On Binary Opposition

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, threw it up rather quickly

we have structured life on binary oppositions. Good versus evil, right versus wrong, love versus fear, rich versus poor. However, binary opposition is inadequate to resolve the existential turmoil that is at the basis of all dissatisfaction and epiphany. It is only when the universe is exposed as the multifarious and overlapping co-existence of concepts that one truly approaches the Genuine Experience. Being geared toward binary thinking, it is only when binary opposition fails to define a characteristic of our experience that we are pushed closest to truly living.

Marshall McLuhan states that whenever a system (be it an organizational system such as the Internet, an aesthetic system such as Impressionism, a philosophical system such as Existentialism and so on) is pushed to the limits of its capability, there is a sort of reversion to a system that is simpler (structurally) but more comprehensive and capable of handling more information. For example, think of spoken language. The way one learns is to identify “things”. One learns nouns for objects and verbs for overt actions. These words themselves are made up of tiny bits of information (syllables and letters). Eventually (and rather quickly), simply being able to identify “things” is no longer adequate. One needs to be able to express relationships between “things” as well as incorporate abstract thought into very non-abstract situations. The language system goes through a reversion. It becomes simpler in that words lose some of the “concreteness” in their meaning, the upshot being that whole words now represent the basic unit of language rather than syllables or letters. One may argue that poetry is an attempt to take that further and use whole lines as the basic unit of information (and potent information, with multiple connotations).

We experience our lives using systems that are inadequate to explain the universe and ourselves within it. This is not an indictment; we are geared for a relatively simple life on a tiny planet. Cultural evolution (including the idle time available to agricultural societies, the broad sharing of information from society to society, and the ingenuity that allowed a frail, pink bipedal to dominate the earth) has repeatedly pushed us up against the very limits of our systemic capability to understand. For instance, creation myths served to satisfy our questioning nature for a time but eventually it grew inadequate. We were (or still are) forced to accept some new informational system to explain our life experience. The same occurs in the arts. We see a steady evolution in how art is produced, understood, how it interacts with our life, etc. This is because art is a powerfully self-propelling memetic system. I read great literature, learn from it, and understand that while it may be brilliant it fails in some way to render MY experience fully. Thus I am forced to make attempts, using the informational/philosophical/aesthetic systems I’ve encountered as a sort of cipher to decode the emotional communion I’ve made with the world.


Where does binary opposition come into play?
Binary opposition is the principal taxonomic activity We undertake. The first test we put any new “thing” to (a piece of art, a concept, a new food) is into the “good” and “bad” categories. Though I have little scientific support (but also no contradictory science), I would argue that this divvying up of our experience is directly related to our evolution. When our decisions were primarily concerned with life and death, it was of prime importance to efficiently divide the world up into things that were dangerous and things that were good. As time went on and our brains got bigger, we started to introduce what seems like ambivalencies. Fire is dangerous, but extremely useful. Water is essential to life, but can be deadly in the winter or can drown us. Upon closer examination, this is still binary division. Dangerous things are divided up into those that can be useful (“careful” things like fire) and things that are not (rotten meat). Moving from the simple classifications to these more nuanced classifications represented a shift. Our systems of understanding began to be inadequate, and thus “things” had to be considered not as monolithic entities, but as collections of characteristics (some bad, some good). This was a giant step forward in cultural evolution.

However, that understanding of our experience is only partial. First, it has been derived strictly by our subjective experience as humans with very particular needs (and thus is not required to be universally true). Secondly, we’ve merely divided the world into millions of pieces rather than a few and each “piece” still represents one side of a binary opposition. If you are familiar with calculus, you will know that one of the most important early uses for it was its ability to accurately measure the area under a curve. Calculus can take any function, no matter how wily and extreme its curves, and precisely derive the area underneath it. Prior to calculus, the only method to do this (and important scientists such as Johannes Kepler did this for integral astronomy calculations) was to divide the area under the curve into as many little squares as possible, and add up their areas. This is not only tedious and energy-intensive, its inaccurate. Our informational system, mathematics, was inadequate and thus we were forced from a system of binary oppositions (the question of accuracy presumes a binary friction: there are spaces under the curve that aren’t covered by squares) to one that could explain things more comprehensively and simply.

My point is this: we have made attempts to explain life by adding up a million tiny squares. It has been relatively adequate over the centuries, but as the spread and growth of information increases exponentially there are far too many nooks and crannies for us to stick our squares in. Our existential grief, this sense that something is missing and that the true meaning of our experience is fleeting and intangible, is our hackles being raised at the inaccuracy inherent in summing up a million tiny squares in our lives. We require nothing short of a calculus of life; a system of pattern recognition (and McLuhan says that only the artist is truly capable of this) and an identification of a new, simpler and yet more comprehensive system of understanding ourselves.