Binary Opposition (Ex. Female/Male, Emotion/Reason, Black/White, Evil/Good...) A cultural tendency to sort everything into two, opposing categories.
| The hegelian dialectic is a theory that states any thesis has an antithesis, and together thay make a synthesis--thereby forming a new thesis, which is eventually clearly defined by determining an anti-thesis. These then support the formation of a new synthesis--this is the dialectical process towards the Absolute idea. Daniel S. Waldspurger's lecture notes Communism is most often linked with the dialectic. Marx and Engels used it to describe how fuedalism eventually gave way to capitalism, and how socialism and communism would eventually result (the antithesis of Socialism, needed to achieve Communism was never clarified in his writing.) citation missing, my apologies, e-mail: me@gillian.org |
Gloria Mitchell, The Would Be Equestrienne essay in Nerve, Ed. Field and Griscom, Broadway Books, NY, 1998
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| This dialectic implies the negation of one, for the benefit of the other. Helene Cixous A writing by Surrealist theorist Suzanne Cessair. She was a part of the "tidal wave of color," a period of about 10 years (1945-1955) when black and brown people around the waged a war of resistance against European domination and exploitation--exposing a simplistic tenet of colonialism: Black and woman, and emotional and evil, are of lesser value than their opposites of white and man, and reasonable and good, and are therefore considered sites for disciplinary action.* |
In literary theory, deconstruction of a text--or the assessment of formal properties such as the structure, the composition, and the presentation--exposes the value judgements (the use of binary oppositions for example,) so the text's authority can be properly assessed. |
| Feminist artist Mierle Ukeles makes excellent use of this concept. The subject matter of her art is maintenance--specifically, her culture's perception of the people who sweep the floors, clean the toilets, and "take out the trash." See her art at http://www.feldmangallery.com/ pages/artistsrffa/artuke01.html | |
| Women... have also been ascribed certain ‘abilities' by that group which are undervalued by that hegemony and hence suppressed by/in them. These might be described as ‘poetics'. They are involved with understanding the intricacies of the wholistic nature of our species and of accepting a full range of human activities as valuable. In doing this, the binary opposites which provide power for the ‘right' way of enacting our culture give way to multiple, acceptable possibilities. Thus, for example, ‘emotions' are no longer seen as a lesser human experience than ‘reason', and therefore pitted against one another. From http://www.ld.swin.edu.au/staff_dev/entered/html/jaw1.htm |
Postmodern shorthand for the whole discussion is the other. |