In his classic study Orientalism (1987), Edward Said argued that the West has long employed images of the East as a way of ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over [it]’, using the study of languages, culture and religion as the central means by which a Western “science” of the East was developed from the 18th century onwards. In Said’s view, the conception that the West embodies rationalism and the East fantasy (and hence ungovernability) is characteristic of Western relations with the East from the time of Napoleon to the present day: on persuasive example of this discourse is, for instance, the writings of Henry Kissinger on the need to submit the East to strict control.
 Said’s interpretation of this discourse and his term (“Orientalism”) has become so widely accepted that it figures on the official website of the Metropolitan Museum (New York) where it designates a part of the permanent exhibition of that great collection of world-art. There we are told in so many words that ‘Orientalism is a fabrication of the West’ and not a real form of knowledge - and this is precisely Edward Said’s thesis. (See “Orientalism in 19th century Art” and related pages.)
 The most frequently-cited illustrations of the imaginary versions of the Orient purveyed in the West in modern times are two paintings: “The Massacre at Chios” (1824) by Eugène Delacroix and “The Turkish Baths” (1862) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres [See images]. The former purports to record the cruelty of orientals - in this case Turks - when they massacred 20,000 Greeks in a contemporary episode while the latter subjects an eastern harem to the western “male gaze”. (Cruelty and sensuality are chief signifiers of Eastern - and more specifically Islamic life - in European visions of the Orient, as Said has shown.)
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 In this lecture I spoke of Said’s use of the post-Freudian concept of the “Other” considerated as a means of self-definition in societies, together with his use of Michael Foucault’s view of knowledge as “discourses of power” by means of which modern populations are controlled. Taken together, these ideas enable him to read Western texts ‘against the grain’, revealing the ways in which colonial societies are “othered” in the English classics such as Dicken’s Great Expectations, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Kim - all of which reveal the ‘structure of feeling’ that is the colonial mentality.
 Said’s theory of “orientalism”, though firmly established at the centre of postcolonial studies, has nevertheless been strenuously contested by several critics, chiefly on the grounds that the connection between images of the East and the exercise of colonial power is tenuous at best. For examples of this view, see Ernest Gellner’s and Keith Windschuttle’s commentaries on Said - and read the book yourself!.
 No further discussion of Said’s work is conducted on this page. Instead, its contents are restricted to remarks on the postcolonial terms “binarism” and “alterity” which ultimately underlie his theory. These expand on brief notes given in “Guide to Postcolonial Terminology” [link].

Semiology is the science of signs and sign-systems. Any system of signs which assigns opposite senses to different terms (white/black; good/bad; raw/cooked) is characterised by the operations of binarism. Though most familiar, perhaps, from the computer science methodology - which “encode” data in terms of on/off binaries arranged in 8-, 16-, or 32-bit strings - binarism is fundamental to the modern, anti-essentialist view of the relationship between language and its referents.
  In the new semiological linguistics inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), no word has meaning apart from another or other words which supply the sense of ‘difference’ by which its meaning is constituted. (White is the opposite of black and not grey, green, &c.) De Saussure’s insight that binaries (or significant pairs) define the very way that language works has supplied a basic premise for most forms of modern secular thought - including notably structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. All of these deal with the way that the meaning-world of cultural significance is constructed out of fundamentally arbitrary signs arranged in patterns of complex, self-transformative significance.
 It is worth being clear about the secular implications of semiology as the basis of modern theories of knowledge, and how far it is from theories based on any idea of self-evidence (i.e., common-sense) or revelation (i.e., religion). Semiological binarism puts aside all thought of absolutes or essences: nothing is said to have meaning because it reflects an underlying state of being but only in sofar as it holds its place in a field of meaning-elements (i.e., significant pairs) which, in turn, insures its denotation and its connotations. In that sense, a single sign (or seme in Greek - hence semiology) is said to be arbitrary: that is, it has no other meaning than the one assigned to it by its place in the wider system.
 The epistemological relationship between language and truth presupposed in naive accounts of realism is therefore replaced by a new conception in which the ‘reality’ implied in a given cultural perspective is seen to be a product of that culture as much as - if not more than - a privileged means of access to it (i.e., a true knowing as distinct from error or illusion). If the arbitrariness of signs is first acknowledged, the cultural systems, or fields of meaning, which arise from that fact are seen, by definition, to be purely relative in as much as no one system has absolute priority over any other considered as a representation of the world in which we live (or the world that lives in us, which comes to the same thing).
 Moreover, in as much as each cultural system is complete unto itself, no one is no more ‘true’ than another. Imagination and perception become interchangeable; things that were taken to be ‘real’ are now said to be ‘imagined’ or ‘invented’; all cultures and ideologies (including science and religion) are now held to be entirely relative: this is more or less the common supposition of ‘enlightened’ cultural theorists today. This leads on to multiculturalism and the mutual appreciation of cultural traditions (at least in theory). Ultimately it leads to the concept of hyperreality which informs the theory of postmodernism according to which everything that can be represented is represented, and nothiing that is not already a representation can actually be called real. Yet if the world that is ushered in by these ideas is profoundly secular it is also haunted by a phantasmic light: everything that formerly seemed solid now assumes the translucence of a mental ‘construct’.
 What has all of this to do with postcolonial studies? In postcolonial studies, the term binarism is chiefly used to describe the way in which a colonial ideology constructs a culture (or meaning-world) in which the colonist maintains a position of privilege by means of a cultural hegemony infused in the everyday language of the colony, spoken by colonist and coloniser alike though always to the disadvantage of the colonised. Hence, terms white and black, on the one hand, and the terms good and bad, on the other, are linked by vertical association so that white and good conjoin to produce a symmetry that results in the equal association of black and bad. In this way the binarism of the colonial mentality divides the world up into good white people and bad black people, and negotiates all social transactions on that basis.
 Such is the power of the binary system that any areas falling between the main binary terms (e.g., black/white) are treated as taboo - that is to say, it is felt to be scandalous in colonial soociety to engage in any mixing of one with the other or to suggest that there is an habitable zone between them which does not participate in teh vertical logic of the dominant semiological system. However: contrary to this defining function of colonial ideology, it is precisely in that in-between zone, that the postcolonial studies takes on its full import by seeking to establish a new relationship between the opposed elements in the system. Instead of equating difference with opposition with exclusion, the postcolonial mind sees it as a form of variance and a mandate for inclusion. One way of expressing this shift in thinking is the movement away from binarism toward alterity - about which see below (q.v.).

1: Reprinted in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.259-422.

Alterity (meaning “otherness”) is used, in postcolonial studies to refer to the difference between opposite terms in a binary system which are not necessarily seen as remorselessly opposed, and mutually antagonistic, to each another . This is a two-way process since the reflex that causes the colonised simply to reverse the binary so that the equation white-good/black-bad becomes black-good/white-bad is seen as no less less erroneous than the colonial status quo.
  Hence the term alterity is commonly used to suggest a way or ways in which the oppositional nature of the binary system can be made to break down revealing an area of freedom based on the the very differences involved in it. Where binarism implies a rigid set of terms that bestows positive and negative meanings on the coloniser and the colonised respectively, alterity speaks of their differences in such a way as to open up the possibility of dialogue between them.
 Alterity has its roots in the theory of knowledge associated with Western philosophy and, more specifically, with the “cogito” of René Descartes. In positing the “I” as that which knows in his famous formula (‘cogito ergo sum/I think, therefore I am’), Decartes placed the individual at the centre of the modern knowledge-system and - by implication - placed the European self at the centre of the modern world, looking out on those “others” deprived of knowledge whom we were equipt to understand from an ‘objective’ standpoint which they did not themselves possess by virtue of our claims to rationality - the summum bonum of the European Enlightenment. In practice, of course, that meant that Europeans would know non-Europeans as “savages” and “natives”.
 The location of the individual at the centre of the knowledge-universe had, however, a double-effect. While, on the one hand, it enhanced the power of the European collective to gain knowledge of the material and cultural world beyond its boundaries, it also tended to disintegrate the community of knowledge upon which the European consensus was founded. By removing revelation and authority from the knowledge-system and substituting individual experience and scientific experiment, the European effected the “othering” of those living beyond his continental boundaries. At the same time, a similar process of “othering” took place within the European community in sofar as each individual now became the unique centre of his own world.
 The practice of democracy and (so far as it has actually been practiced) of socialism in Western societies to some extent soutured up the rifts caused by this centrifugal tendency. At the same time, it produced a consciousness of difference which have often found expression in various degrees of social and spiritual alienation. Thus, for instance, when the “I” and the “Other” are so opposed at the level of knowledge-theory, it is no wonder that the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre defined the experience of otherness in this famous sentence: ‘L’enfer c’est l’autre/Hell is other people’.
 Now, this certainly an extreme idea and one that, for all its melancholic appeal, stands apart from the common wisdom of the European mind. In that context (and hence in the lives we live as Europeans) the perception of the ‘otherness’ of others is generally seen as something to be overcome by an exercise in sympathy inspired by a sense of shared human values. Needless to say, the Christian injunction to ‘love one’s neighbour as oneself’ has significant bearing on this matter, and it is not surprising to find the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum recently professing the opinion that European society cannot continue to function if it moves too far away from its Christian basis - a judgement which is not at all the same thing as an act of faith in the Christian doctrine of personal salvation.
 In bourgeois society, moreover, the commandment of love is not always an effective one since class division throws up barriers that no amount of cross-community bonding is able to overcome except perhaps in time of war when a reinvigorated sense of community arises with a shared sense of difference from the enemy without. It is ironic, though perfectly explicable, that the bourgeoisie commonly espouse ardent forms of Christian faith at the very moment when they are bringing the pressure of economic oppression strenuously to bear upon those locked outside of their own class formation - i.e., the working-class; and only a generalised European movement towards socialism (albeit in a Social Democrat or Christian Socialist guise) has prevented the outbreak of open class war.
 In colonial society, by contrast, the sense of difference between colonist and colonised is so acute that no prospect of breaking down the difference seems possible. Yet this is exactly what postcolonial thinkers require of us to do today. That is to say, those who reflect on what happens to a colonial society after it has been decolonised must reach the recognition that the anti-colonial mindset is not the final solution to the problem. Once liberated in economic fact, and then decolonised in personal and collective thinking, the postcolonial subject finds him/herself ranged against others who are no longer separated from the self by the colonial divide. It is in this context, especially, that the term alterity comes into play with full force.
 The hallmark of alterity, thus considered, is the ability to enter into dialogue with the ‘other’. And, while the outcome of such engagement is ultimately political, its original form is more like to be interpersonal - and, by implication literary and artistic. Arguably, in fact, it is the literary author (e.g., the novelist) which most effectively demonstrates - or even epitomises - the breaking down of barriers between opposites in the binary world-vision. Why? Because the novelist is the one who attempts to understand a multiplicity of characters and hence to understand that his own character (or narrator) from outside no less than from the inside. (The idea that dialogue - or its more general equivalnet heteroglossia - plays a central role in novels was first advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin in an essay entitled ‘Discourse in the Novel’ of 1934-35) [1].
 The result, of course, is dialogue the reality of which can be judged by the extent to which characters in novels genuinely form independent centres of consciousness ranged against each other across the barriers of private and collective difference. Clearly, in the case of a novel based on colonial experience, the element of collective difference is hugely prevalent.
 The same style of thinking, if applied to real people, produces a form of alterity which promises to overcome the bitter divisions created by colonial experience. Hence alterity, though it primarily connotes the stark opposition of ‘self’ and ‘other’, is ultimately seen as promising release from binary systems with their assertion of irreducible kinds of difference. In place of that, it substitutes a new order of difference-as-variation of a kind that can attain to fertile interchange, mutual recognition, and practical compromise - if not positive agreement. At this point, postcolonial man has finally been born.