Abstracts

Self-translation: Between Minor Literature, Extraterritoriality, and “Bilingualism”

Sigrid Weigel

Abstract: This talk discusses various theoretical concepts of self-translation—such as rewriting, reenactment, and reproduction—given the rise of “translation” as a master trope of theory. Furthermore, it discusses self-translation's various linguistic-theoretical preconditions and their political implications. With the rise of “cultural translation” as a master trope of theory, the emphasis has shifted away from exile towards migration and bilingualism, so that translation work itself and any attention to possible linguistically hegemonic contexts has receded to the background—along with the question of whether the translated text was written in the author’s first or second language. This talk positions the belatedness of self-translation as writing against these trends in the research, as it differentiates between authors’ discursive and poetic texts. 1. The Discomfort with Self-Translation in “Minor Literature” 2. The Emblematic Figure of the “translated man” 3. On the Disappearance of Translation Work in Bilingualism 4. The Echo of Translation 5. The Ghost of the “Original” 6. Self-Translation as Translation without Original.

Language of Talk: German

Translating Nationalsozialismus as “Socialism”: Hayek’s Liberalism in English

Spencer Hawkins

Abstract: Analyzing the case of Friedrich Hayek helps to disentangle the factors behind the brain drain from central Europe to the Anglophone world during the 1930s and 40s. While the conditions in central Europe were becoming unlivable for Jews and outspoken socialists, the Anglophone world was building the world’s largest university system. Hayek was neither Jewish nor socialist, and thus the draw of British and American universities is more significant in his case, and it attracted many other central European scholars, especially economists, to the Anglophone world even before the rise of fascism in Europe. This talk discusses Friedrich Hayek’s first major English-language work, The Road to Serfdom, which argued that centralized state economic planning inherently worked against the interests of minorities, whether that planning took a socialist or dictatorial form. Like Hannah Arendt and his intellectual ally, Karl Popper, Hayek conflates communism and fascism as two forms of government especially inimical to the freedoms cherished in the Anglophone world. Hayek supports his argument through the authority of his immigration experience—making his book an especially representative translatio for the culture of exiled academics. He brought his Austrian cultural and disciplinary perspective first to the increasingly Keynesian British economic culture and then to a United States still enamored with the New Deal—while reformulating his economic theory in the English language so effectively that, a few decades after his arrival in Chicago, liberalism would come to be perceived as the Anglo-American economic approach par excellence.

Language of Talk: English

Three Models of Academic Self-Translation in American Exile: Fritz Heider, Gustav Ichheiser, and Kurt Lewin

Clemens Knobloch

Abstract: The three selected examples deal with exiled German-Jewish academics, who were all psychologists, although the three of them worked on problems in linguistic and communication analysis in different ways. Fritz Heider’s “naïve psychology” takes its point of departure in the systematic explication of expressions used in everyday language and their implicative associations. Gustav Ichheiser’s 1930 “Critique of Success” could neither help him establish a long-term career in “Red Vienna” of the 1920s and early 1930s nor in exile after he was removed from his position under the Dollfuß Regime, which were Poland and then the United States (Fleck 2015: 295-332). In spite of his marginal position, his self-translations exerted considerable infleunce on Erving Goffman’s microsociology and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnometholodology. Finally, Kurt Lewin, perhaps the best-known and most institutionally successful of the three (despite his early death in 1947), strongly influenced group-dynamic and cybernetic areas of thought, which were reimported in the 1960s. Translations occurred not only from language to language, but from one disciplinary style of thought to another within academia (Fleck 1935). And these styles of thought did not simply mimic “esoteric” communication within small disciplinary communities, but they also followed the “exoteric” rules of sayability of neighboring disciplines, the social climate, and the authority and reputation of different fields. I will try to pursue some of the translation questions within this conceptual nexus.

Language of Talk: German

Vom Multilingualismus zur Lingua Franca: Die vergessene Sprachgeschichte des Logischen Empirismus

Friedrich Stadler

Abstract: One of the key features of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin School of Logical Empiricism in the interwar period war their multi-ethnic, mostly Jewish, background and multilingualism. That heterogeneity is clear when surveying the members (male and female) and the multilingualism of their publications (German, French, English, Dutch, and Italian, among other languages) until the outbreak of World War II. Due to the increasing internationalization and simultaneous disintegration of this movement when Austrofascism and National Socialism took over Austria and Germany, which forced most members to emigrate into the Anglo-American world, another “linguistic turn” arrived, which was already evident: the dominance of English as a language of science became irreversible—with practical and theoretical consequences that extend to the present day. Aside from this fact, Neurath’s project of an international picture language (isotype)—just like Carnap’s efforts to promote Esperanto—can be seen as an offer to overcome linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, which went hand in hand with Neurath’s use of “Basic” English. Taken together, these developments invite the question of how this forgotten linguistic history is reflected in the profile and content of their philosophical program marked as it is by semantic losses—which is in turn mirrored in condensed form in the dualism between analytic and continental philosophy.

Language of Talk: German

Anglophone Scientific Exile: Émigrés and Language Choice before and after the Cold War 

Michael Gordin

Abstract: Today’s scientific labor is intrinsically global, with individuals routinely studying at university, completing their doctorates, and then occupying postdoctoral positions in different countries, even on different continents. As has been widely noted, this phenomenon is enabled by and further entrenches the dominance of a single register for professional communication: “Global English” or “Scientific English.” Although the roots of this Anglophone turn away from a previously triglot system of English, French, and German are rooted in World War I, which broke some of the international linkages that enabled more multilingual capacities among scientists, its human impact began to be felt only with the large emigration of national scientific communities in the 1930s in the face of National Socialism. Germanophone scientists (largely Jewish) overwhelmingly emigrated to English-speaking countries, and most of them changed their dominant language of scientific publication to English. This presentation juxtaposes that case with those of Soviet scientists (again largely but less exclusively Jewish) who emigrated from the USSR and its successor states in the years around 1990. The scale of this scientific emigration was larger than the one from the 1930s, and it took place heavily to Germany and Israel as well as the United States, yet it happened long after the transition to global English for science had been established. Taking these two cases together highlights how different features of the linguistic environment for scientists had become tied to English across the years of the Cold War.

Language of Talk: English