Born in the United States and trained at Cornell University, Jon has lived in east Asia for twenty-five years, Europe for nine, and North America for twenty-three. His current project develops a discussion of ‘area’ as an essential operation for the governing capacity of the state in parallel to the question of ‘population’, a form of the investment of state power within life, what can be called, after Foucault, ‘biopower’. These parallel operations of articulation – ‘area’ and ‘population’ – are required by the state in order to give itself an image of community called ‘nation’, an image that folds back into itself in order to naturalise the modern form of belonging to the nation-state. Within this project, an examination of the biopolitics of translation occupies a privileged place for the understanding of relations amongst: anthropological difference, geocultural area, areal divisions in the humanities, and the abstractions of capitalist accumulation.
This contribution considers how Machine Translation (MT) and the militarisation of information technologies is radically transforming the world’s inherited colonial–imperial modernity. Because of the reduction of translation to logistical transfer and the grounding of that operation in an imaginary cartography of spatialised difference, this familiar (post)colonial world is rapidly collapsing into a dystopian future, which conjoins technological totalisation and militarisation in a senseless defence of the privilege of anthropological difference.