othering

If you think about it, Marx’s Capital is all about the other. Let’s start, simply, with a commodity. It is, as Marx explains, “in the first place, an object outside of us,” an other. Now, if we want to exchange one commodity for another, we need a third ‘something’ to which the exchange-value of each other commodity is reducible. Considering this necessary exchange-value of commodities, Marx finds that:

they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Karl Marx, Karl Marx: selected writings edited by David McLellan, 2000 (pg.460)

In the shared sense of a marketplace, objects become relative, value only in exchange, that value translated from the work that produced them into an abstraction of that very labor. The other of the object, the very object we made, circles back around into an abstraction of “work” itself. This capitalist ‘othering’ comes as both cold comfort and no surprise to anyone who has been a cog in the workforce or sought too much pleasure from the things money can buy.

The other must always be some sort of abstraction, created by and needed by the self for its own definition. Such was Edward Said’s notion of ‘orientalism’ which proposes that the West defined, represented, and communicated about the East, the Orient, as other. By setting it apart from what they were, the West’s orientation towards the Orient was in fact essential to their definition and consolidation of selfhood.

The other is essential to the self, even when the other is considered backwards, dirty, uneducated, or uncivilized. Or especially in this case. In contrast, the self — the nation, the continent, or the individual — becomes the most civilized, cultured, educated, indeed the greatest in contrast and without needing to speak it.

Sometimes the other can be more important than the self. Many collectivist cultures identify the self only in relation to others, focus on the importance of decision-making as it is linked to group health, and place greater emphasis on shared rather than individual goals. When focus shifts, subtle realities manifest such as the Malaysian tendency to talk around meaning, gently nudging the message, as the relationship is more important than one’s particular pontification. Instead of saying ‘no,’ I may just say ‘let’s see’ or ‘I’ll try.’ A conversation changes, a relationship changes, and perspective on purpose relocates.

Focus on the other can bring more joy than focus on the self. Volunteering is correlated with tangible health benefits such as lower levels of depression, lower mortality rates, and increased cognitive function.

There is another road, however. Let’s be honest. Are not all of our past selves ‘others’ to our current self? Self and other collide within ourselves. The other/self duality may be the headache. Buddhism, for example, argues for the elimination of egoism, for the fallacy of selfhood. Some take this tenet at great offense. What, there is no me? This aspect of the philosophy, though, takes aim at an illusive foundation on which we may have built too many structures. It is the ‘foolish man who builds his house on sand.’ (Matthew 7:26) The alternative to dualism is nondualism. The alternative to these separations is connection. The alternative to self/other just might be nirvana.

To those who have had, observed, or studied a baby, this may seem obvious. A newborn has no sense of itself as an other, as a being separate from its mother. It is considered a developmental milestone at around 6 or 7 months when a baby starts to realize that she is a distinct individual and that her caregiver can walk away. Separation anxiety often kicks in soon thereafter. Self-awareness continues to develop throughout baby- and toddler-hood.

True, the baby develops awareness of what is necessary to survive in our world. There is another way of seeing things, as always. Perhaps the baby comes out into our world more deeply connected to an interconnection between things, between an existence without otherness. The baby is of the dawning of the light and the elderly person is of the gloaming. Some say that we are born alone and we die alone, perhaps suggesting our natural state is in our isolated individuality. But we are not born alone. And perhaps we do not die alone either. There is a Yiddish proverb which states: The whole world is a dream, and death the interpreter.

In our daydreaming state of being, we may see many things as ‘other.’ Perhaps only when we return to wholeness can the universe interpret our lives in the fullness of undivided being.