CHAPTER 5

Fashioning the Other: Fashion

as an Epistemology of Translation

Andreas Behnke

Introduction
What does it mean to live in an inter-national world in which the co-­
presence of the other, of other identities, nationalities, cultures and civili-
sations, constitutes the very condition of possibility of our existence? How
do we interact and communicate with other cultural communities when
their intentions, interests and interventions reflect cultural contexts very
different from our own?
This question has gained renewed relevance at a time when Western
claims to victory in the Cold War have grown stale, when the ‘end of his-
tory’ has come to an end itself and the ‘unipolar moment’ has given way
to a ‘complex multi-polarity’ in which no one power can claim to provide
an undisputed hegemonic regime of truth for global politics.

A. Behnke (*)
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading,
Reading, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 89

Switzerland AG 2021
Z. G. Capan et al. (eds.), The Politics of Translation in International
Relations, Palgrave Studies in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56886-3_5
90  A. BEHNKE

The recognition of this shift, this return of the inter-national, raises a

number of epistemological questions, chief among them the mediation of
difference. The relations between entities, constituted in these relations,
be they nations, cultures or other forms of collective identity, emerge as
one of the primary concerns of our time. How do we understand the
interests, motivations, intentions and the cultural frameworks within
which they are articulated? How, in other words, do we translate the lan-
guages of others and of otherness into our own conceptual and cultural
framework?
For the most part, the ‘proliferation of difference’ (Laclau and Mouffe
1985) and the concomitant degeneration of the Cold War grand narrative
and its replacement with particularistic identities and narratives that char-
acterise the world in the twenty-first century is coded in terms of ‘culture’
(Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Walker 2016, pp. 37–64). What the refer-
ence to difference in terms of ‘culture’ highlights is the task to invest the
‘other’ text with meaning accessible to us, to inscribe it with familiar intel-
ligibilities and interests (Venuti 2004, p.  482). This necessitates a com-
plex, even paradoxal transposition between different structures of meaning,
to translate, übersetzen, traduire, переводить: to carry over, to set across,
to guide across, to lead across. As Inayatullah and Blaney (2004) artic-
ulate it,

[T]he language of culture draws our attention to the construction, mainte-

nance, and transformation of meaningful and purposeful schemes of exis-
tence as a common human endeavor, yet also as multiple, diverse, and often
competing human projects. (p. 15; emphasis added)

Hence, while the desire to live within meaningful and purposeful social
communities is universal, their respective vocabularies, their regimes of
truth and knowledge cannot be assumed to be directly translatable. Inter-­
cultural communication and co-existence are therefore necessarily a proj-
ect rather than a given background condition. However, for a number of
reasons, International Relations (IR) theory in its different modernist
guises has yet to digest and acknowledge this insight.
Questions of culture and identity emerged in IR in the wake of the
Cold War, when the ‘bipolar overlay’ (Buzan and Wæver 2003, pp. 17–18)
of ideological identities gave way to the (re-)emergence of historical—or
perhaps historicising—national and cultural identities (Lapid and
Kratochwil 1996). For the longest time before this moment, IR had done
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  91

away with questions of culture and identity, reducing them to concerns

about power and preferences in an international system without subjects.1
In its latest iteration, the cultural framing of international relations has
led to a discussion of ‘worlding IR’ and an investigation into culturally
contingent forms of knowledge in and about world politics (Tickner and
Blaney 2012, 2013).2 For the most part, the essays collected in these vol-
umes are about focusing on different culturally contingent expressions
and articulations of global issues; inter-cultural communication and the
problem of translation have not been given a prominent place.3
At the same time, IR theory remains unable to address the ‘inter’ in its
analysis of international politics, remaining instead dedicated to, ontologi-
cally, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and, epistemologically to a position in
which the world appears as Vor-stellung.
The following section will critically discuss the problem of translation as
rooted in a particular modern (and Western) epistemology. Drawing on
Martin Heidegger’s critique of the Welt als Vor-stellung, it argues that
modern tenets of knowledge try to overcome rather than address transla-
tion as an inter-cultural process by creating a position or site that stands
detached and remote from the world, which now appears as ‘re-­
presentation’ or Vor-stellung, something put in front of the modern sub-
ject’s gazing eye. This decontextualised and rarefied site offers the
investigating observer a master code that renders legible all cultural texts
without excess or lacunae.
The next section uncovers the traces of this epistemological structure
within three dominant modernist IR theories, Realism, Liberalism and
Social Constructivism. The point of this section is not to provide a com-
prehensive overview of these theories; rather, it focuses on paradigmatic
texts that highlight how these theories address (or rather fail to address)
inter-cultural relations and the problem of translation.

1
 But see Kratochwil’s (1996) argument for a case of ‘amnesia’ about (an always present
and relevant) culture.
2
 See also Ariel Shangguan’s (2021) chapter in this volume.
3
 One interesting exemption is Qin Yaqing (2013) who in his personal reflections as one of
China’s most prominent IR scholar and translator of IR texts reflects upon the issues involved
in the latter process. While most of his narrative deals with translation as a fairly technical
process, its potentially problematic nature is at least alluded to in a discussion of the contrast
between Western and Chinese understandings of the ‘balance of power’ and the role of rules
and relations in IR.
92  A. BEHNKE

The next section introduces the Politics of Translation. Focusing on

Jacques Derrida’s work on this topic, it formulates a critique of modern
epistemology as described by Heidegger and its resurrection of the Tower
of Babel as the site of a universal code. Following Derrida, it identifies
cultures as ‘texts’ in need of translation in the absence of such a code,
where the task of the translator takes place within an ethical and political
space in which a decision about the proper translation is required.
The final section turns to the imaginary of fashion in order to develop
a post-modern paradigm of inter-cultural translation, outlining its limita-
tions and potentials. It references Karl Lagerfeld’s 2010 Pre-Fall 2011
fashion show Paris-Shanghai for the House of Chanel, and the 2015
China: Through the Looking Glass fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New  York. It rejects the modernist commitment to
‘true knowledge’ of other cultures and insists upon the production of
these in processes of translation. China, as the paradigm for the Other
here, emerges in the translation of its cultural text as it is appropriated and
given meaning within our own established cultural codes.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political implications of
a post-modern mode of translation in terms of inter-cultural or inter-­
national relations.

Heidegger on the World as Vor-stellung

The efforts regarding ‘worlding IR’ reflect an insight that we live in a
world in which its inter-national structure can no longer be contained and
mastered by a Western symbolic hegemony, i.e. an ‘ability to define identi-
ties, both their own and those of other states’ (Weldes and Saco 1996,
p. 65). The West is no longer the site of Man, it can no longer claim to
stand outside this world, approaching it as a Vor-stellung or a Weltbild,
akin to a canvass placed in front of it, upon which it inscribes its worldview.
As Heidegger (1977) defined this epistemic structure,

Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as
that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore
intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently
intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world pic-
ture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but
the world conceived and grasped as picture. (p. 129)
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  93

In modernity, Heidegger argues, the world appears and becomes know-

able as Vor-stellung, as ‘re-presentation’.4 Heidegger emphasises in this
context the historically specific nature of the Weltbild. There was no
ancient or medieval world picture, ‘the fact that the world becomes pic-
ture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age’ (Heidegger
1977, p.  130). The notion of the world as picture therefore denotes a
particular epistemology that sets the modern age apart from its precursors
and, one might surmise, its successor. In a sense, modern man claims to
have finally built the Tower of Babel and achieved a divine perspective
upon the world, able to divine its multiplicity through one master code.
It is therefore only in the modern age that the monocular gaze of a de-­
contextualised, indeed transcendental subject becomes the dominant
mode of gathering knowledge about the world. This gaze originates in the
modern subject—Man, Nation, Race, etc.—that stands in front of this re-­
presentation, ‘as lord of the earth’. ‘Man’, in Heidegger’s (1977, p. 128)
words, ‘becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded, as regards
the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational centre
of that which is as such’. Yet Man itself is therefore no longer of this world.
He assumes a Cartesian position of a pure mind, with all traces of culture,
contingency, indeed world itself eradicated from his image. The very con-
ditions of his being are externalised and rendered a re-presentation, a Vor-­
stellung for him, it becomes something over which he can exert cognitive
and practical control.
It is this epistemic position that can no longer be defended in light of
the (violent) contestations of Western hegemony and the resistance of the
local against the universal. The guiding interest here is based on a move
away from the question of ontology—who or what is the other?—to a
question of epistemology: how can we know the other in the first place? In
doing so, this chapter follows the ‘aesthetic turn’ of International Political
Theory (Bleiker 2001, 2009); or rather, it pushes it into the so far unex-
plored and undervalued realm of fashion and sartorial code (Behnke
2016b). Only in this area, this chapter argues, can we find a productive

4
 As all translators of Heidegger’s work notice, many of his German language concepts are
virtually untranslatable, as their English correspondents hardly ever produce the same con-
notations as the German original. In this case too, ‘re-presentation’ does not connote the
‘putting forth in front of the gazing subject’ that the German Vor-stellung does. In order to
remind the reader of this crucial aspect, I will occasionally use the German concept in lieu of
the English one.
94  A. BEHNKE

engagement with the aesthetics and ethics of cultural exchange and trans-
lation and avoid politically charged reifications and essentialisations of
identities.

On (Not) Knowing the Other in IR

Arguably, culture and identity are (re-)deployed in the 1990s within IR as
it becomes clear that the conflicts of the post–Cold War era cannot easily
be explained without reference to them. Whatever the differences between
them, mainstream modernist IR approaches dealt with this insight in very
similar epistemic ways, suggesting that inter-cultural translation is not
needed, or at least not a problem, for IR theory. In the following, the
paradigmatic realist, liberal and social constructivist responses of this time
and their ‘culturalist’ parameters will be critically examined.
Within the quickly growing body of realist literature on post–Cold War
international politics, a canonical text emerged, i.e., Samuel Huntington’s
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997).
Assuming a Heideggerian position of Man and his master code, Huntington
sets out to identify both the nature of cultures and civilisations in general,
as well as the identity of extant ones and their mutual relationships.
Committed to a ‘realism writ large’, he defines these relationships as basi-
cally antagonistic, as civilisations’ different values, norms and institutions
are irreconcilable with one another. Crucially, these values and norms are
essential to cultures and civilisations; they are fixed throughout history
and determine the conduct of its members. These monolithic and monadic
entities compete for power and influence in a global system in which the
ideology of the Cold War has given way to the ‘true identity’ of civilisa-
tions. As Huntington states in one of his most infamous arguments,
‘Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards’ (Huntington 1997,
p. 258; emphasis in the original).
The point is not to rehash the well-worn criticism that Huntington has
received over the last two decades regarding the problematic methodol-
ogy, theory and ethics involved in his work; it is rather to remind the
reader of the particular epistemological commitment of this approach that
merges IR realism with epistemic realism’s commitment to know the
world ‘as it is’. What Huntington describes are not the processes through
which cultures are mutually constituted in complex configurations of self
and other; rather, these entities are simply present, awaiting their proper
identification and description. And this appeal to reality then supports the
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  95

political strategy that he espouses: to defend the West against aggressive

and hostile competing civilisations.
For IR liberalism, the amnesia regarding culture and identity has since
been replaced by an obsession with the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT).
Identity here is coded in terms of the democratic vs the un-democratic or
authoritarian nature of domestic regimes. The assumption is that regime
type determines or structures states’ behaviour and the relationships they
establish with other states. Amongst democracies, the argument goes, col-
laboration and cooperation prevail as democracies are either loath to go to
war as such or because they recognise ‘kindred spirits’ with regards to
norms and values in each other (cf. Russett 1994). Again, the point here
is not to repeat familiar arguments and criticisms; our attention should
instead be drawn to the particular epistemic position assumed by the theo-
rists of the DPT. From the Heideggerian vantage point, it appears
unequivocally possible to objectively establish the boundaries between
democracies and non-democracies. Perhaps the best way to problematise
this move in terms of its political as well as philosophical implications is to
remember that ‘democracy’ is an ‘essentially contested concept’, a con-
cept, in other words, that defies a closure through fixed definition (Gallie
1955/1956).5 These concepts defy any such fixation, as they are an essen-
tial part of the political contestations that they on the surface seem to only
describe or analyse. The uses of the concept ‘democracy’ in political dis-
course are therefore always political themselves, as they privilege one par-
ticular instantiation of it over others, thus legitimizing one form over its
alternatives. Thus, the liberal definition of democracy cannot claim any
universal applicability. As Gallie (1955/1956) points out, claims about
this particular definition

reflect our grasp of a particular historical truth […] as to how democracy has
taken root and flourished in the west. But if they are put forward as universal
political truths expressing the necessary conditions of any genuinely demo-
cratic aspirations or achievements, then they are surely open to question.
(p. 185 [fn. 3])

The consequences of the identification of ‘democracy’ as an essentially

contested concept are also relevant for our assessment of DPT. Firstly, it is
logically impossible to adjudicate between contending claims of what

 The following argument draws on Bishai and Behnke (2007).

5
96  A. BEHNKE

democracy really is. What this position cannot acknowledge is the way in
which the non/democratic identity of a regime is a product of inter-­
subjective negotiations and assessments, translating the features of a for-
eign regime in highly politicised fashion (Oden 1995). Secondly, the
assumption of a ‘scientific perspective’ only offers another reordered
structure of complexity.

To the extent that the investigator stakes out a position on these conceptual
contests and we know about it, he can be said to participate in our politics
itself. For these contests over the correct use of partly shared appraisal con-
cepts are themselves an intrinsic part of politics. (Connolly 1993, p. 39)

DPT, in other words, deconstructs itself. Its self-understanding as a

scientifically detached and objectified stance outside the political pro-
cesses, through which the meaning of ‘democracy’ is established, becomes
itself as political a move as the distinction between democracy and
its others.
Finally, social constructivism (here in the modernist Wendtian guise)
considers identity as the outcome of processes of symbolic interactions in
which their relationships as ‘enemies’, ‘rivals’ or ‘friends’ are established.6
This sounds promising enough, as it suggests a ‘worlded’ view of the
establishment of identities between ontologically equal entities that
encounter each within a ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’, Heideggerian
structure. Alas, Wendt’s (1999) explicit commitment to ‘modernism’ and
rejection of ‘postmodernism’ puts him firmly into the position of
Heideggerian Man. Firstly, his constructivism in fact presupposes what it
claims is produced in the symbolic exchanges: a common code according
to which the participants’ signs can be encoded and decoded. For Wendt,
it is therefore unambiguously clear what counts as a hostile or a friendly
gesture.
Secondly, social constructivism insists on the ontological priority of
material reality and thus of ‘objective’ identities. Nowhere does this
become clearer than in Wendt’s problematic discussion of the ‘first
encounter’ between Aztecs and Spaniards. A puzzle appears in his reading

6
 This discussion focuses explicitly on the modernist variation of Social Constructivism as
prominently endorsed by Alexander Wendt (1999). For a wider critique of his approach, see
Guzzini and Leander (2006). For a useful general exposition of the different versions of
Social Constructivism, see Fierke (2016), for a discussion of different notions of translation
within these different versions, see the editors’ Introduction (Capan et al. 2021).
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  97

of this encounter: how was it possible that Montezuma and his army were
destroyed by a Spanish army 100 times smaller than his own?

The realist answer is that Montezuma was simply wrong: the Spaniards were
not gods [the representation of ‘his choice’], and had come instead to con-
quer his empire. Had Montezuma adopted this alternative representation of
what the Spanish were, he might have prevented this outcome because that
representation would have corresponded more to reality. (Wendt
1999, p. 56)

A truly ‘worlded’ approach to identity would understand that ‘choices’

of representations are culturally contingent rather than universal and that
it is probably precisely the Aztecs’ interpretation of the Spaniards as
(vengeful) gods that explains their demise (Sárváry 2006, p. 172). Wendt’s
re-assertion of the Heideggerian position, while necessitated by his com-
mitment to the notion of a material and objective reality out of which
agents choose (more or less correct) representations of the other, in fact
makes it impossible for him to understand the particular drama that
unfolded between the Spaniards and the Aztecs. A sensitivity to the ‘lat-
eral’ and ‘liminal’ negotiation of identities is replaced by scientific hind-
sight, or perhaps rather ‘Heideggerian oversight’, that cannot reproduce
the very contextuality of the encounter and the processes of translation
involved in the (violent) encounter.

The Politics of Translation

What unites the three mainstream approaches to IR discussed above is
their common assumption that no translation is needed in international
politics. The inter- is superseded and transcended by the arrogation of an
epistemic position from which all cultures appear as part of the world as
Vor-stellung, and while these cultures index difference, knowledge about
them represents them as identical in this difference. In other words, their
particularities can be ascertained in a universal fashion.7 Yet this episte-
mological stance itself becomes political: by denying that translation is a

7
 See the editors’ critical discussion of ‘translation as transfer’ based on an ‘assumed shared
referent that stands outside all languages as a tertium comparationis’ in the Introduction.
Unlike the editors, I locate this referent in the Heideggerian epistemological position rather
than ‘in a world out there’.
98  A. BEHNKE

problem in the first place, one particular translation—in this case, the
Western one—becomes hegemonic and totalitarian.
In order to address translation as a central issue in a ‘worlded’ interna-
tional political system, it is useful to consider cultures not as a set of objec-
tive facts and data, but as ‘texts’. This conceptual appropriation builds on
Jacques Derrida’s (1988) definition of ‘text’ that extends beyond the quo-
tidian understanding of the term:

[Text] is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to dis-
course, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbolic, ideal, or
ideological sphere. What I call ‘text’ implies all the structures called ‘real’,
‘economic’, ‘historical’, socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents.
Another way of recalling once again that “there is nothing outside the text”.
That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in
a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to
have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality
has the structure of a differential trace; and that one cannot refer to this
‘real’ except in an interpretive experience. (p. 148)

A number of points emerge as central here. Firstly, our existence within

cultures involves a constant reading and writing of the text that gives our
lives meaning and purpose. Our very agency is tied up in this ‘text’; and
however ‘creative’ we are, we can never escape it into a position that tran-
scends all cultural con/texts. Secondly, the encounter/clash of cultures/
civilisations involves and requires a translation of the respective texts. As
reality is open only to interpretive experience, the experience of the ‘oth-
er’s’ text requires that we invest that text with ‘our’ intelligibility. This
process of translation, however, is further complicated by the observation
that meaning is not produced in a system of presences, where concepts
refer to pre-existing entities, but within a system of difference or, in
Derrida’s words, ‘différance’. Meaning emerges in language not because
the latter refers to an ontologically prior entity or signified; ‘but because
language accrues, through fairly regulated repetition of signifiers in a gen-
eral code, certain instituted meaning effects’ (Davis 2001, p. 23; emphasis
in the original). Meaning can be stabilised through these effects, but it
never fully escapes the play of signifiers and ‘traces’. In this sense, every
reading or writing is a translation, a re-contextualisation of text that modi-
fies the former as well as the latter. Text becomes meaningful not because
it has but one referent, but because it is iterable in different historical,
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  99

political, social or cultural con/texts. ‘[The] stable elements in language—

which are effects of historical repetition, codification, institutionalization,
etc.—allow access to, but can never completely exhaust, or shut down, the
text’ (Davis 2001, p. 32).
Translation across cultural and linguistic boundaries, however perme-
able these are today, therefore present only another, albeit more complex,
case of a general process of meaning production. While we may assume
that the general code that stabilises meaning within a society or culture is
mostly shared among its members, thus containing the play of signifiers,
across cultures we face the existence of at least two such general codes.
This of course further complicates the process of translation, as we cannot
assume there to be a ‘master code’ that ‘programmes’ the translation
between signifiers across the cultural boundaries. The tower of Babel, after
all, was never completed; the world as Vor-stellung is therefore not avail-
able. Only with such a biblical accomplishment would it be conceivable
that ‘the signified could be transcendental, and language could become
singular and thus totalitarian, in all senses of that word’ (Davis 2001,
p. 45; emphasis in the original).

The desire for total translatability, which has always been the desire of
Western metaphysics, is a desire to reign, or dominate. The impositions of
truth-systems (establishing ‘kingdoms of presence’) upon others has struc-
tured the violence of human history. In subverting the very ground of such
systems, deconstruction [and translation] is deeply political. (ibid., p. 46)

The absence of a ‘tower of Babel’, of a master code that could provide

a warrant for a direct and correct translation, opens up the space for the
interplay of the political and ethics in the relationship between cultures.
Firstly, the translator has to ‘decide the undecidable’, i.e., to formulate a
translation that cannot pass through a predetermined, ‘pre-decided’ pas-
sage. Rather, the task is to decide upon the appropriate or ‘relevant’ trans-
lation of the foreign text. ‘A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of
the undecidable would not be a free decision; it would only be the pro-
grammable application or unfolding of a calculable process’ (Derrida
1992, p. 24). The translator’s decisions negotiate a crucial aporia between
the culturally embedded texts:

They obviously cannot take place fully outside the rules and norms of a
specific context (for example, we cannot translate at all without relying on
100  A. BEHNKE

particular language systems and rhetorical conventions), but they nonethe-

less must go beyond, rather than owe themselves fully to the limits of an
already established order. (Davis 2001, p. 93)

The aporetic decision thus introduces the political nature of translation

and inter-cultural conduct. How we translate the texts of other cultures
becomes a problematique that cannot revert to the Western metaphysics
of presence. Cultures are not simply there, as modernist IR theories sug-
gest; nor are the words and vocabularies to make sense of them clear,
unambiguous or universal.
The aporetic decision crucially also involves an ethical choice, or rather,
it opens up the space for such a choice. The presence of a master code that
would transcend the respective cultural con/texts would in fact ‘collapse
the difference between self and other, reducing them to the “same”’
(Davis 2001, p. 96). What is required instead is an ethics that goes beyond
the ‘recognition of the other’. As Simon Critchley (1999) states in his
reading of Derrida,

Such an ethics would not be based upon the recognition of the other, which
is always self-recognition, but would rather begin with the expropriation of
the self in the face of the other’s approach. Ethics would begin with the
recognition that the other is not an object of cognition or comprehension,
but precisely that which exceeds my grasp and powers. (p. 14)

The translator’s decisions are therefore facing an ethical aporia that

maps onto the political one described above: to make the other familiar to
‘us’, while at the same time acknowledging and preserving the sense of
‘otherness’ of the foreign culture that escapes our understanding. While
closing the gap between cultures, such a translation also maintains a dis-
tance that militates against the absorbing of the other into the self, and at
the same time rejects any facile surrender on our part out of a hyperbolic
sense of ‘responsibility to the other’. As Kathleen Davis (2001, p. 106) has
observed, both self and other ‘emerge with the initiating gesture of trans-
lation’, thus neither subject can claim ontological or ethical primacy. The
‘wholly other’ is what is created in the decisions on how to translate, what
the decision excludes by necessity and which constitutes a remainder that
constantly undermines any sense of finality or closure for the transla-
tion event.
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  101

What makes a translation ‘relevant’, what elevates it beyond calculation

and established possibilities is its response to the singular in the event. As
such, it opens up new intelligibilities between cultures by affecting extant
codes of understanding.
Understanding the intrinsic ethical aspect of translation, we can begin
to appreciate the peculiar archaic definition of ‘translate’ in the Oxford
English Dictionary (2019) that follows more contemporary entries: ‘16.
To transport ... with the strength of some emotion; to captivate or inspire.
Now archaic’.
The commitment to ‘elevate’ the translation event into a creative inter-
vention in inter-cultural relations by passing through the political and
ethical aporia that defines the condition of its possibility therefore does
more than ‘convey’, ‘transfer’ or ‘transport’ given linguistic or semiotic
items from one culture to another. Rather, translation becomes a raptur-
ous, entrancing event in which the play of creatively re-casting well-worn
assumptions and pre-judgements about cultures makes possible the emer-
gence of new intelligibilities and familiarities in the never-ceasing dynam-
ics of différance. In the following, this argument will draw on a fashion
video and an interview that accompanied a runway show, as well as a fash-
ion exhibition. They all refer to the influence of Chinese historical dress-­
codes on Western fashion designers’ imagination and inspiration. Fashion,
as will hopefully become clear, is both an example as well as a paradigm for
the (sublime) translation of cultural texts.

Of Looking Glasses, Dreams and ‘China’

On the occasion of its Pre-Fall 2010 fashion show ‘Paris-Shanghai’ in
December 2009, the House of Chanel published a set of videos on its
homepage. One is a (not all that compelling) movie about a ‘dream’ that
Coco Chanel has about a fantasy trip to China, the other contains an
interview with Chanel’s then head designer and creative director, Karl
Lagerfeld, in which he provides some commentary about the runway
show and the inspiration for the Chanel movie. Let us begin with a brief
review of the former, which depicts a trip that ‘Coco Chanel only made in
her dreams’ (Chanel 2009a). The movie begins in Chanel’s studio on Rue
Cambon in Paris, where she meets the Duchess of Windsor for a fitting.
Inspired by the Duchess’ reminiscences about her time in China, after her
departure Coco Chanel repairs to her private chambers and falls into a
dream that takes her to different eras and episodes in ‘China’. Moving
102  A. BEHNKE

from an exchange with young Chinese revolutionaries in the time of the

Cultural Revolution, in which she admires their revolutionary outfits as
inspirations for her next runway show, to scenes inspired by the 1932
Dietrich-von Sternberg Hollywood movie Shanghai Express (Paramount
Pictures 1932), encounters with a young Wallis Simpson in a gambling
hall, and finally, a meeting with the Empress and Emperor of China at
court, the film lacks a coherent narrative, casts Western actors/models as
Chinese characters, and reduces ‘Chinese culture’ to a superficial, quite
‘orientalist’, reservoir for Chanel’s fashion designs. The film certainly does
not warrant second screenings. Or as LHM Ling (2016) writes in
her review,

I neither excuse nor commend Lagerfeld’s film. Even for 22 minutes, it

drags on dully. What I take from the film, instead, is its amusing ridiculous-
ness. In it, Lagerfeld seems to parody the European Self’s stereotyping of
the Chinese Other. Looking at how Europeans ‘tr[y] to look Chinese’, he
subjects the European gaze to a European gaze, winking: I know exactly how
you think about China and the Chinese because I’ve thought the same myself,
and, by the way, aren’t we ridiculous? Coco Chanel fronts the charade but
Lagerfeld is really representing himself. As a world-class expert at illusion
and fantasy, he is precisely not subject to being deluded and fantasti-
cal. (p. 82)

However, Ling’s commentary on the ‘ridiculousness’ of the movie only

partially captures the true subversion it offers. This gesture is better cap-
tured through the notion of ‘irony’. What is crucial here is not the unsat-
isfactory format and substance of the film. Rather, it is the particular ironic
attitude towards the desire to know the other, to penetrate and under-
stand correctly what Chinese culture is all about. All that ‘China’ is, and
all that it can be, the video suggests, is a composite of ideas about it in our
own mind, a ‘dream’ refracted through our pre-established interests, prej-
udices and our own understanding of our selves. The other, Derrida once
provoked, is but a trace in our own self, the différance to our identity. As
Geoffrey Bennington (2016) summarises Derrida’s contribution to
philosophy,

Derrida’s insight is quite simple, yet in its very simplicity hard to grasp.
Identities in general (of whatever kind, at whatever level) arise out of differ-
ence, but difference is not itself any identity or indeed any thing [sic] at all.
It is not that there are first things, and then differences and relations between
them: the ‘things’ emerge only from the differences and relations, which
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  103

have an absolute priority, and that emergence is never complete. It’s that
insight that led to the neologism différance. In the beginning is différance,
which means that there is no simple beginning or origin. And the différance
never ends, which means that there is no simple end. Derrida’s simple claim,
then, is that nowhere ever is there anything simple. … Things are what they
are only by bearing the trace of what they are not.

‘China’ is therefore ‘Chinese’ because we imagine it as a trace to our

identity; as much as the trace of the other is constitutive to our identity, so
the identity of the other bears the trace of our identity. ‘China’, in other
words, emerges in the event of a translation in which its cultural text
becomes appropriated and made sense of within our established cultural
code. This insight, simple yet hard to grasp, is expressed in Lagerfeld’s
interview that accompanied the publication of the movie:

[KL]: I love 18th-century French chinoiseries. It’s an idea of

China painted by people who never saw China. And that’s
amusing, because there is real imagination. It’s spirited
and light. I also enjoy having non-Chinese playing
Chinese. It’s not necessarily a Chinese singing Turandot.
It’s amusing. The influence and spirit of China provide
inspiration, which must be developed. Otherwise, it’s
folklore.
[Interviewer]: Coco Chanel never went to China. And yet she was
steeped in a love of China.
[KL]: Sometimes the idea of things is more creative than the real-
ity. All the same, China has always been present in art,
decoration, bronze, Coromandel screens… The French
have always loved Chinese art. This part of the world
provided inspiration for decorative arts in Europe from
the 17th and 18th centuries. Chanel had Chinese art in
her houses. (Chanel 2009b; emphases added)

No, Karl Lagerfeld is not a philosopher of knowledge, and yet a gener-

ous reading of his comments does provide central insights into trans-­
cultural exchange and translation. Much like Coco Chanel, we (Westerners)
‘never saw China’ in an ontological sense. What we make of it, what we
write about it, and how we define it is based on ‘ideas of China’ as the
other, as the trace that can inspire, and indeed requires, the recognition
and conscious ‘development’ of such inspiration as an aesthetic artefact.
104  A. BEHNKE

And as such, it is more ‘creative’ or productive than any reference to ‘real-

ity’ can ever be. The ‘idea of things’, refracted through our own identity,
interests and pre-judgements, produces after all the ‘thing’ we take to be
‘China’. What Lagerfeld acknowledges here is Critchley’s exposition of
Derrida’s ethics: ultimately, China remains outside of our cognition or
comprehension. This, indeed, is the very condition of ‘China’ being a
source of inspiration for Western fashion.
No amount of methodology training can move us away from this epis-
temic and ethical conundrum. At the same time, we must not reduce
‘China’ to folklore, to a cliché within our own cultural text, to unproduc-
tive and uncreative kitsch. For it to work as an inspiration, for it to affect
and transform our cultural text and to enable the play of signifiers beyond
that code, ‘China’ needs to remain the ‘other’. Notes Davis, ‘translation
transforms the receiving language as well as the original because through
it different, incommensurate signifying systems interact, and because the
translated foreign text necessarily performs new meanings in the target
system’ (Davis 2001, p. 41; emphasis added).
There is therefore another element in Lagerfeld’s statement that bears
emphasising: the joyful assertion of this play of identity and différance, of
acknowledging the debt otherness pays to identity. In other words, the
inability to know the ‘real’ China does not produce a debilitating void in
our methodological claims about inter-cultural exchange and translation.
Rather, it defines the very condition of possibility for such an exchange. It
is only when we rescind any heroic claims that we know the world and its
cultures ‘as they are’ that we can begin to explore the political nature of
inter-cultural relations and how aesthetics/fashion is constitutive of them.
We can provide a bit more philosophical depth by moving from Chanel’s
2009 ‘2010 Pre-Fall runway’ to the New York Metropolitan Museum of
Art’s 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass (Metropolitan
Museum of Art 2015). One of the most successful and popular exhibitions
at the museum, it displayed numerous Chinese dresses of different eras
and regions next to the contemporary Western designs they inspired.
The point of the exhibition is to overcome the traditional ‘politicised’
understandings of Orientalism and to open up new avenues for appreciat-
ing the (mutual) inspiration that fashion has provided for designers in
both China and the West (Bolton 2015; cf. Ling 2016). As noted above,
the ethical commitment to a ‘relevant’ or elevating translation between
cultural texts concerns the aporetic space between these texts and the play
between intelligibility and foreignness for both sides. In perhaps its most
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  105

impressive form, illustrating this relational dynamic of identity and differ-

ence, Chinese designer Guo Pei’s sweeping gold-lamé gown references
and appropriates a Western form of gown, with its texture, colour and
lotus blossom shape itself inspired by Chinese sartorial and cultural tradi-
tions (Image 5.1).
As the catalogue explains,

Image 5.1  Gold-lamé dress designed by Guo Pei. (Photograph by Andreas

Behnke; reproduced with permission from Guo Pei Paris)
106  A. BEHNKE

In this dress by the Chinese designer Guo Pei, Buddhist iconography pro-
vides the primary source of inspiration. The bodice is shaped like a lotus
flower, which is one of the eight Buddhist symbols and represents spiritual
purity and enlightenment. The motif is also embroidered onto the skirt. In
an act of Occidentalism, the shape of the skirt, which has no archetypes in
Eastern dress traditions, is based on the inflated crinoline silhouette that
emerged as modish apparel in the West in the 1850s. (Met 2015)

What this dress displays is therefore the persistent deferral and differ-
ence of the trace of the other, playing back and forth between cultures: a
Chinese designer ‘tracing’ Western sartorial forms which are themselves
tracing Chinese influences.
To appreciate fashion as a medium of cultural translation militates
against any essentialisation or ‘contextualisation’ of culture. What we see
is what there is to see, cultural signs refer to no deeper meaning, history
or ‘identity’ as realists, liberals or social constructivists would have us
believe. The other, in this case China, presents us with an ‘Empire of
Signs’ (Barthes 2005) in which the other appears via its cultural significa-
tions that refer to no ‘real’ entity. In a similar vein, the fashion exhibited at
the Met does not refer to a ‘real’ China—as argued before, no such thing
is available to us. Instead, we are confronted with, or rather, immersed in,
sartorial signs that appear as traces in contemporary Western fashion
designs, only to reappear in Chinese designs that cite and ‘translate’
Western fashion styles. In the exhibition’s curator’s voice,

A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free asso-

ciations. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated. As if by magic,
the psychological distance between East and West, spanning worldviews that
are often perceived as monolithic and diametrically opposed, diminishes. …
As … binaries dissolve and disintegrate, the notion of Orientalism is disen-
tangled from its connotation of Western domination and discrimination.
Instead of silencing the other, Orientalism becomes an active, dynamic two-­
way conversation, a liberating force of cross-cultural communication and
representation. (Bolton 2015, p. 18)

And further: ‘As Japan was for Barthes, China for [the contemporary
Western designers] is a country of free-floating signs (signs, after all,
assume a life of their own once they are released into the world). In the
world of fashion, China is a land in which postmodernity finds its natural
expression’ (ibid., p. 20).
 5  FASHIONING THE OTHER: FASHION AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY…  107

The opening up of the narrative, political and ethical space between

cultures, the space within which their ‘approximation’ becomes possible,
depends—ironically, perhaps—upon a commitment to epistemic ‘distance’
as a recognition of the impossibility of gaining ‘true’ knowledge. While
Heideggerian Man and his claim to a ‘close knowledge’ with regard to
other cultures more often than not alienates and distances these, a ‘post-
modern’ semiotics of cultural exchange and translation recognises the
other as the inescapable trace within our identity, as the inspiration for our
own fabrication of culture.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Politics of Fashioning

Self and Other
It would be overly simplistic to argue for a causal relationship between
epistemic position and political strategies with regards to the relationship
between cultures. The idea that ‘China’ is an imagined entity produced
through the creative play and interaction of signifiers without a signified
does not in itself offer alternative ways to negotiate cooperation and con-
flict in inter-national politics. Yet a couple of philosophical and ethical
arguments suggest themselves.
Firstly, a ‘postmodern’ interpretation of the fashioning of identity and
difference responds to the demand to ‘world’ the Western subject better
than any of the traditional approaches. If indeed Heidegger’s Man is no
longer the centre of our epistemology of life-worlds, if the West can no
longer assume a position outside the world, then the recognition of the
mutually constitutive and productive relationships between cultures
becomes as much an epistemic as an ethical issue. To return to the ques-
tion posed above on how we translate the languages of others and of
otherness into our own conceptual and cultural framework, the answer
starts with the acknowledgement that translation becomes mutual ‘trans-
formation’ as both self and other emerge as ontologically unstable prod-
ucts of reiterative processes of translation.
Secondly, whereas the essentialisation and reification of identity as
deployed by mainstream IR theories necessitates an antagonistic relation-
ship between ‘civilisations’, the rejection of such processes and the insis-
tence on the ‘fashioned’ nature of identity opens up theoretical, political
and ethical space for the fabrication of different and potentially more pro-
ductive relationships. At a minimum, the question to what extent ‘Chinese’
108  A. BEHNKE

or any other culture is itself partly constituted via the traces of Western
identity, politics and violence which provide a peculiar ‘fabric’ for its pro-
duction is worth considering. On the other hand, a consideration of the
presence of the other in our cultural productions of identity would spell a
more sophisticated understanding of the traces of our own identity as
reflected back upon us by the traces of the other.
Finally, the reading proposed here cannot be reduced to an ‘alternative’
to the traditional approaches. Much as fashion is inescapable in the daily
fabrication of our social identities (you may not care about fashion, but
fashion, much like politics, always cares about you), so it works in the
theoretical construction of self and other. Therefore, we need to investi-
gate the fashioning of cultural identities in realism, liberalism and con-
structivism. Contrary to their essentialist claims, a critical and close reading
will reveal and deconstruct the inevitable play of identity and difference in
their texts. Whether it is Huntington’s ‘civilised’ realism in which the West
is ultimately defined by what it is not, or the spectral and thinly defined
other of the Democratic Peace Theory which appears as little more than
‘non-democratic’, the fabric of identities is always already shot through
with the traces of the other. The argument here appropriates the ‘fashion
system’s’ appreciation of this play of signs and signifiers and attempts to
turn it into a productive aspect of inter-national politics. Whether IR
scholars who are fickle at best, and hostile at worst when it comes to fash-
ion, will heed this argument remains of course to be seen.

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