Test1-7

In my recent philosophical writings I have been making use of the methodology of ‘diffractive reading’ so as to prevent the dialectic from slipping into my work. The dialectic ‘reduces philosophy to interminable discussion’.2 After all, Henri Bergson, whom Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cite in What Is Philosophy? in relation to ‘the nature of philosophical problems’,3 stated in Introduction to Metaphysics that:

divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short, between the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great masters. But would one find them as clear-cut between the masters themselves? Something here dominates the diversity of systems, something, I repeat, simple and definite like a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the bottom of a same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very different materials. It is on these materials that disciples normally work: in that is the role of analysis. And the master, in so far as he formulates, develops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his own disciple. But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that of analyzing.4

Bergson’s intuitive method is meant to reach ‘the whole of experience (l’expérience intégrale)’.5 I argue that diffractive reading is connected precisely to the methodological issue of intuition-reaching-the-whole-of-experience, and indeed the term diffraction is to be found in the work of Bergson. As I write in the volume Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film: ‘Distinguishing acting freely from automaton-mode, Bergson hints at interference patterns or ‘diffraction’ as a tool to think with’,6 precisely because experiencing one’s deepest self implies ‘[a] disturb[ance of] my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the water of a 18pond’.7 This stone produces a series of waves circling into infinity. In addition, diffractive reading can be said to be exemplary for the new humanities both in terms of how the philosophical canon is dealt with (i.e., transversally) and how the humanities and the sciences are traversed in the same stroke. Diffraction, and diffractive reading in particular, play a central role in transversal methodology. This method derives from classical and quantum physics and partakes in a discussion about the fact that the quantum physical notion of diffraction can explain the classical one, whereas classical physics cannot explain the quantum definition because—and this is very Bergsonian—parts cannot be used to reconstruct or understand the whole.

‘Diffraction’ features in Deleuze’s philosophy and in Deleuzian scholarship. Arkady Plotnitsky has commented on this in terms of the conceptual engagement created by the crossover of quantum physical phenomena, (feminist) quantum physical conceptual tools, and a most general understanding of process-philosophies of becoming.8 Plotnitsky has also demonstrated that diffraction features in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? when they argue that ‘[c]oncepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them’.9 However, so far this peculiarity hasn’t been studied or evaluated in methodological terms: what does diffraction do in, or for, Deleuze scholarship? Diffraction has made a methodological appearance in the Deleuze field: Leonard Lawlor has put to use Foucault’s ‘points of diffraction’—formulated in the latter’s The Archaeology of Knowledge.10 One of his former students, Valentine Moulard-Leonard, has done the same in her monograph Bergson-Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual. Through a critical reading of Moulard-Leonard’s work, this chapter asks whether the potentialities of diffraction, in particular reading diffractively, are sufficiently utilised in Deleuze Studies, given that the methodology is so successfully employed in the field of Gender Studies at the moment.11 I argue that whereas Moulard-Leonard’s engagement with diffraction through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of interference is not in line with the methodological implementation of the Foucaultian notion, it is nonetheless possible to remedy this situation. This becomes clear in the feminist implementation and conceptualisation of diffraction, where we find Deleuze’s Foucault next to Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge.

The Point of Diffraction as Y-Crossing Divergence?

This chapter is less interested in Moulard-Leonard’s (or Lawlor’s, for that matter) own contribution to philosophical debates than in the way in which 19she journeys through the oeuvres of Bergson and Deleuze. I am interested in what the mode of their encounter—to use Moulard-Leonard’s own term—is able to actualise. What can an encounter be given the specific utilisation of ‘points of diffraction’ in play?

Diffraction appears first on page 5 of Bergson-Deleuze Encounters and always without a footnote. Although diffraction is never defined, the argumentative line with which the term is entangled demonstrates that diffraction must have something to do with a Y-crossing divergence: a parting of ways. Moulard-Leonard argues that Deleuze’s reading of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu introduces this forking (and whereas the differences and similarities between Proust and Bergson are well documented,12 these are not footnoted by Moulard-Leonard either). Indeed, on page 7 we find the term ‘point of indiscernibility’, contrasted on the next page with ‘point of diffraction’. The argument is that transcendental, virtual or superior empiricism can be found in the work of both Bergson and Deleuze,13 whereas in the work of Deleuze

the pre–World War II humanist hope for progress still held by Bergson is replaced with the postwar vision of a world reduced to chaos and crumbs. The whole has been shattered, the human has been demoted from its pedestal, and the only junction between the human and the world now lies in their shared positive fragmentation. But for Deleuze, this transcendental experience is also the experience of becoming, because it coincides with experimentation as the very force of time (and not only its effects): the empirical cycles of creation and destruction are shown to be conditioned by deeper, ‘machinic’ processes governed by a necessary absence of unity. And of course we must keep in mind that for Deleuze this fundamental fragmentation of the world, the self, and time also coincides with the future, with the untimely event of A life.14

The methodological aspect of this quote reveals quite a lot about Moulard-Leonard’s conceptualisation of diffraction. We see that whereas Moulard-Leonard makes a distinction between unity (Bergson) and fragmentation (Deleuze), this dualism immediately proves to be uncontainable: ‘But for Deleuze … ’ Deleuze demonstrates that unity and fragmentation are both effects of machinic processes. As confirmed by the author herself on page 9, the dualism is pushed to the extreme, which is precisely an instantiation of Bergson’s methodological formula from Matter and Memory: dualisms (unreal oppositions) are dealt with correctly—that is, metaphysically—when pushed to an extreme.15 We see this too when, somewhat later in the book, Moulard-Leonard focusses on Deleuze’s cinema books in her attempt to locate the presupposed point of diffraction—Y-crossing divergence—that causes Deleuze to depart from Bergson. Here, Moulard-Leonard tries to argue that Bergson has stayed with the movement-image while Deleuze has 20advanced to the time-image,16 whereas it immediately becomes clear that this situation of moving from a representational logic of recognition to the direct presentation of time without a standpoint has an excess that is likely to stem from the optical analogy that is employed here. In line with diffraction as such—and this is not taken up by Moulard-Leonard—the representational logic of recognition (in other words: classical physics) can be understood by the direct presentation of time, whereas the reverse relation does not hold. Representational logics (for instance logics of reflection) start from parts and will never reach the whole, whereas the time-image is the whole. Once we have established this point we are directed by Moulard-Leonard to the famous concluding section of Cinema 2: The Time-Image: ‘It is at the level of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events’.17 This interference can be read productively along the lines of the three interferences that are distinguished in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, namely: extrinsic, intrinsic, and nonlocalisable interferences.18 It appears that Deleuze at this point favours intrinsic interference, given that he states at the end of Cinema 2: ‘no technical determination, whether applied (psychoanalysis, linguistics) or reflexive, is sufficient to constitute the concepts of cinema itself’.19 Here we see a leaping into philosophy of cinema, as a kind of intrinsic interference.

My question is, therefore, whether Moulard-Leonard has reduced the possibilities enabled by the Bergson-Deleuze encounter. I am left with many questions when differentiations are made between Bergson and Deleuze, and hope to respond to some with my meditation on diffraction in this chapter. First, Moulard-Leonard’s conclusion seems to be that Bergson ultimately uses the intellect to open to intuition, which implies the wrong—the impossible—part-to-whole relation. But when she states that ‘Bergson remains committed to an otherwise conventional conception of truth as the stable—though not immutable—accord with reality’,20 I ask whether this is not what I will call, in the following text, a performative correspondence, along the lines of the immanent interference patterns mentioned earlier? In line with this, when Moulard-Leonard argues that ‘Bergson has opened up avenues for what one may call, following Gregg Lambert’s insight, Deleuze’s non-philosophy’,21 yet that he did not manage to reach ‘the spark that provides the reason for the continual yet fortuitous genesis of a thought that must not be equated with knowledge or representation’,22 what is again eclipsed is something that also, nonetheless, appears in Moulard-Leonard’s book. This is the relation between Bergson and Deleuze as a ‘creative involution’,23 on the one hand, and, on the other, the very positive claim—well-phrased in the light of the current trending of Object Oriented Ontology—that ‘Bergson shows that the intelligence’s negative activity must be negative of something, and that this something we must grasp [intuit] in some sense in order to delimit it in 21the first place’.24 Intelligence’s dis-identification with intuition—the fact that even intelligence experiences the whole before it starts analysing—implies that Moulard-Leonard’s conclusions cannot be sustained. Indeed, ‘[t]o regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations’.25 This chapter discusses this ‘between’ or ‘beneath’, with respect to the method of diffraction.

Let me therefore end this part of the chapter by claiming that Moulard-Leonard’s search for ‘the man Henri Bergson’26 is futile; and whereas a solution might have led to the why and how of Bergson’s thought, it would certainly not have provided insight to its event. Attending especially both to the conclusion of What Is Philosophy? and to Deleuze’s early and later Bergson-texts, Lambert provides further clues about the nature of Deleuzian interferences:

[I]t is the brain that thinks, not man. A brain is not in your head, any more than it is in the next thought, or the next perception, association, or memory; it is all of these at once and more. What is more is the plane on which all of these take place at once, as if simultaneously, even though this plane never appears as an object of representation, that is to say, does not refer to any external point of view. Thus, the brain is not opposed to the world, but rather the world is composed of a special type of brain-matter … each time new images are created, like new circuits in the brain, they also first become possible in a world, enlarging our sense of reality.27

This point is important because whereas Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is ‘chaos into which the brain plunges’,28 they also formulate specific modes of interference.

Deleuze and Guattari’s Three Interferences

As indicated, Plotnitsky has written about interference as a concept from physics, which enters the philosophy of Deleuze, and of Deleuze and Guattari. Plotnitsky argues that we must make a distinction between the way in which ‘resonance’ features in the early work of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and how ‘interference’ characterises the work of Deleuze and Guattari from Anti-Oedipus onwards.29 Resonance comes from classical physics and therefore deals with predetermined and predeterminable entities even as it differentiates waves—obstruction or amplification—from particles. Interference comes from quantum physics and whereas it includes resonance as an actualisation, its workings are not exhaustively classifiable 22as either–or situations: the co-production of entirely new waves, and the wave-like behaviour of single particles, must each be taken into account here. Nevertheless, resonance is both object (there can be ‘extrinsic interference between philosophy and science [physics]’)30 and concept (this would then be ‘an interference that leaves the resulting concept within a given field, in this case, philosophy’);31 for instance, the artistic production of a sensation based on engagement with a philosophical text. The interference is extrinsic; it is a resonance between two entities related externally. When it comes to the other two kinds of interference—intrinsic and nonlocalisable—we instead observe how ‘[c]oncepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them’.32 Plotnitsky argues especially that nonlocalisable interferences take on a quantum-physical reality, and we can therefore mention—next to ‘THE plane of immanence’ of Spinoza—‘the ultimate nature of quantum objects, such as electrons and photons, [which] must be thought and yet cannot be thought by quantum theory’ as exemplary nonlocalisable interferences.33 Intrinsic interference, however, would involve a sliding of art into philosophy, a sliding of science into philosophy, and so on.34 Another example of a nonlocalisable interference given by Plotnitsky affirms that ‘Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s unthinkable quantum objects are nonlocalisable interferences which are themselves quantum-like as we can no longer describe, or even conceive of, the ultimate nature of quantum objects, even though we must still work with these inconceivable objects which must be thought and cannot be thought’.35

Whereas this may seem to be a detour, Plotnitsky’s work is important for the argument that I wish to make about methodology as he uses the three interferences as a yardstick in order to make diagnostic statements about phases in the work of Deleuze (and Guattari). A definition of diffractive reading from Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning reads as follows: ‘Diffractively reading Bohr’s and Butler’s insights through one another for the patterns of resonance and dissonance they coproduce usefully illuminates the questions at hand’.36 What we see here is description of a more or less conscious act (of reading) on the part of Barad, who disrupts the terms of extrinsic interference in order to describe a sliding of feminist theory into philosophy of science, and vice versa. In other words, what she formulates is an intrinsic interference. Another example comes from the article ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’ in which Barad famously formulates diffractive reading for the first time:

Diffractively reading the insights of feminist and queer theory and science studies approaches through one another entails thinking the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ together in an illuminating way. What often appears as separate 23entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions—the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of ‘exteriority within.’ This is not a static relationality but a doing—the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability.37

We see here that even the element of exclusion taken on by Barad hints at nonlocalisable interference! What I wish to do now is follow in Plotnitsky’s footsteps and discuss the ‘point of diffraction’ in Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. Following the analysis of Moulard-Leonard’s work, we have seen that the concept needs work in order to reach something like the notion of interference that we find in What Is Philosophy? Barad’s reading of Foucault’s Archaeology next to Deleuze’s Foucault is key to this operation of specification.

Foucault’s Point of Diffraction and the Speculative Dimension

The two scholars who have put the so-called diffractive reading methodology on the agenda of feminist scholarship—Donna Haraway and Karen Barad—each have an ambiguous relationship with the philosophies of Foucault and Deleuze (and Guattari).38 However, Barad refers to both Deleuze’s Foucault and Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in her seminal monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway. In fact, quotes from both books are used as epigraphs to a section dealing with juridical and epistemological individualism, and the related issue of the gap between epistemology and ontology. Barad writes:

[R]epresentationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing.39

She specifies that the assumption of objectivity in the mediating function of a representation—whether a legal, scientific, or literary text—does not solve but rather continues the trend of ontologically separating word and world by having subjects begin and end at the surface of the skin, which becomes impermeable. Distinguishing representationalism from practices of representing makes clear that some work on representation is done in unawareness of the assumed gap, and therefore cannot study how ‘the represented’ participates in the entangled, material-semiotic or material-discursive process of its own representation. Foucault’s Archaeology is 24referenced in this context for its problematisation of ‘discourses as groups of signs’, and Deleuze’s Foucault is noted for its ‘rais[ing of words and sight] to a higher exercise that is a priori’. The Foucault reference is especially important for our purposes, because it is precisely The Archaeology’s notion of diffraction that has been introduced to Deleuze scholarship. However, the way in which this has been done by Lawlor and by Moulard-Leonard is not in line with Barad’s (and Haraway’s) methodological innovation. Furthermore, Foucault’s own concept can advance the feminist new materialist implementation, but only provided that we read it with a focus on Deleuze’s rewriting of the concept in his book on Foucault.

Let us first look at the way in which Foucault conceptualises and implements diffraction. Barad quotes Foucault:

‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.40

Journeying towards the development of a methodology for revealing and describing this ‘more’, Foucault’s chapter on ‘The Formation of Strategies’ places objects in conjunction with concepts and enunciative types, which are all formed by discourses-as-practices and together they form theories or themes (such as linguistic kinship in nineteenth-century philology and species evolution in biology a century earlier). Foucault is interested in designing the study of discursive formations multidimensionally and he argues that the starting point could be to ‘[d]etermine the possible points of diffraction of discourse’.41 At first sight, this study seems to continue the trend of Foucault’s predecessors/teachers Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem; that is, to argue for an epistemological history of the sciences. But this, as The Archaeology itself affirms, is only one of four types of history of science.42 More specifically, with ‘points of diffraction’ we are talking about an analysis of points of incompatibility which turn out to designate points of equivalence (thus establishing the epistemological form of either–or logics) and indicate link points of systematisation:

[O]n the basis of each of these equivalent, yet incompatible elements, a coherent series of objects, forms of statement, and concepts has been derived (with, in each series, possible new points of incompatibility) … [which o]ne describes 25… as a unity of distribution that opens a field of possible options, and enables various mutually exclusive architectures to appear side by side or in turn.43

The important point made here is underlined in the next section of Foucault’s text, where he makes clear that the description of the process of branching-off has a speculative dimension while at the same time making clear that the analysis is—in spite of feminist critique 44—thoroughly materialist. By using the term ‘speculation’ here, I want to indicate that not only does Foucault speak of an endless list of sheer points of diffraction, but he also identifies the task of analysis being to project imaginatively the ‘field of possible options’ alongside the specific architectures that ‘appear’, but whose sense as such relies upon their discrete differentiation from that field. In addition, we may want to argue that Foucault here approaches Deleuze’s own method of ‘transcendental empiricism’, which then substantiates Barad’s bringing together of the two philosophers. But let us first refine our reading of Foucault’s ‘points of diffraction’, and make sure to come back to the latter observations later.

Gary Gutting makes the same analysis: the pairs of either–or ‘represent forks within the discursive formation from which different theoretical turns can be taken, leading to very different theoretical developments’.45 Whereas the rules of the discursive formation may afford some diffraction points, not all of these points may actualise owing to the work of certain ‘authorities’ (among them are the ones mentioned in the next quote, but also relations between discursive formations, an ‘authority’ I will deal with somewhat later in this chapter). In Foucault’s terms:

In any case, the analysis of this authority must show that neither the relation of discourse to desire, nor the processes of its appropriation, nor its role among non-discursive practices is extrinsic to its unity, its characterization, and the laws of its formation. They are not disturbing elements which, superposing themselves upon its pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form, suppress its true voice and emit in its place a travestied discourse, but, on the contrary, its formative elements.46

The material institutional analysis seems to be preceded by a speculation that is to be found in the considering of all possible options, while ‘all the possible alternatives are not in fact realized: there are a good many partial groups, regional compatibilities, and coherent architectures that might have emerged, yet did not do so’.47 The materialism is not founded upon a naïve realism (a representationalism?), which can be said to be the opposite of a speculative philosophy. In order to come to an understanding of the nature of this entanglement of material genealogy and speculation—especially since Deleuze, too, argues that ‘the task of archaeology is double’,48—I wish 26to suggest that the important feature of note is that the point of diffraction operates as a ‘threshold’ in The Order of Things:

Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another (but how?—historians have not yet enlightened us on this point); one thing, in any case, is certain: archaeology, addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it, defines systems of simultaneity, as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity.49

In concrete terms, this ‘threshold’ is evident also in observations like: ‘Possibly Justine and Juliette [of De Sade] are in the same position on the threshold of modern culture as that occupied by Don Quixote [of Cervantes] between the Renaissance and Classicism’.50 The importance of this claim resides in the fact that other texts existed too and it could have been other texts that had leapt into the future! Having been trained in the specifically French tradition of historical epistemology, which suffered from a ‘chronological empiricism’ just like any naïve realism,51 what we see Foucault do here is consistently argue for critical attention paid both to the realised (or, in fact, actualised; Foucault’s word choice is suggestive for the careful Bergsonian) and to the possible (the virtual). These stand in a relation to one another that can best be explained with reference to Deleuze, who guides us to the closing section of Archaeology of Knowledge, even if the concept of ‘threshold’ was also formulated by Foucault’s colleague Gilbert Simondon. Interesting also for our discussion of points of diffraction and diffractive reading in the Baradian sense is that Simondon’s threshold-concept was informed by quantum physics, which field of expertise as we have seen has been influential for Barad’s formulation of the diffractive method. In the words of Brian Massumi:

Simondon’s bitter critique of ‘holism’ in the ‘Technical Mentality’ essay applies to philosophies which replace the diversity of conditions from which an effect arises with the nondecomposability of the arising whole, annulling their diversity and attributing a foundational ontological priority to the whole rather than rightly placing it on the level of emergent effect. This is one example of one of the most original aspects of Simondon’s thought: his endeavoring to always think discontinuity and continuity together… . This endeavor is encapsulated in his emphasis on the quantum, borrowing from physics. A quantum leap in physics is non-decomposable as a movement across a threshold. But its nondecomposability takes off from one set of diverse and decomposable conditions (a collection of particles in a particular configuration) and leads to another (a collection of particles in a changed configuration). The dynamic 27wholeness of the quantum event (the all-or-nothingness of its occurrence) interposes itself between two diversities, whose discontinuity it marks by a change in level accompanied by a qualitative change in the defining properties of the system (a passage, for example, from one element of the periodic table to another). For Simondon, all transition, all change, all becoming, is quantum.52

Later we will see that Barad also shares these insights, and also Deleuze, evident especially when he discusses ‘the whole and the part’. Furthermore, despite how my linking of Foucault to Deleuze adds to Foucault’s celebration (or was it jokingly, that he said it?) of a Deleuzian century,53 we must not forget that in The Order of Things a particularly Nietzschean episteme was pronounced by using the word threshold,54 signalling a threshold between modern and—what was later called—‘postmodern’ philosophy.55 Additionally, we must ask ourselves to what extent our discussion is situated on the level of historical ages at all. After having specified the four gradations of thresholds—the thresholds of positivity, epistemologisation, scientificity and formalisation56—Foucault argues:

If one recognizes in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognize it in a discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times and for all forms of knowledge: a division between what is definitively or what is not yet scientific. All the density of the disconnections, the dispersion of the ruptures, the shifts in their effects, the play of the interdependence are reduced to the monotonous act of an endlessly repeated foundation.57

Foucault is here revealed as a Bergsonian, because in addition to making the important point about thresholds (or diffractions) in discursive practices (which appear much freer from their historical age than we tend to think of them), he argues that we must not mould science according to the predetermined format of linear time, which approaches Bergson’s ‘retrograde movement’, ‘[f]rom [which] results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion’.58

It is here that we should insert the second epigraph used by Barad: the quote from Deleuze’s Foucault. This is what Deleuze argues:

As long as we stick to things and words we can believe that we are speaking of what we see, that we see what we are speaking of, and that the two are linked: in this way we remain on the level of an empirical exercise. But as soon as we open up words and things, as soon as we discover statements and visibilities, words and sight are raised to a higher exercise that is a priori, so that each reaches its 28own unique limit which separates it from the other, a visible element that can only be seen, an articulable element that can only be spoken. And yet the unique level that separates each one is also the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with two irregular faces, a blind word and a mute vision.59

It is important to note that whereas Foucault has famously asked himself whether the archaeological project had been successful at all, Deleuze attends to the fact that ‘the question of primacy’ is key to The Archaeology. He insists: ‘The question of primacy is essential: the statement has primacy. … But primacy has never meant reduction’.60 Deleuze affirms the fact that the statement’s primacy has never meant reduction plays out on the levels of rhythm, history, and form (of expression). This means not only that form pertains to the differing of ‘fields of statements’ and ‘places of visibility’, but also that whole and part, or system and individuation get their proper place, and that ‘the primacy of the statement will be valuable only in this way, to the extent that it brings itself to bear on something irreducible’.61 This irreducibility is played out only with regards to the thresholds of epistemologisation, scientificity and formalisation.

The third step in this chapter then involves taking up the ‘threshold’ of positivity, which is performed in Deleuze’s Foucault with the ‘subject-function’ and another discussion of the virtual and the actual, but is announced by Foucault only in the conclusion to The Archaeology, where he posits that the positivity-threshold deals with individuation 62 and that he is ‘[a]t the moment … not sufficiently advanced in [his] task to answer this question’.63 The notion of ‘interference’ (synonymous of diffraction) appears a few pages later as the modus operandi, the doings of ethics (e.g., the talk about sexuality), aesthetics (e.g., the making of a painting) and politics (e.g., the tactics of the revolutionary).64

The Threshold of Positivity

Let me now explain, with reference to Deleuze, the difference between the intermediary step of ‘irreduction’—to borrow a concept from Bruno Latour 65—and the threshold of positivity, which does not come out well in Foucault’s work. Indeed, the points of diffraction in Foucault are less straightforward than ‘applicable’. Diffraction implies that realised theoretical options and all possible other forkings relate to one another. Theoretical possibilities that are available but have not been seized were cut off by ‘authorities’ which must not be seen as disturbances but, on the contrary, as formative (here we recognise Foucault’s double face of power: potestas and potentia). One additional quote by Foucault—describing the role of authority in shaping 29relations between discursive formations—will lead us back to the heart of the matter:

A discursive formation does not occupy therefore all the possible volume that is opened up to it of right by the systems of formation of its objects, its enunciations, and its concepts; it is essentially incomplete, owing to the system of formation of its strategic choices. Hence the fact that, taken up again, placed, and interpreted in a new constellation, a given discursive formation may reveal new possibilities … but we are not dealing with a silent content that has remained implicit, that has been said and yet not said, and which constitutes beneath manifest statements a sort of sub-discourse that is more fundamental, and which is now emerging at last into the light of day.66

This quote demonstrates the extent to which Foucault works in agreement with the Simondonian interpretation of thresholding: the point of diffraction is a nondecomposable event, but what is effectuated on both sides of the threshold (this is the effect of the diffraction) is decomposable (either–or).

In Foucault Deleuze takes the leap to the threshold of positivity and explains what is at stake with regards to this threshold, in a much more explicit manner than the Foucault of Archaeology of Knowledge has been capable of. With the claim that The Archaeology ‘analyses the subject-function’67 Deleuze wants to explain how—and differently in different ages—‘we cannot say that the individual pre-exists the subject-function, the projection of a psyche, or the normalizing agency’.68 Dis-connected from psychiatric discourse, this is about ‘individuation’, to use a Simondonian concept. Deleuze explains:

[T]he subject is a place or position which varies greatly according to its type and the threshold of the statement, and the ‘author’ himself is merely one of these possible positions in certain cases. A single statement can even have several positions. So much so that what comes first is a ONE SPEAKS, an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects: ‘the great relentless disordered drone of discourse’.69

The thresholding is now fully positioned at the level of one statement and a lot is bypassed (some of this bypassing we have seen as if announced in this quote): the Cogito, the structuralism of the generation of 1890, and phenomenology’s all-too-easy equalisation of world and word.70 Of crucial importance is the Foucaultian point—made also earlier—that individuation has a history, knows specific moments of effectuation, and is in transformation (through history, form and rhythm). Risking making a neo-Kantian out of Foucault, but successfully circumventing an equalisation act, Deleuze concludes that Foucault’s work ‘is neither a history of mentality, nor of behaviour. Speaking and seeing, or rather statements and visibilities, are 30pure Elements, a priori conditions under which all ideas are formulated and behaviour displayed, at some moment or other’.71 I wish to call this latter moment the point of diffraction, which demonstrates how a diffraction is not a Euclidean, circumscribed point that exists in stillness and isolation, but rather an event that exists in a spatial (potestas-potentia) and durational (actual-virtual; transformative) field. But how should we best deal with the historical, the systemic and the individuated, levels or layers which have been intermingling in the text produced so far? Since diffraction was introduced as a methodology that sidesteps epistemological individualism, we must simply continue our quest.

Do Not Reduce

Reminding ourselves of the fact that ‘diffraction’ was introduced by Haraway and Barad in a discussion about the presuppositions of representation (these were spelled out by Trinh T. Minh-ha)72 allows us to move away from René Descartes (the classical age) and Immanuel Kant (the modern age), and towards Deleuze. Also referring to Foucault’s discussion about the episteme to come,73 Lambert in In Search of a New Image of Thought has argued:

Today … the only thing that the faculties can be said to share in common is a notion of difference that remains abstract, because it is now understood or presupposed in nonrepresentational terms. It no longer works, at least according to the rules previously prescribed to it by Representation … does this not accurately depict the situation of contemporary philosophy … for which in place of presupposing the world and the self as objects of natural representation, philosophy presupposes a pure plane of immanence that it is not yet capable of thinking according to a framework of representation?74

Affirming a subject that is becoming, not Being (or identitarian), Lambert directs the reader to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (a volume prefaced by Foucault), and precisely to the section ‘The Whole and Its Parts’ of the chapter ‘The Desiring-Machines’. Here, the complex intra-action—to borrow a conceptual tool coined by Barad—between the actualised and the virtual, and the formative nature of the closing off of paths, is stated in a manner that Lambert calls ‘most crucial’ and ‘in the most material and even historical of terms’.75 Indeed, converging with the argumentative field opened up above, the claim is that breaks in a seeming whole are productive, and that assembling, disassembly, and reassembling may happen at the same time and in multiple ways. A whole must not be seen as holistic, but simply as a machine in, and with which, a great number of antagonistic, different or differing 31movements happen simultaneously. The point is to move way from a ‘logic of One’, and the insight must be that a romantic, nostalgic or naturalising holism is nothing but a reaffirmation of the predetermination coming from dialectics. This is the (Simondonian) reading offered by Deleuze and Guattari:

We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull grey outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.76

Complicating the unity-fragmentation distinction emphasised by Moulard-Leonard, for Lambert the task of the philosopher today is ‘to know how to assemble a multiplicity from all the parts that have no relation to the Whole, to create a real multiplicity out of nothing but differences’.77 For us, this exposé is necessary, because Foucault gives us no clue about the nature of diffraction (the term is not footnoted), and yet we know that there are at least four interpretations possible: the classical and the quantum interpretation, and (leaving Albert Einstein out) the debate between Bohr and Heisenberg. This takes us to the third step of our discussion, a step we began previously but which was hindered by the limitations of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, in which the point of diffraction is not brought to the fullest fruition.

Earlier I argued: ‘Diffraction implies that realised theoretical options and all possible other forkings relate to one another. Theoretical possibilities that are available but have not been seized were cut off by ‘authorities’ which must not be seen as disturbances but, on the contrary, as formative (here we recognise Foucault’s double face of power: potestas and potentia)’. The issue of ‘nondisturbance’ has direct bearing on the issue of diffraction, because (non)disturbance is key to the famous debate in the 1940s between Heisenberg (who opted for uncertainty and disturbance) and Bohr (who chose for indeterminacy, nondisturbance and complementarity). The notion of diffraction that we find after Plotnitsky and Barad, in particular, is Bohrian:

The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess 32the complete set of properties that Newtonian physics assumes (e.g., position and momentum); rather, there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interactions such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded. Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.78

Hence, again we see the interplay of the empirical and the speculative, whereby the speculative—and this is of course an importation of a philosophical notion into the text of Barad here, a text that is differently philosophical at this point—does not undo the empirical or vice versa. Precisely the point of complementarity, for instance, is that one entity can be objectively measured to be both A and non-A or B, which does not imply an uncertainty, but rather the entanglement of subject, object and instrument. Therefore, ‘[i]n absence of a given apparatus there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the object and the agencies of observation [subject + instrument], but then the apparatus must be understood as part of what is being described’.79 My favourite example pertains to an experiment described by Barad, who concludes: ‘Among the particulars are a warm bed, a bad cigar, a timely postcard, a railroad strike, and an uncanny conspiracy of Nature’.80 The point of Bohrian diffraction is simple: do not reduce.

The Field-Nature of the Diffraction

In order to bring the discussion to a close, we must return to the way in which ‘point of diffraction’ features in Deleuze Studies and repeat the analysis I made of Moulard-Leonard now with her teacher, Lawlor. It is in the final section of this chapter that I will work with Foucault’s notion itself and with Deleuze’s Foucault. Although Lawlor’s analysis is philosophically more complex than Moulard-Leonard’s, I will be able to be more concise about his work.

Lawlor does not define diffraction either, yet his line of argumentation also is about disjunction. In addition, Lawlor argues from the start that the diffraction may be absorbed by similarity. Both ‘The Beginnings of Thought’ and Thinking Through French Philosophy uphold a definition of diffraction that is threefold: first, diffraction deals with a disjunction between thinkers/philosophical systems; second, diffraction is a point: ‘Always the diffraction [the disjunction] threatens to disappear into the point [of convergence];’81 and third, a point of diffraction is sought or constructed on purpose by the commentator, or the philosopher, or both.82 The convergence, on the one hand, seems to ‘happen’. This has to do with the fact that in the end, diffraction is 33a field rather than a point (albeit that in the following formulation, the term ‘point’ pops up again):

If one used, not Merleau-Ponty, but Sartre or Lacan or Lévi-Strauss as a partner in the dialogue, one might be required to construct the French Sixties philosophical system differently. Undoubtedly changing the partner would bring to light a different aspect of the point of diffraction.83

The field-nature of the diffraction—which indicates how what is diffractive involves more than what is documented between the covers of the book—is hard to reconcile with the demand of being ‘required to construct’. This reveals much about the nature of the diffractive methodology of Lawlor: wherever partners in dialogue come from, their presence—in movement—is not without consequences. In sum, Lawlor states:

I was seeking a point—like a glimmering star—on which to focus; I was seeking a point—like a knot—to disentangle. The point that I found has, I think, to speak like Deleuze, the power on the basis of which one creates new concepts. Because of this power concentrated in this point, I have come to call this system of thought ‘the great French philosophy of the Sixties.’84

Lawlor argues that diffraction is an optics that consists of several aspects. First, it involves constructing a schema that ‘always focuses on a lack (powerlessness)’,85 which has to do with the fact that the French sixties philosophy he is interested in is a philosophy of interrogation. Second, it involves establishing oppositions: ‘I was interested in that fine point where one kind of thought turns into its opposite just as white turns into black’.86 And a final step causes Lawlor ‘to determine, with precision, the gradual change of the “more and less” ’,87 which is about the infinitesimal nature of change. Before this, however, when Lawlor states that Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘had already found the point of diffraction in the experience of the question’88 in his uncompleted last book, the three characteristics of the point of diffraction (including diffraction as a point) are compromised: we do not know whether it is a disjunction we are talking about; the point-nature of diffraction comes out transformed; and the purposeful quest is still continuing. The same happens in the work of Lawlor, about whom we may ask whether he has actually succeeded in writing up a system, since the system is a philosophy of interrogation and the conclusion—reached after documenting a myriad of oppositions (this or that) and gradual changes (more or less)—reads:

[J]ust as a question lacks an answer, it also demands an answer. Thus the question opens out onto an excess of answers, potentiality of voices, responsibility. Where time is out of joint, the untimely (l’intemporel) is generated as an 34excess of life. The question implies: life in death, death in life. The doubling of life in death and of death in life is a paradox. The paradox of the double is what finally enables the genuine movement of thought. The paradox of the double is the point of diffraction.89

So, finally, what we find in Lawlor is next to convergence and opposition, a graduation and a movement ‘from white to black’ even in the point of diffraction, which suggests something like a quantum understanding of the diffractive point. Take the example of a razor blade, about which Barad has stated:

If you look at the image carefully, you’ll see that the shadow cast by the razor blade is not the sharply delineated geometrical image one might expect. In particular, there is not a single solid dark area in the shape of the blade surrounded on all sides by a uniformly bright background. Rather, a careful examination reveals an indeterminate outline around each of the edges: along both the inside and outside edges there are alternating lines of dark and light that make the determination of a ‘real’ boundary quite tricky. Perhaps even more surprisingly there are lines of alternating dark and light even into the very center that corresponds to the notched-out part of the blade. Shouldn’t that entire area be light? How can there be dark lines in the center at all? How can we understand this pattern that is produced?90

Lawlor argues that his system was written up ultimately as a ‘claim [which] could be tested’,91 suggesting that he is speaking here of an empirical exercise that does not ‘rais[e words and sight] to a higher exercise that is a priori’. However, we find a doubleness in the Merleau-Ponty quote from The Visible and the Invisible, which Lawlor is so fond of and which does demand a ‘higher exercise’, because the question is, just like in Deleuze’s Foucault, ‘a question as to how the “ideas of the intelligence” are initiated over and beyond’.92 Should we say that Lawlor’s historical-systemic account tries not to change the parameters of either historical or systemic philosophy, and that it does not make sense in the context of diffraction? That the excess in the text itself demonstrates the soundness of the double nature of diffraction, a doubling up also confirmed by Merleau-Ponty?93

The conclusion at this point could be that my exposé is in the end about Hélène Metzger’s solution to the chronological empiricism that she argued was shared by the two extremes of logical positivism and historical epistemology, the two competing paradigms of her time (the 1930s). This is what she argues: the historian of thought does not prejudge what he or she has found, because this historian is aware of the difficulties of scientific research. Constantly searching for a deepened understanding of the past, the historian tries to

35 penetrate with greater certainty and more active sympathy the creative thinking of the past in which he infuses new life, that he revives for a moment. Moreover, there is a personal, subjective factor … which is impossible to eliminate completely; it is better to admit it honestly than to deny it a priori. Historians, like all philosophers, like all scientists and like all humans have innate tendencies, individual, but imperceptible ways of thinking that are themselves not yet opinions or even systems of thought, but that can and do engender such opinions and systems. … And instead of rebelling against the nature of things to achieve a fake objectivity placed outside of the world and outside of science, [the historian] tries to find or recreate, for a moment in itself, the forces underlying the works that are the object of his meditation.94

Intuitive metaphysics is not a move either stirred by (under the spell of) intellectualism, or moving away from it (thus reaffirming it by negation), because intuition can also pertain to thinking, to epistemology. In the a priori exercise of Deleuze there is no place for reduction.

Notes

1. This text was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the conference Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities (June 9–12, 2014; Hong Kong).

2. Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 79.

3. Ibid., 8.

4. Bergson 2007 [1934], 168; emphasis added.

5. Ibid., 169.

6. van der Tuin 2013, 233.

7. Bergson 1913 [1889], 168.

8. Plotnitsky 2012.

9. Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 36.

10. Lawlor 2003a, 2003b.

11. See, for example, Kaiser and Thiele 2014; Hickey-Moody et al. 2016.

12. Gunter 2012.

13. Moulard-Leonard 2008, 7.

14. Ibid., 8, emphasis in original.

15. Bergson 2004 [1896], 236.

16. Moulard-Leonard 2008, 106ff.

17. Deleuze 2000 [1985], 280, emphasis added. In French this reads: “C’est au niveau de l’interférence de beaucoup de pratiques que les choses se font, les êtres, les images, les concepts, tous les genres d’événement” (p. 365 Cinéma II).

18. Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 216–18.

19. Deleuze 2000 [1985], 280, emphasis added.

20. Moulard-Leonard 2008, 125.

21. Ibid., 127.

36 22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 2.

24. Ibid., 7.

25. Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 238–39.

26. Moulard-Leonard 2008, 128.

27. Lambert 2012, 205–8.

28. Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 218.

29. Plotnitsky 2012.

30. Plotnitsky 2012, 23.

31. Ibid.; cf. pages 26, 28–29.

32. Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 36.

33. Plotnitsky 2012, 28.

34. Ibid., 29.

35. Ibid., 30.

36. Barad 2007, 195.

37. Barad 2003, 803.

38. With regards to Foucault, Barad’s point is that he has been prone to predetermining the (causal) relation between matter and signs (e.g., Barad 2003, 809–10). Haraway (2008, 27ff) has been critical about Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘fantasy’ of the wolf pack and Barad (2007, 436–37 n.80) about the privileging of the virtual-actual coupling to the real and the possible. Haraway says: ‘My Deleuze is Rosi Braidotti’s feminist trans-mutant’ (in Gane 2006, 156) and Barad has said that she wants to take Braidotti’s Deleuze Seminar (personal communication).

39. Barad 2007, 46.

40. Foucault 1972 [1969], 49; emphasis in original.

41. Ibid., 65, emphasis in original. The French text—L’archéologie du savoir—speaks of ‘points de diffraction’ (Foucault 1969, 87). The concept is not footnoted.

42. Ibid., 189ff.

43. Ibid., 66.

44. For example, Barad 2003, 803–11.

45. Gutting 1989, 237; emphasis added.

46. Foucault 1972 [1969], 68; emphasis added.

47. Ibid., 66.

48. Deleuze 1999 [1986], 45.

49. Foucault 1994 [1966], xxiii.

50. Ibid., 210.

51. Metzger 1987 [1937], 58.

52. In De Boever et al. 2009, 40–41.

53. Foucault 1998 [1970], 343.

54. Foucault 1994 [1966], 342.

55. See Gutting 1989, 207.

56. Foucault 1972 [1969], 186–87.

57. Ibid., 188.

58. Bergson 2007 [1934], 11.

59. Deleuze 1999 [1986], 55.

37 60. Ibid., 43. Only the first sentence—up to the colon—appears in the work of Barad.

61. Ibid.

62. Foucault 1972 [1969], 186.

63. Ibid., 192.

64. He says: ‘interference and mutual transformation’ (Foucault 1972 [1969], 195). The French edition speaks of ‘l’interférence et la mutuelle transformation’ (Foucault 1969, 255).

65. Latour 1988 [1984].

66. Foucault 1972 [1969], 67.

67. Deleuze 1999 [1986], 47.

68. Foucault 2006 [2003], 56.

69. Deleuze 1999 [1986], 47.

70. Note that some contemporary new materialisms repeat the evaluation of phenomenology as ‘the “World speaks” ’ [Ibid., 48].

71. Ibid., 51; emphasis added.

72. Minh-ha 1997, 1996.

73. Lambert 2012, 11.

74. Ibid., 21.

75. Ibid.

76. Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 42; emphasis in original.