Archetypes and Binary opposition

In his books Jung takes the reader on a journey through nations, religions and eras whilst all the time comparing and contrasting symbolic representations that have been highly valued by societies. He suggests that much cultural content should be followed back to its earliest primordial beginnings: the resulting archetypal roots include ‘the shadow’ (a moral problem, revealing the darker side of personality); the ‘anima’ (the inner, and possibly the most repressed, face of man which is best represented by femininity); the ‘animus’ (the inner, and possibly the most repressed, face of woman which is best represented by masculinity). There are other archetypes – such as ‘the persona’, ‘the old wise man’, ‘mother’, and ‘trickster’, but from the very mention of these words you can see the ambition to classify images for all people in all societies. To illustrate, if we return to the anima / animus, Jung simply states: ‘A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very masculine man has a feminine soul’.

So, archetype is an underlying process which determines the form of imagery and symbolism although not necessarily its content. Archetypes are to be inferred from a vast range of symbols and images which appear to have some common property, or shared characteristics, which allow them to be traced back to simpler yet stronger signs. As such, an archetypal image possesses powerful appeal, is highly motivated, and may transcend cultural and historical boundaries.

The problem with the concept of archetype is that it deals in such generalities that a close definition according to content is impossible: the content is too varied to be scientifically pinned down. Instead, and as emphasized by Storr, archetypes manifest themselves through an ability to organize images and ideas at an unconscious level which might be occasionally detected at a later date. Jung’s own favourite analogy was with the axial system of crystal: ions and molecules aggregate according to a given system, but the resulting crystalline masses can be of different sizes and shapes – all that remains constant is the geometric proportions of each crystalline cell. Jung’s search for underlying patterns within symbolic worlds thus complements a science of signs, in as much as he attempts to identify large-scale paradigms for cultural imagery.

It is therefore somewhat ironic that so little reference is made to Saussure or semiology in Jung’s writing – or that later structuralist and semiotic theorists have not recognized Jung’s interpretations. This may be because of certain psychodynamic assumptions which determine much Jungian literature: for example, that there may be a collective of inherited unconscious for various social groups, that this might imply a genetic blueprint for consciousness and unconsciousness (especially when Jung discusses the concept of race, as noted by Billig). At times discussions of archetypes become positively speculative as with the possibility of an underlying form which determines a link between an imagined and real event – for example, dreaming about a long-forgotten friend and then actually hearing about that person soon afterwards. For Jung this is meaningful coincidence; where the simultaneous occurrence of symbols within the lives of separate individuals (notwithstanding the intervention of mass communication) underlines the importance of shared coincidence associated with a collective unconscious. This type of argument borders on a world of spirituality and psychic phenomena: in so doing, Jung’s work has often been marginalized within the discipline of psychology.

We might also be suspicious of such an ambitious project which examines signifier / signified relations in so many cultures and eras: is it possible to achieve this when historical evidence can be so patchy and when such different languages, religions and art forms have to be familiarized? Even so, analysis of ‘clustered’ images has been aided by the archetype concept, which emphasizes a world of symbolism that goes way beyond the popular imagery of television screens or newspaper advertisements, and that extends to dream worlds and memories.

 

In its turn Binary opposition is an analytic category from structuralism, used to show how meanings can be generated out of two-term systems. Basic propositions are as follows:

1) Meaning is generated by opposition This is a tenet of Saussurian linguistics, which holds that signsor words mean what they do only in opposition to others – their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not. The binary opposition is the most extreme form of significant difference possible. In a binary system, there are only two signs or words. Thus, in the opposition LAND: SEA the terms are mutually exclusive, and yet together they form a complete system – the earth’s surface. Similarly, the opposition CHILD: ADULT is a binary system. The terms are mutually exclusive, but taken together they include everyone on earth (everyone can be understood as either child or adult). Of course, everyone can be understood by means of other binaries as well, as for instance in the binary US: THEM – everyone is either in or not in ‘our nation’. Such binaries are a feature of culture not nature; they are products of signifying systems, and function to structure our perceptions of the natural and social world into order and meaning. You may find binaries underlying the stories of newspaper and television news, where they separate out, for example, the parties involved in a conflict or dispute, and render them into meaningful oppositions.

2) Ambiguities are produced by binary logic and are an offence to it. Consider the binaries mentioned so far: LAND: SEA CHILD: ADULT US: THEM. These stark oppositions actively suppress ambiguities or overlaps between the opposed categories. In between land and sea is an ambiguous category, the beach – sometimes land, sometimes sea. It is simultaneously both one and the other and neither one nor the other. Similarly, in between child and adult there is another ambiguous category: youth. And in between us and them there are deviants, dissidents, and so on. The area of overlap shown in the diagram is, according to binary logic, impossible. It is literally a scandalous category that ought not to exist. In anthropological terms, the ambiguous boundary between two recognized categories is where taboo can be expected. That is, any activity or state that does not fit the binary opposition will be subjected to repression or ritual. For example, as the anthropologist Edmund Leach suggests, the married and single states are binarily opposed. They are normal, time-bound, central to experience and secular. But the transition from one state to the other (getting married/divorced) is a rite of passage between categories. It is abnormal, out of time (the ‘moment of a lifetime’), at the edge of experience and, in anthropological terms, sacred. The structural ambiguity of youth is one reason why it is treated in the media as a scandalous category – it too is a rite of passage and is subjected to both repression and ritual.

News often structures the world into binarily opposed categories (US: THEM). But it then faces the problem of dealing with people and events that don’t fit neatly into the categories. The structural ambiguity of home-grown oppositional groups and people offends the consensual category of ‘US’, but cannot always be identified with foreigners or ‘THEM’. In such cases, they are often represented as folk-devils, or as sick, deviant or mad – they are tabooed.

3) Binary oppositions are structurally related to one another Binaries function to order meanings, and you may find transformations of one underlying binary running through a story. For instance, the binary MASCULINITY: FEMININITY may be transformed within a story into a number of other terms:

MASCULINITY: FEMININITY

OUTDOORS: INDOORS

PUBLIC: PRIVATE

SOCIAL: PERSONAL

PRODUCTION: CONSUMPTION

MEN: WOMEN

First, masculinity and femininity are proposed as opposites, mutually exclusive. This immediately constructs an ambiguous or ‘scandalous’ category of overlap that will be tabooed. Then, the binaries can be read downwards as well as across, which proposes, for instance, that men are to women as production is to consumption, or MEN: WOMEN:: PRODUCTION: CONSUMPTION. Each of the terms on one side is invested with the qualities of the others on that side. As you can see, this feature of binaries is highly productive of ideologicalmeanings – there’s nothing natural about them, but the logic of the binary is hard to escape.

The ideological productivity of binaries is further enhanced by the assignation of positive-negative values to opposed terms. Thus, in an industrial dispute in the National Health Service in 1979 the television news structured the parties to the dispute into binaries which were assigned positive and negative values.