Notes on: Barad, K. (2012) Nature's Queer performativity. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning (Women, Gender & Research) 1--2: 25--53 Dave Harris [This is the one referred to in the Mousse interview. A lot of the phrases in that article come from here]. A recent news story about amoeba hints at issues of foundations, stability, shape shifting, 'queer critter behaviours' and lots of binaries. Apparently there were billions of genetically identical single celled individuals clustered together. The article was written in terms that seem to raise all sorts of anxieties. One is that cells might evolve to produce a larger scale organisation, another is that they might be everywhere. The whole article is riddled with 'subterranean imaginaries' (26) touching on Cold War fantasies. Some of the terms, even by scientists are a bit odd, such as 'suicide', and  'all that it implies about intentionality and the metaphysics of individualism'. The real interest is that amoeba have mixed behaviours, some of them equal to those of animals with ganglia or simple brains [citing an expert]. Individualism is questioned, identity. The creatures are often taken to be model organisms, but they 'queer the nature of identity' and display 'multiple indeterminacy'. We even find the origin of the phrase[ in Mousse]  'managed to hoodwink scientists' ongoing attempts to nail down its taxonomy', and the difficulties of classifying it by phylum or kingdom. However there is a 'rhetorical bias' which favours stories about individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, with obvious 'political and moralistic undercurrents' (27). Fears of the movie The Blob [sic] affected xenophobia and anti-communism, as well as other social fears based on 'loathing and contempt for the Other' including recent health epidemics, and the spread of racial religious or ethnic extremism is. Overall 'an aggregate of angst and dread labours beneath the surface' (27). There is even an article referring to '"amoebic morality"', and a lot of science reporting also uses moral descriptors like noble or self-sacrifice, and notices that amoeba are featuring in laboratory studies of altruism. Images of nature are invoked which range from 'exemplary moral actor or a commie activist'. This is anthropomorphic, but she is interested in anthropomorphism as a way of breaking with anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, with humans alone featuring agency or rationality of language. Anthropomorphism can be used to call all this into question and challenge the assumptions of anthropocentrism, and this will be jolly brave, 'putting oneself at risk' to generate response, opening the issue to new discussions. So the problem might lie in our current conceptions of moralism with its 'forceful and stinging character' (28) and its implication in the nature/culture binary. If humans are the only moral agents, this binary is implicit, and has to be safeguarded — but breaches are also inevitable. We can see this with reference to an article about crimes against nature, including bestiality or sodomy. Such crimes are subject to serious penalties. Jaffa has even claimed that sodomy offends against nature and is thus irrational [the source apparently is an editorial in the Los Angeles Times]. Distinctions between male and female cannot be just arbitrary, and to argue so would threaten all the distinctions central to morality including those that condemn slavery and genocide. Despite this, the underlying implication is that unnatural sexual acts are worse than mass killings of nonhumans. Among other problems, the whole argument assumes that whoever commits these acts have somehow escaped from nature, and thus pose a particular danger likely to oppose all natural behaviour. There is also a contradiction in that bestial behaviour could be seen as perfectly natural. The law itself implicitly admits that humans are quite capable of engaging in nonhuman acts. Nature is seen to be a good Christian, but what if she is a commie or a pervert? Haldane's quote raises the possibility [see Mousse interview], and Bagemihl insists that creatures themselves are often homo, bi or trans, and that homosexuality occurs in 450 animals and so on [but she has objected to anthropomorphism like this above]. Atoms might themselves be queer. Queer means 'a radical questioning of identity and binaries' [for cultural and political reasons --humans only?]  including nature/culture (29). We come to realise that all sorts of apparent impossibilities are actually possible including queer causes, matter, space and time. 'Queer' is not fixed and determinate, [shouldn't be according to queer theorists quoted in the notes]  however but itself turns on 'a desiring radical openness… Multiplicity… Dis/continuity'. [This very human form?] may reside at the heart of spacetimemattering. She would like to 'thank the amoeba, an exceptional comrade' for assistance and in foregrounding the characteristics of moralising cultures that turn to hatred. Queer performativity is demonstrated by 'a motley crew of queer co-workers', from social amoeba to academics and atoms. The binaries that support divisions between human and nonhuman are to be challenged, including the nature/culture divide. We can start by reconsidering 'acts against nature' and the moral condemnation they evoke. Human sexual activity can be seen in this way, however, demonstrating the instability of the logic, where perpetrators are damaging nature and yet have somehow slipped back to it. Human violence against animals, associated with the food industry, might also be seen as a crime against nature. Sexual acts are particularly focused upon, however. Performativity is central to queer theory, but is usually seen as exclusively human. However human exceptionalism is inadequate to ground a theory relating to 'matters of objection and the differential construction of the human', especially if we grasp that humanness is graded, and can include the inhuman, or dehumanisation of oppressed groups. Himmler, after all, saw anti-Semitism as delousing (31). [This is a tricky example though, because it is an equivalence between the human and the nonhuman, seeming to agree with her  — but a bad one]. We can attack Himmler's view by insisting that human beings have 'singular superiority' but this also devalues the nonhuman, and thus reproduces 'the very same calculus of racialisation deployed in the first place' [implying that loathing of lice is the same crime as hatred of Jews?]. This exclusion is an ethical and moral matter and it should be accounted for — we have taken a decision to ignore how  'material conditions and effects of how different differences matter', and this leads to further erasures, such as those of any question of the right to kill nonhumans. Asserting and privileging animal rights will not do either, because this still does not 'promote accountability' (31). [A strange and largely incomprehensible note 22 explains that we should 'be attentive to any underlying mathematics' when accounting, and notice that 'the vulnerability of the abject constitutive  other' doesn't depend on hierarchical rankings, but can build on equivalence relations'. I take this to mean that saying animals have the same rights as us will not protect them]. We need an analysis to rethink equivalence relations and how they are produced by cuts producing distinctions between human and nonhuman. The constitution of both terms is important and so are there 'respective constitutive exclusions'. We need to consider this before we get onto any comparisons. Post-humanism would argue that we should not blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, not erase distinctions and differences, and certainly not just invert humanism. Instead we need to understand how particular boundaries have material effects [note 23 refers us to another piece where she explains post-humanism and how it questions categories and practices of boundary making]. However, cuts cannot be just human or cultural — we 'must not assume a prior notion of the "human"'. We should ask instead what about the nonhuman and performative accounts? [We assume there are some nonhuman ones -- and then berate Butler for not discussing them!] This will widen the applicability of performativity to include nonhumans. In particular though, it will emphasise the practices of exclusion and differentiating and their material effects, rather than doing an analysis based on leaving these boundaries in place. We will have to consider 'not merely natural and social forces but the differential constitution of forces as "natural" or "social"' (32) [an equally baffling note 24 says what this means is that we have to rethink performativity not just widen it, in particular understanding it as 'iterative intra-activity rather than iterative citationality' — I haven't yet got to the basis of this reference to citationality --yes I have, it's Butler, meaning cultural citations, or different discourses?]. Instead of thinking of nonhuman performativity, we should think of it instead as '[non motivated?] materialising practices of differentiating' and then not all the actors will be human. The nonhuman can also make distinctions, by differentiating themselves [they do, or human observers do?]  from their environments or from others. This will also our effects of 'causality, agency, relationality and change'[am afraid I can't see any way to do this. These are human terms and can only be applied to the nonhuman via metaphor or homonym]. We have to think about differentiating, something that actually makes space-time and matter, whose exclusions are part of the very fabric. She claims to have given such an account elsewhere — in the Signs article, 2003, and in her book -- and discussing agential realism. This assumes 'the world's performativity — its iterative intra-activity' [apparently, note 27 tells us, it is Butler who has a notion of performativity as 'iterative citationality' in her book on the discursive limits of sex, 1993]. In particular, matter is not an effect  of discursive practices but is itself agentive. Individual entities are entangled parts of phenomena which are themselves material-discursive, and interactions extend across conventional space and time. This reworks notions of both material and discursive and moves away from humanism. Phenomena are best seen as entanglement in the special quantum sense — the '(ontological) inseparability of agentially intra acting "components"' [so intra-action and phenomena more or less mean the same thing?]. Intra-action reconfigures notions of causality agency space-time and matter. An agential cut is not a Cartesian cut between subject and object but only a local resolution of indeterminacy. They enact 'agential separability — the local conditions of exteriority-within-phenomena'. Differentiating does not involve radical exteriority but this form of separability [but only because you denied radical exteriority in the first place in the definition of phenomena]. Hence the phrase to 'cut things together – apart (as one movement)' [I'm not sure this is anything more than a word game really — when we cut things apart, we have assumed that they are together, and they become together in the sense of both being parts of what was once whole]. Identity is a matter of phenomena rather than individuals and is thus multiple, 'diffracted through itself — identity is diffraction/différance/differing/deferring/differentiating' [note 30 tells us that 'diffraction, as a physical phenomenon, entails the entanglement/superposition of different times and spaces'(49), and refers us to Barad 1993 which is not however in the reference list — maybe she means 2003 which is the Signs article]. She wants to show this by demonstrating that nature is 'intra/activity' [written with a forward slash this time] is a matter of queer performativity. This will help us see ourselves as 'always already a part of nature'(33) and that any claim to label some acts as against nature 'erases and demonises'[so everything human beings do is natural, including the nasty bits?]. This literally means that queer critters are queer, not just odd, not that they engage in queer sexual practices, but rather that identity and relationality are queered — this implies that identity as a relation can only be among entities 'understood [not] to precede their relations' (33) [baffling note 31 expands this point to say that identity is multiple and fluid, but is itself 'at stake and at issue in what matters and what doesn't matter', but this assumes that 'accountability is part of the ethico– ontological relations and entanglements of Worlding' (50). It really is an attempt to baffle us into compliance. It's worse than academic discourse — it is deliberately evasive and incantatory academic discourse?] To refer to queer critters is to break with conventional definitions of both terms [make a cut that cuts across cuts in her absurd language]. The term critter offers conventional exclusions that we wish to question, especially the line between animate and inanimate. It also implies something that is in contrast to and distinct from humans — 'contrary associations' [are they?], And it can be meant both contemptuously and affectionately. Thus critters 'are inherently destabilising and do not have determinate identities, by definition' [absurd philosophical exaggeration from a routine mundane ambiguity]. [A list of queer critters ensues]. All of them display 'uncanny communicative abilities' and 'bizarre causal relatings' which follow from their phenomenal or entangled nature. Their consequent agential reality and queer performativeness will become clear. The first one is lightning [!] which 'inspires fear and awe' and may be associated with the beginnings of life in the organic soup, or with experiments that go wrong as in Frankenstein. It looks like 'an archetypal "act of nature"' causing direct deaths and fires [so act of nature here is a term validated by the insurance industry?]. Its performances are queer, as her colleague, V Kirby, explains — it might show a certain logic in not striking in the same place twice [really? a logic?], although this is denied by some scientists. An 'intriguing communication, a sort of stuttering chatter' (34) precedes any lightning strike [Deleuze's 'dark precursor'], as with St Elmo's Fire or ball lightning. It's common to assume that it originates in a cloud and is discharged towards the ground, but this assumes there is some optimal path for the discharge. Instead 'according to experts', there is more of an 'arcing disjuncture that runs in both an upward and downward direction', and objects on the ground can initiate strikes by extending 'upward moving "leaders"' to a spark travelling downward'. Some clot called Uman explains this 'in terms of speech acts', so that lightning starts from the cloud without any knowledge of what is below, being unaware of objects until it nears them, and awareness produces the final connection projecting upward. Barad wants to know 'what kind of bizarre communication is at work here' [anthropomorphism I would say] — she prefers 'some kind of nonlocal communication' (35), 'by some mechanisms scientists have yet to fully explain', although we do know that electrons are stripped from atoms and gathering different places producing a massive charge, not a unidirectional one yet though. That time she quotes Discovery Channel to repeat the explanation about both upward and downward. She renders this as 'it is as though [!] objects on the ground are being hailed by the cloud's interpellative address'. The discharge is not continuous but tracks between upper and lower parts of the channel. This is 'an enlivening and indeed lively response to difference if ever there was one'. We don't know the mechanism, but apparently 'awareness lies at the crux of this strangely animated inanimate relating' — because the ground can be seen to be 'animated into an awareness of its would-be interlocutor'. The message is being sent, but it is still unspecified so conventional [!] sender and recipient notions do not apply. Lightning is somehow 'on the razor's edge between animate and inanimate' [note 38, page 50, discusses the expansionary notion of a field, but says there are still bizarre features and puzzles about electrical fields — such as the fact that they don't seem to be big enough to generate lightning flashes. Linear causation is challenged in favour of 'a division of separate polarities'. Kirby says that scientists '"are now looking to outer space for the answer"']. Let's look at stingrays and clairvoyancy. Apparently stingrays can anticipate a message which has been addressed to them because they '"unlock themselves in readiness"', as a kind of generalisation from a receptor cell [this is Kirby again, presumably comparing this to her highly simplified version of human communication as a matter of SR links]. Apparently these paradoxical cases can be extended, by Kirby. She talks about a group of scholarship recipients [presumably human ones] having to explain their intellectual projects to benefactors — in her case deconstructive criticism. A young biologist before her talked about stingrays and how cells talk to neighbouring cells via special receptor cells which require particular keys or messages, producing an effect of '"some mysterious clairvoyancy"' (36). Kirby realises that this might involve an entangled identity of human proportions, so the biologists somehow had anticipated her own intellectual labours — '"what infectious algorithm had already brought us together before our actual meeting?"'. Barad says this is a 'scandalous'mixing of different phenomena, and Kirby gets there through 'a materialist reading of Derrida's grammatology', where she says quantum paradoxes, whether those of lightning, stingrays or humans, have to be denied any empirical validity because that degree of ontological complexity would be bewildering, and needing domestication. She argues that properly understood 'as a positive science', deconstruction would reveal 'the liveliness of the world in a way that speaks to my agential realist account of worlding', that entangled relations and not just human ones. She has been in conversation with Kirby ever since, as 'untimely collaboration… One of a multitude of entangled performances of the world's worlding itself' (37). [Kirby has four books in the references — 1997 Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. Routledge; 2001 Quantum Anthropologies in L Simmons ed Derrida Down Under. Dunmore press Palmerston; 2006 Judith Butler: live theory. Continuum; 2011 Quantum Anthropologies. Life at Large. Duke University Press. Much of the stuff on page 36 seems to come from Kirby 2001]. Pfiesteria pisicidia[P], a microorganism, a one celled predator that can seemingly transform from animal to plant and back again, implicated in a mass killing of fish in North Carolina. It is apparently a dinoflagellate, unicellular and microscopic, sometimes producing a toxic red tide. They are 'neither plant nor animal but can act as both'. They can photosynthesise and also eat other organisms, changing their habits according to varying environments, and also changing the way they reproduce, including sexually [here, the references to an unpublished version of Schrader 2010, which has apparently been published in Social Studies of Science 2010/40/2. The references also have her doctoral thesis, and a 2008 paper delivered to the American Anthropological Association]. Their appearance caused a kind of scientific hysteria because scientistss were unable to identify its basic features or agree about its life-cycle. They are not even sure if they did cause the deaths of millions of fish, so there are 'real-world concerns at stake'. Policymakers can only wait and see, but for Schrader this is a dangerous position, assuming that science will always deal with certainties, and that gaps in knowledge will be filled in [the notes have an example of where this happened though] . In this case, 'its very species being is indeterminate', that there is ontological indeterminacy not just epistemological uncertainty. The species is inherently indeterminate and can never be unambiguously separated from its environment. Rather than having a definite life history, it seems to vary according to what needs to be done — they cannot be made to kill fish for example, but only do so in particular circumstances. The toxic variant seems to be different from other variants. Schrader argues that there is no simple emitter transmitter receiver model [again]  to explain these events, and trying to define P's procedures in such terms would preclude 'the kinds of toxic agential performances' in which they engage [assuming indeterminacy that escapes simple models is an ontological problem]. There is apparently another procedure in a laboratory that does not impose deterministic models, but allow P to 'engage in heterogeneous temporal and nondeterministic causal relatings'. What this means is that they don't see toxicity as an inherent property of a particular life stage, but that P can be understood as a set of performances belonging to '"an assemblage of morphs"[quoting the unpublished version of Schrader 2010]. Particular temporal manifestations '"cannot be isolated from the intra-actions that bring them about"' [so she is happily using Barad's terms] — the apparent fixed categories can transform into one another, where toxicity is affected both by present environments but also by the history of the organism, rendered as '"the effects of indeterminable intra-action that have led to P's current material mode"'. Recent contacts with fish, apparently, produce different action towards fish newly encountered, implying '"a biochemical memory"'. This in turn means there is a temporal dimension in their relations with their environment. [Coldn't we have used the less mysterious locust here?] To Barad, this shows how responsible laboratory practices must deal with agential performances. This is a form of responsibility which 'entails providing opportunities for the organism to respond' [not asking if it is reponssible to 'sacrifice' them] . They do not respond to deterministic models but 'insist that their agential performances be taken into account'. It has to be a particular performative account at that, not an assumption that we can see performances as effects in the old causal sense. They are 'choices… Not simply deterministic causality, acausality, or no causality' (39). Instead there is a particular mode of causality as 'iterative intra-activity' [with a reference to Barad's book] and this can be an inheritance, introducing temporality. In the right circumstances, things like deadly toxins are seen as 'cutting together'. Specific matters have to be included [like these?] if the experiment is to be repeatable. Clearly ethics are involved as well, woven together with good responsible scientific practice [which she renders as woven with 'justice–to–come'] [weird and anthropomorphic again for me, simple determinist models have to be replaced by more complex determinist models including past states]. The atom can be seen as queer — inherently indeterminate, not just strange. This queerness emerged with quantum physics. Böhr applied the idea of energy quanta to matter and developed a new model of the atom to replace Rutherford's solar system model. Electrons occupy discrete or quantised orbits around the nucleus and there are a finite number of discrete energy levels. Electron jumps between levels emit photons with different frequencies, and this can be used to identify the atom. The emission spectrum of hydrogen was one of the first to be predicted and it was that that earned the Nobel Prize. However there is further queerness. Each line in the spectrum with a given colour results from an electron making a leap or jump, but what is this leap? In ordinary discourse 'quantum leap' means a substantial qualitative leap, but the quantum is of course a very small area. The thing about electron leaps is that they are discontinuous, with electrons changing energy levels 'without having been anywhere in between! Quantum leap is a discontinuous movement'. The emission of the photon is similarly problematic. For Böhr, electrons do not act a bit like planets around the sun, but instead occupy 'one of a set of discrete energy levels at a time' (40). Following a leap to a lower level, excess energy is emitted as a photon, but not continuously [by definition] — so at what point is the photon released? Not when the electron is in passage between two energy levels, because it never is. Not when it first gets released because it does not know where it is going to end up [higher or lower] before it makes the leap. The emission of the photon cannot be seen as an energy conservation device because this would involve 'a strange causality' [for the same reason — energy would have to be conserved before the leap happened]. There is 'an inherent discontinuity', and Barad wants to extend this as '(constitutive of all intra-actions)' [still at the quantum level?]. A quantum discontinuity is not just the opposite of the continuous, not just a displacement in space. The rupture itself 'helps constitute the heres and nows and not once and for all'. So it's not just that electrons appear here and then there without having been anywhere in between, but that 'here – now, there–then have become unmoored'. If we cannot deploy conventional causality to follow cause into effect, as an unfolding of existence, we cannot 'orient oneself in space or in time? [In theoretical physics]. Can we even continue to presume that space and time are still "there" ?' Overall there is a dizzying destabilising, and existence itself seems indeterminate, somewhere between possibility and impossibility, producing 'the open-ended becoming of the world which resists acausality as much as determinism' [acausality is an interesting category, presumably one that is of special interest to physicists who do not wish to abandon causality altogether because it would have awful consequences for the Newtonian world]. Not only that, 'the nature of change changes with each intra-action' (41), implying quite a different sort of change from the normal which takes place in space and time. As a results, existence is not just some manifold that evolves in space and time, but should be understood instead as 'iterative intra-active becomings of spacetimemattering' [note 48, page 51, just really reasserts this argument saying that space and time are not just there but are constituted through 'interactive performances of the world']. We can see entanglements in this [non-Euclidean] way as well as 'enfoldings of spacetimematterings'. Quantum entanglement is characteristic of quantum mechanics, and the main reason it has to depart from classical thought, as Schrödinger once argued. Derrida seems to say [!] something similar about pasts having never been present, and futures which are not just reproductions of forms of presence. Feynman has said that the phenomena of quantum mechanics are '"absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way"'. However 'physicists now claim to have empirical evidence that it is possible not only to change the past, but to change the very nature of being itself in the past', in the quantum eraser experiments. According to Böhr, there are no inherent ontological identities for quantum objects which can be both particles and waves, so identity is 'not given, but rather performed'. The two slit apparatus shows this [summarised page 41], so waves and particles are not distinct. The results apply with atoms, neutrons or photons. It is not like macro diffraction though because 'particles don't "interfere" with one another (they can't occupy the same place at the same time)' (42) and are never sent through the slits at the same time anyway so they never encounter each other. The problem then is to explain waves [which classically do show interference patterns]. If we were able to watch each electron going through the slit, as Einstein proposed in his [gedanken]  '"which – slit" device', we would be able to see that the entity would be revealed to be definitely contradictory  — a particle at the slit, and a wave at the screen. Böhr disagreed and argued instead for 'complementarity', where something can be either a wave or a particle 'depending on how it is measured' because it becomes entangled with the measuring apparatus. If we add which-slit detectors to a simple two slit experiment, electrons will perform like particles, showing the dependence on the experimental apparatus. This replaces contradiction with complementarity 'and enabled objective results to be obtained'. The nub is that we should not refer to waves or particles as objective referents with separate characteristics, but rather refer to a phenomenon, implying emergent entanglement or inseparability of object and apparatus.Böhr came to this from philosophical speculation about how concepts work and how they come to mean what they mean [with a reference back to her own 2007 book — I don't remember it as being particularly clear there, unless she means the bit about humanism?]. The two slit detector experiment has been much discussed ever since as 'the gedanken (thought) experiment of its time' [apparently, 'it could exist only in the rarefied realm of pure thought']. But now it can actually be performed in the lab — 'without going into too many details' we have a two slit device and a which-slit detector where the which slit measurement does not disturb the motion of the atom, but considers only some of its internal parts. [It looks ingenious — the atom passes through a laser beam which raises one of its electrons to a higher level. Particular devices — '"micromaser cavities"' are placed at each slit, and they force the photon to go back to the lower energy level as the atom passes through — this is a signal, made by the photon as it's left in the cavity, so we know which slit the atom went through {with minimal interference}. If we run the experiment without this which-slit detector we get a diffraction pattern, but with the which-slit detector, we get particles just as Böhr predicted {the implication is that it is the presence of the measuring apparatus which produces this change, but it is not a human observer}. For Barad 'this is direct empirical evidence that identity is not fixed and inherent, but performative' (43)]. Böhr explains performance in terms of quantum entanglement of the apparatus and the object of measurement. It is not just that things behave differently when measured differently. There is only ever the phenomenon where apparatus and object are already inseparable. This conception can explain apparently impossible things. What if we can  erase the evidence in the cavities [above] after the atom has gone through? It seems that if we do, we revert to wave patterns just as if there were no which-slit detector, but this means that we've determined the nature of the particle afterwards — 'the entity's very identity has been changed'. This is 'empirical evidence'that the identity or ontology of the atom is never fixed 'but is always open to future and past reworkings'. It is actually not correct to talk about having changed the past, or erased information. A more careful interpretation, not so based on conventional assumptions about being and time will see it differently. Assuming 'a metaphysics of presence' with 'individually determinate objects' makes erasure of information and effects facing backwards inexplicable, implying some strange reverse causality or instantaneous communication, 'spooky action-at-a-distance causality'. The conventional ontology is at fault after a'diffractive reading [of]  insights from physics and poststructuralist theory through one another'. If we do that we can 'elaborate' Butler's performativity theory 'beyond the realm of the human' (44), which we should do anyway even to explain the human. This will make us rethink notions such as materiality, agency and causality. We can resolve the paradoxes with the quantum eraser evidence in this way, and this will give 'deconstructionism empirical traction'. We have to make 'the wager that the radical reverberations of deconstructionism are not merely perverse imaginings of the human mind or of culture but are, in fact, queer happenings of the world' [note 54, page 51 says that Kirby 2011 would agree with this and she even provides 'compelling evidence that the story can be told from within deconstructive theory']. Such a reading would help us see that the past and future are not modifications of the present, not involving production or reproduction of presence in Derrida's terms. So the experimenter has not changed a past that had already been present by erasing the information. Instead, 'the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold' instead both are 'iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering' [in other words pixie dust]. Both space and time exist only in phenomena, never as some outside determinate. In this way, 'the evidence is against the claim' that events are erased or recovered. The diffraction pattern produced after erasing information is not the same as the '"original"', it is not just simply evident, but requires tracing from 'extant' entanglements [measurement has cut these entanglements, and we need to find its traces?]. Traces of measurement remain even if information is erased, but 'it takes work to make the ghostly entanglements visible'. The past is neither closed nor present. Past and present are — guess what — 'iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world's ongoing intra-activity' not connected by any determinate relationships, not definitely located in space or time. Phenomena are material entanglements, and are 'enfolded and threaded through' spacetimematterings. [So sometimes such matterings produce phenomena — but not always? The other way around? Phenomena belong with other materialisations, and then produce further more empirical materialisations? There has to be some notion of the virtual behind all this? 'Materialisation' is certainly ambiguous]. A diffraction pattern might return, but this is not going back or restoration of the past. Memory is always written into the fabric of the world, held by the world. It consists of 'sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity', and the world 'is its memory (enfolded materialisation)' [so everything is material — but the material is itself several things?]. In conclusion [thank God for that] there are many challenges to classical ontology, defined as 'a worldview that posits the existence of discrete entities that interact with one another the locally determinate causal fashion, wherein changes in the result of one event (the causing) causing [sic] another event (the effect) and causes effect the motion of entities moving through space in accord with the linear flow of time' [so we have to accept all of those together, or intra-action — there can be no modification of classical views, no exceptions, no probabilistic findings, nothing typical and marginal?]. Further implications are that the world is composed of individual objects, properties and boundaries are determinate, space occupies a given volume, time is linear, effects follow causes [by definition, but even Hegel knew that this was a problem because effects turn into causes of their own]. All of these are challenged by 'nature's queer performances' (45) like the example she has given — oh and human beings and their 'practices, identities, and species being' [but they are not subject to conventional causality because of culture and language — it is not the same indeterminacy as with the activities of a dinoflagellate]. We have seen 'uncanny communicative abilities' and 'queer causal relatings' which are inexplicable if we stick with independent entities or discrete agents with an external environment. In each of the cases considered we have a challenge to a conception of time as '"homogenous flow of self identical moments, in which are caused by definition proceeds its effect"' [Schrader 2010]. Instead we need a quantum ontology, 'an agential realist ontology' based on the existence of phenomena as 'performative entanglements of spacetimemattering', and only they can account for the performances considered. These findings do not just apply to the microscopic, although there have been several attempts to domesticate nature's queerness by Barad's critics. But queerness is always threatening to leak out and contaminate normal life. Instead we should appreciate it 'across divisions of scale and familiarity' as we did with what looks like an everyday macroscopic phenomenon like lightning — it 'nonetheless exhibits the kinds of queer behaviours that atoms do in the microcosmic domain' [well, she has decided they can both be described as queer, which is itself variously described as relating to indeterminacy or apparent inexplicability in terms of classic theories]. She thinks that more 'closet indeterminacies might be lurking in the presumably straightforward classification of micro and macro' [once she applies her terminology even more widely]. She is particularly interested in deconstruction, via Kirby and Schrader which permit Derrida to engage with these queer behaviours. She insists that there is now 'the possibility of empirical support for deconstructive ideas like différance'. She does not agree with those who argue that deconstruction has itself deconstructed empiricism — this is a 'common mis/understanding' (46). There are materialist readings of deconstruction that 'open up the empirical to reworkings' away from conventional understandings [so what is the empirical exxactly?] . Empirical claims should not be ruled out but are indeed understood to be 'particular intelligible articulations of the world (with all due regard to all the various qualifications required to make good sense of this claim)'[very evasive]. We should not see them as relating to individual existing entities but to 'phenomena – in – their – becoming' [another type of phenomena?]. Empirical claims here refer to 'radically open relatingness of the world worlding itself' [repetitive and circular]. Of course, 'agential realism is not a straight read of physics' but refers instead to 'a diffractive investigation of differences that matter' arising from reading physics, poststructuralist and deconstructive theories 'through one another'[note 58, page 51, refers the notion of diffraction as a methodology back to chapter 2 of her book, and says it is 'indebted to Haraway 1997'. It's not the same as 'social constructivist critique because 'it doesn't presume to take a position outside of science but rather constructively and deconstructively engages with science from the inside (not uncritically but not as critique)' focusing on 'ontology, epistemology, and ethics as well as methodology' — there are the usual problems about which of these is the most important, and whether or not extending out from methodology confuses the issue or not. So diffraction might be acceptable as an ontology, but not as a methodology, or a methodology not as an ethics?] Physics 'wonderfully deconstructs itself, reopening and re-figuring foundational issues' [note 59 says this makes Derrida's point that 'deconstruction is not a method but what texts do']. Focusing on the key ethical issues, 'Derrida's notions of "justice – to – come" and différance haunt this essay'. Agential realism means that differentiation is not just about cutting apart, but also cutting together, in one move, 'a matter of entanglement'. And entanglements are not just intertwinings but are 'irreducible relations of responsibility', removing especially lines between self and other, past and present, here and now, all cause and effect. Just like quantum dis/continuity, agential cuts do not offer absolute separation but also a '"holding together" of the disparate itself' without defacing heterogeneity, 'offering some unity before '"synthetic"' junctions, conjunctions and disjunctions [all of this referring back to Derrida]. Agential separability is both differentiating and entangling as one move, not a sequential process. Agential cuts rework relations of joining and disjoining. Separability means 'irreducible heterogeneity that is not undermined by the relations of inheritance that hold together the disparate without reducing difference to sameness' [largely definitional matter again?]. The very notion of differentiating is queered and rethought, requiring a new accountability not based on some fixed identity or fixed intervals or origin, indeed an 'ac/counting' [why this split?], looking at what materialises and what is excluded. There can be no simple calculation based on the notion that individual identities can be added to or equated with each other, we should not identify individual causal factors or assign blame to particular causes. Causality is itself 'an altogether queer matter'. As a result 'accountability is an ethico- onto – epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter in the processes of worlding and the entanglements of spacetimematterings' (47). We should be accountable, but not from some external position only by operating agential separability, differences within. The can be no mathematics of identity with simple substitutions or transitivities among individual elements. There can be no '"acts against nature"' because this entails absolute exteriority again. But there is no outside of nature. Thinking and language use are themselves acts of nature. This 'is not to reduce culture to nature, but to reject the notion that nature is inherently inadequate and in particular lacking in value and meaning, and so requires culture as its supplement (Kirby)' [this is entirely an ethical point then? We might want to argue about hierarchies, but it is absurd to say that culture does nothing to add value or meaning to human actions]. We might understand 'culture as something nature does' [note 60 quotes Böhr as arguing that humans are part of that nature they wish to understand, and recommends Kirby on the nature/culture divide, understanding Derrida that there is no outside of the text as '"there is no outside of nature"' — which surely is the opposite of what Derrida is arguing?]. If we rework these binaries, this 'frees up space for moral outrage directed at specific acts of violence against humans and nonhumans' and how they are differentiated or equated [idealist challenging of the binaries will produce a new tolerance]. Entanglements are not just interconnections but 'specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world'. They are also 'relations of obligation — being bound to the other — enfolded traces of othering'. Others are 'irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through the "self" — a diffraction/dispersion of identity'. This entangled relation is the same as Derrida's différance. So there is an ethics of entanglement which means we can and must rework 'the material effects of the past and the future' there is no absolute redemption but we can productively reconfigure and rework im/possibilities. If we change the past, we do not erase marks on bodies which are sedimented material effects 'written into the flesh of the world' [so what's the point? No easy redemptions?]. We do have debt 'to those who are already dead and those who are not yet born' and this 'cannot be disentangled from who we are' [massive guilt must ensue]. We should realise that differentiating is a material act, that is not about radical separation but really 'about making connections and commitments' [which seems to justify any kind of identity politics you fancy — by insisting that men are different from women you are really making connections with and commitments to them?] The summary, rather perversely right at the end, says that she wants to develop queerness as a radical questioning of identity and binaries to make all sorts of impossibilities possible. Queerness lies in the very heart of spacetimeetc. She sees moralism as based on a nature culture divide and human exceptionalism and this 'causes injury to humans and nonhumans alike, is a genetic carrier of genocidal hatred and undermines ecologies of diversity necessary for flourishing'. There are loads of notes apart from the ones I mentioned. Note 5 says that after initial ambiguity, there is now an acceptable classification for social amoeba — quoting a Wikipedia entry [ontological indeterminacy didn't last long then?]  She notes (6) that in a particular article, notions of language or morality are found regularly in literature on social amoeba. Note 7 likes 'social amoeba'as a provocation to human exceptionalism. Note 8 provides a definite '"amoebic morality"' avoiding colonial moves to cover humans, and leading to questions about what the other can teach us and who we speak for. Note 12 offers definitions of natural and unnatural from the Online Dictionary. Note 13 subdivides bestial acts into those that might include acting as if one were nonhuman, and the law gets into trouble here. She knows she is being 'playful ironic' in her use of 'as if', and notes that moral authorities do not use the term, as when Himmler said that Jews just are the same as lice, reflecting the long tradition to equate Jews with animals, especially parasites. She argues that we need to disrupt binaries in order to disrupt 'the calculus of exterminism and killability', where a binary involves a radical difference of esteem. Note 14 says that queerness does not entail desire, that this is human exceptionalism, and the other forms of desire might exist. Note 17 tributes the 'important ethics notion of "making killable"' to Haraway 2008. Note 22 says that the abjection of the other does not necessarily mean a hierarchy, because 'equivalence relations can be effectively enrolled'. Note 28 says that phenomena 'are ontologically primitive relations — relations without pre-existing relata', where there is a mutual ontological dependence of relata and relation, 'the result of specific intra-actions' — lovely circular and self propping terms. Note 30 says that diffraction in the usual sense, 'as a physical phenomenon' entails the entanglement/superposition of different times and spaces', and refers to the elusive Barad 1993. Note 34 says that Haraway has insisted that we do animal studies and eco-criticism, the result of challenging the boundary between the animate and the inanimate. Similarly the biological tends to be preferred over the physical in academic disciplines [ a bit of inter-faculty micropolitics here?] . Note 43 supports the argument that queer identity should be seen 'as an empty placeholder for an identity that is still in progress and has as yet to be fully realised' [citing Halperin]. Queer politics should not become referential or positive or concrete, but see queerness 'as a resistant relation rather than as an oppositional substance'. Note 56 acknowledges that classical physics can still be used to explain certain behaviours of these identities, lightning for example, but so can quantum physics. Quantum physics cannot be just accepted as perfectly applicable but only to a micro domain. Questions of scale are not simple. Barad page