Structualism and Binary Opposition

Humans see things in pairs. We all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two halves of our brains etc. We also consider people who have symmetrical faces to be attractive. This makes so much sense that I don't know why I’d never realised it before. We all interpret the world in pairs.

Structuralism is how we interpret and make meaning out of the world. Binary Opposition is a part of that, explaining why we only understand something if we know what the opposite of it is. For example, how could we possibly know what good is if we don't understand the concept of evil. You know someone’s alive when there not dead. We trust in these beliefs and they are a learned response. Just like seeing a cat play with a mouse for fun, we think it’s cruel because we've learned when growing up that killing shouldn't be enjoyed.

However some opposites are not as trustworthy as we might think, because there is always a grey area in between. How can we possibly say someone is pure evil, for example They can't have been evil all their lives, and even if they have, I’m sure they would have done something nice in their time, and like Ivan said they might have stroked a cat once in a while!

How can we tell when life begins? At a certain stage when your growing in the womb? When the sperm meets the egg? When you’re born? This thought enforces the fact that there must be a bit in the middle that no one really understands. When it comes down to the comparison of light and dark, we know that in the evening the light slowly turns to dark to become night, implying that there is a sliding scale of values between both opposites and that there isn’t just two examples. The anomalous zone is considered the bit in the middle, usually where the interesting things happen.

  

When thinking about these opposites I came up with the idea of smooth and rough. I then looked down at my laptop which has a smooth surface yet has a slightly raised patterned on it making it look and feel a bit rough. I assume this means my laptop is in the anomalous zone.