Language Arts

Language and Art share many similar tendencies. In language, as with earlier forms of Art, representation plays a large role. Language acts as a representation of some elaborate envisioned concept(s), Writing as a representation of a sounded phonic language, and Art as a representation of some subject(s). Within these mediums exist elements that make Art and Language and, by extension, Writing successful. ese are the signifiers. e signifiers are built imperfectly, they summon up signs other than those intended based on frequency of usage, misusage and place contextually. ey are influenced by a multitude of extra-textual forces. It is from these axioms, that Structuralism and thence, Deconstructivism take form.

Jacques Derrida introduces the misspelled ‘différance’ as concept to account for the deferred nature of Language. He raises the idea of difference possessing two functions: as ‘a distinction, inequality, or discernibility’ that creates a non-identity between two units of Language, and an ‘interval of a spacing and temporalising’ that defers a ‘sameness’ between two units (279). e latter of the two takes the misspelling as the oen silent definition of difference. e différance admits a difficulty to comprehend language as signifiers point to an array of other signifiers that continue to defer the essence of meaning.

Viktor Shklovsky, who precedes Derrida, speaks of a de-familiarisation with relation to art:

e technique of art is to make objects ”unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important . . . (Shklov...

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...completely outside. Take Picasso’s 1937 painting La Guernica, the aesthetic aim was for the signifiers (the magnified Cubist heads) to signify the terror of the Spanish Civil War, an action completely extra-textual. In Literature, the works of James Joyce invoke something outside of the discourse. ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ from e Dubliners possess a large number of political undertones from extra-textual sources, namely, the funeral of Charles Stewart Parnell (Ivy Day).

Différance, therefore, occurs with a de-familiarisation between the language components that summon it. It invokes an a-formalist reading of the nature of language and art that extends to complex invocations of intertextuality and extra-textuality. Différance appears as an unconscious linkage between signs that invokes sameness through a deference of meaning through a filter of pre- read forms.