Two sides to every story..

STRUCTURALISM AND BINARY OPPOSITIONS

‘Structuralism’s enterprise is to discover how people make sense of the world, not what the world is…’ according to John Fiske..

It is basically saying that there is no right way of seeing the world and our cultural backgrounds are what influences are understanding of the world

Binary Oppositions- we understand things through 'opposites' so knowing what it isn't. Therefore we know 'hot' IS NOT 'cold' and vice-versa..

BUT..what's hot for one person may be cold for another, this means that STRUCTURALISM creates categories of binary positions which cannot be moved.

HAPPY is NOT SAD

GOOD is NOT BAD

Binary oppositions are very common in movies for example human and non human examples in a movie such as 'Rise of the planet of the Apes' which is comparisons with apes or 'The Terminator' which is a type of robot or cyborg.

We were shown examples, one of which was Frankenstien where examples of good and evil where mentioned, and many other oppositions

JACQUES DERRIDA explained how the categories do not reflect peoples experiences and meanings which is more complicated..

He explaines how categories of binary oppositions are IDEOLOGICAL, so one side has been traditionally seen as 'better' than the other. This can be seen in small pr large scale, politically, mythologically and in story telling terms such as 'Batman' being the good guy saving gotham city and 'The joker' being the bad guy who is trying to kill batman.. As well as this, there is a divide between life and death (zombies, ghosts, vampires) and inevitably human and non human.

An example of binary oppositions is shown in photographs such as ones done by Fay Godwin, a landscape photographer, who captures images that show the contrast between dark/light as well as land/sky

Finally..the last sort of binary position is between 'self' and 'other' which Jacques Lacan tells us all about. He discovered the 'mirror stage' which is where a child realises the difference between 'self' and 'other' which happens during 6-18months (first sign of conciousness)