How does the construction of Alterity relate to our theme of order and chaos? "Alterity" means "Otherness," from the German "alter", "other," not as a description of simple individual differences but as the systematized construction of classes of people. The theme of Alterity will be central in my lecture. It is a necessary concept in understanding cultural difference, which Professor Schoolman touched upon in his opening comments on truth. It is useful when trying to understand the Mayan Popul Vuh, and those aspects of its narrative which seem completely alien to our own concepts of narrative, character, time, and causality.It is central to Professor Bickmore's questions about whose speech is correct. And, to some extent, both Dr. Chepaitis and I, as creative writers, may seem to you unalterably "alter" ---our techniques of thought and action outside what you expect academic discourse to be.
Here are 6 points and a conclusion
1. The distinction between self and other is a primary tool by which we make order out of the chaos of our daily perceptions. It is, for example, necessary for early childhood development.
2. The construction of Alterity takes a step beyond that basic ordering tool, and sees, not individuals, but classes and categories. Constructing entire categories of individuals as other than people, other than human, it proposes that other than ourselves = less than ourselves. Victor Frankenstein, as those of you have have seen the movies or read the book know, constructed "less than human" to equal "sentient individuals in human form created in the laboratory rather than by sexual intercourse." But his creature, at least in the novel, rather than having a tabula rasa for a brain, had an innate language instinct and cognitive intelligence, even though he was never nurtured or given a name. The category of less than human has historically been defined to include different subcategories at different times, using as markers gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, sexuality, national origin, culture, religion, type of intelligence.
3. The construction of Alterity is not the same thing as prejudice or the various "isms"--- for example, racism, sexism, classism---although it leads to them. It is an early step in the process by which we create a semblance of social order. First we construct some group as Other and less than fully human. Next we project onto it those qualities we reject, fear, or disown in ourselves. Then we assign qualities to variable human individuals on the basis of their inclusion in this constructed Alterity. Once we take this step in our construction of Alterity, then, at last, we have also created prejudice and stereotyping.
4. The final step in the construction of Alterity is to institutionalize these prejudices in our laws and customs. When laws, group culture, educational values, and social custom operate as if prejudices were truths, then we have racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism, and so on. Racism is institutionalized racial prejudice; it has the weight of the entire society to enforce it. Sexism is institutionalized gender prejudice. Classism is institutionalized class prejudice. Thus, the construction of Alterity, ---which, in an early stage in the development of individual infants brings greater order into the chaos of our lives,--- when we extrapolate from it to the adult and institutional scales, brings a false order, junk information, not meaningful information. The actions we take based upon this false order lead not to greater order but to chaos. Even such clearly objective operations as those of some contemporary science are more affected by the construction of Alterity than they seem. Although the motion of the planets and the properties of mass and acceleration are not linked to our social constructions of gender or race, many of our other scientific investigations are. Most of the medications I take have not been tested upon women and are, it now appears, the wrong dosages for me, and not safe. The reason most drug companies gave for not testing medications on women were that our hormonal "difference" from men would wreck the data. But clearly the data cannot be accurate if they fail to take into account these differences. Here, as with the drug Thalidomide, which was prescribed to pregnant women although it had not been tested on them, and which produced birth defects, the construction of Alterity has created false science, false order.
5. A further consequence of the construction of Alterity is that we fail to take into account, and therefore distort or ignore, information from outside our own cultural assumptions. Thus, we treat the European Enlightenment as a force in universal human intellectual history. But it was not. It was an historical movement needed within the context of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance , which had just passed through the so-called Dark Ages. Outside of that culture, an Enlightenment was not needed because those other cultures had not passed through the European Dark Ages. Even the term, Enlightenment, has different meanings in other cultures. Satori in Zen culture is a different kind of Enlightenment from the rationalist and humanist construction so central to European intellectual history.
6. Finally, for those groups who have always been and still are Other and marginal to the constructed history of European civilization, we both do and do not participate in the heritage of the Enlightenment. Because women's role in the history of the European Enlightenment and in the literary and artistic history of Modernism is so severely limited, I am outside it, always Other, always not included. Because the roles of Jews and Gypsies in that history are likewise limited, I am outside it also as a Jew and a non-ethnic Gypsy. It both was and was not my Enlightenment. I stand in this intellectual history with a double and divided consciousness. One voice in my mind takes hold of the Enlightenment structures and say: yes, I can use these. But whole other voices say: this leaves me out; it was made in deliberate ignorance of my experience and my mind. It excludes some essentials. This Enlightenment, for one thing, excludes Satori, excludes the visionary, the prophetic, the spiritual unified with, rather than in opposition to, or what remains after, intellectual discovery. It defines the emotional and the spiritual as feminine, therefore less than rational or scientific, therefore not part of scientific order. It has discarded meditational and visionary techniques from its methodology rather than integrating them. Modernism in the arts began to see, lamented, and tried to remedy what the Enlightenment erased. Postmodernism reacts against the ethnocentrism of the Enlightenment and is therefore still trapped in it. But, because it erased me, it is not and never was my Enlightenment.
7. Conclusions: When I stand outside the European Enlightenment, I see other forms of order and more fruitful forms of chaos. Professor Delano told us that what matters about the truths he can verify is that they enable him to do things. That is also what matters about the huge range of cultural perceptions, methods, and techniques the Enlightenment excluded. They enable me to do things. We need to be able to do the things that the Enlightenment and Modernism excluded.
Return to Emily: A Reconsideration