Ego meets Alter: The meaning ofotherness in cultural semiotics

GORAN SONESSON

Ever since it was first introduced by a group of Soviet semioticians meet-ing in Tartu in the seventies, the term 'semiotics of culture' has beenappropriated by a rising number of anthropologists, sociologists, linguists,and outright semioticians: but it seems to me that, in general, the term hassimply been used to designate what has long been called anthropology,ethnology, sociology, and so on. At best, some concepts and ideasstemming from semiotics proper have been added. Conceptually, this isundoubtedly an adequate maneuver, for all the disciplines mentionedshould rightly be considered 'semiotic sciences', in Prieto's (1975a, 1975b)apt term, rather than either social or human sciences. But science beingan institution, and institutions being notoriously inert, there is not muchhope of getting out of the present conceptual muddle by pushing throughsuch a sea change.

This is why I will propose to give a much more specific and limitedmeaning to the notion of a semiotics of culture. In my work on culturalsemiotics, I have retained two lessons from the Tartu school, which seemto have been largely forgotten by the school itself: that it is not aboutCulture per se, but about what the model members of a Culture makeof their Culture; and that this model itself is more involved with relation-ships between cultures (as well as subcultures, cultural spheres, and soon) than with a Culture in its singularity. This is not to deny that amodel of Culture easily becomes a factor in Culture; thus, for instance,those who insist that contemporary Culture is an information societyand/or a global village certainly contribute to transforming it into justthat. Indeed, if semiotic systems are points of view on the material world,as Saussure (1968-1974: 47) claims, then cultural semiotics is a point ofview on these points of views. It is easy to imagine this second-hand pointof view contaminating the former.1 As to the second limitation, if it isnot all too unfashionable to retain some aspects of the structuralistlesson, relations between cultures may be seen as partly defining whatcultures are.

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538 G. Sonesson

Given these conditions, one may well wonder what we should takethe subject matter of cultural semiotics to be. It will certainly be neces-sary to leave some room for applied semiotics, that is, in this case, theapplication of our knowledge of cultural models to particular social andhistorical circumstances. In this sense, I have myself used cultural semioticsto study the development of Modernism in the arts throughout the lastcentury (Sonesson 1992, 1994a, 1999). Essentially, however, I will takecultural semiotics to be something else: a study of the models conceivablybrought to bear on the interrelationship of cultures. In order to establishthe possibility of such models, however, historical and contemporaryexamples will undoubtedly be necessary. But these are then the material,not the goal of the study.

In the present essay, my aim is to formally define the distinction betweenwhat in some versions of cultural semiotics (e.g., Posner 1989) has beencalled, respectively, Non-Culture and Extra-Culture, by using thetraditional opposition between Ego and Alter, in particular as it hasbeen extended by Benveniste (1966), with some considerations on other-ness taken over from Bakhtin and Peirce. As an example, I will use themeeting of cultures known as the conquest of America, as it has beenmanifested in texts, both verbal and visual (cf. Todorov 1982; Gruzinski1990), and then proceed to investigate an even older cultural opposition,that between men and women, as it might be conceived by extendingFoucault's (1976, 1984a, 1984b) history of sexuality.

Elements of cultural semiotics

In the following I will present the Tartu model in the schematic form oftwo overlapping squares representing Culture and Nature respectively,which are connected by different arrows, referring to the inclusion andexclusion of texts and non-texts (cf. Figure 1 and Sonesson 1987, 1992,1993, 1994a, 1995, 1996, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1998, 1999, 2000, in press,forthcoming).2 This scheme is of course too simple to do justice to theTartu school conception: as we shall see, it only accounts for one part ofthe examples given in their articles. On the other hand, it is a model in amore pregnant sense than the one which seems to be implied by the Tartuschool: it is, as we shall see in the rest of this essay, a simplified likeness thebusiness of which it is to be continuously modified in the confrontationwith new real-world examples.

What I will henceforth call the canonical model is built around anopposition between Nature and Culture by means of which both termsare constituted, in the classical sense of linguistic structuralism, i.e., by

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Culture (Textuality) vs

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mutually defining each other. Yet a fundamental asymmetry is built intothe model: Nature is defined from the point of view of Culture, not theopposite. According to the canonical model, every Culture conceives ofitself as Order, opposed to something on the outside, which is seen asChaos, Disorder, and Barbarism, in other words, as Culture opposed toNature. In this sense, Nature will include other cultures, not recognizedas such by the cultural model. It is easy to see that this is true of mosttraditional (or 'primitive') cultures, and is even codified in their language:one of the Mayan languages still spoken in Mexico, the Huesteco, has onlyone term ('uinic') for saying 'human being' and 'speaker of the Huestecolanguage'. Indeed, it is well-known that Barbarians were, to the Greeks,those who could not speak the Greek language: those who babble,i.e., who make sounds which not only are not meaningful but even lackorganization. The Aztecs took the same view of those who did not speakNahuatl ('popoluca'). An even better example may be that of the RomanEmpire: the limes did not separate Rome from other countries or cul-tures, but from something which was not yet Rome, i.e., a literal no-man'sland.3 Indeed, there are many historical examples of cultures describingother people as being 'dumb', e.g., the name given to Germans by theSlavs ('nemec'), to the Toltecs by the Maya ('nunob'), and to the peoplein Veracruz by the Aztecs ('nonoualca'). This attitude is certainly notonly manifested in verbal language, but in a number of other culturalpractices: thus, for instance, persons coming from cultures which weretoo distant from the Aztec one were not even considered worthy ofbeing sacrificed. The gods would accept a Totonac, but hardly a Spaniard(cf. Todorov 1982: 81f.).

540 G. Sonesson

Languages employed in present-day Western Culture do not make useof terms of this kind, nor are we so particular about whom we sacrifice. Butit would be naive to think that there is not a similar mechanism at workalso in the relationship between contemporary cultures, subcultures, andcultural spheres. On the other hand, it is clear that the canonical model istoo simple to account for all those relationships which it is today possibleto have with other cultures. Here I want to mention two other cases.

There are two respects in which the Tartu school model of Cultureis curiously reminiscent of the proxemic model which describes howdistances become socially meaningful (Hall 1966). First, they are relativeto a center, an origo, which in one case is the own Culture, and in theother the own body, that is, like the Husserlian Lifeworld (and likeBakhtin's world of everyday life), they are 'subjective-relative'. In thesecond place, the categories defined by both models attribute meaning toobjects to the extent that they transgress borders, in one case between ourown Culture and other cultures, and in the other case between differentspaces having the body as their center. Only in this way can we under-stand that something, which is a 'text' on one side of the cultural divide,becomes a 'non-text' on the other side of the border, and vice versa.This latter feature is also found in the rhetorical model of meaning(cf. Sonesson 1995,1997b). Textuality' is relative to a center. In this sense,the model is necessarily asymmetric: Culture defines Culture and Nature,not vice versa.4

Beyond the canonical model

In some cases, however, a Culture may construe itself as being on theoutside, representing Nature and Chaos while another society plays therole of Culture. To take the example developed in most of the Tartuarticles, Peter the Great and other Russians trying to modernize Russiaheld this latter view. The Slavophiles, more classically, conceived ofRussia as Culture and the Occidental countries as being the Barbaricoutsiders. Another case, often discussed in the Tartu articles, is (atleast in some respects) Moscow as the 'Third Rome' (which refers toConstantinople referring to the original Rome). Other examples abound.For a long time, Latin Americans looking at Spain as the 'Madre Patria'have taken the same stance, as have more recently the Argentineansdefining Paris in the same way (and correlatively, seeing themselves asrepresenting France in Latin America, an isle of Culture in Nature).5More generally, Third World countries trying to become industrialized,or states of the former Soviet Block wanting to become integrated into

Culture (the Textual)

Ego meets Alter 541

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Figure 2. Projected Ego extension of the canonical model

Western Europe, may easily come to look upon the Occident as theircultural model. For the last few decades young people all over the worldhave construed the United States, in this peculiar sense, as being theCulture. Even the scholars meeting at the time in Tartu looking toFrance (and pre-Soviet Russia, which is another Culture in time) for theirsources may well have felt that they were themselves outside of Culture.

If the cultural model is intrinsically egocentric, then Culture willalways be where the Ego (the subject having the model) is, just as inproxemics. We can imagine, however, that this same Ego is projected toanother sphere, so that there is an imaginary Culture which is built uparound the projected Ego (Figure 2). In fact, there are reasons to believethat it is not only spatially (in terms of causal history, i.e., the trajectoryfrom birth, in the sense of time geography) that the subject having themodel cannot really move from inside his original Culture. As I haveshown elsewhere (Sonesson 1998), there are in fact several conflictingcriteria for defining what a text is, and hence what Culture is (sinceTextuality is that which is inside Culture), and these do not always gotogether. The non-text is that which is not possible to understand. But, atleast, it is also that which we do not care to understand, because it is notfamiliar and/or because we do not ascribe any value to it. Culture maywell have been outside Russia for Peter the Great, in terms of attributedvalue, but in the sense of ease of understanding, it is a good guess thatRussia remained more cultural.

542 G. Sonesson

If this inverted canonical model corresponds to what Todorov (1989)has called Homer's rule, which stipulates that the further something isfrom home the better it is, the canonical model itself is closer to Herodot'srule, according to which the closer a neighbor lives to us the better heis. This way of thinking certainly adds continuity to the model, but thescale still starts out from a prototypical center of goodness or badness.

There is, however, another way in which the canonical model mayseem insufficient to describe our relationship to other cultures. It certainlyseems to be possible for a subject in one Culture to conceive of someother society, cultural sphere or whatever as being a Culture, withoutbeing part of his or her Culture. We may therefore imagine a model inwhich Culture is opposed not only to Non-Culture (or Nature), but alsoto Extra-Culture. These terms are in some respects self-explanatory. Butconsidered as an extension of the canonical model, such a duplicationof the opposite term of Culture at once becomes problematic.

This extension of the model is systematically built into the version ofcultural semiotics elaborated by Posner (1989). In his view, the distinctionbetween Non-Culture and Extra-Culture is accounted for by a scaleof semiotization, which runs from a zero degree in Non-Culture, thenincreases in Extra-Culture and even more in Culture, within which itattains its maximum degree at the Center (as opposed to the Periphery).This solution seems unsatisfactory to me for several reasons. First, it is notclear what semiotization is. It cannot mean that something becomesor ceases to be a sign, for this seems to be an all-or-nothing affair, noris such a characterization wide enough to define Culture in the Tartumodel. Perhaps it should be understood as something which is subject toattention (as when Lotman [1984a] uses this term to describe the way theDecembrists made ordinary behavior sequences into 'texts'; cf. Sonesson1998: 104). Or perhaps the term is used to refer to the basic Hjelmslevianintuition underlying the notion of Nature in the Tartu school model,i.e., an opposition between 'form' which is organized and can be under-stood and 'substance' (or rather 'matter') which lacks organization andthus cannot be grasped. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere (Sonesson1998), many different criteria are used to distinguish texts from non-textsin the Tartu model (such as meaningfulness, order, ease of interpretation,prominence, worth, etc.), so we should really need to have recourse toseveral scales.6 But in either case it remains unclear how a scale, which iscontinuous, should be able to account for a segmentation into differentdomains, the limits of which change the meaning of the artefact crossingthem: in fact, if there is an Extra-Culture and a center, as well as aNon-Culture and a Culture, there should also be extra-texts and centro-texts, in addition to texts and non-texts. In Francis Edeline's apt phrase,

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'to semiotize is (first) to segmentize'.7 Rather than a continuous scale(or several scales), what we need are criteria for segmenting the domainof Culture and Non-Culture in such a way that Culture and Extra-Cultureremain more intimately connected to each other than either of them isto Non-Culture. This can be done by attending to the parallel betweenpersons and cultures, suggested, independently, by Peirce and Bakhtin.

The axes of conversation and reference

Already when claiming that the cultural model is egocentric (ratherthan, more trivially, ethnocentric), I suggested a parallel between per-sons and cultures. The cultural model is an origo, a portable center,by means of which members of a culture 'take possession of the semio-sphere (to generalize what Benveniste said about language). Indeed,parallels between persons and cultures have often been made, not leastin semiotics. Peirce talked about cultures as 'compact persons' (cf. Singer1984; Colapietro 1989). Moreover, Lotman argued that a Semiotics ofCulture was possible because cultures could be seen as (collectionsof) signs, and Colapietro (1989: 58, 78ff.) quotes Peirce's comparableidentification of minds with symbols when trying to show the viabilityof a Semiotics of the Self.

In his early work, Bakhtin (1990, 1993) is very much preoccupied bythe differences between the self and the other, often masquerading underthe terms Author and Hero.8 He points out that it is only the other whichmay be (and must be) seen from the outside, and thus is perceived as acomplete and finished whole; the self, on the other hand, is an unlimitedprocess which can never be grasped in its entirety; indeed it is some kindof stream of consciousness, which only comes to a standstill at death.This is so because 'my emotional and volitional reactions attach to objectsand do not contract into an outwardly finished image of myself (1990:35; cf. 1993).9 Only the other's body can be seen completely: there isan 'excess of seeing' (1990: 22ff.). In the case of ourselves, some part ofthe body is always lacking, even as reflected in a mirror. This differencetranslates to the mind. In this sense the other, contrary to the self, has theproperty of outsideness, or transgredience (1990: 27ff.).

Bakhtin (1990: 25ff., 61ff.) uses these observations to criticize thetheory of empathy popular at the time: understanding cannot be anidentification with the other, for to begin with, this would be pointless,since it would only give us the same thing over again. In the secondplace, it is impossible, because the other by definition can only be seenfrom the outside.10 Yet Bakhtin (1990: 15ff., 17, 25f.) admits that we

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may imaginatively take the position of the other on ourselves, thoughwhat is gained from this outside position can only be appreciated onceit is reintegrated into the stream of consciousness, as a phase of theongoing process which is the self.11 In a very late text, however, Bakhtin(1986) suggests that a parallel can be made between the meeting of selfand other, and the interpretation of other cultures. In both cases,understanding is not possible by a total identification with the otherculture, but only by entering the other culture and then returning to aposition external to it. In our terms, Non-Culture can only be transformedinto Extra-Culture by taking one's own ultimate stand in Culture.12

In some other articles (Sonesson forthcoming, in press) I have alreadynoted the parallels which might be drawn between relations betweencultures, on the one hand, and relations between persons, on the other:notably by differentiating Non-Culture into the equivalent of the Non-Egoand the Non-Person. In fact, in a famous analysis, Benveniste (1966) hassuggested that what are ordinarily considered the pronouns of the first,second, and third persons, should really be considered the result of combin-ing two different dimensions: the correlation of personality, which opposesthe person to the non-person; and, within the former pole, the correlation ofsubjectivity, which opposes the subject to the non-subject. The traditionalthird person, in this sense, is no person at all. It is opposed to two kindsof persons, the one identified with the speaker, and the one identifiedwith the listener. Tesniere (1969) later proposed to use the somewhatmore enlightening but more cumbersome terms autoontive, antiontive, andanontive, respectively: i.e., the one who exists in itself; the one who existsagainst (the first one); and the one who, properly speaking, does not existat all. It could be said, then, that Culture is the domain of the subject,or autoontive, while Extra-Culture is the domain of the non-subject, orantiontive. Non-Culture, finally, is the residence of the Non-Person, oranontive. It seems particularly proper to describe Non-Culture as thatwhich does not properly exist.

The terminology suggested certainly does not involve the impositionof a linguistic model on culture; rather, it is Benveniste's merit to havediscovered a cultural layering within language, which may well also existin other semiotic systems. However, I do think the terminology is in someways influenced by the semantics of Romance languages. It is naturalfor a Frenchman, a Spanish-speaking person, and so on, to think of thethird person as a non-person, because the pronouns in question areequally employed about things and living beings. In Swedish, German,English, and so on, however, we use two of the varieties of the thirdperson pronoun, 'he' and 'she', almost exclusively about persons.13 Ittherefore seems more correct to talk about the axis of conversation or

Ego meets Alter 545

dialogue, joining Ego and Alter, as opposed to the axis of reference ornomination, which connects the former to the thing meant, or Aliquid.Extra-Culture is the one with whom Culture is On speaking terms';Non-Culture is the one Culture may at the most be speaking about.14

In this sense, cultural semiotics becomes, in Milton Singer's (1984)phrase, a real 'conversation of cultures'. Though at the same time, it isa conversation conducted out of reach of other cultures.

Peirce has also had recourse to the metaphor of the three common typesof personal pronouns to describe analogies between persons and cultures,but perhaps in a somewhat different way from mine. He even puts themin place of what was later to become the three fundamental categoriesof Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. But Peirce did not identify thesecond person as one may at first naively expect with Secondness, butwith Thirdness. In his view, the second person was the most important,not the first: 'all thought is addressed to a second person, or to one'sfuture self as a second person' (quoted from Singer 1984: 83f.). In termswhich Peirce took over from Schiller, the first person stood for the infi-nite impulse (Firstness), the third person for the sensuous (Secondness),and the second person for the harmonizing principle (Thirdness). Peircecalled his own doctrine 'Tuism' (from 'Tu', as opposed to 'Ego' and 'It'),and he predicted a 'tuistic age', in which peace and harmony wouldprevail. So the Peircean other is a friend and collaborator; he is notthe spirit which always says no, the devil in a Biblical sense.

What seems to be lacking in Peirce's thought is the second person asa real Alter, someone who is basically different. As we observed above,both Bakhtin and Peirce see the self as something that is not and cannotbe concluded, something that exists only as developing in time. Butwhile to Bakhtin the other is something static, essentially closed off, he isfor Peirce of the same kind as the self: that is, a stream of conscious-ness which cannot be halted — before the moment of death. So from thispoint of view, the other is just another self to Peirce. On the other hand,Peirce claims there is no direct access to knowledge about the self, just asthere is none about the other: both are only indirectly known throughsigns. As far as access to knowledge is concerned then, the self is merelyanother other to Peirce. The outsideness, or transgredience, which Bakhtinattributes to the other is also a property of the Peircean self.

I would not presume to decide who is right, of Peirce and Bakhtin,about the self and the other; perhaps we should consider their descriptionsto be alternate but equally possible models. In any case, it seems clear thatgiven its egocentrical point of departure, cultural semiotics must side withBakhtin. Ego and Alter are two of a kind to Peirce, but in the model ofcultural semiotics that we have presented, Ego and Alter are essentially

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opposed as to their nature, as in Bakhtin's work.15 Since Alter is petrifiedand closed-off by the look of the Ego, he should of course be the squareinserted into the openness of the Ego, not the opposite as the model(cf. Figure 1) suggests. This is another aspect, not taken into account bythe model in its visual manifestation. What is important for the momentis that Ego and Alter appear as essentially different.

The quest for otherness: Naming America

What is familiarly known as the discovery of America is surely one ofthe most important examples in history of the meeting of Culture andits other, whether the latter is conceived as Non-Culture or as Extra-Culture. In fact, the very term 'discovery' (as well as 'conquest') points tothe egocentrical roots of cultural modeling which we have alreadyobserved. The fact that the model may in some respects be reversed is ofcourse particularly poignant. There's even a place for those who wouldproject their Ego onto the other culture.16

Todorov makes a lot of the differences in the attitude taken bythe two cultural heroes of the conquest: Colombo, on the one hand,and Cortez, on the other. While both find themselves faced with ahermeneutic task, the former applies it to things, the latter to peopleand their society. As a skilled mariner, Colombo is able to make excellentobservations of nature, the direction of winds, currents, etc., but he takesno interest whatsoever in language, culture, people, and so forth. Whenhe talks about people, it is only as part of the landscape: in long listsof things observed, he will often mention the Indians in between birdsand trees. The first time Colombo meets the Indians, he describes themas being 'naked'; and he turns out to have the same view of them alsoin several metaphorical senses. He sees no interest in mentioning theartefacts the Indians use. He believes they lack everything, includinglanguage, culture, religion, and customs. Therefore, he also fails to dis-cover any differences between the tribes he encounters: they are allalike, as are their languages (Todorov 1982: 36f. 40, 41 f.). So it seemssafe to say that Colombo really thinks he is confronted with Non-Culture, both in the sense of a negation of Culture rather than anotherCulture, and in the sense of an absence of order and organization, anidentification with Nature and Chaos.

In the beginning, Colombo admires everything he sees, but aftera number of bad experiences, his attitude to the Indians becomesentirely negative. But this is no fundamental change: both the myths ofthe good savages and that of dirty dogs are based on the model of

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Non-Culture, only with different evaluations. As far as the observationof culture is concerned, Colombo is a finalist: he starts from the answersto find the questions. Sometimes this aspect also surfaces in his study ofnature. He gives three reasons to think that the continent must beclose: there is an abundance of fresh water; the Bible predicts thatthe continent must be there; and the people he meets also say so. It isnot only that these reasons are of very different orders: the last, whichon the face of it appears to be an empirical observation, is actuallythe most finalist. A little earlier Colombo has himself reported that theIndians claim to be living on an island. Often Colombo will tell us thatsome Indians have informed him about something; but then he goeson to say that nobody understood their language. When the Indiansrefer to Cariba, he hears this as 'Caniba', which he takes to be areference to Kubla Khan; but he also understands it as containingthe Latin word stem 'can\ and thus, interpreting the same word twice, hethinks the Indians are claiming that Kubla Khan's people are dogs,which he considers to be a lie. First, the Indians are not able topronounce properly, and when their utterances are corrected as to theirpronunciation, they turn out to be lying. Colombo must 'teach them tospeak'. When he realizes that there are other languages than those of theLatin stock, he takes it for granted that they must all be similar, if notidentical, to each other, and so he sends a speaker of Arabian to talk withthe Indians (Todorov 1982: 22, 37, 42ff.,).17 So it seems clear that, inColombo's view, correlatively to their Non-Culture, the Indians havea Non-Language.

Todorov (1982: 35f.) even takes Colombo to task for not under-standing the arbitrariness of language: thus for instance, when Colomboencounters words such as 'cacique' or 'nitayno\ he is eager to find outwhether the former means king or governor, and whether the lattermeans nobleman, judge or governor. What Colombo fails to under-stand, Todorov concludes, is that other languages may make differentsegmentations of reality than the Romance languages. Here I thinkTodorov is a little hard on Colombo: after all, ever since Saussure madethe arbitrariness of language a basic postulate of linguistics, a lot of peo-ple find it very difficult to understand. There is a more important pointwhich should be made against Todorov's interpretation, however: it isnot true that Colombo takes a totally asemiotic attitude. Contrary toTodorov's opinion, the reported facts cannot be taken to indicate alack of interest in semiotic operations. We also learn from Todorov'sbook that Colombo is very anxious to give names to all places heencounters, although he obviously knows that they have names already,which testifies to his interest in rewriting the foreign Culture as a text

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of his own Culture. Segmentation, it should be remembered, is theprimordial semiotic operation. But Colombo treats everything, fromislands and animals to people, as Non-Persons. This is semiosis asreference or nomination, not as conversation.

Colombo's hermeneutics is understandable, partly as an identifica-tion of the other Culture with Non-Culture, and partly as a deformationresulting from reading the other Culture according to the system ofinterpretation established in his own Culture. A very illuminating exam-ple of the deformation resulting from reading texts stemming fromanother Culture using the systems of interpretation available in one's ownCulture is given in one of Lotman's (1977b) shortest articles. The twocultures involved are those of children and adults. Lotman claims thatwhat adults take to be the Oedipus complex is really the result of thechild using a very restricted code stemming from its own experience inorder to interpret new information. The child's code consists in reducingeverything to what it knows, the image of family structure. Here, Lotmanthinks, the mother is obligatorily given the part of the good person, sothat only the bad part remains for the father to incarnate. Colombo's'code', in this sense, is of course not generally more 'restricted' or'elaborated' (to adopt the terms introduced by Bernstein [1964] in anothercontext) than that of the Indians. Rather, it may be more elaboratedin some respects, and more restricted in others. But in other ways theanalogy holds: the own Culture, with its language, is necessarily giventhe good part; so the other one is either identical to the first, deprivedof properties, or it has the bad part. In fact, the last two alternatives donot seem to be consistently distinguished.

Serge Gruzinski (1990), who interprets the meeting of Western andpre-Colombian cultures in terms of visual texts, notably religious picturesand statues, has a very different view of Colombo's attitude, whichhe also contrasts with that of Cortez and later conquistadors. WhereasColombo and his men consider the depictions of the Indians to haveno religious meaning, being in no competition with the saints, Cortezclearly sees them as 'idols' and actively contributes to destroy them andput saints in their place. In Gruzinski's view, this shows that Colomboand his followers are more open to unprejudiced observation than laterconquistadors. But the few reported facts rather tend to confirm Todorov'sinterpretation (which is not mentioned by Gruzinski). Colombo asks('with signs') if the Indians worship the pictures, and they tell him thatthey do not. But we already know that Colombo's communication withthe Indians was seriously flawed by his knowing the answer beforehand.What Gruzinski sees as Colombo's openness to observation is betterunderstood as part of his preconception that the Indians have no religion

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and thus are susceptible to conversion. In fact, it is part of their general'nakedness', their inclusion in Non-Culture.

Todorov goes on to show that the attitude of Moctezuma is, in manyways, similar to that of Colombo, notably in its finalism, but we have noplace to discuss these parallels here. Suffice it to say that ignoring (andeven killing) human messengers, Moctezuma is busy finding out whatthe Gods have to say. Closing this section, Todorov (1982: 69if., 75, 102f.)goes on to claim that there are two basic forms of communication:between men, and between men and Nature. While the Spaniards aregood at the first kind, and the Indians at the second kind, we really needto master both.18 Curiously, Todorov here forgets that Colombo would,in this sense, be a regular Indian. What really needs to be questioned,however, is Todorov's idea that we could and should communicate withNature. As Habermas (1968) observed in his pertinent critique of theearlier generation of the Frankfurt School, there is no possibility ofcommunicating with Nature, only with human beings. Nature may beinterpreted (Habermas would say 'explained'), but there can be noconversation with it; it does not answer back. One may even wonderwhether the trouble with Moctezuma and Colombo is really that theyrestrict themselves to communicating with Nature. It rather often seemsto be that they treat Nature as a Subject, i.e., as a real Alter. Divination,together with medical symptoms, were the first semiotic phenomenastudied (cf. Manetti 1993); but these signs became interesting not as signsof Nature, but because they were conceived as messages from some kindof Super-Subject. When Moctezuma makes sacrifices, he is initiating aconversational turn, and he is expecting to receive an answer in return. Onthe other hand, when Moctezuma and other Indians think that historyrepeats itself, following the turning of the intricate calendar wheels, theyobviously believe that history is governed by natural laws (cf. Todorov1982: 78, 95). In this case, they really treat Culture as Nature, personsas non-persons.

But the ultimate mistake is really elsewhere: neither the Spaniardsconfronted with the New World, nor we ourselves have ever stoppedtreating Culture as Nature. A lot of Culture is simply taken for granted:it is, as Marx would say, 'naturally grown' (? naturwüchsig*). Husserl calledit the Lifeworld.

Celebrating Malinche: The other as go-between

As Todorov describes him, Cortez takes a very different attitude fromthat witnessed in Colombo. First of all he wants to understand the other

550 G. Sonesson

culture, although he is of course not interested in understanding forunderstanding's sake. He interprets the world in order to change it. Sohis first priority when arriving in the New World is to find an interpreter.In fact, he finds two. A fascinating chain of interpretation is set up:the Spaniard Aguilar, who has been living with the Maya, translatesfrom Spanish to Maya; then Cortez's mistress, Malintzin or Malinche,who is a Maya, translates Aguilar's Maya into Nahuatl. Thus together,Cortez, Aguilar and Malintzin travel through two Extra-Cultures.In due time, Malintzin learns to master Spanish, and thus is able totranslate directly from Spanish to Nahuatl. There is evidence that herfunction as an interpreter was more important than that as a mistress(Todorov 1982: 105ff.).

This is only one element of Cortez's strategy, however. He also gives theimprisoned Moctezuma a Spanish servant who speaks Nahuatl, so thatmessages may circulate in both directions. The strategy goes beyondlanguage policy to behavioral semiotics: he stops his soldiers from robbingto avoid giving a bad impression. Already when he becomes leader ofthe expedition, his awareness of impression management prompts him toacquire a ceremonial costume. He is conscious of the symbolic import-ance of weapons, beyond their value as brute force. He even uses theknowledge about the other culture that he acquires for his own purposes.The most notable example of the latter is the way he takes advantageof the myth about the return of Quetzalcoatl (cf. Todorov 1982: 105,107, 122). In order to realize purposes undoubtedly defined by his ownCulture, he allows his own behavior to be rewritten as a text of theother Culture. There can be no doubt that to him, Aztec society is anExtra-Culture. But this does not mean, as can be seen, that his behavioris necessarily more ethical than that of Colombo. The 'conversation ofcultures' here is not for mutual benefit, but serves to subtly overpowerthe other.

Todorov (1982: 251) claims there is something specifically European inbeing able to understand the other. So Western Culture discovered, not theother, but the discovery of the other. The extended canonical model, whichincludes Extra-Culture, was invented by Europeans (although it has laterbeen exported to most parts of the world). The ability to understand theother, first found in Cortez, is, in Todorov's view, a movement in twophases, an identification with the other, followed by a return to one's ownCulture, which one continues to see as superior. This is the attitude takenby most of the monks who came to the New World. Their aim was toconvert the Indians to what they considered a superior religion (and,perhaps more unconsciously, a superior culture generally). In the case ofsome persons, like Guerrero among the Mayas, Duran, Cabeza de Vaca,

Ego meets Alter 551

and perhaps Sahagun, identification gained the upper hand (Todorov1982: 21 Iff.)· This is also true, in the other culture, of Malinche. Indeed,in contemporary Mexico, 'Malinche' is a derogatory term for somebodywho is felt to be a traitor to Mexican culture (for instance by marrying aforeigner). It designates somebody who projects his or her Ego onto whatis, from the point of view of earlier experience, his or her Non-Cultureor Extra-Culture.

Todorov's two-phase model corresponds closely with Bakhtin's descrip-tion of the encounter with the other and his Culture. Yet there is noreference to Bakhtin (although Bakhtin's term 'exotopy' is mentioneda few pages later on). There are differences, of course. Bakhtin does notsay that we will necessarily continue to see our own culture as superior.And the encounter does not imply any assimilation of the other. Rather,we would expect that in the ideal case, there is both assimilation andaccommodation in Piaget's sense on the part of both participants: a com-bination of projecting our traits on the other, and of taking over some ofthe other's features. Such an attitude, in the best case, would seem to bethe real contribution of the Occident to the 'conversation of cultures'.It is the true sense of the dialectics of Enlightenment.

Such a process may also be internal to the subject. Exile is fertile,Todorov (1982: 254f.) claims, to the extent that one continues to be partof both cultures, if one holds double passports mentally. Different voicesmust be heard. But this may be next to impossible to avoid. Like Peter theGreat, Malinche may have placed her values in the other Culture. Her fullunderstanding, like that of the tsar, can only have been in her ancestralworld.

Jacques and his master, fatally

In a later book, Todorov (1995: 15f., 3Iff., 34ff.) returns to the other,this time in order to criticize the Hegel/Sartre kind of dialectic betweenEgo and Alter as a combat where one of the participants must alwayslose — or indeed, both. In this reading of Hegel, Ego can only berecognized as a person by subduing the other; but once the latter hasbeen subdued he is a Non-Person, and his recognition of the other as aperson has lost its value.19 Like Peirce, Todorov points out that weare always with the other. There is, so to speak, no moment in timein which the other is not already there with us. Thus, Todorov alsocriticizes those who believe that man starts out alone and egotistical, andthen is forced to adapt himself to a life in society. He sides with Smithand Rousseau who claim human beings need the other, to the point of

552 G. Sonesson

creating his image within themselves (comparable to Mead's generalizedother and Bakhtin's super-addressee).

Since we know nothing in this respect about the origin of the species, wehave to study the origin of the individual. Thus, Todorov (1995: 39ff.) goeson to quote evidence from developmental psychology, which naturallyshows us that the first other is not a man met in combat, but the mothertaking care of her child. And there is no problem in being recognized asa person: in fact, already after a few weeks the child tries to catch his/hermother's gaze and is rewarded by the mother's attention. Conflicts emergelater and suppose a third party who determines who the winner is. In hisearlier book, Todorov (1982: 251) claimed the other had to be discovered.Human existence was said to take place between two extremes, where theEgo invades the world, or the world absorbs the Ego. Now, however, Alterappears as a given.

But this is not the same Alter as the one which emerges from thestudy of the Conquest, or the book on French attitudes to foreigners,although Todorov nowhere comments on the difference. In the first twobooks, Todorov is concerned with radical otherness, a propertyattributed to somebody coming from another culture. Such radicalotherness may of course be attributed to somebody who no longeroccupies another space. It may be an inner other, like the Moors inSpain, women in the men's world, or, to take a more topical example,the immigrants in contemporary Europe. Here otherness is dissoci-ated from space, though it may have a real or fictitious origin in anotherspace. This otherness is not only characterized by Outsideness', inBakhtin's sense, but by some more definitive kind of foreignness. It isnot reversible.20

In contrast, the kind of otherness which Todorov now discusses isthe otherness of just about everybody. In this version, as well as in thework of Peirce, Mead, Cooley, etc., everybody is the other for another,i.e., the other is the Ego viewed from another point of view; and the pointof view changes as it changes with the use of the first person pronoun.This relationship is certainly constitutive of life in society (that is, lifein general), but it is the other kind of relationship between self and otherwhich is constitutive of relations between cultures.

What was called the inner otherness is of course an important factor inhistory, or rather, in the models that have contributed to form history.History would have been different without the Moors in Spain, the gypsiesin much of Western Culture, and, more obviously, women in what hasthrough most of history been the men's world. Some such kinds of innerotherness is part of the anthropological universals present in all societies:women as opposed to men, children as opposed to adults (cf. Sonesson

Ego meets Alter 553

1997b). Other divisions are characteristic of particular societies: slaves asopposed to free men in Ancient Greece; servants and their masters until thebeginning of the century in Sweden (as in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander)and still in Mexico, for instance; rational persons and fools through muchof Western history; the 'gay' as opposed to the 'straight' in contemporarysociety; and the 'first-to-third-generation immigrants' as opposed to 'realSwedes' in contemporary Sweden (cf. the mechanisms of exclusion inFoucault 1971).

This does not mean that we can identify the two kinds of relationshipbetween self and other which have been mentioned above, the reciprocaland the non-reciprocal one, with that of the other which is external orinternal to the Culture. Both the internal and the external other isnecessarily a non-reciprocal other. There is no point in subdividing thereciprocal other, for he is not defined as other: he is just the other of someEgo which is his other.

It follows that the kind of otherness which interests us here is alwaysnon-reciprocal. Thus, it is not only the relation of Culture to Non-Culturethat is asymmetrical, but also that to Extra-Culture. The asymmetryconcerns the relationship to the other Culture as non-subject, not only asnon-person. There is a possibility of communicating, but the relationshipis not reversible. Only within Culture, and outside its domain of innerotherness, is outsideness exchanged between peers.

Foucault's paradox: The discovery of conversation

In his history of sexuality, Foucault (1984a, 1984b, 1994: IV) encountersa paradox, which results from adult men's love of boys in Greekantiquity. Both the boy and the man are free citizens who have a relationof equality (as opposed to the relation of a free man to a woman or aslave), but the sexual act, which in the Greek view distinguishes an activeand a passive part, is only possible between unequal participants. If weare allowed again to make an analogy with the social structure embodiedin ordinary pronouns, we could say that to the Greeks solidarity excludespower (in terms of the social psychologists Brown and Oilman 1960).There are those whom we address with a T (as in French 'tu') to receivethe same back; and there are those whom we address as V (as in French'vous') while they answer us with a T — and these two relations cannotinvolve the same two subjects at the same time. This paradox explains thatPlato suggests it is better to sublimate sex into philosophical conversation.

The boy is subordinated to the grown man because he is no adult, buthe is also an equal, because he is going to be an adult man in the future,

554 G. Sonesson

contrary to a woman who is eternally subordinated. The problem is thata sexual relation is doubled by a social one, where the former is seenas penetration with an active part, while the second is characterizedby equality. It seems to me that we could identify the first relationshipwith the kind of relation one has to a thing, or Non-Culture, while thesecond relationship involves a person, or Extra-Culture.21

The boy is a free subject who has the ability to say no to an advance;he is able to postpone satisfaction, and in fact he should do so. Thismeans that he may be the object of a whole series of acts of seductionand respond to them with coquetry. That the sexual relation is also asocial one may well constitute a problem, but, in my view, it is alsoan advantage, because it makes seduction, coquetry, and similar kindsof behavior possible. This means that it stimulates the production ofsigns — and it was perhaps precisely because it was impossible to havesuch a relationship with a woman that reflection in Greek antiquitywas so much preoccupied with the love of boys. Foucault himselftells us this preoccupation shifted in late antiquity to another subject,woman. It is true that at first it involved the best way to protectvirginity. But we should continue this history into the Middle Ages,which also discovered ways of rendering the love between men andwoman difficult, and covering the distance with words and other signs(cf. Rougemont 1961). It is because of this discovery that woman, notthe boy, has been the inner other of the larger part of human history(as seen from a male perspective, which has been that of history formost of the time).

But conversation is the beginning of Culture as we know it (cf. Tarde1910). And it was certainly made up of seduction and coquetry beforeit was transformed into the more weighty interchanges known as 'thepublic sphere' (in the sense of Habermas 1962), itself ever more invadedin the age of television and the Internet by seduction and coquetry(cf. Sonesson 1995).

It is no doubt exaggerated to conclude that woman, to the Greeks, wasseen as a mere thing, not an Alter. She was very important for taking careof the house, so she should be respected as a partner in the household. SoGreek men were On speaking terms' with women, as far as some simplekinds of practical conversation was concerned. Neither should we forgetthat, apart from boys, some free men chose to make love to hetaerae, andalso apparently had a lot of conversation with them of a less practicalkind. But, as always, we are not talking about real Greek society inantiquity: we are talking about the model the Greeks made of their ownculture. In this model, courtesans and economically responsible wivesconstituted no paradoxes.

Ego meets Alter 555

I would like to end with another paradox. The hero of my final story isinherited from Diego de Landa (by way of Todorov 1982: 250): a Mayawoman devoured by the dogs. Before dying in the war her husband hadforced his wife to promise that she was not going to let any other manmake love to her. She is captured by a Spanish captain, but shestubbornly refuses to let him have her. 'Elle met tout ce qui lui reste devolonte personnelle a defende la violence dont eile a ete I'objef. In the end,she is thrown to the dogs. Assigned the part of a thing by both husbandand Spaniard, she responds like a real Alter. As an Alter, she takes onthe task assigned to her as a mere Object.

Notes

1. Correlatively, if all semiotic sciences are points of views taken on the points of viewswhich semiotic systems take on the material world, as Prieto (1975a: 144; 1975b: 225f.)maintained echoing Saussure, then cultural semiotics is a point of view on such asecond-hand point of view, and it is akin to epistemology, i.e., some kind of folkepistemology.

2. The Tartu school model has been variously described in a number of texts, some of whichwere written together by Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, and some involving severalother authors (cf. References). In spite of Lotman's (1990) late book The Universe ofMind there really is no comprehensive statement of the theory, but its elements must beput together from a number of texts. Unfortunately, it is not too difficult to discovercontradictions between the different articles, as well as internal contradictions in someof them.

3. As suggested by Barry Smith in the lecture given at the Congress of the Nordic Associationfor Semiotic Studies, Oslo, October 29-31, 1998.

4. Apart from other cultures, Nature also stands for nature in the sense of ordinary language(and thus perhaps to some extent for nature in the sense of the natural sciences). To givebiosemiotics its due, it should of course be noted that, while Culture includes Naturefrom an intensional point of view, it is Culture which is included in Nature, once we shiftto the extensional viewpoint.

5. Here, of course, we may really be considering the model which non-Argentinean LatinAmericans make of the models made by Argentineans.

6. This suggests another way in which the canonical model is too simple: the limits betweentexts and non-texts (extra-texts, centro-texts, etc.) will often be different if different criteriaare used, which means that the limits between Culture and Non-Culture (Extra-Culture,Center, etc.) will also be different: the canonical model is simply the case in which all thesedifferent oppositions will map out the same border (cf. Sonesson 1998).

7. In a conference given at the Second Congress of the Nordic Association for SemioticStudies, Lund 1992.

8. Bakhtin is undoubtedly arguing for a parallel between the two couples, but it seems to methat he often forgets one of the pairs when suggesting properties which are plausible inone case but not in the other. Thus, for instance, it is a fundamental fact of semioticecology that 'precisely that which only I see in the other is seen in myself, likewise,only by the other' (1990: 23), but this cannot apply to the relationships between Authorand Hero.

556 G. Sonesson

9. This sounds very much like HusserFs notion of 'intentions', which are directed to objects,which they characterize, and which may be used to define the subject who is intending theobjects only in the phenomenological attitude.

10. However, Bakhtin (1990: 23f.) also claims that this limitation may be overcome bycognition, but not by perception, which is always incarnated (a position which isreminiscent of Bühler and Merleau-Ponty); but then it seems possible to conceive ofsome kind of 'cognitive empathy'!

11. Curiously, the concept of dialogicity, for which Bakhtin and the other members of hiscircle are famous, is very rarely applied to the relation between the other as listener, andthus potential speaker. It is rather concerned with the other as seen from the outside,the one about whom we are talking. Cf. in particular Voloshinov 1973 and the contribu-tions by the same author in Shukman 1983, as well as Bakhtin 1981 (an exception isthe notion of 'super-addressee').

12. To illustrate this point, we would have to invert Figure 1: it is the other/Non-Culturewhich is an open space with definite limits, while the self/Culture is a square limited onall sides (Bakhtin [1990: 12] claims the Hero is included in the Author). I don't thinkthere is any real contradiction here however, for the 'insideness' and Outsideness'involved are of different kinds: in the canonical model, they concern the position ofthe Ego, of that which is known, etc.; in Bakhtin's version, they concern limits inspace and time.

13. Such a linguistic bias is also a problem with Ricoeur's (1990) discussion of Ego and Alter(which contains a reference to Benveniste's ideas).

14. Dialogue should not be understood in Bakhtin's rather truncated sense. As notedabove, the other of the Bakhtin circle is rather the one we speak about (the hero) or evenonly look at (as when we see the other's body but not our own in its entirety). This is eventrue about dialogicity as it is understood in the later books, familiarized as 'inter-textuality' by Kristeva: the author relates to the speech of the other, but the other hasno way of talking back. In the Rabelais book and the late version of the Dostoevskybook the quoted other is curiously supposed to be able to talk back; but then theasymmetry between Ego and Alter is also given up (cf. also Morson and Emerson1990: 172ff.).

15. It is in the sense that Ego and Alter are not interchangeable that we side with Bakhtin; forwe can certainly not follow him in treating the other as a mere subject of conversation.

16. For some later aspects of this story, cf. Narea 1998.17. For semiotic completeness, it should be noted that Colombo takes the same attitude to

the non-verbal communication of the Indians (cf. Todorov 1982: 38).18. Curiously, Todorov (1982: 75) includes 'human groups' in the communication

with Nature. Not only is this a strange assimilation to make, but, in addition, theIndians' mastery of the latter is often contradicted by the reported facts (cf. 1982:76ff.).

19. It should be noted that neither Bakhtin nor Peirce or the tradition stemming from Meadand Cooley (mentioned by Todorov 1995) emphasize any antagonism in the relationbetween Ego and Alter.

20. Or rather, it cannot be reversed without changing its meaning: the otherness of Cortezto Moctezuma is not the same otherness as that of Moctezuma to Cortez.

21. Foucault does not speak any further about the case of the slave, which is an interestingcase in our perspective: he may well have been a member of another culture, who wasa free citizen until he lost in a war, and who may eventually be free again. Perhapsno problem is thought to arise, because to the Greeks his culture is contained inNon-Culture.

Ego meets Alter 557

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Goran Sonesson (b. 1951) is Associate Professor in the Department of Semiotics at LundUniversity in Sweden <goran.sonesson@artnew.lu.se>. His research interests include culturalsemiotics, visual semiotics, and semiotic theory. His major publications include PictorialConcepts (1989) and Bildbetydelser (1992).