Israel, June 2001

Mary Thomas Crane
Fair is Foul: Macbeth and Binary Logic

In recent years, criticism of Shakespeare's Macbeth has often relied upon an analytical tool common to postrstructuralism and to cultural studies generally: the deconstruction of binary opposites. This play in particular elicits such an approach because of the often-noted linguistic pattern, most commonly seen in the language of the witches or of Macbeth himself, which seems to perform just such a deconstructive move: "fair is foul and foul is fair," "when the battle's lost and won," "nothing is but what is not," --these are just a few examples of a pattern that is almost insistently present throughout the play. Expanding on older historicist readings which linked this language to the Jesuitical practice of equivocation, recent readings are based on a set of assumptions about the role of binary opposition in human thought, language, and culture, which are widespread in contemporary criticism. Culture, so the argument goes, defends its ideological status quo by constructing a set of basic binaries: self/other, natural/unnatural, man/woman, and then by rigorously policing those distinctions, elevating one term over the other. Cultures need both poles of each binary to be present in order to define and defend the difference, so that the witches in Macbeth represent only a seeming deconstruction of the binaries on which their culture is based. In fact, according to these readings of the play, they are present as the "unnatural" against which Scottish culture defines its "natural" beliefs and practices.

Cognitive theory makes possible a very different view of the role of binary opposition in human meaning and culture. In my talk, I want to trace a brief history of a reliance on binary opposition as a primary structural principle of meaning and thought, going back to late-sixteenth-century Ramist dialectic (an immediate context for Shakespeare's interest in this structural logic), through Descartes to Saussure, structuralist anthropology, Derrida, and cultural studies. I will then sketch out an alternative cognitive position: that, while binary opposition is one possible cognitive mechanism, it is not central to the production of meaning. Differing from the classical view (reflected in Saussurean linguistics) that meaning is produced by the difference between firmly bounded categories defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, cognitive linguists now argue that meaning is built up on image-schemas and that meaningful concepts take the form of radial categories with fuzzy boundaries, structured by a gradient of resemblance to a prototype. I will do a brief reading of Macbeth in light of the cognitive awareness that binaries are not to be taken for granted as the structural basis of human language and culture. Such a reading allows us to see how the play highlights Macbeth's desperate and mistaken reliance on binaries and how it sketches out several alternate bases of knowledge. Since the play is a tragedy, however, none of these alternate cognitive models is adequate to solve its personal and cultural difficulties.

Mary Thomas Crane
Boston College
E-mail: mary.crane@bc.edu

top