THREE MANIFESTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

Difference possesses a special significance. This part of it often remains untouched in our interfacing with it. Three examples of places where difference appears to reside:

“Environment does not exist without me. I the observer am the living human experience. Life is the present experience. Experience begins with awareness. No otherness: No awareness.” - Buckminster Fuller Synergetics II

Several things occur inside Fuller’s depiction. To start, the presence of difference reveals itself as a necessary component. This implies a kind of wholeness of difference. The picture is contingent on this. If wholeness is broken, difference will be lost and with it the rest of Fuller’s construction. Difference must therefore be a kind of reconciling not a resolving. The sustenance of this reconciliation is dependent upon a mutual commitment that does not conclude which distinguishes that only through a particular co-created balancing of difference, can awareness emerge. 

Otherness and difference have a unique relationship. While the presence of otherness either is or is not; difference seems to collect various qualities of otherness into a dimension yielding volume. The tendency of common speech is to use the words otherness and difference interchangeably. This handles difference as only capable of existence/nonexistence without any navigable complementarity. It, however, is precisely through its gradiented-ness that mutual commitment to difference may impart the complementarity which stabilizes it. 

Our second example takes a look at difference in the work of Douglas Hofstadter. His explorations of analogy-making as forming the basis of human cognition functions also largely operate upon the notion of a sustaining difference. In his Stanford lecture Analogy As The Core of Cognition and book Surfaces and Essences he discusses the roots of analogy in our language among other things. His portrayal of lexical-item choice usually having a clear winner shows that there is gradient in semantic space. It is not a matter of existence/nonexistence but differences of volume by which one choice or another wins out. And thus difference again plays a role. Yet, what becomes crucial to note is that this is specifically a gradiented, moving, difference which does not conflate with the on/off nature of otherness. 

A third and perhaps broadest example is found in discourse regarding support for autistic differences. Autism exists in a diversity of profiles consisting of any variety of communication, cognitive, sensory, social, motor, physical, emotional, and behavioral differences. Yet we can use our same framework to distinguish between the flat on/off-ness of otherness and the navigable complementarity of difference. Support framed in otherness is one-directional and locked in a model of deficit. This is not always the case however and difference can exhibit as a mismatch of salience creating a double empathy problem (as described in the work of Damien Milton). The mutual orientation towards difference again provides a movement and flexibility of support not possible in a model of deficit. 

This does not account for limitations of ability and by no means whatsoever does it intend to establish validity among specific support styles for autistic individuals. 

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that more substantial and mutually fulfilling outcomes occur when difference is parsed out from otherness and meaning is co-created.