What is the Omnosyne’s Mother Tongue?

If I need to be translated, can I ever truly speak for myself?

That translation is a political act is clear, given the new technologies developed to avoid it. During emergencies, we do not want to have to translate or be translated. Even high up in the safety of the literary superstructure, the same goes: “I believe I began writing in Italian to obviate the need to have an Italian translator,” novelist Jhumpa Lahiri writes in Translating Myself and Others. The need for translation – both literary and emergency – is an obstacle to self-determination. If I need to be translated, can I ever truly speak for myself?

Currently, countless “translations” are performed each day that are not, in the sense of human labor, translations. This is thanks to the ascendance of Neural Machine Translation (the AI technology used by Google Translate, ChatGPT, and DeepL), which, in its solution to the problem of translation and self-determination, does away with both. Beyond their obvious utility in emergency contexts, the prevalence of these “translators” also points to a societal exhaustion with language – even with one’s mother tongue – and a yearning for alinguistic communication, expression without expressing, what amounts to telepathy. A 2024 podcast suggesting that the “telepathic” powers of non-verbal autistic children “could heal the planet and people and relationships and animals” becomes the most popular podcast on streaming services in the US and UK. Meanwhile, the development of AI is spoken of by state actors as an “Arms Race” towards “dominance” that requires the plunder of natural resources within the great powers’ spheres of influence. This coincidence is nothing new. The innocuous Euroamerican fascination with telepathy surged with the height of European imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which brought with it the need to communicate with foreign language speakers to control them.

This essay is not about telepathy. I write about telepathy here only as an extreme manifestation of the unspoken yearning for communication without language reawakened by AI. The fact remains that technologies developed in the context of imperial domination will be used in the service of imperial domination. I’m going to give a reading of two novels featuring translating machines towards an understanding of empire and the desire to express oneself without language.

The colonial commander’s idea of justice is performance rather than practice. What is being performed is the transfer of ideas towards control.

In Kafka’s 1920 story “In the Penal Colony,” an elaborate torture device inscribes the flesh of condemned colonized subjects with a mess of elaborate scribbly signs that only the European commander and his followers can decipher as the words “Be Just!”. In the final moments of the victim’s life (the torture lasts for twelve hours), the native spectators behold “the expression of transfiguration [Verklärung] on the tortured face,” supposedly interpreting the face as “the splendor [Schein] of this justice finally achieved and already departing.” The guilt of the condemned natives is never questioned, and they, who anyway don’t understand French, are given no opportunity to confess. That’s not the point. The colonial commander’s idea of justice is performance rather than practice. What is being performed is the transfer of ideas towards control. The execution is meant to impress on the native audience the idea of “justice” that the commander scribbles out.

If translation were understood as merely the transmission of ideas between those who do not share a language (it shouldn’t be), Kafka’s “apparatus” would constitute a translation machine. Its message is interpreted by the orchestrators and the audience at each of its stages of operation: the scribbly design is interpreted by the colonizer in charge as “Be Just!”, its inscription interpreted by the victim as torture, and the victim’s “tortured face” interpreted by the spectators as “Verklärung” [transfiguration/idealized distortion] and the “Schein” [splendor/false appearance] of “justice.” The machine transmits the commander’s message – be just! – through markedly non-linguistic means to a colonized population with no knowledge of his language. Kafka’s story can certainly be read as a critique of the abiding colonial conception that “the native only understands the language of force,” but the importance of the violent mode of inscription itself remains ambiguous. Is it a meaningless, monotonous drone of painful stimuli? Or a long raising and reraising of the question “Why am I being hurt?” with different possible answers each time? In any case, the result is transfiguration, distortion, bad idealization – the expression of “this finally-achieved-and-already-fading justice” on the victim’s face.

the transmission of the colonizer’s “justice” only operates with the terms of translation, it is not translation itself. It weaponizes language in a bid to speak directly to subjects with no common tongue.

Inadvertently, I’ve phrased the idea of the apparatus’ raising and reraising the same question in the language of the 20th century mystic/teacher/activist Simone Weil: “Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, ‘Why am I being hurt?’, then there is certainly injustice.” For Weil, the “cry” of victims is not an expression of “justice achieved” but of what isn’t unique to them, the “impersonal,” which “alone” is “sacred.” She writes, “So far from being his person [personality], what is sacred in the human being is what is impersonal in him.” The “sacred” is what reacts to “injustice,” what expresses “injustice” in the cry. The machine, by soliciting “the cry,” piles injustice upon injustice to transfigure the victim’s face into an expression of “what is impersonal,” what is invariably achieved, the “look of transfiguration,” the “sacred.” The machine could even be a satire on Weil’s idea of becoming “just” through self-torture, “punishment,” the “destruction of the I:” after the victim’s ego is destroyed by prolonged torture, his face expresses that which is “just,” the “destruction of the I,” the destruction of particularity as the performance of the sacred. But again, the transmission of the colonizer’s “justice” only operates with the terms of translation; it is not translation itself. It weaponizes language in a bid to speak directly to subjects with no common tongue.

*

The baroque torture device of Mark Doten’s The Infernal: A Novel, though indebted to it, differs drastically from Kafka’s. Its emphasis is not on torture as a performance of transmitting “justice” but as a medium of immediate, uninterpreted extraction of confessions, of “deep stories,” of “Information.” This is proper to its subject matter, the US’s “War on Terror.” In The Infernal, the idea of justice doesn’t even enter the equation.

Here is its frame story. The body of a boy, terribly burned and scandalously alive, is found by US forces in occupied Iraq. “The Commission” brings the defunct Omnosyne out of retirement to find out what the boy knows; the machine pierces its victim’s spine and extracts his “deep story” directly from his tongue, transcribing it in “Omnocode” with “Clockwork Threads” and “a keyboard assembled from old Remington and Salter typewriters.” The burned boy yields his “deep story,” which turns out to be bizarre accounts narrated by key and peripheral actors in the War on Terror and decoded into English by the Omnosyne’s Cronenbergian inventor (who shares a name with the real creator of Wikipedia), Jimmy Wales.

The title page of each story resembles that of a classified government file accessed via a computer by “the Commission.” There is a set of click boxes arranged like this:

“[ * ] translation [ ] original"

Each story is purportedly a “translation” into English of an Omnocode original, performed by Jimmy Wales. The “Commissioners” who created the files insist on “translation” and “original” rather than the “decryption” and “encryption” more proper to code (Neural Machine Translators, for example, “encode” and “decode” language). The Commissioners don’t realize that “the deep story” the Omnosyne extracts has no “original” in human language. Understanding the “deep story” by analogy as text necessitates understanding its original as written in Omnocode.

The Omnocode product is closer to the “cry” of the victim Weil speaks of than it is to a literary work, but, unlike the cry and like a literary work, it is transcribable, translatable as language, even if it isn’t human language at all. The “look of transfiguration” that follows the “cry,” though it also appears in The Infernal, is not the point of the Omnosyne as it is the point of Kafka’s apparatus. The point is “Information,” extracting directly from where “truth lives” and encoding it. The Omnocode final product is akin to the unknown “creaturely language” Adorno speaks of in his essay “On the Use of Foreign Words” – the language “hidden from human beings or lost to them,” the “quintessence” of which “would be nothing but the quintessence of represented truth.” The “deep story,” the “truth” of a life, is represented as code, is code; it renounces “the realm of truth intended by languages” in favor of creaturely territory, the “quintessence of represented truth.” As the creaturely original language of what is most essential to each human life, Omnocode constitutes the final solution to the problem of translation. The transcription process described in the novel is invariably fatal.

when the liquidation of language is complete, how will poets respond?

The machines operated by Kafka and Doten’s depraved imperial protagonists bypass the need for translation, expressing what is most essential to humanity through and towards incredible violence. The violence Kafka in the 20th century understood as terminating in performance, Doten in the 21st century recognizes as terminating in the encoding of information. In a world of obsolete language, code promises to literalize the “quintessence of represented truth.” The first languages to fall victim to the desire not to speak will be those that the AI community calls “low resource languages,” which include every indigenous language in the Western Hemisphere. Walter Benjamin, facing the qualitative change brought by the “technological reproducibility” of art, mentioned the film producers of his time who enthusiastically called for the film adaptation of their cultural heritage were “inviting the reader, no doubt unawares, to witness a comprehensive liquidation.” The encoding of experience, though still in its early stages, calls us to witness the liquidation of languages, of language. Doubtless, many in power and indifferent to it will be glad when that day comes. Benjamin saw the liquidation of the traditional “aura” of the artwork as the perfect opportunity for revolutionary-minded art. Honoring his optimism, the following question is not meant to be fatalistic: when the liquidation of language is complete, how will poets respond?