- character, binary oppositions, meaning -

The construction of the “Other” is vital to the construction of the Self. Ferdinand de Saussure argued that meaning depends on the difference between opposites. Meaning, argued Saussure, is relational. It is the “difference” that carries meaning. These binary opositions - white/black, day/night, masculine/feminine, citizen/alien have the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes.

In everyday life, the marking of difference is the basis of the symbolic order which we call culture. Culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system. As Stuart Hall emphasizes, binary oppositions may be useful as a beginning point for interpreting our world, but they are also a crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning and often give rise to stereotyping. In his essay on stereotyping, Dyer argues that, without the use of types, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the world. We understand the world by referring individual objects, people or events in our heads to the general classificatory schemes into which - according to our culture - they fit.

In other words, we understand “the particular” in terms of its “type.” We come to “know” something about a person by thinking of the roles which he or she performs: is he/she a parent, a child, a worker, a lover, boss, or an old age pensioner? We assign him/her to the membership of different groups, according to class, gender, age group, nationality, “race”, linguistic group, sexual preference and so on. We order him/her in terms of personality type - is he/she a happy, serious, depressed, scatter-brained, over-active kind of person? Our picture of who the person “is” is built up out of the information we accumulate from positioning him/her within these different orders of typification. In broad terms, then, “a type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or "development" is kept to a minimum”.

- deconstruction -

In order to avoid misinterpretation of reality, and avoid stereotypes in its representation, we must deconstruct hierarchy of binary oppositions. But Jonathan Culler notes that deconstruction disrupts not only the hierarchy, it disrupts the opposition itself. Derrida develops a programme of reading texts that sees beyond the narrow confines of binary opposites and thus to disturb the reliance on hierarchical oppositions. He believes that the critical metaphysical tradition which extends from Plato to modern times, that includes Marxism and structuralism is insufficient.

The philosophical project of deconstruction attempts at charting how key terms, motifs, and characters are defined by binary oppositions within a text, how the oppositions are hierarchical and demonstrating that these oppositions are unstable, reversible, and mutually dependent on one another. Then we may be able to show how each term in the opposition is joined to its companion by a complex network of arteries. Derrida claims that the line ordinarily drawn between the two terms is shown to be a political and not natural reality.