More on binary oppositions

by Julie Wroblewski

To know and love Derrida means one must come to terms with his need to complicate easy and comforting system of binary oppositions on which people like to rely. Binary opposition is simply Derrida's jargon for pairs. People like to think of things in pairs: every head has its tail, every up has its down, the world is composed of men and women.

The opposition comes from the way in which we assign values to each half of the pairs, and make them mutually exclusive. Maybe you don't really have a preference for heads over tails, but generally we like to think of stocks going up, allowing us to move up in the world, putting us in an up mood for the day; and, if you pay any attention to society at all, it should be clear which sex gets the shaft because of presumed intellectual and physical inferiority. In short, the pairs we think about have unbalanced relationships; they are defined as opposite in meaning, while one is thought of as good and the other bad, or at least less good.

Think of the cowboys in Westerns: the pure of heart hero, untouchable, untempted by the dark side. He wears white. We want him to win the shoot out with the big, bad bully in the ten gallon hat. Life in westerns represents these simple binary oppositions of the good old days (another opposition: towards the bad, scary, complicated present). Good fought evil, and won. Men were strong, reserved, smart, and independent. Women were weak, emotional, flighty, and in need of protection. Then came Sergio Leone and the spaghetti westerns to complicate everything. Sure, in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Clint Eastwood wore white and was called the good, but he also showed no mercy toward his supposed friends and killed for money just like "the bad."

Reality is not as simple as black and white or good and bad. The man in white could just have poor fashion sense. On closer inspection, "he" might be in drag and beginning the process of physically becoming "she," raising the questions of which pronoun is most accurate. Does becoming "she" mean that he's moving up or down in the world? And if he can't be classified easily as male or female, does that mean he is good or bad in relation to the rest of us? By now you get the picture: with Derrida, there is never just black and white, completely separate from each other and ranked as superior or inferior. Those nasty shades of gray swirl around and infiltrate the neatly constructed opposites.

For even more on binary oppositions, including a list of binaries, click here.