Similarly, non-localization can only be meaningful as the negation of a localization that could have been carried out. It only has sense as an abstract point locating the place of a potential localizer. One could of course trace the trajectory of a hand painted in a cave, saying that the distributed text could have been localized at any point over the past 50 or 500 years. But then non-localization would be little more than a description of distribution as a continuum of
potential but unmanifested localizations (which is indeed a nice formal definition). It seems far more fruitful to insist that non-localization concerns a particular point actively pertinent to localization, the specific state of the text at the moment when it becomes the initial object for a potential localization.
Let us call that the position of the "distributed text". It would be the Kuwaiti advertisement as it arrives in the offices of Le Monde, the rock-hand as it appears to Patrick and Jane, De Gaulle's speech in French before it is subjected to the typewriter of Major Spears.
When source texts and distributed texts are thus identified through conceptual negation, their theoretical significance far outweighs that of their coordinates in time and space. They become fixed positions only in the sense that they refer to specific stages in a text’s capacity to provoke meaning or to be localized.
Our pedantry on this point is due to two concerns. First, we are trying to open the way for a theory able to address phenomena like "pseudo-translations", understood as apparent translations for which the sources and anterior distributions are imaginary (cf. Toury 1995:40–52). When, for instance, a text was published with the title Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760), the moments of distribution ("collected in the Highlands") and localization ("translated from…") were somehow inseparable from the text. Both moments were fictitious, of course, having been created by James Macpherson, who thus virtually invented the third-century bard Ossian. Since such things use the logic of translation, they should be held within a theory of the same, and they certainly fall within the mandate of localization. Thus, the fact that a text is received as a translation is sufficient basis for analyzing the text in terms of localization, independently of the existence or non-existence of an anterior source that one can see and touch. A baser materialism would have to exclude such phenomena.
Second, we want to avoid the problem of the exact geopolitical location of the localizer. In principle, the process of localization is essentially indifferent to the physical location of the people involved, whose virtual position can be surrounded by any culture at all. Like Thomas Mann declaring (from Pacific Palisades?) "Where I am, there is German culture", or like De Gaulle broadcasting French resistance from London, localizers and their end-users can carry a
locale to any point on the globe. Localization is not geopolitics.
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