Notes on: Roosth S and Schrader, A. (2012) Feminist Theory Out of Science: Introduction. Differences, 23 (3): 1--8 Dave Harris There is a danger in offending people by claiming this is a new feminist materialism. The question is how scientific theories inform cultural critique, how critical theories might be generated out of scientific ones. The term 'out' does not imply a simple emergence. First we have to assume that the 'world is already theory all the way down' (2), taking Barad's argument that theories are living and breathing reconfiguring is, forms of experiment. It follows that 'the world… Is inhabited by theories of itself', that corals do not just manifest mathematical theories but 'do mathematics', that bacteria do code breaking, 'the same' as cryptographers and hackers. Bacteria may also be seen as engineers or pharmacists. It follows that human beings are '"already practising physics"' [citing Barad]. In particular writing about science is the same as doing science, which is the same as 'simply getting on in the world'. The issue then becomes one of choosing the right sort of scientific theory, ones which will 'servers analytical starter cultures'. There is already a practice which works across theoretical and empirical branches of science to generate new theories [abduction?], 'sideways manoeuvers'. They can also link 'the critical and the empirical, the semiotic and the material'. We can challenge the usual distinctions between theory and things, matter and method. Any encounter between feminist theory and science studies should also question what an encounter is and how they might be used to understand 'entanglements and partial engagements with creatures, technologies, and other things that furnish our world'. Nagel once asked what it was like to be a bat, suggesting a gulf between observable fact and phenomenal experience. This must be reckoned with, although we can still maintain 'the promise of such an impossibility'. In particular it means that any knowledge like this must be 'always persepctival' in in particular always accountable. We can then reimagine and pursue 'thickly describing' of these encounters, teasing out all their elements. There is particular promise in doing this with different biological species, as Haraway has argued. Techno-scientific practices sometimes make this difficult. All disciplinary discourses already imply a relation between subjects and objects, but leave 'inherently indeterminate to engages with whom'. Thus the term affectivity starts to appear 'from spaces between discourses, frames, images, subjects and objects' these might guide us towards some practice of communication which departs from the usual human realm. We might notice what happens when subjectivity undergoes technical modification, perhaps via new media. Affectivity might be engendered by art [the examples are technological artists like Viola], especially if it manipulates time and modification images [examples from Viola which 'simultaneously modifies recording and playback, retooling the image itself' on page 3] or points to an excess of self, affectivity points to passivity in consciousness, a certain sense in which subjects are out of phase with themselves. This passivity within subjectivity also 'allows for care, affects on responsibility in scientific knowledge production' [quoting Schrader on dinoflagellates -- her thesis]. It involves de subjectification, allowing a more passive decision '"coming from the other within"' (4) in Derrida's phrase. We become aware of our own vulnerability and lack of power. This should lead to 'hetero affection', where the other is seen as internal to the self and 'nature is always contaminated by technology'. There are connections with diffraction as both scientific practice and metaphor. Barad goes on to generalise from the classical notion based on geometrical optics to a concept like entanglement found in quantum optics. In classical objects, light reflects and refracts, but does not affect the object itself even if it offers differences for the Observer. Feminist accounts want to challenge this, seeing knowledge production not just as playback, but as a more active recording. In Barad's terms, diffraction does not just describe entanglement, but refers to differences that matter [ethically, or politically]. There is an inseparable entanglement between the apparatus and the object, and inherent undecidability in their intra-action. The authors want to suggest 'spectrology as a visual technology', the study of spectres, a pattern that appears by diffraction after light is dispersed into its component colours. It also links to the notion of different kinds of species and to respect, or show concern. Spectrology implies that diffractions actually 'reconstitute time'(5). Classical diffraction means that interfering components are in phase, temporally coherent. Spectrality looked instead at time out of joint, a fundamental asynchrony'. Here, 'physical and affective work' is required to make temporal connections, and to deny a simple temporal unity. Again Derrida is cited to argue that '"all work produces spectrality"'. For Barthes, there is the object image of the photograph, produced by touch. There is physical touch of light rays on the photosensitive material, and then the way in which the images transmitted to the retina of the Spectator. In this way, the image becomes 'the real past', and photographs in particular imply  irreversibility. The 'geometrical optics of reflection only work one way'. Derrida argues against this view that touch is what we are deprived of when we look at a photograph, so that such becomes 'desire signifying its absence'. Things can only exist in the real past if they are both different and absent. However, photons are different [for Derrida], appearing as a flow of light which envelops the Spectator and provides a different view, '"from the point of view of the other"' (6). This also implies a certain indeterminacy in the transmission process, akin to the possibilities of manipulation with digital photography as opposed to analogue. Both playback or reading and recording or writing processes are affected. For Derrida, spectrology therefore means an attention to 'an irreducible alterity, a respect for the "other", "for what is not simply present", a spectre'. We want to not just record history but undo past meanings by seeing how they are constituted, by denying fixed ontological relations. Each essay pursues this view, offering multiple spectres and their interference s— 'through incorporations, appropriations, and re-recordings of inherited discourses ineffective transdisciplinary labour'. [With some discussion of the different chapters]. The point is to show '"critical enmeshments"' between scientific and feminist theories, 'across, alongside, within, against, athwart, beyond, betwixt and between' (7).