Excruciating time in Wales. B’s relative, E., is an absurd Hyacinth Bucket figure, who measures everything against some imagined scale of Distinction. When she addresses me the malapropism count suddenly shoots up, as in “We’re just going to a small restaurant, nowhere very elusive”. This has little to do with me as an individual (who she’s never before met) and presumably relates to my education and qualifications. If she addresses her children in public space, in earshot of others, her remarks are in fact addressed to these others, conceived as representatives of Society. She will anxiously glance round, as if soliciting their approval. But, as she doesn’t know them, she is in fact soliciting Society’s approval by proxy. Her comments and actions are therefore addressed always to the Other – not simply the empirical others who she happens to encounter, but the big Other which they represent. Needless to say, these same empirical others may well also view everybody else as ‘representatives’ in this way, as mere incarnations of the Other, of ‘People’ (as in ‘what will people think’).
A similar mechanism is in evidence with her children and their choice of sportswear, which, they tell me, signifies ‘coolness’. It signifies this for Others, but of course these others are no less than others wearing the same sportswear in order to signify coolness to..[etc]. The ‘Other’ is always elsewhere, a kind of organising fiction which serves to link the diverse empirical individuals in empty seriality.
Cue Sartre's notion of seriality:
“For I make myself an other or the Other, and deliberately pattern my behaviour on what I imagine the Other’s to be. The ontological irony of this mode of being is, of course, that all the while I am modelling myself and my behaviour on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression, an infinite flight in all directions. [..] and in this sense seriality is a vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as ‘public opinion’ or simply ‘they. But public opinion does not exist, and it is rather the belief in it and the effects of such belief which “unite” individuals in the series."