Notes on Barad Book Chapters Dave Harris Very quick summaries of these, focussing on implication for /from the 2007 book --highlighted in bold. Dave Harris Barad K ( 2000)  Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential LIteracy . On Doing Science and Culture Eds. R Reid and S Traweek. London: Routledge Same old same old, only early Only new thing is 'agential realism' here means getting experiments to work. She devised an ug course for science and non-science students to get them to abductively engage with classic experiments and they liked it. I like it myself! Barad K (2001). Reconfiguring Space, Time and Matter. In Feminist Locations Global and Local, Theory and Practice, edited by M Dekoven. London: Rutgers University Press. [I'm gonna gloss about yet another restatement of agential realism, even though it has even more extreme fomulaiton confusions and circularities,  and focus on the commentaries on Fernandes which top and tail that discussion.  And the political implications for feminism toabandon theold fixed notions of identity politics or intersection. It's a bit fuller and more ambitious than the discussion in Barad 2007 in my view,becasue it is placed in this extensive framework] the piece starts by arguing how modern transport and electronic communication produce 'an ambiguity of scale that defies geometrical analysis' (75). We should think of changing topologies instead of a fixed Euclidean geometry, a pattern between zeros and ones, a flow of capital which changes material conditions globally, a 'cyborg "trans-action"' that weakens boundaries. Feminism has long insisted on a view from somewhere, although some of it still operates with 'a Euclidean geometric imaginary' (76), spaces the container, with easily mapped coordinates which identify position, and with time as a matter of evenly spaced increments. Soja has challenge this as ignoring the inextricable connection between time space and matter, providing space with '"an aura of objectivity, inevitability, and reification"'. Thinking of new conceptions of space helps replace a politics of location with a politics of possibilities. Foundational ideas of location are challenged, and indeterminacy and ambiguity 'coexist with causality' in a space of possibilities. This will allow for 'normative analyses crucial to critical political practices'.  It will be agential realism which cuts across many old binary oppositions and reformulate agency as something productive and exclusionary. It is better than performative with the theory because it takes account of discursive and material elements of practice, this helps us incorporate material constraints and dimensions 'into poststructuralist analyses' (77). Materiality is not just a consequence of discursive practices, but something active and productive in its own right. See it that way will help us better understand how discourses have material consequences, and how relationships between them can work both ways. The split itself shows something about 'our current material and discursive conditions'. Culture's theories can provide crucial insights, but are inadequate in terms of explanations, especially how things like economic forces can re-form subjectivities. Hence Fernandes, seen as 'theorisation of the relationship between structural and discursive forces' (77). In particular, it shows how poststructuralism doesn't just oppose Marxism but can help elaborate limited forms of structural analysis by seeing class as a dynamic variable with 'integral cultural ideological and discursive dimensions' [nearly epic]. We can see how economic capital materialises, and how cultural economies have a material aspect. We are going to work Fernandez and agential realism 'through another to get a deeper understanding of structures materiality and their relation to discourses, especially the dynamics of power relations. This will help us add new tools to feminism. Political economy and cultural identity are inseparable and Fernandez provides strong empirical support. She uses tools from poststructuralist and Marxist schools [Foucault and Stuart Hall?], using both to understand the multiple technologies of the production of the working class. In particular, class structure is not seen as uniform objective or pure compared to other identities which are merely symbolic or ideological forces. The different identities are connected in a dynamic process revealed in everyday life of the workers, and featuring 'ongoing contests over space, time, and movement'. Barad calls this the 'iterative production of… spatiality' and a matter of the 'dynamics of structural relations'. Thus workers are positioned on the factory floor through gendered recruitment, gendered divisions of labour, the whole gendering of space, so that '"gender in community are integral to class 'structure'"'. Classes are dynamic and contested, the result of local politics. This is not saying that classes just something ideological or cultural. Fernandez argues that we cannot see economic categories as material and other social categories not, or indeed that the categories are separable, or only interact [not intra-act?]. For her, class is still about economic capital, but the economic is not just about class, but also gender in community. This means that class will not be experienced equally by all workers all over the world. In particular, gender is a structural force not just a discursive one. Capitalist machinery is both material and discursive, and they produce by combining different forms, they 'literally work through one another' (79). The forces may be unevenly distributed, but it is this that enables 'different potentials and performances' by the various components. It is an extension of Foucault on disciplinary regimes that structure time space and movement, understood as the codification of power, embodied in factory codification of time movement in space. Thus factory discipline organises space [actually an 'analytical space'], complete with its material borders, including those between class, gender and community. However, they do this rather than produce individual subjects, but this should not be seen as a rejection of structural relations, a focus only on the micro physics of power. Instead, she wants to rethink the structural dynamics of power, so that structure is not anything objective or transcendental, but is '"shaped by modes of representation and meaning that social actors… Give to their positions and activities"'. So structures are also produced. But in what sense? How do the material and the discursive dimensions relate? Agential realism will explain [by transforming the description so that the shop floor is understood as the production of meanings bodies and material – discursive boundaries]. However, apparatuses have to be themselves produced through '"iterative interactivity"' and we will have to radically rethink causality and exclusions, and notions of space time at and agency. In particular agency will refer to the potential to change to apologies, reconfigure structural relations, raise accountability issues of matters such as boundary articulations and exclusions [but how does this turn into politics?]. It brings in nonhuman beings, 'nonhuman and cyborg Ian forms of agency' (81). First we need to think about how machines work and how they relate to humans. A particular historian of science, one N. Wise, suggest that industrial machines 'mediate societal values in the production of knowledge'. A steam engine gives us both labour value, a concept in political economy, and work, a concept in engineering mechanics. This apparently leads to a whole structural analogy between a network of concepts between the two disciplines. [The example I don't understand — before industrialisation, Kelvin was able to see agency as some natural quality? Barad seems to want to go back to that?]. We want to retain this link between productive apparatuses social and cultural values, political economy and human and nonhuman forms of agency, but we cannot accept the idea of a mediating role. We need yet another radical shift. Both Kelvin and Marx had Newtonian conceptions of force and causality, but that has been dissipated by quantum. Bora played a key part [then off we go] bore this time questions assumptions of observation independent objects with well defined intrinsic properties, and continuous measurement independent of those objects. Instead 'theoretical concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement'(82). This is a 'fact' supported by 'an empirically verifiable discontinuity in measurement interactions' this shows there is no inherent cut between object and agencies of observation. Board draws upon quantum wholeness instead and uses the term phenomenon to designate 'particular instances of wholeness'. In particular, we must consider the interaction between object and apparatus as an inseparable part of the phenomenon. We should also offer '"a description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement"'. This has epistemological consequences. Concepts refer to a particular apparatus which implies a cut between object and observation [the example is given of the apparatus to distinguish location from momentum]. The implication for observation is that we should be able to state the conditions necessary for the reproduction of the phenomenon '"in an unambiguous way"' (83), implying that the experimenter cuts between objects and agencies of observation, because there is no inherent distinction. It follows that ambiguities are resolved 'only for a given context', a particular instance of wholeness, a phenomenon. However, we can still attain objectivity in a reformulated form — permanent marks, produced in an apparatus, involving bodies. Properties cannot be attributed to objects or to measuring instruments, but must be referred to phenomena. Interaction also means the inseparability of objects and observations. We have to revise strict causality and determinism as well as the nature of reality. This does not produce disorder or a rejection of causality, but a reworking, something 'between the usual dualistic thinking about causality — freedom and determinism' (85). It explains contradictory evidence like wave and particle experiments, by seeing wave and particle as descriptive concepts located in classical understandings but which refer actually to 'different mutually exclusive phenomena', so we can hold both wave and particle explanations simultaneously. The key is a re-conceptualisation of referential reality to shift it from an independent object to a phenomenon. Only then can we gain objective knowledge in boards sense. Apparatuses are not passive instruments but are productive. Nevertheless, Bora needs a better account. Apparatuses are specific to observational practices, but this leaves the boundary problem, which might include 'the scientific community that judges the value of the research' (86). We also depends on unambiguous communication implying some scientific body. We have to acknowledge these complexities too when we think of an apparatus. Barad says she does this in the getting real piece, incorporating Foucault and Butler. Thus Foucault's notion of an apparatus can be combined with Bohr's to bring in the production of subjectivation as a dimension of power. But there is gender performatiity in subject formation can be seen as a form of materialisation. However, both leave I theorise the materiality of nonhuman beings. Foucault does not examine the materiality of the prison, for example [I thought he did]. Butler sees performative to exclusively as a matter of discursive citation, without looking at 'the material constraints and exclusions and the material dimensions of agency' (87). It's hard to see materiality just as an effect of power [later on, she wants to see it as an effect of agency]. An exclusive focus on discourse dilutes the notion. It as a spatial dimension as well as a temporal one. If we see phenomena in terms of constituting agential reality, this is an elaboration an extension of bore, from observation instruments to a broader idea of apparatuses. Phenomenon needs to be broadened as well and can now be defined as something produced through interactions by material – discursive apparatuses. The apparatuses are not just observing instruments. Agential reality is not a fixed ontology waiting for epistemic enlightenment but is itself 'segmented out of the process of making the world intelligible through certain practices and not others' [very confusing in my view, it's a better concept because she has a better more enlightened epistemology?]. We are responsible for this knowledge and 'in part, for what exists' [since we developed powerful technology at least?]. Notions of realism and truth need no longer be based on representationalism. We can get accurate descriptions of agential reality. The iterative processes of materialisation display a difference in the efficacy of practices as partners [so saying something will not cause it to materialise, and some accounts are more 'empirically adequate' than others]. Matter is not a blank slate nor an uncontested grounds, not citation à la tea, not a support for discourses, but rather pattern of interactivity that both stabilises and destabilises. Materiality is not an inherent fixed property of objects. Materialisation should be the focus. Empiricists are still Newtonian's, even if they do disagree with others about how important language is, or other social. The point is that materiality is not nonbeing outside of the real, and we can still make reference to material constraints and inclusions and 'the material dimensions of power' in agential realism. We do not need to naturalise matter because materiality has to be referred to agential reality. It helps us to re-examine how the boundaries of human and nonhuman are drawn. This always happens in particular materialisation is, but these should not be limited to human forms. We can better understand power knowledge practices and the production of bodies if we think about materiality beyond the realm of the human. Apparatuses have a physical presence. We can better understand how they produce particular bodies, as materialising them, a necessary part of regulatory apparatuses. This is what she means by looking at 'how matter comes to matter'. Material – discursive bodies 'are segmented out of the interaction of multiple material – discursive apparatuses' and it is through these apparatuses that 'phenomena (bodies) become intelligible' [still equally well explained by abduction dialectic or chiasm, recognising the dynamics of matter and knowledge of course]. , [So, I think the whole point here is to underpin Fernandez with an ontologyclaiming that this will make her more powerful, that she will be able to explain more things. But what exactly? More possible dynamic interactions — but she has already pinned down those that matter in that specific context. Why do we need a general philosophy?] Back to it We have to remember apparatuses are also phenomena made up of specific interactions between humans and nonhumans, although the boundaries are constituted through practices [but who initiate practices?]. Any apparatus 'is always in the process of interacting with other apparatuses' explaining the enfolding of phenomena in iterations, and producing important shifts in apparatus. Another example of the process of materialisation. 'Apparatuses do not simply change in time, they materialise through time and space' (90) [more philosophical excess]. This can help us explain power dynamics, but this is often still Newtonian, implying that the values of variables change over time as an effect, with an objective time as an external parameter. However interactions are 'causally constrained but nondeterministic irreversible enactments' which sediment out matter, so that it can become an ingredient in further materialisation is of bodies. It does not take place in conventional space or time, since these are also produced and reconfigured. Certain exclusions produce 'conditions of possibility of new possibilities'[so this is what allegedly is gained, even more flexibility, this time to alter space and time as well, and to trace even more connections between apparatuses. Vertigo awaits]. Materiality is itself a factor in [further] materialisation and iterative enfolding is. Temporality is produced 'just as rings of trees mark their segmented history of their interactions within the world' — hardly a production of temporality, though, more a measure of it. Matter is segmented history of practices. 'Time has a history' (91) [made to look very mysterious] so it can't be just an external parameter. Properties themselves are 'redefined through time' [no argument with that, but daft to conclude that] 'temporality is constituted through iterative intra-actions' [yes, but why would we use tree rings when we have perfectly adequate metric instruments]. Both Butler and bore focus on exclusions as a crucial part of intelligibility. Butler's abject of people are not yet subjects but are some sort of formative outside, something unlivable peopled by non-subjects, which help to define the rest of us as subjects. This is the same as Barad arguing that material discursive practices draw boundaries, like the ones between interior and exterior, intelligible from unintelligible. But we do not see these as inherent, simply something provided by exclusions, which never fully resolve indeterminacy and lead to new possibilities. Agential cuts are not independent, existing and abstract space although 'they are indeed material' [supported by citing bore saying that descriptive concepts require particular material circumstances for their very definition]. Space is not some container. Speciality is a process of restructuring, drawing new boundaries, making exclusions, and this is crucial in materialisation. Especially, the boundaries between interior and exterior are changed and that reconfigures space. The example is the way in which position and trajectory are no longer fixed values but are seen are products of the dynamics, where particular material conditions make concepts meaningful and intelligible [and the other term unintelligible]. Newton assumed that you could specify deterministic trajectories and causalities, but we now know that position is contingent, and that position and momentum are mutually exclusive [in the quantum world it is necessary to keep repeating].  For Stengers, this is a full recognition of the productivity of time which is not just a parameter negating becoming of natural beings [and then a puzzling bit about we need an explanation that reduces the diverse to the identical, the changing to the permanent and '"as a result eliminates time"' (92). But agential realism does not eliminate time or demote it, but sees it as a matter of space time, produced by iterative intra-activity, space-time. Manifolds are iteratively reconfigured, through enfolding, changes in the internal connectivity as well as by changes in shape or size, which widens the space of possibilities 'entailed in exclusions'. We now have a topology where interior, exterior, past and future are 'iteratively unfolded and will you worked, but never eliminated'. Causality is not a matter of strict determinism, but produced as a possibility [?] by exclusions and particular boundaries. These exclusions also open the future to possibility. Apparatuses constrain but do not determine, so traditional causality is reformulated to mean a space for agency [pretty unconvincing, theoretical juggling leading to better politics?]. We must recognise human, nonhuman and cyborg Ian agency, not least in realising that 'the world "kicks back"'. The human itself is redefined by apparatuses remaking boundaries, and again this widens possibilities and helps us see better dimensions in the working of power. Back to Fernandez thank God, and the role of machines. Structural relations of power are reproduced and contested in the jute mill. Spatial positioning is a marker of class. And an example of the wider material practices and constraints. These constraints are not obstacles, nor the independent of discursive practices, nor reducible to them. Instead, we can see Fernandez is offering 'contingent materialisation of the shop floor' (94). The space of the jute mill is produced, as are the workers as disciplined subjects. 'But the spatiality of capitalism is itself produced through the politics of gender, community, and class and daily contests over the relations of power' [if we take the jute mill to be somehow typical]. Fernandez shows how the reproduction of gender relations, for example arises from an array of local practices and discourses that also maintain 'the national hegemonic construction of class' (95) nor is it a matter of just releasing pre-existing ideologies, because gender is constantly manufactured through specific local notions of masculinity and femininity. These also reinforce management power and weaken union activity. This shows how exclusionary practices by managers and workers create the spatiality of capitalism. Just as the mill materialises capital, so exclusionary practices materialise the mill. There is no linear additive dynamics. The ones that exist should be understood as 'part of the technologies of capitalism'. In this way, local practices reconfigure and enfold structural relations, seen as apparatuses, but also maintained or produced by various exclusions. We can see the whole jute mill as an apparatus of bodily production, materialising through interactions 'among workers, management, machines and other materials and beings'. Materiality is not once and for all but something contingent and contested, constrained but not determining, a process whereby some practices come to matter, not 'mere brute positivity or some purified notion of the economic' The economic is no more material than the others factors. We have to see production as 'iterative intra-activity' (96) producing commodities and also subjects and structures. It does not involve the repetition of some fixed process, but is constantly reworked by various forms of agency, including nonhuman. This is what we see when a machine refuses to work, it means lost wages, a struggle between weavers and mechanics, intervention of management, union responses, a strike, a new configuration of machines and workers on the shop floor. Boundaries and divisions between various social categories also affect these actions, such as wildcat strikes being cross cut by cast positions. If we see apparatuses themselves as phenomena, we can redevelop the analogy of a gear assemblage with uneven forces different potentials and performances, but it has to be thought to be reconfigured while itself it produces others, some new gears are produced or re-milled, some are enfolded into the assemblage. Processes of inclusion and exclusion reworked the boundaries. [Most puzzling of all 'the accumulating marks of time do not correspond to the history of any individual gear, but rather are integrally tied to the genealogy of the assemblage and its changing topology' — we can chart the changes in machines in terms of different configurations]. This might be too mechanistic, but it highlights some limits of common conceptions of production, which often focus either on the human dimension, usually what happens in the economy, or on material cultures which invariably split humans and nonhuman is. We have to understand dynamics much more fully as a general reworking of the nature of production, something non-linear, causal and nondeterministic, enfolding, changing to apologies and boundaries between interior and exterior, seen as agential processes reproducing apparatuses. These are not aalthuserian apparatuses which are 'rigidly fired and separable formations of power' operating outside. We don't get to understand them through Euclidean geometry. We need to see it as 'a topological animal'. For example, if we take intersection analogy in feminism, colour helps displace hegemonic discourses that just stressed gender. Even some intersectional lists still had a 'Euclidean eyes Asian pathology' (98), because of a reservation about questions of race and how it might be misappropriated. The result was some Euclidean geometry with sets of axes of identification positioning marked bodies [as on a graph]. This still produces limits in seeing gender race & are separate characteristics of individual human beings, that taxes of identity are at right angles to each other and are independent, that intersection goes on in marked bodies, not just in specific ones [gender affect women], that multiple identity is just one of these Euclidean intersections. Instead, we have to see identities is not separable so they can't interact. There produced by topological dynamics of intra-activity. Some constrain, some enable various apparatuses of bodily production. They are a contingent material process, thus constantly open to contestation. We should study them as genealogies of topologies [different structural relations of power which have materialised]. This is what Fernandez shows us in the multiple dimensions of the union management conflict, how class is contingent, only sometimes connected caste hierarchies after a specifically political process, how caste is itself produced through hegemony and resistance, narratives of class and gender. All these identities materialise through and are enfolded into one another. They'll constrain and enable but not determining. They are in interaction with other apparatuses of bodily production. Together they make up 'the changing topology of the space-time manifold'and show the need for responsibility and accountability [so shifting to this absurdly general ontology somehow leads to union and workforce sitting down and discussing their mutual responsibilities?]. The shop floor is not neutral, not Euclidean. Workers do not have fixed trajectories. Position itself is contingent and contested, just as a worker is not a property of individual human beings but something contested and disunified ['but nonetheless objective' (100)]. Referring to specific phenomena, subjects in interaction. Workers are not just pawns on a Euclidean chessboard. Capitalism itself is contested and ever-changing in its attempt to spatialise. Class is therefore the result of a dynamic, particular 'material discursive practices' that locally define categories including gender and community. Thus the overall category can have status differences. It can appear as an habitus in reproducing patterns. It is affected by materialising relations including economic structures, but enfolded into gender and community. This might be a kind of discursive production, but this is not to deny materiality. Material conditions matter not just because they support discourses but because both discourses and matter comes to matter through materialisation. They are intertwined, enfolded. We can't determine any individual effects of material or discursive factors. Agential realism helps us see both material constraints and conditions but without falling into empiricism or positivism, and by investigating processes in far more detail than is usually developed just by insisting on mediation. Mediation should be replaced by accounting. At least we are taking the empirical world seriously again, as long as we remember that we are studying phenomena not apparently given empirical objects. Geometrical analyses are no longer sufficient to analyse complex events, but what are its dynamics? There is no simple metric, but rather reconfigurations and folding, requiring topological analysis. This will include reconsidering questions of size and shape, and scale. So a geographer sees scale is an exclusionary matter, produced in and through social activity, it refers to spatial properties which are always interactively produced contested and reproduced, so it actually has an active form for social processes. Different scales are agential and enfolded through one another [which challenges the idea of geometrical nesting according to size, and reinstates intra-activity and topological dynamics, agential enfolding is that reconfigure connectivity] [clearance flocking mud] Boundary transgressions have to be rethought as well, for example as a result of information technology and its transparency and disregard for obstacles. But such technology does not produce a flat manifold or level playing field, but can even exaggerate the unevenness of distribution of material goods, can further constrain that. Fernandez apparent in this volume says that of trans-nationalism and globalism, for example — these are topological matters where the global the local and the national intra-act. We need genealogy's of changing to apologies, including connectivity across different scales, seeing how different regions affect each other. This also requires 'ethics of knowing and being' (103) opening up possibilities for change into apology, interventions, a space of possibilities. That space is not a fixed uniform container but has a dynamics produced by agential interventions which can reconfigure it. We can see this with the politics of identity and the politics of location which still operates with the old geometry. Instead we need a politics of possibilities, 'ways of responsibly imagining and intervening in the reconfigurations of power', (104) [So this is the real claim that if we shift from Euclidean geometry to topology, we don't just have to operate by manipulating the fixed positions that are already provided, inverting hierarchies between identities, for example. You can explore far more connections. We don't need to stick with determinism, or even with fixed objects. All is in flux. The possibilities are endless. We should have an ethics of possibility rather than one that just sticks with manipulating fixed positions] Barad, K. (2008a) Queer Causation the Ethics of Mattering   In Queering the Non/Human, edited by N Giffnet and M Hird, 311-- 338. [this is heavily reliant on her earlier works on bio engineering in the trans-piece, and the inevitable brittle star commentaries in the follow-up. We have slightly different intro tough and some minor additions] Causality has been challenged by Foucault and Butler. Ziarek notes that Foucault talks about discursive events and series which exhibit irregularity, which is not the same as mechanical causality or an '"ideal necessity"'. Butler notes that this is linked to Foucault's conception of power, which appears in its effects rather than existing before events, and includes even '"dissimulation as one of its attributes or modes"'. (311) Butler says that the material is not just the effect of a discourse, and that we should focus instead on effects instead of presuming some ontologically prior cause. This goes over into queer theory as a challenge to traditional concepts of identity — challenging causality opens up 'possibilities for resistance and agency in a space evacuated by deterministic conceptions of causality'. A commentary by Kaufman- Osborne on Butler notes different kinds of causality in Western philosophy, for example organic and mechanistic, the former link with agrarian practices, the latter with craft. This might be an example of linkages between material and discursive practices, and a 'transfection of metaphors' (312) rather than technological determinism. However, he still operates with a foundational difference between humans and animals. This is carried by a comparison of how he experiences causality as opposed to the way a  guinea pig pet experiences it. Greater awareness for us leads to a conception of causality, 'an intelligible account' even though the guinea pig experiences it. Barad challenges this, initially through all sorts of witty remarks about how the guinea pig still occupies a telling moment, tells all, speaks volumes and so on. The remarks show 'meta-questions and underlying presuppositions' that need to be examined. One is that it is the ability to intervene in causal events which is a 'condition for producing discourses about causal relations', so that intervention matters. There is also a suggested 'inverse relation, between agency and causality' (313). This is a distinctive 'un-/queer moment' in his paper. Generally, the nonhuman has an outside entangled with the inhuman and the dioferentially human 'haunts these accounts' that are based on causality in terms of human sociality and processes of subjection. We need to queer these accounts still further. We do this by 'seeing what we can learn from some very queer creatures' [oh no]. These will show that causality is entangled with notions of difference and the differences found in nature. Before we get to brittle starfish, we consider another example of biomimicry discussed in the trans-paper. The activities of an abalone making a shell, in producing 'a delicate crystal lattice… [That]… Calls to mind the flawless thin film layers on a silicon chip' (314). This leads a professor to say that Mother nature is the '"only true nanotechnologist"' and that we must learn to mimic her. Biomimicry is going to be important in a new post-industrial era. It's based on what we can learn from nature. The author has received lots of awards and has founded a 'biomimicry Guild' bringing together all sorts of big companies like Nike and Novell. It's fans see it as an answer to Carson's Silent Spring, but there are clearly dangers of misuse and abuse. We can see the risks from examining how the Wright brothers learnt about lift and drag by watching vultures, but by 1914 aircraft were used to drop bombs. Biomimesis can also be a kind of camouflage, raising projects 'above the murky pool of ethical, legal and social concerns'(315), as nature loving. One Canadian biotech company has set up a farm for thousands of goats. The point is not to clone the goat, not to alter nature, but rather to harness it to produce a variant of spider silk. Spider silk is 'the holy grail of material sciences' with wonderful qualities and possible applications in surgery,  industrial fibres, recreational applications. The biochemist concerned explains the 'ingenious engineering talents of this arachnid' in terms of natural competition, 'a kind of arms race between spiders and bugs'. So 'What could be more natural then than scientists that the Canadian biotech company Nexia teaming up with the Materials Science Team of the US Army Soldier Biological Chemical Command to take some lessons from spiders' (316). This is 'emulating… Nature's best ideas for peaceful coexistence' and 'her ingenuity in the face of military challenges', both 'taking nature as inspiration to a new level'. Happily, the collaboration is productive and it led to 'a way to spin silk from goats milk' with enormous potential. Nexia holds the patent. Luckily, 'Bio Steel©" is eco-friendly as well. The CEO obviously is talking this up. When challenged with ethical implications, 'he responds with the confidence of the jujitsu master' and sees the spider as working in concert with the fly, using the fly's own energy. The argument is 'what could be more natural than taking nature as inspiration? Even nature does it' The misuse of biomimicry is also well recognised. Goats might be being turned into cheap factories, not treated with respect, illustrating hubris. This suggests a further ethical issue — we should not do what nature does not do herself [rukles out all industrial applications?] This applies particularly to gene swapping. If things have not emerged in nature that's a sign that "there is probably a good reason for its absence… Natural selection is wisdom in action'" (317) [citing Benyus]. We have 'an ethics based on the principle of following nature's lead', but this has had unfortunate consequences in some 'misguided attempts' to justify 'every possible social prejudice' as in social Darwinism. Benyus points to the dangers especially and says they arise because we have selectively attended to particular species or behaviour. She thinks we are '"a unique species, an ethical moral animal"' (318). This seems reasonable at first, says Barad, but everything depends how we are to understand nature and human exceptionalism. There is also an assumption that we can read nature's designs immediately. And that we can separate 'material designs [from] the agential practices that produce them'. All this leads to exceptionalism, and the old mirroring practice separating humans from others. But there is no pure nature. Its purity has been invoked in such a way as to lead to 'some of the most highness crime is known to humankind' [so don't blame nature blame men — human exceptionalism again though?]. Biomimetic's itself challenges a sharp boundary between nature and culture. Such challenge can and do become prejudices if they are based on a dualism. The notion of a pure nature is not helpful — it is itself a construction. The real issue is as Haraway says '"what counts as nature, for whom, and at what costs"' (319) [then a banality] 'these practices hold both incredible promise and unfathomable dangers. Which is not the end point but the beginning point for ethical considerations' [Then on with the brittle starfish, maybe with one or two extra popular accounts and talk ups, but a lot of very familiar argument. NB some gripping chapters in this collection, including one by Kirby which I must summarise, and lots of highly entertaining looking ones like those on werewolves or queer canine literature] Barad, K (2008b) Living in a Post-humanist Material World. Lessons from Schrödinger's Cat. In  Bits of Life. Feminism at the intersections of media, bioscience and technology Edited by A Smelik and N Lykke. London: UNiversity of Washington Press. [Mercifully short, summarising the main points about agential realism and the phenomenon. I read some of these comments as clarifications of some of the key terms, although Barad says in a note that it's based on a paper she gave in 2004. Not some witty challenge to temporality through Derrida, but rather a conflict between two ways of measuring the development of an idea — via a career or via a calendar. Some things are clarified, such as post-humanism, and some are clarified unwittingly — discourse becomes like a material unfolding because things are developed over time in both. We have syntagm but not paradigm. What about metaphors? The whole thing strikes me as Hegelian or some other kind of vitalism, with humans being produced, perhaps deliberately so that nature can know itself?] The piece starts by explaining how Schrödinger was one of those predicting a new scientific tone for biology, one which finally explains some of the residual mysteries, '"a science that tolerated no secrets"' [citing Keller] (166. Secrets have a flirtatious quality, but it also tells us about ethics, in the sense that it implies the 'mastery of Nature's secrets and her recreation in Man's image'. Science challenges the underlying ontological presuppositions including 'geometrical relations of depth and surface, inside and outside, thinking and being'. There is also a sexual connotation where nature is the 'coy female awaiting the heroic advance of the masculine scientist who will lift her veil'. Science is already also driven by 'its expanding role of the great technician' [and this role will persist even if we no longer think of revealing secrets]. The connection of all these issues shows an entanglement between technology, quantum theory, physics and biology. We can begin with Schrödinger's cat paradox. We have to begin by thinking of classical or Newtonian physics, where nature is both determinate and deterministic, objects have boundaries and we can predict the future of objects as well as their past [it is this Newtonian mechanical notion of time that is attacked so joyfully, but subjective time rejected it long ago, as in the above example of my readings]. Objective knowledge will reveal the objective state of the world. Newtonian physics was seriously questioned by quantum physics which denied fully determinate states and saw prediction only in terms of probability rather than causal determinism. So we cannot predict with certainty whether the atom will decay in a given period of time, but we already know the probability that it will — 50%. The experimental setup clearly links the fate of the to the fate of the atom: 'their are two fates are entangled' [but this is the ordinary sense of entangled not the quantum sense?]. Schrödinger's wave equation therefore predicts two states superposed — decayed and non-decayed atom, dead and alive cat.. We can now clarify superposition and entanglement. Schrödinger was really questioning the complacency of physics which just assumed states like these without considering the consequences. His aim was to lead to further investigation of entangled states. This is just one issue raised by a whole set of quantum quandaries. In this case, it is about [collapse], why we do not find the superimposed state when we open the box, but rather one of the more determinate ones. Schrödinger's wave equation does not account for this. Quantum theorists of various kinds have tried to explain this 'including the shockingly anthropocentrism hypothesis that human consciousness collapses the superposition… And the bizarre, metaphysically hyper schizophrenic "many worlds" interpretation' (169). Barad's notion of entanglement makes more progress. The existence of the cat is not smeared or blurred between two states. The cat must be either alive or dead [because we have defined it that way? Elsewhere, she is quite happy to smear the binary between organic and inorganic]. It cannot be both simultaneously, because 'this possibility is logically excluded, since "alive" and "dead" are taken to be mutually exclusive states' [but we don't like binaries!]. The cat might be partly alive and partly dead, or neither. The 'correct way to understand' the paradox is to say that 'the cat's fate is entangled with the radioactive source' [no less mysterious, and still depending on definitions of cat and radioactive source]. This is not just an epistemic entanglement as shredding a thought but an ontic one. The cat and the atom do not have separate states of existence. There is indeed no enclosed entity despite our normal understandings of cat. 'The fact is that no fact of matter concerning the life state of the cat exists independently of some way of measuring/defining "life state"' (170). These measurements or definitions resolve the indeterminacy of the boundaries and properties of those concerned. A cat has no determinate life state. Indeed, we can't even really speak of a well-defined life state since there is no determinate meaning [if it is a human error to define things as if they were separate objects, why is it not an equal error to claim to have objective measurements?]. Quantum mechanics attacks 'the metaphysical substrate of representationalism', (170) that words and things a primary unit with determinate boundaries and properties. Quantum physics has 'yielded compelling empirical evidence for the surprising claim that things do not have inherently determinate boundaries and properties'. Instead, we need agential realism. Concepts are not just ideational but 'are specific material configurations' [so scientists have no real role at all, and science becomes a matter of just fooling around until we reveal the truth]. So it is material arrangements that resolve indeterminacy and also produce a cut between object and subject [so nature provides human consciousness and subjectivity]. We need to talk of intra-action not interaction. What does it mean to materially specify a concept like life? Why can we not just work with agreed definitions? However, there are 'five different definitions of life' (171) and most of those assume living organisms as the reference point. We now know that we must break these dualisms, and lots of others, not least because there are 'genetically modified trends life' forms including artificial intelligence or artificial lifeforms. Even if we could work with a concept and operationalise it into a measuring device, we would still be 'left with the question of what it is that we've measured', because measurements 'do not reveal the already determinate state' of an entity, but rather constitute boundaries and properties. What is the objective referent for a measured property? Not some measurement independent determinately bounded object. We need the phenomenon 'the entanglement of interacting agencies ("objects" and "subjects") however [the boundary problem emerges] because the phenomenon 'includes much more than we could ever drawing a diagram… The entangled and enfolded sets of apparatuses of bodily production of all the beings and devices relevant to this example' [and how have we defined relevance?] Humans are also phenomena, 'produce through the interaction of multiple material – discursive apparatuses of bodily production'. Consciousness is not an inherent property of individuals [and we are referred to the 2003 article on post-humanist performative accounts]. Post-humanist here means not 'post-modernist celebrations' of the techno-human, nor the next stage of Man. Instead it involves a 'commitment to accounting for the boundary practices'through which human and others are constituted. It is not 'a celebration difference for differences sake' but rather 'accountability to and for differences that matter' (173). It implies that matter is not a fixed essence or property and we should talk instead of mattering as 'a dynamic process of iterative interactivity'. Matter is substance in its becoming, 'a congealing of agency' [but how does this happen?] There are no inherent fixed properties. Phenomena are not just produced in laboratory exercises, nor are apparatuses just scientific apparatuses. Instead they are 'boundary drawing practices through which differential boundaries and properties come to matter' [I'm not at all sure what is distinctive about this, of course there are purposive rational elements in designing apparatuses. That matters to scientists, but does it matter to Nature?]. Discursive practices are also 'specific material configurations which determine ['differentially enact'] boundaries properties and meanings [which defines discursive as meaning any sequence of determination: notions like boundaries properties and meanings are found only in human discourse?]. Phenomena are not just laboratory constructions but are found wherever there is 'complex agential interactions of multiple apparatuses'. They are agential. Meaning is 'a performance of the world in its differential intelligibility', so that matter emerges out of the configuring and reconfiguring of boundaries just as with discourses. Thus 'the material in the discursive mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity' (174) [human interactivity, perhaps even in something explicit like, science, she means?]. Matter is agentive alive with possibilities and these possibilities are differentially configured [swings from Buddhism to vitalism]. So what is life? 'If quantum physics has any insights to offer' (174)  it will direct us not to revealing nature's secrets or pinning down a definitive answer. 'There is no pre-existing Nature, and we are not Nature's keeper'. Humans are not external to nature but 'rather a part of the lifeblood of the universe in its ongoing recreation' this is why we must be accountable to becoming an relationality is rather than looking at the epistemologies ontologies and ethics employing secrets. We should trust the universe. 'Life is not a secret to be revealed' but 'rather an entangled agential performance of the world'. There is no final answer to the question of life because 'there is no final state of aliveness that can be pinned down'. Instead we have 'the inexhaustible creative vitality of the world' Barad K 2014  Invertebrate visions:diffractions of the brittlestar in The Multispecies Salon, ed E Kirksey. London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376989-015 The brittle star story in the New York Times is cited. It's 'skeletal system… Also functions as a visual system'. It can also reconfigure the boundaries and properties of its body. It has raised implications for what counts as human, and the creature is being 'enterprised up for new computer designs and telecommunications optical networks' (222) . The author, J. Abraham, as also published in Nature stressing the ability to escape predators. 10,000 calcite crystals function as micro-lenses which focus light onto nerve bundles. This forms a compound eye in the sense that it can optimise light from one direction{better than focus and resolutiomn see below]  They can navigate and detect shadows and turn lighter at night, which seems to increase the visibility to predators but overall, it helps make their vision more effective. The technique in Aizenberg was 'optical lithography' the same one that is used to inscribe circuits on microchips [with some details of the experiment including cleansing dorsal arm plates]. By shining light through the sample they could etch a patent on recording wafer. They then detected bundles of nerve fibre. Aizenberg's press release likens the brittle star to a digital camera and says we can learn from this marine creature because it's very good at peripheral vision and that would be very useful in cameras. Sambles also expresses enthusiasm [as in the 2007 quote]. We have to give nature a credit for this 'superior ingenuity which exceeds the current technological ingenuity of humans'. It could be the potential applications that have attracted interest, however. There is also understatement 'considered good professional etiquette in scientific publications' (225), while 'statements of the popular press follow a different set of rules altogether' (226.) Press releases are also 'very upbeat' and promised 'biomimetic lenses'. Aizenberg's more recent achievement was also praised, stressing how naturally designed crystals can have implications for nanotechnology. So this is a new optical system, contrasting with the classical ones that you find in science studies and cultural studies, and it leads to comments on the 'different kinds of epistemological and visualising systems' found in Western epistemology (227). It should challenge our ideas of representation which means that nature is held at bay. There is horrendous anthropomorphism: 'the brittle star is not a creature that thinks much of epistemological lenses the geometrical optics of reflection'. It does not have eyes, but rather is eyes, so it's visual system is embodied it is a 'visualising apparatus'. Therefore 'it does not suffer the Cartesian doubts of an alleged mind-body split', nor are they obsessed with the boundaries of their bodies. It has 'discursive practices… [of a  very limited kind] Boundary drawing practices by which it differentiates between "itself" and the "environment"… [Which are] materially enacted'. It's very substance is morphologically active and generative so it plays 'an agentive role'. It differentially enacts the cuts between self and other as in intra-action. In one agential cut, a particular arm is part of the self, but in another, part of the environment. These categories are not fixed because there is a need to discern the reality of their nature as a living creature. It can enfold bits of the environment within itself and expel other parts of itself [the paradox of being both entity and relational system]. It challenges notions of embodiment which are firmly located in the world. The body's performance Objectivity needs to be changed as a result to a matter of 'occupying political coordinates in space and time, in culture, and in history' (228). We can also rethink conventional ideas of space and time. Space is not just a container, nor is time uniform. For them the relation between 'space, time and matter is much more intimate' (229). But nobody stands outside the world, although we can construct 'exteriority within… Agential separability'. A jettisoned limb can be a survival tactic to distract predators, but be should we understand it just as a piece of structure with 'remnant reflex energy'? If we think of it that way, the organism itself must also be seen as energised like that. It seems much more animated [classic circular argument] and there is a video clip on the multispecies – salon website]. What of diverse behaviour like sexual behaviour? Sometimes a broken off limb can be an offspring. Only positivists would see visual separation as defining bodily boundaries, while real connectivity 'does not require physical contiguity'. There are implications for 'lost limb memory trauma' in psychoanalysis. We can use brittle star optics as the illustration of Haraway's diffraction. It can be a 'useful counterpoint to reflection' (230). It stresses patterns of difference rather than reflection, and so do brittle star optics, because they are 'attentive to different optical effects all at once'. There lenses might experience diffraction effects which is in a trade-off with resolution. In this way they 'live at the edge of being diffraction gratings' [in a different one-dimensional sense?]. Diffraction is about differences which matter. Interaction between brittle star and environment shows the ultimate relational nature of the world rather than interaction between things. There is dynamic 'iterative intraactivity'. Small compound lenses that favour diffraction rather than resolution can have a survival effect as with insect eyes. Brittle stars are 'in a different genus' from common figures of vision like lenses panopticans and others. Technically, this simple form of geometrical optics 'will produce a fuzzy image'(231) [and so is rejected]  It would also ignore quantum effects. It reveals anthropocentrism, but challenging that would also be to 'welcome women, slaves, children, animals and other dispossessed Others… Into the fold of knowers' (232). The animal shows us that 'knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of interacting with the world as part of the world', and does not involve mediation. This means '"mind" is a specific material configuration of the world, not necessarily coincident with  a brain', because the brain does not hold memory exclusively. Brittle stars can respond without brains. Somehow, the existence of tacit knowledge makes the same point. Generalising [!], Knowing is not exclusively human, knowers are not always self-contained rational human subjects, there is no thinking spirit inside the body. Subjects are differentially constituted through intra-action, and may range across the traditional binaries. Even science takes place with humans as 'part of the larger material configuration of the world and its ongoing, open-ended articulation' (233). Intelligibility is 'an ontological performance of the world''s own knowing 'does not require intellection in the humanist sense' [but only because we have defined knowing as] 'a matter of differential responsiveness to what matters'. However, it also requires 'differential accountability' [with a reference back to Rouse on the different apparatus needed to study position and momentum, where their actual use produces '"discursive significance"'. We do not need 'cognition in humanist terms', because a brittle star can already 'recognise a predator' [anthropomorphism], because it matters, 'life and death are at stake'. So brittle stars are not just useful models but a living testimony to intra-action. They cause us to challenge assumptions that boundaries are sharp and inherent. This is not the same as celebrating the blurring of all boundaries asin pomo,  which is 'simplistic', but we 'do not trust our eyes'. This is part of a wider error to 'put our faith in representations than in matter', assuming we have a better access to those. So diffraction is a 'much subtler and more profound phenomenon' than classical understandings imply. Not only does it disrupt representationalism and all the metaphors of reflection, it shows the connection between ethics ontology and epistemology. We are all intra-active in the world's articulation, and diffraction as a 'material – discursive phenomenon' challenges all the conventional assumptions about binaries. Instead it focuses on differential entanglements, implying 'their very inseparability'. This is the 'deep significance of a diffraction pattern' [only in the quantum world?]. Agents can be separable but not individuated, differentiated but also entangling and we need to think about what will be 'the right response to the other'. Brittle stars are not just resources or tools but are phenomena,[as entities? no environment?] 'agentive beings, lively configurations of the world', not just objects of our knowledge. This is how we 'learn about and co-constitute one another through a variety of "brittle star" – "human" interactions' (234). This also gives a deeper understanding of biomimesis. It is not just copying nature as some pure essence, any more than the brittle star is just an object for us. Instead we need to follow nature's example, be responsible and accountable for entanglements that we enact [only as nature does?] Proper biomimesis will preserve difference and oppose sameness by opposing geometrical optics and attending to differences. It honours nature as the first engineer, but does not stick with her methods. It still wants to bring the new to light, of course there are 'very practical reasons' [she seems to be justifying copywriting new innovations here? — The © is a sign of responsibilities for different materialisations (236) Brittle stars are 'trans/materialities', not just classifiable as organic, machine, matter and so on they 'already know how to do nanotechnology' and do it better than humans do. Their successful evolution, [bringing ancient nanotechnology together with current examples] marks 'a rather queer temporality that comes from the past and the future'. We should think of forming partnerships with natural phenomena. The ethical issue is 'how our desires and our beings are co-constitutively reconfigured' Optical lithography has added to our understanding optics. Using the apparatus itself has led to changes in them. Studying brittle star lenses inspires new optical lithography. 'Tools are used to rework tools' (236). This is enfolding. Differences are important, diffraction effects and how they produce differences which matter.