Tabish Khair
The paradigmatic chain of words is always revealed as saying – and hiding – far more when we start looking at antonyms. If you are ordinary, you are likely to be plain, simple or, if the speaker has an agenda, ugly. But if you are not ordinary, what are you? The possible antonyms that come to mind are far more varied: special, unusual, beautiful, complex, rare, non-ordinary, extra-ordinary, exotic, etc. And, of course, all these antonyms have or can have different meanings.
The version in which the antonym of ‘ordinary’ is often encountered in colonial discourses is ‘exotic’, and this stands almost on its own in the chain I have listed above. For to be ‘exotic’ is not just to be special or unusual or rare; it is also to be ordinary elsewhere – in that other space or for that other person. The exotic defines the other simply because it is not extraordinary with the other.
In this sense, one can conjecture that the exotic comes before the ordinary, in the very sense in which Emmanuel Lévinas suggests that the other comes before the self. Claire Langhamer suggests (and she appears to be right to me, with an exception that I will return to) that “the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category” (Langhamer 2018, 175). Langhamer is effectively talking of the socio-political formation of ordinariness in the West; that is, in colonial and/or imperial nations, and it is not incidental that this formation of ordinariness coincides with the erosion of the exotic empire.
Because the exotic empire came first. Its erosion was already being recorded – as fact or fiction or both – in the 19th century. When the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) laments the disappearance of “blank” spaces on the map of the globe, he is essentially talking of a process leading to the erosion of the exotic. But as Conrad’s narration shows, this is yet to come: the blinding transparency of light in Europe (as in Brussels) is still different from opaqueness of the ‘jungle’ in Africa, where both native and foreign human endeavor ceases to make sense, or even to be seen: massacres are lost “in smoke”, natives crawl off into the jungle to die, as, in effect, does Kurtz. The powerful, desirable and towering native woman who is revealed for just a second at the death of Kurtz – and who has been contrasted by many critics to Kurtz’s anemic “betrothed”, clutching at the straw of platitudes in Europe – is, above all, the embodiment of the exotic.
One can claim that in much of 19th century fiction about empire, from Conrad to Rudyard Kipling or Richard Marsh – the colonies offer space for action and adventure. To what extent did this perception of empire as exotic, or ordinarily exotic, influence the turn towards the ordinary in the war years when empire had slipped or was slipping out of Western grasps?
Ordinary People [a wartime documentary filmed in the winter of 1940–1941 in London] was not of course the only wartime film that sought to valorize ordinariness. […] And the attempt to represent the truth of wartime experience through recourse to the ordinary transcended the documentary genre. […] The extreme demands of wartime seemed to colourise the ordinary and draw attention to it.
Victoria Robinson (2015, 904), quoted also by Langhamer, has noted that “the extraordinary is both embedded within and in dialogue with the mundane, rather than having a separate and unmediated existence of its own”. That is undoubtedly true, though it appears to me that it is actually the ordinary and the mundane, which is embedded in the extraordinary and the exotic.
The discussion is similar to that of the self and the other. I have often had occasion, while teaching courses in postcolonial studies, to distinguish between the other and othering. Without such a distinction, one ends up simplifying matters on one side or the other by confounding the philosophical notion of the other with the colonial notion of the other. The colonial other, as Elleke Boehmer (1995, 21) notes, undoubtedly signified “that which is unfamiliar and extraneous to the dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined”. Actually, the colonial other – and various other formulations of otherness, for instance in male-dominated gender terms or political terms – is almost always either the negative of the European self, or its infantile version. This, however, has not been the case with major engagements with otherness in European philosophy. This – shall we say – philosophical other denotes unfamiliarity and even unknowability, but it does not denote negativity (for the negative is, by being obverse, fully knowable) or the extraneous. Actually, philosophically speaking, the other is essential for the self to come into existence. In that sense, it can be maintained that the activity of othering – of reducing the other, which by definition is essential to the self and exceeds the self’s knowing – is the activity of reducing otherness into a known negativity or a knowable transparency.
In this sense, it might be misleading to use the other only in the sense in which the colonial other was constructed. The other was considered essential to the self and beyond the knowing – and hence full control – of the self by major European philosophers. Where, however, they differ from post-holocaust engagements with otherness, as in the writings of Emmanuel Lévinas, is in this: they considered the self, in its freedom, to be prior to the other. Or, to switch back to my original set of synonyms–antonyms, they considered the ordinary to be prior to the exotic, the mundane to come before the unusual.
Lévinas had a different understanding of this relationship: he highlighted it by pointing out that the face of the other calls the freedom of the self into being. It is when the self is faced with the other that it encounters choice of action. For instance, put simply, it can accept its responsibility to the other, which calls for a meeting with the unknown, or ignore it. It can even choose to murder the other. The freedom of the self does not exist before the other calls it into being, and in that sense the self is not prior to the other. The other comes before the self. It calls the self into being by calling it into question.
Here, if we finally place the scare quotes back on the ‘exotic’, is the way in which the ordinary too might have come into existence, and that is why the European ordinary followed in the wake of the colonial ‘exotic’ and an extraordinary war. That is also, to my mind, the main reason for an anthology like this: the ordinary has long been neglected in favour of its various antonyms, and its time now to rectify this neglect. This neglect, I have suggested, has been part of the very constitution of the ordinary. That the attempt to rectify is being made, in this anthology, largely within the field of literary studies is also significant. For as Professor John McLeod notes in one of the essays, literature was attracted very early to the ordinary, well before Langhamer’s historical war years.
The novelty of the ordinary has formed the very basis of the novel genre. This does not run against my suggestion that the imperial exotic called the European ordinary into being, in the very manner in which the other calls the self into being. After all, the empire of the imagination in literature requires no fixed geography, as the ancient epics continue to illustrate.
Bibliography
Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Langhamer, Claire. 2018. “‘Who the Hell Are Ordinary People?’: Ordinariness as a Category of Historical Analysis.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (Dec.): 175–95. DOI: 10.1017/S0080440118000099. May 20, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440118000099
Robinson, Victoria. 2015. “Reconceptualising the Mundane and the Extraordinary: A Lens through which to Explore Transformation within Women’s Everyday Footwear Practices.” Sociology 49(5): 903–18. DOI: 10.1177/0038038515591942. May 20, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038515591942