One of my favorite writers on this theme, it is almost an obsession in some
of his (brilliant) work, is Anthony Wilden (see his _System and
Structure_). Wilden takes his cue from Bateson, looking to substitute a
logic of both/and for the classically exclusive either/or. He is also a
Lacanian, which makes for some interesting loops (Lacan is a late
structuralist, or early post-structuralist, and much influenced by the
binarism of Levi-Straus, Jakobson, et al.)
Binarism is in fact quite a useful heuristic, as the great insights of
1960s structuralism do show, I think. The problem comes when one reifies it
as a truth rather than as a tool, or when one accepts the principle of
exclusivity, either in the internal-binary form (it must be either A or B
but not both), or in the external form (it can't be anything else but A or
B). Logical exclusion is not unrelated historically and culturally to
social exclusion, as many anthropologists of the 1960s noted about
societies other than our own, and as many critical theorists, feminist and
postmodernist-postcolonialist (see Diane's posting) re-voiced about us in
the 1970s and 80s. In fact there is a strong thesis (maybe too strong, but
interesting) that all the disjunctions in the McDermott list are reflexes
of one another historically and culturally in the Eurocultural tradition.
Feminists have made a fairly good case I think that the masculine/feminine
disjunction and the corresponding social exclusion (of women, from power,
from resources, etc.) is prototypical for many of the others. Queer theory
notes that this disjunctive model grounds exclusions of some males as well.
And social class analysis has found many similar homologies for a
boss/worker or master/slave or lord/peasant dichotomy (cf. mind/body,
rational/irrational, cognitive/affective, etc.) I think that the
adult/child model would also work foundationally for all these cases (women
are just like children, serfs are just like children, blacks are just like
children, etc.).
One could also add to McDermott's list: social/natural, human/animal (and
these too line up with dominant-good/subordinate-bad on the other
disjunctions). Latour in _We Have Never Been Modern_ has an interesting
analysis of the cultural-historical foundations of some of these
disjunctions in the origins of modernism in the 17th century.
The most recent upsurge of binarism dates from the discovery of the
distinctive feature analysis of the phoneme in linguistics, which more or
less grounds a lot of formal semiotic theory.
Foucault gives some interesting insights into how the associative logic of
the European medieval and early renaissance periods shifted toward the
formal neo-Aristotelian logic of the early modern period, though in fact
it's likely they coexisted (and still do) with more of a shift in their
relative status and influence in various social institutions.
Peirce and most Peiceans give good critiques of binarism and good examples
of the fertility of ternarism (everything in 3's). When the third term is
constituted out of a relationship between the first two, we get variations
on the theme of dialectical logics, one of which, 'meta-redundancy' is the
basis of my own brand of semiotic analysis (and derives historically from
Bateson).
If you keep going back in the Euromythos, of course you get to Aristotle,
and there's even a fair bit of dichotomism in Plato's socratic elenchus.
But it's my view that they were anomalous in their own historical period,
and their connection to our exclusive logics lacks historical continuity.
Binarism of course does not have to serve the gods of exclusivity. There
are many other cultures where it grounds inclusivity (e.g. indigenous
Australian kinship systems). I don't quite know how to classify the I
Ching; in its contexts of use, I would say that it is more like the
associative logic of our own pre-modern period, but it is as binaristic in
its internal logic as any mathematical group theorist or binhex programmer
could desire. And of course Yin/Yang maps canonically onto
feminine/masculine and a whole host of other Han cultural dichotomies --
which may or may not also be disjunctions.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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