Deference
- Submission or courteous yielding to the opinion, wishes, or judgment of another.
- Courteous respect. See Synonyms at honor.
Many years ago, while still a Fine Arts graduate student, I heard the buzz concerning the writings of Derrida. There were even a few of my fellow grad students that often testified about the dramatic influence his writings had on their own work. Much to my dismay, no matter how much I questioned my peers over any specific influences, the answers that I received were at best- vague. Finally, I decided the only way I would be able to get any understandable information about what Derrida had said was to read a sampling of his work for myself.
After decent amount of effort, I was able to get my hands on a text, not of Derrida's writing, but about his writing. Keep in mind that this was during the Neo-Dark Ages; a time before the Internet was accessible by the common man. During this pre-dawn of the Information Age, I had no easy way of reading what others had said about the work and nothing to compare it with. In fact, most of my reading during this period came in the form of third or fourth generation photocopies; blurred and smudged, with characters that often provided little more than a good guess as to what letters of the alphabet they might be. But this bit of writing was different, it was in the form of a real book; it was bound, had a hard cover, and even accurate page numbers.
I have to admit that these outward trappings of authority completely deceived me (Insert joke about judging a book by its cover.) and I was taken in. What I did not know was that the article in the book was a horrible translation and to be completely open about the whole instance, took me down the wrong path for several years.
The article was on Derrida's difference/differance and it attempted to explain the concept with several analogies. Due to the style of the translation (giving the original author the benefit of doubt) the analogies were so intertwined and oscillating that reading the piece was like the literary equivalent of attempting to ride three rodeo bulls at the same time.
I tried several times to keep up with the wildly swinging ideas, but finally gave in. Finally, I tried a different approach: I would pick one of the bucking bulls and ride it to the end of the article, then I would return to the beginning of the article to take on the others. This was my undoing.
I grabbed my chosen thread just where the author was explaining the difference between difference/differance in spoken and written French. Somehow a wayward e slipped in the text and I saw the word defference . I interpreted this as meaning deference and picked that as my single thread. I had no idea that the bull I was riding wasn't even in the rodeo.
When I arrived at the long analogy about differance , I was presented with an example of sign B differing to sign A and sign C differing to sign B , which in turn, again differed to sign A , but instead of understanding all of the convoluted differing, I read it as deferring .
In my artist's mind it all made perfect sense and I was amazed that no one had ever stated it so clearly before: any part of a work of art (and therefore a sign ) would always defer to some other part. Artist and designers work with this concept all of the time, but usually on a very intuitive level.
An example of this could be a painting of a fearful child's face. In one corner of the painting there is also the image of a bee. Although this example fits perfectly with Derrida's concept of differance and the meaning of the child's facial expression is differed until the sign of the bee has been added into the mix, there is another dialogue between the two signs. This is deference: one sign deferring to the other, giving up its place in the mind of the viewer for the other. Often, this may even result in a ranking of elements (or signs) by importance. No matter how many elements or signs, a sort of hierarchy will develop in the mind of the viewer.
In a similar example, if the bee is removed from the painting there is no other object for the child's face to be compared to. In this instance the viewer steps in to fill the void and the dialogue is now between the face and whatever conjectures the viewer develops. It could even be a comparison between the child's face and the viewer himself. Once again there is deference, but now at least one of the signs is completely internalized and produced by the viewer.
Over the years the concept of deference proved useful and had an influence on my work as an artist and as an author. The amusing part of the tale is that sometime later I finally got my hands on a decent translation of Derrida's writing. I had to reread the article of difference/differance several times before I was able to overcome what I thought I already understood.
But it was too late. The three concepts were forever tangled into one:
Difference, Differance… and Deference . |