glossary entry: binary
this one gets a bit academic.
appx. reading time: 20-30 min.
our world is becoming increasingly complex. or so it would seem. everyone fancies themselves ‘complex’. but it is more likely that people are not, and in fact, the world isn’t either; rather, everything is merely ‘complicated’. crudely formulated, the difference between a complicated system and complex one is that within the former, everything is predictable; whereas within the latter, things are not. for sure, nature and life itself are complex. but human society? big data, artificial intelligence, consumer behavior analytics, and capitalism would all suggest otherwise (for more, see here, an oldie but a goodie, by yours truly). this algorithmically mediated world in which we live at this moment in history is perhaps the most indicative of binary force we’ve yet to see. with this horizon in mind, let’s move forward and try to understand just what ‘binary’ means.
{ binary: that which is neither complex nor fluid }
a simple way to understand ‘binary’ is to think of it as the antithesis to complexity and fluidity. a binary suggests that there are only two parts or options– an either/or, zero sum game state of relations. self, or other. one of us, or one of them. good, or evil, and so on. when thinking in terms of either/or there isn’t much room for flexibility; one is trapped in a fixed scenario for which there are two options and ultimately only one choice to make. what is binary is not fluid. it is a fixed, pre-determined scenario (and highly predictable w.r.t. consumer behavior algorithms that we help generate, leading to recurring feedback loops). likewise, a binary is not complex, consisting of just two parts or options. (*1)
{ but wait, everything is complex and fluid. hence, nothing is actually binary }
however, nothing is actually binary since everything is complex and in a state of flux, things only appear so thanks to the ubiquity and hegemony of social phenomena. once the deceit of civil society is shed, ‘binary’ is understood as being merely rhetorical– its usage is simply descriptive of something that is reductive and static/fixed. it is an abstraction. in most cases binary is used to describe a way of thinking– binary logic.(*2) however, while you could describe someone as thinking in binary terms, thought itself is not actually binary.
for example, when someone dogmatically or religiously believes in something, their behavior may reflect binary logic– thinking in moral absolutes, or in terms of good and evil. though a behavior may express binary logic, the behavior itself is not binary because it is the result of a wide range of different influences– i.e. repetition of religious imagery and language, reinforced identity through shared community values, patriarchal hetero-normatively informed null curriculums, power dynamics, etc. such influences condition and affect how a person can think, behave and express themselves. many of which one has no control over, let alone awareness of. of course, one could be highly self-critical, but if the paradigm in which one is self-critical is based on binary premises, then this is not self-criticism, it is simply the reinforcing of one’s biases (i.e. asking for the forgiveness of sin).
another quick example. someone could call you a racial slur, and this slur, along with the mindset that instigates it, can both be described as reflective of binary thinking– reductive and divisive. however, the process by which one comes to use a racial slur is not binary– it involves a complex history full of varying forces and affects that influences such a behavior. the behavior of a racist/sexist/fascist/whathaveyou reflects binary logic, but the persons themselves are not binary. people, regardless of how violently binary they may behave, are not binary. they are complex, as are all of us (that is, when free of coercive forces. again, with reference back to social phenomena like identity politics). these examples are phenomenological, and merely descriptive of ‘what’s going on underneathe’; which is to say, just because something is the case, doesn’t mean that’s how it manifests in social reality.
the point here is that complexity is directly correlated to affectivity, or life itself. so long as a thing– or let’s say, a body– is alive, it has the capacity to affect and be affected, to feel and be felt. the more complex a body is, the more ways in which it can be affected. and a body can be affected by an infinite number of things– from the particles in the air, to memories from childhood, to what you had for dinner last night, to your anxieties about tomorrow, so on and so forth. the fact that a body can be influenced/conditioned/affected by an innumerable amount of forces and affects expresses its complexity.(*3)
to think that people aren’t complex is to say they are incapable of change, which is reflective of binary logic; to predetermine one’s future relative to their past, is to project a fixed image of who they are in the present onto their future. this doesn’t mean that everyone does change, it merely reflects badly upon the one who thinks that someone else isn’t capable of it. it is divisive; it cuts a person off from any possibility for growth. it is reductive; it reduces the complexity of a person down to a fixed image of who they are. just as we are all complex, we are all just as capable of violent behaviors that betrays an underlying driving binary force.
we are all affected by a multitude of phenomena that we are unaware and unconscious of. every situation is a complex web of a near infinite amount of intersecting forces. instead of reacting to first, second, or even third impressions, the challenge is to understand and trace the multiple lines of affectivity that produce different situations or expressive forms (examples above). every action is an expression of the many affects that produce it. though things can appear binary on the surface, and can reflect reductive and divisive logic, nothing is actually binary because nothing is simply one way or another, everything is complex. the ability to parse the difference between surface impressions and underlying affects is important.
when you recognize and appreciate that something is complex, you understand that it cannot be simplified or reduced down to a singular essence. when you recognize that something is fluid, in a state of flux and constantly shifting, you understand that an initial perception can never be the final take; first impressions can never encapsulate the totality of something that will eventually change relative to context, place and time. to think that anything is absolute, non-negotiable, or not subject to change is reflective of binary logic.
{ even though nothing is actually binary,
doesn’t mean binary isn’t the default mode of existing }
so nothing is actually binary, since nothing can be reduced to a fixed state unless forced to.(*4) and even then, it would only be an abstraction. what appears in binary form is merely a surface level visage. the underlying forces and affects that induce such expressions are always complex and in a state of flux.
ok, that’s great and all, but we relate with the world in binary terms nonetheless. humans can’t help but think in binary terms; it’s like we’re allergic to complexity and fluidity. the thought that not everything is as it seems, or that things are in a constant state of flux, upsets our habits and assumptions. it’s anxiety inducing.
seemingly everything human expresses binary logic; we seem hell bent on clinging to reductive and divisive ideologies, pathologically dismissing complexities. we have a helluva hard time getting along with one another– sharing resources, finding common ground as opposed to seeing differences, etc.– all the while the planet suffers from our humanism. one could go on and on about how society is structured, and the power dynamics at play– two party political systems, an economic system based on the illusion of 1:1 exchanges, racial dynamics along the phenotypic spectrum from black to white, rampant sexism, crisis after crisis, so on and so forth. now it seems as if everything is binary huh?
sure, nothing is actually binary (just have to keep repeating it). but this doesn’t mean we can help ourselves from seeing the world in black and white, in terms of profit and loss, or in terms of self and other. we are stuck in a perpetual feedback loop of self-perception (social media anyone?). which is why ‘identity’ is such a problematic phenomenon, insofar as it is the one thing that coincides with a fixed personal essence or sense of selfhood from which one views the outside world as 'different from me'. but as i mentioned before, identity itself is complex and fluid, affected by so many influences we have no control over. nonetheless, our default state of being-conscious is structurally binary because it always pits the privilege of self over and above others. everything we do and believe is relative to this immovable, fixed sense of identity. the gravitational pull of this sense of essence/identity is so strong that to lose it feels like losing life itself. selflessness and charity? even those are tied to one's identity. indeed, to break free from the binary is tantamount to losing one's life (e.g. all the privileges that come with citizenship/identity, all the accumulated records, accounts, and monies that amount to one’s ‘life’). anxiety inducing right?
if that’s the case what hope is there for understanding what’s beyond ourselves in non-binary terms, in terms of respect, interconnection and creativity rather than the mere repetition of the self-same? meaning, understanding others without understanding them through our own values and filters? on their own terms and not on mine? now this, this would truly be something new and original.(*5)
{ binary logic and humanism go hand in hand, both are consequences stemming from the distinction between self and other }
the perception that there’s a distinction between one’s self and others is fundamental to what is binary. the perception of one’s self as a solitary and autonomous being simultaneously creates, and is created by, the fantasy of ‘me’– of identity. this fantasy results in a primary distinction, or disconnection, that separates the mental category of ‘self’ from ‘others’. “this is me, that is not me. this is who i am. that is not who i am.” being conscious of one’s own existence, the self perceives of things that exist independent from itself as other, foreign, and different.(*6) two things of note occur: that one’s world becomes hierarchically organized, beginning with the self, and that a sense of value is first learned, again starting from self-value– survival instincts, the capacity to form beneficial social relations, etc.
man’s distance from others, displacement within nature, and disjunction from himself is the binary condition. this condition has its origins in the self-awareness of selfhood. to be clear, this is not yet ‘individualism’– individualism is when this sense of selfhood becomes enraptured with and conflated with group identity, i.e. identity politics and american ‘individualism’– to stand out from a group, you need a group to stand out from first, which is why there’s no such thing as a ‘true’ individual (to be clear this is not to say there’s no such thing as subjectivity, which is something else altogether, but this, for another time). prior to this group identification one develops a sense of self first.
having a sense of self-identity is the feeling that one occupies the center of their lives. the notion of one’s self as a project into which one invests all of life’s energies. the starting point from which the world becomes carved up into and organized through binary categories is the internalization of a fiction– that i am. this is not to suggest that you or i don’t physically exist. rather, the way in which we exist, mediated via an identity, is merely a convenient lie, a binary abstraction that reduces the complexity of what it means to be an individual down to a single solitary entity– me.
it’s important here to note that the natural state of the world is not binary. nature is non-binary. the binary condition is a consequence of humanism, of man’s pursuit of power and freedom (freedom in terms of autonomy from nature). what is binary, is the world of man.
{ language is reductive and frames all of human thought and experience.
we can’t help but think in binary terms }
in a way, all of the human experience is binary (and this is to suggest that it is also, in large part, vapid and banal) because human life operates under the framework of language and value. language’s(*7) basic function is to simplify the phenomena that one encounters in life by naming and labeling them. instead of saying “carbon-based cylindrical container that i use to hold water, in order to drink”, we just call the damned thing a cup. imagine thinking in terms of long-winded descriptions everytime you came across a ‘cup’. yea, it’d be a pain in the ass. but perhaps the next time you come across a ‘cup’ you see in it something different from the previous time, and this next time you add some more words to describe your ‘cup’– if you did this, your concept of ‘cup’ would expand each time. alas, time is money, and no one has the patience to engage with everyday objects in such a descriptively complex way; we no longer see the wonder or newness in things anymore.
words give us a false sense of familiarity with an object– familiarity mistaken for convenience– and this familiarity turns violent and banal. what happens over time is this object becomes identified with its label, and its value becomes fixed– a cup is what one drinks from. and that’s all a cup will ever be henceforth (with some inconsequential variations of course), a boring and banal cup. and we’re just talking about a cup. now apply this example to the word ‘woman’, or ‘God’ and you see what happens. to this day humans still have yet to break free from the linguistic conditioning that shapes and affects their thoughts and actions. no matter how much we can rationalize and debate the status of any given thing, the inertial pull of language certainly doesn’t do anything to help us move on from antiquated and oppressive notions of any given label.
words are used to label things, to identify them. words and categories go hand-in-hand. to name a thing, is to simultaneously name another thing that is not this thing, as ‘other’. and voila, you have the birth of ‘category’. like words, categories are simple, they allow us to abstract things from their context, and see them in a vacuum. for example, to see a mixed person and think, “is that person more black or more white?” is indicative of binary thinking. even if you thought of a mixed person not in terms of race but as a human, the label ‘human’ still carries a connotation that this person somehow exists in a sphere different and separate from animals and nature.
i’m not saying language doesn’t have its value; i’m saying that it only has value insofar as it alleviates the anxiety that complexity confronts us with. language helps us skirt the question of where one thing ends and another begins. it grants us reprieve from thinking in terms of interconnection. when a thing is named, you section off that thing from its context, and from other things that have other names. nomination is the fabricating of distinctions, the consequence of which is division and disconnection. that humans are adept at binary logic expresses their creativity and industriousness, but also their extreme anxiety.
{ lamenting division and discord }
unfortunately, binary logic can be found in most social movements and ideologies that seek justice and equality– for themselves (that’s humanism for ya). when they are founded on some common identity or organizing principle, this has the consequence of resulting in an us/them distinction. this is just the unfortunate and unavoidable consequence that comes with any territorialization; to carve out and claim one’s territory (or brand identity) is to simultaneously leave out those that fall outside these border lines. of course, this is not to say others won’t form territories of their own. this is just physics: for every action there is a reaction. not all bodies are the same, and because of this there will always be a multiplicity of varying beliefs that will always be at odds with each other. this isn’t a matter of right or wrong, it is a matter of degrees to which people identify with one thing/value over others. this is not to say that one cannot feel strongly about any given thing, but reducing one’s values down to an identity is the ground upon which the binary is founded. as i’ve published elsewhere– “when identity and values overlap this is fundamentalism.”
when people, ideologies, or institutions are no longer able to see similarities, make connections, or find common ground with others, the flow of discourse, empathy, or whathaveyou ceases, and an impasse occurs– when a situation is no longer fluid, nor capable of movement, mobility or negotiation, it has become binary. such is identity politics based on the concept of ‘race’, for example. a fictive construct which, by force of habit, has become manufactured and spun as truth. such binary lies force and trap you into a choice by coercively reducing a complex and fluid reality into an illusory fantasy that plays to the most base of human desires– identity.(*8)
[a quick note about fluidity] if a binary is something that is static/fixed, and not fluid, then it is dead. that which no longer flows, which no longer moves, which is no longer capable of activity, is dead. meaning, a binary is that which has no value to the living, to those who are active, and creating. if something is static, it is no longer moving, hence it does not experience the passage of time, it does not have a duration, it does not endure. if it is not moving, it has no moving parts; if there are no longer any cells dividing within an organism– it is dead. i repeat, it is dead– it has no capacity to be affected, because if something has the capacity to be affected, it can be moved, it can flow. to cut off this flow, to reduce anything to a fixed and absolute state is perhaps the definition of violence itself. it is to make a thing die, to end a thing’s capacity to be affected.
to be clear, there is nothing evil about or wrong with something that is described as ‘binary’. to think so would be to think in binary terms, to dismiss the complexity behind every binary expression.
{ mxdflz and exploring the non-binary }
when we refer to ‘binary’ here on mxdflz, we use it pejoratively. it’s a concept we lament and resist. we lament the binary because it induces– and is simultaneously amplified by– identity politics, which expresses the default state of human relations today. binary influence is found wherever there exists territorial divisions– oppositions and competition– based on dominant identity categories. these have their origin in the fundamentally structural distinction between self and other.(*9) it is a consequence of man’s disjunction from and displacement within nature.
so you won’t find any content here that you would find regurgitated ad nauseam everywhere else on the internet. you won’t find us jumping into the zombie fray and feeding into the never-ending binary frenzy of articles on race, sex and politics. and perhaps because of this, we won’t have many readers. but such readers aren’t a concern of ours. we simply hope to connect with those that are also tired of the binary bullshit. and rather than nihilistically raging against the machine, we hope to understand the trauma of dis-identifying and being displaced from this binary world; and from these complex and intersecting affects, create new ways of being.
so when we say we’re exploring the non-binary, essentially everything’s fair game because nothing is actually binary. despite this understanding, by no means are we randomly exploring just any story. our aim is to highlight the stories that express these themes. we’re exploring stories and concepts that have always been around but never expressed in a non-binary way. and such is art. art is non-binary because art always takes what is, and shows how what it could be, always already was– the actualization of potential. however, like i expressed in the above paragraph, we won’t engage in the binary rabble. enough already do so. and there’s still so much brave, new, and [mxd] stories out there to share that have yet to be explored.
to recap: a binary is reductive, divisive, and fixed. it expresses disconnection and opposition based on an identity, aided and abetted by language. but nothing is actually binary, since everything is complex, in a state of flux, and interconnected. nonetheless, humans can’t help but relate to their world in binary terms; identity and language condition and reinforce us to think in divisive and reductive terms.
( please contact us if you'd like to recommend other examples of binary in movies and television )
footnotes:
*1 for the sake of understanding, let’s repeat that in slightly different terms. a binary situation assumes an either/or scenario for which there are only two options. it is not fluid, it is a fixed scenario. one could also say it is an ‘established’ scenario where one’s decisions and actions are conditioned by the ‘establishment’ (low-hanging fruit example here would be 2-party politics). ‘the system’ is binary. and systemic injustices are born of and perpetuated by binary logic. to be or not to be. it is or it isn’t. you’re one of us, or you’re one of them. a binary is all-encompassing insofar as it includes everyone in its categorizing schemes of either/or. but this does not mean it is inclusive. it is exclusive, and by virtue of its structure, it necessarily marginalizes whatever does not fit into the two dominant and ‘opposing’ poles of power. it is totalizing, subjecting everything relative to these dominant binary poles of power. such is totalitarianism.
*2 you might come across ‘binary system’ here and there but this is somewhat of an oxymoron since a system by definition is complex. a system which consists of two parts could be described as binary, but one could then argue that this thing in question is not actually a system.
*3 causality is reductive of this complexity. there’s no clear definite or fixed cause for any given effect. ‘cause and effect’ is a reductive concept. for every effect, there isn’t just one cause; rather, there’s a complex web of forces and affects that inform and produce this effect.
*4 and even then, such a reduction would only be an abstraction. zero sum game situations are policed and enforced by oppressive regimes. labels and concepts whose meanings have become fixed (indexed to an organizing principle) are a result of both structural policing and self-surveillance. obviously, all this gets really complicated and complex.
*5 too often what advertises itself as 'new' or 'different' is merely a mirrored image of what came before. take for example the sexual revolution of 60s. minutes later, the 'golden age of porn' is born. there's always this back and forth between code and recodification, but more on this for another time. the point to this aside is that it's extremely difficult for anything or anyone to break free from binary influences. what is considered 'new' or 'countercultural' within a binary system is anything but.
*6 there’s a visual/spatial and ocularcentric element to all this– seeing things at a distance exacerbates the perception that things are separate. the comparison of physical forms is merely judging books by their covers. language certainly doesn’t help in this regard, as it reinforces the separation of things via nomination.
*7 logic-based language. as opposed to affective language that is non-linear, unspoken, and unseen; it is felt.
*8 this is different from individuality, or uniqueness. identity is not unique, it is always relative to a governing group.
*9 more precisely, between mind and body. the mind’s ineptitude at understanding the affects of the body.