Notes on: Barad, K. (2011). Erasers and erasures: Pinch's unfortunate 'uncertainty principle'. Social Studies of Science, 41(3), 443-454. Retrieved July 2, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/41301941 Dave Harris Pinch raises the issue of the relation of science to science studies. Barad does not agree with his assessment and says he has offered 'misunderstandings of my project' (443). Pinch refers to an 'uncertainty principle' to describe this relation, but he should know that uncertainty principles 'represent an absolute in principle limit on the possibilities for knowledge making, not a practical limit that might be overcome'. Pinch's paradox of mutual exclusivity is supported 'as empirical evidence' by failures of past attempts to unite science and science studies in the same project, and also the difficulties of engaging in dialogue between the camps. She sees this as a 'trick of drawing uncertainty principles out of an analogical hat'. (444). Even Böhr found this difficult as she says in her book. However the main objection is that a methodological constriction as proposed by Pinch 'altogether excludes both poststructuralist and feminist science studies in principle'. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a key in diverging from Newtonian physics. Its mutual exclusivity concerns the view that the position and momentum of a particle 'cannot be known simultaneously'. But why this exclusion? This essentially addressed in the 2007 book. There has been much debate about the issues, and 'feminist poststructural theorists have emphasised that matters of politics, ethics and social justice are also at stake'. Heisenberg's disagreement with Böhr, uncertainty principle versus complementarity, needs to be better understood. Böhr is not easily invoked to support Pinch on mutual exclusivity, and Pinch is better understood as supporting uncertainty. Complementarity by contrast has 'mutual exclusivity and mutual necessity', and this is the paradox, compared to simple exclusivity. Pinch ignores mutual necessity. Complementarity is not just offering limits on what we can know, which is more like Heisenberg. The issue is ontological indeterminacy rather than uncertainty. Pinch remains with epistemic limitations. He also ignores that mutual exclusivity is rooted in problems of measurement — her version says that such 'material – conceptual' practices are simultaneously conditions of possibility and performative actions that produce phenomena. Both subjects and objects emerge from intra-action. Pinch might be 'a bit loose and ironic' in using the term uncertainty principle (445) but he is serious about the mutual exclusion of science and science studies. He has overlooked mutual necessity. This is 'symptomatic' of an elision he sees in feminist science studies of key concerns and methodological imperatives. Feminist science studies of always looked at mutual constitution of 'subject and object, nature and culture, humans and nonhuman is and science and society'. They have also made it an imperative to engage with science up close with materiality. 'To do otherwise is to exclude in principle that which has been coded feminine — namely, nature's agent rather than as passive blank slate awaiting the imprint of culture'. In the 2007 book , she does not use physics 'as a mirror metaphor for thinking about a variety of different issues'. She is not entirely against metaphor or analogy, but there is a tendency to 'find the same things/relations/patterns everywhere' in mirroring, which maintains with conventional optics. This is why she stresses diffraction not reflection to suggest not just an analogy but 'an altogether different analytic practice… A diffractive methodology — a practice of reading insights through one another while paying attention to patterns of difference (including the material effects of constitutive exclusions)'. This would be engaging with the physics of distraction not 'mimicking the physics literature' and it does not see physics as settled, but rather emphasises 'disagreements among physicists as well as relevant new research experiments' and takes the philosophical issues seriously — for example by 'diffractively reading physics, philosophy of physics and history of physics' [which Pinch says she has not done very well]. The results will be a 'robust (that is, physically sound, philosophically coherent and empirically verifiable) understanding of diffraction as both physical phenomenon and analytic tool. Heisenberg's notion of mutual exclusivity as an epistemic limitation cannot be supported 'on philosophical and empirical grounds' [presumably the erasure experiment]. Agential realist 'reconstruction and further elaboration' of Böhr is coherent philosophically and also 'with the latest physics experiments'. Bohr did not see philosophical and physical issues as separate [but did me head into phenomenology?]. Pinch is wrong to see physicists as uninterested in philosophy. The evidence against Heisenberg includes 'the recent quantum eraser experiments' (446), so Pinch's exclusion would undermine 'significant historical as well as contemporary efforts to understand and be responsive to the world' [a really garbled passage this]. Unlike Pinch, she is not interested in 'some principle about what constitutes the proper practice of science studies. I believe that would be deadening'. We should do practices called science studies together with practices we call science, and this has produced significant results 'that are not otherwise achievable'. Such 'conjoined considerations'  help us understand 'the entangled co-emergence of "social" and "natural" (and other important co-constituted factors)' if we are to 'strive for the responsible practice of science' [in other words she wants ethics to inform science, especially ethics in terms of relations with the natural world]. These will be 'creative endeavours that seek to open up spaces and opportunities for these con joined efforts'. The world is too complicated for any one discipline, and separating disciplinary practices means we will miss 'crucially entangled epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues', which Pinch is wrong to rule out in principle. Conjoined efforts are not easy nor methodologically straightforward, but the difficulties are not inherently intractable. A diffractive methodology [will soon develop its own vocabularies method standards, forms of argument and evidence]. It will help the project of thinking science together with science studies 'and feminist and queer studies' which Pinch has just left out. Her approach is respectful of different disciplinary approaches 'and the differences between them' and rigourous enough to provide new insights 'recognisable by scholars in the various disciplines with which I engage'. 'I tested the methodology by challenging myself to make good on the claim that I could derive new results in this way'. One rigorous experiment was to try and work out the implications of agential realism for a particular 'ongoing research question in physics' — quantum physics. This agential realist interpretation is vulnerable to empirical results, as it should be. It has to cohere with what we know. And likewise, yes, scandalous as it may be to some, agential realism could ultimately prove to be wrong, or at least not sufficiently responsive' [to various intra-active engagements. Vulnerability 'is a real strength of any theory'. Theories are not free floating ideas but specific material practices in intra-active engagement [her favourite technique of endlessly repeating connected arguments]. We do not want to shield theories from the world. She remembers the encounter with Pinch differently. She was invited to address a conference theme on engagements between the sciences and the humanities, and focused especially on 'troubling the nature/culture dichotomy' (447). Her alternative would suggest 'intra-active engagement of different disciplinary concerns, facilitated by a diffractive methodology'. She illustrated the possibilities by a 'rather unconventional interpretation' of the quantum eraser experiment. Pinch asked a question afterwards, whether further experiment would affect agential realism. She saw that as 'friendly', and an invitation to elaborate. She said that her philosophy should be responsive and responsible to interactions with the world. It would also take empirical data seriously 'without embracing either an naive empiricism… Or a social constructivist approach' which operate with such a dichotomy. For her, 'the objective referent for empirical claims' is to be understood as 'material – discursive phenomena (with the notions of objectivity and referent appropriately redefined)'. She said everyone could agree that one experiment never makes or breaks any theory, but that agential realism offers a possible way of thinking social and natural together 'in a way that is responsive and responsible to the world'. Pinch saw this as a contradiction. He had obviously seriously misunderstood. She had reported on the recent quantum eraser experiments enthusiastically, as a scientist. This might well 'suggest a straight realist account', especially if you assume that she is indifferent to science studies. But most people present would not have assumed this. Her presentation was 'highly irregular, one might say queer' far from straight realism. For example she displayed a slide quoting Derrida on how the past is never present and never will be, and whose future is not the reproduction of the present. She claimed that these insights of Derrida can help reread physics. Then she talked about quantum erasure, and ask whether quantum theory might help make 'sense of a literary theorist and philosopher famous for the seeming impenetrability of his writing, and vice versa'. This is not straight realism. Derrida is normally seen as a poster boy for social constructivism, often used as an example of all that is wrong with the humanities. She suggested that Derrida would help us rethink temporality but only if '(admittedly a big if)' (448) we read him 'in a materialist agential realist (not social constructivist) mode' despite his biggest fans. This is a diffractive reading of Derrida and agential realism 'through one another', far from a straight realist presentation by a narrow scientist. Pinch has overlooked the queerness of what she said. He loses it when she starts to engage with feminist and queer poststructuralist theories. Of course they are difficult, but clarity raises the issue of standards and who holds them. She deliberately chose a form of language that 'doesn't rely on the same set of assumptions being questioned. Creative and non-straightforward forms of expression are then not optional'. But Pinch misunderstood this. It is still common to appreciate poststructuralist and feminist approaches [and while she's there  'queer, postcolonial, and critical race theory is'] so Pinch is not alone. He does display 'a telling symptom' when he says he cannot see a connection between entanglement experiments and Barad's claims to develop a new ethical framework or how materialist approaches to the body will have consequences for gender. His lack of understanding 'is already evident' (449) because she does not offer a specific gender analysis of quantum entanglement, and mentions gender only in a brief discussion of reflexivity. Her concern is not women or gender, but 'an engagement with feminist understandings of the political', much broader than the usual focus on politics, more concerned with 'dimensions of politics and power'. That is one reason poststructuralism has been so important. Pinch is 'aghast' at any implications for science studies. His summary of agential realism, though is too brief and misses the political dimension. She has used insights from science studies in developing agential realism. This is seen in her diffractive methodology — 'a special kind of "reading through" as it were… an intra-active phenomenon' which does not prioritise particular concerns or disciplines. Pinch should have looked at how the social studies insights informed agential realism and implications for future science studies. Her discussion of quantum physics shows the relevance of science studies for the practice of science. Agential realism, 'and feminist and queer studies for that matter' are not social constructivism but can still make a contribution. Social constructivism 'both assumes too much and leaves out too much'. It did offer important insights and a counterweight to realism. But, as Callon and Latour argue, social constructivism is really a form of social realism, 'a form of representationalism that takes the social for granted' Rouse and Hacking have also argued that it shares the same assumptions as scientific realism, that 'knowledge is about representing rather than the practices of intervening'. The feminist science studies scholars, its 'founding gesture was already gendered'. It fixed and nature culture dualism, saw the social as a matter of 'active (gendered male)' agency operating on the passive female slate of nature. It is not enough to simply reject this dichotomy — 'we need to understand how it matters and for whom', and social constructivism does not do this. It is human exceptionalist, it has not examined its own frameworks that inform it. It never 'gets around to asking how matter matters. It permits only a one-way analysis, at best' (450). It's insights, together with 'performative alternatives' are read through other insights including Bohr. His performative materialism asks about the social practices of meaning making. 'With some further elaborations' we can get to agential realism seeing apparatuses as 'material – discursive practices that are simultaneously the conditions of possibility of meaning making and causally productive forces in the intra-active materialisation of phenomena — that is, apparatuses are about mattering in both senses of the term' [magic substance]. We are not just inverting social constructivism but trying to develop a methodology 'that would take either the social or the natural as primary and performed categories'. It is about intra-active constitution of subjects and objects and the rest. Feminist science studies have made important contributions. Particularly, they do not just describe what scientists do but ask how they might be practised 'more responsibly, more justly'. 'This issue is my passion' which drew her to science in the first place. Like many others she is trained as a scientist and still finds it amazing — 'photons and electrons leave me in awe. So to brittle stars, humans, ferns' [a kind of Buddhist sensibility, awe and wonder stuff]. Proper examination of those will deconstruct science and their assumptions better than social constructivism. 'If we look carefully,' we can see that science deconstructs itself as it engages in 'power charged conversations with (or rather as part of) the world'. Turning to ontology does not avoid epistemology because knowing is an activity that the world engages in. Ethics are never secondary or derivative either. There already is a body of work doing both science and science studies that she 'would identify with feminist science studies', and Barad 2007 is a part of that tradition. It focuses on 'the possibilities are making a better world, a livable world, a world based on values of co-flourishing and mutuality, not fighting and diminishing one another, not closing one another down… New possibilities, which with any luck will have the potential to help us see our way through to a world that is more liveable, not for some, but the entangled well-being of all' [dreadful naive utopianism]. She is pleased to be a part of those diverse conversations and approaches and be committed to conjoined different academic and nonacademic material practices. Activists and practitioners at every stage already do this. Feminist science studies is not just a subfield that talks about women and gender, but is instead 'richly inventive'. Attentiveness and responsiveness is not just 'academic curiosity or luxury'. We can see that questions of science are always 'interactively entangled with questions of politics and power' even 'esoteric features of quantum physics'. Theories are not just metaphysical pronouncements but 'living and breathing reconfigurings' Agential realism 'won't live or die by one testable result alone, but it must be alive and open to the world, or it's a life that will be very short lived' young feminist scholars are already elaborating it as with all good metaphysics. Note 1 says that Pinch assumes that scientists just make claims on the natural. 'Furthermore, there are significant data that speak against pinches claim, showing that science studies practitioners and scientists can and do work together productively' (451). Note 3 says that intra-action is her term not boars, introduced to help clarify and mark one of his crucial insights. It is a 'key concept in agential realism'[another word for it] intra-action is the 'mutual constitution of entangled agencies' not interaction [and Pinch has not understood this. Note 5 says that diffractive methodology 'is a practice of simultaneously attending to important differences among practices and their specific entanglements by reading respective insights through one another in a way that does not build in foundational distinctions and separations before the analysis gets off the ground, and that is responsive to our interactive engagements with the subject matter, including to what gets excluded and how it matters', and we are referred to chapter 2 (452). Note 7 asks whether we should separate philosophy and physics in Böhr as well and if so, how we should decide, and suggests that Pinch thinks scientists only philosophised one science studies were invented. Note 8 says that 'of course, "cohere" is not a transparent standard'. Note 10 defends her understanding of the quantum eraser experiment and denies that she is indifferent to history. Note 11 says Derrida denied that he was a poststructuralist and reminds us that 'deconstruction is about bringing constitutive exclusions to the four, because the texts/materials that are deconstructed are precisely what we can't live without. It is attuned to the constitutive exclusions of mutual necessity. Thus lives the spirit of Böhr' note 11 says the ethics is about what matters and who matters. Note 15 says it's difficult to define feminist science studies and again there will be exclusions. She says that she is in the tradition that believes in engaging constructively with scientists, and says she has worked in very produ. Ctive interdisciplinary places, and still does. Apparently Schrader also had a paper in this issue-- she does have some on JSTOR