This lecture was a bit harder to understand than previous lectures. I started to understand the meaning to structuralism. There is no single way of understanding the world we live in, as there are so many ways and theories that help us understand it. We get our understanding of the world based on our cultural background (the way we were brought up by our parents and the things we watch on TV etc.)
People understand things by constructing the meanings from the opposites. By this I mean you can know something by knowing what it is not. For example you know what "good" is because you know what "bad" is.
Binary oppositions are opposites put into categories to help us understand the world. For example:
Good (god) - Evil (devil)
Happy - Sad
Human - Non-Human
Day - Night
The in-between is determined by our cultural differences. By this i mean no one is completely good or evil and neither completely happy nor sad. The best way to understand this is via imagining these categories as a scale.
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| The Terminator (Cyborg) |
In-between the categories there could be more defined categories for instance in-between day and night could be "sunset"/"sunrise". Another example could be in-between human and non-human could be "cyborg".
In a way we can relate to this as cyborg can be defined as an extension to the human body. Not necessarily a machine that looks and acts like a human like "The Terminator". By this i mean the clothes we wear are an extension to us as well as: glasses to help us see, watches help us tell the time and if you have been in an accident you might need to have a metal plate fitted or temporarily require the use of crutches. If people were completely human then they would likely be arrested for being indecent.
The point I'm making with the cyborg example is that; the best way to understand structuralism when it comes to binary oppositions is to use the categories as a scale and use the middle of the scale to get a better understanding of things.
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