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Different cultures have different binary oppositions. The whole point is that these aren't inherent and universal but instead the product of cultures and ideologies.
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Apr 20, 2023 17:08
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| # ? May 6, 2024 00:18 |
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Beefeater1980 posted:Has there been any attempt to apply this analysis to cultural contexts other than Europe -> America? I think east Asian philosophy has some very clear binary oppositions, especially ideas about yin and yang. Things like Masculine/Feminine, Active/Passive, Heat/Cold, Compassion/Wisdom, Light/Dark, etc. are delineated in that sort of value structure. Although I think in such philosophical traditions, while these qualities are opposites, one is not necessarily superior to the other. For instance, in the Tibetan Buddhist "yab-yum" iconography, the male figure represents compassion and the female figure represents wisdom. But one would not necessarily say that it is "compassion over wisdom." The entanglement of the two values to create a perfect whole is entirely the purpose of the icon. But it is curious that the values still coalesce in a binary way, even if the greater understanding is that they flow into each other. In my biased personal opinion, I think one of the great things about eastern philosophy was the very early acceptance of nondualistic thinking. So these binary oppositions are recognized, but they are also subverted by ideas like codependent origination and sunyatta and wu wei. I've seen the view that this adoption of nondualistic thinking was a response to the heavily hierarchical thinking of Confucian social values. So you know, you can see Chan Buddhist traditions revering Thousand-Armed Guanyin in a female form, reaching out to save all sentient beings, so you could say "Here you go! The feminine is recognized as embodying action. The binary oppositions are destabilized." But at the same time there is a very real historical strand of male power having privilege over female power, like in the case of foot binding, which is a very clearly codified "femininity as passive" social value. That's an extreme example but it illustrates how these sorts of value systems play out in the world. I think in contemporary culture, a lot of these ideas are being renegotiated, sometimes quite fiercely. So we have the "tiger mom" meme and the "girlboss" meme, which are trying to destabilize "male over female, power over weakness" by associating female with power. It's a powerful approach that is making a lot of good changes in society, but a feminist looking at these sort of binary oppositions would say that we probably need to get away from the idea of hegemonic power altogether. Maybe power is a type of weakness, maybe weakness is a type of power. So rather than changing who holds the football, we need to change the football itself. This is also one of the funky things about poststructuralism: Derrida had this idea of the "general text," this idea that everything is text. So you can apply lit crit to everything, not just literature. So discussions about poststructuralism have this tendency to immediately go toward cultural criticism writ large, rather than toward specific works of literature. But in my opinion it's much more interesting to deconstruct literature than culture, since culture is very fuzzy and nebulous and it ends up sounding more like a hot take than a serious intellectual inquiry about meaning. I don't know of any post-Maoist deconstructivist writing personally, but I'm certain there's no lack of it out there. One of the things about post-structuralism is that it's kind of intentionally ideologically hollow (being more interested in overturning ideas than establishing new ones), so it can be deployed toward just about any rhetorical aim. This is also the greatest point of criticism levied against it (an accusation, basically, of detached nihilism; always eager to dismantle structures but never to suggest alternatives) Cephas fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 05:48
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