Panopticon's Subject Index Bb
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| Bb | Binary
Oppositions Birmingham School Blade Runner Bricolage |
BINARY OPPOSITIONS
Originally a structuralist, metaphysical concept used to describe the way we use language to think about the world (e.g., we can only think about "hot" in relation to its opposite, "cold", "high" to "low", etc.) the term has been applied to Poststructuralist thought as well.
Derrida's theory of deconstruction often focuses on so-called binary oppositions contained in language; i.e., words exist only in relation to other words, e.g., truth versus falsity, self versus other, mind versus body, etc. Deconstruction demonstrates how these oppositions collapse into themselves to undermine the whole system of meaning. For example, a deconstructionist might explore the binary opposition between "man" and "woman" in terms of male dominance.
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Aka the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England. The Centre was a Neo-Marxian school of thought, most notably associated with Stuart Hall. Research carried out at the Centre from the 1970s continued in the post-Gramscian tradition of studies of hegemony and ideology.
See also:
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BLADE RUNNER
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: a postmodern science-fiction movie made at the beginning of the 1980s, the style decade.
A postmodern reading of Blade Runner:a.) Globalization -- the whole world brought to you in a single place (e.g., Japanese food, Italian streets, etc.).
b.) Cognitive hyperspace - you forget where you are because of globalization.
c.) Mix of genres - a sci-fi romance action thriller mystery.
d.) Ubiquitous advertising - giant neon signs.
e.) Electicism - borrowing of different historical film styles.
f.) Style over meaning (more so than in other sci-fi films such as Star Trek).
The film was also interesting in that it used something similar to a Turing test as a plot device. Deckard, the blade runner in the movie, used what was known as a "voight kampff" test, which helped the authorities to distinguish between humans and the outlawed replicants. The test measured replicants' emotional responses. The human tester would interpret these responses and decide whether the testee was human. The film thus raises some interesting issues regarding how we as humans relate to machines displaying human-like intelligence.
Click at right to see
a Quicktime movie clip
of director Ridley Scott's postmodern view of the Los Angeles of the future:
(NB: Movie clip is not working at present)
For a useful comparison, click at right to see
a Quicktime movie clip
of Fritz Lang's 1920's modernist view of the city of the future:
(NB: Movie clip is not working at present.)
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Term for putting together elements from different cultures or historical periods. A bit like intertextuality. An obvious application of the concept of bricolage is in architecture.
As used by Claude Levi-Strauss, the term bricolage describes how people use disparate objects around them to develop and assimilate ideas. E.g., using the Mac graphic user interface and the Web as a way of understanding postmodernist ideas of simulation and surface representation.
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CT. Subject Index Bb
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Last Updated: mar 9 2001