Notes on three examples of
diffractive reading
Dave Harris
Ceder S (2015) diffraction as a methodology for
philosophy of education. Paper presented at AERA
conference 2015, Chicago.
This explores the methodology of diffraction in
studies of philosophy education. The three main
components are 'multiplicity, affirmativity and
creativity' (1). Biesta is also affirmative in
advancing arguments that are risky and which
invite further work.
Post qualitative research in Lather or St Pierre
has emerged after qualitative research managed to
shake off those bits of quantitative methodology
which remained — '"system intensity, linear
process, technique, clarity and transparency of
language, accurate observation, representation,
and so on"' [quoting St Pierre 2013]. We have to
move beyond humanism into post-humanism, and
things such as indigenous theories, actor network
theory. Research needs to be nonhierarchical,
nonrepresentative and non-essentialist. These
approaches are connected by a renewed focus on
ontology. It is not just perspectivism, where it
is assumed that there is one real phenomenon but
that knowledge of it is multiple. Phenomena are
themselves multiple. Barad has been important here
Barad says that no object is an independent
entity, but 'rather, it is always already
changing, and changes the subject'. The phenomena,
relations and relata is the starting point. The
metaphor is the wave particle duality, where light
is both a wave and a particle, and we do not study
light itself but rather light in relation to the
actual experiments. The relations in phenomena are
best described as intra-action rather than
interaction [the latter implies a separation
between relata and relation].
Haraway introduced the notion of diffraction as a
methodological approach, and Barad developed it as
a way to work with agential cuts. In Haraway, the
optical notion of diffraction is used instead of
reflection, to stress interaction and interference
and difference rather than reflections. Lenz
Taguchi argues that 'reflexivity often means
mirroring essentially fixed positions is, that is
reproducing difference from… [not] difference
within' (3). This is a deleuzian notion of
difference, and it implies something positive.
Diffraction patterns are an effect of this
difference within. Methodologically, it [somehow]
compels us to find 'productive connections instead
of limiting the analysis to a critical
classification exercise'.
Diffraction leads to affirmative reading since all
the components are already interacting with each
other and with the researcher. Attention to fine
detail is needed. One text can be read together
with and through another. Transdisciplinary
practices can be brought into '"dynamic
relationality"' [Barad]. Braidotti says we should
not focus on representational citation but '"on
the effective traces, and what is left over, what
remains, what has somehow caught and stuck around,
the drags and the sentiments of the reading and
the cognitive processes"'. In this paper, 'the
affective traces' are joined with the affirmative
tendency [because he is only considering nice
affects?]
The idea is to create new concepts as in Deleuze
and Guattari, and this links with Haraway on the
reflective practice. However, for Deleuze and
Guattari 'creating new concepts, consequently
means to disrupt the ideas of other philosophers
and even to be forever disloyal to ones favourite
philosophers'. Nevertheless [strangely]
diffraction as an affirmative strategy 'using
multiple realities in order to create new concepts
and philosophies'
The methodology could be fruitful in the
philosophy of education. The focus on creativity
instead of critique needs to 'an affirmative
pragmatic reading instead of merely classifying
and criticising ideas' (4). It is
transdisciplinary. Inputs may have an unexpected
source. Theories can still 'affirmatively
contribute to each others development' even if
they start from different ontological or
epistemological points.
In education settings, Mazzei (2014) has used
diffractive analysis instead of coding data,
involving 'being open towards what the data does
to the researcher' as the two intra act. Taguchi
(2012) [below] seems to combine both diffraction
and deleuzian cartography [in the 2014 piece with
Palmer below ] to analyse young girls well-being
using a multiplicity of data — narrative data is
placed next to an excerpt in a daily newspaper and
an interview with a psychotherapist. The authors
propose to read these kinds of data into each
other and this also produced a memory story from
one of the researchers which is also presented to
the reader. This shows that 'the data is affecting
the researchers, and they acknowledge this event'
and this expands the data. This shows us how to be
open to affects, and affirmative and also how to
'deal with a multiplicity of data'. Philosophical
data can be analysed in the same way, using memory
stories and film fragments as well as texts [as in
his own work]
The idea is, with Biesta, to take a multiplicity
of inputs 'and create pragmatic philosophies for
education'. The three aspects of diffraction go
'well in line' with and support Biesta. It also
demonstrates affirmative and creative forms of
risk
Mazzei, L (2014) Beyond an Easy Sense: A
diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry.
20. DOI 10.1177/1077 80041453257.
This involves diffractive reading of data through
multiple theoretical insights to avoid 'habitual
normative readings' [same old feminist stuff
blaming patriarchy] and generate 'thought in
unpredictable patterns producing different
knowledge' it takes data previously collected from
interviews.
There is more to data analysis than just
identifying thematic groupings or coherent and
familiar narratives. Instead, the intention is to
think with theory as with the earlier deleuzian
work with Jackson, in this case diffraction. Barad
refers to '"reading insights through one another"
(742), and she drew on a range of theories
including quantum physics and feminist theory. She
distinguished diffraction from reflection using a
metaphor from the physical phenomenon of wave
behaviour and how it generates patterns of
difference. She argues that this 'takes into
account' that knowledge is always affected by
different forces coming together, in her case
'"knowing is a matter of part of the world making
itself intelligible to another part of the world"'
Coding limits analysis and is often linked to
macro themes [especially in all those repetitive
feminist studies] in a pedestrian way. Concern
with the macro produces broad categories and
themes that are then 'plucked from the data'
reassembled into a narrative. This rarely produces
different knowledge, and in her own interview
studies soon led to the usual major themes and
patterns of impostor syndrome, male privilege,
double standards and so on. Here, the categories
were 'driven by our experience' as well as that of
the participants, and it tended to reproduce what
was already known. It also missed some of the fine
details and textures, contradictions and tensions.
This coding produces the 'easy sense' of the
title, and pleasingly affirms personal experience.
They wanted go beyond by plugging in [oh yes – now
I remember]. Multiple texts are taken as literary
machines, and text includes interview data and
works of theory or methods. If we plug these into
each other we would get 'sense of the ceaseless
variations possible', and focus on process, the
formation of assemblages. Diffraction can explain
this move away from 'habitual normative readings
at zero in on sameness' to readings that disrupts
thought 'as I plugged multiple theories into data
and read them through one another' the result is a
rhizome that leads in different directions and
keeps analysis 'on the move'.
Diffractive analysis emphasises difference 'by
breaking open the data (and the categories
inherent in coding) by de-centring and
destabilising the tropes of liberal humanist
identity work', rejecting 'the subject,
interpretation, categorical similarity, and so on'
instead of layering codes onto the data we need to
thread through or plug-in [thus does Deleuze
transition to Barad] theory into data leading to
'multiplicity, ambiguity, and incoherent
subjectivity' we do not do this according to one
theorist's concept but into the assemblage and
make new connections. In this way, 'plugging in
creates a different relationship among texts: they
constitute one another and, in doing so, create
something new'.
We can see this with the data excerpt which
features 'feminist poststructuralist theory, a
transcript, 'Barad's concept of intra-action', and
'Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire' as well
as inputs and the editor of this journal and
Jackson. The texts are read 'through, with an in
relation to each other'. There is no zeroing in
but a spread of thoughts of knowledge through
multiple readings. The exercise could have been
extended with multiple transcripts.
[The transcript is with a female academic, Brenda,
who describes the effects of being an academic on
her life. She ended up divorced because her
husband was jealous wanted her to quit. She felt
like she was having an affair when she returned to
school because she got so much positive feedback,
but hubby got jealous and forced her to choose
between school and him. Eventually she chose
school. She now has a new partner who was jealous
but has now come around]
The conventional approach to data analysis could
simply categorise examples of how relationships
change but now, 'reading through multiple
theoretical insights' (744) she wants to open up
her thinking through various theoretical concepts,
especially Deleuze and Guattari on desire and
Barad on intra-action.
Deleuze and Guattari insists that desire is about
production, something active and becoming from a
multiplicity of forces, not a lack but because of
our productive force. The question that arises is
how desire produced a partner for Brenda in her
intellectual peers — 'or what does the presence of
intellectual peers produce'. This will help us see
how desire works how it produces and how
'intensities and connectives' are at work.
Barad says intra-action with other bodies will
produce subjectivities and performative enactments
'not previously thought'. It is 'an enactment of
the ontological shift made by Deleuze in a
philosophy of immanence' (745) [?] This produces
her onto–epistemological stance when knowledge and
being are mutually constitutive, bringing the
material back in after the linguistic turn. This
leads to questions such as 'how does Brenda
interact with her world, both human and nonhuman
in ways that produce different becomings?'
We can see that leaving her husband is a
production of desire that has produced material
effects. She's both materially and discursively
produced as a woman and as a wife. Brenda is 'both
constituting and constitutive of the discourses
perpetuated in a traditional patriarchal marriage'
[supported by going back to the bit where she said
that she caused trouble after wanting to move
around the country to attend different schools].
Embracing an intellectual life also has material
effects and 'indeed becomes a life of the body'
because Brenda described going back to school as
like having an affair. The description of pursuing
the doctoral work 'evokes desire (in a
sexual/sensual sense), pleasure (in an
intellectual and sensual sense), and production
(of satisfaction in the affirmation she
receives)'. Deleuzian desire produces both effect
and affects.
This lines up [somehow] with Barad on the
materiality of texts. As Brenda 'encounters the
thrill of the affair with her intellectual work,
the pages and thoughts take on a material force'
and with the new space provided by the affirmative
school, produce Brenda 'in a mutual becoming'.
Deleuze and Guattari talk about processes that
couple machines together including man and nature,
and this seems to be 'writing about the entangled
nature of the material and discursive'. So that
'the material is always discursively produced and
the discursive is always already materially
produced'. Her husband's comment that she isn't
smart enough and that she must choose is not just
speaking against Brenda but is 'an assault on
Brenda', not just the construction but as
something material, an attempt to negate her as a
woman. In other words these interactions are about
bodies and words and also about 'the mutual
production of both subjectivities and performative
enactments'.
Reading diffractively, we now see how discourses
and text materialise and produce subjectivities
and enactments. This helps us 'think with the
abstract concepts of Deleuze and Guattari to
produce a different methodology in the form of a
diffractive analysis', and help us consider
entanglement between bodies, texts, data, language
and theory. We are 'just beginning to understand
this' and there is 'the possibility of much
productive potential for qualitative researchers'
[Massive talk up and finding equivalence between
terms, not surprising following the mutual
definitions]. Here is the other piece Ceder
cites...
Lenz Taguchi, H. & Palmer, A. (2013). A
more 'livable' school? A diffractive analysis of
the performative enactments of girls' ill –/well
– being with (in) school environments. Gender
and Education, 25 (6): 671 – 87. DOI:
10.1080/0954 0253.2013.829909
Schoolgirls in Sweden can develop psychological
ill health over behaviour and achievement in
school. Palliative methods usually aim at self
management of stress and health. This is a
'feminist agential realist study' (671) to
show how the 'material – discursive school
environment, that is, the entanglement of
architecture, materialities, bodies, discourses
and discursive practices', including those about
health in research texts are 'responsible for,
co-constitutive of and enacting female students
ill – and well – being. Diffractive analysis means
they must indicate how they are involved in
co-production, and it also raises new possible
realities
Any production of knowledge also produces reality
with material consequences, Barad and others
argue. For example boys finding it unmanly to
study often leads to blame for overachieving girls
and female teachers. Realities have material
consequences. This topic leads to asking how
knowledge production is part of a larger and
extended apparatus producing schoolgirls
realities, and how it affects their enactments of
health. In particular are scientific findings
'co-constitutive agents' (672) of well-being,
together with others? Agents here are
'entanglements of discourses, places,
materialities and embodied practices in or
connected to the school environment'. They have a
history relating to gender agents and so on. The
materiality of language is 'the strongest agent in
these interactive entanglements' but other
material agents such as buildings are also
co-constitutive.
The whole material–discursive school environment
has various agents and practices and together it
is collectively responsible for the phenomenon of
well-being. Enactments arise as 'effects of an
open-ended material – discursive apparatus of
knowing' involving the researchers themselves as
performative agents. They're not looking for
answers inside but instead analysing encounters of
different sorts of agents and practices,
especially focusing on differences — 'how matter
matters' in Barad's terms. The methodology is a
diffractive analysis. They going to make 'very
specific agential and provisional cuts in the
multiple realities' produced by this apparatus
which they 'understand to be productive of girls
school-related' health. They explain this in a
section below.
How do they identify which practices matter? First
they need to investigate their apparatus of
knowing and encounters with its different agents,
'including the affective responses and memories of
our own' (673). This involves outlining Barad's
concepts of agential realism phenomenon and
apparatus.
Agential realism is a relational ontology focused
on phenomena rather than stable objects separate
from language and concepts. This provides 'an
ongoing process of mutual intelligible–making of
matter and meaning that are constitutive of
reality'. Girls health is 'material – discursive
intra-active enactments' so we can show how, for
example 'a panicking girl – body' has a specific
meaning of ill-being attached in specific situated
events within a wider apparatus. As a result, the
girls body is no longer a separate ontological
unit with boundaries and properties, but a
phenomenon, an inseparable entanglement of
agencies — 'the agencies of discourses of
schooling and ill – or well–being… Physical
school building and practices of schooling' these
components collectively interact in particular
events and the phenomenon of illness is produced,
in that it's boundaries and properties have become
determinate, and also meaningful. This depends on
Barad seeing concepts not just as linguistic but
as material arrangements, and discursive practices
are not the same as discursive speech acts. In
other words, 'material – discursive
intra-activity' is what we will be studying,
neither are prior, nor reducible to the other but
are '"mutually articulated"'. Becoming and knowing
are co-constitutive, so agential realism is onto
and episto.
An apparatus is not a schemata or Althusserian
apparatus or even a Foucault discursive practice.
It's something that refers to Bohr and quantum
physics. At that level, 'specific
material-discursive practices… Become productive
of phenomena by ways of specific boundary making
cuts' they define particular concepts and exclude
others and produce phenomena with particular
physical properties. Our cuts are temporarily
manifested through the practice of producing
scientific knowledge — phenomena are not 'manifest
in themselves'. Thus researchers are entangled
with apparatuses, not just observers and 'the
subject – object distinction is invalidated'. Our
knowing is part of a 'larger material arrangement
(of which we are an entangled part)' that produces
differences, cuts, boundaries and meanings.
So they set up an apparatus of knowing. There is a
background of medical and psychological studies on
female stress and ill-health which point to high
achieving girls and their anxieties. Invariably
preventative treatment involves self-management.
They also had their own experiences of the sorts
of realities young girls experience and they now
suffer as adults. Both of them are high achieving
academics experiencing stress and treating
themselves. This means that they are not fully
formed pre-existing subjects but are interactively
co-constituted by their own material discursive
practices. A knowing apparatus involves embodied
engagements with data and this will lead to some
data being found, and some differences produced —
for example as white middle-class heterosexual
women they might be transformed by the research
process itself
They got stories from young girls and engaged
particularly with them. They met them informally.
They first got some information and informed
consent. The girls told memory stories and showed
them photos. They asked about specific places
spaces and practices that mattered — for example
where in school buildings they would feel ill or
anxious, whether they could describe the context
in terms of smells or sounds. They 'had no
problems' talking and writing about these details
which they transmitted by email. They also took
photographs of places or situations where they
felt ill or well. They said that the photos helped
them write the stories and that they felt
differently after having written about them and
discussing them
The two researchers then sat together surrounded
by all the data, read things out to each other or
put photographs into different software 'to
highlight or downplay parts of them' these are
'agentive cuts in the construction of various
encounters with data' they produced knowing in a
'rhizomatic zigzagging flow' they immersed
themselves in a flow of 'entangled social,
material and discursive forces in the apparatus of
knowing', looking especially for places where one
text would produce a collision or connection and
thus something new — a memory or experience evoked
in them, and association with another field of
research, different sorts of data. This helped
them 'physically experience the workings of a
diffractive analysis. We felt like surfers' just
like Barad. Overall, the analysis 'constituted
events where minds and bodies, thinking and
feeling cannot be understood as separated but
entangled in a "spacetimemattering" practice'
(676).
Why is this diffractive? Diffraction means the
interaction of waves of any kind so diffractive
analysis is wavelike, attending to the effects of
different forces coming together. It is an
alternative to critical reflection which basically
mirrors reality. It involves engagement and
becoming, not interpreting data as something
external but 'an enactment of flows of
differences, where differences get made in the
process of reading data into each other, and
identifying what diffractive patterns emerge in
these readings'. It focuses on intra-activities
between researchers and data which mark out
different emergent directions — 'the new disturbs,
intervenes, and calls for attention' this can be
creative. Intention is not just something
possessed by a single human subject, but rather,
for Barad, 'something distributed that emerges
from a complex network of human and nonhuman
agents'
Their own identities were important especially
gender class and ethnic identities. They affected
the way they inter [not intra?] related to each
other, how they negotiated and how they decided
which agential cuts to make. Thus they made cuts
'in a predominantly ethnic, white, middle-class
reality of girls and women that have all the
opportunities for Western democracy in a
progressive nationstate'. The writing of the paper
in the presentation also involve diffractive
analysis, new additional cuts, and 'different
data… Literally written into each other'.
They include a photograph and story focusing on
the liberal school reforms of the 90s implementing
free choice of schools, this produced crowds of
kids with different identities travelling to
schools they have chosen. There is a notion of a
better education taking place in ethnic Swedish
middle-class white high schools. The story
concerns a girl understanding that education
enables her to better compete with men, even
though she finds journeys on a train and
struggling through crowds at stations stressful.
[There is a photograph of a station in rush hour
produced by this kid]. She must get to school to
do maths which she knows is important for
university entrance. Here, discourses about school
achievement or maths or anxiety are 'productive of
bodily contractions' [well we have known about the
somatic affects for years]
Barad says that human concepts such as maths are
embodied not abstract not just about ideas but
actual physical arrangements interacting with
other matter, concepts produce differences that
come to matter, including sickness and anxiety. We
must not neglect the experiences of using public
transport because they matter, they connect with
memories of maths, and reminded the researchers
that they never mastered maths either — 'we become
with this data and in the event of engagement and
become, in a sense, different from what we just
were'.
There are interactions with another story reported
in a newspaper of a girl who experienced stress as
soon as she went near the school building. Here,
'in an agential realist sense, the school
environment is making itself intelligible'. School
refusers can also tell us about the school
environment. Research on truants noted that they
all wanted education but had not found the right
way to go to school, unlike mainstream work
focusing on individual psychological problems or
family problems. 'Truancy can instead be
understood as material – discursive intra–actions
of many different performative agents such as the
formal structures of school, architecture, the
computer technology to register absence and
presence, as well as human agents' [all pretty
small yields for such a heavy investment in
Barad]. Sometimes a transparent glass construction
can 'intra-act with a particular girl' to cause
anxiety, because [if?] girls feel they are being
watched.
Some schools have been constructed in order to
enable better surveillance and self-regulation.
Foucault notes a connection between schools and
other disciplinary institutions. This work
'connects diffractively' to a story and a
photograph (679) where another girl talks about
feeling anxious as she walks through a large open
hallway — it risks people throwing things or
making sexist comments. Here we see the effects of
'discursive practices of gender sexuality and age'
(680). This connects with some strange research
showing that large hallways are also places for
frequent bullying or assault. We need to
acknowledge these entanglements and become part of
the world
There are however other images of hallways, partly
because they also contain personal lockers which
can be personal spaces. However, lockers also
require particular capacities to decorate them and
thus become 'a central part of your enactment as
schoolgirl.' The effects of TV shows about
schoolchildren can also have effects. Sometimes
they offer a different image ['similar
material–discursive imaginaries'] of what school
might be like. The researchers also can draw upon
images of TV programmes to transform their days in
the Academy. Media images intra act, can become
normalising, managing discursive practices or
escapes, or provide 'inventive leakages and
enhancement'
Stress can be positive and negative. It can work
on body and mind. Even the girls who are made
anxious from stress can also brag about it, say
when it assists with studying or sport. Again the
researchers recognise this --'we read this
quote diffractively into the realities of (female)
academics') -- and realised that almost aggressive
stress leads to hard work and scholarly success.
However there can be over ambition, and girls can
be affected by over achievement with which they
are fixated. A newspaper article agrees. Another
diffractive exercise produces another possibility,
an 'enactment… Based… On emancipatory feminist
goals within, and with an awareness of, the
patriarchy's brute reality' (682). This is
apparently combined with the notion of high
achievement as something good and useful even if
guided by masculine norms
[An extract of a memory of a girl imagining
possible future realities — she tried to relate
everything she read to a future scenario and this
made learning more fun. She saw the need to
outsmart teachers as an equally important goal.
Her teacher thought the boys used smarter
techniques, but she had one of her own and this
led her to distrust and disrespect the teacher]
We can now 'unfold a different reality of ambition
and high achievement' for this girl. She is
actively engaging with possible transformations in
becoming different. This 'makes new realities
emerge, although so far in her imagination only'.
Nevertheless this can affect school achievement,
showing that the I isn't separated from the word
but that both are in the world of material things
and imaginaries.
In another example, stress and anxiety led to 'her
brain [putting] [making?] the switch to the level
of constant and chronic pain' this syndrome is
usually associated with middle aged women and it
has a degrading name among doctors. There is no
physical cause so the accusation is that the pain
is all in your head, doctors say they cannot help
and sufferers are recommended to take command of
themselves, develop 'an even more self – and
brained–controlled subjectivity'
This connects to Barad on responsibility as an
incarnate relation preceding intentionality. This
means that pain in this case is not a matter of
individual choice to be fixed by the individual,
but instead 'is constituted by a larger apparatus
of multiple discursive practices… A complex
process of multiple interacting agents that are
collectively productive of and responsible for her
ill being'. This can be read into official
programs on self-help, the need to reduce thinking
and valuing, and except more, develop a
'"transcendent sense of self"' [quoting a medical
manual] the recommendations to detach rather than
to become different, accept the hardships of life
— 'but do we really want to tell our youth that
they are thinking about the future, whether in
success, mediocrity or dropout failure, is not
real and cannot become possible future realities?'
Overall, well-being is a multiple phenomenon.
Their research should be seen as being part of an
apparatus of knowing with multiple performative
agents — photographs, media texts, memories and so
on. This paper reflects the ability only 'to make
a few provisional cuts in this complex intense
multiplicity' (684). They've chosen these cuts so
they are responsible for the boundary making. [At
the same time?] cuts depend on what is given,
including their identities, as well as their
imaginary faculties. Has the exercise been a
success? Have they produced other ways of knowing
or new imaginings, especially ones that escape
putting the blame on the girls themselves, and
suggesting how it might be otherwise.
They have argued that ill- and well-being are
enactments of intra-activities in entangled
environments. One material – discursive practice
might evoke ill being in one context, but
well-being in another. Some girls are on the
threshold here. The diffractive patterns are
indeterminate at the wider level but determinate
'in the situated local cuts we make' — that is we
have resolved ontological indeterminacy in Barad's
terms. [We have focused on the most important
factors]. It is these cuts that make it possible
to write about indeterminate phenomena. It follows
that different cuts produce different phenomena.
We have to be ethical and take the local
situatedness into account to evaluate material
consequences. We have to be particularly careful
before we draw firm conclusions about schoolgirl
health
However, we have shown that it's not an individual
affair but rather something collective and
distributed. It follows that we should not try to
just cope ourselves by becoming detached. Instead
we should think differently 'and together with
other material – discursive agents in the school
environment… Collaboratively engaging practices of
interactive engagements of imagination' to express
and actualise different images and discourses
about the school environment. This will enhance
well-being and make schools more liveable places.
[What a talk-up and damp squib! Collaborative
discussion is still ego adjustment]
back to social theory
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