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Diffraction vs refraction1/3/2024 ![]() The proliferation of pronouns in the first two lines of “Matter”, and the deictic now (“It separates everything you were from what happens now”), plot an entanglement of identity and temporality. The first line of the poem, “We call change in a person the effect of time” (18), shortens the first line of “A Placebo” (13), setting up a larger concatenation of difference in the book as a whole. The poem “Matter” approaches and re-approaches “the effect of time” and ideas of separateness, closeness, through minerals, quantum bonds, and “change in a person,” seeming to map the effects of difference through the diffraction grating of the poem. Perception and natural phenomena touch, exist contiguously, interfere. With her longer line and use of parataxis, there’s a refusal to level out ambiguity. Hello, the Roses foregrounds entanglements of subject and object within the relational interchange of phenomena. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.” I’m still trying to understand diffraction as a critical practice, but want to venture, and further consider, how Berssenbrugge’s poetry might function as a diffractive creative practice, as a mapping of interference in language. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. For Barad, through Haraway: “Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Barad’s interested in the use of diffraction, over and in place of reflection and refraction, for its potential as what she calls a “mutated critical tool of analysis.” She traces a lineage through the work of Donna Haraway and Trinh Minh-ha, theorists using diffraction to rethink relationality and difference, where difference is figured as a “critical difference within,” which resonates with Dorothy Wang’s approach to Berssenbrugge’s work, where racial subjectivity “can make itself felt in and as language,” the linguistic structures of the poems themselves carrying the impress of social and historical influences. ![]() The most amount of diffraction happens when the wavelength is a similar size to the gap.I wanted to bring up the concept (or perhaps rather, practice?) of diffraction, which was only noted in the Barad reading-though it figures centrally in her larger critical project-and consider how a diffractive reading/writing might be at work in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. ![]() (a picture would help to explain this)ĭiffraction: Waves spread out as they enter an aperture (gap). As it slows down it changes direction, meaning that the angle that it is travelling at changes - the angle becomes closer to the normal. Refraction: When light travels from air into another material (such as glass) at any angle other than normal (perpendicular), it slows down. Remember that in reflection the angle of incidence (this is the angle that the initial wave makes from the normal), is the same as the angle of reflection (the angle that the reflected wave makes from the normal). Reflection: This is when a wave hits a surface (e.g light hitting a mirror) and is bounced back. On the diagram it is useful to mark on a line for 'normal', this is a straight line that is perpendicular (makes a 90 degree angle) with a surface. It can also be helpful to draw diagrams of each to help you to remember the difference. These are all properties of waves and their definitions are useful to remember for exams.
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