Notes on: Dolphijn, R & van der Tuin, I (2012) New Materialism: interviews and cartographies.  Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press Dave Harris [good collection of new materialists incl DeLanda] Interview with  Karen Barad [D and T]. New materialism was first outlined by DeLanda and Braidotti. It argued that the mind was 'always already material '(48) or  that there were '"naturecultures" for Haraway. It opposed transcendental and humanist dualist traditions in cultural theory, although these approaches still produce debate, for example in recent work by Butler. Dualism is reduced by thinking of 'the travelling of the fluxes of nature and culture, matter and mind, and opening up active theory formation'. Barad's emphasis on quantum forces seems to be similar — agential realism wards off dualisms and so does intra-action. It is an 'immanent enfolding' of matter and meaning (49). Is it the core of your critique? [Barad] First, 'I'm not interested in critique' which is overrated, overemphasised, and over utilised to the detriment of feminism', as in Latour's article. It is no longer right for the situations we face. It's too easy, especially if it no longer involves 'reading with care'. Reading and writing are also ethical practices which critique misses. Europeans might understand critique differently. It is too often not deconstructive, 'the practice of reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without', but just destructive, dismissive, 'a practice of negativity', distancing and othering. Latour suggests we use Turing on the critical instead, a nuclear metaphor where a chain reaction explodes with ideas — but this is too 'chilling and ominous'. She prefers instead Haraway on diffraction 'reading diffractively patterns of differences that make a difference', in a way that makes it 'suggestive, creative and visionary' (50). She discusses this in chapter 2 of the 2007 book. She acknowledges that insights are to be read through one another to build new ones, but that there is an intrinsic ethics 'not predicated on externality but rather entanglement'. The idea is to produce inventive provocations but these are 'respectful, detailed, ethical engagements'. Entanglement does question dualism, including nature/culture, matters of fact/matters of care, which are currently dealt with in separate academic divisions and a division of labour. This makes diffraction patterns difficult to see. Her keynote at a recent conference [at Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ] commented on the 'innovative revamping of their humanities program', proposing that we use the sciences to rethink humanities. However, they seem to think in terms of a synthesis, but this implies they are already separated not entangled, and would invite the old dualism again with values and culture on one side and fact and nature on the other. This would be analogical thinking, involving mirror images between sciences and humanities. She told them an anecdote about doing fieldwork on the high-energy physics community [by a certain S Traweek], where a physicist was admiring fractal images, and saw their beauty in that they illustrated the same patterns everywhere.  Feminists similarly are often 'not trained to look or take pleasure in everything being the same, but to think about differences'. We need a shift of geometrical optics from mirroring and sameness, reflexivity and image, which separates you and the mirror, the subject and the object. Instead we should shift towards diffraction, physical optics not geometrical optics, which treats light as if it were just a ray. Diffraction allows you to study 'both the nature of the apparatus and also the object' (52), the nature of light and of the apparatus. We can learn a lot about diffraction from quantum physics There is a difference between macro diffraction and quantum diffraction, so we can develop the metaphor that Haraway has given as to add nonclassical insights. Interference is replaced with entanglement, which is 'an ethico-onto– epistemological matter'. Entanglement produces a phenomenon. Objectivity is not about accurate images of the world, but about accountability to marks on bodies and to taking responsibilities for entanglements 'of which we are a part' [but isn't that all of them?]. We can also consider insights from outside of academia in diffractive reading [Any? New Age?]. We need to be attentive to what gets excluded as well as what 'comes to matter' (53). As another example, she taught a lecture course on feminism in science which had science students as well as humanities social science and arts students, and they were discussing scientific literacy: there is a big programme in the USA to increase it but it seems difficult to do, and is still found mostly among scientists and engineers. She thinks a different kind of literacy is required, including 'consideration of the ethical, social and legal implications': that should not just come 'after the fact' — current bioethics for example just examines imagine consequences of given projects. But this is 'based on the wrong temporality', so  asking questions is too little and too late, 'because ethics, of course, is being done right at the lab bench'. We should approach the issue of scientific literacy through asking what apparatuses of bodily production are involved, and this would involve far more than scientists. [D and T] who is the agent in agential realism? [Barad] she wants to avoid agent or even actant as insufficiently relational. We risk seeing humans as the only agents who can then grant agency to nonhumans, due to the 'gravitational force of humanism' (54) in the question. Agency is not a property, it is not held, but should be seen as an enactment 'a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements'. This does not involve liberal notions of choice but rather possibilities and accountabilities, 'including the boundary articulations and exclusions' inherent in these practices. As to how agency works, that is a matter for the 'specificity of the particular practices', although we can consider 'the space of possibilities' [surely infinite?] . Butler was wrong to suggest that agency requires 'a clash of apparatuses' [the 'contradictory norms of femininity']. Instead, there is no need for a clash of apparatuses 'because intra-action is to begin with never determining, even when apparatuses are reinforcing'. They entail exclusions which 'foreclose determinism'. However once determinism is foreclosed, free will is limited [about time this was recognised]. This is a better way of thinking it instead of an opposition between determinism and free will, which follow each other like cause and effect. People need to talk about causality again for example trying to find out causal relationships behind clusters of cancer in particular populated areas, for example to identify local contaminations. There are different kinds of causalities. Intra-action helps us rethink those. Intra-action is not just a neologism moving from interaction, it is instead 'the new understanding of causality itself' (55). Agency 'is about response – ability', possible mutual response. This requires us to attend to power imbalances. Agency means the possibility for 'worldly configurings', as enactment. Nonhumans are involved. The point is not to democratically distribute agency to humans and nonhumans, because 'there are no agents per se'. Specific interactions show us power imbalances in a field of forces. We miss this if we localise agency in human subjects alone, and we cannot take account of the power imbalances it involves. For example she found an article on avian flu and the 'bio – geopolitics of potential flu pandemics'(56). The analysis looked at 'agential entanglements of interacting humans and nonhuman practices'. [looks like classic ANT]. Governments are surveying migratory birds and small chicken producers, but the empirical data suggests other causalities, like the diffraction patterns of large-scale poultry production which increases the density of birds and thus of viruses. Industrial production and international trade and transport 'are among the various agential apparatuses at work' (56). Causality is not interactional but intra-actional — policy based on additive causes misses key factors [which can be included in further interactions, I would have thought]. It would be wrong just to attribute agency to humans. This would lead to inadequate counting. Complex material practices also contribute, which are not attributable to organisms or people. Haraway has another example referring to research by Smuts on baboons in the wild. She began by keeping a distance from them so as not to influence their behaviour, as 'the condition of objectivity', but this prevented her doing adequate observations because it resulted in behaviour that looks strange to the baboons. She had to be responsible instead, and this was also objective, although it did not require distance. She learned to be 'completely responsive to the nonhumans' (57), 'she became a good baboon citizen' [all the paradoxes of going native, and engaging in inauthentic relationships because you are the only one doing research]. 'They left her alone… Making it possible for her to conduct research' (57) [very naive]. [D and T]. You stressed diffraction, but how does that relate to your treatment of Böhr, and other scientists? You seem to read them 'very affirmatively', rather than agreeing or disagreeing. What about the generational implications among feminists who are keen to avoid Oedipality relating to Masters and affirming their creativity, including the way they have negated other work. How does diffraction steer between duty to Masters, and [extending] them? [Barad]. She's glad they have carefully read her work. She agrees that she is not seeing Böhr's work as scripture, nor just being a dutiful daughter. She wants produce something new well still being 'very attentive'(58 )to Böhr [which is evading the question really]. [D and T] Gender has been seen as a concept with a particular 'Anglo – American and linguistic' legacy. This is sometimes seen as requiring a rejection of biological determinism or essentialism, or any fixed sexual ontology. Guattari himself once said that he and Deleuze do not speak specifically of sexuality, but rather refer to desire, to avoid any physiological reduction. This also involves elements beyond the individual, in social and political fields Is this how you see the concept? You do not refer to psychoanalysis, but rather to physics [Barad]. She's sometimes been accused of not talking about women or gender specifically and thus not being a feminist. She is glad she can now operate at a new level where 'Eros, desire, life forces run through everything, not only specific body parts' (59). Matter is not a substrate for the flow of desire but is 'always already desiring dynamism, a reiterated reconfiguring, energised and energising'. The question is how matter comes to matter, 'makes itself felt'. This is a feminist project, even though women might be absent. There are others who agree — Kirby, argues that 'matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers'. A certain N Davis has also agreed. She tries to make this 'vivid'in her chapter 7, although feminists have been less engaged. Nevertheless this chapter on the physics of things cannot be assumed to be relevant to humanities or social sciences. Physics has a broader concern than is usual. If you work through the issues you will see there are some 'important ways for rethinking some key feminist issues about matter and space and time and so on'. First a crash course on quantum physics [particles and waves, two-slit experiments and so on] (60f —  starts with talking about diffraction a lot more in the macro world, with amplification and cancelling, and the differences with electrons. She also talks about another which-slit device which mounts a slit on a spring [a gedanken? propsed by Einstein with predicted contradictory results?] so that any particles going through impart detectable momentum. Böhr's argument is that such a mechanism revises the whole apparatus, 'that the ontology of the electron is changing depending on how I measure it', and that this arises because we are taking the objective referent to be the independent object, and we should be focusing instead on the phenomenon. 'When we change the apparatus… We are investigating an entirely different phenomenon' {doesn't seem to have a virtual level in there at all?}]. There are important feminist lessons, which are already built in. She has taken insights from feminist theory in order to read them through physics, including 'going back and seeing if agential realism can solve certain kinds of fundamental problems in quantum physics' (62). She cites 'the fact that it is robust enough to do that', so feminist theory has important things to say to physics. She probably made the wrong choice to publish the results in a feminist book because this limited the engagement of physicists, but then 'practices of publishing are always political' (62) [then stuff on the dispute between Böhr and Heisenberg, the uncertainty principle explained by ontological indeterminacy — 'there are no inherent properties… Before the measurement intra-action… There are no things before the measurement… The very act of measurement produces determinate boundaries and properties of things' for Bohr. The dispute was actually resolved, so we can now 'do experimental metaphysics' (63), showing there is no longer a boundary between physics and metaphysics or philosophy. The thought experiments are now technologically possible. They have 'designed out' Heisenberg [and Einstein?]. A laser beam excites a rubidium atom 'see, there is already talk of desire in physics!' And when these enter the which slit detector they revert to their ground state by emitting a photon, which means no observer disturbance. This means 'you can now show that Böhr is right not Einstein'] referring specifically, I think to Einstein's doubt about the coherence of quantum physics].  There are 'amazing' implications for feminists from erasing information [erasure is actually done by adding a retractable plate which absorbs the photon]. When this happens, there is a diffraction pattern. Which might be '"delayed choice"' — 'I am able to determine its ontology [wave or particle] afterwards'. Some physicists have said this means 'we have the ability to change the past' (65) but this 'a very convenient kind of nostalgic fantasy' will be a seductive one — we'd all like to be able to change the past. However, more careful examination shows that the original pattern is not being restored, there is no complete erasure. Implications for time follow 'using the insights from feminist theory, from poststructuralist theory, and things that Cultural studies has been telling us' (66) — we are seeing 'the making of temporality', that time is not universally given but is 'articulated and re-synchronised through various material practices', so that time only makes sense in the context of particular phenomena. 'Physicists are actually making time in marking time', but past, present and future are really entangled. We have discovered 'intra active entanglements' as 'the only reason we get a diffraction pattern again'. The old one does not just return, but a new one is created. So 'the "past" was never simply there to begin with' but is 'iteratively reconfigured and enfolded [with present and future] through the world's ongoing interactivity'. Causality is interactivity, not the usual billiard ball model. This produces 'possibilities for reparation' rather than erasure. We cannot undo the past, although the past and the future 'is not closed'. The past is open to change and it can be 'redeemed' (67). It does have 'sedimenting effects', though,  which cannot be erased, and this memory 'is written into the world'. Schrader argues this in the pfiesteria paper — showing that 'time is differently made/synchronised through different laboratory practices. She argues that memory is not a matter of the past, but recreates the past each time it is invoked'. This is the sort of thing she has learned from diffracting quantum physics and feminist issues. This shows her passion is grounded and [also?] based 'in questions of justice and ethics' (67). She has brought 'an important materialist sense of Derrideann notions of justice to come' [followed with the Derrida quote about how the past has never been present, while justice involves responsibility, both to ghosts and to those not yet born] [so is this still an interview?]. Overall she thinks responsibility 'entails in our active engagement of segmenting out the world in certain kinds of ways and not others'. We have to be attentive to this process because 'each intra-action materially [is] redoing the material configurations of spacetimematter' (68) we are alway reworking past present and future, which 'says that the phenomena are diffracted and temporality and spatially distributed across multiple times and spaces', which requires a different sort of understanding of social justice as well as causality. She has not just learned something from physics 'and applied [it] to feminism', there is 'something [more] fundamental '(68). [D and T] Post-humanist theories are said to lack an ethics, and a connection with physics will emphasise this. Your ethics is central, as in your post humanist performativity material, although that also seems to imply 'cases in which meaning can be nonmaterial, idealistically travelling through space while not being affected by matter', something not entangled. [Barad]. For her, 'questions of ethics and of justice are always already threaded through the very fabric of the world', with mattering (69). Matter and meaning 'cannot be severed'. Matter is an expression or articulation of the world 'in its interactive becoming' and bodies come to matter through this activity or performativity. 'Boundaries, properties, and meanings' are also differentially enacted. Differentiating does not just refer to radical exteriors, but also to 'agential separability', not othering or separating but 'connections and commitments'. Ethics is not about responding to a 'radically exteriorised other' but rather about mattering and responding to mattering [actually 'the ability to respond'], 'an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self' if we think ontology, epistemology, and ethics together, the world is 'always already an ethical matter' [almost a tautology]. [D and T] you are in the same post Kantian boat as Badiou and Meillassoux , and this must involve revaluing various disciplines without 'falling into the traps of disciplinary, multidisciplinary team, interdisciplinarity or post disciplinarity. [Barad] I'm not writing a manifesto. Haraway meant her manifesto ironically. Agential realism is not a manifesto because it does not assume everything can be made manifest. It is instead 'a call, P, a provocation, a cry, a passionate yearning for an appreciation of, attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world'. Ethics and justice are at the core of her concerns, and run 'through "my" very being, all being' (70). We do not just add ethics — it is 'the very nature of what it means to matter'. Barad page