Beyond reflexivity and representation: diffraction as a methodological sensitivity in science studies

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of the broad reception of Karen Barad's framework of agential realism, it comes as a surprise that there has been little discussion so far of her core concept of diffraction in the social studies of science. This article aims to evaluate the methodological potentials of a diffractive approach for science studies. In order to achieve this, I will examine Barad's take on quantum mechanics, which serves as the foundation for her ethico-onto-epistemological framework of agential realism. In doing so, I will unpack the crucial role played by diffraction in reworking the relation between the objects of observation and the agencies of observation, and subsequently in reshaping the question of the referent of objectivity. Building on this analysis, I propose the notion of the researcher as transducer, demonstrating how such a take allows for the emergence of an understanding of the researcher as themselves materializing in intra-action with other human and more-than-human forces and practices. As I will show, such a diffractive approach not only shifts our attention even more to the performative power of research as a material practice but also to the constitutive nature of knowledge-making practices, along with their ethical and political implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Agential realism
• diffraction
• feminist science studies
• Karen Barad
• new materialism
• reflexivity
• representationalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ines Handler, Katharina Hoppe, Thomas Lemke, Ruzana Liburkina, and Franziska von Verschuer for engaging discussions and their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would like to extend my thanks to Franziska Zirker and Lucy Duggan for proofreading the manuscript as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and tremendously helpful remarks that helped me to clarify my arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Barad (2007, 33) proposes the neologism intra-action in order to signify ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies'. In contrast to the notion of interaction, ‘which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (Barad 2007, 33). I shall revisit this idea in more detail later on.

2 A notable exception is Hollin et al. (2017).

3 In fact, Lynch admits that it would have required ‘a more extensive reading of Barad's writings, because the limited sections I have read are usually self-referential’ (Lynch 2014, 140). Only to add that his ‘limited forays into Barad's writings [which consisted of a monograph and around nine contributions to journals and edited volumes in 2011; JB] have not inspired me to continue such a time-consuming and arduous undertaking’ (Lynch 2014, 140).

4 In the course of this article, I will diffract this apprehension itself in an attempt at foregrounding a different understanding of physics and its entanglement with questions of objectivity, ethics, and justice that lies at the heart of Barad's framework.

5 It is worth noting that while Barad has a rather clear understanding of realism – namely, as all those approaches that assume that phenomena have inherent properties that exist regardless of whether anyone is observing them, which then can be measured in order to reveal their properties along with their boundaries – constructionism, as Bard conceives it, not only refers to both linguistic and social constructivist approaches but also seems to be used synonymously with epistemic relativism in parts of her work.

6 Although Lumsden (2019) does make a point in stressing that reflexivity becomes a caricature in some critical readings, she runs the risk of repeating the same mistake by throwing together agential realism, new materialisms, posthumanisms, poststructuralist theories, and post-qualitative inquires. In fact, most of her concerns apply to post-qualitative research, rather than to agential realism and new materialisms. What is more, her argument that all these different theoretical and methodological perspectives re-scribe humanist values ‘by extending agency, vitality, and social phenomena to non-human material’ (Lumsden 2019, 61) ignores the fact that for Haraway and even more so for Barad, agency is neither ‘something that humans and even nonhumans have to varying degrees’ nor is it ‘a binary proposition, either on or off’ (Barad 2007, 172). Agency, instead, ‘is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment’ (Barad 2003, 826).

7 Barad (2014, 168) proposes the notion of ‘re-turning’ for highlighting an epistemological and political practice that is not about ‘returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns’.

8 According to van der Tuin (2019, 17), diffraction as a methodological tool makes what may be its first philosophical appearance in Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will, where Bergson refers to interference patterns as a tool to think with and about the self.

9 Such a take on the genealogy of diffraction is especially indebted to Geerts and van der Tuin’s (2021) reconstruction of the ties between Trinh, Haraway, and Barad.

10 Barad is careful to avoid using ‘queer’ as a metaphor or, even worse, instrumentalizing and hence depoliticizing it by employing it as just a fancy term. Rather, for Barad, ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’ express that ‘[t]he very nature of an atom's being, its very identity, is indeterminacy itself’ (Barad 2011b, 136).

11 As I will demonstrate in what follows, Barad's understanding of apparatuses should not be confused with instruments or experimental setups in the laboratory or elsewhere. Apparatuses are not instruments, tools, or machines for Barad. See also Barla (2019, 136–9) for a detailed genealogy of Barad's notion of the apparatus.

12 Even though Bohr introduced the notion of complementarity as early as in his lectures in 1927, it is in his letters to Einstein that he elaborates on the phenomenon of complementarity in quantum mechanical measurements in greater detail, stressing that ‘any arrangement suited to study the exchange of energy and momentum between the electron and the photon must involve a latitude in the space-time description of the interaction sufficient for the definition of wave-number and frequency which enter into the relation’ (Bohr 1949, 210).

13 Since the talk of ‘the “new” not only ignores matter/ing's inherent historicity but also assumes a progressive notion of time’, setting in place ‘a discontinuity from other materialisms’ (Barad and Gandorfer 2021, 27), matter/ing and materialism cannot be understood in terms of the ‘new’ and the ‘old’. For Barad, the ‘new’ is always already the ‘old’, and vice versa. This is also why Barad has been critical of the so-called ‘founding gesture’ (Ahmed 2008) of new materialisms from the very beginning.

14 Lynch, too, seems to arrive at such a misunderstanding not only of the notion of entanglement but also of the phenomenon when he states that in his ‘understanding, the general lessons that Barad draws from Bohr about physical phenomena seem roughly in line with Husserl's conception of phenomena or Merleau-Ponty's account of “the intertwining”’ (Lynch 2014, 139). Leaving aside the tiresome gesture of tracing back the originality of feminist scholars to male authorities – a practice that Haraway regards as ‘one of the ways women thinkers are made to seem derivative of male philosophers’ (Haraway in Gane 2006, 156) – Barad not only explicitly states that her ‘notion of phenomenon is not that of philosophical phenomenologists’ (Barad 2007, 412n30) but also that entanglements are not about connections, interactions, or intertwinings for that matter.

15 Quantum mechanics indeed posits that the wave-like nature of particles extends, in theory, to all matter and thus even to the macroscopic world (Brody 2020).

16 It was Einstein who referred to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement somewhat dismissively as ‘spooky actions at a distance’ (‘Spukhafte Fernwirkungen’) in a letter to his colleague Max Born in 1947 (Einstein and Born 1971, 158). It was only in 2019, for the first time in history, that an image of quantum entanglement (or more precisely the entanglement between two photons) was captured using a sophisticated experimental setup (Moreau et al. 2019).

17 See also Giraud, who develops an ethics of exclusion ‘which pays attention to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are materialized’ (Giraud 2019, 2). Drawing on Barad's thought, Giraud highlights the need to explore the possibilities for ethical responding and/as political action in the face of the constitutive role played by exclusions in the materialization of realities.

18 Natasha Myers (2020) proposes a highly insightful notion of the anthropologist as transducer that resonates with some of my claims. Expanding on Spinoza's understanding of bodies and affects and Erving Goffman's idea that the ethnographer has to ‘tune’ her body ‘in’ to the field that she seeks to understand, Myers is interested in the interactions between affect and physical senses in both ethnographic research and artistic practices.

19 See Lather and St. Pierre (2013) for a similar take on the position and role of the researcher in post-qualitative research practices.

20 Barad draws on Levinas’ idea that responsibility is not about a relation between subjects or individuals but rather about the Other. For Levinas, it is the otherness of the Other that allows for the emergence of subjectivity and hence for ethics – or, more precisely, for the emergence of an ethics of responding with the Other (see Barad 2007, 391–3; 2012a, 216–8) For a discussion of Barad's take on ethics in Levinas and Derrida see also de Freitas (2017), Geerts (2016), Hinton (2013), and Thiele (2014).

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Josef Barla

Josef Barla is a postdoctoral researcher in the Biotechnologies, Nature and Society research group based at the Institute of Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt. He earned his PhD from the University of Vienna and has been a visiting researcher at the Science and Justice Research Center of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at the Posthumanities Hub based at Linköping University. He is the author of The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production: A New Materialist Theory of Technology and the Body (transcript, 2019) and other publications in the fields of feminist epistemologies, technoscience studies, and new materialisms.