D I F F R A C T I O N

D I F F R A C T I O N

D I F F R A C T I O N

D I F F R A C T I O N

D I F F R A C T I O N

D I F F R A C T I O N

The world diffracts against my eyes
with each blink it breaks
apart little
by little
in a
quiet
and
careful
undoing

Diffraction occurs when a multitude of waves overlap, or encounter an obstacle in their path. They bend and stretch, extending into one another. Barad* helps us claim this as a method of inquiry that involves attending to difference, to patterns of interference, and the effects of difference-making practices. She says, “In my agential realist account scientific practices do not reveal what is already there; rather what is “disclosed” is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming.” Here she creates something ontologically new, where reality is continuously re/constituted through material entanglements, not assuming pre-existing categories. According to Barad’s agential realism, knowledge production is reality formation.

A way of reading things through other things, I am interested in using diffraction as a way to understand our becoming-with the world. In questions around identity, embodiment, class and race, “we can understand diffraction patterns – as patterns of difference that make a difference – to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world". What we are within can only be understood in terms of our knowledge of it. Different lenses of experience and perception alter the world and our relation to it in a constantly ongoing process.

*Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: 361 / 72

As bodies with fluid boundaries, entangled with each other and the world we are enmeshed in, or becoming-with, diffractive thinking can be employed to challenge notions of objectivity, authority and materiality. Negotiating our position in the world is a process of establishing, collapsing, and interfering with boundaries. Tim Ingold* states that we “join with [things] in the material flows and movements contributing to their – and our – ongoing formation”. This approach moves us beyond reductive Self/Other dialectics, drawing attention to the agency of the more-than-human.. A diffractive method allows us to see how we are implicated and entangled in these intra-actions and becomings.

*Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description: 88

The water is an unbounded body, patterns form, waves come into being through flows and exchanges just like the unbounded form of the body I inhabit.