If the stories of hyper-productionism and enlightenment have been about the reproduction of the sacred image of the same, of the one true copy, mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist self-birthing, then the differential artifactualism I am trying to envision might issue in something else. Artifactualism is askew of productionism; the rays from my optical device diffract rather than reflect. These diffracting rays compose interference patterns, not reflecting images. The "issue" from this generative technology, the result of a monstrous16 pregnancy, might be kin to Vietnamese-American filmmaker and feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha's (1986/7b; 1989) "inappropriate/d others."17 Designating the networks of multi­ cultural, ethnic, racial, national, and sexual actors emerging since World War II, Trinh's phrase referred to the historical positioning of those who cannot adopt the mask of either "self" or "other" offered by previously dominant, modern Western narratives of identity and politics. To be "inappropriate/d" does not mean "not to be in relation with"—i.e., to be in a special reservation, with the status of the authentic, the untouched, in the allochronic and allotopic condition of innocence. Rather to be an "inappropriate/ d other" means to be in critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality—as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domi­ nation. To be inappropriate/d is not to fit in the taxon, to be dislocated from the available maps specifying kinds of actors and kinds of narratives, not to be originally fixed by difference. To be inappropriate/d is to be neither modern nor postmodern, but to insist on the ^modern. Trinh was looking for a way to figure "difference" as a "critical difference within," and not as special taxonomic marks grounding difference as apartheid. 300


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