Final: The Other

I felt pretty darn lost for the first couple weeks of our class and a lot of it was because we started out with Radical Alterity, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of the Other. I wanted a more detailed definition, a list of examples, an explanation of what exactly this “Other” was. It took me awhile to get out of the mode of learning in which someone just tells me what to learn. Now that I’ve gotten over that, I realize that the other is whatever I think of it as and that it’s not the exact same thing for everyone. Which is really an essential part of the other; it is whatever you think of as not yourself, not familiar, not relatable, uncertain, etc. From the other’s perspective, I am the other.

            A couple things that stuck out for me from Radical Alterity were the ideas about spectral communication, and some things about traveling and exoticism. Because spectral communication can strip us of things like body language, context, our name, etc, it allows us to communicate without those things affecting us. Without all these identifying factors it seems that who the other is will be less easily determined. All of us communicating on the Internet or through other technological means have something in common and have less ways of sorting people into “us” and “them”.  It was also said in Radical Alterity that anonymity liberates imagination and distances oneself from oneself. So not only are we getting closer to others, we are getting farther from ourselves and farther from those factors and rules that define us and trap us within ourselves.

            Another part of Radical Alterity that helped me understand the Other was about the draw towards the exotic. On page 85 it says, “That may be the secret pleasure of the voyage, not in enrichment from others but simply shedding your self, sloughing off a truly heavy weight.” I really liked the idea of travelling as more of a way to escape your own surroundings than to be in someone else’s surroundings. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but it makes a lot of sense that part of the seduction of exoticism is to be free of the weights that are upon you in your normal life. We are drawn to the other not only because it is different from us, but also simply because it is not us and we can be free of ourselves while exploring the other.

            A couple more things I want to tie into my thoughts about the other are the Disney films we watched about vaccinations and malaria, and our discussion about politics versus culture. I think of these things together because although those films were clearly political, it could also be argued that the themes they were presenting were just as much influenced by culture. In our discussion we also talked about how genetics and how we are raised affect us and these ideas also connect to the Disney films because these films were used as propaganda and I wonder how much they affected the young viewers. These both relate to the other because the films clearly had an “us” versus “them” theme and the other was something to be exterminated. The film about the vaccine was creepy in the way that getting the vaccine was like an insinuation to conformity in general, not just conforming to getting the vaccine. This concept of “us” being good and “them”, or the other, being bad is both a political and cultural trend in the US I feel, as shown by these films. The existence of the other is never going to go away, but I would hope that in our explorations of the other, we don’t label it as evil or bad.