Contribution
A short statement of agential realism, in Barad’s own words, aimed at queer theory and ecocriticism. It extends performativity from human practices to “all matter(ings)” (p. 31) and puts “queerness” in the indeterminacy of identity, causality, space and time, not in human sexuality alone. For this record its value is that it states the agential cut, intra-action, phenomenon and agential separability first-hand (pp. 31–32, 46–47), where the record had them only at second hand.
Key insight
There are no things before relations. A phenomenon is an entanglement in which “relata only exist within phenomena as a result of specific intra-actions” (p. 49, note 28). Where classical thought takes the line between subject and object as given in advance (the Cartesian cut), Barad takes every such line as enacted, locally and within the phenomenon, by an intra-action: the agential cut. It separates and binds in one movement (“cut things together-apart”, p. 32), so separation is “exteriority-within”, not absolute. Accountability then attaches to the cuts that are made and what they exclude.
Assumptions
- Bohr’s philosophy-physics, read ontologically. The objective referent of “wave” and “particle” is not an object with inherent properties but “what he called a phenomenon – the entanglement/inseparability of ‘object’ and ‘apparatus’ (which do not preexist the experiment but rather emerge from it)” (p. 42). That this inseparability is ontological, and not a limit on description, is Barad’s reading, asserted here and argued in Barad 2007.
- Quantum entanglement as the model of all relation. Phenomena are entanglements “in the technical sense of ‘quantum entanglements’” (p. 32), and the shift “is not necessarily circumscribed by the scale of the microscopic realm” (p. 45; note 56 distinguishes the ontological question from whether classical laws explain a regularity).
- Diffractive reading. Agential realism is “not a straight read of physics” but insights from physics and from poststructuralist theory “read through one another” (p. 46, note 58).
- Performativity as iterative intra-activity, against Butler’s “iterative citationality” (p. 49, notes 24 and 27).
Key results
The essay has no results of its own. Its claims, in order:
- The nature/culture divide undoes itself (pp. 27–31). The legal and moral category “crimes against nature” both places the human outside nature and condemns acting like a beast, so its logic trips over the very divide it is meant to secure (pp. 29–30).
- The cut cannot presuppose the human (p. 31). What is needed is “accountability for the cuts that are made”, and “Whatever a ‘cut’ is must not assume a prior notion of the ‘human’”. The posthumanist point is “not to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman” but “to understand the materializing effects of particular ways of drawing boundaries”.
- The agential cut (p. 32). Quoted in full: “A specific intra-action enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. Crucially then, intra-actions enact agential separability – the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena.” And: “Identity is a phenomenal matter; it is not an individual affair.”
- Intra-action (p. 32). “The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata)” reworks “causality, agency, space, time, matter, discourse, responsibility, and accountability”.
- Queer critters (pp. 33–38). Lightning, whose upward and downward leaders make “a communication that has neither sender nor recipient until transmission has already occurred” (p. 35); stingray receptor cells that seem to anticipate a signal (from Kirby 2001); Pfiesteria, whose toxicity “only ‘are’ in relationship to fish” so that, on Schrader’s account, an epistemic uncertainty is “an ontological indeterminacy” (pp. 37–38).
- The quantum leap (pp. 39–41). Read as a discontinuity “that exists in neither space nor time”, which “torques” the relation of continuity and discontinuity (pp. 40–41).
- Which-path and quantum eraser (pp. 41–44). With a which-slit detector the pattern is a scatter pattern; without one, or after the which-slit information is erased, a diffraction pattern. Barad: “This is direct empirical evidence that identity is not fixed and inherent, but performative” (p. 43), and the eraser shows “the atom’s identity, its ontology, is never fixed, but is always open to future and past reworkings”. Against the eraser’s proponents she argues the past is not changed or restored: the post-erasure pattern “is not the same as the ‘original’”, and “the trace of all measurements remains even when information is erased” (p. 44).
- Cutting together-apart (pp. 46–47). “Agential cuts – intra-actions – don’t produce (absolute) separation, they engage in agential separability – differentiating and entangling (that’s one move, not successive processes).” “Agential cuts radically rework relations of joining and disjoining” (p. 46).
- Ethics (pp. 46–47). “There are no ‘acts against nature’ … there are only ‘acts of nature’ (including thinking and language use)”; accountability is “an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter” (pp. 46–47).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | An intra-action enacts an agential cut, a local resolution within a phenomenon of an inherent ontological indeterminacy, yielding agential separability | asserted | definition, pp. 32, 46; argued in Barad 2007 |
| C2 | The Cartesian cut is an inherent, prior distinction between subject and object, and is what the agential cut replaces | asserted | p. 32 |
| C3 | Relata do not preexist relations; phenomena are the ontological primitives | asserted | notes 28–29, p. 49 |
| C4 | The which-path and quantum-eraser experiments show identity is performative, not inherent | weak | Bohr’s interpretation of the experiments taken as ontological; the experiment is described, not analysed (details deferred to Barad 2007, ch. 7) |
| C5 | Erasing which-path information does not restore the original pattern or the past | moderate as physics, interpretive as ontology | the post-erasure pattern appears only on sorting by the entangled record, which she states informally (p. 44) |
| C6 | The quantum ontology applies at macroscopic scale (lightning, Pfiesteria) | weak | analogy and secondary accounts (Kirby, Schrader); note 56 concedes classical laws may explain the regularities |
| C7 | There are no acts against nature, only acts of nature | argued | from C1–C3 and the nature/culture analysis |
Concepts
- Phenomenon — “material-discursive intra-actions” that “extend across … space and time”; “ontologically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata” (p. 32, p. 49 note 28). Bohr’s word, which Barad takes over.
- Intra-action — action within a phenomenon, as against interaction between independently existing entities (p. 32).
- Agential cut — what an intra-action enacts: a separation between “subject” and “object” that is a local resolution of ontological indeterminacy within the phenomenon (p. 32). Not an absolute separation: “cutting together/apart” (p. 46).
- Cartesian cut — “an inherent distinction” between subject and object (p. 32), the classical assumption the agential cut replaces.
- Agential separability — “the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena” (p. 32); a separability that is “a matter of irreducible heterogeneity” without reducing difference to sameness (p. 46).
- Spacetimemattering — the imploded term for space, time and matter taken as entangled, not separate (p. 49, note 25).
- Apparatus — used here only of the two-slit set-up and its which-slit detector (pp. 41–43). The essay gives no general definition.
Connections
The essay presents itself as a companion to Barad 2010 (note 57) and points to Barad 2007 (LIT-1657) for the physics (notes 49, 53), and to Barad 2003 (LIT-1653) for posthumanist performativity (note 23). It draws its nonhuman cases from Vicki Kirby (Quantum Anthropologies, 2011) and Astrid Schrader (2010). Its quantum physics is Bohr’s complementarity read as ontology, the line Faye and Jaksland (NOTE-1220) and Jaksland (NOTE-1230) examine in the record. Its view of performativity is set against Butler’s.
Bearing on the record
- TERM-087: partly. The term waits on “a reading of Barad herself that confirms or corrects the third sense”. This reading confirms the core in her own words: an agential cut is enacted by an intra-action within a phenomenon, it is “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy” (so ontological, not epistemic), it yields “agential separability – the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena”, and it is defined against “the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object” (p. 32), which matches TERM-087’s first sense. It does not confirm the rest. The essay never defines an apparatus in general (the word is used only of the two-slit set-up), never says that a cut is movable or that “no agential cut is an inherent distinction”, and never mentions Heisenberg. Those parts still rest on Faye and Jaksland’s quotations from Barad 2007. One difference to note: Barad reads Bohr’s phenomenon as an ontological inseparability of object and apparatus “which do not preexist the experiment” (p. 42), whereas TERM-087, after Faye and Jaksland, holds Bohr’s own separation fixed and epistemic. That is a disagreement between Barad and her critics about Bohr, which the term already reports, not a correction of the term.
- CLAIM-476. It calls luria an apparatus “in Barad’s constitutive sense” for a record’s objects. The essay supports the sense of cut the claim uses (a differentiation enacted within a phenomenon, not presupposed), but gives no general account of an apparatus, so it does not supply the constitutive sense the claim names. It says nothing about records.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- An essay, not an argument from evidence. The physics is described informally and the interpretive step from Bohr’s complementarity to an ontology of phenomena is asserted here and referred to Barad 2007. The macroscopic cases are taken from secondary accounts and read by analogy.
- What “evidence” means here. The claim that the eraser is “direct empirical evidence” of performative identity holds only on Barad’s reading of Bohr; a reader who takes the which-path result as a fact about what can be jointly measured gets no such conclusion from it.
- Terms are defined in the notes or by reference: phenomenon (note 28), spacetimemattering (note 25), diffraction (notes 30, 58). Apparatus, the word TERM-087 most needs, is not defined.
- The version. Barad says the Qui Parle printing is not the version she submitted (notes 1 and 15); this reading is of the authorized one only.
Open questions
- Does Barad 2007 define the apparatus and the movability of the cut as Faye and Jaksland quote her? Only a reading of LIT-1657 settles it.
- Is the agential cut ontological in a sense that differs from a movable Heisenberg cut taken realistically? The essay does not compare them.