Notes on: Pinch, T. (2011). Karen Barad, quantum mechanics, and the paradox of mutual exclusivity. Social Studies of Science, 41(3), 431-441. Retrieved July 1, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/41301940 Dave Harris Barad was talking( at a conference where they met)  in order to demonstrate quantum entanglement. But she did not do 'deconstructing or contextualising such experiments' but 'used the results to support own position in science studies — an approach she calls "agential realism"' (431). Surprised, Pinch asked if she did not find it 'more than a little odd' that a metaphysical position should depend on the outcome of physics experiments. If the experiments had come out differently, would we have to abandon agential realism? Barad apparently said that she was happy to connect science studies with the best work in physics, whether that meant stand or fall. Quantum mechanics is 'vastly successful', yet what it actually means remains 'notoriously obscure'. Relations between the entities it describes and how it connects to space and so on used to be discussed in the 1930s, as with the debate between Einstein and Böhr, with the former arguing that statistical bases are insufficient. The later Copenhagen Interpretation became accepted wisdom, and involves not worrying about foundational issues all the time physicists could calculate and make technologies 'and get funding for their work'. As a result, philosophy took over the issue of foundations, and 'Philosophy, as all physicists know, is good for you in small doses but ultimately can be dispensed with' (432). The emphasis shifted back a bit to physics and to quantum technologies, but how this is happened has not been examined by Barad — she 'seems uninterested in history'. She also omits a particular article by Harvey who argued in 1981, that 'the possibility of turning philosophy into real experiments made the area much more "plausible" (that is fundable)'. [Harvey had interviewed many of the experimenters at work in the 70s]. He also argued that social and material practices of physicists and the credibility of the results 'was far more complicated than suggested in Barad's rather bare – bones account'. Entanglement arose from an experiment first performed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in a thought experiment. Apparently, it involves searching for correlations 'between two remote particles that once interacted'. The technique is for remotely separated experimenters to measure spin in different directions: the second detector is randomly set.  Apparently, despite random variations, 'the spin of the particles at both locations is found to be instantaneously correlated' (433) according to the predictions of Bell's Theorem. All this is summarised really well by Barad, but agential realism departs from 'crystal clarity' and becomes 'very dense assertions about such matters as agency, intra actions, becoming, phenomena, causality, dynamics, materiality, and the role of the post-human'.  As well as dense prose there is also repetition and sloppy editing.  Engagement with other science studies people is left to the footnotes.  Barad does engage with some of the 'limitations of popular accounts of quantum mechanics' as in Frayn's play, which talks about Heisenberg and uncertainty 'without understanding the physics behind it '.  She wants to address the common notion of the disturbance exerted by measuring instruments and says that Böhr goes deeper into thinking this.  Her goal is to conceive this relationship but not actually measure it. One strange absence is Kuhn's work, even though he has referred to the history of quantum mechanics.  Her account of quantum experiments''is not so much a view from nowhere as a rather Whiggish account, where all the experiments lead up to what we know these days—the truth about quantum entanglements' (434).  She wants to reinstate Böhr in particular.  She misses out 'the messy history, the lacunae ...  the grasping and stumbling in the dark ... most of the social and historical context'.  Instead, elite physicists are revered as brilliant.  Böhr sometimes gets close to god.  She agrees with Haraway about the need to situate knowledge, but 'her own failure to situate these experiments is one of the paradoxes of the book'. This might be because she's following a philosophical take.  Even so, 'history and sociology do really matter here'.  Context is introduced in other parts of the book, where science emerges from 'contingent human interests, from messy materiality and practice, and from a wider constellation of cultural, technological and military interests', but this should also 'make us... a little less likely to take them...as the obvious grounding for a new ontology'. Particularly relevant factors are the context of world war two, the development of the bomb, growth during the Cold War era benefiting 'a colossally wealthy postwar physics community allied to a military industrial context', then of the counterculture and political protest.  Quantum mechanics became 'a hugely popular source for the culture industry', and it is no good Barad's just regretting this.  Proper students of science would have helped her here, but instead she he relies on a bold 'pass on the literature' There are also physicists who rejected the role of philosophy in interpreting quantum theory, including Bohm who was suspected of being a communist fellow traveller, and forced out of his university, Princeton. He made an alliance with Soviet scientists who were also questioning quantum mechanics.  The story needs telling, but in an interview with Pinch, Bohm said he had serious troubles trying to understand the theory, and rejected 'Böhr as idealistic metaphysics'(435).  He produced a rival 'materialistic interpretation of quantum theory [apparently 'known as a hidden variables interpretation'], but was rejected by the Copenhagen tendency.  A colleague of Böhr, Rosenfeld, announced that Bohm was wrong, and relied upon an alleged mathematical proof by Von Neumann.  This seemed to be mathematics trumping philosophy.  Nevertheless both Bohm and Bell developed new work, and showed this proof 'could trivially be overcome' Bohm apparently returned to the USA with a revised theory.  Meanwhile, entanglement experiments'had been taken up by a new high powered group at Berkeley, who were open to things like extra sensory perception as well as entanglements'.  Bohm presented some of his results using 'several pieces of bent metal' apparently produced by Yuri Geller, and Geller had already been supported by two other 'laser physicists' in an article in Nature.  It looked as if a quantum mechanics might indeed be connected to parapsychology, until Geller was accused of fraud and lost support, and as military pressures became more important.  Military and corporate links produced 'quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation'. Barad announces that she is departing from conventional science studies approaches to suggest that the study of science and the study of nature go hand in hand.  This is supposed to have a direct relevance for science studies, especially the way in which issues like agency and relationship to the material world are thought. She develops this through her account of the double slit [quantum erasure] experiment, which Feynman claimed 'entailed the whole quantum mystery'.  Interference patterns are produced after beams of electrons or atoms are projected, the interference pattern resembles diffraction.  Diffraction patterns can occur even when only one [particle] atom at the time passes through the system.  However, one electron at the time indicates particles.  If we detect which slit an atom passes through, without humans observation immediately involved, then this will confirm a particle status.  Once we know which slit is being traversed, the atom starts to behave as a particle.  We turn off then back on  the which slit detector device after the atoms have gone through, and wave like interference reappears.  For Böhr, this illustrates complementarity rather than the classical separation of waves and particles.  He says that we have to consider the whole measuring system, including the apparatus—if we do an experiment to search for particles we find them, and the same for waves.  This is not just observer disturbance.  The results are 'actualised according to how the experiment is set up'(436).  There can be no independent reality with properties waiting to be measured.  Instead, of the complementary phenomena available, the ones that are realised 'depends on how the whole measuring apparatus is set up'.  Barad says this is not a matter of changing the past, despite the name of the experiment, because we're talking about inseparable wholes including objects, agencies of observation, space and time.  Böhr's account is certainly 'self consistent' and there is no warrant for any connections with mysticism or ESP.  Böhr's work is objective because it provides reproducible results which can be 'clearly described and communicated between physicists'(437). The whole approach has also been called relationism. Böhr addressed the result of his experiments' primarily to Einstein et al, but in the 'notorious later writings', he applied the principle more widely, including to 'all sorts of other situations, including those of the social sciences'.  This full radicalism is not always been recognized.  Lots of people support Böhr on quantum physics, but not on social sciences.  It is the same with current allegiance to ANT, which has been partially accepted by people inside science studies, but not the bit about 'complete symmetry between humans and non humans'. Barad's great merit is to explicate Böhr clearly, but she goes further.  She tries to save him from his commitment to humanism, a matter of giving 'priority to humans' and how humans' agree over measurements'.  This is a mistake and might lead to some notion of an overarching human mind [indeed, transcendental consciousness].  It also suggests that quantum phenomena only actualise when they encounter human consciousness.  The real criticism of Böhr is that his notion of complementarity 'rested upon a notion of what could be communicated in language and by this he meant classical concepts'.  Bohm had already said that, and argued that we need to find a new language for quantum phenomena. The extension into agential realism involves three steps.  First, Böhr's notion of language is too narrow, and assumes the sharing of concepts.  Instead, Barad draws upon a 'materialist reading of Foucault' to refer to 'material discursive practices'.  Second, the concept of apparatus is extended to mean more than just the actual instruments—the cigar of Stern can also be seen as a part of the apparatus.  Boundaries are not easy to delineate [they seem infinitely extendable].  Fernandes fits in by examining 'the political economy of apparatuses': the jute mill is a piece of apparatus which produces not only jute but workers, bodies, post colonial relationships and so on.  Third, humans are  produced by Nature, argued through looking at the work on ultrasound scanning and parenthood, and also through a materialist critique of Butler. Her new 'performative approach of agential realism' (438) is still indebted to Böhr especially the notion of the phenomenon and the way in which material agencies instantiate them.  This leads her to suggest that the world is a place of becoming, intra-actions are everywhere producing phenomena.  Agents are not just humans', and can become intelligible to non humans'who can respond [this is what the brittle star staff allegedly shows].  Space time and matter continually unfold from these intra actions.  Experiments' are not the only apparatuses'.  Human beings do not just observe the world but intra act in it.  Ontology and epistemology cannot be separated—'they study practices of knowing in being'.  These will also help us identify 'which specific intra actions matter'. Agential realism is seen as or more self consistent way of describing quantum mechanics, systematizing Böhr, avoiding subjectivism, leading to new ways to think about connections between humans and non humans'.  Pinch is still uncertain that the 'notorious difficulties in that field' have been solved.  Barad goes on to say that agential realism should be the basis for science studies and also a grounding for a new ethics. The history of science studies is sometimes seen as moving from representation through an interest in practice to the modern interest in performativity and its ontological turn.  Pickering is important here and he too has written about physics and agency.  He does appear in Barad's work but only in footnotes, where it is dismissed as 'overly humanist' (439) others like Mol and Law are also neglected.  Barad has cited  other interpretations that are close to her own, however, but Barad never really explores similarities and differences.  This is odd for 'someone committed to the diffraction metaphor and its emphasis upon difference'.  Barad does emphasize reproducibility, but, 'like Karl Popper' , (439) does not see that this is contested, and that there are difficulties in agreeing that phenomena are the same or that an experiment is repeatable.  Everything depends on 'the culture of trust,  a shared form of life and shared practices, including tacit knowledge, learnt and passed on in communities of practice', obviously human practices again.  Epistemology doesn't just go away.  Entanglements experiments can be described 'in a simple realist way', effacing all the 'history, sociology, and struggle of the physics community to obtain a precious consensus' [I think she does this by stressing the single decisive experiment that split Böhr and Heisenberg].  Barad never discusses how agreement is actually realised.  That might be just too human centred, or just seen as another becoming of the world.  She says the results are never incontrovertible.  In the end she adopts the 'physicists' typical viewpoint' '(caveats and all)' in saying that experimental findings offer direct evidence [of Böhr in particular]: this is a 'a long way away from a science studies treatment of experiments and the grounding of experimental findings in the society and culture of physics'. The turn to ontology disputes the claim that knowledge is situated in human communities.  How they actually do epistemology, reach agreement is neglected.  Barad calls both for a more situated account of science while still 'drawing in a realist mode upon experiments' to support her position'.  She seems to offer a kind of exclusion between doing science and writing about it, separately, as a scientist and as a science studies practitioner, but this 'negates the history of a field' which aims to produce a productive dialogue between the two camps.  Efforts so far have revealed it to be 'a most a difficult and fraught enterprise, with much misunderstanding and miscommunication going both ways' [I think Barad bottled out of it when confronted with objections to feminist science studies] Barad thinks physics and its results are not just a metaphor but have 'direct implications for science studies' (440).  At times this 'courts a form of scientism', using prestigious elite science to support a view in science studies.  The outcome may be benign there.  Böhr's work is hardly 'at the centre of the scientific enterprise these days' [nasty].  Most feminists are concerned to reconfigure science 'or at least its social relations'.  Barad's sees feminist science studies as about gender and science in the making, how the two co-constitute each other.  The new ethical framework on the materialism of bodies has important consequences for gender.  But the connection of entanglement experiments is less understandable.  She knows that it might be 'the right political move' 'to have science on your side', and we do need to think about how we engage with people, including the ones we've studied.  But this 'paradox of mutual exclusivity between science and science studies' is not the solution, and it risks losing 'the earlier insights gained from the contextualising and the cultural and social embedding of science' Note two says that Bohm's explanation referred to hidden variables 'acting at the sub quantum level producing the statistical fluctuations at a higher quantum level—in the same way that the kinetic theory of gases can be used to explain Boyle's law' (440). back to Barad page