THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONALISM

Looking at SD from this point of view, a lot of projects seem to be detached from the present, existing in their own speculative bubble (out of language, beliefs or ideas), somewhere in the future. This strategic placement makes difficult any meaningful way of direct engagement and subordinates them to a reflexive standpoint.

Barad adopts Haraway’s diffractive viewpoint within her Agencial Realism, suggesting that a diffractive methodology can provide a better understating and a deeper insight to the world’s entanglements. Her diffractive methodology is therefore to be seen as a critical practice of engagement that allows us to learn about how phenomena come to matter and how they participate in the ongoing reconfigurings the world.

Donna Haraway found a substitute to the metaphor of reflection in the phenomenon of diffraction. Diffraction is a physical phenomenon exhibited by waves, as they pass through an aperture or around objects. A classical example of diffraction would be the water ripples that occur when throwing a pebble in a pond. For Haraway “[…] diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals.

Representationalism has constantly been contested by post-humanists, as it takes for granted the idea that representations reflect (social or natural) reality and mediate the relation between presence and representation, and in so doing they submit thought to a proper relation to an outside rather than to a direct engagement with it.