Logics of differentiation

Take a difference. Try. Did I write "make" a difference? I don't think so. I did actually mean "take" a difference. Do it.

Do you find that difficult? Then try not to. Take "not a difference". Well, think it, anyway. Now, take a difference and place it next to the "not-difference". Can you tell the difference.

We normally think differences in pairs or more: something is different from something else. One of Gilles Deleuzes first achievements in his 1968-dissertation "difference et repetition" was to try to hink the difference in itself. Thereby he made it clear that difference in itself actually presuppose a repetition - and the repetition in itself creates a difference. So, even when we try to think difference in itself, we are in the midst of thinking of "more than one". Something is in the process of being differentiated, rather than being a difference in itself. But let me try anyway.

Take the difference between a "something" and its negation. This difference is obviously a difference, but what kind? The thing is that the negation is nothing in itself, as it must negate to something. So the relation between a "positivity" and its negation is a close one: no negation without the positivity. The negation is an aspect of the positivity - and it thereby become a form of positivity itself, but a negating one; a mirror-image of the positivity. The relation between the positivity and the negativity includes the relation itself, the difference is what binds them together, while it apparently keeps them apart.

So now, let these two be a pair, and think of the difference between the posivitity-negativity entity and its negation. That would be the negation of both being and not-being. As not-being is an aspect of being, the negation must be one that is not in itself an aspect of being. Can we think of a difference that leaves out this relation between the positivity and the negativity? That would mean having to create a difference that did not itself contain the other as part of itself, thus being able to escape the relation, escape the difference. A not-[being_not-being], so to say.

We may start with a static option: the not-difference. But what is that? this, in itself, is not a not-difference, as it is contrued by the negating of difference, which is itself a positivity. So not-difference is a negation, a blind spot - a limit which contains no difference, yet it does contain the difference inside itself as that which makes the not-difference possible. It will be more fruitful to turn to a dynamic or modal solution, as all the examples we sould think of within an indicative logic would fail to set the difference outside of themselves.

There is more than one modal solution: One is the impossibility of being, which of course is also an impossibility of not-being, as Aristotle told his contemporaries a couple of thousands of years ago. The impossibility of being excludes being, and thus excludes not-being, which is an aspect of being. It does not, however, exclude the possibility of difference, as the impossibility of being is a negation of the positivation of being. Which is a relation of being. So the impossibility per se is a part of being itself, too. This was made clear by Maurice Blanchot in "L'entretien infini" (The infinite conversation, 1969).

So we must go further than that to find a difference in itself, which is not itself construed by the effect of difference. This, a bit surprisingly is the impossibility of difference.

How can we say that the difference in itself is its own impossibility? That is not what I was saying, though. This would mean that the difference somehow contained its own impossibility inside it. This counts for being, but not for difference. The impossibility of difference is a negation of the possibility of difference, rather than the negation of difference itself. But in order to negate the possiblity of difference, it must make difference impossible. It must then leave out difference as a possiblity, as something which could become. It must make becoming impossible, it must a not-becoming as such. So the true privation of difference is the impossibility of becoming.

Recapitulate this logic sequence: differentiation is a becoming difference. But the difference in itself can only be understood as the impossibility of becoming (difference). What does this mean? Should we then separate becoming from being, differentiation from difference? The thing is that - and this is the clue of this line of thought - we normally tend to think of entities as the normal condition of the world. Whereas becoming is thought of "that which is in between" entities. If we claim the opposite, is that merely a sophism, a rhetoric trick of the eye? Bergson said that the possible precedes the actual. Becoming as a possible precedes becoming as an entity, process or not.

Take it one step further: that which is in between is being, not difference. before difference can be thought of, understood, we must understand its impossibility. this is the way to understand difference, not by thinking difference as difference whioch has already taken place. Does this mean that we normally walk about thinking impossibility before we think difference? No, it means that we normally exclude difference from our daily conceptions of the world around and inside us. We see sameness, not difference. When we fear the threat of strangers, we place them within a sameness, a category, which already belongs to the completeness of the world as we conceive it. This is a trick of the mind, which makes it easier to go about living, and even functions in many cases of learning.

When do we let difference into our lives? In the case of everyday living, most people will only let it in if it is forced upon them. Even when we think of the future, we are not thinking of a different future, but as a future, which is the same as the life that we are living. Or the static image of the life that lives us - life seen as a being, rather than as difference, as becoming, as more-than-being. Heidegger claimed that we fall from a conception fo the future, back into the understanding from the past, our history, and into the present. How beautiful this picture may be, it means that we would constantly be rethinking our understanding of the past in an image of the future. and both the past and the future ar dynamic, rather than static, difference rather tahn being.

Benjamins image of the angel of history (also a painting by Klee), watching the past as the future falls upon it from behind seems more precise. We stand still, crutching the entity of our conceived being, while difference slowly takes it apart. Sadly, it is possible to live life that way and only discover that something was wrong at the verge of a breakdown: dying, etc.

What is the alternative? A constant crisis? Yes, in the sense that crisis is the moment of differentiation if there ever was one (and in a sense there "is not", as it "is" not). Crisis as an openness towards difference, which would mean actually encompassing difference, or rather becoming difference, by letting impossibility and difference in itself be part of living. This sounds like a voluntaristic solution - choose to be open, and everything will be all right. That is not what I mean. Understanding difference is not something that you can conrtol - you can only choose to not control it, focusing on difference and becoming in whatever action (if not every action, note the difference between whatever and any or every, as described by Agamben), rather than on being, which means excluding difference as part of the action.

Beyond that, nobody knows what happens. And thsi is probably not worth very much as a solitary act, as that leaves out the possibility of the other as difference. But we will return to the other one of the coming days. Let's just state that opening to the becoming of difference is an act of mutualilty. Openness will have to be discussed as well, then. Someone remind me, if I forget. Heidegger was there, too. Hmm.. I would believe more in a kind of Deleuzian, not-subject based solution. Or the subject as difference. Right. Now we are back to the top. Read from the top. Take a subject. etc.

 

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