The Translation Machine: Exploring the Infrastructures of Valorization under Semiocapitalism

In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose to view translation as a metasemiotic infrastructure for speeding up and scaling up production and for crafting forms of sociality and subjectivity conducive to capital- ist valorization. The articles in this collection ethnographically explore the working of translation across registers, channels, modalities, semiotic fields, and ontological orders (as well as linguistic codes). Our goal is to analyze how translation affords the global circula- tion of standardized discursive protocols and institutional policy bundles, and enables the formation of politico-juridical networks of corporate personhood and (neo-)liberal gov- ernmentality. Furthermore, we investigate how translation can be resisted, sabotaged, or made invisible, showing how its semiotic metamarks can be alternatively disguised or high- lighted within the regimes of uniqueness and seriality underlying contemporary forms of commodity production. This Introduction provides the theoretical backdrop underlying these diverse contributions.