Diffracting Autotheory
alex christie
@inadeqt_futurs
inadequatefutures.com
Who we are (becoming) cannot be thought apart from what we encounter.
"The world has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives" (Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters") "Form and content are short-lived, and this makes them false starters. In a politics attuned to emergent difference, we must begin instead in the midst, where force has not yet tuned to form. In this middle, where the event is still welling, there is potential for new diagrams of life-living to be drawn" (Manning, *The Minor Gesture*)
"The world has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of **actants and of networking and unequal collectives**" (Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters") "Form and content are short-lived, and this makes them false starters. In a politics attuned to emergent difference, we must begin instead in the midst, where force has not yet tuned to form. In this middle, where the event is still welling, there is potential for new diagrams of life-living to be drawn" (Manning, *The Minor Gesture*)
"The world has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of **actants and of networking and unequal collectives**" (Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters") "Form and content are short-lived, and this makes them false starters. In a politics attuned to emergent difference, we must begin instead in the midst, where force has not yet tuned to form. **In this middle, where the event is still welling, there is potential for new diagrams of life-living to be drawn**" (Manning, *The Minor Gesture*)
"To read diffractively implies a certain *suddenness*" (van der Tuin, "Signals Falling")
"Diffraction does not produce 'the same' displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the *effects* of difference appear ... Science fiction is generically concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience" (Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters")
"*Ordinary Affects* is an experiment, not a judgement" (Stewart, *Ordinary Affects*) "Full of resonating stories, encounters quirky in their unapologetic ordinariness, and murmuring objects, this book takes me into the thick world of the everyday in the U.S.A." (Haraway on *Ordinary Affects*)
"**Meaning is not an ideality; meaning is material.** And matter isn't what exists separately from meaning. Mattering is a matter of what comes to matter and what doesn't. Difference isn't given. It isn't fixed. Subject and object, wave and particle, position and momentum do not exist outside of specific intra-actions that enact cuts that make separations--not absolute separations, but only contingent separations" (Barad, "Diffracting Diffraction")
"Reading diffractively is a methodology that wants to stay clear from classifactory reading (reading *from* or *for* an authoritative classification of ideas, a regulation of dependence that is often implicit and stays unacknowledged)" (van der Tuin, "Signals Falling") "...the diffractive method allows us to affirm links between seemingly opposite schools of thought, thus breaking through a politics of negation. At the same time, it allows us to affirm and strengthen links between schools of thought or scholars that only *apparently* work toward the same goals. Diffraction, then, is the strategy with which new concepts or traditions, new philosophies, can be engendered" (van der Tuin "A Different Starting Point, A Different Metaphysics")
Reading, the encounter among reader and text, is itself a diffraction. Who and what I am (becoming) is iteratively reconfigured in the reading, by the encounter with the text.
"I’m always looking for terms that are not 'memoir' to describe autobiographical writing that exceeds the boundaries of the 'personal,' and since this book has more theory in it than other books of mine, it seemed an apt description" (Nelson, "Riding the Blinds") "This book is not a memoir. This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol, which concerns the body and affects of BP. A body-essay. […] If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, a self-theory" (Preciado *Testo Junkie*)


Butler

"I mean writing that dramatizes the way in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always" (Nelson, The Argonauts)

*autotheory* (n): . . . "We owe each other everything" (Moten & Harney *The Undercommons*)
"What does my body consist of?" (Paolo, *Body Toxic*) "I'm the product of my mother and father's DNA and of their DDE: these lay down with the in their nuptial chamber. A mouthful of breastmilk and DDE formed by my first human meal. At the resurrection of the body we will carry these along with our sins to the throne of judgement. Peter will weigh them: sins, graces, pesticides, radiation" (Paolo, *Body Toxic*)
"What does my body consist of?" (Paolo, *Body Toxic*) "I think I shall write memoirs about life in America, and my philosophy and opinions about it. Then I will wrap it in mud or clay, and someday I shall bury it for people far in the future to find" (Paolo, *Body Toxic*)
"That's what this book means. We are talking to our 'masters.' Very gently and subtly. Dogs are true leaders and strong teachers as the life of Eileen Myles *after* my own life will show" (Myles *Afterglow (a dog memoir)*)
Preciado / T: "This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol" Paolo / DDT: "I'm the product of my mother and father's DNA and of their DDE" Nelson / Butler: "...we are *for another or by virtue of another*" Myles / Rosie: "Dogs are true leaders and strong teachers"
"There is no 'I' that exists outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story. In an important sense, this story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con)figuring me. 'I' am neither outside nor inside; 'I' am *of* the diffraction pattern. Or rather, this 'I' that is not 'me' alone and never was, that is always already multiply dispersed and diffracted throughout spacetime(mattering), including in this paper, in its ongoing being-becoming is *of* the diffraction pattern" (Barad, "Diffracting Diffraction")
Autotheory does not require diffractive reading, but performs and enacts a series of diffractions both narratively and within the relational encounter we call reading.
"*The aim is not to answer questions, it's to get out, to get out of it*" (Nelson, *The Argonauts*, Parnet & Deleuze *Dialogues*) "...my *aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced* (creativeness)" (Nelson, *The Argonauts*, Parnet & Deleuze *Dialogues*)