Derridean différance

This post is inspired by commenter Daniel, who mentioned Jacques Derrida's concept of différance over at my other blog.  So what is différance?  It's the semantic quality of being both different and deferred.  Allow me to explain.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was an Algerian-born Frenchman who contributed hugely to the two sister movements of postmodernism (which I usually nickname "PoMo") and poststructuralism. Historians who study Derrida tie his thinking in with that of Ferdinand de Saussure, the so-called "father of linguistics."  I alluded to some of Derrida's language- and text-related thoughts in my other posts on PoMo, but suffice it to say that Derrida is often seen as having "radicalized" Saussurean thinking.

So we need to understand first that Saussure looked at language as a field of contrasts (recall what I'd written, earlier, about Derrida seeing vocabulary as pairs of opposites, with one side of the pair being "privileged"), as well as a field of implied contrasts. Take a word like dog. The moment I say the word, certain contrasts come to mind, e.g., dog vs. cat.  But Saussure noted that the field of implied contrasts is, in fact, infinite:  the moment you say X is a dog, you're saying that X is not a cat, not a paper bag, not a novel, not a car, not a wish, etc., ad infinitum.  A whole universe of contrasts is implied the moment you say or name a thing.  Derrida's notion that words are only ever defined by other words has its roots in Saussurean thought, and now, the stage is set for understanding the world of swirling text in which we live.

The French verb différer means both to differ (i.e., to be different) and to defer (i.e., to put off until later).  Derrida deliberately misspelled the noun form (normally spelled différence) to arrive at a word whose strange spelling keeps you forever off-balance:  différance.  The concept of différance, as applied to words or to text in general (remember that a painting can also be a text), means that any given word has a meaning that is unknowable until it is seen in context.  Take cat, for example.  If I use a form of that word in the sentence She's a catty individual, I'm talking about felines only obliquely.  If the syllable cat were floating around in a context-free abstract space, you'd never know what the syllable meant until it nestled itself into a context-providing sentence.  So:  the word cat is different insofar as it means "not a dog, not a wooden block, etc."—and it's also deferred because you can't know what the syllable cat means until you see it in a sentence.  Different and deferred:  the word cat exemplifies différance, and so do all other words and concepts.

You can see how différance might apply to smaller units of text, such as letters.  You can't know how the letter "c" is pronounced until you see it in context:  police car.  See?  (C?)  Or how about the letter "x":  xylophone, Felix, Oaxaca.

So this is the textual world we live in, according to Derrida.  There is a constant semantic dynamism at work in all words and concepts, and it's not until you add context that you can know anything... and even then, the added context is no guarantee that you've understood the text "correctly," whatever "correctly" might mean.  Meaning has an inherent plasticity, and because there's no ultimate foundation for meaning (no "transcendental signified"), there will always be some "play" when it comes to semantics.  That's largely thanks to différance, the deferred difference.

This may be one of the few areas where I think Derrida's thought has merit (my overall judgment is that PoMo/PostStruc is garbage), but that's mainly because this line of thinking is a direct extension from Saussure's work in linguistics.  You could, in fact, argue that human history shows a centuries-long awareness of différance at play in human discourse and art:  our puns, our slyly hidden subtexts, our accidental and deliberate misconstruals, the fights we get into over this or that terminology—all of these things imply an intuitive understanding of différance.  Derrida just happened to be the one to put it into (ha!) words.  Perhaps he could be said to be a discoverer of différance, not its inventor or creator.