25 Nature’s Queer Performativity *

BY KAREN BARAD

“O ozing through Texas Soil, How can the possibility of the queer - a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong” (Yoon ness of one of the most pervasive of 2009), is a news story title teeming with all critters – atoms – be entertained? powerful imaginaries that collectively exude These “ultraqueer” critters with a fearful, if not at least faintly moralistic, scent that permeates the article. The body their quantum quotidian qualities of the article is crawling with hints of the queer queerness itself in their radi - kinds of phenomena that are at issue in this cally deconstructive ways of being. paper: concerns over foundations, stability The aim is to show that all sorts of and instability, reconfigurations and shape shiftings, nonhuman agency, queer critter seeming impossibilities are indeed behaviors, fear and moralism, and nature/ possible, including the queerness of culture, micro/macro, temporal, and spa - causality, matter, space, and time. tial boundary crossings. “Scientists found the vast and sticky em - pire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston”. 2 The mix - ture of morality, politics, and bodily fluids – the aggregation of night terrors of a collec - tive underground movement and revulsions of the flesh – form a tantalizing cocktail. * the authorized version 1 The descriptive language is poignant and 26 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 evocative – “vast and sticky empire … ooz - and “suicide” – an interesting term given ing along in the muck” – and the imagery, all that it implies about intentionality and held in colloidal suspension right there on the metaphysics of individualism – is in fact the surface, is ripe with the musty odors of a common way that scientists and science fear. One doesn’t have to read very far be - reporters speak of the fate of “individual” neath the surface to witness the merger of amoebas in the process of aggregation. But political anxieties and scientific curiosity in - is it not a rather peculiar reading of the be - to a more complex multi-cellular organism: havior of an organism initially named after the shape-shifter god Proteus – Proteus ani - Though amoebas would seem unlikely to co - malcule – “a blob with no defined shape, ordinate interactions with one another over bits of which could break off to take up a much more than microscopic distances, the life of their own”, an organism that morphs discovery of such a massive clonal colony, from a seemingly uncoordinated group of [Kevin Foster, a Harvard evolutionary biolo - genetically identical single cells to an aggre - gist] said, “raises the possibility that cells gate “slug” with an immune system and might evolve to organize on much larger spa - other organismic functionality characteristic tial scales.” of multicellular species with different roles … In fact, like the colony of social amoe - played by identical cellular units? 3 As Pro - bas, the giant amoebas could be everywhere fessor John Tyler Bonner, who has spent a underfoot without anyone’s noticing. lifetime studying slime molds puts it, slime “I used to joke,” Dr. Schliwa said, “that molds [of which social amoebas or cellular there might be a giant organism in the soil slime molds ( Dictyosteliida ) are classified as spanning the entire continent and whenever one kind] are “no more than a bag of you dig up a shovelful you get a piece of it.” amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet So where will the next giant amoeba be they manage to have various behaviours found hiding? Dr. Schliwa points out that the that are equal to those of animals who pos - original discovery of the amoeba-to-end-all- sess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that amoebas was made in the 1940s by a re - is, simple brains”. 4 What is or isn’t an “in - searcher named Ruth N. Nauss. She dis- dividual” is not a clear and distinct matter, covered the species in a New York City park. and that seems to be precisely the scientific sticking point: the question of the nature of Drawing back the curtain on the workings identity is ripe here – it’s what’s so spec- of her own dramatic rendering, the author tacularly exciting from a scientific point of of The New York Times article presses one view. No wonder that social amoebas are of the article’s subterranean imaginaries to taken to be model organisms in molecular the surface, outing the thinly veiled ghost biology and genetics for studying commu - of the 1958 horror classic “The Blob”, a nication and cell differentiation. Social Cold War movie about the creeping threat amoebas queer the nature of identity, call - of communism. The anti-communism ing into question the individual/group bi - theme percolates through the article and nary. In fact, when it comes to queering creeps into the (presentation of the) scien - identity, the social amoeba enjoys multiple tific details: “Only an apparent oxymoron, indeterminacies, and has managed to hood - social amoebas are able to gather in orga - wink scientists’ ongoing attempts to nail nized groups and behave cooperatively, down its taxonomy, its species-being defy - some even committing suicide to help fel - ing not only classification by phylum but low amoebas reproduce”. The sacrifice of also by kingdom. 5 Nonetheless, the rhetori - the individual self for the good of the cal bias favors the story line of the indivi- whole fits the red-scare theme like a glove, dual sacrifice for the good of the whole. No NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 27 wonder the reader doesn’t have to exert nothing innocent about the playful stimula - much effort to unearth the political and tion of the fear response. An aggregate of moralistic undercurrents. angst and dread labors beneath the surface While this journalist is clearly having lots and when the conditions are favorable it of fun with her subject matter, the affective oozes out into the open. Fear and moral - response stimulated by the playful conjur - ism make a caustic brew. ing of this specter is not purely nostalgic, In fact, when it comes to social amoebas for The Blob – a sticky oozing illimitable one doesn’t have to look very far to find all protean creature that consumes everything manner of moralizing rhetoric. “Amoebic in its path, a particularly vivid literalization Morality”, an article whose title betrays all of the fear of being consumed by the Other subtlety, is not in the least bit out of step in a xenophobic panic over the spread of with science reporting in its use of moral foreign elements – did not die off with Mc - descriptors like “noble”, “cheaters”, Carthyism, but thrived during the Vietnam “leeches”, “cooperating with strangers”, War years and on through the Reagan “self-sacrifice” to describe amoebic behav - years. Rabid anticommunism isn’t the only iors. It goes on to explain that amoebas are form this fear assumes. Over the course of being deployed in laboratory studies of al - history it has mutated and multiplied its truism, as if it’s the most natural follow up forms to take on the shape of other rank investigation, with no acknowledgement of societal fears, setting up the conditions for the circularity at work. 6 All of which raises panicked reactivity and the spread of the question whether Nature is an exem - loathing and contempt for the Other. For plary moral actor or a commie activist (or, example, The Blob has gone viral in recent heaven forfend, both)! That said, it would years, producing a combination of panic be a serious error to conclude that I am out and neglect rather than compassion and to recount the sins of anthropomorphizing. reasoned response during recent health On the contrary, I am deeply interested in crises, such as the AIDS epidemic, the mad ‘anthropomorphizing’ as an intervention cow disease epidemic, and the avian flu epi - for shaking loose the crusty toxic scales of demic, which has resulted in the willful sac - anthropocentricism, where the human in its rifice of humans (particularly gay men, IV- exceptional way of being gets to hold all drug users, and adults and children living the “goodies” like agency, intentionality, in Sub-Saharan Africa), nonhuman mam - rationality, feeling, pain, empathy, lan - mals (particularly cows), and birds (particu - guage, consciousness, imagination, and larly chickens), respectively. The systemic much more. That is, I am interested in incitement of fear and loathing is also evi - troubling the assumptions that prop up the dent in the spread of racial, religious, and anthropos in the first place, including the ethnic dis-ease, as in the pernicious spread assumed separation between “the human” of Islamophobia in the US and Europe, the and its others. What I am suggesting is not stunning reawakening of virulent strains of strategic anthropomorphism per se, but us - anti-Semitism in Europe a mere fifty years ing the anthropomorphic moment to call after the Holocaust, and the latest round of the question, not in order to reiterate the unabashedly racist anti-immigration legisla - habits of projection, but rather, in fractur - tion in Arizona, to name but a few. What - ing the presumptions of the ‘anthropos’ of ever specific form it takes, fear of The Blob “anthropocentrism”, and in so doing open - is very much alive on the contemporary po - ing up a space for response – that is, mak - litical scene. ing an invitation to the other to respond by When trekking in the slimy muck of putting oneself at risk and doing the work morality, politics, and bodily fluids, there’s it takes to truly enable a response, thereby 28 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 removing (some of) the weight of the en - torial page piece published in the The Los crusted layers of nonhuman impossibilities Angeles Times on January 14, 1989. An on - (or at least drilling a hole through and al - line position paper entitled “Homosexuali - lowing some air to circulate). 7 ty and Natural Law”, posted on the website As such, I would suggest that the diffi - of the ultra-right-wing The Claremont In - culty at hand does not lie in the attribution stitute in southern California, quotes the of moral virtues to nonhumans per se, but line from the opposite the editorial page rather in the forceful and stinging character piece and finishes the thought: “To regard of moralism, particularly as it is directed at ‘the generative distinction between male securing the nature/culture divide. 8 Given and female’ as arbitrary, [Jaffa] continued, that moralism fashions humans as the only ‘is to regard all the distinctions upon which moral agents on the scene, the nature/cul - all morality rests – e.g., those which con - ture divide is not just any old boundary but demn slavery and genocide – as arbitrary. It the very air it breathes. It’s no wonder then implies that we are free to choose whether that moralism sees itself as duty-bound to there are objective limitations upon human protect this sacred boundary with the ut - action, objective standards of right and most ferocity. There is, however, a kind of wrong’”. 11 So according to Jaffa, if homo - sweet justice in the irony that to the degree sexuality is not criminalized, the morality that fear and moralism are whipped up into floor drops out: the illegality of homosexu - a fevered state aimed at safe-guarding the ality is the very foundation of morality. This nature/culture divide, a compulsive (il)logic neatly coheres with the perverse breeching of that very divide inevitably fact that the most heinous crime against na - breaks through, like some uncontrollable ture, at least by the lights of many different tic. cultures, is not mass killings of nonhumans Consider the following example: the or those deemed “less-than-human” hu - (il)logics of the notion of “Crimes against man Others, but “unnatural sexual acts”, as Nature”, a legal term referring to “sexual in non-reproductive sexual acts, especially intercourse contrary to the order of na - sodomy, in other words “homosexual acts”. ture”, including all “acts of bestial charac - Moralism, which feeds off of human ex - ter whereby degraded and perverted sexual ceptionalism, and, in particular, human su - desires are sought to be gratified”. 9 Most periority (indeed, being moral agents is one commonly it refers to “sodomy”, and in way that humans are said to be better than particular, to sex acts between persons of the beasts), props up the specific moral in - the same sex. Today, criminal penalties for junction against “unnatural” human behav - committing sexual acts “against nature” are iors. There is a price to pay for going as severe as life in prison (see for example against the “ways of nature” and her laws. the statutes of the state of Idaho) or even But if the crime is against Nature herself – death. 10 the whole of Nature, that is, if the act is so The perverse coupling of nature, sexuali - egregious as to go “against all that is natur - ty, and morality is vividly illustrated by the al” – then it must have been committed by following claim: “sodomy is to be con - some agent who is outside of Nature, pre - demned because the rational ground of all sumably a human agent, one cognizant of morality is nature, and sodomy is against his sins. Now, if the act is against Nature, nature”. This statement by Harry V. Jaffa, and the actor is not of Nature, but outside the Henry Salvatori Research Professor of it, then all acts committed by this actor Political Philosophy at Claremont McKen - must be “not in accordance with or deter - na College and the Claremont Graduate mined by nature; contrary to nature” – that School, is taken from an opposite the edi - is, “unnatural”, by definition. 12 And at the NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 29 same time, if the moral injunction is against entertain the possibility of the queerness of “unnatural” human behaviors, including one of the most pervasive of all critters – acting like a beast, then this is because one atoms. These “ultraqueer” critters with is acting like nature – performing “natural” their quantum quotidian qualities queer acts. Hence, the (il)logic at work trips over queerness itself in their radically decon - the very divide – the nature/culture divide structive ways of being. 14 Indeed, given – it seeks to secure. In fact, it is the law it - that queer is a radical questioning of identi - self – in fashioning some human acts as ty and binaries, including the nature/cul - bestial in nature – that breeches the sacred ture binary, this article aims to show that all divide, opening up the possibility of hu - sorts of seeming impossibilities are indeed mans engaging in nonhuman acts. 13 So it is possible, including the queerness of causali - the law that violates its own injunction, ty, matter, space, and time. Queer is not a forceably penetrating the nature/culture fixed determinate term; it does not have a divide, committing the ultimate violation. stable referential context, which is not say Furthermore, the discourse on “crimes that it means anything anyone wants it to against nature” always already takes liberty be. Queer is itself a lively mutating organ - in the confidence that Nature is herself a ism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy good Christian, or at least traffics in a kind protean differentiating multiplicity, an of purity that the human has been excluded agential dis/continuity, an enfolded reitera - from ever since the Edenic fall of man. But tively materializing promiscuously inventive what if Nature hirself is a commie, a per - spatiotemporality. What if queerness were vert, or a queer? Opening with evolution - understood to reside not in the breech of ary biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s famous quote nature/culture, per se, but in the very na - “The universe is not only queerer than we ture of spacetimemattering? suppose, it is queerer than we can sup - In concluding this prelude, I would like pose”, Bruce Bagemihil writes that the to thank the amoeba, an exceptional com - world is “teeming with homosexual, bisex - rade able to cooperate over long distances ual, and transgendered creatures of every and spans of history, for assisting me here stripe and feather” (Bagemihl 2000: 9). in helping to foreground the subterranean Citing the scientific literature on mammals, diffusion of moralizing cultures that spread birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, the disease of genocidal hatred and under - and other invertebrates, he writes: “homo - mines ecologies of diversity necessary for sexual behavior occurs in more than 450 flourishing. When moral indignation is different kinds of animals worldwide, and is seeping through the groundwork of soci - found in every major geographical region ety, surely this is the case. and every major animal group” (ibid.: 12). But even this extraordinary zoological cata - 15 logue of queer animals covers only a small NATURE ’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY fraction of the universe – even if we stick to A motely crew of queer co-workers – social the earth, there are all kinds of critters that amoebas, neuronal receptor cells in don’t make the list, like all manner of stingrays, lightning, a phantom species of nonanimal life forms (amoebas, plants, dinoflagellates, academics (a strange com - viruses) and the multitudinous forms of ex - panion species), and atoms among them – istence we deem as ‘inanimate’. assist in this discussion of nature’s queer It is my contention that the world in its performativity. The approach used here is exuberance is far more queer than all the not to invite nonhuman others into the numerous citations to Haldane’s quote fold of queerness, but to interrogate the bi - seem to intend. In this article, I will even naries that support the divisions that are at 30 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 stake. So before they enter, a few more pre - cluded from counting as any kind of infrac - liminaries are in order, including a more in- tion within the (il)logic of this moralizing depth discussion of how the nature/culture practice. A case in point: given the usual as - divide, especially in the specific guise of hu - sociations of humans with culture and ani - man exceptionalism, undermines attempts mals with nature, one might think that to think and grow ecologies of difference forms of violence against animals perpetu - that have a chance of flourishing. Since the ated by industrial meat production – that very nature of spacetimemattering is at is - is, the mass extermination of “Others” sue, let’s begin then, as with all beginnings, made killable – would qualify in this logic with a reiteration. And so this beginning as “acts against nature” worthy of our pro - returns again for the first time… voking moral outrage. 17 And yet, it is par - “Acts against nature” – what beastly im - ticular sexual acts that are criminalized and ages are conjured by this phrase? When labeled immoral, while the mass extermina - “acts against nature” are committed, the tion of animals goes unnoticed and unpun - crimes are of no small measure. Moral in - ished, and is normalized, naturalized, and dignation is oozing forth, like amoebas sanitized as part of the cost of food produc - through Texas soil, and lives are at stake tion. If logic falters, what difficulty of the (maybe literally). 16 What kinds of acts nature/culture divide is being indicated at against nature inspire moral outrage? this juncture where queer theory and eco - Queer pleasures for sure, even some forms criticism meet? of heterosexual sex, and an assortment of Performativity has been essential to other human practices. Clearly, the na - queer theory. 18 And yet, performativity has ture/culture divide is at issue and at stake, been figured (almost exclusively) as a hu - but the logic that tries to hold it in place is man affair; humans are its subject matter, quite perverse. On one hand, it is clear that its sole matters of concern. 19 But human humans are understood to be the actors, exceptionalism is an odd scaffoldings on the enactors of these “acts against nature”. which to build a theory that is specifically The sense of exteriority is absolute: the intended to account for matters of abjec - crime is against Nature herself, against all tion and the differential construction of the that is natural. Nature is the victim, the vic - human, especially when gradations of hu - timized, the wronged. At the same time, manness, including inhumanness, are often humans who commit “acts against nature” constituted in relation to nonhumans. are said to be acting like animals. In other A case in point is the well-honed tactic words, the “perpetrator” is seen as damag - of dehumanization – through the identifi - ing Nature from the outside, yet at the cation of an oppressed group of humans same time is reviled for becoming part of with despised nonhuman others “whereby Nature. Bestiality is surely both a spoken it [becomes] possible not only to set a and an unspoken infraction here, but the group apart as an enemy, but also to exter - “real crime”, as the accusers would have it, minate it with an easy conscience” (Mam - is the breach of the nature/culture divide, dami 2001, quoted in Raffles 2006: 521). 20 which has not simply been ruptured but Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi has itself been wronged. In other words, force the SS, was no stranger to this tactic. those who would prosecute the “perpetra - He is unflinchingly explicit about the kinds tors” of “crimes against nature” trip over of consequences such equivalences are the very divide they seek to secure. To meant to effect: make matters worse, “acts against nature” truly deserving an enraged response for Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. grave injustices enacted are traditionally ex - Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideolo - NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 31 gy. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the difficulties and do nothing more to pro - same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a mote accountability. 22 question of ideology, but a matter of cleanli - What is needed is a starting point for ness, which now will soon have been dealt analysis that does not presume that the with. We shall soon be deloused. We have on - terms on either side of equivalence rela - ly 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is fin - tions are given, but instead directly takes ished within the whole of Germany (Himmler up the matter of the cuts that produce dis - April 1943, quoted in Raffles 2006: 521. tinctions between “humans” and “nonhu - Emphasis added). mans” – where the differential constitution of both terms is important, and so are their The effects on human life of such identifi - respective constitutive exclusions – before cations or (en)forced equivalencies between any such comparisons get off the ground. humans and nonhuman others have been, That is, what is needed is accountability for and continue to be, devastating. At the the cuts that are made and the constitutive same time, we would be remiss if the ac - entanglements that are effected. In particu - knowledgment of the differential constitu - lar, the “posthumanist” point is not to blur tion of the human in relation to the nonhu - the boundaries between human and non - man only served to refocus our attention, human, not to cross out all distinctions and once again, exclusively on the human. differences, and not to simply invert hu - One response to the kind of genocidal manism, but rather to understand the ma - arithmetic used by Himmler has been to re - terializing effects of particular ways of ject such comparisons by invoking the sin - drawing boundaries between “humans” gular superiority of humans. But this reac - and “nonhumans”. 23 Crucially, then, such tion not only crosses out the equivalence an analysis cannot figure cuts as purely a relation by further devaluing one side of matter of human practices of differentiat - the equation – the nonhuman at the ex - ing, that is, as cultural distinctions. What- pense of the human – but it does so by re - ever a “cut” is must not assume a prior no - peating the very same calculus of racializa - tion of the “human”. tion deployed in the first place. This kind Alternatively, we could ask: What about of response echoes the problem it seeks to the nonhuman when it comes to performa - address, underwriting an ethical and moral tive accounts of abjection, subjection, position engaged in erasure – a lack of ac - agency, and materialization? Surely nonhu - countability for the (unavoidable) constitu - mans as well as humans must figure in, but tive exclusions enacted. That is, the equiva - widening the radius of performativity’s ap - lence relation between human and nonhu - plicability to include nonhumans is not man is canceled out in this rendering, but what is at issue. Rather, the point is that only by eliding the material conditions and the very practices of differentiating the effects of how different differences matter. “human” from the “nonhuman”, the “ani - One dimension that is erased is the unques - mate” from the “inanimate”, and the “cul - tioned killability of nonhumans. Nonhu - tural” from the “natural” produce crucial mans do not figure in this kind of moral materializing effects that are unaccounted computation. 21 But the contrary positions for by starting an analysis after these – the reassertion of an equivalency between boundaries are in place. In other words, humans and nonhumans in the name of what is needed is an account not only of animal rights, or the privileging of animal the materialization of “human” bodies but rights over human rights (by inverting the of all matter(ings)/materializations, includ - usual inequality that takes human superiori - ing the materializing effects of boundary ty for granted) – rest on the same kinds of making practices by which the “human” 32 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 and the “nonhuman” are differentially con - worked. In particular, I have argued that stituted. This must include not merely na- what we commonly take to be individual tural forces and social forces but the differ - entities are not separate determinately ential constitution of forces as “natural” or bounded and propertied objects, but rather “social”. 24 are (entangled “parts of”) phenomena (ma - Consequently, my subject matter here is terial-discursive intra-actions) that extend not nonhuman performativity per se but across (what we commonly take to be sepa - the materializing practices of differentiat - rate places and moments in) space and time ing, where one cannot take for granted that (where the notions of “material” and “dis - all the actors, actions, and effects are hu - cursive” and the relationship between them man. Of interest then are not only practices are unmoored from their anti/humanist by which humans make distinctions but al - foundations and reworked). Phenomena so practices of differentiating engaged in by are entanglements of spacetimemattering, nonhumans, whereby nonhumans differen - not in the colloquial sense of a connection tiate themselves from their environments, or intertwining of individual entities, but from other nonhumans, and from humans, rather in the technical sense of “quantum as well as from other others. To be more entanglements”, which are the (ontologi - precise, the point is not merely to include cal) inseparability of agentially intra-acting nonhumans as well as humans as actors or “components”. 28 The notion of intra-ac - agents of change but rather to find ways to tion (in contrast to the usual “interaction”, think about the nature of causality, agency, which presumes the prior existence of inde - relationality, and change without taking pendent entities/relata) marks an impor - these distinctions to be foundational or tant shift, reopening and refiguring founda - holding them in place. What is needed then tional notions of classical ontology such as is a way of thinking about the nature of dif - causality, agency, space, time, matter, dis - ferentiating that is not derivative of some course, responsibility, and accountability. A fixed notion of identity or even a fixed specific intra-action enacts an agential cut spacing. Indeed, what is the nature of dif - (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inher - ference if differentiating doesn’t happen in ent distinction – between subject and object) space and time but in the making of space - effecting a separation between “subject” and timemattering? 25 What strange causality is “object”. That is, the agential cut enacts a operative in per formative constructions? “local” resolution within the phenomenon of What temporality constitutes (and/or is the inherent ontological indeterminacy. 29 constituted by) its operation? What does it Crucially then, intra-actions enact agential mean for constitutive exclusions to be part separability – the local condition of exteriori - of the very fabric of spacetimemattering? ty-within-phenomena. Thus, differentiating Elsewhere I have given a detailed exposi - is not a relation of radical exteriority, but of tion of a posthumanist performative ac - agential separability, of exteriority-within. count of materialization that does not limit Intra-actions cut things together-apart (as its concerns and analysis to the realm of the one movement). Identity is a phenomenal human. 26 On my agential realist account, matter; it is not an individual affair. Iden - all bodies, not merely human bodies, come tity is multiple within itself; or rather, identi - to matter through the world’s performati- ty is diffracted through itself – identity is dif - vity – its iterative intra-activity. 27 Matter is fraction/différance/differing/deferring/dif - not figured as a mere effect or product of ferentiating. 30 discursive practices, but rather as an agen - In this article I want to explore these is - tive factor in its iterative materialization, sues further by considering acts of nature – and identity and difference are radically re - that is, nature’s intra/activity, its queer per - NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 33 formativity – in making alliances with, in - in this section include lightning, neuronal deed in seeing “ourselves” as always already receptor cells in stingrays, a phantom a part of nature, of all manner of beings species of dinoflagellates, academics (a that the category “acts against nature” strange species), and atoms. Keeping an eye claims to save or defend but in reality erases (or, if you’re a brittlestar, your whole be - and demonizes. In the next section I intro - ing) focused on their uncanny communica - duce some rather “queer critters”. The tive abilities, or more precisely, on the point in referring to them as “queer” is not bizarre causal relatings they exhibit as a re - to use an eye-catching term when “odd” or sult of the phenomenal/entangled nature “strange” would have sufficed, nor is it to of “their” being, will help make evident the make a case that these critters engage in agentially intra-active, that is, queer perfor - queer sexual practices (though some do, at mative, nature of (their) being/becom - least on some countings), but rather to ing. 33 make the point that their very “species be - In engaging our queer co-workers here, ing”, as it were, makes explicit the queering it is crucial that we are mindful of the fact of “identity” and relationality. 31 (It is not that the point here is not merely to use enough to simply assert that identity is a re - non/humans as tools to think with, but in lation, if the relation in question is between thinking with them to face our ethical or among entities that are understood to obligations to them, for they are not mere - precede their relations.) ly tools for our use but real living beings To speak of “queer critters” is to cut (and I include in this category “inanimate” across the cuts that define these terms. For as well as “animate” beings). 34 A related on the one hand, we can understand point is to avoid the pitfall of positioning “queer” as a verb acting on the noun “crit - everything in relation to the human and to ter”. The queering of critter is important, embrace a commitment to being attentive since the term “critter” already enacts ex - to the activity of each critter in its ongoing clusions of the kind that are being trou - intra-active engagement with and as part of bled. Critter, in one sense of the term, is an the world it participates in materializing. animate being, where the line between “animate” and “inanimate” is taken as given, rather than an effect of particular Lightning’s Stuttering Chatter boundary-drawing practices. On the other Lightning inspires fear and awe. It jolts our hand, “critter” is already internally queer, memories, flashing images of the electrify - having contrary associations as a term de - ing origins of life in our mind’s eye: images fined both in contrast to or as distinct from of lightning’s energizing jump start, its en - humans (as in its reference to animate non - livening of the primordial ooze as it is humans), and, in relation to humans (e.g., shocked into a soup of organic materials for as a term of reprobation or contempt, but brewing earth’s first organisms, and images also sometimes as term of affection or ten - of nature gone awry in man’s usurping of derness). 32 In an important sense then, crit - the power to give life, famously animated ters are inherently destablizing and do not by Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Lightning have determinate identities, by definition. gives life and takes it away. Lightning is a striking phenomenon. It is an archetypal “act of nature” causing QUEER CRITTERS , Q UANTUM “more direct deaths than any other weather CAUSALITY , AND NATURE ’S phenomenon” (Uman 1986: 17). Approxi - PERFORMATIVITY mately ten thousand forest fires in the U.S. The queer critters that will be introduced are ignited by lightning each year (Uman 34 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012

1986: 5). According to the National nature of St. Elmo’s fire and its associations Weather Service, “at any given moment, with those “mobile luminous spheres” called there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress ball lightning. 36 For example, if we begin by somewhere on the earth”, or some 16 mil - considering a lightning stroke, the flash that lion lightning storms annually. 35 we are used to observing in an electrical Lightning is both an everyday occur - storm, we will probably assume that it origi - rence and a complex phenomenon in its nates in a cloud and is then discharged in the own right, challenging scientists in their direction of the ground. However, if this di - grasp of the physics at every turn. One of rectional causality were true, it would be rea - my other co-workers, poststructuralist the - sonable to ask how lightning can be apprised orist Vicki Kirby, beautifully animates the of its most economical route to the earth be - queer nature of lightning’s performances: fore it has been tested. According to experts, the path of lightning is one of arcing disjunc - As I live in something of an aerie whose ture that runs in both an upward and down - panorama includes a significant sweep of the ward direction (Uman 1986, 73). Buildings Sydney harbor and skyline, it is common to and other objects on the ground can initiate see electrical storms arcing across the city. As strikes by sending out what are called upward I’ve waited for the next flash, trying to antici - moving “leaders” of invitation to a visually pate where it might strike, I’ve wondered undetected downward traveling spark, called about the erratic logic of this fiery charge a “stepped leader” – or vice versa. Uman ex - whose intent seems as capricious as it is deter - plains this moment of initiation in terms of mined. The assumption that lightning does speech acts. “What is important to note . . . is exhibit a certain logic is evident in the com - that the usual stepped leader starts from the mon wisdom that lightning never strikes in cloud without any ‘knowledge’ of what build - the same place twice. But as Martin Uman, ings or geography are present below. In fact, one of lightning’s foremost interpreters tells it is thought . . . that the stepped leader is us, the situation is quite the opposite. “Much ‘unaware’ of objects beneath it until it is of what is known about lightning today has some tens of yards from the eventual strike been discovered precisely because lightning point. When ‘awareness’ occurs, a traveling does strike the same structure over and over spark is initiated from the point to be struck again . . . The Empire State Building in New and propagates upward to meet the down - York City is struck by lightning an average of ward moving stepped leader, completing the about 23 times a year...” (Uman 1986, 47). path to ground” (1986, 49-50). We might Reading about electricity’s predilection for well ask what language drives this electric tall buildings, lone trees on golf courses, trac - conversation that seems to get ahead of itself tors and bodies of open water, I also learned in the final instant (or was it the first instant?) that quite curious initiation rites precede of divine apprehension – “when awareness these electrical encounters. An intriguing takes place”? (Kirby 2011: 10-11). communication, a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky, appears to What kind of bizarre communication is at anticipate the actual stroke. A quite spectacu - work here? What strange causality is effect - lar example is the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s ed? A lightning bolt is not a straightfor - Fire, a visible light show that can sometimes ward resolution of the buildup of a charge be seen to enliven an object in the moment, difference between the earth and a storm just before the moment , of the strike. . . cloud: a lightning bolt does not simply pro - But let’s begin with something whose be - ceed from storm cloud to the earth along a havior we might expect to be significantly unidirectional (if somewhat erratic) path. more straightforward than the contentious The path that lightning takes is not only NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 35 not predictable, it does not make its way in after the path has been carved, as it were, some continuous fashion between sky and the discharge does not proceed in a conti- ground. There is, as it were, some kind of nuous fashion: “The part of the channel nonlocal communication effected between nearest the ground will drain first, then suc - the two. By some mechanism scientists cessively higher parts, and finally the charge have yet to fully explain, a storm cloud be - from the cloud itself. So the visible light - comes extremely electrically polarized – ning bolt moves up from ground to cloud electrons are stripped from the atoms they as the massive electric currents flow down”. were once attached to and gather at the An enlivening, and indeed lively , re - lower part of the cloud closest to the earth. sponse to difference if ever there was one. In response, the earth’s surface becomes What mechanism is at work in this commu - polarized with these earth-bound electrons nicative exchange between sky and ground burrowing into the earth. A strong electric when awareness lies at the crux of this field between earth and cloud results, and strangely animated inanimate relating? all that remains to be accomplished now is How does this exchange get ahead of itself, a conductive path joining the two. The first as it were? How is the ground animated in - inklings of a path have a modest beginning to an awareness of its would-be interlocu - offering no indication of its explosive end. tor? And what does it mean for the sender “It begins as a small spark inside the cloud to transmit a message to a recipient that is five miles up. A spurt of electrons rushes both particular to the given recipient in its outwards, travels a hundred meters then exacting localized connection and yet un - stops and pools for a few millionths of a specified at the moment of its transmission? second. Then the stream lurches off in a What are we to make of a communica - different direction, pools again, and again. tion that has neither sender nor recipient Often the stream branches and splits. This until transmission has already occurred? is not a lightning bolt yet” (Discovery That is, what are we to make of the fact Channel 2007). 37 These barely luminous that the existence of sender and receiver first gestures are called “step leaders”. But follows from this nonlocal relating rather the buildup of negative charges (electrons) than preceding it? If lightning enlivens the in the lower portion of the cloud does not boundary between life and death, if it exists resolve itself by a direct channel of elec - on the razor’s edge between animate and trons making their way to the earth in this inanimate, does it not seem to dip some - fashion. Instead, the ground responds next times here and sometimes there on either with an upwards signal of its own. “When side of the divide? 38 that step leader is within ten or a hundred meters of the ground, the ground is now aware of there being a big surplus” of Clairvoyant Neuronal Receptor Cells charge, and “certain objects on the earth in Stingrays respond by launching little streamers up to - Neuronal receptor cells in stingrays seem to ward the step leader, weakly luminous plas - possess “some mysterious clairvoyancy”: ma filaments, which are trying to connect with what’s coming down”. It is as though They are able to anticipate when a message objects on the ground are being hailed by which has yet to arrive, will have been ad - the cloud’s interpellative address. When dressed to them, for they unlock themselves one of the upward responses is met by the in readiness. It is as if the identity and beha- downward address, the electrical circuit is vior of any one observable receptor cell is closed and a powerful discharge is effected somehow stretched, or disseminated, in a in the form of a lightning strike. But even space/time enfolding; as if they are located 36 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 here, and yet also there, at the same time. If After remarking on the strange causality the separation between sender and receiver is evidenced in this result, Kirby continues: strangely compromised in this biological ex - ample, so too is the status of the message. To I had, of course, heard it all before. Indeed, consider this more carefully, if the interval be - with some amusement I could see that the tween the two is no distance, then what dif - entangled identity of one cell within another ference could a message effect, and what had even assumed human proportions in re - would it be? Strange stuff, this action at a dis - gard to individuation. Was this biologist al - tance that confounds the logic of causality (Kir - ready in receipt of my intellectual labours be - by 2001: 59, my italics) .39 fore our meeting, even as I tried to articulate the results that she, of course, had inevitably Lest we conclude that these two examples discovered? What infectious algorithm had al - of paradoxical communication (as exhibited ready brought us together before our actual by lightning and neuronal receptor cells in meeting? (Kirby 2001: 59). stingrays), paradoxes which ultimately im - plicate structures of temporality and causal - Kirby’s account of these two nonlocal com - ity, only apply to a select few phenomena, municative happenings – engaging in a let’s widen the frame and take in more of seemingly improper (nay, scandalous) mix - the story as Kirby tells it. Kirby begins this ing of phenomena at apparently different tale of neuronal chatter in stingrays by de - scales and realms of applicability (seemingly scribing the situation she finds herself in conflating natural and cultural forces, as if when she is in receipt of this astonishing forces come in such markedly different scientific result. kinds) – pays no homage to shared human - ist and antihumanist indulgences in human I was waiting in line with a small group of exceptionalism. In her book, Quantum An - scholarship recipients, each of us charged thropologies , in which Kirby argues for a with the task of explaining our various intel - materialist reading of Derrida’s grammato- lectual projects to an assembled association of logy, she notes that the quantum paradoxes benefactors. I’d been called upon to justify exhibited by lightning, stingrays, and hu - my enthusiasm for deconstructive criticism to mans are persistently denied any empirical a non-academic audience which, quite prop - purchase, as though the thought of allow - erly, expected to hear it was getting value for ing nature such a radical degree of ontolo- its investment. Needless to say, I was some - gical complexity is too much to bear, and what apprehensive about my ability to con - that such bewildering matters must, in the vince them. As it happened, however, with no end, be a result of culture’s perverse fram - particular fuss or fanfare, the young biologist ing of something significantly more tame. who spoke before me conveyed the peculiar Arguing that deconstruction should be un - stuff of my question eloquently. The object of derstood as a positive science, Kirby un - her special passion was the stingray and, as I leashes the liveliness of the world in a way recall, her interest in how cells talk to their that speaks to my agential realist account of neighbors was facilitated by the ease of obser - worlding. That is, the entangled relatings vation which the neuronal structures of these of natureculture don’t stop with the intra- particular creatures enabled. . . . Her fasci - action between Kirby and the biologist nated listeners were informed that receptor whose account precedes hers in a radical cells, which operate like locks that can only undoing of “precedes”. 40 Always already in be opened by the right key or message, seem receipt of each other’s materialist interven - possessed of some mysterious clairvoyancy tions, Kirby’s materialist readings of Derri - (Kirby 2001: 58–59). da’s grammatology and my quantum NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 37 physics re-thinking of matter/ing (making mented for many dinoflagellates and involves evident physics’ own deconstructive undo - the fusion of asexually generated gametes to ing of its classical foundations) have been in produce a motile zygote, the planozygote”. conversation with one another since before (Coats 2002: 418) (From an earlier, unpub - we met. This untimely collaboration is one lished version of Schrader 2010. Used with of a multitude of entangled performances permission from the author). of the world’s worlding itself. A toxic species of dinos – Pfiesteria piscici - da (“fish killer”) – has caught the attention Pfiesteria’s Phantom Performances of science studies scholar Astrid Schrader. 41 In the summer of 1997 the Washington Schrader explains that a kind of “ Pfiesteria Post ran a story with a headline worthy of hysteria” has gripped the scientific commu - the National Inquirer : “The Feeding Fren - nity, which has been unable to identify the zy of a Morphing ‘Cell from Hell.’” The most basic features of Pfiesteria after more article describes these devilish micro-organ - than two decades of research. There is no isms this way: “Invisible to both scientist agreement about either Pfiesteria ’s life cy - and fish is the creature itself, a bizarre one- cle or whether or not they are the causative celled predator that can appear to trans - agents responsible for the death of millions form itself from animal to plant and back of fish and major estuary damage and de - again. Called Pfiesteria piscicida , this killer struction. Far from being a matter of mere dinoflagellate captured the attention of sci - scientific curiosity, the real-world concerns entists worldwide when it emerged six years at stake in answering these questions have ago [1991] from the murk of North Car - economic and ecological implications on a olina’s coastal estuaries, the phantom sus - global scale. 42 pect in a string of mass killings that de - The lack of scientific consensus concern - stroyed more than a billion fish” (Warrick ing the inherent features of Pfiesteria has 1997. In Schrader 2010: 175-276). prompted policy makers to adopt a wait- Dinoflagellates are microscopic, usually and-see stance. But Schrader warns that unicellular, often photosynthetic protists this (allegedly non-position) position is as with whiplike appendages. “Dinos” are dangerous as it is misinformed, since it is thought to be the cause of red tide and are based on a gross error concerning the na - suspected of being toxic to certain fish. ture of science: policy makers (and most They are neither plant nor animal, but can scientists) believe that a lack of definitive act as both: evidence necessarily marks an uncertainty, a gap in the current state of knowledge that While it has been believed that about half of will eventually be filled in. By contrast, in the described dino species act as photosynthe - examining the different laboratory practices sizing plants and the other half are het - in detail, Schrader argues that scientists’ in - erotrophic (obtaining energy by eating other ability to pin down the nature of Pfiesteria organisms), there is a growing awareness that has precisely to do with the nature of the many species are actually mixotrophic, chang - critter itself – namely, that its very species ing their nutritional habits between plant- being is indeterminate. In other words, and animal-like with varying environmental Schrader makes the case that what scientists conditions (Coats 2002: 417; Hackett, et al. and policy makers take to be an epistemolog - 2004: 1523). Also depending on environ - ical uncertainty is in actuality an ontological mental conditions, dinos can change the way indeterminacy : “ Pfiesteria ’s species beings they reproduce, most often asexually, but not are not simply multiple or fluid, reducible always. “A sexual phase has also been docu - to variations along some preconceived flow 38 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 of time, but inherently indeterminate. terial agency by trying to impose a deter - There is no moment in time in which Pfies - ministic model of causation as the mecha - teria could be unambiguously delineated nism of fish kills. Instead, their approach al - from its environment” (Schrader 2008B). lows Pfiesteria to engage in heterogeneous Schrader fleshes out the point in this way: temporal and nondeterministic causal relat - ings: In addition to an inseparability of “organism” and “environment”, spatial (synchronic) and [The] agential definitions [used in Burkhold - temporal (diachronic) changes in Pfiesteria ’s er’s lab] don’t presuppose toxicity as an in - life-histories are thoroughly intertwined. herent property of a particular life stage. There is no moment in time in which Pfieste - Rather, the various toxic Pfiesteria strains re - ria can be captured in their entirety. Thus, fer to performances of an assemblage of part of the conundrum that drives the con - morphs, described as temporal manifestations troversy, I suggest, is that the questions “who of a variable life cycle that cannot be isolated Pfiesteria piscicida are” and “what toxic Pfies - from the intra-actions that bring them about. teria do” are inseparably entangled (Schrader Since the strains are not fixed categories but 2010: 283). can transform into one another, their kind of toxicity cannot be solely controlled by pre - Pfiesteria exclusively cultured on algae prey sent environmental parameters but is depen - cannot be made to kill fish. Ironically, they dent on Pfiesteria ’s history; that is, on the ef - need the fish around in order to become their fects of indeterminable intra-action that have killers. Toxic Pfiesteria only “are” in relation - led to Pfiesteria ’s current material mode. The ship to fish and specific environmental condi - dinos act differently towards fish dependent tions. In simpler terms: without fish there is on how recently they have been in contact no fish killer. If you want to know who Pfies - with fish. In Burkholder’s terms, Pfiesteria teria are by themselves – if that were possible have a biochemical memory for recent stimu - at all – you will inevitably produce nontoxic lations by live fish, which introduces a vari - Pfiesteria , but not Pfiesteria piscicida , the fish able temporal dimension into the relationship killer (Schrader 2010: 285). between the organisms and their environment (From an earlier, unpublished version of Like our other queer co-workers, Pfieste - Schrader 2010. Used with permission from ria ’s worldly performances are not localiz - the author). able in space or time. Examining a range of laboratory approaches to studying the toxi - Hence, what Schrader is able to demon - city and species being of Pfiesteria , Schrad - strate is that responsible laboratory prac - er makes the case that approaches that in - tices must take account of the agential per - sist on a “simplistic emitter-transmitter-re - formances of the organism in making the ceiver model” fail to establish the toxicity specific nature of causal relations evident. of Pfiesteria because their procedures – Responsibility entails providing opportunities which embody particular ways of defining for the organism to respond . Dinos do not toxicity and particularly rudimentary un - respond to deterministic models of causali - derstandings of causality and temporality – ty. They insist that their agential perfor - preclude by design the kinds of toxic agen - mances be taken into account. But not just tial performances in which Pfiesteria en - any performative account of scientific prac - gage. tice will do. Understanding that the objects By contrast, the procedure designed by of investigation are effects rather than caus - one laboratory, the laboratory of Burkhold - es does not settle once and for all the mat - er et al., does not suppress Pfiesteria ’s ma - ter of causation as one of acausality or of NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 39 no causal relationship whatsoever in the of discrete energy levels. When an electron space vacated by determinism. That is, the “jumps” from a higher energy level to a choices are not simply deterministic causali - lower energy level, a photon (a quantum of ty, acausality, or no causality. What Pfieste - light) is emitted with a frequency (color) ria make evident is a mode of causality as corresponding to the difference in energy iterative intra-activity (Barad 2007). And between the two levels. 45 Since each kind indeed, it is precisely the fact that “causality of atom in the periodic table has a unique as iterable intra-activity thus becomes an in - configuration of discrete orbitals, the atom - heritance that temporalizes the phenome - ic spectrum uniquely identifies the atom non in ‘cutting together’ deadly traces and that produces it, much like an atomic fin - hinges on the inclusion of specific matters gerprint. 46 of concern as part of the experimental ref - Bohr’s model was able to account for the erent, which renders the experiments re - stability of matter, and it accurately predict - peatable” that evidences the inseparability ed the emission spectrum of hydrogen. The of matters of epistemology and ethics stunning successes of this model earned (Schrader 2010: 297). The responsible Bohr the Nobel Prize in physics. However, practice of science is simultaneously a mat - upon careful examination it becomes clear ter of good scientific practice (epistemolog - that there is something inherently queer ically sound science) and justice-to-come. about the nature of matter. Consider the process by which a single emission line in the atomic spectrum is pro - The Atom’s Queer Performativity duced. Each spectral line (of a given color “No one understands these queer quantum or frequency) is the result of an electron things”, writes Alan Grometstein in The making a “leap” or “jump” from a higher Root of Things (Grometstein 1999: 4). energy level to a lower energy level. What What could be more queer than an atom? precisely is the nature of this “leap”? The And I don’t just mean strange. The very expression “quantum leap” has become a nature of an atom’s being, its very identity, part of everyday speech, where it has taken is indeterminacy itself. 43 on the meaning of a large change, when ac - There seemed to be something queer tually the change we are talking about here about the quantum from the beginning. 44 couldn’t be smaller . “Quantum”, in the Or rather, it became evident from the start sense used by physicists, signifies the “mini - that quantum causes trouble for the very mum amount of a physical quantity which notion of “from the beginning”. More can exist, and in multiples of which it can than a decade before the advent of the vary”. 47 quantum theory, physicist Niels Bohr made So a quantum leap is very small, but the imaginative theoretical move of apply - that’s not its signature feature. What’s most ing Max Planck’s idea of energy quantiza - unique about it is that, unlike any ordinary tion to matter itself, and in particular to experience of jumping or leaping, when an each bit of matter, that is, each atom. The electron makes a “quantum leap” it does so Bohr model of the atom is a quantum vari - in a discontinuous fashion (belying the very ant of the solar system model of the atom notion of a “leap”): in particular, the elec - proposed by Ernst Rutherford. In the Bohr tron is initially at one energy level and then model, each atom has a nucleus (made up it is at another without having been any - of protons and neutrons) with the electrons where in between ! A quantum leap is a dis - residing in discrete (i.e., quantized) “or - continuous movement . Quantum phenome - bitals” around the nucleus. Each electron na are famous for their uncanniness. But in an atom occupies one of a finite number for all the fanfare and the display of an in - 40 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012

creasing array of astonishingly strange phe - was going (i.e., E 1) before it left , so the nomena, and all the sophisticated mathe - proper frequency of photon would be emit - matical machinery used to describe it, the ted to conserve energy – a strange causality crux of these paradoxes is right here in this indeed! Thus, the paradoxical nature of quantum discontinuity. quantum causality derives from the quan - Let’s consider the situation closely. Ini - tum discontinuity – the very fact there ex - tially the electron is in a higher energy state ists an inherent discontinuity (constitutive

E2; finally it is in a lower energy state E 1. of all intra-actions). At what point is the photon emitted? Ac - What constitutes a quantum discontinu - cording to the classical physics model pro - ity? This discontinuity that queers our pre - posed by Rutherford, an atomic electron sumptions of continuity is neither the op - continuously loses energy as it orbits the posite of the continuous, nor continuous nucleus, a continuous spectrum of light is with it. Quantum “leaps” are not mere dis - emitted, and the atom quickly decays in a placements in space through time, not flash of light (i.e., atoms are unstable in this from here-now to there-then, not when it model, which is one of its weaknesses). By is the rupture itself that helps constitute the contrast, Bohr’s quantum model has two here’s and now’s, and not once and for all. important features that diverge from the The point is not merely that something is classical model: (1) atomic electrons do not here-now and then there-then without ever orbit around the nucleus like planets having been anywhere in between – that’s around the sun, but rather each must occu - bad enough, of course – but that here-now, py one of a set of discrete energy levels at a there-then have become unmoored: there’s time, and since each “orbital” corresponds no given place or time for them to be. to a fixed energy, and electrons that reside Where and when do quantum leaps hap - in a given orbital do not radiate energy pen? If the nature of causality is troubled to (light), (2) when electrons make a transi - such a degree that effect does not simply tion from a higher energy level to a lower follow cause end over end in an unfolding one, the excess energy is emitted in a dis - of existence through time, how is it possi - crete packet called a “photon”. As such, a ble to orient oneself in space or in time? continuous transition between energy levels Can we even continue to presume that isn’t possible. But now a problem arises. If space and time are still “there”? a photon can only result from the leap it - This queer causality entails the disrup - self, at what point during this leap is the tion of dis/continuity, a disruption so photon emitted (recall that a photon is a destabilizing, so downright dizzying, that it quantum of light, and hence, light is not is difficult to believe that it is that which being emitted continuously but rather in a makes for the stability of existence itself. Or discrete amount as a particle of light)? The rather, to put it a bit more precisely, if the emission of the photon can’t take place indeterminate nature of existence by its na - when the electron is on its way from E 2 to ture teeters on the cusp of stability and in - E1 because it is never anywhere in between stability, of possibility and impossibility, the two energy levels; nor can the photon then the dynamic relationality between be emitted when it is at energy level E 1 or continuity and discontinuity is crucial to E2 because no energy change has (yet) tak - the open-ended becoming of the world en place. And furthermore, something is which resists acausality as much as deter - deeply amiss about the nature of causality, minism. for if the atom were to emit a photon of a I don’t want to make too much of a little given color as it leaves E 2 (on its way to E 1) thing, but the quantum, this tiny disjunc - it will have had to already wind up where it ture that exists in neither space nor time, NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 41 torques the very nature of the relation be - being itself in the past. The experiment in tween continuity and discontinuity to such question is the so-called quantum eraser ex - a degree that the nature of change changes periment. 49 with each intra-action. Change, to the ex - According to Niels Bohr, quantum tent that any general characterization can physics makes evident the fact that entities be given, is a dynamism of an entirely dif - (atoms, photons, electrons, etc.) do not ferent sort which functions in an entirely have an inherent ontological identity (as ei - different way from that which is presumed ther particles or waves, that is, either as lo - to operate on matter situated in space and calized objects or as extended disturbances in time (e.g., one important difference is in a field). 50 On Bohr’s account, identity is that existence is not simply a manifold of not given, but rather performed. This can being that evolves in space and time); rather, be demonstrated using a simple device what comes to be and is immediately re - called a two-slit apparatus, which is basical - configured entails iterative intra-active be - ly a screen with two holes in it. According comings of spacetimemattering .48 Iterative to classical physics, if you want to know if intra-activity configures and reconfigures an entity is a wave or a particle you simply entanglements. Entanglements are not the send it through two open slits, over and interconnectedness of things or events sep - over again (or, alternatively, send many arated in space and time. Entanglements are identical entities through the slits), devel - enfoldings of spacetimematterings . oping a pattern over time. If a scatter pat - tern appears with most of the entities land - ing directly across from one slit or the oth - Queer Identities, Quantum Erasures, and er, it’s a particle. If a diffraction pattern ap - Im/Possibilities for Changing the “Past” pears – a result of some disturbance (like Quantum entanglement is the characteristic that of a water wave), making its way trait of quantum mechanics, the one that en - through both slits simultaneously – it’s a forces its entire departure from classical lines wave. 51 This distinguishing feature is im - of thought. – Erwin Schrödinger: “The Pre - portant: a diffraction pattern is the result of sent Situation in Quantum Mechanics” an interference of that which emerges through multiple slits at once (rather than The concern is not with horizons of modified one slit or the other as in the case of a par - – past or future – presents, but with a “past” ticle). Waves and particles produce distinct - that has never been present, and which never ly different two-slit patterns, and so from will be, whose future to come will never be a the point of view of classical physics, this is production or a reproduction in the form of a definitive test of an entity’s nature. presence. – Jacques Derrida: Margins of Phi - Quantum physics calls into question the losophy classical ontological classification of entities into two distinct kinds: waves and particles. We choose to examine a phenomenon which Experiments at the beginning of the twen - is impossible, absolutely impossible, to ex - tieth century produced results that were in - plain in any classical way, and which has in it explicable in terms of classical notions of the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it identity, and the two-slit experiment is suf - contains the only mystery. – Richard Feyn - ficient to reveal these nonclassical behav - man: Six Easy Pieces iors. Send an electron through the double slits hundreds of times (or send hundreds Physicists now claim to have empirical evi - of electrons through the slits one at a dence that it is possible not only to change time), and the pattern that emerges is a dif - the past, but to change the very nature of fraction pattern characteristic of waves. The 42 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 same experiment can be done with atoms ture . For Bohr, complementarity saved the or neutrons or photons, and a diffraction theory from contradictions and enabled pattern is produced in each case. But unlike objective results to be obtained. His expla - water waves, particles don’t “interfere” nation is that the objective referent for con - with one another (they can’t occupy the cepts, like “wave” and “particle”, is not a same place at the same time), and in any determinately bounded object with inher - case, since they are being sent through the ent characteristics (as the ontology of classi - slits one at a time they aren’t given a chance cal physics would have it), but rather what to encounter one another in any way. So he called a phenomenon – the entangle - what accounts for the wave behavior? Each ment/inseparability of “object” and “appa - particle should be going through one slit at ratus” (which do not preexist the experi - a time (by definition), and yet a diffraction ment but rather emerge from it). Bohr pattern is the result of an entity (like a wa - came to this understanding by a very un - ter wave) going through both slits at once. orthodox approach for a physicist – he fo - To help resolve the paradox suppose we cused his attention on how concepts work (a devise a device to “look and see” what is radically unusual step for a scientist!), on happening at the slits, to “watch” as each how they do the work they do, and how electron goes through the slits on its way they come to mean what they mean. 52 to the screen. In fact, Einstein, who reject - The two-slit experiment was thus the fo - ed quantum theory and was committed to cus of heated debates and endless discus - a classical ontology, proposed such a sions by the founders of quantum physics “which-slit” device to show that quantum beginning in the 1920s, and it continues to physics was conceptually self-contradictory be of great interest to this day. It was the in that the entity would be revealed to be gedanken (thought) experiment of its time. particle at the slits (going through one or Einstein and Bohr argued endlessly about the other) and a wave at the screen, and en - it. Today the experiment that was never to tities can’t be both waves and particles si - be (it could exist only in the rarified realm multaneously. Bohr adamantly disagreed of pure thought) can, in fact, be performed with Einstein and argued that Einstein’s in the lab: welcome to the world of experi - which-slit experiment beautifully demon - mental meta/physics. strated his idea of complementarity, accord - Without going into too many details of ing to which an entity either behaves like a the experiment, suffice it to say that we can wave or a particle depending on how it is design a very clever two-slit device with a measured (i.e., on the nature of the mea - which-slit detector (composed of a laser suring apparatus it becomes entangled and two cavities). This device performs the with). In the case of a two-slit apparatus which-slit measurement without disturbing with a which-slit detector, Bohr argued that the “external forward motion” of the atom the pattern that would be exhibited would by manipulating the “internal parts” of the in fact be a scatter pattern, characteristic of atom only. The atom, as it makes its way to particle behavior. That is, although an enti - the double slits, passes through a laser ty performs like a wave with a simple two- beam, thereby exciting one of its atomic slit experiment (no which-slit detector), it electrons to a higher energy level. Two performs like a particle with a two-slit ap - “micromaser cavities” are set up at each paratus modified to include a which-slit de - slit, designed to force this electron to tector. So the very nature of the entity – its “jump” back down to the lower energy lev - ontology – changes (or rather becomes differ - el as the atom passes through the cavity, ently determinate) depending on the experi - thus emitting a “tell-tale” photon, which is mental apparatus used to determine its na - left in the cavity – marking which slit the NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 43 atom went through on its way to the dence of the fact that the atom’s identity, screen. its ontology, is never fixed, but is always open Running the experiment without the to future and past reworkings! which-slit detector reveals a diffraction pat - The physicists who proposed the quan - tern – that is, the atoms behave like waves. tum eraser experiment interpret these re - If the experiment is run again with the sults as the possibility of “changing the which-slit detector in place, the pattern is past”. The language they use speaks of a that of particles, just as Bohr predicted. particular read on these results that does This is direct empirical evidence that identi - not square with Bohr’s philosophy-physics: ty is not fixed and inherent, but performa - in particular, they refer to the which-slit in - tive. formation as having been “erased” (hence Bohr explained the performative nature the name of the “quantum eraser” experi - of things in terms of quantum entangle - ment), and the diffraction pattern as having ments of the measurement apparatus and been “recovered” (as if the original pattern the object of measurement: according to has returned). But, as I have argued, this Bohr, it is not so much the case that things interpretation is not as careful as it might behave differently when measured differ - be, and furthermore, it is based on assump - ently; rather, the point is that there is only tions that are being called into question by the phenomena – the intra-action of “appa - this very experiment, assumptions concern - ratus” and “object” in their inseparability. ing the nature of being and time. Now, if Bohr’s hypothesis that phenomena If one assumes a metaphysics of pres - are quantum entanglements holds, then ence, that the pattern results from the be - some evidently impossible things become havior of a group of individually determi - possible. Suppose that the which-slit detec - nate objects, then it seems inexplicable that tor is made in such a way that evidence of the “erasure” of information about which which slit the entity in question (in this slit each individual entity went through, af - case an atom) goes through can be erased ter the individuals have gone through the after it has gone through the slits. 53 It slits, could have any effect. Otherwise, turns out that if the which-slit information what notion of causality could account for is “erased”, then a diffraction pattern char - such a strange occurrence? What could be acteristic of waves is once again in evidence the source of such instantaneous communi - (as in the case without a which-slit detec - cation, a kind of global conspiracy of indi - tor). In fact, it doesn’t matter at what point vidual actors acting in concert? What kind the information is erased – in particular, it of spooky action-at-a-distance causality is could be erased after the entity in question this?! The difficulty here is the mistaken as - has already gone through the entire appara - sumption of a classical ontology based on a tus and made its contribution to the pat - belief in a world populated by indepen - tern. In other words, whether or not an en - dently existing things with determinate tity goes through the apparatus as a wave boundaries and properties that move or a particle – through both slits simultane - around in a container called “space” in step ously or one slit or the other, respectively – with a linear sequence of moments called can be determined afterwards – after it has “time”. But the evidence indicates that the already gone through the apparatus. That world does not operate according to any is, it is not simply that the past behavior of such classical ontology. some given entity has been changed be - I have argued elsewhere (Barad 2007) cause of something that happens in the fu - that in diffractively reading insights from ture, but that the entity’s very identity has physics and poststructuralist theory been changed. Thus, we have empirical evi - through one another it is possible to “ex - 44 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 tend” and further elaborate the ideas of the claim made by some physicists that all Butler’s performativity theory beyond the trace of the event is “erased” when the realm of the human (that indeed one must which-slit information is destroyed and that do so in taking account even of the human the previous diffraction pattern is “recov - in its materiality), if certain key notions like ered”. On the contrary, the diffraction pat - materiality, discursivity, agency, and causali - tern produced as a result of the local era - ty are suitably revised in light of the radical sure of information (as to which slit the revision of classical understandings of mat - atom went through) is not the same as the ter and meaning-making suggested by “original” (that is, as the diffraction pattern these findings. Examining the quantum produced before a which-slit measurement eraser evidence in light of this posthuman - was made). Unlike the original, the new ist performative understanding of the na - diffraction pattern is not plainly evident ture of nature resolves some of the evident without explicitly tracing the (extant) en - paradoxes and gives deconstructionism em - tanglements. The trace of all measurements pirical traction. To put the point differently, remains even when information is erased; it this move makes the wager that the radical takes work to make the ghostly entanglements reverberations of deconstructionism are not visible . The past is not closed (it never was), merely perverse imaginings of the human but erasure (of all traces) is not what is at mind or of culture but are, in fact, queer issue. The past is not present. “Past” and happenings of the world .54 “future” are iteratively reconfigured and Returning to the evidence in question, enfolded through the world’s ongoing in - the quantum “eraser” experiment gives em - tra-activity. There is no inherently determi - pirical weight to the deconstructionist nate relationship between past and future. claim that the concern is “not with hori - Phenomena are not located in space and zons of modified – past or future – pre - time; rather, phenomena are material en - sents, but with a ‘past’ that has never been tanglements enfolded and threaded through present, and which never will be, whose fu - the spacetimemattering of the universe . Even ture to come will never be a production or the “re-turn” of a diffraction pattern does a reproduction in the form of presence” not signal a going back, an erasure of mem - (Derrida 1994). The evidence is in fact ory, a restoration of a present past. Memory consistent with this point, that it’s not that – the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iter - (in erasing the information after the fact ative intra-activity – is written into the fab - that) the experimenter changes a past that ric of the world . The world “holds” the had already been present. Rather, the point memory of all traces; or rather, the world is is that the past was never simply there to be - its memory (enfolded materialization). gin with and the future is not simply what will unfold ; rather, the “past” and the “fu - ture” are iteratively reworked and enfolded CONCLUSIONS through the iterative practices of space - My co-workers and I have presented a host timemattering – including the which-slit of challenges to classical ontology – a detection and the subsequent “erasure” of worldview that posits the existence of dis - which-slit information – are all one phe - crete entities that interact with one another nomenon. Space and time are phenomenal, in a locally determinate causal fashion, that is, they are intra-actively produced in wherein change is the result of one event the making of phenomena; neither space (the cause) causing another event (the ef - nor time exists as a determinate given out - fect) and causes effect the motion of enti - side of phenomena .55 ties moving through space in accord with As I mentioned, the evidence is against the linear flow of time. The assumptions NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 45 that support this view include the follow - these findings is not necessarily circum - ing: the world is composed of individual scribed by the scale of the microscopic objects with determinate properties and realm. 56 But somehow my exhaustive repe - boundaries, space is a given volume in tition and development of this point does which events occur, time is a parameter that not ward off panicked attempts to contain, advances in linear fashion on its own ac - tame, or normalize nature’s queerness, cord, and effects follow their causes. All of which will not be quarantined and is always these assumptions have been called into threatening to leak out and contaminate question by nature’s queer performances: “life as we know it” – turning the fun- lightning bolts, neuronal receptor cells in house, freak show of atoms’ perverse put - stingrays, a dinoflagellate animalplant life- terings into an anxiety-inducing largescale form found in North American estuaries, “catastrophe”. My hope is that in examin - atoms, and humans are among nature’s ing these (further) examples involving critters whose practices, identities, and spe- macroscopic entities, such as the queer cies being cannot be accounted for within a quantum ontological performances of Pfies - classical ontology. teria and lightning, nature’s pervasive We saw, for example, how classical con - queerness might be appreciated across divi - ceptions of causality and identity fail in sions of scale and familiarity. So, for exam - each case, and how their uncanny commu - ple, although an everyday macroscopic phe - nicative abilities, their queer causal relat - nomenon , like lightning, might yield certain ings, are inexplicable if their identities are regular features of its behaviors to an expla - understood in terms of independently exist - nation based on the laws of classical ing entities. These critters cannot be under - physics, it nonetheless exhibits the kinds of stood as discrete agents interacting with an queer behaviors that atoms do in the micro - environment or other external or separate cosmic domain . Unlike more “exotic”, less agents, not when the presumed succession familiar phenomena, like that of atoms, of effect following cause is out of joint and whose queer behaviors refuse to be civilized causality seems to take on some kind of un - by the laws of classical physics, this everyday canny character. Each of the critters we macroscopic phenomenon poses a set of quan - have considered not only “challenge[s] our daries, displaying an array of queer/quan - conception of time as [a] homogenous flow tum happenings, from within the very do - of self-identical moments, in which a cause main of “classical” physics. What closet inde - by definition precedes its effect” (Schrader terminacies might be lurking in the pre - 2010: 278-79), but also the notion of sumably straightforward classification of identity “itself” and its derivatives, includ - micro and macro? ing questions of causality, responsibility, Behaving much like an electron or a and accountability. ghost, deconstruction tunnels in and out of In its place, I have proposed an agential this essay implicitly or explicitly in each sec - realist ontology, or what one might call a tion. Together with Kirby and Schrader, I “quantum ontology”, based on the exis - give room for Derrida’s ideas to engage in tence of phenomena rather than of inde - serious play with these queer critters. 57 pendently existing things (Barad 2007). Without going into more detail about these These performatively materializing entan - deconstructive elements than the length of glements of spacetimemattering are able to this essay would allow, it may seem surpris - account for the causally complex perfor - ing, or even disconcerting, that I mention mances we have considered here. the possibility of empirical support for de - Elsewhere, I have repeatedly emphasized constructive ideas like différance . While the that the ontological shift suggested by suggestion that deconstruction might have 46 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 empirical support may appear blasphemous apart but also cutting together as one to some (especially given the common movement: cutting together-apart. Differ - mis/understanding that deconstruction has entiating is a matter of entanglement. En - fully deconstructed empiricism and put it tanglements are not intertwinings of sepa - to rest, as it were), we are insisting on ma - rate entities but rather irreducible relations terialist readings of deconstruction that of responsibility. There is no fixed dividing open up the empirical to reworkings that line between “self” and “other”, “past” unmoor it from conventional understand - and “present” and “future”, “here” and ings and do not presume that it can (or “now”, “cause” and “effect”. Quantum even ought to) be put to rest. According to dis/continuity is no ordinary disjunction. my agential realist account, not only are Agential cuts do not mark some absolute empirical claims not ruled out, they are un - separation but a cutting together/apart – a derstood to be particular intelligible articu - “‘holding together’ of the disparate itself ... lations of the world (with all due regard to without wounding the dis-jointure, the dis - all the various qualifications required to persion, or the difference, without effacing make good sense of this claim). In particu - the heterogeneity of the other ... without lar, empirical claims do not refer to individ - or before the synthetic junction of the con - ually existing determinate entities, but to junction and the disjunction” (Derrida phenomena-in-their-becoming, where be - 1994: 29). Agential cuts – intra-actions – coming is not tied to a temporality of futu - don’t produce (absolute) separation, they rity, but rather a radically open relatingness engage in agential separability – differenti - of the world worlding itself. ating and entangling (that’s one move, not In this brief brush with deconstruction, successive processes). Agential cuts radically it may be helpful to keep in mind that rework relations of joining and disjoining. agential realism is not a straight read of Separability in this sense, agential separabil - physics, as it were, but a diffractive investi - ity, is a matter of irreducible heterogeneity gation of differences that matter, where in - that is not undermined by the relations of sights from physics and poststructuralist inheritance that hold together the disparate and deconstructivist theories have been without reducing difference to sameness. read through one another. 58 The quantum dis/continuity queers the As I have pointed out before, physics very notion of differentiating. It offers a wonderfully deconstructs itself, reopening much-needed rethinking of ac/counting, and refiguring foundational issues such as taking account, and accountability that agency, causality, space, time, matter, and isn’t derivative of some fixed notion of responsibility as it goes. 59 identity or even a fixed interval or origin. I now want to return to the questions Ac/counting – a taking into account of raised at the beginning, or rather they re - what materializes and of what is excluded turn here once again as much as they per - from materializing – cannot be a straight - colate throughout the essay, and draw out forward calculation, since it cannot be some of the key ethical issues and matters based on the assumed existence of individ - of concern threaded throughout the discus - ual entities that can be added to, subtracted sion of causality, temporality, and entangle - from, or equated with one another. Ac - ment as informed by the queer performa - countability cannot be reduced to identify - tive enactments of these nonhuman critters. ing individual causal factors and assigning Derrida’s notions of “justice-to-come” blame to this or that cause. Indeed, causali - and différance haunt this essay for good ty is an altogether queer matter. Rather, ac - reasons. On my agential realist account, countability is an ethico-onto-epistemolog - differentiating is not merely about cutting ical commitment to understand how differ - NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 47 ent cuts matter in the reiterative intra-activ - but spacetimematter can be productively ity of worlding, that is, of the entangle - reconfigured, reworking im/possibilities in ments of spacetimematterings. Taking ac - the process. Changes to the past don’t count entails being accountable, for all erase marks on bodies; the sedimenting ma - ac/countings are from within, not without. terial effects of these very reconfigurings – There is no pure external position, only memories/re-member-ings – are written agential separability, differences within, dif - into the flesh of the world. Our debt to férance . Accountability cannot be based on those who are already dead and those who a mathematics of identity. Simple substitu - are not yet born cannot be disentangled tions, equivalence relations, or transitivities from who we are. What if we were to rec - among individual elements are undone. ognize that differentiating is a material act Ironically, in an important sense, there that is not about radical separation, but on are no “acts against nature”, not if they en - the contrary, about making connections tail the sense of absolute exteriority that is and commitments? 61 usually assumed. In this radical reworking of nature/culture, there is no outside of nature from which to act; there are only “acts of nature” (including thinking and language use), which is not to reduce cul - NOTES ture to nature, but to reject the notion that 1. There is a previously unauthorized version of nature is inherently inadequate, and in par - this paper that appears in the graduate student run ticular, lacking in value and meaning, and journal Qui Parle (2011/19/2 University of Ne - braska Press). I am grateful to Hilda Rømer Chris - so requires culture as its supplement (Kir - tensen and the editors of Women, Gender, & Re - by). What if we were to understand culture search for allowing me the opportunity to bring as something nature does? 60 This rework - the authorized version of the paper to light. ing of the nature/culture and human/non - 2. All quotes in this section are from the cited New human binaries frees up space for moral York Times article unless otherwise indicated. outrage directed at specific acts of violence 3. How cool is it that “In response to the cAMP against humans and nonhumans, including distress call, up to one hundred thousand of the material(izing) effects of how they are dif - amoebas assemble. They first form a tower, which eventually topples over into an oblong blob about ferentiated (and then equated). two millimeters long. The identical amoebas with - Entanglements are not a name for the in this pseudoplasmodium – or slug – begin to dif - interconnectedness of all being as one, but ferentiate and take on specialized roles” (Otte rather for specific material relations of the 2007, see ref fn 6). ongoing differentiating of the world. En - 4. Quote attributed to Professor John Tyler Bon - tanglements are relations of obligation – ner, from Wikipedia entry on Slime Molds. being bound to the other – enfolded traces 5. “First discovered in a North Carolina forest in 1935, Dictyostelium discoideum was at first classi - of othering. Othering, the constitution of fied under ‘lower fungi’ and in subsequent years an “Other”, entails an indebtedness to the into the kingdoms Protoctista, Fungi and Tubu - “Other”, who is irreducibly and materially lomitochondrae. By the 1990s, most scientists ac - bound to, threaded through, the “self” – a cepted the current classification. Amoebozoa are diffraction/dispersion of identity. “Other - now considered by most to form a separate king - ness” is an entangled relation of difference dom-level clade, being more closely related to (différance ). both animals and fungi than to plants” (Wikipedia entry on Dictyostelid). I thank Fern Feldman for An ethics of entanglement entails possi - sharing my delight in the indeterminacies of social bilities and obligations for reworking the amoebas and for pointing out the elusiveness of its material effects of the past and the future. biological classification. There can never be absolute redemption, 6. By Carol Otte, posted October 9, 2007 48 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012

(http://www.damninteresting.com/amoebic- turns on how the “as if” gets played. The use of morality/, accessed November 5, 2010). This is a such equivalence relations across species bound - “damn interesting” article, a well-written compila - aries that moralism heavily traffics in do not intend tion of lots of different research findings on social anything as “innocent” as an “as if”. Indeed, as amoebas. Otte’s use of language or morality is not Hugh Raffles points out, Himmler’s remark that an added flourish to attract readers; rather, ques - “anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing” is tions of morality circulate with great regularity in not a “mere” suggestion that “anti-Semitism is … the scientific literature on social amoebas, which is like delousing, nor is it merely a form of delousing. a very interesting phenomenon. It is exactly the same as delousing” (Raffles 2010: 7. For example, if the notion of the “social amoe - 142). The purposefully inflammatory statement is ba” as an oxymoron rings true, that is, if there is a not “merely” that Jews act like lice, what is being belief operative that single-celled organisms are set forth by Himmler is an equivalence relation: simply too primitive to engage in social relations Jews are lice. Raffles goes on to point out that or any form of cooperative behavior (especially “Although the Nazis imposed the borders with over large distances), then setting aside the prohi - unprecedented ferocity, they did not initiate the bition on thinking of sociality and agency as non - expulsion of Jews from the kingdom of humanity. human capacities is surely an important step in dis - In early-modern France, for example, ‘since lodging some of the sedimenting effects of human coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a exceptionalism. man should copulate with a dog”, Christians who 8. Indeed, the very possibility of the moral nonhu - had heterosexual sex with Jews could be prosecut - man opens up a rethinking, a queering , of morality ed for the capital crime of sodomy and burned such that it is not founded on the nature/culture alive with their partners – ‘such persons in the eye divide, but rather calls that very divide into ques - of the law and our holy faith differ[ing] in no wise tion. With this reorientation, “amoebic morality” from beasts” (who were also subject to trial and would not constitute one more colonialist move to execution). In a minor key, long-standing German covertly cement humans into the equation (the in - identification of Jews with dogs (mongrels) and, equality) by setting the nonhuman up for episte - sometimes, pigs, persisted through the Nazi era. mological resourcing, making everything into a More destructive – and more insinuating – was the question of what the Other can teach us, or even association of the Jew with the shadowy figure of about who ‘we’ ought to speak for as a substitute the parasite, a figure that infests the individual for response-ability, that is, making it possible for body, the population, and of course, the body the other to respond. politic, that does so in both obvious and unexpect - 9. From the legal code of the state of North Caro- ed ways, and that invites innovative interventions lina and controls” (ibid, p.145). (http://www.ncgala.org/guide/guidecan.htm). Hence, in the next section of the article, I em - 10. http://www.everything2.com/ phasize the necessity of radically disrupting the cal - index.pl?node_id=1009724 culus of exterminism and killability (the immorality 11. http://famguardian.org/Subjects/SexualIm - of making killable, see Haraway 2008). If this morality/Homosexuality/HomoAndNaturalLaw.h murdering arithmetic is left in place, by trying to tm deny the equivalence by defending only one side 12. From the Online Dictionary: http://www.vo - of the equation and holding the other in disdain, cabulary.com/definition/unnatural for example, it will surely come around to haunt The indeterminacy of meaning of “natural” and and harm all matter of beings, human and nonhu - “unnatural” produces interesting instabilities. man alike. How we signify the Other matters. It is 13. If one understands the law as guarding against important to be clear that equivalence relations of humans parodying animals, not actually engaged this kind do not trouble the nature/culture divide in “bestial acts” per se, but in acts of mimicry, that – they feed off of it. is, acting as if one is a (nonhuman) animal, a hu - 14. See also Barad 2010. Some may raise the ob - man in sheep’s clothing as it were, then it is the jection that queerness necessarily has something to law that would have humans engage in a rather do with desire and that this disqualifies atoms, sheepish form of cross-dressing by marking specific electrons, space, and time. But this objection human acts as a form of drag that crosses the na - based on human exceptionalism begs the question: ture/culture divide. The playful ironic edge in my what form must desire take such that only some response to this weaker claim is fully intended, for beings or forms of existence are entitled to it and the malicious use of such equivalence relations not others? NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 49

15. The remainder of this article (aside from the ing an animal die, if not from killing it ourselves? first paragraph of the section entitled “Nature’s The question comes partly out of what we know Queer Performativity”) is the final version of the to be the relative invisibility of the enormous num - article “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, as sub - bers of animal killings that take place daily in mitted to Qui Parle . Unfortunately, this is not the slaughter yards, science labs, and animal shelters – version Qui Parle sent to the publisher, and at - killings that, before the middle of the nineteenth tempts to have the error corrected failed. century, most often took place before our eyes, on 16. In the original version there was a footnote de - the streets if not in the kitchen” (Weil 2006: 90). scribing The New York Times article “Oozing Recently, we have witnessed a sharp increase in the through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions acknowledgement of the mass murder of animals, Strong”. That (part of the) footnote became the which had been ignored; see, for example, Derrida inspiration for the opening section of this paper, 1991 and 2008; Wolfe 2003; Sztybel 2006; and thus has been removed. The invocation of Spiegel 1997; Agamben 2004 and 1999. “stake” in this sentence, as it came forth, in the 22. When accounting and accountability are at is - sense of “investment”, conjures an historically im - sue it is important to be attentive to any underly - portant sense of the word relevant to this discus - ing mathematics. Notice that the vulnerability of sion: the historical fact that “acts against nature” the abject constitutive other is not necessarily were actively prosecuted by the Church during the predicated on the existence of hierarchical rank - Middle Ages, and that one form of capital punish - ings. Equivalence relations can be effectively en - ment used was burning at the stake. On the one rolled. hand, we might call this an act of the unconscious; 23. A posthumanist account calls into question the alternatively, without denying the existence of the givenness of the differential categories of “human” unconscious, but given that we will reopen the and “nonhuman”, examining the practices matter of communication in this paper, we might through which these differential boundaries are wonder what the mechanism of this reverberation, stabilized and destabilized (Barad 2003: 808). The this excitation of meaning, is, and whether what is notion of “effect”, and of causal relations more at issue is an entanglement (in time as well as generally, is reworked in this essay. space) that is inherent in the materiality of re- 24. In other words, an element of an analysis is to membering rather than being yet another feature rethink (humanistic) performativity, not simply that is unique to the human. Or at least this twist widen the circle of its applicability. This includes to the usual story is the kind of human/nonhu - understanding performativity as iterative intra-ac - man reworkings this article hopes to provoke. tivity rather than iterative citationality. 17. On the important ethics notion of “making 25. The imploded phrase “spacetimemattering” killable”, see Haraway 2008. (without the usual hyphens to separate out the 18. See especially classic works by Butler 1993 and nouns) refers to the entangled nature of what are 1990 and Sedgwick 1995, 2003, and 2005 and generally taken to be separate features. See Barad the productive and queer legacy of this significant 2007. engagement with the notion of performativity. 26. See Barad 2007 and 2003. 19. Engagements with performativity theory that 27. To be contrasted with Butler’s notion of per - explicitly challenge its singular focus on the human formativity as iterative citationality (Butler 1993). include Barad 2007 and 2003; Birke, Bryld, and 28. Phenomena are ontologically primitive rela - Lykke 2004; Giffney and Hird 2008; Kirby 1997 tions – relations without preexisting relata. That is, and 2006, and Schrader 2010. relations are not secondarily derived from indepen - 20. The Stanton report on stages of genocide dently existing “relata”, but rather the mutual on - identifies dehumanization (stage 3) as a stage tological dependence of “relata” – the relation – is marked by the identification of groups of humans the ontological primitive. Relata only exist within with nonhumans. Dogs, rats, cockroaches, lice, phenomena as a result of specific intra-actions (i.e., vermin, insects, and parasites are commonly enlist - there are no independent relata, only relata-within- ed as the despised others for this purpose. relations). 21. “But what of the death of animals? Is that 29. In other words, relata do not preexist rela - death ‘as such’ and do they have access to it, or tions; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge perhaps we through them? What exactly might an through specific intra-actions. animal death do for us, not in terms of what it 30. Diffraction, as a physical phenomenon, entails might supply us as food or clothing, but rather the entanglement/superposition of different times might there be any ‘knowledge’ gained from see- and spaces. See Barad 1993. 50 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012

31. Indeed, the point is not merely that identity is 38. If the notion of a field is key to an explanation multiple or fluid, but rather that identity itself is at of this phenomenon, as it surely seems it must be, stake and at issue in what matters and what then the point here is to open up to examination doesn’t matter, where accountability is part of the the bizarre features of the field rather than to shut ethico-ontological relations and entanglements of down the discussion by naming it. In any case, worlding. many puzzles still remain about the nature of the 32. OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com: electric field that is animated. Kirby raises an inter - “critter”, jocular var. “creature” esting one: “‘If thunderclouds, even great big “creature”: thunderclouds, don’t have electric fields big 2. a. A living “creature” or created being, an ani - enough to generate the giant spark that lightning mate being; an animal; often as distinct from actually is, where’s all that energy coming from?’ “man”. Researchers at this point are not reconsidering the 3. a. A human being; a person or individual (as in nature of ‘the field’ as a division of separate polari - “every creature in the room”). Common in the ties, the notion of ‘location,’ nor explanations that phrase “our fellow-creatures”. [So F. créature.] presume linear causation. Faced with the problem b. With qualifications expressing (a) admiration, of finding lightning’s origin they are now looking approbation, affection, or tenderness (sometimes to outer space for the answer” (Kirby 2011: 138- playfully); (b) compassion or commiseration 139). (sometimes with a shade of patronage). 39. The notion of “action at a distance” is a refer - c. Expressing reprobation or contempt. ence to what is more aptly identified as “quantum 33. See Barad 2007 for more details of the brittle- entanglements” and appears again in the discus - star’s unique optical system. Brittlestars are one of sion of atomic performances below. my other queer co-workers. 40. “Naturecultures” is of course one of Donna 34. Haraway has ingrained in us the need to take Haraway’s incredibly evocative imploded terms. account of our obligations here. Her tenacious 41. See Schrader 2008A, 2008B and 2010. questioning of the human/nonhuman boundary 42. Pfiesteria are thought to cause red tides, or has had an enormous impact on the field of “ani - what are now being called harmful algal blooms mal studies” (long before there was such a field) (HABs). “Algal booms are considered harmful in and beyond. Where would ecocritism, feminist sci - two distinct but overlapping ways – through the ence studies, science and technology studies, femi - production of high biomass and the production of nist theory, and the rest be without her interven - toxins. Of greatest concern to marine ecologists tions? The line between the animate and inanimate are those microorganisms called dinoflagellates ... may be the least questioned and most comfortable An explosive increase in algae biomass can lead to boundary of them all (at least for humans, surely the expansion of so-called ‘dead zones.’ Dead not for brittlestar). Ironically, this echoes the cur - zones are oxygen-depleted zones in the ocean. rent privileging of the biological over the physical When massive amounts of algae can no longer be in our technoscientific imagineries, in the larger consumed by predators, their bodies sink to the culture as well as in cultural studies, science stud - bottom of the ocean, where bacteria work on their ies, and animal studies. A reverberation of this cul - decomposition. The bacteria consume so much tural prejudice is that the category “nonhuman” is oxygen that life for any other kind of ocean bot - often just assumed to be equivalent to the catego - tom-dweller becomes impossible. According to the ry “nonhuman animals”. latest estimate, about 400 ‘dead zones’ worldwide 35. National Weather Service, “Lightning Safety”, suffocate major taxa of life in the ocean. . . . These http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/science.htm. so-called ‘dead zones’ are however not dead at all, 36. Kirby adds in a footnote: “Despite the title of in fact they are full of life – just not the kind of life Peter Coleman’s book on the subject, Ball Light - ‘we’ want” (Schrader 2008B). ning: A Scientific Mystery Explained (1998), it ap - 43. Queer theorist David Halperin writes: “Queer pears from the literature that ball lightning is a politics ... its efficacy and its productive political contentious subject and its account remains incon - life can indeed still be renewed and extended, the clusive”. first step in this procedure will be to try and pre - 37. All quotes in this paragraph are from the Dis - serve the function of queer identity as an empty covery Channel television program “Discovery placeholder for an identity that is still in progress Wonders of Weather: Lightning Phenomena” and has as yet to be fully realized, to conceptualize (September 2007), http://science.howstuff - queer identity as an identity in a state of becoming works.com/nature/natural-disasters/lightning.htm. rather than as the referent for an actually existing NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 51 form of life. Queer politics, if it is to remain queer, 51. A classic diffraction pattern is the one pro - needs to be able to perform the function of empty - duced by the interfering disturbances of water ing queerness of its referentiality or positivity, waves when two stones are dropped simultaneous - guarding against its tendency to concrete embodi - ly into a pond. That is, it is a pattern of alternating ment, and thereby preserving queerness as a resis - regions of intensity. tant relation rather than as an oppositional sub - 52. See Barad 2007 for further details. stance” (Halperin 1997: 112-113). As specified 53. For details of how to make such a detector see here, queerness’s temporality is one of futural Barad 2007, chapter 7. openness. Queer critters go a step further: the in - 54. Kirby argues for this very point (Kirby 2011) determinate “nature” of Nature not only has an and gives compelling evidence that the story can open future but also an open past. (See especially be told from within deconstructive theory. the section in this paper on the quantum eraser.) 55. See also Barad 2010. Indeed, “past” and “future” are themselves subject 56. There are two distinct issues here. One is how to indeterminacy. entities and events are understood. These are ques - 44. Most of the recent discussions of quantum tions of ontology. A separate issue is whether the causality cite Bell’s inequalities (Bell 1964: 195) as behavior of the entity in question can be account - the quintessential example. But the paradoxical na - ed for in terms of the laws of classical physics or ture of quantum causality is already evident in the quantum physics (or some other set of laws or pat - very notion of a “quantum leap”, which is the core terns of engagement). Surely one can consider feature of the Bohr’s model of the atom (1913), lightning, for example, to be a phenomenon (in the first quantum model of the atom (which pre - the technical sense of the proposed quantum on - ceded quantum mechanics). tology) and still be able to explain certain regular 45. The fact that the energy difference between features of its behavior using the laws of classical the two levels is carried away as a photon is a result physics. Also, interestingly enough, those who of the conservation of energy – energy is neither challenge the importance of a quantum ontology created nor destroyed. Conservation of energy (or for the macroscopic domain are happy to assume of mass-energy according to the theory of relativi - that it unquestioningly applies to sub microscopic ty) is considered a fundamental law of nature, per - domains all the way down to the smallest length haps the fundamental law of nature. scales. Furthermore, as I argue in Barad 2007, 46. Pictures are surely worth a thousand words scale is also not a straightforward concept, and here. To take a concrete case, the emission spec - notions of “macro” and “micro”, like “past” and trum of hydrogen has four primary lines: red, light “future”, are not nested or ordered in simple ways. blue, dark blue, and violet. It is therefore possible 57. See especially Kirby 2011; Schrader 2010, and to identify what elements are present in a glowing Barad 2010. Barad 2010 might usefully be read as gas (even one at a great distance, like a star) by a companion piece to this article. looking at its atomic spectrum and seeing what 58. On diffraction as methodology and physical colors are present. phenomenon see especially chapter 2 of Barad 47. “quantum, n.5”, OED Online, http://dictio - 2007. My notion of diffraction in a methodologi - nary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50194299. cal vein, as against reflection, is indebted to Hara- 48. Space, time, and matter are not simply way 1997. Diffraction as methodology is impor - “there”; rather, they are constituted (and iterative - tantly different from social constructivist critique. ly reconstituted) through the intra-active perfor - In particular, it doesn’t presume to take a position mances of the world. outside of science but rather constructively and de - 49. I only summarize certain key features of the constructively engages with science from the inside experiment here. For a more detailed description (not uncritically but not as critique). Ontology, and analysis of this experiment, see Barad 2007: epistemology, and ethics, as well as methodology, 310–17. are at issue here. 50. According to classical physics, everything in 59. This goes to Derrida’s point that deconstruc - the world could be definitively placed in one cate - tion is not a method but what texts do. (Derrida gory or the other; the nature of every entity (al - 1985). though the nature of “entity” is itself in question 60. Bohr takes the point that “we [humans] are a here) was such that it was either (inherently) a part of that nature we seek to understand” as a pri - wave or a particle. I take liberty with the word mary inspiration for this philosophy-physics. Kirby “entity” here since it is precisely what is in ques - has relentlessly interrogated the nature/culture tion. divide and has insisted on these points throughout 52 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012 her work. She launches the provocation that Derri - culation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques da’s controversial claim “there is no outside of the Derrida, in: Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, & text” should be understood as “there is no outside Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.): Who Comes After the Sub - of nature” (Kirby 2011). ject? Routledge, New York. 61. I am indebted to Vicki Kirby and Astrid · Derrida, Jacques (1994): Specters of Marx: The Schrader for the inspiration of their work, and for State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New their generosity in allowing me to invite in a few of International . Routledge, New York. their favorite nonhuman co-workers, to borrow · Derrida Jacques (2008): The Animal That There - sizable quotes from their work, and to include fore I Am , Fordham University Press, New York. quotes from unpublished materials, for this article. · Giffney, Noreen and Hird, Myra J. (2008): I am solely responsible for any errors or misstate - Queering the Non/human . Ashgate, New York. ments in this paper. I am also very grateful to Fern · Grometstein, Allan A., (1999): The Roots of Feldman for her patient reading of this paper and Things: Topics in Quantum Mechanics. Kluwer Aca - for her helpful suggestions and comments. demic/Plenum Publishers, New York. · Hackett, Jeremiah D.; Anderson, Donald D.; Erdner Deana L. & Bhattacharya Debashish (2004): Dinoflagellates: A Remarkable Evolution - ary Experiment, in: American Journal of Botany LITERATURE 2004/91/10. · Agamben, Giorgio (1999): Remnants of · Halperin, David M. (1997): Saint Foucault: To - Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive . Zone wards a Gay Hagiography . Oxford U Press, Ox - Books, New York. ford. · Agamben, Giorgio (2004): The Open: Man and · Haraway, Donna (1997): Modest_Witness@Sec - Animal . Trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford University ond_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Press, Stanford. Feminism and Technoscience . Routledge, London. · Bagemihl, Bruce (2000): Biological Exuberance: · Haraway, Donna (2008): When Species Meet . Uni - Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity . versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Stonewall Inn Editions, New York. · Kirby, Vicki (1997): Telling Flesh: The Substance · Barad Karen (2003): Posthumanist Performativi - of the Corporeal . Routledge, New York. ty: How Matter Comes to Matter, in: Signs: Jour - · Kirby, Vicki (2001): Quantum Anthropologies, nal of Women in Culture and Society 2003/28/3. in: Laurence Simmons (ed.): Derrida Downunder . · Barad, Karen (2007): Meeting the Universe Dunmore Press, Palmerston. Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement · Kirby, Vicky (2006): Judith Butler: Live Theory . of Matter and Meaning . Duke University Press, Continuum, New York Durham. · Kirby, Vicki (2011): Quantum Anthropologies . · Barad, Karen (2010): Quantum Entanglements Life at Large . Duke University Press, Durham. and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: · Mamdani, Mahmood (2001): When Victims Be - Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Jus - come killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Geno - tice-to-Come, in: Derrida Today 2010/3/2. cide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, · Bell, J. (1964): On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Princeton. Paradox, in: Physics 1964/3. · Raffles, Hugh (2006): Jews, Lice, and History, · Birke, Lynda; Bryld, Mette & Lykke, Nina in: Public Culture 2006/19/3. (2004): Animal Performances, in: Feminist Theory · Raffles, Hugh (2010): Insectopedia . Pantheon 2004/5/2. Books, New York. · Butler, Judith (1990): Gender Trouble: Feminism · Schrader, Astrid (2008A): Dinos & Demons: The and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New Politics of Temporality and Responsibility in Science . York. Doctoral dissertation, History of Consciousness, · Butler, Judith (1993): Bodies That Matter: On the UC Santa Cruz. Discursive Limits of “Sex” . Routledge, New York. · Schrader, Astrid (2008B): Toxic Waters and Tur - · Coats, D. W. (2002): Dinoflagellate Life-Cycle bulent Times: Red Tides, Dinoflagellates, and Complexities, in: Journal of Phycology 2002/38/2. Phantomatic Species, paper delivered to the Ame- · Derrida Jacques (1985): Letter to a Japanese rican Anthropological Association , San Francisco, Friend, in: David Wood and Robert Bernasconi November, 2008. (eds.): Derrida and Différance . Parousia, Warwick. · Schrader, Astrid (2010): Responding to Pfiesteria · Derrida Jacques (1991): ‘Eating Well’ or the Cal- piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontolo- NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 53 gies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic SUMMARY Microbiology, in: Social Studies of Science Nature’s Queer Performativity 2010/40/2. In this article, Karen Barad entertains the · Sedgwick, Eve (1993): Queer Performativity: possibility of the queerness of one of the most Henry James’s The Art of the Novel , in: GLQ 1993/1. pervasive of all critters – atoms. These “ultra - · Sedgwick, Eve (1995): Performativity and Per - queer” critters with their quantum quotidi - formance . Routledge, New York. an qualities queer queerness itself in their · Sedgwick, Eve (2003): Touching Feeling: Affect, radically deconstructive ways of being. Given Pedagogy, Performativity . Duke University Press, that queer is a radical questioning of identity Durham. and binaries, including the nature/culture · Spiegel, Marjorie (1997): The Dreaded Compari - binary, this article aims to show that all sorts son: Human and Animal Slavery . Mirror of seeming impossibilities are indeed possible, Books/I.D.E.A., New York · Sztybel, David (2006): Can the Treatment of including the queerness of causality, matter, Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust? in: Ethics space, and time. What if queerness were un - and Environment 2006/11/1. derstood to reside not in the breech of nature/ · Uman, Martin (1986): Lightning: Physics and Ef - culture, per se, but in the very nature of fects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. spacetimemattering, Barad asks. This article · Warrick, Joby (1997): The Feeding Frenzy of a also considers questions of ethics and justice, Washington Post Morphing ‘Cell from Hell’, in: , and in particular, examines the ways in June 9, 1997. · Weil, Kari (2006): Killing Them Softly: Animal which moralism insists on having its way Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for with the nature/culture divide. Barad ar - Ethics, in: Configurations 2006/14/1. gues that moralism, feeds off of human excep - · Wolfe, Cary (2003): In the Shadow of Wittgen - tionalism, and, in particular, human superi - stein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, in: Zoontologies: ority and causes injury to humans and non - The Question of the Animal . University of Min - humans alike, is a genetic carrier of genoci - nesota Press, Minneapolis dal hatred, and undermines ecologies of di - · Yoon, Carol Kaesuk (2009): Oozing through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong, in: versity necessary for flourishing. The New York Times , March 23, 2009, D3. Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz