(No)End: Rainbow Æffects: Diffracting Colours and Futures Pallets

It is im/possible and inappropriate to summarise the lively collection of chapters in this book and submit them to the editors’ ‘final word’. We resist the temptation to ‘grasp’ the ‘essence’ of each chapter in isolation. Rather than evaluate their significance for different academic fields of enquiry from an epistemic distance, we view them as already ontologically in relation with one another. The chapters were written more or less simultaneously. Yet, although the authors were familiar with the main thrust of each chapter through summaries in the book proposal, they were not familiar with each other’s actual writing. Still, the ‘others’ (and other times) are already entangled in the ‘now’ of the writing as we/they were re-turning to the From Queer Theory through Quantum Physics to Questions of Difference seminar at Monkey Valley Conference Centre in 2017. Performing their first paper during the event, Karen Barad tells us that as a quantum entanglement, “each moment is an infinite multiplicity” (Barad 2014, p.169). Each moment of re-turning is a sedimenting of the world in its iterative becoming and a thickening of the relationship between each chapter and between the authors. From an ethical viewpoint, this book is not a collection of chapters but a “strange topology” where each is inside the other (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, pp. 22-23). Agential realism troubles the ontology of texts as independently existing bodies with precise ‘edges’ and ‘boundaries’ separated from their ‘context’ and ‘other’ texts. 

Of course, we as editors are not ‘outside’ the chapters but are also implicated. Disrupting the unilinearity and chronology of the use of numbers in writing, we asked the authors to ‘give’ their chapters a colour – as an articulation of æffect. We trace some of the entanglements through these colours and express how they æffect our writing here and in the introduction. This superposition or interference pattern is not about mixing colours but about diffracting them through one another.