35 Difference

Figure from ground, specific from generic, individual from collective, local from global: it is through the act of distinction that we ascribe and understand the relative identities of things, spaces, ideas, people. The critical ambivalence of "difference" is that it requires first a sameness to be measured against; it vacillates constantly between affinity and dissimilarity (the ones and zeroes of apprehension). As Gilles Deleuze puts it in the preface to his canonical text on the subject, difference "allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained."

But what constitutes a meaningful or productive difference? How can simple relativism and reductive categorization be usefully reconfigured? The contributors to thresholds 36 present sixteen distinct but interrelated studies that probe these and other questions while situating difference within particular cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical contexts.

 

35
Difference

34
Portability

33
Formalisms

32
Access

31
Ephemera

30
Microscosms

28
Baroque

27
Exploration

26
Denatured

25
Sacrosanct

23
Deviant

22
Fashion

20
Be-longing

19
The Invisible

16
Speed. IMPACT. Change

14
Landscape and the Environment