Essay 3

The Other: Radical Alterity was a thought provoking read for me in many ways. It introduced a new direction of thinking about limits and my relation to everything else in the world, whether it is an individual human, a culture, an animal, plant life, or an inanimate object such as a photograph. The paradoxes that come with examining a relationship to the Other, such as the orbital nature of knowledge and its inverse limit, are very interesting though probably slightly exaggerated when stating that there is next to nothing left of the Other now that we have discovered so much. I say slightly because in many ways it does seem like we have greatly reduced the Other. There is clearly much left to discover, but I remember reading a Kurt Vonnegut interview a few years ago that made an impression on me in which he talks about chemistry, the field he initially got a degree in, and how constructing the periodic table was one of the biggest steps in science, that it does not leave much left to uncover. Now that we know the building blocks of the universe it does not seem that there is a whole lot more to find that will be quite as significant, but then again you have Richard Feynman’s speech “There’s Always Room at the Bottom” which presents an enticing potential for interaction with those building blocks and how much more we could learn about the nano by physically controlling the particles that make up these elements, how much more we could learn by living on a smaller scale in addition to this one. Exhausting the space between the self and Other seems just as unlikely for culture as science. Segalen’s classification of the different types of traveler shows that our attitude and intent change our experience of the Other significantly even if we have managed to encounter every possible thing. We would have to approach the same situation, culture, or object from the perspective of at least the assimilator, profiteer, tourist, impressionist, assimilated traveler, exote, exile, allegorist, or philosopher to fully understand it. I remember Cody communicating something along the same lines during a class discussion when he said “perhaps how we live with others is a symptom of how we view the other.” We cannot fully understand the Other unless we view them in multiple ways.
My experience with blogging this quarter, even in the most general sense, was definitely an encounter with the Other. I am one of those rare people my age (twenty) who are more or less incompetent with a computer and have refrained from keeping up with technological breakthroughs even with social networking. I have never had a Myspace, Facebook, or blog let alone Plurk account and I can easily count the number of times I’ve used e-mail on my digits. I found that both Plurking and Blogging added a new dimension to the classroom experience though, and I am sure that I will resume both after the class is done. One thing that I found intriguing, an experience with the Other that could not be achieved had this class been set up differently, was being able to walk into lecture and see so many people, many of which I knew I would not get the chance to know personally, and inevitably making a shallow face value judgment only to later read through some of the blogs and still feel like I had made a kind of connection with them. This connection is unique though and would not have been the same had I just gone up to the person and started talking to them, I would see a different part of them and they would see a different part of me than what is displayed on the blogs, we would try to put on different images face to face. Plurking added a different dimension as well, in many ways it was similar to communicating through blog posts, but usually it had a more humorous feel to it and another side of the person is often exposed through sharing media.