Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Defending the sign against attempts to undermine and circumvent it, attempts made possible by the new configuration produced by the sign itself, provides for the capacity for ever increasing foresight, especially insofar as cultural signs become increasingly complex, deferring (through a kind of ethical and esthetic economy) a range of rivalries and crises simultaneously. In that case, though, the real threat to the sign is not so much direct attacks on it or attempts to evade its strictures, but the rivalries the sign itself instigates over who represents or embodies it. So, one has to reproduce the sign in such a way as to defer conflicts generated by the previous iteration of that sign. What I’ve been trying to show so far is that “deferral,” far more so than any of its near synonyms, keeps us always inside the scene, so that knowledge of the scene is always a part of concern for sustaining the scene. The concept of deferral also means we cannot really say what exactly, is being deferred—no one could know that violence has been deferred, because no one can know what would have happened without the sign of deferral. Maybe it just would have been a harmless little skirmish. Implicit in an iterable sign of deferral is a worst-case scenario imaginary, albeit one that cannot be articulated. We can talk about “imagination” on the originary scene insofar as we understand “imagination” as nothing more than a widening of the scene so as to include something the scene will have retroactively appeared to have been constituted by: if you see two figures converging on a part of the object that can accommodate only one you can extend the scene to include some version of irreconciliability which can be taken to inform the convergence itself.”

— Adam Katz, Lecture 3: Deferral of Violence · Essays & Articles