Page 34 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

BINARY OPPOSITION

BINARY OPPOSITION

The generation of meaning out of two-term (binary) systems; and the
analytic use of binaries to analyse texts and other cultural phenomena.
In contemporary life, it may be that the most important binary is the
opposition between zero and one, since this is the basis of computer
language and all digital technologies. But in culture, binaries also
operate as a kind of thinking machine, taking the ‘analogue’ continuity
of actuality and dividing it up in order to be able to apprehend it.
Thus binary opposition is used as an analytic category (this occurred
first in structural anthropology and then in structuralism more
generally). Basic propositions are as follows.
Meaning is generated by opposition. This is a tenet of Saussurian
linguistics, which holds that signs or words mean what they do only in
opposition to others – their most precise characteristic is in being what
the others are not. The binary opposition is the most extreme form of
significant difference possible. In a binary system, there are only two
signs or words. Thus, in the opposition land : sea the terms are
mutually exclusive, and yet together they form a complete system –
the earth’s surface. Similarly, the opposition child : adult is a binary
system. The terms are mutually exclusive, but taken together they
include everyone on earth (everyone can be understood as either child
or adult). Of course, everyone can be understood by means of other
binaries as well, as for instance in the binary us : them – everyone is
either in or not in ‘our nation’.
Such binaries are a feature of culture not nature; they are products
of signifying systems, and function to structure our perceptions of the
natural and social world into order and meaning. You may find
binaries underlying the stories of newspaper and television news,
where they separate out, for example, the parties involved in a conflict
or dispute, and render them into meaningful oppositions.
Ambiguities are produced by binary logic and are an offence to it. Consider
the binaries mentioned so far:

land : sea
child : adult
us : them
These stark oppositions actively suppress ambiguities or overlaps
between the opposed categories. Between land and sea is an ambiguous
category, the beach – sometimes land, sometimes sea. It is both one and
the other (sea at high tide; land at lowtide), and neither one nor the

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