Our interest is to question the valorization of the common less by drawing attention to the more obvious register of political economy and the exploitation of free labor than by highlighting the role of the common as a political potential in biopolitical assemblages organized around logistics industries and the politics of the human. As Fiona Jeffries maintains, "One place where we find the common and the commons converge is in globalizing communication infrastructures."8 It is from within this conceptual context that we want to raise the possibility of alternative cartographies of the political. The question of translation is a crucial element in the conceptual elaboration of these emergent configurations.
The Task of the Translator
Boris Buden has suggested that
culture has not, as it is often believed, simply pushed away the notion of society from the political stage and taken its leading role in theoretical debates and practical concerns of political subjects. The change is more radical. Culture has become this very stage, the very condition of the possibility of society and of our perception of what political reality is today.9
This centrality of culture has given the practice of cultural translation newsignificance and a political purpose. From within the horizon of multiculturalism, its “political purpose is the stability of the liberal order, which can be achieved only on the grounds of non-conflictual, interactive relations between different cultures in terms ofthe so-called multicultural cohabitation."Understood in the more radical (if still liberal) sense Buden derives from Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler, cultural translation refers to“the process by which the excluded within the universality is readmitted into the term,"which implies that "cultural translation—as a return of the excluded’—is the only promoter of today's democracy. It pushes its limits, brings about social change and opens new spaces of emancipation. It does so through the subversive practices, which change everyday social relations." Over and against what remains an essentially liberal articulation of cultural translation, Buden turns to Spivak's“strategic essentialism' to acknowledge that "she simply admits that there is no direct correspondence between these two languages" since the language of antiessentialist theory and of essentialist political practices “cannot be sublated in an old dialectical way by a third universal term which could operate as a dialectical unity of both. Therefore, the only possible way of a communication between them is a kind of translation." Cultural translation is, then, the mise-en-scène that brings newvisions ofthe political onto the stage of culture.
Acts of Translation
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