(some of this material has been adopted from the Wikipedia articles on Charles Babbage and Jacques Derrida)
Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine.
Think of Raymond Babbage, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the movie Rainman.
We will design the Différance Engine.
Charles Babbage was a 19th century English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer.
In 1991, a perfectly functioning Difference Engine was assembled from Babbage’s original plans.
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth, the London Science Museum, under the direction of Doron Swade, the then Curator of Computing, constructed a working “Difference Engine No. 2.”
Built to tolerances achievable with 19th century engineering technologies, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage’s machine would have worked.
The Difference Engine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so the Difference Engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.
J.H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army, conceived the idea in a book published in 1786, but failed to find funding to progress the project further.
In 1822, Babbage proposed the use of such a machine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”
The machine proposed in Babbage’s paper uses the decimal numbering system, and is powered by cranking a handle.
Babbage went on to design his much more general Analytical Engine, but he later produced an improved Difference Engine design – “Difference Engine No. 2” – between 1847 and 1849.
Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida and homophonous with the word différence.
Jacques Derrida was a Jewish-French philosopher born in Algeria who is known as the founder of deconstruction.
Derrida’s prolific work had a profound impact upon literary theory and Continental Philosophy.
Derrida’s best known book is “Of Grammatology.”
That early work of Derrida is the book by him that most interests me as the basis of the New Computer Science.
In the year 2000, I went to some philosophy seminars at Wolfgang Schirmacher’s European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
I participated in seminars with Donna J. Haraway, Avital Ronell, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
All three of them are great thinkers.
I had extensive conversations with all of them.
I told Nancy in French and German that I was thinking about the idea of inventing a New Computer Science that would be very close to the humanities.
Nancy was a close friend of Derrida, who died in 2004.
Nancy said to me that such a project would very much please Derrida, because Jacques was disappointed that deconstruction had so far had very little influence outside of literature and philosophy.
Jacques would be especially interested in a process bringing deconstruction to an engineering field.
This exchange with Nancy was particularly memorable for me.
I promised him that I would work on it.
Différance plays on the fact that the French word différer means both “to defer” and “to differ.”
If you are different from the prevailing ideas and practices of the dominant culture, it is wise to engage in clever strategies of postponement.
There are extremely few people who can say “f**k you” to the established system and survive.
I have done that, and I have survived and thrived.
If you know how to postpone, and then how to remember and act at the right moment, you will succeed on every level, including changing the world for the better (although the phrase “changing the world” only has to do with talking about it, not doing it).
Derrida first used the term différance in his 1963 paper “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” republished in the book “Writing and Difference.”
Différance plays a key role in Derrida’s engagement with the philosophy of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in the book “Speech and Phenomena.”
Différance is elaborated in detail in the celebrated essay “Différance,” republished in the book “Margins of Philosophy,” and further expounded upon in interviews collected in the book “Positions.”
Différance encompasses a number of polysemous features governing the production of textual meaning.
Words and signs can never fully conjure what their authors intend them to mean, but can only make appeals to additional words.
Meaning is forever “deferred” or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers.
The subversive, differential play of language.
The free play of discourse.
The functioning of the “revaluation or dislocation chains” of human languages.
The (negative) différance which Derrida in some sense claims to be a force or quality possessed by all languages which is subversive of “metaphysics” (the deeply-ingrained philosophical-cultural system of binary oppositions of the West).
Another feature of différance (relating to difference, and sometimes referred to as espacement or “spacing”) concerns the force which differentiates elements of language from one another.
The power of poetics.
A force which is perhaps another name for God.
If you say “f**k you” to the established system, it is very wise to love God and to do what She indicates to you as being the divine path.
This is the proper symbolic exchange, the gift of survival from God to me, followed by the appropriate counter-gifts from me to a higher power.
I am suspicious of so-called radicals, critical theorists, and even some Buddhists, who are either atheists or against monotheism.
Their a-theism suggests that they have not truly defied the system, as I have.
We must understand textuality in a much broader sense than merely books – understand textuality as the history of the world.
Différance is a profound theory of the liveliness of language.
Différance can give life to software, in the sense of Artificial Life.
We will design and implement the Différance Engine, just as the Difference Engine was designed by Charles Babbage and implemented by the London Science Museum.
We will program a subsystem of poetic signifying chains of meaning in language games, chains of associations, and sounds which foster vitality.
The vitality of autonomous, self-evolving, self-learning Artificial Life is energized by so-called natural languages.
Differance is a miss, rather than being different. This amiss undoubtedly is in chain of signification, which results that there is a miss in in the life and world around relationship itself, both at cognitive realm as well as in tangible appearance. would this dualism that causes a miss be resolved, perhaps we have to go to the stsrting point through chain of signs.