Notes on: Kleinman, A (2012) Intra-actions [Interview with K Barad] Mousse 34: 76--81 .Milano: Mousse Magazine and Publishing: http://moussemagazine.it/product/mousse -34/ Dave Harris ['documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH {dOCUMENTA (13) {https://www.documenta.de/en/about#}  is a non-profit organization supported and funded by the City of Kassel and the State of Hesse, as well as by the German Federal Cultural Foundation'. It aims 'to bring Germany back into dialogue with the rest of the world after the end of World War II, and to connect the international art scene through a “presentation of twentieth century art.”' Kleinman is an 'agent' for dOCUMENTA]. [Barad has apparently been important, 'a key influence on us at documenta 13'. The first question is what is intra-action] Interaction assumes 'individual independently existing entities or agents that preexist their acting upon one another' (77) [a non-sociological definition for a start]. But the familiar sense of causality can be queered — '(where one or more causal agents proceed and produce an effect)', and the metaphysics of individualism unsettled [which extends to the notion of individual times and places]. Agential realism or 'ethico–onto–epistemology' says that individuals only materialise in intra-action, that intra-action makes differences, including individuals. Individuals 'only exist within phenomena (particular materialised/materialising relations) in their ongoing iteratively interactive reconfiguring' [redundant terms of course -- pure bullshit] Phenomena involves entanglement, 'ontological inseparability – of intra-acting agencies'. Agencies and enactment rather than what something has or something instantiated. Agential interactions determine boundaries and other 'particular material articulations of the world'. An agential cut is in contrast to a Cartesian one which distinguishes subject and object. Ontological indeterminacies are resolved 'within the phenomenon', because 'intra-actions enact "agential separability" — the condition of exteriority–within–phenomena'. Phenomena are different patterns of spacetimemattering. There are implications for many 'foundational notions such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, meaning… Responsibility, accountability, and justice'. So there are new prior questions, how differences are made and remade, stabilised and materialised, and the issue of 'constitutive exclusions'. Cuts are enacted not given, which changes our ideas about mattering, 'meaning, being, and valuing'. Discussing amoeba colonies and slime moulds [raised in the other interview I think, and raised in the intro]. They are 'amazing critters' who can 'morph from a seemingly uncoordinated group of genetically identical single cells to an aggregate "slug" with an immune system, muscles and nerves with ganglia (that is simple brains)'. So it is not easy to say what is an individual. Social amoebas are often taken as models in molecular biology, but they 'queer the nature of identity'. The amoeba 'enjoys multiple indeterminacies, and has managed to hoodwink scientists' ongoing attempts to nail down its taxonomy', because it does not fit easily into either phylum or kingdom. It has also questioned explanatory models about how individuals do 'interacting' [sic] with each other and the environment, because it offers complex 'intra-active reconfiguring of bodily boundaries' Kleinman refers to her habit of synthesising perspectives from apparent paradoxes, referring to human sodomy — both unnatural and bestial, that is natural. Barad says that she is not synthesising, but doing diffraction experiments, 'get my hands dirty and experiment with different differences, trying to get a feel for how differences are produced and how they matter. Reading insights through one another diffractively… Experimenting with different patterns of relationality, opening things up'. This does not solve paradoxes nor synthesise, certainly not from the outside. Instead it is about 'the material intra- implication of putting "oneself" at risk', by troubling one's ideas, especially different ways of touching — you could understand the whole history of physics as about touching. Specifically about cuts, 'dichotomy' comes from the Greek [which is probably where Morris and Bozalek got it?] And this raises issues of the notion of difference, that they are made, not found, that a dichotomy is a particular cut [all this is detectable from the genealogy of the term]. If we focus on genealogy, we can deconstruct our Cartesian inheritance. She is not reinforcing the idea of a binary, but not rejecting things, trying to renew ideas rather than 'put the old out to pasture', deconstructing, looking for' aporias', 'rereading them through other ideas, querying their received meanings (80 — sic, the intervening pages are devoted to photographs].  Quantum physics is an inspiration along with 'feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theories'. Matter cannot be seen as 'mere stuff… Inanimate', but rather substance 'in its iterative intra-active becoming, not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency' [so who does the doing?] As a result, matter is 'responsive, generative, and articulate' displaying the differentiating of the world, and the effects of agential cuts which cut both together and apart '(.. .entangling – differentiating), as one move (not sequential acts)'. That only seems paradoxical, but the agential cut even crosscuts itself, 'not only the notion of "itself" even the notion of the cut itself' [baffling and evasive on the issue of foundations]. Contemporary experiments challenge the ontology of classical physics and have produced 'mounting empirical evidence that there are no inherently bonded and property to things that proceed there intra-action with particular apparatuses' [well this was Böhr's view – is it still producing mounting empirical evidence?]. Boundaries and properties only materialise in intra-action, implying the inseparability of things and apparatuses. It is the 'larger apparatus in its particular material configuration' that enacts particular cuts and produces determinate boundaries and objective properties including '"agencies of observation"'. This extends to the notion of matter as 'mattering or meaning'. Particular apparatuses [now defined as 'a particular set of material – discursive practices that materialise'] gives meaning to the notion of particle as well as actually materialising particles, and distinguishes it from resolving indeterminacies by using the term waves. This is an example of how 'some meanings – things are nonetheless indeterminate… entail [ing] constitutive exclusions'. Böhr is acknowledged as originating this insight about how meaning comes into existence [he is described as 'the Nobel Prize winning physicist']. There has been 'remarkable resonance' with those theories that question the liberal humanist notion of the subject — 'feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race' [no nasty French structuralists or Marxists]. For example gender is 'a reiterative doing through which the subject is constituted' for Butler, there is no preceding or following 'I', because it emerges from gender relations. Theories like this are not 'analogous'. They are instead 'always already interactively co-constituted' [if you stick an extended ontology beneath both of them?] And this permits 'diffractively reading insights from different theories through one another'. This in turn can materialise productive patterns that shift, no anchors, no fixity, no fixed ground, only agential cuts as 'touchstones... something solid and tangible in their particularity, rather than anything as immobile/immobilising as an anchor'. Kleinman still wants to discuss nature/culture. This bedrock founds a whole array of other dichotomies, especially in the 'naturalisation of morality'. A certain Prof Jaffer wanted to condemn sodomy because it is against nature, and she wants to see how this divide actually appears. There is clearly a whole set of associations — 'sodomy – condemnation – rationality – ground – morality – nature', and many questions. The point is what is 'the nature of nature' and how does it serve as the rational ground for morality — for whom? Does it apply to all cultures and natures? If we examine nature itself, can it be its own ground for morality? Can it be rational? [Barad gets close to saying that it can be, of course]. If nature is a ground, then subsequent pronouncements are 'nearly cultural creations, human fabrications, with at best some unspecified association with natural creations'. Specifically, what is the notion of nature here? It cannot include nonhuman animals and their behaviours 'since there is scientific evidence that hundreds of species engage in one form or another of homosexual activity [anthropomorphism?],  which is the usual way the term "sodomy" is construed'. Mother nature herself might be queer, and the bedrock she provides made more by slime moulds and other things that 'lack determinate identities'. It is an unstable divide and once we see this, it will be disrupted and unsettled — nature itself offer 'far better deconstruction than any cultural theorist!'. Instability and indeterminacy might be a better grounding condition or foundation — 'a flaming queen, a faggot, a lesbo, a tranny, or gender queer' Kleinman asks why atoms are called ultra queer as well — but are they critters? Why should we take the inanimate/inanimate divide as stable?. Why not think of naturecultures as does Haraway? Animal studies have effectively questioned human exceptionalism, but still left the animate/inanimate binary. Modern neo-vitalist theories [who they?] take 'every – thing to be living' although distinctions can come to matter in different ways and for particular purposes. Important political and ethical questions are raised. As to atoms, even Haldane  said the universe is queerer than we can suppose. A certain Bagemihl says that the whole world is teeming with homo,bi and transgendered [human categories again] creatures, that homosexual behaviour '"occurs in more than 450 different kinds of animals worldwide]' [and how is he defining that], and this is likely to be 'only a small fraction of the universe'. We still haven't included nonanimal lifeforms or other inanimate forms. So the world is more queer than even  Haldane thought, and she extends this in her article Natures Queer Performativity. It is there that she says atoms are ultra queer critters — because 'their quantum quotidian qualities queer queerness itself in their radically deconstructive ways of being' (81). Recent experiments suggest that all sorts of impossibilities are possible 'including the queerness of causality, matter, space, and time' politically, it is important not to fix the term 'queer' so it can stay as 'a desiring radical openness… Differentiating multiplicity… Agential dis/continuity' Kleinman wants to ask about the ethics of interacting with queer phenomena, especially as she says that responsibility means '"providing opportunities for the organism to respond"' The issue is the queerness of phenomena themselves and their iterative interactive becoming, which unsettles earlier boundaries and binaries and makes them inseparable. Ethically speaking, responsibility 'is  not  about right response, but rather a matter of inviting, welcoming, and enabling the response of the Other… The ability to respond'. We constrain the range of possible responses by the kinds of questions we asked, remembering that questions are 'particular practices of engagement'. These will produce specific histories, and we must be respons-able 'accountable' for them, not as individuals, of course, which is riddled with 'assumptions that fall under the heading "the metaphysics of presence"'. [as with Derrida] we are responsible for past and future as well, because the presence displays the 'ontology of inheritance' [with an open reference to Derrida and her own work on the quantum eraser experiment as providing 'empirical evidence of hauntology and differance]. Thus responsibility is queered and we must reconsider ethics, especially if it is based on human exceptionalism. [Then our old favourite about responsibility as 'an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness' -- see my discussion]. It is not a matter of calculation, but developing the right relation to the world's 'ongoing interactive becoming and not becoming', it is to be iterative opening, and enabling of responsiveness through the 'iterative reworking of im/possibility'[self confirming bullshit flying thick and fast]. We should not accommodate the inhuman too easily. It is not the same as the nonhuman, which seems to be co-constituted together with the human 'through particular cuts'. The inhuman is more 'an infinite intimacy that touches the very nature of touch, that which holds open the space of the liveliness of indeterminacies bleed through the cuts and inhabit the between particular entanglements. It is only very recently that I have dared to speak about this publicly'. She got there through an even deeper exploration of quantum field theory, even wilder than quantum mechanics. QFT requires 'enormous labour, intense focus, patience, and humility. It is an awesome labour of love'. It leads to a notion of a between that she can so far only 'gesture toward' not really '"do it justice"' which is for her 'a profound yearning, a crucially important if inevitably unachievable activity, and always already inadequate attempt to respond to the ethical cry of the world'. It is a matter of justice to come rather than a search for final answers As a provocation, it might be necessary to face our own inhumanness, our own infinite alterity, to 'widen the bounds of inclusion to let everyone and everything in'. To sense the abyss, the limits of inclusion rather than imposing binaries. Only when we face the inhuman with all its indeterminacy that we might be able to develop an ethics 'committed to the rupture of indifference… Liveliness'. This might help us confront our own inhumanity, '"our" actions lacking compassion' [later rendered as com-passion]. We have to suffer with and participate with being, 'feel… Care… Respond'. We may only come to do this 'by way of the inhuman'. back to Barad page