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Self & Other |
The dialogue or dialectic of self and other is a widely-used discursive practice in recent academic literary studies, multiculturalism, gender studies, post-structural linguistics, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Self and other may operate on principles similar to the dialectic of subject and object, but self-other personalizes identity or values relative to other peoples or entities (as in the slave-master dialectic), making self-other friendlier to literary studies than subject and object.
Beyond academic interests, self-other discussions tap into powerful human instincts of identity such as "us and them" or tribalism. (scroll down for more examples)
Texts by writers with more or less different identities forces readers to learn or come to terms with others and thus learn something of their own self-identities, self-interests, and cultural or historical development.
Cultivated as conscious practice, dialogue between self and other overcomes polarization by revealing shared identities and interests. For instance, two nationally or ethnically opposed entities may discover themselves in each other via gender, family, religion, etc.—or vice versa.
In such exchanges, the polarized, absolute, or hostile self-and-other enter a field of equalify and difference (not entirely the self, not entirely the other) that prospers communication, exchange, and development of shared interests.
As an added benefit, dialogue between self and other informs the self of all that it doesn't know, the limits of its identity, with potential benefits of humility, cooperation, listening, learning, etc.
Perennial question: What is the relation of self to other? Of the known to the unknown?
Potentially dangerous answer: self and other are sharply differentiated and polarized: usually the self is validated and elevated, which dehumanizes and degrades the other.
Typical linguistic / formal development: Marked and Unmarked; "my people" or "people like me" versus "terrorists," "cannibals," "savages," etc.
Psychology / sociology parallel: in-group and out-group.
Pop anthropology: us-and-them or tribalism
Anthropological / Historical background: Until recent centuries nearly all humans lived their lives and evolved in communities of 50-150 people whose lifespans averaged just long enough to bear children to replace the dead. (subsistence culture)
Faith in or support for group identity was essential to individual and group survival.
Identifying the other as either us or them, you might defend, nurture, befriend, intermarry or attack, undermine, drive away, or abduct.
Attractions of us-and-them spirit still appears in local or traditional institutions such as . . .
High school or college sports . . . .
Religious denominations . . . .
Political parties
(all very tribal)
+- races, cultures
Origins of self-other in religion: original sin? Genesis 4.9: Cain after slaying Abel: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
Origins of self-other in human evolution: Human brains evolved to present state in hunter-gatherer societies of 50-150 people, all closely related like extended family who were "us" as opposed to the other groups who were "them." See Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 20-1, 82-3, 198-99.
Particular risk of academic study of self and other: The values may be reversed, but the us-them dynamics continue (maybe in a more complicated way).
Put another way, first-world students who benefit (more or less) from various forms of oppression may learn to despise their privileges and validate those who were oppressed.
So far, so good, but reversing the poles of values threatens to dehumanize the exploiters and may elevate the oppressed to a superior status if only for being victims.
Pop-culture example of American movie westerns' treatment of "cowboys and Indians" in the 20th century:
Until the
1960s, white cowboys, pioneers, and U.S. cavalry were always seen as innocent,
virtuous heroes, while American Indians were depicted as bloodthirsty,
untrustworthy savages—much as we see "terrorists" today.
Beginning
in the 1960s, white cowboys, pioneers, and U.S. cavalry became bloodthirsty,
rapacious conquerors, while American Indians were depicted as honest, innocent,
and close to nature.
William Butler Yeats, "The Great Day"
What kinds of moral quandaries does this reversal raise? Are there options beyond righteous polarization?
Intellectual solution: self-other does not equal 2 entities but 3 (or 1).
The third element is the interaction, communication, or exchange between self and other.
Or all three elements become a single process or dialogue or intertextuality.
interaction of self and other
first options: antagonism, hierarchy, superiority-inferiority, us-them
but exchange leads to . . .
-
commerce or gift-based economy
-
bilingualism
-
sexual / genetic "intercourse," . . .
Outcome: instead of one entity being pure, clean, righteous and the other being impure, dirty, evil, you have the human condition in which all characters, actions, motives are aspiring but ironically, even tragically compromised.
Literary-theoretical sources on self and other
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the 'other')?" (325).
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. 1982. (notes)
3.
subject--the discovery
self makes
of the
other
I can conceive of these others [also I's] as an abstraction, as an instance of
any individual's psychic configuration, as the Other--other in relation to
myself, to me; or else as a specific
social group to which
we do not
belong.
This group in turn can be
interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the
"normal"; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be
near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on
the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders
whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme
instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.
It is this problematics of the exterior and remote other that I have
chosen--somewhat arbitrarily and because one cannot speak of everything all at
once--in order to open an investigation that can never be closed.
38
...Columbus finds, to characterize the Indians, only by
adjectives of the good / wicked type,
which in reality teach us nothing: not only because these qualities
depend on the point of view adopted, but also because they correspond to
specific states and not to stable characteristics, because they derive from the
pragmatic estimate of a situation and not from the desire to know.
Nor more than in the case of languages does Columbus understand that
values are
conventional, that gold is not more precious than glass "in itself," but only in
the European system of exchange.
42
Columbus's attitude with regard to the Indians is based
on his perception of them.
We can
distinguish here two component parts, which we shall find again in the
following century and, in practice, down to our own day in every colonist in his
relations to the colonized; we have already observed these two
attitudes in germ in Columbus's report concerning the other's language.
Either he conceives the Indians (though without using these
words) as human beings altogether, having the same rights as himself; but then
he sees them not only as equals but also as identical, and this behavior leads
to assimilationism, the projection of his own values on the others.
Or else he starts from the difference, but the latter is
immediately translated into terms of superiority and inferiority (in his case,
obviously, it is the Indians who are inferior).
What is denied is the existence of a human substance
truly other, something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of
oneself.
These two
elementary figures of the experience of alterity are both
grounded in
egocentrism, in the identification of our own values /43 with values in general,
of our I with the universe--in the conviction that the world is one.
49 Indian women are women, or Indians to the second power; hence, they
become the object of a double rape.
. . .
How can Columbus be associated with these
two apparently contradictory myths,
one whereby the Other is a "noble savage" (when perceived at a distance) and one
whereby he is a "dirty dog," a potential slave? It is because
both rest on a common basis, which is the failure to
recognize the Indians, and the refusal to admit them as a subject having the
same rights as oneself, but different. Columbus has discovered America but not the Americans.
92 ...Las Casas discovers that higher form of egalitarianism we are calling
perspectivism, in which each man is put in relation to his own values, rather
than being faced with a single ideal.
132 To
formulate matters differently: in the best of cases, the Spanish authors speak
well of the Indians, but with very few exceptions they do not speak
to the Indians.
Now, it is only by speaking to the other (not giving orders but engaging
in a dialogue) that I can acknowledge
him
as subject, comparable to what I am myself.
247
For the other remains to be discovered. The fact is worthy of astonishment, for
man is never alone, and would not
be what he is without his social dimension.
. . . And just as the discovery of the other knows several degrees,
from the
other-as-object, identified with the surrounding world, to the other-as-subject,
equal to the I but different from it, with an infinity of intermediary
nuances, we can indeed live our lives without ever achieving a full discovery of
the other (supposing that such a discovery can be made).
Each of us must begin it over again in turn; the previous experiments do
not relieve us of our responsibility, but they can teach us the effects of
misreading the facts.
Yet even if the discovery of the other must be assumed by each individual
and eternally recommenced, it also has a history, forms that are socially and
culturally determined.
The history
of the conquest of America makes me believe that a great change occurred--or,
rather, was revealed--at the dawn of the sixteenth century, say between Columbus
and Cortes; a similar difference (not similar in details, of course) can be
observed between Montezuma and Cortes; this difference functions, then, in time
as in space, and if I have lingered over the spatial contrast more than the
temporal one, it is because the latter is blurred by countless transitions
whereas the former, with the help of an ocean, has all the necessary
distinctness.
Since the period of
the conquest, for almost three hundred and fifty years, Western Europe has tried
to assimilate the other, to do away with an exterior alterity, and has in great
part succeeded. Its way of life and
its values have spread / 248 around the world; as Columbus wished, the colonized
peoples have adopted our customs and have put on clothes.
This extraordinary success is chiefly due to one specific feature of
Western civilization which for a long time was regarded as a feature of man
himself, its development and prosperity among Europeans thereby becoming proof
of their natural superiority: it is, paradoxically, Europeans' capacity to
understand the other. . . . Schematically this behavior is organized into two
phases.
The first is that of interest in the other, at the cost of a certain empathy or temporary
identification. . . . Then comes the second phase, during which he [Cortes] is
not
content to reassert his own identity (which he has never really abandoned), but
proceeds to assimilate the Indians to his own world. In the same way, it will be recalled, the
Franciscan monks adopted the
Indians' ways (clothes, food), to convert them more effectively to the Christian
religion.
251 "Neutral" love, Las Casas's "distributive" justice, are parodied and drained of meaning in a generalized relativism where anything goes, so long as one chooses the right point of view; perspectivism leads to indifference and to the renunciation of all values . . . . Exile is fruitful if one belongs to both cultures at once, without identifying oneself with either; but if a whole society consists of exiles, the dialogue of cultures ceases: it is replaced by eclecticism and comparatism, by the capacity to love everything a little, of flacidly sympathizing with each option without ever embracing any.
