The following commentary considers After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, by George Steiner and asks whether it has anything to say about non-verbal forms of communication, most notably photography:
I like to joke that I started my undergraduate career by canceling my auditions to music schools so I could do something more practical like read English Romantic poetry. At the time, the prevailing attitude treated education as job training, overwhelmingly instrumentalist, with little patience for students like me who didn’t know what they wanted to be when they grew up. In the intervening years, I suspect that attitude has intensified. For my part, my contrarian nature led me to ignore the warning (that I would graduate with no marketable skills) and do whatever I pleased based on the conviction that education is an end unto itself and not a mere means to something else. In my case, that meant pursuing a classical education—Greek, Latin, English literature.
Like most high schools, mine didn’t offer Greek or Latin so, in order to study those subjects at the university level, I had to take introductory catch-up courses. I took my introductory Latin course from Kenneth Thompson, the registrar of Victoria College. Years later, after he died, I learned that he had worked for CSIS. My first Latin professor was a spy!
Once I had completed the introductory course, I was allowed to go on and take ‘real’ Latin courses in the U of T Classics Department. One of those courses was called “The Letters of Cicero and Pliny.” In this course, a handful of students sat around a table and took turns sharing our translations while our professor sat at the end of the table in black vestments and urged us along. He was young and geeky and clearly entertained an Oxford fantasy. One afternoon he called on me to share a translation and, as I read from my notes, I was interrupted by a loud thunk, like the sound of a coconut hitting the ground. I looked to the source of the sound and found my professor hoisting himself from the table, blood burbling over his lower lip and down his chin. He had fallen asleep while I shared my translation, striking his head on the table and splitting his lower lip. “Excuse me for interrupting you, Mr. Barker, but I believe I need to go to the washroom.” He ran from the classroom with his black vestments flapping behind him. With the blood and the cape, he looked like he had leapt from the screen of a Gothic horror film.
I can’t say that my efforts at translation ever rose above the mediocre. However, coupled with my experience interpreting literary texts, applying legislation and case law to concrete scenarios as a law student, and imposing an exegetical discipline upon my theological readings as a seminarian, I believe I have learned a few simple lessons about the nature of language, all of which amount to the same thing. Language is a slippery beast. Meaning is inherently unstable. Precision is a fantasy. To bastardize the Heraclitean trope: if meaning is a river, the words we dip into it never touch the same water twice. And so I find myself vibrating in sympathy with George Steiner’s thinking while chastising myself for failing to read his work earlier.
Although After Babel is an imposing 500 page tome, its central premise is straightforward. When considering human communication, theorists have traditionally regarded translation as a specialized sub-category of inquiry. Steiner sees no reason to place translation in its own specially marked linguistic box. On the contrary, he examines the cognitive operations at play in the act of translation and finds that they are the same operations we deploy when we engage in communication generally, even where that communication occurs intralingually. Put another way: all communication is translation.
It’s easier to understand why this might be so if we consider a liminal case. What would truly unmediated communication look like? When I was a teenager, my future wife’s uncle offered a snapshot of unmediated communication. We asked him what happens after we die. We understood that the body decomposes and eventually vanishes. But what about the soul? What about the I that sits a the centre of my being? Tom had been the director of the Ontario Medical Association and was, at the time of our questions, medical director for the Canada Life Insurance Company. More than that, he was a fantastic person to engage in conversation, entertaining, and respectful of young people. We thought he was eminently qualified to answer our questions. It turns out he was a bit of a Cartesian. He believed that when we die, the essential part of the self survives the body, perhaps existing in a state which the rest of us cannot access, and it communicates with other such beings by direct thought transfer. Sadly, Tom (and George Steiner for that matter) is now in a position to confirm his belief. I suspect Steiner would respond that his investigations in After Babel are restricted to communication amongst the living and, in that context, direct thought transfer is only a fantasy. More charitably, we can call it a thought experiment.
Steiner offers another liminal case which runs to the opposite extreme: the idiolect, the private language to which no one else has access. While it is a fantasy to suppose that people can circumvent language through disembodied apprehension of pure meaning, the idiolect is very real. We encounter it with certain people who are autistic, people who suffer from aphasia, and with the last survivors of dying languages. Steiner goes so far as to suggest that, in a certain sense, all speech is idiolect. There is no way to ascertain with certainty if the meanings I map onto my speech are identical to those you map onto your speech. To compensate for this instability of meaning, we intuitively use techniques which are no different than translation. However, if you and I are both speaking the same language (e.g. English) when we communicate, our idiolects are so similar we don’t notice that our listening constantly engages us in acts of translation. Steiner makes clear that far from impeding us in our quest to attain a more perfect communication, our private speech habits may be essential to individuation and identity formation. The apparent imperfection in human communication may, in fact, play an integral role in informing that central question: who is the I that sits at the centre of my being? Our speech places us perpetually in the tension between solitude and community.
Steiner leans into the prevailing wind of generative linguistics promoted most vociferously by Noam Chomsky. In its weak version it holds that, taken together, all human languages form a single great tree. Although some languages seem quite unlike others, appearing as they do on completely different branches, if you follow the branches down to the trunk and the roots, you will discover that they are related. Sometimes the tree metaphor is swapped for a Darwinian analogy: all languages share a common ancestry which can be read in their DNA. Chomsky presents a strong version: all languages conform to a narrow set of invariant structures embedded deep within the human experience. There are no idiolects, only languages whose particular features have not yet been traced to their underlying common structures. Gene Roddenberry and the writers of Star Trek would go one further, suggesting that languages are determined by structures that inhere not simply in the human experience but in the experience of all self-aware sentient beings whether Earth-bound or alien. Lt. Uhura can sit at her console and understand the speech of virtually any creature thanks to her universal translator. Steiner denies that such a position is tenable, but Chomsky enjoys the protection of the logical axiom that you can’t prove a negative proposition. Nevertheless, there is evidence that some languages are utterly unrelated. More to the point, the very notion of a universal grammar may only be possible in a creature that has so suppressed certain cognitive structures that it can no longer call itself human. The debate remains open. Steiner’s chief contribution is to ensure that the debate is no longer so lopsided.
Near the end of his study, Steiner acknowledges that his concern may extend beyond the limits language, touching upon the problem Roman Jakobson identifies as transmutability—“the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs in non-verbal sign systems.” He offers music as the exemplary case, but he limits subsequent discussion to music as accompaniment to words either in opera or in art songs.
I pause. Steiner is silent on a matter that, to me, cries out for consideration. What should I make of this? Steiner offers a clue earlier in the book when he presents his own interpretation of the Babel myth:
The tower did not mark the end of a blessed monism, of a universal-language situation. The bewildering prodigality of tongues had long existed, and had materially complicated the enterprise of men. In trying to build the tower, the nations stumbled on the great secret: that true understanding is possible only when there is silence. They built silently and there lay the danger to God.
The silences. The lacunae. These are as important to speech as the positive assertions it advances. I am reminded of the Japanese concept—ma—which Seiji Ozawa discusses in relation to his music in Haruki Murakami’s Absolutely On Music. Ironically, ma is probably untranslatable because it arises from a sensibility to which Western culture historically has been hostile. It is the caesura in a musical phrase, the space between the notes. If I knew how to inject ma into my music, I would be Seiji Ozawa. By analogy, one might think of the negative space in a painting or a photograph. And here we stumble upon a lacuna in Steiner’s text, a grand chasm, or so it seems to me given my personal interests: throughout his discussion of communication via non-verbal systems, Steiner makes no mention of the visual arts. What does it take, George? Do I need to draw you a picture?
A common claim I hear in relation to photography is that, unlike blogs, poems, novels, newspaper articles, and tweets, photographs speak in a universal language accessible to all. In its strongest formulation, the claim suggests that each one of us, regardless of our native culture, comes with a built in Star Trek universal translator which allows us to understand a photograph whatever the circumstances of its making. A weaker formulation holds that photographs are subject to a visual grammar. Although the meaning(s) communicated by the photograph may not be immediately accessible, a viewer properly schooled in its underlying grammatical structures will have no difficulty bringing the photograph’s meaning(s) to light. Effectively, this formulation extends Chomsky’s generative linguistics to encompass communication through photographs. In a way, it treats the photograph as a form of encoded speech. Like a poet, the photographer has something to say; they encode their intentions not in a poem but in an image; a viewer looks at the images and, applying rules of visual grammar (typically an unconscious process), they decipher the photographer’s intended message.
The problem with such a formulation is that it’s easy to imagine situations in which it doesn’t work. Without the claim to universal application, it ceases to be a viable theory of how images communicate. For example, it’s easy to imagine an instance in which the coded message is expressed in the visual equivalent of an idiolect. The image can be an abstraction, much like an abstract expressionist painting, for which the customary rules of composition—its visual grammar—have no application. There is no subject to speak of, no horizon line, no leading lines, no rule of thirds, no golden mean, no perspective, no complementary colours, no patterns, no play between positive and negative space. It presents as cacophony resolving to silence.
Even if Steiner had turned his mind to the question of the photographic image as a form of non-verbal speech, his thoughts might still have proved inadequate to the situation which has arisen since the publication of After Babel. Call it the Instagram effect. Every day, people around the globe share billions of photographs with one another. On my account, I follow people from Stockholm, Berlin, London, Glasgow, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona, Warsaw, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Bali, Mumbai, Sydney, Perth, Auckland, Cape Town, Accra, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, Yellowknife, Halifax, etc. I enjoy the photographs even when I can’t understand the accompanying text. Our habit of global sharing lulls us into accepting claims of universality. But this may have little to do with qualities inherent in the photographs and far more to do with the way the platform is engineered. For example, the ‘like’ has proved a powerful incentive to manipulate the kinds of photographs a user posts. Because ‘likes’ come from other users, the practice seems organic. However, this is possible only with a suspension of disbelief; everybody knows that each user feed is algorithmically tailored to that user’s preferences and those preferences are interpreted not as aesthetic tastes but as consumer desires. Every 5th image in my personal feed is posted not by somebody I have selected to follow but by an advertiser selected for me to view. In subtle ways, my visual grammar is tutored by the school of commercial advertising. It specializes in the grammar of desire, both for likes and for products.
Not everything on the platform appears to arise so organically. Some of its manipulations can be downright heavy-handed, nothing short of censorship. Most egregious is its practice of removing images and suspending accounts displaying images of nude women whose nipples are exposed. Male nipples, of course, incite no such moral outrage. Instagram produces a globally determined aesthetic in which the female nipple is either blurred or struck out, or where the photographer self-censors or, as in the case of Shelby Dimond, removes herself altogether. The foregoing suggests that if we hold to an account of photography determined by a transformational grammar of universal reach, we can no longer gather evidence one way or the other because the matter has been utterly obfuscated by the manipulations a few global platforms whose only dialect is consumer desire.
In the field of linguistics, Steiner laments the death of many marginal languages as the consequence of globalization and the hegemonic chokehold of the English language. Each language that vanishes represent the loss of an entire “thought world.” By its disappearance, we are all diminished. He offered up his lamentation in 1975 and the global attrition of languages has only accelerated since then. It is arguable that an analogous destruction of thought worlds is underway in the visual field. Social media, consumerism, and globalization represent a three-pronged attack on the diversity of visual communication. Increasingly, there is a sameness to the images we see, but its advance is surreptitious so we scarcely notice.