What after Rejecting the Binaries?

As spaces expand under debinarised imaginations, finding the ground beneath will become all the more difficult

- Ajay Gudavarthy

"BINARIES of various kinds, whether ideological between the Left and the Right, or gender between men and women, of nation between citizen and subject, or psychology between sane and insane or morality between good and evil are known to be problematic. Binaries are problematic because they exclude, and therefore the growing demand to move away from binaries into a deconstructive mode that wishes to introduce to social processes constitutive fluidity and instability. Deconstructive imagination is against fixity and opens to self-contradictory and liminal existence of life. Nothing is black or white, almost everything is grey.

In making ideas and identities, practices and imaginaries unstable, what is sought is a possibility of non-exclusion through radical flux. French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that binary is a mode in which power operates under modernity. He therefore once famously said: "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." This is best left to the bureaucrats to keep papers in order and fix identities in law and policy.