Opposites Detract
Preface D (prefaces to books I will probably won't have time to write)
When you find yourself less playful than you are wont to be (or that you want to be - there is only a letter difference and the difference in reality is even less than that), you might get obsessed with defining the state you find yourself in. If that you is a cis heterosexual male like myself, you might go for the word ‘grim’, or maybe for ‘sober’, ‘stern’ or even ‘somber’, although the first one fits best with the 55 years old that I just became. In most other cases, you might realize - after an internalized shriek - that you have to go for the word ‘shrill’. It is the play of opposites to always come up with more instead of less. This is in stark contrast to the law of the excluded middle that has any negation splitting a logical universe without any emotional remainder.
This book is about binaries, the pristine view of opposites that detracts by excluding even the possibility of a nonbinary muddle. Binaries that are designed to cut nature at its joints1, creating for instance the patriarchal mother of all opposites, that of male and female, which is at play in lacks of playfulness translating in being either stern or shrill, respectively (if not - it has to be added here, again - respectfully). That they are so designed is clear if we ask the most Latin of all questions: “Cui bono?”. Or is it a coincidence that the dominant side of the binary - the male, the sane, the healthy, the white, the straight - gets to be playful while the other side is marked by the weakness of not getting the joke, being - in Sara Ahmed’s phrase - a killjoy? And that after said joy is killed, the unmarked norm-bearing side can get away with being stern or somber, or merely soberly note that their harmless fun is spoiled? Opposites are unavoidably entangled with power play. A benefit is created and that benefit is secured by constructing contrasting concepts with a vengeance for anybody not befitting that play. They are kept in place, kept captive in the dominant world as María Lugones had it, by internalizing their lack of playfulness as a shrillness to be avoided at all cost. There is no straight jacket so tight as the infinite sequence of micro-aggressions reminding one that if one shrieks one just confirms one’s weakness. Not even Edgar Allen Poe could describe the drop-by-drop everyday terror of being on the receiving end of pristine binaries.
The essence of feminist philosophy necessarily is to oppose such binaries; siding with the weak in order to help them find their strength. It took this white cis heterosexual male quite some time to risk feeling seen as appropriating this thought. Can I be playful in stating that the nonbinary always already assumes the binary? Or am I playing a grim “gotcha”-game wondering if the mother of all opposites is that of binary and nonbinary? I hope the answer to these questions is as close as reality can get to a one-zero2 but I do not know for sure. It is this lack of certainty that makes me want to play with my attraction in thinking opposites detract, complicating said opposites into nonbinary ever-creative complementary muddles.
But, hang on!, why did I come to appreciate feminist thought in the first place? Am I not as close as it gets to the unmarked norm? Probably so. Still, as this book is about binaries not representing reality, my reality eventually turned out to be marked as well. I was marked as being autistically atypical3. I soon found out that playlessness was assumed to be my trait par excellence. When I tried to make fun of this assumption I found others to react soberly, for instance questioning whether I really could be so marked, or I found them reacting in a rather somber way, decrying for example that society labeled too many who just happened to have a rough time, or I found them reacting sternly, staring into the distance as if what I said was merely meaningless motion of their air4. It took me, then, experiencing my reality as that of being on a receiving minoritarian end of sanity to appreciate the appropriateness of feminist (queer, disability, postcolonial, mad, …) philosophy. It is not (mis)appropriation if one is genuinely making sense of one’s own reality as a marked human taking inspiration from other minority experiences to inspect the Catch-22-ness of one’s own situation.5
With that out of the way let me come back to my play. As a modern Western man, I stand in the tradition of purifying binaries by experimental science. As non-Western philosophies show, it is not in my power to just up and leave my tradition by the sheer power of a purely individual critical will. The only thing I can do is follow the science of purification to its very end: that of quantum physics. And there I find (and you will find with the help of this book) what Niels Bohr found: after millennia of purification there not just is a remainder, it bears the name of Planck. Where purity should have reigned, we find an essential impurity dictating a neither/nor approach to physicist’s world pictures. It is not just that, at the very end of purification, elementary processes cannot be reduced to either particles or waves; it is that they are nonbinary complementary (and clearly very creative) muddle of both.
Being - necessarily, see above - a traditionalist, I will argue in this book that it is important not to jump over Bohr’s result to its consequences. When Karen Barad does this, they talk, correctly, about indeterminism and entanglement but they forget the ground level impurity of complementarity. Simply stated: that to picture the world we need mutually exclusive but jointly sufficient ways to talk about that world. Simpler still: that we need opposites but that they are by the very nature of nature impure, always creating new nonbinary muddles that allow us to remain playful. The grace of Bohr is that he traced his result back to traditions existing well before the Western one, for instance traditions in the East which hold that we are always both actors and spectators in this world. The grace of this book is that it traces his result back to the lived experience of every minority in struggling with pristine binaries. To wake up from our modern dogmatic slumber, my book just asks to get in touch with your inner minority; playing with your binary instead of defending the opposites you profit from.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
And even though, as you will see at the end of this unambiguously ambiguous paragraph, we construct both said nature and said joints, even this fact of construction is sometimes, sadly, used in vice of some nationalist narratives randomly picking out a ‘them’ from an ‘us’ melancolically reminiscing about times of purity where well born and well educated were thought to be eugenically synonymous by Francis Galton, the bad nephew of Darwin, who thought, as many still exclusively do today, that ‘knowing is measuring’.
How close that feels depends, see below, on the factual context in which these questions are asked. In this book I hope to stay far away from intimating knowledge about other people’s feelings of oppression whether it is because of color, gender, queerness, sex or not feeling as if we live in a best possible world.
A mark I retrospectively realize I always bore in the eyes of the typical unmarked other. The funny thing is that my memories of being considered slightly off only made sense after accepting my autistic mark (in the period before they were just vague paranoid hunches, each contributing a little drop of depression). Remembering - this is a shout-out to Shotwell’s book Against Purity - is never a ‘pure’ act of recollection. It is always an activity of reconstituting one’s past based on insights of other (in my case autistic) pasts.
Luckily, my almost complete approximation of unmarkedness allowed me to appropriate the attitude of grimness creating an awkwardness where I was much more myself after lifelong training than they could ever be. Not that it mattered: after a short while they invariably shrugged my attitude off as inappropriate,
It is merely inappropriate but then majorly so to presume to know the experience of other minorities on the basis of one’s own hurt feelings (see footnote 3). That, my dear readers, is the definition of gaslighting, and it is unfortunately (but not coincidentally) a characteristic of traditional majorities to both consume as well as produce way too much gas, literally and figuratively (and unapologetically) respectlessly.
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