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Lois Shawver Permit me to introduce you to a deconstruction
quilt. Notice the way your eyes look over it. It's hard
to see it clearly. You get it in your vision a bit, then it switches.
This quilt is intended to provide a visual illustration of what happens with decon- struction experientially. Deconstruction is possible because our minds can see patterns only by ignoring other patterms. In this quilt you can see the blue and white checker board pattern by ignoring the distinction between yellow and white. You see the pattern of concentric squares by ignoring the distinction between blue and white. In this example, you can go back and forth fairly easily. For example, suppose you were brought up trained to ignore blue, because blue was not important, or just background dullness. Yellow versus white was the distinction that mattered. Then, you might see this quilt as simply a pattern concentric diamond shapes. But, suppose your neighbor had been trained to ignore yellow, as if it was the musty background color, like the yellowed page. What was important was the distinction between the blue and the white. Then, you might see this quilt as a checkered pattern, training your eyes to ignore the yellow. The argument for deconstruction (to continue with this analogy) is that we learn to see one pattern or the other and that this pattern is held in consciousness while the other is pushed into the background. That which we can see, that is front in consciousness, is the "privileged distinction." That which is pushed into the background (distinguished but deferred) is what Derrida calls differAnce -- (although I am transliterating this French term to make obvious that this is not a typo for "difference.") Derrida defines differAnce as the pattern of differences that is deferred. As you can see, whoever looks at this quilt must defer one pattern of differAnces in order to see the other. The argument is that the world is like this. Only one pattern of differences can be seen at any one time (is privileged). All the other patterns (and there can be many) must be deferred in order to make the particular pattern that strikes us come to the fore. What is it that causes some patterns to be deferred to the differAnce (the shadows of our understanding)? It is language and our linguistic habits of using binary distinctions to talk about anything. I think the point is not that the distinctions are binary; they could be tertiary. The point is that language presents itself as offering only categorical distinctions. According to the way we usually talk, for example, humans consist of only males and females. We defer hermaphrodites and transexuals as something to ignore. But deconstructionism tells us that each time we see the quilt (or encounter some similar object that can be seen in more than one way) then the other pattern is obscured from our sight. However, something can come along that deconstructs this one-sided vision. For example, with regard to the male-female dichotomy, it might be argued that the Academy Award winning movie, Boy's Don't Cry, helps deconstruct the dichotomy. The hero(ine) is sort of male, sort of female, and in our culture this kind of semi-hermaphrotitic person falls between the lines, is deferred from our cultural consciousness. The deconstruction of the gender dichotomy does not consist in passing from one concept to another [such as from male to female], but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order...." (Derrida, 1982, p. 329). It shows us that the hermaphrodites of our the world (and not just the gender hermaphrodites), that is, the borderline folk, are there, even if we are blind to them. Such people are borderline only because our cultural traditions set up the dichotomies that blind us. The deconstruction quilt is meant to serve as a visual model for deconstruction. The technology of how concepts are deconstructed is a matter of debate. Derrida, J. (1982). Signature, Event, Context. In J. Derrida (Ed.), Margins of Philosophy, pp. 309-330. Margins of Philosophy (pp. 309-330). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Quilt example is from:
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