ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by discussing the backgrounding of mediation as a condition of discourse and its relation to the ideological assignment of cultural 'identity' as a mark of othering. It provides a discussion of this phenomenon of othering as a form of symbolic scapegoating and read such scapegoating as a manifestation of the construction of cultures through splitting – that is, through a form of differentiation that cannot be absolute because it is a product of mediation. The chapter develops some political implications of cultural split and assesses the conditions under which the effect of scapegoating might be reversed and the difference that grounds othering be transvalued so as to become a mark of community. The dominant community has the power to produce its other as non-community by virtue of attributing to it cultural identity.
