|
|
|
|
Human culture integrates all people in the sense that "we are the world". Culture, considered as a universal entity, is the most valuable common property of mankind. Far as we share this belief we can proceed together on our way. But when you reach a cultural crossroads you have to choose a path which differs from the other possible routes. You notice, perhaps, that "we" are a majority and "our way" is a malestream.This way we are culturally situated in a circle of familiarity where foreign elements are kept outside.
What are the cutting-lines (crossroads, boundaries or walls) between different social realities and cultural worlds, addressing the question of how cultural interactions are compiled from uniting and separating elements. In this sense we are interested in the existence of identity-barriers and confrontations between "us" and"them". We ask how selfhood and otherness are culturally produced, or how the feelings of familiarity and alienation are experienced. Questions concerning trust towards each other or hesitation to all propositions by the partner in interaction are also considered crucial in these border-crossing situations. 1 (http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/sosio/culture/first/other.htm)
Jean Baurillard writes :
Starting with modernity, we have entered an era of production of the Other. It is no longer a question of killing, of devouring or seducing the Other, of facing him, of competing with him, of loving or hating the Other. It is first of all a matter of producing the Other. The Other is no longer an object of passion but an object of production. Maybe it is because the Other, in his radical otherness [alterite], or in his irreducible singularity, has become dangerous or unbearable. And so, we have to conjure up his seduction. Or perhaps, more simply, otherness and dual relationships gradually disappear with the rise of individual values and with the destruction of the symbolic ones. In any case, otherness [alterite] is lacking and, since we cannot experience otherness as destiny, one must produce the other as difference. And this is a concern just as much for the body as it is for sex, or for social relationships. In order to escape the world as destiny, the body as destiny, sex (and the other sex) as destiny, the production of the other as difference is invented. This is what happens with sexual difference. Each sex has its own anatomical and psychological characteristics, its own desire with all the insoluble events that emerge from that, including an ideology of sex and desire, and a utopia of sexual difference based on law and nature. None of this has any meaning [sens] whatsoever in seduction where it is not a question of desire but of a play [jeu] with desire, and where it is not a question of equality between different sexes or of an alienation of one by the other since this play [jeu] implies a perfect reciprocity of each partner (not difference or alienation, but alterity/otherness [alterite] or complicity). Seduction is nothing less than hysterical, since no sex projects its sexuality onto the other. Distances are set. And otherness [alterite] is left untouched. This is the very condition of this greater illusion, of this play with desire. 2 (http://www.ctheory.com/a33-plastic_surgery.html)
Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image. If we are today condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fatality. In fact, the paradoxical limit of alienation is to take oneself as a focal point [comme point de mire], as an object of care, of desire, of suffering, and of communication. This final short-circuiting of the other opens up an era of transparency. Plastic surgery [la chirurgie esthetique] becomes universal. That surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one: that of otherness and destiny.
What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic movement of an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the other, of denial of strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to that reconciliation around the Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning, cloning. We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with our own bodies or with our selves. We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must not be reconciled with nature. We must not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for women too). The secret to a strange attraction lies here.3 (http://www.ctheory.com/a33-plastic_surgery.html)
Thomas McEvilley writes:
The self is created by its apprehension of an other. The other is created by its distinction from a self. They create each other and sustain each other's existence. Each makes the other what it is.
Insofar as self is unknown it is known. It is known as self only by its distinction from the other, which as other is unknown. It is known insofar as it is different from an unknown. It is known by an unknowable difference. It is unknowably known. 4 (http://128.138.144.71/abr/lumpkin.html)
Difference is comfortable, comprehensible, and ordered in time, while "otherness" is puzzling, chaotic and vaguely threatening.(O´Malley, Michael "History and Theory" 1992)
|
|
|
|