The Face of the Other

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The Face of the Other

Everything seen is seen with the help of the Others. At birth, we are thrown into a specificity of culture that is alien to us. We are engulfed in this culture and the networks of ideologies entailed by culture that define the world because there is a grounding for the possibility of ideology that lies not only in our existence of a subject with Others, but also in the way that culture, as a form of existence with Others, manifests meaning and understanding. Although we are thrown into culture, we cannot recognize us as beings alien to the cultural process itself, there is a primordial ethical responsibility that our existence with the Others calls forth.

Culture arises at the same moment it disperses, it is constantly being remolded by the individuals that take part in their everydayness as subjects.

Commonly understand, culture is the products of a given society. Value is assigned to these products through their historical relation to the crumbling network of production that we call ‘culture’. Commonalities in personalities of Others begin to arise exponentially as individuals encounter different experiences. There are some commonalities within all of our personalities, and more of these commonalities the specific subjectivities within a culture, these cultural codings are how the Others define each other. Culture is maintained and sustained through individuals. But, what is it that maintains similar subjectivities among each other, consisting us as neighbors? The term most readily available in English would have to be “ideology”.

Ideology functions through the use of language as it transmits culture; it acts as a systematic body of concepts that transgresses into an individual not only th...

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...rhetorical language as ideology. The same set of meanings that defines the terrestrial world affects all of us relatively equally. All of our reception is received into our thought-processes through the same “ideological” process as our encounter with language. It is ideological in that the elements are received as a whole, as a systematic body of beings. To receive the plenum of elements is to receive an ideology of sorts. And this reception is essential to ourselves as Visions, as looking out and understanding the world.

There is a difference between the acceptance of the meanings in language and the acceptance of substance in the world. But this is preceded by an acceptance and a vision. Mythical social structures envisioned by sociologists are words and only words. Ideology and language are inseparable; they arise and interact with us experientially.

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