Re: IRE & peer collaboration

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Tue, 02 Jan 96 22:14:35 EST

I was also struck by the wisdom of saying 'encompassing differences'
rather than, at least in some usages, 'transcending' them. For me
the distinction was that the latter formula somehow supposes that
we _can_ and that it would be good to get away from a focus on or
awareness of differences. While Ellice probably didn't mean it
this way, I think there are many people, good liberals even, who
want to be able to think of us all as 'deep down' alike in our
humanity (part of a moral project of liberal anthropology in
fact, and the well-intended side of universalizing psychology).
'If we could just get past our differences' many people think,
then we could all get along in harmony, etc. That harmony, and
the hoped-for common elements, however, usually turn out to be
those of the liberal culture of the dreamer, still, if more
good-heartedly, part of rejections of Other on the part of
dominant groups, part of their naturalization of their own
dreams and ways, generously extended to all Others.

'Encompassing' on the other hand seems to me to present a
different stance and project: to include differences, the
feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and ways of Others as part of
our own reality, as themselves being as 'down deep' as our
own. It might even imply the project of looking in ourselves
for those qualities of Others in which they seem most different
(and invariably most deficient, perverse, or repellant) from
us. It seems in fact quite likely that we are also Other,
paradoxically, for as we constitute the Us/Others differences,
dialectical logic guarantees that we contain our own
contradictories, which we project onto Others from ourselves
and what is feared, repressed, denied, disparaged in Us. There
is much to be learned from such a project.

As to encompassing how Others truly see us and themselves,
I have often wondered to what degree this is truly possible.
But we ought to try, we ought to listen, to hear not difference,
but something wholly Other, not defined by comparison or
relation to Us, outside our frames of reference, mostly
incomprehensible. There is work that might make us more than
we could otherwise be. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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