‘Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?’ asked the Sergeant, giving me a look of great inquiry and surprise.
‘No,’ I answered.
‘That is a very serious defalcation,’ he said, ‘but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentleman are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?’
...‘you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings at the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?’
...‘Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you persevere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and the other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar'....
‘The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles'....
‘When a man lets things go so far that he is half or more than half a bicycle, you will not see so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at curb stones…‘The behaviour of a bicycle that has a high content of humanity,’ he said, is very cunning and entirely remarkable. ...[He/it] will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in his kitchen instead of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party’
O’Brien, F (2007) The Third Policeman. London: Harper Perennial pp 85–92

There are some ingenious experiments that have been done on this creature, and it does seem very complex, with different versions taking quite different forms, including toxic and non-toxic forms. It seems particularly difficult to define what sort of creature it is, and to reconstruct its life-cycle. Understandably, a lot of biologists are particularly interested in how and why it gets toxic and kills fish, and again there are all sorts of ingenious experiments trying to isolate the causals — it's not just environmental cues, because one variable is whether or not it has killed fish before, and whether killable fish are actually present. Even the biologists concerned seem to want to talk about things like 'memory'.

The usual paradox presents itself though, whether this is an epistemological uncertainty, which could in principle be pinned down to complex systems of determinants, or whether this is an ontological indeterminacy, somehow mirroring the indeterminacy of quantum particles and showing the same characteristics like 'complementarity' between the different forms. The first variant is perhaps represented best by a huge complex diagram with all sorts of lines of different lines joining the components. This nearly gets accepted when Schrader talks about a Pfisteria 'complex' with several actual variants — that sounds a bit like Kirby in a deleuzian phrase. Elsewhere, the processes are described as 'synchronisation', not quite as mysterious, and even Schrader lapses into listing the main suspect variables or even using the term determinations.

However, Schrader mostly opts for the second possibility, understandably loyal to Barad and trying to work in all sorts of Derridvian implications about hauntings and traces. I'm not terribly convinced that we need Derrida to describe what goes on in ordinary human consciousness and language as recapturing subjective time [I think personally that Bergson would be just as useful,and,via Deleuze,  'duration' already links subjective time and material reality] , although he would of course refer to linguistic systems. But only linguistic systems -- so is the argument that Nature is also a text with a system of signs? [Does Nature write in the same way as humans in Derrida's sense?].

The main interest, though, is the way all this is argued. There is almost a kind of prime knowledge tactic where complex scientific experiments are discussed, and arranged in a kind of narrative of increasing complexity and mystery. Then Baradian terminology starts to get applied to the discussion. This is really a rhetorical shift, but Schrader wants to suggest that it follows necessarily from the difficulties faced by the conventional approaches. As before, sometimes those conventional approaches are straw men, with simple positivist notions of cause or identity that are fairly easily shown to be inadequate. Underneath the persuasion, I suspect that it is really a matter of argument by residue — even the finest current biology cannot solve the problem, so we somehow must switch the paradigms altogether and talk about matters that seem even more mysterious and unsolvable, like whether this dinoflagellate is actually 'performing' or 'enacting' its various transformations.

It has some problems of compatibility with Barad's account, and some problems of its own anyway. The argument is that homosexual and bisexual behaviour is very common among animals, which means it must have some biological and (limited) cultural origins. If other primates display such common and frequent behaviour, that makes human displays of sexual diversity 'natural' as well as cultural. The explanatory mechanism is 'biological exuberance' where an excess of sexual energy has to be discharged in a range of polymorphous sexual activities, since the opportunities for heterosexual contact are never enough to exhaust this exuberance.

Bagemihl admits that there are problems in sustaining this argument. For example sexual activity among wild animals is hard to observe at the best of times. Domestic and captive animals display the same kind of behaviour, however. But there are notorious problems in defining sexual activity, of course. Bagemihl opts for some delightfully operational definitions, such as genital rubbing or mounting, and he also considers as sexual activities various contacts with objects as well. Perhaps the most controversial points arise when he claims that studies have identified sexual pleasure arising from these contacts, possibly even orgasm, and these are defined operationally too as erected organs (among mammals) or screams and cries.

It is pretty clear that we are entering positivist territory here with these operational definitions, and the solemn observations based on them. I could not remove from my mind the image of an earnest zoologist hiding in a bush with binoculars in one hand and a stopwatch in the other, producing quantitative data about the frequencies of genital contact among female Bonobo. It is not surprising that there is a reference to the classic positivist studies of human sexuality by Masters and Johnson. What this sort of positivism is doing being quoted as support by Barad is a mystery.

Bagemihl''s arguments vary. The most common one is paratactic onslaught, where point after point, summary after summary is hurled at the reader, ranging across a wide variety of sexual activities and animal activists. Bagemihl acknowledges that there is a problem of aggregating all this data, but that does not stop him suggesting that it does all aggregate together, whether we are talking about dolphins, chimpanzees, plovers, or polar bear, and discussing activities ranging from playful propulsion to mixtures of aggression and maternal care. There is absolutely no way to check this sort of argument — even one of the animals examined in detail in the 'bestiary' yielded about 20 references in zoological journals. We are simply in his hands, and now and then, he summarises things for us and points us in the right direction of the underlying truth, in a classic form of 'academic realism'.

Strangely, there is also a lengthy section on the wisdom of indigenous peoples in recording and commenting on animal sexuality in particular. Although such wisdom is not at all based on the sort of scientific observation and recording that he values in zoological studies, it still has to be made compatible. This is common, of course in some qualitative research which also values indigenous wisdom. The findings in this wisdom somehow anticipate scientific ones — native classifications of species, for example, include individuals unknown to science until recently; acute observations of the habits of polar bears among the Inuit, long enshrined in myth, have been confirmed by recent studies; apparently irrationally sexually ambiguous characteristics of cassowaries have been confirmed once zoologists realised that the birds possessed cloaca. Of course, there are significant differences between indigenous wisdom and science as well, especially in terms of the origins of these findings, the methods, and their social and religious significance, but these can be ignored. I've already argued that this kind of approach could easily be seen as science colonising indigenous wisdom, correcting it, or doing some other form of symbolic violence to it. Amusingly, Bagemihl claims that indigenous peoples have even developed a kind of quantum theory, long before the Western heroes studied by Barad: if we choose to interpret some of their myths in that way, we will find confirmation, no doubt.

The most common other form of argument is anthropomorphism. Bagemihl warns against this, and detects it even in academic zoological commentary. But it creeps in to his own account, not least in the descriptions of sexual activity. I've already mentioned dubious examples of being able to identify 'pleasures', but there are several other examples as well

There are rhetorical manoeuvres to introduce generalisation and therefore relevance to human affairs. Take the arguments about left-handed polar bears. Inuit and other indigenous peoples regard polar bears as predominantly left-handed, and there is a symbolic connection with sexual ambiguity. As anyone familiar with Lévi-Strauss knows, there are often terms required to mediate between apparent polar opposites — so that substances that are 'cured' or smoked can mediate symbolically between the raw and the cooked, or substances like honey have significance in that they are not raw, but have been processed by animals not humans. It is not surprising to find a considerable mythological and social function for these mediations in mechanical solidarity, and in this case, of course, we are talking about plants and insects, not sexually ambiguous mammals or birds. Bagemihl wants to argue that just as recent scientific observations of polar bears have confirmed a predominance of left-handedness, so the attribution of sexual ambiguity might also be valid.

That problem of extending validity can be seen in other arguments as well. For example, Bagemihl argues that sexual behaviour is not easily isolated from a whole context which will include factors such as the age and rank of the individuals involved. The strongest form of his argument is that sexual behaviour is the dominant one in the combination of factors, but this is nearly always inferred, never actually demonstrated. Perhaps some extra positivism, in the form of factor analysis or cluster analysis might help here? The weakest form of his argument is much more reasonable — that sexual behaviour should be as important for zoological studies as any other kind of behaviour, such as aggression, tool use, hunting or social bonding. Again the most robust form of this argument is that sexual behaviour has been important in the development of a lexicon of signs and gestures among primates like the bonobo, because there is such variety of behaviour that the animals need to develop some form of communication to coordinate and choose among the possibilities.

The main issue for our purposes is the implication of all this for human behaviour. There is a clear agenda in Bagemihl, and in Barad, to support liberatory sexual politics in humans, including the acceptance of 'deviant' behaviour and the rejection of the argument that only heterosexual conduct is 'natural'. Whether we need these endless studies of birds and mammals to make that point is not clear. Old-fashioned symbolic interactionism, perhaps in the form of the studies of sexuality by Plummer (in Brake 1982), long argued that human beings can either sexualise or de-sexualise any encounter with any person or thing, but this would give culture far too much weight for the new materialists, and lead to human exceptionalism.

But human exceptionalism in sexual matters is just not that easily dispelled. We have to operate in two directions. First we make animal sexuality much more variable and diverse, even cultural in some cases. Then we reduce human sexuality back to the same combination of biology and culture. The abundance of sexual energy in animals seems to have caused in some sense this sexually diverse behaviour, perhaps rather mechanistically as they seek release. Applying this to human beings would be much more controversial, however, implying, in effect that homosexuals gratify themselves with people that come to hand because they cannot sufficiently access the 'proper' object of their drives. Not only would it seriously reduce the cultural capacities of human sexuality, the role of fantasy that has been so important in some studies, but it will also reduce the political implications as well. These are summarised for me by quoting one of the last comments in Barad's account of queer performativity, about queerness:  'Queer politics, if it is to remain queer needs to be able to perform the function of emptying [human] queerness of its referentiality or positivity, guarding against its tendency to concrete embodiment,and hereby preserving queerness as a resistant relation rather than as an oppositional substance' . The whole emphasis in Bagemihl is on the functional integration of animal queerness as it provides the innovation needed for mechanical solidarity -- a resistant relation requires a politics. It is hard to see any equivalent for this in animal queerness. Biological exuberance suggests a biological basis underneath it all, even allowing for some role for culture – that is biologically determined too, or at least affected by evolution. That seems to be attributed by outside observers, and there is also running throughout Bagemihl, a motive for such observers in trying to classify and domesticate more aspects of animal behaviour, precisely to resolve queerness rather than celebrate it.