A generative principle of becoming that names how realities, relations, and capacities emerge through variation, differentiation, and repetition-with-change, rather than from fixed essences or stable identities.
In postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist work, difference is the creative process through which entities, relations, and phenomena come to be. In this sense, difference is ontological and productive. In the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari, difference is inseparable from becoming: repetition is never a copy, it is a variation that produces new capacities and forms. This is often called “difference-in-itself,” meaning that difference is primary and identity is an effect that congeals from ongoing differentiations. In affect theory (e.g., Massumi), small variations in intensity can tip systems into new arrangements; difference names those micro-shifts that accumulate into qualitative change.
New materialist and posthumanist thinkers extend this to matter and practice. For Barad, difference is enacted through “agential cuts,” the material-discursive delineations that temporarily stabilize phenomena within apparatuses; here, difference is performative, not pre-given. Haraway treats difference as situated and world-making: it arises from specific histories, ecologies, and technoscientific arrangements, and it obliges practices of “situated accountability.” Bennett emphasizes vibrant matter: differences in material affordances and assemblage compositions modulate what human and nonhuman bodies can do. In postqualitative inquiry, difference guides how researchers compose with variation, follow divergences and resonances, and attend to the production of novelty across research apparatuses.
Treating difference as generative reshapes method and ethics. Postqualitative studies do not seek stable categories to sort data; they craft apparatuses that are sensitive to variation, trace how concepts and materials differentiate together, and attune to threshold moments when practices shift. Analytically, this means following where patterns diverge and how new configurations emerge, rather than forcing commensurability. Ethically, it requires accountability for how analytic choices enact some differences while obscuring others. Practically, it supports methods such as diffractive reading (following interference patterns), cartography or mapping (tracking evolving relations), and composition (experimenting with arrangements to see what differences they make).
Difference foregrounds how authorship, creativity, and learning arise from variations in practice, material setup, and affective climate. In AI-entangled writing classrooms, differences in prompt design, interface settings, dataset exposures, feedback rhythms, and institutional policies produce distinct composing pathways and artifacts. Reading with difference makes visible how small adjustments—rephrasing a prompt, toggling a model parameter, introducing peer response before model input—lead to qualitatively different texts and pedagogical interactions. It clarifies how instructors’ lived experiences and affects shift across encounters with media narratives, student uptake, and platform affordances, producing different sensibilities of risk, curiosity, or care. It also highlights distributed authorship as an emergent pattern of differentiations among writers, models, materials, and evaluative rubrics, inviting assessment practices that recognize variation as a resource for learning rather than a deviation to be corrected.