This week the Pittsburgh Review of Books will be publishing an experiment in collective translation featuring a French-language original literary text, its translation as rendered by students in Carnegie Mellon University Teaching Professor Sébastien Dubreil’s course “L’apprenant comme locuteur/acteur” or “The Learner as Speaker/Social Actor.” Part 3 is below.
Alain Damasio – Vallée du silicium, “Biopunk”
Introduction to Alain Damasio and his book
By Sébastien Dubreil
One of France’s most prominent contemporary science-fantasy authors, Alain Damasio left business school to pursue a career in writing. His fiction work (novels, short stories) offers a blend of science fiction and fantasy. His writing is marked by an innovative style that often foregrounds multiple narrator perspectives and never shies away from neologisms. Traveling through Damasio’s writing is a journey in an approach to language as a malleable tool that serves an approach to literature that is both creative and playful, dynamic and meditative. This makes his use of language both exciting, innovative (owing in part to his use of neologisms), and a challenge to translate. The best-known example of Damasio’s science-fantasy work came in the form of La horde du contrevent (Éditions La Volte, 2004), which was awarded Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2006. In spring 2022, Alain Damasio conducted a six-month residency at the Villa Albertine, in San Francisco, bringing his technocritical gaze to the epicenter of the companies that shape our lives and societal choices through technological innovation (one can hardly speak of progress, here). In this collection of seven essays and one short story, Damasio puts into question the objects that structure this technological line of thinking, from Infiniti Loop to the self-driving car, from the quantified self to VR goggles. In this excerpt, Damasio offers the notion of biopunk as a new way of framing our intentional engagement with the world, one that is neither interior nor exterior but ‘alterior.’ The ‘alterior’ is a liminal space, one made of movement, exploration, wayfinding, encounters with radical alterity, pointing, perhaps, to a form of hospitality.
Original text in French
(Excerpt from the essay entitled “Power and Might”)
Pour en revenir aux mythes manufacturés par la Silicon Valley et emballés par un Hollywood tout proche, comment les dé-jouer ? Qu’est-ce qui peut nous sortir, en un mot, des mythes transhumanistes et du cyberpunk éculé ?
J’ose cette réponse : et si c’était le Biopunk ? J’entends par là un type d’histoire qui envisagerait nos liens intensifiés au vivant – animal ou végétal, bactérien ou fongique – comme une réouverture magnifique au monde, au moment même où le cyberpunk a trahi sa promesse de libération en hypertrophiant notre dépendance aux plateformes, nos boucles d’auto-addiction et notre fusion gluante au smartphone. Car l’enjeu, tout aussi bien, est de battre le techno-capitalisme sur le terrain de la promesse (cette autre forme de l’espoir). Soyons lucides: que nous promet donc l’IA et son mythe ricain de la Singularité, sinon une destitution, au moins un appauvrissement de notre propre faculté à utiliser le langage ? De quoi nous fait-il rêver, sinon d’une triste sous-traitance à la silice de notre aptitude à dessiner par nous-mêmes ? Que nous promet, à l’inverse, une alliance renouvelée avec la forêt, l’océan, les champignons qu’on va aller cueillir et la rivière où l’on se baigne ? Avec les chamois qu’on surprend en passant la crête et l’empire inouï de ce qui pousse quand on en prend soin ? Sinon ce bonheur exigeant d’accorder nos attentions croisées à tout ce qui vit, dans un entrelacs de prédations et d’amour, et d’en être émerveillés, et bousculés, et nourris, de retrouver dans ces vifs des algues, des fouines ou des mousses, qui font frissonner les nôtres, ce qui nous constitue tous : une vitalité transversale que tout être sait déployer à sa manière. Manger le soleil comme un arbre, croire aux fauves, plonger en pleine mer et habiter en oiseau. Cette promesse du biopunk, n’est-elle pas tout simplement plus exaltante qu’un énième couplage psychique avec des machines qui ne font que reproduire ce que nous disons ou chantons déjà, ce que nous calculons, en plus mal, ou ce que nous avons dorénavant « la flemme » d’assumer ?
Je ne critique pas la technologie qu’on nous offre parce qu’elle serait inerte ou stupide, non responsive ou robotisante. Je la critique parce qu’elle nous dévitalise en nous donnant l’illusion de faire plus de choses… qu’on fait pourtant moins bien. Je la critique parce que j’ai la conviction que ce qui a forgé la noblesse de notre humanité a tenu à cette confrontation constante (que nous n’avions jamais esquivée jusqu’à peu) avec l’altérité : l’altérité du minéral et des formes de vie, si multiples, celle de l’étranger qu’on apprivoise et du phénomène inconnu qu’on va finir par décrypter, l’altérité radicale de la mort, du dehors et de l’incompréhensible. Pour Sapiens, l’espace fertile n’est ni l’intérieur, ni l’extérieur : il est cette lisière tremblante où l’on s’élève en se confrontant à ce qui n’est pas nous et que j’aime à appeler : l’altérieur. L’altérieur est la ligne de touche de la science-friction. Il est l’hétérotopie native, le lieu où, si l’on écrivait de l’imaginaire, il faut aller porter ses personnages pour les mettre au monde ; le lieu où, si l’on prétend vivre une vie qui mérite d’être vécue, alors il s’agit d’oser bivouaquer. Aux antipodes, notre modernité technique est l’em pire de l’identique. Home est son biotope. Elle a fermé la porte et allumé les lumières. Elle a mis sous nos fesses des sofas et sous nos narines, à sniffer, la poudre blanche de la digitaline. Tout est contenu et appli, tout sonne réplique et copie, du pareil au mime, et puis du mime au même, et puis du même au mème. Rivalités virales & viralités triviales font tik-tok dans l’horloge des réseaux. Tout tourne en rond et part en loop : snapchat-chatbot-botnet-netflix-flixbus-busy > neuralink-linkedIn-Insta-stat-statut-tuuutt-tûûût ! Fraîchement apparue, l’IA générative contrefait l’une des dernières aptitudes certifiées human origin dont nous pouvions être fiers : notre art du langage. Qu’est-ce qui se passe quand nous externalisons dans des machines de langage nos capacités d’analyse et de synthèse, la clarification de nos connaissances, notre propension au récit ou à l’introspection, nos journaux intimes et nos poèmes de peu ? Qu’est-ce qui se passe quand parler va devenir, la moitié du temps, parler avec une machine qui malaxe et remixe la moyenne de tous les mots ? Saura-t-on encore écrire nos propres lettres d’amour sans les paraphraser à partir d’un prompt ? Saura-t-on encore argumenter ou finira-t-on par laisser les machines s’expliquer entre elles dans le Parlement vide d’une démocratie purgée ?
Nous nous croyions naïvement préservés dans notre forteresse littéraire, nous les écrivains. Que nenni ! Tout écrit partout, à toute heure, et nous écrivons dessus. Tous les robots de conversation content sur nous. Précisément parce que nous n’avons plus le monopole des histoires, la narration forte devient plus que jamais une technique de lutte. Qui sait vraiment ce que peut un récit ? Le philosophe Yves Citton l’a finement exprimé : « Peu importe leur degré de fiction les valeurs affirmées par les récits agissent sur nous par induction ou comme des prompteurs (sic), elles activent des idéaux ou des modèles qui nous incitent à faire quelque chose, à rire, à pleurer, croire, élire, acheter… Quand lire, c’est faire… » Un récit peut nous empuissanter, encourager en nous des comportements libres ou libérateurs, solidaires et attentifs aux autres ou favoriser au contraire l’égocentrisme. Un récit pré-scénarise des comportements collectifs en mettant en scène des situations potentielles et fait entrevoir comment nous pourrions y réagir ensemble : réagir au collapse (par l’entraide ?), au réchauffement (avec le low-tech ?), à l’immigration climatique qu’il est absolument crucial d’accueillir au retour des fascismes…
Citons encore Citton : « C’est ce pouvoir de scénarisation, tel qu’il s’exerce au Journal de 20 heures ou dans la publicité, mais aussi dans nos conversations quotidiennes, qui décide du résultat des élections, des emballements boursiers, des montées du racisme, des contagions d’indignation ou de l’invention collective d’autres mondes possibles. »
Dans mon propre travail de créateur d’univers, j’essaie de mobiliser le plus large spectre de ressources dont je dispose pour ouvrir, parmi tous les possibles, ceux que je considère comme les plus généreux – et non les plus anxiogènes ou les plus cathartiques. Ni divertir, ni convertir : subvertir.
Dès la création des personnages, je veille au mode d’identification que je vais privilégier : va-t-on s’y identifier par admiration, parce que le lecteur se dira « j’aimerais tant être comme lui, j’aimerais tant être elle », ou par familiarité en mettant la fragilité du personnage en partage ? Vais-je les réenchanter, mes héroïnes et mes hordiers, par la puissance de l’épique ou les rendre aussi paumés que nous ? Puis il s’agit de tracer la trajectoire dramatique, en univers souvent dystopique, tant ce rôle d’alerte des auteurs de SF reste nécessaire : sera-ce une trajectoire de soumission ou d’écrasement, à la 1984 ? Non : plutôt une courbe ascendante vers la révolte, plus rythmée que la vie même, portée par une quête, barrée d’obstacles et grevée de chutes, tordue de twists et striée de choix, une montée au climax dans la vulnérabilité, qui ne soit jamais le parcours d’un seul personnage mais la mise en feu et en faisceau d’un groupe qui va aller au bout de ce qu’il peut. Si bien qu’un mode de narration en découle : je l’appelle polyphrénie. Si je m’en tiens à la focalisation interne, si tous mes personnages disent « je » pour intensifier la plongée dans leur mer intérieure, c’est la multiplicité de ces points focaux qui crée le tableau du roman et conjure le côté toujours un brin autoritaire et panoptique de la focalisation zéro qui ne livre aux lecteurs qu’un unique point de vue, à prendre ou à laisser, sur l’univers. Restent le thème, le fond, les valeurs portées, la ligne éthique que j’ai toujours centrée sur la vitalité du collectif et son autonomie tissée, sur l’importance de créer des liens qui libèrent. Restent ces boussoles de lutter contre nos sociétés de contrôle et de tenter un dépassement du capitalisme par la mise en récit de pratiques sociales fondées sur l’entraide, le don, la furtivité, la joie de faire ensemble. Mettre l’imaginaire au service du tissage à une époque où la fantasmatique repose sur l’illusion de ne pouvoir être libre que seul. Pour le dire en rime, nos imaginaires modernes affrontent des imachinaires. Ils s’inscrivent dans un monde déjà machiné où l’on se fascine encore une fois moins pour l’intelligence animale, assez prodigieuse et même optimale dans sa niche écologique, que pour celle d’une machine à discuter, sans conscience aucune, qu’on pré-entraîne avec des téraoctets de messages triviaux à produire une simulation de dialogue. Notre art doit précisément servir à ça : décaler la sensibilité vers ce qui mérite d’être aperçu, vers ce qui appelle l’expérimentation. Si la mythopoïèse est l’avenir du politique, comme je le crois, elle l’est parce que seul le mythe a cette faculté de fusionner affects, percepts et concepts dans une seule boule d’énergie, dans un seul soleil de la taille d’un poing où toutes nos mains se fondent. Si le peuple ne préexiste jamais, comme le disait Deleuze, c’est parce qu’il est à créer – par et sous ce soleil du mythe qui frappe le Capital au plexus, C’est à ça que nous entendons contribuer.
Collective Translation by Stefan Langridge, Morgan Tarr, and Harthistha Veeravalli
To return to the manufactured myths of Silicon Valley and packaged by nearby Hollywood, how do we foil them? What can free us? In a word, from transhumanist myths and obsolete cyberpunk?
Dare I say, Biopunk? By that, I mean a type of story that envisions our intensified connections to life – animal or plant, bacterial or fungal – like a magnificent reopening to the world, at the exact moment cyberpunk betrays its promise of liberation by hypertrophying our dependency on platforms, our spiraling loop of self-addiction, and our viscous fusion to the smartphone. Because the challenge is, quite simply, to beat techno-capitalism on the ground of its own promises (another form of hope). Let’s be clear: what does AI and its ‘murican myth of the Singularity promise us, if not a dispossession, or at least, an impoverishment, of our own ability to use language.
What does it make us dream of, if not a sad outsourcing to silicon of our aptitude to design our own lives? Conversely, what does a renewed alliance with the forest, ocean, mushrooms we’re going to gather, and the river in which we will swim, have promised for us? What does an alliance with the mountain goats we spot as we crest a ridge, and the unparalleled empire of everything that grows when we tend to it, hold in store for us? What indeed if not this joy demanding that we redirect our shared attention to all that lives, in an intertwining web of predation and love, and that we be filled with wonder, shaken and nourished by it. To rediscover in these living creatures – algae, weasels, or moss – the essence that makes us who we are: a transverse vitality that every being knows how to express in their own ways. To absorb the sun like a tree, to place our faith in the natural world, to dive into the open sea, and to dwell as a bird. Is this not simply the promise of biopunk? Isn’t this promise more exhilarating than yet another psychic interaction with a screen, that merely repeats what we’ve already said or sung, what we’ve already calculated, only worse, or what we now “can’t be bothered” to handle ourselves and be accountable for? I am not criticizing the technology we are offered, because it is inert or stupid, non-responsive or dehumanizing. I criticize it because it devitalizes us by fostering the illusion that we are accomplishing more when in fact, we are accomplishing less with an increasingly lower quality. I criticize it because I am convinced that what forged the nobility of our humanity consisted of that constant confrontation with otherness (which, until recently, we never shied away from): the otherness of minerals and of life forms in all their multifarious; strangers we learn to get to know, and of the unknown phenomenon we will eventually decipher; the radical alterity of death, of the external, and of the incomprehensible. For Sapiens, the fertile space is neither the interior, nor the exterior: it is that brittle edge where we grow by confronting what is not us, and what I like to call: the alterior. The alterior is the baseline that touches upon science-friction. It is the native heterotopia, where if one were to write fiction, one must take characters to bring them into the world; the place where, if one pretends to live a life worth living, then one must dare to bivouac. On the other extreme, our technological modernity is the worst kind of conformity. Home is her natural habitat. She has closed the door and turned off the lights. She puts a seat under our asses, and for us to snort, under our noses, white digitalin powder. Everything is empty content or an app. Everything is a replica or a copy from the same to a mime, from the mime back to the same, and finally, from the same to a meme. Viral rivalries, trivial viralities, go tik-tok within the clockwork of our networks. Everything is going in circles, running on a loop: snapchat-chatbot-botnet-netflix-flixbus-busy > neuralink-linkedIn-insta-stats-status-update-d-d-ding, ding DING, DING! GenAI, a relatively new development, is mimicking, counterfeiting one of the last skills we could take pride in as certifiably made in human: our mastery of language. What happens when we outsource to language machines, our ability to analyze and synthesize, to clarify our understanding, our inclination toward storytelling or introspection, our diaries, and our little poems? What happens when half the time speaking becomes: exchanging with a machine that kneads and melds a statistical average of every word? Will we still be able to write our own love letters without paraphrasing them with a prompt? Will we still be able to argue, or will we eventually let machines explain themselves to one another in the empty parliament of a purged democracy?
Us writers, we naively believed ourselves safe in our literary fortress. I think not! Written everywhere, all the time, and we write on it. All the chatbots are counting on us. Precisely because we no longer have a monopoly on stories, powerful storytelling has become, more than ever, a tool for advocacy. Who knows what a story is really capable of? As philosopher Yves Citton put it eloquently: “Regardless of how fictional they may be, the values conveyed through stories influence us through induction or prompts, they activate ideals or models that inspire us to do something: to laugh, to cry, to believe, to vote, to buy… When reading means doing…” A story can empower us, encourage behaviors that are freeing or liberating, supportive and considerate of others, or, on the other contrary, encourage self-centeredness. A narrative predetermines collective behavior by presenting hypotheticals and offers a glimpse of how we might respond to them together: responding to collapse (through mutual aid?), to global Warming (with low tech?), to climate migration, which is absolutely crucial to welcome, responding to the resurgence of fascism…To quote Citton again: “It is the power of narrative, as it is not only exercised in the 8 pm TV news or in advertising, but also in our everyday conversations, that determines the outcome of elections, stock Market booms, the rise of racism, waves of outage, or the collective invention of other possible wor(l)ds.”
In my own work as a creator of worlds, I try to mobilize the broadest spectrum of resources at my disposal in order to open up, among all possibilities, those I consider the most generous—not the most anxiety-inducing or the most cathartic. Neither to entertain, nor to convert: to subvert.
From the very creation of my characters, I pay close attention to the mode of identification I want to privilege: will readers identify with them through admiration—thinking, “I wish I could be like him, I wish I could be her”—or through familiarity, by sharing in the character’s fragility? Should I re-enchant my heroines and my hordiers through epic power, or render them as lost as we are? Then comes the task of tracing the dramatic trajectory, often in a dystopian universe, since this whistleblower role of science fiction authors remains necessary: will it be a trajectory of submission or crushing, à la *1984*? No: rather an upward curve toward revolt, more rhythmic than life itself, driven by a quest, obstructed by obstacles and weighed down by falls, twisted with turns and streaked with choices—a rise toward a climax in vulnerability that is never the journey of a single character, but the ignition and convergence of a group that will go as far as it can.
From this follows a mode of narration: I call it polyphrenia. If I stick to internal focalization, if all my characters say “I” to intensify the immersion into their inner world, it is the multiplicity of these focal points that creates the novel’s tableau and wards off the zero focalization that is always a tad authoritarian and panoptic but offers readers a unique point of view on the world that they can take or leave.
What remains are the theme, the substance, the values conveyed—the ethical line I have always centered on the vitality of the collective and its woven autonomy, on the importance of creating bonds that liberate. What remains are these compasses: to resist our control societies and to attempt to move beyond capitalism by narrating social practices grounded in mutual aid, gifting, stealth, and the joy of doing things together. To place the imagination at the service of weaving the social fabric, at a time when fantasy rests on the illusion that one can only be free alone.
To put it in rhyme: our modern imaginaries confront imachinaries. They are inscribed within an already mechanized world, where fascination turns once again less toward animal intelligence—remarkably prodigious and even optimal within its ecological niche—than toward that of a talking machine, devoid of consciousness, pre-trained on terabytes of trivial messages to produce a simulation of dialogue.
Our art must serve precisely this purpose: to shift sensibility toward what deserves to be perceived, toward what calls for experimentation. If mythopoiesis is the future of politics, as I believe it is, it is because only myth has the capacity to fuse affects, percepts, and concepts into a single ball of energy, into a single sun the size of a fist in which all our hands merge. If the people never pre-exist, as Deleuze said, it is because they are to be created—by and under this sun of myth that strikes Capital in the chest. That is what we intend to contribute to.
Essay by Stefan Langridge, Morgan Tarr, and Harthistha Veeravalli
One of the challenges was that we didn’t all share the same perception or understanding of the text. Even if we grasped the general meaning, we didn’t always agree on what the author intended to emphasize in a given sentence. This showed us that translation begins with interpretation. Before even translating, we had to determine what the text actually said, implied, or suggested. Our varying levels of comfort with French and English influenced our initial drafts. Some translations remained closer to the original text, while others aimed for a more fluid or natural sound in English. Stefan and Harshi sought the advice of Morgan, who is pursuing a master’s degree in translation and adjacent fields, and who was our closest point of contact, besides Professor Dubreil.
A major difficulty was the vocabulary, especially since a French word could have multiple meanings depending on the tone, context, or the author’s intention. Some words seemed simple at first glance, but once placed in a sentence, they acquired a political, emotional, or cultural connotation that made translation more challenging. For example, we all had different approaches to translating “du pareil au mime, et puis du mime au même, et puis du même au meme.” Sentence structure also presented a challenge. French allows for longer and more complex sentences, whereas in English, the same structure can feel cumbersome or unclear. Consequently, we often had to choose between preserving the structure of the original text and preserving its impact on the reader.
We noticed that a translation can be literally accurate yet fail to convey the force or urgency of the original text. In some cases, one version was more faithful to the original wording, while another better captured the overall spirit or intention of the passage. Reviewing our work together proved helpful, as it brought to light the assumptions that guided our choices. A formulation that seemed obvious to one person was not always as obvious for another. The group discussion made us realize that translation is not a mechanical process. It involves negotiation, judgment, and sometimes compromise.
To resolve disagreements, we used several criteria, including fidelity to meaning, clarity in English, tone, consistency with the rest of the text, and whether the sentence sounded like one a genuine English-speaking author would have actually written. We also assessed which version preserved the author’s voice rather than simply reproducing the dictionary definition for each word. Another criterion was context. Instead of choosing a word in isolation, we examined how it fit within the paragraph and the text as a whole. At the same time, we didn’t want to over-adapt the text and erase its cultural specificity.
This prompted us to reflect more seriously on the role of the translator. A translator is not simply someone who replaces words from one language with words from another. A translator interprets, selects, and rewrites. In this sense, the translator has a creative as well as an ethical responsibility. But this does not mean that they can do whatever they want. Their freedom is limited by their responsibility to the source text, the author’s intention, and the intended audience. The translator must therefore be both faithful and inventive.
Translation is a form of intercultural mediation, as meaning is conveyed not only from one language to another, but also from one cultural context to another. The translator must consider references, tone, values, expressions, and ideas that may not be immediately understandable to a new audience. This means that the translator helps the target reader enter another world without reducing it to its simplest expression. In this sense, translation provides access to another culture, but it also shapes how that culture is understood.
