Saving 'Population' From Governmentality Studies:

Translating Between Archaeology and Biopolitics Jon Solomon In Alain Brossat, Yuan-horng Chu, Rada Ivekoic, Joyce Liu, eds., Ethics, Biopolitics, Subjectivation. Paris: L' Harmattan. 2011. 190-205. The term "biopolitics" leads one to expect, minimally, a field of intervention that gives equal weight to life and politics, a field that is concerned with the modern process of the "speciation of the human" and the "recruiting of species life into the strategization of power relations" (Dillon 2004, 81). Yet in the lectures given in 1978-79 at the Collège de France by Michel Foucault under the course title of "The Birth of Biopolitics"-the only course that actually bears the title of "biopolitics", the central concern was not life per se, but the critique of political liberalism and political economy undertaken through the innovative concept of governmentality. Does this mean that governmentality constitutes the essential problem of biopolitics, or did Foucault's overwhelming interest in governmentality constitute an instance of what Foucault calls the "detours of my work" (Foucault 1985, 7)?

The rising prominence within anglophone academic publishing markets of "governmentality studies" has resulted in a growing number of works that either lose sight altogether of the biopolitical, or else misrepresent the object of biopower-population-by ignoring its essential hybridity. As the field where human speciation takes place, 'population' denotes the complex relation between the plasticity of the individual body and the mutability of a species. Yet when 'population' happens to be located outside the conventional boundaries of 'the West', the result, as seen in Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics [START_REF] Greenhalgh | Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics[END_REF], is an ironic confirmation of the legitimacy of both the sovereign power that the Foucaultian concept of biopower was supposed to correct and the speciation of the human, born out of colonialism and primitive accumulation, that biopower in its global dimensions takes as its object.

Given that so many of the ideas introduced by French philosopher Michel Foucault-biopolitics, governmentality, the archaeological critique of historicism-are so important to helping us wrest the common away from the privatizing trends of the contemporary global hegemony, it has become something of a pressing issue to undertake a thorough critique of their latent eurocentrism at a methodological level. This critique must advance along two lines of approach. The first of these would proceed (Solomon 2010) by a focus on the distribution of the heterogeneous b e t w e e n e x p e r i e n c e a n d k n o w l edge in the construction of modern geocultural regions. The second axis, which constitutes the line of inquiry adopted by the present essay, would remedy the culturalism inherent in governmentality studies by appealing to the archaeological method developed in The Order of Things (1966), which emphasized the interrelatedness of language, life and labor. Conversely, the culturalist limits of the archaeological method can be fruitfully remedied by a biopolitical perspective that brings language and biology back into the concern with fluid techniques of urban population control known as "governmentality". These two lines of inquiry are part of a project to elaborate what I call a biopolitics of translation (Sakai and Solomon, 2005;Solomon, 2008;Solomon 2009a;Solomon 2009b;Solomon 2010a;Solomon 2010b).

Governmentality and biopolitics

Governmentality first appears in the lecture series at the Collège de France on February 1, 1978-barely two years after launching, on January 21, 1976, an outline of a new form of non-sovereign, non-disciplinary power-biopower-that would lead to an understanding of the "'biopolitics' of the human species" (Foucault 2003, 243;translation modified). Since biopolitics is largely concerned with the emergence of population as a new object of knowledge that mediates and politicizes the relations among the biologically-inflected concepts of bodies, species, a n d m i l i eu, it is easy to understand the reasons why a corollary concept of governmental practices was necessary. The rationalities and technologies based on the model of truth-claims developed in the natural sciences effectively serve to transform, optimize and intervene in the development of populations as a whole. Governmentality thus names a specific field of intervention into the political that takes as its target the life of a group (as opposed to what Foucault calls "disciplinary power", which takes as its target the body of an individual and control over a territory and its produce). But what about the relation between the singular and the plural: a body and a species, a population and many populations, a niche and an environment? Foucault was undoubtedly aware of Canguilhem's assertion that the notion of 'milieu' (the term used in French for environment) in the social world had been directly imported from the biological sciences (Foucault 2007, 27). Seen from this perspective, the category of biopolitics would obviously have to extend beyond the problems of governmentality conceived as regulatory power to the problems of social speciation, the fact that the "State…is obliged to use race…to exercise its sovereign power" (Foucault 2003, 258). In a line that echoes the now-famous dictum concerning the "entry of life into history" that defines the concept of biopolitics, Foucault speaks, with regard to population, of "the entry of a 'nature' into the field of techniques of power" (Foucault 2007, 75). "The population is therefore everything that extends from biological rootedness through the species up to the surface that gives one a hold provided by the public" (Foucault 2007, 75). This much is evident when Foucault first identifies what he calls the "population series" composed of "biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State" (Foucault 2003, 250). The question is how this series then relates to the one he gives on Jan. 25, 1978, in the course from the following year: "security-population-government" ( Foucault 2007, 78). Although the relation between biological processes and State/regulatory mechanisms would have to be, in terms of this series, logically integral, it is equally clear that the disappearance of biological processes (and linguistic processes) from the ensuing discussion of governmentality leaves us unable to fully comprehend the speciation of the human. Nevertheless, a version of governmentality without speciation becomes so central to that part of his research made public in the lectures at the Collège de France that by the time Foucault begins a course devoted in name to biopolitics per se ("The Birth of Biopolitics"), the political problem o f body-species-milieu has v i r t u a l l y disappeared.

Perhaps the centrality of security, political economy, and government(ality) should be ascribed to nothing more than contingency. Foucault's lectures, as he stressed at the beginning of the 1976 course "Society Must Be Defended", were not finished works but rather a record or report upon results of on-going research. As The History of Sexuality project was planned to culminate in a sixth and final volume entitled "Populations and Races", it is clear that Foucault did not intend for the attention given to the State and regulatory mechanisms in the work on governmentality to draw attention away from the biological and the problem of speciation.

Compared to understanding the way in which specific technologies affect the subject "where body and population meet" ( F o u c a u l t 2 0 0 3 , 2 5 2 ) , the focus on t h e rationalities and technologies of urban economic life is but a regional part of the problem. Although the displacement of territory by governmentality makes sense in terms of introducing "flexibility" and "security" (or what Deleuze subsequently identified as "control") into the analysis of power after discipline and sovereignty, the result is a tendency to reify the connection between population and region. Nothing exemplifies this tendency more than the constant references throughout Foucault's lectures to a social formation known as "the West" that is never subjected to either genealogical or archaeological scrutiny. Yet since biopower intervenes at the point where assemblages of body, species, and milieu are to be differentiated, one would have expected it to be the realm in which hybrid objects of study dominate.

What are we to make of this contingent "detour" amidst the conspicuous absence of hybrid social objects? A footnote in Deleuze's study of Foucault reminds his readers that "Foucault never considered himself competent enough to deal with Oriental formations" (Deleuze 1986, 114; my translation). Deleuze could not deny, however, that Foucault could not avoid mentioning the Orient. It is precisely this strategy of bracketing that enables Foucault to assert the 'absolute uniqueness' of the form taken by pastoral power in the West (Foucault 2007, 148). Similar sweeping generalizations about the Oriental difference that are scattered throughout Foucault's published works and public statements persuade us that Deleuze's characterization of Foucault's ambivalence in the face of the Orient is in fact a missed opportunity to problematize the role of the specialist in speciation. What may seem like the height of modesty on the part of Foucault-the-non-specialist takes on a much more ironic tone when one considers the fact that he was also the century's most ardent critic of discipline.

"[S]election [through "disqualification"], normalization, hierarchicalization, and centralization" are the four moments that characterize the biopolitical intervention of the State into the formation of knowledge through the institutional nexus of the University (Foucault 2003, 180-183). Competence undoubtedly falls under the purview of such disciplinary measures. To view F o u c a u l t ' s flirtations with the Orient in terms of a l a c k o f c o m p e tence would be tantamount to negating the entire premise of Foucault's work on power since the disciplinary society: Power does not repress so much as construct and create! Hence, the link between specialization and speciation is integral and as such must be problematized in terms of the norms that enable and justify knowledgeable indifference or avoidance. Deleuze might well have consulted Foucault's advice concerning the definition of a 'discursive practice': "it must not be confused...with the 'competence' of a speaking subject when he constructs grammatical sentences" (Foucault 1995, 117). I understand this to mean that the critique of the 'West', a subject that gathers itself in discourse, must not overlook the non-specialist's reliance upon the grammar of translation-as-exchange [START_REF] Mezzadra | Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude[END_REF]. If the problem of biopolitics is primarily an investigation of the nature of the species-being that mediates between body a n d environment, then discontinuities and differentiation within the human species cannot be normatively assumed through either disciplinary measures such as competence nor regulatory measures that correspond to geopolitical divisions of language, population and territory.

Archaeology and biopolitics

What concerns me here are neither the arguments about authorial intention that would betray Foucault's understanding of subjectivity as an effect of power nor the debates about periodization in the life of an author that serve the interests of monumentalization (against which Foucault militated, Cf. Foucault 1995, 7) and the bureaucratic institutions that manage it. I am interested, rather, in the relation between concepts and how that relationality describes or interdicts a set of problems. I share, in other words, one of the concerns central to the archaeological method developed earlier in Foucault's career: that of understanding how the relation between statements can often tell us much more about the conditions of knowledge than the actual concepts or objects which those statements describe. I am interested, in other words, in the "fundamental distinction between the acceptability and the predication of truth" (Han 2002, 84). As I think about why Foucault narrowed his interest in biopolitics to a critique of liberalism through the category of governmentality, I cannot help but feel that it was on account of reasons having to do as much with the acceptability as with the predicability of truth.

'Culturalism' deserves our attention not just because it is one such reason that continues to enjoy persuasive status in terms of both acceptability and predicability, but also because it forms a nexus between experience and knowledge, disciplinary power and biopower, archaeology and biopolitics.

Archaeology can assist our understanding of biopolitics. One of the principal arguments of The Order of Things is that political economy forms, together with biology and philology, the essential epistemic structure of the modern. One does not have to argue that governmentality has no relation to biopolitics (indeed, it does) to point out that Foucault, by turning the discussion of biopolitics to a critique of liberalism while leaving both biology and language largely out of the picture, left the door open to misleading his audience away from the "whateverness" ( D e l euze 1986, 79) or indeterminate quality of population upon which biopower intervenes.

Foucault's archaeological method is important for biopolitical critique because of its refusal of the historicist tropes of origin, influence, and dissemination. Those familiar with debates in a post/colonial context will immediately recognize the radical displacement of culture and history-in short, the national subject-that the Foucaultian critique operates. Under the archaeological method, assumptions that would lose validity include many of the standard ones that structure the entire field of inquiry about the non-West: the 'Western' origins of modernity, the exteriority of the 'non-West' to the 'West', the "alternative modernities" specific to non-Western culture, the influence of the 'West' upon derivative forms of indigenous culture, and the continuity or substratum of indigenous cultural forms. Under the archaeological method, discontinuity, indeterminacy, and hybridity become the operative mode of culture in general.

One can easily see that, for the transnational cognitive bureaucracy that manages postcolonial relations between the 'West' and the 'non-West' according to the theme of cultural difference and the methodological presuppositions of origin, influence, and exteriority, the archaeological methodology poses a challenge that must be neutralized. Perhaps the easiest way to disqualify Foucault's relevance f o r a c r i t i q u e o f social speciation o n b o t h s i d e s o f t h e bifurcation between imperial and colonial formations would be to simply contain his work within the conventional boundaries of the 'West'. For this reason, the internalist methodology deployed by his great study of the anthropological assumptions behind the modern episteme has always seemed to me as deeply troubling for a critique of the culturalism represented by eurocentrism as it is necessary to an understanding of how experience is distributed according to various disciplines of knowledge that take the speciation of the human as a given. The extent to which recurring terms like "our modernity", "our culture", and "Western culture" constitute an integral part of the archaeology of the human sciences is never thrown into question, yet the notion of archaeology itself as method has its birth in the citation of the fictitious Chinese encyclopedia from Borges. "[T]he stark impossibility of thinking that", as Hence I do not think we can accept at face value Foucault's assertion that "my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities" (Foucault 1995, 15). I understand that there are precise methodological reasons-the discontinuity central to the archaeological method being the most salient one-for which Foucault regards the modern episteme as "the strict unfolding of Western culture in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century" (Foucault 2002, 419). Discontinuity provides both a template for countering the phenomenological presuppositions of historical experience-seen in the concepts of development, evolution, tradition and influence (Foucault 1995, 21-26)-and a way of relating processes of the visible and the discursive that are mutually integrated yet distinct. Y e t t h e c o n c l u d i n g d e s c r i p t i o n o f The Order of Things as, "a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area-European culture since the sixteenth century" (Foucault 2002, 421), reinstantiates the deictic move with which the text began. In spite of the aura of modesty that a "restricted" object of study apparently inspires among specialists, it cannot conceal the fact that 'bordering' is a fundamental mode in the operation of biopower. As Gayatri Spivak has famously written in reference to Foucault: "I am suggesting...that to buy a self-contained version of the West is to ignore its production by the imperialist project" (Spivak 1988, 291). In spite of the many methodological precautions taken in The Order of Things to avert this closure, the constitution of the 'West' brings to mind with no small irony one of the questions posed at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge:

"We must ask what purpose is served by this suspension of all the accepted unities, if, in the end, we return to the unities we pretended to question at the outset." (Foucault 1995, 28). The solution to this problem is to be found in a biopolitical translation of archaeology that divests the latter of its culturalist presuppositions.

Literature and biopolitics

Preoccupied by a fascinating "detour" i n t o g o v e r n m e n t a l i t y , F o u c a u l t d e v o t e d s c a n t consideration to the apparatus of language in his elaboration of biopolitics 2 . Yet, if the attempt to engineer society along the lines of biological knowledge is intrinsic to the project of modernity, it follows that we will need a critical category capable of comprehending the anthropological divisions modeled upon species difference that have been inherited from colonialism. Biopolitics offers the promise of a break with eurocentrism without a recuperation of its assumptions about experience and knowledge through the assertion of cultural otherness. Precisely because the study of the human species is inseparable from the colonial encounter that brought about the single world and with it the possibility of anthropological knowledge in general, the cultural divisions institutionalized by the human and social sciences as well as the geopolitical divisions of the world system must be interrogated for their complicity with the biopower that takes the classification of species-being as its object. For this reason, the relation between biopolitics and eurocentrism cannot be reduced to a question of historical archives the answer to which would lie in the introduction of objects of experience culled from colonized social formations that had been previously excluded by research, such as Foucault's, exclusively centered on Europe (Cf. [START_REF] Stoler | Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things[END_REF]. To flesh out the concept of biopolitics would require not just a new bureaucratic apparatus for managing non-European archives but also an archaeology of culture in its modern form. It is my hypothesis that when the series of language-community-specialized knowledge is related to the eruption of the biological and medical sciences, what begins to emerge is an historical narrative about technologies and rationalities designed to intervene in the 'transitions' between the plasticity of the individual body (seen for instance in neurobiology), the mutability of a species (seen for example in evolutionary biology), the plurality of each and the environment in which they co-exist. Just as colonialism cannot be understood without reference to what Mezzadra calls the "transitions" t o C a p i t a l i s m t h a t are incessantly repeated throughout its frenetic development [START_REF] Mezzadra | Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude[END_REF], so it must also be understood in relation to the growth of the technologies designed to intervene in and manage the "transitions" between and within body, species, and milieu. The archaeological method deployed by The Order of Things would lead us to expect that these biopolitical "transitions" need to be understood simultaneously in terms of language, labor, and life, or again, in terms of the disciplines that take (really, make) these fields of experience as their objects.

My understanding, which I shall not be able to elaborate here, is that literary technologies such as figuration and translation that were crucial to the establishment of national language, aesthetics, and print capitalism ought to be seen in contiguity with the otherwise very different technologies of biology and medicine. Together, these heterogeneous technologies constitute an archaeology of biopolitical intervention in the speciation of the human. Needless to say, this is a different concept of literature from the one espoused by Foucault in The Order of Things,

where literature functions as the name for a transgressive exteriority, much like madness in Discipline and Punish, that provides a clue to surpassing the modern episteme (Foucault 2001, 104-128). In other words, in addition to the literary 'outside' explored by the modernist avant-garde, there is also a literary 'inside'. "It is important to point out, however, that literature, like philosophy, is not always or necessarily on the side of transformative as opposed to everyday experience. It is just as likely, in fact much more likely, that what we call literature will bolster and reinforce accepted modes of experience and thought, than that it will undermine and transform them." (O'Leary 2008, 18). In The Order of Things, this 'inside' is concentrated in the new science of philology, which becomes a site of unconscious accumulation of collective memory (Foucault 2002, 324). Although Foucault characterizes "literature" as the domain that is "the contestation of philology" (Foucault 2002, 327), there is certainly another side-exemplified by t h e r e a l i s t n o v e l a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e r i s e o f t h e b o u r g e o i s i e , the propagation of national language, and the creation of the modern nation-state-that created templates for aesthetic normalization of population along national lines. This literary 'inside' is Why did Foucault not incorporate this powerfully in-formational and figurative aspect into his understanding of literature? To do so would have subjected the concept of literature, upon which he relies as the figure of a transgressive outside, to a fundamental internal oscillation between figuration, stratification, and linguistic structure on the one hand and the "maximum of intensity and the maximum of impossibility at the same time" (Foucault 2001, 862) that he saw in avant-garde literature on the other. This in turn would have certainly contaminated the main achievement of The Order of Things, which was to alert us to the fundamental oscillation between the empirical and the transcendental in the constitution of modern Man. For this reason it is regrettable that Foucault was never able to connect his earlier work on the modern episteme to the later work on biopolitics, given that the Foucaultian concept of biopolitics has its roots in the search for a literary outside that defined his work from 1962 through 1966.

Judith Revel summarizes the transition from literature to biopolitics [START_REF] Revel | La naissance littéraire de la biopolitique[END_REF]) in Foucault's work under the guise of a rejection of spatialized forms of difference, to which The Order of Things falls prey, and the discovery that resistance to objectification is not found only on the side of impossible objects-in the manner of Borges-but from the side of re-subjectification.

The problem with Foucault's attempt in the 1960s to think "the outside" through literature, according to Revel, is that even though he abandons very quickly the dialectical model (of transgression), he is still trapped by spatializing metaphors of "the outside". This is exactly the problem that we have seen in the recuperation of culturalism in spite of Foucault's stated intentions to avoid a history of cultural totalities. "It is precisely the theme of subjectification or, as he would say later, the production of subjectivity, that allowed Foucault to pass from the old

[literary] theme of exteriority to the structure of order, the outside of objectivity or the refusal of procedures of objectification, to a non-spatialized political formula in the form of a practice of freedom" (Revel 2004, my translation). This biopolitical formula is thus "an outside that does not need exteriority to mark its difference, since rather than look for it elsewhere, in some other space, it inaugurates it right here, in a present [actualité] that has once again become creative" (Revel 2004, my translation). Abandoning the literary model in favor of a biopolitical one, Foucault accomplishes a fruitful move from space to time and from epistemological exteriority to productive ontology.

It now seems more important than ever, however, to argue that the move from space to time effected by Foucault's transition to a biopolitical problematic contributed to his inability to tackle issues ostensibly related to territoriality, yet connected in fact to temporality, such as the constitution of the 'West'. Johannes Fabian's work on the temporality of otherness in colonial history (Fabian 1995), like Naoki Sakai's work on the colonial classification of difference [START_REF] Sakai | Subject and Substratum : On Japanese Imperial Nationalism[END_REF], has alerted us to the problem of spatialization in colonial relations. The defining feature of the West is not, as culturalism would assume, a series of collective traits (religion, territory, race, language, etc.) that are virtually impossible to identify, but rather its capacity to organize its relation to others through the temporal model of self-producing subjectivity. The West is precisely the subject of a temporal process of unlimited accumulation acquired by means of expropriation and the totalization of experience in knowledge. According to this regime, the principal feature of the non-Western social formation is the characteristic reduction to a spatialized register-the typical image of which is that of the national cultural tradition.

Neoteny, biopolitics, and translation

Due to limitations of space, it is impossible to do anything more than briefly sketch how recent work by Paolo Virno (Virno 2000a, Virno 2000b) on the bioanthropological implications of neoteny and neurobiology ties language and biology together in a perspective that could help rectify the imbalance often seen in governmentality studies. Virno argues that the attempt to resolve the problems of neoteny through the creation of secondary cultural and political "pseudoenvironments" is fraught with dangerous contradictions-especially in an age in which species-specific faculties have been "tossed onto center stage [by "big industry"], to the point of making these faculties the genuine mainstay of modern production" (Virno 2008a, 41). In the postfordist age, it is precisely the inherent "instability" or "plasticity" of the human animal that is pushed into the forefront of production under the rubric of "flexibility". Virno's explicit aim is to find or invent institutions that would "avoid the delineation of a pseudoenvironment" for neotenous human animals. Although he does not come up with a solution, he does suggest that it may be found in relation to language-particularly the capacity to invent new 'norms' via constituent practice, rather than pre-constituted institutions-as seen in the context of the joke.

Jokes, of course, have traditionally presented the greatest obstacle to translation, and many jokes, particularly those with an ethnic content, play on the problem of untranslatability. The connection between translation and humour amounts, in the final analysis, to the creation of innovative norms through praxis 3 . Nobody has written more persuasively about this aspect of translation with regard to the speciation of the human than Naoki Sakai. Essentially hybrid by nature, translational practice understood in the biopolitical sense that I see in Sakai's work shares a fundamental affinity to the Foucault/Canguilhem 'biological' account of knowledge, which holds that, "an organism is...epistemically creative precisely by being in error" (Gutting 2002, 79). Etienne Balibar's suggestion, now widely circulated, for a displacement of the identity through translation-as-a-common language (Balibar 2001, 318) c o n s t i t u t e s a n important step in the direction of finding a biopolitical response to the postfordist appropriation of our neotenous condition. Perhaps for these reasons we will come to think of translation in the same context as aphasia or the forgetting of language that is constitutive of our accession to it (Heller-Roazen 2008), seeing it as the non-event of non-relation, or, in other words, something that is not exceptional or extraordinary at all but a very ordinary occasion-filled with biopolitical significance for the multitude of foreigners.

Conclusion

In this short essay we have merely been able to sketch out the translations between archaeology and biopolitics that will help save 'population' f r o m i m m i n e n t c a p t u r e b y governmentality studies. To summarize: 1) the concern with and resistance to biopower must intervene simultaneously on each of the three archaeologically-related levels of modern experience that are language, labor, and life and on the disciplines of knowledge that take them as their objects; 2) biopolitical study is at its best when focused on objects-such as sexuality and language, and, of course, labor-that are essentially hybrid by nature (or, to put it more precisely, constitute the crossroads where biopower enacts the operation o f speciation); 3) intellectuals cannot simply focus on "self-contained" social objects related to one specific population, language, area, or discipline, any more than they can deny the practico-temporal aspects of the production of knowledge.

Foucault

  writes in the conclusion to the opening paragraph of The Order of Things, signals to readers that the problem of "words and things" centers on the indecidability of indication and signification. Foucault's reliance upon t h e d e i c t i c , "that" 1 , t o u n d e r l i n e t h e s c a n d a l o u s spectacle of exteriority ironically hides from view the oscillation between the transcendental and the empirical that is at the heart of the historical conditions of possibility and the modalities of epistemological constitution that define the equivocity of modern Man as ours and Western yet still quasi-transcendental in the constitution of knowledge.

  the aesthetic realization of t h e t r i a d o f e c o n o m y / b i o l o g y / p h i l o l o g y that constitutes the archaeological strata of the modern episteme. As such, it performed a historically-significant biopolitical function, intervening in the organization and transformation of populations within the human species.


come

Translation, Biopoliticsand Colonial difference Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon

The primary imperative given to subjective formation under the post-Fordist regime of immaterial labor is, as Maurizio Lazzarato and ToniNegri observed nearly two decades ago, communication. An i pe ati ethat ight see like a o e t of ope i g tu s i fa t i to just the opposite: The post-Fo dist su je t, ites Lazza ato, is a si ple ela of odifi atio a d de odifi atio , hose transmitted essage ust e lea a d ithout a iguit , ithi a o te t of o u i atio that has ee o pletel o alized. I the o te t of the e glo al e o o a d its migratoryregimes, subjects of communication face the especially daunting task ofaccounting for enormous differences and diversities throughout and acrossglobal populations. Hence, if communication is to be effective, it requires anideology of anthropological difference according to which the normalizationof diverse populations can be universally instituted. Needless to say, in the eraof post-colonial governance, such normalization would encounter impossibleresistance were it to proceed according to a model of uniformity that would inevitablyhighlight the uneven relations between center and periphery. What isneeded, rather, is a strategy of normalization that accounts for and includesdifference, yet organizes it according to predictable codes. Amidst the litany ofvarious biologico-sociological classificatory schemes that have arisenoftenwith disastrous political consequencessince the 19th century, none is morepervasive, historically persistent and o side ed to e politi all eut al tha that of ultu e. Cultu e p o ides o u i atio ith the crucial classificatoryframework necessary both to preserve difference at a level acceptable topostcolonial governance and to ensure sufficient regularity in codification.According to this ep ese tatio al s he e, t a slatio a es the p o ess ofe odi g/de odi g e ui ed to t a sfe informational content between differentlinguistico-cultural spheres. Just as the post-Fordist subject ust o u i ate, the atu e of o u i atio itself is st i tl odified a o di gto a g a a of pronominal identities and representational positions that codifieslinguistic exchange according to an essentially predetermined representationalscheme of mutually determined anthropological codes.

I o te po a pa la e, ultu al t a slatio a es the oste si l ethi al elatio to the othe founded on mutual respect for difference. Given themassive effects of lingering colonial difference, a o di g to hi h theWest is supposed to e e ise a do i ati g ediatio upo ultu al ep ese tatio sa oss the glo e, ultu al t a slatio u dou tedl o stitutes a i efutably progressive development in the recognition of previously colonizedpeoples. Yet as Boris Buden poi ts out i his defe se of st ategi esse tialis , the otio of t a slatio utilized toda s proponents of culturaltranslation is not the conventional, modernist one that emphasizes semanticidentity and hierarchies of translatability and untranslatability, but rather apostmodernist one sensitive to the problems of indeterminacy and differenceraised by the philosophies of difference.

In 2006, we published a issue of the ultili gual se ies T a es titled T a slatio , Biopoliti s, Colo ial Diffe e e i hi h e p ese ted a a gu e tfo a ti ulati g the i dete i a of translation as a modality of socialpractice to the contingent commodifications of labor-power and the nexus ofknowledge that governs anthropological difference. The call for papers for thatissue proposed to prospective authors the idea of bringing translation squarelyinto a politically informed discussion about the production of both social relationsand humanistic knowledge in the context of anthropological difference inheritedfrom colonialism. We did not hide our ambition to push the idea of ultu al t a slatio e o d st ategi esse tialis to p ese t a e isio ofs eti k o ledge and social practice that would directly subvert the anthropo-te h ologi al status of the West as both exception and a form of immunity.Central to this discussion was the notion of a biopolitics of translation.In a series of lectures in the late 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced and elaboratedthe asso ted o epts of iopoliti s a d go e e talit as tools fo thi ki g a out the a i hi h the processes of lifeand the possibility ofcontrolling and modifying them through the technical meansenter thesphe e of po e a d e o e its hief o e . Fou ault s effo t has generallybeen understood as an innovative attempt to introduce a new ontology, beginningwith the body, that would provide a way of thinking the political subjectoutside the dominant tradition of ode politi al philosoph that f a es it asa su je t of la . Biopoliti s thus a es a uotidian sphere of ostensibly apolitical (or depoliticized) social action and relationswhat Foucault calls thee t of life i to histothat is nevertheless invested with crucial effectsfor the production of social subjects. These effects, far removed from the roletraditionally ascribed to politics per se, nevertheless bear directly upon the constructionof what is at stake in the formation of power relations.

I o de to use tools f o Fou ault s o eptual kit, ho e e , e fou dit as ot o l possi le ut also necessary to subject the latent and pervasiveOccidentalism in his work to a thorough critique while at the same time openingup possibilities for an understanding of biopolitics in a global o te t.The otio of a iopoliti s of t a slatio a ui es o eptual alidit a d iti al importance with a view to the specifically modernwhich is to say,globalphenomenon of the linguistic standardization associated with nationalizationand colonial land appropriation. Ever since the concomitantbirth of philology and biology, modernity has been associated with the adventof a glo al a tog aphi i agi a that pla es peoples ith o p io e o of igratory contact, or o l deep e o su h as et olog , i to elatio th ough the ediatio of a i pe ial e te . As the transition to aglobal form of spatial imaginary, modernity begins, linguistically speaking,when the project of standardization is extended across all manner of socialdifferences to encompass diverse populations in the process of national homogenization(which occurs, as Jacques Bidet argues, on the le el of o lds ste a d do esti seg e tatio hi h o u s o the le el of lass difference or structure). This process must be seen, in turn, in the context ofcontact with other global populations undergoing the same traumatic processof systemic definition and structural segmentation. The biopolitics of translationthus names that space of exchange and accumulation in which politicsappears to have been preempted by the everyday occurrence of language.Our research shows that he t a slatio is u de stood a o di g to a ep ese tatio als he e of the episte ti subject, it names not the operatio hi h ultu al diffe e e is idged, ut athe the preemptive operationthrough which originary differencewhat is encountered when translationis understood as an act of social practiceis segmented and organized accordingto the various classificatory schemes of biologico-sociologicalknowledge emerging out of the colonial encounter.

"ee f o this pe spe ti e, the ode egi e of t a slatio is a o etefo of s ste i o pli it hose p i a fu tio is populatio a age e t ithi the purview of imperial domination. In other words, it is a globallyapplicabletechnique of segmentation aimed at managing so ial elatio ships fo i g the to pass th ough i uits o the s ste i le el. I ou esea ho the transnational discursive structure of both Japanese studies and the institutionof the Japanese Emperor system, or again in the relation between imperial nationalism and the maintenance of ethnic minorities, we were persuadedthat the geography of national sovereignty and civilizational difference that constitutesthe geocultural and geopolitical map of both the world and the humansciences indicates an important kind of subjective technology or governmentaltechnique that has, until recently, been thoroughly naturalized by an anthropologicaldis ou se of ultu e. It is o l today that we can begin to see how amultiplicity of disciplinary arrangements forming an economy of t a slatio i pla e si e the olo ial e a ut fa outli i g olo ialis s de ise a tuall p odu es differentially coded subjects, typically national/racial ones, whoseconstitution is interdependent and, at specific intervals, actually complicit in asingle, yet extremely hierarchical, state of domination. Our ai as thus tot a e a se ies of ge ealogies ithi hi h t a slatio is o lo ge see assi pl a operation of transfer, relay, and equivalency, but rather assumes avital historical role in the constitution of the social.

Our research into the position of the translator within the modern regimeof co-figured, nationalized language, shows a precise parallel to the logic ofsovereignty. Just as Giorgio Agamben has shown how sovereignty is based onthe form of exception (embodied by the figure of the sovereign), the positionof the translator in the modern era has been represented in a similarly exceptionalfashion.

Ou o k has tu ed this elatio ship i side out, de o st ati gthat the egula it of the atio al la guage as a fo atio i hi h the h id positio of the t a slato has ee dee ed i ele a t is in fact producedin a representational manner only after the practical encounter of social differencein translation. By proposing to look at the formation of national languagethrough the ostensibly exceptional case of translation, we have beenable to show that it is indeed a systemic, or international, technique of domination.This discovery parallels the growing awareness, largely advanced byYannMoulierBoutang, of the crucial role in capitalist expansion played bythe various forms of irregular and slave labor, rather than the regularized formsof wage labor. Hence, at the back of the call for papers for that issue was aproposal to displace the state of domination managed by the dual normalizingtechnologies of wage labor and nationalized speaking subjects with the inventivesubjectivities seen in the exodus from wage labor and national language.In effect, translation appears to us as the social relation from which thecritique of communication and its o olla ultu e as the eig i g ideolog of apital is ost di e tl linked to a politics of life, or again, the politics inwhich life becomes invested by capital.

In the various exceptions that alternately govern labor, life and language,we begin to grasp the way i hi h the West has esta lished a d ai tai edits ide tit as a spe te fo the last fe centuries as the leading, knowledgeableregion of the globe that supposedly exports innovation and developmentto other regions. Yet the very concept of the global, according to which regionsas such are imagined is intrinsically indebted to the legacy of colonialism. Althoughthe colonial encounter p odu ed the fi st t ul glo al elatio , theWest ide tified itself as a pa ti ula a d u i ue egio only by claiming exemptivesubtraction from this relation while at the same time undertaking unprecedentedaccumulation through originary expropriation.

The contemporary configuration of the West and the Rest along an immunitarianmodel is but the most recent development in this remarkablydurable history. As the contemporary West prepares to innoculate itself againsta slew of viral threats supposedly emanating from the Third World, it is wellworth remembering that for the indigenous, pre-Colu ia populatio s of the Ne Wo ld, the contact with Europeans brought far more death from diseasethan any other cause. It took nearly 400 years, we are told, for population levelsin North and South America to reach pre-Columbian levels. This decimationof pre-Columbian populations by viral disease, often occurring in advanceof actual contact with Conquistadors and European colonists, constitutes anemblematic event of modernity: here, we find the original form of immunitariandistance that disavows the destructive, expropriative relationship whilesubsequently preserving the account of that history in the codes of anthropologicaldifference. The temporal inversion effected by the representation ofthis event is hat autho izes the West to lai its sa e a d i ilizi g issio a d ep ess its i al, a a i history.

The presentation to the Multitudes list of our call for a biopolitics of translationrequires more ela o atio tha e a p o ide he e, ut e ould like i i all to add ess t o poi ts: 1 If ofigu atio a es the st u tu e ofthe o ld i as u h as a th opologi al diffe e e is go e ed the epistemologicalrepresentation of translation (at the expense of the practical subject),then it could be politically-pertinent to see something like a Europeanreception of this project. Vis-à-vis the global networks of bipolarity establishedby the United States (which remains dominant in Asia), Europe stands in ahighly ambivalent position. Undoubtedly some Europeans will dream of makingthis ause fo a e Eu opea e eptio . But at the sa e ti e, this ift i E pi e, to o o B ia Hol es s suggesti e phrase, also presents us with aninteresting possibility to displace the bipolarity.

2) Concomitant with this creativepotential, we cannot overemphasize the necessity of a long-term, farreachingcritique, via the conceptual framework of translation, of theEurocentrism and Occidentalism that still pervades the Human Sciences today.Previous critiques of Occidentalism have focused on themes such as colonialambivalency and the reversal of established hierarchies, yet tend to leave thebasic structure of anthropological difference intact inasmuch as it is linguisticallyencoded in the complex and mobile relations between major and minor languages; by contrast, a project in the biopolitics of translation brings to thecritique of the West both an epistemological critique of the anthropologicalbasis of knowledge and a practical engagement with the contemporary socialformation at the level of expression. Just as the Marxian critique of the commodityfetish proposed to remind us that the fruits of labor, now reified, actuallybear within them the trace of a social relation (and hence the possibility ofcreative transformation), we advance the thesis that translation can also be understoodas a form of social relation requiring similar critique of elements assumedto be extraneous to the production of meaning and bearing similarcreative potential. From the geneaological perspective of a biopolitics of translation,the emphasis is on, as Negri and Hardt propose of the multitude, notwhat we are but rather what we can become.

Crucial to that potentiality in the post-Fo dist e a is hat Fou ault ould all the ole of the spe ifi i telle tual. If a th opologi al diffe e e odedas t a slatio u de stood, o e agai , a o di g to an epistemico-representationalscheme rather than as a modality of social practice) is the reigningideology of the post-Fordist imperative to communicate, one must pay particularattention to the way the subject of knowledge, formed in the crucible ofdisciplinary and linguistic codifications still indebted to the legacy of colonialdifference, is particularly prone to communicate according to a restricted economyof ressentiment. This is not so much a problem of colonial psychology inthe Fanonian sense, but rather a more generally encompassing economy ofsubjective formation distinguished by the structure of return and the contradictionsthat riddle the search for recognition by minorities.

Undoubtedly, the struggle for control over the representational tactics ofanthropological difference, as it plays out within and between disciplines aswell as within and between nationalized populations favors the production ofsubjects bound by the expression of ressentiment. Control over the codificationof this representational scheme invariably involves preemptively identifyingwith an exceptional position that is subsequently disavowed even whileactively promoting its creation through disciplinary institutions. We propose, in closing, to see in the biopolitics of translation the form of socialmovement that corresponds most specifically to the intellectual laborer oftodaya practice of knowledge, in other o ds, as a so ial o e e t of pe a e tt a slatio to use 'adaI eko i s illia tl su i t formulation ) devotedto producing the multitude of foreigners we can become. It is perhaps onlyfrom this perspective that one can still hope, in this era of globalized civil warand unresolved historical injustice, for forms of collective agency capable ofconstituting a decisive break with the political subject of ressentiment.

  It is withinthis historical context that we can fruitfully expand upon Lazza ato a dNeg i s se i al o se atio that the ole of the i telle tual toda e peutdoncêtreréduiteni à une function épistémologique et critique, ni à un engagementet à un t oig age de li atio : est au i eau de l age e e t olle tif e u ili te ie t a ot thus be reduced either to an epistemologicaland critical function, nor to an engagement with and witness to li e atio . Withi the iopoliti s of t a slatio , the o st u tio of olle ti eage o u s ea h time anew in what our research has called the mode of theheterolingual address: in this mode, as we ha e said efo e, ou a e al a s o f o ted, so to speak, ith fo eig e s i our enunciation when your attitude is that of the heterolingual address. Precisely because you wish to communicatewith her, him, or them, so the first, and perhaps most fundamental,determination of your addressee, is that of the o e ho ight ot o p ehe d ou la guage, that is, of the fo eig e .