Notes on: Fox, N & Alldred, P. (2023). Applied Research, Diffractive Methodology, and the Research – Assemblage: Challenges and Opportunities. Sociological Research Online 28 (1): 93 – 109.  DOI: 10.1177/1360780421102997

Dave Harris

[This distinguishes between diffractive analysis of texts, and that which approaches data analysis. That involves reading empirical research with other materials 'including researchers perspectives, memories, experiences and emotions — to provide novel insights and events'. It seems to be based on Barad and Bohr on the necessary implication of the observer with the experiment, the 'agential cut and more loosely, 'the situatedness of all research data'. They want to understand it through D and G and the research as assemblage to get a better understanding of the entanglements between research and its subject matter.It is a classic example of forgetting Barad on quantum theory altogether and seeing 'diffraction' as any interaction between researchers and data]

They want to focus on evidence to inform practice or policy. They recognise a tension in sociological research, including questioning whether social enquiry can adequately represent or reflect the social world it studies. Some have recommended a minor science perspective instead, involving flows and becomings, a world in flux. The problem is that the evidence so generated does not always productively informed practice policy or activism. Diffractive methodology (DM) might need modification.

The approach was developed by Haraway and Barad and has been adopted by various others. It intends to show where the effects of difference appear, and to explore engagements and interferences between world and social researcher. Barad drew her insights from Foucault, Butler [?] and Bohr. DM makes explicit entanglements and differences by reading data through 'other texts , personal experiences, or other data'. This leads to context specificity, but this only reassures us that research findings are relevant and applicable. However, there is a potential to generate 'a near infinite multiplicity contingent — and different — conclusions from research data' (95). They propose a new materialist framework offering a more nuanced assessment, looking at how exactly and to what extent observations affect data.

Ethicoontoepistemology (EOE) entangles [!] researchers with their responsibilities for research, ethical responsibility and the apparatus with its epistemological implications. Socio-material processes interact and diffraction when studied makes this evident, including '"changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing"' (citing Barad 2007, 73). Data produced by research is 'unavoidably[!] a diffraction' rather than representation or reflection of the world.

DM may explore diffraction phenomena, 'the ways in which social processes diffract the world as they intra-act', and the way in which data analysis may be 'tuned' the better to understand phenomena. Neither of these offers a strict methodology for research design: the first is a focus on diffractions and interferences, and the second is a data analytic method.

One root is in quantum mechanics, especially the diffraction patterns produced by the two slit experiments. Bohr referred apparently to '"phenomena"' to refer to 'specific instances of entanglements between quanta [yes -- materia phenomena] and observers/measurement devices/theories' (96) [citing Barad 1996) [not just the modern sense then]. Barad extends these findings to the social world leading to agential realism acknowledging the entanglement of research and research apparatus and leading to a focus on '"things in phenomena"' [citing 1996]. The particular point of view established by research designs method for theories become '"agential cuts"'.

IN social enquiry, we must attend to entanglements and read insights through one another while paying attention to patterns of difference. Science has not been successful because of its observer independent knowledge, but rather because it has produced data via human engagements relevant to the human enterprise [1996 again], producing a particular '"cut"'. [I must chcek this]

Secondary literature also follows the distinction between entanglements on diffractions in social processes and the data analytic method to read texts. For the former, the emphasis is being on a way to '"question the nature of space, time, number and life"' [citing de Freitas 2017], or to examine the entanglements of bodies texts, data language and theory {Mazzei 2013]. Barad on Hiroshima [unrefd --do they mean Hayashi?] So is 'the interferences and diffractions between nuclear physics, culture geopolitics and life'(97 )Pienaar et al (2017) apparently explored how dualism in stereotypes and biomedical discourses produced 'differing agenda shortcuts and social perspectives upon drug use'. Dixon-Romain (2016) investigated the effects of quantification and also rehabilitated quantitative methods.

Most studies however have focused on reading data texts together. Mazzei generated multiple diffractive reading is by reading data from different theoretical perspectives. Renold and Ringrose (2017) drew data from two disparate case studies to study gender and power. Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013) applied specific agenda shortcuts in their reading of data [the bullshit about how they brainstormed the project]. At least they realised that researchers are responsible for the 'choice of agential cuts' and that their own identities might have affected this choice.

At least the approach rejects essentialism and nature/culture dualism. Instead material factors are not fixed and stable but emergent, with context specific properties. 'Intra-action' emphasises this — 'there is nothing "beyond" with which to interact' (98) [crazy!!]. They also want to congratulate Barad for supporting, of all things constructionism, retaining much of the language and concerns around performative of the and ethical responsibility in feminism and 'smoothing the ontological shift' towards a 're-immersion in materiality'

Criticism includes extending findings from quantum theory to the macro world, while ignoring other explanations, such as Bohm. Pinch suggests that the whole messy history has been ignored. Perhaps Bohr, and therefore Barad is only one agential shortcut among many, and it might be threatened still alternatives be accepted.

Another problem is that most DM studies have ignored practical findings and how they are affected by research design, in favour of data analysis and reporting. There is clear influence in the analytic cuts pursued by the researchers 'history experience or perspective' as acknowledged by Lenz Taguchi and Palmer. This increases context dependency, and rules out combinations with other less context -dependent methods such as quantitative analysis. This further limits transferability.

They argue that key specific issues are not addressed — how observers affect events, how data are affected by the actual process, and how some kinds of observation affect data more than others (99). There is no way to gauge whether effects are minimal or massive, or exactly how observation affects events, such as hawthorn effects, or asking leading questions. There is no clear guidance about observer interactions.

Deleuze's materialist methodology offers improvements Deleuze is a 'monist' [a process ontologist], advocating minor science that follows flows of events, with the Observer part of the phenomenon under investigation, rejecting researchers representation. However, minor science 'should run alongside representational "major" science, rather than entirely substituting for it' [citing TP 367]. So we are going to refine both Barad and Deleuze through a diffractive approach.

Deleuze has a Spinozist ontology [citing the little book on Spinoza], where materiality is not defined by form substance or 'subjectivity' but by emergent capacities to affect or to be affected [the bit everyone gets]  Effective arrangements of bodies and things are 'assemblages… Constellations of matter', (100) unstable yet productive. They display affective interactions or affect economies and these determine what a body can do. Assemblages replace individuals or bodies, and analysis is to disclose affect economies in assemblages and the capacities produced. Event assemblages produce micropolitical moments of power and resistance. Research is also an assemblage, say various deleuzians, assembling from research tools, analytic technologies and machinery, and findings of earlier studies the data generated and ethical principles, and everything else to generate outputs from multiple affects. It's not just a matter of the agency of the researchers. This is like Barad on research apparatuses as open-ended material discursive phenomena that themselves reconfigure space and time. [Although Deleuze emphasises better?] 'The micropolitical processes that produce "research knowledge"' (101).

The interference between apparatus and assemblage leads to explorations of entanglements between events and research [ordinary understanding of entanglements]. Research assemblages need to be affected by events if their information is to be relevant. Affects in research assemblages must not overwhelm those in event assemblages, though for fear of producing unintended effects like bias [and here they equate Bohr to the Hawthorne effect]. We can investigate this in more detail.

Qualitative interview assemblages, for example privilege human accounts and then researcher interpretations, while randomised trials establish controlled environments and statistical techniques, privileging the model over real-life conditions. Each research assemblage has a series of 'simpler research machines' each of which performs specific tasks like data collection or ethical review, each with a 'specific affect economy' (102). We can do micropolitical analysis on these machines to gain greater precision on their transformative effects, for example how data is coded. In general, the perspectives of researchers over the researched are nearly always privileged; data is nearly always aggregated 'to produce uniformity and underplay real world changes' and sometimes to alter events; however something of the event finds its way through, if only as traces. In general any specific research technique 'transforms ("diffracts") the event it is studying' (103) [so any transformation is a diffraction]. Research methods lacking an impact on the social world is  just the same as Bohr arguing that macro scales physical systems are not affected by apparatuses [?]. [They also use the term 'interference pattern' to describe the 'differing ontologieis of research apparatus and research assemblage' — these are really differences of scale and intention?]

Diffractive readings produce analytic cuts. This happens because data are read in relation to another source of affect, for example the analyst's own experiences including emotional responses, as in Lenz Taguchi and Palmer [but this is crap]. This shows their 'entanglement with the event they studied' and how it was powerfully affected by their own 'affect economy', in effect privileging their perspective: Fox and Aldred call this a '"re-diffraction"'.

So Barad shows us the way to acknowledge Data produced by research is 'unavoidably[!] a diffraction' rather than representation or reflection of the world.
 or assemblages [does she bollopx]. The inevitability of entanglement leads to a diffractive approach rather than a representation, a multiplicity of possible knowledges. However there are problems if you are interested in policy or practice. The questions asked earlier can now be addressed.

It all depends on the ability now to do micro-politics and analysis of the way in which research designs methods and techniques are actually entangled with the events, and how these entanglements affect [further specified as '"diffract", 'interfere with" the data] (104), which adds an additional toolkit, especially because we can now reveal the different extent to which this takes place and assess the effects. We do 'meticulous micropolitical analysis'. We can use any specific research method or technique as long as we calibrate it according to the 'requirements of the particular research study or its sponsors', and proceed strategically, to produce findings but which also acknowledge the effects that research has and offer an assessment of them in the form of '"health warnings"', a pragmatic resolution.

[Page 105 offers a table spelling out these techniques in more detail — pretty banal]



Barad seems to offer the total rejection of major science, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, and unlike Braidotti in her critical posthumanities piece. DeLanda also argues against  We need to remain 'methodologically open inclusive' (106) rather than opting for one or the other, using 'representational approximation and theoretical elaboration' cautiously if necessary, while acknowledging inevitable entanglements and seeing what effects they have. Approaches should be chosen that are best suited to research aims, and these may include diffraction, but a plurality of methods and techniques are at our disposal. However we should 'always [be] fully aware of how these research assemblages diffract the data they produce' (106).
NB  Real Barad “wrongly attribute agency to reified notions called Culture, Power, Discourse, et cetera”. Ideas are not just in her head— “they are specific ongoing reconfigurings of the world in its iterative intraactivity… threaded through ‘me’ and ‘me’ through them” (Jeuleskjaer and Schwennesen 2012, 23). Specifically, it would be wrong to see her own work as a narrative produced by a conventional subject “since this position is counter to diffracting. There is no I that exists outside the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story. In an important sense, this story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con)figuring me” (2014, 181). More generally, “all ‘selves’ are not themselves but rather the iterative intraactivity of all matter of time-beings… dispersed/diffracted through being and time” (Barad 2017, 80). For that matter, human memory is not a feature of human consciousness but is materialised, embedded or sedimented in objects such as landscapes.


 “the shockingly anthropocentric hypothesis that human consciousness collapses the superposition  Barad (2008b)

 Empirical and political commitments are necessary to prevent arguments looking like idealistic moralising or as another abstract scholastic intervention in philosophy. Nevertheless, making the arguments materially relevant requires an examination of the social world to avoid mere idealism, as Marx showed with historical materialism. The problem arises in Barad herself in the various discussions about material limits to various processes. The most obvious issue is whether apparatuses have an outer limit. If they do not, then possibilities are endless with nothing to limit them, and, correspondingly, no constraint on, and no possibility of testing for, creative thought. We could grasp the possibilities entirely within thought and consciousness itself as in classic idealism. Barad notes the problem and offers a partial solution in offering Foucault and discourse as an outer limit for apparatuses. She also mentions materiality as a constraint, but her actual position over the possibility of empirical falsifiability, for example, seems unclear as we saw.

 Barad’s phrase is that responsibility is “an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness.”  Barad (2007) has this phrase in a section close to the end entitled “Towards an Ethics of Mattering”, which begins with citing Levinas, or rather a reading of Levinas by Ziarek. This is further described as a “materialist” reading in later work (Barad 2010), and the context there is the familiar one of having to materialise accounts to remedy any humanism before any diffraction can be pursued.

 an embodied sensibility which responds to its proximal relationship to the other through a mode of wonderment that is antecedent to consciousness” (Barad 2007, 391).

 Ziarek (2001b) says that ethical responsibility for Levinas is located not in consciousness but specifically in “incarnation”... Levinas suggests instead that there is a responsibility “prior to the will and intentionality of consciousness” before any notion of the subject or the ego.... Consciousness for and of itself is not the defining feature of the human subject: something else persists— “the
embodied ego, or what Levinas calls ipseity”