3

Translational Invention, Inventive Translation

The preceding chapters have taken a bird’s-eye view of cultural translation. Chapter 1 described the utopian dreams it inspires. Chapter 2 described the dystopian nightmares. Where does that leave us?

This chapter looks at the nuts and bolts of cultural translation. What techniques do people use to change other people’s minds—to induce them to see the world through a parallax view? In that respect, it changes the scale of our analysis from macro to micro. Through this act of refocusing, we will see that both the utopian and dystopian views are misleading if they overlook the contingent nature of cultural translation, which is not inherently good or bad. It is a tool, and its value depends on the use to which we put it.

Consider the point where the last chapter left off. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is hermetically sealed, turned in on itself in a form of (nearly) inescapable solipsism. It might remind us of our current political circumstances, but our world is not as bleak as Winston Smith’s.¹ Of course, we don’t live in some magical world where everyone gets along, either. Instead, we’re somewhere in between.

Still, the worlds we live in are more closed than we think. They differ from Nineteen Eighty-Four in degree more than substance. What I mean is that we impose symbolic order on our experience in the form of explanations about what the world is and how it operates. We recognize certain phenomena as causes and others as effects, building a chain of events that lets us explain who we are and what we are doing. We create, both individually and in interaction with others, symbolic worlds that appear complete and self-sufficient.

These worlds lead us to a rather pedestrian form of solipsism (as I hinted at in the opening lines of the introductory chapter). We don’t hold hard and fast to the idea that nothing outside our mind exists, but, pragmatically speaking, we act as if that were the case. We struggle to make sense of new ideas because they don’t follow the logic that appears to us to be common sense. We’re faced with a paradox that researchers in science education identified nearly four decades ago: “Whenever the learner encounters a new phenomenon, [she or] he must rely on [her or] his current concepts to organize [her or] his investigation.”² In other words, we stack the epistemological deck: to understand something new, we have to use the conceptual tools we’ve already developed to investigate it. The effect is counterintuitive. New ideas leave our conceptual foundations untouched: rather than challenge our a priori assumptions, they strengthen them.

Another way to see this paradox is to recognize that the symbolic worlds we inhabit can always absorb evidence that, to an outside observer, appears to contradict our views. Consider one controversial issue in our era of polarized politics—climate change. People on opposite sides of the spectrum arrive at different interpretations of major weather events, which fit into their narratives about politics and climate in ways that support the ideas they already have. In 2016, for instance, a fire engulfed the town of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the centre of bitumen oil production in Canada. The year leading up to the fire had been dry, a fact that prompted some to think climate change was responsible for the conditions that made the fire possible. Others blamed cyclical weather patterns. But however obvious the role of climate change was to people who believed in it, they could make no argument that would change the minds of those who did not. Indeed, skeptics had a ready-made explanation for any “evidence” about climate change they might present: it was political theatre and victim-blaming, especially if they suggested that oil production contributed to the dry weather.³ Not only could skeptics explain away evidence by attributing it to politics, but doing so seemed to confirm something they already knew (or thought they knew), namely that their opponents were crassly and shamelessly political (figure 19).⁴

But, of course, people do change their minds. We don’t dismiss every new idea: sometimes the external world intrudes into our internal solipsisms, and sometimes new ideas cause us to step back and examine how we understand things. Maybe they hit upon some inconsistency in our worldview—something we can’t explain but can’t necessarily put our finger on—or maybe they’re simply too provocative to ignore. People change their minds about global warming, for instance, when they see its effects as personal, rather than politically motivated. In series of surveys between 2011 and 2015, more than 20 percent of respondents who had changed their mind about global warming said they did so because they had personally experienced the impact of climate change.⁵ A New York Times article from 2018 described how a handful of people saw past their skepticism: a meteorologist spoke directly with scientists, a coal miner saw the effects of his career on the environment around him, a community organizer in Miami saw the threat higher waters posed for her neighbourhood.⁶ In each case, people came to see the effects of climate change in light of their own experiences, where they made a different kind of sense. They found a different frame for making sense of the world, which caused them to interpret evidence such as rising waters or increased average temperature in a new way (figure 20).

What pins can we use to prick our solipsistic bubbles? Poetry is one. It can bring about a “meditative state of mind” that “yields clarity” about “the way our voices sound when we dip below the decibel level of politics.”⁷ Humour is another. Jokes work by saying two things at once. They have two meanings—one literal or denotative, the other ironic or connotative—that contradict each other. The contradiction makes us laugh and see the world differently, at least for the brief moment where we hold the two meanings together.⁸

This chapter focuses on yet another pin—that of shock—used by a Russian artist named Petr Pavlenskii.⁹ He is known for performances, which he calls “actions,” that involve inflicting pain upon his body in protest against injustices perpetrated by the Russian government. This chapter examines his actions through the lens of rhetorical invention, which, drawing on Aristotle, I described in chapter 1 as the ability to generate arguments by identifying and using “the available means of persuasion” in any given situation (Rhetoric, I.2).¹⁰

Invention, like many ideas in this book, has paradoxical qualities. On the one hand, any act of invention is contingent on context. On the other, at least as laid out by Aristotle, the tools of persuasion (of which invention is one), are formulaic, which is the opposite of contingent. After an overview of invention and the paradox it engenders, this chapter turns to Pavlenskii’s art. It describes the art world’s interpretations of his actions and then asks what happens if instead we look at them through the lens of rhetorical invention. Then it identifies ways his actions prompt viewers (not to mention his police interrogator) to see the world from a new angle. He uses two rhetorical tools: he implicates his viewers in his actions, and he compels them to see his actions in the context of a different interpretive frame, replacing one, whether legal or psychological, with another from the world of symbols and art.

Aristotle and Rhetorical Invention

Aristotle was a list-maker who lived in the fourth century BCE and was a student of Plato’s. He wrote about biology, physics, language, art, and poetry, among other things, working systematically through categories of objects and ideas, cataloguing their relationships to one another.

In Rhetoric, he explores the nature of persuasion and speech-making. He makes a list of tools a speaker (or “orator” or “rhetor”) can learn to use to persuade different types of people in a variety of situations. He categorizes these tools as a function of how they relate to what speakers want to accomplish, how they craft their appeals, and what their listeners expect, given their life experience. The first, and arguably the most powerful, of these tools is invention, a term that, for Aristotle, refers to the construction or generation of arguments. These tools require no specialized skills, only the desire to acquire them (I.2). Anyone studying Rhetoric, Aristotle says, can learn this system and become a persuasive speaker.

Aristotle begins by identifying three types of speeches, political, forensic, and ceremonial, based on what speakers want to accomplish. Sometimes an orator seeks to persuade others about the future (as in the making of laws, when legislators want to shape how people will behave), sometimes about the past (as in court, when judges want to know what an accused person has done), sometimes about the present (as in situations meant to honour someone, when a rhetor uses a speech about a person to talk about the current situation more broadly) (I.3). Similarly, he identifies three modes of persuasion. Speakers are persuasive when they appear trustworthy (an appeal to ethos), when they influence how listeners feel (pathos), and when they present cogent, evidence-based arguments (logos). These tools all work in tandem. Appeals to emotion are made all the stronger when they come from someone who appears trustworthy, just as they are stronger when they accompany appeals to reason.

He breaks each of these modes down further. With respect to character or ethos he says, “It adds much to an orator’s influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings towards his hearers” (II.1). In other words, speakers are persuasive when they appear trustworthy and authoritative. They control their vocal tone, physical gestures, and other aspects of delivery to appear prudent and virtuous. (Think of someone about whom you might say, “That person has real presence.” They walk into a room and command attention by virtue of the way they carry themselves and address their listeners. Those actions that contribute to that person’s presence, so to speak, constitute the appeal to ethos.)

Aristotle is also concerned with the character of the listeners (which is his way of talking about what they find persuasive): as much as speakers should “entertain the right feelings” toward their listeners, they should also work to put their listeners “in just the right frame of mind” toward them (II.1). They can learn techniques to this end, based for instance on the age and wealth of the listeners, along with their station in life. Aristotle thinks speakers should appeal to a man’s desire and frame their appeals to address the roots of that desire.¹¹ Young men, he says, are hot-headed and love honour and victory because they want to feel superior. Speakers can appeal to them by linking what they want them to think or do to the honour they might achieve if they do it (II.12). Conversely, old men, having been tricked and cheated many times, act carefully, and they want only what they need to keep on living, rather than honour or victory. Speakers can persuade them by appealing to their sense of prudence (II.13). To be fair, two millennia later, we might take issue with Aristotle’s essentialism, but his insight into the relationship between desire and persuasion is valuable nonetheless.

With respect to emotion or pathos, he speaks of influencing “those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure” (II.1). Emotions act on people in different ways and can thus be put to different use. Anger, which Aristotle defines as a desire for revenge in the face of injustice, is effective for persuading judges to convict someone accused of a crime (II.2). Fear, which he defines as pain in the face of imminent danger, is effective for persuading people to act in a way that promises them safety (II.5).

With respect to reason or logos, Aristotle describes two types of appeal: examples (a form of induction) and enthymemes (a form of deduction). Rhetorical examples are a type of comparison where, to persuade listeners about a given situation, speakers compare it to one that is already familiar, in hopes that listeners draw the same conclusion about the new situation as they would about the old.¹² Enthymemes are a type of syllogism, or a logical statements made up of two parts, namely a major premise (such as a categorical statement: “All people are mortal”) and a minor premise (such as a statement of contingent fact: “You are a person”) that, when both are true, allow us to arrive at a conclusion (the implications of the major and minor premises: “You are mortal”). What makes an enthymeme different from a typical syllogism is that the speaker doesn’t state all the propositions: “For if any of these propositions is a familiar fact, there is no need even to mention it; the hearer adds it himself” (I.2). The speaker lets the listener fill in the gaps. (If I say “you are a person and therefore mortal,” I do not need to include the premise that all people are mortal. You would arrive at my intended conclusion because you already know people are mortal.)

This overview is necessarily brief. Rhetorical invention encompasses a wide range of strategies and tools to address an equally wide range of situations. Aristotle provides many more tools, such as a catalogue of propositions “about greatness or smallness and the greater or the lesser—propositions both universal and particular [that make it possible] to say which is the greater or lesser good, the greater or lesser act of justice or injustice; and so on” (I.3). He also catalogues common arguments in his work called Topics and explores emotion in On the Art of Poetry, his treatise on poetics. And he is not the only person to study invention. It held philosophers’ and scholars’ interest before Aristotle (whose Rhetoric was in part a response to Plato) and after (Cicero explores it in On Invention), and it continues to hold their interest now.

In light of the idea’s rich history, what this chapter does is rather modest: it identifies and explores one inventional tool, cultural translation, to see its value in a specific type of circumstance. Our task is to see how invention becomes a pin with which to prick our solipsistic bubbles. The point is not to use translation to say something new about invention, but to use invention to say something new about translation. In other words, the idea of invention provides us a new view on the work of translation.

Like Aristotle, we need to identify the available means of persuasion. For that, we turn to Russian performance artist Petr Pavlenskii and consider both his art and what he says about it. Pavlenskii takes pains (literally and figuratively) to put members of his audience into “a right state of mind,” as Aristotle would say. His performances or “actions” evoke a strong visceral reaction, on which he builds an argument when he talks about them later in the media, in court, and in police interrogation. His central strategy—and the tool that is our focus—consists in leading a listener to interpret a contested idea in the context of a competing conceptual frame, as in the examples earlier about global warming, where people came to see weather events through a personal frame. More simply, he helps people see things in a new way through a parallax view.

Now it is time to break his acts of invention down into their constituent parts.

The Art of Petr Pavlenskii

Petr Pavlenskii is a Russian performance artist best known for inflicting pain on himself in protest against the abuses of the Russian government. In 2012, for instance, in an action called Seam (Шов), he sewed his lips together in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg to protest the trial of the punk band Pussy Riot, whose members had been arrested after a performance they staged in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In 2013, in an action called Carcass (Туша) he wrapped himself naked in barbed wire to protest laws restricting individual freedoms. Perhaps his best known action, Fixation (Фиксация) took place in 2013, when he nailed his scrotum to the paving stones in Moscow’s Red Square as “a metaphor of the apathy and political indifference and fatalism of the modern Russian society.”¹³ And in 2014, in an action called Segregation (Oтделение) he climbed up on a wall outside the Serbsky Centre, a psychiatric hospital in which political prisoners from the former Soviet Union disappeared, and cut off part of his earlobe (figure 21). Not all of his actions involve self-mutilation, however. In 2014, in Freedom (Свобода) he set a barricade of tires on fire on the Malyi Konyushennyi Bridge in St. Petersburg to evoke anti-Russia protests in Kiev, and in 2015, in Threat (Угроза) he set the doors to the headquarters of Russia’s secret police (formerly the KGB) on fire.

Members of the art world have reacted to Pavlenskii in a variety of ways, but all take it as given that his actions are indeed art. Critics reacting to Fixation saw it as “the final argument that can be made in an ongoing dispute with the government,” as an expression of “the poetic language of performance to a highly effective political end,” or, in a different vein, as an act that was ultimately derivative of the “various forms [of self-mutilation] by members of the Wiener Aktionismus movement back in the 1960s.”¹⁴ They also placed him in the context of past artists, such as van Gogh (who famously cut off his ear), and prior artistic movements, such as the Russian Futurists (who rejected traditional notions of art as they explored the machines of modern life in the 1910s) and the Viennese Actionists (who engaged in violent performance art in the 1960s), as noted above.¹⁵ They saw Pavlenskii’s immediate predecessors as the band Pussy Riot, not least because he held a sign referring to their incarceration in his action Seam. (For his part, Pavlenskii has rejected most suggestions about his artistic lineage, citing only Chris Burden, an American artist who once had an assistant shoot him in the arm, as an inspiration.)¹⁶

Others interpreted Pavlenskii’s actions through different frames, or the “principles of organization which govern events—at least our social ones—and our subjective involvement in them,” to borrow a definition from Erving Goffman.¹⁷ Less abstractly, they give different answers to the question, “What is it that’s going on here?”¹⁸ Artists debated the newness of Pavlenskii’s work. Other people, especially members of the public or actors in Russia’s legal system, thought his self-mutilation could be only a symptom of mental illness. Others in the legal system saw his actions as vandalism or desecration of Russia’s patrimony, both of which were crimes (see table 1).

Table 1. Different frames used to explain Petr Pavlenskii’s actions

How can we understand the concept of frames in the theoretical terms set out in previous chapters? Charles Peirce, whose notion of “interpretant” grounds the analysis in chapter 1 and thus forms the foundation of this book, classifies a sign as a function of three conditions: what makes something a sign, how it relates to its referents (that is, what it’s a sign for), and what it reveals about them. He also classifies signs as a function of their complexity. The simplest signs (“firsts”) are unmediated and unreflexive; more complex signs (“seconds”) are mediated, but not yet reflexive; the most complex signs (“thirds”) are both mediated and reflexive, and they derive from convention, habit, or law.¹⁹ The simplest signs are ones where the three conditions are all firsts, such as “a nebulous patch of color, seeing a blotch of red in an afterimage, hearing the wind blow through an old house, the musty smell while walking in a forest, the aftertaste from a deliciously exotic meal.”²⁰ The most complex are ones where the three conditions are all thirds: the “paradigm case is that of an inference of an argument, which shows the connection between one set of propositions (the premises) and another (the conclusion).”²¹ As a simple sign evokes an interpretant (which in turn evokes another and another and another), it becomes a building block for signs that are more complex. A nebulous patch of colour becomes the colour red, which people recognize in different contexts, and in certain contexts it takes on specific meanings: if people are driving and see a red octagon, for example, they know to stop.

Or, in the case of Pavlenskii, the feeling of resistance becomes an awareness of politics and history, and his actions come to evoke a series of propositions. Self-mutilation is a symptom of mental illness, and Pavlenskii mutilates himself, so he must be ill. Or vandalism is a crime, and Pavlenskii’s actions are a form of vandalism, so the police and courts are right to treat him as a criminal.

In this way, we can use the way signs grow in complexity to understand the idea of a frame. When people see Pavlenskii’s actions, they have an initial reaction as to what those actions are—what it is that is going on here, to paraphrase Goffman. That initial reaction then shapes the chain of interpretants that leads to their conclusions about the meaning of his actions. It directs the movement from one interpretant to another, so that someone watching or reading about an action arrives at one of many potential conclusions, to the exclusion of the others. That initial reaction—the first interpretant—becomes the frame.²² Pavlenskii replaces that first interpretant—the primary frame—with another interpretant and changes not just the chain of associations but the final conclusions at which people arrive. In other words (there is that telling phrase again!), his strategy is to perform an act of cultural translation.

This idea of a frame-as-first-interpretant makes it possible to see Pavlenskii’s actions from a new angle, not just as art but also as rhetorical invention. Consider his response to the psychiatric frame. Many people see his actions and think he must have a mental illness. Their logic goes something like this: self-mutilation is so grotesque that is must be a symptom of mental illness (their major premise). Pavlenskii engages in self-mutilation (their minor premise). Therefore he must be mentally ill (their conclusion) (figure 22).²³

Pavlenskii refutes this syllogism by challenging its major premise: people do the things he has done for other reasons, such as to criticize an oppressive government. He shows that his purpose is critique by engaging with the court system in strategic ways. He insists on being charged with the most serious crime, even when prosecutors would prefer lesser charges, effectively forcing their hand. He puts them in the position of making arguments they don’t want to make, confronting them with a forced choice: either they support the system at the cost of their integrity, or they maintain their integrity and challenge an unjust system.²⁴ This approach suggests a type of methodical thought that is not a symptom of mental illness. Thus Pavlenskii establishes a competing syllogism: self-mutilation can be something other than a symptom of mental illness (his major premise). He hurts himself, but for reasons related to art and protest (his minor premise). Therefore his actions are not a sign of mental illness (his conclusion) (figure 23).²⁵

Pavlenskii takes a similar approach to the legal frame. Police officers, lawyers, and judges tend to see his actions as crimes. Their logic follows these lines: people who destroy property that is not theirs commit acts of hooliganism, vandalism, or desecration and should be charged with a crime (their major premise). Pavlenskii has committed such acts, such as when he lit tires on fire on the bridge in St. Petersburg (their minor premise). Therefore he should be charged with a crime (their conclusion) (figure 24). Not surprisingly, those charges have been the ones he has faced: hooliganism, a charge also brought against Pussy Riot for their protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and vandalism or desecration, a charge applied when a person vandalizes cultural artefacts.²⁶

Pavlenskii employs a similar strategy to challenge this frame as he does to challenge the psychiatric frame: he implicates his viewers, especially those in law enforcement, in his actions. He wants them to see they are cogs in a machine: “People in law enforcement agencies are forced to become tools,” he says; “everything human in them is suppressed. But many of them doubt that what they are doing is right, so the human element can rebel against the functional one.”²⁷ He establishes a different syllogism: the legal system turns people into cogs or tools (his major premise). Police officers enforce the law (his minor premise). Therefore they are tools, people who must surrender to the system (his conclusion). He also establishes a second syllogism, where the conclusion of the first is the minor premise: people who are tools in the system want to regain their humanity (major premise). Police officers are tools (minor premise). Therefore they want to regain their humanity (conclusion), which they can do, he suggests, by seeing his actions as art, rather than hooliganism or vandalism (figure 25).

Freedom and “A Dialogue about Art”

We have seen how Pavlenskii replaces one frame with another at the level of his art in society. But what about at an interpersonal level? What are the strategies he uses in conversation to prompt someone to see the world from a new perspective? After Freedom in 2014, when he set fire to a pile of tires on a bridge in St. Petersburg, he was arrested and interrogated. Unbeknownst to his interrogator, Pavel Yasman, he recorded the interrogation. He later published a transcript on the website Snob.ru.²⁸ An English translation was published in 2017.²⁹ The interrogation, which took place in three sessions, was published in the form of a dialogue between Pavlenskii and Yasman, and it reveals the artist’s rhetorical strategies. Remarkably, when the interrogation was done, Yasman quit his job to become a human-rights lawyer, having been persuaded by Pavlenskii to examine his life more closely.³⁰

Throughout the interrogation, Pavlenskii and Yasman argue from within identifiable, incompatible frames—Yasman’s legal, Pavlenskii’s symbolic. At various points, they both try to argue from within the frame of the other. Pavlenskii finally prevails by showing Yasman where the contradictions lie within the legal frame and how Yasman perpetuates those contradictions, which ultimately are contrary to his own personal convictions.

Yasman’s main strategy is to focus the discussion as narrowly as possible. He does not want to consider context: he wants to talk about specific acts, namely those related to the fire. He constantly chides Pavlenskii “not [to] think so globally in such matters” (284). His logic follows these lines. His major premise is that “we have laws and a legislature that describes specific actions for which a person is legally responsible” (281). His minor premise is that Pavlenskii committed one of these acts by lighting the tires on fire: “It does not matter whether it is art or not art” (282). His conclusion is that Pavlenskii is legally responsible and must suffer the consequences.

In several places, Yasman tries to argue from within Pavlenskii’s symbolic frame. He offers examples of art (as he imagines it) where the actions that matter are clearly crimes. “But you might just go and murder someone for the sake of art” (279). Or “let’s say that some people go to the grave of an African-American, [and they] break the tombstone, smash it, but play it in a theatrical way” (280). Pavlenskii responds by showing either how these acts are unprincipled and not art or how context matters: “It could be the friends of the African-American [who break the tombstone],” he says, “because their country’s ritual provides for some kind special treatment. As in Tibet, for example” (280).

Such responses derive from Pavlenskii’s symbolic frame. He adopts a broad view: “The act of art occurs in the symbolic field for the most part; and to a certain extent, of course, in reality. That is, we must begin to look at the action from different angles” (283). Symbolism and law, he argues, are largely incompatible. With respect to the specific charges of desecration he faces, he says:

I will try to talk about vandalism from a legal point of view. Like talking about desecration. What is desecration? A humiliation of something: piss, crap, smash, this can be seen as desecration, because some actions are well-established symbols of humiliation from the point of view of the amassed experience. But fire is not a symbol of humiliation. (286)

He establishes yet another syllogism: Desecration implies humiliation (major premise). Or, to restate it, if there is no humiliation, there is no desecration. That, he maintains, is his case: the fire he set put no one at risk, did not harm the bridge, and evoked social struggles in support of freedom. “The bridge was not humiliated” (288) (minor premise). Therefore he committed no crime (conclusion).

Pavlenskii goes a step further by showing Yasman how Yasman has been instrumentalized within a dehumanizing system. At the beginning of the third session, he asks why Yasman has returned. Yasman answers, “I . . . got my ass handed to me because the case is still in court” (288). Yasman says he has to carry out his instructions. “So you admit that you are a tool,” Pavlenskii responds:

This instrumentalization, the power just instrumentalizes people. . . . [These systems] make you do what you do not want to do. They take people who are initially able to recognize art, to make art. And then some people are forced to attack others. (288)

Pavlenskii is critiquing a system that makes people act against their will. Yasman recognizes himself within that system because he feels constrained in the way Pavlenskii describes. In effect, Pavlenskii has introduced a new syllogism. A dehumanizing system must be challenged (major premise). Yasman sees the Russian legal system as dehumanizing (minor premise). It no longer provides an explanation of the world he finds convincing, and it must be challenged (conclusion). The last words of the interrogation are Yasman’s: “I’m going to leave the system sooner or later,” he admits. “I just don’t know how” (291).

Conclusion: What Invention Teaches Us About Translation

Throughout the interrogation, Pavlenskii’s appeals to reason are clear. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. He also works to put Yasman “in just the right frame of mind,” as Aristotle suggests (Rhetoric, II.1), by acting in such a way that his words are imbued with authority (although, of course, we have only a translated transcript to go by). He is unwavering in his insistence that Yasman consider the broader context, but he never says a rude word. When Yasman tries to provoke him, he responds with restraint, while Yasman often appears flustered. And Pavlenskii appeals to those “feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements” (II.1), specifically Yasman’s sense of frustration in the face of a dehumanizing system and his hope in light of the choices he can make to escape that system. In short, he is inventive in Aristotle’s sense: he has used identifiable tools to generate an argument tailored to a specific person and circumstance.

What does his approach reveal about translation—that is, the substitution of signs? Pavlenskii was successful when he changed his interrogator’s initial interpretant—the first thing he thought of when he considered the tires Pavlenskii set on fire. When Yasman’s first thought was dehumanizing system rather than law-enforcement, the final conclusion at which he arrived was different. He changed his mind about Pavlenskii because Pavlenskii’s actions came to have a more personal meaning for him, much as the climate change skeptics in the introduction changed their mind when extreme weather events touched them personally.

In this way, translation becomes a tool for invention. It’s at our disposal as one possible way to persuade the person we’re talking to. At the same time, the idea of invention—the ability to see and use the tools at hand—helps us see translation as strategic. Pavlenskii’s approach of implicating his viewers to prompt them to see his actions in a different frame is one such strategy.

These strategies, of course, are not the only ones, nor is change of this type a foregone conclusion. At the macro, conceptual level, cultural translation had utopian and dystopian possibilities, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2. The same is true at the micro, strategic level, as this chapter has shown and the next chapter shows.

1 I write this sentence with the idea that although my present as writer and your present as reader are not the same, something about your current political situation will remind you—as my current situation reminds me—of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

2 George J. Posner, Kenneth A. Strike, Peter W. Hewson, and William A. Gertzog, “Accommodation of a Scientific Conception: Toward a Theory of Conceptual Change,” 212.

3 Martine Danielle Stevens, “Ultradeep: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change.” As Stevens points out, of course, it is hard to draw a direct causal link between climate change and specific weather events. But what matters for this example is the way people perceived a link.

4 For other examples, see Kyle Conway, Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation, 27–30.

5 Kathryn S. Deeg, Erik Lyon, Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, John Kotcher and Jennifer Marlon. “Who Is Changing Their Mind About Global Warming and Why?”

6 Livia Albeck-Ripka, “How Six Americans Changed Their Minds About Global Warming.”

7 Tracy K. Smith, quoted in Ruth Franklin, “Tracy K. Smith, America’s Poet Laureate, Is a Woman with a Mission.”

8 Conway, Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation.

9 The artist’s name is transliterated from the Cyrillic spelling, Пётр Павленский, a number of different ways. I have adopted the spelling used in Russia—Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist, edited by Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev, which is the source of the translation of the dialogue on which I focus at the end of the chapter.

10 All quotations in this chapter come from the translation of Rhetoric by W. Rhys Roberts, in the digital edition published by the MIT Internet Classics Archive. Citations refer to book (Roman numerals) and part (Arabic numerals).

Note that invention is, as I wrote in the introductory chapter, one of those terms that might strike contemporary readers as odd: why this term and not another? Aristotle answers that question when he writes that there are two modes of persuasion, one that uses “such things as are not supplied by the speaker but are there at the outset—witnesses, evidence given under torture, written contracts, and so on,” the other that uses such things “as we can ourselves construct by means of the principles of rhetoric. The one kind has merely to be used, the other has to be invented” (I.2).

11 Aristotle envisions listeners as men.

12 Sometimes when my kids are arguing over something they both want, I say to them, “Remember the last time you couldn’t share? What happened then? You got in a fight and both had to spend time in your rooms. You know what’s going to happen if you keep up the argument you’re just starting now?” That’s an example in Aristotle’s sense. I’m comparing their current argument to one they’ve already had in hopes that their memory of the consequences then will persuade them to change their behaviour now. (Rarely does this happen.)

13 Pavlenskii, quoted in Craig Stewart Walker, “Madness, Dissidence and Transduction,” 694.

14 In order, Marat Guelman, David Thorp, and Anton Nossik, quoted in Ekow Eshun, Maryam Omidi, Jamie Rann, and Igor Zinatulin, “The Naked Truth: The Art World Reacts to Pyotr Pavlensky’s Red Square Protest.”

15 Per-Arne Bodin, “Petr Pevlenskii and His Actions,” 271–78; Amy Bryzgel, “Chopped Earlobes and the Long History of Political Shock Art in Russia”; Ingrid Nordgaard, “Documenting/Performing the Vulnerable Body: Pain and Agency in Works by Boris Mikhailov and Petr Pavlensky”; and Walker, “Madness, Dissidence and Transduction.”

16 Bodin, “Petr Pavlenskii and His Actions,” 272.

17 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, 10–11.

18 Ibid., 8.

19 Charles Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, 98–119.

20 James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, 48.

21 Ibid., 52.

22 It is first in a conceptual sense, in that it is primary, rather than a strictly chronological sense, although in some circumstances it might be both. I’m taking liberties with Goffman here. He doesn’t necessarily see frames as something people actively shape, but I do. That idea comes more from media studies, where people like Robert Entman have used frames to talk about the choices journalists make when they draw attention to certain aspects of a story. See Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.”

23 Cf. Walker, “Madness, Dissidence and Transduction.”

24 Bodin, “Petr Pavlenskii and His Actions.”

25 Strictly speaking, the syllogisms here do not hold up to a rigorous logic. The major and minor premises of Pavlenskii’s syllogism, for instance, do not lead necessarily to the conclusion (mental illness does not stop people from being politically active, for instance). What matters discursively, however, is the conclusion he leads viewers to make (see, for example, Bodin, “Petr Pavlenskii and His Actions”). This idea is consistent with Aristotle’s account of logos, which depends on “the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself” (Rhetoric, I.2, emphasis added).

26 Walker, “Madness, Dissidence and Transduction,” 691; and Bodin, “Petr Pevlenskii and His Actions,” 277. The term desecration reveals another dimension of the legal frame, namely, its relation to the religious sphere. In some cases, the link is direct: Pussy Riot protested in a cathedral, and Pavlenskii’s action Seam, where he expressed support for Pussy Riot, took place in front of a different cathedral. Elsewhere it is indirect, as when art critics point out “the resemblance of his performances to the public behaviour of Russian fools for Christ, which included provocations directed at the powers that be, nakedness and extreme asceticism” (Bodin, “Petr Pevlenskii and His Actions,” 277).

27 Quoted in Ivan Nechepurenko, “How Russia’s ‘Most Controversial Artist’ Persuaded His Interrogator to Change Sides.”

28 Lena De Winne, “Допрос Петра Павленского. Пьеса в трех действиях [The Interrogation of Petr Pavlenskii: A Play in Three Acts].”

29 Petr Pavlenskii and Pavel Yasman, “A Dialogue About Art.” For the sake of legibility, in this section I give the page numbers referring to this transcript in parenthetical in-text citations.

30 Nechepurenko, “How Russia’s ‘Most Controversial Artist’ Persuaded His Interrogator to Change Sides.”