Notes on: Barad, K. (2015) Transmaterialities.   Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imginings GLQ 21 (2--3) DOI: 1215/10642684-2843239 387--422. Dave Harris We start with a metaphor about lightning bolts as 'charged yearnings', excitations of desiring fields, experimental ways to connect 'in the virtual exploration of diverse forms of coupling and dis/connected alliance'(387). This is an experimental article about matter and its experimental nature, the way it tests out impossibilities and unimaginable parts. 'Matter is promiscuous and inventive in it subject or wanderings:one might even dare to say, imaginative'.  Similarly, scientific imaginings are 'clearly material' because they involve electrical potential buildup and charged particles, with neurons transmitting electrochemical signals. This is not just an individual subjective experience nor 'a unique capacity of the human mind' (388), nor a passive materialism, or a discussion of material possibilities. We can see the nature of matter and 'it's a gent sure capacities for imaginative, desiring, and are effectively charged forms of bodily engagements'. We are going to use zigzagging arguments just like lightning or electrical energy. This is an experimental piece, but 'with a political investment in creating new political imaginary is and new understandings of imagining in its materiality', imaginary is with material existences 'in the thick now of the present', with all sorts of topics joined together — condensation is, super positions, multiple im/possibilities, intra-active reconfigurings. Lightning as 'an energising player the desiring field… Tortuous path… Electrifying yearning for connection' it produces images on our I, and jolts and memories. It 'arouses a sense of the primordial, enlivening questions of origin and materialisation… Conjures haunting cultural images' as in Der Golem and Frankenstein, reminds us of how life may have started. In 1953 the [primordial soup approach] marks the beginning of experimental research into the origins of life. This is controversial, but persists. One early scientist, Miller, even informed research after his death because not all of his data had been analysed. Scientific American reminded readers of its Frankenstein connections. Lightning is therefore indeterminacy, troubling self and other, past and future, life and death, on the border between animate and inanimate. [A long quote from Frankenstein follows]. Mary Shelley was inspired by Galvanism, leading to accounts of Galvanism on electricity as an innate force of life (390). Galvani's work spread to others, including Aldini, his nephew, who went around trying to apply electricity to the mentally ill and even executed criminals [described 391]. Bioelectricity was a major topic, and led to some therapies such as cardiac revival. A section on the monster as a disrupter of categories and boundaries, 391F. It's like an electric jolts it both dehumanises and demoralises, but also 'it can empower and radicalise'. Stryker has written a 'powerful and empowering performative piece' imagining a dialogue with Frankenstein, showing how monstrosity can lead to both rage and self affirmation, political action, inventiveness. She links it to the transsexual body which is also a medical product and technological construction. She is a trans and identifies with the monster, and feels sometimes excluded and less than human, leading to range. She tries to discuss the nature of nature, denying that she has a fixed Nature, and arguing that all conceptions of it cloak privilege. We are all constructs. We all need to confront our own nature. This helps stave off those who would see themselves as having natural bodies 'against the monstrosity of transit embodiment', and show that we are all a patchwork, a "suturing of disparate parts". Instead, there is a primordial fecundity and anarchic womb, which trans people can identify with as the full picture of nature. Stryker shows how she shares the pain of giving birth out of 'queer kinship relations', particularly rich and multiple. She experienced birth as painful and exclusionary, and somehow, this led to an notion of 'the womb through which she rebirths herself' this is 'radically queer configuring of spacetimemattering… An uncanny topological dynamic' that breaks with old notions and leads to new generative tea. There are other 'entanglements', with the notion of Genesis and the emergence of the world. Which produces nature itself as 'an originary queerness'', a 'diffracted/differentiating/differnncing murmuring, and originally repetition without sameness, regeneration out of the fake and nothingness'. Then on to familiar ground with quantum physics, nothingness and the void. The energy of the vacuum for quantum physics is not determinable, but not zero or empty. The void may be the source for everything that exists, so 'birth and death, it turns out, are not the sole prerogative of the animate world; so-called inanimate beings also have finite lives', and one physicist (the improbably named A Zee, according to note 19 on 418) is quoted to say that particles live and die (394). QFT replaced quantum mechanics because it combines insight from classical theories of electromagnetism special relativity and quantum mechanics as well, offering a 'deeper level of understanding'. It is 'a call, an alluring murmur of the insensible within the sensible to radically work the nature of being on time' (amateur poetry). For QFT the vacuum can never be nothing because it is allowed to fluctuate. First we have to understand the notion of a field. Classically this involves 'a physical quantity associated with every point in space time… A pattern of energy distributed across space and time', like a magnetic field, or an electric field — 'a desiring field born of charged yearnings' (395), since particles express desires for each other. In terms of physics, protons emanate an electric field and when this reaches the electron 'it feels the protons desire pulling it toward it'. The electron also has its own field and so they sit 'in each other's fields. If we had quantum physics and special relativity, we can discuss the phenomenon of 'quantising or making discrete physical quantities that classical physics assumed were continuous', opening instead to indeterminacy in energy and time. Special relativity reminds us of 'matters impermanence', because matter can convert into energy and vice versa. 'Putting these ideas together' (not diffracting them?) We can see that: fields are patterns of energy which can be quantised. Energy and matter equivalent, so there must be a correspondence between fields of energy and particles of matter. In electromagnetic fields, there is a  quantum of light, a  photon, and electrons which are also quantas of the electron field. So are gravitons the quantum of the gravitational field. With quantum vacuums, indeterminacy is central and we cannot pin down any states of matter, or no matter — 'the so-called energy – time indeterminacy principle', and, because energy and matter are equivalent, this is also the '"being-time" or "time-being"' indeterminacy principle'. So in indeterminacy in the energy of the vacuum becomes an indeterminacy in the number of particles associated with it, so the vacuum is never determined the empty. These associated particles are called '"virtual particles'… Quantised indeterminaciess – in – action'. They are material but 'not present (and not absent)'. Most of what matter is is virtual particles. We need to remember they do not exist in space and time but are 'ghostly non-/existences' between being a nonbeing (396). This is difficult to grasp (and I think there is a note that says she is going to connect this to Deleuze's notion of the virtual in a future publication). This makes the void into 'a lively tension… Flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what might yet (have) be(en)'. The fluctuations of virtual deviations or variations from the classical zero energy state, 'the material wanderings/wanderings of nothingness… The ongoing thought experiment the world performs with itself'. Thus the void becomes 'an endless exploration of all possible couplings of virtual particles a "scene of wild activities"'. It is an ongoing questioning of the nature of emptiness and of itself, the structure of nothingness. The vacuum is 'doing its own experiments with non-/being. In/determinacy is an extravagant inexhaustible exploration of virtuality, where virtual particles are… Performing experiments in being and Time' (note 23 says that this argument has developed further in the On Touching article and promises further exploration 'in a forthcoming publication'. Subsequent notes say that she borrows sections from that article and also the one on queer performativity. Note 26 says that she uses quotations from the Discovery Channel television programme on lightning). We can understand the quantum vacuum as 'the ongoing questioning of itself (and itself and it and self). It is not like Democritus where particles take place in the void: they are 'constitutively inseparable from it'. The void is 'a living, breathing indeterminacy of nonbeing… An extravagant inexhaustible exploration of virtuality' [does any of this bullshit  actually help?] Let's explore touch — nothing 'but an electromagnetic interaction' for physics. This conception does not involve actual contact, though, and what we actually sense is the 'electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers [and those of the object you are touching]'. Decreasing distance increases the repulsive force, but electrons can never be brought into contact with each other. So when we touch, we only feel the electromagnetic field. Similarly, atoms are mostly empty space. This is the conventional story, but it will not wash with lovers (as she has said, 397). On to lightning a cloud becomes electrically polarised and electrons are stripped from atoms and gathered at the lower part of the cloud, leaving the cloud with 'an overall negative charge'. 'In response' the electrons on the surface 'burrow into the ground' to get away from this buildup of negative charge, leaving the surface with an overall positive charge. This sets up a strong electric field and 'the yearning will not be satisfied without the buildup being discharged. The desire to find a conductive path joining the two becomes all-consuming'. At first, there is a modest spark inside the clouds, with a spirit of electrons travelling, say hundred metres, stopping very briefly and then going in a different direction, again and again. There may be branches and splits. This is not yet a lightning bolt but 'barely luminous first gestures — 'stepped leaders'. This is not sufficient to resolve the buildup of negative charge. The ground responds next with an upward signal when the stepped leader is within metres of the ground — '"the ground is now aware of there being a big surplus"' [presumably, this is the television programme]. Some objects can launch streamers towards the stepped leader — 'assign the objects on the ground are attending to the clouds seductive overtures'. Eventually upward responses meet downward gestures and a powerful discharge appears — a lightning bolt. Even then, there is no continuity because the bit nearest the ground drains first and it progresses upwards, appearing to show that visible lightning bolts move from ground to cloud as currents flow down. A 'lightning expert' explains this 'strangely animated inanimate relating' (398) [in a wonderfully mystical way] — the stepped leader has no 'knowledge' of what is present below, it is 'unaware' of objects until it gets really close to them, when this happens another spark stretches up from the point to be struck to meet this stepped leader. Barad finds this all very mysterious, a matter of awareness, how an exchanges 'gets ahead of itself', 'queer communication' where there is neither sender nor recipient until the transmission has occurred [I still don't see this as terribly mysterious — the bolt wanders until it finds the optimum path — water does the same?]. This is 'strange causality'. There is no 'straightforward resolution of the buildup, no 'unidirectional (if somewhat erratic) path' [why not]. Instead there are 'flirtations' and gestures, possible forms of connection. The path is not predictable. Overall 'it seems that we are witnessing a quantum form of communication [at a large scale] — a process of iterative intra-activity' [bollocks]. QFT demonstrates all sorts of trouble with classical conceptions, and puts this at the heart of issues of matter and the void. If we start with the electron as a point particle, we find that it does not exist as an isolated particle but is already 'inseparable from the wild activities of the vacuum... Always (already) intra-acting with virtual particles… In all possible ways' (399). It might emit a virtual photon and then reabsorb it, 'electromagnetically interacting with itself'. Other possibilities go on in what looks like pure emptiness: a virtual photon can change its very identity into 'a virtual electron – positron pair that subsequently annihilate each other and morph back into a single virtual photon before it is reabsorbed by the electron' in fact 'there is a virtual exploration of every possibility'. All involve particles touching themselves and then transmitting the touch, transforming and then further touching and transformations 'and so on, ad infinitum). Barad insists that particular intra-actions  offer limits, but that possibilities are infinite. What we have is 'a radical undoing of kinds — queer/trans*formations' [note 32, 419 explains that the * is used as a deliberate wildcard symbol, 'a term meant to be broadly inclusive (e.g. transgender, transsexual, trans-woman, trans-man, trans person and also gender queer, Two Spirit, genderfuck, gender fluid, masculine of centre'. Apparently asterisks are used to indicate there is more meaning to something, citing an online activist]. Thus 'self touching is an encounter with the infinite alterity of the self' [a kind of quantum physics justification of Levinas?]. Matter is enfolding. We can see it as  'polymorphous perversity raised to an infinite power: talk about a queer/trans* intimacy!' This self is 'dispersed/diffracted through time and being' (400). Feynman, a Nobel prizewinner, we are reminded describe the electron with horror as monstrous and perverse, even immoral. Similarly, the notion of self energy and self touching is also monstrous because it is infinite, incalculable. Barad, this shows that 'touching oneself, or being touched by oneself… Is not simply troubling but a moral violation' [oh dear how revealing] The perversity of QFT goes deep, especially when it gets '"re-normalised"'. Some physicists have tried to argue that we have two notions of infinity here, one to do with self touching and another to do with 'nakedness', the 'Infinity associated with the "bare" point particle'. This concept was used to rescue the old idea that there is only one electron, not entangled with the void. Renormalisation 'is the systematic cancellation of [these] infinities… Perversion eliminating perversion'. In other words, electron is 'dressed' by the contribution from the vacuum, the virtual particles, and becomes a normal finite electron. This works mathematically, because you can subtract infinities to get a finite answer. But it still leads to queer theory, suggesting that all matter is essentially 'a massive overlaying of perversity is: an infinity of infinities' (401) [Note 34 says this is a sign of 'physics' ongoing (auto) deconstruction', the way it is constantly open to new possibilities and reconfigurings]. So 'foundational reductionist essentialism… Is undone by QFT', and perversity and monstrosity 'lie at the core of being… Threaded through it'. Touching entails an infinite alterity [so why does she need Levinas?]. The smallest bits of matter 'are an unfathomable multitude', including all possible interactions, 'diffracting through being and Time… an un/doing of identity'. Electron is a chimera's, crossing species and kinds, made of virtual configurations and reconfigurings, across space and time. It is a 'point particle that structure… A patchwork' it constantly produces new appendages from 'various particle – antiparticle pairs, producing and absorbing differences of every possible kind'. 'It's very nature is unnatural' electrons engage in ongoing recreation and undoing. They are 'always already untimely'. These are not characteristics, but rather 'what an electron is'. Indeterminacy is 'a condition for the possibility of all structures'. Matter should better be understood as a dynamic player of indeterminacy, an 'iterative materialisation', always radically open, never settled, with impossibility and indeterminacy 'integral ,not supplementary, to what matter is'. Matter is touching and sensing, condensing responses, doing 'response – ability' because each bit of matter is in touch with the other, 'a matter of untimely and uncanny intimacy, condensation is of beings and times' [in other words a haecceity]. Galvanism is still used in more mainstream biology like gene therapy. It is used to understand regeneration. Some animals can already regenerate either parts or even the whole. But in this particular lab at Tufts University, Levin and Adams are experimenting and producing new forms. Their work is based on frogs, a classic model organism for biology, relatively close in evolutionary terms to us, showing 'laboratory co-operativeness' [note 39 explains that they were used early in cloning experiments], and prolific in reproduction and as a result of releases from labs. The tadpoles of this particular frog, Xenopus, can regenerate their tails if they are lost early enough. The tale is a complex organ. Apparently, they will regenerate later if there is a suitable electrical field. There are connections between the old idea of bio electricity and molecular biology, because there are apparently genetic components, and a particular protein that is a '"natural source of regenerative electricity"'. This protein can be manipulated because it is also '"an ion transporter"'. A flow of charged particles works at a molecular level. For the biologist concerned, large-scale electrical patterns can play 'a causal role' in embryonic development and regeneration, and this is controversial because it introduces something outside the molecular level. They suggest there is a '"bioelectric" code of the body' which can be tweaked. Other experiments were undertaken and results were good, including '"the regeneration of complete frog legs… Providing appropriate electrical gradients at the frog's wound site"' produced the growth of a new limb. The researchers could also grow monstrous embryos, extra heads and limbs. 'Science reporters'got interested, and one reported the production of a tadpole that could grow eyes outside its head area. The suggestion is that cells from anywhere can be used to form an eye, and that some of them might be able to see. This is 'rather dramatic evidence in support of epigenetics'. There is more than a genetic code. The researchers showed 'a combination of serendipity and… Scientific instincts'. One left the camera on to record the early stages of tadpole development, 'for the heck of it'. The resultant blurry images could be clarified 'after computer processing' and turned into a time-lapse video. [Barad encloses the video — I couldn't get it to work] it shows two frog embryos, one of it which develops an electric potential as it traces out its face. This produces the whole light show, but the gripping thing is that a pattern for a face appears before the actual development of the face, a 'face – to – come of the embryo', before any actual features, before cell differentiation. Disrupting this bioelectric pattern affects subsequent development and leads to abnormality. Overall 'apparently the genes are activated by the bio electricity … A bioelectric epigenetic switch that regulates gene expression', and this is fundamental to development. It seems to regulate the whole sequence of events. Bioelectric signals seem to be required before conventional genetic sequences produce proteins. One researcher claims that this will lead to all sorts of gripping therapies in '"correcting birth defects, or preventing them"' (406). The director of the lab likes to pose as 'the errant genius', and a reporter helps spell out the geewhiz areas of regenerating limbs in humans, destroying cancer cells and so on. Barad thinks that 'this autopoietic framing', can conceal the huge labour that is also involved, a 'patchwork of entangled practices', but 'this futuristic imaginary is no doubt currently sparking the interest of a host of potential funders' Her own article is a patchwork, but this is okay because it hints at 'one or another forms of original wholeness'. Parts arise from divisions or cuts, but they do not simply 'break things off either spatially or temporarily'. Instead we have intra–actions cutting things together apart. Her article is not so much a patchwork as a phenomenon, already holding together, with different patterns of 'differentiating – entangling'. Some of these are remembered, but memory here does not refer to the human mind but rather 'marked historialities ingrained in the world's becoming' [definitely bullsjit in intent]. Memory is a field of enfolded patterns, and remembering is not recollection, not 'assembling and ordering events like puzzle pieces', but re-membering, tracing entanglements 'responding to yearnings for connection, materialised into fields of longing/belonging, of regenerating what never was but might yet have been' and she dedicates this article to those remembering this and reconfigurings (407). We can now trace a few entanglements in this article, between lightning, primordial ooze, galvanism, monsters, trans rage, quantum vacuum [and all the others]. So let's go back [oh no] to lightning. We see something like the flashings of the embryonic tadpole, and both mark out 'traces of (what might yet) be–coming'. In both cases, virtual diagrams are appearing from the play of electrons and photons, intra-actions, and QFT tells us that these are 'elemental happenings'. This makes them 'an intrinsic feature of materiality: matters ongoing experimenting with itself — the queer dance of being – time indeterminacy, the imaginative play of presence/absence, here/there, now/then, that holds the disparate parts together – apart' [Jeezus]. A U.S. Air Force research lab use a slow motion camera to allow us to see what actually happens at the beginning of a lightning bolt, 'embryonic lightning'. Again we turn to the Discovery Channel, showing someone replaying the video. We are not watching both but rather 'the display of its embryonic electrical stirrings before any part of a lightning bolt begins to manifest' (408). What this actually is is '"a flash of light dart out of the cloud and zigzagged downwards in roughly 50 yard segments"'. We are urged to watch this video for ourselves [about the third urging to watch video or make observations of our own — naïvely empiricist]. We can see 'not – yet – lightning flashes… Erratic, disjointed sets of flashes tentatively testing out different pathways'. We are told it is the stepped leader. If we 'look closely… [We]… Can see that the so-called back-and-forth motion is a discontinuous pattern of flashing… And that some of the gestures are upwards rather than downward', or 'the stepped leader gesturing toward the earth, variously expressing its yearnings'. These are barely luminous. They represent 'the potential face of lightning yet to be born' a discontinuous exploration of different pathways. Apparently, the 'musings' of the stepped leader are fractal -like, and one hero thinks of them as electrical confusion, produced by '"possibly various airborne regions of charge (space charge)" [this is rapidly replaced by American scientist baby talk — '"more likely, the leader just doesn't know exactly where it wants to go"']. 'It is as if' [!] The electrons are trying different paths 'feeling out', 'exploring entanglements of yearning'. There is no direct channel of electrons between cloud and earth. The ground itself can respond. 'These gestures are material imaginings, electrical flirtations signalling connections – to – come… Signals of the desiring field that animates their interactive becoming' (409) [note 59 (421) connects this to the debate about action at a distance in Einstein, which is now simply understood to be a matter of quantum entanglements — and she references all her own early work]. If this is 'reminiscent' of a quantum phenomenon 'it may not be that surprising' because lightning is the result of strong electromagnetic fields where photons and electrons 'engage in a quantum exploration of multiple temporalities and polymorphous/polyamorous couplings — the dance of indeterminacy' [so here are quantum phenomena have caused something macro, by assertion. Back to the electronic face of an embryo. One of the researchers is fascinated, and says that the features that are shown do not actually exist at that time, and that genes to produce them hadn't been turned on, so that they flashes show '"the ghost of features yet to come"'. They are like the traces of embryonic lightning. They are 'traces differentiating materialisation is – to – come, virtual explorations of making face', exploring different possibilities [so do they show different forms of faces?] She is 'drawing on quantum field theoretic imagery to describe this event' [a lot less firm than the earlier statement about quantum phenomena appearing in lightning]. And that in turn says that there is a 'quantum' feature of these biophysical phenomena [again descriptive language does this], adding to the 'emerging field' of quantum biology. We are not just describing quantum mechanical effects which have already been used to explain bird navigational photosynthesis, but rather 'quantum field theoretical effects… Virtual explorations of what might yet materialise… As an integral part of ongoing processes of materialisation'. Skies and embryos and quantum voids are 'imagining all matter of becoming' (410), 'having brain flashes', experimenting, and these are 'explorations of possible trans*formations' [and if all this is right, we might conclude that these are 'integral to each and every (ongoing) be(com)ing', unless we thought that in the first place] Back to Stryker and affinities with monsters, now seen as 'a regenerative politics' a way of exploring new ways of being, new possibilities for kinship. 'Regeneration understood as a quantum phenomenon brings indeterminacy's radical potential to the fore', showing 'material wanderings/wanderings… A virtual exploration of what might yet be/have been… Condensed into each material bit – here – now… (Each "dressed point")'. Virtual possibilities are not just a collection of individual possibilities, not what is absent from the real, not some unrealised potential future once and actual lived reality has developed. Instead it is 'a superposition of im/possibilities, energetic throbs of the nothingness, material forces of creativity and generativity… Material explorations… Integral to what matter is' (410 – 11). Matter is not lifeless it is a material exploration it is 'creatively regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation', a condensation of multiple dispersed beings and times 'where the future and past are deflected into now'. It is caught in desiring fields. It touches itself 'in an infinite exploration' and this inevitably involves a partnership 'with otherness in a radical ongoing deconstruction and (re)configuring of itself'. It explores 'trans*-animacy [and all sorts of other wonderful things] but 'not in an autopoietic mode' (411). 'On the contrary' [it operates as] 'a radical undoing of "self," of individualism'. It is 'uncountably multiple,mutable' it is agentialism, it does reconfiguring in a radical sense, undoing fixed notions of this and that, reconfiguring 'spacetimemattering itself' — future past and present are 'integral to the play of the indeterminacy of being – time' [I really think you should go for this. This is repetitive assertion, conjuration, poetry that works because it is homonymic and so on]. Electric bodies at all scales are 'quantum phenomen[a]'. 'Regenerative possibilities are endless. Fodder for potent trans*imaginaries, reconfiguring future/past live realities' we might cultivate the radical potential of bioelectrical science to offer 'aligning neo-galvanism with trans*desires, not in order to have control over life but to empower and galvanise the disenfranchised and breathe life into new forms of queer agency and embodiment' we might get a regenerate the materiality in virtuality to produce 'what was missing in fleshiness', to make tangible what we can sense but cannot yet touch [all in the form of rhetorical questions] can we reconfigure 'fleshliness bit by bit by slowly changing the flow of ions'.Can we dis- and re-member? If all this seems cruel, and requiring pain to overcome hard reality, we can still think of a 'regenerative politics with all its monstrously queer possibilities' which will 'recharge our imaginations and our electric bodies – spirits'and reanimate ourselves. This is not just 'an uncritical embrace of science's utopian promise' (412). We may not get simple progress and 'there is no illusion of queer regeneration being a bloodless affair' [getting really sinister now]. Regenerative medicine 'does not constitute an innocent mode of engagement with science, divorced from any heteronormative reproductive impulses'. It is sometimes openly normative, with ideas of embodiment and naturalness. It sometimes seeks to 'eliminate bodily irregularities in a quest to honour Nature'. Current studies of bio electrics are already 'aligning themselves with promises of curing cancer, birth defects and disabilities', and there was initial interest in a robot that could heal itself. Projects are often 'in the service of the military industrial complex, capitalism, racism, and colonialism [which] cannot be disentangled from the practices of modern science'. Science does try to '"contain and colonise the radical threats posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance"' and it is aligned to '"a deeply conservative attempt to stabilise gendered identity in service of the naturalised heterosexual order"' [it is not at all clear who is being quoted here, although note 67 refers to Stryker]. However 'this is not reason to believe that trans*desires can be corralled into cooperation' and science might invite us to imagine different possibilities, subverting its conservative agendas, opening it up from the inside, 'and serving as midwife to its always already deconstructive nature'. QFT suggests that nature 'is an ongoing questioning of itself', indeterminate, 'an ongoing deconstructing of naturalness' [that is as silly plebs imagine naturalness]. The quantum void is the scene of activity, 'perverse and promiscuous couplings, queer goings-on that make pre-AIDS bathhouses look tame'. It is a virtual exploration. Nature is perverse at its core, so there is no need for it to be sited as a naturalised order opposing trends queer and others in the form of '"hegemonic oppression"'. We should be naturalised [this] nature and demonstrate its queerness, its monstrous face, to unlock its 'significant political potential' (413). The overall picture is of 'monstrously large space of agency unleashed in the indeterminate player virtuality in all its un/doings… A trans-subjective [no*] material field of im/possibilities worth exploring'. QFT has been entangled with capitalism colonialism and the military-industrial complex, but it also 'contains its own doing — in a performative exploration/materialisation of a subversive materialism...[ This]...very undoing is the im/proper object of study' [note 69 refers to her ongoing book manuscript — oh no — Infinity, nothingness, and justice to come]. We are not trying to 'make trans or queer into universal features and dilute their subversive potentials'. We have to undo universality in favour of 'radical specificity of materiality' nor is trends some abstraction, 'sacrificing its embodiment inappropriate if embrace of the latest theory trends' (413). We need instead to make alliances, building on a radical tradition that goes back at least to Marx, to challenge naturalness. Science has its own political agency from its own deconstructive forces that help us imagine new possibilities and provide new understandings. 'Queer kinship is a potent political formation' says Stryker, and we might extend this to kinship with nature, 'to reclaim our trans*natures as natural', refuting essences and the past history where nature was mobilised for oppression. Instead we can see ourselves as part of nature's doings.  Stryker's work 'reverberates' with this [followed by a quote where she thinks of her body as a matter of movement, able to explore the boundaries]. This is a 'topological dynamic [which] reverberates with QFT processes', as in interactive becoming reconfiguring and the like. Stryker rights of transgender rebirthing. 'Her voice solicits me to defer actively intercut her words of there... [Below] with those... Of an electron I imagine to be speaking contra punctually of its own perpetual (r)ebirthing' (414 in case I forgot to mention it). [Note 71 apologises to Stryker for disrupting her poem and thanks for a corporation and openness to this 'experiment in entangled poetics' (422)] [Some truly awful shit follows about how she is an electron seeing shimmering lights, living in the void — it reminds me of my own parody about the talking condom. Then chunks of Stryker's text with bits added, such as '[void]' close, then another bit about how the electron wants to interact and become multiple, until 'a raging scream without sound'erupts (416), just like Stryker's rage. It is awful. Notes start by saying that Stryker has accepted to have 'some of her poetics differ actively read through mine'. Note to says that her 'ontological – political project resonates with Marco Cuevas-Hewitts' call for something — a 'futurology of the present" to identify alternative futures. The notes often reference herself. Darwin is dragging in note 4. Various magazines including Smithsonian magazine and scientific American other sources for some of the stuff about primordial soups. Note 16 quotes Judith Butler on the suspect universality of the category of sexes, although she wants to explore much more as she does in the 2007 book. Note 17 confesses to a 'political investment in enlarging the scope of my project to include quantum food field theory [because it helps] trouble the underlying metaphysics of colonialist claims such as terrae nullius' (417) — do aboriginals need that?. Note 20s says that QFT has helped her to 'further articulate the agential realism' because it offers radical deconstruction of identity and the equation of matter with essence even better than quantum physics does. There's lots of borrowing from your own work. Note 28 acknowledges Kirby (2011) on lightning and its connective engagement. Note 29 also says that it shows that quantum phenomena are not just restricted to the micro-domain. Note 34 understands renormalisation as 'a sign of physics ongoing (auto)deconstruction'. Note 35 says that she did not choose electrons arbitrarily, but because we are made up of them. Arguing that electrons are trans-material configurations 'is not to naturalised trans (or queer for that matter), but rather to acknowledge the radically transgressive potential of nature itself… (Sufficiently subversive, in this case, to instil "horror" and those who would propose to know it fully)'. Note 36 refers to a talk she gave in Australia 2013. Note 45 cites Tufts Journal as the source for a geewhiz E bit about regeneration, and note 54 refers us to a news release. Note 60 argues that quantum effects are found at larger and larger spatial scales, including the molecular in this case, 'orders of magnitude larger than the atomic scale' (421). Note 62 is an indication of Donna Haraway are monsters. Note 63 refers to collapse as a matter of superposition of possibilities shown in the wave function diagram in her book. It also says that 'the notion of the virtual discussed here is based on my interpretation of quantum field theory. It is not the same as Giles Deleuze's notion of the virtual, although there are some interesting residences. I discuss this further in a future publication [oh no again] (422). Note 65 says that 'scale is only materialised/defined within particular phenomena'.