Diffraction and response-able reading of texts: the relational ontologies of Barad and Deleuze

Abstract

In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze and Guattari are incommensurable. Our point of departure is from a stance which is quite different from that of Hein’s – we propose that it is indeed productive to put the work of Barad into conversation with that of Deleuze. As an alternative to critique used by Hein to engage with the work of Barad and Deleuze, we consider how a response-able and diffractive reading of notions of critique could provide a more affirmative and productive way of reading academic texts, including those by Barad and Deleuze.

Keywords:

• Diffractive reading
• Barad
• Deleuze
• response-able methodologies
• relational ontology

Notes

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/publication of this article.

Notes

1 As we will elaborate on below, for Barad there is no ‘old’ or ‘new’. She writes: “Diffraction is not a set pattern, but rather an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling. As such, there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new”. Importantly, this is not from the perspective of the subject, as e.g. in memory. She continues: “Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented intra-acting, an open field. Sedimenting does not entail closure. (Mountain ranges in their liveliness attest to this fact.)” (Barad, 2014, p. 168)

2 Our arguments about appropriate ways to ‘do’ critique complement arguments about the conventional ‘gatekeeping’ approaches to manuscript reviewing, see, e.g. Gough, 2012.

3 Barad (2014b, p. 222) claims that this critter’s ability “to reconfigure the boundaries and properties of its body is prompting technology enthusiasts to reimagine what it means to be human”.

4 Sympoiesis, rather than autopoiesis, refers to making together.

5 In contrast, see Hein’s claim (2016, p. 136) that the process of intra-action is itself an identity.

6 In the case of the brittle star, this would have amounted to perceiving individual brittle stars in the world (with ‘world’ as a spacetime container concept) and through a process of generalisation and abstraction arriving at the concept ‘brittle star’ that denotes (signifies) a particular body in the world.

7 We are grateful to one of our reviewers for pointing out that this claim has been challenged by a number of thinkers–Indigenous studies authors, and anti-racist social theorists, who maintain rather, that the Barad and Deleuzian scholars are largely white and have not produced a large amount of scholarship on racism and colonization. We do however, see both Barad’s and Deleuze’s ideas and work as resonating with issues which contribute to decolonization and postcolonialism, especially their critique of capitalism and progress and their ideas of thinking differences differently, and ontological relationality and indeterminacy.

8 Barad (2014, p. 179) argues very clearly that “Intra-actions don’t occur between presences”, which dispels the myth that she is a realist, as Hein (2016, p. 135) claims.

9 The importance of this distinction for postcolonial theorising is explained clearly in Bignall’s chapter. She points out how postcolonial theories that draw on dialectical philosophy rely on what Deleuze calls negative difference, i.e., ‘differentiation’ (Bignall, 2007, p. 197-198).

10 See Bozalek (2017) for a discussion of the need to overcome the binaries of reading and writing through the readerlywriter and the writerlyreader.

11 See for example, Anker and Felski’s (2017) edited collection on Critique and Postcritique in which there are a variety of perspectives, mainly in literary studies, that offer a alternatives to critique which is viewed as “suspicious hermeneutics” (p. 1).

Additional information

Funding

This writing is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa [Grant numbers 98992 & 105851].

Notes on contributors

Karin Murris

Karin Murris is Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy at the School of Education, University of Cape Town. She is a teacher educator and grounded in philosophy as her academic discipline, her main research interests are in intra-active pedagogies such as Philosophy with Children and Reggio Emilia, childhood studies, children's literature, posthumanism and postqualitative research.

Vivienne Bozalek

Vivienne Bozalek is a Senior Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research interests include new materialism,posthumanism, the ethics of care and social justice and their applications to higher education and other fields of practice. She is currently involved in research projects which focus on socially just pedagogies in higher education.