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2016, Vol. 16(1) 4874
Responsivity and ! The Author(s) 2016
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Bernhard Leistle
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
Building on recent efforts in this direction, this essay provides arguments in support of
the concept of responsivity, developed by the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, and its
importance in anthropological theorizing. Responsivity is a way of thinking about rela-
tions between self and Other, structure and agency, universality and particularity that
escapes the dichotomy which usually characterizes such conceptual pairings. By defining
responding as a relationship to the Other as other, and by defining the Other as what
we respond to, Waldenfels concept enables anthropologists to theoretically overcome
the contradiction between radical and empirical alterity. This potential is illustrated in a
discussion of the responsive aspects of other approaches to empirical otherness: the
sociology of the stranger, psychoanalysis and semiotics. Through comparisons that
stress points of contact and compatibility, the notion of responsivity is thrown into
sharper relief. At the same time, familiar anthropological approaches to alterity are re-
presented in a changed light.
Keywords
alterity, otherness, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, sociology of the stranger, semiotics,
Waldenfels
Introduction
Response or responding are certainly common enough terms, familiar through
use in everyday language as synonymous for answer or reply. Less so responsivity,
or responsiveness, which have a ring of technicality to them. As a denition for
the adjective responsive, from which these two words are derived, we nd in
Websters dictionary: reacting in a desired or positive way, quick to react or
Corresponding author:
Bernhard Leistle, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, 1125
Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada.
Email: bernhard.leistle@carleton.ca
Leistle 49
Two things seem noteworthy here: the extension of the meaning of response to all
forms of behavior physiological, sensory and psychological in denitions 1, 2
and 3, and the identication of behavior with responding in denition 4. Without
putting too much stress on it, we can derive from this dictionary entry important
characteristics of the concept of responsivity developed by the German philosopher
Bernhard Waldenfels.1 In our everyday understanding, reected in the rst three
denitions, we regard response as a secondary phenomenon, as something executed
or occurring in the aftermath of something else, and in this sense temporally, or at
least logically subordinated to it: the answer follows the question, answering it; the
reaction is caused by the stimulus, which preceded it.
The fourth denition introduces a new dimension: when every form of behavior
is a response, then does this not apply to questioning behavior as well? And if a
question is itself a response to yet another question, who or what asks that ques-
tion? Are we being continuously questioned, called, summoned, and is our own
experience essentially a process of responding to a demand which escapes us?
Questions such as these are tackled in Bernhard Waldenfels philosophy, which
is essentially a rethinking of the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition
from the vantage point of responding. Just as in our everyday usage, philosophy
traditionally gives priority to the question over the answer.2 Knowledge is pro-
duced through answering questions, and the questions ask about what we dont
know. Thus, everything appears to rely on the question; the answer just seems to ll
a void, or compensate for a lack, which is already inscribed in the question.
Therefore, if philosophy can dene the nature of questioning, it will automatically
gain a correct understanding of answering. Waldenfels engages thoroughly with
this line of reasoning and proposes to start from answering or responding as a
primary phenomenon.3 Before the human being can ask any questions, it answers
to a name; before it speaks, it is talked to; before it perceives, the world appeals to
the senses and the body.
Recently, it has been claimed that the notion of a fundamental responsivity
bears the potential of overcoming some classical obstacles in anthropological
50 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
theorizing: the dichotomies between subject and object, structure and agency, real-
ism and constructivism (Leistle, 2014, 2015; Schwarz Wentzer, 2014). While the
thinking of Waldenfels has not yet made its way into the center of anthropological
discourse, there are indications that its arrival is imminent (Leistle, forthcoming).
Through the growing inuence of the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1981), the
concept of responsibility has recently gained substantial ground in anthropology
(Evens, 2008; Lambek, 2010). Levinas situates the origin of all meaning in an
ethical call manifested in the face of the Other. Through the face, the Other
pleads to the self not to kill her or him, thereby confronting the self with a resist-
ance which it cannot overcome.4 The self becomes a self in the sense of a perceiving,
acting, and thinking subject only through responding to this call that it cannot
evade, by taking over a limitless ethical responsibility for the Other. The common
term responsibility is thus related back to its etymological origin.
Beyond this general trend, the term response, implying in a sense the concept of
responsivity, appears conspicuously in anthropological literature, and across topical
and theoretical orientations. For example, in his ethnography of contemporary
religiosity in urban Morocco, Emilio Spadola describes the emergence of the reli-
gious subject in terms of a selective response to competing calls of Islam. These calls
can be mass-mediated, or, as in the following passage referring to a young woman by
the name of Zuhur, they can be expressed in the medium of ritual possession:
Well before Zuhur was summoned to trance, so too was her grandmother. She specu-
lated that her own possession by the jinns derived precisely from that lineage as a
debt unpaid and now inherited. Those accumulated debts reiterate the sense that the
ritual of trance is the response to a prior command, thus an act of responsibility, rather
than an original act in itself. Even though Zuhur was responding to the jinns call, that
call, as command, was bound up with people who preceded her and indeed who placed
her in the position of suering the call itself. (Spadola, 2014: 86)
. . . We cannot study most peoples questions, but we can study how they answer them
as the object of our study, and thereby know their questions and our questions better.
Leistle 51
Eorts such as these are interesting, since they proceed from correct intuition, but
they suer generally from a lack of conceptual reection, leading to a use of terms
like question and answer, call and response, in their colloquial sense. The present
essay intends to provide further arguments for the usefulness of Waldenfels con-
cept of responsivity in anthropological theory and practice. This is to be accom-
plished through connecting his concept with empirical approaches to alterity that
are more familiar to anthropologists, namely the sociology of the stranger, psy-
choanalysis and semiotics.5 Stressing responsive aspects of these approaches will
not only demonstrate their compatibility with Waldenfels phenomenology, but
also further clarify the concept of responsivity itself.
The response is creative despite its being a response. The call does not belong to the
order which integrates or subjects the response. Rather, the call only becomes a call in
the response which it causes and precedes. Thus responding runs over a small ridge
which separates bondage and compliance from arbitrariness and willfulness. The one
who waits for ready-made responses does not have anything to say because everything
has already been said. In turn, the one who speaks without responding does not have
anything to say either because there is nothing for him to say. We invent what we
56 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
respond, but not what we respond to and what gives weight to our speaking and
acting. (Waldenfels, 2011: 42)
The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized,
in the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which may be most briey formulated by
the saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is
far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. For, to be a
stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specic form of interaction. The
inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any sociologically
relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near. The
stranger, like the poor and like sundry inner enemies, is an element of the group
itself. His position as a full-edged member involves both being outside it and con-
fronting it. (Simmel, 1950: 4023)
Leistle 57
From a perspective of responsivity the social type of the stranger can be understood
as a kind of hinge between the radical and the empirical Other. In the sociological
phenomenon of the stranger, society as an order is confronted with a person or a
group of persons that, while part of society, is also alien to it. Interactions with the
stranger and his treatment at the hands of other group members can be interpreted
in terms of responses to this challenge. In this way, the stranger becomes known
and in a certain sense familiar, for example, in the widespread role of trader, but
also as immigrant, mediator or shaman. However, he or she also retains irre-
movable traces of otherness. These can be detected in the strangers fundamental
ambiguity: near and distant, distant when near, present and absent, inside and
outside of the group, a member of it and yet objective and to a certain degree
indierent toward it.
To provide clarication of this strange ambiguity, Waldenfels concept of a
responsive dierence can be invoked. Insofar as the stranger is assigned a function
and a role, he or she becomes part of a social order of meaning. This naming and
assigning has to be understood as the concrete, empirically observable answer to
the practical problem posed by the stranger to society: somebody comes today and
stays tomorrow, as Simmel puts it. But intertwined with the answer to this problem
is a continued relation of call and response. Although an answer has been given, the
otherness of the stranger has not been, can never be completely banned and abol-
ished. In the gure of the stranger, an alien demand keeps challenging and disturb-
ing the order, provoking it to respond creatively, that is, in ways that aect the
order itself.6
In his short text, Simmel characterizes the social relationship to the stranger with
a ne phenomenological intuition, opening up interesting perspectives for anthro-
pology. For in so far as societies are necessarily in contact with each other, and
perhaps have always been, the stranger is a ubiquitous phenomenon. How dierent
societies typify their specic strangers, what categories they apply to make sense of
them, how these categories relate to concrete social interactions with strangers
these and other questions could provide guidelines for anthropological inquiries
into responsivity. Moreover, a body of classical sociological research and a wealth
of ethnographic materials7 could be examined with a fresh eye. This is even true for
the role of the anthropologist, famously referred to as a professional stranger
(Agar, 1980).
What would it mean concretely to approach the social phenomenon of the
stranger from a perspective of responsivity? On the one hand, anthropology
would have to continue doing what it has done traditionally: provide thick descrip-
tions to determine as accurately as possible the value of a certain sign or practice
within a semiotic context. This is because responding necessarily takes place in
relation to orders of cultural meaning out of which the responsive movement
must emerge and into which it must fall back. On the other hand, however, anthro-
pology would have to search for ways in which to preserve genuinely responsive
aspects of the relationship to the Other. In other words, ethnographic description
and interpretation would have to develop a sensibility for how responding is
58 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
experience (Schutz, 1963: 104) that his own taken-for-granted assumptions can be
proven invalid under certain circumstances, and therefore sees faultlines in the host
life-world with a clarity denied to its members. Schutz regards as not without basis
the suspicion of lack of loyalty to which the stranger is often subjected, but dier-
entiates as follows:
Psychoanalysis
Otherness doesnt appear only in social relations to others, for which the stranger-
relation is only a particular example; it also characterizes relations to oneself.
Radical alterity, as conceived by Waldenfels and others (e.g. Derrida and
60 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
Levinas), challenges the very idea of selfhood as an autonomous sphere. The Other
permeates the self to the core. In our discussion of conicts experienced by the
stranger in his approach to a new life-world, we have already indicated how the
inability to respond to the Other aects the constitution of a personal self.
The crisis of sense experienced by the stranger and in confrontation with him
always is also a psychological crisis. The intrusion of the Other into the individual
self has, however, become the specialty of another intellectual project: psycho-
analysis. It can be said with some justication that the main discovery of Freud
consisted in the realization that the ego is not master in its own house (Freud,
1955a: 143). Rather than being in control of aect, thought and behavior, the
psychoanalytic self was seen to be inuenced by unconscious drives and desires,
many of which were unacceptable to the conscious ego of the person, and conse-
quently repressed.
The particular text of Freud most often cited in connection with the problem of
alterity is his 1919 essay, The Uncanny (see, for example, Csordas, 2004: 1689;
Kristeva, 1991: 18292; Waldenfels, 1997: 44). Here, Freud rst denes his goal as
a psychoanalytic study of motifs of the uncanny in literature, in particular in the
works of the German romantic author E.T.A. Homann. His investigation of the
meaning of the German word unheimlich (uncanny), however, already indicates a
more encompassing perspective. Un-heimlich is grammatically a negation of heim-
lich, an adjective with highly ambiguous semantics: on the one hand, heimlich is
connected with what is homely (from the noun Heim, home), that is, long
known, intimate and familiar. On the other hand, it refers to the sphere of the
hidden, the secret, the clandestine (to do something heimlich is to do it without
others noticing). Freud concludes: Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which
develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it nally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich (Freud,
1955b: 226). One semantic strand of heimlich already carries the notion of the
uncanny within it. When we experience something as uncanny we are frightened
precisely by what is close to us, what we are familiar with: the uncanny is that class
of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar
(Freud, 1955b: 220). In other words, in experiencing the uncanny we feel that what
is our own doesnt completely belong to us, that our very self is always also other.13
Or, as Julia Kristeva (1991: 188) puts it, uncanniness is a destructuration of
the self.
In her book Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva credits Freud with the discovery of
a radical otherness in ones own self. Focusing on the experience of the foreigner, in
both the subjective and objective sense, Kristeva connects the notion of the
uncanny with the sociological stranger, in particular, with the phenomenon of
xenophobia:
In the fascinated rejection that the foreigner arouses in us, there is a share of uncanny
strangeness in the sense of the depersonalization that Freud discovered in it, and
which takes up our infantile desires and fears of the other the other of death, the
Leistle 61
other of woman, the other of uncontrollable drive. The foreigner is within us.
And when we ee or struggle against the foreigner, we are ghting our unconscious
that improper facet of our impossible own and proper. (Kristeva, 1991: 191)
Waldenfels (1997: 4042) criticizes Kristevas solution to the dilemma of the Other
which is summarized in her slogan: The foreigner is within me, hence we are all
foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners (Kristeva, 1991: 192). For
him the intertwining of ownness and alienness is an irreducible fact: inclusion in an
order of self-world-experience and exclusion from it are two aspects of one and the
same movement. Also problematic is Kristevas characterization of the relationship
to the alien as negative and ultimately leading to rejection, fascination notwith-
standing. In a responsive phenomenology, relation to the alien must be situated on
a level prior to the split between positive and negative evaluation. Rejection and
fascination, love and hate are already responses to the alien, dening it in one
or the other way. Any intrinsic value assigned to the Other must necessarily miss it
in its otherness.
But without having to agree on particulars, we can acknowledge that psycho-
analysis provides a conceptual language to address the self in its capacity as respon-
sive process. Emotions, aects, anxieties, feelings of uncanniness
psychoanalytically, these are not the reactions of a closed o entity to external
stimuli but responses produced by a self interacting with a world. The world has the
power to overwhelm the self in trauma and pathos, and the self struggles to nd
responses that give rise to a viable order, an emotional economy, if one wants to
put it this way. Freud himself came very close to a responsive conception of psychic
life, when he interpreted delusional symptoms like those exhibited by Schreber not
as signs of disease but as attempts at healing, that is, as responses to suering
(Freud, 1958: 7071).
As was said with reference to the stranger, the ethnographic record, particularly
studies in psychological and psychoanalytical anthropology, can be revisited from
a perspective of responsivity. The question then becomes how the selves of cultural
others respond to the demands of the alien, and in what ways their responses and
their styles of responding are dierent from, or similar to, our own. The example I
would like to present here, however, focuses on the relationship between the
anthropologist and the Other, George Devereuxs From Anxiety to Method in the
Behavioral Sciences.14 Devereuxs general thesis is that anthropologists and other
behavioral scientists under certain circumstances respond to anxiety-arousing
research experiences with counter-transference, that is, the transference of their
own psychic conicts onto the behavior encountered in research subjects.
Devereux regards this as a major problem aecting claims of validity and demands
scientic reection, not only on the behavior of others but on the relation between
the researcher and those others. Through a great number of case studies and
vignettes of varying lengths, Devereux is able to show that anthropologists (as
well as psychiatrists and psychoanalysts) respond to emotionally problematic
experiences through a variety of defenses. Some can be called professional
62 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
I would venture to claim that there is no anthropologist who has not at least once
employed this professional defense to ward o anxiety and to deal with ethical or
psychological conict in eldwork. The evocation of the professional stance, or of
cultural relativism as methodological paradigm, is an example of a response on the
part of the anthropologist that is motivated psychologically but makes use of
pregured answers provided by a cultural order, in this case the professional cul-
ture of anthropology.
At this point we can ask ourselves whether the perspective of responsivity
enables us to adopt a critical attitude and to dierentiate between good and
Leistle 63
bad responses. Since responding to the Other takes place in the interstices between
orders, and since its creativity rests on its in-between character, this criterion can be
applied for purposes of evaluation. Creative responses do not fall into the domains
of any order and are in this sense excessive but at the same time manage to use
their situation in relation to orders to achieve transformative eects, i.e. produce
new orders. This characterization doesnt imply a moral evaluation; rather, it
denes creativity from a structural viewpoint. The question therefore is not any-
more whether a response is good or bad, but whether it is progressive or con-
servative. Answering according to a pre-existing responsive repertoire may be an
accomplishment of great importance for human evolution, which allows preserva-
tion of the achieved and frees cognitive capacities for other tasks (Bateson, 1972:
1413; Wulf, 2013: 512), but becomes an impediment in confrontation with
the unexpected and new. In such situations, and anthropological eldwork can
serve as a ne example, creative responding is called for, not falling back into
pre-established orders of meaning in a quasi-automatic manner.15
Semiotics
When loosely dened as the systematic study of the formal and pragmatic proper-
ties of signs, semiotics seems exclusively concerned with what can be named,
depicted, symbolized. The semiotic Other must always be the signied other
associated with a signier which serves as a token for it, therefore part of a sign-
relation. Beyond such a sign-relation there is only the unsayable, which becomes
synonymous with the non-existent. In other words, a radical Other, always already
elsewhere and past because we respond to it, seems to be a concept alien to
semiotics.
Such a statement, however, needs to be qualied in at least two respects: for an
anthropology grounded in a notion of responsivity, semiotics and other approaches
concerned with communication, like hermeneutics, are indispensable research
tools. To regard selfhood and ownness, and with them any kind of objectication
resulting from an underlying process of responding to the Other, means that signs
are ultimately to be understood as answers. And we as anthropologists are con-
cerned with signs in the sense of answers in empirical research.16 To put it dier-
ently: even if signication would rule out radical otherness, all empirical otherness
still has to take the form of signs.
The second qualication relates to the philosophical implications of a semiotic
perspective on human existence. What does it mean if we posit that as human
beings we have no access to the world except through the use of signs, that in
this sense nothing exists beyond the semiotic? One of the founders of semiotics, the
American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, articulated this panse-
miotic view of the universe explicitly, stating: The entire universe is perfused with
signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs (Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5,
Paragraph 448, fn; cf. Noth, 1990: 41). As to the place of the human being in this
universe, Peirce even went so far as to conclude that the fact that every thought is a
64 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that
man is a sign (Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5; cf. Noth, 1990: 41).
But if it is true, as Peirce implied, that mind, self and even man himself are sign-
processes, dont we have to acknowledge once more, as in the case of psychoanaly-
sis, that the Other intrudes upon the very abode of ownness, this time in the form of
semiotic structures of sign-composition and sign-use? Peirce famously distinguished
between icon, index and symbol as dierent types of relations between the signier
and the referent. While icon and index both preserved a direct connection to what
was being represented (similarity in case of the icon, physical contact or contiguity
in case of the index), the sign-type of symbol was based on conventional agree-
ments and, thus, ultimately arbitrary. The arbitrariness of signs was further empha-
sized by the semiotician and linguist Ferdinand De Saussure (1966) for language,
where the symbolic is the predominant type of signication. But if signs, or more
precisely the relation between signier and signied, are regarded as fundamentally
arbitrary, this means that signied reality can always also be otherwise, since other
conventions would give rise to a dierent reality. Any actually existing worldview
would carry around with it the shadow of unrealized possibilities. In other words: a
sphere of unreality would always accompany what we claim to be real, manifesting
as an ultimate uncertainty about whether the signs and signifying structures we use
to make sense of the world are indeed true or even the best possible. The appear-
ance of this uncertainty of experience can engender anxieties mounting up to a
horror vacui, the fear of falling into an existential void. If this is indeed the case,
then semiotics, too, is confronted with the problem of radical otherness and, thus,
not at all opposed to responsivity.17
Empirical and radical alterity merge in a famous study that adopts a semiotic
perspective towards the European discovery and colonization of America, Tzvetan
Todorovs The Conquest of America. The books subtitle seems auspicious for our
theme: The Question of the Other. Indeed Todorov frames his study of relations
between Spanish conquistadores and colonizers and the Aztecs in terms of an
encounter with otherness. His guiding question is how the Spaniards under
Columbus and, particularly, under Cortes were able to subdue, with a compara-
tively small contingent of armed men, a population which greatly outnumbered
them and whose civilization was, in many respects, comparable to that of the
Spaniards. He gives a semiotic answer to this question: the Spaniards were able
to defeat the Aztecs not because of superiority in military technology, greater bru-
tality, or immunological dierences,18 but because of an advantage in the eld of
communication. More than the Aztecs, the Spaniards made use of what Todorov
calls the interhuman aspects of communication, the fact that sign-use is also an
action that has an eect on the addressee. Hand in hand with this went the
Spaniards realization that signication, at least of the symbolic type, is grounded
in conventional agreement and in this sense arbitrary. Taken together, these two
insights amounted to acknowledgement of the importance of communicating with
others in order to gain information about them. They also led to an attitude in which
signs could be used for instrumental and manipulative purposes, as for example
Leistle 65
when Cortes intentionally and successfully posed as the God Quezalcoatl, whose
return was prophesized in an Aztec myth (Todorov, 1999: 11619).
In contrast to the Spanish ability to improvise, to respond eectively to unpre-
cedented situations and problems, stood the inability of the Aztecs to make sense of
the invaders and to transform their understanding into action. This paralysis was
personied in the reigning Aztec ruler, Montezuma, who let himself be taken cap-
tive by Cortes and seemed to oscillate between admiration and contempt for his
captors (see, for example, Todorov, 1999: 7072). Montezumas indecisive behav-
ior, Todorov insists, was not merely a personal idiosyncrasy, but was motivated by
the Aztecs cultural perspective, their view of the world. Drawing on contemporary
accounts written by both Spanish and indigenous authors,19 Todorov presents
Aztec culture and society as organized around the key-concept of order
(Todorov, 1999: 66). Everything and every person had its place in a strict social
hierarchy; ways of speaking with each other and about things were strongly ritua-
lized; events were predetermined by oracles and prophesies. Within such a cosmo-
logical order a radically dierent cultural perspective was inconceivable. As an
example of the Aztec conception of the Other, Todorov cites the Totonacs,
whom Aztecs thought of as speaking a barbaric, unintelligible language and
leading an uncivilized life. In general, the Aztecs distinguished two types of strange
people: those whom their Gods accepted as sacrices and those whom they found
unacceptable:
Now, the otherness of the Spaniards is much more radical. . . . Unable to integrate
them into the category of the Totonacs whose alterity is not at all radical the
Aztecs, faced with the Spaniards, renounce their entire system of human otherness and
nd themselves obliged to resort to the only other device available: the exchange with
the gods. (Todorov, 1999: 76)
In other words, the Aztecs inability to assess the motives of the strange newcomers
correctly and respond to them eectively was due to a cultural perspective that
determined their thinking and behavior. Unlike the Spaniards actions that, as
improvisations, moved beyond the known and familiar into new territories, the
Aztecs responses remained within the connes of their cosmos; they lacked the
creativity called for by a completely unprecedented situation. As presented by
Todorov, we might call the Aztec response conservative in the above sense.
Yet, it would be wrong to suppress the subtlety of Todorovs argument which, in
a simplied form, can be regarded as ethically problematic. He doesnt simply
claim that the Spaniards were more creative than the Aztecs; rather, he says
that the cultural perspective from which the Europeans were acting provided
more margin for the emergent idea of an extreme cultural dierence. The openness
of Renaissance culture to the Other (a culture which Todorov calls allo-centric,
since its religious center was perceived as lying elsewhere, in Jerusalem) and their
previous experience with cultural alterity through confrontation with Muslim civ-
ilization allowed the Spaniards to perform more eectively in the situation of the
66 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
conquest. On the other hand, Todorov makes a serious eort to avoid representing
Aztec responses in terms of failure. Their emphasis on order, ritual and religion is
itself to be understood as a positive expression of the second fundamental aspect of
communication, which is communication not as interhuman exchange but as a
contact between man and world. In communicating with each other, human
beings always also communicate with nature, with God, with the Universe; they
become part of an order whose origin lies beyond their doings. To selectively
emphasize interhuman aspects of communication may have given the Spaniards
the edge over the Aztecs in the conquest of America, but it comes at the price of
destroying the capacity to feel in harmony with the world, to belong to a pre-
established order. The eect of the victory is to repress mans communication with
the world, to produce the illusion that all communication is interhuman commu-
nication; the silence of the gods weighs upon the camp of the Europeans as much as
on that of the Indians (Todorov, 1999: 97).
However, here my concern is to point out as clearly as possible the convergences
and frictions between a semiotic perspective on otherness and one grounded in the
notion of responsivity. For this purpose it is useful to quote Todorovs abstract
formulation of the problem:
The touchstone of alterity is not the present and immediate second person singular but
the absent or distant third person singular. . . . Language exists only by means of the
other, not only because one always addresses someone but also insofar as it permits
evoking the absent third person; unlike animals, men know citation. But the very
existence of this other is measured by the space the symbolic system reserves for him:
such space is not the same, to evoke only one massive and by now familiar example,
before and after the advent of writing (in the narrow sense). So that any investigation
of alterity is necessarily semiotic, and reciprocally, semiotics cannot be conceived
outside the relation to the other. (Todorov, 1999: 157, emphasis added)
The Other is dened as a value in a system; in this view, a radical Other in the sense
of what we respond to is, indeed, not possible. This is why the fateful encounter
between Spaniards and Aztecs has to be reduced, on the theoretical and analytical
plane, to a clash of signifying orders, with the more ecient or more aggressive
order emerging as winner. Ultimately, it is the operation of structures, not the
actions of individuals, that determines the outcome of historical confrontation.
There is no need to completely dismiss this thesis, or the structuralist/post-
structuralist perspective that gives rise to it, in the name of responsivity. As has
been stated repeatedly, responding to the Other takes place in relation to orders;
and signifying orders, or cultural systems of meaning, are particularly important
for anthropology which, by denition, is concerned with eorts of understanding,
i.e. interpreting the Other. Rather, the concept of responsivity adds something
vitally important to this traditional concern, thus promising to solve some of the
aporia resulting from it. It allows us to grasp theoretically and analytically that no
matter how strong the structural and contextual forces in a situation, in the last
Leistle 67
analysis these are incapable of completely determining the behavior of the partici-
pants. Determination and causality are, at least as far as humans are con-
cerned,20 post hoc descriptions of processes which, when ongoing, are
indeterminate and open-ended.
The conceptual pair of demand and response enables us to move closer to the
event as actually happening (even though this remains, of course, an approxima-
tion). A fact is not simply something given but results from responding to a
demand which eludes any answer one might give, and exceeds any order that
might emerge, even that of reason. A responsive anthropology would aim to get
at this excess and nd ways of expressing it. This is important for any discipline
dealing with human phenomena, but it is critical for anthropology, for which, some
would say, working with groups and persons in marginal and subaltern positions is
its dening characteristic (Bourgois, 1991). Here, the concept of responding to the
Other opens up the possibility of speaking about power, oppression and violence in
structural terms, without in the same breath renouncing the individuals agency,
freedom, and dignity. For a discipline like anthropology, this is no minor or trivial
achievement.
The Conquest of America contains many indications of primordial responsivity
in a Waldenfelsian sense,21 including even the motivation of the project itself.
Todorov describes this project as the writing of an exemplary history (as contrasted
with a narrative that simply claims to tell the historic truth objectively), a history
that attempts to answer a moral question: How to deal with the Other? (Todorov,
1999: 34, 2534). Doesnt this mean that the author himself describes his book in
terms of a response to a demand coming from the Other, a demand which has a
strong ethical dimension? I believe that Todorovs dedication, which seems so
strange at rst, should be read in this sense: I dedicate this book to the memory
of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.
Conclusion
If there was such a thing as an overarching discipline of anthropology, it would
have to have the whole human being as its subject matter: a being endowed with a
sense of self that is, however, necessarily realized in social and cultural contexts. In
both its personal and its socio-cultural existence, this being relies on faculties that
distinguish it from other beings; it is dened by a specic form of reason, a logos.
Understandably, this thematic eld came to be divided among a great number of
sub-disciplines, dierent anthropologies specializing in specic aspects of being
human: psychological anthropology, social and cultural anthropology, and philo-
sophical anthropology, amongst others.
Another fundamental concern of anthropology is otherness, or alterity (Auge,
1998; Maranhao, 1998). This concern runs through all the various levels of anthro-
pology dened as a science of the human being or, perhaps better, of being human.
Otherness becomes critical in cultural anthropology where researchers study cul-
tural dierence by entering into encounters with concrete others. In these
68 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
encounters, the anthropologists self and the others self engage in a complex
interweaving of their personal and cultural experiences. The entanglement of self
and Other that occurs in ethnographic eldwork has the potential to cast doubt on
the universality of reason. It can lead to an epistemological crisis in which the
rationality the anthropologist applies to the interpretation of the Other appears
as only one particular type of reason, the logos of western modernity.
Bernhard Waldenfels concept of responsivity and his characterization of the
human being as a responsive being enable us to talk about these fundamental
anthropological concerns in a unied conceptual language; this alone should
secure an anthropologists attention. Furthermore, the notion of a constitution
of orders and ownness in responding to alien demands overcomes the usual prob-
lems of dualistic thought. Since the Other we respond to is always already gone, the
answer we give (and in which we produce ourselves and the other as someone or
something that is named) never reaches what provoked it. The response is never
caused by the demand, as, for example, a physiological reaction is caused by an
external stimulus. Although they give rise to orders of sense, to sets and systems,
responses dont follow existing rules and regulations. While thus essentially con-
nected to structural processes, the response is animated by an irreducible agency of
the individual human being. The individual itself, however, needs to be thought of
as a continuous process of responding, of including what belongs to it (but never
completely so) and of excluding what is alien to it (but keeps disturbing the self
through its demands). Ownness and alienness, self and Other, subject and object,
structure and agency within a responsive paradigm all of these and other oppos-
itions have to be thought of as primordially intertwined with each other.
The challenges of adapting this conception to the needs of anthropological
research are obvious. They can only be met through careful and thorough discus-
sion. The purpose of the present article was to demonstrate adaptability through
linking responsivity with other approaches to alterity which are more familiar to
anthropologists. The sociological type of the stranger was presented as someone
forced to respond to the demands of an alien socio-cultural order (Schutz) or,
conversely, as a person or a group who placed a demand on that order
(Simmel). More than existing approaches, I propose that responsivity allows us
to account for the dynamics of stranger-relations. In particular, it allows us to
better grasp the function of strangers in the constitution of social identity: whatever
label we attach to the stranger, whether we refer to him as guest, immigrant, or
enemy, inevitably in one movement we conceptualize him as bearer of the label
and ourselves in relation to him. But to regard this as a creative response means
that there must always remain a sphere of alienness in connection with the stranger
from which demands continue to arise. There is no perfect or ultimate social
response to the stranger.
The psychoanalysis of the uncanny and of anxiety was compatible with a
responsive conception of the personal self. Freuds Ego struggles for order but is
continuously in danger of being overwhelmed by the unconscious drives of the Id.
Several processes of responding structure the persons psychic life: on the one hand,
Leistle 69
the person responds to the world as a totality; on the other hand, various aspects of
the self respond to each other. The psychoanalytical self is thus never completely
identical with itself, a non-coincidence reected in the feeling of uncanniness.
The concept of responsivity can enrich anthropological approaches inspired by
psychology and psychoanalysis. This potential was exemplied through anthro-
pologists responses to anxiety experienced in the eld. Professional defenses in
the sense of Georges Devereux were interpreted as answers to a threatening alien.
These responses can be called conservative in that they are pre-formulated by an
existing order, a professional culture of anthropology, and serve to preserve
that order.
Finally, the semiotic approach to otherness was considered, both in general and
in a violent encounter between cultures, the Spanish conquest of America as pre-
sented by Todorov. As with the earlier approaches, the investigation stressed points
of contact and compatibility rather than contradictions. Waldenfels conception of
the Other as what we respond to in no way precludes the importance of signifying
structures and orders of meaning, but deepens the semiotic-hermeneutic approach
through a sensitivity for the origin of orders in an in-between sphere of dis-order.
No matter how abstract and impersonal a constellation might appear, from a
responsive perspective it must ultimately be relatable to an unpredictable
human element. This notion is particularly important for anthropology as a dis-
cipline which is often concerned with people who nd themselves in the subordinate
position of power relations, a discipline in which questions of ethics acquire central
importance.
Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. Waldenfels himself relates his use of the terms response and responsivity back to
behaviorism, but to the German adaptation of this broad approach through authors
such as Karl Buhler, J.F.F. Buytendijk, Wolfgang Kohler, or Kurt Lewin (Waldenfels,
2007: 28). Following ordinary usage, Waldenfels uses the German word Antwort for
various aspects of responsivity that can be distinguished as response and answer in
English. The more abstract notion of a general responsiveness he renders as Responsivitat,
translatable as responsivity.
2. With certain modifications this even applies to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, who also
assigns priority to the question: It is of the essence of the question to have sense. Now
sense involves direction. Hence the sense of the question is the direction in which alone
the answer can be given if it is to be meaningful. A question places that which is
70 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
questioned within a particular perspective. The emergence of the question opens up, as it
were, the being of the object. Hence the logos that sets out this opened-up being is
already an answer. Its sense lies in the sense of the question (Gadamer, 1975: 326). For a
critical discussion of Gadamers hermeneutic from a perspective of responsivity see
Waldenfels (1994: 12236).
3. See in particular Part I of his Antwortregister.
4. This is not supposed to mean that the self cannot factually kill the Other. Quite to the
contrary, Levinas, who lost his family in the Holocaust and was himself imprisoned in a
German POW camp, attributes to the self a desire to kill which is aroused by the Other.
The resistance lies in the fact that self, when fulfilling this desire, destroys its object. The
Other cannot be possessed, not even by murdering him.
5. I happily acknowledge that Waldenfels himself provided the inspiration for making
these connections. He regularly cites Simmel and Schutz, Freud and Bakhtin, even
Todorov in his works.
6. It should perhaps be stated explicitly that this is not supposed to mean that efforts aimed
at integration are futile. But one should keep in mind that integration, when it is
completely successful, dissolves the phenomenon of the stranger. The completely inte-
grated stranger is no stranger anymore but a normal member of society and the ambi-
guity that defines the status of the stranger has vanished.
7. For example the studies of the Chicago School of sociology, whose members
initiated the field of immigration studies and formulated important concepts of the
immigrant-stranger as marginal man (Park, 1928) and sojourner (Siu, 1952, 1987).
Both Park and Siu based their conceptions directly on Simmels The Stranger (Siu,
1987: xxxii). Also valuable for a revitalization of the sociology of the stranger would
be Margaret Mary Woods monograph The Stranger: A Study in Social Relationship
(New York, 1934). As for anthropological sources, they are too numerous to list as
any study of contacts between social groups will provide material on the types of
strangers involved. A good example for how to make use of the ethnographic record
from a perspective emphasizing otherness is Fritz Kramers comparative work on art
and possession in Africa, The Red Fes (1993). Kramer is able to show how, in a
variety of African societies, contacts to actual, concrete strangers, that is to other,
African and European peoples interrelate with aesthetic forms and possession prac-
tices in non-arbitrary ways. In general, Christoph Wulf (2013: 71) has pointed out
that the stranger has been one of the central concerns of research in historical
anthropology.
8. This difference is of course important for the effective outcome of processes of adapta-
tion and integration, but it is not relevant with regard to the structural characteristics of
the experience of the stranger considered by Schutz.
9. For Schutzs influential conception of the everyday life-world as that province of reality
which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of
common sense, see Schutz and Luckmann (1970: 3 ff).
10. The term is accurate for Schutz and preferable to self since Schutz himself defines the
ego in the center of the life-world as reflecting on its own experience, that is as subject in
the strict sense.
11. Simmel, too, describes the relationship to the stranger as founded on a shared human-
ness that, somewhat paradoxically, restricts the possibility of intimacy with him: In
some cases, perhaps the more general, at least the more unsurmountable, strangeness is
Leistle 71
not due to different and ununderstandable matters. It is rather caused by the fact that
similarity, harmony and nearness are accompanied by the feeling that they are not really
the unique property of this particular relationship: they are something more general,
something which potentially prevails between the partners and an indeterminate number
of others, and therefore gives the relation, which alone was realized, no inner and
exclusive necessity (Simmel, 1950: 407).
12. Schutzs influence on anthropological theorizing outside of phenomenological anthro-
pology was mostly indirect. A notable exception is presented by Clifford Geertzs essay
Person, Time and Conduct in Bali (Geertz, 1973), in which he uses Schutzs distinction
between predecessor, contemporary and successor for a description of the Balinese
conception of time.
13. An example for the uncanny in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffman are the various figures of
the double: a doubling of the self by someone who is uncannily similar to it and whose
thoughts are telepathically connected to the selfs; or the identification of the self with
another up to point where self and double cannot be separated from each other; a
duplication of events which keep recurring again and again (Freud, 1955b: 234).
Freud relates both the duplication of the self and the recurrence of events back to
infantile experiences and instinctual drives. At an early stage of development, he says,
the other self is experienced as a protection since it seems to guarantee the continuing
existence of self. Later, however, the double becomes a reminder of ones own death; it is
now frightening since it reminds us that our very life is surrounded by otherness.
Recurrent events, like passing the same place again and again when lost, are uncanny
because they carry within them a residue of the compulsion to repeat characteristic of
instinctual behavior (Freud, 1955b: 238).
14. Although Devereux doesnt work explicitly with the concept of the uncanny, but with
the more encompassing notion of anxiety, what he has to say applies to uncanniness in
the stricter sense. After all, uncanniness can be understood as the mode of anxiety that
relates to the selfs insecurity regarding its sphere of ownness (that class of the frighten-
ing which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar).
15. These interrelations also seem to be at play in Devereuxs distinction between sublima-
tory, that is, creative, and defensive, that is, automatic uses of methodology: What
matters, therefore, is not whether one uses methodology also as an anxiety-reducing
device, but whether one does so knowingly, in a sublimatory manner, or unconsciously,
in a defensive manner only (Devereux, 1967: 97).
16. See also the remarks by Sykes at the beginning of this essay.
17. Some semioticians have come up directly against the problem of the radical Other.
Gregory Bateson, for example, in his famous essay A Theory of Play and Fantasy,
arrives at the realization that any form of change and innovation in communication
involves logical paradox (Bateson, 1972: 193). As in Waldenfels concept of responding,
meaning arises here out of the interstices between orders. Another example for a semi-
otic contribution to a radical notion of alterity is the literary theory of the Russian critic,
linguist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. The discourse of the novel, says Bakhtin, is
organized according to the principle of heteroglossia, the tendency of any living language
to differentiate itself into a theoretically infinite number of varieties, dialects, sociolects,
professional jargons, etc. (Bakhtin, 1981: 2623). In the novel, heteroglossia becomes
dominant, dissolving the individual voice of the author into a genuine polyphony. The
author or speaker becomes a meeting ground of heterogeneous forces: she is not in
72 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
control of what she says her speech literally comes from elsewhere, the product of
responding to the Other in language.
18. Although these factors, and in particular the last one, played a big part in the near
annihilation of the Indian population of Latin America within 50 years of the conquest.
19. However, it has to be taken into consideration that the indigenous accounts were mostly
written in retrospect, that is, after the Aztec defeat.
20. The concept of responsivity theoretically extends to the non-human realm, including
animals as responsive beings. It suggests that the boundary between human and non-
human animals cannot be drawn in absolute terms, but must be based on a distinction
between different modes of responding. A promising starting point for such an endeavor
seems to be the human ability to produce creative responses, thereby transcending
pre-existing orders of being and creating new ones. This approach connects well with
classical attempts in philosophical anthropology (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner,
Arnold Gehlen) to define the human being.
21. Todorov is, for example, very sensitive to differences in responding on both sides of the
conflict. On the Aztec side, he contrasts Montezumas hesitant behavior, and that of the
Aztecs in general, with the determination of other leaders and peoples. For the Spanish
on whose side the historic record is, for obvious reasons, richer Todorov contrasts the
attitudes and behaviors of such different figures as Columbus, Cortes, Las Casas and
Sahagun, thereby demonstrating that one and the same cultural perspective can give rise
to a great variety of individual responses. Particularly worthy of note is Todorovs
interest in culturally hybrid figures, like Cortes famous Indian interpreter and mistress
whom the Spanish called La Malinche or Dona Marina (1999: 100102), or the
Dominican Diego Duran (pp. 202ff.), who was raised in Mexico and whose description
of the pre-Columbian world was characterized by standing in-between the two cultural
worlds (for a reading of the role of La Malinche in openly responsive terms, see the
chapter The Go-Between in Stephen Greenblatts Marvelous Possessions). Finally,
Todorovs discussion of the work of Bernardino de Sahagun (pp. 219ff.) must be men-
tioned in terms of polyphony and dialogical representation.
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