Celebrating The Other

A Dialogic Account Of Human Nature

Edward E. Sampson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367158859
• eBook ISBN: 9780429720185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

T he title, Celebrating the Other, is based on Clark and Holquist's (1984) reference to Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory as a celebration of alterity. Like Bakhtin's work, mine is designed to provide a long overdue celebration of the other. For too long our major cultural and scientific views have been monologic and self celebratory - focusing more on the leading protagonist and the supporting cast that he has assembled for his performances than on others as viable people in their own right. Time now to celebrate the other - not only to set the record of our understanding straight but, of equal importance, to give voice, and in their own register and form, to those who have been condemned to silence.

Part I
Prologue

1
The Context of Power

Scarcely a day passes without reminders that the end of the Cold War has not brought about the end of humanity's endless dance of death and destruction. The dominant groups in nation after nation continue to use physical force and military might to accomplish their particular ends. No part of the world is now or, it seems, has ever been free of this charge. And the claims of advanced civilization and the rule of reason count for little when it comes to employing force to dominate.¹

However, there is a somewhat more silent "killer" on the loose in the world, one whose form of destruction leaves its own special mark on its living victims, the kind of "mind-forg'd manacles" of which Blake (1946/1968) has written. This too is an ancient "killer", with roots – in the West at least – extending back to well before the Judeo-Christian era. This "killer", too, tries to achieve its ends through domination. But rather than using brute physical force, this domination is accomplished through construction. Construction through word – through the very frameworks by which self and other are experienced, subjectivity and self-understandings made known. Construction through deed – through the life opportunities made available to self and to other.²

We need not bother to pull out our scales in order to determine which "killer" – force or construction – is more destructive. Each one readily slides over into the other and back again. The boundaries that separate them are highly permeable and require no special visa to cross freely. How much easier to employ force against an other who has already been constructed as worthy of receiving our contempt or as masochistically enjoying our advances. How much easier to deny subjectivity to those who have survived our abuse.

Self-celebratory Monologues

The techniques devised to dominate through force are undeniably tragic. My concerns in this book, however, lie elsewhere, with those forms of domination that center primarily around the construction of the other: forms that deny life by controlling its definition and its reality. The effect of these constructions, if not their conscious design, has been to rob the other of any genuine standing in the world, thereby permitting the dominant groups to operate more freely to achieve validation for themselves and ensure the maintenance of their privilege.

Although it somewhat oversimplifies the complexities involved and makes it seem more conspiratorial than it usually is, it is nevertheless useful to suggest that every construction has a dominant group – the constructors – and its others, those who are constructed. Throughout most of recorded Western history, whether we look at religion, philosophy, cultural activities, economics, or science, including the physical as well as the human sciences, the primary constructors have been male, white, educated, and of the dominating social classes, while the objects of their construction have been defined as all that the dominant group is not.³

And so the other has included women, nonWestern peoples, people of color, people of subordinated social classes, people with different sexual desires. The dominant groups have given priority to their own experiences and their places in the world and have constructed serviceable others: that is, others constructed so as to be of service to the dominant groups' own needs, values, interests and points of view.⁴ Indeed, although its specific forms may have changed throughout Western history, the Western project has had an unnerving continuity: dominant groups constructing serviceable others.

It is the construction of a serviceable other, one constructed on behalf of the particular needs, interests and desires of the dominating group, that leads me to describe the Western project as self-celebratory and monologic, two terms I will use interchangeably.

When I construct a you designed to meet my needs and desires, a you that is serviceable for me, I am clearly engaging in a monologue as distinct from a dialogue. Although you and I may converse and interact together, in most respects the you with whom I am interacting has been constructed with me in mind. Your sole function has been to serve and service me.

All such monologues are self-celebratory. They are one-way streets that return to their point of origin. They lead from the self back again to the same self, having passed briefly through the mirror that has been constructed to ensure that what Cixous (see Cixous and Clément, 1975/1986) calls "the Empire of the Selfsame" will be enshrined.

In Hegelian fashion, enshrining the selfsame means the obliteration of the other: "The other is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other" (Cixous and Clément, p. 71). To know the other on its terms is too menacing. Discard after use:

society trots along before my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanisms of the death struggle: the reduction of a "person" to a "nobody" to the position of "other" – the inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some "other" – no master without a slave, no economico-political power without exploitation, no dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no "Frenchmen" without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion. ... If there were no other, one would invent it. (Cixous and Clément, 1975/1986, p. 71)

Other theorists have proposed much the same kind of analysis of the Western project.⁵ Dichotomies are created out of otherwise continuous fields, defining the master term (e.g. self, male, reason) "as possessing x, y, z properties whereas its 'opposite' is negatively defined. Not-A becomes defined by the fact that it lacks the properties x, y, z, rather than being defined in its own right" (Gatens, 1991, p. 93).

And so, if the self is to be rational, it is defined as such by virtue of considering all that is not-self (not-me) as lacking rational qualities. The female becomes the not-male; the "primitive" native, the non-European, Through this process, the other is made serviceable to the self, a creature constituted by the dominant self to represent what it is not, to be used and then discarded until it is needed once again.

It is now time to illustrate my meaning by calling upon two paradigmatic examples: the first involving woman as other, the second people of color – in this case, African-Americans – as other. These are not the only groups who have become the others for the dominant white male constructors of the Western world. Those with different cultural and social class background and experience, those with different sexual orientations, all that is not human, including animals as well as nature itself, and all those aspects of the self that have been associated with any of these, have also been constructed to be serviceable to the dominating groups.

Woman as Other

Many feminist theorists have insisted not only that woman has been constructed as man's other, but in addition that this is the master construction on the basis of which all other self-other formulations have been built.⁶ It is not germane to my own concerns either to argue along with them in this regard or to claim that other distinctions have been even more basic to the Western project. I find myself convinced that whether it is the primary foundation or not, man's construction of woman reveals full-blown the processes that appear in all other spheres of the Western world.

I will illustrate three related aspects of this construction so that we may better see the processes by which woman as other has been constructed so that she is serviceable to man: woman as the absent presence; the male gaze and standpoint as the implicit standard and universal point of view; the unheard voice of woman's own specificity. These aspects also illustrate the manner by which other others have been similarly constructed by dominant Western groups

The Absent Presence

Margaret Miles opens her book Carnal Knowing by presenting two classic epics: one involving the story of King Gilgamesh, an early text of heroic struggle written about 2800 BCE; the other involving the Odyssey. The precise details of each epic need not concern us. What is of central importance, however, is the depiction of women in both. Miles notes that women play several key parts in the Gilgamesh story: as unnamed and anonymous brides raped by Gilgamesh; as prostitutes who tame another male, Enkidu, who will eventually become a person of deep concern to the King; as a named human woman, Siduri, an advisor who tries to help Gilgamesh deal with his grief over the loss of Enkidu.

Miles observes that while we know a great deal about Gilgamesh and even about Enkidu, we know virtually nothing about the women except in their role as props servicing the needs and desires of the men. As Miles comments, "Where is the epic of Siduri? Why was her wisdom presented only as a foil for Gilgamesh's aspirations? What physical experiences, what struggles, shaped her self-understanding and the philosophy of life she articulated so poignantly?" (Miles, 1989, p. 4). In other words, from the earliest recorded times, woman is present as an element in men's lives who must simultaneously remain absent as a full figure with her own being, experience and subjectivity.

Little changes when we consider the Odyssey, where we meet the man, Odysseus, and the woman, Calypso. Again, although Calypso is present, her subjectivity is not. We learn of her love for Odysseus and of her grieving over his departure, but these are quickly glossed over as we turn instead to Odysseus's story. Miles asks: "Where can we read the epic of Calypso?" (p. 4). It would seem that Calypso's only purpose is to be of service to Odysseus, who "has constructed her as an enemy in order to rationalize hurting her ... her literary role ... [is] nothing more than a moment in his journey" (p. 4).

The depiction of woman in the Judeo-Christian Bible offers a further early illustration of woman's absent presence in the hands of men. Several accounts (e.g. Coote and Coote, 1990; Fiorenza, 1989; Pagels, 1981) reveal the power struggles between different early cults, each of which sought to ensure its supreme standing in society by having its version of the early biblical stories and early Church practices dominate. In account after account, women and all those qualities associated with their femininity were viewed as threats to the emerging male-dominated religious hierarchy. And so women were present but simultaneously absent: silent, background figures required to be of service to the men, but never having their own subjectivities or specificity represented.

Commenting on more recent times, Teresa de Lauretis (1987) makes much this same point in describing the play Despite Gramsci, performed in a small town near Bologna, Italy, in the summer of l975 "in the town square and courtyards of two medieval castles" (p. 84) ... by a militant feminist collective" (p. 85). De Lauretis's point – and the point of the play – is to remind us that although we have a literature detailing the life, imprisonment and death of the political revolutionary Gramsci, while we know of his major published work and his letters from prison, the letters written by the two women in his life, Giulia, his wife, and Tatiana, Giulia's sister, are not considered important historical documents:

They were women's letters, dealing "only with children and marmalade," banal, insignificant. Little information could he found about these mute women, whose complex relationships to Gramsci and to one another constituted the most intense private aspect of Gramsci's life as a revolutionary. (p. 86)

The play Despite Gramsci was an attempt to rewrite history, "inscribing in it the missing voices of women, and therefore to examine the relationships between the private and the public, love and revolution, personal/sexual/emotional needs and political militancy" {pp. 86-7).

Miles, de Lauretis, Fiorenza and Pagels call our attention to a point stated eloquently by Virgina Woolf in her pioneering work A Room of One's Own. Woolf aptly describes the absent presence of woman: serving a vital role, and thus present; yet never developed in her own right, and so simultaneously absent:

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (pp. 43-4)

The Universalizing Male Gaze

Although the term male gaze is not original to the work of Morawski and Steele (1991), the concept captures the sense of their argument and directs us to a second aspect of woman constructed as man's other. Morawski and Steele conduct a textual analysis of Freud's paper "Medusa's head", in which Freud analyzes the frightening quality of the severed head. The gaze that Freud adopts – and calls upon us, his readers, to adopt as well – is one that is rendered horrific by the decapitated figure. The horror itself, he tells us, is based on an underlying link between decapitation and castration, and reflects the great fear the little boy experiences on first viewing the female genitals.

"His interpretation requires that we see the event through his male eyes and identify not with the beheaded female in the scene but with the male" (p. 110). In short:

With centuries of convention to aid him, the author so controls the field of vision that he passes off a typical artistic and cinematic illusion as reality; that is, we do not see that our entire view of the phenomena is through an idiosyncratic perspective – the male gaze. (p. 111)

Although the gaze is specifically male, it is presented as a universal, objective vision, thereby not only silencing and dominating other possibilities but doing so in a manner that we have all, both male and female, assumed to be "the way things really are".

Morawski and Steele's point, echoed by many others – e.g. de Lauretis's (1987) analysis of the male gaze in film; Miles's (1989) analysis of the male gaze in the painting of nudes; MacKinnon's (1989) examination of the male standpoint in law and in the liberal state – is that we have learned to adopt one particular standpoint or gaze in looking upon the world, and to treat this standpoint as though it represented the way things actually are. In this often subtle manner, other ways of experiencing are silenced. The male gaze is presented as though it were neutral and universal, a standard by which all seeing, knowing and experiencing are in fact constituted. The process has become so ingrained in most of us that we are no longer even aware of the particularity of the standpoint we are employing. It is not even experienced as a standpoint at all; it appears to us, men and women alike, as though it were what Putnam (1990) has so aptly described as a God's-eye view from Nowhere and MacKinnon describes as a point-of-viewlessness (p. 117).

Several feminist critics of science have proposed much this same argument, commenting, for example, on the degree to which both the selection of problems and the conception of methodological objectivity reflect the male gaze passing itself off as the universal human gaze (e.g. Code, 1991; Harding, 1986). Code, for example, in addressing herself to the epistemological model underlying most scientific understanding, asks whether or not characteristics of the knower are considered by that model to be relevant to the knowledge claims that are made. She observes that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Prologue
• Part II Monologism: Celebrating the Self
• Part III Dialogism: Celebrating the Other
• Part IV Implications
• Bibliography
• Index