Notes on : Murris K and Bozalek, V (2019) Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology: Some propositions. Educational Pbhilosophy and Theory. DOI 10.1080/00131857.2019.1570843 Dave Harris Haraway and Barad have produced propositions for a diffractive methodology. Objective investigation by independent researchers at a distance from their objects is denied. Instead we need 'a nonhierarchical list of propositions' diffracted through the text. These will disrupt the theory practice binary and encourage experimentation with 'diffractive reading texts oeuvres and philosophies through one another'. Further propositions are gained by reviewing three books on post-human nonrepresentational research, so that we can 'creatively engage with the in/determinate direction of what a diffractive methodology might look like in practice', although terms like methods imply a human centred activity (1) [The whole set of propositions are designed to spell out what it means 'to live without bodily boundaries'] Some commentators think we should resist the idea of methodology altogether because it can '"sideline ontology"' (citing St Pierre). (2). Feminist philosophy in Haraway and Barad do not separate theory and practice. Researchers have to be taught to reject the notion of a world which is 'independent of and at an ontological distance from the researcher'. We are interested in what research methods might do rather than can do. There is no prescribed framework and so far, 'little guidance is given to researchers' about diffraction — so how do we read texts diffractively? We can develop some propositions, where a proposition is something activating self organisation, quoting Whitehead, 'a "new kind of entity" — a "hybrid between potentialities and actualities"' (2), something both actual and speculative. They can be true or false, but even false ones are helpful in offering potentials. The propositions below are not be seen as a hierarchy. Diffractive apparatus is not linear or causal but works through 'what Whitehead calls "feeling" and experiencing their actualisation'. Post-human research is experiential, something between human and nonhuman bodies [generalised to mean even the 'sheer materiality of this 2-D article with written words']. This is a distributed and trans-individual notion of agency and it affects causality. We are affected by propositions but this is more than emotion or feelings — it is 'a kind of mutual performativity that queers cognition/emotion and inner/outer binaries' [citing Barad] we are going to put diffraction patterns into practice rather than theorise them. We will develop key questions for example as diffractive guides. This is not just a literature review which assumes that observers are a distance from the literature and  can create an overview [the whole problem of reflection — see below]. No texts are foregrounded, none foundational. We read texts 'through one another' to generate new insights. We have two entangled sets of propositions which have been 'diffractive through theoretical explanations of diffraction' (3) [endless regress threatens]. The hope is that there might be some potential for a diffractive methodology emerging. The order of propositions is irrelevant. Living without bodily boundaries. Diffraction was originally a metaphor in Haraway built on by Barad via quantum physics. Barad herself offered 'a diffractive reading of physics and feminist queer theory' and ended with 'a philosophy of agential realism', taking insights from feminist theory and from physics. However, there is a genuine move beyond the subject/object dichotomy, not just a metaphor — we must accept that 'much is not knowable cognitively and can never be articulated'. Barad shows how she goes beyond classical physics into quantum physics, where diffraction is a matter of entanglement not just interference. And is thus '"an ethico – onto – epistemological matter"'. It implies that knowing is a material engagement, that agential cuts do violence to material but also '"open up and rework the tangential conditions of possibility"' [which might be what '"cutting together – apart"' means. This is old hat, though — any intervention even a positivist one raises new possibilities, perhaps best seen in mathematical activity — once we've objectified something we can consider it in a number {sic} of different ways]. The 'phenomenon'[in Bohr?] means an entanglement of subject and object. Objectivity is not a mere mirror image but rather a matter of '"accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the entanglement of which we are a part"' [we are responsible now at the quantum level?]. There is no 'epistemic arrogance' of locating knowledge, intelligence and meaning in the subject. We can use diffraction as a pedagogical tool as well to replace reflective methodologies, since diffraction is an alternative to reflection. Reflection is an inner mental activity involving distance from data and an attempt to fix meanings. Instead, foundations must be deconstructed and contingency acknowledged, other possible meanings/mattering is sought. Researchers intra-act 'between human and nonhuman phenomena'. The entanglements we study '"point to the interconnectedness of all being as one"' [for Barad — this is the step into animism. Or Buddhism?]. The researcher is 'always already part of the apparatus'[there are observer effects]. We are not interested so much in the meaning of data as with 'what phenomena do and how they are connected and co-constituted'. [An endless research programme of course]. In particular, dichotomies are rejected [if they are seen] '"as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then"' [but who are the naive realists who think this? The whole thing is directed at dogmatic positivists, including those who peddle dogmatic positivistic educational theory?]. Binaries introduce a power differential and a process of inclusion and exclusion. Diffraction patterns involve interference or overlap with waves so that they 'change in themselves in intra-action' [I'm not at all sure this is all mysterious or beyond the reach of Newtonian physics — we need to get to the quantum level to discover anything grippingly new]. These 'superpositions'are best seen as 'the effect of difference'. We can use them to disrupt identity producing binaries and thus 'learning has occurred' (5). Difference itself is not a matter of essence nor is it minor: it is relational and we must think through and with difference. We move beyond the metaphor with Barad, into a description of 'phenomena of matter'. So 'waves are not bounded objects'[at the quantum level but may be treated as if they were just about everywhere else?]. We should not reflect on the world but attempt to understand it 'from within and as part of it' [sentimental animism]. We should study entanglements including 'multi-species relations' and entanglement with the nonhuman. These entanglements are 'specific material – discursive configurations' changing with each intra-action. As an example, we should attend to how 'techno-scientific practices are implicated in what it means to teach or to do research' [so we are developing intra-action as a useful critique of positivism?]. Again there is a deeper point — entanglements do change from moment to moment because '"space time and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that constitute" them' [Barad] [this might be what Deleuze means by actualisation? But for him the virtual certainly does exist and is real]. So knowledge practices have material consequences and, deeper, are themselves '"specific material engagements that participate in (re-) configuring the world"'. We must appreciate this entangled nature and proceed with a notion of 'distributed agency', making visible interference patterns [and creating them] by bringing them into relation with one another. We can attack classical notions of identity and replace them with the idea of '"quantum superposition"', with many more possibilities of combination. It does matter which practices we enact [using the ambiguity of the term matter] because making knowledge involves 'giving the world specific form' (6). The researchers are accountable for this, responsible, and need to pay 'attention to accurate and fine details' — the same as being respectful towards the details of the text, 'trying to do justice to it', and 'being acutely aware that small differences matter enormously when using a diffractive methodology' [so we are celebrating small differences here, assuming in advance they are really important. But how small and how important? The colour of a respondent's eyes? This is a pre-research point]. All this makes diffractive methodology ethico–onto–epistemological, acting responsibly and with care to '"creatively re-pattern world making practices"'. [ Really, we are denying epistemology as anything other than just doing what we find in Nature?]This inseparability means research is always political, combining values and facts. We should study not things but phenomena, which will include 'the apparatus that produces data and things'[and the apparatus that has produced this statement?] We must rethink notions of the past and future. Producing values and meanings through diffraction apparatuses involves an indebtedness to the past and future. In particular we must not construct 'the new through a radical break with the past' [why not? We are somehow responsible to the past as well?]. As an example we can 're-turn'to events of the past, former seminars, perhaps, and read our earlier publications, 're- turning and re-turning again and again to the "same" text, creating "thicker" understandings' (7). We need the hyphens to remind us that '"reflection and diffraction [returning and re-turning respectively] are not opposites", but overlapping optical intra-actions in practice' the hyphenated one means intra-acting with diffraction — '"diffractive diffraction"' and we must see this sort of temporality as integral to diffraction — 'cutting together–apart as one move' [pass. Can we diffract diffractive diffraction? Why should some eternal present be seen as cutting together-apart — because slapping a time interval on processes always separates some out? Pretty banal if this is all it means] Diffraction opposes dichotomy [isn't that a dichotomy?] and this includes the split between researcher and researched. We have to commit to human and more than human equality and queer the binaries, accepting that the researcher is 'always already part of the apparatus that measures'. Researchers are not outside the diffraction pattern, but rather '"neither inside nor outside"'. As we have no fixed bodily boundaries our story is reconfiguring us, we are in a diffraction pattern and of it, trans-individual, '"multipliy dispersed and diffracted throughout space-time (mattering)"''. We are in/determinate, one or the other according to the apparatus that measures this and that we use to measure, including 'man-made categories'. These include scale [handy way to dispose of the usual criticism. Note the dichotomy between concepts that are material and merely man-made ones]  . Quantum field theory tells us that there is this indeterminacy in both space and time 'for both human and nonhuman'. The split between micro and macro is 'human made', already presupposing a spatial scale [Barad's presupposition is that the quantum directly affects or implies the macro? There are no emergent effects?]. At the quantum level each moment in time is '"an infinite multiplicity… Broken apart in different directions "'. This is the notion of force, she argues where relationalities '"do not appear to be proximate in space and time"' but are still connected. There is a link with Deleuze and Guattari, who also saw individuals as 'an infinite multiplicity'. The past is open for future reworkings even as 'the traces of iterative materialisations are sedimented into the world'. [All of them? If not why some and not others -cf Deleuze on the compossible, where one possibility limits the chances of others -- there can be no world in which Caesar both does and does not cross the Rubicon]. This means there is both spatial and temporal diffraction and this has [?] inspired research methodology. Entanglements are 'always here, there, now, then' (8) Entanglements are also relations of responsibility. Barad talks about 'travel hopping ' as a way of 'describing quantum leaps or temporal diffraction''. She gets this notion from a novel and uses it to 'unpack the infinite density and complexity of a particular spatial "point"' in space and time. There are exciting possibilities to re-turn to the past, 'for example, researching a teaching space, or as in this article reading experiences with diffraction as a methodology through one another'. [Now we get another one of these hyphenated terms 'im/possible'. I'm sure I have seen it in some French trope before — compare with Deleuze on the possible in the book on Leibniz]. Travel hopping is 'dis/embodied material – discursive labour'. It reworks the past but not as a linear chronology. Instead, 'moments exist one at a time, the same everywhere, replacing one for the other (like beads on a string)' this helps us disrupt what it means to be human' the notion that memories [?] become 'a fleshy unit' in space and through time. This is 'the modernist notion of the self with, for example, rights' [yes, what happened to rights — do only humans have them? What about their opposite, responsibilities — do only humans have those?]. Collaborations necessary for 'the responsible practice of education' but we also need to 'productively engage and think with [all?] other humans and more – than – human (e.g. matter)'. It means that we cannot write an objective history of [just] a body, since that would involve 'power producing dualisms between self and world'. [Endless rights beckon again -- we have no unique right to impose these dualisms? There areno dualisms in the world?] We need to offer 'imaginative, speculative philosophical [claim for Faculty priority?] enquiry that ruptures, unsettles, animates, reverberates, enlivens and reimagines'. Past present and future are threaded through one another and a body's ontology 'remains open for future reworking' [as in the 'quantum eraser experiment']. The past is real and we can re-enter it if we turn again to it, discovering a past that was never available before, which 'intensifies the affect that experiencing the experience has on human and nonhuman bodies' [we rake over our old memories hoping for new emotional discoveries?]. Focusing on the discursive alone is 'anthropocentric'. The material and the discursive are related indeterminately as in agential realism. We must reject binary thinking in concepts like causality and agency. We must not treat research participants as sources of data and code their responses. We must 'call the very nature of personal identity into question and not only for human bodies'. This means that we must include the 'more – than – human as research participants' [ask the permission of the tape recorders?]. We must honour 'inheritances and entanglements' rather than trying to break with the past [the example is 'feminist engagements with materialism' — so basically she is saying that we don't just rubbish everything that feminists used to think, unless they use binaries or dichotomies of course (9)]. We should see our inheritances differently 'because diffraction patterns are always already there' — the authors of the text or the creators of an image are always already entangled 'like waves in the sea', 'and the task of the researcher is to make this evident' [how, by constantly reasserting snippets of Barad?]. We must work re-iteratively, 'reworking the spacetimemattering [sic] of thought patterns' not just turning away or leaving behind. We are not making analogies or pulling together ideas in assemblages 'this would assume individual existence is ontologically prior' [so who was responsible for Barad's metaphors?]. We need to trace 'some entanglements ([by making?] "agential cuts") by focusing on the specificities of texts, fields, oeuvres et cetera in a broad sense and what might not be visible, there and then, here and now'. This should be 'situated ontology'. We should re-turn to the past to create thick understandings, 'because knowledge is sedimented into the world the researcher is part of'. [Lame example to follow] 'avoiding literature reviews that adopt a bird's eye point of view, that is, creating an overview by comparing, contrasting and looking for similarities and themes'. This assumes 'a relational ontological and a post-human subjectivity'. A relational view of reading 'assumes that the relationship is prior to the text and the reader'. Both are articulated 'with and through' the other. Both are affected by and affect each other, 'leading to unpredictable and creative provocations and becomings'. This is also true of writing, as Barad has argued where both book and author work and rework each other. We cannot separate 'epistemology, ontology and ethics' [we deny the autonomy of the last two] so what holds for theories also holds for academic reading and writing of texts. We propose 'a response–able methodology' with diffraction 'as one of its manifestations, informed [sic] by such a relational ontology'. Diffractive readings disrupt representationalism and established academic habits that involve uncovering meanings and values, interpretation judgement '"and ultimate representation"' (10) [cf Deleuze on interpreters]. This is particularly important in the Anthropocene era. We are not assuming that natural systems are universal and separate from human communities but rather 'offering a transdisciplinary approach that disrupts the nature/culture binary'. We might for example cross disciplinary boundaries 'by diffracting quantum physics with poetry or fiction or queer theory' and relinquish the idea that there is unity within fields or disciplines 'e.g. education'. We need '"an affirmative ethical – political economy"' to grasp looming extinction, including both trans-subjective and transhuman forces. We need to use diffraction to change the ways in which texts meet each other. This 'inevitably involves "the affirmation of a diffracted/ing world"' [not Barad this time but Kaiser]. We need to respect entanglements, not undermine them and we need to explore and produce entanglements through diffraction. There is little support for this at most HEI's, still dependent on 'the power producing binaries of Western metaphysics'. We are not prescribing a framework but showing how to intra-– act with texts about diffraction. We have re–viewed literature. This is objective because 'All diffractions are sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming'. They are not outside us, 'our own subjectivity is constituted in and through the methodology' [so we have dissolved all sorts of binaries and queried lots of dichotomies] We produce some propositions to consider. We do not prescribe or instruct, but 'offer an imaginary and… inspire a different "how" of research' we have been especially interested in queering the theory/practice binary [a pressing issue for education departments of course]. We have been affirmative not critical, respectful, responsive and response – able '(enabling response), trying to do justice to the text [Barad quoted for this old academic platitude]. We are not looking for similarities or differences, making comparisons or trying to identify themes. We are not putting texts against each other. We want to take a piece of work to 'new and unpredictable places. Creating provocations, new imaginaries and imaginings, and new practices'. We have created a diffraction pattern, not through a lack but as something affirmative and creative, 'nonrepresentational and ethical'. (11). We stressed differences that matter, but do not create oppositions, deconstruct, destroy or caricature [American professional ethics]. This would involve taking a position of exteriority and superiority. We need to create new patterns and superpositions, new cuttings together–apart as a single move. We can read parts of the text like chapters as a diffraction apparatus, showing how questions of difference emerge, how these come to matter. We can take what we find to be inventive and work carefully with the details of patterns of thinking involved — 'that might take you somewhere interesting and that you would never have predicted'. This is not being critical, since superposition 'adds force to "both"', not assuming that there is a unity, not particularly prioritising the diffraction pattern that has been created, but seeing it more as something that might inspire 'post-human research practices that make a difference'[so there is a practical agenda], to both knowledge and to subjectivity. 'Importantly, the propositions are self activating and not prescriptions' [big drive here to restore peace to the Academy, but only by reducing individual contributions to patterns produced by outside forces?] [Overall, it's not at all clear why some texts should be prioritised and not others, and some practices not others. There is nothing in the very general theory to guide us, since diffraction patterns are everywhere and infinite. So we have to smuggle in an extra consideration, in the form of assumptions that we all know what we should be doing, supporting feminism, ending nasty binaries and patriarchal power relations. Anyone for diffractively reading Mein Kampf? The actual results are pathetic — always introductory and inspiring. Enlightened academic practice delivered most of them already, like reading science and poetry. The specific terms of the whole opus are terribly vague and incantatory, and a lot of work is done by splitting words with hyphens or forward slashes, which gets irritating and unnecessary — as I said with Sellers and Gough, why not split everything, or should I say every/thing?. The real enemy is nasty positivist educational theory and research, I suspect, and this is using massive a philosophical hammer to suggest the endless complexity of everything as a tactic to defend philosophy] [There are some examples in the notes of diffractive readings. Barad has read queer theory through quantum physics, she has written chapters in a book which could be seen as a diffraction apparatus. She sees diffractive quantum theory through feminism and post-colonialism and also the work of people like Derrida, Foucault and Butler. And it's events as well — 'clock time, calculus, Schrödinger's cat'. She diffracts diffraction by re-turning to her own past articles and papers and intra-actions with a collaborator. Post-humanist literature also shows how two or more philosophers can be diffracted through Barad and Haraway — Whitehead, de Beauvoir, Irigaray and Ettinger. They also demonstrate how to review papers from an affirmative position rather than 'doing epistemological damage by taking up an external position', and the same goes with book review writing which should not foreground rational critique but offer diffractive readings of different books 'in order to create a set of propositions for post qualitative, nonrepresentational research' (12). We might deconstruct [sic] certain foundational concepts of ideas and reveal contingency to open other possible meanings [they choose the term 'secret' in Murris and Haynes]. These are 'transversal enquiries' crossing discipline boundaries. Murris has written about the concept of pet. Haraway uses an example of diffraction by showing 'how a safety pin may have many meanings and contexts by diffractively thinking the meaning of the safety pin in terms of its history in state regulatory apparatuses' [sounds like one of those stupid philosophical exercises they give to kids]. Murris has also offered 'a diffractive reading of three figurations of the educator and reads two rhizomatic pedagogies through one another — Reggio Emilia and Philosophy With Children. Both queer power producing binaries] Back to social theory