Ethos of Diffraction: New Paradigms for a (Post)humanist Ethics

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for conversations with Karen Barad and Vicki Kirby during the writing of this article. It was an incredible experience to be in exchange while writing on diffraction. I would also like to thank Birgit M. Kaiser, Iris van der Tuin and the two reviewers for very insightful and helpful comments in the completion of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (London: Pandora, 2003), p.197.

² See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™ (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p.273 and Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.114.

³ In this sense I take up the questions that Vicki Kirby in her recent essay on ‘Initial Conditions’ brings to the table: ‘How to justify why the coordinates of one particular frame of reference should take precedence over another? How to avoid political quietism? How to work toward a more generous understanding of the politics of difference if to differ, to discriminate, to decide and judge, seem to involve an inevitable act of negation or erasure: “This and not that!”’ See Vicki Kirby, ‘Initial Conditions’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, 23:3 (2012), p.198.

⁴ Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273 [my emphasis].

⁵ Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today, 3:2 (2010), p.254.

⁶ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

⁷ Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

⁸ The essay uses deliberatively different spellings for the entangledness of posthumanism and humanism: (post)humanist, posthuman(ist), (in)human. With this I wish to render specific the alternating emphases that I see at work in the different situations.

⁹ Donna Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p.129.

¹⁰ Donna Haraway, ‘“Gender”’, p.129.

¹¹ Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p.17 [my emphasis].

¹² Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.34 [my emphasis].

¹³ See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.16.

¹⁴ Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in The Haraway Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.70. For ethos as ‘attitude’, see Michel Foucault's ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp.303–319, especially p.309.

¹⁵ Melanie Sehgal, ‘Diffractive Proposition: Reading Alfred North Whitehead with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’, in this issue.

¹⁶ The expression ‘differing differences’ comes from Gilles Deleuze's ‘Difference must be shown differing’, in Difference & Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.56. I wish it to be read as always/already diffracted with the paper's epigraph by Audre Lorde.

¹⁷ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.73.

¹⁸ See Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements’, p.253.

¹⁹ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.73.

²⁰ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.72 and 84 [my emphasis].

²¹ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.83.

²² Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.89 [my emphasis].

²³ Vicki Kirby, ‘Initial Condition’, p.204.

²⁴ Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p.88.

²⁵ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.90.

²⁶ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.381.

²⁷ Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies, p.76. A specification needs to be made respectively the three authors cited here in quite entangled manners. It might be argued that Haraway's use of diffraction (and also her corresponding thought of ‘naturecultures’) by focusing on the production of interference patterns suggests pre-existing entities entering into relations. Thus, the quantum dimension in the Baradian and Kirbian sense of diffraction that touches precisely ‘initial conditions’ is not directly implied (see also Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.381). However, in my reading I entangle Haraway's When Species Meet into this (at least) triangular web, in which multispecies becomings are elaborated via Barad's intra-activity. Nonetheless, a differentiation might always be necessary given that Barad and Kirby explicitly engage with ontology/systematicity, while Haraway uses biology/evolution as her continuing main reference frame. Of significance in such careful differentiating (in a diffractive sense) see also Kirby's earlier discussion of Haraway's ‘cyborg’ in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p.146ff.

²⁸ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.384.

²⁹ See Kathrin Thiele, The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze's Poetics of Life (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008). The equation is inspired by the Deleuzian formula ‘Monism =  Pluralism’ that emphasizes an understanding of Deleuze's philosophy as inheriting Spinozian immanence – ‘radical immanence’ even, as it is called by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

³⁰ Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, 23:3 (2012), p.216.

³¹ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.384.

³² Karen Barad, ‘Nature's Queer Performativity’, Women, Gender & Research, No. 1–2 (2012), pp.46–47.

³³ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.394.

³⁴ Referring again to the book entitled Who Comes After the Subject?, see note 2.

³⁵ Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies, p.89. See also Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's ‘Introducing New Materialisms’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.1–43.

³⁶ Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies, p.89.

³⁷ Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p.29.

³⁸ This is for sure a lesson to be learned already from the manifold critical engagements with the subject in its phallocratic and eurocentric profile by black feminist, queer, and postcolonial voices.

³⁹ Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal’, p.18. I therefore join both Kirby's and Barad's ultimate dissatisfaction with the Latourian actor-network theory tradition of STS. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.58–59, and Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropology, pp.79–88. With ‘object-fetishization’ I refer to ‘object oriented’ philosophies/theologies. For a representative collection, see The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds Levy Bryant, Graham Harmann and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re-press, 2011).

⁴⁰ I will only be able to address the conceptual thought-practice of Ettinger here while her thinking is intimately linked to ‘metramorphosing with the artwork’. See Bracha Ettinger, ‘Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating’, Parallax, vol.5, no.1 (1999), p.92.

⁴¹ Bracha Ettinger, ‘Copoiesis’, Ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 5(X) (2005), p.703.

⁴² Griselda Pollock, ‘Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?’ in The Matrixial Borderspace, p.2.

⁴³ For both these quotations, see again Griselda Pollock, ‘Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic’, in Carnal Aesthetics. Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, eds Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p.23; and ‘Femininity’, p.3.

⁴⁴ Bracha Ettinger, ‘Copoiesis’, p.709.

⁴⁵ Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.110 and 196.

⁴⁶ For a close reading of Ettinger's work as one of diffraction, see Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Scriptures: Diffracted Traces’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol.21, no.1 (2004), pp.101–105.

⁴⁷ See The Matrixial Borderspace, p.110.

⁴⁸ Griselda Pollock, ‘Femininity’, p.6.

⁴⁹ The expression ‘aesthetico-existential’ I borrow from Félix Guattari who e.g. in The Three Ecologies molecularizes subjective agencies thus. For a factual conversation between Ettinger and Guattari, see ‘From Transference to the Aesthetic Paradigm’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 24:3 (1997), pp.611–624.

⁵⁰ Citations in this passage all come from The Matrixial Borderspace, p.196 [my emphasis].

⁵¹ See Bracha Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, Studies in The Maternal 1 (2) (2009), < http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk>[01/03/2014].

⁵² Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.392.

⁵³ Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, p.32.

⁵⁴ This seems especially fruitful given that both Barad and Ettinger turn to Levinas' ‘ethics as first philosophy’ in order to flesh out their ethical projects. For Barad, see ‘Towards an Ethics of Mattering’, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.391–396; for Ettinger, see her conversation with Levinas ‘What Would Eurydice Say?’, ATHENA, 2 (2006), pp.137–145, and ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besideness and the Three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-Enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment’, pp.100–135.

⁵⁵ See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.392ff.

⁵⁶ Considering that we are here striving for a (post)humanist ethics, we might want to call it ethology rather than ethicality. For ethics as ethology see also Gilles Deleuze in Spinoza. Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988).

⁵⁷ See Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.157ff; and also ‘Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing’ and ‘Fragilization’.

⁵⁸ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.396.

⁵⁹ See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.395 and 396, and Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.144 and 145 [my emphasis].

⁶⁰ See e.g. Donna Haraway, ‘Cosmopolitical Critters: Companion Species, SF, and Staying with the Trouble’, < http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-literature/cosmopolitical-critters-companion-species-sf-and-sta>[01/03/2014].

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Kathrin Thiele

Kathrin Thiele is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is trained as a critical theorist with research expertise in continental philosophy, feminist theories of difference and (post)humanist studies. Her current research explores feminist cosmo-politics from a posthuman(ist) perspective, and with it she aims at the revitalization of critical analyses within the (new) humanities. She has authored The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuze's Poetics of Life (2008), and edited (with Katrin Trüstedt) HAPPY DAYS: Lebenswissen nach Cavell (2009) and (with Maria Muhle) Biopolitische Konstellationen (2011). Her articles have appeared in Women: A Cultural Review and Deleuze Studies. She is also co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities Terra Critica (www.terracritica.net) Email: [email protected]