Translatability, however, requires construing a discourse that allows for transposing a foreign culture into one’s own. Such a discourse has to negotiate the space between foreignness and familiarity, which is in the nature of a ”black box” that defies explanation. The ”black box,” in Gregory Bateson’s words, reflects the point at which we are ”to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”[2] Therefore, the operational mode of a cross-cultural discourse can neither explain nor represent anything any more, but has to pivot around such a ”black box” which separates cultures from one another.

In order to become fully operative, however, such a discourse must in itself contain a ”black box” which not only reflects what is to be negotiated, but which, as inexplicable, energizes its operational drive. Coming to grips with an otherness hardly to be known requires a continual looping from the known to the unknown in order to make the unknown fold back upon what is familiar. Hence the mode of such a discourse is one of recursive looping. It develops as an interchange between output and input, in the course of which a familiar projection is corrected insofar as it failed to square with what it has targeted. Consequently, a dual correction occurs : the feed forward returns as an altered feedback loop which, in turn, feeds into a revised output. Recursive looping adjusts future projections to past performances (Wiener). For a foreign culture to become comprehensible, a change of attitude toward the familiar one now being penetrated by something other is unavoidable. The recursive looping organizes such a transfer by processsing the information received, which is to be gauged by the correction of what the output was meant to achieve. Such a recursion is intensified by the fact that each output, in cybernetical terms, is an intervention into the organization of the system targeted, and such inroads bounce back as a heightened complexity of information. Heightened complexity increases the rapidity of self-correction, which results in a fine-tuning of further outputs. Cybernetics distinguishes /pp. 11-12/ between positive and negative feedback loops. A negative feedback loop entails that the discrepancy of information between output and input is minimal, and thus serves to stabilize the system which initiated the recursion. A positive feedback loop has far-reaching repercussions on the system that triggered the recursion. It may change the original targets as well as aims, and will tend to unbalance the system concerned by bombarding it with uncontrollable events, thus becoming unable to process adequately the received information for fine-tuning further outputs.

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