Notes on: Barad K (2017) Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: re–turning, re–membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations 92 . Online https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/nf92_05barad.pdf. DOI: 10.3898/NEWF: 92.05.2017 Dave Harris This one pursues the idea of temporal disjunction, using quantum field theory and a novel about the Nagasaki bombing and nuclear stuff . The diffractive reading involves indeterminacy of time and 'troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction… The binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human' (56). We need to undo time to mourn the victims, to undo the erasure of colonial practice, 'rethinking the notion of the void 'which is to be understood 'in terms of Derrida's hauntology; a spectral domain where life and death are  originarily entangled, and inanimate matter itself gives itself to be thought' [this is the abstract written in the third person, or possibly by another pseud]. Derrida is quoted in the epigraph saying that justice involves recalling ghosts, victims 'that which disjoins the living present'. We need to trouble time and produce collective imaginaries that deny the inevitability of progress or the inaccessibility of the past. Fascism is on the rise and an accelerated nuclear arms race threatens. The origins of the Anthropocene involve more than just segments of time, but smuggle in a linear structure of temporality. Radioactivity is a key sign of the Anthropocene. There is in fact no singular origin and no unilinear time. We need a new sense of temporality which might 'understand 1492 as living inside 1945, for example, and even vice versa' (57). There is the Doomsday clock, for example, now calibrated to include climate change. It is obscene or mechanical. It doesn't progress on its own. It clocks 'sociopolitical, techno-scientific events' even so, it still assumes homogenous times and spaces, universal crisis rather than an uneven distribution of it. And by focusing on apocalypse, it distracts attention from real wars. The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico and affected American Indians. Nuclear war has taken the form of nuclear testing ever since, quite often in the fourth world. It is not something of the past. Nor should we understand it as fixed on the prospect of total annihilation. In Hiroshima in 1945, clock mechanisms were melted or synchronised to a particular moment, but that moment was not the end and the event extended into the future. Atomic time is based on a rhythm and quantum leaps. The first ones were constructed in 1949 and now they are indispensable. Time itself is now globalised in a very precise way, a requirement of the global economy Quantum physics underpins all these examples. It is 'deeply entangled with the military-industrial complex' (60). All the examples see time as 'determinate and singular', marking one time at a time. None of them incorporate the radical rethinking of time in quantum physics, which challenges '"homogenous empty [standard clock] time"'. This modern conception has been overturned for example by recognising that other cultures think differently and are not all heading for progress and civilisation. Such notions threaten the future biology of the planet. We need many paths, especially to protect the environment. Quantum physics shares these notions, but this 'is not to suggest that (specific) quantum and (specific) indigenous approaches are identical or commensurate' (61): but both disrupt standard time. A novella featuring a pilgrimage by survivor of Nagasaki [by Kyoko Hayashi] uncovers 'entanglements of colonialism, racism and militarism'. The survivor finds kinship with the plants and animals that were 'the bomb's first victims' although there is nothing on the human casualties of a subsequent nuclear test [see below] . Even the US government denied that there might be human casualties, however, and were very slow even to recognise them in Japan. There is evidence that many American Indians experienced increased types of cancer, however. [Lot of repetition in this -- see below] First, quantum theory which deconstructs determinism and also 'the progressivist notion of time', especially its colonial variants. In this way 'quantum physics opens up radical spaces for exploring the possibilities of change from inside hegemonic systems of domination' (61) [in a very abstract sort of politics]. These radical political imaginaries might ally with indigenous and other knowledge practices. Quantum theory has also troubled time in the sense of making atom bombs possible, in a 'strange topology' which links the two. The normal geography separating macro and micro 'is but a marker of an imperialist and colonising worldview', [ie straw man worst case] where it is subatomic particles that are being colonised and dominated [!] , declared 'inanimate and lacking in agency''(62). However conventional notions of scale and those of nature and space has been radically rethought in quantum theory. It does have applications for the real world as we see with the military-industrial applications of quantum physics. However, it does not support 'ideas of totality and closure' as Newtonian physics did, because of quantum indeterminacy — a 'dynamism that entails its own undoings from within' an internal form of Derrida's deconstruction. If we can destroy the totality of physics, we can unleash radical possibilities. This essay shows the entanglement of history, memory and politics and talks of the possibilities of justice to come, to undo colonial configurations of spacetimemattering. Scale is called into question, for example when the ability to split an atom can go on to destroy cities [eventually, after a lot of important social interventions] . A minute nuclear force has led to incalculable devastation. We do better to think of nested scales, where neighbourhoods are found in cities, which are found in states, which are found in nations, the units encompassing each other 'like Russian dolls'. [This seems pretty conventional, and it is being set against a straw man 'geometric spaces'. In nested spaces, there are precisely boundaries between the units, and a relation of dominance so that the larger ones constrain the smaller ones — or vice versa. The issue is which way round does it work, bottom-up or top-down? What are these constraints? What is the role played by human culture and politics especially?] Time has also been affected in its scale. Atomic explosions reset cellular clocks and generate long-term changes. There is not just an immediate effect but reconfigurations. 'Radioactive decay elongates, disperses, and exponentially frays time's coherence. (63). We now understand matter as entangled with time. Matter itself has been drastically rethought with the discovery of subatomic particles. And when the bomb was dropped 'the distance between Heaven and Earth was obliterated… Physically crossed out by a mushroom cloud reaching into the stratosphere' (64) [imaginative talking up] Quantum field theory changed their understandings of space, time and matter and also produced a theory of nuclear force which was 'integrally involved in the production of wartime technologies' [well it was one factor, but why think of it as the prime factor? I much prefer DeLanda on machinic phyla]. Because 'at the very core of QFT are questions of time and being' we should also 'trouble time' politically, doing 'mourning attuned to justice'[in another trope, to notice the void in avoidance]. [It looks endless too -- see below --a huge burden of guilt and debt that means we must devote our lives to justice everywhere and anywhere -- or signal our virtue and get on with our lives] This is a diffractive essay, not a linear presentation, [inded -- badly edited as well]  but aspects of quantum physics diffractively read through the novella. This is a methodology as 'a matter of reading insights through rather than against each other to make evident the always–already entanglement of specifics [sic] ideas in their materiality… Not to make analogies, but rather to explore patterns of difference/différance, which she sees as 'differentiating–entangling' and to show the effects of specific material conditions 'in their interactive restucturing [sic]' to trouble binaries and analogical analysis Trinh Minh ha has argued that we live in many worlds at the same time, that the one does not exclude multiplicity. 'Not all differences are the same' (65): in classical physics, diffraction means 'a comparison between this and that' whereas in quantum physics it is 'allied with the fundamental quantum physics notions of superposition and entanglement… Differences within, not the "apartheid type of difference"' [quoting Trinh Minh ha]. Waves make diffraction patterns, but so can particles at least, 'given an apparatus that allows for this possibility', because particles are in superposition, 'indeterminately here–there'. As a result 'there is no fact of the matter' nor simply an unknown, but indeterminacy between position and momentum. The point is that if you try to measure where a particle is, if you can detect its position it behaves like a particle, but it can also behave like a wave and not have a fixed position to detect. Laboratories produce diffraction patterns 'at the expense of others' (66) but patterns of difference are at the core of what matter is — 'relational différancing all the way down' for Feynman [we are told he is a Noble Laureate physicist] no such thing existed:  there was no determinate path, but we can calculate probabilities by taking account of all possible paths which are then weighted. The argument can be scaled up by imagining a diffraction grating 'with an infinite number of slits' and then an infinite number of such gratings which will sum all possible planes and cover all space. The probability is then related to the superposition of all possible paths which 'all coexist and mutually contribute to the overall pattern' [there are some interesting diagrams to illustrate this argument 67F]. There is also temporal diffraction which 'has in fact been observed experimentally'. We can observe this by taking a disc with slots in it which is then rotated. A beam of light or particles is directed at the rotating disc parallel to the axle. This produces slits separated in time [and space surely, but not in the usual configuration]. What we are seeing is the results of 'another, much less well known, indeterminacy principle: namely the time–energy indeterminacy principle' (67). This means a particular entity can be in a state of superposition of different times, indeterminately coexisting — 'for example, yesterday, today, and tomorrow' [but the disc through which the particles are spread does not travel in time — if we assume the slits are separated in time because they are rotating, we can see that particles might be superimposed in different slits. This is much glamorised by referring to yesterday today and tomorrow. It really refers to a sequence in time which we control experimentally --the slits are not in the future for us] this temporality is entangled and threaded in a multiplicity, so there can be no determinate time: only 'a manifestation of different times bleeding through one another', not just a difference but 'an ontological indeterminacy of time'. We can diffract in both space and time at once so a single particle is superposed in multiple places and times. A diffraction pattern shows all possible coexisting histories or configurings of space-time. There are apparently four dimensions [one relativist time-space] in QFT, so that the probability that a particle ends in a particular position 'entails taking account of all possible histories'. Again possibility here does not mean uncertainty, [but something more like virtual possibility, until one is actualised]. So a diffraction pattern 'is a manifestation of the superposition' [not in normal use of course], based on linear [NB] combinations of different times. This shows a radical potential for linear time, which should trouble even the notion of linear time in colonial ideas of progress. [Much easier ways to do this, by showing the survival of the pre-modern in the modern — which Barad acknowledges as allied positions]. This is more 'subtle… complex… and stranger than multiplicity itself' (68). Any argument that we might find a superior notion of time to refresh our ideas of progress should be replaced by understandings where new and old might coexist [as above!] [For Barad this is immediately exaggerated to argue that multiple temporalities 'are diffractively threaded through and are inseparable from one another' (69). Back to the novella with its scenes of time and being. It chronicles the experiences of victims of colonial violence including nuclear attack. It is all focused on 'one particular space-time point', Nagasaki. The protagonist of the novel '"travel hops"' from one space-time point to another — Nagasaki, the US Air Force Base, the first test site, the colonisation of New Mexico. The point is to 'take responsibility for re-membering' the victims (70). The story covers nationalism, colonialism, violence and temporality among others, not to try to make sense of them to construct a rational story but to 'take hold of the radical possibility of the undoing [of the bomb at Nagasaki]. It is not just a time travel novel where a unified subject returns to a past. The point is not to set time right, but rather to undo universal time and its linear progress, questioning 'modernity's unified notion of self and what it means to be human'. 'The travel hopper must risk her sense of self', through 'embodied material labour' to cut through colonial thinking, to understand the inhumanity of the bomb by tracing it to the violences of colonialism in more specific material entanglements. This is not easy In the late 20th century, the idea of the quantum eraser developed. Barad wants to rework the idea by 'paying close attention to the material labours entailed' (71). You add a measuring device [particle detector]   to a two-slit apparatus and then particles do go through one slit or the other. Now you erase information about which slit is chosen after it's gone through — and then a diffraction pattern appears. This seems to show 'you can determine after-the-fact whether the particle has  gone through one slit or  the other… Or through both slits at the same time'. Initially it was claimed that this is evidence you can change the past. Barad says it tells us that really, it's ontology, and  means 'the past remains open to future reworkings'. This is evidence for 'a relational ontology that runs counter to a metaphysics of presence', 'empirical evidence for a hauntology'. Interestingly, the diffraction pattern is not immediately evident after erasing information, so it is not that the original diffraction pattern has returned. Instead we have a different one, but 'if and only if the experimenter is clever enough to know how to trace the existing entanglement' (73) — human labour to trace entanglements and work them out 'is a necessary step'. What the experiment really shows is that 'entanglements survive the measurement process… and… material traces of attempts at erasure can be found in tracing the entanglements'. It's not the case that all traces of the past have been erased. Instead erasure, a 'material practice', itself leaves a trace, and has itself contributed to 'the very worlding of the world'.  There is no final erasure but traces of it, included in the process of materialisation. This challenges the Newtonian concept of time as a continuous flow, which is what underpins 'the possibility of erasure without trace'. An interpretation 'that seems to be in better accord with the empirical evidence' is that the past is never finished, because 'the world holds the memories of its iterative reconfigurings'. Each configuring is 'sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming' [that is leaves a trace] and we must take this into account 'in an objective (that is, responsible and accountable) analysis' (73). The atomic past haunts the present and can be discovered 'in the thickness of the here and now'. We can see this by looking at the Fukushima power station disaster which is 'directly entangled with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki'. Japan was convinced to develop nuclear energy after the war, but the civil program also helped develop the nuclear arsenal — an example of a material haunting [exaggerated to argue that the past 'is literally swirling around with the radioactivity in the ocean'] (74). Less dramatically, we can see that the history of nuclear energy and weapons, nationalism, racism, global exchange, water systems, plate tectonics and all the rest of it provide 'an ongoing material history'. [Why wouldn't normal material history deal with this, and maybe even assign some priorities? Back to the novel with an extract (74) of how multiple temporalities are present [the protagonist travel hops]. This is a 'pointed contestation of official museum history' [another strawman I suspect], and of all attempts to describe objective reality from above — 'the god's-eye view… The view from nowhere' (75). While an official photo can show an aerial view of the destroyed city, it cannot tell us about 'the structure of the void' and all the personal and historical elements in it. So photos do not show the bare facts of history but rather 'a record of erasures'[frames reality — old-fashioned photorealism is being rebuked here]. The novelist can retrace these entanglements, however. Colonialist assumptions of space and time can be disrupted [she offers another dubious link to quantum theory by referring to photos of shadows left on walls by incinerated bodies and asks 'where are the edges?',referring to Grimaldi]. The novelist also raises the issue of the race of the museum visitors, the entanglement of colonial history that led to the bomb being tested in New Mexico. We get from the novel the notion of how boundaries are materialised and sedimented, how violence plays a part including erasures [we need much more discussion of the other social factors as well, not just committed feminist activism]. We can see a space for new possible histories. Colonialism is 'tied to logics of the void' (76). Occupying land was justified after travel and discovery uncovering population voids as in terra nullius. It helps colonial avoidance [get it?]. The void was also central to Newton and his natural philosophy, arguing that space was indeed a void, with matter as discrete and finite. The void is 'literally universal'. This is linked with the notion of property and the apparent absence of 'energy, work and change', something that 'literally doesn't matter' (77) in this way, 'Newtonian physics helped consolidate and give scientific credence to colonialist endeavours' which saw  colonised lands as 'de-void of persons in possession of culture and reason' [a note apologises for this rapid trot through history and refers us to several other works] Quantum physics questions the existence of zero energy states, because indeterminacy allows fluctuations even 'of the quantum vacuum'. Vacuums fluctuate with 'indeterminate vibrations' because they are 'filled with all possible indeterminate yearnings of time–being'. Voids tell us 'stories of creation and annihilation' which we need to understand. Another way of seeing this is to talk of the existence of 'virtual particles… quanta of the vacuum fluctuations', where virtuality refers to 'the indeterminacy of being/nonbeing, a ghostly non-/existence'. Nothing can be free of ghosts. Virtual particles do not exist in space and time but are found 'between being and nonbeing' (78) [pretty much like Deleuze] [but then] 'there are an infinite number of possibilities, but not everything is possible' [quite so, so what limits possibilities, what of compossibility?] This goes to show that indeterminacy also affects non-matter or the void Such indeterminacy may 'in fact be the source of all that is'. The right levels of energy create particles out of vacuums, giving virtual particles enough energy to emerge, and vice versa, where particles go back into the vacuum 'emitting the excess energy'[a note tells us that this is what happens when new particles, especially antiparticles, are created in quantum accelerators]. We can talk of birth and death and finite lives for inanimate beings — indeed quantum field theory is an explanation for  birth life and death, says a physicist [another rhetorical slip between particles and humans]. Matter is inseparable from the void [the actual from the virtual]. If we take an electron, a point particle with zero dimensions 'completely devoid of structure' we can see troubling implications. The electron is not an isolated particle 'but is always already inseparable from the wild activities of the vacuum' (79). As charged particles they can touch and be touched in the form of 'an electromagnetic intra-action' [this apparently explains the solidity of objects in the macro world, because of electromagnetic repulsion holding things in structures?]. Electrons both emit and interact electromagnetic fields — 'self touching intra-action'. This has caused problems in physics because it produces monstrous behaviour, including suddenly emitting virtual photons to carry the electromagnetic field only to reabsorb them. Some physicists have called this perverse, providing unacceptable answers to routine questions about the mass of charge of the electron — Barad says this is seen as 'not simply troubling but a moral violation' [feminism haunts all the stuff about touching oneself of course]. Other things are involved in this intra-action, leading to 'a virtual exploration of every possibility, an infinite set of possible ways of self touching through touching others in all possible ways'. People like Feynman have a tempted renormalisation of the electron's 'queerness, its unruliness' suggesting that a bare electron is dressed with various contributions until it becomes finite. That still implies an infinite number of possible interactions, and suggests that 'even the smallest bits of matter are an enormous multitude' with multiple virtual interactions. There is a further implication that 'there is no such thing as a discrete individual… The 'other"… Is always already within' (80). Indeterminate matter challenges the foundations of being and nonbeing. Derrida apparently says something similar, noting that identity involves the possibility of difference, as a very condition of the self. For Barad 'all "selves" are not themselves but rather the iterative intra-activity of all matter of time – beings… Dispersed/diffracted through being and time'. It is 'undecidable' whether we see this as an implosion of otherness or dispersion of self. Matter is enfolding, involution [as in Deleuze?], self touching and this incorporates otherness. Such indeterminacy opens up possibilities and is 'at the core of mattering'. Indeterminacy is a condition for possibility of all structures. Nothingness [as normally defined, really virtual reality]  is an 'infinite plenitude'for QFT. This helps us develop a counterhegemonic politics. [a very abstract one] Back to the novel and how colonisers are forced to cultivate wildernesses. The protagonist comes to full realisation at the ground zero of the very first atomic test. This is travel hopping rather than using conventional chronology. It is 'a time–diffraction tale, an embodied pilgrimage', tracing material entanglements, hinting at all possible histories just as physicists have suggested. Re-turning is troubling. We have loop diagrams in QFT, 'calculation devices representing processes' which return. These loops cause trouble for the normal conceptions of space time matter [with a Feynman diagram on 81, illustrating vacuum fluctuations leading to creation and annihilation of electron–positron pairs. It is of course a normalised diagram and in real quantum theory there is an infinity of infinities of possibilities. We can map the journey of the novel's protagonist with a similar diagram, risking a 'self–energy intra-action' [counteractualisation ?] which will transform herself from victim to survivor and identify with the other survivors — 'touching oneself involves touching Others'. Apparently, this shows that 'revenge doesn't make any sense'. This is different from conventional history [another extract follows, referring to 'swallowing' an event]. This might represent the serpent biting its tail, or an attempt to embody events and feel them in your gut, or perhaps it refers to a transfer of self from victim to survivor, and undoing of the self, 'touching oneself through touching all others' (82). There is risk involved in sharing vulnerability and invisibility, and realising the dreadful effects on the self.  [Another extract follows, imagining seeing the first test. The wilderness was apparently 'forced into silence' but of course this is not a void, but rather murmurings of possibilities. She realises that animals and plants also suffered, that there was a tear in the very fabric of the world [an agential cut it might be called elsewhere] and that consequences include wounding others not humans. Landscape is an active force, 'the time- being marked by its own wounds and vitality', itself troubling boundaries between things like the Earth, human beings, human and nonhuman. It is a 'landtimescape' [it has a history, strata] . Memory is not just a subjective capacity but is 'written into the worlding of the world in its specificity', in sediments. [Bergson's better]. [Another excerpt, comparing the damage to the landscape with the casualties in the war] we need to do 'respect for justice and non-violent mourning' when we re-member. We re-turn with our body [somehow sensing the victims in a place]. [Another extract helped her forget her life and imagine an alternative one, not a victim]. This shows 'desiring im/possibilities' and response- abilities for events, even if this risks a sense of self. [Another extract shows the difficulties of mourning her schoolmates]. The void of Nagasaki is linked with another at the test site to explore im/possibilities. When we confront the void, we have to question its meaning, which 'must be asked over and over again with one's body' (85). Ground zero is not empty but full of im/possibilities, not to mention all the animals and plants and future victims. All these are subhuman or nonhuman others for 'colonial and racialised violence'. There were 19,000 people living in the radius of the test, which for some reason is not mentioned in the novel. [well--maybe you can't be reponssible to everything and everyone after all?] The novel addresses what it is to be human. Not our distinctiveness from nonhumans or sub- humans, but 'our relationship with and responsibility to the dead, to the ghosts of the past and the future' (86) [a note suggests that this is not exceptional to humans after all  'since all time – beings mourn']. It is not performed by a liberal humanist subject. It is a matter of 'tracing entanglements of multiple time- beings', and seeing how the self is also constituted in this ontological reconfiguration. It brings together different elements of nothingness and traces their entanglements. Commitments like this should be a life practice [!] of tracing 'the entangled violences of colonialism, racism, nationalism'. We need to re-turn, undo the notion of the human 'founded on the poisoned soil of human exceptionalism' [a note thanks among others Haraway for this imagery]. This is not to privilege everything else over humans, but simply to 'begin to come to terms with the infinite depths of our humanity' and having done so investigate 'the infinitely rich ground of possibilities for living and dying otherwise'. [Then move on with your career, I suspect] Back to social theory