‘The Other’

 Otherness: The use of word ‘other’ has become more frequent ion the contemporary critical theories and is used quite often to suggest the marginalized and colonized. For Jacques Lacan the ‘other’ without the capital ‘O’ means the imaginary self, which is formed during the mirror stage of an infant, wherein he/she confronts his/her own image, and the ‘Other’ with capital ‘O’ means the unconscious – a symbolic place, the place on which the subject is constituted, something which it lacks but must seek.

Usually in the cultural studies and theories of ideology the ‘other’ is defined by those who dominate the social order in different aspects like sexuality, race, and ethnicity. In the similar way in the postcolonialism those who are colonized are perceived as simultaneously demeaned and ennobled in such a way that it reveals the internal decision within the colonizers. The polarities of ‘us’ and ‘other’ are largely unstable in so many other contexts.

The postcolonial theory has extensively evoked the concept of otherness. It becomes very important for the postcolonial critical discourses to consider the otherness which helps in the formation of symbolic domain of psyche and social identification. When we try to articulate the cultural differe-nces, actually we question and at the same time acknowledge the other. And in the course of doing so we do not reduce ‘The Third World’ to some homogenous other of the Western world and also we do not celebrate the astonishing pluralism of the human culture. It is important for us to be very careful with the concept of otherness as it should not be overdone, as sometimes it happens in contemporary theory. For Lacan otherness must be perceived on conjunction with desire. We will look at it in detail later. 

Where Do We Go From Here 

       Contemporary theory questions a great deal of traditional concepts like ‘meaning’, ‘reading’, ‘representation’, ‘identity’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘and ‘authorship’. Deconstruction joins hand with other strands of post-structuralism and skepticism, which have their roots in postmodernism, and leads us to a climate where ‘logic of disintegration’ dominates. In this context what James E.B. Berslin wrote in his1965 book, From Modern to Contemporary is still relevant. He writes:

“Drinking from the heady waters of the Derridean critique, a literary critic, now empowered with the means of revealing the limits not just of the language of competing critical schools but of the language of western thought itself might well feel elated until he remembers that his method, breeding suspicion of all systems, leaves him disillusioned, impotent and empty within the present form of a structure he himself has characterized as totalitarian”

Both post modernism and poststructuralism have attacked the humanist tradition. Geoffrey Thurley in his 1983 book, Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory, writes:

“The deconstructionist who tries to show that a text is in contradiction with itself and thus, in some way, demonstrating the necessary failure of discourse to achieve ‘closure’ or definite meaning is likely to forget that no matter what meanings the text juxtaposes, aligns or harmonizes, they constitute a whole which requires interpretation and which is, in a serious sense, as incapable of contradicting itself as of referring to itself”. (p. 157)

The interpretive anarchy, which results from the idea of giving freedom to the readers to read the text, the way they wish, also originates certain set of problems. Culler suggests that a check is required on the conventional reading of the text, but it must not go too far to cost the ‘authorial intension’.

All these things have been done in literary theory so far. These ideas have shaken and destabilized the literary study as it was in the time of New Criticism, which was definitely more placid. Today literary criticism theory has become much more self-reflexive than it was ever before, because of its analytical, speculative and interdisciplinary biases. Of course this is a positive development. The argument of structural linguistic and cultural analysis about the nature and the function of reading and writing have coincided with desire to explore the functioning of other system of signs that offers a framework which help us to read and make sense of what we experience and how we produce meaning in the world we live in and try to construct our own understanding and identity. Another important aspect of it is the demystification of various kinds. There has been a total decanonization of the concept of canon-formation. This suggests that the way we use to look at the certain writers and their work in awe, no longer exists. The concept of ‘literariness’ is also losing its ground very rapidly.

Sometimes the shrillness of the debates seems disconcerting. The use of theory should be to make us aware about the various different texts and the motives behind them, but at the same time there must be some room left for openness. And also theory should not be considered as more important than the creative text itself. It is clear that various theories and their applications are important and have their own uses and so does holding on to poetry or literature as a space that requires some guarantees against the threats of extinction. At the same time the popular literature has its own importance and value. We must not take a rigid approach rather a more inclusive one.  

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