Binarism & Alterity

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Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 5

Postcolonial Logic: Binarism & Alterity

What follows is an account of the postcolonial terms binarism and alteritywhich ultimately underlie Edward Said's theory of colonial difference in thecontext of Western travels and conquests in East realms (hence

Orientalism). These expand on brief notes given in Guide to PostcolonialTerminology [link].

Binarism Alterity

Binarism

Semiology is the science ofsigns and sign-systems - an academic discipline whose modernorigins are usually ascribed to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Fundamental to thescience is the observation that language is arbitrary in origin - that is to say, there is noreason why one word should mean one thing rather than another, or why words and thingshould exist in a given relationship to each other. Differently stated, this means that thekey 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 soarranged that it institutes a set of oppositions which structures the world-view of thosewho 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 todayfrom the methodology of computer science - where bits and bytes are encoded in aseries of on/off strings arranged in in series of 8-, 16-, or even 32-bit strings - binarismis in facta fundamental element of modern thought especially in so far as it related to ananti-essentialist conception of the relationship between language and its referents. In abinary 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 itsrelationship 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 tobe a dominant if not the dominant element in the forms of philosophical thinking orcritique which identify themselves by the prefix post- : that is, poststructuralism,postmodernism, and postcolonialism. All of these deal with the way that themeaning-world of cultural significance is constructed out of fundamentally arbitrary signsarranged in patterns of complex, self-transformative significance with the implication thata world so constructed is the agent of a specific power-relation that favours one groupover another.

Whether that relationship is created by the group for its own advantage or actuallycreates the group in the course of a larger historical process is a matter for furtherreflection. In any case, de Saussures insight that binaries - or significant pairs, in theterminology of phonetics - define the very way that language works has supplied a basicpremise for most forms of modern secular thought.

It is worth being clear about the secular implications of semiology as the basis of moderntheories 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 allthought of absolutes or essences. In a semiological outlook, nothing is said to havemeaning by reason that it actually reflects an underlying state ofbeing, but only in sofaras 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 inGreek - hence semiology) is said to be arbitrary: that is, it has no other meaning than theone assigned to it by its place in the wider system. God does not mean God; it meanswhat people mean by God, which, in turn, is what the language that they use means byGod.

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The epistemological relationship between language and truth traditionally presupposed innaive accounts of realism is therefore replaced by a new conception in which the realityimplied 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 distinctfrom 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 inas 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 andsecret), none of them is more true than another. The ideas of imagination andperception are therefore interchangeable: things that were taken to be real in traditionalculture are now said to be imagined or invented. All cultures and ideologies (includingscience and religion) are now held to be entirely relative, and this is more or less thecommon supposition of enlightened cultural theorists today.

needless to say, this style of thinking leads on directly to - or, perhaps, arises from -multiculturalism in the l ife of nations and, at least in theory, to the mutual appreciation ofdifferent cultural traditions. This idea and a climate differs widely from the idea of liberaltolerance 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 ofhyper-realitywhich informs postmodernist theory. According to this view, everything that nothing thatis real but representation - an idea that perhaps works better in California thanCushendall.

Now, the world that is ushered in by these ideas is profoundly secular in temper but it isalso oddly haunted in as much as everything that seemed solid to the eyes of naiverealists now seems to be comprise of a sort of phantasmic light which reveals its characteras a form of mental construct - not real but hyper-real in the sense that it has beenengendered 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 termbinarism is used to describe the way in which a colonial ideology constructs a culture (ormeaning-world) in which the colonist maintains a position of privilege by means of acultural hegemony - a term which we will not pause to explain (but see the . infused inthe everyday language of the colony, spoken by colonist and coloniser alike thoughalways to the disadvantage of the colonised. Hence, terms white and black, on the onehand, and the terms good and bad, on the other, are linked by vertical association so thatwhite and good conjoin to produce a symmetry that results in the equal association ofblackand bad. In this way the binarism of the colonial mentality divides the world up intogood 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 binaryterms (e.g., black/white) are treated as taboo - that is to say, it is felt to be scandalous incolonial soociety to engage in any mixing of one with the other or to suggest that there isan habitable zone between them which does not participate in teh vertical logic of thedominant semiological system. However: contrary to this defining function of colonialideology, it is precisely in that in-between zone, that the postcolonial studies takes on itsfull import by seeking to establish a new relationship between the opposed elements inthe system. Instead of equating difference with opposition with exclusion, the postcolonialmind sees it as a form of variance and a mandate for inclusion. One way of expressing thisshift in thinking is the movement away from binarism toward alterity - about which see

below (q.v.).

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Alterity


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Alterity (meaning otherness) is used, in postcolonial studies to refer to the differencebetween opposite terms in a binary system which are not necessarily seen asremorselessly opposed, and mutually antagonistic, to each another . This is a two-wayprocess since the reflex that causes the colonised simply to reverse the binary so that theequation white-good/black-bad becomes black-good/white-bad is seen as no less lesserroneous 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 offreedom based on the the very differences involved in it. Where binarism implies a rigidset of terms that bestows positive and negative meanings on the coloniser and thecolonised respectively, alterity speaks of their differences in such a way as to open up thepossibility 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 whichknows in his famous formula (cogito ergo sum/I think, therefore I am), Decartes placedthe individual at the centre of the modern knowledge-system and - by implication - placedthe European self at the centre of the modern world, looking out on those othersdeprived of knowledge whom we were equipt to understand from an objective standpointwhich they did not themselves possess by virtue of our claims to rationality - thesummum bonum of the European Enlightenment. In practice, of course, that meant thatEuropeans would know non-Europeans as savages and natives.

The location of the individual at the centre of the knowledge-universe had, however, adouble-effect. While, on the one hand, it enhanced the power of the European collectiveto gain knowledge of the material and cultural world beyond its boundaries, it also tendedto disintegrate the community of knowledge upon which the European consensus wasfounded. By removing revelation and authority from the knowledge-system andsubstituting individual experience and scientific experiment, the European effected theothering of those living beyond his continental boundaries. At the same time, a similarprocess of othering took place within the European community in sofar as eachindividual now became the unique centre of his own world.

The practice of democracy and (so far as it has actually been practiced) of socialism inWestern societies to some extent soutured up the rifts caused by this centrifugaltendency. At the same time, it produced a consciousness of difference which have oftenfound 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 nowonder that the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre defined the experience ofotherness in thisfamous sentence: Lenfer cest lautre/Hell is other people.

Now, this certainly an extreme idea and one that, for all its melancholic appeal, standsapart from the common wisdom of the European mind. In that context (and hence in thelives 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 sharedhuman values. Needless to say, the Christian injunction to love ones neighbour asoneself has significant bearing on this matter, and it is not surprising to find the eminentMarxist historian Eric Hobsbaum recently professing the opinion that European societycannot continue to function if it moves too far away from its Christian basis - a judgementwhich is not at all the same thing as an act of faith in the Christian doctrine of personalsalvation.

In bourgeois society, moreover, the commandment of love is not always an effective onesince class division throws up barriers that no amount of cross-community bonding is ableto overcome except perhaps in time of war when a reinvigorated sense of communityarises with a shared sense of difference from the enemy without. It is ironic, though

perfectly explicable, that the bourgeoisie commonly espouse ardent forms of Christianfaith at the very moment when they are bringing the pressure of economic oppressionstrenuously to bear upon those locked outside of their own class formation - i.e., theworking-class; and only a generalised European movement towards socialism (albeit in aSocial Democrat or Christian Socialist guise) has prevented the outbreak of open class


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war.

In colonial society, by contrast, the sense of difference between colonist and colonised isso acute that no prospect of breaking down the difference seems possible. Yet this isexactly what postcolonial thinkers require of us to do today. That is to say, those whoreflect on what happens to a colonial society after it has been decolonised must reach therecognition that the anti-colonial mindset is not the final solution to the problem. Onceliberated in economic fact, and then decolonised in personal and collective thinking, the

postcolonial subject finds him/herself ranged against others who are no longer separatedfrom the self by the colonial divide. It is in this context, especially, that the term alteritycomes into play with full force.

The hallmark of alterity, thus considered, is the ability to enter into dialogue with theother. And, while the outcome of such engagement is ultimately political, its originalform 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 world-vision. Why? Because the novelist is the one who attempts to understand a multiplicity ofcharacters and hence to understand that his own character (or narrator) from outside noless than from the inside. (The idea that dialogue - or its more general equivalnetheteroglossia - plays a central role in novels was first advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin in anessay 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 whichcharacters in novels genuinely form independent centres of consciousness ranged againsteach other across the barriers of private and collective difference. Clearly, in the case of anovel based on colonial experience, the element of collective difference is hugelyprevalent.

The same style of thinking, if applied to real people, produces a form of alterity whichpromises 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 aspromising 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 kindthat can attain to fertile interchange, mutual recognition, and practical compromise - ifnot positive agreement. At this point, postcolonial man has finally been born.

Notes

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

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