Logos, deconstruction-writing, ideology and the false social construction of meaning and representation of the "other" from the perspective of John 1:1

Abstract

This article focuses primarily on meaning and representation of the “other”. The collective memory of primarily oral cultures about the ways in which knowledge about them was collected, classified and then represented in various ways to the West, and seen through the eyes of the West, and then mirrored back again to those that had been colonised, remains imperative in the discursive discourse of the “other”. Smith refers to this process as a Western discourse about the “other” which is supported by institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery (bewitchment of imperial language), doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. This process has worked partly because of the constant interchange between the scholarly and the imaginative (false consciousness - or sophistry) construction of ideas about primary oral cultures. The whole idea of the “other” is linguistically and ideologically constituted by the West and can be seen as a social construct which is in need of deconstruction. In this example, the “other” has been provided with a name, a face and a particular identity, and is represented by the indigenous people. According to Boemher, a post-colonial theorist who refers to the colonised as the colonial “other” or simply the “other,” the concept of the “other” is built on the ideas of inter alia Hegel and Sartre who signify it as that which is unfamiliar to the dominant subjectivity or which is against the authority of the dominant class.