In critical cultural analysis, the metaphor of 'diffraction' surfaced in 1992 with Donna Haraway's 'The Promises of Monsters' as a feminist tool to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s. 2 Drawing on physical optics, where it describes the interference pattern of diffracting light rays, Haraway adopted diffraction to move our images of difference/s from oppositional to differential, from static to productive, and our ideas of scientific knowledge from reflective, disinterested judgment to mattering, embedded involvement. It is an 'invented category of semantics' 3 that builds on and contests metaphors we habitually use to describe as practices of knowing and living. Diffraction, thus, is a significant 'subject-shifter'. 4 It shifts the subjects of critique andif we leap to Karen Barad's quantum understanding of diffraction -it even shifts the foundational ontological and epistemological presuppositions that condition these subject-formations. With Barad's quantized diffraction, a relational ontology emerges that can no longer be categorically separated from its epistemological processes. Quantized diffraction becomes 'entangled': as both method of engagement and radically immanent world(ing) where relationality/differentiation are primary dynamics of all material-discursive entanglements. Ontology and epistemology become inter-/intra-laced as onto-epistemology. 5Drawing on Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, Barad highlights the (uncanny) inseparability of the queer behaviour of matter evidenced on a quantum level and our practices of (scientific) observation, knowledge and 'meaning-mattering'. The quantumphysical 'two-slit diffraction experiment' was for Bohr a thought-experiment to determine if light was particle (as classically held by Newton) or wave (as experimentally shown by Young in 1803). It made evident that under certain conditions (if it remains unclear through which slit the photon passes) the results are a wave pattern, while under other conditions (if the photon's path is defined by a 'which-path detector') light behaves like a particle.6 One crucial point of this quantum mechanical paradox -with far reaching implications -is that 'the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus'. 7 The transparency of measurement assumed in classical physics and reflexive theories of knowledge are thereby toppled. Measurement matters, and it does so not only in the supposedly small-scale, weird world of quanta. As Vicki Kirby notes, the full implications of the insight that 'the very ontology of the entities emerges through relationality' still need to be fathomed for 'life at large'.
Are we on the same page here? Because we too are also now struggling to move beyond the knee-jerk limits of the Us and the Them. 1 One key historical 'site of memory' in which the Jamaican novelist, dramatist and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter places the emergence of the modern figure of Man and the possibility of its contestation is '1492'. In her seminal essay, '1492: A New World View' (1995), she approaches the '1492 event' as a historical entanglement that not only lays bare the systemic omissionsespecially of blacknesswithin figurations of 'Man', but also affords an outline of a new 'species-inclusive' account of humanness. 2 Wynter argues that such a 'new world view' upon the 1492 event and its unfolding afterlife has to move beyond the binaries of colonizer/colonized or perpetrator/victim that continue to dominate memory practices. This oppositional model of remembering (based on a logic of 'us versus them') presents '1492' either from a celebrant ('European') perspective as a discovery and 'glorious achievement' or from a dissident (what Wynter calls 'Native') perspective as a violent invasion that precipitated five centuries of colonization, 'genocide and ecocide'. 3 Perhaps surprisingly, yet decisively, Wynter acknowledges aspects from both perspectives, stressing the atrocities and the accomplishments of the planetary five-centuries-long event of '1492'. Her main point here is that arguing from any one of the oppositional stances still remains a 'product of the intellectual revolution of humanism', i.e. neither of them yet leaves the colonial order. 4 In '1492: A New World View' she points out that such binary framing of 'European'/'Native' in the Caribbean and the Americas always/already 5 ignores the formerly enslaved peoples of African descent, a third element which, however, profoundly shapes the antagonistic and dualist dynamic at play in the colonial setup and still also informs its reversal: 'It was on the basis of this triadic model and its dually antagonistic and interactional dynamic that the new syncretizing cultural matrix of the now-emerging world civilization of the Caribbean and the Americas was first laid down'. 6 The oppositional model, still effective at the quincentennial memorial event, then once more reiterated the fundamentally dualist ordering principle of humanist Man, positing Amerindians and Europeans (despite significant inequality) on the side of life/Man/free and invisibilizing Africans on the side of death/nonhuman/enslavable. While the act of remembrance was meant to counter the oppression and injustices of colonial history, its oppositional 'Native vs. European' confrontation failed to tackle the systemic violence and
We present a detailed description and reference implementation of preprocessing steps necessary to prepare the public Retrospective Image Registration Evaluation (RIRE) dataset for the task of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to X-ray computed tomography (CT) translation. Furthermore we describe and implement three state of the art convolutional neural network (CNN) and generative adversarial network (GAN) models where we report statistics and visual results of two of them.
The following conversation explores the stakes of the human(e) in the work of Bracha L. Ettinger. Ettinger has been working on this question throughout all of her art-workings as well as her theoretical work. Central elements to her feminist reworking of psychoanalytic approaches to (human) subjectivity are the insistence on the matrixial and metramorphosis, in which connectivity acquires primary importance, and supplements-questions Lacan's starting point of the cut and lack as constitutive of what becomes human. Taking the feminine matrixial as a model, Ettinger's conception of human subjectivity is always already relational-a transsubjective relationality, however, that is different from mere intersubjectivity. Relationality here crucially means also "relations-without-relating to the other based on re-attuning of distances-in-proximity" (Ettinger 2005, 65) and affective resonance. This invites the "possibility of co-respons-ability with/for the unknown Other," which also implies that we "participate in the traumatic events of the other" (ibid., 89). This interview explores the question of the human and of humane-ness along the three interwoven axes of the aesthetic, the (micro)political, and the ethical that can be found in Ettinger's oeuvre. A longer, unpublished paper by Ettinger from 2013 (working title "Carriance-for Mexico") 1 and thoughts she developed in various lectures between 2012 and 2016 served as background texts for our conversation. Inserting fragments from the text written between 2011If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane 103 call it-and we then already dwelled on the different layers of the poeticaesthetic, political, and ethical in your art-working. At one point, we touched on your series Autistwork and you said that autistwork-I quote from our earlier conversation-"is a paradoxical notion: you enter yourself and you discover strings to the world. The poetic level is very real. One has to go there, inside, lose oneself and suddenly you find a world" (unpublished manuscript; for German, see Kaiser/Thiele 2012, 259). The title of the conversation's German translation is taken from that figure: to "lose yourself and suddenly find a world," which is possible as borderlinking in the matrixial sphere, even if our conscious being in the phallic-symbolic is not aware of this (for more details, see Ettinger 2005). In that light, you also stressed that being humane means that one "can reach another membrane of the cosmos, we can enter it like butterflies, [. . .] become ashen grains, oscillating color-lines, and we can also feel-see such a becoming in-by an other when we are borderlinking to an other, we can feel-seejoin and transform an ambient timespace of light, and in this dimension we are transconnected like ants or bees or birds" (Kaiser/Thiele 2012, 259). Perhaps we can take this as our starting point here: to lose oneself and find a world in ways that crucially also resonate with the nonhuman membranes of the cosmos.Kathrin Thiele: And perhaps I may add to this before we begin:...
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