Other

For other uses, see Other (disambiguation).

In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other each identify a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; his or her acknowledgement of being real. As such, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self. In relation to the Self, the Constitutive Other is the relation, between the essential nature (personality) and the outward manifestation (person) of a human being; that is, a binary perspective of the essential and of the superficial characteristics of personal identity, wherein each personal characteristic is the inverse of an opposite characteristic; that the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.

In the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness refers to and identifies the characteristics of Who and What of the Other, which characteristics are distinct and separate from the Symbolic order of things; from the Real (the authentic and unchangeable); from the æsthetic (art, beauty, taste); from political philosophy; from social norms and social identity; and from the Self. Therefore, the condition of Otherness is a person’s non-conformity to and with the social norms of society; and to the condition of disenfranchisement (political exclusion), either by the activities of the State or by the activities of the social institutions (e.g. the professions), which are respectively invested with political and social Power. Therefore, in the condition of Otherness, the person is alienated from the centre of society, and is placed at the societal margin, for being the Other.

When the term the Other is applied as the verb Othering, it is a usage that distinguishes and identifies (labels) someone as belonging to a category, defined as Other. In practice, Othering excludes those persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is a version of the Self. Likewise, in the field of Human geography, the verbal-action term to Other refers to and identifies the action of placing someone outside the centre of the social group, at the societal margins, where the social norms do not apply for the Other person.

History

Philosophy

Conceptually, the Self requires the existence of the Other, as the counterpart entity required for defining the Self; in the late 18th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the concept of the Other as a constituent part of self-consciousness (preoccupation with the Self), which complements the propositions about self-awareness (capacity for introspection) proffered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) applied the concept of the Other as a basis for intersubjectivity, the psychological relations among people. In Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) applied the dialectic of intersubjectivity to describe how the world is altered by the appearance of the Other, of how the world then appears to be oriented to the Other person, and not to the Self. The Other appears as a psychological phenomenon in the course of a person’s life, and not as a radical threat to the existence of the Self. In that mode, in The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) applied Otherness to Hegel’s dialectic of the “Lord and Bondsman” and found it to be like the dialectic of the Man–Woman relationship, thus a true explanation for society’s treatment and mistreatment of women.

Psychology

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) established the contemporary definitions, usages, and applications of the Other, as the radical counterpart of the Self. Lacan associated the Other with the symbolic order and language. In The Infinite Other, Lévinas associated the Other with the supernatural deity of scripture and tradition, thus, ethically, the Other is superior and prior-to the Self. Moreover, the concept of the face-to-face encounter (wherein a person is responsible to the Other person) was re-formulated to assume the propositions of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) about the impossibility of the Other being a metaphysical pure-presence, that the Other could be an entity of pure alterity (Otherness) from which arises the matter of the representation of an other human being, by way of language. The conceptual re-formulating of the nature of the Other included Lévinas’s analysis of the distinction between “the saying and the said”, whilst retaining the priority of ethics over metaphysics.

Moreover, the term The Other also identifies and refers to the unconscious mind, to silence, to insanity, and to language (i.e. to what is referred and to what is unsaid). There might also arise a tendency towards relativism if the Other person — as pure, abstract alterity — leads to a notion that ignores the commonality of truth. Likewise, problems might arise from unethical uses of the terms The Other, Otherness, and Othering, when used to reinforce ontological divisions of being, of becoming, of existence — of reality.

Ethics

In the practice of ethics, Lévinas describes the nature of the Other as “insomnia and wakefulness”; an ecstasy (an exteriority) towards the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at fully capturing the Other, whose Otherness is infinite; even in the murder of an Other, his or her Otherness remains uncontrolled and not negated. The infinity of the Other allowed Lévinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to that ethic; thus:

The others that obsess me in the Other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor, by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race, or chips off the old block . . . The others concern me from the first. Here, fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.

— Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), p. 159.

Critical theory

In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), the geographer Derek Gregory said that the responses of U.S. President George W. Bush (2001–2009) to the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 reinforced philosophic divisions of connotation and denotation that perpetuated the negative representation of the non–Western Other, when he rhetorically asked the U.S. populace Why do they hate us? as political prelude to the War on Terror. President Bush’s rhetorical question led the U.S. populace to make an artificial, Us-and-Them division in the relations between the U.S. and the countries and cultures of the Middle East, which artifice is a basic factor of the perpetual war on terrorism, and is a step away from eradicating the imaginary representations of the Self and the Other created with the Orientalist geographies produced by Oriental Studies; about which the cultural critic Edward Saïd said that:

To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural — our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange — whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.

— The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (2004), p. 24.

Imperialism and colonialism

The contemporary world system of nation-states (with interdependent politics and economies) was preceded the European imperial system in which of “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states, and often in the form of an empire, [was] based on domination and subordination.” In the imperialist world system, political and economic affairs were fragmented, and the discrete empires “provided for most of their own needs . . . [and disseminated] their influence solely through conquest [empire] or the threat of conquest [hegemony].”

The subaltern native

Maintaining the empire requires the cultural subordination of the Other into the subaltern native (the colonized people), which facilitates the exploitation of their labour, of their lands, and of the natural resources of their country as a colony of the motherland. To realise those ends, the process of Othering culturally justifies the domination and subordination of the native people, by placing them (as the Other) at the periphery of the geopolitical enterprise that is colonial imperialism. The colonizer creates the Other with a false dichotomy of native “weakness” (social and political, cultural and economic) against the strength of imperialist power that can be resolved only by noblesse oblige — the “moral responsibility” that psychologically authorizes the colonialist Self to unilaterally assume a civilizing mission to educate, convert, and culturally assimilate the Other into the empire.

In the praxis of colonialism, the Other is the people whom the colonizers seek to dominate in order to civilize and save, whilst exploiting the natural and human resources of the colonized homeland of the Other. Colonialism is a way to dominate and dispose of two groups of people, which can be used synonymously with defining the Other. Othering in colonialism is habitual between marginalized people and the colonizers, who believe themselves essentially superior and so more powerful than the native who has been reduced to the Other. Colonial régimes practice the cultural subordinations of Othering — the colonist “Self” and the colonized “Other” — by way of the false binaries of social class and race, of sex and gender, and of nation and religion. The proper functioning of colonialism entails continual struggles to protect the cultural boundaries that establish and separate the civilized man from the savage man.

Orientalism

The imperial conquest of “non–white” countries was intellectually justified with the fetishization of the Eastern world, by way of cultural generalizations that divided the world into the artificial, binary-relationship of “The Eastern World” and “The Western World”, which is the dichotomy that identified, designated, and subordinated the peoples of the East as the Other — as the non–European Self. The process of fetishization is a function of Orientalism, which the colonialist ideologue realises with three actions: (i) Homogenization (all Oriental peoples are the same folk), (ii) Feminization (Oriental people are the lessers in the East–West relationship), and (iii) Essentialization (reduction to an artificial essence of innate characteristics), thus, Othering reduced the people, places, and things of the Orient to cultural inferiority, which then justified colonialism and so establish the West as the superior standard.

Race

The practice of Othering was the prevalent cultural perspective of the European imperial powers. In that vein, scientific racism fabricated the pseudo-intellectual belief that the size of the cranium of the non–European Other was indicative of the inferior intelligence of the coloured peoples identified and designated as the non–white Other. In 1951, the United Nations officially declared that the differences among the races were insignificant in relation to the anthropological sameness among the peoples who are the human race. Despite the facts, in the U.S., the artificial distinctions against the Other remain, especially in government forms that ask a U.S. citizen to identify and place him or herself into a racial category, as in the questionnaires of the census bureau. In practice of Othering, immigrants and refugees endure the experience of socio-political reductionism by way of racial classification, as implied in the terms “illegal immigrant” (from overseas) and “illegal alien” (for Mexicans) in the U.S.

Sex and gender

Simone de Beauvoir applied the concept of The Other to the man–woman relation, to analyse the dominator–dominated relation that historically characterised the relations between the sexes.

Simone de Beauvoir applied G. W. F. Hegel's conception of "the Other" (as a constituent part of self-consciousness), to describe a male-dominated culture that treats Woman as the Other in relation to Man. In the cultural context of the Man–Woman binary relation, the Other is a minority, the least-favoured social group, usually of women, "for a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of Man to designate human beings in general; whereas Woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" from the first sex, Man.

In 1957, Betty Friedan substantiated the ordinate–subordinate nature of the Man–Woman relation when the majority of women she interviewed, at a university-class reunion, referred to and identified themselves with their roles in the private sphere of life (wife, mother), rather than identifying with their own achievements in public life (career). Unawares, the women had automatically identified themselves as the Other; although the Other is influenced by the society's social constructs (class, sex, gender), society does possess the social and political power to change the relation of the Self and the Other. (see: The Feminine Mystique, 1963)

Moreover, in effort to dismantle the conception of the Other as part of a binary relation, Cheshire Calhoun proposed the deconstruction of the word Woman from a subordinate association within a relation, and conceptually reconstruct the Other by showing that the reality of Woman need not be rationalised by male dominance, which deconstruction minimalises the hierarchical subordination implied by the word Woman.

In the essay “Feminism is Humanism. So Why the Debate?” (2012), Sarojini Sahoo said that women are equal to men, yet have a discrete identity that is independent of the male definition of woman.

In the essay “Feminism is Humanism. So Why the Debate?” (2012), Sarojini Sahoo, agrees with De Beauvoir's proposition that women can only free themselves by "thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their equal." Yet, disagrees with De Beauvoir in that, although women hold the same human-being status as men, women have their own identity and are different from men. In feminist definition, Women are the Other (but not the Hegelian Other) and are not defined by the active and subjective demands of Man. Women are the Other who unknowingly accepts subjugation as part of subjectivity. That whilst the woman-identity is constitutionally different from the man-identity, men and women do share basic equality as human beings. Hence, the harmful, asymmetric Othering of sex and gender arises accidentally and "passively" from natural and unavoidable intersubjectivity.

Othering is the action of excluding a person or a group of people perceived as different from the norm (of the Self). Moreover, the Other can be understood from the perspective of gender (a social construct) and from the perspective of sex (a biological reality). In a society where heterosexuality is the central norm, the term the Other refers to and identifies women who love women and men who love men, who were and are deemed 'deviant' because of their attraction to persons of the same sex. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community often is reduced by way of Othering into a social group identified by the negative connotations inherent to being at the sexual margins of society. To neutralise such Othering, communities are queering the city, by using the spatial and temporal layout of the city to allow the LGBT community free expression of social identity in a time and place where they are visible in and to society, such as a gay-pride parade, with which the sexual Other establish their reality as part of the body politic of the city.

Knowledge

In the production of knowledge, intellectuals, such as Michel Foucault and the Frankfurt School, and postmodern philosophy, have said that the process of Othering has everything to do with imaginary representations and power, acting through knowledge "of the Other" to achieve a political agenda of domination. Quoting "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense" (1873), by Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Saïd addressed the matter of What is the Truth of language? but:

. . . 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.

— Orientalism (1978) p. 202.

Representations

Knowledge of representations (metaphoric, metonymic, anthropomorphic) illuminates the cultural attitude in the historiographies of the foreign cultures of the Other, all created by the dominant culture, by way of the analytical discourses (academic, geopolitical, military, etc.) that surround the histories (written and oral) that explain the East to the West. The foreign cultures that a supposedly superior ethnic-group deems important to study, and the aspects of the studied culture, either ignored or considered valuable knowledge, relies upon the judgement of the ethnic group in power. In the case of historiographies of the Middle East, and in the Oriental-studies field, before the late-nineteenth century, Western European empires studied what Orientalists said was the high culture of the Middle East—the literature, language, and philology of the cultures comprised by the term The Orient.

The Orient as emphasized in Edward Said's reading, "Imaginative Geography and Its Representation: Orientalizing the Orient", from his book Orientalism, is a representation of 'the other' on a geographic, linguistic, cultural and ethnic scale; furthermore, the orient is everything that "the west" or western civilization is not (feminized, weak, corrupt, inscrutable and tradition bound). This notion of Orientalism, which represented on a global scale, created a division between countries and even continents; moreover, as Edward Said says in Orientalism, "A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant". Colonial and post-colonial history has provided academic evidence of othering, and the many tactics produced by colonizers (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, etc.), which aided the control and development of a nation, along with othering native citizens (forced to assimilate). Othering is represented through many methods (biological, social, demographic, etc.), which are present across the globe and illustrated in the media, along with academic text.

The Academy

In the Eastern world, the field of Occidentalism, the investigation programme and academic curriculum of and about the essence of The West — i.e. geographic Europe as a culturally homogenous place — did not exist as a counterpart to Orientalism. Moreover, in the Orientalist practices of historical negationism, the writing of distorted history about the places and peoples of “The East” continue in the postmodern era, especially in contemporary journalism; e.g. in the Third World, political parties practice intra-national Othering with fabricated “facts”, such as threat-reports about non-existent threats (political, social, military) that are meant to aggravate the character faults of the opponent political parties, which usually are composed of people from the social and ethnic groups identified and designated as the Other in that society.

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 (cultural, religious), which are negatively measured against the ideal standard of the Self — is realised through mundane methods of investigation, such as cartography. Historically, the drawing of maps emphasised and bolstered specific lands and the associated national-identities, the natural resources and cultures of the native inhabitants. In early cartography, the distortion (proportionate, proximate, and commercial) of actual places and true distances established the Western homeland of the cartographer as the centre of the mapamundi; thus did British cartographers centre Britain in their maps, and drew the British islands proportionally larger than the real geography might allow. In contemporary cartography, polar-perspective maps of the northern hemisphere, drawn by American cartographers, distort real geographic spatial relations (distance, size, mass) of and between the U.S. and Russia, to emphasise American superiority (military, cultural, geopolitical) and the inferiority of the Russian Other.

Perspectives and applications

In Key Concepts in Political Geography (2009), Alison Mountz proposed concrete definitions of the Other as a philosophic concept and term; when used as a noun, the Other identifies and refers to a person and to a group of persons; when used as a verb, the Other identifies and refers to a category and a label for persons and things. Post-colonial scholarship demonstrated that, in pursuit of empire, "the colonizing powers narrated an 'Other' whom they set out to save, dominate, control, civilize and or extract resources through colonization". The imperialism facilitated by Orientalism proposed that the colonised spaces—foreign countries in the Western map of the world—needed to be saved by colonial powers, therefore imperialism was for the material, spiritual, and cultural benefit of the foreign peoples colonised by the West.

Counter to the post-colonial perspective of the Other as part of a dominator–dominated binary relationship, Post-modern philosophy positively perceives the Other and Otherness as phenomenological and ontological progress for Man and society. Public knowledge of the social identity of peoples classified as "Outsiders" is de facto acknowledgement of their being real, and so are part of the body politic, especially in the cities. As such, "the post-modern city is a geographical celebration of difference that moves sites once conceived of as 'marginal' to the [social] centre of discussion and analysis" of the human relations between the Outsiders and the Establishment.

See also

• L'épreuve de l'étranger
• Orientalism (1978), by Edward Saïd
• Otherness of childhood

Sexual difference

• Judith Butler
• Julia Kristeva
• Luce Irigaray
• Sarojini Sahoo

Sources

• Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06813-0.
• Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
• Colwill, Elizabeth. (2005). Reader—Wmnst 590: Feminist Thought. KB Books.
• Haslanger, Sally. Feminism and Metaphysics: Unmasking Hidden Ontologies. 28 November 2005.
• McCann, Carole. Kim, Seung-Kyung. (2003). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Routledge. New York, NY.
• Rimbaud, Arthur (1966). "Letter to Georges Izambard", Complete Works and Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986). Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
• Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
• Althusser, Louis (1973). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Warner, Michael (1990). "Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality", Engendering Men, p. 191. Eds. Boone and Cadden, London UK: Routledge.
• Tuttle, Howard (1996). The Crowd is Untruth, Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0-8204-2866-3

Further reading

• Levinas, Emmanuel (1974). Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence).
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1972). Humanism de l'autre homme. Fata Morgana.
• Lacan, Jacques (1966). Ecrits. London: Tavistock, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques (1964). The Four Fondamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
• Foucault, Michel (1990). The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.
• Derrida, Jacques (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
• Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective", Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237–258.

External links

• Definitions of Other/Othering
• The Centre for Studies in Otherness