Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [69]
First, here is a quick reprise on the benefits and dangers of binary thinking. When you run into a binary opposition in your thinking, it is like a fork in the road, a place where two paths going in different directions present themselves and you pause to choose the direction you will take. Binary oppositions are sites of uncertainty, places where there is struggle among various points of view. As such, binaries are the breeding ground of ideas. And, as we suggested in our discussion of The Method in Chapter 2, when you determine the organizing contrast in whatever you are analyzing, you have found the structural beam that gives conceptual shape to a piece.
If you leap too quickly to a binary, however, one that is too general or inaccurate, you can get stuck in oversimplification, in rigidly dichotomized points of view. At that point, you are in the grasp of a reductive habit of mind called either/or thinking.
The solution is to remember that, when you find a binary opposition in an essay, film, political campaign, or anything else, you have located the argument that the film, essay, or campaign is having with itself, the place where something is at issue. Your next step is to immediately begin to ask questions about and complicate the binary. To “complicate” a binary is to discover evidence that unsettles it and to formulate alternatively worded binaries that more accurately describe what is at issue in the evidence.
Step 1: Locate a range of opposing categories (binaries). Finding binaries will help you find the questions around which almost anything is organized. Use The Method to help you uncover the binary oppositions in your subject matter that might function as organizing contrasts.
Step 2: Define and analyze the key terms. By analyzing the terms of most binaries, you should come to question them and ultimately arrive at a more complex and qualified position.
Step 3: Question the accuracy of the binary and rephrase the terms. Think of the binary as a starting point—a kind of deliberate overgeneralization—that allows you to set up positions you can then test in order to refine.
Step 4: Substitute “to what extent?” for “either/or.” The best strategy in using binaries productively is usually to locate arguments on both sides of the either/or choice that the binary poses and then choose a position somewhere between the two extremes. Once you have arrived at what you consider the most accurate phrasing of the binary, you can rephrase the original either/or question in the more qualified terms that asking “To what extent?” allows. Making this move does not release you from the responsibility of taking a stand and arguing for it.
Discussion Thinking is not simply linear and progressive, moving from point A to point B to point C like stops on a train. Careful thinkers are always retracing their steps, questioning their first—and second—impressions, assuming that they’ve missed something. All good thinking is recursive; that is, it repeatedly goes over the same ground, rethinking connections. And that’s why reformulating binaries is an essential analytical move.
As a general rule, analysis favors live questions over inert answers. It thrives where something remains to be resolved, not where things are already pretty much nailed down and don’t leave much space for further thinking.
Reformulating binaries will cause you to do one or more of the following:
Discover that you have not named the binary adequately and that another formulation of the opposition would be more accurate.
Weigh one side of your binary more heavily than the other, rather than seeing the issue as all or nothing.
Discover that the two terms of your binary are not really so separate and opposed after all but are actually parts