Driftwork

“Difference 1 emphasizes difference between men and women, whilst differences 11 and 111 emphasize difference within the category of women. Difference 11 rejects the human subject on which difference 111 is predicated. Difference 111 is also predicated upon the apprehension of an unproblematic ontological reality – the historical and institutional organization of social division – that is explicitly refused by differences 11, Differences 1 and 111 incline towards essentialism; difference 11 is deconstructive in its approach to gendered subjectivity…” Michelle Barratt (1989)

Difference 1 is straightforward sexual difference. Difference 11 is Saussurean difference in which meaning is constructed though linguistic opposition rather than absolute reference (1989:41) and Difference 111 is ‘effectively a recognition of diversity’ (1989:44).

“Talking about ’samenesses’ and ‘differences’ also diverts attention from the problem of heirarchy… if women are in fact ‘different’, the question becomes why has this difference been constructed as disadvantage ? If women are in fact the ’same’, the problem of their relative disadvantage and lack of disadvantage remains unresolved. There is a need therefore to shift the focus of analysis from the ‘difference’ to the structures which convert this ‘difference’ into disadvantage…” Braccha (1990)

The meaning of words inheres in their relations with each other, that words have no foundations and meanings are not self-contained. This idea, that the meaning of words is produced by their relationships with each other, or their differences, and that there are no foundations, is often referred to as a a relational account of meaning.
The relational view of meaning is clearer if the words sameness and difference are left out of it for the moment since in the discussion so far they are both objects and the method of analysis. If i had started from the words night and day this would not have arisen because the problem that I am describing in the designation of meaning would not have contaminated the very words that I am using for the description…” (2 Currie)

In difference and repetition Deleuze states that difference is the condition for species and ontological categories. “We must show not only how individuating difference differs in kind from specific difference, but primarily and above all how individuation precedes matter and form, species and parts and every other element of the constituted individual…” (D&R 33 or 56)

Levinas rather famously prioritizes ethics over ontology and consequently difference… “The subject is inspired by the infinite, which is illeity (the there of the face), does not appear, is not present, has always passed, is neither theme, telos, nor interlocutor …” (Levinas Otherwise than being or beyond essence p155.) It’s a question of reversing the Levinas prioritisation of ethics over ontology. Just as for Deleuze we would argue that a properly differential ontology must underpin the possibility of ethics. Such an ontology responds to Levinas’s dislike of the role of identity, representation and totality in ontology through the terms of of the statement ‘ is already a hypostasis of the eon'’ (Logic of Sense). What is made is the thought that a difference resistant to representation is the condition for identity and representation is the condition for identity and representation. It is notable that Lyotard also states the priority of difference over ethics (in the differend). He convincingly argues that the differend between different phase regimes is prior to the Levinasian infinite obligation that occurs with the face of the other. This does not deny this obligation, rather it places it within the many different types of obligation, relations and phase-regimes.

To exclude the empirical is to exclude differentiation, the plurality of others that mask the same. It is the first movement of mathematization, of formalization… In this sense the reasoning of modern logicians concerning the symbol is analogous to the Platonic discussion of the geometric form drawn in the sand: one must eliminate cacography, the wavering outline, the accident of the mark, the failure of gesture, the set of conditions that ensure that no graph is strictly of the same form as any other. (Serres Hermes p69)

… the result of binary opposition is usually a refusal of difference and a practice of oppression, repression or suppression…(Jeanne Hyvrard ) She goes on to construct an interconnectedness, wholeness as it is expressed in various manifestations of what she considers sacred and sacredness(62) (but then nobodies perfect are they…)

Opposition is a crude cutting tool dealing with a phenomenon – difference – that requires more subtle instruments…(Widder)

The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values…merely forground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were… – N. Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche maintains that the entire panoply of principles and concepts surrounding both identity and opposition, must be revalued in order to determine whether other modes of thinking, being, and feeling are possible. As N knew well, opposition incorporates only limited forms of difference according to two general models. The first, expressed most prominently in Platonism and Christianity, elevates one term in opposition to a positive and pure identity and defines the other as lack or absence, so that beauty, for example, is the beautiful in itself and can exist independently of ugliness, which is nothing but the falling away from the beautiful. The result is crude idealism. The second model, found in Hegelian dialectics, insists that each term of a binary opposition invokes and passes into its other, creating an identity of opposites that relates and reconciles them. Nietzsche takes a different route…. ( Widder).

To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. Deleuze and Guattari , A Thousand Plateaus.

Does objectivity have a history ? It’s not after all as if we could say that it defines science. Not as if it is the same thing, or even related to Truth, Information or Knowledge and it is very much younger thatn either of them. The objective appears to be the artifact, the artifice and the difference that might have been removed by the noise (the parasite) that undermines evidence and certainty. (Certainty anyway). To be objective is certainly to construct a knowledge with minimal input, a minimal trace of the discoverer. Perhaps objectvity is an event.