Otherness

Definition

Otherness names the condition of being constituted as the outsider to a category — the "non-X" that a boundary's taxonomic logic requires (Ardener's "'X' in contrast to 'non-X'") — and, in this wiki's disciplinary register, the lens through which an emerging discipline is received by its established neighbours. The concept's disciplinary form comes from the Reader's closing statement: interior architecture "is often viewed by conservative architects and interior designers through a lens of 'otherness' representing an alternative, controversial, and resented form of practice" (Marinic 2018) — the third discipline cast as other by both parents, its alternative status read as resentment rather than contribution. The chapter pairs the lens with the interrogation it licenses: the pointed questions advocates confront ("What are the specificities of this discipline? Who does it represent? Who is welcome to participate in its development, refinement, and stewardship?") "seem defensive rather than constructive and inclusive" — otherness administered through the form of the question itself.

This page requires fuller treatment — it is a stub created at the Marinic ch. 50 ingest (see log).

Key Thinkers

• Gregory Marinic — the disciplinary register: the "otherness" lens through which conservative members of both established disciplines view the third discipline, paired with the defensive questioning that polices participation (2018).

Related Concepts

• identity-of-the-interior — the identity that the otherness lens denies: the three defensive questions as the identity-debate's gate-keeping form.
• boundaries — the boundary-logic that produces otherness: the category's perimeter requiring its "non-X."
• disciplinary-frontiers — the geography of the othering: the interstitial zone mined by the discipline cast as other.
• global-constructs — the user-side register (Hadjiyanni): identities and otherness negotiated and produced in interiors in a world of movement.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture (Marinic 2018) — the founding disciplinary source: the "otherness" lens ("an alternative, controversial, and resented form of practice"), the skeptical reception of "the mining of an interstitial zone," and the defensive questioning that polices the discipline's constituency and stewardship.

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — otherness's sartorial-ornamental register: "distinction" as the secondary ordering function's most common effect — "the distinction of pure otherness as embodied by the famous photograph taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing a Melanesian man wearing a Kellogg's box by way of finery, or hierarchical distinction" (p. 315). Otherness here is not a disciplinary lens (Marinic) but an ornamental effect: a body made other by what it wears, its finery readable as pure otherness — the commodity-comma colonizing a colonial body, "otherness" as the display system's first product. The source adds the concept's display-economy register to its disciplinary and boundary registers: otherness as what an ordering system produces at the frontier of its ornament. See ornamental-ground-plan, fashion, primitivism.

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the methodological "double Otherness" of historical anthropology: Medick argues that ethnology sharpens our sight for "a double Otherness: the strange and alien aspects of our own European culture and history, and the effective role of cultural differences … as decisive forces" (pp. 42–43), and that the historian must make "the familiar alien" rather than project the present onto the past (Ginzburg: "The fundamental instrument is that of alienation" (p. 49)); the recognition of what is "alien" and "other" "still runs the risk of being misunderstood in terms of a model ultimately derived from the conception of Western individualism" (p. 61). Lüdtke's Annäherung makes the same point: "the distance between 'us' and the 'others' … may be possible to bridge, but it cannot be eliminated" (p. 8).

Open Questions

• Is the "otherness" lens a contingent reception (a sociology of conservative gate-keeping) or a structural condition of any discipline formed between two established ones — i.e., does the third discipline need its otherness the way the boundary needs its non-X?
• How does the disciplinary otherness-lens relate to the human/geographic otherness the wiki's gender-and-space and global-interior clusters track — is the emerging discipline "othered" by the same mechanism that others muted groups within bounded territories?