iSpace: Printed English After Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida

To begin my essay with a nonword or borderline word is to relive the consequence of manifest entanglements between the literary imagination and technoscience. iSpace is one of many graphic aberrations introduced into English by James Joyce. There are others, of course—printed signs on paper as well as electronic pulses on the computer screen—that can go anywhere from exuberant nonsense to promised logographical embodiment: “alaphbedic,” “televisible,” “verbivocovisual,” and so on. Joyce scholars have rightly pointed out that literary theory is still catching up with the author of Finnegans Wake, that modernist engineer of a cyberspace avant la lettre of outrageous signs and letter sequences. Joyce conjured up the printed sign iSpace long before the internet or the iPod. The novelty of his vision and technē of writing never ceases to surprise the generations of readers who have since grown up and experienced the dramatic unfolding of biocybernetic events in their own lives.I am interested in exploring whether the perceived entanglements between literature and technoscience can promise a new understanding of the nature and function of the phonetic alphabet and alphabetical writing. What insights or implications, if any, can we glean from contemporary biocybernetic developments that may help us rethink literary theory and make it truly relevant to the task of interpreting social life, text, and machine from the ground up, which is to say, from the basic building blocks of literacy

Translingual Folklore and Folklorics in China

Folklore can mean different things to different people and even become different things as it travels from place to place across the various technological media: writing, print, gramophone, radio, film, television, and so on. Focusing on the work of modern folklorists in China and their translation of a colonial discourse, this article – a chapter in "Companion to Folklore" (2012) – examines the global trajectory of folklore studies in colonial mimicry, nationalism, and the staging of the world revolution in the twentieth century

The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals

The article seeks to develop a new angle for translation studies by rethinking its relationship to the political. It begins with the question “Can the eventfulness of translation itself be thought?” Since neither the familiar model of communication (translatable and untranslatable) nor the biblical model of the Tower of Babel (the promise or withdrawal of meaning) can help us work out a suitable answer to that question, the author proposes an alternative method that incorporates the notions of temporality, difference, and competing universals in the reframing of translation. This method requires close attention to the multiple temporalities of translation in concrete analyses of translingual practices, or what the author calls “differentially distributed discursive practices across languages.” The author’s textual analysis focuses on a few pivotal moments of translation in global history—chosen for their world transforming influences or actual and potential global impact—to demonstrate what is meant by the “eventfulness of translation.” These include, for example, the nineteenth-century Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s "Elements of International Law" or "Wanguo gongfa", the post-World War II multilingual fashioning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a focus on P. C. Chang’s unique contribution, and the Afro-Asian writers’ translation project during the Cold War

The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare

In the modern English lexicon, the curious word thug is usually traced to Hindi. In the early days of the antithug military campaign in India, William Henry Sleeman, the British architect of the campaign, brought out a thug lexicon entitled Ramaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs in 1836. This lexicon represents the first systematic attempt to identify who the thugs are and how they communicate with one another in secret society. It appears to provide hard linguistic evidence for a newly discovered threat to the British presence in India, cobbling together a large collection of predominantly Hindi words and phrases and building them into a coherent image of the thug that attests to the authenticity of Hindu thuggism. The graphic details of thugs’ cold-blooded strangling of innocent travelers are as numerous as the amount of verbs and nouns that have found their way into the book and into subsequent embellishments by popular media. That the word thug is of Hindi origin (thag, theg, or thak) seems sufficient to prove that thugs exist and pose a threat

Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948

How did the idea of self-determination get written into human rights after World War II? And by whom? In this article, Lydia H. Liu reopens the history of how the postwar norms of human rights were radically transformed by an unexpected clash with the classical standard of civilization in international law. She analyzes the drafting of the document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the UN debates surrounding it to explore the translingual forging of universalism in the multiple temporalities of global history

The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality

In her interview published in the Cairol based journal ALIF, Lydia H. Liu reflects on the centrality of translation to the circulation of all knowledge. She emphasizes, in particular, new ways of understanding translation beyond semantics: What role does the supersign play in the making of concepts in translation? How do we analyze the logic of equivalency that simultaneously determines the "translables" and "untranslables"? Why is nonsense inseparable from sense? How do we analyze the conditions of the universal in translation? etc

Wittgenstein in the Machine

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, and knowledge representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy

The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime

This short essay, originally published in May 2020 as a blog piece, reflects on Covid-19 by asking how the most powerful biosecurity regime of the world has failed, why the analogy with the Spanish flu is misleading, and how the racist fantasy of world domination cannot reckon with the unintended consequences of its own logic

Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot

How was the value of porcelain differentiated from soft-paste ceramics in 18th century Europe? Why was the difference important to the merchants, scientists, collectors, and novelists of the time? This essay explores the economic and technological rivalries between European and China by reexamining Daniel Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" and its silences or colonial disavowals

From Fair Decision Making to Social Equality

The study of fairness in intelligent decision systems has mostly ignored long-term influence on the underlying population. Yet fairness considerations (e.g. affirmative action) have often the implicit goal of achieving balance among groups within the population. The most basic notion of balance is eventual equality between the qualifications of the groups. How can we incorporate influence dynamics in decision making? How well do dynamics-oblivious fairness policies fare in terms of reaching equality? In this paper, we propose a simple yet revealing model that encompasses (1) a selection process where an institution chooses from multiple groups according to their qualifications so as to maximize an institutional utility and (2) dynamics that govern the evolution of the groups' qualifications according to the imposed policies. We focus on demographic parity as the formalism of affirmative action. We then give conditions under which an unconstrained policy reaches equality on its own. In this case, surprisingly, imposing demographic parity may break equality. When it doesn't, one would expect the additional constraint to reduce utility, however, we show that utility may in fact increase. In more realistic scenarios, unconstrained policies do not lead to equality. In such cases, we show that although imposing demographic parity may remedy it, there is a danger that groups settle at a worse set of qualifications. As a silver lining, we also identify when the constraint not only leads to equality, but also improves all groups. This gives quantifiable insight into both sides of the mismatch hypothesis. These cases and trade-offs are instrumental in determining when and how imposing demographic parity can be beneficial in selection processes, both for the institution and for society on the long run.Comment: Short version appears in the proceedings of ACM FAT* 201