otherness – GV Loewen

Flatteries not Included

Flatteries not Included (The Problem of False Other-directedness)

One aspect of David Riesman’s famous analysis of post-war society that is often overlooked is the sense that the ‘other’, in his ethical rubric, presents an inauthentic otherness. In following our literal neighbors, in ‘keeping up with the Jones’’, we are not only aping an ideal form by means of idealized formulae, we are striving to homogenize society; to make everyone into the same thing. Riesman’s other-directedness, which he rightly casts as both unethical and cowardly without quite explaining why this is more profoundly the case deontologically, is thus not about otherness at all, only ‘the others’ in the sense of a diaspora of Das Man. Insofar as one is left with making what appears only as a decision of individual character – a way in which to distinguish ourselves from a merely individuated life, another aspect of modernity of which Riesman is correctly critical – we leave in possession of an incomplete analytic, suggesting in turn that such a decision cannot itself be fully either made or kept.

Riesman’s ‘other’ is simply another version of myself. I look at him with envy or disdain, resentment and, in a crisis, even ressentiment. Yet he is nonetheless an intimate stranger; familiar in every way that society seems to count. He has either what I have or what I would like to have. I regard him thence with covetousness, which goes beyond the antique sensibility that his trophy wife is more attractive that mine. Or, conversely, I play the other’s role for him, with similar sentiments abounding. None of this is otherness per se, only what is ‘next’ in line. And the more so, it is also not the Other, the radically irreal Otherness of the uncanny. Are there then three kinds of others with which I must live? The next person, like me in all outward respects and most inward ones as well – we often underestimate the mental sameness occurring in mass society as it is somehow disturbing to imagine myself as much less unique than I would desire – is another; a representative of the herd, to be harsh, an expression of the generalized other, to be discursive, a mimesis of class filiation and that in both senses, to be critical, or yet a ‘fellowman’, to borrow from Schutz. All of these themselves demean the humanity of this next person, and yet all of them are correct in their own way about what he is in society.

Most mature adults will recognize the great difficulty in procuring friendship as one ages. We are wary of letting just anyone in on who we are, preferring to display only the what for public consumption. This, in spite of the corresponding fact that friends hailing from other phases of contemporary lifespan have changed beyond recognition, especially those much-vaunted childhood friends. Yet we tend not to seek replacements for friendships come adrift or gone awry, suggesting that our perspective is one that suggests ‘well, any further friendships will ultimately go the same way, and if not, we will all die out of them in any case’. Romantic relationships are subject to the same stern logic, but survive its lens more easily given the erotic desires present for some decades after youth. Either way, however, authentic otherness is the last thing persons seek when surrounding themselves with serial circles of acquaintance, very often the most any of us is willing to commit to during working adulthood. Indeed, the frisson of fascination exerted by fictional limns of the Other as an irruptive force exert more pull than does otherness as a cultural fact. Once again, the otherworld requires no real commitment from us, given its own cameo ethereality. If the potential friend might be relatively blameless in the face of our diffidence, the ghost has only itself to blame for same.

The reliance on sameness to distinguish otherness presents, even so, a more complex problem for ethics and for sociality alike. Though it is reasonable to a point to prefer those who are deemed ‘like us’, to fall in love with ‘kindred spirits’, at least of the earthly kind, or to idolize historical figures who appear to embody our own ideals, whatever they may be, what is less reasoned is the sensibility which overdevelops out of such liaisons. We learn, from a young age, those whom to shun, and these cleavages fall mostly along class and status lines. In-marriage rates exhibit a shocking social class homogeneity, and even those ‘progressive couples’ who do not share a skin colour or even a religion, if any, find that they share almost everything else, especially when measured against the most important variables for match-making or even simply hooking up. For women, anything else is slumming, and for men, just another notch on one’s belt, so to speak. Authentic otherness is inadmissible in marriage; there is too much at stake for elemental disagreements to carry the day. But even for acquaintances who may not share anywhere near as much as do spouses, there one quickly co-constructs a list of topics that will have to remain taboo. Within families it is proverbial that one does not discuss either religion or politics, and perhaps more recently, sexuality as well. Each contemporary person travels in a set of mostly disconnected circles, a more-gentle rendering of living secret lives, if one is deemed sane, or of having multiple personalities, if one is not.

These social circles are themselves bound by either similar tasks, viewpoints, status backgrounds, or yet beliefs, such as a church membership, and persons who appear in one circle are more likely never to frequent another. Simmel’s ‘web of group affiliations’ still provides one of the most insightful analyses of this aspect of modern society. Circles may be casual or formal, or may move from one to the other pending occasion. They may accept new members, if those more veteran tire of one another’s direct company, or they may hive off into yet smaller groups, driven by a competition for in-group status. In none of this, however, do we discover the differences associated with authentic otherness. To do so, one must be willing to essentially throw over one’s own druthers and connections, and so once cherished and newly perished. Two of my oldest friends, hailing from vastly different cultural backgrounds, nevertheless married decades ago and are yet together. The parents of the woman refused to speak to her for nine years after she had taken up with him. Only when the couple produced their own children did the newly-minted grandparents seek them out. This kind of dynamic will no doubt be familiar to many, even if very few persons take the risk of striving to know the authentic other.

Yet one can say this and still be well within the normative definitions of otherness. The one who is truly different to me is oddly familiar in that she is eminently recognizable as a societal sore thumb. At the same time, the dominant genders and their relations present an ongoing normative context shot through with apparent conflict and difference. Men and women continue to be raised quite differently in our society and indeed, in all cultures succeeding those of the social contract. The chief reason why the total divorce rate has hovered around fifty percent for many decades is not so much economic – women appearing en masse in a non-crisis mode workforce starting in the 1970s is often cited as the most important variable here; let us suggest that this is merely a vehicle for divorce and not a motive for it – is that men and women find one another to be stunningly unrecognizable, and this as a human being, not simply as another person. Every dominant gender marriage is thus an odd exercise in internecine yet still cross- cultural ethnography. Participant observation rules the day, and one of the major reasons why youthful intimacies are so erotically inclined, aside from the general sexual repression of our puritanical educational institutions, is that sex is by far the easiest thing for two people to share with one another. It generates both authentic and inauthentic intimacy; it tends to play us beautifully false to one another.

When the overt passions fade, young people change up and the dance continues elsewhere. If there is also a sense that ‘the grass is always greener’ there is also a growing sense that one needs to ‘settle down’ at some point or other, and so a balance is eventually struck. Subjectively, same-sex relationships are more convenient for such persons, as they do not participate in the wider cross-cultural gender conflict. Of course, objectively they remain more difficult, since the rest of us still cast aspersion towards them, and that precisely because they are seen as avoiding a perduring conflict but one that is nevertheless necessary for the reproduction of society as a whole. It is a simple case of appearing to not be ‘doing one’s part’, ‘sharing the load’, ‘taking a hit for the team’, and so on. Any alternative gender may be hung up on such crosses, and this same diaphanous resentment is at work in other, if related, arenas having to do with the interface of sexuality and gender and the character of the polis, such as women who do not support reproductive rights and who thus vote ‘pro-life’: ‘I raised my own children, why can’t she?’. The underlying pattern to such sensitivities acts like a leitmotif; in this case, it is the perception that someone is cheating.

It does take a tremendous effort to construct a long-term intimate companionship with an authentic other, and the dominant genders have been experimenting with this task for millennia. Those who have forsaken this norm, however jaded and jaundiced it may be as a principle and certainly not and never being something ‘natural’, are in their turn consigned to a number of margins, not least that of apparent cowardice. It may well be a wondrous thing for men and women to love one another, but how, exactly, does one go about doing such a thing? To face this question squarely is not to just be a ‘square’. There is enough queerness in heterodoxy to make most of us blink at anything yet further down that proverbial side-street. What we find in adult relationships of all kinds is a practice which both acts at a safe distance, all the while safeguarding the perimeter with which the relationship has itself surrounded. Marriage and like companionships represent the epitome of this construction, which is why, even for younger persons, it requires a fair bit of work to undo. Though statistically consistent even if in and out of pop culture fashion, ‘swinging’, mutual and consenting, provides a failsafe for formal intimacy whereby one preserves the once-again edible cake. Alternative genders may themselves be acted out in such spaces, but we lack the data to state that those who play-act the margins are more compassionate towards their reality.

In all of this, we flatter ourselves. But the world-as-it-is does not include such pat and happy ends. Our tendency to pursue the faux otherness of distant cultural items such as cuisine and popular art forms, as well as genuflect toward political positions of ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘inclusivity’, betray our deeper motives. We seek only the kind of difference that cements our sameness, that cannot sabotage our sense of what we are and which allows us to decoy ourselves away from the question of who we might become. That we ultimately become other to all that we have been presents Dasein with its ownmost completedness. In contemplating this, however, we are brought bodily into the question of the Other as Anxiety and as the Nothing which comes to me; that it shall come to all others itself means nothing, and this is where normative understandings of otherness let us down the most palpably. Perhaps we can rather suggest that the flight from authentic otherness in life is a proprioceptive resonance of the denial of death; it is the faux equivalent of imagining a form of consciousness immortal; it is the method by which we learn to die by ourselves. In this, we cannot entirely dismiss its patent cowardice as outside of all ethics, even if we might ideally state that resoluteness in life is the better practice of that to be tested in the face of the absence of that self-same life.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Identity Fetishism

Identity Fetishism (the objectification of echoism)

In over-identifying with the generalized other, the echoist sacrifices at first self-interest, as does the traditional altruist, but also thence the very self, if the pursuit of the other’s needs and desires overcomes the one who so pursues. The echoist is commonly seen as the figure who expresses personality traits opposite to that of the narcissist, though it is not correct to assume that this latter always acts in their own best interest. The narcissist is, after all, blinded by his own blind loyalty not to the self as he actually is, but to an idealized selfhood into which he has placed a fallible reality. The echoist, on her part, denies that the self either has needs at all, or, more usually, places these needs below those claimed by the other, giving them a lesser value. The danger for psychology as a discourse when using these Greek ethical constructions is that, aside from their original caveat against extremities – the golden mean or moderation in all things was a Greek mantra – that the best kind of personality holds within it a balance of self and other, which is a mere technical manner of stating that a neo-Christian selfhood is the newer ideal. Not the Christian in the original, and more radical sense, for the neighbor figure is after all the ultimate altruist. He is, as I have stated elsewhere, simply the libertine of compassion.

Not so the ‘balanced’ self, which identifies with the generalized other as if this abstract and very much collective presence is expressed in now this individual before me, now that. Such a middle road, the fairway between La Scylla of the echoist and the Charybdis of the narcissist, and thus the fair way to adjudicate between one’s own needs and those of the other or others, always as well denies the selfhood as it is. It is a personalized way of doing the same to the world as it is. For in gifting oneself to the other, we do generally gain our own desires, be they having to do with public acclaim, a sense of personal vindication, a veneer of the virtuous, or being a model citizen, in no order and perhaps also in toto. Augustine is himself cautious about self-sacrifice, not due to Jesus becoming the Christ through so enacting it, but rather because for lesser beings, it would be a challenge to sort out one’s intents. Are we truly selfless in our actions? Did we actually put the other before ourselves? Do we rather seek to become an echo of the savior; to ‘borrow status’, to use a sociological turn of phrase.

The narcissist seeks all such things, and in spades. In this, he is by far the easier to identify, and perhaps somewhat perversely, to identity with as well. He is unsure of his own person and thus desires to build around it a persona, the bastion against self-doubt constructed of that same anxious architecture. A persona is, however, still a more authentic expression of the lack of selfhood than is the fullest leap into the generalized other. A persona, though a mask, yet must be carried by its wearer. Not so otherness, of course, for it is irruptive, if rare, and especially in modernity. Not so the Other, capital ‘O’, which is alien and we would suggest, generally incomprehensible even if fully present to our senses bemused. But the case is different when it comes to echoism. This otherness, generalized in G.H. Mead’s sense that one has by a certain age internalized social norms and is able to exemplify them in one’s day to day or quotidian conduct – something which the over-identification with specific guises of the generalized other ironically allows one as a person, and even as a citizen, to forego – is not taken on as one does a costume of oneself, as in narcissism, but is rather slipped bodily into as if one were able to simply up and transfer one’s being into a ready-made vessel. Anyone who has adopted for themselves a form of identity politics has indulged in this fantasy.

This is why one might suggest that there has been an objectification of echoism. The classic echoist, whom one might recognize casually as a ‘doormat’ or even a masochist, gears herself into the needs of singular others, usually serially and repetitively. It is these persons who are at most risk for domestic abuse, for example. The echoist internalizes the sense that she is of little value, or that her only value is in being a servant of another, aggrandizing his needs if he has no merit, or, if authentic value is present, then aiding his genuine quest. Either way, the echoist denies the self. It is a pressing weakness of the genius that he demands an echo; first from a person, then a community, and thence from the world itself. When Mahler consulted Freud in the Netherlands in 1910, the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams had recently appeared and its author was by then as world-famous as was the celebrity composer and conductor. Aside from uttering the expected ‘what a meeting of giants, wish I could have been there’, we can more seriously remind ourselves that no archaeologies of selfhood, no high-flying hermeneutics, no ambitious analyses were involved. No, Freud simply told Mahler that he was being a prick, hmm. For Mahler’s marriage had been shipwrecked by his demand that Alma, once the hottest young woman in Vienna and an aspiring composer in her own right, should utterly sacrifice her own needs and desires to his superior gifts. And as challenging as it would be to compete with a Mahler, this was manifestly not what Alma was trying in any case to do. Freud told Mahler to instead aid his estranged wife’s quest, and ‘who better to do it’, for Pete’s sakes. More deeply and consistently, to take his mate’s needs as seriously as he took his own. Note to self, and dear reader.

Alma was neither echoist nor narcissist. But then again, neither was her husband. So, what comes out of this historical vignette is both an illustration of the problem of identifying just exactly where our selfhood lies, especially in relation to others, and also, by extension, where might we find the place or the space wherein our best self resides? For many today, these questions are too challenging to confront in any authentic manner. Hence the mass objectification of echoism as a parallax to the much more individuated construction of a persona. Statements such as ‘I am a person of color, a trans-person, a proud boy, a Christian “first”, a liberal, a conservative, a survivor of the residential schools, a Holocaust survivor, an abuse victim, a revolutionary, a woman, a man’ and a myriad of others, if held to be front and center in even casual conversation and in one’s political opinions, if taken to be the defining characteristic of one’s selfhood, are all decoys, meant to help one avoid the anguish of being a self, and short-circuiting the essential relation between anxiety and personhood. With all the patent irony of modernism, it is psychotherapy itself which plays upon these projections. And even if we place our faith in the analytic process – which involves a gradual unmasking of persona in order to confront the authentic self in all of its patently fragile mortality – we must, in the end, also abandon the wider conception of faith as well.

But what of the second term in our title? Speaking of faith, the fetish item, ethnographically, contained the Mana of some otherwise amorphous and animistic force. It might be the famed Churinga stones of the Australians, it might be the disembodied artifacts pinned into the shaman’s mesa in Mexico, or yet the ‘figurines of the Virgin Mary’, to borrow from King Crimson. Marx lights upon this conception and realizes that in capital, it is the commodity which now is seen as ‘Mannic’, excuse the obvious pun. Part of the object’s ‘surplus’, indirectly linked to the broader economic conception of surplus value, lies in its ability to transfer the consumer’s desire by objectifying it. The ‘finest’ marques, such as Ferrari, have mastered not the marketing of self-indulgence, but rather the ability to place the person in intimate association with the thing, as if the driver of a legendary auto is direct kindred with the shaman and their traditional fetish. Certainly, when I drove an expensive Jaguar just for fun, I felt a kind of augmented power, as if the prosthetic was mimicking an extramundane quality, something that the shaman’s tried and true trickery also mimicked. I also felt that the big cat was a mere extension of myself, and not just of my body, but rather of my very being.

And this is what the idolaters of identity also seek. In their absence of selfhood, they desire to deny their very existence as human beings first, as historical beings, as beings endowed, by evolution or otherwise, with both reason and imagination, and as cleaving to a very much mutable ‘human nature’ which is not, and has never been, one thing, let alone the one thing they have, like a long line of crucified simulacra, hung themselves upon.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.