Translation as icosis as negentropy  
at the edge of chaos
Douglas Robinson 
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
A B ST RAC T
Kobus Marais’s monograph Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Ap-
proach carves out new territory in translation studies, namely what might be called translational 
development studies – but it also seeks to fuse that new subdiscipline with an invigorated complex-
ity-theoretical framework. This article seeks to promote and advance Marais’s project by offering 
correctives to two areas where his own theoretical framework remains somewhat blurry – in fact, 
undeveloped – namely the translator’s agency and social constructivism. The article explores an 
emergentist theory of “icosis” (somatic plausibilization) as a solution that, like Marais’s own ap-
proach, is steeped in Peircean semeiotic.
Keywords: complexity, development, constructivism, agency, icosis
Prevajanje kot ikoza kot negentropija na robu kaosa
I Z V L EČ E K 
Monografija Kobusa Maraisa z naslovom Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complex-
ity Theory Approach [Teorija prevajanja in razvojne študije: Pristop teorije kompleksnosti] orje le-
dino na novem področju prevodoslovja, ki bi ga lahko poimenovali študije prevodnega razvoja, 
hkrati pa poskuša spojiti to novo podpodročje s prenovljenim okvirom teorije kompleksnosti. V 
članku Maraisovo delo nadgrajujem tako, da ga poskušam dopolniti na dveh področjih, na katerih 
je nekoliko nejasno oziroma celo nedorečeno, in sicer na področju prevajalčeve delovalnosti in so-
cialnega konstruktivizma. V članku raziskujem emergentistično teorijo »ikoze« (somatske plavzi-
bilizacije): ta ponuja rešitev, ki jo podobno kot Maraisov pristop, navdihuje Peircejanska semiotika.
Ključne besede: kompleksnost, razvoj, konstruktivizem, delovalnost, ikoza
97Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
1.  Introduction
I propose in this article to stage an engagement with a single book: Kobus Marais’s 
2014 Routledge monograph Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complex-
ity Theory Approach. I do this not because I want either to attack or to promote the 
book, let alone to offer a fair and balanced review of it, but because I find it an impor-
tant statement that should be transformative for the field of Translation Studies – and 
also because I find it quite problematic in one key area, and I want to dedicate the 
article to the sketching of a possible solution. 
I want, to put that differently, to participate in the transformative effect that Marais’s 
book should have on the field. I want to enter into a transformative dialogue.
In a sense Marais’s book is three books. The first book, coterminous with Part I, is 
a study of complexity theory: “Toward a Philosophy of Complexity” (Chapter 1), 
“Emergent Semiotics” (Chapter 2), and “Developing Translation Studies” (Chapter 
3). The second book consists of a single chapter, the first chapter in Part II, Chapter 
4: “Translation and Development”. It contains some wide-ranging summaries of the 
tensions within development studies, but mainly takes potshots at Western transla-
tion theories as “constructivist” – which he takes to mean that the descendants of 
European colonizers believe they have the power to create and shape reality. The third 
book, covering the rest of the monograph, Chapters 5-7, consists of a series of empir-
ical research reports conducted by Marais and his students in South Africa, mostly 
mappings of what got translated by whom, and in what language pairs.
Specifically, the problem I find in the book is an excluded-middle problem – a per-
sistent, though not ubiquitous, binarization of options that both (a) takes the classic 
form binaries usually take in hegemonic Western thought, namely ME vs. NOT-ME, 
a.k.a. “the right way” (mine) vs. “the wrong way” (all those other translation scholars 
out there), and (b) employs the dread non distributio medii, the shunting over into 
opposite poles of everything messy in the middle. One might be inclined to shrug this 
off as par for the course, what one would normally expect in an academic treatise of 
this sort – except that Marais’s core complexity-theoretical message in the book is that 
binaries are (to overdramatize slightly) enemy territory:
In my view, the paradigm of simplicity is the cause of the binary thinking 
that dominates the reductionist paradigm. As Morin (2008, 39) argues, 
this paradigm can see the one and the many, but it cannot see that the one 
is simultaneously the many. It can see phenomena, but it cannot see, or 
at least it cannot theorize, the interrelatedness of all phenomena (Morin 
2008, 84). Put differently, it can see parts and it can see wholes, but it 
98 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
cannot see the interrelationships between parts and parts and between 
parts and wholes. The simplicity paradigm cannot see that difference is 
similarity and that the universal is the particular. In short, it cannot deal 
with complexity, or paradox. (Marais 2014, 20)
The simplicity paradigm vs. the complexity paradigm: not perhaps the best logical 
format to impose on an argument against binary thinking! 
In one sense, of course, it is clear that Marais faces an argumentative impasse: he sees 
all the ways in which scholars have failed to address the complexity of translation, and 
sees why – their/our unthinking adherence to the reductionist models that have dom-
inated Western thought since Plato – and wants to correct the errors. This is of course 
a standard impulse in academic discourse: there is all this wrongness, but fortunately, 
finally, I am here to rescue us. How else does one justify the writing and publication 
of books and articles? What else is there to say, in the end, what else is worth saying, 
besides “they’re wrong and I’m right”? And yet, awkwardly, what Marais is right about 
is the clutch of oversimplifications and overstabilizations attendant upon the impulse 
to binarize argumentation into “they’re wrong and I’m right”. 
The fact is, I agree with both sides in this impasse: I agree that Marais is right about the 
need for complexity theory, and I agree that binary polemics are both a very bad way 
to argue for complexity theory and, in the end, utterly unavoidable.
What are avoidable, however, I want to suggest, are the specific excluded-middle pit-
falls into which Marais keeps stumbling in formulating his polemics. He does not 
need to caricature his opponents to the extent that he repeatedly does. He does not 
need to reduce their methodological and theoretical preferences – in particular, their/
our constructivism and analyses of translatorial agency – to straw men in order to 
make his case. 
What typically happens, in fact, when he resorts to these extremist strategies, is that 
the position he attacks comes to seem remarkably reminiscent of the position he de-
fends. On the face of it, this is quite astonishing: his extremist caricatures of con-
structivism and translation scholars’ explorations of the translator’s agency, designed 
to render those orientations not just indefensible but ludicrous, seem nonetheless to 
apply unconsciously to his own preferred model.
The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that Marais believes he needs to accuse the 
other side of exaggerating human control of reality – indeed, needs to escalate those 
supposed exaggerations to mythic proportions. His opponents’ conception of agency, 
he thinks, projects onto translators not only fully conscious decision-making but He-
roic Agency, Super-Agency, and that is not only wrong but an expression of Western 
99Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
power and privilege. What drives translation, and all other forms and flows of sociali-
ty, he insists, is not sovereign rationality but the complex structure of open systems. A 
tidy binary: not Lockean liberal agency – King Reason at the helm of the Free White 
European Male – but the nonequilibrium of nonlinear dissipative systems. And his 
opponents’ constructivism, he thinks, similarly entails a belief in the human power to 
create reality ex nihilo, through the sheer force of rationalist Will, and that is a phan-
tasm born of Western colonialism: the delusion conjured up in and by “powerful soci-
eties where people have the power to construct their reality. In a postcolonial context,” 
he adds, “it is an open question whether people have that power” (Marais 2014, 66). 
Only a European or North American would harbor such delusions. Africans, never 
having had that power, are humbler, and so less susceptible to such ignes fatui.
On one page (144) in the book, in fact, early in Part II (the empirical study of devel-
opment and translation in South Africa), while Marais continues to hammer away at 
the colonial delusions of the West, he also tentatively sketches out a middle ground 
between elitist Western agency/constructivism and an utter lack of agency/construc-
tivism – a middle ground that remains agentive but without the kind of Western colo-
nial elitism and activism that Marais finds objectionable in most TS work:1 
Studying development from a translation studies perspective will require 
more thinking on agency. The type of activist agency currently advocat-
ed in translation studies will have to be revisited. As (a part of) transla-
tion studies frees itself from its bondage to critical theory and academic 
activism, it will be able to see that perhaps there are many other ways of 
being agents than being activists. (Marais 2014, 144)
That is still quite denunciatory (“frees itself from its bondage”), but at least now there 
is room for a middle-ground theory of agency that is not instantly shunted over into 
the colonial delusion of omnipotence. Note, however, that Marais does not know what 
that middle ground might consist of: it “will require more thinking,” he says. “The 
type of activist agency currently advocated in translation studies will have to be re-
visited.” There is a potential content to be filled in later – perhaps. Lower down on 
1 In some places Marais finds that “the intricate relationship [between agent and system] 
has been lacking in translation studies” (2014, 44; emphasis added); in others, however, 
he finds that an impressive number of major translation scholars are “interested in the 
relationship between translatorial action and social systems, and their interest goes both 
ways, that is, how the agent influences the system and how the system influences the 
agent” (Marais 2014, 90). Among that latter group he lists Andrew Chesterman, Michael 
Cronin, Johan Heilbron, Anthony Pym, Christina Schäffner, and Michaela Wolf.
100 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
the same page he offers a fuller working out of this two-pronged approach (attack the 
wrong way, hope for some future exploration of the right way):
I thus contend that the focus on agency in translation studies is part of 
a Western analysis of reality. You can only contribute if you are actively 
for or against something. It also rests on a very strong belief that your 
actions matter and that you are in control of history and nature, that is, 
humanism. Nonlinear systems theory relativizes the importance of hu-
man agency. The outcome of your input cannot necessarily be predicted.
I am not arguing that one should forego the notion of agency. What I 
suggest is that we look for other modes of agency, that is, translation that 
serves or translation that builds. These forms of motivation for action are 
also agentive in nature. What I am trying to say is that agency in the criti-
cal theory definition of the word is not necessarily the only kind of agency 
contributing to the construction of social reality. The typical anonymous, 
voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translat-
ing boring municipal regulation after regulation, is contributing as much 
if not more to the construction of social reality than the verbose literary 
translator who performs an aggressive feminine translation of a literary 
classic. Western notions of high visibility, branding, and status should not 
be the only ones defining the agency of translators. (Marais 2014, 144)
That “typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little 
office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”, is here tentatively as-
signed not only agency but the kind of constructivist agency that makes her or him a 
contributor to “the construction of social reality” – precisely what Marais elsewhere 
in the book, by attacking constructivism tout court as an egregious colonial fantasy 
of agentive omnipotence, seems to deny. About the middle ground that he seems to 
be speculatively theorizing, or at least positing, he says only: “The kind of agency 
involved in these actions needs to be thought about, and to refer to Latour (2007), 
agency is the one thing we know virtually nothing about” (Marais 2014, 144).
Offering a tentative suggestion for that middle ground is thus my purpose in this 
article. My brief is that, because Marais does not know how to fill in the gap between 
his binary extremes, he sets a marker for that gap, with every intent of coming back 
to fill it later, but in the meantime keeps falling, as if lured in by some Western fatal 
attractor, into the right-wrong/up-down rhetoric of hierarchical binarization – and, 
therefore, that he could use some help. 
101Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
One way of thematizing Marais’s polemic, as I have suggested, is as the (former) empire 
writing back to the center (see Ashcroft et al., 2002). Another way might be as an histor-
ical mythomachy between the Enlightenment and Romanticism/Idealism, say, between 
Locke’s Aristotle and Hegel’s Aristotle. What Marais really needs in Part I of his book, 
I suggest, is a post-Kantian complexity-theoretical explanation of the human agency 
that constructs reality anywhere and everywhere in the world, so that he does not need 
to rely rhetorically on the heaping of abuse on the Enlightenment/colonial Heroic Su-
per-Agency model that he problematically attributes to his Translation Studies oppo-
nents. Here and there he seems to come close to stumbling upon such an explanation 
– this is the sense in which the positions he attacks uncannily adumbrate the positions 
he defends – but he pointedly, and to my mind self-defeatingly, sidelines the social and 
affective neuroscience that might help him theorize that approach in useful ways.
My version of that neuroscience is what I call icosis, built hegelizingly out of Aristot-
le’s observation that, given a choice between a story that is true but implausible and a 
story that is plausible but untrue, we tend to prefer the latter, because plausibility is a 
sign that the story has been vetted by the community.2 “Things that are plausible” in 
Aristotle’s Attic Greek are ta eikota; by Latinizing eikos “plausible” as icos-, I derive the 
coinage “icosis” for the communal process of “plausibilization”. Icosis in my theori-
zation is the fourth stage of somatic theory, following (1) Antonio Damasio’s somatic 
markers, which stabilize what we have learned from experience by reminding us of 
those lessons somatically (Descartes’ Error); (2) what I call the somatic or somatomi-
metic transfer, also borrowed from Damasio (Feeling), where the stabilizing force of 
somatic markers is circulated from body to body through the mimetic power of the 
mirror neurons; and (3) the somatic exchange, in which the dyadic somatic transfer is 
almost simultaneously reticulated throughout an entire group, so that everyone feels, 
say, the “same” collective approval or disapproval of a given action or attitude. Through 
that (1-2-3) group somaticization process, then, (4) group norms are socio-affectively 
stabilized and plausibilized (“icotized”) as truths, realities, stable identities.
2 I first developed this icotic model in the writing of The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius 
and Aristotle, which began life as a monograph on Aristotle’s Rhetoric back in 2009. When 
I moved to Hong Kong in 2010, I began studying Mencius or Mengzi, and got so excited 
about the parallels between Mengzi’s somatic theory and my own, and between Mengzi’s 
rhetoric and Aristotle’s, that I completely overhauled the book and made it East-West-
comparative. Because of editorial delays at the press, the Deep Ecology book (2016) came 
out after I had already launched the model it inspired, in Schleiermacher’s Icoses (2013c) 
and The Dao of Translation (2015).
The groundwork for the somatic theory on which icosis builds was laid in The Transla-
tor’s Turn (1991), and further developed in Performative Linguistics (2003), Estrangement 
(2008), Feeling Extended (2013b), Displacement (2013a), Sway (2011), and Dao.
102 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
Such icotic stabilizations and plausibilizations are channels of human agency, and 
they have the effect of constructing reality – but they are complex dissipative systems 
that are out of equilibrium and therefore always susceptible to symmetry-breaking 
events, and they mostly operate so far below the level of conscious awareness that 
they usually seem mysterious to us, like the operation of some nonhuman “force” 
like God or Truth that simply imposes objective reality on us.3 I offer Marais icosis, 
which maps the middle he excludes, as a solution to his binarization problem: it is a 
human constructivist agency that is also an Aristotelian/post-Kantian complex adap-
tive system characterized, as Marais would say, summarizing John Holland, by (1) 
aggregation (“the complex, large-scale behavior that emerges from the interactions of 
less complex agents” [33]), (2) nonlinearity, (3) flow (“the resource thus flows from 
node to node via a connector with the nodes acting as agents and the connectors as 
possible interactions” [33]), and (4) diversity (“one finds parts of different nature or 
agents of different nature” [34]). I will return in the Conclusion to consider the Deleu-
zian implications of this model.
Note, however, what I am not saying: my brief is not that Marais is wrong and I am 
right. My brief is rather that Marais is right about almost everything, and wrong about 
this one tiny detail. My correction is dwarfed by his rightness, but also participates ad-
miringly in his project by helping him move past this one self-limiting argumentative 
strategy. That arguably does not quite rescue me from the binarizing implications of 
the “you’re wrong and I’m right” rhetoric of academic discourse – I’m still correcting 
Marais – but my correction serves to bring Marais’s complexity theory of translation 
into better and stronger alignment with complexity theory, and so strengthens his ar-
gument. It is corrective support for an argument that is itself a complex adaptive sys-
tem that by definition is out of equilibrium. My support is an attempt to buttress that 
equilibrium. Because it is an intensification of the argumentative system’s negentropy 
at the edge of chaos, however, and because negentropy is not a state but a homeostat-
ic sorting conduit that does not just export chaos and import order to keep its own 
entropy low but also imports what it guesses might be the right quantity of chaos in 
order to keep its entropy hopping, the equilibrizing/organizing/structuring effort of 
my support for Marais’s argument is not proof against chaotic collapse. So far from 
3 Another word for those complex systems of human nonconscious agency in the West 
would be Hegel’s Geist, usually translated as “spirit” or “mind,” which is actually the by-
product of human action in the aggregate. In ancient Chinese thought, those systems are 
typically called 天 tian “heaven” (Confucians) and 道 dao “way-making” (Daoists). Both 
天 tian and 道 dao are often mistakenly deified in the popular imagination, but in the 
ancient texts they actually mean something like mysterious doings/forces that we do not 
understand and cannot control. See my Dao and Deep Ecology for discussion.
103Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
seeking to establish a stable right-or-wrong binary, in other words, I am pursuing 
diversity along the nonlinear flows of Marais’s argument, seeking to aggregate the in-
teractions of his less complex arguments into enhanced equilibrium on a higher level. 
2.  Agency
The two points on which I offer correctives to Marais’s argument here, then, are agen-
cy and constructivism. The common ground undergirding both correctives is my 
sense that Marais wants to assign too much Enlightenment/empiricist/reason-based 
agency to his opponents and to claim too little Romantic/Idealist/affect-based agency 
for his own argument. 
2.1  Systems without human agency
Let me begin by noting that his defense of complexity theory tends to be based on ex-
amples of pre-social – physical, chemical, biological – systems without human agency. 
This, I admit, is a somewhat tendentious claim, since Marais does everywhere stress 
the importance of “the mind/brain/individual as the basic level from which social 
phenomena emerge, itself emerging from physical, chemical, and biological substra-
ta” (Marais 2014, 110, and see section 2.2, below). Somehow, however, whenever he 
describes such emergences in translation and other social phenomena, the negentrop-
ic organizing effects of human social complex adaptive systems tend to be presented 
rhetorically as if they proceeded non-agentively:
Open systems are governed not by the second law of thermodynamics, 
that is, entropy, but by negentropy. This means that they do not decay 
into chaos but maintain their organization by interacting with their en-
vironment. Whereas entropy tends toward dissipating the differences 
on which structure and order are built, negentropy tends to lead to the 
maintenance of difference (M. Taylor, 2001, 119–21).
Negentropy is the reason why two people cannot produce the same 
translation. Human beings are not closed systems; thus, their thoughts 
and interpretations cannot be predicated based on initial conditions. 
Being open systems, the same stimuli, such as a text, could give rise to 
widely differing interpretations and thus translations because the initial 
conditions in two brains can never be the same. Translation is thus not 
a process of which one can predict the outcome; translational action can 
only produce probable outcomes. One cannot predict how two transla-
104 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
tors will translate or what effects a translation would have in a society. 
The laws of prediction have to be replaced by laws of probability. In this 
respect, a field such as translation studies has much to learn from the 
conceptualization of complexity theorists. (Marais 2014, 32–3)
The problem there, I suggest, is that in Marais’s account the “initial conditions” out 
of which translations emerge are not agentive minds but the physical, chemical, and 
biological substrata of minds, namely brains: “the same stimuli, such as a text, could 
give rise to widely differing interpretations and thus translations because the initial 
conditions in two brains can never be the same.” Human “thoughts and interpretations” 
arise unpredictably out of those cerebral initial conditions; and translations, rather 
than emerging unpredictably out of divergent mental agencies as initial conditions, 
would appear to be among those “thoughts and interpretations”. In other words, the 
differences between translations have to do not with the different translators’ diver-
gent kinesthetic-becoming-affective-becoming-conative(-becoming-cognitive) ex-
periences and experientially guided inclinations, but with the different initial neural 
conditions in their brains. Another binary.
Not only that: despite what Marais notes about the power of mind to effect downward 
causation on reality (Marais 2014, 67), presumably including the physical reality of the 
brain, there is apparently no downward causation here. All causation is upward, from 
the brain to thoughts/interpretations/translations. This is rather surprising in light of 
the “fact” – or rather, Marais’s rhetorical framing – that brain-based “negentropy is the 
reason why two people cannot produce the same translation”: negentropy, after all, the 
organizational sorting that systems do “at the edge of chaos” (Stuart Kauffman’s pithy 
phrase from At Home in the Universe), is the maximization of stability and equilibri-
um in a system. By rights it should be the reason why two people can produce similar 
translations despite divergent brain structures! If it is because of negentropy that the 
linguistic, cultural, and professional skill-sets of translators “do not decay into chaos but 
maintain their organization by interacting with their environment”, presumably those 
negentropic interactions are in large part mental interactions with the linguistic, cultur-
al, and professional environment. The professional negentropy of translators obviously 
has a lot to do with language-learning, training, mastery of marketplace norms, and so 
on, which, as Daniel Simeoni noted back in the late 1990s, shapes/structures/stabilizes 
(exerts partial/imperfect downward causation on) both the linguistic, cultural, and pro-
fessional environment and the brain shaped by that environment: “Translators govern 
norms as much as their behavior is governed by them” (Simeoni 1998, 24). The fact that 
what is stabilized, organized, equilibrized in these interactions tends to be partly idio-
syncratic – or what back in The Translator’s Turn I dubbed “idiosomatic” – does justify 
105Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
Marais’s observation that “negentropy tends to lead to the maintenance of difference”; 
but that tendency is the unstable and unpredictable result of interactions not just with 
stabilizing forces in the professional environment, but with entropic forces as well, in-
cluding divergent brain structures, no doubt, but also transient states of body and mind 
such as alertness and exhaustion, hunger and thirst and a full bladder, and distracting 
neural excitations from loud jarring noises, physical commotions, and unresolved emo-
tional issues. The symmetry-breaking distractions of a new love affair are very different 
from the symmetry-breaking distractions of a crushingly bitter break-up. The trans-
lator’s negentropic “sorting” of entropic forces “at the edge of chaos” is obviously an 
agentive effort to master the chaos, to impose sufficient “structure and order” to get the 
job not only done but done well – and just as obviously that effort only ever succeeds in 
part. Translation, like any social activity, is a dissipative system not because it is roiled 
with chaos but because it can never perfectly banish chaos. And while the translator, like 
any other social actor, is not always aware of working to banish chaos – to impose order 
on the internal and external environment – it would be inaccurate to deny that work 
“agency” on the grounds of insufficient awareness.
Marais’s rhetorical inclination to deemphasize translatorial agency is also reflected, 
it seems to me, in his insistence that “the laws of prediction have to be replaced by 
laws of probability”. Probability is a mathematical concept designed to measure blind 
chance. In the world of “laws of probability”, agency is a human intervention that 
skews measurement – like saying: “Watch me toss this coin ten times and catch it so 
that I get heads at least eight tosses out of the ten.” In icotic theory, you will recall, the 
counterpart term is “plausibility”: is it plausible that someone could catch a tossed 
coin accurately enough to raise the probability of heads from .5 to .8? Plausibility is 
a measure not of mathematical likelihood but of group normativization – how well 
the members of a group have been conditioned to accept collectively normativized 
opinions as truths and realities.
But let us think through the difference between probability and plausibility with a 
story – a thought-experiment.
2.2 A mini-novel
At the individual level, the probability that a subject will perform a certain action in 
a certain context can certainly be calculated. Imagine a married couple, which I will 
anonymize for gender with “spouse” and ze/zir pronouns. 
Spouse A writes novels in Language X and Spouse B translates them into Language Y. 
Spouse A can read Language Y well enough to check Spouse B’s translations, but not 
well enough to translate them – besides, ze says, it would be boring to have to rewrite 
106 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
them in another language. Spouse B is a talented translator, and zir translations have 
done well – have burnished Spouse A’s reputation not only in Language Y but in sev-
eral other language areas as well, where translations of zir novels have been made not 
directly from zir originals but from Spouse B’s translations. Spouse A’s only complaint 
about the translations is what ze calls their “negativity”. Descriptions and attributions 
are often enhanced for criticism, blame, or general aggression. The two have been 
married for going on three decades, and Spouse A feels that this negativity reflects 
Spouse B’s outlook on the world. Spouse B has several stock defenses of zir “negative” 
translations: (a) ze is just translating what Spouse A wrote, not enhancing anything; 
(b) zir translations sell much better in Language Y than Spouse A’s originals sell in 
Language X; and (c) reviewers praise Spouse B’s translations for their “liveliness”.
And so for several years now Spouse A has been keeping a log of such “negative en-
hancements.” At first, however, showing the count to Spouse B led to scoffing: “That’s 
just a few isolated incidents.” So Spouse A began counting not only “negative en-
hancements” but “positive enhancements” and “neutral renderings” as well. To zir 
mind this expanded log proves zir right: out of a total count of several thousand tex-
tual passages, ze can show mathematically that the probability of a negative enhance-
ment is .68, the probability of a positive enhancement is .13, and the probability of a 
neutral rendering is .19. “See?” ze presses Spouse B. “You’re imposing the imprint of 
your own personal style on my novels!” Unfortunately, Spouse B continues to scoff: 
“You’re just cherry-picking passages that confirm your paranoia!”
But then one day, writing a paragraph about a female character who is sexually at-
tracted to men in uniform, Spouse A unplugs zir laptop and carries it over to where 
Spouse B is working.
“Read this paragraph,” ze says. 
Spouse B complies. “So?”
“So I’m predicting,” Spouse A says, “that you will call this character a 
‘slut.’” 
Spouse B reads through the paragraph again. “But she is a slut!”
“That’s your stereotyped interpretation,” Spouse A says. “Do I call her 
a slut?”
“Not in so many words,” Spouse B admits. “You’re too good a writer to 
be so obvious about it.”
“And you’re too good a translator to be so obvious about it as well,” 
Spouse A retorts. “But I’m still predicting you’ll call her a slut.”
“We’ll see,” Spouse B says.
107Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
Well, you’ve guessed it. Just to prove zir spouse wrong, feeling irritated and aggrieved at 
being so predictable, Spouse B does not call the character a slut – not in that paragraph, 
nor anywhere else in the translation, either. That female character is portrayed through-
out without attributive aggressions. Spouse B has, Spouse A feels, bent over backwards 
to render zir descriptions and attributions accurately, faithfully, neutrally. Everything 
else in the translation conforms to the usual – mathematically probabilized – pattern, 
within what Spouse A regards as a standard deviation. But, as an experiment, Spouse 
A decides to praise Spouse B only for rendering that one character without added neg-
ativity, and to leave zir probabilistic assessment of the rest of the translation unspoken. 
So what do we conclude from this story? Like Spouse B, Kobus Marais too may want 
to conclude that I have cherry-picked the textual passages in his book that confirm 
my critique. I have not even compiled a quantitative log of such cases, and so could 
not throw statistical probabilities at him. He may even want to compile such a log to 
prove me wrong.
Setting that aside for a future discussion, however, the obvious conclusion of my little 
story is that if the “law of probability” based on a purely quantitative log of past events 
is a dissipative system – and of course it is, despite the closed-system implications of the 
word “law” – Spouse B’s irritation at being thought predictable is the symmetry-break-
ing event that causes the system to tip. Well, causes it to tip this one time: Spouse A can 
of course continue to believe that the calculated probability of Spouse B’s translatorial 
negativity will remain high, and that expectation may well be borne out in practice. 
But now suppose Spouse B decides to take it further: decides not only to break the pat-
tern and always translate passages about sexually active female characters “faithfully”, 
without intensifying zir attributions and descriptions in ways that Spouse A calls “neg-
ative”, but to extend the new pattern to other characters as well. To Spouse A’s surprise 
– and, to be honest, mixed feelings, zir public pleasure at the more “faithful” renderings 
mixed with private dismay at the breaking of zir probabilistic patterns – the probability 
of negativity plunges alarmingly below .5, and then below .3, and seems headed for 0. 
And since in this mini-novel I am the omniscient narrator, I know and can report 
that, despite Spouse B’s repeated protests that ze is still translating exactly the same 
way as before, ze is actually not only changing the way ze translates but learning to 
like the change. A new translatorial style is emerging. Spouse A’s “law of probability”, 
which to Spouse B felt gratingly like a “law of predictability”, has given rise to a new 
plausibilization, and thus, in my retelling, a new “law of plausibility” – or rather, per-
haps, a new “epistemology of plausibility”. By predicting a probability to an agent capa-
ble of affecting the probabilistic outcome, Spouse A skewed the mathematical system. 
Ostensibly non-agentive probability flipped over into undeniably agentive plausibility. 
108 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
Spouse B decided – out of spite, at first, but then, gradually, out of more complex mo-
tivations – to prove Spouse A wrong.
Of course, despite the complex emergence of Spouse B’s new stylistic plausibilization – 
the creation of a new pattern (“system”) out of symmetry-breaking deviation from the 
old – the quantitative social scientist’s (or say Spouse A’s) inclination to impose a new 
numerical “law of probability” on it could still be (at least arguably) predicated on an 
objectivizing empiricism, one that wanted to base probability judgments on non-agen-
tive data. 
The same would be equally true if the quantitative social scientist set out to study a 
population sample of (say) a thousand translators, with the same deagentizing meth-
odology. Non-agentive probability is of course easy enough to posit even in studies of 
human agency: all the quant has to do is exclude affective interactions in groups from 
consideration. But the guidance wielded by affect could also be incorporated into this 
sort of quantitative “law of probability” study as well, by aggregating, say, the social 
groupings (stable categories) of age, gender, and social class as independent varia-
bles, and reducing “affective guidance” (as dependent variable) to stable stereotypical 
“mechanisms” activated variably in the different social groups: 
• women will tend to translate novels with more empathy, men with more hierar-
chical aggression (despite my Spouse A/Spouse B/ze/zir anonymizing, you prob-
ably mentally made Spouse A female and Spouse B male); 
• young men will tend to translate novels with more empathy, old men with more 
hierarchical aggression; 
• old upper-class men will tend to translate novels with more empathy, old work-
ing-class men with more hierarchical aggression, and so on. 
“Empathy” and “aggression” as statistical artifacts – which is to say, as mechanistic 
reductions. 
But now if we start exploring the agency that is always operative in actual human de-
cision-making, the reductionism of a “law of probability” becomes completely inade-
quate – both because probability cannot account for agency, and because a law cannot 
account for decisions (let alone whimsical or resentful impulses) to act against pattern. 
At the dyadic level, those of us who have lived in committed relationships for decades 
know that our significant others are always capable of surprising us in radical ways. 
Long-term relationships, supposedly so stable as to be boring, are actually dissipative 
systems out of equilibrium. Symmetry-breaking events are always possible. But even 
in the aggregate, studying behavioral and attitudinal trends in thousands (or even 
dozens) of people, we know that the rough “accuracy” of stereotypical attributions 
109Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
to large groups is only probable because it is plausible, and only plausible because 
the attitudes and behaviors in question have been “plausibilized” (icotized) as group 
norms, and those group norms have been icotized as ontologized belief structures, all 
of which has a behaviorally and attitudinally aggregating effect on group members. 
Nonconscious or preconscious affective-becoming-conative beliefs and inclinations 
are shaped by the groups to which we belong – which is to say, our individual agency 
is shaped by collective agency, almost always without our conscious awareness, and 
never perfectly. Surprise is always possible, and surprise as the leading edge of emer-
gence is also possible. 
2.3 Translators with “Little Intention”/“No Particular Intent”
And Marais mostly seems to know this. The theory of translatorial agency he proffers 
is adapted slightly from the “Introduction” Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin wrote 
to the essay collection they edited, Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organ-
izations, according to which “the system does not exist prior to symbolic interac-
tion between individuals. A system is an emergent phenomenon that emerges out of 
the relationships between individuals” (Marais 2014, 94). Interactive agency, in other 
words, is the lower level out of which social systems emerge, and it should go without 
saying, of course, that social systems also exert downward causation on interactive 
agency (shaping individual identity, personality, and so on). Even more promisingly 
for icotic theory, Stacey and Griffin draw on George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and 
Society to argue that systems are not “real”, but only take on the feeling of being real by 
emerging specifically “out of the bodily interactions or relationships between human 
beings” (Marais 2014, 94; emphasis added). 
Given the deep grounding of icotic theory in shared and circulated somatic response, 
this resonates immediately. But is the reticulation of socioaffective impulses through 
groups the kind of “bodily interactions or relationships” Marais is borrowing from Sta-
cey and Griffin? He never says. His theorization of translatorial agency remains at pre-
cisely this fairly cursory level throughout. He never quotes directly from Stacey and 
Griffin’s “Introduction”, where we do find clarification: “All we have are vast numbers of 
continually iterated interactions between human bodies and these are local in the sense 
that each of us can only interact with a limited number of others” (Stacey and Griffin 
2005, 9). In other words, what Stacey and Griffin mean by “bodily interactions” is phys-
ically situated interactions: the fact that existing in corporeal form restricts our mobility. 
We can’t be physically present in more than one place, and thus one situation, at a time. 
The first problem this arouses for a reader like me is that it does not give us much to go 
on. How do social systems emerge out of situated human interactions? What kinds of 
110 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
interactions give rise to such social emergences? Is conversation enough, for example? 
If so, does the interaction have to be explicitly verbalized, or is body language enough? 
And, once we move past the 7% of human communication that is channeled through 
the disembodied words that appear in corpus transcriptions of those conversations, 
how does the embodied remaining 93% work to generate sociality?4 My icotic theory 
can answer those questions. In Feeling Extended (Robinson 2013b, 16–24), in fact, I 
develop an early formulation of that theory out of the work of George Herbert Mead. 
None of that is in evidence in Stacey and Griffin, however, and Marais gives us a rather 
minimalist version of Stacey and Griffin. 
The second problem is that I do not see much evidence that Marais was particularly 
interested in developing the workability and applicability of this stripped-down mod-
el of translatorial agency through his empirical study of translation and development 
in South Africa, in Part II. He insists in the Conclusion to Part I, in his bulleted list 
of “advantages of thinking about translation from a complexity perspective” (Marais 
2014, 114), that his complexity theory of translation “provides a theory of agency, 
explaining the relationship between agents and society” (Marais 2014, 114), and he 
returns to reiterate that much as a theoretical foundation for Part II: “If it is true that 
societies emerge from the complex interactions and links between individuals (Chap-
ters 1 and 2), and if it is true that these interactions are of a semiotic nature (Chapter 
2), and if it is true that in multilingual contexts these interactions need to be facilitated 
by means of translation (Chapter 3), it follows that translation has a role to play in the 
way in which societies emerge” (Marais 2014, 120). 
And I agree, this does indeed all follow. But (a) what happened to agency in all that? 
Whenever the issue comes up, Marais seems content to state the importance of “ex-
plaining the relationship between agents and society”, but nowhere theorizes that rela-
tionship, except to say that “when you talk about agency, you are asking how individual 
4 I refer here to Albert Mehrabian’s so-called 7%-38%-55% rule, according to which, as his 
research for Silent Messages showed, three different communicative channels contribute 
differentially to our “liking” for a person: the words themselves contribute 7% of the 
effect, tone of voice 38%, and other body language (facial expression, gestures, posture, 
body positioning, and so on) 55%. 
For example, one might imagine a local official in the Free State, South Africa, where 
Marais lives and conducted his research for this book, interpreting a visitor’s English 
speech into Sesotho or Setswana, with a high degree of verbal accuracy (7%), but with a 
tight tonality (38%) that is arguably ambiguous but at the very least seems to be signalling 
some degree of distancing, combined with frequently rolled eyes (55%), turned away 
from the speaker, so that (a) only the audience gets the strongly negative message and 
(b) the interpreting official has plausible deniability if someone accuses him or her of 
prejudicing the audience against the speaker’s words.
111Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
actions cause other individual or social actions, which is a question concerning the in-
fluence of the agent on social reality, that is, on other agents” (Marais 2014, 89). Again, 
a relationship – a causal relationship, this time, though not necessarily an intentional 
one – without an accompanying theory. And (b) where is situated embodiment? The 
jump to semiosis is important, I agree again; but semiosis also lends itself, if one is not 
careful, to abstraction, disembodiment, and I do think that Marais could have done a 
lot more to remind us of the affective, conative, and kinesthetic aspects of semiosis – 
of Peirce’s emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants, for example. 
Even more important, (c) how does this minimalist theory of translatorial agency as 
translation playing a semiotic role in the emergence of societies explain Marais’s specific 
South African case studies of translation in development contexts in Part II? And 
above all, (d) how do the case studies complicate and develop the bare-bones theory of 
translatorial agency stated quickly on two pages in Part I?
I think it is not an overly harsh assessment of Marais’s book that he does not do much 
with this problematic. The project that I tentatively sketch out in those two previous 
paragraphs is a massive one – one that I am contributing to, in a minuscule way, in this 
article, and may contribute to more significantly in the near future, but one that will 
ultimately require the efforts of many more translation scholars than Marais and myself.
For now, though, note that Marais repeatedly tends to encapsulate his empirical find-
ings in Part II with vague talk of a single emblematic type of translator – and that his 
remarks on that emblem do not reflect well on his theoretical engagement with his 
qualitative data. There is, apparently, a whole class of translators – the majority world-
wide, Marais claims – who have no conscious desire to leave their personal imprint 
on their translations, and so, apparently (though he hedges on this), have no agency:
1. “This does not solve the question as to how to account for the large number of texts 
translated everyday [sic] by anonymous ‘agents of translation’ who may have very 
little intention concerning agency beyond earning a living.” (Marais 2014, 90)
2. “Current theories of agency in translation … cannot theorize the majority of 
translation activity in which the translator has no particular intent, other than 
making money of [sic: or?] having to do a job.” (Marais 2014, 95) 
3. “The typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy 
little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation…” (Marais 
2014, 144)
“Little intention concerning agency beyond earning a living” in 1 and “no particular 
intent, other than making money” in 2 seem to be roughly synonymous, and I may 
be reading Marais’s implicatures incorrectly, but he seems to be suggesting that the 
112 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
minimal “intent[ion]” aimed exclusively at “earning a living”/“making money” signals 
a more or less complete lack of translatorial agency. “Agency in translation” seems 
to be defined as the translator’s intent(ion) to impose a personal style on her or his 
translations; Marais seems to be implicating here that most translators have no such 
intent(ion), and are in it just for the money.
Indeed, in 1 the scare quotes around “agents of translation” would appear to suggest 
that these translators are not really translatorial agents at all. They are at most eco-
nomic agents, working human parts in the biocapitalist machine whose translatorial 
performances are perfectly deagentized, mechanized. They are also “anonymous” in 
both 1 and 3, and “voiceless” and “invisible” in 3, all of which, combined with “in-
tentless” in 1 and 2, seems to be a jab at (a) Western theories of the translator’s heroic 
visibility, which Marais explicitly equates with misguided colonial theories of trans-
latorial agency, and (therefore?) (b) a reversion to the binary opposite of that Heroic 
Agency visibility, namely no (translatorial) agency at all. 
“Majority” in 2 also sounds very quantitative, more strongly redolent of a depersonal-
ized/disembodied “law of probability” than of social plausibilizations effected through 
affective-becoming-conative “bodily interactions between humans” (Marais 2014, 94) 
or “the bodily ways in which the anthropos interacts with both other anthropoi and 
the environment” (Marais 2014, 110). And while this is more a suspicion than any-
thing else, it also seems to me that the dismissal of (1/2) “intent[ion]” in cases where 
translators are just mechanically doing a job for money would appear to deny the 
relevance of socially constitutive “bodily interactions between humans” altogether.
But one wonders:
a. How exactly does Marais know when translators have “little intention concerning 
agency beyond earning a living” or lack “a particular intent, other than making 
money [or] having to do a job”? Is he asking them, and believing them when they 
say they do not care about the text, are just doing it for the money? Is he seeking 
confirmation for his inclination to believe those replies by reading body language? 
Or is he just imposing easy reductionist stereotypes?
b. If he means that there is a kind of economic quasi-agency or sub-agency that 
drives a translator to “do a job” in order to “make money,”, which is somehow cat-
egorically (stably, non-complexly) different from the translatorial Heroic Agency 
that drives a translator to leave a personal interpretive/stylistic imprint on a target 
text, how does he know (i) whether that binary distinction is actually at work 
in specific translators doing specific jobs, (ii) whether the distinction is ever air-
tight, and (iii) whether the distinction is air-tight in “the majority of translation 
activity” worldwide?
113Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
c. Is the Enlightenment/colonial Heroic Agency that drives a translator to leave a 
personal imprint on a target text necessarily so conscious and deliberate, so de-
finitively grounded in an explicit decision to leave an imprint, that it would be 
not only possible but unproblematic for each individual translator to recognize 
the operation of that translatorial Super-Agency in specific translation jobs, or in 
specific decisions (this word or that, this phrase or that, this register or that, etc.) 
in a given translation job, and thus, as in (b-ii), to distinguish it from the shadowy 
mercantile sub-agency? 
i. And, conversely, does a given translator’s or translator class’s lack of awareness 
of the translatorial choices that leave a stylistic imprint therefore univocally 
signal a lack of Heroic Agency, or even a lack of any agency at all?
ii. Is it possible that the agency that drives a translator to leave a personal imprint 
on a target text is always nonconscious, and therefore only very rarely even 
vaguely heroic? Is it possible that all translators, even the ones who say they 
do not care about the job and only do it for the money, nonconsciously leave 
their own stylistic imprint on their translations?
My guess is that Marais might answer Question c-ii in the affirmative: yes, it is possi-
ble that translators nonconsciously leave personal imprints on their translations. After 
all, he notes that “a translation performed forward and backward, that is, from source 
to target and from target to source, will not yield a copy of the first source, because of 
the unidirectionality of history” (Marais 2014, 39) – and, we might unpack that last 
clause, because the differences between the forward-translation and the back-transla-
tion are driven not by conscious translatorial decision but by “history”, which is to say, 
by the open-system complexity of translation. 
Whether he would agree to identify those differences as “the translators leaving their 
personal imprints on their translations”, however, is not clear. As he writes elsewhere: 
“In closed systems, were the initial conditions identical, that is, were two identical 
brains to tackle the same translation job, with the same brief, at the same time, under 
the same conditions, one could imagine having identical translations. However, in 
open systems, with the slightest difference in initial conditions, one cannot predict 
the outcome; that is, one could not have identical translations” (Marais 2014, 10). No 
need for agency: the translations differ not because they are performed by different 
translatorial agents, who bring different experiences of language and other people 
and the world to the task, but because the “brains” perform the translations “in open 
systems, with the slightest difference in initial conditions”. 
But then what would he do with translatorial agency? If he would continue to insist on 
answering Question c-i in the affirmative – yes, agency requires a conscious decision 
114 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
– his solution to the apparent discrepancy between his answers to Questions c-i and 
c-ii would have to be the complete depersonalization of the translator’s decision-mak-
ing: the irreversibility of translation is driven not by the open-system complexity of 
translator agency but by “the unidirectionality of history”. The unpredictability of 
translation is driven not by the open-system complexity of translator agency but by 
“the slightest difference in initial conditions” in two or more open nervous systems. 
My guess, in fact, is that if pushed Marais would back off from the extremism of his 
attack on translatorial agency, and admit that his anticolonial resistance was not so 
much to the possibility (indeed the omnipresent reality) of nonconscious affective-be-
coming-conative agency in every translatorial decision (indeed every human action), 
as it was to only a single egregiously exaggerated version of that agency – the one I 
have capitalized as Heroic Agency, a.k.a. the translator’s visibility, narratoriality, and 
so on. If I am right, his invocation of “the majority of translation activity in which the 
translator has no particular intent” is not intended to deny translatorial agency, just 
to minimize its Enlightenment heroism – and only gets rhetorically transformed into 
a noncomplex binary out of Marais’s understandable vexation with Western colonial 
privilege. It is, in other words, what we might call “backlash binarism”. 
2.4  The negentropic movement of information
Marais’s complexity theory of translation is based on the idea, very similar to Juri 
Lotman’s translational “two-language” model of cultural semiotics, that negentropic 
“sorting” (organizing, structuring) takes place at the boundaries between systems – 
“at the edge of chaos” not just on the periphery of a single system, but intersystemical-
ly. This “inter-ness” or “inter-ing”, as Marais dubs this negentropic interfacing, for him 
is translation writ large (see Marais 2014, 42–5, 96–105). He writes:
Open systems allow for the flow of information of various types; that 
is, it allows for life (Morin 2008, 10). This means that these systems do 
not operate according to the laws of thermodynamics, a position that 
assumes equilibrium in systems. Systems theory has realized that equi-
librium means death for any system. It is the apparent complexity or cha-
os that, together with simultaneous structure, makes life possible. Both 
structure and change are thus paradoxically a precondition for life.
… This interaction takes place by means of a movement of information, 
be that symbolical, chemical, biological, or any other kind of informa-
tion. This information is organized within a system so that noise is di-
minished and negentropy is achieved. The interesting point that I wish to 
115Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
highlight here, and that I expand on later, is that this “inter-ness” or “in-
ter-ing,” this need for exchanging information between systems in order 
to keep them alive is the philosophical underpinning of translation. All 
systems need some kind of “inter-action.” … According to Latour (2007), 
the social, which is connected to the natural – if one has to make such a 
distinction – refers to links that change relationships continuously. It is a 
sociology of connections, but not static connections, rather connections 
that translate, that is, carry over or transfer, all the time. The social refers 
to moving relationships, in which carryings over, that is, translations, of 
various natures take place. Of these, linguistic carryings over are but one 
category of inter-ings or inter-actions. (Marais 2014, 38–9)
I like that idea a lot. My only problem with it is that in social systems it is not just the 
“movement of information” or “exchanging information”, it is the interpretation and 
organization of information as knowledge. Again, Marais knows this – “Scholars point 
out”, he notes in Chapter 6, “that ICT has made it possible to turn knowledge into 
information in order to store and/or disseminate it” (Marais 2014, 174) – but he often 
forgets it.5 It is not the “connections that translate, that is, carry over or transfer, all the 
time”, it is the people who make the connections that translate. Information can move, 
and can be exchanged, without human agency. And yes, that kind of movement can 
be troped as translation, a term that has been used over the millennia to mean many 
different kinds of movement, not all of which have involved human interpretive agen-
cy. But what exactly do we gain by reducing translation to the non-agentive exchange 
of information between systems? 
5 Chapter 6, from which I take this quotation about converting knowledge into information, 
also theorizes the human embodied kind of knowledge that circulates icotically, and 
manages normativity as well as the normative conversion of opinion into fact, as “tacit 
knowledge”. This is an extremely important point, and one that could – and, I would 
argue, should – have been brought out of its confines in Chapter 6 and mobilized for the 
theorization of translatorial agency.
116 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
My guess, again, is that Marais did not really intend that reduction – that it was a 
kind of rhetorical accident, born of his excitement about complexity theory, the mod-
ern scientific version of which was originally developed for nonhuman systems.6 Or 
would we want to say that submental human systems, like the synaptic movement 
of biochemically stored information from neuron to neuron in a nervous system, 
are purposive, and therefore agentive? If human agency is (thought to be) at work in 
the movement of information through human nervous systems, should we take that 
agency to inhere in the physical, chemical, and biological strata of the brain, or to be 
produced through the downward causation effected by mind on brain? 
Border disputes like that remain to be explored. It should be clear, in any case, that the 
complex purposivity of nonhuman systems operates at a different evolutionary level 
from the normativity of human social systems – what I’ve called icosis. People in groups 
are not only working to impose negentropy, to “import” it and “store” it, but they’re also 
organizing that work around group norms, and ontologizing those norms as “realities”. 
It is not just probability; it is plausibility. It is not just negentropic; it is icotic.
Obviously, the normativity imposed on their members by groups of humans and oth-
er social animals is an emergent system – it emerges “upward” out of that lower-level 
purposivity, and partakes of some degree of similarity with the systems out of which 
it emerges. But “negentropy tends to lead [not only] to the maintenance of difference” 
(Marais 2014, 32), but also to the mobilization and management of new differences – 
and the question becomes, when something “new” like social normativity emerges out 
of the old, whether we should draw a semantic or other semiotic line through that new 
difference. Would we want to say that broad-based semiotic “translation” consists now 
only of normative inter-pretations of information as knowledge and no longer of mere-
ly purposive inter-exchanges of information? Or would we prefer, with Marais, to leave 
“translation” definitionally open to all forms of “inter-ing”, including, say, the semiocap-
italist movement of banking information through computer systems? 
6 The origins of modern complex systems theory have been traced back to the political 
economic theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially perhaps Adam Smith’s “invisible 
hand of the market,” which is ultimately “emergent” (spontaneous) in the sense that it arises 
out of human economic interaction but is neither carried out rationally by human plan or 
design nor imposed on human affairs by a deity. For discussion, see my Who Translates? 
(Chapter 6) and Andy Chan’s (2016) article on “pushing hands” and “the invisible hand.” 
Because the transhuman “agency” of the market is not controlled rationally by any 
individual or group, however, it is sometimes supernaturalized – as it was by Adam Smith, 
disapprovingly – as a mystical force (“invisible hand”); the later applications of complexity 
theory to physical, chemical, and biological systems have tended to naturalize/scientize it 
as a random force. I am suggesting that Marais is drawn to the latter. (And please note that 
I am not remanding it to the former, namely mystical/supernatural forces.)
117Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
We could go either way, it seems to me; see for example my discussion of Jon Sol-
omon’s (2014, 172–73) critique of semiocapitalist translation in Critical Translation 
Studies: 
The corporation as “source author” translates its “source code” both for 
the consumer as “target reader” and into the consumer as “target code” – 
and the target code recodes the source text so that it becomes better able 
to address the target reader. The primal scene of translation as capitalist 
“growth” (reciprocal learning as a revenue-generator). It is in this sense 
at least (perhaps in some others as well) that Solomon charges translation 
with complicity in the corporate-state: “In relation to translation I would 
argue, in other words, that it must be considered in light of the reproduc-
tion of stateness (which is a way of producing and managing ‘anthropo-
logical difference’ for the sake of capital accumulation), and that it (trans-
lation) plays a crucial role in the management of the transition to a new 
type of world order based on the ‘corporate-state’”.  (Robinson 2017, 148)
But perhaps those neural-net computer systems (“reciprocal learning as a reve-
nue-generator”) have already been normativized and thus human-agentized by their 
programmers for the single all-encompassing norm of profit, as “the reproduction of 
[‘corporate’-]stateness”?
3.  Constructivism
Kobus Marais is not a fan of constructivism. He only ever defines it in short subordinate 
clauses that sound more like broad stereotypes, or caricatures, than like definitions; and 
he never cites, let alone critically engages, even one actual source defining or discussing 
constructivism. His attacks thus seem to be based on his best guess at what “constructiv-
ism” might mean, based on the fact that it has the verb “to construct” in it.
Constructivism of course is core Kantianism – the Idealist belief that we have no re-
liable access to the “thing in itself ”, and that therefore what we take to be reality is a 
social construct. We do of course experience the material reality of the thing itself: 
yesterday I slipped and fell and bunged up my right knee. Nothing dangerous, but the 
lump that formed was painful for a few hours, and today I can still feel some soreness 
when I press on it. The rock I fell on, and the lingering pain in my knee, are “the thing 
in itself ”. But we cannot know that material reality reliably. Our nervous systems in-
terpret sense-data for us in coherent ways – and those ways are rendered coherent by 
the groups we belong to.
118 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
In Marais, by contrast, this is the sort of critique we get: 
1. “I shall argue that extreme forms of constructivism philosophically negate the 
ecological model of reality. This view, which conceives of humanity as dominating 
over nature, in the fashion of fundamentalist Christianity or, for that matter, fun-
damentalist constructivism, is part of what causes the destruction of the universe.” 
(Marais 2014, 10)
2. “Reality is not ours to control, to command. It is something we cannot control and 
something of which we stand in awe. This is contrary to the humanistic, construc-
tivist position. Also, in translation studies, which is currently dominated by con-
structivist views, one has to reconsider the notion of human control over reality.” 
(Marais 2014, 29)
3. “Strong versions of constructivism represent an epistemological position that is 
not only unecological but suited to Western conceptualizations because it is re-
lated to powerful societies where people have the power to construct their reality. 
In a postcolonial context, it is an open question whether people have that power.” 
(Marais 2014, 66)
“Extreme forms” in 1, “strong forms” in 3: the implication would appear to be that 
there might exist “moderate” or “weak” forms of constructivism that Marais would 
applaud, but he mentions something like a weaker form only once in the book, and 
that very sketchily, in a place we have seen twice before: “The typical anonymous, 
voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring 
municipal regulation after regulation, is contributing as much if not more to the con-
struction of social reality than the verbose literary translator who performs an aggres-
sive feminine translation of a literary classic” (Marais 2014, 144). Put aside the ag-
gressive anti-feminism of “aggressive feminine translation”, and the aggressive attack 
on literary translation (or High Literary Translation Theory) in “verbose”:7 the big 
question is, What is that translator contributing, and how? What might the “complex” 
constructivism adumbrated in that sentence be like? Marais does not provide enough 
7 I assume that “aggressive feminine translation of a literary classic” is an attack not so 
much on “feminine” as it is on feminist translatorial activism like Susanne de Lotbiniére-
Harwood’s Re-Belle et Infidèle. The colligation “aggressive feminine”, of course, seems to 
suggest that white colonial privilege has spoiled the nice proper submissiveness of women 
in the West; presumably the African women Marais knows are more appropriately passive 
than this? It also suggests that Marais’s anticolonial ire irrepressibly binarizes more than 
just his philosophical argumentation: it also imposes extremist binaries on his gender 
politics, thus balancing his anticolonial protest against white colonial privilege with his 
own male privilege.
119Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
detail for us even to venture a guess. As a result, “constructivism” as a kind of blanket 
term for colonial delusions of omnipotence remains a much-abused whipping-boy 
throughout his argument. 
And yet, on the very next page following 3, he gives us this: 
4. “In other words, not only does physical reality give rise to semiosis, through the 
biology of the brain from which mind emerges, but through mind, semiosis is also 
able to exert downward causative power on reality, changing reality, creating new 
forms of reality.” (Marais 2014, 67)
This claim, coming as it does hard on the heels of the damning association of con-
structivism with Western colonialism, makes me wonder: is semiosis “able to exert 
downward causative power on reality, changing reality, creating new forms of reality” 
only in the colonial centers? Or does it have that power even in postcolonial contexts?
The problem here is, on the one hand, the middle that Marais excludes between (2) 
“ours to command” (white Western privilege wielding conscious, deliberate, godlike 
agency) and (4) “semiosis is also able to exert downward causative power on reali-
ty, changing reality, creating new forms of reality” (semiosis as a mysteriously out-
sourced agency beyond human control). This is a stable, noncomplex binary that he is 
only able to construct through his extremist anticolonial middle-excluding caricature 
of constructivism. That would be 2. That mysterious outsourcing of semiosis that he 
broaches in 4 sounds more like what I know as constructivism, but Marais deagentiz-
es it by middle-excludingly depersonalizing “semiosis”. He does hint at the excluded 
middle between those two extremes in the adverbial phrase “through mind”, which 
hints at what “we” do without conscious godlike control; but again, because he defers 
(perhaps indefinitely?) discussion of the neuroscience behind “through mind”, he is 
in no position to complexity-theorize the simultaneously (or alternatingly?) upward 
and downward causation of white Western privilege and mystical semiosis – or rather, 
perhaps, the downward causation that belief in the constructivist positing of white 
Western privilege exerts on the actual constructivist operation of semiosis. 
On the other hand, however, the problem is also that Marais seems to ontologize 
semiosis as “real” – as the complex “intering” structure of reality. Semiotics, he says, 
“is rooted in the brain, one can even say in the psychological, which emerges from 
the brain, and it is simultaneously, paradoxically, part of the social where more than 
one physical brain interacts” (Marais 2014, 71). No, “semiotics” is not “rooted” in 
the brain. It is not rooted anywhere. It is not “part” of anything. Semiotics is in fact 
120 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
the study of semiosis, which is not “rooted” anywhere either.8 Semiosis is a situated 
production of meaning that is not one thing “simultaneously” or “paradoxically” in 
several places or systems at once. Semiosis is not a reality-structure but a reality-struc-
turing activity. 
Nor does the “simultaneity” of different levels or activity-domains of semiosis (what 
Lotman calls “semiospheres”) render them parallel, or equivalent, let alone consub-
stantial – any more than the “simultaneity” of gestural communication in primates 
and verbal communication in humans makes them the same thing.9 Semiosis as so-
cial meaning-production emerges out of semiosis as individual psychological mean-
ing-production, which emerges out of semiosis as neural pattern-production, storage, 
and recovery. Each semiotic system operates in and as its own semiosphere, emer-
gently. Each works in its own way. Not one is reducible to the lower level out of which 
it emerged. It is misleading, therefore, to say that “one does not have to pose a typical 
constructivist divide between the first, nature, and the second, culture. Nature and 
culture are one because semiosis is both physical-chemical-biological-psychological 
and social” (Marais 2014, 71). No, nature and culture are not one. That is a grossly 
reductionist claim that undermines Marais’s entire complexity-theoretical project. 
The “typical constructivist divide” that he attacks here is in fact one of the core insights 
of the Peircean semeiotic: that signs are not things in themselves, but are constructed as 
signs by interpretants working on objects. What Marais calls “emergent semiotics” is in 
its original Peircean sense explicitly constructivist complexity theory. The functioning 
of semiosis in, say, slime molds (“Man’s Glassy Essence”) is not “real” – it is a construc-
tivist semeiotic, developed by Peircean interpretants to explain the emergence of mean-
ing-production in single-celled organisms. The recurring triadic patterns that Peirce 
finds in slime molds, the practice of scientific inquiry, and cosmic evolution (“Evolu-
tionary Love”) are similar because Peircean triadic interpretants are constructing them 
8 Marais’s notion that “semiotics is rooted in the brain” does sound suspiciously static 
and stable for a complexity theory, but his metaphor might be rescued for complexity 
theory by reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics. If one thinks of semiosis (not 
semiotics) growing underground like the rhizomes of Bermuda grass, putting nodes into 
the soil and storing nutrients (starches, proteins, etc.) in the nodes so that the entire plant 
can be regrown from any one of the nodes, that rhizomatic growth might well work as a 
root-trope for semiosis.
9 See my discussion of the emergence of verbal language in humans out of gestural 
communication in primates in Chapter 3 of Robinson (2023a).
121Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
as similar.10 The Peircean semeiotic is post-Kantian Idealism, not Enlightenment empir-
icism. It is a mental structuring procedure, not an ontological blueprint. It is construc-
tivism, not objectivism. Or rather – to ease out of the binaries in those three previous 
sentences – in the Idealist frame, it is mental constructivism that gives the impression 
of ontological objectivism. What makes it a conduit for complexity theory is its radical 
situated perspectivism: semiosis operates in many different systems, in ways that seem 
similar when reduced to abstract triadic patterns but that also generate throughout the 
universe astonishing emergent (irreducible) diversity.
4. Conclusion
By way of wrapping up this constructive (and constructivist) intervention into 
Marais’s complexity theory of translation, let me give a final Deleuzian thought to his 
summary of John Holland’s list of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems: 
aggregation as “the complex, large-scale behavior that emerges from the interactions 
of less complex agents”, nonlinear flows “from node to node via a connector with the 
nodes acting as agents and the connectors as possible interactions”, and diversity as 
“parts of different nature or agents of different nature” (Marais 2014, 33-34). 
In the terms Deleuze and Guattari develop for this complexity thinking in A Thou-
sand Plateaus, translation would be a line of flight out of the source-textual/cultural 
territory that not only deterritorializes the source text and reterritorializes it as the 
10 “Man’s Glassy Essence” and “Evolutionary Love” were the fourth and fifth instalments 
in what is known as Peirce’s “metaphysical” or “cosmological” series written in 1890 and 
published in The Monist in the early 1890s. They can be found in The Essential Peirce, vol. 
1, 341–49 and 352–71, respectively. Peirce also writes of semiosis in slime molds in The 
Grand Logic (1893); see the Collected Papers, vol. 7, 280– 84. For discussion, see my Dao 
of Translation (2015, 105).
Marais expresses other Peircean ideas throughout the book, citing only other sources, 
suggesting that perhaps he has not read Peirce. For example, he argues that “while the 
logic of difference has been made clear, at times one needs to draw boundaries, though 
contingent and temporary, to these deferral processes because you have to act (Cilliers 
2005, 263–64)” (80). This principle derives from Peirce’s solution, late in life (between 
1903 and 1907), to the problem he posed in the late 1860s of “endless semiosis”. The 
poststructuralists borrowed that early notion from him as a defining trope, but never 
found (or never wanted) his late solution, namely, that habit stops semiosis in order to 
facilitate action. For the rethinking process beginning in 1903, see the Collected Papers, 
vol. 1, 542, and vol. 2, 242 and 275; for the solution, see vol. 4, 536 and 539, and, for “habit”. 
the unpublished manuscript referred to in the literature as MSP (cited in Short’s excellent 
accounts of this process in “The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Signs” [219–26] and 
Peirce’s Theory of Signs [53–9]). For discussion, see my Semiotranslating Peirce (240 n5).
122 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
target text, but also deterritorializes the target language/culture and reterritorializes it 
in the image of the source text. But what interests me most here is not so much trans-
lation as it is the translator’s agency – or what Deleuze and Guattari might well call 
translatorial becoming-agent. 
What, after all, in translation terms, might be the “interactions of less complex agents” 
out of which aggregations emerge? They would apparently be the “nodes” by and 
through which the flows move – but what might that mean in the interactivity of trans-
lation, or of translation studies? And what would the “agents of different nature” be, and 
what would constitute their “difference” or “diversity”? Is it possible to map this complex 
adaptive system onto “translation” with human beings as agents? Should we say, as in 
skopos theory, that translation commissioners, project managers, researchers, transla-
tors, editors, and end-users are the diverse nodes by and through which a translation 
flows into being? That might be a Taylorized becoming-translation; in what way would 
each of those “nodes” also be a becoming-agent? Should we imagine, for example, that 
each “node” is a professional role with a job description, and individual human beings 
become those node-agents not only by being hired to perform each task, and then per-
forming it, but by forming a more or less stable professional unit that processes a text 
from source to target in an industrial production line? 
No. That would not be Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “becoming-agent”, and I 
very much doubt it would be Kobus Marais’s either (though it somewhat suspiciously 
resembles those intentless “[non-]agents of translation” who are actually just cogs in 
the biocapitalist machine). Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-” construction is nev-
er about assimilating oneself to stable ontological categories, or, as they would say, 
“imitating” the “molar” states of assigned subjectivity that we associate with specific 
body shapes (“man”, “woman”, “child”, “animal”, etc.) or roles (“project manager”, “re-
searcher”, “translator”, “editor”, “end-user”). Becoming for them is always “molecular”. 
As Louise Burchill explains, this means that it is “a process of desire opening us to 
creative exploration of modes of individuation, intensities and affects (relatively) un-
trammelled by the forms, functions and modes of subjectivity society imposes upon 
us” (Burchill 2010, 88). In Burchill’s account, for example, their infamous concept of 
“becoming-woman” consists not “in imitating women but in producing in ourselves 
the relations of speeds and slownesses—the spatio-temporal determinations—and 
correlative affective intensities that are proper to the girl in her identity of a ‘molecular 
woman’ or ‘microfemininity’” (275–6)” (Burchill 2010, 88).11 
11 For a fuller exposition of Louise Burchill’s reading of D&G on “becoming-woman”, see 
my Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019, 122–29).
123Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
In the translation marketplace, for example, “molar” subjectivity – the imprisoning 
territory of a static role in geographical space and linear time – would be what Marais 
calls “the typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy 
little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”. But to clarify: 
it would not be that person. For that matter, in Marais’s demeaning description “that 
person” is not “that person” either: what Marais describes is a stereotype, a category, a 
molar territory. The molecularity or becoming-molecular of the person who sits there 
in that “stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”, 
would be the unfolding of possibility as a fractalized becoming-agent, an infinite se-
ries of bifurcating moments or “micro-agencies” pulling him or her simultaneously 
back into a binding past and a potentially unbinding future. For Deleuze and Guattari 
becoming is a participation in the relationalities and pressures mobilized by what they 
call “the time of the event”, which they define as “the floating line that knows only 
speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at 
the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that 
is both going to happen and has just happened” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 262).12
To put that in icotic terms, the molecularity of the Deleuzian translatorial becom-
ing-agent would be the bound openness of that icotic complex adaptive system called 
“the translator”: the affective-becoming-conative experience of past normativities, 
which bind and constrain, intershot with the inevitable partial failure of such bindings 
and constraints and the potential opened by that failure for creative deviation. What 
is depressing about Marais’s description of “the typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible 
translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation 
after regulation” is the sense we have of the hopelessness of that quasi-agency, the ico-
tic pressurization of that sub-agency into debilitating role-paralysis. Not only is this 
translator “anonymous, voiceless, invisible”; not only is s/he “slaving away in a stuffy 
little office”: s/he is typical. S/he is a type, a stereotype: a molarity, trapped by past and 
present icoses in molar subjectivity. 
The becoming-molecular of this becoming-agent, by contrast, is shot through with 
the “not-yet-here”, the complex becoming of an open system that is never perfectly 
closed off to the future. Emergence is always possible – even if it is only the occasional 
indulgence in parodic out-loud readings of excruciating source-textual formulations 
to one’s humorously commiserating colleagues across the room, or in silly bad trans-
lations called out and not written down. Or even if it is only a slightly off translation 
12 See also the brilliant things that Brian Massumi does with this notion in “Perception 
Attack”. I mobilize Massumi’s adaptation of Deleuze and Guattari in terms of “infra-
temporality” in Chapter 1 of Robinson (2023b).
124 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos
that, written down and admitted into print, no one else will notice as even slightly 
problematic, but still gives the “typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slav-
ing away in a stuffy little office” a tiny smile of secret satisfaction. Or even if it is only a 
parodic translation written during a break and shown to colleagues, which somehow, 
as if by accident, finds its way into print, and launches a new career more promisingly 
laced with creativity and possibility. And so on.
But would we want to cluck our tongues at this Deleuzian vision as the mere phan-
tasmatic flowering of the Romantic imagination in the colonial West? Would Marais 
claim that, while emergence is always possible for open systems, the work of a mu-
nicipal translator in South Africa, say, is a closed system? Is the openness of becom-
ing-agent something imaginable only by “powerful societies where people have the 
power to construct their reality”, while “in a postcolonial context it is an open ques-
tion whether people have that power” (Marais 2014, 66)? 
Blown up into a utopian globalization, perhaps, yes, translatorial becoming-agent 
might be dismissed as typical colonial grandiosity. But Deleuze and Guattari are work-
ing with molecularity: tiny fragments of micro-agency. At that level, surely everyone 
on Earth is engaged in becoming, becoming-agent, self-agentizing, at every moment 
of every day? If that were not true, surely there would be no hope at all anywhere, not 
only in the formerly colonized world, but in the penthouses and shiny offices of the 
rich and powerful? Surely in a world, or a country, or a region where becoming-agent 
was perfectly impossible, even development in the top-down neoliberal model (bring-
ing the poor outwardly up to the standards of the “developed” “first world”) would 
be a mere sham – and development in the bottom-up human-centered mode (“op-
portunities for increased humanness”, “people finding or constructing meaning for 
their lives”, “the experience of the lifeworld”, “the entire universe of participants”, “the 
beneficiaries of development are not conceived of as recipients but as contributors” 
[Marais 2014, 130–31]) would be simply unthinkable?
As I say, Marais only mostly seems to foreclose on the openness of translatorial be-
coming-agency, in “the majority of translation activity in which the translator has 
no particular intent, other than making money of [sic] having to do a job” (Marais 
2014, 95). At least once in the book – on that magical page 144 – that same intentless 
translator “is contributing as much if not more to the construction of social reality 
than the verbose literary translator who performs an aggressive feminine translation 
of a literary classic”. It remains unclear just what s/he is contributing, but I would have 
to assume that it partakes at some level of the becoming-molecular excess that I have 
theorized as translatorial becoming-agent.
125Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128
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About the author
Douglas Robinson, Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of 
Hong Kong, Shenzhen, has been translating professionally between Finnish and Eng-
lish since 1975; since 2009 his translation work has been entirely literary, cinematic, 
and dramatic. His most recent book-length translations are a transcreation of Volter 
Kilpi’s unfinished posthumous novel Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Zeta Books, 
2020) and Mia Kankimäki’s feminist travel memoir Women I Think About at Night 
(Simon and Schuster, 2020). He is best known as a translation scholar, with mono-
graphs ranging from The Translator’s Turn (1991) to Transgender, Translation, Trans-
lingual Address (2019), the anthology Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to 
Nietzsche (1997-2014), the textbook Becoming a Translator (1997-2020), and Trans-
lation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the 
Translator” (2023).
128 Douglas Robinson: Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos