Thinking Beyond the Binary
Gregory J. Lobo
Binaries are curious things. They are, so to speak, totally man-made. If a virus were to wipe out human life on earth, there would be no more binaries. They don’t occur in nature — absent human linguistic and cognitive work. They are, rather, cultural.
The so-called sex binary, for example, is simply a misnomer or perhaps, more accurately, a category mistake. When someone uses this phrase, the phenomenon to which they are really referring is sexual reproduction as opposed to asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction does not depend on a sex binary but on the existence of two sexes. Despite the au courant insistence on destabilizing this thing that doesn’t exist — the sex binary — no one has yet been able to identify a third sex.
The two sexes do not constitute a “sex binary” because binaries are cultural, linguistic and cognitive phenomena. As I’ve said, take away human culture, language and cognition and you take away binaries. Each of the two terms of a (cultural) binary depends on the other if it is to make sense. Sense is a human, cultural good. Non-humans don’t need it, and the male and female sexes, as such, do not make sense. What they do is interact in a process called reproduction. Together they make (more) life.
It is then cultural binaries that interest us. The way we have thought about men and women and their respective social roles and qualities has, up until quite recently, been formulated in terms of what we can accurately and properly call a binary. If, for example, men are to be strong it is because women are to be weak; if women are to be private men are to be public; if men are to be rational women are to be emotional. If we stop to consider this for a moment, we will see the women are defined by not being what the men are, or not doing what the men do; and men are defined by not being or doing as women are or do. Thus men are promiscuous while women are chaste. And so on. Recent criticism of what the reader will surely recognize as the gender-role binary has had the outcome of allowing men and women to break out of traditional roles and act in ways more in keeping with their desires and personalities, rather than with what were socially imposed as the dictates of their sex.
Though we have to some extent managed to think beyond the gender-role binary, the left-right political binary continues to plague our thinking and action with regard to our comprehension, analysis and critique of historical and current events. In doing so, this binary constrains as much the flourishing of human ways of thought as it does, by simple extension, the flourishing of human ways of life. Most people, for instance, subject to the current structure of the left-right binary, would place the Nazis on the right. Is this correct? And they would place theterrorist army Hamas on the left, as at least one famous critical theorist has done. Is this appropriate? (What defines a terrorist here is his — or her — active dedication to targeting non-combatants as an end in itself. Such a definition allows those who so wish to distinguish between the “freedom fighters” of the African National Congress and its armed wing, who engaged in sabotage and scrupulously strove to avoid civilian casualties, and those groups who barbarically attack civilians and gleefully commit atrocities.)
In order to understand how the left-right binary as currently formulated short-circuits our ability to think politically and imagine less conflictual futures, we might start with a brief overview of its history.
In the summer of 1789, in full revolutionary mode, the French invented the rigid and reductive left-right binary. The unfortunate French king had not yet been beheaded, and the question worrying those trying to write a new constitution for France was how much power or authority royalty should have, or whether it should have any at all. Revolutionaries who wanted to abolish the kingship entirely sat to the left of the hall in which the National Assembly met, while those who supported at least some role for monarch in the future of France sat to the right. Thus the left-right binary was born, based solely on seating arrangements.
Those who sat on the left wing of the hall were committed to radical change, to such an extent that they would eventually see fit to execute the king, ending over a thousand years of continuous monarchy in France. Those who sat on the right — wanting to preserve the good of the past (what there was of it, for surely there was some) and extend it into the present — had still seen a role for royalty. And indeed the chaos that engulfed France for more than several decades after the start of the revolution suggests that France would have been better off keeping some type of constitutional monarchy, such as is found in the United Kingdom. But what’s done is done. That said, the basic distinction, minus the details, is this: the left wing wanted not so much to turn society upside down, as to pull the rug out from underneath it, to annihilate its symbolic center. A human society can be thought of as an ecosystem, with biotic (living) and its abiotic (non-living) components, but also with a semiotic component, comprised of meaningful things — not truly alive, but hardly inanimate either — in relations that produce sense. The left, in executing the king, obliterated the semiotic system in which life in the region we call France had heretofore unfolded. It unmade sense. The right on the other hand wanted to conserve sense, with necessary modifications.
Over the years, the left-right binary has become omnipresent in our everyday political discourse. The left-right binary is in fact a proper binary, which is to say a cultural binary based on each pole more or less representing itself as the opposite of the other, while having no positive standing in and of itself. It is impossible, therefore, to discuss politics in terms other than left-wing this and right-wing that, because such discussions come always already structured by the binary and its self-evidently opposed categories. And we imagine (though we are mistaken to do so) that these categories can be applied accurately and meaningfully to specific policies, thoughts and practices.
Thus we arrive at a reactive thinking process, which isn’t really thinking at all. If the left supports proposal or policy X, and I think of myself as being on the right, then I will oppose policy or proposal X. And if the right supports policy or proposal Y, and I think of myself as being on the left, I will oppose policy or proposal Y. At least some people reading this, whether on the left or the right, will dismiss it, and its author, as being on the side with which they do not identify, because the argument and its author are troubling their identification, and thus are on “the other” side.
But we should be troubled if we identify as being on the left or the right. Not only because it leads us into reactive “thinking”, but also because it short circuits our analytical and critical abilities to comprehend, appraise and critique historical and current events. So, to take perhaps the most striking case, people still conceive of Nazism as a right-wing formation. But Nazism believed itself to be a movement dedicated to total change, much in the mold of its avowed enemy, communism (the enmity between communism and Nazism has more to do, surely, with the narcissism of minor differences than doctrinal differences: both embraced slaughter in their projects of building utopia). Recall the distinction between the left and right in revolutionary France. The right wanted to conserve something; the left wanted to abolish everything. In this sense, Nazism is not at all conservative and thus does not qualify as right wing — unless, of course, we want right wing to simply mean “bad”. Unfortunately, this does indeed seem to be the way many people use the qualifier “right wing” today. But, according to the distinctions between right and left that we saw in the French revolutionary context that gave us these terms, Nazism is not at all rightist. It is left-wing, or leftist. The clue, so willingly overlooked by so many on the left, is in the name: national socialism.
Being politically mature means leaving behind our self-imposed inability to think outside the left-right binary. Being mature, then, implies thinking about policies on their own terms, in terms of the problem they are trying to address and in terms of the possibility and likelihood that they will address it efficiently and effectively. It’s time to forget about the left-right binary and the intellectual violence it exerts on our ability to think and, what’s more, on our ability to think generously and civilly with others. That is, we owe it to ourselves to become full-fledged thinkers and leave behind that binary thinking; but we owe it to others — as full-fledged compatriots, as full-fledged human beings — too.
About the Author:
Gregory J. Lobo is currently OSUN senior researcher at SOAS — University of London, for AY 23–24, where he is working on understanding the tensions, such as they are, between religion and democracy. His permanent position is with the Department of Languages and Culture at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He directs the Humanities for the People project, which is funded by the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network at the Hannah Arendt Center and the Open Society University Network.
