19/11/18 - LZ402 Lecture 8

In this lecture, we learned about “the other” in media, specifically regarding immigrants and non-Britishness.

Semiotic “other”

• ·         Saussure stresses the importance of the binary (black and white)
• ·         Binaries contrast one thing with another (e.g. black and white, male and female, light and dark.)
• ·         “Binary oppositions tend to be reductionist and over simplified” (pg. 225)
• ·         Derrida talks about how all binaries are charged with a bias (for example, he believed white would power over black, male would power over female, etc)

Social “other”

• ·         Bakhtin (in Hall 2013: 225) argues that we “need difference because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the ‘Other’ (pg. 225)
• ·         “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when... the speaker appropriates the word, adapting it to his own sematic expressive intention. Prior to this, the word... does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language...rather it exists in other people’s mouths, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own.” (Bakhtin, 1981 [1935] p.293-4)

Anthropological “other”

• ·         Assignation of varying positions
• ·         In order to classify things
• ·         “Symbolic order”: “culture”
• ·         Hall (citing Douglas 1966) notes the importance of Mary Douglas re: Durkheim (sociology and symbolic systems) and Levi-Strauss (anthropology and studies of mythology)
• ·         Argued that “social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organising...into classificatory systems” (pg. 226)
• ·         Culture is viewed less as a set of things, and much more as an ever changing and evolving set of practices, has necessarily involved a critiquing of apparently simple distinctions: house and home.
• ·         “It is our use of a pile of bricks and mortar which makes it a house: and what we feel, think or say about it which makes

Psychoanalytic “other”

• ·         Hall summarises the Oedipus Complex: “sexual identity is not fixed in the very young”
• ·         “Boys first refusing, unconsciously, to identify with the father figure, having had the object of their desire (the mother) stolen from them by this figure”. (p. 227)
• ·         It is essentialist; it is a stereotype that ‘is how it is’.
• ·         “The child has no sense of itself as a subject separate from its mother until it sees itself in a mirror, or as if mirrored in the way it is looked at by the Mother... or what Lacan calls ‘the look from the place of the other’” (2013: 227)
• ·         Cultural studies have noticed a split and applied it metaphorically to great effect in analysing, say, representations of race: (citing Bhabba [1986] from Hall [pg. 228]) “much racial stereotyping and violence arose from the refusal of the white ‘other’ to give recognition ‘from the place of the other’ to the black person”

Orientalism: the exotic other

• ·         Edward Said (1978) in Hall (2013: 249) defined orientalism as “...the discourse by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”