Not about binaries

Last night on the radio, I heard a woman, an academic and/or activist, someone giving a lecture, someone who had written a book, say that the worst problem in America was dehumanization. She explained all contemporary problems as repercussions of an ethics that excludes some from the human community. Her examples were the words "terrorists" and "illegal aliens." These terms, she claimed, make us fail to see how underneath "it all" we are really the same, part of one human family.

This broadcast echoed some themes in one of the essays I recently read in a collection on so-called third way feminism--the big problem was binaries, us and them. And, I've just today read a blog post that not only criticizes bloggers for using binaries (us/them) but that classifies bloggers insofar as they use binaries. This leads to an oddly recursive argument insofar as it relies on a binary opposition between those who use binaries and those who do not.

I don't find any of these views convincing. First, dehumanization is not the problem--inequality rooted in neoliberal capitalism is. Second, the Bush administration gets off on torturing and killing people. That's part of its power. It claims the right, the executive privilege, to decide which people to watch, arrest, imprison, torture, and kill. Doing all this to non-humans wouldn't provide quite the kick, nor would it hold those inside the Beltway in awe, inspiring them to give in. The terms "terrorists" and "illegal aliens" designate who can be killed.

The "feminist" argument strikes me as ill-informed--a great deal of feminist academic work in the nineties criticizes binaries, engaged in deconstruction, examined the workings of oppositional terms and the exclusions necessary for oppositions to function at all. Echoing the charge today fails to acknowledge the change of context: the proliferation of identity categories (in part because of consumerism), the multiplicity of sexualized and racialized positions, and the ways that the impulse to pluralize supports contemporary power arrangements. Even as the division between the classes is all the clearer and stronger in the US (the income of one's parents is the strongest indicator of future income; class mobility is lower in the US than in most European countries), the emphasis on multiplicity and plurality functions ideologically to prevent the clear expression of antagonism.

The point made by the blogger is clearly the weakest one, particularly insofar as blame is placed on television as the base determining the impulse to think in terms of oppositions. If that is the case, then would not the one who groups bloggers into those who use binaries and those who do not be the ultimate consumer of television? And why is the presence of heroes and villains blamed on television rather than attributed to all sorts of different genres? And, why is it wrong? Can't there be instances where exploring a relationship between a hero and a villain or between a perpetrator and a victim or a detective and a suspect becomes interesting, opening into all sorts of other questions (some of which are cliched--the criminal within, everyone is a victim, the prostitute with the heart of gold) that resist binary terms?

The structures, terms, and concepts that enable thought, prevent it. To think in one direction is not to think in another. To organize one's thoughts with a binary (on the one hand, on the other), with an image (the figure of), with a matrix, paradox, dialectic, set, analogy, or repetition necessarily excludes elements of a context, aspects of a question. Often, it seems to me, those who charge others with binary thinking (or with being trapped in the dialectic or captured under the One) have to repeat the thinking that structures their charge. To show binary thinking in their object, they have to become subjects who think in terms of binaries (and this applies to the other examples as well; we can imagine the figure of the figural thinker).

And maybe this isn't so bad--it can demonstrate that sometimes binaries (and other modes of structuring thought) can be useful, despite (and actually because of!) the inadequacies of the critic's substantive claims.

Comments

[Dale]

I agree with you that the continued denunciation of binary oppositions in Western culture is out of touch with the proliferation of endless identity categories, subject positions... and niche markets. Moreover, this proliferation has clearly been one of the key ways of effacing the awareness of class divisions in American society.

Thomas Frank, in *The Conquest of Cool*, *One Market Under God* and *What's the Matter with Kansas*, has presented some of the more entertaining analyses of this question. He pretty much argues that contemporary popular culture is pseudo-subversive, offering up a simulacrum of cathartic transgression, in order to neutralize or distract us from structural inequalities and economic injustice.

One needs to take his withering dismissal of popular culture with a big grain of salt, since it's clear that he's pretty shamelessly nostalgic for a kind of New Deal-era American wholesomeness, and can't seem to identify some of the ways in which popular culture has been genuinely capable of upsetting conventional wisdoms and social pieties. However, I think his key argument still holds: the proliferation of cultural difference, narratives about difference, the academic celebration of difference, etc., have all been complementary to, not subversive of, the present regime of neoliberalism.

[kenoma]

As a matter of courtesy, why not name the blogger whose post you completely misrepresent here? It's Le Colonel Chabert of course. And this is your part in the childish 'war' declared by your racist, misogynistic friends, Dejan and Patrick Mullins of the Cultural Parody Center, on Chabert and other bloggers.

[McKenzie Wark]

There are two kinds of people: those who classify people into two kinds and those who do not.

[patrick j. mullins]

'If that is the case, then would not the one who groups bloggers into those who use binaries and those who do not be the ultimate consumer of television?'

That's very clever and fantastically hilarious.

But the follow-up is even better, and I've been thinking a lot about this very specifically too:

"And why is the presence of heroes and villains blamed on television rather than attributed to all sorts of different genres? And, why is it wrong?"

I may prefer other genres, but the 'heroes and villains' being delimited to television is absurd, especially since these are the ones that consumed by all classes, and the other ones are not--this despite the fact that the critics of television are not only able to afford live performance, but often have decided that the elitisms they prefer come from a ruling class they have decided to take umbrage towards...admittedly this allows new poltergeists to be placed in opera houses, and these are poltergeists who hate working class entertainments like TeeVee, but have decided that just those same TeeVee watchers must be the very ones to produce a revolution, NOT that they shouldn't be DIRECTED by the poltergeists consuming 'elite product', since SOMEBODY has to do the organizing...of course, my major fear is that the poltergeists last into the Paris Opera Ballet season and I am thinking of writing Nicolas le Riche and others to check the bags of those attending the Palais Garnier off-season....

[Dejan]

since it's clear that he's pretty shamelessly nostalgic for a kind of New Deal-era American wholesomeness, and can't seem to identify some of the ways in which popular culture has been genuinely capable of upsetting conventional wisdoms and social pieties.

Dale, the blogger who launched the thesis is given to Communist-era wholesomeness, and practices a deadly mix of retro-Situationism with pastoral Humanism. I suspect that in 1968 she used to live in a nudie commune. She is addicted to the new media, like blogging, which long ago exploded the more conventional binaries of daytime television, but only talks about the more conventional TV of bygone eras. Her attack on ´´racism´´ and ´´misogyny´´ is further bogged down in the politically correct United Nations discourse, which wouldn´t be so bad if she didn´t attack Jodi from the perspective of a male currency tradeuring bigot (for example, she often pounces on Jodi for having a ´´provincial mentality´´). Finally, the blogger in question is among the blogosphere´s most avid consumers of elitist cultural product like opera.

[Jodi]

Dale--I am also a Thomas Frank fan, particularly of One Market Under God. That book may have been the first time I got (as in not just read and understood but absorbed)the way some forms of academic postmodern cultural criticism were being read and used in advertising agencies.

Ken--I think you may have said that here before...and I had it in mind as I was jotting (what is the appropriate term when typing) this little post.