3 Otherness and Literature

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

The aim of this chapter is

1. to present   various    theories    of   Otherness,    posited   upon   a    historical/contextual understanding of as well as a psychological understanding of Self and Other
2. To understand the constitution of Otherness and the process of Othering through representation, linguistic or in other media.
3. To consider the relation between representation and Otherness through literature.

IDEAS OF THE OTHER 1.1 :

Hegel discusses the ambiguity of the ”Master-Slave Dialectic” which he describes as having two dimensions : the political/historical dimension and the more fundamental, psychological dimension. The former concerns the relationship between feudal lords and serfs; the latter is a much more abstract account of self-consciousness in relationship with (an encounter with) the other and is the main theme. Hegel suggests that in its encounter with the other, self- consciousness sees that other as both self and not-self. Self-consciousness ”does not see the other as [another] essential being, but sees itself in the other”, and conversely, self-identity is (or originates in) the ”exclusion of everything other outside itself” and that ”other is [thus] unessential, negative”, that is, not-self. The work focuses on just one side of the dialectic, on the other as not-self (i.e. self-other distantiation).

An encounter with another person evinces a particular feature: the other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. I can constitute the other person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund Husserl’s basic phenomenological approach to constituting other people within a shared social universe. Like Husserl’s, Levinas’ first philosophy also sets aside empirical prejudices about subjects and objects. Like Husserl’s phenomenology, it strips away accumulated layers of conceptualization, in order to reveal experience as it comes to light. But Husserl’s constitution lacks, Levinas argues, the core element of intersubjective life.

Levinas’ position does not take cognisance of the consequences of Heidegger’s views.According to Heidegger every subject

“ is prior to everything else a project, every inter-subjective situation involves an encounter of wills which generates a field of existential tension. This tension is inevitably attendant upon any interaction including the interaction of two viewpoints or even two perceptions. This follows from the notion of subjecthood as project: even simple mutual perception cannot occur without that tension, since even to perceive the other is to have a perspective on him/her which involves an appropriation of him as an object with a particular status and role in the projects of one’s will. To recognize another locus of will in fact unleashes the energies that eventually constitute the field of existential tension of all interactions.”

According to Levinas, however, this notion of subjecthood as project does not address the intersubjective reality. Instead of the existential tension that characterizes the field of all interactions, Levinas places the onus of hospitality to the Other upon the Self. The other person addresses me, calls to me. He does not even have to utter words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach. This gaze is interrogative and imperative . It is this encounter that Levinas describes and approaches from multiple perspectives (e.g., internal and external). He will present it as fully as it is possible to introduce an affective event into everyday language without turning it into an intellectual theme. For Levinas, intersubjective experience, as it comes to light, proves ‘ethical’ in the simple sense that an ‘I’ discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other.

Jacques Lacan insists on a decentering of Otherness that parallels his much-discussed decentering of the Subject. Lacan explores an intrapsychic Otherness different from the Other of interpersonal theories of identity and distinct from the philosophical problem of Other Minds. This view of the Other is based upon the humanist idea of unified self. Lacan attempts to show that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named within a natural language, like other objects can be (“table,” “chair,” or so on). It is no-thing.

“One of the clearest points of influence of Kojeve’s Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the emphasis he places on the subject as correlative to a lack of being (manqué-a-etre/want-to-be), especially in the 1950’s. Lacan articulates his position concerning the subject by way of a fundamental distinction between the ego or “moi“/”me” and the subject intimated by the shifter “je“/”I.” “(http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH4c)

When Lacan says the subject is split, he means that it is split into a conscious and an unconscious, and also that, as the subject of language, there is a distinction between the speaking I and the spoken about I. That is when I say “I am fat”, I, the subject or self, speak about myself or my ego .The ego is therefore the subject of what is said, ie enunciated. What my enunciated sentence will speak about , for Lacan, is my ego. And I who enunciate or speak, is my self.

Lacan’s decentring of both subject and Other articulate a post-humanist subjectivity. This is distinct from contemporary constructions of the “Other” as a person, particularly a person who is marginal or subversive in some way. This conceptual disjunction between theories of a humanized Other and Lacan’s radically alterior Otherness suggests a gap between the two approaches.

These differences in conceptualizing the other and the self are to be kept in mind when analyzing the representation of the Other in various discourses.

1.2 OTHERING

Following Hegel’s conceptualization of the Other in psychological and historical terms, the act of ‘Othering’ is simultaneously psychological and political . Foucault and the Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that we produce the Other through our discursive constructions. The representations of the Other (see XXX below) are made in service of geopolitical power and domination. The metaphoric, metonymic, anthropomorphic constructions of the Other are manifestations of the cultural attitudes inherent to the agent of Othering. For example, in colonial times, the dominant ideology of the colonizing culture posited a binary relation between the European Self and the Colonial Other. European historiographies of the non–European peoples labelled as “the Other” were written using analytical discourses (academic and commercial, geopolitical and military) to ‘expalin’ the Eastern world to the Western world. Edward Said’s Orientalism (See Module XXX) is an analysis of this process of Othering of the homogenized Orient with respect to the dominant Occidental colonial culture.

But from the point of view of Heidegger, we may say that something like othering takes place in any encounter between two intelligent, interpreting creatures.

APPLICATIONS : CONCEPTUALISING THE OTHER

In feminist and post-colonial thought, self-identification by means of distantiation from the Other, as described by Hegel in his discussion of the Master-Slave Dialectic” was further developed as the notion of othering. These constructivist notions of a human or humanized specific Other form the basis of political engagement and oppositional discourse. However, as we have noted, the Heideggerian and the Lacanian concepts of self/subject and other are distinctly different from the constructivist and subjectivist positions.

Given the different ways of conceptualizing the Other, we must now understand the construction of categories of analysis which are based on this concept.

AREA STUDIES :

The contemporary idea of the Other rooted in area studies inscribes itself in theories of race, class, and gender and reinscribes itself in post-colonial theories of national identities, both placed and displaced. The homogenization of an ‘Area’ proceeds through reification of some essential characteristics to which the ‘Area’ is reduced. Here we see the use of the constructivist anthropologising idea of the Other rather than the idea of radical or irreducible alterity of the Other which Lacan proposes.

IDENTITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are assumed as essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, the identity would not exist in its distinctness and solidity.

“Entrenched in this indispensable relation is a second set of tendencies, themselves in need of exploration, to conceal established identities into fixed forms, thought and lived as if their structure expressed the true order of things. When these pressures prevail, the maintenance of one identity (or field of identities) involves the conversion of some differences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous surrogates. Identity requires differences in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.

The term ‘identity politics’ signifies a loose collection of political projects, each undertaken by representatives of a collective with a distinctively different social location that has hitherto been neglected, erased, or suppressed. Personal identity refers to one’s sense of self and its persistence. But underlying many of the more overtly pragmatic debates about the merits of identity politics are philosophical questions about the nature of subjectivity and the self.

In contemporary Humanities scholarship, the term is used more loosely to imply, most commonly, an illegitimate generalization about identity (Heyes 2000). In the case of identity politics, two claims stand out as plausibly “essentialist”. To the extent that identity politics urges mobilization around a single axis, it will put pressure on participants to identify that axis as their defining feature, when in fact they may well understand themselves as integrated selves who cannot be represented so selectively or even reductively (Spelman 1988). The second form of essentialism involves generalizations made about particular social groups. These may come to have a disciplinary function within the group, not just describing but also dictating the self- understanding that its members should have. Thus, the supposedly liberatory new identity may inhibit autonomy, as Anthony Appiah puts it, replacing “one kind of tyranny with another”.

In identity politics, the decentering the Subject can lead to an equal and opposite reaction: a centering–of the Other as object, an “it” denied the status of a “Thou.” This objectification is seen to deprive the Other of agency, reducing it to one of its general characteristics. Thus, theoretical discourses defining Otherness as race or class or gender or nationality see Otherness as attribute rather than alterity. Many contemporary theories of identity use the Other as half of a Self/Other dichotomy distinguishing one person from another. This aspect of identity politics has crystallized around the assumed transparency of experience to the oppressed, and the univocality of its interpretation. Experience is never, critics argue, simply epistemically available prior to interpretation (Scott 1992); rather it requires a theoretical framework—implicit or explicit—to give it meaning.

In dialogue with theories of identity, Lacan insists on the radicality of Otherness, an alterity that has frequently been obscured by the residual humanism implicit in the construction of the Subject as a political entity.

RACE/INDIGENEITY

The process of Othering a person or a social group, by means of an ideal ethnocentricity (belief that one’s ethnic group is the superior group), and the cultural tendency to evaluate and assign meaning to Other ethnicities, which are negatively measured against the ideal standard of the Self—is realised through mundane methods of investigation, such as cartography or the making of maps. The position of the mapmaker’s onw country is equivalent to the centring of his own identity, whether racial or religious or gender : the world represented by the map is the world as seen from his vantage. Colonial ethnography and cartography are complicit in conceptualizing the Other in this manner.

Racial categories are perhaps most politically significant in their contested relation to racism. Racism attempts to reduce members of social groups to their racial features, drawing on a complex history of racial stereotypes to do so. Racism is arguably analogous to other forms of oppression in being both overt and institutionalized, manifested both as deliberate acts by individuals and as unplanned systemic outcomes. Poststructuralist postcolonial critics like Bhabha decentre the view of the unified Other opposed to the unified Self : but their critiques  are questioned by other scholars, like Abdul R. Jan Mohamed who brings together the phenomenologically neutral perception of irreducible difference with the colonial construction of a hierarchy of humans based upon racial characteristics . He claims that these two elements together constitute a ‘trope’, a trick of language which by extension transforms racial difference “into moral and even metaphysical difference”. In “The Economy of Manichean Allegory”, Jan Mohammad says

“Though the phenomenological origins of this metonymic transformtions may lie in the neutral perception of physical difference…its allegorical extensions come to dominate every facet of imperialist mentality”

Discourses of gendered selves parallel discourses of racial identity in the tendency to humanize the Other. Thus, a parallel distinction appears in feminist discourses discussing woman as Other, particularly those discourses opposing patriarchy. Where political rights are at issue, discourses refer both to woman as an Other human being and to the female Subject as a political entity, a theoretical move that unifies the “Subject” as a person subjected to the law of the land. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex emphasizes the humanism that is at stake in the Self/Other dichotomy, writing of the Biblical Genesis: “… humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him… He is theSubject, he is the Absolute–she is th e Other” (xxii); Judith Butler’s critique of the “exclusionary logic” of the Other as it signifies in the Self/Other binary of identity points toward the limited usefulness of oppositional constructions that manifests when just such signifying binaries as white/black, West/East, or heterosexual/homosexual merge with a fixed, imaginary ego identity. Butler’s analysis shows that Otherness can be relative, making the interpersonal dichotomy of Self and Other endlessly reversible.

REPRESENTATION AND OTHERING

According to Nietzsche, truth is:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

Such illusions, historically constructed, have become unquestioned truths and form the basis of discourse. One such illusion is the notion of a fixed identity and the idea of unified entities pre- given as “self’ and ‘other’. The other is always represented to us through our experience, and we construct it accordingly in representing it to ourselves and the world. Representing the Other  thus follows a relational construction of self and other . Othering, as we have seen, is based on an identification of difference from the Self. Both the self and the other are represented in the constructivist humanizing theories by a list of opposite or ‘different’ attributes. This foundational difference makes a truth claim about the world. Based on this claim, taken-as-inherent or taken- for-granted Difference prescribes positions, inscribes hierarchy, proscribes recombination. In  and of themselves, such differences are singular and located. But if we view Difference as an abstract idea its insistent fixity renders it insufficient for the analysis of dynamic problems, whether the problems are intrapsychic, social, or political.

ESSENTIALISATION AND DIFFERENCE

AS we have seen above with respect to the theory of Orientalism proposed by Edward Said, the distanciation of self and the consequent Othering is based on a consciousness of difference constructed as real and irreducible. Critics like Grossberg have pointed out the essentialism inherent in this view which claims that the Other can be fully and unambiguously known and represented as essentially different from the Self. The Other is defined by the logic of difference which is irreducible. Grossberg cautions, “this logic of difference, in which the other is defined by its negativity, can only rise to a politics of resentment.”  His solution is “ an alternative  theory of otherness which is not essentialist….

On the other hand, given the radical alterity of the Other posited by Lacan, it is difficult to take any political position or propose an oppositional stand, since both Self and Other relational and constantly figured in respect of each other and the context of their interactions, are never fixed. Luce Irigaray cautions, while the strangeness of the other must be respected, the difference between two must not be absolute. Unlike Levinas, who understands the infinite alterity of the Other as necessitating a non-relation (1996, 16), a radical gulf segregating self from other, Irigaray questions whether we can meet the other when s/he is exiled into an inaccessible realm. From Lacan’s conceptualization of the Other, an ethics of relationality is called for. This call is answered by both Butler and Levinas in different ways, both of whom are in general sympathy with the radical alterity proposed by Lacan, and critical of the discourses of phenomenology and existentialism, thorugh their critiques of Heidegger and de Beauvoir respectively.

Ethics

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961) Emmanuel Lévinas said that previous philosophy had reduced the Other person to an object of consciousness, by not preserving its absolute alterity—the innate condition of otherness, by which the Other radically transcends the Self and the totality of the human network into which the Other is being placed. As a challenge to self-assurance, the existence of the Other is a matter of ethics, because the ethical priority of the Other equals the primacy of ethics over ontology in real life.

Simone de Beauvoir, also proposes an ethics which begins with the assumption that “ The me- others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” Asserting that “ Man  can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men. Now, he needs such a justification; there is no escaping it.”, de Beauvoir explains that existentialist ethics condemns man’s imposition of his choice and values upon another, whether in the spirit of passion or pride. “If , if it is true that every project emanates from subjectivity, it is also true that this subjective movement establishes by itself a surpassing of subjectivity “ towards the other. Existentialist ethics does not posit the abstract pre-given Other who elicits a compulsory response of hospitality, as posited by Levinas. As de Beauvoir says, no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others. The idea of such a dependence is frightening, and the separation and multiplicity of existants raises highly disturbing problems. Existentialist ethics proposes a way of living with this reality :

There is no way for a man to escape from this world. It is in this world that …. he must realize himself morally. Freedom must project itself toward its own reality through a content whose value it establishes. An end is valid only by a return to the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this end. But this will implies that freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal; neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal. It is not necessary for the subject to seek to be, but it must desire that there be being. To will oneself free and to will that there be being are one and the same choice, the choice that man makes of himself as a presence in the world. We can neither say that the free man wants freedom in order to desire being, nor that he wants the disclosure of being by freedom. These are two aspects of a single reality. And whichever be the one under consideration, they both imply the bond of each man with all others.

This risky engagement with the world is an inevitability , but according to de Beauvoir, “Man is permitted to separate himself from this world by contemplation, to think about it, to create it anew. Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect and to achieve it as an absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many intellectuals seek their salvation either in critical thought or creative activity.”

OTHERNESS, ETHICS AND LITERATURE

By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon.

– Marcel Proust, Time Regained

The subjectivist and constructivist stances detect the dangerous reductions and imperial assimilations of the other to the self, as we noticed in the case of scholarship on ‘commonwealth’ literature. But this discursive turn in literary criticism assumes a transparency between the real and its mediation through language, being restricted to, yet dependent on, contextually specific systems of understanding and reductive closures that are necessary to render possible any kind of meaning production, to render the literary other coherent even though this coherence is an imposed construct. Proust’s words clearly indicate that it is the indeterminate, the unknown the impossible that forms the literary event.

This Proustian conviction, however, is questioned by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida for whom the notion of otherness as radically Other, unthinkable, unrepresentable, and resisting conceptualization. According to Levinas, the moment Otherness is articulated in positive terms it is drawn into the orbit of the self-same whereby its alterity is eclipsed (Levinas 1969, 121). The limitations of an epistemological position bound by socio- culturally specific circumstances, the longstanding philosophical problem of other minds consequent upon the impossibility of experiencing another’s experience – and the epistemic limit in accessing the minds, motives, and sensations of others, as well as our own question the Proustian certainty of representation.

Theorists of radical alterity contend that otherness must always be recognized as Altogether- Other. On these grounds, then, ethically relating to the other and the literary attempt to narrate, recognize, and understand the other are mutually exclusive courses of action since in the process of describing and grasping otherness, one is also producing it, reshaping it to reflect one’s own image. Literature has been seen as a formative force on account of its ability to produce “imagined empathy,” that is, to imagine that “someone else is like you” and that “their inner experiences are like one’s own” (Lynn Hunt, 2007, 32, 39). But Levinas would constitute this as an unethical act to the extent that such an empathic understanding presumes that the other is knowable, is like me, and can be subsumed within my own horizon of understanding: If grasped, the other would not be Other (1987, 90); and in sympathy “through which we put ourselves in the other’s place,” Levinas warns, difference is annulled whereby the Other is merely known “as another (my)self, as the alter ego”.

Recognizing the fact of finite human understanding does not entail that we are blocked from any knowledge whatsoever or from partial and provisional understandings of the other; epistemic access is limited not prohibited. Yet precisely on account of the limited access to other minds, imagination becomes a precondition for empathy. This is what renders literature pertinent to studies on otherness: a quintessentially imaginative activity, literature and its unlimited range of characters accommodate a means to envision not only fictional others but also “what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours,” to momentarily plunge into other contexts removed spatially, temporally, and culturally from ours. Instead of seeing a single world, that of our own, Proust contends that it is by virtue of art, “we see it multiplied,” worlds “differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite”.

Analogously, we cannot know otherness in its raw, pristine form, but not because its alterity is anchored in some unchanging fixity whose elusive essence forever eludes us, nor on account of the inaccuracy of representation owing to the arbitrariness of the sign and endlessly deferred signified of a self-enclosed signifying system. Both these accounts, moreover, presuppose a firm division between representation and objects of representation. In contrast to a realist approach which assumes the existence of an autonomous entity with fixed delienations passively awaiting represenatation (cf. Barad 2007, 55). But otherness cannot be known in absolute pristine terms to the extent that there is no such pregiven, eternal objective reality of otherness existing a priori and independent from its discursive articulations and localized material conditions.

Hence, Simone de Beauvoir designates another role for literature – not that of representation of reality, but of a creator who wins the work of art from nothing :

The artist and the writer force themselves to surmount existence in another way. They attempt to realize it as an absolute. What makes their effort genuine is that they do not propose to attain being…. It is existence which they are trying to pin down and make eternal. The word, the stroke, the very marble indicate the object insofar as it is an absence. Only, in the work of art the lack of being returns to the positive. Time is stopped, clear forms and finished meanings rise up. In this return, existence is confirmed and establishes its own justification. This is what Kant said when he defined art as “a finality without end.”

My own eyes are not enough for me,” C.S. Lewis writes towards the close of An Experiment in Criticism, “I will see through those of others.” In this respect, literature is essential inasmuch as “ iterary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality” because, as he explains, “in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself … I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see”.