About
Diffractions is the journal of Spherical.
Why Diffractions?
Diffraction refers to the bending and spreading of waves when they encounter an obstacle or opening. In physics, it describes how light or sound waves bend and spread out when passing through a narrow opening or around an object.
Diffraction is also metaphor for recognizing complexity, interconnections and fluidity rather than binary divisions. It suggests working across differences to build understanding, not reinforcing divides - and avoids reproducing sameness or oppositions by mapping where differences emerge and how their effects ripple out. The metaphor opens up new ways of thinking about identity, knowledge and relationships.
The use of the diffraction metaphor was introduced by Donna Haraway, and further elucidated by Karen Barad, to develop alternative way of thinking about difference and identity. Rather than seeing difference as absolute opposites or binaries (like male/female, self/other), diffraction suggests differences can co-exist and be interrelated. Barad argues that nothing is inherently opposite - wave/particle, self/other - but rather differences emerge through relationships and intra-actions. Entities, ideas and identities are not fixed but shift depending on context.
The metaphor highlights that differences exist within as well as between. Identities are complex and multiple, not binary. Boundaries between self/other or insider/outsider blur rather than being absolute separations.
We've chosen this metaphor as the name for Spherical's journal because it both breaks rigid dualistic logic and challenges notions of western causality, much like the Buddhist notion of Pratītyasamutpāda (a.k.a. dependent origination or co-arising).
Reflexivity has been recommended as a critical practice, but my suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real. ... What we need is to make a difference in material-semiotic apparatuses, to diffract the rays of technoscience so that we get more promising interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies. Diffraction is an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world .... Diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals. Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form .... Rather, diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness at the end of this rather painful Christian millennium, one committed to making a difference and not to repeating the Sacred Image of Same .... Diffraction is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential meanings.
- Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™
Difliract - dif-frangère - to break apart, in different directions' (as in classical optics)
Diffraction/intra-action - cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re) configuring of spacetimemattering; diflerencing/diflering/ diflérancing
- Karen Barad, Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart