Entangled Lineages
By Georgia Lummert
The robot as slave, mere extension of our will, is a relentless, restless worker. These etymological roots and oceanic routes not only tell us how we shape and perceive our worlds — and what substance those worlds are made of — but also make visible the kinds of relations we establish and live in. More importantly, they tell us to whom we deny certain interrelations, who we perceive as rootless, and who we see as not having a voice and will of its own. Rather than attempting to create legitimising unambiguous human lineages, we might instead use translational histories and the act of translation itself as a chance to understand our mutual co-dependence and relatedness.
In translation, Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia E. Alvarez state in “Dislocating the Sign: Toward a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation,” “there is a moral obligation to uproot ourselves, to be, even temporarily, homeless so that the other can dwell, albeit provisionally, in our home.” Translation illuminates the fact that we are not alone in this world, and that this world is not one — but many, a pluriverse. Barbara Cassin writes, “Several languages are several worlds, several ways to open oneself to the world.” The robot, too, lives in different languages and worlds.
From (one of its) birth(s) in Karel Čapek’s drama R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, where the robot, designed by humans as cheap workforce deprived of any rights, finally revolts, through variations and translations of it like Alexandr Andriyevskys 1930s (finally failing) prospect of robots potentially bringing down capitalism, till today where we have mostly forgotten its multilingual, entangled origins and revolutionary potential. Albeit not considered consciously, this history makes itself heard. It is the ‘tłum’, the ‘mass’, the ‘crowd’ when we speak of it in Polish for example. Although official etymology has it that the word ‘tłumacz’ is of Turkish origin – ‘dilmac,’ from language, ‘tyl’, and the one that has it, ‘mac’ –, I cannot help but also hear the ‘tłum’ in it, the crowded and messy place where my every enunciation, my every translational attempt departs from.
To have a chance at being understood, I need to stifle, suppress, muffle — ‘tłumić’ — a whole range of meanings. I need to cut some threads, violently uproot my word, make it an orphan, a robot to possess and become seen as a person that commands the language she is speaking in. Commanding a language, władać językiem, eine Sprache beherrschen, владеть языком all imply acts of subjugation, of conquest and appropriation — resorting to drastic, sometimes funny means. Commanding a certain language can offer access, recognition, and allow my words to become heard as reasonable language, as knowledge. Thinking of language as a mere tool, a extension of my will that I can fully control, in short: thinking of language as of a ‘robot-slave’ forgets the revolutionary potential they have, it obfuscates its uncontrollability and fleetingness, leading us to forget that it is language commanding us, giving directions to us, and thus accommodating us — rather than the other way around. The metaphor ‘commanding a language’ manifests itself in how the interfaces of current day neural translation programs are shaped. But they do not work on their own: the data their translation suggestions are based on represents but a fragment of our multilayered pluriverse. Their decisions are arbitrary, because every word we use shapes, tints and aligns the ones surrounding it.