Notes on : Bayley, A. And Chan, J. (Eds) (2023) Diffracting New Materialisms Emerging Methods in Artistic Research and Higher Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Dave Harris

Bayley A. Entanglements and the Many-Worlded Doing of Research – Based Practice, practice – based research, Practice – as – Research and Post-qualitative Inquiry in the Academy (3-- 14)

Practice is apparently emergent and structures contexts including assessments and accreditations. Practice is the site of contestation and a site of theory, but embodied knowledges in particular 'signal that there may be more than one world' (3). Some will not be traceable back to a 'European, enlightenment heritage' and some will be obviously more embodied.

Practice was divided from theory via differences that the Academy has inculcated. Theory is critical and practice is not, for example instead we need to see them as flows of knowledge and knowledge making and investigate new patterns and configurations that emerge, especially via timelines, the matter of justice and how the erotic appears in various epistemic practices especially in artistic research. Then some waffle about positioning, including the positioning of the authors and editors of the book. The articulations include the possibilities in the title as a few possibilities about artistic research. These modes 'begin the dance, the breath, and the being – with that I hope will diffract in the relationships to position, and momentum, that you make through the apparatus of your own artistic, scholarly, educative, activist and other life/lives' (for) [I think we've got the measure of this]

They think of it as involving Barad's notion of entanglement, specifically the absorption of the subject/object divide, the way in which phenomena 'are cut by modes of observation into being' (five). There is also Haraway's '"tentacular thinking"' where one arm of the octopus acts independently but it still remains an octopus. Phenomena do not intersect. Matter is doing and there is an 'entangled onto-epistemology' which is a 'part of the ongoing flow of movement itself'.  As a result, 'methodologies and their methods make worlds and this is active, political and engaging, resonating with activism action and justice. Thinking this way opens us to many worlds and opportunities to 'practice the world anew as part of the entanglement' (6), new kinds of inclusions and exclusions and marks on bodies, different identities.

Justice 'matters'. The flow of movement 'that we call the world' is not just intersectional, something outside, but at a different level of specificity. Justice can be considered as 'constituted through entanglement and as a matter of movements… A resonance that is as central and specific to existence as time', a phenomenon, or 'apparatus through which we might create history' and at the same time 'an intimate companion, constantly changing the body into something else'. It is something unfolding and pedagogical, involving different kinds of worlds.

How do we do this — we perform research as the editors and contributors go. Often they perform with 'inherited hauntings of research from worlds that affirm vitalisms,  essentialisms, metaphysics or fixitties'. But we have to find new ways to diffract our thinking through new materialist practice committed to justice. This transcends the usual organisation of research into the 'intra-sectional or entangled', and this is world building.

We have to consider de and reterritorialisations in the Academy. Artistic practice is an epistemology, a way of knowing the world and in this case entangling how we know is what we now, and 'onto-epistemology that allows for multiple world's to exist together – apart' (7), a matter of 'diffractive, material – discursive encounters that emerge together'. This is 'risky and rebellious', a matter of using the master's tools to build worlds inside the crevices and gaps. We have to focus on what matters and how meaning is folded into our practices.

Research – based practice, or research- led practice follows the model of research first in practice and this is common in the Academy. It is Cartesian or traditional, but we can challenge it by asking what we mean by research as a phenomena — is it ontology, is it a privilege method? Its links with practice are often conflated, but research is privileged in building the apparatus, for example it might impose a timeline as in cause and effect, or a sequence of policy-making in artistic work: this can be expedient. Practice – based research reverses the flow. Lorde suggests it is based on the erotic, the sense of completion and fulfilment and this is dangerous to the established order, if it underpins all the ways we know the world: it has its 'own inherent intelligence and knowledge making' (10). The choice between the two so far involves different entrance points, different practices, different research experiences, different politics. We are already beginning to see the possibility of entanglement and diffraction.

Practice-based research must avoid reduction: instead we have to consider 'particular diffraction patterns… You, your pen, the page you right on, or your screen and pixels… As if flickering in and out of existence, from virtual to actual and back again'. Reverse the direction and get new diffractions. You are left with 'a swirling, shifting, swerving, resonating, moving ontology of diffractions' (11), with several entrance points or 'diffractive possibilities'. We could list the differences that these different patterns make. They highlight the process by which research makes a difference, 'the way difference is actually made' and this is especially important if we need to look at justice or injustice at the micro level and open ourselves to chaos and many worlds.

Post-qualitative enquiry 'shifts and slides through all of these' referring back to ghostly heritages of artistic research practices. However it diffracts these heritages through post-humanism and new materialism, with the special attention paid to 'the entanglement of matter and meaning' (12). Lather and St Pierre say we must question attachments that keep us from thinking and living differently, constantly attend to our practices ['diffractive practices' of course]. We must re-inscribe ethics, seek unjust practices and be prepared to engage in '"reparative"' mode' (13). We must question attachments between matter and meaning, focus on entanglement and matterings, and see the way in which phenomena arrives as a results, using Barad.. All the current trends can therefore 'diffract through one another to produce new research'.

There are lots of other approaches, but they all share a commitment to potential to create new configurations of ethically responsible open movements, new reconfigurations of artistic modes of thinking and doing the world a new.

[Fluffy and confused bollocks]]

Schrader, A. Diffraction as Cross – Disciplinary Methodology between Science and Arts (15 –39)

Arts are often supposed to make science more accountable and accessible, while science can act as resource for innovative arts. This chapter offers 'a diffractive cross disciplinary methodology in which the disciplines get neither synthesised nor merely serve one another' (15). Following Barad (2007 p.89), a diffractive methodology 'investigates how "the world is materialised differently through different practices"'. Different modes of thought are 'read or worked through one another to engender creative and unexpected outcomes.

Haraway elaborated her notion as a tool for feminist research. She also cited Randolph and a painting called Diffraction 'that depicts multiple selves inhabiting one body'. In the 'omcomouse' piece she says diffraction is a 'material – semiotic tool' to be added to 'syntactics, semantics and pragmatics in semiotic theory' (20).

There are links to scientific phenomena and also optical ones. Optical metaphors are updated in a way that emphasises the 'particularity of embodied ways of seeing'. Optical instruments are also semiotic and figurations material practices. Haraway's term is 'figures' — 'neither literal nor self identical, they engender uncertainties and displacements' (21). The visual and the verbal 'are inexplicably tangled'.

Haraway reads Latour to say that science studies has also moved away from mimesis between the object studied and the method of study. Instead, figural interpretations offer '"a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfils the first"' [citing Haraway 1997]. This 'deconstructs mimesis and its self-fulfilling temporality'. In her book on the promises of monsters, Haraway develops the notion of 'inappropriate/d otherness' [from Trinh Minh-ha]. This refers to relations between people and organic and inorganic beings and refers to a '"critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality — as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination"' [Haraway 2004]. This undoes dialectical oppositions but stresses differences 'within the belly of the monster', appropriating Greimas and the way he constructs narrative through dialectical oppositions: instead 'places and stories are re-composed from interference patterns' [apparently you place stories in interacting squares but not in dialectical opposition]. This means that 'diffraction may engender relations between events occurring in different times'. Basically, the structural device in Greimas is used to interrupt the ordinary course of things, to deconstruct relationalities, and a diffraction pattern '"does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appears… The history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference… Heterogeneous history"'. Overall, this revolutionises semiotics and 'diffractions tear down the entire Euclidean geometry that depicts space as a container and time as an external parameter' (22).

Barad also opposes classical notions of reflection and diffraction, which still see the optical apparatus independent of the object of study. For her diffraction is not only about difference but '"about entangled differences that matter"' [citing 2007] — the apparatus is 'inseparably tangled with what it diffracts, always about the 'undecidability/indeterminacy between what functions as technology/apparatus and what is the object of that articulation/measurement'. Intra-actions cannot be separated from patterns: so effects of differences do not just mean those which follow interactions in time.

Bozalek and Zembylas (2017) therefore see diffraction as a process and as a result, 'ontologically a being and becoming… How we record interferences matters to which differences come to matter' [still evasive in my view]. Diffraction is a process of producing difference so a diffractive methodology 'implies a profound reworking of research, teaching, reading and writing processes', as revealed in her own table 1 [3 characteristics from Barad — interference patterns rather than mirror images, differences from within, reading through, as opposed to their opposites].

The actual literature 'describes many different forms of descriptive practices; the common denominator is a focus on relationality, materiality, creativity and the unexpected' [every reason to be highly suspicious about all of them]. As a result, the concept has attracted interest in the arts. For example dancing problematises  boundaries between teachers and learners, subject and object, embodiment and theorisation.

'The most common form of a diffractive methodology is a diffractive reading practice [!] In which different texts are read through each other rather than against each other' (23) this is more than just reading data through various conceptual lenses because it generates differences 'through mostly unexpected interferences' [hmmm]. Some texts encourage interference with other text more than others. Texts include material observations and other ethnographic practices.

Mengus and Nicolini (2021) say diffraction is a metaphor rather than a practical orientation and it remains open 'unclear how diffraction can be used in research practices...[it]... Can be interpretive, and methodology, or inventive'. A central concept for artists is the notion of the gaze acknowledging that seeing is socially and historically constituted, and M and N translate the gaze as Baradian apparatus, 'a set of material – discursive practices that are productive of the phenomenon', something that is not just in the eye of the interpreter or the interpretations of the viewers, but something culturally constituted. To make a difference, an alternative gaze needs to be mobilised, to generate interference, and M and N propose 'conversation with a "relational materialist gaze"'. Another video artist stresses the need for '"embodied engagement with the materiality of the research data"', which will apparently emphasise embodiment materiality, reconnecting 'the artwork this method of production', going beyond representational analysis alone. This is like Lenz Taguchi engaging with the materiality of the research data, and shows that 'a diffractive methodology is essentially performative'.

Barad says that diffraction is a dynamism, integral to mattering, generating 'a multiplicity of moments within what they call a "thick now"', some '"infinitely rich condensed now in a changing field, diffracted across space-time"' [citing 2014]. They have changed their view of time since 2007 inspired by both Benjamin [in 2017] and Derrida [2010] and also 'findings in quantum physics on "temporal diffraction"' [unrefd]. 'What seems to be clear' [!] Is that there is 'no meaning of time outside specific material discursive apparatuses' (25). Sometimes time is seen as 'a multiplicity of (holographic) moments' [in Barad 2017], (25) sometimes time is created in the action [2010], sometimes '"diffracted through itself"' [2017], or 'diffracted "through the present moment, like the play of light inside a crystal"' [2017 again]. [I read this as just different metaphors]  In 2017, Barad argues that temporal diffraction is a manifestation of a lesser-known '"indeterminacy principle… The time – energy indeterminacy principle… [Where]… A given entity can be in (a state of) superposition of different times… A state of indeterminate being coexisting multiple times — for example, yesterday, today and tomorrow"' [2017 page 67 apparently].

Her own work shows that 'ontology itself can become '"history"/dependent' where, as Barad argues, '"no absolute boundary" exists "between here – now and there – then"' [citing Barad 2014]. Anything new 'is necessarily aporetic… Simultaneously connected to a past (to be recognised as something) and disconnected from it (in order to count as new)' [but this is not new ontology, merely a definition of the new?]

This is crucial to understand creativity in the arts especially. Jones has argued that we need to know how to let go of knowledge, that 'temporal paradox lies at the heart of creativity' and originality — it must draw on existing knowledge and skill, but must be disconnected from tradition. This is 'temporal undecided ability (or spectrality) '. The Kantian notion of the sublime suggest something transcendental that can still be recuperated through rationality but there are other notions of 'not – knowing', some inherent grasp of infinity.

In science, according to Stengers, not knowing is a virtue but it has been disciplined, and there is a need for a new possibility of encountering different forms and reproducing them without prematurely subjecting them to a general law. We need to remain with what is 'in principle determinable and representable' (26) and the failure of current representation, but avoid a notion of representation 'that assumes an absolute externality the human observer and the world that would remain unaffected by the observation of it' (26).

A diffractive methodology suggests a new approach to 'spaces of indeterminacy'. Agential realism offers an ontological notion of indeterminacy, an 'ontological inseparability, and entanglement of an "object of study" and the "agencies of observation"'. There is nothing outside phenomena, but we can get new diffraction patterns through superposition or interference, remembering that '"an interference pattern is an objective mark of a superposition"' [citing Barad 2007 p 269 ), and superpositions 'are the embodiment of a quantum indeterminacy'. Therefore 'superpositions of scientific and artistic practices {?} may change relations of knowing'.

[SO -- clear ref to the quantum notion of superposition here and above, but what about the use in bold italic?]

First we have to clear away some stereotypes. Art is new, science is static, art does not produce answers to questions or knowledge but generates affects and experiences. To be receptive to difference you have to cultivate ignorance and otherness [this is how recognition of difference = surprise is manufactured in research] . The audience must be involved with the arts project.

There are also differences in terms of agency — agents describe or discover and science and create in arts, reveal what's always been there or create something new, require management in order to be objective and 'make the object of investigation appear to speak for itself' [citing Latour] (27), while it is almost the opposite in the creative arts.

In science, transformations transpose things like soil samples into data and records, and in this case study, 'creative intervention is required to transform the life history of an aquatic snail into videos of transparent blobs in a petri dish'. Experimental biology does not try to describe nature, of course but to approximate natural conditions in the laboratory. However, mimicry can 'be strategically employed in the arts' (28) sometimes playfully. Diffractive methodologies can also render things visible just like playful mimicry, but with a different notion of agency,not arty humans but  the  whole material-discursive apparatus [make the methodology appear to speak for itself again?]. The relations between subjects and objects shifts, breaking the stereotypes above. The creativity in science and the rule-boundedness in arts becomes visible -- 'the art in science and the science in art'

So [recapping and going back a page] a diffractive methodology offers a different way to cultivate 'spaces of indeterminacy'. Indeterminacy is now an ontological matter, due to 'ontological inseparability', an entanglement between an object of study and the agencies of observation. There is nothing outside of phenomena and the apparatuses that bring them about. There can only be new diffraction patterns produced by new superpositions or interferences of things, phenomena or disciplines. Superpositions represent 'ontological indeterminate states — states with no determinate fact of the matter concerning the property in question' (26) [citing Barad 2007p 265] [but these are known unknowns]. So 'super positions of scientific and artistic practices may change relations of knowing'.

Haraway says diffractive reading practices are related to transdisciplinary skills [always?], So reading a scientific experiment requires different skills from reading a novel and those skills will '"interact [sic] diffractively"' (28). Different skills can reinforce and interrupt each other just like interfering waves. Haraway calls these '"jokes"' [but are they regular or haphazard?]. They can be productive, but 'in any case they are creative', equivalent to Barad on '"cutting together – apart"'. This is different from a critique, and not like a practice in STS ['"sociotechnical integration"'] where a researcher becomes embedded in practices in order to intervene and disrupt the flow of things, by making practitioners aware of social dimensions]. Diffractive methodologies do not critique or correct a workflow but 'open up new spaces in which differences can interfere' (29).

Barad themself has done diffractive reading across Bohr, Butler on performativirty, and Foucault on power and apparatus [the staff on Foucault shows the limits of interdisciplinary readings without much knowledge]. She claims this is '"respectful engagements"'. Artists and other cross disciplinary collaborators have also enthusiastically taken up diffraction, as in Geerts and van der Tuin ( 2016) [Rhizomes piece]. It is not just crossing disciplinary boundaries but looking for shifting circumstances and interference patterns. Not just cross disciplinary collaborations which maintain disciplinary practices, but something transcending those norms, often focusing on real world problems. A diffractive approach focuses particularly on how boundaries between disciplines are 'enacted, maintained and re enacted'. They may not contribute knowledge to their own discipline but rather contribute an understanding of differences and therefore shift the practice of their field.

A case study of a long term arts science collaboration between Robinson and Rundle, the RADIX network [which includes her] [Rundle works at UOP!]. The radix in question is an aquatic snail and the project explores developmental biology, evolution and climate change. Rundle looks at changes induced by the environment among snails and others in estuaries and intertidal zones and how it affects the development, especially in terms of key changes in their life history like hatching, settlement and maturation, which are all affected by environmental conditions. The timing of these transitions varies within a species and therefore there might be species variations to climate change, concerning heart development or reactions to oxygen limitations. Robinson uses 'metaphorical and material lenses' that 'isolate capture and engender an object of scientific investigation and how artistic interventions may reveal assumptions about the processes of creating visual data in science' (30). She is particularly interested in 'unthought or "unconscious" structures' in scientific knowledge production, and does things like drawing on surrealism to evoke repressed undersides of scientific knowledge like mind-body or nature-culture divisions.

The joint projects explore borders and interfaces between science and art, tensions between aesthetic decision-making and scientific method. They generate artwork that interrogates and adds critical dimensions to scientific practice and also generates new perspectives and insights. The claim is that 'the diffraction of artistic and scientific practices may render visible what science either left invisible more labours to hide' (31). [pretty modest visibilities]

Specific projects have been produced, including a sound installation translating visual data from video recordings of developing snail embryos into sound producing 'an immersive experience that drew attention to the sensory body of the observer' usually ignored by scientific experimentation. This calls attention to the relation between scientists and the animals they observed and the '"messiness" of the natural environment and the process of data collection'.

Other projects work with visual representations. One 'reconfigures temporalities… And demonstrates the process of diffraction both literally (through the generation of ripples in the liquid contained in a petri dish) and metaphorically through the interference of science and arts'. All seek to immerse the viewer , make observation tangible, and draw attention to relations between humans and nonhumans.

The snail has become a model organism to study survival under altered environmental conditions and Rundle has gone on to get interested in intra-species variations due to climate change. The animals are convenient for laboratory study because they reproduce rapidly and their embryos are transparent. Schrader thinks the whole thing has been a great success refocusing attention on observation, despite 'allegedly objective science' trying to raise these processes, and also emphasising 'processes of creative transformation' (32) [real talk up in my view — do the observations actually transform the results in any way?]

Another video installation on the development of the embryos. This time there are scientific images following rigourous protocols following bio-imaging observations covering particular time lapses digital processing and so on, but this footage is then appropriated and put into a different context, images are placed on the surface of dark liquid, and the image [the liquid] is disturbed physically, enlarged and projected onto a wall. This 'artistic interference renders visible the interferences within experimental observations' (33), illustrating '"uncertainties in the space between the boundaries of science and art"' (33).

There is a commentary by Rundle, other artists, philosophers of science in literary scholars [the real significance of the work I assume], which point out the visibility of the process of observation, the challenge to transparency and the conceptual challenges to the notion of ideal development: there is apparently a tension in developmental biology 'between idealised images of embryos and… "Natural" variation' [who knew?]. Some variations of particular organs for example are biologically important part are often suppressed an overall representation 'as only the most beautiful embryos are chosen… In scientific representations' [according to Rundle]. The aesthetic conventions found even in scientific methodology 'may undermine its own process of discovery. Further, 'selection of images helps it to be 'easily overlooked that heterochrony that is usually associated with a phenomenon between species, defined as an "altered timing of the expression of the developmental stage or event between ancestral and descendant species", could also be significant within a species' [again as a result of selecting particular images?] So what is revealed is the 'relevance of aesthetic components and conventions in science' — but presumably all this is conveyed in the commentary?].

Another commentary by an artist looks at the idea of transparency, implied in the visual transposition of the video recordings into time-lapse re-presentations. Transparency usually suggests a mimetic relation, while diffraction shifts this relation and re-entangles observer an object. The installation sifts attention from knowledge production back from individual embryos to the process of life formation of the embryo, because it offers 'temporal manipulations that foreground the agency of the snail embryos' (34). The time-lapse technology adjusts or condenses the development of the embryo makes it fit the attention span of the human viewer.

In another visualisation the enlarged diffracted image projected on the wall [same as the one above?] disrupts the video sequence. Another temporal sequence is superimposed on the actual [? Or human adjusted?] developmental time, especially 'an impression of pulsation', which redirects attention back to the 'pulsation of the embryo heart' what we have here is 'the superposition of two temporalities' which 'enables a shift in the relation between the viewer and the object of observation [not all superposition in the quantum sense, more like superimposition?]. Knowledge of developmental growth 'is backgrounded in favour of an experience of a lively pulsation' [an artistic effect]. Scientific manipulation of development 'is not raised but highlighted as manipulation such that viewers can insert themselves into the temporal lapses' [viewers can realise that scientists are manipulating the development in between the images?]. This makes visible the apparatus of scientific production 'and a specific materialisation of time'. Or, in Baradian talk-up 'human – snail relations are "cut together apart"… Differently in time'. Back into ordinary language — 'noise interferes with the signal but noise can also become the ground from which nourishment [or creativity] can be gleaned' [is it though, and would it be without the commentary?].

So we have a wonderful movement across disciplinary boundaries, representing both being transposed and the act of transposing, simultaneously and this crossing of positions between the disciplines 'is both disruptive and connective. Diffraction is at work… As a deconstruction of mimesis or transparency (in Haraway's sense) and across the disciplines interferences that engender new phenomena (in Barad's sense)' (34 – 35). We see 'new generative spaces of indeterminacy between science and arts [maybe, but only because the artistic depictions do not conform to the normal literal scientific depictions. It is hardly rocket science].

Yet another project involves a scientific experiment in an art gallery, an installation. Glass containers were filled with water, snails and plants, pondweed, as food for the snails. The snails were drawn from different locations with different salinities. The jars are connected by wires and illuminated by LEDs where the light corresponds to the salinity. a fourth jar acts as control and reference ['normal' links between water and the LED] . This set up 'literalises the notion of experimental control' (35) [again there is an artists account for those who don't get it] which is not normally made visible. The ethical concerns also 'take on new dimensions in a gallery'. Viewers participate in monitoring, 'provoked to move between aesthetic and a scientific gaze' which are set up to interfere and destabilise each other. [They tweak the snails then empathise with them?] There is a sound accompaniment, a text by Linnaeus of his early own fieldwork on the snail, and two versions scrambled by an algorithm. Linnaeus's visit describes the connection between the laboratory experiment and the field, but the scrambling 'destroys any illusion of a pure origin' (36) [weird]. Overall the artist thinks this depicts the essence of an experiment, revealing the mechanism of laboratory experiments that are often repressed, a way to identify '"fissures within an experimental system that can then be open to further reflective artistic investigation"'. The normal pattern of mimicry is displaced, but Schrader finds 'the notion of diffraction a better fit' because playful mimesis can make visible what was supposed to remain invisible, while diffraction amplifies that which is covered up by focusing on interference patterns. [contradictions for the audience to puzzle out?]. The whole setup, the gallery, the emphasis on control, the controlled participation of the viewers and the connection between the apparatus, and the joining of accounts of fieldwork and laboratory 'diffract the scientific experiment in such a way that it increases the amplitude of those scientific aspects — such as the importance of context, the parameters that bind and control in experiments, experimental noise — that are downplayed in the scientific world'. The creative processes remain visible, including the apparatuses of observation which remain 'visible through the diffraction of the gazes' [massive talk up again, with an admission that diffraction is not much more than playful mimicry, and diffraction of gazes still not well explained, and more or less just means alternative gazes?].

In conclusion [thank God] these cross disciplinary practices reveal and interrogate methodologies and how they position specific bodies of knowledge but in these projects 'art functions as a "diffraction grating" for science' that is, like Barad, '"instruments that produce patterns that marked differences in the relative characters (i.e. amplitude and phase) of individual waves as they combine"' [2007). They tell us that sometimes the point is to understand the substance that is being diffracted and sometimes to learn about the diffraction grating itself [2007 p. 83] [and this is supposed to be helpful?] Diffraction patterns acquired different meanings in the frameworks of science and art. Temporal diffraction generates new temporal experiences by exposing the artificiality of the construction of time[?}  in experimentation. It also shifts the relations between viewer and object of observation 'through the superposition of different times' [I still think she means superimposition]. Temporal variations are visible and amplified. Unlike mimesis 'diffractions draw attention to nonhuman agencies in the process' [no, the commentaries do]. So interference patterns make a difference in how meanings are made and lived [a paraphrase of Haraway].

[Note 6 says that heterochrony involves '"an altered timing of the expression of a developmental stage or event between ancestral and descendant species"'. Choosing a single image to represent developmental stages can miss this or confuse it with timing differences within species. (37)