“Binaries of various kinds, whether ideological between the Left and the Right, or gender between men and women, of nation between citizen and subject, or psychology between sane and insane or morality between good and evil are known to be problematic. Binaries are problematic because they exclude, and therefore the growing demand to move away from binaries into a deconstructive mode that wishes to introduce to social processes constitutive fluidity and instability. Deconstructive imagination is against fixity and opens to self-contradictory and liminal existence of life. Nothing is black or white, almost everything is grey. In making ideas and identities, practices and imaginaries unstable, what is sought is a possibility of non-exclusion through radical flux. French philosopher Michel Foucault♏ believed that binary is a mode in which power operates under modernity. He therefore once famously said: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.” This is best left to the bureaucrats to keep papers in order and fix identities in law and policy.
From Politics To Love, Breaking Binaries Creates A Crisis Of Meaning
💟As spaces expand under debinarised imaginations, finding the ground beneath will become all the more difficult
Binaries shrink our imagination. Why not trigger imagination beyond the confining limits of the binaries? Foucault saw this in the spirit of the protests on the streets of Iran during the revolution in 1978-79. He saw what he referred to as “political spirituality” marked by preparedness for death as against certainty of submission to authority. It was a protest beyond the known. It was an attempt of knowing the unknowable and thinking the unthinkable. What excited Foucault about the protests in Iran was that those protesting had no alternative. They did not know what they were resisting. It was the liberation of the body🦩 against the control of the soul. Foucault, therefore, said, “A man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable.” He is beyond explanation because it is beyond known experiences that existing categories cannot possibly capture. It is in breaking barriers of social constraints that new imaginations await us.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in his celebrated book, Beyond Good and Evilꦬ calls out the need for truth claims in order to project what are ‘essentially’ the desires of the heart. He says philosophers, “pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic… while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an inspiration, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event”. Nietzsche had no qualms in declaring that the search for truth is a dubious enterprise. Our drives and desires interpret the world for us, and there are no values beyond these interpretations. Like Foucault, Nietzsche too strongly feels our best creative selves are in a state of hopeless confusion. Self-fashioning is our best beyond social constraints that are presented as binaries.
This indeed is a powerful intervention to dismantle binaries in order to re-imagine radical possibilities. There is no telos to history to be arrived at and there are only anarchic futures that come from nowhere. We need to live the inner drives without guilt or compromise. In a real and concrete world such interventions have handsomely helped sexual minorities 🤪to displace known truths of being natural. Subalterns could call the bluff of truth-regimes to expose power machinations at work. In such fluidity of unstable practices everyone could read their stories. There is no story that is untold.
The Resurgence of the global Right is based on unconventional acknowledgement of debinarised thinking and knocking down binaries of ideology and ethics.
But do we need to pause to ask a question in different registers? What if fluidity and liminality are being colonised under the conditions of late capitalism? It is not the anarchic instincts that flourish, but resistance to power that is blocked and debinarised modalities and dialectical thinking have helped build new hegemonies of the conservative kind? Resurgence of the global Right is based on unconventional acknowledgement of debinarised thinking and knocking down binaries of ideology, and ethics. Is this a realisation of a condition or constructing micro-power networks? Mere plurality of epistemes are not subversive enough, they are already sucked into neoliberalisms’൩ dispersed networks. Fluidity can enable construct more centralised power at the other end of the spectrum. Under current populist conditions, the Right has fashioned itself in appropriating the discourse dismissing binaries in order to construct supra-binaries that are rigid and stubborn.
For the Indian Right, they promote the sacred to enhance marketisation; they actively support smaller states to create a stronger centre; they aid unstable caste identitiesꦰ to imagine a monolithic Hindu identity; they are vociferous about global, as they are about ‘vocal for local’. Here, sacred and profane and global and local are debinarised into a seamless continuity. Caste identities are deconstructed into fluid instability. The workings of neo-conservative social forces are infinitely interesting because they are simultaneously highlighting the potential and limitation of displacing binaries with deconstructive politics. Is it a condition that is being weaponised or a strategy that is becoming a condition?
♛Breaking binaries also creates a new kind of social crisis of meaning, ethics and direction. Binaries at one end create power, and at the other, they are entangled with meaning-making. Meanings are generated in a relational sense. For instance, the figure of mother has no essence of its own; it makes sense only when we differentiate it with what the figure of father looks like. The debinarised mode of seeking liberation has created the crisis of meaning. Where meaning ends much begins from pleasure to crime. The flashy inner drives of desire remain on the surface in denial of anything deeper.
Moving beyond binaries ♑also invariably involves questioning ethics and equating all of normative as power-laden. Are normative confusions only generative of creative potential, self-fashioning and thinking the unthinkable, or can they also land us in nihilism without motivations? The epidemic of loneliness, global regimes of boredom, anomie and suicidal deaths are only symptoms of the search for meaning and the security of norms. As spaces expand under debinarised imaginations, finding the ground beneath becomes all the more difficult. Haven’t psychoanalysts often cautioned this as the mushrooming ground for fascism in the modern world? It was the amoral world of soldiers that was meant to rescue the culprits at the Nuremberg trials. Are we becoming unrecognisable without a sense of directionality? We may celebrate breaking down linearity to a genealogy of multiplicity. But we may be condemned to read banality as multiplicity. Without the normative, we might be more efficient in breaking the chakravyuh, but the fate of Abhimanyu might await us!
Dutch scholar Roanne van Voorst in her new book, Six in a Bed: The Future of Love—From Sex Dolls & Avatars to Polyamory🍃, explores the new world of polyamorists and ‘shareable fatherhood’. One such instance is that of a V relationship where any of the three partners is allowed to have loving relationships outside the triangle. The upside is that there is no need to hide or cheat among polyamorists like the way those who vouch by monogamy often do. But Voorst says, “Jealousy occurs among polyamorists too. It is not an emotion that vanishes on contract with openness and honesty.” However, the polyamorous version of jealousy, which is closer to envy, means you wanted to be there to watch the last episode of that enjoyable Netflix series, or wish that you too had received such a romantic anniversary present. It’s a matter of and, not or. It’s about extending, not forbidding. There is no emancipation here. Let us break binaries, but handle it with care!
(Views expressed are personal)
Ajay Gudavarthy is with the Centre For Political Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'What After Rejecting The Binaries?'.