The Mirror’s Value
[In the following quotes, let the 'translator' be the maker of the picture, and the 'reader' be the viewer of the picture. You looking at my photographs, or I looking at yours -- from my personal culture to yours or vice versa. ]
“This can be understood as an occasion for mutual reflection between different cultures, where the mirror’s value is not just in the image of clarity but in the clouding that is a sign of life. Mutual reflection here should be distinguished from mutual understanding, especially if the latter involves a direct “face-to-face” dialogue between the different. In mutual reflection the relationship is more indirect – symbolized by a relationship through the father tongue, by written words. In observing the way the other confronts his own culture and language, one is turned back upon her own culture and language, as a stranger. The idea of mutual reflection suggests that “mutual understanding” can be blocked not only by difference in an inter-cultural dimension, but also by blindness to the difference in an intra-cultural dimension — the reader’s and the translator’s inability to confront their own native language and culture, and sometimes perhaps, their naïve trust in understanding the familiar.”
“… mutual reflection (with its emphasis on the written word) offers us a standpoint from which to gain critical awareness of a danger that besets the language of mutual understanding: the danger of the unconscious assimilation of the different into the same, the possibility of blindness to the foreign in the near, the residual or the excess in experience beyond the immediate and the visible. This might be thought of as a danger entailed by our trust in immediacy and directness, as if this were the underside of our fear of not being able to get closer to the other.”
“… awakens us to an illusion of the knowability of the immediate and invites us to keep discovering and rediscovering the strange and the foreign within the same, to release from within ourselves the voice of the different that eternally escapes our full grasp.”
” … she plays the role of a prophet on the edge of her own culture and langue, in her profession of philosophy [or photography ...] . This requires that she work in the interstices of a culture, without settling down in any fixed space. She plays translator by converting the mother tongue into, as it were, a “foreign” father tongue, by seeking the indirectness and separation that is the means of a common still to be achieved. In the very way she is engaged with her own culture and language, she offers a mirror to the eye of an outsider (both native and foreign) so that the latter can also be engaged in the criticism of his own culture, on his part.”
All of the above quotes taken completely out of context, with meaning therefore bent to my own ends … from an essay, Philosophy as Translation: American philosphy, perfectionism and cross-cultural understanding
-Julie
