Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal

Volume 4 Issue 1, 2019

PATHOLOGY: A DIFFRACTIVE ENCOUNTER OF

MACHINE/BODY

Jessica Smartt Gullion

Texas Woman’s University

jgullion@twu.edu

Jessica Smartt Gullion, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for

Research for the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Woman’s University. She is the

author of more than thirty peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, appearing in

outlets such as Qualitative Inquiry, the International Review of Qualitative Research, and the

Journal of Applied Social Science. Her latest books include Diffractive Ethnography and

Writing Ethnography.

Abstract: I’ve been thinking about poems and about college as rhizomes (Deleuze and

Guattari 1987), and as diffractive techniques (Barad 2007; Gullion 2018) for thinking about

the social world. This project emerged as a way for me to understand my embodied

experience of abdominal surgery. I began with the creation of an art journal, and then wrote

a poem to accompany the images. I created the images and the text while thinking about my

experience of undergoing surgery and diffracting that through Haraway’s (2016) ideas about

cybernetics and machine bodies.

Keywords: diffraction; poetic inquiry; art journaling; rhizomes; surgery; endometriosis

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Figure 1.

I’ve been thinking about poems and about college as rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari

1987), and as diffractive techniques (Barad 2007; Gullion 2018) for thinking about the social

world. This project emerged as a way for me to understand my embodied experience of

abdominal surgery. I began with the creation of an art journal, and then wrote a poem to

accompany the images. I created the images and the text while thinking about my

experience of undergoing surgery and diffracting that through Haraway’s (2016) ideas about

cybernetics and machine bodies.

Art journaling is a material discursive interface, a mixed-media project that combines

visual elements with text. Painted pages are fixed with ephemera - patterned papers,

photographs, images and text cut from magazines and other printed materials (I used a

1990s edition of Our Bodies Ourselves in this journal), memorabilia, inks, rubber stamps,

markers, special pens, pastels, chalk - anything that can be used to make a mark (Gullion

and Cooksey 2013:120). The book itself may have begun as a blank book, a handmade

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book, or an altered book repurposed for art journaling. Writing is typically integrated into the

visual elements of the pages; although a page may have no words, allowing the visual

elements to do the expressing. In this journal, I used a variety of techniques and mediums,

and I incorporated found objects associated with the event of my surgery.

Barad (2007:91) writes that,

making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds, or

rather, it is about making specific worldly configurations - not in the sense of making

them up [ex nihilism or] out of language, beliefs, or ideas, but in the sense of

materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form.

To diffract, we make something new.

Figure 2.

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The concept of diffraction comes from physics and has been adopted in feminist

theory as a means for describing that ways in which objects and ideas interfere with each

other in a process of creation. My goal in creating this text and these visuals was not to tell

the story of my surgery (although it will in some ways) and it was not to make meaning out of

the experience (although you could use it to do so).

When waves crash into each other through a barrier, new patterns are created. This

is the basic understanding of diffraction. There is an inter/ruption, and what emerges is not

more of the same. In diffracting, we are not reflecting a reality but creating one.

I chose to focus on three moments in the poem, echoing a 2014 paper by Barad

called Diffracting Diffraction. These moments, “like all moments [are themselves] a diffracted

condensation, a threading through of an infinity of moments-places-matterings, a

superposition/entanglement, never closed, never finished” (169).

November 10, 2016

My body, naked

In a cold, bright, white room.

On a metal table,

Unconscious.

A stretchy, white strap secures the smooth endotracheal

tube that descends down my throat. A whirring machine pushes

oxygen into my lungs, sucks

out carbon dioxide.

Breathing for me.

First aid tape secures the needle that stabs my wrist. Clear liquid pumps

into my vein. A spider web of wires sticks to my chest.

Five robotic arms penetrate my abdomen,

The metal gleams in the spotlights.

I diffract.

Break apart.

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“Cutting together-apart

(one move)

In the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering:

Differencing/

Differing/

Différancing” (Barad 2014:168)

I become a “cybernetic organism,

A hybrid

Of machine and organism,

A creature of social reality

As well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 2016:5).

Become? Becoming (Deleuze and Guattarri 1987).

One tiny robotic hand is a camera.

For I am woman.

“permeable to both ‘visualization’ and ‘intervention’” (Haraway 2016:43).

This body open,

Un-private.

“The technologies of visualization recall

the important cultural practice of hunting

with the camera and the deeply predatory nature

Of a photographic consciousness” (Haraway 2016:44).

The others are scissor hands. They snip at pathologic tissue. The texture and color

determines the cuts.

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Five cuts in a pentagram

Across my belly

Puckered with translucent

Violet surgical glue.

Danger Will Robinson.

Two days after Donald Trump won the US presidency, I had my left

Ovary and fallopian tubes

Removed and was diagnosed with Stage IV endometriosis.

I grieved through a hydrocodone haze, unable to conceive

How so many Americans could vote for him,

Why liberals were fighting over a safety pin,

The appearance of swastikas spray painted on buildings,

And talk of internment camps for Muslims.

My doctor would be barred from entering my country,

But for now he can enter my body.

I wake up on fire

Sweat-soaked sheets.

I think the doctor lied to us,

My husband said.

He made this sound easier. But this hadn’t been easy.

“We are all chimeras,

Theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine

And organism” (Haraway 2016:7).

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Figure 4.

Today

“The cyborg would not recognize

The Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream

Of returning to dust” (Haraway 2016:9).

I diffract.

Break apart.

“Cutting together-apart

(one move)

In the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering (Barad 2014:168).

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REFERENCES

Barad, Karen. 2014. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20(3):168-

187.

Delueze, Giles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press.

Gullion, Jessica Smartt. 2018. Diffractive Ethnography: Social Sciences and the

Ontological Turn. London, UK: Routledge.

Gullion, Jessica Smartt and Ariel Cooksey. 2103. “Social Representations of

Motherhood through the Practice of Art Journaling.” Pp 119-132 in Mothering and

Literacies, edited by A. B. Richey and L. Shuford Evans. Bradford, ON: Demeter

Press.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press.

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