Philosophy proposal

final proposal due By March 2rd at 21:00pm CST

1. By March 2rd at 21:00pm CST you must submit a proposal (5 pts):

A description (of about one page) of the use you intend to make of the text detailing:

i. The section or text that you will make use of (it may be a subsection of a text, a chapter or a full text)

ii. Material you will create, detailing the medium you will use

iii. A justification of why the original material can be used in the way you intend to use it (remember that Ahmed in pp 25-26 claims that material/materiality is important to determine which uses can be given to a thing, even if they are outside of the intended use).

Final Project (25 pts)

Prompt: Throughout the quarter, Sara Ahmed will guide us through the uses of use, and the goal of the final project is to take a selection of text from the course and “make use of it.” This will take different shapes for everyone but hopefully by the end of the quarter you will have found something that you find useful in Philosophy.

Ahmed suggests that use is in the plural—that things have different uses and use has different uses. She says:

In some instances, then, by “uses of use,” I am referring to how scholars have made use of use in developing their arguments. In reading for use, we are making connections that might not otherwise have been made across domains that might otherwise remain distinct, such as biology, psychology, architecture, and design, which all make use of use to explain the acquisition of form.[footnoteRef:0] [0: Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use, Durham: Duke UP, 2019, 8.]

Following her, you might choose to write a paper that makes certain connections, you might want to change the form of a text to give it another use, you might want to create an object of use. I am giving you the opportunity to be creative with this task. However, I do have to approve of the project, which is why you must first submit a proposal where I’ll give you notes or suggest that you change some things.

The final project must be submitted in two parts:

1.

By March 2rd at 21:00pm CST you must submit a proposal (5 pts):

A description (of about one page) of the use you intend to make of the text detailing:

i. The section or text that you will make use of (it may be a subsection of a text, a chapter or a full text)

ii. Material you will create, detailing the medium you will use

iii. A justification of why the original material can be used in the way you intend to use it (remember that Ahmed in pp 25-26 claims that material/materiality is important to determine which uses can be given to a thing, even if they are outside of the intended use).

2. By March 15 at 8:00am CST you must submit (20pts):

a. An introduction of 2 pages in length (double space, 12pt). If you decide to write a paper, the introduction should be part of your paper, if you decide to do something else, your introduction should be in a separate document. Your introduction should do the following:

i. Explain very briefly the main issue that you think the section of the text/the text you chose treats (in other words, what is the main thesis of the section of text/text.)

ii. Why you think the text is useful in the way you to use it. Explain why you find this to be useful.

iii. Explain the way you use the text, describe the process you follow.

b. Your final paper (the paper should be at list 6 pages exclude the introduction pages and work cited page)

Assessment

Grading of the project will be determined by the following criteria:

· Timely submission of each of the elements

· Capacity to understand what the stake of the chosen text is and ability to translate the stakes into the medium you choose

· Ability to draw from and reflect critically and creatively about a philosophical issue presented in the text and relate it to contemporary or relevant use

· Proper justification of the project (including elements listed above)

· Eloquence and organization, as well as proper citation

No late projects (or elements of the project) will be accepted.

Some ideas for inspiration:

Art, game design,…

· I Was Raised in the Age of the Internet – MCA Chicago 2018

https://mcachicago.org/Publications/Websites/I-Was-Raised-On-The-Internet#online-artworks

This exhibit had a lot of really amazing interactive websites

· Hito Steyerl has a series of artworks that are thoroughly informed by philosophical texts. Adorno’s Gray is an installation that tries to investigate Adorno’s (Adorno was a famous german philosopher of the 20th century) last day of class, where he turned away from the student movement in Berlin by taking apart the classroom where the class took place. Here’s the booklet from the exhibit at the Art Institute, it also describes other works.

https://monoskop.org/images/b/be/Hito_Steyerl_ARTIC_2012

· Hito Steyerl – How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File

https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651

· Godard, et.al., Ici et Ailleurs

He makes use of footage in ways he didn’t intend to. It produces a work that also has different uses.

· Agnès Varda, film shed

Varda makes use of film in different ways.

· Spinoza’s Ethics mapped in a website

http://ethica.bc.edu/#/

· Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays

http://clocktower.org/series/radio-benjamin#prettyPhoto

· Turning Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into music

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/oct/04/artsfeatures.arts

Texts and …

· bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua write children’s books

· Anne Carson – Decreation

She writes a text in prose, an analysis of three important thinkers and mystics, and then writes an opera in 3 acts (d2l)

· Jorge Luis Borges makes use of false archives (d2l)

· Carmen Maria Machado creates an archive that wasn’t there in In the Dream House

· Feminist translators have translated classics (from the Greek, for example) which makes for different texts. Every translation makes a text different. (Anne Carson translated fragments of Sappho, Emily Wilson translated the Odyssey)

· Eva Brann on translating Plato https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1248

· Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” makes use of photography and the archive (d2l)

· Audre Lorde teaches us that “Poetry is not a Luxury,” which might inspire some uses of texts (d2l)

· Elisabeth and Descartes’ letters and other philosophers’ correspondence

· Sara Ahmed’s blog https://feministkilljoys.com/

John Wilkins’ Analytical Language

I see that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has omitted
the article on John Wilkins. The omission is justifiable if we recall its trivi­

ality (twenty lines of mere biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614;

Wilkins died in 1672; Wilkins was the chaplain of the Prince Palatine,

Charles Louis; Wilkins was appointed rector of one of the colleges of Ox­

ford; Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London; etc . )

b u t inexcusable if w e consider Wilkins’ speculative work. He was full of

happy curiosity: interested in theology, cryptography, music, the manufac­

ture of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possi­

bility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the principles of a world

language. He devoted a book to this last problem: An Essay Towards a Real
Character and a Philosophical Language (6oo pages in quarto, 1668 ) . Our
National Library does not have a copy; to write this note I have consulted

The Life and Times of john Wilkins by P. A. Wright Henderson (1910 ) ; the
Worterbuch der Philosophie by Fritz Mauthner ( 1924); Delphos by E. Sylvia
Pankhurst ( 193 5 ) ; and Dangerous Thoughts by Lancelot Hogben (1939 ) .

All o f us, a t one time o r another, have suffered through those unappeal­

able debates in which a lady, with copious interjections and anacolutha, as­

serts that the word luna is more (or less) expressive than the word moon.
Apart from the obvious comment that the monosyllable moon may be more
appropriate as a representation of a simple object than the disyllabic luna,
nothing can be contributed to such discussions; except for compound

words and derivatives, all the languages in the world ( not excluding Johann

Martin Schleyer’s Volapiik and Peano’s romantic Interlingua) are equally

inexpressive. There is no edition of the Royal Spanish Academy Grammar

that does not ponder “the envied treasure of picturesque, felicitous, and ex­

pressive words in the riches of the Spanish language,” but that is mere

boasting, with no corroboration. Meanwhile, that same Royal Academy

230 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

produces a dictionary every few years in order to define those words . . . .

In the universal language conceived by Wilkins in the middle of the

seventeenth century, each word defines itself. Descartes, in a letter dated

November 1619, had already noted that, by using the decimal system of nu­

meration, we could learn in a single day to name all quantities to infinity,

and to write them in a new language, the language of numbers;’ he also pro­

posed the creation of a similar, general language that would organize and

contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that

task.

He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were

then subdivided into differences, and subdivided in turn into species. To

each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a

consonant; to each species, a vowel. For example, de means element; deb,
the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame.
In a similar language invented by Letellier ( 185 0 ) , a means animal; ab, mam­
malian; abo, carnivorous; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv,
equine; etc. In that of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) , imaba means build­
ing; imaca, brothel; imafe, hospital; imafo, pesthouse; imarri, house; imaru,
country estate; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imago,
window; bire, bookbinder; hirer, to bind books. ( I found this last census in a
book published in Buenos Aires in 1886: the Curso de lengua universal
[ Course in Universal Language] by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

The words of John Wilkins’ analytical language are not dumb and arbi­

trary symbols; every letter is meaningful, as those of the Holy Scriptures

were for the Kabbalists. Mauthner observes that children could learn this

language without knowing that it was artificial; later, in school, they would

discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.

Having defined Wilkins’ procedure, we must examine a problem that is

impossible or difficult to postpone: the merit of the forty-part table on

which the language is based. Let us consider the eighth category: stones.

Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate ) ; moderate ( marble,

amber, coral ) ; precious (pearl, opal); transparent (amethyst, sapphire); and

insoluble (coal, fuller’s earth, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as

1Theoretically, the number of systems of numeration is unlimited. The most
complex ( for use by divinities and angels) would record an infinite number of sym­
bols, one for each whole number; the simplest requires only two. Zero is written o, one
1, two 10, three 1 1 , four 1 0 0 , five 101, six 1 1 0 , seven 1 1 1 , eight 1 00 0 . . . . It is the invention
of Leibniz, who was inspired (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrams of the I Ching.

J 0 H N W I L K I N S A N A L Y T I C A L L A N G U A G E 2J1

alarming as the eighth. It reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion,

quicksilver); artificial (bronze, brass) ; recremental (filings, rust) ; and natu­

ral ( gold, tin, copper) . The whale appears in the sixteenth category: it is a vi­

viparous, oblong fish. These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies

recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia

called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages
it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the em­

peror; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs;

(e) mermaids; ( f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included

in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) in­

numerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush;

(1) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at
a distance resemble flies. The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exer­

cises chaos: it has parceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions, of which

number 262 corresponds to the Pope, number 282 to the Roman Catholic

Church, number 263 to the Lord’s Day, number 268 to Sunday schools,

number 298 to Mormonism, and number 294 to Brahmanism, Buddhism,

Shintoism, and Taoism. Nor does it disdain the employment of heteroge­

neous subdivisions, for example, number 179: “Cruelty to animals. Protec­

tion of animals. Dueling and suicide from a moral point of view. Various

vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities.”

I have noted the arbitrariness of Wilkins, the unknown (or apocryphal)

Chinese encyclopedist, and the Bibliographical Institute of Brussels; obvi­

ously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and

speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe

is. “This world,” wrote David Hume, “was only the first rude essay of some

infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame perfor­

mance; it is the work only o f some dependent, inferior deity, and is the ob­

ject o f derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in

some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on . . . ” ( Dia­
logues Concerning Natural Religion V [1779 ] ) . We must go even further, and
suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambi­

tious word. If there is, then we must speculate on its purpose; we must

speculate on the words, definitions, etymologies, and synonymies of God’s

secret dictionary.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe can­

not, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though it is

clear that they are provisional. Wilkins’ analytical language is not the least

remarkable of those schemes. The classes and species that comprise it are

232 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

contradictory and vague; the artifice of using the letters of the words to

indicate divisions and subdivisions is undoubtedly ingenious. The word

salmon tells us nothing; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the per­
son versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly

river fish with reddish flesh. (Theoretically, a language in which the name of

each being would indicate all the details of its fate, past and future, is not

inconceivable.)

Hopes and utopias aside, perhaps the most lucid words written about

language are these by Chesterton: “Man knows that there are in the soul

tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the col­

ors of an autumn forest . . . . Yet he seriously believes that these things can

every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and

unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and

squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really pro­

duce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory

and all the agonies of desire” ( G. F. Watts [1904] , 8 8 ) .

[1942] [EW]

1

03 2008

Politics of the archive

Translations in film

Hito Steyerl

 

VHS to .flv

A closeup of a woman at a blackboard. She turns around to speak. But her mouth is not visible on screen. Clearly, this

picture has been cropped on both sides. But why? And by whom?

 
Translating images into words.

This text deals with some aspects of the afterlife of two films. Both were shot in Yugoslavia. Both are famous
partisan movies, called “Valter brani Sarajevo” (1972) and “Bitka na Neretvi” (1969). The film studio where
“Valter brani Sarajevo” was shot was destroyed in the recent Bosnian War. But this film and the even more
legendary “Bitka na Neretvi” live on. Their existence in cinemas belongs to the past, just like the country they
were produced in. But they travel around the world as home videos, as DVDs or online. The afterlife, as
Walter Benjamin once famously mentioned, is the realm of translation. This also applies to the afterlife of
films. In this sense, this text deals with translation: with the transformations of two films, whose original
prints were caught up in warfare, transformations which include transfer, editing, translation, digital
compression, recombination and appropriation.

 
Memory

2

I came across the incomplete picture of the woman teacher, when doing research for a film of mine. I saw it
on a cinema screen in the Sarajevo film museum, where the print is screened once a year – in order to be
ventilated and thus preserved, as the projectionist explained. Because I wanted to use this picture in my film, I
tried to find a more complete version of it. But during the research, it turned out that the image as such was
no longer the point. It started to give answers to questions nobody had ever asked in the first place. Questions
like: what is an archive? What is an original version of a film? What is the impact of digital technologies on
translation? And what constituencies are created within the digital limbo of globalized media networks?

The further I got with my research, the clearer it became that the cropping of this image wasn’t just a simple
mistake or misfortune. It had been cropped because specific forces had been tearing at it and had pushed part
of it into an hors-champ, which is defined by political and economic factors. Within the contradictory
dynamics of globalization and postcommunism/postcolonialism, archives fragment and multiply, some become
porous and leak, some bend and twist their contents. While some images are being destroyed for good, others
can never be deleted again.

 
35mm, color positive.

The image in question is from a take in the film “The Battle of Neretva”, a famous Yugoslav partisan movie
made in 1969, starring Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Franco Nero as well as many famous Yugoslav actors. It
tells the story of a legendary battle on the river Neretva in Bosnia during WWII. Partisans fought against a
combination of German, Italian and Croatian fascists as well as against Serbian nationalists. The female teacher
appears near the beginning of the film, as part of a very short scene inside a school located in the liberated
territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She turns around to her students to spell out the words she had written on
the blackboard; the word “AVNOJ” (Antifašističko V(ij)eće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije), meaning the
antifascist people’s liberation committees founded in the Yugoslavia of the early 40s. The intended meaning of
this sequence might be: children are being educated in the spirit of socialism and antifascism. But then again,
the scene also raises questions about teaching how to read and write as such. What does literacy mean? Does it
mean to imprint meanings on other minds or to provide tools for the creation of new meanings?

 
National Culture

Obviously, many ideals of modernism are condensed within this short sequence: the hope for education,
progress, equality, as well as its inherent authoritarianism, and its top-down idea of enlightenment. But most
importantly, children are learning to read and to write within a specific framework whose acronym is AVNOJ.
We are left in no doubt about the political framework of this education. To educate in common means
building a common literacy and, more often than not, a common nation.

Classical cinema is a slightly different institution. It has been rooted within both the national framework of
the Westphalian order and international Fordist cultural industries. It still is closely tied to notions of national
culture, cultural memory, the construction of a collective imagination, of a patrimony and its preservation as
well as to discussions around cultural imperialism and hegemony. The distribution of cinema prints is tightly
controlled; it is expensive and prints require an extended institutional framework. Copyright is heavily
enforced. Thus, transfer of a film into a different format might also mean transforming this underlying
framework.

 
35mm to VHS.

3

So why are both sides of the image cut off? The answer is simple. The people working at the Sarajevo film
museum made this VHS print on their own. They simply pointed a VHS camera in 3:4 format at a projection
which was in widescreen format. As a result, both sides of the screen were cropped. The reason is the rather
dramatic lack of funds for this institution in a post-war situation of rampant privatization. Proper equipment
for professional transfers is not available. The cropping of the image refers to this economical and political
scarcity, to the situation of a state within so-called transition. The original state has been cropped just like the
letters spelling its name on the blackboard. The original word Jugoslavije, written in chalk, has been reduced to
…slavije, the words liberation and antifascist are hardly legible. The cropping of the image thus refers to a
political cropping that replaced the unfulfilled values of modernism with particularist practices.

 
Archive

The film museum as video rental store: this situation expresses the state of an institution that is supposed to
preserve the cultural heritage of a nation, as well as the state of this nation itself. Usually, an archive, like a
film museum, is supposed to create “faithful” reproductions of its material: that is, reproductions that are as
identical as possible. Keeping the control over reproduction is the basis of the power condensed within
archives. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the word “archive” is derived from the Greek Arkheion, a house, or
the residence of the superior magistrates.[1] Documents are kept in the houses of the powerful. The archive
more often than not preserves the history of the victors, while presenting it as historical reality or scientific
truth. The archive is a realist machine, a body of power and knowledge, and it sustains itself by repetition.
More precisely, the authority of traditional archives controls and regulates the reproduction of their items. Of
course, this means that there are criteria of how to reproduce those objects “faithfully”, according to specific
rules. In the audiovisual area especially, property rights are supposed to be reproduced as well. Repetition
within the archive is controlled by different logics of power and of knowledge, most often enforced both by
the nation-state and capital interests.

 
Repetition

But nowadays, the function of the archive has become more complicated, for the most diverse reasons, ranging
from digital reproduction technologies to the mere fact that some nations simply cease to exist and their
archives are destroyed and collapse. Temporarily, this was the case with the Sarajevo film museum, which was
heavily damaged during the war of the 90s. On the other hand, new national archives appear on the scene. In
addition to the film museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, there is now also a Bosnian-Serbian film
museum in Pale. Heritages are dispersed and recollected, though in different combinations. Not only are the
archives themselves being transformed, but some of their content is being repeated differently as well. To put
it more precisely: the repetition on which the archives’ authority rests is being transformed. Cracks and
fissures open up between the various types of control exercised by nation or capital, because nations and capital
are themselves profoundly transformed by the forces of postcommunist and postcolonial situations as well as
by deep neoliberalization. The repetition of the objects in the archive is no longer identical, it doesn’t repeat
the same under the same name or ownership. The repetition is no longer faithful, but treacherous, displaced,
distorted, expropriated or plainly different. This reminds us of the different types of repetitions, which Gilles
Deleuze described in his work Difference and Repetition[2]. He argued that several types of repetition are
possible. To summarize it very briefly: the repetition of the same, the repetition of the similar and the
repetition of the new, which either mask or unmask difference within repetition. Now if, in the case of
contemporary archives, we can talk about different types of repetition taking place, this is due to very specific
political, technological and economical situations, which combine digital technologies of reproduction with
processes of violent globalization.

4

 
VHS: NTSC

Let’s come back to the picture of the teacher in “Battle of Neretva”. Given the incomplete state of my VHS
tape, I went on line to find another, more professional home-video version of the film. In recent years, DVDs
and VHS home video copies can be easily bought from Amazon and other retailers. The precise point for the
explosive proliferation of private prints is paradoxically the slow death of the VHS format. Because of the
introduction of DVDs, lots of VHS rental stores simply sold their old stocks on line, which not only
introduced a huge slump in prices, but in fact created a market in which more and more private copies began
to be distributed. A few years ago, it would have been very difficult to track down a home-video copy of a film
like “Battle of Neretva” in Berlin. But now it was very simple to get an American version of “Neretva” on
VHS, which was sent to me within two weeks.

 
Cut

But the scene I was looking for wasn´t in the video. I couldn´t believe it and looked through it several times.
Eventually, I realised it was not included in this version. Indeed this version is 70 minutes shorter that the
175-minute original. Even if it had been there, it would still have been in a 4:3 format. The teacher would still
have said her lines off frame, but this time they would have been dubbed in English.

 
Video 2000

There was one other video tape on sale, which was a German Version and 145 minutes long. But this tape was
very difficult to play back since its format is Video 2000, which only existed from 1979 to 1986. Thus, one
could only view “Battle of Neretva” for seven years in this specific format, and one would probably have to go
to a technical museum now if one wanted to play back this video. So I don´t know whether it contains the
complete picture of the teacher on the blackboard. I just knowthat she would have been speaking German.

 
Dubbing

In the meantime I got suspicious because it occurred to me that the German version might not correspond to
the cinema print either, and I retrieved following details about the film´s length from ImdB (internet movie
database) and various online shops:
Original: 175 min / Serbia: 165 min / Croatia 145 min / Germany:142 min / Italy:134 and 147 min / Spain: 11

6

min / USA:127 and 102 min / Russia: 78 min

This means that, in all of these countries, different versions of the film are being distributed. The movie thus
exploded into countless versions of itself, adapted to ever new national imaginations. A user even commented
that one had to see all the different DVD versions and learn German, Italian and Spanish in order to get the
most complete version of the film, which seemed to exist only in between its versions like a lost Adamic
language. Even within the post-Yugoslav countries, several versions are in circulation. An online comment
specified that the Serbian DVD version was ~160 minutes long and consisted of a significantly different cut
from any other DVD or video releases.

The film had not only been shortened, but also radically transformed during its multiple dubs. It had not been
repeated identically while being squeezed through global digital connections and the dubbing lines of
international video industries. It has been remade, refashioned, re-edited so as to conform to specific national
tastes or different consumer groups.

5

 
Repetition II

According to Deleuze, apart from the repetition of the same, which is based on habit, there is also another
form of repetition that repeats not the same but the similar by repeating the things that have never been. This
form of repetition displaces the original; it repeats but with a difference. It creates memory, which relates to a
present that has never been present. In memory, events are repeated that never existed before like in national
memory, which is always based on a fiction. If we apply these statements to the abrupt and violent political
and economic effects of nation, capital and technology on “Battle of Neretva”, it becomes obvious that the
archive has lost its original power of identical preservation. Instead, the power of the new archives consists in
twisting and modifying the film according to different interests, and in producing derivative versions for
specific markets, thus formatting its audience and reinforcing or even creating different constituencies.

 
Subtitles

I finally found the picture of the female teacher. It was included in a very interesting post-Yugoslav DVD
release, which contains four national versions of the movie: Serbian, Slovenian, Bosnian and Croatian.
Although it features a slightly shortened version of the film, the image of the teacher was there – in all four
versions, each of them marked with a small national flag. So I found her not only once but four times.
Surprisingly, her scene turned out to be absolutely identical in three out of the four versions. Only the
Slovenian version was subtitled, all other versions were the same – no subtitles, no difference in length or
anything else. This means that when it came to this scene, three out of four different national versions were
absolutely the same, except for the fact that only the Serbian and Slovenian version were licensed. The others
were pirated. It wasn’t the language that had been fragmented, but the markets for intellectual property.

Accordingly, all parts of the film, in which the local language was spoken, were identical in all three versions.
Only the parts that featured other languages like German showed minimal differences within the subtitling.
So when I finally found the complete image of the teacher, she had split into four different versions of herself
– three of those were the same, except that one was licensed and two pirated.

One could say that the multiplication of the image of the teacher refers to the contemporary multiplication of
educational systems in Bosnia, according to so-called ethnic and religious differences. Nowadays, segregated
schools are very common in Bosnia. The European Union even encourages this type of education because it
complies with its policies of diversity. The result is the creation of new divisions, which are presented as
original traditions. The image of the teacher is no longer cropped but it is cloned to produce new national
echoes of itself.

 
H.264

But the “Battle of Neretva” has also moved beyond home-video releases. Digital files of the film are
expropriated, circulated in different formats like Flash or Quicktime and distributed for free. On You Tube,
the further dismantling and remixing of the film takes place, most notably in the works of a certain Yugomix,
who has in some parts made it black and white in order to match historical shots of partisans. In this case, the
original material is distorted, rearranged; it is incomplete, it is neither reproduced nor repeated faithfully.
Issues like copyright, intellectual property, national heritage, cultural memory are affected by this
transformation, as well as traditional notions of patrimony, genealogy, ownership.

 
Retranslation

6

One example: Nowadays half of You Tube clips of another famous partisan film “Valter brani Sarajevo” (1972)
are extracted from DVD releases dubbed in Chinese. Although the only video available in Europe is an old
battered VHS in the original language, “Valter… ” became a huge box office hit in China, when it was
exported there in the 80s. Apparently it is still being screened every New Year’s Eve on national television. It
was so popular, that a special Chinese beer brand has been named after Valter. One can currently also
download the whole film for free on a very popular torrent client. This version of the film is again strongly
modified. An individual user has combined the image of a Chinese DVD with the sound of the old Yugoslav
VHS. It is a retranslation into a language that now lacks a specific name. This person has simply assumed
control over the different versions of the film and, by spreading it for free, has temporarily suspended its
commodity status.

 
Copyright

One might be tempted to conclude with Deleuze that these online platforms are the place where the third
form of repetition, the repetition of the new takes place. The films break free of the confines of nation and
capital, which are trying to control the repetition and reproduction of these films. Their distribution negates
ownership and copyright, since it apparently takes place, as Deleuze wrote in characterizing the nature of the
repetition of the new, in the mode of theft and the gift.

But obviously, this would not only be naїve but simply wrong. On the new digital platforms, the forces of
nation and capital are in full swing, as evidenced by the different lawsuits against You Tube, the different
commercial operations around it, the struggle over copyright issues and so on. In the case of Piratebay, a
torrent platform distributing all sorts of pirated material without any pretensions to censorship whatsoever,
the issue is even more clearly outlined. Its servers were confiscated in May 2006, after strong pressure by the
US government on the Swedish government. Absurd details of this raid include the broadcasting of the
surveillance videotapes of the raid on You Tube, a hacker attack in retaliation on Swedish police servers and
the surprising discovery that Piratebay had been technically and financially supported by a well-known
Swedish rightwing populist.

So within these platforms, largely deregulated and quite disordered archives catering to volatile and
heterogenous peer groups, the clash between different forces and interests is still going on but is simply
displaced onto a new battlefield. Those archives are not based on exclusion and faithful repetition like the
traditional ones, rather on inclusion and invisibility.

 
Ripping

These archives are closely connected to yet another form of repetition and reproduction, which is called
“ripping”. Repetition or reproduction is being shortened to ripping. To “rip off” means to tear, to steal, to
cheat, but to “rip” is a technical term used for copying files into another file format, also often removing copy
inhibition in the process. It means to copy more or less identical content while removing the ownership
restrictions and references to the original source or genealogy of distribution. So while some archives are based
on repetition and reproduction, those new archives are based on ripping, tearing, stealing, on the possibility
both to recover every image and to delete it permanently.

 
Literacy

Recently Zhang Xian Min from the Beijing Film Academy, told me that a Chinese remake of “Valter defends
Sarajevo” has already been underway for a long time. It had been delayed, first because of the Bosnian War,

7

and then because the Chinese producers were unsatisfied with the way post-war Sarajevo looked. Now
shooting is supposed to take place in the Ukraine, where the exterior settings of Sarajevo will be rebuilt.

In the Chinese posters of “Valter… ” the city’s name, written in Latin, has also been slightly altered to spell
Salarewo. While this is the faithful transcription of the correct Chinese translation of Sarajevo, questions
remain. According to Jon Solomon, it is highly unlikely that translators wouldn´t have known the original
Latin spelling of Sarajevo. For him, this creative spelling is rather reminiscent of the spelling on fake branded
goods or pirated DVDs. Although it is a perfect clone of the original (except for dubbing in Mandarin
Chinese), it transmits the message: Relax, it´s just a fake.

Again, the politics of intellectual property intersect with national imaginaries, which appear differently
depending on perspective. Seen from the devastated film studio in Sarajevo, where destroyed film rolls litter
the landscape, it seems as if Valter, the fictitious character created there made a successful escape and even
managed to increase his fame in exile. But one wonders whether Valter hasn´t in fact become a mercenary, like
so many ex-Yugoslav veterans, who have become much-valued experts within global theatres of war. Has he
become a mercenary of the imagination, travelling around the world, intervening in less than stable nations,
haunted by the prospect of partition and disintegration?

 

[1] Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996. S VIII.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press
1994.

 

Politics of the archive
Translations in film
Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl