Transvaluing the Global: Translation, Modernity and Hegemonic Discourse

XIE MING

The question of globalisation and translation has often been discussed in terms of the processes of global capitalist economy and their social, economic and political consequences. Michael Cronin (2003), for example, offers a set of incisive reflections on the changing geography of translation practice in contemporary globalised societies and economies. This chapter aims to highlight some of the intellectual problems in considering the role and context of cultural translation in modern China in terms of modernity and globalisation.

Keeping up with the World

Among contemporary theorists of globalisation, Roland Robertson (1992) was one of the first to emphasise the interpenetration of the dual processes of 'the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular' (pp. 177–178). On the one hand, the process of particularising the universal 'does involve the thematization of the issue of universal (i.e. global) "truth"'; on the other hand, the process of universalising the particular involves 'the global valorization of particular identities'. But the crucial point for Robertson (1992) is that the global context of such a valorisation is more important than any specific assertion of particular identity: 'Identity, tradition and demand for indigenization only makes sense contextually. Moreover, uniqueness cannot be regarded simply as a thing-in-itself. [...] In brief, globalization – as a form of "compression" of the contemporary world and the basis of a new hermeneutic for world history – realizes and "equalizes" all sociocultural formations', thereby registering 'the increasing salience of civilizational and societal distinctiveness' (pp. 130–131; original italics). Here, Robertson clearly formulates the paradox that globalisation equalises all cultures and also simultaneously enables each culture to articulate its own distinctiveness. Robertson (1995) compresses the interpenetration of these two dimensions into the notion of 'glocalisation' as a process of facilitating 'the diffusion of 'general modernity'' across 'geographically distinct civilizations', a process in which 'homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies' can be 'mutually implicative' (p. 27). Furthermore, Robertson (1990) emphasises the relations between globalisation and modernity and characterises globalisation as 'a particular series of developments concerning the concrete structuration of the world as a whole' (p. 20). This definition has the merit of highlighting the concretely structured and constructed nature of the global situation and its incessantly shifting patterns of both temporal movement and spatial configuration.

Globalisation has non-Western as well as Western origins (see the essays by a number of professional historians in Hopkins (2002a)). Globalisation is much more than the 'rise of the West' (as some commentators have argued), or the extension of Western dominance to every part of the globe, or even a historical consequence of colonialism and a new form of cultural imperialism. Globalisation is certainly not a new phenomenon or process occurring in the last few decades of the 20th century. Historically, globalisation has always been associated with a certain assertion of universal claims. But Christianity is not the only belief system to have made such universalist claims. Other major religions or cultural systems such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism have made similar globalising and universalising claims, though many scholars (in both East and West) have found it 'easy to assume that all societies can be encompassed by a teleology that is fundamentally Western in conception' (Hopkins, 2002b: 21). In the wake of the Cold War, there has been much talk of the 'End of History' or the triumph of global capitalism. This view of globalisation seems to assume that 'there is no place left on the "globe" where the capitalist system, its values, its power, and way of life can be contested': The 'globe' is all there is, and despite its diversity, it is to have a single future, prolongation of the prevailing relation of forces. Globalisation is thus the successor to the notion of 'One World', itself a recent offshoot of the 'universal history' that was 'the Enlightenment heir of the Christian eschatological narrative' (Weber, 2001: 15).

Modern Chinese globalisation has at least three major phases: first, the modernisation movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the May Fourth New Culture movement; second, Marxist universalism as embodied in the Chinese communist revolution; and third, the reform movement since the late 1970s and the current process of global capitalism facilitating China's integration with the advanced West. Each of these waves of modernisation is also a period of intense and large-scale translation and appropriation of Western knowledge, ideas, theories and ideologies.

The most influential teleological model of universal history in modern China is of course Marxism, which has enabled Chinese communist intellectuals and leaders in the course of the 20th century to re-insert China into the history of Western modernity as a universalising process, into the global narrative of progressive transition. Despite their divergence of views in many fields, Chinese intellectuals generally share a strong collective faith in the various paradigms of modernisation. In the modern Chinese context, the antinomy of China/West is by no means a simple binary opposition, or a double bind, but a more complex structure of supplementarity, différance and imbrication. As Jacques Derrida (1976) points out:

what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that...