ADVENTURES IN ALTERITY
GOD, SEX AND OTHER PEOPLE
A short history of "Otherness"--an invaluable concept if you find yourself struggling to make small talk on the academic conference circuit. By Philip Davis, a professor of English literature at Liverpool University, and editor of the Reader magazine...
From our arts blog, MOREOVER
The academic conference season is ending here in England. If you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in such a setting, you only need one word to get by. The word is "Otherness", and it has been in tarnished vogue for some time now. If you are feeling really out of place, then try saying "Alterity" as well. Means the same, sounds even better. You sit in a conference room and you hear so many of these notional terms replacing the reality they purport to describe.
I was brought up in Nottingham, home of D.H. Lawrence, in the English Midlands. When I was a boy, I am afraid that "the Other", in crude slang, meant Sexual Intercourse. As in: "I fancy a bit of the other."
When I next came across the word, at university in Cambridge, it meant God. God was the Other, utterly beyond any anthropomorphic terms of understanding. Anything you can say about God, said the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart, is untrue.
No wonder I was a confused young man, not fitting in very well. And then there came along the Excluded Others, mainly vulnerable minorities, women and foreigners, especially colonials, and people of lower class or different sexuality. You gave yourself identity, it was said, precisely by unconsciously creating those "others" (inverted commas are important in academe). But they had their revenge: they caused you anxiety at the edge of consciousness. Later, they threatened the stable framework which their exclusion had helped to create.
Nowadays we all (in English academe) respect "Otherness". Ironically it has become a rather comfortable form of liberal tolerance again. We respect Other People, Other Races and Other Cultures. Apparently one of the great virtues of reading literature is that we find out about Other People’s Experience (a subtler version of colonising, perhaps).
My friends kindly tell me I am not always very good with other people. And certainly I behave badly at conferences. But I got into the bad stuff a few weeks ago when I angrily said in a plenary session that I was bored by Otherness. That it was the refuge of those who were no longer interested in themselves.
I remembered a conversation I had when I was collecting material for my biography of Bernard Malamud. It was with one of Malamud’s former pupils, Danny Myerson, who now spends much of his time teaching in Egypt. I caught him on the telephone during a brief return to his native Brooklyn. At one point Myerson, excited and eloquent, said to me, "I am sorry I have just interrupted you. You interrupt me back." Adding: "That’s what we call conversation in Brooklyn."
It is what I call conversation too. It is about the melting pot into which we throw everything we’ve got when the talk is really cooking. All the exciting stuff happens in the uncertain place where differences get thrown together; the holding-ground between one culture and another, between the religious and the secular. There is no room for Otherness here, only Assimilation.
"Brooklyn", said Malamud, "is the centre of the universe". Another novelist, my old schoolteacher Stanley Middleton, thought it was somewhere in Nottingham. But it is wherever you really are--in the rich mix of things. (And it isn’t in conferences.)
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The Banality of the Utter Other
September 15, 2007 - 18:29 — VisitorThankfully the PC fever has about run its course, mercifully in sync with the global economy. As a former episcopalian I can confidently say that I've heard enough of this useless prattle coming from the pulpit. Didn't hear so much of it in college: I was a hard sciences major, so most of my courses were serious learning experiences. Point is, social norms have a purpose, which is the survival of human society. As western society becomes ever more balkanized due to the institutionalization of inclusiveness, an ironic side effect is that ever-smaller fragmentary sub-cultures and sub-groups become more rigorously exclusive in their rejection of "the other". Gay culture is a perfect example of this, where absurd distinctions based on age, gender and choice of clothing are as rigorously enforced as in any 12th century european court. Talk about exclusion! I think we will, of necessity, return to the bad old pre-pc days eventually, with the intuitive knowledge that we are all "the other". Talk to your child, if you have one (that's another big topic for us in the West), first big concept is "MINE!".
Perhaps it's time for the Individual to emerge
September 20, 2007 - 10:53 — VisitorI notice that the more we focus on Otherness, the more we become fragmented. Isn't this just a "Divide and Conquer" tactic? Say hello to Market Segmentation! I'm also bored about Otherness, not because the Other is boring, it's because Otherness is just irrelevant to an Individual. Perhaps it is time for the Individual to emerge. But I suspect this will not get any support from those who rely on Otherness to validate their existence.
alterity and otherness
September 25, 2007 - 23:06 — VisitorIf "others" are a problem - travel to iran - they dont have them.
I would suggest instead that
September 27, 2007 - 13:15 — VisitorI would suggest instead that the focus on otherness has very real implications and motivations. It is the social construction of the "other" allows one to dehumanize, abuse, and generally deny the common humanity between oneself and the this "other". For instance: any war ever waged, look at the cartoons surrounding it. The propaganda. The speech. They're not like us, they're a threat to our society, they must be dealt with. Hitler did it to the Jews, we did it to the Nazis; the Japanese and the US, and the US and the soviet block, African-americans and Whites, Irish immigrants and now Mexican immigrants, Hussein against the Kurds, us against Iraqis, the genocide in Darfur which the United States isn't attending to. And I'm just writing from my own American perspective--please let me know if you think you can show anyone free of constructing such identities in whatever country you happen to live. My point is not to assign blame, partly because its absurd to single out anyone or say whether they're right or wrong because IT HAPPENS, everywhere. That's how you can shoot someone and not feel as guilty, whether you're on the battlefield or a man is robbing your house, or you just aren't going to acknowledge the personhood of that beggar on the side of the street by looking him in the eye. "They aren't like me."
So many of our "Other" constructions are taken for granted. They happen under the radar. "It's natural that we are different--that's just the way things are."
The only way to break out of these constructions is to name them, to talk about them. Which is a little paradoxical, to be sure, because then it sounds like you are trying to cement differences between people, and, isn't the point really that we are all the same, we're all human? But we're not the same, at all, and we all have our own experiences and worlds and ways of being and they are very definately not the same.
But only in "understanding" those differences (philosophically, it's doubtful if you really can, but that's another issue), or at least having the WILL to understand them, not in an flippant, self-assured manner but in what Maria Lugones calls with "loving perception", can we say that yes, we have differences, but that those differences are secondary to the respect that I owe to you, and that this isn't about assimilation, but about maintaining selfhood. That I am going to allow you to assign your identity, instead of imposing one on you... because as Marilyn Frye says in regards to oppression, there is great wonder why the bird does not fly away until you can see all of the bars which form the cage--then it is perfectly apparent. Any bar, taken by itself, seems insignificant.
Only by listening can we hear each others stories, realize that there are very real forces of oppression, of discrimination, of identity-shaping and destroying, which have very real impacts on the lives of very concrete people.
Priviledge is sometimes embodied in not having to worry about a particular issue: often the minority's identity is subsumed into majority identity with "Assimilation"--the majority always wants the minority to assimilate with THEM. The majority is the reference point. And until we talk, seriously, about what it means to NOT BE THE MAJORITY, that likely will remain the case, indefinately.
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