Johanna Haagsman

Well, this is interesting. I’m reading this book in English, for I couldn’t find a Dutch copy. Therefor I guess it is not translated in Dutch at all. Now I find something in it, which is about translating. I wrote something about it in Dutch, because you have to know Dutch to understand what I mean. But hey, I started to write about this book in English….. So, what do I do now? Write this article in English or in Dutch? Well, I’ll have a go at it in English.

Mitchell writes (at page 59):

Of course, as a native English (or American) speaker, he is only focused on the English word ‘drawing’. But in other languages, there is another double meaning in the word which is translated for ‘drawing’. In Dutch (my native tongue) ‘drawing’ = ‘tekenen’. There is no such meaning as ‘to pull’ in this word. But it can mean ’sign’ or ‘mark’. So then the whole idea changes. I even looked it up in other languages; in German translated ‘drawing’ is ‘zeichnen’. The word ‘zeichen’ (’mark’, ’sign’) is used for words as Zeichenblock (=’pad’).

[ interesting sideline:  'das Wild zeichnet' = 'game leaves a bloodtrail' kinda poetic, sorry to say for the game itself ofcourse ]

Spanish: ‘tekenen’ = ‘dibujar’ (as ‘to depict’),  ‘marcar’ or ’señal’ (as ‘to mark’).

It’s the same in French; in Turkish ‘çizmek’ (’drawing’) could also mean ’stripe’, ’scrape’, ‘design’, ’scratch’ a.o..

Perhaps another book must be written: What do pictures say?

I’m reading the book ‘What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images’ by W.J.T. Mitchell. Interesting stuff, although English is not my motherlanguage, and I couldn’t find a Dutch translation. I think it’s quite difficult to translate, for instance the word ‘image’ has various meanings, when you translate it into Dutch each meaning uses another word.  I guess. But I am no translator. Obviously. I once met one. He was paranoid. Whether this was because of the huge variety of meanings and choices to make, or because he smoked a lot of pot, don’t know.

Anyway, it’s an interesting book, which I found when looking for literature about 9/11. Mitchell had written some essay (or also a book?) about it, or gave some lecture somewhere (…. o sorry… I always forget these kind of futilities). In thís book he also writes about 9/11. The terrorist act can be seen as an iconoclastic act, ánd at the same time as the creation of a new icon/image (the twin towers burning etc.). A quotation of the first chapter (page 25/26), for this can be seen also as a context for my own work:

” [...] A predictable objection to my whole argument here (JH: you should read the book ….:-) that it attributes a power to images that is simply alien to the attitudes of modern people. Perhaps savages, children, and illiterate masses can, like sheep, be led astray by images, but we moderns know better. Historian of science Bruno Latour has put a decisive stumbling block in the way of this argument in his wonderful book ‘We Have Never Been Modern’. Modern technologies, far from liberating us from the mystery surrounding our own artificial creations, have produced a new world order of ‘factishes’, new syntheses of the orders of scientific, technical factuality on the one hand and of fetishism, totemism, and idolatry on the other. Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also (as we know equally well) mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life-forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own. New media have made communication seem more transparent, immediate, and rational than ever before, at the same time that they have enmeshed us in labyrinths of new images, objects, tribal identities, and ritual practices. Marshall McLuhan understood this irony very clearly when he pointed out that  ‘by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the serveo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse, or the executive of his clock’. [...] ”

So, more books to be read! And more questions raised:
‘Do I feel modern?’
‘Can I become my own image?