INTERMEDIAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO HISTORIOGRAPHICAL RELATIONSHIPS

 Introduction: Coercion and Wage Labour in History and Art

Anamarija Batista, Viola Franziska Müller and Corinna Peres

This book explores the manifold ways in which coercion has occurred in and through remunerated labour. Covering a variety of historical periods and places brought together for the first time, it does so in a unique way by mobilising an interdisciplinary dialogue. Texts by historians and social scientists are accompanied by a series of images specifically created by illustrators that visualise and interpret the main messages. Other chapters written by art scholars draw on image material such as photographic portraits, film and exhibition posters to discuss how coercion in remunerated labour has been constructed and reflected in artistic practice. This book thus offers three means of knowledge production and reception: 1) through the academic text, which develops its argument successively word by word; 2) through the image, which develops the argument simultaneously and spatially; and 3) through the collaboration of image and text, which develops the argument in a hybrid way.

Two main purposes stand central. First, this book challenges the juxtaposition of wage labour and coerced labour by showing that different mechanisms of coercion have been used in combination with wages over the centuries. Most of the chapters deal with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when wage labour became the dominant form of labour relations in industrialised societies, such as Brazil, the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, North America and contemporary Bangladesh. And yet, wages are an age-old phenomenon, as the chapters on the medieval Frankish empire and Fatimid Egypt and on early modern Tuscany demonstrate. By assembling areas as diverse as textile production, mining, naval and war industries, civil service, domestic work and agriculture, we attempt to renew the scholarly attention to wage labour, which had conceptually been largely separated from coerced labour. To do so, Coercion and Wage Labour scrutinises anew, with a trans-epochal perspective, this ‘traditional’ subject of labour history through the lenses of global labour history.

The second intervention departs from the fact that narrating history in academic disciplines usually takes place in textual form. To challenge this conventional approach, the book places written histories in dialogue with artistic illustrations. This dialogue has two dimensions: the illustrations were created out of the text, while the chapters, in turn, also integrate and reflect on the illustrations. This hybridity of image and text makes it possible to accentuate different aspects. The text weaves dense information about coercion into its argumentation lines, including historical causes, consequences and possible ambiguities. The illustrators, by contrast, selected central aspects of the argument capable of carrying significant parts of the narrative. The direct links between the two media activate diverse interpretations and can draw unexpected parallels between work in past centuries and now.

THE METHOD OF TRANSLATION LOOP: INTERMEDIAL COMMUNICATION

Afterword

Word and image in communication: ‘translation loop’ as a means of historiographical research

Anamarija Batista

The methodology of this volume brings to mind the figure of thought of a ‘translation loop’. Characteristic of this loop process is the exploration of the common topic – coercive relations in the context of gainful employment – based on the method of an intermedial translation of reflections and interpretations. Accordingly, the interplay of the textual and the visible is analysed by continuously correlating, linking and, in doing so, also distorting the reflections on and interpretations of a text or a picture. In an interactive loop, the mechanisms of coercion are recomposed linguistically as well as visually. The commentary, contextualisation and supplementation of both conceptual topologies and visual motifs take place through interactive referencing.[i] At the same time, this type of translation goes hand in hand with the formation of an intermedial hybridity.[ii]

Following Marshall McLuhan, intermedial hybridity can create a line between forms that ultimately results in a ‘moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses’.[iii] The numbness that McLuhan refers to emanates from the representation of contexts in the form of subject-specific motifs and models, around which lines of arguments are drawn continuously. Thereby, necessary deepening and explaining of structures oscillate between the tension of procedural logics of the own discipline and the own medium. In doing so, however, we enter a certain framework that is marked by its own normativity for the development of lines of argumentation. The intermedial production chain proposed here aims to expand mediation formats of the network of historical relations and to put the normativities of the ‘offered’ interpretation into a state of tension. In this process, we did not, however, lay down a guideline for a fixed repertoire of situations or tools for interpretation. Both texts and pictures are considered producers of a common hybridity, which sees the intermedial difference as a potential for questioning and expansion.[iv]

[i]
See Deleuze, Foucault, 86.

[ii]
It is important to note at this point that intermedial hybridity is understood here as an ongoing, one-after-another process of interpretation. In its ‘own’ mode of media-specific translation, interpretation itself embodies the potential of hybridity by weaving the pictorial into the textual and the textual into the pictorial. In doing so, it forms itself neither in the sense of an affirmation nor in the sense of an alliance, but aims to secure the field for a deepening contextualisation through the inclusion of body and space. See, for example, Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’; Bachtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes; Ette, Wirth, Nach der Hybridität: Zukünfte der Kulturtheorie; Kristeva, Die Revolution der poetischen Sprache.

[iii]
McLuhan, Die magischen Kanäle, 66.

[iv]
Mitchell, ‘’Über den Vergleich hinaus: Bild, Text und Methode’’.

Teresa Petrik