Notes on: Lenz Taguchi, H (2012) A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data. Feminist Theory 13(3) 265--81. DOI: 10.1177/1464700112456001 Dave Harris We are going to consider the co-constitution of matter and meaning, as in Barad, through a diffractive analysis of interview data with a six-year-old boy. Diffractive analysis is 'an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming–with the data as researcher… transcorporeal engagements with data'. This concept is diffracted with Deleuze and Guattari on becoming minor we are going beyond mere reflexivity and interpretation seen as 'inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher… separated from the data' we intend to make visible 'new kinds of material–discursive realities' that will have political consequences (265). Feminists have always argued that bodies and material realities are 'discursively constituted, but this has not been related to matter and its constitutive role and agency, especially in "feminist de/constructionism"' (266) As a result, the relations between gender and biological sex have been problematic, until we understood gender/sex 'is a mixed and entangled cultural – natural phenomenon'. Haraway's cyborg has helped here. The body's agency has been explored, especially examining 'bodily and transcorporeal materialities' which will avoid either biological determinism or cultural essentialism. Someone called Lykke has proposed that we call this 'post constructionism' although no dichotomy is implied with earlier work — feminists must acknowledge the continuities with earlier theories such as Marxism psychoanalysis and post structuralism, but 'the sexed body and pre-discursive factor cities of materiality' can now be brought back. Barad is important here for explaining how discursive practices and material phenomena are co-constitutive. The new problem of addressing the real has led to new thoughts about research. Feminists can now 'read the data from our own bodies as researchers' (267), and more generally address the agency of bodies and how it is articulated in the data. This should include nonhuman bodies, although they could be understood as minoritarian material bodies as in Deleuze and Guattari. This would help them escape majoritarian conceptions and habits, disrupt hierarchical thinking, and destabilise dichotomies. Deleuze 1994 says that we should use all our body faculties to do this [so we are eliding together quite a few deleuzian bits and pieces]. In particular we need 'our bodymind' to extend knowing into other realities and responsibly engage in shaping the future. Diffractive analysis on interview data will show the possibilities of considering 'the agency of the material in the production of knowledge'. She wants to add to Barad on material-discursive intra-activity with the concept of the transcorporeal [Alaiamo --?] and becoming minoritarian. We become minoritarian with the data, paying attention to 'body mind faculties' that register smell, temperature, pressure tension [and other affects -- all assumed to be equally relevant in some way?]. We use these as well as the mind, and this means a new way of thinking, beyond reflexivity and interpretation 'as inner mental activities'. We seek other realities 'presented in the data: a real beyond those produced by processes of recognition and identification'. In this we are reading texts from different traditions diffractively [citing Barad herself and also Jackson and Mazzei!]. Feminists and Deleuze understand this is how to theorise and do philosophy. We need to avoid asking what does it mean and ask instead how does it work, as Deleuze notes in his letter to a harsh critic. Plugging in Deleuze, Barad and feminists has led to new ways of theorising and doing research. First we plug deleuzian texts into Barad. Barad criticises the notion of reflection as mirroring of essential positions rather than processing differences. Only a few people have tried to use the approach in feminist work [including herself, Palmer, Jackson and Mazzei]. This research sees discourse and matter is mutually constituted and knowing as 'a flow of continuous differentiation' (268). We can grasp this by exploring feminist standpoint epistemology first, especially 'multiple standpoint analysis' (269) [Lykke again]. We have to recognise the 'situatedness of the Knower' if we are to avoid a godlike position in positivist empiricism [so says Haraway — another silly binary?]. The usual position [straw man]  is that data are a passive matter and researchers are ontologically separated: interpretation and analysis involves a self reflexive mental process of naming, structuring and representing. In interviews in particular, '"voice makes present the truth"' [quoting Mazzei and Jackson this time] reflects the meaning of an experience. Voice shows the presence of consciousness. Narration is a desire to 'recover a lost origin or truthful discourse'. Interpretation involves trying to work out what the interviewee really means, making sense, and seeing the subject of research as the source of meaning. Interpretation is made coherent and interesting by 'themes and patterns understood to emerge from the data'. So interpretation reflects sameness or manageable differences — 'from something previously identified and acknowledged' such as a subject position identity or category. Examples are 'woman as different from man' or different classes. We can cite Deleuze to argue that this sort of difference is a difference from, 'a construct of the negative', not difference as positive — 'an effective connections and relations within and between different bodies, affecting and being affected by each other'. This sort of positive difference involves multiplicities in becoming or in differentiating themselves — it is 'like life itself'. Braidotti's take is to argue to move away from the logic of negativity in Marxist dialectics of consciousness and in psychoanalysis. The negative approach implies 'corresponding conditions of resistance' or counteraction — marginality, injury, oppression. This stopped us understanding reality as 'the processing of differences with various material effects' as Barad suggests. Identifying categories, identities and positions also risks 'fixing and confirming them' (270). Jackson and Mazzei offer instead 'a methodology against interpretivism' [in another book]. To oppose the centring of traditional qualitative research with its assumption that the interviewee is voicing coherent narratives and representing the self. In feminist research in particular, any sign of heterogeneity or contradiction is interpreted as meaning an effect of women as a group or class. At the same time, the oppressed have '"epistemic privilege"'. Human voices and interpersonal interactions are at the centre — 'anthropocentrism' which ignores matter and materiality [citing Haraway but also Law]. Instead, interview data should demonstrate the limitations of research analysis, data as partial or incomplete, and a story as in place of another possible story. Analysis can also open up data, diffract it and imagine new results [still J and M]. We can connect this back to diffraction in Barad and Haraway, which offers superposition [of waves though] or interference, like the transformation of waves in the sea. Waves can intra-act with an obstacle and bend and spread, although the original wave 'partly remains within the new'. As a methodology, this means we have to study how differences get made in process and what effects they have, what is excluded. This involves rethinking ontology. Bodies are no longer separate entities with distinct borders, but are entangled and interdependent, co-constitutive, coexisting. This covers nonhuman bodies as well. Co-constitution and entanglement cannot be studied as effectively by reflexive methodology. When we do this, we engage our bodies and interfere with the data 'in a process of transcorporeality' (271). We are developing what Barad calls onto – epistemology, derived from Bohr, where we are studying '"practices of knowing in being"'. This 'goes for any material body — a stone or a fruit — when making itself intelligible to our bodyminds' as we might eat it. Our body is also making itself intelligible to the material. This is 'material – discursive intra-activity'. It is not the same as interactivity, which refers to a relationship between separate entities, including interpersonal relationships between two humans [binary again]. Implies that there are no clear boundaries but that bodies are affecting or being affected 'in an interdependent and mutual relationship as a condition for their existence'. Apparently, this 'brings to feminist research' the necessary recognition of the agency of material bodies, instead of just regarding them as 'passive tools'. For Deleuze, to reflect means to interconnect with something [doesn't this contradict what we just argued?]. We are forced to think in fundamental encounters with objects. This is not recognition involves representations. Those construct 'distinct differences between objects and identities to constitute dichotomised oppositions and hierarchies of values' (272). Instead we need to think diffract if the, think of interference and overlapping and positive differences, reading and 'becoming with… The data' not separating ourselves from it. In this way 'the data is itself understood as a co-constitutive force'. All our faculties are needed to think like this, D and G argue. Analysis as an event becomes 'a transcorporeal engagement' where all the senses are required. We have to try to see how data interferes with our sensibilities. This links to becoming-minoritarian [which might be one productive aspect of diffraction], and we can escape from taken for granted normalised thinking. Becoming minoritarian is about thinking otherwise. It means 'embodied involvement, transformation and the capacity to change that make a diffractive methodology both feminist and political'. On to the data. It was a pilot study collected by somebody else for a PhD, concerning the construction of how to become a successful school pupil. There was discursive analysis of data that included 'curricula [sic] texts… Conversations (as opposed to formal interviewing) arising from conversations led by the researcher with six groups of 2 to 4 nine-year-olds. The researcher tried to be different from the teacher, and the kids were to tell narratives about becoming a school pupil 'focusing on "expression of power and control, mastering your body and controlling your feelings, praise and appreciation, managing oneself and being nice, friends and games, decision-making, making mistakes, uncertainty about rules, punishment, force, challenging the discourse, significance of gender and rules"' (273) [pretty extensive agenda]. This data was brought to a workshop on deconstructive methodologies. [Very lazy way to gather data, and it is at least second-hand] We have field notes written by the interviewer describing the context first. The boy [Eric] has some kind of special needs: [lengthy account ensues about what the kids did, what the interviewer expects to find, and the early opening gambits with Eric, leading to description of what they did yesterday, making toy boats. The interviewer thinks Eric has a good relationship with the kids but  'has difficulties in handling his subjectivity as a good schoolboy, which is what is expected of him in school' (274). Eric is not sure whether to treat his supporter as a friend. LT wants to respond to the challenge of J and M to open up this data and read it diffractively. She wants to 'open up my bodymind faculties to experience the entanglement of discourse and matter'in this event, and note the 'material–discursive intra-actions' taking place. Her readings intend to disclose another reality 'from the thickness and intense multiplicity of intra-activities that any event constitutes'. There is no claim to be uncovering essence or truth, but merely 'a reality that already exists among the multiple realities being enacted in an event, but which has not been previously "disclosed"' (274 – 5) [so any poetic reading will do then?] First she notices how tables and chairs 'an act or space of interviewing' and 'an event of sitting' involving formal talk. The table separates and distances the participants, that is 'agential enact[s] distance formality and seriousness' as does the 'performed talking'. This space becomes part of a more general one in schooling where performances are judged by things like good or bad sitting. The adult asks a question first, a form of discursive determination. The unexpected presence of another adult affects the intra-actions, 'causing new differences that evoke in me (and perhaps Eric) and even stronger feeling of vulnerability', and this might be deepened by the presence of any adult body, interviewer or teacher. It is hard to disentangle the effects of many other event of talking involving a child and adult in school. After thinking of becoming-with-Eric and becoming-minoritarian, however, she can argue that 'a reality of this event is that there actually was no interview', at least not a benevolent one to find out about children. Instead, the whole situation was 'saturated with material–discursive conditions that compose virtually all kinds of talking initiated by adults enactments', including assessing and judging the children. She then engages in 'the transcorporeal act of reading the data when making myself aware of my imaginary and bodymind sensibilities'. She now can 'sense [oh no] the intensity of eagerness and anticipation' when Eric played with the boat. As the boat sailed and then turned over, 'Eric is drawn into a new event, the funeral of the boat and skipper' and this is 'enacted' by a girl who throws flowers onto the water: 'one event unfolds and overlaps into the next; involving the entanglements of the children's bodies, their words and imagination, the bark boat and the running water of the stream' (276). In this becoming minoritarian, we can invoke another reality, not the one recorded in the interviewer notes, which contain codes of expectations of Eric's emotional struggles or social difficulties or feelings. She, by contrast, does not anticipate or expect the need for Eric to be on guard with himself or having to overcome problems. Instead she sees 'an event where it is possible to become–with–Eric as taking part in an exciting adventure of interest – activities, where all the performative agents differentiate in relation to themselves as the events unfold' [in other words she reinterprets what Eric tells the interviewer about the play with the boat] this is to be understood as 'a reality of success in narration, creative imagination and intense collaboration… Eric is no longer a child who is lacking in social ability… He is successfully intra-acting and collaborating with many performative agents — and is making many new friends' [she's imposed primary school ideology on the poor lad to talk up a bit of play]. 'I encounter the data in an event of becoming–minoritarian' [she's trading off the deleuzian notion of the event throughout, I think]. This is an alternative to the 'majoritarian position of researcher as the sole subject of knowledge production'. As she does 'becoming–with–the–bark–boat', she sees the data as 'transformative passing from one state to becoming to the other… A sensation in the zone of indetermination'. She can install herself in the data and imagine intra-activity, not only 'relationship of nonhierarchical entangled intra–activities and co–dependencies between human and non–human performative agents', but the very weight and height of the boat. Her 'transcorporeal imagining' has the participants calling out to each other. She is affected, but this shows that 'thinking and imagining exceed data and ourselves as researchers' (277) because, as D and G argue, both subject and thinking are effects of forces affecting and being affected. This diffractive reading helps her disclose a reality 'that causes me to differentiate in relation to myself — as in a difference in itself as understood by Deleuze'. So we have a different reality than we would get from de/constructivist readings which confine themselves to 'interpersonal discursive subject positionings'. She is now understood how power production in schools is a material discursive intra-activity, involving 'several material performative agents in an event'. She has transformed understanding of the socially competent child, by extending social competence 'to include collaborations with nonhuman or more–than–human performative agents' [special need kids are terribly good with toys and animals]. It was knowledge produced or rather 'evoked in a transcorporeal engagement with the data' and she now understands herself differently as a socially competent agent. There are also implications for planning and performing pedagogical practices, 'relying more on understanding the force of material artefacts as performative agents'. 'Reading in resistance to the normative' also connects diffractive analysis to standpoint feminisms. This is seen 'in the ability to make real an event that can undermine the certainty of those who claim to know how to understand who Eric is… Based on dominant discourses in the context of schooling'. The benefits arise from the 'different ontological presuppositions of diffraction', 'knowing in being (onto–epistemology)' rather than analysis based on ontological separation and distance. Eric can now be understood as both powerless and powerful, 'depending on from what discursive subject position we read the data'. Researchers perform multiple readings often 'from a distance and basically unaffected position from the data'. The events are hidden behind multiple interpretations, 'which in fact means that anyone can "own" the reality of the event', or that people with epistemic privilege can. In this way interpretive and multiple discourse analysis 'merely produces socially constructed alternative points of view, satisfying only for those who have the power to "play" with alternatives'. Material feminist readings, however 'aspire to invoke other possible material realities that can have political and material consequences' (278) [so the only difference is they claim their alternative interpretations as different realities?]. We get to different realities after foregrounding the material and allowing the real back into the discussion '"without retreating to a simpleminded empiricism"'. A different reality is 'not the reality, but a (potential) real'. That we have done this 'constitutes a feminist resistance and subversiveness', against 'foundational, anthropocentric and privileging points of view'. We 'acknowledge our interdependence and coexistence with other bodies in the world'. We produce as knowledge 'a material–discursive reality', with activity extended to other bodies. We become aware of our own embodiment in materiality of the event (analysing data). Both diffractive analysis and deleuzian approaches are about 'intervention and invention; responsibility and ethics'. Any feminist diffractor 'is committed to understanding how we as researchers are responsibly engaged in shaping the future for humans, nonhumans and the material environment in our production of knowledge': productions of knowledge 'also productions of reality that will always have specific material consequences'. [So Barad is bolted onto a poetic and progressive reading of an educational encounter. I'm not sure D&G are that well grasped either. Because Barad is involved, we can call this reading another 'reality'. We also prefer this reality, that is we are responsible for it, and we hope it will transform things] Back to social theory