From Rhizomes 30 (2016) Special on Barad Dave Harris Bryant,L.  (2016) Phenomenon and Thing: Barad's Performative Ontology Rhizomes 30  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e11 Barad develops a fully material performativity to escape the necessary entaglement of human consciousness (in Kant this time) -- plasticity. ' Phenomena take place regardless of whether or not anyone is there to witness them.' (no p,] [not unlike Delanda then] [But doesn't this make intra-actions between things themeselves unknowable? Have to be deduced --effects of light on rocks etc]  Also specific for individuals --  'the properties of an entity are the result of a dynamic genesis, a becoming, in tandem with the world about them that produces these properties' but what of general properties too? As in epigenetics not rigorous coding. Supported by res. Lab experiments when the scientist is creating a reactive environment, observer is part of the field etc. Phenomena are not just there for us though, their intra-actions for Barad are not 'only true for us' , but occur whenever the fields operate. So representationalism in all forms is to be junked. However, when we choose we are reponsible, and relationism means responsibility is also widespread Nevertheless he prefers object-oriented ontology, actually range of diffrent ontologies. There is still debate about whether objects have essences or whether they are all only relational. Barad too keen to reject essences? No more foundational than relations and risks 'neo-positivism' in thinking only the given exists, nothing behind the phenomena, no non-phenomenological  eg theoretical entities. Admitting things as separate adds qualities outside relations, including unintended consequences. Her notion of things is the common sense one -- but what of philosophical notions of essences, as when things are powers or capacities not properties. Hence -- we never know what a body can do etc NB finds inconsistencies -- matter and meaning both entangled and relational but meaning is also quietly limited to humans -- are interrelations between gas moelcules on Saturn meaningful? Meaning is fused with matter but not vice versa:  'We can readily agree with the proposition that "all meaning is fused with matter", while we cannot concede the thesis that "all matter is fused with meaning"'. Dolphijn, R. (2016)  Critical Naturalism: A Quantum Mechanical Ethics  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e12 Barad's rejection of critique appears in the article with van der Tuin, directed especially against destructive critique. This is unethical. Haraway emphasises situated knowledges rather than outside perspective, and feminists should know while we realise and actualise. Feminist activist politics implies that the object of knowledge itself as an actor and agent, since there is no hard separation between nature/culture, human and animal. She also points to new forms of subjectivity, combining nature and culture in a permanent emergence [apparently, 'Melanesians' use the term 'dividuals' not individuals to refer to this]. Nature also appears as a subject in Barad via 'non-dualist deconstructivism'. Thus critical theory 'has always – already  been of the earth'. Potential realism goes beyond the usual notions of subjectivity and stresses ontology rather than searching for different views — it involves sameness 'every reality is and can only be agential' and we can only study it through its contractions. Her critique of science is linked to naturalism via Rouse (Barad 2007), since scientific theories must also be accountable for practices. Potential realism shows a process of becoming as opposed to objectivity and the [Newtonian?]  laws of nature. Entanglement opposes dualism. Post-humanism is really 'critical naturalism' as she says in 2007, but this recaptures the feminist potential and links with others like Braidotti to oppose dualist thinking. In this sense quantum mechanics is 'necessarily a post human feminism' Braidotti agrees and insists on post-humanism as in biopolitics and Foucault on the history of sexuality, involving the care of the self, although this tends to individualism. Braidotti wants instead something more sustainable and ecological that does not privilege the human mind, Barad too:  critical naturalism is politically necessary because of eco-shock and the separation of subject from world. NB Whitehead also opposes dualism which he finds in Descartes, an excessive separation of body and mind. Which has produced the modern world. Barad concludes that her post-humanist elaboration of Böhr sees the human as a natural phenomenon in a relational ontology. Harman, G. (2016)  Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad's Ontology  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e10 Agential realism is ambitious as we saw, and there are far-reaching implications. The core of the argument is her chapter 4. The term realism is of course complex – there may be six different meanings. DeLanda will do, defining as realist philosophers 'who grant reality full autonomy from the human mind'. This is not Barad's conception though, because relations means mutual co-constitution not autonomy. So realism is about consequences, possibilities, interventions and responsibilities. Co-constitution is signified by interaction. It does imply a certain correlation of world and thought, particularly criticised by 'speculative realism' [which also seems to be connected to object-oriented ontology, represented by Meillassoux]. Barad does criticise Böhr for putting human beings right back in the centre of all that is, however, and this flaw is shared by Butler and Foucault who also see agency as only human, implying a nature culture boundary. Her position corresponds to Whitehead and Latour as a '"relationalist"' and this forms the basis for her post-humanism. However, there are obstacles Barad rejects the centrality of language because it is too realist, representational. We need performative standpoints instead, stressing practices of engagement with the world. The world itself establishes boundaries and performs, making agential shortcuts. When she turns to performativity [and her notion of discourse] she makes 'an ontological claim that no separation exists between humans and things but that everything co-constitutes everything else'. Individuals are therefore derivative, so are independent things, matter is just congealed agency, constantly being re-enfolded. 'The world is a self determining relational structure rather than a set of preexistent and autonomous individuals. It is a dynamic field of possibilities, a constantly folding and unfolding flux of agential shortcuts' this obviously opposes liberal individualism. However, problems arise with her notion of atomism in chapter 4. She refers to Democritus as positing atoms as the smallest unit, and links this with Böhr to argue that things are not ontologically basic entities with boundaries and properties, nor do 'words… have inherently determinate meanings'. But this addresses two different philosophical claims — reductionism in the first case, which prioritises physics over chemistry or other macroscopic realities. In the second case though it is a denial that there are any individual identities at all. This involves a 'terminological sleight of hand', since it's possible to believe in individual things without demanding that they be reduced to their smallest components. Barad sees this as 'irrelevant nuance' because both macro objects and tiny particles are derivative, produced by some primal dynamism, a dance of difference in which various congealments occur. This makes Barad a reductionist after all. Harman has long criticised 'undermining' whereby everyday objects have to be reduced to something more important. This sort of atomism is rejected by Barad because properties of compound things are not found in tiny subcomponents, and things seem to be robust even though their pieces change. However there is also 'overmining', where the object is 'too deep' to be the truth — there is nothing other than interaction behind their 'phenomenal character' so the thing 'is always what it appears to be' not some vague thing in itself. So there is no 'unexpressed reservoir that might lead to future change' and the world is static after all, change is just asserted. There is no inherent 'volcanic energy' that mean things can turn into something else. The entanglement of beings is primary. The only energy arises from the whole, the eternal 'dance of differences', but this involves another undermining — now there is some underpinning dynamic folding and unfolding. Overall 'reductionism enters not only through the back door, but through the front door as well'. Hird M.  The Phenomenon of Waste-World-Making.  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e15 [Barad light really, OK it can be made to fit if we translate the usual  stuff about complex variables in Baradian indeterminacy and material-discursive practices etc --  but makes no difference if we leave it out] We can consider an important inhuman inclusion – waste, 'a kind of earthly restratification', with unmanageable long-term consequences. There are implications for ethics, and we need an 'ethics of indeterminacy'. She wants to put Barad to work empirically, within feminist science studies. She likes the tendency not to separate ontology from epistemology, nor nature from culture, and enjoyed the attempt to develop empirical studies from agential realism (the brittle star). But if phenomena are always relational, what does this imply for the politics and ethics of waste? Waste is not exactly natural, given that the whole earth could be seen as full of useful waste products such as oxygen, or soils. Humans can turn anything into waste, and also into not waste. Douglas sees waste as allowing purity to be distinguished. But if everything and nothing can be waste, 'it is conceptually vacuous'. What we need are 'material – discursive constructions' to clarify particular relations. There is a certain thingification  of relations in Barad (2003) implying at least a partial autonomy of things, which 'obscures' the notion of phenomena as dynamic reconfigurings. Waste is not a thing in this sense, not just static and submissive but something which 'flows and mobilises relations' if only through the bacteria that live in it and the half-lives of some of the nuclear materials — it displays entanglements and relationalities. Similarly, the focus on phenomena leads us to examine material discursive practices and agential cuts: waste is a phenomenon. She is researching these agential cuts, researching mass production, anaerobic digestions, global transportation, cultural analysis and so on — the various apparatuses involved. A particular feature is that indeterminacy, at the beginning, somehow becomes a condition for the possibility of structures (Barad 2016). Schrader (2012) talks about measuring as a rendering determinate, but this process must always be occurring since matter is never settled and is radically open for Barad. Contributors include environmental studies professors, members of the public, waste management regulators, but it is not just humans, so world making is not just a matter of human measuring or knowing — the world itself theorises and experiments, making exclusions and inclusions. Determining waste is complex for engineers and there are lots of constitutive inclusions. They have become more technically sophisticated in management waste, for example in restructuring modern landfills with complex layerings, and in being able to predict outcomes [a matter of about a dozen variables]. Waste contains so many components, from plastic to food. Some are hazardous. Overall, waste is heterogeneous and a mixture of known, unknown and unknowable components and processes. There are also billions of bacteria working in unpredictable ways 'psychical, directional, stochastic, or chaotic'. They produce leachate, a mix of everything from heavy metals to various gases. This production again is affected by and large number of variables, some of which change over time. Leachate may percolate into neighbouring soil. Sometimes interactions produce new biological forms, sometimes unknowable ones. Engineers build conceptual and statistical models,, sometimes assuming a uniform distribution of the components of waste but these are never just reality itself. Barad describes a similar process of 'renormalisation in physics' (Barad ND in my system — she says 2012): this is a cut off process, involved in subtracting infinities to remove what is unknown. Waste managers do this, bracketing out indeterminacy, and 'this is necessary to the acquisition of knowledge' in theory building. This leaves bacterial forms that may be unknown and unknowable. These are sometimes rendered as matters of emerging concern, like new contaminants. There are social processes which are similar, agential cuts embodied in waste sorting, waste clearing policies, health discourse and so on. All these have to be traced. Waste is a form of re-layering, sometimes with an extremely long lifespan. This has unforeseen consequences. Some are described as side effects or residual risks, although Beck prefers to call it '"organised irresponsibility"': all these are agential cuts. Local disasters are not usually seen as expressing wider factors, but we are all now exposed to contamination. Nevertheless, generally, we are talking of a global phenomenon with limited prescriptability. There will be unintended consequences as the world experiments with itself, and unrealised effects such as thistles that absorb radiation and then get blown by the wind, or trees planted on landfill who managed to expire contamination. In this way, '"eco-solutions" are predicated on the differential sacrifice of inhuman beings as well as humans'. So ethics for Barad is about social obligations arising through phenomenal relations. Example of waste shows that our ethical responsibilities to future generations and to sustainability may be 'imprescriptible' (apparently a legal term meaning prescribing a statute of limitations for identification and assignation of blame). Barad also recognises this. King, K. Barad's Entanglements and Transcontextual Habitats  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e13 [Mostly bluffy waffly stuff welcoming Barad on indeterminacy because she's a bit of a cognitive tourist herself. Loads of rhetorical questions. Diffraction means taking notes from different people and tihnking about them. The thing is to meet and discuss stuff playfully] Barad's work is very fruitful and it might lead to a 'boundary – object-oriented feminist approach to new materialisms'. What does it mean to say that research demonstrates particular things, including the impact of drugs on feelings. The point rather is to use a series of motivations and affective states to try to build collectives to minimise damage and maximise flourishing [citing Haraway]. Does human affective arousal discriminate sufficiently between personal death and planetary death, for example. How should we attempt to alter the conditions in climate change? How does all our effort compared to the power of fossil fuel magnates? Perhaps there is too much emotion? Can it simply be a way of trying to align the way we think with the way nature behaves? [Apparently a question by Bateson]. Barad's stuff might support and encourage this effort, as does Haraway and Leigh Star. How much of a physicist or mathematician do you have to be to grasp the arguments? How does experimental metaphysics fit with climate change or a feminist responses to object-oriented ontology? [She is going to offer us 'gathering'], to 'engage diffractive practices' across a range of concerns. Examples include experiencing a conference where people argued that there were different sorts of biological coordination among complex systems, illustrated by 'using stop action multimedia of the British rock group Queen' and how they interacted with the audience. She was also 'enlisted' by discussions of object-oriented feminism, which included a wonderful demonstration of how data points turn into lumps and embody themselves. In particular she is interested in ' transcontextual tangles' and 'boundary objects' — they enable coordination and collaboration without conscious consensus, [they seem just usefully thought-provoking] they might be seen as enfoldings. She also wants to bring in Kirby on mathematical signs. It will not be a matter of facile analogy, of course. She learned even from a well-known failed Progressive governor, because such participations show what was intended to build collectives. This person was therefore diffracted. So was Bateson at the conference, dispersed through time and being, 'a version of Barad's diffractive methodology' — that is interdisciplinary. Her own descriptions of what went on shows how quotations can be interspersed as a diffraction array. It also helps break down 'too literal overreliance on her book'. She realises that she risks caricature[!] , but explains her notes as different sorting apparatuses and reframings, offering some form of logic even if it is 'non-coherent and materialising'. She intends to do what Barad did to Bohr. People from all sorts of disciplines were represented at this conference, it was intended to be 'maximally inclusive', but that only works sometimes. There were all sorts of emotions,'] tension, pleasure, disappointment. [Back to rhetorical questions] how do conversations work, how do similarities between colleagues appear, and why are they sometimes insulting. How does this fit in with responsibility and loyalty? Complex systems are slow to respond. What of autopoiesis? She thought it distasteful before even though it invokes poetry. This seems to have the paradoxical quality where closure of the system means it can also open to different environments. She wanted to talk to ['curious to be in the same space with' Maturana, who presented with his colleagues and showed how there are implications for their current practices [somehow involving family counselling being used as a technique to humanise organisation incorporations]. She felt lots of hauntings. She is this really feels memories. She found hauntings in another piece by Varela, who offered a definition involving conversation phenomenon, something experimental and nonrepresentational, a boundary object. She reads Chapter seven of Barad, which lies alongside a campus Sennett document on faculty affairs, relating to tenure track. They joke about whether feminists relate to reality, and involve some other bloke who is interested in quantum encoding of memories. They are calling into question the boundary between these different technologies. She later looks up the idea of experimental and finds it has all sorts of implications, summer relating to Le tour on nonhuman objects and work in object oriented ontology. [Apparently she puts weird terms into Google searches as well as looking up philosophical ones] She goes to a session on object-oriented feminism, and conversation triggers memories of Bateson. She feels like a boundary object. Lots of words are used that have forward slashes in them. She coined a new term'stigmergy' for feeling of being in among, experiencing self organising, indirect coordination, like the interactions of insects or flash mobs. Boundary objects have this. It is not only a mechanism but an effect. There are sometimes tipping points in seminars. No one is just as faithful disciple of somebody. There is a danger of simplification. She has lots of questions like why Barad prefers Bohr over Heisenberg, why she chooses indeterminacy and not uncertainty. It is to do with their use of superposition. Barad  also wrote a chapter in a book, apparently on a feminist approach to teaching quantum physics.  [Barad, Karen. 1995 "A Feminist Approach to Teaching Quantum Physics." Teaching the Majority: Breaking the Gender Barrier in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. Ed. Sue V. Rosser. New York: Columbia Teachers College, 1995. 43-75. Print.] She produced 3D computer animations. She notes that students can be marginalised or disillusioned. King thinks that's because students are sometimes too literal and they should engage in thought experiments. They should do gathering, together boundary objects. We need to pursue further experiment through these boundary objects, and she thinks that Leigh Star is a good one to follow. A colleague of hers said that students don't like the scientific approach, perhaps because science is masculine. She notes that scientists sometimes feel the same way about social science and humanities. The trick is to cultivate curiosities and develop multiple vocabularies and thought processes. She does this with Facebook friends. She has recently read an expose of a study of emotional health [seems to be an attempt to work out some scale of positive and negative emotions, and has led to some mathematical modelling involving 'non-linear dynamics'] mathematical models are suspected, others want to debunk it, including Sokal. Lots of other people are uncomfortable with other bits like a connection to Buddhism. She sees it as experimental metaphysics as well, needing to be taken seriously while not hyped. It's okay to laugh at noncoherence and it leaves people open to new perspectives and overall flourishing, just like Barad on enfolded possibilities. We should not restrict our notion of explanation, nor embrace moral panics appearing as social critique, or resort to political loyalties to resolve the confusion of cognitive schema. Instead we need Barad. We should celebrate indeterminacy.  H.Meißner. Conversing with the Unexpected : Towards a Feminist Ethics of Knowing.  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e05 [Defends Butler, denies theoretical universality. Says Barad should acknowledged paradoxes of the subject] There is a problem with striving for responsible relations with Others. We need to keep these possibilities and those of Haraway and Butler in 'permanent tension', since both poles of the paradox are necessary. Earlier feminists have argued that ethics is an integral part of knowledge production, so that research necessarily involves maintaining good relations with the subjects not treating them as objects of knowledge. Apparently, McClintock has applied this to research with corn plants, developing a close and loving relationship. Greater responsiveness in these relations is preferred instead of hierarchical exclusionary and violent ones. Barad is in this tradition and in order to make a better world, we need to refashion our idea of knowing. She relies on Bohr. Ethical and political questions are integral even to physics. They are not objective observations of an independent reality. Hence knowing is a material entanglement, intra-action. Relationality extends not just to humans or even just to living organisms. Separating knower and known object is anthropocentric. This is shared by social constructionism (citing Rouse), which overdoes it and sees scientific knowledge in general is contingent. But what is the implied 'we'? Not a detached human observer, probably not even a human subject. Entanglement denies any separability including linear causality. She sees instead entanglements as '"relations of obligation"' (Quantum Entanglements). Others are entangled with self. We require a non-humanist take because '"responsibility is not ours alone"' (Barad 2007). Central to ethics becomes not taking charge or giving reasons, but 'an ability to respond to Others'. There is a paradox and a tension, however. We are urged to engage in encounters with otherness which will even undo material effects of the past and future, but the 'protagonists and addressees of these ethical injunctions are a human "we"'. Even if we are trying to acknowledge that 'we' are not only humans, we still 'experience our engagement in the world in terms of first person narratives'. Indeed, Barad recognises the irony in us 'granting' agency to other beings [1 of her bleeding book chapters]. Acknowledging Others requires a specific subject, itself 'constituted through processes of othering', acknowledging the 'very demarcations and exclusions that constitute these Others'. [both emerge in modernity] The human subject is both 'decentred phantasm and protagonist and addressees of ethical demands' and this is a fundamental tension in feminist ethics. We know that ethical stances have been configured by various apparatuses, implying 'social/cultural meaning making', hence the specificity of feminist theory. Language seems pivotal for agency. On the other hand, we should not see everything as being shaped by social cultural meaning making [hence emergence or becoming?]. Barad offers us all sorts of 'interesting concepts and metaphors for working with this tension. The way forward might be found in an 'affirmative confrontation with the work of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler' to keep open contradictory perspectives [chiasms?]. We both need to understand the production of knowledge and elaborate new practices, which might even include fantasy and an imaginary. Barad's concepts and metaphors trouble the usual conceptions, but reworking assumptions is more difficult. Barad sees representation as 'access to the world' where words or concepts reflect pre-existing reality. Knowledge means vision. The theory mediates between objects and subjects as systematic knowledge, often based on observation and reasoning. There is a long tradition of feminist critique here, especially on the split between subject and object, summarised by Haraway using the term '"God trick"' which disavows entanglement and relationality and assume some self-sufficiency and disembodied stance. Haraway borrows from critique within the natural sciences to argue that we can actively arrange and transform the world. Even Enlightenment modes have been liberating. Of course these practices are saturated with power and power differentials have to be understood if there is to be political transformation. These arguments assume a social dimension, a 'we', responsible for deciding what is real. This also means a particular understanding of language which separates words and things, with concepts as mediators. Haraway questions but does not reject the possibilities, and suggests that we investigate 'material – semiotic apparatuses' [does she now!]. There is an ethical dimension to which concepts and metaphors we use. Being able to make a difference by changing the accounts or theories of the world, the classic promise of science still depends on 'the epistemic gap between words and things'. Haraway gets round this by seeing language as a performative force involved in materialisation. She also argues for a replacement of classic humanism with '"a non-generic humanity"', a displacement, so we can develop radical alternatives, but still using scientific practices. For example she reworks the idea of vision to argue it is particular and embodied, delivering partial perspectives and situated knowledges, for which we must become answerable. Theories become 'constitutive elements' of 'partial and limited realities'. Other agencies are also responsible for generating objects of knowledge — this is why humans need to be a modest witness. Barad might be offering the same idea to reconfigure sighting devices. The referent becomes a phenomenon, which means that theories and concepts are not just cultural artefacts, nor just reflections of an independent reality. They are instead constructed of the human mind that can be applied in particular experimental circumstances. This does not mean that a concept such as a photon is just a construct of the human mind, but nor is it observer independent. Her realist framework is based on phenomena which constitute particular entities — '"things – in – phenomena"'. With phenomena, the observer and the observed are inseparable, but this does assume there is nothing that preexistent these relations, nothing exterior to them. Yet there is still a notion of objectivity by seeing entities as local and relational, becoming determinate through agential cuts as local resolutions. These cuts are also entangled with what's left out. Causality and effect are not just simply temporal and continuous as a result. Agential cuts make things determinate and indeterminate, configurations with potential reconfigurations. Ontological separability inside of phenomena is '"agentially enacted"'. The apparatus plays a specific role to resolve ontological indeterminacy. However there may well be a residual 'epistemic space configured by the very understanding of language it is trying to undermine'. It is this that tells us that a particular term as a concept, or that there are certain conditions of possibility for experiments. There are 'particular modes of subjectification' implied in the understandings, coming from language. Ethically responsible practice in particular implies a specific human subject. The apparatus is a condition of possibility for objective description and causally significant, the reference here is to the difficulty of defining momentum and position of a particle and how this is only resolved in a particular apparatus of measurement. The momentum of a particle is a phenomenon, constituted in a measurement apparatus which enacts a cut. This is an intra-active achievement implying exclusion of other properties. This means that epistemology is inseparable from ontology. And also allows for apparently contradictory explanations — complementarity implies an inseparability of objects except when they are measured with experimental apparatus. Both complementary parts are necessary, and are ontologically connected. Barad wants to resist humanism in discussions of accountability, and uses relationality to reject the idea of independently existing individuals. She also sees agency as an enactment [all this is referencing the article in Dolphijn and Tuin]. But this still means that agency for the nonhuman can only be expressed as 'the desire of a specific [human] subject'. She wants to stress nonhuman agency to question existing '"power asymmetries"'. This needs further elaboration though because it implies that power asymmetries have a really important role, and may even invite the classical view that some groups or individuals have more power than others.[ She has not pursued that] The notion of the agential cut is important here, so that power asymmetries can be seen as 'effects of specific apparatuses', which are general enough to incorporate 'social structures and inequalities'. Here Barad 'resonates' with Foucault on the asymmetries of power stemming from unequal power relations, equally 'local resolutions within specific apparatuses' [she uses the term dispositive]. It is an ethical requirement then to make these apparatuses visible and open them to transformation — but who is to do this and with what desires and intentions? Questions of agency and responsibility are fundamentally altered. Research ethics, for example is not just about avoiding error but is a matter of being accountable for what we do in practices of knowing and becoming. Some of her earlier work is more conventional, saying that the particular cut is '"chosen by the experimenter"' [in Rossner's book, 1995], which seems to be humanist, involving human intentionality and subjectivity. She modifies this later to say it's not a matter of choosing, rather that we are already involved in material becoming, we have 'an agential part' [in 2007]. There is no human 'we' outside of interaction with specific apparatuses, no distinction between nature and culture. Yet there is also an appeal to the classic subject position of modern Western rationality in her notion of analysis. There is already an assumption that specific conditions have produced a subject that desires to know and an object or subject which is to be known, that concepts of the constitutive elements of phenomena, but if they are to allow us to access other possibilities and to change phenomena, this again 'implies a specific separability of knower and known and of signifier and signified'. Barad tries to understand this as a product of an agential cut that has provided these possibilities of human meaning making, but this also extends to the critique of human exceptionalism, which is also 'bound to notions of history, agency, and politics that find their conditions of possibility in [modern Western rationality]'. Ethical accountability assumes it is desirable, and this arises from a whole legacy of European history. This legacy also 'poses the social as an epistemic horizon' against which individual action is defined and experienced. Barad tries to de-centre the role of language in meaning making, but in her decentred ontology 'there is no subject of ethical invocation'. Specific apparatuses are required to make agential cuts to produce such a subject. But there are still possible arguments about apparatuses and what they might be, hence the need to look at Haraway and Butler as well, who have equally adequate apparatuses to explain ethical engagements. Haraway still embraces the notion of humanity is essential to critique and emancipation, even if it is not fully specified. This is shared with Butler. For both, we have been constituted as subjects that makes possible 'ethical epistemic and political commitment'. Although it might be violent or exclusionary, this means there is a specific agency which is required for our participation and our ethical desires. Haraway and Butler want to refashion these apparatuses. Haraway suggest we find imaginary metaphors to think about the possibility of different actors, but she also acknowledges that we participate in political processes as 'a self-sufficient subject founded on hierarchical dualisms, eurocentrism, and anthropocentricism'. Not even all humans enjoy these privileges. Haraway focuses on better metaphors, better stories, including science fiction, to reveal elements of our heritage such as Eurocentrism. Acknowledging others is risky, and reconfiguring of conventional notions are required. So her work is devoted to 'citing/sighting the presence of Others' who have been excluded from agency but who are nevertheless agenitive forces. Butler also questions whether a subject with agency must be assumed theoretically in any demand for political transformation. Her own view is that some versions of the subject are '"politically insidious" close ', and that coherent identities are only assumed in notions that there is a pre-given subject which is then placed in culture: the cultural context is already there. Nor is it the case that subjects exist with interests who then express them in relations with others — this depends on a phantasm 'an autonomous intentional subject'. Butler wants to argue instead that '"agency is always and only a political prerogative"'. This 'resonates' with Barad's critique of the human individual subject, but there are differences. Butler wants to rethink intentionality and politics via a post humanist account of human subjectivity. Barad wants to open new possibilities of responsiveness by reducing agency to human intentionality and letting matter play an agenitive role. Butler is performativity is better than seeing culture as writing on passive matter as in constructionism, but Butler still focuses far too much on human bodies and social factors, ignoring other aspects of materiality, which ultimately sees matter as a passive product of discourse. Butler is anthropocentric. Barad agrees with Butler that any phenomenon must contain 'an exteriority within… A constitutive outside' rather than absolute exteriority, but Butler does not develop sufficiently broad notion of the outside because of its Anthropocentrism and focus on language [with a suggested bit of Butler that might support this view]. This does mean she is no longer a social constructivist because there is something outside which has to be managed, but she still sees the outside of matter as derived from language or culture, without a dynamism of its own The may be an inconsistency here with Barad's engagement with quantum physics. It's not always the case that pointing out shortcomings means a theory is wrong or incomplete. Butler may be focusing on language in constituting or materialising phenomena, but she 'is not negating the possibility of other agencies', even though they may not be transparent in her theoretical approach. We can 'read [Butler] through Barad's terminology' to render it as a focus on agential cuts that constitute human subjects in language as local resolutions. Bodily and psychic dynamics are not captured but are 'exteriorities – within', and can themselves prompt ethical questioning of discursive orders — they are unacceptable, still present but excluded by linguistic intelligibility, causing us to ask how the unintelligible gets managed or rendered as monstrosity. So she focuses on local resolution that makes us human subjects and provides us with possibilities, but argues that this configuration is problematic, and asks how we can rethink the unintelligible and 'learn to engage in actual conversations with unexpected Others'. We can borrow Barad on Bohr here [for a more sympathetic reading]. For example complementarity might be used to check any drive for 'theoretical comprehensiveness or universal generalisability', so that we can critique theories if they claim to offer a complete vision, without rejecting them out right. 'The assessment of failure appears as an attribute of any theory… Theories necessarily produce exclusions' and we must make them accountable. However instead of 'aspiring to comprehensiveness' we might instead keep to the view that different and contradictory points of view 'can be considered as equally possible, or equally necessary' producing particular forms of agency and marginalising others. Barad might really be focusing on Butler's specific commitments, to an agency that can question 'an immutable ontology of sexed bodies', or her focus on specific social apparatuses of exclusion. She is interested in investments in the processes of realising sexed bodies. She focuses on the linguistic apparatus that does this. She is not making a general argument about any 'necessary dichotomy of activity/passivity or of cause/effect'. Suggesting that materiality is conceptualised in and for language, does not mean a clear distinction of passivity and activity. Arguing that gender indicates the apparatus of production to establish the sexes is not a matter of language turning into matter, or no more than Barad's arguments that processes are affected within experimental apparatuses. Instead, Butler's focus on the constituent of role of language is supposed to question the very 'constellation in which "language is what makes matter "matter — what makes it have significance in the political sense"' [citing Barad 2007]. Butler's exposes limitations and exclusions of a particular constellation of the political which organises subjects by language and excludes any other agencies. She wants to disrupt this ontological assumption that sexed bodies of the material basis for cultural gender. She is questioning discursive presuppositions of that materiality not negating materiality, calling a presumption into question rather than doing away with it, trying to expose its metaphysical and political underpinnings. All this is done with the political commitment, to initiate new possibilities, even '"new ways for bodies to matter"'. She proposes a theory to 'sight' a particular psychic economy produced by a regime of rationality, which includes the idea of subjects as having a coherent identity. Only some normative possibilities are engaged. Specific social and linguistic apparatuses exclude these possibilities, and they are also disavowed, relegated to the unconscious. Other possibilities are still there, even as a 'spectral presence' [and Butler does use the term haunting]. In other words, Butler can visualise other historical constellations which will enact human subjects differently, as a different 'we'. She does not see the split between human and nonhuman as some primary or intact dichotomy, but wants to deconstruct it, looking for what is ruled out when it is enacted. The same language that constitutes us in a particular way is also 'a specific space of possibility' so that we can respond differently to what is outside. Butler Haraway and Barad are all interested in making available new possibilities, through reconfiguring the subject, questioning conventional foundational assumptions. Butler focuses on 'psychic dynamics' that bind us to a particular type of body and subject, conditions for us to become a subject. Accessing those can open spaces of possibility by seeing them as exclusions. Similarly, Western rationality disavows entanglement and relationality for Butler, but the remedy is not just to acknowledge or avow relationality. It's not just an ethical demand to acknowledge the agency of Others. Instead we have to give up the whole '"first person narrative point of view"' and this will necessarily involve 'the loss of certain fundamental certainties about ourselves and our needs'. Spivak said that we need to unlearn our privileges, but this will necessarily involve loss. If we are to be an autonomous subject we have to disavow dependency. If there is a specific human responsibility in the current present for ethical stance, we will have to acknowledge the loss of this agency our heritage and the way we rework privileges. We have to invent entirely new forms of subjectivity by refusing individuality. We might even have to abandon the notion of the subject itself. However, practical engagement means we have to still maintain a 'privileging of entitlement provided by subjectivity'. There may be compelling arguments more three-way we should try to unlearn this privilege. But Butler and Haraway also make contributions ['sighting devices']. Any focus like this displaces or marginalises other apparatuses, but we should not aim for theoretical inclusiveness, rather remind ourselves of the necessary limitations of any approach. All these approaches are limited, but 'are equally necessary'. Olkowski, D The Cogito and the Limits of Neo-materialism and Naturalized Objectivity.  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e09 [Really good -- ie agrees with me on contradictions and inconsistency between the natural and the human, with implications for how science is inexplicable in Barad's ontology] Barad offers a kind of 'naturalistic objectivity' where objective judgements are those that are accountable to how the world really is. However we get to them through analysing practices that 'are empirical, historical, and socially situated'. A particular problem will arise with material–discursive practices, based on 'one account of a "quantum" reality. A book by Kukla begins with a familiar rejection of objectivity as some transcendental view from nowhere, and sees objective judgement as arising from various 'material and social contexts of epistemic practices'. Naturalistic objectivity takes objective judgements to be accountable to how the world really is. Any such account will have 'key components… Concrete practices (or performative); natural activities… Activities performed by natural beings and the natural world; concrete, epistemic practices that emerge bottom-up out of micro-practices; and naturalised metaphysics and ethics of the self; most importantly, genuine accountability to the real'. O's question is whether we can explain what happens when scientists are actually wrong — if objectivity depends on a performance, how can a scientist know if they are wrong. Kulka says that 'different judging selves or cogitos' are required to assess each other — there is still no transcendental position. However, 'knowledge never rises above knowledge of the practitioner, a historically and socially situated concrete self. What would make one approach objective? Kulka says that concrete historical and social selves must try to eliminate all traces of themselves and 'produce knowledge that is maximally reproducible' [so a kind of correspondence theory combined with a vote]. However, this will produce either a range of local knowledge is with dubious objectivity, or 'at most a generalisation'. All the local knowledges might just be variations of a single one anyway. O thinks it unlikely that anyone can theorise a common structure 'from below' and doubts whether we can decide that this structure is objective. We need an external [real, non-manipulable] standard. Eliminating all traces of one's historical self would be endless. Reproducible empirical results do not normally receive the status of objectivity in science unless they are combined with 'the existence of an external world whose properties are independent of humanity as a whole because they are encoded in eternal physical laws'. But to accept that might mean returning to a view from nowhere. 'Whatever route we take seems to be fraught with difficulties' Kulka thinks Barad is a good example, so we can examine it as a test. Barad accepts the term new materialist, and develops agential realism. She sees this as a break with the old humanist notions of agency [Dolphjin and van der Tuin interview], including the ironic suggestion that humans grant agency to others as some sort of property. O says if this is ironic, Barad must be implying that it is the opposite of what is really the case [a quibble about the term 'irony'?]. Barad still sees humanism as a matter of independently existing individuals who choose. Instead, agential realism is about possibilities, some of which are going to give rise to accountability following reconfiguration of material – discursive apparatuses, of course. [O thinks this abandons the notion of agency altogether] Barad's critique of phenomenology whose centre is conscious subjective experience [where is this?]. At least that questions the self evidence of bodily boundaries, mechanistic notions of embodiment, but cyborg theorists see this as ironic too, implying 'a fundamental opposition between what phenomenology us concern themselves with —[ being, subjective experience] — and what is real'. How then do we characterise human agency? Does it really necessitates independent individuals in liberal choice? What about subjectivity or the idea of a self? It is a mechanistic embodiment necessarily implied? How does agential realism become a theory without irony 'that is, one that gives an account of what is real'. The apparent opposition between agency and bodily boundaries leads to Barad on materiality. This is to be understood through the quantum notion of entanglement 'possibly the ultimate foundation of Barad's position'. So we need to understand quantum physics [which she summarises: atoms become particles once observed, and have a knowable position and momentum, but outside of observation it is a possibility wave, a wave function, and then, there is no change over time, no distinction between rest and motion. Once we observe the atom again particular possibilities are activated — such as sending waves through a slit, or merging two waves to produce a diffraction pattern]. Diffraction is 'a key metaphor for Barad's materialism'. Haraway thought of it first as a counter to reflection models, and says that diffraction causes serious problems for classical metaphysics, because it indicates superposition and entanglement. This looks impossible, but it is Barad's model ontology. She insists there are physical systems that are both particles and waves, and, by extension, phenomena that can be both discursive and material, nature and culture, no dualism. This might be an extension too far for O. Quantum reality is still disputed, still a mystery, especially the way in which waves collapse. Barad's position has to make it also possible for discourse to become matter. This requires a 'particular interpretation of quantum reality' — Bohr, although there are also 'a number of yet unproven possibilities'. So nobody knows how the world really is. In a further development, atoms can be observed, but not directly by human beings, but rather a device that makes a record, 'a collection of irreversible changes observed in the natural world'. This is the Copenhagen interpretation, developed at great length, and used to depart from Newtonian physics, which is 'not in question'. There are other quantum phenomena as well, though such as the quantum jump and the idea that quantum entities 'have a determinate size' [I'm not sure this is right, although there are limits to the size of a photon set by the impossibility of measuring it otherwise] In her example, a flash camera mounted on a tripod measures the position of a particle. There must be a fixed photographic plate. These circumstances actually define 'the concept of position' [as opposed to momentum, which requires a moving plate if I recall correctly]  for Barad, as a physical arrangement. There are problems, though if we think about positions as standpoints for human beings — they must also involve specific physical arrangements which explain 'the totality of their ethics or politics', maybe even make some impossible. This is one implication of the claim that theoretical concepts are material. [Shows the danger of witty neologisms and metaphors -- we can do it right back] Intra-action  takes place between the object and the measuring agencies — but this implies the apparatus is an agent, and this needs clarification. Barad thinks that the only alternative is to see things in themselves, represented by their phenomenal appearance, but there may be other possibilities. An allied issue arises with representationalism — 'belief in the power of words to mirror pre-existing phenomena while standing outside of or above the world' which is again seen as the only alternative to performativity. If concepts are 'actual physical arrangements' they do not rely on human ideas. This is implied by referring to them as discursive practices, material reconfigurings which produced both subject and object. Apparatuses enact what matters and what is excluded so they are an agency determining boundaries and properties, and they also actualise. Human involvement is itself 'meaningful or not on the basis of the determinations of apparatuses'. Iterative agential enactment produces both things and persons. So phenomena are ontologically inseparable interacting agencies, basic units, and are 'otherwise known as apparatuses' and as material performances of the world. Thus even causes and effects are produced by agential cuts, and measurement should better be understood as an entanglement between 'the interactive marking of one part of the phenomenon by another'. Apparatuses can include human beings, 'at least their physical bodies', but humans are effects of apparatuses, still influenced by the material configuration of the world. This makes humans the same as brittle stars which display 'a creative tension' between various effects. As the brittle star has no brain, it has no thinking cogito, it cannot mediate or represent, so it is the very model of interaction, enfolding bits of the environment and expelling bits of itself into the environment. It is not an autonomous entity, and not 'positioned inside a space time frame of reference' of any kind used in classical science. Instead its behaviour is better described as '"space – time – matter – in the making"'. It shows the inseparability of knowing and being. Back to Kulka. Objectivity is historically situated, and there are been different types through history. Each one has 'its own type of cogito, a judging self' these are correlated with a metaphysics and ethics of the self, a self which emerges out of encounters with science and scientific practice. These cogitos do different things — find what's essential, try and exercise the self, display expertise including technological expertise. This is not to say that objectivity is just a function of what scientists do, because they might be wrong about what is 'the case in the real world' [the old problem of corrigibility]. This is not really a rigorous standard [maybe], because selves cannot stand outside nature. Barad takes this to suggest that the only alternative is material interactive activity. This is in effect a denial that the issue is whether knowing is real, nor that removing subjective elements will guarantee it. It also denies the godlike standpoint. O wants to ask who is actually guilty of this and suggests the 'possibility that it is a strawman, a position held by no one in particular, but a convenient site of opposition'. O says later that Barad may not be describing 'the actual assumptions made by scientists of the pre-quantum era [I said this, especially this view that experiments don't throw up puzzling findings] Barad in particular agrees that concepts change over time, such as the concept of the atom, but sees this as arising from a change in apparatuses not cogitos, part of a general enthusiasm for technological advances which produce both objects and subjects. This is 'a rather dense material monism', which does not explain why technological advances happen at all. There must still be something more than a claim that something is self evident or transparent. 'Why would there even be science?' [I think Barad covers this by saying that the world resists us and bites back?]. Why do we still ask about the nature of reality? [Well, not all of us do, of course, especially the shut up and calculate merchants]. Barad contrasts the idea that nature is self-evident and transparent with quantum phenomena and the revelations of difference patterns and interactions. Science does not just reveal something that is already there. We are talking instead about the effective interactive engagements with the 'differential becoming of the world'. There is no need to think of us in Cartesian terms as a thinking being, because brittle stars also gain knowledge. However, O wants to ask whether material brains in humans do actually make a difference even though they are just material. Barad is not clear what the phenomenon actually is, and how it relates to entanglement, interaction, primitive relations, apparatuses, material discursive practices, all of them 'simultaneously ontologically and semantically indeterminate'. The phenomenon as a concept covers too much ground. It is quite a stretch from the specific meaning of entanglement in quantum physics — that involves no ethical questions or responsibilities. It also implies some 'order and organisation that greatly exceeds human existence and human capabilities', so how can we ground our human ontology in it? We can only do this by assuming that discourse is matter [or, like Kirby, that humans are natural beings making sense of nature as a representative of nature's writing]. This does away with the concept of mind and leaves only brains. Kukla agrees that it is an extension too far to see phenomena as basic units of existence with the universal ontological status, especially if there is a claim that this arises from a 'focus on particular events'. However, Barad does see differences in conceptions, say of the atom, although she 'claims that her version of quantum physics is a privileged practice the ontological structure of which suffices for all'. Relating to actual debates in physics, there is agreement that quantum facts are undisputed and that we can make predictions, but quantum reality is another matter and there is no theory, no agreement about whether we are describing real physical processes. 'Barad never raises this question', nor addresses numerous competing theories. Bohr's approach is 'only one of at least eight' including multiple universes. Phenomenology for Barad is humanist, representational, involving a 'transcendental ego with a priority knowledge of the world' but this is a caricature. It renders the whole split between noema and noesis as easily dismissed by the commonality between us and natural things as we encounter each other and affect each other. This is 'bizarre', but even Kulka says that for Barad objectivity arises from agential cuts, a kind of choice in setting up an apparatus, which involves a role for the self, especially a judging self. 'For Barad the self disappears into the apparatus that it sets up'. So all the stuff about enacting agential cuts might be saying no 'more than that the self makes a decision and from that decision something is revealed about the world'. Even in quantum physics human selves set up the apparatus, they do the cut, or at least make a decision that makes it possible. This is quite different from the actions of a brittle star who is 'mindlessly' responding to its environment. Human selves do mingle with their environment but in different ways than brittle stars. There are 'fundamental differences in interactivity' which means it's perfectly possible to make 'fundamental cognitive distinctions' between humans and animals, or quantum particles and human discourses. Entanglement relates to quantum phenomena, but discourse is a  human cognitive function: 'the two do not naturally entangle and no metaphor can make them do so' There may also be a difference between measured and unmeasured phenomena, what is possible and what is actual. Quantum objects possess no attributes, so they do not choose between real alternatives — the choice makes particular attributes real, so the observer is 'a cocreator of reality along with nature'. At least they 'invite [an] attribute to manifest itself in the actual world'. The issue of ethics raises the problem. Barad follows Levinas in suggesting that the self must respond to the other ['which can only be the apparatus']. This cannot be deduced from materialist ontology 'which fundamentally prohibits such a distinction': there is no discrete I which can be separated from interactive becoming. Any sense of self or Other is only 'the effect of the material interaction which alone could determine what is and is not possible'. Responsibility can only be 'material responsiveness', and subjects can only await the material regeneration of self and Other. The conclusion returns to the issue of how scientists know they've got anything wrong.  For Kukla, Barad says we should turn to the 'concrete historical circumstances that ground the judgement in question', yet this is also combined with general ontological and ethical claims based on 'one account of quantum reality'. She says that the world matters, which commits her to realism, a departure from Bohr. She might actually be a materialist or arealist — whatever, there are 'contradictions and consequences of a materialist or naturalist ontology and epistemology'. In particular, they have not dispensed with the concept of self or cogito. Rouse, J  The Conceptual and Ethical Normativity of Intra-active Phenomena https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e01 [difficult with lots of extraneous material, but centrally directed at the reduction of human exceptionalism,  dwescribed in terms of one-  and two-dimensionality!. H;;.e claims, does not mean we have to revert to classic humanism. I think this ends with a recommendation that we examine ways of life instead of individuals, which is really where sociology begins!]. There are different stages. Barad sees agency as not incorporating human beings even as concept users. This involves a different understanding of measurement and theory, and ethical accountability for consequences, including exclusions. However, there are still 'significant differences between humans and other agencies', especially when we consider the articulation of concepts and ethical responsibilities. However, this is not about isolated people but the 'larger worldly phenomenon', the 'we'. Nor need it reinstate a hierarchy between us and other agents. Barad chooses 'a metaphysics of phenomena', with the phenomenon as the primary unit. This makes her naturalistic. Semantic/epistemic and ethical activity is materially enacted within such 'naturalcultural' phenomena. Everything is enacted within phenomena including object boundaries and conceptual contents, reconfiguring is and enactments which include 'discursive practices'. Everything else risks denying agency to all but humans, a god trick. Articulations of phenomena include conceptual content 'both meaning and what is meant'. Cuts articulate boundaries and this is important in measurement, because a cut divides the objects and the agencies of observation. [At this point there is a long digression about an alternative account in Salmon, which apparently smuggled in lots of assumptions about the isolation of the different processes. Causal entanglement in particular 'requires further apparatus within the agencies of observation' {including theoretical determinations of sequence and so on?}. Observing and recording marks left on apparatus requires further interaction There is also a risk that we have to take space and time is given not configured within the phenomenon in order to clarify 'spatiotemporally continuous trajectories' which had embarrassing consequences, including denying causality to quantum mechanical interactions] Apparently, this highlights some qualities of phenomena. They are not just complicated articulated objects that do cutting, but have no outside boundary [even for Barad?]. They are thus 'articulations of the world from within' [which is gonna give us problems separating organisms from environments as we shall see]. What happens is that a particular agential cut makes some components matter differently — but there are still continual connections with the rest of the world, even if these are 'relatively insignificant' [really requires Deleuze on the haecceity here]. We can see some problems if we examine the brittle star as a phenomenon. It is a visual system with no central processor, and its optics 'is also thoroughly diffractive (and hence materially intra-active within viral earning photons', that is, not just responding to rays of light. It does have an intentional directness towards relevant bits of environment, involving '"life and death stakes"' if things go wrong. However, the brittle star is seen as both an entity and an enfolded phenomenon. The phenomenon continually differentiates between the entity and its environment, 'but neither side of that difference can be specified non-relationally'. The surroundings only become an environment in terms of a way of life: the difference between organism and environment is 'not a separation, but an iterative entanglement', the constant traffic across the boundary. [What seems to be implied is] a way of life is a particular [distinctive?] Material system with characteristic responses to changing circumstances. This is what makes [living?] phenomena different from autopoietic ones, such as convection currents in seawater. These currents 'stop rather than die', they do nothing to sustain themselves. Currents are interdependent with circumstances, but 'unlike the organism, it couldn't care less (or more)'. Caring need not be anything other than a complex pattern of response to perturbations. Organisms crucially self maintain differentiation from an environment. [A detour to another writer, Akins, introduces the notion of narcissistic detection of differences in environments, which means animals respond to thresholds not continuous changes. So organisms are worried about their own comfort and survival, not interested in trying to objectively grasp a range of states outside] Brittle stars respond with their entire organism, but this can only be 'a single integrated response, however multi dimensionally cued', a response to the overall environment, not two independently identifiable objects. An ornithologist is quoted to argue that it is better to understand environments not as some objective property of regions but rather '"the space defined by the activities of the organism itself"'. Organisms do not have separate properties except 'as integral to ongoing interaction with its environment'. Let's apply this to discussions of theoretical concept in measurement. Barad considers  Bohr on the difficulties of measuring both position and momentum — one has to have a fixed detector, the other a movable detector. Thus concepts 'require specific physical arrangements'. Conceptual objectivity is not just a norm deciding what is correct or incorrect, but rather something constructed by an intra-action, so that a concept is a measurement of one object rather than another in some particular respect. Objects do not have inherent boundaries for Barad. Objectivity therefore requires something else — marks on bodies to 'indicate the correctness or incorrectness of the applicability of the concept', in a way that matters makes a difference. They must be discernible if they are to be communicated, reproducible, implying that the same phenomenon can be detected in subsequent material arrangements. In this way the idea of position is generalised to refer to 'whatever entity holds the relevant place in that arrangement… A semantic marker for what those similarities and differences tell'. If there is no way to tell a difference the relevant concept is 'indeterminate in that context', and remains a concept only because it applies somewhere else. There is no full plasticity, indeterminacy of position still brings with it, actually configures, 'a field of possibilities and probabilities' with various degrees of relations to other concepts, including inferential ones, for example in determinations that take the form if-then. The ability to form these relations and configure them is what makes phenomena conceptual. [Then a diversion to an empiricist, Sellars], arguing that a particular concept only makes sense within a whole battery of other concepts [is example is the concept of green], and the whole battery is required, and lots of other operations. This argument is relevant if people are to have concepts, but also if they are to be reproducible and used to explain phenomena in terms of differences and sub- patterns, since concepts also imply a capacity for conceptual difference, if only between correct and incorrect applications]. The brittle star is doing 'autopoietic reconfiguration', and this response has been shaped by the phenomenon of which it is apart [including its environment]. The environment itself is developmental and selective on its side of the agential cut. This produces 'a "one-dimensional"' directedness to the environment by the organism, fully integrated of course as a phenomenon, but not 'two-dimensional', which would require 'a partially autonomous practical repertoire' as part of the engagement with the environment. This helps an organism assess the significance of particular responses, according to their 'relations to other aspects of the same repertoire' — we identify something as linguistic because it is both a [functional] performance and a suitable [!] 'response to a conversational setting'. This autonomy is only partial, and there are whole networks of responsiveness within the repertoire, a much 'larger behavioural economy' so there can be conflict between what might be appropriate to a repertoire, and what is at stake in the whole way of life. This means that 'it thereby becomes possible for an organism's behaviour to be mistaken in some respect, to mean something that is nevertheless incorrect or counter-productive, rather than merely abnormal or sub- optimally adaptive'. We can see two-dimensional behaviour as 'conceptually articulated'. Barad is acknowledging the one-dimensional responses of the brittle star by reminding us of the importance of life and death stakes. Two-dimensional organisms [evidently including us] want to survive as well, yet there is a surplus: 'whether it maintains itself and what it will become' and these can conflict. 'As far as we can tell, the two-dimensional [variety]… Has only emerged within the material arrangements of human ways of life as "naturalcultural"'. Many other organisms articulate one-dimensionally, but 'conceptually articulated phenomena nevertheless seem only to show up within one biological lineage [understood as] a long complex shifting patterns of behavioural niche construction'. Does this reinstate humanism? Two reasons not. Conceptually articulated responsiveness is not limited to us as organisms but 'an articulation of the world' [Rouse wants to describe society as 'the gradual interactive construction of a conceptually articulated niche that coevolved with the abilities of organisms in our lineage to produce and track its conceptual markers in their dual significance'. We can still see this as a form of material reconfiguring [but not the same form as animals develop]. We are not insisting that two-dimensional is better than one-dimensional — they are just not needed in nonhuman organisms, where two dimensions would be useless and maladaptive. Rather than a general benefit, it represents 'a strange and hypertrophic oddity within a single lineage'. Brittle stars and others do constitutive exclusions, in the sense of excluding things that don't matter in a context. Yet these are not articulated as exclusions, because the brittle star is not using the boundary between what is functional and what isn't. With two dimensionality, there is a gap between meaning and truth, and this is what makes us accountable, a matter of choice of exclusions. These are also an important response to the 'conceptually articulated environment', so 'conceptual understanding and ethical accountability are always entangled, as Barad rightly insists' [I would say mixed, and even then only in cases where an exclusion is materialised and has consequences] We now know that our way of life has become risky and unsettled, and two-dimensional directedness might actually now be inimical to the continuation of life. The universal will be indifferent to the result, and mass extinction would be equally correct as a material enactment. Within human life 'the phenomena that constitute our ways of life' [in other words social relations] we have to worry about possible exclusions, and consider if we should not be accountable, since they can affect everything we do [and then a strange weasel at the end: Rouse considers us still to be 'organisms enacting our lives within the world'. Notes have some picky stuff on the difference between metaphysics and ontology, glossed in Barad, and lots of references to his own alternative work, as apparently arguing that 'conceptual understanding, biologically understood, is a form of behavioural niche construction within the human lineage', for example. We also suggest that the lack of capacity in other primates 'is strongly suggested either that it is not adaptive, all that there are significant adaptive or developmental barriers to its emergence'.  Savransky, M  Modes of Mattering: Barad, Whitehead, and Societies  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e08 [Another one on relationality and the problems of denying human exceptionalism. It also draws on Whitehead. Relationality is too abstract and we should be treating it more locally and technically, because it would take different forms — there are 'modes of mattering through which different [local] societies come into existence' [This piece starts with a story of someone being injured in a road accident, and the participants tried to discuss what happened and how the various components had interacted. The moral is that this sort of analysis is dehumanising because it treated the victim as a category, a grandpa, as medics and engineers do. A purely technical description will also dehumanise, both persons and observers]. He wants to 'think with' Barad, Whitehead Cortazar [whpse example it is] and others about the ethical implications of worlding and knowledge making, about which is written. This will not be about reviving humanism, but exploring post-humanism, 'a non-bifurcated cosmology that forces us to think the very relationship between Anthropos and Oikos' [the Social World, rather in micro f2f terms] humans both inter-and intra-act with nonhumans in complex ways, and this places us under an obligation. There are no clear-cut ontological distinctions, but we still need to account for the difference and separate modes of existence, which bring 'heterogeneous obligations'. Knowledge practices are performative, but also risky Barad might offer an agential realist reading of the road accident, looking at various agential cuts and practices, examining how the boundaries are constructed to decide if it is an accident or suicide, for example. However, 'the process seems to "triumph blindly"' ignoring human experience and reducing the victim as a mere effect — his experience of being interacted with, so to speak. This denies that the human victim is just an emergent element of the phenomenon, that he exists only in and through interactions. There should be more speculation and thought. Barad is right to stress the role of relations and how they produce objects as relata, but how does this work, and in particular our new relations and new identities constructed, especially those that do not shift to a completely new option but which 'endure' [Whitehead's term], and thus take part in multiple phenomena. Such enduring entities have their own obligations or constraints affecting future possibilities, 'both limiting and enabling'. Barad seems to postulate only a "minimal ontological autonomy"', unlike Whitehead who talks about undifferentiated endurance producing 'independent substances to which relations merely "happen"'. This also presumes a bifurcations in ontology, primary and secondary qualities, but these are already present in science and philosophy, and are the basis of scientific materialism. This may need to be resisted. We should also be careful not to dismiss relational thinking as such, but we do need to treat it carefully and not make it 'an all – too – general proposition to which [sic] nothing can resist'. Instead we should apply it with care, as a technical tool, without embracing it as an all-encompassing worldview. Again Whitehead has argued this, apparently saying that any mode of thinking is associated with the mode of existence of the entities involved, and these domains present 'a lure for feeling… Pointing towards what matters'. This prevents us from overextending a concept, 'making us prisoners of the false problems it creates'. Barad is right to oppose Cartesian notions of a subject object split and of individuals, but how best to carry on this opposition? There is no doubt that Barad's material might be applicable to quantum phenomena, but extending intra-action to the whole world can be counter-productive, and fail to grasp 'the adventures of any enduring entity'. It can turn into 'the rehearsal of a habit of finding… the same relationalities and entanglements… everywhere and always'. Barad recognises this danger and refers to entanglements of specific material relations, but still refers to 'the world', glossing over specific contrasts, and the 'radical irreduciblity of the stubborn fact of [entities'] existence'. This does not involve making entities ontologically distinct, nor can we use the classic ideas of types or kinds, especially if these are seen as absolute divisions. It is also impossible to know a reality independently of any practice, 'that is, of any relation'. Barad does risk seeing quantum mechanics as something more fundamental, and implies the entire world must comply with it 'as a matter of principle'. It should be extended much more cautiously, together with different modes of response. Otherwise this will risk '"relational reductionism"'. The problems arise particularly with Barad's 'radically relational proposition' of agential separability, where the world creates differences through folding and unfolding. Deleuze's notion of a mannerism might be better, 'an account that does not introduce ontological gaps in the fabric of the universe nor reduce enduring entities to the relations that constitute them, but instead seeks to become sensitive to the different modes of mattering of the many creatures [involved]'. Whitehead will help as well in his distinction between '"actual entity"' and '"actual occasion"', which in turn becomes a question of how enduring entities create some sort of '"Society of actual occasions"'. This can be understood as multiple planes of reality with their own practices and modes of existence, including their own specific ethical responsibilities. Whitehead sees actual occasions as relational, linked to the world and present in other actual entities. They do not become actual through temporal continuity, so there is no specific history. This implies that the entity '"never changes. It only becomes and perishes"'. This is what makes up reality and, time Yet these actual entities are not empirical objects, 'certainly not those of the social sciences'. Those do require that entities endure, but enduring entities are already societies. Societies as we understand them involve groupings of these actual entities 'under some kind of "social order"', and this is what provides different forms of society [well done, nearly there]. The society of entities is not secondary, there is no primary real process. They are not grouped together because of their common contrasts, or as a matter of scale or quantity. Instead, modes of existence provide for 'organisational complexity' [Whitehead seems to embrace some sort of evolution towards complexity notion here]. When we look at societies we see a history of changing reactions to changing circumstances, implying that societies also endure. However there are different modes of social order, and it is these that produce different modes of existence, although again never simply — for example can be animal and vegetable life, inorganic molecules and the rest. The implication is that human beings are also specific, not 'just like all other physical systems'. We should acknowledge the difference even if we do not wish to reserve them a special place, because differences matter. Back to the road accident. The old man is himself a society of actual entities which can have adventures in Whitehead's terms. There is a nexus continuous in both space and time that connects the members, and which prevents simple reduction to the current, or any other, relationalities participation transforms both the phenomenon and the individual, the relata  and the relation, so for Whitehead '"the relationship is not a universal it is a concrete fact with the same concreteness as the relate"'. Relations are only as real as the different entities, not primary, as concrete as everything else, operating in 'specific and diverse manners'. Of course real art and relations are connected, but we must resist 'relational reductionism' and opt instead for a dynamic world constructed by shifting modes or manners of mattering. This leads to a diverse ethics, not based on abstract distinctions but trying to come to terms with the coexistence of many modes. This is the problem with the account of the accident that treats the old man is just like any other entity — his experiences matter, they are implicated in the process, not just another variable. This is the challenge of becoming responsible to phenomenon, affirming adventure in a society that endures. Each practice has a manner of responding to the mattering in which it is involved, but this should allow for 'novelty and new habits of attention'. Reductionism risks a disjoint world and a limited notion of togetherness and concern. We need a more complex way of understanding the ethical challenge, which accounts for different modes of mattering of experiences. We might think about this when looking at scientific practices, which affirm both entities and relations. These cannot be legislated in advance but should be achieved, in the full realisation of obligations posed by the existence. Knowledge emerges from engaging with enduring entities, but does not create those entities, hence there is always a risk, always a requirement for 'delicate contacts' between the mode of mattering of an entity and the invention of knowledge producing practice. This has implications for scientific practice as genuinely and experimental achievement, with no guarantees provided by methods or rationality, and with an important contribution made by the object itself. Again we need 'delicate contacts and marvellous adjustments with the world' Pickering refers to 'the "dance of agency"' [defined believe it or not as "a dialectic of resistance and accommodation", where resistance means that we've not entirely grasped agency, and accommodation is the strategy of response to that resistance which can mean modifications of various kinds. This means experimental objects have a specific mode of existence, which includes some independence. Our relationship to them is not just the application of various material – semiotic practices, but is more like posing a question and investigating ways of responding. Whitehead apparently calls the usual societies as in the social sciences, '"personal societies"', and there can be a social interest in questions being asked, how questions are posed, the way in which engagement can take place. They can even be 'silent about the assumptions such questions make', an example of delicate contacts sufficient to distinguish them from experimental sciences. This is often ignored, but it usually ends in something catastrophic, missing the precise ways in which obligations are contributed, new possibilities of togetherness [not helped by implicit power relations in conventional social science]. Too often, scientific practice looks as if it is 'obligated by nothing' and that they possess the only right to obligate. Come to terms with different modes and different objects is often 'a particularly fragile achievement', a challenge, are seeking for a response. There is no known procedure to use in advance. Instead we have to come to terms with objects, which may indeed 'object to the assumptions that are made about them'. Human communication with 'recalcitrant subjects' is the particular problem. It is wrong to assume an abstract mode looking for some once and for all response that would be decisive and tell us the right thing to do. A proper ethics of Worlding needs a more practical and situated mode of relating, which may even include the breaking of rules. It is particularly important to avoid relational reductionism because this overlooks specific modes of mattering and the adventures of entities. We have to take a risk to invent a manner of attending to these specific obligations, hoping to produce 'delicate contacts and marvellous adjustments'. Relations are important so are entanglements, and this has been discussed before in terms of relations between humans and their subjects. We need more awareness of the connections and the ethical implications. But we have to go beyond affirming relationality to focus on 'the care for textures and patterns of the many modalities of relating' and the consequences arising from our attempt to negotiate the nature of these entanglements. Overall, Whitehead helps avoid the danger of relationism, by referring to societies as specific kinds of relationships, with the implications that we must craft our understandings not exclude otherness by assuming some dominant form. Societies have different bases for grouping and different modes of becoming together. Scientific practices raise particular difficulties, and offer risks for the sorts of relations that we develop. We should be accountable by becoming sensitive to these modes of knowing, and how exactly they do relate to what Whitehead called '"our primary experience" of the world'. Shabbar, A.  Queer Bathroom Graffiti Matters: Agential Realism and Affective Temporalities  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e06 [An exploration of queer culture by looking at graffiti in public toilets. Both Deleuze and Barad are used as sledgehammers to crack this nut, because apparently graffiti 'defaces conventional space time configurations' and remoralises queers and trans] Public bathrooms are a contested site. Gays can use them, but there is often hostility towards trans and queers. Some can pass as male or female, but genderqueers 'who do not identify or comply with normative notions of either male or female' are forced to 'perform a subjectivity that is alien to their own'. They often avoid restrooms and suffer bladder problems as a result. There have been legalistic debates, including arguments that violence against women will increase — this is 'paternalist and sexist' and transphobic because it implies that trans are not proper women. There are deeper cultural anxieties because a binary is being challenged. Queer graffiti can be examined. Graffiti is very significant for cultural analysts, although there is some controversy. Above all it invites us to shift our perception to see a political value in it. Shabbar thinks it 'should be taken seriously as a creative tool for social change'. However we need to see it as more than just a representational object, but rather something nonhuman that has 'the agential capacity to produce political potentials'. Barad on agential realism and Deleuze on affect will help, despite their differences, especially over affect. Citing them 'adds a layer of intensity and meaning'. For Deleuze an affect is a felt experience of the virtual and actual in singular events, while Barad sees it as a material phenomenon constituted by multiple intra-actions between humans and nonhumans. Interaction involves mutual constitution and entanglement, congealed into matter. This shows 'where Deleuze falls short' and provides feminist theory 'with a more nuanced and useful understanding of how affect circulates' as well as discursive power. If we consider both in a dialogue we can 'produce new conceptual phenomena' through their own interactions. This will help her explore bathroom graffiti as entangled phenomena, challenging space and time and the idea of a coherent subject. Barad has made her complex contribution to feminist and queer theory with notions like performative agency and materiality. We can 'put her agential realism to work as a methodological and conceptual tool' by taking on agential realist approach to show material and discursive dimensions of graffiti and how it disrupts congealed heteronormative space. That space is also performative, but it persists through repetitive interactions and is supported by modes of surveillance in public bathrooms. Earlier work on the history of public toilets reveals their social structuring designed 'condition hetero sexist and cissexist ideas of the body and sexuality'. Design allows easy surveillance and regulation. Signs segregate lavatories and require conformism to a binary structure [helpfully illustrated with photos!]. Other features also exclude, for example male urinals, toilets at different heights which can provide 'an acoustic means to discern and regulate gender differences'! The proliferation of reflective surfaces is also suspicious because it helps 'enhance the public's ability to code gender and sexuality' [all this is really what offends trans?]. It's panopticon. The public feel entitled to interrogate and police queers and trans. Queer graffiti changes the aesthetic and produces 'a vibrant messy and communal atmosphere' as well as directly challenging hostile responses. Public bathrooms have also been sites for queer pleasure, and their public sex can destabilise heteronormative culture and challenge patriarchal ideologies by having sex out of place. They challenge the regulation of bodies Queer graffiti can also disrupt resistant transform, because it is also out of place. It is not in sexual encounter between bodies but communicates 'across spaces and times' [really feeble] actual queer sex produces a singular event which disrupts heteronormative flows 'in a certain space for a particular amount of time', but graffiti maintains physical proximity even while distant. It also calls attention to the invisibility of queer sexuality and everyday space, and is thus subversive, although we have to be careful to avoid the usual representational accounts which assume 'that a coherent sexual identity exists prior to its inscription': the very act of writing graffiti produces or performs gender sexuality. However, it does run foul of the objection raised by Butler that what looks like subversion is often the citation of an alternative norm — this is how discursive power actually limits the agency afforded by queer graffiti. Agential realism has more promise because it's more dynamic. It would mean that queer graffiti is agentic not just allowing reclamation is of space or subversive speech acts, but through interactions with human and nonhuman matter, raising the potential to 'alter non-discursive material phenomena in its intra-actions' [so does any cultural activity of course, when discourses put to subversive ends. Barad talks about the agentive qualities of matter which challenges representationalism and contests the power granted to language — indeed language and representation are performances which is a '"contestation of the unexamined habits of mind"' which grant language such power. This helps dethrone performative is a regime of regulatory production in Butler. Materiality 'underscores'how experience and knowledge emerge for human beings in interaction [sic] with their environments., How materiality also is agential, this makes interaction open-ended indeterminate and challenges essentialist claims. [With a quote where she tries to say that neither discourse nor the material is ontologically prior]. We are therefore right to reject the idea of graffiti as a nonhuman object produced by some separate subject. It is more significant 'because it engages in material discursive processes'. Deleuze and Qatari says something similar [according to Papadopolous] when they say that separating representations from matter makes them strategic. Queer graffiti has agentive efficacy 'insofar as it is considered to be a performative formation of matter' [well yes, if we talk it up using Barad terms]. Deleuze also says that we can never know what a body can do, [taken completely out of context] and we might think about queer bodies. Together, we can develop 'a Deleuzo – Baradian framework' to look at intera- action producing mutual affect. Queer graffiti is an affective force, not an affection as a trace, but affect as something moving, something before emotion, a visceral impingement, unlike the emotion which puts things into words and thus invokes habitual knowledge. Affect are pure intensities, and become '"projectiles just like weapons"' [quoting WIP] [they're not always positive or reformist, of course]. This 'is synonymous' with Barad on the performative of matter 'since both notions attend to the indeterminacy of multiple potentials and intra-actions' Back to the virtual in Deleuze — 'duration that is real but not tangible'. Memories exist there [she has not realised the philosophical implication of the virtual?]. The virtual is a topological figure — '"a singular point in manifold"' [isn't that the actual?], Continually transforming, folding, never being cut. Barad says that interaction involves cuts which make sense of the world, and actualising form of enfolding. However, certain forms of matter are not possible to see, unintelligible, on a continuum with the visible. So cuts must be superficial, even 'contingently temporary as everything is always deeply connected with everything else'. We can do 'weaving Barad and Deleuze together' and see agential cuts as folds in the virtual which actualise, as when affect is comprehended as emotion,. All this still goes on within the phenomenon, though so there is no abstract difference between emotion and affect. [Real bullshit ends this paragraph, identifying a 'disjuncture' because Deleuze does not use the term phenomenon and sees the real are separate from them]. The virtual always changes but remains immanent, as a constant becoming, containing the past and reaching into the future, a non-linear duration. We can now unpack these understandings to grasp 'the affective temporality of queer graffiti's material – discursive intra-actions'. Queer graffiti exists both virtually and actually, so it is non-linear, with no 'marked beginning or end'. It can be encountered in the future. Its inscriptions can change as new responses arise, an alteration of the past: 'bathroom graffiti's future becoming is always already re-figuring of its own past'. Multiple queer inscriptions 'recall the multiplicity of queer bodies' who wrote graffiti and coped with heteronormative space. This offers a kind of [imaginary unity] as it shows time travel. It might even affect actual sexual encounters and the way they deliver pleasure. This is a 'morphogenesis of virtual and actual matter'. Graffiti is an effective assemblage in Deleuzian terms, with no predetermined outcome. It is comprised of a number of things and moments, a coalescence of human and nonhuman forces. It can disorganise and reorganise: for example trying to clean it off involves a new agential cut and can only change its colour or opacity in an unpredictable way. We've highlighted its dynamism. Queer bathroom Graffiti exists '"on a plane of immanence"', where the old binaries are dissolved into networks. It certainly transforms conventional architecture of exclusion sterility and gender oppression. It will not eliminate transphobia on its own, but it can 'produce new subjective states' and thereby assist 'the multiple becomings of queer bodies' helping them to escape fixed categories' and thus have a definite material effect. She think she's offered a virtual strategy which will actualise new possibilities through 'the odd pairing of queer graffiti and agential realism' this goes on outside of subjectivity, embraces the nonhuman, makes us realise that discourse is only one generative force. Further exploration is required, but we have to disrupt the old understandings first. Sheldon R Matter and Meaning  https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e03 [Explores my idea about joiiing the void with chaos as the construction of matter] We are going to compare the connections between meaning and matter in Barad and Deleuze and Qatari on immanence in WiP. Barad has challenged the 'exuberance of social construction', one of many. This has led to humanities scholars to pay more attention to the nonhuman world in a form of 'new empiricism', or 'question of representational causality' but the binary between meaning and matter can still persist, from both sides of the divide — some approaches reject the need to look at meaning, for example, although it is more common to see it the other way around. The shared assumption is that 'epistemology is uniquely human', despite some of the recent advances of neurosciences, so 'nature does; humans mean'. As Latour notes, despite the importance of labour, science still claims to be had uncover nature, and laboratory work just unveils essences that were always there. Conversely the social realm is seen as some record of human will, unaffected by nature, with meaning as produced by conscious self reflection, located in the mind. Barad tries to use contemporary physics to challenge these approaches. However, the specific importance of meaning in Barad has not been so well discussed. Mostly, Latour's classification has dominated. However, Sheldon proposes materialist meanings, and later investigates the materiality of meaning, using Barad, especially her discussion of differance. However she also wants to consider Deleuze and Qatari on the concept. As a result, she is 'fundamentally unfaithful to any of these scholars', and she wants to develop new lines of enquiry. Meaning is routinely attached to intention, and there is an assumption that something must be thought if it is to have an effect. Ideas are to be distributed, implying that meaning is 'durationally robust', and thought can reconfigure disciplines [which she describes as 'existing force relations']. This is really considered, but when we do look at it we can find some concept of 'dissemination in excess of communication'. Barad wants to show how theories are more than metaphysical pronouncements but rather active reconfigurations. She starts with a concrete example as many others have done — Masumi, for example explains that would in general becomes specific with properties which it can impose, as expressions, on the interaction with the woodcarver. In this sense material traces of the past exist in the present and also represent 'potential capacities for the future' [no need for flocking Derrida!]. Masumi sees this in terms of territorialising the capacities of the wood. We can see this as a counterexample for Barad on the two slit experiment. Masumi starts with definite material qualities in solid objects, but there are no equivalents in the quantum world, so the woodworker is actually 'entangled with her wood'. This implies a different idea of meaning, not produced by an encounter but by an event, and actually producing determinacy for Barad. Barad discussed this in a limited way, comparing Heisenberg uncertainty and Bohr on complementarity, discussing the problem of momentum versus location in the quantum world. We cannot know both, but forbore this is not a problem of human knowledge but the quality of matter itself 'it's ontic indeterminacy'. The problems arise from a fundamental duality between waves and particles at the quantum level, unlike their normal definitions. Barad says that different patterns are generated following recording in different sorts of apparatus, and these are strange, and it looks as if different experiments actually change the nature of matter and past identities. This rejects the usual notion that there are stable building blocks of reality, especially if we see this as an ontological issue. Heisenberg still thinks there is some 'fact of the matter resulting from the inherent properties of the entities involved and  laws that govern [them]', disturbed by measurement inevitably. Heisenberg's view is a strange combination of asserting that reality is 'oth stable and unknowable', which Sheldon finds repeated in 'aggrieved post-modern anti-realism' with its epistemological uncertainties. Bohr on the other hand 'more closely resembles Derridean deconstruction', arguing that the experimental apparatus actually produces the qualities that become properties in a 'tensile system of entangled relations'. The entities and their properties actually 'solicit each other into form' so that measurement provokes a local determination. There is no original state, rather an openness to permutation, 'emergent performances'. This is 'reality exploring itself' for Barad. She thinks that if the quantum phenomena are indeed genuinely real, they must persist outside as well, so all parts of the world become determinate following relations with another part of the world, 'the churning invagination of spacetimemattering'. in this way, knowing becomes part of being. The apparatus itself does not constrain the shape of what emerges, and so it is not like culture imposing itself on scientific practices. Meaning instead is something different — 'the incessant call and response of the universe taking its own measure, of touch touching itself'. There is no void, rather 'reality is everything', but without inherent determinacy. In this way, meaning does not require a particular subject or her intention but becomes a verb: 'the world is mattering meaning itself into a new form'. Barad explores the quantum void as an illustration. Foundational indeterminacy is the only way to clarify the structure of the electron. Other conceptions do not work [good explanation of why not -- if the electron is a simple particle covered with negative charge, electrons will repulse each other not preserve their form, and produce infinite interaction with the surrounding electromagnetic fields]. Instead, electrons are ceaselessly changing in the void. Barad sees this as '"a kind of thought experiment the world performs"', an ongoing theorisation, 'a mattering through meaning'. Particular kinds of meaning shown  in  experiment, test, taste, touch or measure, is how being behaves. After Derrida's Spectres, deconstruction becomes a description of mattering, with no fixed properties and an emphasis on becoming determinate. One of her footnotes says that it is not a human method, but what the text does, what matter does. Textuality and mattering are not dialectically linked but are 'identical'. Barad apparently says that nature writes [in entanglements piece]. There is no divide between humans and nonhuman is organic and inorganic. Theories are not just pronouncements either but material reconfiguring is. [Sheldon then goes off on an odd diversion about assessing the impact of ideas, and the unreliability of citation metrics as 'corrosive', unduly positive, classical mechanist. We can use Barad to question this whole idea.] However, we also need to question Barad not addressing the usual notion of meaning as concept formation, with a fusion of heterogeneous components 'with a history and a milieu of its own'. This is seen as a concern for the humanities, where it is connected to a 'route to social justice'. However, there is still highly individualised notions of creation and transmission, which was why we need Deleuze and Qatari to see the 'autonomous propulsion' of the concept, 'virtual but no less material for that'. First, affect theory which was an early way to challenge the linguistic turn. This found another dimension to meaning, not just linguistic idealism, and added a certain materiality. [She explores this further in an 'interlude'... Affect probably got started by an interest in Spinoza before becoming a central concept in people like Deleuze or Masumi. It now denotes 'emotion, structure of feeling, sensation, aesthetic category, psychophysiological response and force'. All these conceptions share a stance on subjectivity. There's been a recent agreement to focus on affect as sentiment, showing a definite intellectual labour labour to make flows more important than subject formation. Affect theory help to break with the 'deep attachment to semiology'. Masumi, for example says that affects including relations of sound repetition and composition interfere with explicit meanings. Both 'activate autonomic processes like skin conductivity and heart rate', but affect increasingly tends towards 'asignificance'. Masumi also wants to show how emotion came to be the key identifying characteristic of affect, because it is more signifier will. Sheldon season implication for meanings as well, through an analogy between afgfecet and emotion, and form and content, and body in society. Affect is the original energy with force, which gets translated and diminished into more stable and social forms of meaning, but this still confined meanings to human and privileged responses, minimising  asignificance. There is another problem in that activating human senses is only one possible impingement. There can be more direct relations, through induction or changes in 'potential – power' [using Deleuze Ian terms, where potential – power means the virtual and its force]. Here, we might see a synonym for materialist meanings in Barad, because inteaa-actions always move from one actualisation to another. Billers and Qatari even use the example of the electron to show how potential brings about a state of affairs. However, they see potential as '"chaotic virtuality"', something excessive in the way of relational dynamism, producing things like '"accidents, at junctions, oblations, or even projections"', something also energising phase spaces, and extending singularities in ordinary points. This is a particular 'language of space' implying 'an extended plane or field as the source of dynamism behind individuation, a 'topological manifold,' actualised through singular actualisations, or bodies. There are tensile relations, 'dissipative permutations, ripples that are not bound as bodies' this complicates causality in a different way, not by recasting the past and the future as Barad does, but suggesting that causal consequences disseminate in various directions which cannot be wholly anticipated, a kind of 'autonomised affect'.  The point is that this reconfigures concepts as well as bodies [and is better at explaining connections with things like idea and knowledge] concept disseminate, ideas have a duration, and this might change social conditions. These are 'material becomings too' These questions are more difficult to answer from Barad's position, partly because she does not distinguish the dynamism of epistemology as such and thus fails to grasp the materialisation of concepts. She does show us potential for it in her discussion of deconstruction as a material process, although does not pursue the analysis. We need Deleuze and Qatari to fully extend the argument to the materiality of meaning. W IP addresses meaning without falling into idealism representationalism or anthropocentrism. They focus on the concept rather than things like universal truths. Constructing concepts is 'a kind of craft or Constructivism', that has to be adequate to the internal balance of the concept and also to the range of other concepts in its media. They are not just a reflection of pre-existing reality needing to come into meaning, nor are they just generated by logic or opinions, which implies some external Genesis for concepts, with philosophy is just another knowledge producing activity. By contrast the concept as a singularity. It does not aim at systematic knowledge for general distribution, but to 'capture thought and give it form'. That is why it begins with thought in a chaotic state. Concept formation limits the chaos by reducing the speed of thought into at least blocks in a chaosmos. However, concepts are never entirely free of chaos even though they can territorial I is. They are 'formed force' and their force comes from infinite chaos which they never cease contacting and trying to shape. So concept formation depends on some initial structuring of the speeds of chaos, in the form of constraints or diagrams. Concepts have their own plane of immanence, shaped by chaos and featuring its own connections and proliferation is. It is crossed by primordial forces, like the earth or the ocean. Normal spatial categories do not apply, however. There are waves or tectonics, but concepts also deform the topography of the plane, for example 'producing energetic zones… New dynamic constraints'. Concepts also relate each other through affect, 'jostling, tugging, torquing, dispersing and parasitically invading each other' this is why their history shows continuity with wider cultural and intellectual history even though they endure, they display spasms,shocks, restlessness [What we are really getting here is an idea that concepts are autonomous, and have endurance just like things do, that they exceed the relations with which they are constructed. I think this applies to social reality as well] Concepts matter, indeed according to their capacity to relate to other concepts and two events. Some grouped together, catalyse each other, some are more negative for repulsive and generate regions of low intensity, discordance. It is therefore' strikingly future oriented as each new entrant shifts the metastable splay of the whole' it is movements in the plane of immanence that reconfigure them, and this also re-constitutes the past. We can never calculate all the events that will be enacted, not because chance intervenes, but because complex effects of novelty appear, revealing new gaps or contiguities, requiring new thoughts. 'The plane passes transversely through me', the thinker, who helps thought find itself again, possibly in the form of a scholarly discipline. But that discipline is also modulated by thinking: 'thinking intuits movement'. So meaning can be material in the senses, dynamic, autonomous, open to aspect. Barad tends to background these qualities. Deleuze and Qatari do better in maintaining 'autonomous vitality'even if they do not use conventional materialist terms to explain this vitality. They also leave more room for social change. There are movements on the plane of immanence which seem to have little to do with the 'project of social justice', except by way of persuasion only, still implying dissemination and beliefs causing praxis. W IP makes clear this is not the only possibility and that other interactions are possible. Of course it risks idealism. We might be able to diffract 'Deleuze oand Qatari's concept Constructivism through Barad's agential realism'. This might help us study the pattern diffraction  casts rather than trying to grasp the plane of immanence of concepts as something separate. We can find inspiration in the essay on the measure of nothingness. Here, Barad discredits abstract thought as opposed to action, addressing the nothingness of nothing as an outdated opposition, because matter arises from the vacuum. She has a micro example involving the surface of the drum which when struck generates vibration. At the quantum level of course, energy becomes matter, so it is a fluctuation in the field. But there is no other kind of matter outside these disturbances, in perfect stillness. This gives stillness a certain dynamism, a 'passing – into – being', but not requiring anything external. The void fluctuates and matter 'is nearly the becoming – determinate of the void'. We can even quantifyit. Barad talks about yearning, however. Nevertheless this doesn't 'feel so far from Deleuze and Qatari' they may be compatible, even compeimentary. After diffraction, we can arrive at the idea of concepts is formed force arising from virtual self energy. Ideas can 'syncope to the plane into determinate shape' and back into formlessness. This would give us 'nonrepresentational composition', which can ultimately suggest that ideas are matter, a kind of noise, irretrievably associated with vibration. This would be 'an agential realist concept Constructivism'.