Simão, Lívia Mathias and Valsiner, Jaan. (Eds.) (2007). Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self. Reviewed by Seamus Mulryan, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Simão, Lívia Mathias and Valsiner, Jaan. (Eds.) (2007). Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Pp. 413     $39.95     ISBN 1-59311-232-7 Reviewed by Seamus Mulryan University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign October 29, 2007 Lívia Mathias Simão and Jaan Valsiner have collected fourteen works that interrogate Otherness – a central philosophical concept in psychological and educational studies of human development. This book aims to “stimulate reflections on the issue of otherness in the research domain of self and cultural psychology” (p. 393). In doing so, the authors place Otherness in question by examining the dimensions of self; and, in turn, the asking about Otherness brings the self to light, thus showing the bi-directionality and interdependence of the two. The authors ask broad yet penetrating questions that are answered through both theoretical and empirical reflection. They work through textual exegesis, case-based studies from their practice and from the public world, conceptual development, and, of course, combinations of these. These are relevant and important studies for educators, whose task it is to shape a human life by guiding its development within the dynamic of self and other. The specific dynamic of the education scholar's work is that of the student-teacher relationship, and this book offers an account that can illuminate the nature of it. The book is divided into five parts, in between which the editor places interviews that help the reader tie together the particular section it follows. Part One is entitled “Conceptual Roots of ‘Otherness,’” and it aims to place the reader in the context of the central question of the text. Ernest E. Boesch explains how Otherness is a relating term, a dynamic between I and Other: “‘The Other’ is seen in the perspective of an individual, and this perspective changes, of course, with the individual’s action situation – and accordingly, then, the image of ‘The Other’ changes, too” (p. 5). Boesch offers concrete experiential examples that give the reader a close familiarity with this dynamic such that the reader is better prepared for Simão’s following exegetical work with philosophical texts. In Chapter Two, “Why ‘Otherness’ in the Research Domain of Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism,” Lívia Simão lays out the philosophical underpinnings of the many dimensions of Otherness and alterity – temporality, responsibility (and the ethical), novelty and anonymity. It is then in the four parts following this conceptual introduction that Otherness is questioned. Part II is entitled “Otherness and Dialogicality: Feeling into Phenomena.” Part III is entitled “Striving Toward the Unknown: Self in Motion.” Part IV is entitled “Self in Collective Otherness.” Part V is entitled “The Other Within the Self: Dynamics of Multiplicity.” Part II begins with Chapter Three, entitled “The Feeling of a Dialogical Self: Affectivity, Agency and Otherness.” João Salgado’s work is to conceptualize a self that follows from a “dialogical epistemological/ontological stance,” and he does this by examining the role of feelings in the creation of self. He finds that, because emotions such as anger, surprise, fear, and the like might have different labels and meanings in different cultures, it makes more sense to adopt Stern’s vocabulary of dynamics of feeling such as “crescendo,” “fading,” “elongating” or “fleeting”, to name a few. Such terms seem to create a stronger “integral account of human experience,” as it is much easier to accept that all humans experience changes of feelings and emotions than that of particular conceptualizations of their essences. Salgado’s point is to help us “consider our affectivity as the main currency of our exchanges with the world, as an implicit, energetic, and relational dimension that underlies all our conduct” (p. 67). Following Salgado’s work, we encounter Emily Abbey’s examination of feeling the other in intrasubjective space in Chapter Four, “The Boundary of Me and You: Semiotic Architecture of Thinking and Feeling the Other.” Abbey asks how it is that the Other can drift in and out of our awareness, and how it is that in such awareness of the Other we can feel him or her in the space where the labeling of The Other intrinsic to language is mute, and difference is neutralized. Here, the author takes a foray into the intrapsychological world were she lays out the architecture of mechanisms that act to open and close the possibility of feeling the other, and she tells us that signs regulate the boundary where one faces the possibility of feeling the other. In the labyrinth of self, such signage might take one down the path of responding to an event as having the meaning “fearful.” Different signage might rather make the meaning of the same event “joyful”. It is at these signposts that one’s endpoint is determined: ultimately it is that of being “okay to feel” or that of “not okay to feel.” To give the reader context and to ground her theory in practical experience, Abbey uses a single interview to describe the outer motor-perceptual/attention boundary and the inner peripheral/thinking boundary that surround the central core, which is that of feeling. In Chapter Five, N.E. Coelho, Jr. takes a different turn in analysis by drawing from Luigi Pirandello’s character, Vitangelo Moscarda, found in Uno, Nessuno e Centomilla, to illustrate the levels and dynamics of disturbances caused by a confrontation with otherness. He marks the central points of such a disturbance into four levels: the revealing to the subject things about himself that he himself did not know; the effect of such a revelation, which the subject is unable to assimilate; the threat to one’s identity from such a traumatic experience; and, finally, the recognition of an other within “what was until then a ‘monolithic subject’ [that] produces splitting, an element which . . . [is] fundamental in the development of creative processes of mental maturation” (pp. 98-99). Ultimately, Coelho asserts that “we as subjects will always face the impact of an other (internal and external) which is simultaneously familiar and strange and, therefore, traumatic” (p. 104). Part III begins with a case study by Marisa Japur, Carla Guanaes and Emerson F. Rasera that illustrates “the centrality of otherness of in [sic] the conversational construction of change, here conceived as the possibility of emergence and sustenance of alternative self-descriptions . . . ” (p. 131). Here, the roles of the others that are not present in a group session – those about whom the patient will discuss in an individual session – are not those others’ effects that the authors wish to examine. Rather, they set out to describe the dynamics between the patient in the group and the other group participants and how such conversations help shape the self. Alex Gillespie then takes us to the world of tourists in Ladakh, India, where he draws from interviews to show the dynamics of a tourist’s prior conceptions of other as they collide with the later experiences of other, within the context of a tourist's striving to become an other. For example, one interviewee, prior to arriving in Ladakh, sees her self-position as not that of the other-position of a National Geographic photographer. In the course of her tourism, the interviewee begins to see how her photographs resemble those of “those-photographers-in-the-Himalaya” (p. 184). Thus, she begins to occupy the position of this other. Gillespie proffers in Chapter Seven the assertion that “the recognition that self gives to the other is simultaneously recognition promised, or extended, to self (if self manages to occupy the position of other) and thus constitutive of the self’s motivation for striving” (p. 184). Tania Zittoun examines one life story to examine the roles of “poems novels, images, and other objects made out of signs in the fabric of self” (p. 187). Here, she uses interruptions and the re-equilibria that are subsequent to ruptures as landmarks in the spatiality of the striving self. She shows how cultural resources can help enable and shape the movement of the self from present toward the other-toward-which-one-is-striving. Through the life story, the author explains this dynamic as it happens at different stages in development, from the pre-symbolic and early symbolic phases of growth with simpler objects like watches and maps to the later phases where one develops complex systems of symbols such as language. She ultimately offers us a model with which to analyze the transformation of cultural elements into symbolic resources: a semiotic prism where Self, Other(s) and meaning/sense for other, and Cultural Object occupy the three apexes. In Chapter Nine, Alberto Rosa, Jorge Castro, and Florentino Blanco lead us from the striving self to the self in collective others by discussing the many Others of Spanish Regenerationism – Historical, Social, and International (of both regional and Nation-state) – and the role they play in constructing the self. Chapter Eleven takes us to contemporary America, where Derek Richter and Jaan Valsiner analyze the political rhetoric and the dynamics between the dialogical consumers (voters) and dialogical exploiters (politicians) of G.W. Bush and Al Gore. Their analysis points out how politicians attempt to create in the voter a feeling of free choice in their vote, when in fact the politician has targeted the dialogical consumer, “attempt[ing] to display a construction of their own publicly presented selves that can easily be reconstructed by the audience, in a form that is in line with the recipient’s system of I-positions” (p. 281), so that their “free choice” is really a set of carefully manipulated and “strategically facilitated sentiments rather than actual policies” (p. 281); the dialogical self is also a targeted self. Shi-Xu, preceding the Richter’s and Valsiner’s chapter, asserts that the discourse on difference is inadequate: it considers difference as deficiency, it universalizes intercultural communication, and it fails to recognize the historical and power dimensions of such communication (p. 258). To remedy the situation, he says that we must also “view intercultural communication . . . locally and historically” (p.258). Leading by example, Shi-Xu takes on an examination of the discourse between the United States and China regarding human rights violations, paying particular attention to the aforementioned missing dimensions of intercultural communication. The last movement of the book takes us to search for the Other within the self. Mick Cooper and Hubert Hermans begin quite clearly with the assertion that “we can experience elements of our own as mysterious, enigmatic, and transcendent to our ‘self’ just as we can experience the being of an Other. In this sense, phenomenologically at least, it is legitimate to talk of a ‘self-otherness,’ just as we can talk of the otherness of an Other” (p. 308). To explicate, Cooper and Hermans point to the other beings that “exist within our very essence” (p. 309) and that the self is “fundamentally riven with alterity" (p. 313). They ultimately propose a constructive means by which to confront this inner alterity, and they introduce a term to describe a comportment that is open and respectful towards one’s mysteriousness and that does not expect engagement or understanding found in a dialogical relation: honoring. They assert that this comportment is more constructive than the attempts to dominate and oppresses those parts of self one dislikes, and rather it allows for the moving “beyond a ‘nostalgia for totality,’ toward an acceptance of the incompleteness of self, a willingness to live with the unknowability and uncertainty of who we are” (p. 311). In Chapter Thirteen, Danilo Silvia Guimarães and Lívia Mathias Simão take us to the world of role playing games (RPGs) to explore the dialogical dynamics between radical and egological intersubjectivity and the hermeneutics of I-Other and I-I relations. Using the RPG, Guimarães and Simão are able to show how subjects move between I-positions of fantasy selves and “real” selves, and thus how players become others, investigate otherness through becoming other, and how their positions change as they co-construct and maintain the shared world which houses their fantasy selves. Finally, Jaan Valsiner asks us to move away from a discourse that treats emotions and feelings as entities. He presents us with models of feeling and emotion as process; feeling is caught between past and future, initiated by something already in the past when felt, and already anticipates the future: “The subjective world of a human being is constantly in the state of a complex whole of the immediate experience which is dynamically changing” (p. 351). As such, Valsiner tells us, it is not open to being communicated as something discrete. Yet we do desire to communicate such experiences, and so we violate the dureé and discretize our experience by the use of semiotic mediation (p. 351). At the basic level, however, motivations and meanings of actions and calls to respond are “fuzzy,” difficult to describe in words, uncertain. These are when such motivations carry what Valsiner calls “hypergeneralized meanings” (p. 358), e.g., values that become so fundamental to, imbued into and diffused within the everyday of experience that they are hard to articulate. He tells us that “values are so basic – ontogenetically internalized – that they are no longer easily accessible through cerebrally mediated processes” (p. 362), much in agreement with what Charles Taylor (1989) argues about “hypergoods.” Valsiner then describes how the levels of semiotic hierarchy direct our future striving by mediating our future affects. An interesting question he raises is how depression, as a feeling, differs between a culture that considers it just a part of life and characteristic of normalcy (like a Buddhist culture) as opposed to another culture that considers depression something to get rid of, something wrong or uncharacteristic of normalcy (American culture, for example). How is it, then, that the cultural resources we are given to analyze and express our emotions constrain the direction of the striving self? In its entirety, Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self is an excellent resource for a wide variety of audiences interested in exploring the ways in which otherness is understood through examining the self and how the self is understood through examining otherness. Unfortunately, Otherness in Question does suffer from translation errors that become frustrating in chapters where thicker language is being used and more conceptual work is being done. This makes arguments difficult to follow at points, as precision and clarity are exceptionally important in philosophical work in order to covey meaning appropriately. Nonetheless, the authors successfully problematize the dynamic between self and other, the existential space that lies between them, and the discourse of Otherness itself. Otherness in Question has well thought-out and purposeful organization, and it does offer its readers insightful analysis and an accessible view into the relation between self and other to those who have some background in reading phenomenological works in psychology or philosophy. Reference Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. About the Reviewer Seamus Mulryan is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he specializes in philosophy of education. He earned his MA in Philosophy & Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and he has worked in public and private school settings in both teaching and administrative positions. His current work is in conceptions of human development and in the educative dimensions of cross-cultural dialogue.