Human beings seem bound and determined, hard wired even, to divide up the world into two kinds of people: male/female, white/people of color, rich/poor, believers/atheists, righty/lefty, northern/southern, straight/gay. The list goes on and on. What every single pair on this list has in common, save for the possible exception of believers/atheists, who seem to have settled into a determined stalemate (though each has held the upper hand at various points in history), is that each is an example of the binary code that informs reality in very much the same way that zero and one structure a computer program. Our master code: winners/losers.
Postmodernism seems more than anything a loosely organized but consistent effort to overcome the division of our world into two kinds of people, all the assorted versions of winner/loser, by shattering each of the pairs into a million little pieces. I can still remember the time my sister, Pailin, a student in one of postmodernism’s academic footholds, informed me that there were not two genders, but (and I making the number up because I can’t remember it exactly, but you’ll get the point) sixteen. Because of sibling rivalry I pretended that this was the silliest thing I’d ever heard, when in fact, I too being a product of postmodernism, it rang so true as to be painfully obvious. Obvious enough, anyway, that I was soon incorporating it into my worldview, e.g. the best part of every astrology book is when it tells you how good of a romantic pair various signs such as Scorpio and Pisces are, so, even if it failed to undo masculine domination, the profusion of genders at least held out the prospect of making dating a lot more interesting. Interesting, that is, if like me you find the advice on Chinese restaurant placemats for Tigers to avoid romantic entanglements with Monkeys simultaneously mysterious and authoritative.
And just last year I also pretended to balk at the news that A had been added to LGBTQI, making it LGBTQIA, in acknowledgment of asexuality as another healthy, normal niche on the sexuality spectrum. Never one to pass up the opportunity to play the role of intellectual contrarian (see this entire blog), I outwardly harrumphed that this was yet another case of what Terry Eagleton has described (and I paraphrase Eagleton through the fog of memory) as the American fantasy that there are no disabilities, just differences, which, more to the point, is just a way of pretending away suffering. I think I actually just said that asexuality was a disorder, which is less pretentious, but amounts to the same thing. But even as I outwardly sat in judgment of asexuality in the very same way that the DSM-III once coded homosexuality as a mental illness, i.e. even as I obscured prejudice with false authority (reading the history of the DSM is to understand that it was quite literally made up, and, what’s worse, made up by committees), every postmodern bone in my body inwardly rejoiced that now there were nearly half as many sexualities as there were genders, which, factoring in both the eastern and western zodiac signs in addition to the myriad genders and sexualities, would make for a dating manual even longer than the DSM-5.
Postmodernism is not without its victories. The LGBTQIA movement’s success in promoting same-sex marriage rights may be its signal accomplishment. But if we grant that the main point of postmodernism has been to smash up the master binary code of winner/loser into a million little pieces, then postmodernism has been, by and large, a failure. The profusion of letters in LGBTQIA notwithstanding, almost all of us, including those of us supposedly inoculated against the practice by postmodern academe, go around dividing the world up into binary opposites all the time, and inevitably these pairs end up following the master code. Perhaps it’s not even that postmodernism has failed in shattering the code, but that we have an uncanny knack, if you will, for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In other words, it’s impossible for us not to see the world in pairs of opposites. You can shatter straight/gay into LGBTQIAS (the S standing for straight, if I can be permitted the liberty of tacking it on as just another of the smashed up pieces of the straight/gay pairing), but for each letter we will inevitably divide that up into a binary pair, e.g. top/bottom, butch/femme, etc. Binary pairs may just be the cost of doing business. Postmodernism’s failure, then, in as much as it has attempted to undo domination by way of fracturing binary pairs, was inevitable. With binary opposites as our given, the only remaining opening for transformation is by way of rewriting, or at least erasing, the master code.
If you were paying any attention to the internet last week, you know about The Dress. But just in case you missed it, The Dress is a really existing dress that appears to some to be blue and black, while to others it appears to be white and gold. It has nothing to do with camera angles or lighting; as verified by my wife, Jen, in a group of people looking at the dress together on the same computer screen, roughly half saw it as blue and black while the other half saw it as white and gold. This was going on all over the planet last week.
So, there really are two kinds of people in the world. The white/gold perceivers and the blue/blacks. What’s the difference between them? There is no difference (excepting the obscure neurological triggers that explain the differing perceptions- the dress, apparently, is blue/black in “real life”), which is the best difference of all. This particular meaningless difference is stupefying and absurd in how it undermines everything we think we know about reality. This makes it precisely the kind of meaningless difference that can radically destabilize the content of everything we think we know about reality, which is that we think it consists entirely of winners and losers. Because while it may just be too hard to accept the fact that, using myself as an example, I happen to be a straight, white, male, Christian, right handed northerner entirely due to an accident of birth (and since I landed in the catbird seat on the “winning” side of each of those halves of binary pairs it certainly is ego-reinforcing to think that they somehow mark the quality of my character, and therefore all the harder to recognize them for the accidents of birth that they truly are), only a complete nincompoop would argue that perceiving The Dress as white and gold marks him as superior to those who see it as blue and black. (If the blue/blacks attempt to persuade the white/golds that they (the blue/blacks) are superior because they are seeing the “real” color, the white/golds can engage in the late, great Dean Smith’s Four Corner Offense and take the air out of the ball by asking the blue/blacks to adequately define what they mean by “reality,” which question three thousand years of western philosophy has failed to persuasively answer.)
The hope held out by The Dress, then, is twofold. First, in the meaningless difference found in The Dress we will come to recognize that binary pairs don’t necessarily contain winners and losers, and going one gigantic step further, may in fact never contain what we think of as winners and losers. There may, remembering Eagleton, be more suffering on one particular side of a binary pair, e.g. the disabled side of the able bodied/disabled pairing, but I would argue that the first rule of sanity holds that another person’s suffering is not, and can never be, a win for me. (If being a Christian has any meaning for me, it’s almost only exactly that rule. And that’s more than enough, a Grace of God that’s as dependable as the sunrise.) Second, we will begin to recognize how arbitrary our assignment to either side of a binary pair is, and find our attachment to that assignment ridiculous in a way that is funny enough to laugh the whole thing off. If I could just as easily have seen the The Dress as blue/black, couldn’t I just as easily have been a southern, gay, Zoroastrian, left handed, female of color? It is only when I perceive the obvious humor in the absurdity of these arrangements that existence becomes, like the NBA in the 1980’s, Fantastic!
Now, I know as well as you do that it will take a lot more than The Dress to erase the Master Code. (In the final estimation, I side with erasing, rather than rewriting the Master Code, as the world has had quite enough already of its various masters.) But The Dress is important not because it will accomplish the end of domination in one fell swoop, but because it is itself a code that, once cracked, points us in exactly the right direction. Einstein famously said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” In response, I would suggest that God is constantly flipping coins, randomly assigning us to one side or another of the binary pairs the entire universe seems to be made from. This is clearly a ridiculous way to run a universe, meaning either that we’ve been let in on the joke, or the joke’s on us. Only the latter creates a universe full of losers, and, ipso facto, winners. We could, then, do much worse than heed Han Solo’s advice when he says to Chewbacca, in a moment of pique, “Laugh it up, fuzzball.” Because, who knows, we could just as easily have been born wookies.
