ABSTRACT
Binaries-indeed, all oppositions-reproduce material class divisions on various levels of social life. Since structures of owning are fundamental to the accumulation of capital, binaries cannot be eliminated in actual contemporary social relations without transforming the relations of capital and labor. Consequently cultural discourses deploy a range of interpretive strategies articulating the quasi-concept différance and its network of tropes, such as hybridity, heterogeneity, singularity, in-between-ness, etc. (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy), in order to represent binaries as effects of a metaphysics of Truth, which is assumed to be the working of a will to power (Nietzsche, The Will to Power). The class origins of binaries are thus obscured through either discourses of power relations (Foucault, History of Sexuality I, 90-102) or a textual displacement, such as “deconstruction,” by which the material is converted into the cultural and the cultural itself is written as a knot of nomadic signs whose meanings are always in play. Binaries, we argue, are the outcome of the rise of private property, and the discourses of metaphysics are only one of many cultural vocabularies that have been used in class societies to either naturalize binaries (as in Descartes’s Meditations-especially the “sixth meditation”) or to make them culturally suspect (as in Derrida’s Of Grammatology and his Of Hospitality). In order to understand the interpretive logic by which binaries are translated from a material structure into a writing effect through the machinery of différance, we need to examine the working of this machinery.
