“Blinded by the light”: Exploring the desert as luminous landscape

Desert landscapes make up around a third of the earth’s surface. Often described as harsh, remote and empty, they are nevertheless biomes of surprising diversity and alive with a plethora of earth dwelling organisms. But such ecological richness is commonly unobserved by human visitors.Others have detected in this perceived emptiness a spiritual dimension of space, silence and light, signs of divine immanence. The desert as luminous landscape, as translucent void, exerts a powerful metaphorical pull, but at the same time the desert light is visual, spatial and material. Building on Karen Barad’s understanding of diffraction as methodology (Barad 2007: 89–90), as well as extrapolating from Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy, this paper attempts a deconstruction of the desert as ‘emblematic botany’ by looking e.g. at the diffracting properties of quartz and the reconfiguration of patterns that represented a posthumanist shift away from representational reflection. In addition, the extension of luminosity e.g. in terms of the ‘unearthly light’ of the first atomic explosions in the American desert in the 1940s, ties it to a dynamism that is integral to “spacetimemattering” (Barad 2007: 169). Desert Narratives provide an artistic touchstone to my thinking about ‘the luminous desert’ as a diffracted material landscape.