Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings

Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities

Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351386692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Diffraction patterns in quantum physics evidence the fact that the behavior of matter is the result of its entanglements with measurement, or as Karen Barad suggests, the entanglement of matter and meaning. In this sense, therefore, phenomena (including texts, cultural agents, or life forms) are the results of their relational, onto-epistemological entanglements and not individual entities that separately pre-exist their joint becoming. As such, 'diffraction' proposes a new understanding of difference: no longer a dualist understanding, but one going beyond binaries. Diffraction is about patterns, constellations, relationalities.

From this angle, the book explores 'diffraction', which has begun to impact critical theories and humanities debates, especially via (new) materialist feminisms, STS and quantum thought, but is often used without further reflection upon its implications or potentials. Doing just that, the book also pursues new routes for the onto-epistemological and ethical challenges that arise from our experience of the world as relational and radically immanent; because if we start from the ideas of immanence and entanglement, our conceptions of self and other, culture and nature, cultural and sexual difference, our epistemological procedures and disciplinary boundaries have to be rethought and adjusted. The book offers an in-depth consideration of 'diffraction' as a quantum understanding of difference and as a new critical reading method. It reflects on its import in humanities debates and thereby also on some of the most inspiring work recently done at the crossroads of science studies, feminist studies and the critical humanities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.

Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart

Karen Barad

Diffract – dif-frangěre – to break apart, in different directions¹ (as in classical optics)

Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/différancing

Diffraction owes as much to a thick legacy of feminist theorizing about difference as it does to physics. As such, I want to begin by re-turning – not by returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns.² We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it.³ It might seem a bit odd to enlist an organic metaphor to talk about diffraction, an optical phenomenon that might seem lifeless. But diffraction is not only a lively affair, but one that troubles dichotomies, including some of the most sedimented and stabilized/stabilizing binaries, such as organic/inorganic and animate/inanimate. Indeed, the quantum understanding of diffraction troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then.

Re-turning as a mode of intra-acting with diffraction – diffracting diffraction – is particularly apt since the temporality of re-turning is integral to the phenomenon of diffraction.⁴ As I have explained elsewhere, intra-actions enact agential cuts, which do not produce absolute separations, but rather cut together-apart (one move).⁵ Diffraction is not a set pattern, but rather an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling. As such, there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new.⁶ Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented effects of iterative reconfigurings of spacetimemattering, traces of what might yet (have) happen(ed). Matter is a sedimented intra-acting, an open field. Sedimenting does not entail closure. (Mountain ranges in their liveliness attest to this fact.)

Diffraction is not a singular event that happens in space and time; rather, it is a dynamism that is integral to spacetimemattering. Diffractions are untimely. Time is out of joint; it is diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity. ‘Now’ is not an infinitesimal slice but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime in its ongoing iterative repatterning.⁷

Let’s begin by re-turning (to) the past – to a key moment in feminist theorizing about diffraction. Rather than zooming in on one moment in time (as if there were such an infinitesimal temporal slice or instant of time that could be naturally picked out from a presumed whole line of sequential points) in order to see the infinity that lives through it, we re-turn to a thicker ‘moment’ of spacetimemattering – which we might designate by the spacetime coordinates Santa Cruz, CA late 1980s/early 1990s – when, thanks to the enormous labours and persistence of women of colour, questions of differences broke through the breakwater of Universal Sisterhood, built on the foundations of sameness and shared commonalities, to become vital to, if not the lifeblood of, feminist theorizing. This moment is dispersed/diffracted throughout the paper, and this moment, like all moments, is itself a diffracted condensation, a threading through of an infinity of moments-places-matterings, a superposition/entanglement, never closed, never finished.

Let’s re-turn (to) the spacetime coordinate: Santa Cruz 1988.

Trinh Minh-ha is presenting her paper ‘Not You/Like You’ for a UC Santa Cruz Cultural Studies gathering.

Many of us still hold on to the concept of difference not as a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance, but as a tool of segregation, to exert power on the basis of racial and sexual essences. The apartheid type of difference. […] [But] [d]ifference as understood in many feminist and non-Western contexts […] is not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness. […] There are differences as well as similarities within the concept of difference.⁸

Trinh is troubling particular notions of identity and difference defined through a colonizing logic whereby the ‘self’ maintains and stabilizes itself by eliminating or dominating what it takes to be the other, the non-I. This logic entails the setting of an absolute boundary, a clear dividing line, a geometry of exclusion that positions the self on one side, and the other – the not-self – on the other side.⁹

Identity as understood in the context of a certain ideology of dominance has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one’s consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, non-I, other. In such a concept the other is almost unavoidably either opposed to the self or submitted to the self’s dominance. It is always condemned to remain its shadow while attempting at being its equal. Identity, thus understood, supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and not-I, he and she; between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity; between us here and them over there.¹⁰

The self in positioning itself against the other, constituting the other as negativity, lack, foreignness, sets up an impenetrable barrier between self and other in an attempt to establish and maintain its hegemony. The self (‘I’) only ever sees itself, and not the other. The other, the ‘non-I’, is consigned to the shadow region, the space behind the mirror. According to this geometrical optics, the other is constituted as the Other. Difference as apartheid. As Trinh explains, this notion of difference premised on binary thinking has been instrumental to the workings of power, but it is not a necessary way of figuring difference.

Divide and conquer has for centuries been his creed, his formula of success. But a different terrain of consciousness has been explored for some time now, a terrain in which clear cut divisions and dualistic oppositions such as science vs. subjectivity, masculine vs. feminine, may serve as departure points for analytical purpose but are no longer satisfactory if not entirely untenable to the critical mind.¹¹

What is needed, Trinh emphasizes, is a disruption of the binary, a way to figure difference differently. If this is to be the case then difference cannot be positioned in opposition to sameness, not in any absolute sense, for this would reiterate the same problematic logics. As Trinh puts it: a non-binary conception of difference is ‘not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness’.¹²

How might difference be figured in a way that disrupts this geometrical optics of closure, this colonizing logic? How might difference be figured differently?¹³

Bologna, mid-seventeenth century. Francesco Grimaldi is at work opening up a new field of optics, unwittingly so perhaps, but his experiments take him into a realm where light pushes through and around boundaries. Grimaldi is performing a series of experiments whereby sunlight is constrained to enter a dark room through a pinhole, and whereby the narrow stream of light is made to encounter a thin rod in its course, casting its shadow on a screen. Grimaldi observes that the boundary of the shadow is not sharply defined and that a series of colored bands lie near the shadow of the rod. He is certain that these observations cannot be explained by known laws of ray propagation: reflection and refraction. For starters, the shadow is larger than the projected geometrical area; geometrical optics doesn’t cut it.

Replacing the thin rod with a rectangular blade he observes diffraction fringes – bands of light inside the edge of the shadow. Bands of light appear inside the shadow region – the region of would-be total darkness; and bands of darkness appear outside the shadow region. There is no sharp boundary separating the light from the darkness: light appears within the darkness within the light within… Grimaldi is clear that the explanation for these remarkable findings could not lie with the corpuscular theory of light. Imagining light to behave as a fluid which upon encountering an obstacle breaks up and moves outwards in different directions, Grimaldi dubbed this phenomenon diffraction, citing the Latin verb diffringere – dis (apart) and frangere (break).¹⁴

Santa Cruz (the un/holy cross roads), sometime before 1987. Gloria Anzaldúa is busy at work writing Borderlands, a foundational text in feminist studies. She is explaining the Coatlicue state, the prelude to crossing over.

Every time she makes ‘sense’ of something, she has to ‘cross over’, kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self […] It is her reluctance to cross over, to make a hole in the fence and walk across, to cross the river, to take that flying leap into the dark, that drives her to escape, that forces her into the fecund cave of her imagination where ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction – Diffraction: Onto-Epistemology, Quantum Physics and the Critical Humanities
• 1 Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart
• 2 Diffractive Propositions: Reading Alfred North Whitehead with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad
• 3 Ethos of Diffraction: New Paradigms for a (Post)humanist Ethics
• 4 Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement
• 5 Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation
• 6 Diffracted Waves and World Literature
• 7 Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra-Mediality in Louise Paillé’s Livres-livres
• 8 Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy
• Index