© 2019 Steve Campsall

STAGE THREE: HIERARCHY OF VALUES
The recognition of why we tend to judge one half of each binary pair more positively can be attributed to the theorist, Jacques Derrida.

• Derrida noticed that one half of each binary pair is somehow culturally marked as being more 'positive' while its unmarked opposite is viewed less positively or even negatively.
   
• It seems it is natural (or is it cultural...?) to judge one thing's meaning against another 'connected' thing's meaning and to place the meanings within some kind of 'hierarchy of value'.
   
• Think of the following pairs and see if you have any sense of one half of the binary pair being more highly valued than the other in our society: loneliness/companionship; rich/poor; man/woman; West/East; normal/abnormal.
   
• This ‘privileging’ of one half of each binary pair is said to work through a system of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. An example is to consider the important ‘male/female’ binary pair. Freudian psychoanalytical theory (named after the early 20th. century psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud) proposed that the idea ‘man’ was historically – and stereotypically – ‘marked’ by a positive ‘presence’, whereas the idea, ‘woman’ has been ‘marked’ by a negative ‘absence’.
   
• If you consider a few labels or associations that have, at various times, been stereotypically applied to men and women, you will begin to see how this works. Which label or association would you say is positively marked, and which not?
   
• Why do you think it is the male side that seems to attract so many "positively marked" descriptions?

strong		weak
calm		moody
dominant		submissive
tough		gentle
active		passive
logical		emotional
mind		body
aggressive		peaceful

It's very important not to see these labels as real; as with all meaning, they can exist only as cultural ideas, i.e. as ideologies. They can certainly be said to represent reality but such labels can never be more than a version of reality. This is why they are ideological - they act to reinforce judgmental and hierarchical ways of thinking that might well seem entirely natural, but which are anything but. You can perhaps now begin to see how binary pairs can be extraordinarily powerful in reinforcing and maintaining a society's ways of thinking.

• An interesting question to ask of a binary pair is who in society ultimately benefits from people 'thinking that way'?
   
• Another question is to ask who in society works to reinforce such binaries and why?
   

In the man/woman binaries above, who has historically benefited from these 'culturally marked' associations? If you look at many media images, do you think that such binaries are still at work to help shape and create meaning?

• Perhaps you can begin to see how ideologically important binary opposites can be.