Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5: Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity http://www.ricorso.net/tx/ENG312/Teaching/Classroom/Lectures/Lectu...

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Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5

Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity
What follows is an account of the postcolonial terms binarism and alterity which ultimately underlie Edward Said's theory of colonial difference in the context of Western travels and conquests in East realms (hence Orientalism). These expand on brief notes given in Guide to Postcolonial Terminology [link]. Binarism Alterity

Binarism
Semiology is the science of signs and sign-systems - an academic discipline whose modern origins are usually ascribed to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Fundamental to the science is the observation that language is arbitrary in origin - that is to say, there is no reason why one word should mean one thing rather than another, or why words and thing should exist in a given relationship to each other. Differently stated, this means that the key relationship between any language and the world is not a representative (or mimetic) or but a question of the internal structure of that language, whose parts are so arranged that it institutes a set of oppositions which structures the world-view of those who use it. (In this sense we do not use language; instead, it uses us.) At the centre of the structuralist conception of language is the idea of binary difference. Any system which assigns opposite senses to different terms (white/black; good/bad; raw/cooked) is characterised by the operations of binarism. Though most familiar today from the methodology of computer science - where bits and bytes are encoded in a series of on/off strings arranged in in series of 8-, 16-, or even 32-bit strings - binarism is in facta fundamental element of modern thought especially in so far as it related to an anti-essentialist conception of the relationship between language and its referents. In a binary system a referent has meaning only in relation to other referents; or, rather, the signifier stands to the signified in a meaning-relation which is purely determined by its relationship to other signifiers. Every language is, to that extent, a closed system. Although de Saussure postulated his ideas in the context of linguistics they have come to be a dominant if not the dominant element in the forms of philosophical thinking or critique which identify themselves by the prefix post- : that is, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. All of these deal with the way that the meaning-world of cultural significance is constructed out of fundamentally arbitrary signs arranged in patterns of complex, self-transformative significance with the implication that a world so constructed is the agent of a specific power-relation that favours one group over another. Whether that relationship is created by the group for its own advantage or actually creates the group in the course of a larger historical process is a matter for further reflection. In any case, de Saussures insight that binaries - or significant pairs, in the terminology of phonetics - define the very way that language works has supplied a basic premise for most forms of modern secular thought. It is worth being clear about the secular implications of semiology as the basis of modern theories of knowledge, and how far it is from theories based on any idea of self-evidence (i.e., common-sense) or revelation (i.e., religion). Semiological binarism puts aside all thought of absolutes or essences. In a semiological outlook, nothing is said to have meaning by reason that it actually reflects an underlying state of being, but only in sofar as it holds its place in a field of meaning-elements or binary system. This, in turn, insures the denotation and connotations of any term. In that sense, a single sign (or seme in Greek - hence semiology) is said to be arbitrary: that is, it has no other meaning than the one assigned to it by its place in the wider system. God does not mean God; it means what people mean by God, which, in turn, is what the language that they use means by God.

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Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5: Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity http://www.ricorso.net/tx/ENG312/Teaching/Classroom/Lectures/Lectu... Generated by Foxit PDF Creator Foxit Software http://www.foxitsoftware.com For evaluation only. The epistemological relationship between language and truth traditionally presupposed in naive accounts of realism is therefore replaced by a new conception in which the reality implied in a given cultural perspective is seen to be a product of a given culture no less - if not more - than a privileged means of access to it (i.e., a true knowing as distinct from error or illusion). If the arbitrariness of signs is first acknowledged, then cultures, ideologies and belief systems everywhere are seen, by definition, to be purely relative in as much as no one system has absolute priority over any other considered as a representation of the world in which we live. In as much as each system is whole onto itself (or hermeetic, meaning closed and secret), none of them is more true than another. The ideas of imagination and perception are therefore interchangeable: things that were taken to be real in traditional culture are now said to be imagined or invented. All cultures and ideologies (including science and religion) are now held to be entirely relative, and this is more or less the common supposition of enlightened cultural theorists today. needless to say, this style of thinking leads on directly to - or, perhaps, arises from multiculturalism in the life of nations and, at least in theory, to the mutual appreciation of different cultural traditions. This idea and a climate differs widely from the idea of liberal tolerance which presupposes that we are right and they are wrong but they are entitled to be wrong and we are obliged to tolerate their error. Pushed to the extreme, the semiological idea of arbitrary signifiers ultimately leads to the concept of hyper-reality which informs postmodernist theory. According to this view, everything that nothing that is real but representation - an idea that perhaps works better in California than Cushendall. Now, the world that is ushered in by these ideas is profoundly secular in temper but it is also oddly haunted in as much as everything that seemed solid to the eyes of naive realists now seems to be comprise of a sort of phantasmic light which reveals its character as a form of mental construct - not real but hyper-real in the sense that it has been engendered by a history of image-making which bestows form on all material things (houses, cities, automobiles) but also upon things not made by man at all (trees, mountains, tsunamis, God). What has all of this to do with postcolonial studies? In postcolonial studies, the term binarism is used to describe the way in which a colonial ideology constructs a culture (or meaning-world) in which the colonist maintains a position of privilege by means of a cultural hegemony - a term which we will not pause to explain (but see the . infused in the everyday language of the colony, spoken by colonist and coloniser alike though always to the disadvantage of the colonised. Hence, terms white and black, on the one hand, and the terms good and bad, on the other, are linked by vertical association so that white and good conjoin to produce a symmetry that results in the equal association of black and bad. In this way the binarism of the colonial mentality divides the world up into good white people and bad black people, and negotiates all social transactions on that basis. Such is the power of the binary system that any areas falling between the main binary terms (e.g., black/white) are treated as taboo - that is to say, it is felt to be scandalous in colonial soociety to engage in any mixing of one with the other or to suggest that there is an habitable zone between them which does not participate in teh vertical logic of the dominant semiological system. However: contrary to this defining function of colonial ideology, it is precisely in that in-between zone, that the postcolonial studies takes on its full import by seeking to establish a new relationship between the opposed elements in the system. Instead of equating difference with opposition with exclusion, the postcolonial mind sees it as a form of variance and a mandate for inclusion. One way of expressing this shift in thinking is the movement away from binarism toward alterity - about which see below (q.v.). [ top ]

Alterity

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Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5: Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity http://www.ricorso.net/tx/ENG312/Teaching/Classroom/Lectures/Lectu... Generated by Foxit PDF Creator Foxit Software http://www.foxitsoftware.com For evaluation only. Alterity (meaning otherness) is used, in postcolonial studies to refer to the difference between opposite terms in a binary system which are not necessarily seen as remorselessly opposed, and mutually antagonistic, to each another . This is a two-way process since the reflex that causes the colonised simply to reverse the binary so that the equation white-good/black-bad becomes black-good/white-bad is seen as no less less erroneous than the colonial status quo. Hence the term alterity is commonly used to suggest a way or ways in which the oppositional nature of the binary system can be made to break down revealing an area of freedom based on the the very differences involved in it. Where binarism implies a rigid set of terms that bestows positive and negative meanings on the coloniser and the colonised respectively, alterity speaks of their differences in such a way as to open up the possibility of dialogue between them. Alterity has its roots in the theory of knowledge associated with Western philosophy and, more specifically, with the cogito of Ren Descartes. In positing the I as that which knows in his famous formula (cogito ergo sum/I think, therefore I am), Decartes placed the individual at the centre of the modern knowledge-system and - by implication - placed the European self at the centre of the modern world, looking out on those others deprived of knowledge whom we were equipt to understand from an objective standpoint which they did not themselves possess by virtue of our claims to rationality - the summum bonum of the European Enlightenment. In practice, of course, that meant that Europeans would know non-Europeans as savages and natives. The location of the individual at the centre of the knowledge-universe had, however, a double-effect. While, on the one hand, it enhanced the power of the European collective to gain knowledge of the material and cultural world beyond its boundaries, it also tended to disintegrate the community of knowledge upon which the European consensus was founded. By removing revelation and authority from the knowledge-system and substituting individual experience and scientific experiment, the European effected the othering of those living beyond his continental boundaries. At the same time, a similar process of othering took place within the European community in sofar as each individual now became the unique centre of his own world. The practice of democracy and (so far as it has actually been practiced) of socialism in Western societies to some extent soutured up the rifts caused by this centrifugal tendency. At the same time, it produced a consciousness of difference which have often found expression in various degrees of social and spiritual alienation. Thus, for instance, when the I and the Other are so opposed at the level of knowledge-theory, it is no wonder that the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre defined the experience of otherness in this famous sentence: Lenfer cest lautre/Hell is other people. Now, this certainly an extreme idea and one that, for all its melancholic appeal, stands apart from the common wisdom of the European mind. In that context (and hence in the lives we live as Europeans) the perception of the otherness of others is generally seen as something to be overcome by an exercise in sympathy inspired by a sense of shared human values. Needless to say, the Christian injunction to love ones neighbour as oneself has significant bearing on this matter, and it is not surprising to find the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum recently professing the opinion that European society cannot continue to function if it moves too far away from its Christian basis - a judgement which is not at all the same thing as an act of faith in the Christian doctrine of personal salvation. In bourgeois society, moreover, the commandment of love is not always an effective one since class division throws up barriers that no amount of cross-community bonding is able to overcome except perhaps in time of war when a reinvigorated sense of community arises with a shared sense of difference from the enemy without. It is ironic, though perfectly explicable, that the bourgeoisie commonly espouse ardent forms of Christian faith at the very moment when they are bringing the pressure of economic oppression strenuously to bear upon those locked outside of their own class formation - i.e., the working-class; and only a generalised European movement towards socialism (albeit in a Social Democrat or Christian Socialist guise) has prevented the outbreak of open class

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Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5: Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity http://www.ricorso.net/tx/ENG312/Teaching/Classroom/Lectures/Lectu... Generated by Foxit PDF Creator Foxit Software http://www.foxitsoftware.com For evaluation only. war. In colonial society, by contrast, the sense of difference between colonist and colonised is so acute that no prospect of breaking down the difference seems possible. Yet this is exactly what postcolonial thinkers require of us to do today. That is to say, those who reflect on what happens to a colonial society after it has been decolonised must reach the recognition that the anti-colonial mindset is not the final solution to the problem. Once liberated in economic fact, and then decolonised in personal and collective thinking, the postcolonial subject finds him/herself ranged against others who are no longer separated from the self by the colonial divide. It is in this context, especially, that the term alterity comes into play with full force. The hallmark of alterity, thus considered, is the ability to enter into dialogue with the other. And, while the outcome of such engagement is ultimately political, its original form is more like to be interpersonal - and, by implication literary and artistic. Arguably, in fact, it is the literary author (e.g., the novelist) which most effectively demonstrates or even epitomises - the breaking down of barriers between opposites in the binary worldvision. Why? Because the novelist is the one who attempts to understand a multiplicity of characters and hence to understand that his own character (or narrator) from outside no less than from the inside. (The idea that dialogue - or its more general equivalnet heteroglossia - plays a central role in novels was first advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin in an essay entitled Discourse in the Novel of 1934-35) [1]. The result, of course, is dialogue the reality of which can be judged by the extent to which characters in novels genuinely form independent centres of consciousness ranged against each other across the barriers of private and collective difference. Clearly, in the case of a novel based on colonial experience, the element of collective difference is hugely prevalent. The same style of thinking, if applied to real people, produces a form of alterity which promises to overcome the bitter divisions created by colonial experience. Hence alterity, though it primarily connotes the stark opposition of self and other, is ultimately seen as promising release from binary systems with their assertion of irreducible kinds of difference. In place of that, it substitutes a new order of difference-as-variation of a kind that can attain to fertile interchange, mutual recognition, and practical compromise - if not positive agreement. At this point, postcolonial man has finally been born.

Notes
1: Reprinted in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.259-422.

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