The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier

Partons de la conception de l'Autre comme du lieu du signifiant. Tout énoncé d'autorité n'a d'autre garantie que son énonciation même, car il est vain qu'il le cherche dans un autre signifiant, lequel d'aucune façon ne saurait apparaître hors de ce lieu. Ce que nous formulons à dire qu'il n'y a pas de métalangage qui puisse être parlé, plus aphoristiquement : qu'il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre.

[Let us start from the conception of the Other as the place of the signifier. Any statement of authority has no other guarantee than its very enunciation, for it is pointless for it to seek it in another signifier, which could not appear outside this place in any way. Which is what we mean in saying that there is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other.]

—Jacques Lacan¹

Internal otherness: a paradigm and a qualification

The Other has passed into critical ubiquity less as a phenomenological-existential problem than as the problem of cultural difference.² And yet the various registers of the word are never quite distinct from one another: when speaking of the Other, it sometimes seems, cultural criticism is being more philosophical than usual, theory more cultural and ethical. The diverse ways in which "the Other" and its attendant vocabulary are used often make literary criticism seem a multiplicity of disciplines divided by a common language. What, if any, is the connection between these various Others? Are they essentially the same Other? And if not, does it make sense to speak of an Other of the Other?

Rey Chow's Ethics after Idealism offers a compelling account of the historical and structural relationship between Theory and Cultural Studies in terms of their respective articulations of otherness.³ The prestige and authority of Theory arose, writes Chow, from "attempts to be negative and subversive, attempts to blast open the generality of the Western logos with the force of an exotic species/specialization from within" (xvii). "Such attempts have left on Western thought," she continues, "the indelible imprints of an internal otherness, imprints which, until the eruption of a different kind of otherness—in the form of other, non-Western cultures—are taken as definitive signs of alterity per se" (xvii).⁴ This "eruption" is explicitly formulated as a return of the repressed: "Cultural studies [. . .] in effect forces poststructuralist theory to confront the significance of race [. . .] that is repressed in poststructuralist theory's claim to subversiveness and radicalism" (5). At the same time, Chow's account also implies a dialectical, historical narrative. The articulations of otherness associated with Theory were historical prerequisites for the emergence of Post-colonial and Cultural Studies, but the latter do not follow the former as a return to politics and history so much as the return of these forces from Theory's own political unconscious: "the turn toward otherness that seems to follow from the theoretical dislocation of the sign is, strictly speaking, the very historicity that precedes the poststructuralist subversion: the supplementary look at Europe's other reveals anew the violence that was there, long before the appearance of 'theory,' in the European imperialism of the past few hundred years" (5).⁵ Theory as we thought we knew it was then both an allegory of colonialism and a pre-figuration of postcolonial studies.⁶ Western modernity's self-knowledge is thus defined by a lack that can only be addressed by an other it could, until recently, only recognize as abstract figures of otherness: ontological difference, the barred subject, the face, and so on. Much as Hegel imagined the conceptual universe of the "Oriental World" as constrained by a fundamental failure to encounter its own negation and truth in universal Spirit, here the pre-postcolonial West is barred from full historical consciousness by its inability to recognize the material prerequisites of this Spirit and the historical contingency of its would-be universals. Theory was a realm of abstract nouns that...