Oppositional Thinking Research Articles

Le Clézio's "Monster Island:" The Derridean "Monstrosity of the Unrecognizable"

Abstract: This essay delves into monster theory and Derrida's late environmental philosophy in order to probe the philosophical, linguistic, and ethical implications of the metaphor of other-than-human monstrosity in Le Clézio's Voyages de l'autre côté . In this early narrative, the symbolism of the "monster island" deconstructs the oppositional thinking undergirding our representations of the world and our place in it. Overcoming his initial fright when confronted with an entity that is unrepresentable within our dichotomous thought systems, the unnamed old sailor begins to communicate with this "wholly other" which he realizes is a "fellow" semiotic, sentient being. This epiphany leads to a radical biocentric paradigm shift resulting in the creation of a new cognitive structure that is more capable of understanding the cosmos and our relationship to it in non-dualistic terms.

Power dynamics in dance movement therapy

ABSTRACT This article investigates power dynamics in dance movement therapy (DMT), potential blind spots layered into the discourse about power in the profession, and underexplored aspects of the manifestation of power in the therapeutic setting. The research highlights a tendency in the field of DMT towards oppositional thinking and suggests the necessity to hold space for a non-binary approach to the matter. The findings of this study suggests that if dance movement therapists work to deepen their awareness of the implications of their own socio-cultural backgrounds and theoretical frameworks on their embodied approaches to the therapeutic and human relationship with their patients, they will be better able to practise embodied ethical decision-making in an ever more globalised world.

Autoethnographic reflexion: Chicana feminist border/transformative pedagogies and human rights education

ABSTRACT Through the methodologies of critical reflexión and autoethnography, the author illustrates how border/transformative pedagogies and Anzaldúa’s concepts of nos/otras and new tribalism proved useful in efforts to dismantle color- and colonial-blind ideologies, abstract liberalism, and binary and oppositional thinking among members of a graduate seminar in social justice and human rights. Investments in these discourses and unquestioned philosophical commitments to them limited seminars members’ ability to openly talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism. Applying the principles of border/transformative pedagogies, nos/otras, and new tribalism required hard work, in-depth reflexión, and deep listening to each other. As a result of this praxis, some members of the seminar were able to name their philosophical and political positions to work across what seemed to be insurmountable borders. In doing so, seminar members were able to begin to build bridges among multiple intersectional identities and philosophical positions. The author argues that these pedagogical practices are beneficial for human rights education in particular and educational practices in general.

A Relational Marxist Critique of Posthumanism in Archaeology

In archaeology, a Posthumanism has arisen from the ashes of post-modernism and declared that Marxism is dead in archaeology. Archaeological advocates of the posthumanist theory of Symmetrical Archaeology cherry-pick ideas to dismiss Marxism out of hand without considering the depth and nuances of different Marxist theories. They misrepresent the relational dialectic as oppositional thinking and ignore the fundamental dualism of their own polemic. They equate humans and things by arguing that they share a common ontology. A relational Marxism resolves the dualistic nature of their polemic and shows that things, animals and people may be studied relationally while still recognizing ontological differences. Marxism lives.

Presence of Meaning Mediates the Relationship Between Meaning Search and Outcome: A Cross-Cultural Study

Search for meaning (SFM) is associated with many well-being measures. The mechanism behind remains unclear. This study explores presence of meaning (POM) as a mediator to explain the association. While dialectical thinking in Eastern cultures values both process and outcome, oppositional thinking in Western cultures makes the two opposing. Since dialectical thinking increases with age, we hypothesize that with increased age, SFM is associated with POM more positively (less negatively). This heightened POM results in better well-being. We surveyed 2014 participants (aged 18-96, Mage= 55.6) in Eastern cultures: Hong Kong and Taiwan; Western cultures: Germany, United States and the Czech Republic. In Eastern cultures, SFM was positively associated with POM and life satisfaction. POM partially mediated the relationship between SFM and life satisfaction (b=0.328, p<.001). With age, SFM was associated more positively with POM and life satisfaction (b=0.009, p<.001). While POM partially mediated the relationship in younger adults (b=0.162, p<.001), full mediation was found in older adults (b=0.451, p<.001). In Western cultures, SFM was negatively associated with POM and life satisfaction. POM partially mediated the relationship between SFM and life satisfaction (b=-0.120, p<.001). With age, the negative association of SFM with POM and life satisfaction was attenuated (b=0.002, p<.001). These finding suggested that SFM becomes more beneficial to older adults across culture via establishing POM. Identifying factors that facilitate the process of achieving meaning through searching is therefore important.

“It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

Jung’s Fantasies of Africa and Africa’s Healing of Analytical Psychology

Abstract Jung’s dreams about Africa reveal the Whiteness and colonialist assumptions typical of the twentieth century educated European. Jung’s visits to Africa and New Mexico, and his dreams are critically discussed, showing how, even decades later, Jung failed to use his own theory of dreaming with regard to his own dreams. The compensatory function of his dreams was never effected, and his transference fantasies of Africa and blackness were reinforced rather than analyzed. There were unfortunate consequences for the development of his thinking and his understanding of the individuation process, since his oppositional thinking in terms of White and Black remained as a concrete transference fantasy as well as a colonialist attitude towards his internal world. The Nguni term ubuntu, will be used to reimagine individuation in more explicitly ethical and socially embedded ways. With regard to the development of consciousness, a distinction is developed between the withdrawal of projections and as a helpful therapeutic issue and as an epistemological approach to the place of meaning. If Jung’s dreams of Africa had managed to “heal” him, Jungian psychology would look rather like it does today, because the way out of Jung’s Colonialism is to be found in Jung’s life and work, especially in his alchemical studies.

A Verifiable Ontology Transcending the Opposition between Materialism and Idealism

In terms of status and role, ontology as the theory about noumenon is the root and core of all other philosophical branches. However, materialism and idealism have been debated for thousands of years and are still undecided. Why is that? Is there a verifiable ontology? This paper demonstrated four aspects of why materialism and idealism are incompatible at the ontological level. And then came up with a verifiable ontology. Neither science nor philosophy nor religion can do anything about some ultimate issues, why? There are three reasons here. First, people have not yet recognized and broken through the inherent binary oppositional thinking habits and cognitive patterns. So the second, they have not yet known that both cognitive subjects and cognitive objects come from their own unique noumena. And third, they have not yet understood the causality among the noumenon, phenomenon, and function. All in all, the root cause is that everyone attaches to oneself while doesn't know oneself at all. Ordinary people do not know that each of them has eight consciousnesses, and do not know how they work together. People have not yet recognized two important facts — first, each of sentient beings comes from one's own unique eighth consciousness; second, each of sentient beings never lives outside one's own unique eighth consciousness. In fact, as long as finding out and verified our own noumena, and truly understanding the relationship of the noumenon, phenomenon, and function, it is easy to understand most of the puzzles in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Analysis of Key Issues on Man-Control to System-Control Leap in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving is recognized as a global development direction and a major opportunity. The function and use of the vehicle has changed profoundly. The vehicle is gradually transformed from a simple transportation tool to a smart mobile space. The ultimate goal of autonomous driving is to achieve driverless driving. In the course of its development, man-control will gradually turn into to system-control. In other words, the transition from level 3 (L3) to level 4 (L4) is a fundamental leap. At present, the specific path to achieve this leap is not yet clear. Different companies have different and even opposite thinking and choices. In this study, the grading standard for autonomous driving was clearly explained, and the technical route selection of the company was analysed. Based on the analysis, the requirements of sensing, decision making, execution between the L3 and L4 were compared. Moreover, the key technical difficulties of L3 to L4 were clarified. In the end, suggestions on the commercialization of autonomous driving were given.

Epistemic justice through ontological reclamation in pedagogy: Detailing mutual (in)fallibility using inseparable categories

Impulsive uses of collective memory to rally support for decolonised education have been a characteristic of the student movement, establishing clear divisions through binary oppositional thinking. Analysing the binaries that constitute the decolonial turn, I highlight misconceptions of decoloniality which facilitate the erasure of oppositional voices in decolonisation. Misconceptions of decoloniality manifest as the dismissal of all “non-African” knowledge as colonial. I subsequently caution the perverted inversions of power in knowledge production in Higher Education South Africa and interrogate positions which I perceive as recreating fundamentalisms in the quest for decolonised education. Using a decolonial critique that frames education as emancipatory, I argue for the impossibility of separable categories. I conclude by raising two questions, which require further investigation: what is the role of Higher Education in South Africa today, and does decolonial thinking in praxis displace assumptions that continue to perpetuate and maintain coloniality in the South African academe?

Being and Nothingness versus Bergson’s Striving Being

Abstract Bergson imputes the generation of false problems in philosophy to the idea of nothingness and negative concepts. Yet, all his books are fraught with oppositional thinking, such as the oppositions between space and time, quantity and quality, life and matter. Understandably, this apparent discrepancy has led a philosopher like Merleau-Ponty to speak of inconsistency, while Jankélévitch and others counter the charge of inconsistency by arguing that Bergsonism embraces operational opposition as opposed to substantial opposition. This article disagrees with both interpretations and proposes a solution based on the need to distinguish between the level of intuitive vision of the unity of nature and the level of representative analysis whose defining feature is that it operates by means of opposing concepts. The progression from representation to intuition transcends opposition and unites life and matter in the vision of a self-surpassing effort or élan.

Escaping oppositional thinking in the teaching of pleasure and danger in sexuality education

ABSTRACTSexuality education and preventative sexual abuse education are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper extends the argument against this separation by highlighting flaws in the logic that manifests this separation. Diffracting critical sexuality education theory with the monist logic of new materialism, I rethink sexuality as an array of intra-acting1 bodies that are always in a process of becoming anew. Realising the belonging together of dualist terms [Bergson, Henri. 1896 [1911]. Matter and Memory. Translated and edited by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.] and how the reductive structure of dualist logic affirms an original ‘One’, I argue that the feminist push for pleasure-based, sex-positive education affirms sex-negative attitudes. Embracing Barad's [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.] notion of ethics as inescapable entanglement woven through all matter(ing), I suggest that rather than any particular ‘aspect’ of sexuality being emphasised in sexuality education it would be more useful to centre classroom discussions on ethics, as inescapable entanglement.

The Magic of the Ouroboros: Reflections on Class Struggle on the Home Front

Although popular fictions are often separated from scholarly analyses, both discourses frame our understanding of the economics of household labor. This essay examines the ability of Class Struggle on the Home Front not only to bridge such arbitrary divisions but also to free the economic imagination in ways that allows us to reclaim the importance of household labor. In particular, this essay focuses on three interrelated contributions of the volume: the inclusion of class in narratives about work-family balance, the amplification of other scholars' work on these concerns in ways that push the conversation in new and imaginative directions, and the problematizing of oppositional thinking that privileges the masculine over the feminine in both literal and metaphorical ways.

In the Name of the Nothing, from Heidegger to Said: A Spanos Itinerary

This essay is a genealogical appreciation of the theoretical legacy of the work of William Spanos as it has evolved from an early and ongoing commitment to the “de-structive hermeneutics” of Martin Heidegger toward Edward Said’s exilic politics of a contrapuntal secular humanism. The essay argues that Spanos is one of those rare critics who have found a way to align the generosity of ontological thinking with the polemical intensity of political critique. Moving subtly between a poststructuralist epistemological critique of humanism and a robust political-secular advocacy of humanism, Spanos’s long career of distinguished work continues to vivify the human condition in the name of the Heideggerian “nothing.” The uniqueness of the Spanos legacy is its idiosyncratic originality: for example, Spanos’s brand of poststructuralism is not compatible with what has come to be known as poststructuralism, just as Spanosian postmodernism is at odds with canonical versions of the postmodern. During times of theoretical apathy and indifference, what sets apart Spanos’s legacy is its underlying ethics of care, and its indefatigable passion for resistance and oppositional thinking.

Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions by Gillian Woods (review)

Gillian Woods. Unreformed Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 239. $110.00. The title of Gillian Woods's impressive new book, Unreformed Fictions, contains its central argument compressed form. Woods uses the word to describe the seemingly phrases, motifs, Latin tags, story lines, objects, and visual images that percolate through both early modern English culture and plays. This apparently Catholic material--the first example Woods gives is the ubiquitous phrase th'mass--could, and indeed often did, function an unreformed manner, without denoting straightforwardly theology (4). interest the unreformed, Woods argues, is primarily artistic and literary rather than theological--hence the word fiction her title. Taking seriously that Shakespeare's works ... are primarily stories rather than polemics (20), Woods traces manipulation of unreformed material along the chains of created by deeply concerned with the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of playing. As it reconnect[s] historical understanding of post-Reformation culture to the aesthetic and theatrical experience of the plays (21), the book provides rich, nuanced cultural analysis, and welcome intervention recent studies religion post-Reformation England. In each chapter Woods identifies (22) raised by encounter with unreformed material. The first chapter argues that 1 Henry IV asks how history play remembers the pre-Reformation past (23), demonstrating that although the play projects the Reformation binary of and Protestant backwards onto the figures of Joan of Arc and Talbot, it also suggests that such oppositional thinking is ultimately unsustainable (55). Here Woods links the theatrical re-presenting of history to sixteenth-century Eucharistic theology: the body of the actor playing is highlighting the absence of the 'real presence' of Talbot and so associating the phenomenological effects of theater with Protestant Eucharist that was a divinely instituted memorial, not repeated sacrifice (48). Though this first chapter is suggestive, the potential of Woods's approach is more fully realized the book's second chapter, on Love's Labour's Lost. Here Woods associates the topical constellation of (60) that refer to politico-religious controversies 1590s France with the slipperiness of created by the punning, wordplay, vow making and breaking, poetry writing, and witty repartee that is this play's most obvious feature. As critics have long noted, the name Navarre is reference to Henri IV of France--an association strengthened, in case we miss the point (59), by Berowne, Longaville, Dumaine, and Boyet, all names of men who were followers of the historical Navarre. Woods argues that Navarre, the heroic Protestant leader who notoriously converted to Catholicism 1593, represented person who had changed and person who was change itself (71); play, the conversion of converts name to comic role sets up (paradoxically) chain of dislocations (69), so that sectarian conflict and changeability are identified with linguistic slipperiness and generic incongruity. Shakespeare--playfully yet also seriously--puts fractured and ironic representation of the ... convert play where language and signs constantly mislead (71). The unreformed onomastics serve to enlarge the dramas broader linguistic concerns about the slipperiness of meaning (75). Whereas chapter 2 the unreformed material is topical, chapter 3, on Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, it is explicitly theatrical. The representational problem considered here is the seeming of the Catholic-costumed characters these plays: the Duke his Friars cloak, Isabella dressed (possibly) as novitiate, Helen her pilgrim's robes. …

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Low Socioeconomic Factors: Not a Limiting Factor for African American Men

A study on the lived experiences of 14 adult African American men, who grew up in low socioeconomic status (SES)households, was undertaken to determine factors that helped them overcome disadvantage and ultimately achievepositive life outcomes. Theoretically, the odds would seem to be stacked against them. Low SES is an especiallydifficult condition for many African Americans to overcome and may be a catalyst for under achievement ineducation, while fomenting antisocial behavior, and oppositional thinking. The reasons are manifold and complex;the literature graphically details social and economic inequities that occur in low SES environments. Throughpersonal demographic data and verbal reflections, the participants provided insights of events that led to positive lifeoutcomes. Keys to success were found in education attainment, athletic and extracurricular activities, and having atleast one adult mentor/role model whose nurturing, guidance, and love kept them on a straight line trajectory towardadulthood. Their life stories were dotted with influences owing to adult norms whose example helped them overcomelow SES quality of life issues including racially based contextual stressors.

Legacies: Intention and Method

My essay begins with a probing of the continuities between Beginnings and Orientalism in an effort to understand, simultaneously, Said’s location of the intellectual and artistic legacies of Orientalism and the legacies of his own intellectual work. Legacies are related to beginnings in an obvious way: if beginnings signal the moment of production – the inauguration of a period, an episteme, or a discipline – legacies prolong that moment into the indefinite future. A field takes shape through the generative energy that propels the forward movement of ideas. Yet Said, always conscious of disciplinary knowledge systems that induced guild thinking, did not see himself as leaving legacies or founding schools of thought. If he had a method at all, it was one that refused methods, inducing dissent and skepticism in place of affirmations. He was far less interested in fields of study that critiqued Orientalism as a symptom of Western pathology than in those that analyzed the Gramscian “inventory of traces” left by Orientalism on works of the imagination. Said’s aesthetic pleasure intensified his resistance to systematized thinking, and it gave rise to his use of words like “hedonism” and “secularism” to describe a form of oppositional thinking that had creative sources.

From ‘or’ to ‘and’: L’écriture féminine as a methodological approach for Fine Art research

This article asserts that the terms ‘practice-led’ and ‘practice-based’ in the context of Art and Design doctoral research are overly simplistic and maintain oppositional thinking by privileging ‘practice’ in generating knowledge. It argues instead for theory and practice as interrelated discourses and art practice research as complex, dialogical and comprising a heterogeneous spatiality. Building on my own ‘writing//painting’ methodological approach which utilises l’écriture féminine, this article highlights the importance of the specificity of individual methodological approaches and the need for a more common framework of articulation so that these approaches are accessible throughout the wider sphere of Art and Design.

Dignifying the Guerrillero, Not the Assassin

This article examines an understudied aspect of Guatemala's Cold War counter-insurgency campaign: the concerted effort to destroy the seeds of oppositional thinking by criminalizing any and all forms of dissent, both during wartime and since. It explores the lasting effects of this stigma on contemporary Guatemalan society and analyzes the work being done by a tenacious group of activists attempting to reverse that stigma in laboring to rescue and make use of a voluminous, recently discovered cache of once-secret police archives. By marshaling documentary evidence of crimes against humanity committed by state security forces, the activists and war survivors are toiling in the archives with an eye to the future: they hope to achieve not only criminal justice for the past, but also the broader reivindicación, or rehabilitation, of critical thinking and collective social action.