cry could be heard
of puppies and children.

Alleyway: a cross of houses
that softly call to each other,
and don’t know it is frightening
to be alone in the dark.

Art and Chemistry, A Reflection on Life and Energy

Bora Mici, oil paints palette and turpentine, 2014

This is Bora Mici's original text, written in Italian language, which may or may not contain some minor mistakes, since I am still learning this language. The text itself reflects on a thought my chemistry professor in high school shared with me about how artists are impressive because they create something out of nothing. At the time, I did not think much of it but over the past few days, I have challenged myself to use the subjunctive mood as much as possible, and this reflection on art, chemistry and added value is what emerged. You will follow my line of reasoning as to why we need to come up with a sustainable energy model for a better future. 

Ho una pagina bianca davanti a me e la devo riempire. Direi che si tratta già di una sfida di per sé. Una volta, dopo la lezione, il mio professore di chimica al liceo mi ha fatto un complimento e malgrado le sue parole incoraggianti e meravigliate non ne fossi rimasta convinta. All’epoca io ero molto impegnata negli studi, ed ero una brava studentessa in tutte le materie, anche se la pittura era la mia preferita. E tutti se ne accorgessero tranne di me. Dunque, un giorno, dopo che avessimo terminato le ore di classe, il mio professore di chimica, che era uno di quei tizi che cercavano sempre di star simpatici agli studenti, mi ha confessato che fosse rimasto sbigottito da una realizzazione dirompente. Aveva capito che i chimici non partono mai dal nulla per creare cose nuove, mentre gli artisti sì.

Allora, io direi che abbia ragione e no al contempo. Sebbene gli artisti partano da uno sfondo svuotato e ci mettano tutta la loro creazione sopra, che supponiamo, si inneschi dalla loro più profonda interiorità, non è che non godano di un supporto già esistente. In primis, benché possano essere convinti della loro sola autorevolezza, di essere un sistema autarchico a sé stante, gli artisti, come tutti quanti, si ispirano a un input, suscitato per forza da un fattore esteriore a loro, ad esempio un paesaggio oppure anche un sogno. Anche i sogni e le cose che ci immaginiamo non sono ermeticamente isolati dal mondo che ci circonda. Quindi gli stimoli esteriori si mescolano all'individualità di un'artista per far nascere un'opera d'arte che solo quella persona avrebbe potuto creare. 

Per non confonderci le idee, propongo che ci limitiamo ai pittori, quelli che dipingono un quadro sopra una superficie che consideriamo a prima vista priva di contenuto. E in questo non avrei risposto al mio professore di chimica che non avesse ragione. Però, in quanto chimico, avrebbe dovuto rendersi conto dell'importanza delle attrezzature di cui si servono i pittori per realizzare i loro dipinti. Non si può negare che troviamo tra di loro parecchi materiali creati con l’aiuto della chimica e della scienza e la sperimentazione, tra cui i pennelli con i peli naturali e quegli artificiali, le tele di cotone o lino ricoperte di uno strato di gesso liquido che fa in modo che la tela non assorbisca i colori, e non dimentichiamo i tubi dei colori stessi che vengono confezionati per la massima pigmentazione e perché la pittura possa perdurare attraverso i secoli. Forse il mio professore di chimica mi stava spingendo a riflettere proprio su questa interdipendenza tra artisti e chimici. Sara contento di sapere che ci sia riuscita vent’anni dopo e che la sua incitazione non sia andata sprecata. Quando mi ha condiviso la sua riflessione, per quanto l’avessi considerata con occhio scettico, non mi ero spinta fino alla conclusione dove sono arrivata oggi.

Adesso complichiamo un po' l'argomento, per inoltrarsi nel cuore del problema. Se prendiamo la teoria del valore aggiunto in termini economici, chi tra i chimici e gli artisti creano più di valore partendo da una basi materiale che poi trasformano per ottenere un nuovo prodotto? Sarebbe avventato pensare che non esistano anche artisti che scelgono di sfidare i limiti stessi degli attrezzi che impiegano, oppure quelli che ne inventano di nuovi. Per quanto possiate insistere che i chimici svolgono un lavoro essenziale e a fini pragmatici, perché appunto manipolano le sostanze e i componenti della vita, e forniscono gli ingredienti di altri prodotti più finiti, gli artisti e le persone creative sono i loro clienti più fedeli e non si stancano mai di mettere a frutta e di mostrare il potenziale del lavoro scientifico in ambiti diversi, dalla tecnologia all'uso innovativo di materie prime. 

Finalmente affronteremo un altro problema di tenore economico che in qualsiasi modo mi sembra difficile a dipanare e che ci permetterà una riflessione sulla totalità dell'esistenza umana sul pianeta terra. Mettiamo che il valore aggiunto sia un’invenzione umana molto importante per il nostro equilibrio psicologico che ci aiuti a sentirsi valorizzati e ci dia l’impressione di poter crescere questo valore che portiamo anche agli altri, insomma che ci permette di sviluppare le ricchezze e fare progressi. Come facciamo a bilanciare l’equazione che pone da un lato le risorse limitate del pianeta e dall'altro questo valore aggiunto che ci dà l’illusione di poter progredire indefinitamente? Possiamo veramente creare qualcosa dal nulla come ha accennato il mio professore? 

Affinché questo si verifichi dobbiamo essere in grado di arginare a seconda della nostra volontà i poteri immensi della fisica quantica e far sicché una particella subatomica liberi un'energia tremenda che riusciamo a canalizzare, a conservare e a mobilitare a nostro volere. Perciò dobbiamo riuscire a creare più energie di quanto ne usiamo senza sprecarle. Però per quanto ne capisca io, e non sono un'esperta, secondo le leggi della termodinamica, l’energia si può soltanto trasferire, non si può ne produrne di più che ce ne sia già presente nell’universo, ne cancellarne o far sparire una parte. Dunque la realtà è che non possediamo mai niente ma prendiamo in affitto oppure prestiamo al mondo tutto ciò che riceviamo da lui durante la nostra vita per un intervalle limitato. Niente ci appartiene davvero a eccezione del tempo che abbiamo a disposizione. Dobbiamo capire come fare in modo da conservare lo stile di vita che vogliamo sia la norma e che ci possa permettere la convivenza più pacifica possibile come società unita.