How Board Games Explain Everything — Part 3: Differance

Last week I briefly described how games and play help explain Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist theory.  This week I would like to continue on that same topic and focus on just one of Derrida’s neologisms (or, I should say, neographisms, because Derrida valued the written word over the spoken word): différance.  Derrida claims that différance is “neither a word nor a concept.”  Its meaning is deliberately ambiguous, playing on the fact that the French words for “differ” and “defer” are the same.

Derrida’s essay on the subject (titled “Différance”) is a tour de force of post-modern nonsense.  Here’s a fairly representative passage:

Now if différance is (and I also cross out the is) what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration). In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.

I have almost no idea what he’s going on about here, but I think it is possible to understand the concept of différance by thinking about it in terms of board games…because board games explain everything.

In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.

Two weeks ago I described how Saussure’s structural linguistics can be understood as a system of formal, logical relationships, much like a game of chess, and how his methods offered the possibility to getting at logical truths in humanities research.  Last week I described how Derrida undermined those claims to truth by pointing out that our structuring principles are themselves conventional and arbitrary and ungrounded in reality.  The goal is not to arrive at truth, according to Derrida, the goal is interpretation or play for its own sake.  Différance might best be understood as an example of this kind of play—a “play of the world without truth, without origin.”

Sooner or later all our games turn into Calvinball

As I have discussed previously, absolute mastery of a game tends to ruin play.  Adults no longer play tic-tac-toe precisely because they have mastered it.  Even in a complex game like chess too much mastery can be antithetical to play.  The late World Chess Champion (and racist lunatic) Bobby Fisher felt that the memorization of set-piece openings had ruined the early portion of the game, and so he advocated a version of chess in which the initial setup of the pieces is randomized so that players are forced to start from unfamiliar positions and actually think about their moves.  To put it another way, using a different set of structuring principles defers mastery of the game, and reactivates creative thinking and play.  As I have argued before, there is nothing objective or logically necessary about the rules and structure of the game; the rules are there to facilitate to play.  Derrida’s characterization of différance precisely describes how play function in relation to the structure of a game:

In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field.  Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

Derrida reminds us that arriving at truth is no more the goal of research than arriving at total understanding is the goal of playing chess; the goal is the play itself.  He does not suggest we abandon logic or empiricism (without the rules we could not play the game), only that we remember that they do not give us access to truth.  He reminds us that the rules could very well be different, that they can and will change, and that the endless deferral of complete understanding that will result from these changes is fundamental to the whole process.

In this sense, Derrida sees academic research as something very similar to Calvinball.

The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can't play it the same way twice

In this sense, Derrida sees academic research as something very similar to Calvinball.  It is easy to think of Calvinball as a sort of pure, abstract, freeform, “anything goes” play, but this would be to completely misunderstand the game.  Complex, exacting rules are absolutely essential to Calvinball—they are what precisely what facilitate the play—but Calvin and Hobbes realize that total understanding and mastery of the rules would ruin the game.  The rules have to be different every time in order to forever defer the end of play.  When Derrida says that différance “unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions” he could be paraphrasing Calvin when he says, “The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can’t play it the same way twice” (but it is important to remember that changing the rules every time is not an end in itself either, it is merely a cause and result of play).  It is also entirely appropriate to Derrida’s thinking when Calvin says “Sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball.”

It’s not a board game, but perhaps Calvinball is the best possible explanation of différance.