Driftwork

The concept of difference is often thought to be founded on linguistic/cultural difference. It’s ceryainly correct to think that the linguistic turn enabled the recent conceptualization of difference, this may be a more useful underrstanding but still cannot be said to be synonomous with the concept.

This cannot be considered a perfect personal history, but is rather the historical trajectory which lead through many lines of thought to the present through Lyotard and other related post-structuralist notions of ‘difference’. I should acknowledge an anonymous seminar leader who produced the critical reference to equivalence which still haunts me even more than the notion of difference itself does when she said the following phrase ‘…isn’t it terrifying that on a plane of difference no point can be considered better than any other….’ She was mistakenly assuming that in postmodern thought difference meant that each point was equivalent, whereas in fact postmodern difference tended towards believing that each point was incommensurable. In the intervening years I have sadly forgotten the lecturers name, but always remembered the importance of the event itself, for it is the moment when difference and equivalence began to become inextricably linked, became a single concept. I’ve often wondered since whether it was as Badiou might say a ‘Truth Event’ but given the implications I should probably accept that it remains the antithesis to such a conceptualization of Truth.