Diffracting Cinema
Explorations into the Methodological Possibilities of
Diffraction for the Analysis of Film
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Comparative Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
By: Aldo Kempen
Student Number: 10650954 Supervisor: mw. dr. H.H. Stuit 14 juni 2018
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
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6
Tracing the turn
8
Diffraction and writing diffractively
9
Summary of chapters
13
I Concept:
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17
A genealogy of diffraction
18
Methodological dimensions
21
II Comparison:
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25
Diffraction as comparison
28
Diffractive encounters
30
III Ontology:
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39
Cognitivism and film ontology
41
Towards a diffractive ontology
43
IV Talking Back:
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53
Diffractive Arrival
55
Filmic possibilities
61
Conclusion(s)
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66
Filmography
70
Bibliography
70
Introduction
“Reflexivity, like reflection, still holds the world at a distance. (…) Representation raised to the nth power does not disrupt the geometry that holds
object and subject at a distance as the very condition for knowledge's possibility. Mirrors upon mirrors, reflexivity entails the same old geometrical optics of
reflections.”
(Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 87-88)
Reflection; reflexivity; representation; mirroring; mimesis. Once heralded as the underpinning of conducting proper science, now these words point towards an impasse. In the past twenty years, a group of scholars has emerged that unearthed the far-reaching consequences of a scientific practice founded on such ideas. This group, ranging from philosophers to literary scholars to feminist theorists, unite under the banner of ‘new materialism’ and move away from both structuralist and naive positivist positions as these positions are intertwined with a reflexive logic. Prominent within this group is the feminist philosopher Karen Barad who substantiated the move away from a reflective practice of scientific inquiry, towards a performative understanding in her seminal essay “Posthuman Performativity” and her monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway. Barad interprets reflection as a practice of mimesis, where one ontological domain is mirroring or representing the other. Using insights from quantum mechanics and combining this with a feminist perspective, she gave a comprehensive corroboration of a scepticism towards reflection as the central relation between scientific texts and the world. Countering the logic of reflection and building on conceptual and scientific work done by amongst others the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway
and the physicist Niels Bohr, she appropriates the natural phenomenon of diffraction as a methodological concept that would do more justice to the performative and co-constitutive relation between matter and text. Distinguished from reflecting or mirroring, diffraction entails a different spatial and temporal relation towards its constituent objects and is developed as a way to theorise what thinking otherwise might look like; thinking in new and maybe even surprising ways.
This line of thought has been highly influential both in the disciplines where it first originated as in other fields and disciplines such as the social sciences, anthropology, art history, and musicology. The analysis of film has had a long 1
interdisciplinary tradition, using insights from other traditions ranging from postcolonial studies to structuralism to cognitivism, incorporating these fields into research strategies apt for this medium. However, the relatively new tradition of new materialism has not yet been adopted as- and transformed into- a research methodology for the analysis of this medium. Furthermore, research methodologies that are still dominant in the analysis of film such as cognitivism but also constructivism are reliant on a practice of scientific inquiry that takes reflection as the central ontological concept for the relation between text and object. If the objections against reflection, posed by this movement, make any 2
sense, this would have far-reaching consequences for these methodologies. To probe new lines of thinking and new territories that are not susceptible to these critiques, this study will explore possible methodological applications of this new materialist line of thought for the analysis of film. What do practices of film analysis look like that are not reflective, that do not stand in a reflective relation towards its object of inquiry? How can insights from this new line of thinking cross-pollinate practices of the analysis of film? Before moving to how I aim to answer these questions, it is needed to substantiate the claims made against reflection to underpin why a new non-reflective practice of analysis of film is needed. To show this, the next section will trace where and why this turn away from reflection originated.
See for instance Mitchell, Kohn or Kara.
1
In Chapter 1 and 3 this relation between cognitivism, constructivism and reflection will be explored in more
2
Tracing the turn
Approaching this turn away from reflection from a historical point of view, one can see how it emanated from a stalemate of modern and postmodern thought. One can see the rise of this new discourse if one traces the causes of this deadlock. Modernist thought, according to Susan Hekman, builds on an ontology that asserts one external material reality that gives rise to- and is potentially unproblematically represented in language ("Constructing the Ballast” 89). In contrast, postmodern thought posits that there are multiple or a near infinite amount of realities that are structured and created through language or historically contingent cultures (Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” 90). However, through this emphasis on contingency matter becomes a purely passive thing upon which culture, for instance, acts. Social constructivism has arguably reduced the agency of extra-lingual entities. Through focusing on language and how language moulds what one experiences to be real, the body and its fundamental materiality was made passive by this type of theory (Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” 91). From postmodern discourses, a type of reading and writing emerged that focused on showing that every entity that once posited to be real or natural, was in fact contingent and constructed by cultural forces. Whereas modern thought placed trust in an empirical reality, a kind of paranoia replaced this trust, as argued by Eve Sedgwick and Bruno Latour (Sedwick 124; Latour 226).
Countering this culture of paranoia, a new group of scholars emerged that placed a side note to the tendencies of postmodern discourse. Scholars of the new materialist movement tried to demonstrate how the worn-out path of critique became the only viable option within a postmodern episteme. (Sedgwick 127; Best and Marcus 9; Latour 226). Fixated on ideology, discourse, representation and false-consciousnesses, the postmodern discourse has ignored, excluded or condemned materiality and embodied lived experience. This new movement rebelled against how the body and its materiality has become the passive tabula upon which culture and representation paints, moulds and creates (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity” 803).
Spearheaded by Karen Barad, this recent movement contends, against this postmodern discourse, that the body does feel. Bodies are suppressed, bodies feel pain, bodies feel pleasure (Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” 101). Reducing the body to the contingencies of culture denies the reality of the lived experiences emerging from these bodies (Alaimo 15). A form of relativism and a horizontal distribution of values follows from this postmodern constructivism; it becomes impossible to claim that some things are a social construct and others are not as every position becomes susceptible to the plays of power and culture (Latour 227). Furthermore, according to Clare Hemmings, making matter merely passive undoes more of the understanding of how material practices (such as architecture) (re)produce bodies and discourses, since the forms and potentials of different matters give rise to many processes that structure discourse itself (Hemmings 548).
However, as this recent movement notes, there is no way back. The damage that postmodern theory has caused to modernism’s naive materialism, has been done. Theory has troubled the straightforward connection between language and the material world. Social constructivisms and science studies have problematised the status of the real. Cultural studies has had a long tradition of revealing the contingent and constructed nature of things that were seen as natural and factual (Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast” 106). It revealed how unbalanced power relations and totalitarian urges were hidden in supposed ‘facts’. The damage of modernisms totalitarian urges have been shown. On the basis of these studies, a return to naive materialism has been foreclosed and is in any case undesirable. Borne out of this stalemate between modernist materialism and postmodernist constructivism, is a task for cultural theory and philosophy to find a new ground, or, at least, a middle ground.
Diffraction and writing diffractively
The concept of diffraction is proposed as a way out of this stalemate; to find a middle ground. Diffraction refers to a range of natural phenomena and is most clearly observed when two stones are dropped near each other in a pool and cause a wave. The waves caused by the stones reveal an interference pattern; together
the two waves create a new wave with different properties. In this interference pattern, there are points where the newly created wave is amplified and points where they cancel each other out. This phenomenon is used in quantum mechanics as a way of researching the ontology of light but has been appropriated, amongst others by Karen Barad, as a way of theorising the middle ground described above (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity” 806). In a diffraction, the visible phenomenon is the product of two (or more) forces; one does not precede the other; there is no difference between passive and active. This phenomenon is used to describe how matter and discursive structures together create visible phenomena without reducing the one to the other. Through the use of this phenomenon a position emerges that is thus neither naively positivist, nor reducing the outcome to discursive structures.
While science studies in the 80’s and 90’s dethroned the ‘natural sciences’ and its supposed hardness (Latour 224), Karen Barad puts the natural sciences back into conversation with feminist debates in the humanities. According to her, the ontology of quantum mechanics and the phenomenon of diffraction allows for a way to describe this middle ground between matter and discursive practices. Quantum mechanics opens the possibility to theorise an inherent indeterminacy at the heart of nature. The perceived phenomenon of light is not merely the product of matter, neither is it purely the effect of apparatuses employed to describe the matter. Depending on what experiment one uses, the observed phenomenon is different (a wave or particle). Through this queer ontology, quantum mechanics allows for a way to theorise a middle ground between a standpoint epistemology that takes the situatedness of knowledge(s) into account on the one hand, and a position that does not deny the physicality and agency of materiality on the other. In the first chapter of this thesis, I will elaborate on the concept of diffraction from a theoretical and genealogical perspective to see the capacity and possibilities of this phenomenon. There it will also be shown how this phenomenon can be turned into a methodological concept and how it relates to a practice of close reading.
So what does a study on a diffractive methodology look like? A piece on the methodological possibilities of diffraction should at least adhere to the dictum of ‘practice what you preach’. Since diffraction as a methodology is opposed to a
logic of reflection, the methodology of both this text as the methodology that it proposes, cannot be simply reflected in text. On different levels, this text performs rather than straightforwardly explains what it does. However, in the next section, I will try to give a tentative overview of the formal and methodological characteristics of this text.
As the concept of diffraction is intimately related to ideas regarding the multiplicity of possible descriptions emerging from the same object (see for instance the light particle/wave example above), an exploration into the methodological possibilities of this concept should adhere to this. Rather than containing the final truth, all the truths or all the possibilities regarding the application of a diffractive methodology for film, this piece will be more modest in its claims. In its form, this piece will consist of different explorations, each 3
describing a possible application that is visible from the material-discursive perspective of the author. Rather than being a homogenous whole grasps the whole truth, it will be more essayistic in its form. Although multiple lines of thought are connecting the various chapters, the chapters each dissect and research their own possible application and can be read almost separately.
Anna Tsing’s exploration of mushrooms inspires this form. In her book
Mushroom at the End of the World, she traces mushrooms through a world that can
no longer be adequately mapped. Whereas mapping is a reflective and modernist practice, she argues that the present moment can be more adequately approached through a practice that works along the very patchiness of contemporary life. While the current text will not deal as much with theorising the contemporary social-cultural moment, it proceeds alongside her work in that it moves away from the essentially mimetic and reflective practice of mapping. The current work should not be read like a map that represents and encompasses the entire territory of the relation between film and diffraction. Through its essayistic form, it visually alludes to an open-ended assemblage that points outwards. Rather than mapping out a territory, the piece shows different and diverting points of interests that could be useful and productive for others in their process of thinking. This is also the reason that all chapters will end by pointing to things emerging, possibilities
Chapter three will explore in more detail how modesty as an attitude for scientific research is connected to a
3
arising and thoughts forming; it ends open and by opening up. Rather than working towards closure or completely drawing the map, chapters end in an upbeat, pointing outwards and onwards. Moreover, through this essayistic style, it hopes to work through and with previous philosophies; transversing rather than transcending them; pointing towards new possibilities rather than subtractive criticism. 4
Furthermore, the current text does not proclaim to speak from a position of exteriority, looking with a neutral and distant gaze at the matter. Instead, it tries to speak from an entangled position. As diffraction underscores that visible phenomena only occur through the coming together of apparatuses and matter, the very entanglement of the author with the matter is the condition of possibility of the subject to emerge. This entanglement asks for modesty as it necessarily means that the author is limited in his ways. In turn, this limitedness asks for a certain form of curiosity, since other ways of thinking are necessarily always possible. The current piece thus does not seek an all-encompassing model or tries to turn thought into a monoculture. To honour this and to stylistically allude to famous opening of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the current piece 5
is also not written in a homogenous way. It contains multiple ways of writing; some exploring; some arguing; some researching; some critiquing.
Every chapter starts with two quotes that can enter into (a diffractive) relation with each other and with the text following them. Rather than to fix the text in a distinct frame, it hopes to spark new and surprising lines of thought, opening the possibility of new or unexpected threads and entanglements. As diffraction is developed as a move away from a merely critiquing and subtractive way of reading, the current piece through its form, hopes to foster productivity in thought and to “gesture to the so-much-more out there” to speak in Anna Tsing’s words (viii); both to the more that is left unsaid through the necessary limitations of the author and the more that is yet to be thought of by others.
Chapter four will explore the concepts transcendence and transversality more in depth.
4
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a 5
Summary of chapters
The first chapter will function to verbalise my reading of Barad and the concept of diffraction. It elaborates on the theoretical background of the concept of diffraction. Since diffraction underscores the idea that there is no neutral or ‘objective’ reading, this chapter will function to explicate my reading of it. The chapter will unearth the different meanings embedded in this concept and show how Barad’s take on diffraction is itself a diffractive reading of previous conceptions of diffraction. After showing how the concept of diffraction is always already diffracted, the rest of this text will then itself operate as a similar performance; diffracting and refracting the concept with-, through- and alongside film.
The second chapter will explore the methodological possibilities of diffraction by looking at the intersection of diffraction and comparative projects. Comparison in general and cross-cultural comparison in particular has been a long-standing practice in the analysis of film(s). However, the idea of a value-neutral comparison has been critiqued heavily. As the scholar Radhakrishnan notes, behind every comparison lurks the “aggression of a thesis” (454). In this chapter, I shall argue that diffractively reading film could be a way to overcome the critiques regarding the problematic status of comparison. Subsequently, the possibilities of diffraction as a different way of comparing will be explored. As a diffractive methodology counters the logic of representation, the methodology cannot just be described, it also has to be performed. How diffraction can be used in a comparative project in cross-cultural film analysis, will be performed through reading In the Mood for Love (2000) and Synecdoche, New York (2008) diffractively. From this comparison, I will be able to read how a diffractive form of comparison reformulates what it means to compare and how it opens up to a new relation between theory and object. I will show how this new relation between theory and object can function as a corroboration of the methodology of close-reading, prominent within the practice of cultural analysis. It is elaborating on- and bolstering the methodology of close reading by embedding it within a theory of diffraction. Moreover, reading these two movies diffractively will also further the analysis and interpretation of these movies.
The third chapter will devote itself to an exploration of the ontology of film. As diffraction is a way of theorising the interrelation of ontology and epistemology, a piece on the methodological possibilities of this concept cannot skip questions regarding the ontology of film. In this chapter, I will look at the queer ontology of the film Blue (1993) and through reading this film argue that current dominant strains of film ontology cannot adequately theorise the ontological aspects of this film. Subsequently, reading Blue from a diffractive take on ontology will open up to a new practice of ontology that does more justice to the necessary exclusions that scientific inquiry generates. Here the concept of the agential cut will be introduced, which is developed by Barad to explain how borders of objects and categories materialise in practices. Borders and thus how objects are, do not precede interaction, they are made in and through these interactions (intra-action). This will link the practice of ontology to questions of ethics as every practice of ontology generates its own exclusions. From this perspective, a new attitude for scientific research emerges; one that takes curiosity and modesty as its central approach towards its objects. Furthermore, reading
Blue’s ontology from a diffractive perspective will add to already existing
interpretations of this film as this diffractive ontology can better theorise its unique border position. It will show that through understanding it’s queer ontology, it’s political message becomes highlighted.
The fourth and final chapter will turn the light back on itself and scrutinise the concept of diffraction. It will build on ideas developed in chapter three that revealed that an attitude of curiosity and attentiveness is fundamental to an ethical way of practising theory and ontology. Chapter three will open up to the idea that theories are necessarily limited and need to be scrutinised as they always generate exclusions through the agential cuts they enact. As reflection is no longer a viable strategy within this approach to scrutinise a methodology or theory, this chapter does not reflect on- but diffracts the diffractive theory itself. Through this lens, it will return to the text that inaugurated the contemporary understanding of the concept of diffraction, namely “Posthuman Performativity”. Reading this text through the film Arrival (2016) will diffract the concept of diffraction. As theory in this methodology is always already situated, allowing the objects to speak back is a necessary and fundamental part. This diffractive reading of the theory through
an object will open up to a critical assessment of Barad’s text as the form of the paper is contradicting its content. The scholars Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn note that transcending a previous doctrine traps the newly emerged philosophy necessarily within a modernist frame as transcendence is intimately tied in with the politics of the dialectic. Rather old philosophies need to be transversed. However, reading the text of Barad through Arrival will show how form and content are intertwined and that the text is transcending rather than transversing previous doctrines through its form and structure. It is actively negating rather than working through previous doctrines and thus falling into the trap of transcendence. Furthermore, reading Arrival and Barad’s text diffractively will open up to a possibility of the medium of film as a new way of thinking and new way of practising non-representational and non-transcendent forms of academic research.
I
Concept:
digging into the phenomenon; a diffractive genealogy
‘Some of us tried to stay sane in these disassembled and disassembling times by holding out for a feminist version of objectivity.’
(Haraway ,“Situated Knowledges,” 24)
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it
yet”
(Bohr qtd. in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 254).
Shock is one of the central affects experienced when quantum mechanics was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. Currently, these discoveries still cause shocks, and the vibrations are felt far out of the epicentre of the natural sciences. The strange and enigmatic ontology of quantum mechanics crossed disciplinary boundaries, and the discoveries are causing ruptures not only in the practices of the natural sciences but also in the humanities. While the insights that are the result of this shock have been applied in science studies, feminist studies, queer studies and social ontology (as discussed in the introduction), I will explore the possible implications of this “earthquake” for the analysis of film. As the c o n t e m p o r a r y m o m e n t i s ch a r a c t e r i s e d a s “ d i s a s s e m bl e d a n d disassembling” (Haraway 24) and practices of conducting science are shaking again, this is a study that explores these emerging, new and shocking possibilities.
However, in order to see how a diffractive methodology can change and shake up the practices of analysing film; first, it is needed to explore the philosophical
underpinnings of this new methodology. While the coming chapters will explore possible applications of a diffractive methodology for the analysis of film, this chapter will be theoretical in scope. As the concept of diffraction underscores the interrelation of the observer with the object, it is not possible to have an unbiased reading of a text. This chapter will thus function as a verbalisation of my interpretation of the concept and will show how my interpretation is structuring the functioning of the concept. The current chapter will dig into the meanings and ideas enclosed in the concept of diffraction. First, it will explore the genealogy of the concept briefly and unearth the various meanings and utilisations that resonate in it. Then it will look at the relation and status of apparatuses within this diffractive methodology and the implications for the conception of objectivity.
A genealogy of diffraction
The concept of diffraction finds its meaning in a rich etymological and genealogical pool. It is necessary to take a short look at the genealogical layers that are stacked into the concept of diffraction, to understand the concept as proposed by Karen Barad in the article “Posthumanist Performativity” (and then elaborated in the book Meeting the Universe Halfway). This layering movement is essential to and exemplary for the diffractive methodology itself.
Etymologically, the word is derived from the Latin ‘frangere’ (to break) with the prefix dis- (apart). From this, Barad takes the minimal meaning of diffraction to be: to “(…) break apart in different directions” (‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’, 168). In the twentieth century, the word was taken on in two different traditions. One in the sciences and physics, the other in the humanities and philosophy as a response to representationalism and a dissatisfaction with dualistic conceptions of language that separate the world and the language sign. First I will look at its trajectory within the natural sciences and then within the humanities.
A trajectory that influenced Barad’s understanding of diffraction, is the conception of quantum mechanics as developed by physicist Niels Bohr. Diffraction is developed in this trajectory to refer to a selection of phenomena or visible patterns that occur when a wave encounters an obstacle. The most
common example of a diffraction pattern is when two stones are dropped in the water in close vicinity. Once the two waves touch one another, they interact to create a unique new pattern. The waves merge and a new pattern emerges with points where the new wave is amplified and points where it is diminished; the meeting of the two separate waves creates a new and unique pattern.
This phenomenon is essential for the development of quantum mechanics because diffraction only happens when waves meet each other. When particles meet, they retain their own properties and bounce off each other, like in a game of billiards. Waves, on the contrary, are united into a new wave pattern that has emergent properties. That is to say that the newfound wave has unique characteristics (i.e. the wave is amplified or extinguished in different places). Waves and particles thus have distinct and contradictory properties, which would suggest that a phenomenon cannot display both properties at the same time. However, and this is the central point of quantum mechanics, when studying light, for instance, light seems to have both properties depending on which apparatus one uses to study it. If ons uses a specific type of method, the light will appear to behave as a particle, yet if one uses a different method, it will appear to behave as a wave. This simultaneity is the driving force behind the physics of Bohr, which rejects the fundamentals of classical mechanics. Objects thus seem to change in their ontology if you employ different apparatuses. According to quantum mechanics, the ontology of an object is therefore not predetermined or fixed but rather relational. This finding does not announce the end of objectivity or that “anything goes,” because experiments still are (and need to be) reproducible, predictable and (re)iterable (given the usage of similar apparatuses). Indeterminacy is here not seen as an obstacle to knowledge, but as fundamental to the nature of reality.
The other trajectory that is part of the genealogy of diffraction is how Donna Haraway uses the concept within the humanities. According to feminist scholar Iris van der Tuin, Haraway was one of the first to develop the concept of diffraction “as a tool for feminist research into the material-semiotic reality of technoscience” (“Diffraction as a Methodology” 234). Haraway elaborates on the notion of diffraction to develop a mapping practice that renders visible the (personal) interference patterns that happen when two (or more) things interact
and interrelate. It is a tool in her search to account for situated knowledges, which is a take on epistemology that tries to distance itself from the ideal of objective distance as the epistemologically superior position (Haraway, “Modest_Withness” 23).
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 differences appear. (Haraway qtd in Barad, “Posthuman Performativity” 803)
Within this trajectory, Haraway develops diffraction as a response to reflection, which she critiques for its positivist connotations. The difference between reflection and diffraction lies in its direction. Whereas reflection reflects light back in a straight line, diffraction breaks the light in a surprising new direction; it creates something new. The light and the object (that the light encounters) co-create something new. While reflection underscores the mimetic function of language, diffraction emphasises (co-)creative powers. The focus is thus on a dynamic co-creation of different objects, instead of a passive versus dominant relation, which is implied in the logic of reflection.
For Haraway, diffraction is a metaphor to counter the representationalist (reflective) practices of signification and subject formation. However, for Barad diffraction is more than just a metaphor. While Barad builds on the conceptual work done by Haraway, she combines this conceptual understanding with a quantum mechanics approach taken from Bohr. For Barad, quantum physics and its “natural” phenomena such as diffraction are not just a metaphorical resource but the foundations of the new materialist articulation of how materiality, discursive practices and apparatuses are co-constitutive. Diffraction is “a physical phenomenon that lies at the centre of some key discussions in physics and the philosophy of physics” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 71). The physical phenomenon of diffraction is thus both a way into a specific ontology and “an apt metaphor for describing the methodological approach [...] of reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
71). In this way, the Baradian concept of diffraction, through its layering of previous meanings, is itself an example of diffraction. By reading insights from different disciplines diffractively, through one another, the Baradian concept of diffraction arises.
Methodological dimensions
Now that the genealogical building blocks of diffraction have been gathered, how can this be assembled into a methodology? The central focus of a diffractive methodology lies in the idea that multiple entities co-create something new together. If different bodies of work are diffracted through each other, like a confluence of two streams, a new space is opened up; an in-between space amidst the two objects. The encounter of object produces something new. As seen in the Baradian concept of diffraction itself, the old meanings still resonate, but it also produces something new. Scholars working on expanding the diffractive research paradigm to the social sciences note that it “provides additional affordances through its connection of the discursive and the material, with knowledges making themselves intelligible to each other in creative and unpredictable
ways” (Bozalek & Zembylas 123, emphasis mine). Diffraction thus allows
researchers to take into account the creative act that lies at the core of meaning-making. Barad notes that in a reflective paradigm words mirror the world while in a diffractive paradigm words co-create the world (“Posthuman Performativity” 802). However, she stresses the ‘co’ in co-creation, as language does not merely mould passive matter. Rather matter and language are both active and agential.
Contrary to diffraction, reflexivity underscores sameness and separateness and cannot, in the end, take into account its own functioning. It cannot describe its own mirroring function, as mirroring a mirror “does not disrupt the geometry that holds object and subject at a distance as the very condition of knowledge’s possibility” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 87-88). Or as Barad puts it less tentatively: “Turning the mirror around, as it were, is a bad method for trying to get the mirror in the picture” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 418). Diffraction, however, has a different relation to itself and reveals its own functioning, that is to say, it reveals its own apparatus. Researchers working on transforming diffraction
into a methodology for the social sciences note that: “By studying the diffraction pattern it is possible to learn about the nature of the diffraction apparatus so, for example, we can learn something about the dropping of the stones by examining the ripples in the pool” (Holin et al. 927). In diffraction, one thus not only learns something about the interaction of two objects but also about apparatuses used to perceive and describe the final result (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 83).
In the concept of diffraction, the apparatus that diffracts is as important as the final result. While in the case of mirroring only that which is in front of the mirror matters, in diffraction the phenomenon and apparatus that describe the phenomenon are active actors in the final result. An apparatus in the Baradian sense is more than what scientists usually refer to: it is not just a microscope in a laboratory. Barad draws heavily on a Foucauldian conception of apparatuses in her work. Foucault developed the notion of apparatuses to research how power is infused through large assemblages like institutions or communities; to see how power produces and creates the condition of possibility of certain outcomes and knowledges.
(…) what I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” 201)
Apparatuses in this Foucauldian conception thus refer to networks of relations that generate meaning and govern outcomes. Apparatuses are not just material entities but can also be methodologies or strategies. They are the interrelation of sets of materials and discursive practices. Language or forms of literacy are also one of the apparatuses through which one sees and describe the world. If one
translates this back to the laboratory, the apparatus is that which remains unsaid but is implicated in- and structures the results. 6
Recapping the theoretical part of this thesis, one can see that a diffractive methodology brings forth a new practice of ontology. This relational ontology does not separate language and materiality as two different domains, but rather as doubly implicated in each other and co-constitutive. The perceived object is thus the result of an interplay of both discursive practices and material configurations. In this ontology the world loses its fixed essence, rather each apparatus, through which the world is studied, structures the perceived world and thus multiple worlds can coexist. This ontology does not entail a relativism, as degrees of objectivity can still be maintained within the constellation of specific apparatuses since these apparatuses that structure the outcome of the observations can be described and studied. This suggests that diffraction not only entails a new practice of ontology but also a practice of close reading, of seeing and reading how the different objects and actors co-create each other.
Now that I have introduced the theoretical framework, one can start seeing what a methodology of diffraction can bring. What is the theoretical purchase of the theory of diffraction? How does musing on the ontology of quantum mechanics relate to the interpretation and theory of cinema? And to what existing debates and methodologies regarding the analysis of film can this new insight contribute? The next chapters explore these questions.
Apparatuses are changing the very materiality of the phenomenon; they change the form of what is perceived.
6
To describe how apparatuses enact change, Barad introduces the concept of the ‘agential cut'. In chapter three I will dive deeper into this concept as this concept is very much connected to the practice of ontology in a diffractive methodology. The present chapter will not yet deal with this concept, however, as it is first needed to unearth the ethical implications of a diffractive methodology, which will be done in chapter two.
II
Comparison:
a diffractive methodology for comparative projects; an
encounter between Synecdoche, New York (2008) and In the
Mood for Love (2000)
“(…)there is a deep sense in which we can understand diffraction patterns - as patterns of difference that make a difference - to be the fundamental constituents
that make up the world.” (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 72)
Pastor: “Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. (…) And you may never ever trace it to its source.”
(Synecdoche, New York, 2008)
It is 7:44 and the radio-alarm goes off. It is the start of yet another day in the suburb of Schenectady where the playwright Caden Cotard lives with his wife and daughter. On the local radio, the viewer hears a literary critic comment on the current season and its representations in poetry. Within the first few seconds of Synecdoche, New York (2008), directed by Charlie Kauffman, one gets a detailed account of location and time. But, whereas the film starts with a clear relation towards time and place, it gradually loses track of ‘reality’ and temporal, and spatial relations become more and more out of joint, the spectator becomes more and more confused. Although the film starts with a sequential and naturalistic depiction of time and space, time slowly starts moving in unpredictable paces and places become the host of unimaginable and impossible geographies. The more the main character tries to give meaning to his life and the more he searches for - and tries to represent - the ‘truth’, the more evanescent the filmic reality becomes.
“Everything is more complicated than you think,” (see quote above) or at least in the movie, everything becomes more complicated when you think.
The opening of In the Mood for Love (2000), a film that also very much deals with the concept of time, is very different. In this movie by Chinese director, Wong Kar Wai, place is always dis-placed. Whereas there is a distinct sense of place in the beginning of Synecdoche, New York, In the Mood for Love is set in the never-ending non-places of Hong Kong in the sixties. The bustling, crawling and anonymous alleys of this metropolis and its tiny apartments with little privacy, function as the decor of this movie. While time is also moving in unpredictable paces, this seems inherently tied to the place where the movie is set. The British colony’s foundation and geopolitical location have established a society where fast-living and transient existences determine the speed of life. Impermanence, transience and their temporalities are very much connected to the cityscape and the historical configurations under which they took shape. Massive population growth, migration and cold war politics are the forces that shaped the stage upon which the movie is set. The protagonists that dwell through these arbitrary spaces try to capture, in vain, their short-lived relations and moments of contact. Through the volatility of their relations, they double the transience of the cityscape.
The two movies are both interested in the working of time and in both, time jumps erratically between scenes and shots, a feature that is not very common in mainstream narrative cinema. However, the movies diverge in their relation to place and historical geopolitical forces only seem to play a determining role in In
the Mood for Love. How does one compare these movies ethically and productively 7
and what can a comparison between the two contribute to understanding them? And why am I suddenly talk about comparison in a piece on diffraction?
Comparative projects in film- and especially comparing films from different cultural backgrounds (as is the case in this chapter), has been an essential, pervasive yet troublesome part of film studies and film interpretation (Willemen 99). Comparative projects have often functioned to underscore (post)-colonial imperialist discourses, for instance (Chow, 215). Comparing, then, can serve to reinforce western (cultural) superiority. While comparison has often openly served colonial or political interests, even the most self-reflective and politically aware Later in this chapter, I will dive deeper in the relation of historical and geopolitical forces in these two films.
practices of comparison are tied to certain practices of dominance and specific standpoints. Ming Xie, a theorist working in the field of comparative theory, notes regarding this non-neutrality that: “distinctions do not precede our conceptual activity; rather we make and do them” (Xie 676). She stresses that perceived distinctions are not just inherent properties of the object. They emerge with the very act of conceptual inquiry; with the practice itself. Following this logic, one can see that every comparison is a political move since what I perceive and what distinctions I use as the basis of the comparison, are tied to my discursive practices. Ming thus underscores that distinctions are the coming together of different (cultural, discursive and material) forces that exist in practices, not beyond them.
The result is that there is no such thing as a value-free comparison, or as literary scholar Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan notes:
Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive. Behind the seeming generosity of comparison, there always lurks the aggression of a thesis. (…). My point is simply this: even when they are not overtly anthropological or colonialist in motivation, comparisons are never disinterested. (Radhakrishnan 454)
Although every comparison from this view is a political act, it remains a fundamental mode of reasoning, a mode without one cannot do. While the provisional comparison between the films above seems innocuous, how can one proceed in the knowledge of the political implications of such a project? Radhakrishnan gives a hint at how such a project might be possible:
A comparatist project has to be perennially double conscious: on the one hand, act as though the comparison is being made in an ideal world and at the same time deconstruct such an idealist ethic in the name of lived reality and its constitutive imbalances. A comparatist project has to be rigorously aware that despite its avowed egalitarianism it is ineluctably interpellated by a worldview that is captive to dominance and the reproduction of dominance. (Radhakrishnan 459)
Radhakrishnan points towards a double consciousness as a possible solution for the problematics of comparison. In this chapter, I argue that this double consciousness is embedded in a diffractive methodology and that through this methodology one can regain an ethical practice of comparing. First, I will show how a diffractive methodology could give a new interpretation and reformulation of what it means to compare and through this could circumvent the binary oppositions that often structure comparisons. Then, on the basis of the two films, I will perform a diffractive comparative encounter, and show how it differs from a more classical comparison. As a diffractive methodology moves away from the logic of reflection, it is not sufficient to just write about the methodological possibilities, but it has to be performed. That is why In the Mood for Love and
Synecdoche, New York will be read diffractively through the apparatus of time.
Reading these movies on the basis of their relation to time, opens up to a critique of the consequences of the Enlightenment conception of temporality and truth. Moreover, this diffraction will reveal a critical potential of the medium of film, which will then be explored further in chapter four. Furthermore, this diffraction discloses how a diffractive methodology can change the relation of theory and object and shows how diffraction can contribute to the corroboration of the methodology of the practice of cultural analysis.
Diffraction as comparison
Although diffraction and comparison seem distant domains, when one looks into the nature of distinctions, a possibility opens to see how a diffractive methodology relates to the practice of comparing. As seen in the last chapter, the product of a diffractive encounter is always the result of material and discursive forces. A diffractive methodology underscores Ming Xie’s account in that it is not only the object that is active in generating the outcome but also the apparatuses through which the object is studied and perceived. As seen in the previous chapter, in a diffractive methodology both the apparatuses and the materiality generate and structure the outcome. This structuring through both materiality and apparatus relates to the double consciousness described by Radhakrishnan, or as Paula
Saukko, writing on research methodologies in cultural studies, notes: “(…) it [diffraction] highlights that research is never objective but a reality changing material-semiotic force, which always has an agenda or is political’ (28). Furthermore, research methodologies arising from the diffractive paradigm underscore the influence of the knower in the production of knowledge: “For Barad, diffraction is a useful tool highlighting the entanglement of material-discursive phenomena in the world. Diffraction is thus predicated on a relational ontology, an ongoing process in which matter and meaning are co-constituted” (Bozalek & Michalinos, 113). Diffraction as a methodology for comparison is thus aware of the non-neutrality of distinctions and points towards the functioning of apparatuses in knowledge production.
However, this changes the status of what it means to compare. The Dutch scholar Iris van der Tuin notes that “rather than employing a hierarchical methodology that would put different texts, theories, and strands of thought against one another, diffractively engaging with texts and intellectual traditions means that they are dialogically read ‘through one another’ to engender creative, and unexpected outcomes” (“Diffraction & Reading Diffractively” 234). Theory and object simultaneously enhance each other at some locations and undo each other at others; together a diffraction pattern emerges. This dialogical way of reading distances itself further from the ‘classical’ or colonial comparative project as it is not in the business of ranking but instead looks for surprising and original encounters (Van der Tuin, “Diffraction & Reading Diffractively” 234).
Furthermore, Van der Tuin notes in a different paper that “reading insights diffractively allows for affirming and strengthening dynamic links between schools of thought (…) or scholars that only apparently work toward the same goals” (Van der Tuin, “Diffraction as a Methodology” 234). Rather than reproducing ‘dominance’, unequal power relations or endlessly critiquing them, diffraction is about affirmation across geographical borders, across disciplines or as Van der Tuin puts it: “Feminists would be better off affirming diffraction instead of the spatializing act of representation or reflection, which lures us into reduction as well as reaffirming the phallocentric order” (Van der Tuin, “A Different Starting Point” 26). A diffractive reading does not search for differences as the basis of comparison but rather looks at how differences articulate, highlight or fertilise
each other when read through each other. It is not in the game of ‘who does it best’ but rather looks at how insights can cross-pollinate, enhance and highlight each other.
The result of a diffractive methodology is thus moving away from a deconstructive paradigm. The type of comparisons that were part of deconstructive critique were subtractive or as Fredric Jameson describes: “(…)deconstruction is a kind of nihilism (…), that like Foucauldian madness, elle ne compose pas, it results in no result, no tangible outcome, but simply devours its own tail, and thus itself in the process” (“Valences of the Dialectic” 27). This nihilism results, as Eve Sedgwick notes, in a paranoia that is unable to produce anything and is stuck in “a hermeneutics of suspicion and exposure” (Touching Feeling, 124). Sedgwick states that many deconstructive readings try to find the hidden or silenced meanings and oppositions that supposedly structure the text. Diffraction, on the other hand, could help in growing away from this type of critique as it focuses on creation and illumination rather than on subtractive critique.Adding to this, Van der Tuin notes that: “Reading diffractively therefore not only appears to transcend the level of critique, ultimately based in a Self/ Other identity politics, but in Barad’s perspective also can be regarded as a boundary-crossing, trans/disciplinary methodology” (Van der Tuin, “Diffraction & Reading Diffractively”). Through reformulating what it means to compare, a diffractive comparison is thus not only evading problems associated with the ethics of comparison but also transcending or rather transversing the level of critique and the self/other dialectic. 8
Diffractive encounters
Returning to the comparison of the two films. How can a diffractive methodology help in comparing these two films without falling into the
Iris van der Tuin & Rick Dolphijn (2010) The Transversality of New Materialism, Women: A Cultural Review,
8
21:2, 153-171, In this article these two scholars note how new materialism is not transcending but rather transversing previous intellectual positions. Transcending is a movement that is rooted in a modernist teleology and dialectic. Rather than transcending and staying within this movement of the development of thought, they argue that new materialism transverses. An example of this is how Barad uses previous works of Bohr and Haraway; she build on older thinkers in new and spontaneous ways rather than merely critiquing and
disregarding them. Chapter four will further elaborate on the relation of transcendence versus transversality in relation to Barad.
problematics of comparison or reproducing the logic and spatialisation of reflection (Van der Tuin, “A Different Starting Point” 26)? In other words, how can these movies be compared ethically? Before commencing with this comparison, it is still needed to look at the status of the space and location where the comparison takes place as also this comparison will take place in a textual domain. In a ‘classical’ or reflective paradigm of language and comparison, the textual comparison is a space where representations of objects meet each other and enter into a relation of comparison. The status of comparison but mostly that of the text becomes different in a diffractive methodology. In a diffractive methodology, there is no neutral (textual) meeting place where objects can convene on an equal footing. Rather the text is always already an apparatus through which one perceives; an apparatus with its own potentials and limitations. The text is thus a specific production of something new, rather than a representation of something that already existed in a different ontological domain. Comparisons from this point of view do not try to represent the object as adequately as possible or try to deconstruct the space where the objects meet, it rather looks ahead. It focuses on the production of new and spontaneous insights that happen when two objects meet and their perceived differences become visible for a moment. As a diffractive methodology moves away from representation or reflection, a methodological text on the possibilities of diffraction cannot just reflect this methodology but also has to perform it, since the performance is always something more than merely a reflection. That is why in the coming section there will be an encounter of two movies.
So, returning to the two movies, what insights jump up when one reads these objects ‘dialogically’? While these objects are brought here together by pure contingency, coincidentally, their relation towards time seems like a possible way to compare them. Two different movies from different geographical and cultural backgrounds are chosen to perform a possible functioning of a diffractive comparison. Their relation towards time is thus not necessarily an inherent property of the film (although an internal non-essential material constellation needs to be present) but an apparatus through which one can study and dissect the diffraction pattern that emerges. How can the differences between these two movies regarding this aspect of time cross-pollinate each other, for something new
to come into existence? What ‘sparks’ if one looks at the differences between the movies on the basis of their relation to time and their erratic and queer temporalities?
In order to set the dialogue between the two movies, I will begin with reading
In the Mood for Love. As described in the introduction, the queer and strange
temporality of In the Mood for Love seems connected to its geographical and historical location. The movie takes places in the year 1962, which is the same year that the director and his family moved to Hong Kong, in search of a more favourable economic climate. Arriving in such a chaotic and tumultuous place that is in the midst of transition, made a lasting impression on the director, as he notes in an interview (Hollwedel 1). From this perspective, the movie can be seen as an immortalisation of Wong’s memories to his diasporic roots. What strengthens this reading is that the camera is always distant and only rarely enters the frame. For instance, in a scene where the protagonists are eating in a restaurant, the camera pans slowly and distantly around them, as if someone present is distantly gazing at them. It seems like the camera is always behind an invisible wall, it can see the scene (the past) but never truly enter it. The camera mimics the act of remembering as remembrance is always on a distance from what it tries to grasp; the thing that is being remembered will never fully be present again. From this point of view, it is possible to interpret the jumps in time as adding to this idea that the movie is performing the act of remembering, since in memories time also functions differently and clusters together different temporalities.
However, this does not seem to explain the jumps in time entirely. The specific geographical location also seems vital in explaining this characteristic of the film. The narrative of the movie deals with the love that blossoms between two neighbours that live in adjacent rooms in a makeshift commune. They draw towards each other when they realise that their spouses, whom never enter the frame, are cheating on them with one another. Slowly, an affectionate connection between the two grows but as they are unable to publicly out this affection, Mr Chow rents a hotel room where he can receive Mrs Chang. 2042 is the number of the hotel room, which is the same year as when the contract between China and the United Kingdom that promised 50 years of capitalism and relative freedom,
will expire. The number thus directly refers to the geopolitical circumstances in which the film is situated. The tensions between communist China and capitalist Hong Kong invoke a unique dynamic of volatility and temporality in this city. The quick pace of life that is proper to this place and time, seems to echo in the way that time jumps in-between shots.
The movie seems to play with the notion of immortalisation; grabbing, capturing or fixing something fleeting like a memory or a love that blossoms after a spontaneous meeting in the narrow alleys of a hurried city. Both the characters and the film as such try to capture something fleeting. It thus plays with the transience, memory and the different temporalities that are caused by specific diasporic and geopolitical constellations. It researches what happens affectively, if one is caused to live contingently. The unsatisfactory and anti-cathartic ending of the film (the end of the affair because the lovers fail to run into each other) could function as an argument that grabbing, holding or capturing something is doomed within these geopolitical circumstances. The distance of the camera could also be seen to function as an argument that memory is never entirely graspable as one will always remain at a distance of the thing made present.
From this angle, one could start the dialogue with Synecdoche, New York. What are the differences between the movies if they are compared by their usage of jumps in time in-between shots? If this perceived characteristic (i.e. the jumps in time) is used as an apparatus, how does Synecdoche, New York appear to relate to this stylistic device?
In this film, geographical and political factors seem less important in explaining the usage of this particular stylistic device. In this movie, the place changes and the way that time behaves becomes more erratic as the movie unfolds. At the beginning of the movie the place is ‘normal’, while in the end places become warped. Contrastingly, in In the Mood for Love, the location is almost constant; constantly the viewer wanders through the crawling alleyways, the small apartments and other non-spaces of Hong Kong. The jumps in time are also consistent throughout the film and start right from the beginning. In Synecdoche,
New York, time and space only seem to start acting ‘strange’, as soon as the
protagonist wins a grant in order to write and direct the theatre play of his lifetime. He grabs this opportunity to give ultimate meaning to his life with a
masterpiece that would put the ‘bare truth’ into reality. To do this, he builds an exact copy of Manhattan in a colossal abandoned warehouse but in order to construct this true depiction of life, another warehouse is constructed inside the first to be true to the new ‘reality’, and another one inside the second and so on. The jumps in time in between shots appear to be linked to Caden’s project to grab the world and represent it, to give meaning to it. The more he tries to represent everything, the more elusive and evanescent the filmic reality becomes, the more erratic time starts to behave. Through the infinite regress that starts to happen, it becomes apparent that he can always only comprise and capture a part of the whole. He is doomed only to capture a synecdoche of the ‘bare truth’. Representation or the truth as accurate representation collapses on itself like a
mise en abyme.
What can one learn when the two films are read through an another? Which parts enhance each other and which differences are highlighted? In short, what diffraction pattern appears? Both films appear pessimistic against the possibility of capturing or immortalising something. While In the Mood for Love plays with affects and memories that turn out to be only temporal and elusive as a result of the geographical location and diaspora culture, Synecdoche, New York is much more a purely philosophical exploration, more disinterested in its specific geographical and historical location. Synecdoche, New York shows how permanent meaning is impossible and a wasted effort in a representational paradigm. In this movie, the Enlightenment logic of mirroring is pushed to its limits through Caden’s play. Time as a homogenous entity, as the clock that ticks in the same pace everywhere disrupts as soon as this time is attempted to be captured or stopped (immortalised). When one interprets Synecdoche, New York as a critique on Western Enlightenment thought and its relation to time, then it becomes possible to see a connection with In the Mood for Love and a possibility opens for a diffractive emergent element; something new emerges.
The geopolitical situation and diaspora culture in Hong Kong is mostly the result of Western (and in this case British) imperialism. Each time that work or labour is depicted in the movie, images of clocks or watches (of western brands like Siemens) are explicitly in the shot. The pressure on the city and the fast life that takes place in it to make a living, are, as underscored by the sinologist Esther
Cheung (577), the result of Western imperialism and the temporality of Enlightenment thinking (that of the clock) that made this project possible and effective.
From this point of view, it becomes visible how the films thematise two different sides of the same coin. The Enlightenment discourse and its specific dealing with time has had both philosophical as geopolitical and colonial implications. In this view, the films each research a part of these implications. Moreover, reading this dialogue through the lens of time allows me to see why place matters. As quoted in chapter one already, Haraway notes that “diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear” (Haraway qtd in Barad, “Posthuman Performativity” 803). Through reading the interplay of the movies, it becomes not only possible to see their differences but also why they matter. Reading the dialogue through this lens opens up to the fact that a specific geopolitical place allows Synecdoche, New York to be more purely philosophical while the location of In the Mood for Love forces an exploration of the affective consequences of a diasporic existence.
Furthermore, if one reads the movies in dialogue, also a possibility emerges that transcends a mere critique. The characters are locked up in- and subjected to the homogenous temporality of the clock and appear not to be disturbed by the jumps in time; these are experienced as natural in the diegetic world. However, the viewer can experience different temporalities through the medium of film and because of this, a possibility opens to think in ways that are not connected to the time of the clock. The movies themselves defy homogenous time through their usage of these different temporalities. The films open possibilities of thinking in ways that are not stuck in such an enlightenment form of time; that are not necessarily sequential; that are discontinuous. Moreover, it affirms that this homogenous time is all but just one way of thinking and experiencing time and allows different suppressed experiences of time, like diasporic experiences such as in In the Mood for Love, back in. Here a possible critical potential of the medium of film opens up through the dialogue of the two films that can be seen to add to what Agamben describes as the ‘gag’ of the medium of film (58). 9
In chapter 4, this potential of the medium will be explored more in depth, also in relation to Agamben.
So now that I have performed a diffractive encounter, what have been characteristics of this meeting? First of all, a diffractive comparison is done on perceived differences rather than on ‘real’ everlasting differences. A comparison is made within a specific apparatus and only valid within that constellation of apparatus and material-discursive practice. In the case above, the films were read together on the basis of a specific characteristic (i.e. time). This characteristic is not necessarily something intrinsic to the object but something that emerges through the meeting of the materiality of the objects and the conceptual and cognitive apparatuses of the viewer, in this case me. However, this does not mean that one can just say anything. Within a given constellation there is a degree of intersubjective objectivity. One can disagree with the distinctions that form the basis of the comparison above and work towards a better or more valid comparison given the perceived characteristics. This disagreement is not to work towards a final or best comparison; rather the comparison will always only be valid within the specific and temporal constellation. The resulting comparison will thus be as much about the newly emerged thought, as it is about the constellation that enabled such a comparison to be possible. The current comparison is possible only because temporality and its contemporary definitions is accessible as a concept.
Furthermore, one can see how a diffractive comparison does not focus on a comparison as an act of weighing. Rather it reformulates what it means to compare. Comparing from this perspective is looking at perceived differences and use this as a vehicle or motor for thought. While it builds on the double consciousness as proposed by Radhakrishnan, it also differs from it. A diffractive comparison no longer looks to enable a comparison that weighs through deconstructing the structuring characteristics, rather it focuses on the production of new emergent thoughts that are created through bringing objects together.
From this perspective, one can see how a new relation of object and theory opens up. Objects become theoretical object, as defined by Mieke Bal in her work on the artist Salcedo (“Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art”, 2010). She defines a theoretical object as an object that forces one to do theory, but that at the same time also gives rise to specific types of theory. Bal describes this relation between object and theory as "a compelling collective thought
