How to do things with worlds

Abstract

There is a recurring image in the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, that of the sun in Plato’s Republic (which makes its appearance in the famous allegory of the cave). The Platonic sun, says Serres, is “unique and total,” the single, scintillating source of truth and knowledge (Serres 1997: 42). But a shift in position—a transformation of perspective—allows us to see that “the central sun is nothing but a marginal star, a yellowish and mediocre dwarf, without true grandeur, in the immense concert of supergiants, red like Betelgeuse or blue like Rigel” (1997: 150). That is to say, Serres aims to question how it is that “our knowledge unjustifiably established the local solar system as a general law” (1997: 41), and his strategic countermove is instead to shift perspective, to pan back and imagine an expanded cosmos, in which Plato’s sun becomes one of many (see Watkin 2020: 53– 54; Blake 2014: 3–4). This, at any rate, was the image I had in mind when I endedmy article, musing onMaussian moons andmultiple suns. The paper is something of an oddity, to be sure, for it is not an ethnographically grounded case study; nor does it pretend to be a comprehensive investigation of translation in general; nor, yet again, is it a reflection on the conditions of possibility of ethnography (as Pina-Cabral frames the issue).What it is instead is merely an attempt to map out, in a very basic way, the coordinates for the felicity conditions of two opposing modes of anthropological translation and their attendant effects. To the extent, then, that the paper is an oddity, I am all the more grateful toHAU for deeming it to be worthy of publication in the first place, and I am especially indebted to the participants in this colloquium, for generously offering their considered criticisms. An exchange of this nature, consisting of comments on commentaries and replies to replies, can quickly become subject to what J. L. Austin once called “the law of diminishing fleas” (1979: 154), where my remarks—