Friday, December 30, 2011

- character, binary oppositions, meaning -

The construction of the “Other” is vital to the construction of the Self. Ferdinand de Saussure argued that meaning depends on the difference between opposites. Meaning, argued Saussure, is relational. It is the “difference” that carries meaning. These binary opositions - white/black, day/night, masculine/feminine, citizen/alien have the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes.

In everyday life, the marking of difference is the basis of the symbolic order which we call culture. Culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system. As Stuart Hall emphasizes, binary oppositions may be useful as a beginning point for interpreting our world, but they are also a crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning and often give rise to stereotyping. In his essay on stereotyping, Dyer argues that, without the use of types, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the world. We understand the world by referring individual objects, people or events in our heads to the general classificatory schemes into which - according to our culture - they fit.

In other words, we understand “the particular” in terms of its “type.” We come to “know” something about a person by thinking of the roles which he or she performs: is he/she a parent, a child, a worker, a lover, boss, or an old age pensioner? We assign him/her to the membership of different groups, according to class, gender, age group, nationality, “race”, linguistic group, sexual preference and so on. We order him/her in terms of personality type - is he/she a happy, serious, depressed, scatter-brained, over-active kind of person? Our picture of who the person “is” is built up out of the information we accumulate from positioning him/her within these different orders of typification. In broad terms, then, “a type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or "development" is kept to a minimum”.

- deconstruction -


In order to avoid misinterpretation of reality, and avoid stereotypes in its representation, we must deconstruct hierarchy of binary oppositions. But Jonathan Culler notes that deconstruction disrupts not only the hierarchy, it disrupts the opposition itself. Derrida develops a programme of reading texts that sees beyond the narrow confines of binary opposites and thus to disturb the reliance on hierarchical oppositions. He believes that the critical metaphysical tradition which extends from Plato to modern times, that includes Marxism and structuralism is insufficient.

The philosophical project of deconstruction attempts at charting how key terms, motifs, and characters are defined by binary oppositions within a text, how the oppositions are hierarchical and demonstrating that these oppositions are unstable, reversible, and mutually dependent on one another. Then we may be able to show how each term in the opposition is joined to its companion by a complex network of arteries. Derrida claims that the line ordinarily drawn between the two terms is shown to be a political and not natural reality.







Thursday, December 15, 2011




- otherness, alterity, character - 

"Je est un autre" [I is another] 
(Arthur Rimbaud in letter to Paul Demeny on 15 mai 1871) 

"The true life is absent". "But we are in the world ".
(Emanuel Levinas: Totality and Infinity) 


The first sentence by Levinas is a paraphrase of Rimbaud and the second an allusion to Heidegger, who characterises human life as being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world means that we have needs and wants that we can fulfil and enjoy, and yet there is something that does not fit into this world, it is beyond or rather to big to fit into this world it overflows it. This 'it' is the good, the infinite, the other. 


creation of otherness - step by step

- The distinction between self and other is a primary tool by which we make order out of the chaos of our daily perceptions. 

- The construction of Alterity (Otherness) sees not individuals, but classes and categories. Constructing entire categories of individuals as other than people, other than human, it proposes that other than ourselves = less than ourselves. Victor Frankenstein, character from the movie and the book, constructed "less than human" to equal "sentient individuals in human form created in the laboratory rather than by sexual intercourse." But his creature, at least in the novel, rather than having a tabula rasa for a brain, had an innate language instinct and cognitive intelligence, even though he was never nurtured or given a name. The category of less than human has historically been defined to include different subcategories at different times, using as markers gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, sexuality, national origin, culture, religion, type of intelligence. 

- The construction of Alterity (Otherness) is not the same thing as prejudice or the various "isms"--- for example, racism, sexism, classism. It is an early step in the process by which we create a semblance of social order. First we construct some group as Other. Next we project onto it those qualities we reject, fear, or disown in ourselves. Then we assign qualities to variable human individuals on the basis of their inclusion in this constructed Alterity. Once we take this step in our construction of Alterity (Otherness), then, at last, we have also created prejudice and stereotyping. 

- The final step in the construction of Alterity (Otherness) is to institutionalize these prejudices in our laws and customs. When laws, group culture, educational values, and social custom operate as if prejudices were truths, then we have racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism. 



In Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson argues that the Hollywood system has been the only national cinema with the resources and inclination to explore images of others through stories set in exotic and faraway places. He traces many of the ways in which Hollywood has constructed otherness, and discusses the extent to which those images have persisted and conditioned today’s understanding. The book examines a range of genres from the perspective of otherness, including the Western, film noir, and zombie movies and focuses on themes of wilderness, frontier, exotics, night, monsters, borders, sanctification of difference as ways of representing Otherness.