Notes on: van der Tuin, I. (2011) '"A Different Starting Point, A Different Metaphysics": Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively' Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 26, (1): 22 – 42 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01114.x Dave Harris Bergson is apparently becoming popular as a feminist. She wants to read diffractively to break the academic habit of criticism and work 'along affirmative lines', following Grosz who says that reading affirmatively requires '"a mode of assenting to rather than dissenting from those 'primary' texts" (22), not distancing from texts or dismissing them. Affirmative reading still transform however and  not celebratory, itself a departure from some feminist ethics. Grosz still differentiates between Bergson and feminism and discusses Bergson in depth first, but Tuin wants to offer a more immediate method, trying to work out 'how to effectuate a feminist Bergson-ism for the 21st-century' (23). This is not a linear account, nor a comparison, however. A diffractive reading maintains the notion of assent rather than isolating philosophies, and preserves the idea of the movement of thoughts or duration. It implies we are going to also do 'Bergsonian reading of the work of Barad. Bergson himself rejects the idea of criticism which is based on utilitarianism and pragmatic action, and involves a contrast with some reconstructed reality which should have happened instead. It appraises rather than analyses, and it is easy to avoid reality by operating only with concepts and an intention to measure. Pre-existing concepts in language influences our approach to reality and encourages us to note repetitions without difference. It seems inadequate to '"convey all the delicate shades of inner states"' (24). Words have a tendency to turn into order words, following the primary functions of '"industrial, commercial, military, always social"' intentions (25). The philosophical mind is more speculative than the critical stance, better understanding of conventional values. As a result, we have to distrust words and their simplifying constraints which are preserved in critique. This underlying spatialisation limits philosophy, for example producing a particular metaphysics of time and reality. We need to reconstruct instead the '" inner life of things"', based on the thing itself. This would produce what he calls '"intuitive metaphysics"'. Early example of oversimplification, Hill finds phallocentrism and Eurocentrism in Bergson, because his notion of the self is still developed within masculine parameters. Any commitment to dualism is just a disavowal, and his monism still maintains a sexed hierarchy, valorising masculine ways of life. We need to break with his dualism. This is really seeing difference as implying worthlessness. Bergson wants to move beyond dualism. Hill also critics feminist readings of Bergson including those by Grosz and Olkowski, who apparently has identified a direct link between Bergson and Irigaray on sexual difference theory, because both talk about duration and the interval. Irigaray should instead be used to alter Bergson's phallocentrism and break the 'sexed hierarchy between life and matter' (26). Hill also criticises Deleuze on Bergson who sees dualism as just a methodological step: Hill maintains that Bergson is not a monist even after DeLanda's interpretation which finds evidence that Bergson sees feminine matter as capable of self organisation as well. Hill tries to monopolise all of feminist scholarship to focus on Hill, in a spirit of negation, accusing Bergson of setting up a master narrative and seeing the other philosophical critiques as just 'dialectically related schools of thought' (27), one of which is feminism. We should try diffraction instead. Haraway formulated it first to move away from 'a reductive linguisticism' with fixed links between signifier and signified, word and thing, the reproduction of sacred images. Her proposal is to move away from representationalism and develop the new materialism. Feminists should affirm diffraction instead of representation or reflection which are reductive and risk reaffirming fellow centrism. Diffraction disrupted linear and fixed causality in favour of interference patterns. This will involve a genuine qualitative shift in philosophy. Barad works on this, and sees diffraction as 'a reading strategy'(28), designed to break with this cosy dialectics. We read insights through one another and rework concepts away from meanings they have acquired in traditions of thought as in representationalism. We can even see links between apparently opposite schools of thought, overcoming simple negations, and we can find strengths and links among scholars 'that only apparently work towards the same goals'. She develops the idea by looking at 'instances of interference' found all around us. As a method, she sees that poststructuralist critique leading to feminist standpoint theory and identity politics does include the knower, but still sticks with representationalism. There is a danger of critique becoming relativism. Both relativism and realism have to be shifted towards the performative. This means moving away from familiar habits of thought, not working with representations, opening up and accounting for how practices matter, including the practice of classification of bits of reality: we need instead to examine phenomena. This comes close to Bergson seeing reality as movement or flux, not things, which are also constituted by a cut. He has the same aim in mind as Barad even though metaphors and images are only suggestive, tools to think with, to develop intuitive metaphysics — as in the example about light and reflection to counter simple intuition. These links provide the possibility of a diffractive reading with Barad, 'according to a feminist methodology of affirmation' (29). Bergson opposes representationalism but does not exactly turn to diffraction, although is mentioned once in the context of experience disrupting habits. Barad agential realism resembles Bergson's partial realism, and refers to duration even though she does not reference the term or indeed the work of Bergson. In more detail, Bergson's whole approach can be seen in Matter and Memory, where the theory of duration is explicitly laid out. It is a dualism but the intention is to break with the old conceptions of realism and materialism, or dogmatism and idealism by 'pushing dualism (thing versus representation) to an extreme' (30). We can overcome the theoretical difficulties of dualism because they inherit the old conceptions from both approaches. Instead, matter is understood through memory, to put it between Descartes and Berkeley. Thingification arises from representationalism. Bergson suspects some 'common sense' general understanding between both, but urges us not to stop halfway. We have to push dualism instead. Tuin sees Bergson's halfway as more of a '"hyphen, a connecting link"' (31). Bergen sees intuition as the method of metaphysics, in order to overcome old colonialising concepts like spatialised time, and the intention to mastery. We have to rethink matter before idealism split with realism, existence and appearance. It is the same issues the problem of relating body and soul, mind and matter, and this is why we look at memory. Matter is an aggregate of images [in his sense]. Olkowski argues that we can break with representationalism [in an odd discussion about how external images influence the body image by transmitting movement to it] (32). Bergson is meeting the universe halfway, matter is halfway, the universe is made of images, which again are interactions of nature and culture. All this is similar to Barad. Bergson has already begun the analysis, and Barad's concepts can make his 'lessons stronger'. We can also reject Hill as sticking with spatialised time. Barad's work begins with the apparently irresolvable dualism between light as a wave and as a particle, challenged by seeing knower, known and laboratory instrument as acting simultaneously in an entanglement, all of them co-constitutive. This is a break with both realism and relativism. Performance is what produces apparently separated things and dualism. Matter is the same as meaning in having '"always already an ongoing historicity"' (34). This builds on the notion of the material – semiotic introduced by Haraway — 'the idea that matter envelops meaning and meaning matter', so there is no gap between word and thing, which remains only as an 'scholarly and philosophical habit' that rewards intelligence. It is this that creates the objectified feminist nature. Standpoint theory has not altered it, but Barad and Bergson have seriously challenged it. Matter's historicity reminds us that matter is 'in fact duration'. Bergson got there first in denying that matter was just mute. Both life and reality are in flux 'as a creative evolution, structured by duration' (35), ill served by spatialised time as a representation. It is this representation that structures science in its assumed split with metaphysics. Barad makes a 'parallel'argument in her agential conception of science [I'm not terribly convinced by this]. Barad certainly critiques the idea of conventional material particles and causes, and sees materiality as the movement of life. The emphasis on entanglement and interaction breaks with dualism in Barad, while Bergson adds the dimension of historicity, where number resolves itself into vibrations which become objects, memories solidifies, duration links past present and future. This produces a new kind of materialism, based on duration, non-spatial temporality, it is in duration that things differ from themselves, and this 'specifies agential matter' (36). Both oppose a dualism between science and metaphysics. Both see an affirmative relation between the two, not a negation, no drive to mastery, no reproduction of phallocentrism. Bergson's intuitive metaphysics 'affects' (37) Barad onto epistemology, and a diffractive reading can 'install an onto-epistemology of duration'. Complementarity means metaphysics and science are of equal value and both can touch reality. For Bergson the body as an image is at the centre of his philosophy [a good example of how duration can be experienced?] Utilitarianism is not the heart of it, though. This transforms our understanding of memory away from any utilitarian idea that it stores past ideas, or that the body or brain has a special function as an apparatus to represent the world. Instead body is where movement happens through duration. This is anti-humanist, assuming that mind and life are not different in nature — both are matter. Barad addresses this through trying to build on Böhr' s interpretation and remove humanism, but the body is not just a conductor of forces, despite Barad [once] using the term. Conductors are meant to be understood as mediums, between things, showing movement, progressive duration and intra-action. The Bergsonian body is the boundary between duration and matter, but clarification will be gained if we think of it instead as a Baradian apparatus. Conversely, Bergson is right to emphasise 'undividability and flux' and this helps us explain the workings of scientific apparatus. We can even demonstrate 'how Bergson's intuition is onto-epistemological, and Barad's onto- epistemology intuitive' (38). So measurement for Bergson is a conventional exercise driven by utilitarianism, imposed on nature and driven by rationality. This has to be rejected, and Barad makes this more precise. Bergson does address the apparatus through his discussion of the film camera and implies that our knowledge is cinematographical. This is illegitimate assuming spatialised time. The philosophical mind also works like this. We should look instead for movement not snapshots, thinking of how the body works as an apparatus as duration unrolls. Representationalism in the intellect and 'materialised in the camera' camouflages the movement of reality underneath. Tuin finds a 'strong connection with the complementarity thesis of Böhr' (39), when we find reality beneath the snapshots. Both here are collapsing '" knowledge of the thing with its being"' [citing grosz], equating epistemology and ontology. Bergson is offering an onto-epistemological account in his discussion of the cinematograph, before even Deleuze. Onto epistemologies are 'intuitive' (40) in Bergson's terms. The apparatus plays a distinctive part, not sticking with splits between subject and object. The intuition arises because we start from 'the simple and undivided (entanglement and intra-action)' and seeing traditional physics as operating with cuts from this flow. This is like Bergson arguing that we have to move from intuition to intelligence, not the other way around. Böhr has argued against representationalism as well. Bergson draws implications for the whole state of being, only poorly grasped by measurement, and Barad means the same thing by seeing measurement as '"an instance where matter and meaning meet in a very literal sense"' [this is Barad 1996]. This is not fully humanist because instruments also play a role and objects are also agential. Light really is a particle in one experiment and a wave in another. Barad's notion of phenomenon also implies something ontologically basic, and we have to see how knower, known and apparatus are intrinsically bound up with one another which does not predetermine their functions nor the boundaries between them. Apparatuses 'like the Bergsonian bodies' cut through their action. This is implied by Bergson saying that scientific concepts endure only because they are bound up with the rest of the universe. Barad says that reality is not a matter of things but phenomena, with dynamism and flow responsible for temporality and speciality, that apparatuses '"come to matter"'. She adds ethics, defining it as an interest in 'which cuts are made when and for whom'. This is a new materialism, explaining for example sexual difference, where matter is made feminine by traditional scientists and philosophers, but retains components outside as a potential. If we see Bergsonian bodies and Baradian apparatuses as complementary, we can better understand Bergson seeing the body as a conductor, an instrument of intuition as it engages in flows of both matter and meaning. Barad has a similar conception in that bodies come to matter in a similar way, as apparatuses. This helps Barad reject the God trick and 'the (multiple) standpoint(s) of feminist standpoint theory and identity politics'. Bergson sees qualities as the first things we perceive, things in movement, not cut up into states. We then mark off the boundaries of bodies, but this gives a misleading stability. Barad similarly has a take on science that emphasises qualitative shifts, one that will go further than 'all kinds of well-known, dialectically related ontolog*ies and epistemologies' [the old interconnection between realism and constructivism]. Her new metaphysics will help philosophy and science complement each other, as Bergson recommends — by revaluing experience and common sense which breaks with intellectual habits and contingencies. We have to think of a new way to '"pass from the immediate to the useful"', to join philosophy and say mathematics. Barad's local agential resolutions suggest the same. She adds feminist ethics since cuts can be made in different ways, but a similar ethic 'is at work in Bergson', (41) who is not phallocentric and does not require an alternative feminist philosophy as Hill argues. If we read 'Bergson and Barad through each other' we can see that Bergson's dualism can be pushed to an extreme and develop a feminist ethics, denying a simple association between matter and the feminine by rejecting the 'critical, scientific mind' that is responsible for it. We need to focus on creative evolution and to see life in matter as 'entangled, durational, and agential' (42). We'll get there with 'Bergsonian – Baradian metaphysics' Note one says that she is trying to 'make them speak to each other'. She says others have done this without using the term diffraction. Note 4 says that Barad's reference to Derrida on non-linear temporality 'came very close to Bergsonian duration'. Note 6 says that Bohr's philosophy does not mention Bergson, but is explicit about Whitehead. One commentator says that he repeats Bergson's defence of free will. Bohm's refutation of Einstein's relativity affirms complementarity and duration — 'both allow for a range of actualisations of time as virtual multiplicity, for instance in different experimental settings. Note 7 says that she had to 'shift' the metaphor of the cinematograph to look at the apparatus itself, rather as Deleuze does with the movement image.