"Bisociation consists of bringing together elements that previously had not been brought together — and were often thought not to belong together — so that they produce something new, useful and/or humorous. Bisociation is not the same as the Marxian dialectic of opposites, nor are there necessarily contradictions between the things that are brought together — they just haven’t been brought together before." Suber, Howard. The Power of Film (Kindle Locations 1331-1335). Michael Wiese Productions. Kindle Edition. I understood what the author means by 'bisociation' but not sure of what he means by 'Marxian dialectic of opposites'. Can someone please help me on this? Thanks.
A big part of Marx's theory of history (which he got from Kant, and in some ways resembles the ancient Greek idea of thesis/antithesis/synthesis) was that history is made by the working out of contradictions. That is, things will go along in relatively the same way for a while, but underneath are processes working in opposition to each other. Eventually that tension can no longer be sustained, the order of things is upended and a new order is established. He most famously applied this to capitalism--in his reasoning, capitalists needed to extract more and more surplus value from their laborers. But this reduces the laborers' ability to purchase the goods capitalists are selling. Eventually, he thought, this sort of contradiction would blow up capitalism and it would be replaced by socialism. I've never heard the term "bisociation" before, but it sounds like the difference is that it doesn't necessarily imply contradiction. A thesis and antithesis are by definition opposed to each other. Bisociation sounds more like "two things that may be opposed or not".
This came up with a google search: Dialectical materialism This doesn't belong under plot development. Not sure where it would fit actually.
Marx's dialectic is a development from Hegel. You can find lots of summaries of Hegel's dialectic online, but, having read some Hegel myself, I find the summaries really don't do him justice, his thinking is just too subtle and strange for schematic presentations. But to give my own bad summary, in examining any topic (e.g. the question of being, the history of philosophy, politics) his dialectic will start with a broad observation or principle, and then examine that principle closely, finding some flaw or gap in it, which gives rise to its negation, which in turn leads us to an altered but more complete picture than we started with. But this completion itself can prove illusory as it is further examined to have some deficiency which must in its turn run its course. His wonderful, strange, and very difficult book The Phenomenology of the Spirit takes us through the history of Western philosophy using this method, starting from the pre-Socratics, through Platonism, Stoicism, etc., the rise of Christianity, the scholastics, the enlightenment, and finally Hegel's own era, showing how each solution to a given problem gave rise to its own problems that had to be resolved by some successive development. It's a very restless book- anytime he seems to say, "Aha, I've got it!" he then goes "but wait..." Hegel conceived of his own system as the final summation and fulfillment of all philosophy but one that could only have arisen at the end of this long and tortuous development he describes. This is why it's so hard to summarize Hegel because he is very much a concrete, historical thinker and is never satisfied with any proposition that doesn't show its work, as my math teachers would demand for my answers. Any statement of doctrine that doesn't take into account the struggle of ideas that gave birth to it is useless to him.
