Binary opposition helps you understand how ideas and meanings are being shaped, created or reinforced in a text. They realised that words merely act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words, therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed thing: a relationship between opposing ideas. For example, our understanding of the word 'coward' surely depends on the difference between that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero' Other oppositions that should help you understand the idea are the youth/age binary, the masculinity/femininity, the good/evil binary, and so on.
Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other. Recognising such binaries can open up the ideas the writer is trying to express. Look out for these oppositions as they can allow a deep understanding of what is happening in the text as well as alerting you to the 'big picture' - what it is all about.
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