Logologies of Spirit
How are spirits secularized into the metaphors that inform our thought about this world, this life?--negating (but never quite eradicating) with these thisses an occult or supernatural world beyond the grave, the realm of the discarnate spirits of he dead. Karl Marx is not the only one for whom, as Jacques Derrida [see side bar] insists, ghosts or spirits or specters give form or body to ideology, market forces, prosthetics, virtuality, and so on. It happens to all of us ... I want to say: it is done to all of us. We are all haunted by the spiritualist imagination. Even when we least believe in it. Even, like Marx and Max Stirner, whose debate over ghosts in the pages of The German Ideology provides Derrida his main text in Specters of Marx, when we despise that imagination and want to hurl abuse at it. This "go away closer" inclination of the spiritualist imagination Derrida dubs the "paradoxical h(a)unt":
And the ghost does not leave its prey, namely, its hunter. It has understood instantly that one is hunting it just to hunt it, chasing it away only so as to chase after it. Specular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit. One chases someone away, kicks him out the door, excludes him, or drives him away. But it is in order to chase after him, seduce him, reach him, and thus keep him close at hand. One sends him far away, puts distance between them, so as to spend one's life, and for as long a time as possible, coming close to him again. The long time is here the time of this distance hunt (a hunt for distance, the prey, but also a hunt with distance, the lure). The distance hunt an only hallucinate, or desire if you prefer, or defer proximity: lure and prey. (Specters 140)
The ghost you hunt, in other words, continues to haunt you. Which is why you hunt it.
Kenneth Burke calls this hunt (or something very like it) "logology": the imaginative displacement by which the Logos, the supernatural Word of God, becomes Logic, the secular techne of reason and science; the geistesgeschichtlich ("literally" spirit's-historical, "figuratively" intellectual-historical) process whereby words for otherworldly things become words for thisworldly things: "'Spirit' is a similar word. Having moved analogically from its natural meaning, as 'breath,' to connotations that flowered in its usage as a term for the supernatural, it could then be analogically borrowed back as a secular term for temper, temperament and the like" (Burke 8).
And in this sense the series of ten ghosts (Gespenster) that Derrida shows Marx tracing or enumerating in Stirner would be a logology of Gespenst in German religious/philosophical thought: (1) das höchste Wesen, the highest or supreme being, God; (2) das Wesen in general, being or essence; (3) the vanity of the world; (4) a pluralized Wesen, die gute und böse Wesen, good and evil beings, animistic spirits; (5) an imperialized Wesen, das Wesen und sein Reich, being and its realm or empire; (6) another pluralized Wesen, this time apparently closer to human beings, die Wesen, (the) beings; (7) der Gottmensch, the god-man or man-god, Jesus Christ; (8) der Mensch, the human being, a generically masculine "man"; (9) der Volksgeist, the spirit (or ghost) of the people; and (10) Alles, the All, everything, which is, as Derrida says, Marx's excuse for stopping the enumeration, throwing his hands up in mock despair over Stirner's tendency to see ghosts everywhere: "One could throw it all together in any order, and Stirner does not fail to do so: the Holy Spirit, truth, law, and especially, especially the "good cause" in all its forms ..." (Derrida Specters 146).
Shifting terms just slightly, from Gespenster to Geister (a crucial shift, as Derrida shows, for Marx as for German philosophy in general--see also my discussion of Schleiermacher on Gespenst and Geist in Taboo 179-81), we might tabulate a logology of spirit as a kind of structural framework for my argument here, in the transition from "the spirit translates" to "the market translates." Let's build it around three dualisms: singular/plural, control/no control, and knowledge/no knowledge, on the assumption (or perhaps we can agree to call it a hypothesis) that the more singularity, control, and knowledge we ascribe to spirits, the more magical and alive and meaningful and patterned our world will seem to be, and the less we ascribe to them, the more inert and chaotic and out-of-control our lives will seem:
1. God (singular, control, knowledge)
the sole ruler, omnipotent, omniscient
2. gods and goddesses, angels and demons, sprites and familiars (plural, control, knowledge)
possess supernatural or occult knowledge and can control events on earth, but because they are many, to achieve their ends they must compete and conflict with other similar spirits
3. channeled spirits of the dead (plural, no control, knowledge)
possess supernatural or occult knowledge but cannot control events on earth; they must depend on living spirit-channelers to convey their messages to other living beings
4. worshipped/remembered/imagined spirits of the dead (plural, no control, no knowledge)
have no power to act, no agency, no independent existence; in some sense don't exist at all, except as memory images in "real" or living or carnate beings' minds
In the hallowed tradition of literal/figurative dualisms, the entities in 1-3 are "literal" spirits, those in 4 "figurative" ones: we might say that "remembered" or "imagined" spirits aren't "really" spirits, they don't "really exist"; we only think of them as spirits by analogy (or logology) with other (conceptions of) spirits. 4, to put that differently, is the breach in the wall of spirituality: once we call things spirits that have no (or are imagined as having no) agency, that have neither (in)visible form nor intentionality, then anything, really, can be a spirit.
And we could extend that logological chain, 5, 6, 7 ... n, enumerating ever more "figurative" spirits, spirits lower and lower on the logological foodchain, farther and farther from the supernatural. But I want to set it up a little differently: to use that four-step hierarchy as a template for structurally parallel conceptualities, concept-clusters that (can and will) become structurally parallel in and through the act of imposing this spirit-template on them. Notably, first, ideology, which I broached a few pages ago toward the end of "the spirit translates"--but also, and more centrally here in "the market translates," the economy, and Darwinian evolution, which economic theorists like to invoke as a control-model for economic systems.
First, then, ideology:
1. At the top of this secularized (analogized) hierarchy, then, we would find all the ideologies that are not conceived (and that don't conceive themselves) as ideologies, but as "the way things are"--universalist ideologies that ascribe not only singularity (universality) but control and knowledge (agency) to abstractions like truth, logic, reason, fact, morality, natural law, history, evolution, human nature, inalienable human rights. Burke calls these "God-terms," and they do play in universalizing imaginations like divine spirits. Like God, they are conceived as unchanging (no temporal instability), sovereign (no competitors, thou shalt have no other ideologies before me), and often determinist as well (no freedom of choice). They are not merely passive ideal forms, deviation from which marks deviancy of some deep and abiding sort (for example, the belief that translation flatout is the transmission of source-text meaning into the target language without change, and anyone who fails or refuses to do that, or--worse--even to attempt it, is undeserving of the term translator). They also have the power to enforce conformity, to shape humans' attitudes and behavior so as to incline them to obedience. This would not, however, be the level (see below, level 3) at which the source author is imagined as having some sort of active power over the translator. There are too many source authors for this level's singularity--except, perhaps, for God as the Source Author of the Bible. At this level the spirit-analogy would be something like "translation," or "the true nature of translation," or even the fidus interpres, the "faithful translator": the repressive universalizing ideal that will brook no complexity, contextuality, or change.
2. At the level of "polytheism," next, we would find conflicting ideologies or norm-structures as they are analyzed by ideological theorists: social classes, economic systems, the "ruling class," religious groups, political parties and causes, social movements, eras (Zeitgeister, time-ghosts, spirits of the times), age groups and generations, genders, races, professional groups. Polysystems or descriptive translation theory is particularly interested in this level, where literary and cultural "systems" have the power to shape and regulate the nature and aims of both specific translations and translation "in general" (in practice within the confines of each system, of course, though systems sometimes "forget" their own limitations and begin prescribing for all time and all space). One fairly broad spectrum of postcolonial translation theory, too, sees translation in terms of the continuing impact of the former colonizing cultures on the former colonies, "dominant" vs. "dominated" cultures. (For systems theory, see Lefevere, who talks about "the European system" [34], "the Islamic system" [73], etc., and Robinson What [25-42]; for postcolonial theory, see Cheyfitz, Jacquemond, Venuti, and Robinson Empire.)
3. The channeled spirits of the dead in an ideological perspective will metamorphose or logologize into various ideological superstructures--fads, trends, rumors, reports, news, novels, poems, plays, translations, adaptations, legends, retellings--and the people who transmit these things, including source authors, translators, editors, helpers, agents, users, etc. This is, it should be obvious, the level with which I am mostly concerned in this book--in the "spirit world," in the marketplace, and in the prosthetic/virtual world of cyborgs. The analogical entities at levels 2 and 3 could both be described colloquially as "they," as in "They say," "Look what they did to this," "They just won't leave these things alone, will they?" In 2, however, "they" are larger-than-life forces, shadowy individuals or groups imagined as wielding almost unimaginable power, "the government", "the ruling class", "the Christian Right"; in 3, "they" are anonymous and invisible people like you and me, people we could even meet one day, perhaps even people we occasionally speak to over the phone, but people whose impact on our lives is still somewhat mysterious. We deliver a translation and it "gets edited"--by whom? By "them."
4. At the bottom of this ideological hierarchy, finally, we would find various social functions as conceived by theorists: author-functions (Foucault), translator-functions (Díaz-Diocaretz; see also Robinson What [66-77]), agent-functions (agencies), helper-functions. In this perspective the actual human agents that perform the ideological actions--writing, translating, editing, helping--are virtually nonexistent, at least theoretically irrelevant, imagined as subsumed so thoroughly into their social function or role as to have little or no independent power to act. This shift from a liberal-humanist conception of active independent agents who wield a certain amount of power over their actions to a poststructuralist/posthumanist conception of abstract or actantial social functions recapitulates the modern shift from a spiritualist belief in ghosts and other discarnate spirits (who really exist and perform actions, etc.) to the rationalizing or secularizing belief that these entities exist only in our imaginations.
