kagablog

It is significant that there seems to be a growing antagonism between the discourse of the ‘other’ and postmodern discourse and practice. In this regard the fields of postcolonial and non-western theory seems evermore engaged with the critical dissemination of the postmodern condition: Texts such as “Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture” by Ziauddin Sardar (1998), seem to exemplify a growing concern amongst non-western\ postcolonial cultures that the presuppositions and premises of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘modernity’ may in fact be one and the same. There is accordingly a focus on contemporary forms of postmodern discourse and practice as a form of continued Eurocentric expansion, as a re-implementation of certain lopsided western systems of capital and cultural growth under the guise of postmodern plurality. Ultimately postmodernity is viewed with ever-growing suspicion as a western form of exploitation that works to secure the continued domination of non-western and\or contemporary postcolonial cultures to the western\European way of life.

The disciplinarian struggle between the fields of postcolonial\non-western and postmodern identity politics seems to be manifest most acutely along the axis of ‘otherness’. “Who is the postmodern ‘other’?” seems to be the greater point of disciplinarian contention. By virtue of which common denominator do we assign this category, this statute of social dispensation, to certain groups of individuals and why? Is it at all possible to sustain the category of ‘otherness’ in an all-inclusive postmodern milieu?

The now well-known article by Okwui Enwezor “Reframing the Black Subject. Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation”(1997) was countered by a host of critical responses all interrelated on some level by a focus on Enwezor`s conception of ‘otherness’ as primarily informed a certain antiquarian fascination with, indeed a fetishization of binary codification that necessarily situate identities in a fixed oppositional relation to one another. Words such as “stereotype”, “essentialist”, and “objectification” all featured prominently in these replies to Enwezor`s damning raison d`etre on the state of then contemporary South African representation. While it is true that Enwezor used an oversimplified definition of the ‘other’ (as the “black subject”, the springboard from which “whiteness” then stages its “superiority ), I believe it is the functionality of this process of alteriorisation that should be debated more than the “correctness” of this act of oppositional alignment within the field of contemporary identity politics. In that regard I want to suggest that we should indeed “talk less about objects\things that the relations between them”, to quote Collin Richards (1999:186)

Should we not perhaps rather ask: “What function if any does the category of the ‘other’ serve within the greater complexities of the postcolonial\non-western critique of western\European postmodern theory and practice? “ Furthermore, whenever there is talk of function there is talk of organized procedure, of processing and of the ideological bearing of that form of processing as discipline. Thus it becomes possible to talk about a ‘process of alteriorisation’ (of the processed creation of various forms of ‘otherness’ so to speak) as somehow functionally endemic to this critique and also to speculate about existence of a ‘politic’ that precludes this process. Discourse is are after all not neutral and various forms of discourse may therefore be situated in relation to one-another accordingly. But what is the postmodern politics of ‘otherness’ and what purpose, if any, does it fulfill within the contemporary critique of postmodernism?

‘Otherness’ as the Trojan Horse of Postmodern Identity Politics

Let me briefly recount the epic tale of the Horse of Troy: Helen the beautiful wife of the Spartan King Menelaos is kidnapped by Paris and taken to ancient Troy as a hostage. A punitive expedition is organized by the Greeks of Mycenae but for lack of success is prolonged into a 9year siege on the city of Troy. During this time the greatest warriors of both the Greeks and the Trojans fall in battle (Achilles and Hector respectively). In the tenth year Odysseus creates a hollow wooden Horse that he leaves before the gates of Troy whilst ordering the mock retreat of his troops. The Trojans believing the horse to be a gift drags it into their city. The horse is doubles as a vessel within which Greek soldiers can infiltrate the city in order to open the gates at night and thus bring about the fall of the Trojan empire. Helen is duly returned to Menelaos.

If we approach the politics of ‘otherness’ as a metaphorical Trojan horse within the sphere of the contemporary postcolonial\non-western critique of postmodernity we imbue the space of ‘otherness’ with a form of strategic value. By invoking the Trojan horse as symbolic of this critique the signified meaning of ‘otherness’ is contested as a necessarily object-based critique that functions primarily through the sustained creation of illusory coherence\fixity. The classic postmodern conception of the ‘other’ as a déclassé social denominator of a position of exteriority to Western historiography per se can then be challenged as an extension of postmodern disciplinarian functionality in the Foucaultian sense: For Foucault (1963:224) discipline defines the nature of anti-discipline, it delimitates the range of objects and ideas to be known within a field by exercising something akin to what can be called a ‘power constraint’ on other discourses. The ‘other’ now becomes instead a complex social interlocutor where various relations of power intermingle and ultimately vie for disciplinarian power. However, this struggle for disciplinarian power is not alien to the discourse of Eurocentric ‘sameness’. It is centripetal to any discourse of ‘sameness’: The ‘other’ is the necessary space of disciplinarian fecundity, of the prosperous growth and illusory ‘meaningfulness’ of the containment of western homogeneity. It is the thing by which alterity (the limits of ‘sameness’) is conceived of but also the very thing by which any opposition thereto is silenced. However this will only hold true for as long as it (‘otherness’ ) remains accounted for by the ‘will to truth’ of any given system of signification.

Foucault (1963:224) defines this ‘will to truth’ of western society as an institutional constraining system, a “prodigious machine” designed to exclude, to delimit, and enforce the distinction between what is considered true or false, knowable or conversely unknowable. However there is the irony, a system cannot consciously exclude what it does not profess to know. Without the internalization of different forms of exteriority as ‘otherness’ there can be no pretence towards signified meaning: The ‘other’ does not simply cast its moving shadow on the interior of Plato’s cave. Thus, without trying to be pedantic, when the west professes to know the ‘other’ it in actual fact professes to know its ‘other’: For the ‘other’ I speak off here is not bound by the real manifestation of different social groupings, their cultures, customs, ethnographic location or even racial characteristics, it is intrinsically bound together by the manifestation of the ‘will to truth’ of western systems of disciplinary structure. The ‘other’ is pure functionality and conjecture on the part of a greater process of alteriorisation that is supported by the ‘will to truth’ as a western system of exclusion. The ‘other’ I speak of here is the processed fantasy that safeguards coherence, homogeneity and dominance not by virtue of its exteriority thereto but by virtue of its interiority to the judiciary axis of reasoning that sustains and justifies it, wherever it appears. There is just no coherent or natural correlative for the ‘other’ of western disciplinary structure.

Thus in a twist of signification the ‘other’ becomes situated within ‘sameness’. The binary opposition between ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ collapses. But it is not an infinite form of neutral expansion: it is a virtual implosion of signification, a re-centering of meaning through the seizure of all meaning exterior to the ‘sameness’ of western homogeneity. In that sense the ‘other’ is not the non-entity of ‘sameness’, in a Foucaultian sense it is the disciplinarian limit to which the transgression of ‘sameness’ returns once it has fulfilled its goal. The ‘other’ is a form of controlled exteriority, that space where discipline can acknowledge deviance from, and the transgression of, ‘sameness’ without entering into true debate therewith.

This is the non-corporeal ‘other’ of postmodern functionality par excellence: it is the projection of the limits of ‘sameness’ that affords credence to any systematic construction of homogeneity. A Trojan horse that continuously invades difference, slippages in discourse, exteriorities that are glimpsed by ‘sameness’ but not yet accounted for by it. Once exteriority is accounted for and internalized within discipline, it becomes simple deviation, the agent of transgression and is exorcised as the pariah of ‘sameness’ accordingly. But the pariah is never a sign of pure exteriority: it is the constant reminder of disciplinary power, the sign of binary slippage that constantly extends its reach outwards but only in order to infiltrate and to subjugate according to the limits of discipline as such. The pariah is always either nostalgically longing for re-inclusion or caught in a frenetic struggle for de-processing and a complete self-exorcism that it cannot attain: it only exists as a relation of power and never purely on its own terms. In this way exteriority is processed as ‘otherness’: through a gradual process of the “self-aware making” of exteriority as oppositionally related to a form of interiority. Helen is returned to Menelaos once the soldiers of Greece inside the wooden horse open the gates of Troy to let the Greek armies in. The perceived injustice against Greece is resolved and the act of transgression is punished .

I say “perceived” because there is some conflict as to whether Helen was in fact kidnapped and kept as a hostage by Paris at all: it is quite possible that she went of her own free will and that her supposed “kidnapping” was merely a way of restoring Menelaos` pride. In this way Menelaos` pride becomes the illusory signifier of the coherence of western homogeneity. Once Helen has been “kidnapped” the existence of slippage and exteriority is noticed by the discourse of homogeneity. In order to restore the illusion of coherence, of control and of signified meaning, exteriority has to be internalized and accounted for as an act of transgression. More than that, the gates of Troy are now open. Metaphorically one could say that Troy is defeated by an invasion of the Greek Logos.

This brings me to an important point. For the plan of Odysseus to succeed, the wooden decoy has to be brought into the city of Troy freely by the Trojan people. ‘Otherness’ has to be internalized by exteriority as transgression “freely”. This statement seems to pose a significant problem in terms of the historical relationship between the practice of western\Eurocentric colonialism and expansion and the effect thereof on the non-west. Even in terms of contemporary identity politics critics such as Sardar and Enwezor have continuously shown that we do not all have the freedom to choose to be a part of the postmodern “we”. However, despite the fact that western society historically has (and still presently do) brutally enforced the acceptance of ‘otherness’ as a process of social denomination on other non-western cultures, it does not necessarily mean that all space of exteriority to this history of western expansion is somehow now virtually depleted. The global stage of postmodernity is not the last frontier of western interiority (of a somehow all-inclusive ‘sameness’ to which no opposition can remain standing). Let us not imbue it with such fashionably apocalyptic proportions: it is just another space where the battle for dominance is being fiercely contested between the west and the non-west. This is the point: Because ‘otherness’ as historically conceived of seems to embody the discursive slippage of exteriority to western\Eurocentric discourse and practice, it seems to offer the bearer thereof the deconstructive power to contest the coherence of the greater narratives which support and sustain it. But resistance is not the same as deconstruction. The ‘other’ provides a calculated form of resistance whereas exteriority provides the opportunity for true deconstruction, or more specifically, for the ‘destructuring’ of perceived western homogeneity.

Bernasconi in the article “African Philosophy’s Challenge to Continental Philosophy”(1997) speaks about the ‘destructuring’ power of this form of discursive exteriority to the greater western meta-narratives both past and present. Bernasconi provides a specific case study in the form of a critique of Derrida`s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” - a deconstructive reading of Levinas` contestation of Greek philosophy as necessarily arising from non-Greek philosophy. For Levinas Greek empiricism is determined by philosophy as non-philosophy, a sort of non-locus that defines the locus. This ‘totally other’ that elicits the Greek logos is for Levinas best exemplified by the “’ fundamental contradiction between Athens and Jerusalem’” . Greece is then established as the locus of philosophy and Judaism accordingly as non-philosophy or as the ‘totally other’. Derrida collapses this binary opposition by showing that “Greece (philosophy) is the site of …’historical coupling’ between Judaism and Hellenism” (Bernasconi 1997:186). And furthermore, Bernasconi (ibid) states “Derrida sought to negotiate this contradiction by focusing on the capacity of the Greek logos to always expand to include what opposes itself to it: ‘the Greek thought of Being forever has protested itself against every absolutely surprising convocation’” . Inasmuch as this concerns the ability of the Greek logos to continuously re-project its own conception of alterity, ‘otherness’ or of processed exteriority, outwards this may be true. However when faced with the non-entity of its ‘sameness’, the unaccountable exteriority of the Greek logos, the opportunity for ‘destructuring’ appears.

The question could be asked: “does all of this talk of exteriority simply imply that only what the ever-expanding Greek logos of the west does not yet consciously know about presents the destructuring opportunity of that logos?” No, exteriority to the ever-expanding Greek logos (or in contemporary form ‘postmodernism’) could take many forms: it could be the rejection of the judiciary axis of disciplinary structure that protects the more subtle forms of western logocentric investment. In this regard we should no longer speak of ‘otherness’ as the pariah, as deviation, as the transgression of sameness, as the metaphysically challenged or as the causally shortsighted overture of anti-disciplinarian protest. Also ‘unaccounted for’ and ‘unaccountable’ are two widely differing concepts. There is much that remains unaccounted for by the discourses of humanity in general, but when we self-consciously position forms of discourse unaccountable to the Greek logos in this regard, then we destabilize the disciplinary ability of the Greek logos to invade that form of discourse. When the pariahs of western history become self-conscious, realize their own forms of subjectivity and disciplinary structure, are empowered by their own forms of judicial causality as such, that is the moment when the ‘otherness’ of western history becomes exteriority. This exteriority is precisely what cannot be imagined by the all inclusive postmodern plurality, the all-pervasive Jamesonian form of Late Capitalism, Derrida`s form of logocentric deconstruction that always returns to the limits of the Greek logos, the all consuming western meta-narrative of alterity and ‘sameness’ that owe its very existence to the Greek logos or in Foucaultian terms, the ‘will to truth’ of western society in general.

Contemporary African philosophy would be a good case point in this regard: Africa’s exteriority to western\European logocentrism was accounted for, but not internalized as the ‘other’. According to Bernasconi (1997:185) “Africa was seen as non-assimilable”, therefore it could not be inscribed as the opposite of western metaphysics. This is not to say that Africa did not experience the full force of western ‘otherness’ weighing down upon their culture, their traditions and their persons, but rather to state the particular nature of the historical relationship between the west and Africa as one of exteriority, and accordingly of discursive space for the destructuring of western logocentrism.

The time has come for Africa, India, China, the Middle East and generally the non-west to “speak” its exteriority without becoming embroiled in the spatial struggle for ‘otherness’ that so often seems to embody a position of power within the realm of contemporary identity politics. ‘Otherness’ must be realized as what it is: the will to power of the west reified. ‘Otherness’ is only a site of resistance to ‘sameness’ and may as such offer valuable insight into the nature of western discourse, its disciplinary structure and the Foucaultian ‘will to truth’ that shape that structure. But the destructuring challenge, the Heideggerian conception of “another beginning” that accompanies the end of western metaphysics, that can only be found by western philosophy if willing to forego the Trojan horse of ‘otherness’ that always attempts to re-situate exteriority as ‘otherness’.

Endnotes
Within the context of this paper the term postmodernism will be used to denote a hegemonic system of current western socio-politic and economic expansion. Following contemporary critics such as Perry Anderson and Frederick Jameson I situate postmodernism as a mostly North American phenomenon (see Perry Anderson’s “The Origins of Postmodernism”, 1999 pp118-130). In this way postmodernism signals a change in the dominant economic mode of production and consumption related values of the west: The rise of what Jameson calls a ‘Late Capitalist’ society is also the rise of what can be referred to in shorthand as ‘postmodernism’. This means that postmodernism is, amongst other things, just another stage within the development of western society and will accordingly generate more conducive space for its own forms of disciplinary thinking- in other words forms of discourse that do not detract from it but rather inform and sustain it in some way, albeit critically so.
I do not wish to confuse the two terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘non-western’. Firstly not all postcolonial societies are non-western and vice versa. However, this paper is concerned with the critical attack on postmodernism by various forms of discourse that situate themselves in opposition to western\European discourse and practice as the ‘other’. In this way the fields of both postcolonial and non-western discourse is only partially addressed here: it has to be remembered that there are forms of postcolonial and non-western discourse that are concerned with issues outside of the scope of the attack on western forms of discourse and practice. Similarly, certain forms of western discourse, such as the Feminist approach, may also be partially addressed here (though this is not the specific focus of this paper and certainly invites further investigation). In this regard it is not my intention to determine who is the ‘other’ but rather to examine ‘otherness’ as a manifestation of greater relations of power constantly at work within any homogeneous form of discourse such as postmodernism.
I use the word “disciplinarian” in the Derridean sense here. The Oxford dictionary defines the word “disciplinarian” as “maintainer of (especially strict”) discipline”. Foucault also constantly reminds us in the “Order of Discourse”(1963), discipline is the way in which we order the product of discourse. Furthermore, because I will later on in this paper situate the discourse of ‘otherness’ as dialectically bound the discourse of ‘sameness’, there can only be a disciplinarian struggle for the axiomatic seizure of meaning within the limits of the postmodern discourse of homogeneity (of course discernable in itself as a discipline).
The various critical texts collected in “Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and politics in Contemporary South African Art” edited by Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz (1999), were all responses to Enwezor`s article. Atkinson and Breitz intended “Grey Areas” to function as an open forum for the critical discussion of Enwezor`s article and invited contributions on the basis of that criteria accordingly.
Enwezor (1997:22) states about the history of racism within western representation that it “ is founded on blackness as anathema to the discourse of whiteness; whiteness as a resource out of which the trope of the nation, nationality and citizenship is constructed, and everything else that is prior is negated, defaced, marginalized, colonized”. For Enwezor whiteness is “the ideological fantasy” that informs “nationalist desire” and constructs representations of the ‘other’ always according to its own axis of reasoning exclusively.
In other words, ‘otherness’ as a form of exclusion, of marginalisation, as a virtual rendering of ‘being’ as ‘non-being’ effected by various historical systems of western exclusion and self-empowerment.
This “will to truth” is according to Foucault furthermore dependant on institutional support, in other words it is reinforced and renewed by a whole strata of ideological practices such as systems of literature, science, art and even economics. In this way a purely Marxist critique of postmodernism would ultimately fail to question what the “will to truth” of postmodernism as a western form of discursive practice ultimately is.
I should rather say “exteriority”: ‘otherness’ is ‘exteriority’ become accountable to the discipline of ‘sameness’. But it is not a self effected neutral transformation, it is this function of discipline to impose its limits on exteriority that determines its continued growth, or conversely its diminishing power, to affect society.
I use the word “profess” here specifically to imply the attempt at signified closure that accompanies the declaration of knowledge by which systems of inclusion and exclusion are empowered to function. In this sense to profess to know something is also to admit that it has been internalized and processed by the specific judiciary axis of reasoning particular to the bearer of that knowledge.
In other words exteriority has successfully been processed as ‘otherness’ and now becomes accounted for as simple deviation or an act of transgression.
As Bernasconi (1997:185-187) has shown the object of deconstruction remains western metaphysics. It has not taken account of, or even a noticeable interest in, African, Chinese or Indian philosophy amongst other forms of discursive thinking exterior thereto. Thus the word ‘destructuring’ would be more appropriate when speaking of the power of various forms of exteriority to question the illusion of coherence within western discourse and practice both past and present. The notion of ‘destructuring’ implicitly denotes Heidegger`s conception of a ‘new beginning’ that would accompany the end of western metaphysics. However, even Heidegger did not acknowledge the power of other forms of philosophy exterior to the western model to bring about this ‘new beginning’. This fact does however not necessarily undermine the notion of the ‘new beginning’: Bernasconi (1997:190) states that Heidegger ”… sought to prepare for the possibility of another beginning. The fact that this possible future was supposed to arise from recollecting the first philosophy in Greece (!) and was supposed to lead to an opening of German philosophy might not make this a particularly auspicious precedent to which to turn, but… Heidegger`s late thought shows the connection between the construction of the history of philosophy and the opening of future thinking”.
This essay appears in Derrida`s “Writing and Difference”, trans. Allan Bass (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978)
Bernasconi is quoting Levinas from “Transcendence et Hauteur”, (Bulletin de la Societe Francaise de Philosophie, vol 54, 1962, p103).
Bernasconi is quoting Derrida from “Writing and Difference”, trans. Allan Bass (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, p153)

Bibliography
Anderson, P. 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso.
Atkinson, B & Breitz, C (ed). 1999. Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press.
Bernasconi, R. 1997. “African Philosophy’s Challenge to Continental Philosophy” in Postcolonial African Philosophy, a Critical Reader edited by Emanuel Chukwudi Eze, 1997, Oxford: Blackwell University Press, pp 183-196.
Enwezor, O. 1997. Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation. Third Text 40,Autumn1997, pp21-42.
Foucault, M. 1963. “A Preface to Transgression” in Michel Foucault: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984.Volume 2: Aesthetics, edited by James Faubion, 1994, London: Penguin Group, pp69-87.
Foucault, M. 1971. “The Order of Discourse” in Modern Literary Theory. A Reader. (Second Edition), edited by Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 1992, New York: Routledge, pp221-233.
Jameson, F. 1984. “Periodizing the 60`s, the Sixties Without Apology” in Modern Literary Theory. A Reader. (Second Edition), edited by Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 1992, New York: Routledge, pp309-340.
Richards, C. 1999. “Bobbits Feast: Violence and Representation in South African Art” in Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art, edited by Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz, 1999, Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press Limited, pp165-186.
Sardar, Z. 1998. Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture. London: Pluto Press.
Sardar, Z. 1993. Do not Adjust Your Mind. Post-modernism, Reality and the Other. Futures, October 1993, pp 877-889.
Van Reeth, A.1994. Ensiklopedie van die Mitologie (trans. Combrink, J; Muller, D & Van Tonder, J). South Africa: Vlaeberg Press.

this paper can be downloaded in pdf form from johan thom’s website