Gerhard’s Reviews > Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning > Status Update

I will argue that a diffractive mode of analysis can be helpful in this regard if we learn to tune our analytical instruments (that is our diffraction apparatuses) in a way that is suffciently attentive to the details of the phenomenon we want to understand.

As Donna Haraway suggests, diffraction can serve as a useful counter-point to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference.

To many scientists as well as science studies scholars, the theories of semiotics and deconstruction, which call into ques-tion the assumed congruity of signifier and signified, insisting on the intrin-sic arbitrariness of the sign or representation, seem to be the ultimate in linguistic narcissism.

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.