In Defense of Binary Thinking

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:



Not to Complicate Matters, but ...
By RUSSELL JACOBY

"I hope today to complicate our notion of cahiersepistème. Instead we are living in different worlds."

Cutting-edge scholars offer as the latest news these old saws: that things differ according to place and time; that our world is fractured and complex; that multiple entities constitute society. Consider the effort by the historian William H. Sewell Jr. to "clarify what we mean by culture." After 20 pages, he triumphantly concludes that culture is "variable, contested, ever-changing, and incomplete." In case we are deflated by that news, he adds, "I would argue forcefully for the value of the concept of culture in its nonpluralizable sense, while the utility of the term as pluralizable appears to me more open to legitimate question." If that seems a little obvious, he adds: "Yet I think that the latter concept of culture also gets at something we need to retain: a sense of the particular shapes and consistencies of worlds of meanings in different places and times."

These bromides get rehearsed in thousands of articles and studies. "My basic premise," writes a scholar examining translations of German sexology texts into English, "is that both translation and sexology are informed by cultural circumstances." She adds the magic words: "The impact of cultural circumstances necessitates more than just a binary understanding." No one can reasonably challenge this, but why should it be endlessly repeated?



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