Notes on: Kirby, V (2018) Originary différance: "A Quantum Vitalism". Journal of Theory of Social Behaviour 48: 162--6 DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12164 Dave Harris [This is a review article, reviewing Wendt, A (2015) Quantum Mind and Social Science: unifying physical and social ontology {AW} ] Apparently  AW saw the possibility that '"mind and social life are macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomena", and that this would address the fundamental issue of minds and bodies. Kirby's own epiphany came when thinking about the Cartesian notion of identity as coherent and autonomous, and how this led to all sorts of other binaries between cause and effect, self and other. It domesticated space and time as separate moments and suggested an arrow for time. It has been a very persuasive 'illusion' (162). AW offers no catechism, based on any political leverage of various models that are supposed to necessarily obscure unmediated reality. He insists that human exceptionalism is 'inherently unnatural' (163), and wants to recapture an interest in the efficacy of science. Social scientists might venture into the areas of physics and mathematics as well although this is difficult. Kirby has at least facilitated conversations and acted as an 'interlocutor', but it is an asymmetric role [because there is an asymmetric relation between the disciplines -- can social science add to physics?] . She has made an assumption that 'the quantum problematic is ubiquitous and non-local' and has set out to discuss 'quantum quandaries' in the humanities and social sciences. In Telling Flesh…, she argued against political associations that connect the body with women and women with nature. These are still apparent. Cultural or social constructionism developed as an 'explanatory mantra', but this excludes important questions and 'the political agenda of Cartesianism [has been] unwittingly reinstalled', despite an apparent rejection of it. The 'foundational assumption' of constructionism is that the discursive, language, cultural symbolic systems 'have a "worlding" effect', so that reality itself is manufactured, subjective, culturally inflicted, a necessary mediation of nature. Sometimes, this helps culture masquerade as nature [as in 'second nature'?] as a kind of 'back projection of what came first' . The natural order of things is not given but made malleable, subject to a politicised reflexivity, so that we can control our own destiny: we are unequivocally agential, and this is heartening. She did not argue that we should just reverse distinctions, or add qualities together, for that would be to assume that there are separate individuations. That would misunderstand difference as a mere absence or space between something. Instead, she saw a general vitalism at work, life itself, and thus that 'perhaps thinking, agency, even self reflection might be ubiquitous… morphologically exuberant in appearance and variety' (164). The self becomes  chiasmatically articulated' [citing Merlau Ponty], nonlocal. She did not grasp at the time that quantum reality including its strange communications and materialisations 'were already apparent in the "atomic particle" of linguistics — the Sausssurian sign'. As a result, 'any one thing, whether a word, a photon, sell, and notion, gene, and animal or plant is inherently diffracted across "the whole", appearing here and there, with no conventional arrow of time. This was argued in Quantum Anthropologies… She inverts the idea that culture was secondary to nature and suggested instead that 'this holographic whole is nature writ large, with "writ" being the operative word'. She calls it holographic meaning literally '"writing the whole," or, "whole writing"'. She thought in terms of '"originary humanicity"', placing human identity under erasure in order to interrogate it and its claims to exceptionalism. Are we just 'mutant aberrations', breaking free of nature's programs as in Hyppolite on Derrida's argument that nature writes: H saw such writing as 'unintended scribble' quite unlike human being. When Derrida argued that there is nothing outside language, it was not 'about denaturing the human', however but arguing that there is no external reference point 'that isn't entanglement and mutation' [in a linguistic system though?] . Mostly, words and judgements assume what it is to be human with all the associated concepts such as agency and language. We have to use these terms whenever we argue, but we can at least 'acknowledge that their definitional truth, their exact capacities and properties, might say more about the reflexive tautology' involved in being human — that [to be human] we have to use technology, and language (165). This might fit with Latour dispensing agency to objects — 'a "distributed agency"', which makes a start on denying that agency and decision are exceptionally human, at least by definition. Exceptionalism involves 'political myopia and centrist pomposity'. But what if we assume that quantum weirdness is found 'all the way up' [she says that Barad 2007 concedes this]. This relates to the riddles and difficulties in AW's book, but rather than extend his remarks, she wants to explore the idea of her own epiphany. The two slit experiment certainly looks weird, but the results 'remain faithful to classical metaphysics'. Some analysts have tried to restore more conventional notions of causality, by seeing the individual agent, the experiment, the technological apparatus, and a notion of passive or compliant energy linked conventionally. Barad denies this and starts instead with entanglement, but this is also 'strange' because it implies that even the '"decision" to experiment' and to try to explain events, 'is generated by one, worldly/Worlding phenomenon', one that is not even bounded by scientific experiment in laboratories.  [Political implications are also depressing] We need 'a quantum consciousness'. We have to start with 'originary différance/diffraction' and place human exceptionalism 'under erasure'. We have to avoid returning to Cartesianism in the process. If we start with the view that 'some sort of anthropic principle is universal and somehow at work' we should start by thinking of a 'diffracted/holographic starting point', not separate atomic entities or moments. This raises a problem. We do not avoid binaries 'with a purportedly non-binary intervention', because 'binary versus non-binary = binary' (165 – 6) [see Parnet's discussion with Deleuze on this]. A proper notion of the whole 'must comprehend so-called errors, prejudice, Cartesianism, stupidity, cultural constructionism and naïve empiricism' — they are also entangled and inside 'the quantum problematic' [this is precisely the problem of deleuzian univocity, which makes liberatory politics based on it so difficult]. Let's go back to Derrida [what a shame]. He does not refuse to engage in the sciences or the quantum problematic. Indeed, 'his entire oeuvre is testament to its ubiquity'. Ideation is 'in/separable from the matter of the world, where "text" is a gene, an atom, and letter and all at once' [is this Derrida or Kirby?]. We can see from a quotation below that  the subject practising science is 'autoimmune — strangely split from itself, appearing as the "object" of the study, and also as the representational model, the third term, that supposedly mediates the two separate identities' (166) [The quote comes from Derrida in a piece by Vitale, F 2014 on Derrida]. Messages do not say anything themselves, but they emit a [meta?] message to enable its own decipherment or translation. In this sense there is nothing outside '"the message, the information, the communication"'. Words such as communication or message are '"intra-textual"', and only managed to work '"on condition of text"' [this really is weaselly, where 'the text' becomes a specific message, and of course there is no way of decoding that except with other texts. Metalanguage is the same as language -- no wonder science is not particularly privileged. It'snot eeven asreluctantly specific as Foucault ( at the end of The Archaeology...) I still think this is quite different from the behaviour of slime moulds]. back to Kirby page