‘Übersetzen’ als Kulturprozess: Thesen zur Dynamis gemachter Welten

Cultures – though showing, as modern sociology has it, a strong tendency towards being treated as ‘reified’ – are not a pre-existent ‘given’, neither as an ‘entity’ nor as a ‘system’, but ought to be seen as ‘structures’ continuously built and re-built by their members in an endless collective process of appropriatory, and performative, construction and re-construction. It is in this sense that the constitution, tradition, and modification of cultures can be described as a never-ending process of ‘translation’. Drawing above all on Yuri Lotman’s dictum that “the elementary act of thinking is translation” (1990: 143), but also on Bruno Latour’s suggestion to see ‘society’ as a relational network of mediating actors ‘making others do’ things as well as on Patrick Hutton’s idea of seeing ‘history’ as an ongoing process of continuously structuring the previously unstructured, and on a concept of ‘discourse’ that defines it as a system of thought and argumentation predominantly articulated in texts, the article develops twelve theses trying to propose that what is conceived of as the constitution of ‘culture’ must be seen as an interminable dynamic process of an unfathomable plurality of individual hermeneutic acts (con/dissensually) translating ‘understanding’ into ‘understanding’.