Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network (MDCSN)
Theory Reading Group
Meetings 12 and 13: Wednesday 10 October 2007 4-5:30pm and Wednesday 24 October 2007 3:30-5pm
Text: Sara Ahmed, 'Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality' (London and NY: Routledge, 2000).
'Introduction: Stranger fetishism and post-coloniality' 1-17.
Ahmed cautions that both 'stranger danger' and 'welcoming "the stranger"' are problematically centred around the notion of the figure of the stranger - she argues that 'recognising' this figure is in fact what produces it in the first place, and what encourages it to be taken for granted. She critiques approaches to the stranger, first that of Bauman, seeing the notion that 'the stranger becomes a reminder of the differences we must celebrate' as still taking for granted the idea that the figure of the stranger contains meaning, which does not acknowledge responsibility for its determination; then that of Diken, who she believes uses the terminology and figure of the stranger (linked to the theme of displacement) to conceal or elide differences between immigrants, foreigners and refugees, and subsequently to universalise 'strangerhood' by considering everyone as displaced in some way, and by then suggesting that 'everybody is a stranger'; and finally that of Kristeva, for centring the journey to the stranger around the self so that 'the stranger functions yet again to establish and define the "I"' - here Ahmed concludes that to identify everyone as strangers conceals the politics behind that fact that some are clearly viewed as 'stranger than other others.' Ahmed identifies what she terms 'stranger fetishism' (in the sense of the Marxist model of commodity fetishism) and the 'investment in strangerhood' as 'a fetishism of figures.'
Ahmed argues that avoiding viewing the stranger as a 'figure' can only be achieved through placing the focus instead on modes of encounter, the 'social relationships' they reveal and their influence on the institution of identity. Encounters, or meetings, like the identities they constitute, are centred on the notion of the 'more than one.' Ahmed goes on to identify that when we meet others face-to-face 'we seek to recognise who they are, by reading the signs on their body, or by reading their body as a sign': it is thus that the 'subject' is opposed to the 'stranger.' However, the 'surprise' aspect of the encounter, if we are not able to recognise the 'body' of the person we are facing, leads to a re-reading where we attempt to recognise in other ways.
Post-coloniality: Ahmed argues against the value of meta-discourses, which pre-determine the relationships between subjects. She sees post-coloniality as a 'failed historicity' which is ''too totalising and universalising to grasp the multiplicity of colonial histories', yet argues that it must be recognised that the colonial project was not external to the European nations that carried it out, and indeed that the identity of these nations was based on their relationship to the 'colonised others.' Post-coloniality is therefore not indicative of a 'time-frame' but is 'about the complexity of the relationship between the past and present, between the histories of European colonisation and contemporary forms of globalisation', where history is 'a series of discontinuous encounters between nations, cultures, others and other others.' Ahmed suggests that hybridisation can in fact serve to re-form dominant identities in that the hybrid subject is set against the native other, who is seen as the 'stranger' and posits that post-colonialism can allow us to interrogate hybridisation and other means by which power relations are constructed in the contemporary period.
Encounters as method and structure: Ahmed underlines that the notion of 'strange encounters' is also conveyed here through her own response to 'global' texts: 'by coming together at a particular time and place, the reader and the text generate certain possibilities and foreclose others.' Her conclusion is that 'we need to find ways of re-encountering these encounters so that they no longer hold others in place.'
* * * * * *
'Ethical encounters: the other, others and strangers' 137-160. Ahmed introduces a model of difference as economy in order to think through the finite and particular circumstance in which we face up to others (strangers), suggesting that an ethics that responds to others as if they were other in the same way is inadequate. Rather than just thinking of ethics as hospitality to strangers, she argues that the ethical demand is to work with 'that which has already been assimilated', in order to work with that which fails to be assimilated. She considers, within the impossible context of post-coloniality, how to respond more ethically to the work of Mahasweta Devi, as translated by Gayatri Spivak.
Taking up Levinas' call to protect the 'otherness of the other', Ahmed both uses and critiques his ethics and ontology. In Levinas' view, 'eating' and 'sneezing' the other are encounters which transform or expel what is not wanted and assimilate the rest, and are therefore less ideal than encounters such as 'breathing' and 'caressing' since they do not transform the other into a theme and are more able to preserve the otherness of the other. As Ahmed says, the obvious criticism of Levinas' evaluations is that they are normative. Missing from his analysis is an explanation of why protecting otherness is necessarily a good thing. However, Ahmed points out that Levinas' categories are useful in that they enable us to imagine the other as an 'it' which can be taken in, welcomed or expelled (Ahmed 2000: 140-41).
The figure of the other often appears in Levinas' texts as a figure from the bible: the poor, needy, orphans and widows. Others are characterised as needy and weak: contained (paradoxically and contradictorily) by ontology, and asymmetrical with the self. Therefore, Ahmed argues, Levinas' ascription of the characteristic of otherness to others involves thematising and describing them. She suggests shifting the emphasis away from the particularity of an other (the this-ness) to the particularity of modes of encounter. This would avoid the assumption that access to the 'real' of a body can be gained (Ahmed 2000: 143-144).
Ahmed considers two modes of encountering the other in a way that is both generous and responsible: 'touch' and 'hearing'. The contemplation of speaking and hearing in terms of touch may enable a challenge to the notion that communication is expression, exchange and the transparency of meaning. Ahmed is alluding to an ethics of communication here, but explicitly not to a Habermasian establishment of rules which enable equal communication. Ahmed rejects Habermas and Benhabib's insistence that for communication to take place there must be a relation of symmetry between self and other (Ahmed 2000: 155-156). Instead, she argues for a 'communicative ethics which can deal with, or even better work with, the very impossibility of communication as dialogue, as one voice simply speaking to, and being heard by, another' (Ahmed 2000: 156).
Ahmed brings into play Marion Young's notion of asymmetrical communication which requires the acknowledgment of difference, interval and the recognition that others drag behind them shadows and histories, scars and traumas which do not become present in communication. According to Young, in order to avoid the assumption that the self can take up the other's place, the recognition of a time lag or interval, as well as the recognition of a distance which cannot be covered, is crucial to the ethics of communication. It is in 'becoming other' that the dominant subject can reassert its agency. Proximity (consumption, becoming or passing) can involve the technique of getting close to the other in order to maintain a distance. Ahmed points out that the danger inherent in assuming proximity or distance as a basis for an ethical communication is that it fails to recognize the implication of the self in the encounter, and the responsibility the self has for the other.
Ahmed moves on to bring Lyotard's idea that there is an aporia inherent in the notion of testimonial speech into conjunction with Gayatri Spivak's idea of the subaltern as the one who does not speak. Lyotard uses the example of Holocaust testimonial to demonstrate his idea that a damage is a wrong accompanied by the loss of means to prove the damage. For Ahmed, Lyotard's theory is not convincing because he omits the fact that testimonial ethics is not simply about speaking, but about the conditions of possibility of hearing. Lyotard is also guilty of fetishising the mouth as the only organ through which injustice can be spoken (Ahmed 2000: 157). Ahmed suggests instead that it is the circuit between mouth and ear that demonstrates that testimony is not expressed or made present simply through speech, but is 'opened out in the very sociality of encounters, in the very relay of messages between mouths and ears' (Ahmed 2000: 157). Ethical encounters do not take place in 'ears', but in between 'mouths' and 'ears', in the very proximity and multiplicity of the encounter.
"What allows us to face each other [...] is also what allows us to move beyond the face, to hear and be touched by what one cannot grasp, as that which cannot be assimilated in a moment of recognition of either 'the Other' or 'the stranger'" (Ahmed 2000: 157).
Ahmed concludes with a personal reading of Spivak's translation of Mahasweta Devi's 'Douloti the bountiful' (also interspersed with her analysis) in which she attempts an ethical encounter with the text. To summarise, Ahmed's chapter posits an ethic which engages with the particular encounter with a particular other (stranger) and the concept of universalism inherently embedded in all such encounters.
Discussion: We agreed that Ahmed's main critique of Levinas resides in her positing of multiple others rather than just one, and that she both critiques and 'rescues' his ideas. We found Ahmed's notion of responsibility to be a little lacking in clarity in the text. The (negative and positively connotated) metaphors of encounter used by Ahmed and Levinas were viewed with some scepticism, since as for the process of eating, breathing also involves assimilation, transformation and the expulsion of waste products. It was suggested that Ahmed's anti-ontological stance might be explained by a limited understanding of ontology which views ontology only as being and not as becoming, and that this leads to the unnecessary opposition of ethnics and ontology. It was ventured that Ahmed's argument seemed rather pessimistic, since it posits the other as ultimately unknowable. In her text (and methodology), there is no other, only a self and an encounter.
Rachel Ramsay and Kate Roy