The Alien

Wherever one encounters the alien, a mutation or a transformation isn’t far behind. — "https://zinzrinz.blogspot.com/" 10 April 2019This world inspired by Egyptian and Middle-Eastern cultures is so unique and alien it just begs to be explored and learned about. It makes you want to ask every [...] creature what they know about the history of Vvardenfell.— Youtube user "DimeTree" about «TES 3: Morrowind», Apr 27, 2017"We [tend to] fear the different and the strange, yet we require these things in order to evolve. This makes for a paradoxical affective relationship with the notions of otherness and difference that alienness encompasses — a bizarre and complex orientation unifying dread and desire. Already there is a kind of geometrical confusion in this: desire drives you forwards, while dread forces you back."
The alienness of a perceived thing is tied to how identifiable it is. Something not identifiable above a certain level overlaps significantly into the category of being alien. Indeed, alien is highly synonymous with ‘strange’, ‘foreign’, ‘unknown’, and somewhat with ‘unidentified’ and ‘undocumented’. " It is very important
to read how the levels of alienness, constituted as a process, are producing Identity, also as a process." [KP]
Related is the unheimlich, of which Mark Fisher writes, ‘is about the strange within the familiar … it is haunted by an outside which it circles around but can never fully acknowledge or affirm’. However, he continues: ‘[t]he weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside’.
"In a similar fashion to Fisher’s dismissal of the uncanny as subordinating alienness to familiarity — of merely locating the strange within the greater frame of the familiar, of neutralising novelty in advance — Sheldon writes: ‘If the uncanny marks the hideous return as if new of what was always already known — the groundwork whose repression allows the enclosure of a domestic interior, [the outsideness of] xeno is of its own order.’"
== Related ==
"In «Speaker for the dead», second book of Orson Scott Card's Ender Cycle , the author develops a concept he calls "Hierarchy of Alienness [i]  ", translated into French as "Hierarchy of Exclusion [ii ]  ". Mainly applicable to a spatial civilization, this filter makes it possible to classify in four levels the relations between the different Intelligent beings populating the universe. The criterion of hierarchy chosen is the mutual capacity of the beings to understand each other."
== Media ==
* «Alien Rhythms» a talk given at ALL Club in Shanghai, March 2019.
* «Maximum Alienness What might make life hard to recognize as life?» Scharf, in Scientific American, 2018.
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== Rhizomata ==
* The Outside; The Other; The unheimlich (the uncanny; the unhomely); The weird
* Aliens; Alienation
* Xenowords
Category:Change