25 nature’s queer performativityperformativity * by karen barad how can the possibility of the...

“Oozing through Texas Soil,a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong” (Yoon2009), is a news story title teeming withpowerful imaginaries that collectively exudea fearful, if not at least faintly moralistic,scent that permeates the article. The bodyof the article is crawling with hints of thekinds of phenomena that are at issue in thispaper: concerns over foundations, stabilityand instability, reconfigurations and shapeshiftings, nonhuman agency, queer critterbehaviors, fear and moralism, and nature/culture, micro/macro, temporal, and spa-tial boundary crossings.“Scientists found the vast and sticky em-

pire stretching 40 feet across, consisting ofbillions of genetically identical single-celledindividuals, oozing along in the muck of acow 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 revulsionsof the flesh – form a tantalizing cocktail.The descriptive language is poignant and

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Nature’s Queer Performativity*

BY KAREN BARAD

How can the possibility of the queer-ness of one of the most pervasive ofall critters – atoms – be entertained?These “ultraqueer” critters withtheir quantum quotidian qualitiesqueer queerness itself in their radi-cally deconstructive ways of being.The aim is to show that all sorts ofseeming impossibilities are indeedpossible, including the queerness ofcausality, matter, space, and time.

* the authorized version1

evocative – “vast and sticky empire … ooz-ing along in the muck” – and the imagery,held in colloidal suspension right there onthe surface, is ripe with the musty odors offear. One doesn’t have to read very far be-neath the surface to witness the merger ofpolitical anxieties and scientific curiosity in-to a more complex multi-cellular organism:

Though amoebas would seem unlikely to co-ordinate interactions with one another overmuch more than microscopic distances, thediscovery of such a massive clonal colony,[Kevin Foster, a Harvard evolutionary biolo-gist] said, “raises the possibility that cellsmight evolve to organize on much larger spa-tial scales.” … In fact, like the colony of social amoe-

bas, the giant amoebas could be everywhereunderfoot without anyone’s noticing. “I used to joke,” Dr. Schliwa said, “that

there might be a giant organism in the soilspanning the entire continent and wheneveryou dig up a shovelful you get a piece of it.”So where will the next giant amoeba befound hiding? Dr. Schliwa points out that theoriginal discovery of the amoeba-to-end-all-amoebas was made in the 1940s by a re-searcher named Ruth N. Nauss. She dis-covered the species in a New York City park.

Drawing back the curtain on the workingsof her own dramatic rendering, the authorof The New York Times article presses oneof the article’s subterranean imaginaries tothe surface, outing the thinly veiled ghostof the 1958 horror classic “The Blob”, aCold War movie about the creeping threatof communism. The anti-communismtheme percolates through the article andcreeps into the (presentation of the) scien-tific details: “Only an apparent oxymoron,social amoebas are able to gather in orga-nized groups and behave cooperatively,some even committing suicide to help fel-low amoebas reproduce”. The sacrifice ofthe individual self for the good of thewhole fits the red-scare theme like a glove,

and “suicide” – an interesting term givenall that it implies about intentionality andthe metaphysics of individualism – is in facta common way that scientists and sciencereporters speak of the fate of “individual”amoebas in the process of aggregation. Butis it not a rather peculiar reading of the be-havior of an organism initially named afterthe shape-shifter god Proteus – Proteus ani-malcule – “a blob with no defined shape,bits of which could break off to take up alife of their own”, an organism that morphsfrom a seemingly uncoordinated group ofgenetically identical single cells to an aggre-gate “slug” with an immune system andother organismic functionality characteristicof multicellular species with different rolesplayed by identical cellular units? 3 As Pro-fessor John Tyler Bonner, who has spent alifetime studying slime molds puts it, slimemolds [of which social amoebas or cellularslime molds (Dictyosteliida) are classified asone kind] are “no more than a bag ofamoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yetthey manage to have various behavioursthat are equal to those of animals who pos-sess muscles and nerves with ganglia – thatis, simple brains”.4 What is or isn’t an “in-dividual” is not a clear and distinct matter,and that seems to be precisely the scientificsticking point: the question of the nature ofidentity is ripe here – it’s what’s so spec-tacularly exciting from a scientific point ofview. No wonder that social amoebas aretaken to be model organisms in molecularbiology and genetics for studying commu-nication and cell differentiation. Socialamoebas queer the nature of identity, call-ing into question the individual/group bi-nary. In fact, when it comes to queeringidentity, the social amoeba enjoys multipleindeterminacies, and has managed to hood-wink scientists’ ongoing attempts to naildown its taxonomy, its species-being defy-ing not only classification by phylum butalso by kingdom.5 Nonetheless, the rhetori-cal bias favors the story line of the indivi-dual sacrifice for the good of the whole. No

KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 201226

wonder the reader doesn’t have to exertmuch effort to unearth the political andmoralistic undercurrents.While this journalist is clearly having lots

of fun with her subject matter, the affectiveresponse stimulated by the playful conjur-ing of this specter is not purely nostalgic,for The Blob – a sticky oozing illimitableprotean creature that consumes everythingin its path, a particularly vivid literalizationof the fear of being consumed by the Otherin a xenophobic panic over the spread offoreign elements – did not die off with Mc-Carthyism, but thrived during the VietnamWar years and on through the Reaganyears. Rabid anticommunism isn’t the onlyform this fear assumes. Over the course ofhistory it has mutated and multiplied itsforms to take on the shape of other ranksocietal fears, setting up the conditions forpanicked reactivity and the spread ofloathing and contempt for the Other. Forexample, The Blob has gone viral in recentyears, producing a combination of panicand neglect rather than compassion andreasoned response during recent healthcrises, such as the AIDS epidemic, the madcow disease epidemic, and the avian flu epi-demic, which has resulted in the willful sac-rifice of humans (particularly gay men, IV-drug users, and adults and children livingin Sub-Saharan Africa), nonhuman mam-mals (particularly cows), and birds (particu-larly chickens), respectively. The systemicincitement of fear and loathing is also evi-dent in the spread of racial, religious, andethnic dis-ease, as in the pernicious spreadof Islamophobia in the US and Europe, thestunning reawakening of virulent strains ofanti-Semitism in Europe a mere fifty yearsafter the Holocaust, and the latest round ofunabashedly racist anti-immigration legisla-tion in Arizona, to name but a few. What-ever specific form it takes, fear of The Blobis very much alive on the contemporary po-litical scene.When trekking in the slimy muck of

morality, politics, and bodily fluids, there’s

nothing innocent about the playful stimula-tion of the fear response. An aggregate ofangst and dread labors beneath the surfaceand when the conditions are favorable itoozes out into the open. Fear and moral-ism make a caustic brew. In fact, when it comes to social amoebas

one doesn’t have to look very far to find allmanner of moralizing rhetoric. “AmoebicMorality”, an article whose title betrays allsubtlety, is not in the least bit out of stepwith science reporting in its use of moraldescriptors like “noble”, “cheaters”,“leeches”, “cooperating with strangers”,“self-sacrifice” to describe amoebic behav-iors. It goes on to explain that amoebas arebeing deployed in laboratory studies of al-truism, as if it’s the most natural follow upinvestigation, with no acknowledgement ofthe circularity at work.6 All of which raisesthe question whether Nature is an exem-plary moral actor or a commie activist (or,heaven forfend, both)! That said, it wouldbe a serious error to conclude that I am outto recount the sins of anthropomorphizing.On the contrary, I am deeply interested in‘anthropomorphizing’ as an interventionfor shaking loose the crusty toxic scales ofanthropocentricism, where the human in itsexceptional way of being gets to hold allthe “goodies” like agency, intentionality,rationality, feeling, pain, empathy, lan-guage, consciousness, imagination, andmuch more. That is, I am interested introubling the assumptions that prop up theanthropos in the first place, including theassumed separation between “the human”and its others. What I am suggesting is notstrategic anthropomorphism per se, but us-ing the anthropomorphic moment to callthe question, not in order to reiterate thehabits of projection, but rather, in fractur-ing the presumptions of the ‘anthropos’ of“anthropocentrism”, and in so doing open-ing up a space for response – that is, mak-ing an invitation to the other to respond byputting oneself at risk and doing the workit takes to truly enable a response, thereby

NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY 27

removing (some of) the weight of the en-crusted layers of nonhuman impossibilities(or at least drilling a hole through and al-lowing some air to circulate).7As such, I would suggest that the diffi-

culty at hand does not lie in the attributionof moral virtues to nonhumans per se, butrather in the forceful and stinging characterof moralism, particularly as it is directed atsecuring the nature/culture divide.8 Giventhat moralism fashions humans as the onlymoral agents on the scene, the nature/cul-ture divide is not just any old boundary butthe very air it breathes. It’s no wonder thenthat moralism sees itself as duty-bound toprotect this sacred boundary with the ut-most ferocity. There is, however, a kind ofsweet justice in the irony that to the degreethat fear and moralism are whipped up intoa fevered state aimed at safe-guarding thenature/culture divide, a compulsivebreeching of that very divide inevitablybreaks through, like some uncontrollabletic. Consider the following example: the

(il)logics of the notion of “Crimes againstNature”, a legal term referring to “sexualintercourse contrary to the order of na-ture”, including all “acts of bestial charac-ter whereby degraded and perverted sexualdesires are sought to be gratified”.9 Mostcommonly it refers to “sodomy”, and inparticular, to sex acts between persons ofthe same sex. Today, criminal penalties forcommitting sexual acts “against nature” areas severe as life in prison (see for examplethe statutes of the state of Idaho) or evendeath.10The perverse coupling of nature, sexuali-

ty, and morality is vividly illustrated by thefollowing claim: “sodomy is to be con-demned because the rational ground of allmorality is nature, and sodomy is againstnature”. This statement by Harry V. Jaffa,the Henry Salvatori Research Professor ofPolitical Philosophy at Claremont McKen-na College and the Claremont GraduateSchool, is taken from an opposite the edi-

torial page piece published in the The LosAngeles Times on January 14, 1989. An on-line position paper entitled “Homosexuali-ty and Natural Law”, posted on the websiteof the ultra-right-wing The Claremont In-stitute in southern California, quotes theline from the opposite the editorial pagepiece and finishes the thought: “To regard‘the generative distinction between maleand female’ as arbitrary, [Jaffa] continued,‘is to regard all the distinctions upon whichall morality rests – e.g., those which con-demn slavery and genocide – as arbitrary. Itimplies that we are free to choose whetherthere are objective limitations upon humanaction, objective standards of right andwrong’”.11 So according to Jaffa, if homo-sexuality is not criminalized, the moralityfloor drops out: the illegality of homosexu-ality is the very foundation of morality. This(il)logic neatly coheres with the perversefact that the most heinous crime against na-ture, at least by the lights of many differentcultures, is not mass killings of nonhumansor those deemed “less-than-human” hu-man Others, but “unnatural sexual acts”, asin non-reproductive sexual acts, especiallysodomy, in other words “homosexual acts”. Moralism, which feeds off of human ex-

ceptionalism, and, in particular, human su-periority (indeed, being moral agents is oneway that humans are said to be better thanthe beasts), props up the specific moral in-junction against “unnatural” human behav-iors. There is a price to pay for goingagainst the “ways of nature” and her laws.But if the crime is against Nature herself –the whole of Nature, that is, if the act is soegregious as to go “against all that is natur-al” – then it must have been committed bysome agent who is outside of Nature, pre-sumably a human agent, one cognizant ofhis sins. Now, if the act is against Nature,and the actor is not of Nature, but outsideit, then all acts committed by this actormust be “not in accordance with or deter-mined by nature; contrary to nature” – thatis, “unnatural”, by definition.12 And at the


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same time, if the moral injunction is against“unnatural” human behaviors, includingacting like a beast, then this is because oneis acting like nature – performing “natural”acts. Hence, the (il)logic at work trips overthe very divide – the nature/culture divide– it seeks to secure. In fact, it is the law it-self – in fashioning some human acts asbestial in nature – that breeches the sacreddivide, opening up the possibility of hu-mans engaging in nonhuman acts.13 So it isthe law that violates its own injunction,forceably penetrating the nature/culturedivide, committing the ultimate violation. Furthermore, the discourse on “crimes

against nature” always already takes libertyin the confidence that Nature is herself agood Christian, or at least traffics in a kindof purity that the human has been excludedfrom ever since the Edenic fall of man. Butwhat if Nature hirself is a commie, a per-vert, or a queer? Opening with evolution-ary biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s famous quote“The universe is not only queerer than wesuppose, it is queerer than we can sup-pose”, Bruce Bagemihil writes that theworld is “teeming with homosexual, bisex-ual, and transgendered creatures of everystripe and feather” (Bagemihl 2000: 9).Citing the scientific literature on mammals,birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects,and other invertebrates, he writes: “homo-sexual behavior occurs in more than 450different kinds of animals worldwide, and isfound in every major geographical regionand every major animal group” (ibid.: 12).But even this extraordinary zoological cata-logue of queer animals covers only a smallfraction of the universe – even if we stick tothe earth, there are all kinds of critters thatdon’t make the list, like all manner ofnonanimal life forms (amoebas, plants,viruses) and the multitudinous forms of ex-istence we deem as ‘inanimate’. It is my contention that the world in its

exuberance is far more queer than all thenumerous citations to Haldane’s quoteseem to intend. In this article, I will even

entertain the possibility of the queerness ofone of the most pervasive of all critters –atoms. These “ultraqueer” critters withtheir quantum quotidian qualities queerqueerness itself in their radically decon-structive ways of being.14 Indeed, giventhat queer is a radical questioning of identi-ty and binaries, including the nature/cul-ture binary, this article aims to show that allsorts of seeming impossibilities are indeedpossible, including the queerness of causali-ty, matter, space, and time. Queer is not afixed determinate term; it does not have astable referential context, which is not saythat it means anything anyone wants it tobe. Queer is itself a lively mutating organ-ism, a desiring radical openness, an edgyprotean differentiating multiplicity, anagential dis/continuity, an enfolded reitera-tively materializing promiscuously inventivespatiotemporality. What if queerness wereunderstood to reside not in the breech ofnature/culture, per se, but in the very na-ture of spacetimemattering?In concluding this prelude, I would like

to thank the amoeba, an exceptional com-rade able to cooperate over long distancesand spans of history, for assisting me herein helping to foreground the subterraneandiffusion of moralizing cultures that spreadthe disease of genocidal hatred and under-mines ecologies of diversity necessary forflourishing. When moral indignation isseeping through the groundwork of soci-ety, surely this is the case.

NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY15

A motely crew of queer co-workers – socialamoebas, neuronal receptor cells instingrays, lightning, a phantom species ofdinoflagellates, academics (a strange com-panion species), and atoms among them –assist in this discussion of nature’s queerperformativity. The approach used here isnot to invite nonhuman others into thefold of queerness, but to interrogate the bi-naries that support the divisions that are at


stake. So before they enter, a few more pre-liminaries are in order, including a more in-depth discussion of how the nature/culturedivide, especially in the specific guise of hu-man exceptionalism, undermines attemptsto think and grow ecologies of differencethat have a chance of flourishing. Since thevery nature of spacetimemattering is at is-sue, let’s begin then, as with all beginnings,with a reiteration. And so this beginningreturns again for the first time…“Acts against nature” – what beastly im-

ages are conjured by this phrase? When“acts against nature” are committed, thecrimes are of no small measure. Moral in-dignation is oozing forth, like amoebasthrough Texas soil, and lives are at stake(maybe literally).16 What kinds of actsagainst nature inspire moral outrage?Queer pleasures for sure, even some formsof heterosexual sex, and an assortment ofother human practices. Clearly, the na-ture/culture divide is at issue and at stake,but the logic that tries to hold it in place isquite perverse. On one hand, it is clear thathumans are understood to be the actors,the enactors of these “acts against nature”.The sense of exteriority is absolute: thecrime is against Nature herself, against allthat is natural. Nature is the victim, the vic-timized, the wronged. At the same time,humans who commit “acts against nature”are said to be acting like animals. In otherwords, the “perpetrator” is seen as damag-ing Nature from the outside, yet at thesame time is reviled for becoming part ofNature. Bestiality is surely both a spokenand an unspoken infraction here, but the“real crime”, as the accusers would have it,is the breach of the nature/culture divide,which has not simply been ruptured buthas itself been wronged. In other words,those who would prosecute the “perpetra-tors” of “crimes against nature” trip overthe very divide they seek to secure. Tomake matters worse, “acts against nature”truly deserving an enraged response forgrave injustices enacted are traditionally ex-

cluded from counting as any kind of infrac-tion within the (il)logic of this moralizingpractice. A case in point: given the usual as-sociations of humans with culture and ani-mals with nature, one might think thatforms of violence against animals perpetu-ated by industrial meat production – thatis, the mass extermination of “Others”made killable – would qualify in this logicas “acts against nature” worthy of our pro-voking moral outrage.17 And yet, it is par-ticular sexual acts that are criminalized andlabeled immoral, while the mass extermina-tion of animals goes unnoticed and unpun-ished, and is normalized, naturalized, andsanitized as part of the cost of food produc-tion. If logic falters, what difficulty of thenature/culture divide is being indicated atthis juncture where queer theory and eco-criticism meet?Performativity has been essential to

queer theory.18 And yet, performativity hasbeen figured (almost exclusively) as a hu-man affair; humans are its subject matter,its sole matters of concern.19 But humanexceptionalism is an odd scaffoldings onwhich to build a theory that is specificallyintended to account for matters of abjec-tion and the differential construction of thehuman, especially when gradations of hu-manness, including inhumanness, are oftenconstituted in relation to nonhumans.A case in point is the well-honed tactic

of dehumanization – through the identifi-cation of an oppressed group of humanswith despised nonhuman others “wherebyit [becomes] possible not only to set agroup apart as an enemy, but also to exter-minate it with an easy conscience” (Mam-dami 2001, quoted in Raffles 2006: 521).20Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Naziforce the SS, was no stranger to this tactic.He is unflinchingly explicit about the kindsof consequences such equivalences aremeant to effect:

Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing.Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideolo-


gy. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just thesame way, antisemitism, for us, has not been aquestion of ideology, but a matter of cleanli-ness, which now will soon have been dealtwith. We shall soon be deloused. We have on-ly 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is fin-ished within the whole of Germany (HimmlerApril 1943, quoted in Raffles 2006: 521.Emphasis added).

The effects on human life of such identifi-cations or (en)forced equivalencies betweenhumans and nonhuman others have been,and continue to be, devastating. At thesame time, we would be remiss if the ac-knowledgment of the differential constitu-tion of the human in relation to the nonhu-man only served to refocus our attention,once again, exclusively on the human. One response to the kind of genocidal

arithmetic used by Himmler has been to re-ject such comparisons by invoking the sin-gular superiority of humans. But this reac-tion not only crosses out the equivalencerelation by further devaluing one side ofthe equation – the nonhuman at the ex-pense of the human – but it does so by re-peating the very same calculus of racializa-tion deployed in the first place. This kindof response echoes the problem it seeks toaddress, underwriting an ethical and moralposition engaged in erasure – a lack of ac-countability for the (unavoidable) constitu-tive exclusions enacted. That is, the equiva-lence relation between human and nonhu-man is canceled out in this rendering, butonly by eliding the material conditions andeffects of how different differences matter.One dimension that is erased is the unques-tioned killability of nonhumans. Nonhu-mans do not figure in this kind of moralcomputation.21 But the contrary positions– the reassertion of an equivalency betweenhumans and nonhumans in the name ofanimal rights, or the privileging of animalrights over human rights (by inverting theusual inequality that takes human superiori-ty for granted) – rest on the same kinds of

difficulties and do nothing more to pro-mote accountability.22What is needed is a starting point for

analysis that does not presume that theterms on either side of equivalence rela-tions are given, but instead directly takesup the matter of the cuts that produce dis-tinctions between “humans” and “nonhu-mans” – where the differential constitutionof both terms is important, and so are theirrespective constitutive exclusions – beforeany such comparisons get off the ground.That is, what is needed is accountability forthe cuts that are made and the constitutiveentanglements that are effected. In particu-lar, the “posthumanist” point is not to blurthe boundaries between human and non-human, not to cross out all distinctions anddifferences, and not to simply invert hu-manism, but rather to understand the ma-terializing effects of particular ways ofdrawing boundaries between “humans”and “nonhumans”.23 Crucially, then, suchan analysis cannot figure cuts as purely amatter of human practices of differentiat-ing, that is, as cultural distinctions. What-ever a “cut” is must not assume a prior no-tion of the “human”.Alternatively, we could ask: What about

the nonhuman when it comes to performa-tive accounts of abjection, subjection,agency, and materialization? Surely nonhu-mans as well as humans must figure in, butwidening the radius of performativity’s ap-plicability to include nonhumans is notwhat is at issue. Rather, the point is thatthe very practices of differentiating the“human” from the “nonhuman”, the “ani-mate” from the “inanimate”, and the “cul-tural” from the “natural” produce crucialmaterializing effects that are unaccountedfor by starting an analysis after theseboundaries are in place. In other words,what is needed is an account not only ofthe materialization of “human” bodies butof all matter(ings)/materializations, includ-ing the materializing effects of boundarymaking practices by which the “human”


and the “nonhuman” are differentially con-stituted. This must include not merely na-tural forces and social forces but the differ-ential constitution of forces as “natural” or“social”.24Consequently, my subject matter here is

not nonhuman performativity per se butthe materializing practices of differentiat-ing, where one cannot take for granted thatall the actors, actions, and effects are hu-man. Of interest then are not only practicesby which humans make distinctions but al-so practices of differentiating engaged in bynonhumans, whereby nonhumans differen-tiate themselves from their environments,from other nonhumans, and from humans,as well as from other others. To be moreprecise, the point is not merely to includenonhumans as well as humans as actors oragents of change but rather to find ways tothink about the nature of causality, agency,relationality, and change without takingthese distinctions to be foundational orholding them in place. What is needed thenis a way of thinking about the nature of dif-ferentiating that is not derivative of somefixed notion of identity or even a fixedspacing. Indeed, what is the nature of dif-ference if differentiating doesn’t happen inspace and time but in the making of space-timemattering?25 What strange causality isoperative in per formative constructions?What temporality constitutes (and/or isconstituted by) its operation? What does itmean for constitutive exclusions to be partof the very fabric of spacetimemattering?Elsewhere I have given a detailed exposi-

tion of a posthumanist performative ac-count of materialization that does not limitits concerns and analysis to the realm of thehuman.26 On my agential realist account,all bodies, not merely human bodies, cometo matter through the world’s performati-vity – its iterative intra-activity.27 Matter isnot figured as a mere effect or product ofdiscursive practices, but rather as an agen-tive factor in its iterative materialization,and identity and difference are radically re-

worked. In particular, I have argued thatwhat we commonly take to be individualentities are not separate determinatelybounded and propertied objects, but ratherare (entangled “parts of”) phenomena (ma-terial-discursive intra-actions) that extendacross (what we commonly take to be sepa-rate places and moments in) space and time(where the notions of “material” and “dis-cursive” and the relationship between themare unmoored from their anti/humanistfoundations and reworked). Phenomenaare entanglements of spacetimemattering,not in the colloquial sense of a connectionor intertwining of individual entities, butrather in the technical sense of “quantumentanglements”, which are the (ontologi-cal) inseparability of agentially intra-acting“components”.28 The notion of intra-ac-tion (in contrast to the usual “interaction”,which presumes the prior existence of inde-pendent entities/relata) marks an impor-tant shift, reopening and refiguring founda-tional notions of classical ontology such ascausality, agency, space, time, matter, dis-course, responsibility, and accountability. Aspecific intra-action enacts an agential cut(in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inher-ent distinction – between subject and object)effecting a separation between “subject” and“object”. That is, the agential cut enacts a“local” resolution within the phenomenon ofthe inherent ontological indeterminacy.29Crucially then, intra-actions enact agentialseparability – the local condition of exteriori-ty-within-phenomena. Thus, differentiatingis not a relation of radical exteriority, but ofagential separability, of exteriority-within.Intra-actions cut things together-apart (asone movement). Identity is a phenomenalmatter; it is not an individual affair. Iden-tity is multiple within itself; or rather, identi-ty is diffracted through itself – identity is dif-fraction/différance/differing/deferring/dif-ferentiating.30In this article I want to explore these is-

sues further by considering acts of nature –that is, nature’s intra/activity, its queer per-


formativity – in making alliances with, in-deed in seeing “ourselves” as always alreadya part of nature, of all manner of beingsthat the category “acts against nature”claims to save or defend but in reality erasesand demonizes. In the next section I intro-duce some rather “queer critters”. Thepoint in referring to them as “queer” is notto use an eye-catching term when “odd” or“strange” would have sufficed, nor is it tomake a case that these critters engage inqueer sexual practices (though some do, atleast on some countings), but rather tomake the point that their very “species be-ing”, as it were, makes explicit the queeringof “identity” and relationality.31 (It is notenough to simply assert that identity is a re-lation, if the relation in question is betweenor among entities that are understood toprecede their relations.)To speak of “queer critters” is to cut

across the cuts that define these terms. Foron the one hand, we can understand“queer” as a verb acting on the noun “crit-ter”. The queering of critter is important,since the term “critter” already enacts ex-clusions of the kind that are being trou-bled. Critter, in one sense of the term, is ananimate being, where the line between“animate” and “inanimate” is taken asgiven, rather than an effect of particularboundary-drawing practices. On the otherhand, “critter” is already internally queer,having contrary associations as a term de-fined both in contrast to or as distinct fromhumans (as in its reference to animate non-humans), and, in relation to humans (e.g.,as a term of reprobation or contempt, butalso sometimes as term of affection or ten-derness).32 In an important sense then, crit-ters are inherently destablizing and do nothave determinate identities, by definition.

QUEER CRITTERS, QUANTUMCAUSALITY, AND NATURE’SPERFORMATIVITYThe queer critters that will be introduced

in this section include lightning, neuronalreceptor cells in stingrays, a phantomspecies of dinoflagellates, academics (astrange species), and atoms. Keeping an eye(or, if you’re a brittlestar, your whole be-ing) focused on their uncanny communica-tive abilities, or more precisely, on thebizarre causal relatings they exhibit as a re-sult of the phenomenal/entangled natureof “their” being, will help make evident theagentially intra-active, that is, queer perfor-mative, nature of (their) being/becom-ing.33In engaging our queer co-workers here,

it is crucial that we are mindful of the factthat the point here is not merely to usenon/humans as tools to think with, but inthinking with them to face our ethicalobligations to them, for they are not mere-ly tools for our use but real living beings(and I include in this category “inanimate”as well as “animate” beings).34 A relatedpoint is to avoid the pitfall of positioningeverything in relation to the human and toembrace a commitment to being attentiveto the activity of each critter in its ongoingintra-active engagement with and as part ofthe world it participates in materializing.

Lightning’s Stuttering ChatterLightning inspires fear and awe. It jolts ourmemories, flashing images of the electrify-ing origins of life in our mind’s eye: imagesof lightning’s energizing jump start, its en-livening of the primordial ooze as it isshocked into a soup of organic materials forbrewing earth’s first organisms, and imagesof nature gone awry in man’s usurping ofthe power to give life, famously animatedby Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Lightninggives life and takes it away. Lightning is a striking phenomenon. It is

an archetypal “act of nature” causing“more direct deaths than any other weatherphenomenon” (Uman 1986: 17). Approxi-mately ten thousand forest fires in the U.S.are ignited by lightning each year (Uman


1986: 5). According to the NationalWeather Service, “at any given moment,there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progresssomewhere on the earth”, or some 16 mil-lion lightning storms annually.35Lightning is both an everyday occur-

rence and a complex phenomenon in itsown right, challenging scientists in theirgrasp of the physics at every turn. One ofmy other co-workers, poststructuralist the-orist Vicki Kirby, beautifully animates thequeer nature of lightning’s performances:

As I live in something of an aerie whosepanorama includes a significant sweep of theSydney harbor and skyline, it is common tosee electrical storms arcing across the city. AsI’ve waited for the next flash, trying to antici-pate where it might strike, I’ve wonderedabout the erratic logic of this fiery chargewhose intent seems as capricious as it is deter-mined. The assumption that lightning doesexhibit a certain logic is evident in the com-mon wisdom that lightning never strikes inthe same place twice. But as Martin Uman,one of lightning’s foremost interpreters tellsus, the situation is quite the opposite. “Muchof what is known about lightning today hasbeen discovered precisely because lightningdoes strike the same structure over and overagain . . . The Empire State Building in NewYork City is struck by lightning an average ofabout 23 times a year...” (Uman 1986, 47).Reading about electricity’s predilection fortall buildings, lone trees on golf courses, trac-tors and bodies of open water, I also learnedthat quite curious initiation rites precedethese electrical encounters. An intriguingcommunication, a sort of stuttering chatterbetween the ground and the sky, appears toanticipate the actual stroke. A quite spectacu-lar example is the phenomenon of St. Elmo’sFire, a visible light show that can sometimesbe seen to enliven an object in the moment,just before the moment, of the strike. . .But let’s begin with something whose be-

havior we might expect to be significantlymore straightforward than the contentious

nature of St. Elmo’s fire and its associationswith those “mobile luminous spheres” calledball lightning.36 For example, if we begin byconsidering a lightning stroke, the flash thatwe are used to observing in an electricalstorm, we will probably assume that it origi-nates in a cloud and is then discharged in thedirection of the ground. However, if this di-rectional causality were true, it would be rea-sonable to ask how lightning can be apprisedof its most economical route to the earth be-fore it has been tested. According to experts,the path of lightning is one of arcing disjunc-ture that runs in both an upward and down-ward direction (Uman 1986, 73). Buildingsand other objects on the ground can initiatestrikes by sending out what are called upwardmoving “leaders” of invitation to a visuallyundetected downward traveling spark, calleda “stepped leader” – or vice versa. Uman ex-plains this moment of initiation in terms ofspeech acts. “What is important to note . . . isthat the usual stepped leader starts from thecloud without any ‘knowledge’ of what build-ings or geography are present below. In fact,it is thought . . . that the stepped leader is‘unaware’ of objects beneath it until it issome tens of yards from the eventual strikepoint. When ‘awareness’ occurs, a travelingspark is initiated from the point to be struckand propagates upward to meet the down-ward moving stepped leader, completing thepath to ground” (1986, 49-50). We mightwell ask what language drives this electricconversation that seems to get ahead of itselfin the final instant (or was it the first instant?)of divine apprehension – “when awarenesstakes place”? (Kirby 2011: 10-11).

What kind of bizarre communication is atwork here? What strange causality is effect-ed? A lightning bolt is not a straightfor-ward resolution of the buildup of a chargedifference between the earth and a stormcloud: a lightning bolt does not simply pro-ceed from storm cloud to the earth along aunidirectional (if somewhat erratic) path.The path that lightning takes is not only


not predictable, it does not make its way insome continuous fashion between sky andground. There is, as it were, some kind ofnonlocal communication effected betweenthe two. By some mechanism scientistshave yet to fully explain, a storm cloud be-comes extremely electrically polarized –electrons are stripped from the atoms theywere once attached to and gather at thelower part of the cloud closest to the earth.In response, the earth’s surface becomespolarized with these earth-bound electronsburrowing into the earth. A strong electricfield between earth and cloud results, andall that remains to be accomplished now isa conductive path joining the two. The firstinklings of a path have a modest beginningoffering no indication of its explosive end.“It begins as a small spark inside the cloudfive miles up. A spurt of electrons rushesoutwards, travels a hundred meters thenstops and pools for a few millionths of asecond. Then the stream lurches off in adifferent direction, pools again, and again.Often the stream branches and splits. Thisis not a lightning bolt yet” (DiscoveryChannel 2007).37 These barely luminousfirst gestures are called “step leaders”. Butthe buildup of negative charges (electrons)in the lower portion of the cloud does notresolve itself by a direct channel of elec-trons making their way to the earth in thisfashion. Instead, the ground responds nextwith an upwards signal of its own. “Whenthat step leader is within ten or a hundredmeters of the ground, the ground is nowaware of there being a big surplus” ofcharge, and “certain objects on the earthrespond by launching little streamers up to-ward the step leader, weakly luminous plas-ma filaments, which are trying to connectwith what’s coming down”. It is as thoughobjects on the ground are being hailed bythe cloud’s interpellative address. Whenone of the upward responses is met by thedownward address, the electrical circuit isclosed and a powerful discharge is effectedin the form of a lightning strike. But even

after the path has been carved, as it were,the discharge does not proceed in a conti-nuous fashion: “The part of the channelnearest the ground will drain first, then suc-cessively higher parts, and finally the chargefrom the cloud itself. So the visible light-ning bolt moves up from ground to cloudas the massive electric currents flow down”.An enlivening, and indeed lively, re-

sponse to difference if ever there was one.What mechanism is at work in this commu-nicative exchange between sky and groundwhen awareness lies at the crux of thisstrangely animated inanimate relating?How does this exchange get ahead of itself,as it were? How is the ground animated in-to an awareness of its would-be interlocu-tor? And what does it mean for the senderto transmit a message to a recipient that isboth particular to the given recipient in itsexacting localized connection and yet un-specified at the moment of its transmission?What are we to make of a communica-

tion that has neither sender nor recipientuntil transmission has already occurred?That is, what are we to make of the factthat the existence of sender and receiverfollows from this nonlocal relating ratherthan preceding it? If lightning enlivens theboundary between life and death, if it existson the razor’s edge between animate andinanimate, does it not seem to dip some-times here and sometimes there on eitherside of the divide?38

Clairvoyant Neuronal Receptor Cells in StingraysNeuronal receptor cells in stingrays seem topossess “some mysterious clairvoyancy”:

They are able to anticipate when a messagewhich has yet to arrive, will have been ad-dressed to them, for they unlock themselvesin readiness. It is as if the identity and beha-vior of any one observable receptor cell issomehow stretched, or disseminated, in aspace/time enfolding; as if they are located



here, and yet also there, at the same time. Ifthe separation between sender and receiver isstrangely compromised in this biological ex-ample, so too is the status of the message. Toconsider this more carefully, if the interval be-tween the two is no distance, then what dif-ference could a message effect, and whatwould it be? Strange stuff, this action at a dis-tance that confounds the logic of causality (Kir-by 2001: 59, my italics).39

Lest we conclude that these two examplesof paradoxical communication (as exhibitedby lightning and neuronal receptor cells instingrays), paradoxes which ultimately im-plicate structures of temporality and causal-ity, only apply to a select few phenomena,let’s widen the frame and take in more ofthe story as Kirby tells it. Kirby begins thistale of neuronal chatter in stingrays by de-scribing the situation she finds herself inwhen she is in receipt of this astonishingscientific result.

I was waiting in line with a small group ofscholarship recipients, each of us chargedwith the task of explaining our various intel-lectual projects to an assembled association ofbenefactors. I’d been called upon to justifymy enthusiasm for deconstructive criticism toa non-academic audience which, quite prop-erly, expected to hear it was getting value forits investment. Needless to say, I was some-what apprehensive about my ability to con-vince them. As it happened, however, with noparticular fuss or fanfare, the young biologistwho spoke before me conveyed the peculiarstuff of my question eloquently. The object ofher special passion was the stingray and, as Irecall, her interest in how cells talk to theirneighbors was facilitated by the ease of obser-vation which the neuronal structures of theseparticular creatures enabled. . . . Her fasci-nated listeners were informed that receptorcells, which operate like locks that can onlybe opened by the right key or message, seempossessed of some mysterious clairvoyancy(Kirby 2001: 58–59).

After remarking on the strange causalityevidenced in this result, Kirby continues:

I had, of course, heard it all before. Indeed,with some amusement I could see that theentangled identity of one cell within anotherhad even assumed human proportions in re-gard to individuation. Was this biologist al-ready in receipt of my intellectual labours be-fore our meeting, even as I tried to articulatethe results that she, of course, had inevitablydiscovered? What infectious algorithm had al-ready brought us together before our actualmeeting? (Kirby 2001: 59).

Kirby’s account of these two nonlocal com-municative happenings – engaging in aseemingly improper (nay, scandalous) mix-ing of phenomena at apparently differentscales and realms of applicability (seeminglyconflating natural and cultural forces, as ifforces come in such markedly differentkinds) – pays no homage to shared human-ist and antihumanist indulgences in humanexceptionalism. In her book, Quantum An-thropologies, in which Kirby argues for amaterialist reading of Derrida’s grammato-logy, she notes that the quantum paradoxesexhibited by lightning, stingrays, and hu-mans are persistently denied any empiricalpurchase, as though the thought of allow-ing nature such a radical degree of ontolo-gical complexity is too much to bear, andthat such bewildering matters must, in theend, be a result of culture’s perverse fram-ing of something significantly more tame.Arguing that deconstruction should be un-derstood as a positive science, Kirby un-leashes the liveliness of the world in a waythat speaks to my agential realist account ofworlding. That is, the entangled relatingsof natureculture don’t stop with the intra-action between Kirby and the biologistwhose account precedes hers in a radicalundoing of “precedes”.40 Always already inreceipt of each other’s materialist interven-tions, Kirby’s materialist readings of Derri-da’s grammatology and my quantum

physics re-thinking of matter/ing (makingevident physics’ own deconstructive undo-ing of its classical foundations) have been inconversation with one another since beforewe met. This untimely collaboration is oneof a multitude of entangled performancesof the world’s worlding itself.

Pfiesteria’s Phantom PerformancesIn the summer of 1997 the WashingtonPost ran a story with a headline worthy ofthe National Inquirer: “The Feeding Fren-zy of a Morphing ‘Cell from Hell.’” Thearticle describes these devilish micro-organ-isms this way: “Invisible to both scientistand fish is the creature itself, a bizarre one-celled predator that can appear to trans-form itself from animal to plant and backagain. Called Pfiesteria piscicida, this killerdinoflagellate captured the attention of sci-entists worldwide when it emerged six yearsago [1991] from the murk of North Car-olina’s coastal estuaries, the phantom sus-pect in a string of mass killings that de-stroyed more than a billion fish” (Warrick1997. In Schrader 2010: 175-276).Dinoflagellates are microscopic, usually

unicellular, often photosynthetic protistswith whiplike appendages. “Dinos” arethought to be the cause of red tide and aresuspected of being toxic to certain fish.They are neither plant nor animal, but canact as both:

While it has been believed that about half ofthe described dino species act as photosynthe-sizing plants and the other half are het-erotrophic (obtaining energy by eating otherorganisms), there is a growing awareness thatmany species are actually mixotrophic, chang-ing their nutritional habits between plant-and animal-like with varying environmentalconditions (Coats 2002: 417; Hackett, et al.2004: 1523). Also depending on environ-mental conditions, dinos can change the waythey reproduce, most often asexually, but notalways. “A sexual phase has also been docu-

mented for many dinoflagellates and involvesthe fusion of asexually generated gametes toproduce a motile zygote, the planozygote”.(Coats 2002: 418) (From an earlier, unpub-lished version of Schrader 2010. Used withpermission from the author).

A toxic species of dinos – Pfiesteria piscici-da (“fish killer”) – has caught the attentionof science studies scholar Astrid Schrader.41Schrader explains that a kind of “Pfiesteriahysteria” has gripped the scientific commu-nity, which has been unable to identify themost basic features of Pfiesteria after morethan two decades of research. There is noagreement about either Pfiesteria’s life cy-cle or whether or not they are the causativeagents responsible for the death of millionsof fish and major estuary damage and de-struction. Far from being a matter of merescientific curiosity, the real-world concernsat stake in answering these questions haveeconomic and ecological implications on aglobal scale.42The lack of scientific consensus concern-

ing the inherent features of Pfiesteria hasprompted policy makers to adopt a wait-and-see stance. But Schrader warns thatthis (allegedly non-position) position is asdangerous as it is misinformed, since it isbased on a gross error concerning the na-ture of science: policy makers (and mostscientists) believe that a lack of definitiveevidence necessarily marks an uncertainty, agap in the current state of knowledge thatwill eventually be filled in. By contrast, inexamining the different laboratory practicesin detail, Schrader argues that scientists’ in-ability to pin down the nature of Pfiesteriahas precisely to do with the nature of thecritter itself – namely, that its very speciesbeing is indeterminate. In other words,Schrader makes the case that what scientistsand policy makers take to be an epistemolog-ical uncertainty is in actuality an ontologicalindeterminacy: “Pfiesteria’s species beingsare not simply multiple or fluid, reducibleto variations along some preconceived flow


of time, but inherently indeterminate.There is no moment in time in which Pfies-teria could be unambiguously delineatedfrom its environment” (Schrader 2008B).Schrader fleshes out the point in this way:

In addition to an inseparability of “organism”and “environment”, spatial (synchronic) andtemporal (diachronic) changes in Pfiesteria’slife-histories are thoroughly intertwined.There is no moment in time in which Pfieste-ria can be captured in their entirety. Thus,part of the conundrum that drives the con-troversy, I suggest, is that the questions “whoPfiesteria piscicida are” and “what toxic Pfies-teria do” are inseparably entangled (Schrader2010: 283).

Pfiesteria exclusively cultured on algae preycannot be made to kill fish. Ironically, theyneed the fish around in order to become theirkillers. Toxic Pfiesteria only “are” in relation-ship to fish and specific environmental condi-tions. In simpler terms: without fish there isno fish killer. If you want to know who Pfies-teria are by themselves – if that were possibleat all – you will inevitably produce nontoxicPfiesteria, but not Pfiesteria piscicida, the fishkiller (Schrader 2010: 285).

Like our other queer co-workers, Pfieste-ria’s worldly performances are not localiz-able in space or time. Examining a range oflaboratory approaches to studying the toxi-city and species being of Pfiesteria, Schrad-er makes the case that approaches that in-sist on a “simplistic emitter-transmitter-re-ceiver model” fail to establish the toxicityof Pfiesteria because their procedures –which embody particular ways of definingtoxicity and particularly rudimentary un-derstandings of causality and temporality –preclude by design the kinds of toxic agen-tial performances in which Pfiesteria en-gage.By contrast, the procedure designed by

one laboratory, the laboratory of Burkhold-er et al., does not suppress Pfiesteria’s ma-

terial agency by trying to impose a deter-ministic model of causation as the mecha-nism of fish kills. Instead, their approach al-lows Pfiesteria to engage in heterogeneoustemporal and nondeterministic causal relat-ings:

[The] agential definitions [used in Burkhold-er’s lab] don’t presuppose toxicity as an in-herent property of a particular life stage.Rather, the various toxic Pfiesteria strains re-fer to performances of an assemblage ofmorphs, described as temporal manifestationsof a variable life cycle that cannot be isolatedfrom the intra-actions that bring them about.Since the strains are not fixed categories butcan transform into one another, their kind oftoxicity cannot be solely controlled by pre-sent environmental parameters but is depen-dent on Pfiesteria’s history; that is, on the ef-fects of indeterminable intra-action that haveled to Pfiesteria’s current material mode. Thedinos act differently towards fish dependenton how recently they have been in contactwith fish. In Burkholder’s terms, Pfiesteriahave a biochemical memory for recent stimu-lations by live fish, which introduces a vari-able temporal dimension into the relationshipbetween the organisms and their environment(From an earlier, unpublished version ofSchrader 2010. Used with permission fromthe author).

Hence, what Schrader is able to demon-strate is that responsible laboratory prac-tices must take account of the agential per-formances of the organism in making thespecific nature of causal relations evident.Responsibility entails providing opportunitiesfor the organism to respond. Dinos do notrespond to deterministic models of causali-ty. They insist that their agential perfor-mances be taken into account. But not justany performative account of scientific prac-tice will do. Understanding that the objectsof investigation are effects rather than caus-es does not settle once and for all the mat-ter of causation as one of acausality or of


no causal relationship whatsoever in thespace vacated by determinism. That is, thechoices are not simply deterministic causali-ty, acausality, or no causality. What Pfieste-ria make evident is a mode of causality asiterative intra-activity (Barad 2007). Andindeed, it is precisely the fact that “causalityas iterable intra-activity thus becomes an in-heritance that temporalizes the phenome-non in ‘cutting together’ deadly traces andhinges on the inclusion of specific mattersof concern as part of the experimental ref-erent, which renders the experiments re-peatable” that evidences the inseparabilityof matters of epistemology and ethics(Schrader 2010: 297). The responsiblepractice of science is simultaneously a mat-ter of good scientific practice (epistemolog-ically sound science) and justice-to-come.

The Atom’s Queer Performativity“No one understands these queer quantumthings”, writes Alan Grometstein in TheRoot of Things (Grometstein 1999: 4).What could be more queer than an atom?And I don’t just mean strange. The verynature of an atom’s being, its very identity,is indeterminacy itself.43There seemed to be something queer

about the quantum from the beginning.44Or rather, it became evident from the startthat quantum causes trouble for the verynotion of “from the beginning”. Morethan a decade before the advent of thequantum theory, physicist Niels Bohr madethe imaginative theoretical move of apply-ing Max Planck’s idea of energy quantiza-tion to matter itself, and in particular toeach bit of matter, that is, each atom. TheBohr model of the atom is a quantum vari-ant of the solar system model of the atomproposed by Ernst Rutherford. In the Bohrmodel, each atom has a nucleus (made upof protons and neutrons) with the electronsresiding in discrete (i.e., quantized) “or-bitals” around the nucleus. Each electronin an atom occupies one of a finite number

of discrete energy levels. When an electron“jumps” from a higher energy level to alower energy level, a photon (a quantum oflight) is emitted with a frequency (color)corresponding to the difference in energybetween the two levels.45 Since each kindof atom in the periodic table has a uniqueconfiguration of discrete orbitals, the atom-ic spectrum uniquely identifies the atomthat produces it, much like an atomic fin-gerprint.46Bohr’s model was able to account for the

stability of matter, and it accurately predict-ed the emission spectrum of hydrogen. Thestunning successes of this model earnedBohr the Nobel Prize in physics. However,upon careful examination it becomes clearthat there is something inherently queerabout the nature of matter.Consider the process by which a single

emission line in the atomic spectrum is pro-duced. Each spectral line (of a given coloror frequency) is the result of an electronmaking a “leap” or “jump” from a higherenergy level to a lower energy level. Whatprecisely is the nature of this “leap”? Theexpression “quantum leap” has become apart of everyday speech, where it has takenon the meaning of a large change, when ac-tually the change we are talking about herecouldn’t be smaller. “Quantum”, in thesense used by physicists, signifies the “mini-mum amount of a physical quantity whichcan exist, and in multiples of which it canvary”.47So a quantum leap is very small, but

that’s not its signature feature. What’s mostunique about it is that, unlike any ordinaryexperience of jumping or leaping, when anelectron makes a “quantum leap” it does soin a discontinuous fashion (belying the verynotion of a “leap”): in particular, the elec-tron is initially at one energy level and thenit is at another without having been any-where in between! A quantum leap is a dis-continuous movement. Quantum phenome-na are famous for their uncanniness. Butfor all the fanfare and the display of an in-


creasing array of astonishingly strange phe-nomena, and all the sophisticated mathe-matical machinery used to describe it, thecrux of these paradoxes is right here in thisquantum discontinuity.Let’s consider the situation closely. Ini-

tially the electron is in a higher energy stateE2; finally it is in a lower energy state E1.At what point is the photon emitted? Ac-cording to the classical physics model pro-posed by Rutherford, an atomic electroncontinuously loses energy as it orbits thenucleus, a continuous spectrum of light isemitted, and the atom quickly decays in aflash of light (i.e., atoms are unstable in thismodel, which is one of its weaknesses). Bycontrast, Bohr’s quantum model has twoimportant features that diverge from theclassical model: (1) atomic electrons do notorbit around the nucleus like planetsaround the sun, but rather each must occu-py one of a set of discrete energy levels at atime, and since each “orbital” correspondsto a fixed energy, and electrons that residein a given orbital do not radiate energy(light), (2) when electrons make a transi-tion from a higher energy level to a lowerone, the excess energy is emitted in a dis-crete packet called a “photon”. As such, acontinuous transition between energy levelsisn’t possible. But now a problem arises. Ifa photon can only result from the leap it-self, at what point during this leap is thephoton emitted (recall that a photon is aquantum of light, and hence, light is notbeing emitted continuously but rather in adiscrete amount as a particle of light)? Theemission of the photon can’t take placewhen the electron is on its way from E2 toE1 because it is never anywhere in betweenthe two energy levels; nor can the photonbe emitted when it is at energy level E1 orE2 because no energy change has (yet) tak-en place. And furthermore, something isdeeply amiss about the nature of causality,for if the atom were to emit a photon of agiven color as it leaves E2 (on its way to E1)it will have had to already wind up where it

was going (i.e., E1) before it left, so theproper frequency of photon would be emit-ted to conserve energy – a strange causalityindeed! Thus, the paradoxical nature ofquantum causality derives from the quan-tum discontinuity – the very fact there ex-ists an inherent discontinuity (constitutiveof all intra-actions).What constitutes a quantum discontinu-

ity? This discontinuity that queers our pre-sumptions of continuity is neither the op-posite of the continuous, nor continuouswith it. Quantum “leaps” are not mere dis-placements in space through time, notfrom here-now to there-then, not when itis the rupture itself that helps constitute thehere’s and now’s, and not once and for all.The point is not merely that something ishere-now and then there-then without everhaving been anywhere in between – that’sbad enough, of course – but that here-now,there-then have become unmoored: there’sno given place or time for them to be.Where and when do quantum leaps hap-pen? If the nature of causality is troubled tosuch a degree that effect does not simplyfollow cause end over end in an unfoldingof existence through time, how is it possi-ble to orient oneself in space or in time?Can we even continue to presume thatspace and time are still “there”?This queer causality entails the disrup-

tion of dis/continuity, a disruption sodestabilizing, so downright dizzying, that itis difficult to believe that it is that whichmakes for the stability of existence itself. Orrather, to put it a bit more precisely, if theindeterminate nature of existence by its na-ture teeters on the cusp of stability and in-stability, of possibility and impossibility,then the dynamic relationality betweencontinuity and discontinuity is crucial tothe open-ended becoming of the worldwhich resists acausality as much as deter-minism.I don’t want to make too much of a little

thing, but the quantum, this tiny disjunc-ture that exists in neither space nor time,


torques the very nature of the relation be-tween continuity and discontinuity to sucha degree that the nature of change changeswith each intra-action. Change, to the ex-tent that any general characterization canbe given, is a dynamism of an entirely dif-ferent sort which functions in an entirelydifferent way from that which is presumedto operate on matter situated in space andin time (e.g., one important difference isthat existence is not simply a manifold ofbeing that evolves in space and time); rather,what comes to be and is immediately re-configured entails iterative intra-active be-comings of spacetimemattering.48 Iterativeintra-activity configures and reconfiguresentanglements. Entanglements are not theinterconnectedness of things or events sep-arated in space and time. Entanglements areenfoldings of spacetimematterings.

Queer Identities, Quantum Erasures, andIm/Possibilities for Changing the “Past”Quantum entanglement is the characteristictrait of quantum mechanics, the one that en-forces its entire departure from classical linesof thought. – Erwin Schrödinger: “The Pre-sent Situation in Quantum Mechanics”

The concern is not with horizons of modified– past or future – presents, but with a “past”that has never been present, and which neverwill be, whose future to come will never be aproduction or a reproduction in the form ofpresence. – Jacques Derrida: Margins of Phi-losophy

We choose to examine a phenomenon whichis impossible, absolutely impossible, to ex-plain in any classical way, and which has in itthe heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, itcontains the only mystery. – Richard Feyn-man: Six Easy Pieces

Physicists now claim to have empirical evi-dence that it is possible not only to changethe past, but to change the very nature of

being itself in the past. The experiment inquestion is the so-called quantum eraser ex-periment.49According to Niels Bohr, quantum

physics makes evident the fact that entities(atoms, photons, electrons, etc.) do nothave an inherent ontological identity (as ei-ther particles or waves, that is, either as lo-calized objects or as extended disturbancesin a field).50 On Bohr’s account, identity isnot given, but rather performed. This canbe demonstrated using a simple devicecalled a two-slit apparatus, which is basical-ly a screen with two holes in it. Accordingto classical physics, if you want to know ifan entity is a wave or a particle you simplysend it through two open slits, over andover again (or, alternatively, send manyidentical entities through the slits), devel-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-er, it’s a particle. If a diffraction pattern ap-pears – a result of some disturbance (likethat of a water wave), making its waythrough both slits simultaneously – it’s awave.51 This distinguishing feature is im-portant: a diffraction pattern is the result ofan interference of that which emergesthrough multiple slits at once (rather thanone slit or the other as in the case of a par-ticle). Waves and particles produce distinct-ly different two-slit patterns, and so fromthe point of view of classical physics, this isa definitive test of an entity’s nature.Quantum physics calls into question the

classical ontological classification of entitiesinto two distinct kinds: waves and particles.Experiments at the beginning of the twen-tieth century produced results that were in-explicable in terms of classical notions ofidentity, and the two-slit experiment is suf-ficient to reveal these nonclassical behav-iors. Send an electron through the doubleslits hundreds of times (or send hundredsof electrons through the slits one at atime), and the pattern that emerges is a dif-fraction pattern characteristic of waves. The


same experiment can be done with atomsor neutrons or photons, and a diffractionpattern is produced in each case. But unlikewater waves, particles don’t “interfere”with one another (they can’t occupy thesame place at the same time), and in anycase, since they are being sent through theslits one at a time they aren’t given a chanceto encounter one another in any way. Sowhat accounts for the wave behavior? Eachparticle should be going through one slit ata time (by definition), and yet a diffractionpattern is the result of an entity (like a wa-ter wave) going through both slits at once.To help resolve the paradox suppose we

devise a device to “look and see” what ishappening at the slits, to “watch” as eachelectron goes through the slits on its wayto the screen. In fact, Einstein, who reject-ed quantum theory and was committed toa classical ontology, proposed such a“which-slit” device to show that quantumphysics was conceptually self-contradictoryin that the entity would be revealed to beparticle at the slits (going through one orthe other) and a wave at the screen, and en-tities can’t be both waves and particles si-multaneously. Bohr adamantly disagreedwith Einstein and argued that Einstein’swhich-slit experiment beautifully demon-strated his idea of complementarity, accord-ing to which an entity either behaves like awave or a particle depending on how it ismeasured (i.e., on the nature of the mea-suring apparatus it becomes entangledwith). In the case of a two-slit apparatuswith a which-slit detector, Bohr argued thatthe pattern that would be exhibited wouldin fact be a scatter pattern, characteristic ofparticle behavior. That is, although an enti-ty performs like a wave with a simple two-slit experiment (no which-slit detector), itperforms like a particle with a two-slit ap-paratus modified to include a which-slit de-tector. So the very nature of the entity – itsontology – changes (or rather becomes differ-ently determinate) depending on the experi-mental apparatus used to determine its na-

ture. For Bohr, complementarity saved thetheory from contradictions and enabledobjective results to be obtained. His expla-nation is that the objective referent for con-cepts, like “wave” and “particle”, is not adeterminately bounded object with inher-ent characteristics (as the ontology of classi-cal physics would have it), but rather whathe called a phenomenon – the entangle-ment/inseparability of “object” and “appa-ratus” (which do not preexist the experi-ment but rather emerge from it). Bohrcame to this understanding by a very un-orthodox approach for a physicist – he fo-cused his attention on how concepts work (aradically unusual step for a scientist!), onhow they do the work they do, and howthey come to mean what they mean.52The two-slit experiment was thus the fo-

cus of heated debates and endless discus-sions by the founders of quantum physicsbeginning in the 1920s, and it continues tobe of great interest to this day. It was thegedanken (thought) experiment of its time.Einstein and Bohr argued endlessly aboutit. Today the experiment that was never tobe (it could exist only in the rarified realmof pure thought) can, in fact, be performedin the lab: welcome to the world of experi-mental meta/physics.Without going into too many details of

the experiment, suffice it to say that we candesign a very clever two-slit device with awhich-slit detector (composed of a laserand two cavities). This device performs thewhich-slit measurement without disturbingthe “external forward motion” of the atomby manipulating the “internal parts” of theatom only. The atom, as it makes its way tothe double slits, passes through a laserbeam, thereby exciting one of its atomicelectrons to a higher energy level. Two“micromaser cavities” are set up at eachslit, designed to force this electron to“jump” back down to the lower energy lev-el as the atom passes through the cavity,thus emitting a “tell-tale” photon, which isleft in the cavity – marking which slit the


atom went through on its way to thescreen.Running the experiment without the

which-slit detector reveals a diffraction pat-tern – that is, the atoms behave like waves.If the experiment is run again with thewhich-slit detector in place, the pattern isthat of particles, just as Bohr predicted.This is direct empirical evidence that identi-ty is not fixed and inherent, but performa-tive.Bohr explained the performative nature

of things in terms of quantum entangle-ments of the measurement apparatus andthe object of measurement: according toBohr, it is not so much the case that thingsbehave differently when measured differ-ently; rather, the point is that there is onlythe phenomena – the intra-action of “appa-ratus” and “object” in their inseparability.Now, if Bohr’s hypothesis that phenomenaare quantum entanglements holds, thensome evidently impossible things becomepossible. Suppose that the which-slit detec-tor is made in such a way that evidence ofwhich slit the entity in question (in thiscase an atom) goes through can be erasedafter it has gone through the slits.53 Itturns out that if the which-slit informationis “erased”, then a diffraction pattern char-acteristic of waves is once again in evidence(as in the case without a which-slit detec-tor). In fact, it doesn’t matter at what pointthe information is erased – in particular, itcould be erased after the entity in questionhas already gone through the entire appara-tus and made its contribution to the pat-tern. In other words, whether or not an en-tity goes through the apparatus as a waveor a particle – through both slits simultane-ously or one slit or the other, respectively –can be determined afterwards – after it hasalready gone through the apparatus. Thatis, it is not simply that the past behavior ofsome given entity has been changed be-cause of something that happens in the fu-ture, but that the entity’s very identity hasbeen changed. Thus, we have empirical evi-

dence of the fact that the atom’s identity,its ontology, is never fixed, but is always opento future and past reworkings!The physicists who proposed the quan-

tum eraser experiment interpret these re-sults as the possibility of “changing thepast”. The language they use speaks of aparticular read on these results that doesnot square with Bohr’s philosophy-physics:in particular, they refer to the which-slit in-formation as having been “erased” (hencethe name of the “quantum eraser” experi-ment), and the diffraction pattern as havingbeen “recovered” (as if the original patternhas returned). But, as I have argued, thisinterpretation is not as careful as it mightbe, and furthermore, it is based on assump-tions that are being called into question bythis very experiment, assumptions concern-ing the nature of being and time.If one assumes a metaphysics of pres-

ence, that the pattern results from the be-havior of a group of individually determi-nate objects, then it seems inexplicable thatthe “erasure” of information about whichslit each individual entity went through, af-ter the individuals have gone through theslits, could have any effect. Otherwise,what notion of causality could account forsuch a strange occurrence? What could bethe source of such instantaneous communi-cation, a kind of global conspiracy of indi-vidual actors acting in concert? What kindof spooky action-at-a-distance causality isthis?! The difficulty here is the mistaken as-sumption of a classical ontology based on abelief in a world populated by indepen-dently existing things with determinateboundaries and properties that movearound in a container called “space” in stepwith a linear sequence of moments called“time”. But the evidence indicates that theworld does not operate according to anysuch classical ontology.I have argued elsewhere (Barad 2007)

that in diffractively reading insights fromphysics and poststructuralist theorythrough one another it is possible to “ex-


44 KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 2012

tend” and further elaborate the ideas ofButler’s performativity theory beyond therealm of the human (that indeed one mustdo so in taking account even of the humanin its materiality), if certain key notions likemateriality, discursivity, agency, and causali-ty are suitably revised in light of the radicalrevision of classical understandings of mat-ter and meaning-making suggested bythese findings. Examining the quantumeraser evidence in light of this posthuman-ist performative understanding of the na-ture of nature resolves some of the evidentparadoxes and gives deconstructionism em-pirical traction. To put the point differently,this move makes the wager that the radicalreverberations of deconstructionism are notmerely perverse imaginings of the humanmind or of culture but are, in fact, queerhappenings of the world.54Returning to the evidence in question,

the quantum “eraser” experiment gives em-pirical weight to the deconstructionistclaim that the concern is “not with hori-zons of modified – past or future – pre-sents, but with a ‘past’ that has never beenpresent, and which never will be, whose fu-ture to come will never be a production ora reproduction in the form of presence”(Derrida 1994). The evidence is in factconsistent with this point, that it’s not that(in erasing the information after the factthat) the experimenter changes a past thathad already been present. Rather, the pointis that the past was never simply there to be-gin with and the future is not simply whatwill unfold; rather, the “past” and the “fu-ture” are iteratively reworked and enfoldedthrough the iterative practices of space-timemattering – including the which-slitdetection and the subsequent “erasure” ofwhich-slit information – are all one phe-nomenon. Space and time are phenomenal,that is, they are intra-actively produced inthe making of phenomena; neither spacenor time exists as a determinate given out-side of phenomena.55As I mentioned, the evidence is against

the claim made by some physicists that alltrace of the event is “erased” when thewhich-slit information is destroyed and thatthe previous diffraction pattern is “recov-ered”. On the contrary, the diffraction pat-tern produced as a result of the local era-sure of information (as to which slit theatom went through) is not the same as the“original” (that is, as the diffraction patternproduced before a which-slit measurementwas made). Unlike the original, the newdiffraction pattern is not plainly evidentwithout explicitly tracing the (extant) en-tanglements. The trace of all measurementsremains even when information is erased; ittakes work to make the ghostly entanglementsvisible. The past is not closed (it never was),but erasure (of all traces) is not what is atissue. The past is not present. “Past” and“future” are iteratively reconfigured andenfolded through the world’s ongoing in-tra-activity. There is no inherently determi-nate relationship between past and future.Phenomena are not located in space andtime; rather, phenomena are material en-tanglements enfolded and threaded throughthe spacetimemattering of the universe. Eventhe “re-turn” of a diffraction pattern doesnot signal a going back, an erasure of mem-ory, a restoration of a present past. Memory– the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iter-ative intra-activity – is written into the fab-ric of the world. The world “holds” thememory of all traces; or rather, the world isits memory (enfolded materialization).

CONCLUSIONSMy co-workers and I have presented a hostof challenges to classical ontology – aworldview that posits the existence of dis-crete entities that interact with one anotherin a locally determinate causal fashion,wherein change is the result of one event(the cause) causing another event (the ef-fect) and causes effect the motion of enti-ties moving through space in accord withthe linear flow of time. The assumptions

NATURE’S QUEER PERFORMATIVITY

that support this view include the follow-ing: the world is composed of individualobjects with determinate properties andboundaries, space is a given volume inwhich events occur, time is a parameter thatadvances in linear fashion on its own ac-cord, and effects follow their causes. All ofthese assumptions have been called intoquestion by nature’s queer performances:lightning bolts, neuronal receptor cells instingrays, a dinoflagellate animalplant life-form found in North American estuaries,atoms, and humans are among nature’scritters whose practices, identities, and spe-cies being cannot be accounted for within aclassical ontology.We saw, for example, how classical con-

ceptions of causality and identity fail ineach case, and how their uncanny commu-nicative abilities, their queer causal relat-ings, are inexplicable if their identities areunderstood in terms of independently exist-ing entities. These critters cannot be under-stood as discrete agents interacting with anenvironment or other external or separateagents, not when the presumed successionof effect following cause is out of joint andcausality seems to take on some kind of un-canny character. Each of the critters wehave considered not only “challenge[s] ourconception of time as [a] homogenous flowof self-identical moments, in which a causeby definition precedes its effect” (Schrader2010: 278-79), but also the notion ofidentity “itself” and its derivatives, includ-ing questions of causality, responsibility,and accountability. In its place, I have proposed an agential

realist ontology, or what one might call a“quantum ontology”, based on the exis-tence of phenomena rather than of inde-pendently existing things (Barad 2007).These performatively materializing entan-glements of spacetimemattering are able toaccount for the causally complex perfor-mances we have considered here.Elsewhere, I have repeatedly emphasized

that the ontological shift suggested by

these findings is not necessarily circum-scribed by the scale of the microscopicrealm.56 But somehow my exhaustive repe-tition and development of this point doesnot ward off panicked attempts to contain,tame, or normalize nature’s queerness,which will not be quarantined and is alwaysthreatening to leak out and contaminate“life as we know it” – turning the fun-house, freak show of atoms’ perverse put-terings into an anxiety-inducing largescale“catastrophe”. My hope is that in examin-ing these (further) examples involvingmacroscopic entities, such as the queerquantum ontological performances of Pfies-teria and lightning, nature’s pervasivequeerness might be appreciated across divi-sions of scale and familiarity. So, for exam-ple, although an everyday macroscopic phe-nomenon, like lightning, might yield certainregular features of its behaviors to an expla-nation based on the laws of classicalphysics, it nonetheless exhibits the kinds ofqueer behaviors that atoms do in the micro-cosmic domain. Unlike more “exotic”, lessfamiliar phenomena, like that of atoms,whose queer behaviors refuse to be civilizedby the laws of classical physics, this everydaymacroscopic phenomenon poses a set of quan-daries, displaying an array of queer/quan-tum happenings, from within the very do-main of “classical” physics. What closet inde-terminacies might be lurking in the pre-sumably straightforward classification ofmicro and macro?Behaving much like an electron or a

ghost, deconstruction tunnels in and out ofthis essay implicitly or explicitly in each sec-tion. Together with Kirby and Schrader, Igive room for Derrida’s ideas to engage inserious play with these queer critters.57Without going into more detail about thesedeconstructive elements than the length ofthis essay would allow, it may seem surpris-ing, or even disconcerting, that I mentionthe possibility of empirical support for de-constructive ideas like différance. While thesuggestion that deconstruction might have

45

empirical support may appear blasphemousto some (especially given the commonmis/understanding that deconstruction hasfully deconstructed empiricism and put itto rest, as it were), we are insisting on ma-terialist readings of deconstruction thatopen up the empirical to reworkings thatunmoor it from conventional understand-ings and do not presume that it can (oreven ought to) be put to rest. According tomy agential realist account, not only areempirical claims not ruled out, they are un-derstood to be particular intelligible articu-lations of the world (with all due regard toall the various qualifications required tomake good sense of this claim). In particu-lar, empirical claims do not refer to individ-ually existing determinate entities, but tophenomena-in-their-becoming, where be-coming is not tied to a temporality of futu-rity, but rather a radically open relatingnessof the world worlding itself.In this brief brush with deconstruction,

it may be helpful to keep in mind thatagential realism is not a straight read ofphysics, as it were, but a diffractive investi-gation of differences that matter, where in-sights from physics and poststructuralistand deconstructivist theories have beenread through one another.58As I have pointed out before, physics

wonderfully deconstructs itself, reopeningand refiguring foundational issues such asagency, causality, space, time, matter, andresponsibility as it goes.59I now want to return to the questions

raised at the beginning, or rather they re-turn here once again as much as they per-colate throughout the essay, and draw outsome of the key ethical issues and mattersof concern threaded throughout the discus-sion of causality, temporality, and entangle-ment as informed by the queer performa-tive enactments of these nonhuman critters.Derrida’s notions of “justice-to-come”

and différance haunt this essay for goodreasons. On my agential realist account,differentiating is not merely about cutting

apart but also cutting together as onemovement: cutting together-apart. Differ-entiating is a matter of entanglement. En-tanglements are not intertwinings of sepa-rate entities but rather irreducible relationsof responsibility. There is no fixed dividingline between “self” and “other”, “past”and “present” and “future”, “here” and“now”, “cause” and “effect”. Quantumdis/continuity is no ordinary disjunction.Agential cuts do not mark some absoluteseparation but a cutting together/apart – a“‘holding together’ of the disparate itself ...without wounding the dis-jointure, the dis-persion, or the difference, without effacingthe heterogeneity of the other ... withoutor before the synthetic junction of the con-junction and the disjunction” (Derrida1994: 29). Agential cuts – intra-actions –don’t produce (absolute) separation, theyengage in agential separability – differenti-ating and entangling (that’s one move, notsuccessive processes). Agential cuts radicallyrework relations of joining and disjoining.Separability in this sense, agential separabil-ity, is a matter of irreducible heterogeneitythat is not undermined by the relations ofinheritance that hold together the disparatewithout reducing difference to sameness.The quantum dis/continuity queers the

very notion of differentiating. It offers amuch-needed rethinking of ac/counting,taking account, and accountability thatisn’t derivative of some fixed notion ofidentity or even a fixed interval or origin.Ac/counting – a taking into account ofwhat materializes and of what is excludedfrom materializing – cannot be a straight-forward calculation, since it cannot bebased on the assumed existence of individ-ual entities that can be added to, subtractedfrom, or equated with one another. Ac-countability cannot be reduced to identify-ing individual causal factors and assigningblame to this or that cause. Indeed, causali-ty is an altogether queer matter. Rather, ac-countability is an ethico-onto-epistemolog-ical commitment to understand how differ-


ent cuts matter in the reiterative intra-activ-ity of worlding, that is, of the entangle-ments of spacetimematterings. Taking ac-count entails being accountable, for allac/countings are from within, not without.There is no pure external position, onlyagential separability, differences within, dif-férance. Accountability cannot be based ona mathematics of identity. Simple substitu-tions, equivalence relations, or transitivitiesamong individual elements are undone.Ironically, in an important sense, there

are no “acts against nature”, not if they en-tail the sense of absolute exteriority that isusually assumed. In this radical reworkingof nature/culture, there is no outside ofnature from which to act; there are only“acts of nature” (including thinking andlanguage use), which is not to reduce cul-ture to nature, but to reject the notion thatnature is inherently inadequate, and in par-ticular, lacking in value and meaning, andso requires culture as its supplement (Kir-by). What if we were to understand cultureas something nature does?60 This rework-ing of the nature/culture and human/non-human binaries frees up space for moraloutrage directed at specific acts of violenceagainst humans and nonhumans, includingmaterial(izing) effects of how they are dif-ferentiated (and then equated).Entanglements are not a name for the

interconnectedness of all being as one, butrather for specific material relations of theongoing differentiating of the world. En-tanglements are relations of obligation –being bound to the other – enfolded tracesof othering. Othering, the constitution ofan “Other”, entails an indebtedness to the“Other”, who is irreducibly and materiallybound to, threaded through, the “self” – adiffraction/dispersion of identity. “Other-ness” is an entangled relation of difference(différance).An ethics of entanglement entails possi-

bilities and obligations for reworking thematerial effects of the past and the future.There can never be absolute redemption,

but spacetimematter can be productivelyreconfigured, reworking im/possibilities inthe process. Changes to the past don’terase marks on bodies; the sedimenting ma-terial effects of these very reconfigurings –memories/re-member-ings – are writteninto the flesh of the world. Our debt tothose who are already dead and those whoare not yet born cannot be disentangledfrom who we are. What if we were to rec-ognize that differentiating is a material actthat is not about radical separation, but onthe contrary, about making connectionsand commitments?61

NOTES1. There is a previously unauthorized version ofthis paper that appears in the graduate student runjournal Qui Parle (2011/19/2 University of Ne-braska Press). I am grateful to Hilda Rømer Chris-tensen and the editors of Women, Gender, & Re-search for allowing me the opportunity to bringthe authorized version of the paper to light. 2. All quotes in this section are from the cited NewYork Times article unless otherwise indicated.3. How cool is it that “In response to the cAMPdistress call, up to one hundred thousand of theamoebas assemble. They first form a tower, whicheventually topples over into an oblong blob abouttwo millimeters long. The identical amoebas with-in this pseudoplasmodium – or slug – begin to dif-ferentiate and take on specialized roles” (Otte2007, see ref fn 6). 4. Quote attributed to Professor John Tyler Bon-ner, from Wikipedia entry on Slime Molds. 5. “First discovered in a North Carolina forest in1935, Dictyostelium discoideum was at first classi-fied under ‘lower fungi’ and in subsequent yearsinto the kingdoms Protoctista, Fungi and Tubu-lomitochondrae. By the 1990s, most scientists ac-cepted the current classification. Amoebozoa arenow considered by most to form a separate king-dom-level clade, being more closely related toboth animals and fungi than to plants” (Wikipediaentry on Dictyostelid). I thank Fern Feldman forsharing my delight in the indeterminacies of socialamoebas and for pointing out the elusiveness of itsbiological classification.6. By Carol Otte, posted October 9, 2007


(http://www.damninteresting.com/amoebic-morality/, accessed November 5, 2010). This is a“damn interesting” article, a well-written compila-tion of lots of different research findings on socialamoebas. Otte’s use of language or morality is notan added flourish to attract readers; rather, ques-tions of morality circulate with great regularity inthe scientific literature on social amoebas, which isa very interesting phenomenon. 7. For example, if the notion of the “social amoe-ba” as an oxymoron rings true, that is, if there is abelief operative that single-celled organisms aresimply too primitive to engage in social relationsor any form of cooperative behavior (especiallyover large distances), then setting aside the prohi-bition on thinking of sociality and agency as non-human capacities is surely an important step in dis-lodging some of the sedimenting effects of humanexceptionalism.8. Indeed, the very possibility of the moral nonhu-man opens up a rethinking, a queering, of moralitysuch that it is not founded on the nature/culturedivide, but rather calls that very divide into ques-tion. With this reorientation, “amoebic morality”would not constitute one more colonialist move tocovertly cement humans into the equation (the in-equality) by setting the nonhuman up for episte-mological resourcing, making everything into aquestion of what the Other can teach us, or evenabout who ‘we’ ought to speak for as a substitutefor response-ability, that is, making it possible forthe other to respond.9. From the legal code of the state of North Caro-lina(http://www.ncgala.org/guide/guidecan.htm).10. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=100972411. http://famguardian.org/Subjects/SexualIm-morality/Homosexuality/HomoAndNaturalLaw.htm12. From the Online Dictionary: http://www.vo-cabulary.com/definition/unnaturalThe indeterminacy of meaning of “natural” and“unnatural” produces interesting instabilities.13. If one understands the law as guarding againsthumans parodying animals, not actually engagedin “bestial acts” per se, but in acts of mimicry, thatis, acting as if one is a (nonhuman) animal, a hu-man in sheep’s clothing as it were, then it is thelaw that would have humans engage in a rathersheepish form of cross-dressing by marking specifichuman acts as a form of drag that crosses the na-ture/culture divide. The playful ironic edge in myresponse to this weaker claim is fully intended, for the malicious use of such equivalence relations

turns on how the “as if” gets played. The use of such equivalence relations across species bound-aries that moralism heavily traffics in do not intendanything as “innocent” as an “as if”. Indeed, asHugh Raffles points out, Himmler’s remark that“anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing” isnot a “mere” suggestion that “anti-Semitism is …like delousing, nor is it merely a form of delousing.It is exactly the same as delousing” (Raffles 2010:142). The purposefully inflammatory statement isnot “merely” that Jews act like lice, what is beingset forth by Himmler is an equivalence relation:Jews are lice. Raffles goes on to point out that “Although the Nazis imposed the borders with

unprecedented ferocity, they did not initiate theexpulsion of Jews from the kingdom of humanity.In early-modern France, for example, ‘sincecoition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if aman should copulate with a dog”, Christians whohad heterosexual sex with Jews could be prosecut-ed for the capital crime of sodomy and burnedalive with their partners – ‘such persons in the eyeof the law and our holy faith differ[ing] in no wisefrom beasts” (who were also subject to trial andexecution). In a minor key, long-standing Germanidentification of Jews with dogs (mongrels) and,sometimes, pigs, persisted through the Nazi era.More destructive – and more insinuating – was theassociation of the Jew with the shadowy figure ofthe parasite, a figure that infests the individualbody, the population, and of course, the bodypolitic, that does so in both obvious and unexpect-ed ways, and that invites innovative interventionsand controls” (ibid, p.145). Hence, in the next section of the article, I em-

phasize the necessity of radically disrupting the cal-culus of exterminism and killability (the immoralityof making killable, see Haraway 2008). If thismurdering arithmetic is left in place, by trying todeny the equivalence by defending only one sideof the equation and holding the other in disdain,for example, it will surely come around to hauntand harm all matter of beings, human and nonhu-man alike. How we signify the Other matters. It isimportant to be clear that equivalence relations ofthis kind do not trouble the nature/culture divide– they feed off of it.14. See also Barad 2010. Some may raise the ob-jection that queerness necessarily has something todo with desire and that this disqualifies atoms,electrons, space, and time. But this objectionbased on human exceptionalism begs the question:what form must desire take such that only somebeings or forms of existence are entitled to it andnot others?


15. The remainder of this article (aside from the first paragraph of the section entitled “Nature’sQueer Performativity”) is the final version of thearticle “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, as sub-mitted to Qui Parle. Unfortunately, this is not theversion Qui Parle sent to the publisher, and at-tempts to have the error corrected failed.16. In the original version there was a footnote de-scribing The New York Times article “Oozingthrough Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas BillionsStrong”. That (part of the) footnote became theinspiration for the opening section of this paper,and thus has been removed. The invocation of“stake” in this sentence, as it came forth, in thesense of “investment”, conjures an historically im-portant sense of the word relevant to this discus-sion: the historical fact that “acts against nature”were actively prosecuted by the Church during theMiddle Ages, and that one form of capital punish-ment used was burning at the stake. On the onehand, we might call this an act of the unconscious;alternatively, without denying the existence of theunconscious, but given that we will reopen thematter of communication in this paper, we mightwonder what the mechanism of this reverberation,this excitation of meaning, is, and whether what isat issue is an entanglement (in time as well asspace) that is inherent in the materiality of re-membering rather than being yet another featurethat is unique to the human. Or at least this twistto the usual story is the kind of human/nonhu-man reworkings this article hopes to provoke.17. On the important ethics notion of “makingkillable”, see Haraway 2008.18. See especially classic works by Butler 1993 and1990 and Sedgwick 1995, 2003, and 2005 andthe productive and queer legacy of this significantengagement with the notion of performativity.19. Engagements with performativity theory thatexplicitly challenge its singular focus on the humaninclude Barad 2007 and 2003; Birke, Bryld, andLykke 2004; Giffney and Hird 2008; Kirby 1997and 2006, and Schrader 2010.20. The Stanton report on stages of genocideidentifies dehumanization (stage 3) as a stagemarked by the identification of groups of humanswith nonhumans. Dogs, rats, cockroaches, lice,vermin, insects, and parasites are commonly enlist-ed as the despised others for this purpose.21. “But what of the death of animals? Is thatdeath ‘as such’ and do they have access to it, orperhaps we through them? What exactly might ananimal death do for us, not in terms of what itmight supply us as food or clothing, but rathermight there be any ‘knowledge’ gained from see-

ing an animal die, if not from killing it ourselves? The question comes partly out of what we knowto be the relative invisibility of the enormous num-bers of animal killings that take place daily inslaughter yards, science labs, and animal shelters –killings that, before the middle of the nineteenthcentury, most often took place before our eyes, onthe streets if not in the kitchen” (Weil 2006: 90).Recently, we have witnessed a sharp increase in theacknowledgement of the mass murder of animals,which had been ignored; see, for example, Derrida1991 and 2008; Wolfe 2003; Sztybel 2006;Spiegel 1997; Agamben 2004 and 1999.22. When accounting and accountability are at is-sue it is important to be attentive to any underly-ing mathematics. Notice that the vulnerability ofthe abject constitutive other is not necessarilypredicated on the existence of hierarchical rank-ings. Equivalence relations can be effectively en-rolled.23. A posthumanist account calls into question thegivenness of the differential categories of “human”and “nonhuman”, examining the practicesthrough which these differential boundaries arestabilized and destabilized (Barad 2003: 808). Thenotion of “effect”, and of causal relations moregenerally, is reworked in this essay.24. In other words, an element of an analysis is torethink (humanistic) performativity, not simplywiden the circle of its applicability. This includesunderstanding performativity as iterative intra-ac-tivity rather than iterative citationality.25. The imploded phrase “spacetimemattering”(without the usual hyphens to separate out thenouns) refers to the entangled nature of what aregenerally taken to be separate features. See Barad2007.26. See Barad 2007 and 2003.27. To be contrasted with Butler’s notion of per-formativity as iterative citationality (Butler 1993).28. Phenomena are ontologically primitive rela-tions – relations without preexisting relata. That is,relations are not secondarily derived from indepen-dently existing “relata”, but rather the mutual on-tological dependence of “relata” – the relation – isthe ontological primitive. Relata only exist withinphenomena as a result of specific intra-actions (i.e.,there are no independent relata, only relata-within-relations).29. In other words, relata do not preexist rela-tions; rather, relata-within-phenomena emergethrough specific intra-actions.30. Diffraction, as a physical phenomenon, entailsthe entanglement/superposition of different timesand spaces. See Barad 1993.


31. Indeed, the point is not merely that identity is multiple or fluid, but rather that identity itself is atstake and at issue in what matters and whatdoesn’t matter, where accountability is part of theethico-ontological relations and entanglements ofworlding.32. OED Online, http://dictionary.oed.com:“critter”, jocular var. “creature”“creature”:2. a. A living “creature” or created being, an ani-mate being; an animal; often as distinct from“man”.3. a. A human being; a person or individual (as in“every creature in the room”). Common in thephrase “our fellow-creatures”. [So F. créature.]b. With qualifications expressing (a) admiration,approbation, affection, or tenderness (sometimesplayfully); (b) compassion or commiseration(sometimes with a shade of patronage).c. Expressing reprobation or contempt.33. See Barad 2007 for more details of the brittle-star’s unique optical system. Brittlestars are one ofmy other queer co-workers.34. Haraway has ingrained in us the need to takeaccount of our obligations here. Her tenaciousquestioning of the human/nonhuman boundaryhas had an enormous impact on the field of “ani-mal studies” (long before there was such a field)and beyond. Where would ecocritism, feminist sci-ence studies, science and technology studies, femi-nist theory, and the rest be without her interven-tions? The line between the animate and inanimatemay be the least questioned and most comfortableboundary of them all (at least for humans, surelynot for brittlestar). Ironically, this echoes the cur-rent privileging of the biological over the physicalin our technoscientific imagineries, in the largerculture as well as in cultural studies, science stud-ies, and animal studies. A reverberation of this cul-tural prejudice is that the category “nonhuman” isoften just assumed to be equivalent to the catego-ry “nonhuman animals”.35. National Weather Service, “Lightning Safety”,http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/science.htm.36. Kirby adds in a footnote: “Despite the title ofPeter Coleman’s book on the subject, Ball Light-ning: A Scientific Mystery Explained (1998), it ap-pears from the literature that ball lightning is acontentious subject and its account remains incon-clusive”.37. All quotes in this paragraph are from the Dis-covery Channel television program “DiscoveryWonders of Weather: Lightning Phenomena”(September 2007), http://science.howstuff-works.com/nature/natural-disasters/lightning.htm.

38. If the notion of a field is key to an explanationof this phenomenon, as it surely seems it must be,then the point here is to open up to examinationthe bizarre features of the field rather than to shutdown the discussion by naming it. In any case,many puzzles still remain about the nature of theelectric field that is animated. Kirby raises an inter-esting one: “‘If thunderclouds, even great bigthunderclouds, don’t have electric fields bigenough to generate the giant spark that lightningactually is, where’s all that energy coming from?’Researchers at this point are not reconsidering thenature of ‘the field’ as a division of separate polari-ties, the notion of ‘location,’ nor explanations thatpresume linear causation. Faced with the problemof finding lightning’s origin they are now lookingto outer space for the answer” (Kirby 2011: 138-139).39. The notion of “action at a distance” is a refer-ence to what is more aptly identified as “quantumentanglements” and appears again in the discus-sion of atomic performances below.40. “Naturecultures” is of course one of DonnaHaraway’s incredibly evocative imploded terms.41. See Schrader 2008A, 2008B and 2010.42. Pfiesteria are thought to cause red tides, orwhat are now being called harmful algal blooms(HABs). “Algal booms are considered harmful intwo distinct but overlapping ways – through theproduction of high biomass and the production oftoxins. Of greatest concern to marine ecologistsare those microorganisms called dinoflagellates ...An explosive increase in algae biomass can lead tothe expansion of so-called ‘dead zones.’ Deadzones are oxygen-depleted zones in the ocean.When massive amounts of algae can no longer beconsumed by predators, their bodies sink to thebottom of the ocean, where bacteria work on theirdecomposition. The bacteria consume so muchoxygen that life for any other kind of ocean bot-tom-dweller becomes impossible. According to thelatest estimate, about 400 ‘dead zones’ worldwidesuffocate major taxa of life in the ocean. . . . Theseso-called ‘dead zones’ are however not dead at all,in fact they are full of life – just not the kind of life‘we’ want” (Schrader 2008B).43. Queer theorist David Halperin writes: “Queerpolitics ... its efficacy and its productive politicallife can indeed still be renewed and extended, thefirst step in this procedure will be to try and pre-serve the function of queer identity as an emptyplaceholder for an identity that is still in progressand has as yet to be fully realized, to conceptualizequeer identity as an identity in a state of becomingrather than as the referent for an actually existing


form of life. Queer politics, if it is to remain queer,needs to be able to perform the function of empty-ing queerness of its referentiality or positivity,guarding against its tendency to concrete embodi-ment, and thereby preserving queerness as a resis-tant relation rather than as an oppositional sub-stance” (Halperin 1997: 112-113). As specifiedhere, queerness’s temporality is one of futuralopenness. Queer critters go a step further: the in-determinate “nature” of Nature not only has anopen future but also an open past. (See especiallythe section in this paper on the quantum eraser.)Indeed, “past” and “future” are themselves subjectto indeterminacy.44. Most of the recent discussions of quantumcausality cite Bell’s inequalities (Bell 1964: 195) asthe quintessential example. But the paradoxical na-ture of quantum causality is already evident in thevery notion of a “quantum leap”, which is the corefeature of the Bohr’s model of the atom (1913),the first quantum model of the atom (which pre-ceded quantum mechanics).45. The fact that the energy difference betweenthe two levels is carried away as a photon is a resultof the conservation of energy – energy is neithercreated nor destroyed. Conservation of energy (orof mass-energy according to the theory of relativi-ty) is considered a fundamental law of nature, per-haps the fundamental law of nature.46. Pictures are surely worth a thousand wordshere. To take a concrete case, the emission spec-trum of hydrogen has four primary lines: red, lightblue, dark blue, and violet. It is therefore possibleto identify what elements are present in a glowinggas (even one at a great distance, like a star) bylooking at its atomic spectrum and seeing whatcolors are present.47. “quantum, n.5”, OED Online, http://dictio-nary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50194299.48. Space, time, and matter are not simply“there”; rather, they are constituted (and iterative-ly reconstituted) through the intra-active perfor-mances of the world.49. I only summarize certain key features of theexperiment here. For a more detailed descriptionand analysis of this experiment, see Barad 2007:310–17.50. According to classical physics, everything inthe world could be definitively placed in one cate-gory or the other; the nature of every entity (al-though the nature of “entity” is itself in questionhere) was such that it was either (inherently) awave or a particle. I take liberty with the word“entity” here since it is precisely what is in ques-tion.

51. A classic diffraction pattern is the one pro-duced by the interfering disturbances of waterwaves when two stones are dropped simultaneous-ly into a pond. That is, it is a pattern of alternatingregions of intensity.52. See Barad 2007 for further details.53. For details of how to make such a detector seeBarad 2007, chapter 7.54. Kirby argues for this very point (Kirby 2011)and gives compelling evidence that the story canbe told from within deconstructive theory.55. See also Barad 2010.56. There are two distinct issues here. One is howentities and events are understood. These are ques-tions of ontology. A separate issue is whether thebehavior of the entity in question can be account-ed for in terms of the laws of classical physics orquantum physics (or some other set of laws or pat-terns of engagement). Surely one can considerlightning, for example, to be a phenomenon (inthe technical sense of the proposed quantum on-tology) and still be able to explain certain regularfeatures of its behavior using the laws of classicalphysics. Also, interestingly enough, those whochallenge the importance of a quantum ontologyfor the macroscopic domain are happy to assumethat it unquestioningly applies to submicroscopicdomains all the way down to the smallest lengthscales. Furthermore, as I argue in Barad 2007,scale is also not a straightforward concept, andnotions of “macro” and “micro”, like “past” and“future”, are not nested or ordered in simple ways.57. See especially Kirby 2011; Schrader 2010, andBarad 2010. Barad 2010 might usefully be read asa companion piece to this article.58. On diffraction as methodology and physicalphenomenon see especially chapter 2 of Barad2007. My notion of diffraction in a methodologi-cal vein, as against reflection, is indebted to Hara-way 1997. Diffraction as methodology is impor-tantly different from social constructivist critique.In particular, it doesn’t presume to take a positionoutside of science but rather constructively and de-constructively engages with science from the inside(not uncritically but not as critique). Ontology,epistemology, and ethics, as well as methodology,are at issue here.59. This goes to Derrida’s point that deconstruc-tion is not a method but what texts do. (Derrida1985).60. Bohr takes the point that “we [humans] are apart of that nature we seek to understand” as a pri-mary inspiration for this philosophy-physics. Kirbyhas relentlessly interrogated the nature/culture divide and has insisted on these points throughout


her work. She launches the provocation that Derri-da’s controversial claim “there is no outside of thetext” should be understood as “there is no outsideof nature” (Kirby 2011).61. I am indebted to Vicki Kirby and AstridSchrader for the inspiration of their work, and fortheir generosity in allowing me to invite in a few oftheir favorite nonhuman co-workers, to borrowsizable quotes from their work, and to includequotes from unpublished materials, for this article.I am solely responsible for any errors or misstate-ments in this paper. I am also very grateful to FernFeldman for her patient reading of this paper andfor her helpful suggestions and comments.

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SUMMARYNature’s Queer Performativity In this article, Karen Barad entertains thepossibility of the queerness of one of the mostpervasive of all critters – atoms. These “ultra-queer” critters with their quantum quotidi-an qualities queer queerness itself in theirradically deconstructive ways of being. Giventhat queer is a radical questioning of identityand binaries, including the nature/culturebinary, this article aims to show that all sortsof seeming impossibilities are indeed possible,including the queerness of causality, matter,space, and time. What if queerness were un-derstood to reside not in the breech of nature/culture, per se, but in the very nature ofspacetimemattering, Barad asks. This articlealso considers questions of ethics and justice,and in particular, examines the ways inwhich moralism insists on having its waywith the nature/culture divide. Barad ar-gues that moralism, feeds off of human excep-tionalism, and, in particular, human superi-ority and causes injury to humans and non-humans alike, is a genetic carrier of genoci-dal hatred, and undermines ecologies of di-versity necessary for flourishing.

Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz


25 nature’s queer performativityperformativity * by karen barad how can the possibility of the...

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