Lokman Tsui's Profile

The third space
is the space for hybridity, the space for– as he writes in The Location of Culture – subversion, transgression, blasphemy,
heresy etc. He believes that hybridity – and cultural translation, which he
regards as a synonym for hybridity – is in itself politically subversive.
Hybridity is also the space where all binary divisions and antagonisms, typical
for modernist political concepts, including the old opposition between theory
and politics, do not work any more.

In his text – and this is essentially new – Benjamin actually got rid
of the idea of the original and therefore of the whole binarism of traditional
translation theory. A translation for Benjamin does not refer to an original
text, it has nothing to do with communication, its purpose is not to carry
meaning, etc. He illustrates the relation between the so-called original and
translation by using the metaphor of a tangent: translation is like a tangent,
which touches the circle (i.e. the original) in one single point only to follow
thereafter its own way.

Because for Humboldt the faithfulness of translation is a patriotic
virtue. The purpose of translation is not to facilitate the communication
between two different languages and cultures, but to build one’s own language
and, since Humboldt equates language and nation, the actual purpose of
translation is to build the nation.

A traditional theory of translation understands it as a binary
phenomenon: there are always two elements of a translating process, an original
text in one language and its secondary production in some other language. It is
therefore its relation to the original, which decisively determines every
translation. This relation can be of a different nature. For Schleiermacher for
instance, a translation has two major possibilities: it could either move the
reader towards the author, that is, strictly follow the original, or rather
move the author towards the reader, that is, make the original text in the
translation as understandable as possible. Schleiermacher preferred the first
option, which implicates that translation provokes on the reader’s side a
certain feeling of strangeness (das Gefuehl des Fremden) or, as Schleiermacher
says, “the impression that they are confronted with something foreign” (dass
sie Auslaendisches vor sich haben).

In the case of nations, to repeat it, there is a belief that nations are given, that they persist over time
as sort of timeless and eternal essences, that they can be clearly distinguished
from other nations, have stable boundaries etc.

It is in this context that the notion of translation, or more
precisely, of cultural translation has got an immense importance. For it can be
applied on both sides of the contradiction between essentialist and
constructivist understanding of culture, that is either in order to arrange
relations between different cultures or in order to subvert – as a sort of a
reconstructed universalism – the very idea of an original cultural identity.

So, why should anyone else care? First, Benkler argues, because it is intrinsically good to be able to use more of your capabilities -- to create and share as well as make a living, or even to make a living partly by creating and sharing. Second, improved technologies for sharing valuable information could spur scientific research as they already have software production and culture.

What is new is both the quantity of stuff that costs nothing to share and access to billions of people who might be interested in it.

"Everyone a Creator" seems to be Benkler’s first slogan for an economy based on cheap and powerful information technology. The second is "Share Nicely."

The challenge, then, is to find a way of bringing together dispersed information that sorts good information from bad, instead of just amplifying it as voting does.

But on sensitive questions of China's modern history or on hot-button issues, the Chinese version diverges so dramatically from its English counterpart that it sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves.

Sunstein reads Hayek through Condorcet to explain why prediction markets work so well. When people are putting money on the line - real, or imaginary - they’re more likely to be right than when they’re guessing at beans in a jar. In sufficiently flexible markets, a small number of well-informed actors can steer prices in the right direction (often making money in the process from the less well-informed). And because market participation is generally non-deliberative, the social factors Sunstein identifies as destructive to deliberation don’t come into play.

If the deliberative process is broken due to ideological cocooning, this could be a serious problem for the future of the republic.

In a group setting, people will often gravitate towards a strongly stated opinion, especially if their own opinions aren’t fully formed. An ideologically coherent group is likely to repeat a great deal of evidence for one side of an issue, giving more reinforcement for that viewpoint. People find it difficult to defy the will of a group, and may polarize to avoid interpersonal conflict.

One would hope that deliberation could solve this problem - if a small number of people in a group are knowledgeable about a subject, perhaps they can convince the others of the accuracy of their claims and move the group to a result better than the mean of all their preconceptions. This turns out to be true for at least one set of problems: “eureka problems”, where the correctness of a solution is obvious to everyone once it’s been articulated.

This phenomenon is well explained by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which suggests that a group of individuals - all of which have a better than even chance of making a correct decision - will have a greater chance of making the correct decision as the size of the group increases. In other words, if we’re pretty good at guessing the number of beans in a jar, lots of us working together are likely to be excellent at the same task.

Sunstein is deeply suspicious of the optimistic claims made for deliberation, and cites a wealth of studies that demonstrate that deliberation, in many cases, leads to bad decisions and the reinforcement of extreme views.

Specifically, he’s excited about the ways new online tools make it possible for groups of people to assemble information and accumulate knowledge.