While the normative concept of political public sphere needs territoriality in order to link back communicative space to sovereign entities, the analytical dimension of public space should not be restricted by the geopolitical unit of political entities (e.g. nation states) because political public spaces contain practices of both territorialisation and deterritorialisation.
At this point (visual, spoken, written) language – understood as system of symbols – comes in, since language as reference frame of ‘cultures of publics’ allows to capture both –territorialisation and deterritorialisation – as well as to take particularities in articulation processes into account. In terms of the latter translingualisation inherently leads to an understanding of translation as a process of intermediation between different contexts of knowledge and thus to an understanding of translation as a process of ‘meaning opening’ (Schaffer). Hence, in order to approach the question of transnational public sphere, it is analytically required to move one step back and investigate techniques and practices of translingual networking produced within ‘cultures of publics’.
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