an interview with karen barad

I:1We would like to startof with a bit of biographical research trajecto-ry. You were doing research as a physicist andsomewhere along the way you connected yourreading of Niels Bohr with feminist sciencestudies and the work of Judith Butler, MichelFoucault and Donna Haraway in a veryoriginal way. So perhaps you can tell us howthis evolved and how you became able to makethese connections? It’s kind of a tricky ques-tion, I guess.[Laughs]

Karen Barad: Yes, it is. Autobiography.Hmm. Talk about constructing temporali-ties! How to tell a narrative of the trajecto-ry of one’s thinking? A tricky starting pointfor a discussion in the wake of my keynotewhere I talked about dis/continuity (aqueering of the continuity/discontinuitybinary) and how matter in its intra-activeliveliness unsettles terms like evolve, trajec-tory, biography, memory. Who is this “I”that would attempt to narrate my research

KVINDER, KØN & FORSKNING NR. 1-2 201210

Intra-active Entanglements

– An Interview with Karen Barad

BY MALOU JUELSKJÆRAND NETE SCHWENNESEN

This interview was conducted on abalcony, overlooking the Mediter-ranean Sea (with airplanes takingoff and landing above our heads)during the Third InternationalSymposium on Process OrganizationStudies, at Corfu, Greece in June2011. The symposium had the theme“How Matter Matters: Objects, Arti-facts and Materiality in Organiza-tion Studies”. We talked the day af-ter Karen Barad had given thekeynote “Ma(r)king Time: MaterialEntanglements and Re-member-ings: Cutting Together-Apart”.

trajectory? Perhaps if you allow me to turnyour question inside out, as it were, andask: what material forces were contributingto the reiterative materialization of this “I”?Which political forces and texts that I wasreading helped constitute “me”? (Ofcourse, this is not to say that I can’t speakin the first person. After all the notion of anindividual needs to be taken seriously –very seriously these days, because, for onething, it is a very potent notion at the cen-ter of the action of neoliberal forces. At thesame time, it’s crucial to raise the questionof how ‘the individual’, including any par-ticular individual, is iteratively (re)consti-tuted.) Since there is no origin in this story,and no fixed narrative as such – in fact,Derrida might remind us that an autobiog-raphy is not a telling of a past that is pre-sent, but the ongoing openness of the nar-rative to future retellings (a point that res-onates with insights from quantum theoryas well), that is, it is a question of inheritingthe future as well as the past – I will jumpin and pull out a few threads in trying tohonor your question. So there was a time,actually many times, as there still are, whenI was reading all kinds of different thingsfrom different fields at once: physics, phi-losophy, science studies, feminist and queertheories, to name a few of my many debts.(Admittedly this is a rather unusual anti-disciplinary omnivorous reading practicefor someone with a career in physics, whogrew up in the northeastern part of the US,just at the tail end of baby boom, postwar,post-Sputnik, a working-class second-gen-eration American who was the first in myfamily to go to college, without any expec-tation of being an academic. My boundary-crossing and indeterminate ways of beinghave never allowed me to fit any academicspace comfortably. I remember mentioningDerrida at a lunch with my physics col-leagues at Colombia in the mid-80s. It wasimmediately evident that I had committedthe ultimate faux pas, and that in any caseno one had any idea what I was talking

about. So much for C.P. Snow.) Anyway, itstruck me that the theories of Foucault andButler would be very helpful in furtherelaborating Bohr’s amazing insights con-cerning the materiality of discursive prac-tices (or at least that’s the agential realistway of putting it), because it’s quite clearthat in articulating his notion of apparatusBohr gestures in a direction that is verymuch about the social, and yet he does notoffer any theoretical understanding of it.For all its importance, Bohr’s notion of theapparatus is remarkably thin. In fact, theapparatus is just kind of there, in a kind ofstatic form. Bohr drafted very detailed dia-grams of apparatuses that he pointed to inexplaining his philosophy-physics. They arebeautifully detailed in ways that demon-strate just how and why the actual material-ity of the apparatus is constitutive of thephenomenon. So the details are absolutelycrucial, and of course, indicative of the wayin which concepts for him are materially in-stantiated in the apparatus. Or rather, thatconcepts are specific material configura-tions, so the details of the apparatus – likethe bolts fixing one part of the apparatus toanother, or springs that enable parts of theapparatus to move and be responsive – areof fundamental importance. And yet, withall of that detail we just have this apparatusthat’s operating itself – there’s nobody onthe scene building the apparatus, there isno reconfiguring of the apparatus, tweakingit, and all the various practices of gettingthe apparatus to work. Of course, laborato-ry practices are social practices with partic-ular epistemological stakes. So I looked tosocial and political theory for a thickersense of the social to diffractively readthrough Bohr’s insights. These had to benot only very rich insights concerning so-cial forces and the naturalcultural constitu-tion of the subject, but very importantly, Ineeded something that would be, if not onfirst encounter coherent with the ontologythat I was developing in reading Bohr, atleast something that I could use that sug-

INTRA-ACTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS 11

gested a certain consistency in opening theway to further elaboration. And so, I need-ed to find some understanding of subjectiv-ity, the social, and power, that would be inline with my performative understanding ofwhat Bohr was doing. And so at that time Iwas reading Foucault and Butler and so onand that just seemed really rich to me, andreally important. So while science studiesunderlined the importance of a more dy-namic sense of the apparatus, it was impor-tant to me to incorporate feminist andqueer work on subjectivities and on power,because as every physicist worth her saltknows from the famous theorem of EmilyNoether, symmetries do not just appear,rather they are indicative of underlyingconservation laws and it is therefore crucialto examine the forces at work, and so Ididn’t want to simply postulate some built-in symmetry of the human and nonhuman.What was needed was to have a more com-plex topology than a kind of level playingfield of objects and subjects. Not a parlia-ment of things but a kind of questioningand unsettling of representationalist politicsthat was very much alive in feminist work atthe time and still is. So performative under-standings of gender and so on were reallykey to walking along with and movingBohr along in a way that enriches hisprovocative understanding of the material-conceptual nature of apparatus and its rolein the co-constitution of objects and sub-jects, while drawing out and further devel-oping crucial ontological insights. But hav-ing pulled out this particular thread, it’simportant to emphasis the dynamic and re-iterative reworking of Foucault and Butlerthat was necessary as well. Here I am refer-ring to the method of diffractively readinginsights through one another for patternsof constructive and deconstructive interfer-ence. What I mean is that the insights Ifound in Bohr were likewise crucial to fur-ther elaborating feminist and queer under-standings of world-making where humansand nonhumans and the divide between

them are not hard-wired into politicalanalyses. Which brings me back to my in-debtedness to feminist science studies, andthe work of my dear friend and colleagueDonna Haraway, most especially. Donnaand I have been in conversation with oneanother for decades and I have learned anenormous amount from her. Joe Rouse hasalso been a very important philosophicalcompanion over the years. And many oth-ers as well. Inheritance and indebtednessare not only the substance of any particularautobiographical story, but it is somethingthat also goes to the core of the ontology(or rather ethico-epistem-ontology) ofagential realism: phenomena do not occurat some particular moment in time; phe-nomena are specific ongoing reconfiguringsof spacetimemattering. I doubt I have donejustice to any of that here, and so the im-pulse is to reiteratively rework this storyeven before I finish responding, but ofcourse, there is no such terminus as such.

I: Your work has been classified as part of thematerial turn within feminist research andtheories. In the call for papers for this specialissue of Women, Gender & Research on Fem-inist Materialisms, we have re-configuredthis framing somewhat. We write that we arenot eager to canonize a “new materialistturn” or “feminist material turn”, in opposi-tion to other “turns”, and that we conceiveyour work as transgressive and buildingon/connecting with as well the alleged ‘mate-rial turn’ the ‘linguistic turn’, the ‘spatialturn’, the turn to the body and even the ‘af-fective turn’. What do you think about thediscussions around “the material turn” andthe positioning of your work?

Karen Barad: Thank you for this reconfig-uration, one I resonate with very much. If“turning” indicates “swerving off course”that’s one thing, but if it is meant to indi-cate a “turning away from” or “moving be-yond”, a sense of getting on with it andleaving the past behind – that’s not how I


understand my own project. Diffraction,both as methodology and as physical phe-nomenon, does not traffic in a temporalityof the new as a supercessionary break withthe old. On the contrary, diffraction is amatter of inheritance and indebtedness tothe past as well as the future. The quantumeraser experiment that I discussed in mykeynote goes right to this issue. Thinkabout the temporality of “moving beyond”– that’s a temporality that forgets thatwe’re always already haunted by the pastand the future – that neither the past northe future is closed. Closure can’t be se-cured when the conditions of im/possibili-ties and lived indeterminacies are integral,not supplementary, to what matter is. I’msuspicious of the current fascination withthe new, which dovetails all too well withlate capitalism’s voracious appetite for thenew (even in its appropriative repackagingof the old, the nostalgic, as a new/trade-markeable past). So the engagement for meentails a different ethics than one that pre-sumes that we get to reset time, erase thepast, cancel our debts, and start anew withthe new. I see my work as being very muchindebted to rich histories of materialistthinking (some of which I’ve studied anddraw from directly, others that reverberatewith my own thinking that I haven’t hadtime to sufficiently study, as well as otherideas-to-come, those yet to be studied, andno doubt others too that are materially en-tangled with my own thinking without mybeing aware of it). But this is precisely whatis intended, I think, in the designation“new materialisms” that some have sug-gested – not a breaking with the past, butrather a dis/continuity, a cutting together-apart with a very rich history of feministengagements with materialism. (This is notthe case with some other approaches thatare being put forward as self-proclaimed“movements” that don’t see themselves asnecessarily allied with feminism, queerstudies, postcolonial studies, etc., that fancythemselves as having no debts and no past,

a clean break of ideas. But I don’t see thisis the case with new materialisms. There is atension held in using ‘new’ as an adjective,a reference to multiple temporalities, other-wise why reference ‘materialism’ at all?New materialisms are of course deeply in-debted to Marx, and to others indebted toMarxism, including Foucault and a genera-tion of feminist engagements with Marxistinsights that travel under the names “mate-rialist feminisms”, “feminist science stud-ies”, to name a few.) This point aboutdis/continuities and cutting together-apartbrings me again to the notion of diffrac-tion, to a very important aspect of it. Dif-fraction as a physical phenomenon is acute-ly sensitive to details; small differences canmatter enormously. As I discussed in Meet-ing the Universe Halfway, diffractive read-ings must therefore entail close respectfulresponsive and response-able (enabling re-sponse) attention to the details of a text;that is, it is important to try to do justice toa text. It is about taking what you find in-ventive and trying to work carefully withthe details of patterns of thinking (in theirvery materiality) that might take you some-where interesting that you never wouldhave predicted. It’s about working reitera-tively, reworking the spacetimemattering ofthought patterns; not about leaving behindor turning away from. (And surely notabout making a caricature of someone’swork and knocking it down, which unfor-tunately has been a form on engagement insome objections to “new materialist femi-nisms”. Caricaturing does epistemologicaldamage: when epistemological care is notexercised there is an unfortunate and un-helpful obscuring of the patterns of differ-ence, and in this case, the obscuring of cru-cial issues regarding the deconstruction ofbinaries.) I think that “turning away from”is the wrong ethics so that’s why I reallyliked the way that you framed this andthank you for bringing that awareness tothis discussion. As Maria Puig de la Bella-casa puts it, what is needed is not only at-


tention to matters of fact, or even mattersof concern – but also, matters of care.2 Iagree with Latour that critique has run outof steam – it’s too formulaic, too pre-dictable.3 Also, very importantly, it forgetsthe necessary mutual exclusions that areconstitutive of phenomena, and buys intoand enacts a linear temporality that closesdown rather than opens up what is tocome. Critique may provide some impor-tant insights at first glance, but critiqueisn’t an acceptable stopping point of analy-sis. It isn’t sufficient, and often times itisn’t at all helpful politically. The presumedexterior and oftentimes superior positional-ity of critique doesn’t have the kind of po-litical traction that is so needed.

I: How do you see the relationship betweenfeminist science studies and critical engage-ment?

Karen Barad: I remember being very trou-bled in the formative years of feminist sci-ence studies by the naming of the nascentfield “feminist critiques of science”. As ascientist living in science worlds it was crys-tal clear that this naming was really unhelp-ful if one was interested in dialoguing withand working with scientists. The notion ofcritique helps itself to a particular spatiality,as well as temporality: one of separatenessand exteriority. The idea that critique isfrom the outside, outside of science, for ex-ample, was really problematic both in termsof having thick understandings of science,and productive engagements with scien-tists. I can appreciate the political impulse.Feminists were attuned to the ways inwhich globalizing (“Western”) science hasa history (and a present) of excluding wo-men, people of color, people from the glo-bal south, and a host of indigenous Others.And admittedly there’s also a history ofclose relations between science and the mil-itarism, capitalism, colonialism, and so on.These are important pieces, today as well asin the past, but a whole-cloth rejection of

the scientific enterprise based on essentialistclaims about what it is and has been, as ifthere’s some unity in what goes under thename science, is not a helpful opening forworking together. And collaboration is pre-cisely what’s needed for the responsiblepractice of science. In my own work I havetried to engage constructively and decon-structively (not destructively) with science,where deconstruction is not about takingthings apart in order to take them down,but on the contrary, about examining thefoundations of certain concepts and ideas,seeing how contingency operates to securethe “foundations” of concepts we cannotlive without, and using that contingency toopen up other possible meanings/matter-ings. And so, there was a moment when afew of us who long/ed for what we mightcall the “responsible practices of science”,pushed to rename the field “feminist sci-ence studies”, in an effort to open up andwelcome other forms of engagement. Ad-mittedly, this naming has short-comings aswell. One draw-back has been that peoplethink that feminist science studies is a kindof subset of mainstream science studies thatfocuses on women and gender issues, andthat’s really unfortunate. But it has alsoopened up the possibility of spaces of en-gagement that otherwise would have beenclosed.

I: How do you try to create those spaces of col-laboration and engagement in your ownwork?

Karen Barad: At UCSC (University of Cal-ifornia, Santa Cruz) we have created a Sci-ence & Justice Working Group and an as-sociated graduate training program, forumsthat work collaboratively to address issuesof science and justice. These efforts entailbuilding communities of trust across acade-mic divides. In particular, it involves build-ing trust with scientists of good will, scien-tists who care deeply about using sciencefor purposes of mutual flourishing, but may


not have an idea about how to thinkthrough the ethics and justice issues. Mycolleague Jenny Reardon has taken the or-ganizational lead in these efforts, and Don-na Haraway and I have been major contrib-utors from the outset. I think the fact thatthe three of us have an abiding love of sci-ence (a mature love that sees both its wartsand its potential) and are committed toworking across field differences and otherkinds of differences has been very impor-tant to the success of these programs. Wehave ongoing support and participationfrom students, faculty, and staff from allfive university divisions (natural sciences,engineering, arts, humanities, and socialsciences). This may seem like an awesomeaccomplishment and in some ways it is, butit must also be acknowledged that we havebenefitted from an opening that has beenproduced by a range of historical and polit-ical factors. Postwar science education inthe US has made use of a science-as-stew-ard or science-as-savior imaginary to attractstudents to careers in science. It doesn’ttake much to bring out the colonialist, pa-ternalist, and capitalist underbelly of this; atthe same time, this imaginary has served toattract a sizeable population of scientistswho have embraced careers in science andtechnology with the explicit purpose ofhelping to make a better world. Despite thefact that the education of a scientist doesn’tinclude the knowledge and skill base need-ed to think through all the complexitiesthat must be understood in order for theutopian promise to operate in ways that ac-tually move us towards a more just world,rather than away from it, scientists are nowrequired by government funding agenciesto consider the ethical implications of theirproposed project, and many of them wantto take this part seriously but realize theyjust don’t know how to think it through.So despite this gap in the education of ascientist (to say nothing of correspondinggaps in scientific understanding that thosewithout scientific training wind up having),

the commitment – wanting to practice sci-ence responsibly – is a serious entry point, awelcome opening, an invitation. In fact, inour experience there is a substantial up-surge in interest in science and justice issuesamong scientists. Young people especiallyare coming to us saying we care about howthe science we do affects the world but wedon’t know how to think this through. Sowe encourage them to join the conversa-tion. One of the most important things weoffer in the training program is a deep ap-preciation of the entanglements of facts andvalues: the notion that values as well asfacts are being “cooked” together at the labbench. That’s why the new training inbioethics is often an approach that fallsshort – being called on to specific useguidelines after the science is done is toolittle, too late. So we take a very differentapproach, one deeply informed by feministscience studies. It’s really great to see somany young scientists interested in tryingto figure out how to go about asking theimportant ethical and social justice ques-tions. The ethical question can’t simply beabout informed consent, a notion that isrooted in a metaphysics of individualism.And by the way, when I say “ethics” Idon’t mean moralizing and so on and soforth, but rather an understanding of howvalues matter and get materialized, and theinterconnectedness of ethics, ontology, andepistemology. What we’re striving for ishelping students form collaborations tothink and work together to take into ac-count questions of social justice as an inte-gral part of doing good science. If phe-nomena, not things, are the objective refer-ent then the apparatus that produces dataand things also produces values and mean-ings. The students learn to think in moresophisticated ways about apparatuses as lab-oratory practices. Matters of fact are notproduced in isolation from meanings andvalues. This is an ethico-onto-epistemologi-cal issue. Ethical considerations can’t takeplace after the facts are settled, after the re-


search is done. This is the wrong temporal-ity. Values and facts are cooked together aspart of one brew. We have been building a really remark-

able and diverse community, held togetherby our shared commitment to help make amore sustainable livable world for mutualflourishing. We flourish as a group by hon-oring our differences, respectfully disagree-ing, and working collaboratively with andthrough our differences. This is hard work,sometimes fun and sometimes painful. It’snot utopic, but it’s a collaborative alliancewith traction. This kind of traction doesn’tarise out of critique. Critique makes peoplefeel attacked. It doesn’t focus on living to-gether, hopefully living well together andflourishing. Developing diffraction as amethodology for me has been about thatethico-onto-epistemological engagement,attending to differences and matters of carein all their detail in order to creatively repat-tern world-making practices with an eye toour indebtedness to the past and the future.Diffraction is about thinking with andthrough differences rather than pushing offof or away from and solidifying difference asless than. I have taken to using the termtrans/materialities, a term I offered up inmy talk to signal material intra-relatings anddifferences across, among, and betweengenders, species, spaces, knowledges, sexu-alities, subjectivities, and temporalities. Butin any case, creativity is not about craftingthe new through a radical break with thepast. It’s a matter of dis/continuity, neithercontinuous nor discontinuous in the usualsense. It seems to me that it’s important tohave some kind of way of thinking aboutchange that doesn’t presume there’s eithermore of the same or a radical break. Dis/continuity is a cutting together-apart (onemove) that doesn’t deny creativity and inno-vation but understands its indebtedness andentanglements to the past and the future.

I: Talking about theory and politics we canmaybe take the example of Monica Casper’s

work on fetal surgery that you engage with tofurther elaborate on this issue. In a criticalcomment to the discussion on the symmetrybetween humans and non-humans in actor-network theory in the 90s, Casper warns thatconstructions of active fetal agency may ren-der pregnant woman invisible as human ac-tors. On this basis she argues that feministshave to take strategic and political stance towho or what you grant agency.4

Karen Barad: I love Monica’s instinct here.At a particular moment in the discussions ofactor-network theory when the symmetrybetween humans and nonhumans elidedcrucial questions of power and agency, andwhat dropped out was any robust under-standing of power regarding the differentialco-constitution of humans and nonhumans,Monica had her finger on the pulse of a realdifficulty with this symmetry. This difficulty,I imagine, was made particularly poignantfor her in her study of fetal surgery: thegranting of agency all around led straight topolitical difficulties in the granting ofagency to fetuses via practices that consti-tuted the fetus as a patient, sometimes withinterests opposed to that of the pregnantwoman, and in ways that contribute to anti-abortion discourse. That’s where I see hertrying to make an intervention, and I thinkthat’s exactly the right instinct. And I wasvery inspired by that, but her answer Ithought was a bit too quick. Because Ithink about midwife assisted births, and Ithink about the way in which fetal agency isso crucial to many kinds of birthing prac-tices, and also other particular kinds ofgeopolitical practices where the fetus (par-ticularly devalued “girl” fetuses) must bebrought into the picture of what matters.What happens to our ability to engage inpractices of feminist analysis if one draws auniversal boundary, a cut that goes all theway through and applies everywhere for alltime, that says who should and whoshouldn’t be granted agency? In fact,there’s a deeper issue here, the very idea of


the “granting” of agency. The irony of thismove should not escape our attention.What kind of move is that to grant agencyto other beings? – that’s giving with onehand and taking it back with the other, allas one move. Monica’s wonderful work onfetal surgery teaches us how important theattribution of fetal subjectivity is. So if whatis really important is the attribution of sub-jectivity, rather than agency, then perhapswhat needs rethinking is the presumedalignment of subjectivity and agency, andthe notion that agency is something some-one has. So agency is for me not a matter ofsomething somebody has but it’s a doing,it’s the very possibilities for reworking andopening up new possibilities, for reconfigur-ing the apparatuses of bodily reproduction.

I: Your answer here concerning agentialityis, of course, rooted in your theorizing, andwe find that quantum physics is crucial inyour work and theorizing and you also showthat in your talk yesterday. I loved that. Butit seems that this dimension is predominantlyleft out or hasn’t yet entered – or whateverframing one may do on that – the ways thatyour work has been taken up in and out offeminist studies, so we would like to turn toan engagement with these thoughts.

Karen Barad: I really appreciate that younotice that. I think there are so many won-derfully queer twists that spring from quan-tum physics that could be very useful tofeminists but have been given little atten-tion.

I: In what ways do you find that quantumphysics and your agential realist reworking ofit is important and fruitful in social theoriz-ing and feminist thinking? And what does itopen up that other theorizations of non-lin-ear temporality and relational space etc. doesnot already?

Karen Barad: Before I even begin to an-swer your wonderful question I want to ad-

dress an issue that so often gets in the way.It has to do with two key misunderstand-ings: one is that I am suggesting/endors-ing/practicing applying quantum physicsto the social world by drawing analogiesbetween tiny particles and people, and theother is a related confusion that there aretwo worlds – one microscopic and the oth-er macroscopic. Unfortunately, the analogi-cal approach has been somewhat of a fa-vorite and the results have not been veryfruitful. I have the same cringe reaction tomany of these that my physics colleagueshave. I have not only explicitly warnedagainst this approach but I have spelled outwhy I think it is not very productive, or atleast very limited in what it can offer. In-stead of drawing analogies, my method hasbeen to examine the underlying metaphysi-cal assumptions and to understand andelaborate the philosophical structure of thetheory. Also, another reason you wouldn’tcatch me drawing analogies between thetwo domains because I question this veryidea that there are separate domains of exis-tence. This brings me to the second mis-conception. There is the persistent miscon-ception that quantum physics, not only itsequations but also its interpretative struc-ture, including it’s ontological and episte-mological implications, is irrelevant for any-thing ‘macroscopic’. That is, there’s a per-sistent belief that whatever peculiarities ex-ist in the microworld (for example, a rela-tional ontology and all that implies), theydon’t exist in the macroworld. In otherwords, some hold fast to the belief that theworld is separated into two independentdomains – micro and macro with quantumphysics governing the behavior of micro-objects and classical physics governing thebehavior of macro-objects (as if both theo-ries are fundamental rather than under-standing that classical physics is just a goodapproximation to quantum physics for largemass objects.). It’s a belief that suggeststhat at a particular scale, one convenientlyaccessible to the human, a rupture exists in


the physics and ontology of the world, as ifthere’s a seam or impenetrable wall downthe middle. According to this story, parti-cles and other microscopic objects are sin-gularly exotic Others, whereas baseballsand rockets and all matter of everydaythings are as American as apple pie, if you’llforgive the expression, that is, strictly nor-mal. In this way, all queerness is restrictedto the subhuman level. Out of sight, out ofmind. Normalcy is thus safeguarded by themicro/macro distinction, and any dangerof infection or contamination of any kind isremoved in this strict quarantining of allqueer Others. And I might add that I domean “queer” in the sense we use it today,not simply strange. There’s quite a bit tobe said here, and I’ve discussed this in writ-ten work, but for now we might keep thisin mind: Queer is a radical questioning ofidentity and binaries, and quantum physics,like queerness, displaces a host of deeply-held foundational dualisms. One could saythat this denial of quotidian queerness ofthe world is a kind of queer-phobia.(Which is not to say that the new-age em-brace of everything quantum is a celebra-tion of the queer either, because what is be-ing embraced is not quantum queernesswhatsoever, but often a neoliberal individu-alist appropriation of one or another carica-tures of quantum physics, where there’s acomplete reversal of the two domain belief,and a total elision of how scale matters. Iwant to emphasize that I’m not saying thatscale doesn’t matter, not at all – althoughthe way scales are produced has to be partof the conversation – but rather, that it is aparticular kind of assumption at play in in-sisting there are different ontologies andlaws of physics in different domains.) Atthe same time, I should perhaps quicklyadd another cautionary comment, particu-larly for the benefit of my physics col-leagues and others who may not be accus-tomed to this type of analysis. I am not say-ing that those who hold the view that thereis a determinate boundary between the mi-

croworld which is governed by quantumphysics, and the macroworld which is gov-erned by classical physics, are queer-phobic.What I am saying is that one needs to ex-amine the impulse to contain the queer be-haviors that characterize the “quantumworld” to be limited to a subhuman“realm”. Why should we find the meta-physical individualism of classical physicalso “natural” in its obvious applicability tohuman phenomena, while refusing to con-sider the possibility that the nonrelationalontology of quantum physics might yield adifferent set of insights worth consideringabout human and nonhuman worlds, andthe ways that boundary gets made and en-forced? Notice that what I’m suggestinghere is a shift in the ontological and episte-mological underpinnings of our theories,not an insistence that quantum physics canprovide an explanation for everything un-der the sun – as if this were some new the-ory of everything. Quantum physics pro-foundly disrupts many classical ontologicaland epistemological notions what we takefor granted, and delving into the details ofthis disruption can open up exciting realmsof thought. I am sympathetic to my physicscolleagues’ strong reactions against the all-too-familiar approach of drawing simplisticanalogies between the way things happenin the “micro” world and in the “macro”world, or even more egregious the flat-footed applications of (some aspects ofsome) quantum ideas to human phenome-na in all kinds of efforts to give scientificjustification for every nonintuitive beliefunder the sun. I get that. And yet, the in-sistence on keeping these physics insights“where they belong” is an idea that displaysits own ignorance in not appreciating thealways-already historical entanglement ofdiscourses of scientific, religious, philoso-phical, economic, geopolitical, and otherways of knowing and knowledge practices.But I also have to say that many physicistsare in fact open to these ideas, while manynonscientists hold fast to this misconcep-


tion and the associated disciplinary prac-tices that split the world into separate onto-logical domains. So it’s important to un-derstand what we’re talking about when wetalk about the ontology or epistemology ofquantum physics, especially as appreciatedin their inter-implication. It is not at all evi-dent, given the empirical investigations todate, that the ontology of quantum physicsis restricted to the very small. In fact, partof what follows from the relational agentialrealist ontology I’ve proposed is the factthat scale is one of the features that getsproduced as part of this ongoing reconfig-uring of spacetimemattering.Sorry to take so long with the prelimi-

naries but they are so often in the way.Now, when it comes to addressing yourquestions about innovative thinking thatquantum physics opens up, there are manythings that I could talk about, but just topick up on a theme from my talk, that I al-ready mentioned briefly, is the question ofdis/continuity (where the slash is indicat-ing an active and reiterative (intra-active)rethinking of the binary). The notion of aquantum leap is something that has beenunderappreciated and undertheorized.Quantum leaps are not simply strange be-cause a particle moves discontinuouslyfrom one place here now to another placethere then, but the fundamental notions oftrajectory, movement, space, time, andcausality are called into question. And thehere and there and now and then are notseparate coordinates, but entangled recon-figurings of spacetimemattering. (I talkedabout this in detail in my paper in DerridaToday.5) Dis/continuity is neither continu-ous with discontinuity nor discontinuouswith continuity. The assumption that thereis a strict dichotomy between continuityand discontinuity has been a very persistentbelief. It is one of the few binaries that isseldom questioned, even when the discus-sion is about space, or time, or matter, andhow we shouldn’t take them for granted. Aquantum dis/continuity cuts troubles the

very nature of dicho-tomy – cutting intotwo. Cuts are matters of cutting together-apart. The very notion of the cut is cross-cut. Quantum dis/continuity is an un/do-ing, even un/doing itself and the notion of‘itself ’. Even it’s double naming – ‘quan-tum’ ‘discontinuity’ – suggests the para-doxical notion of a rupture of the discon-tinuous, a disrupted disruption, a cut thatis itself cross-cut. I find it a real mind buzzto contemplate how quantum physics callsinto question not only particular binariesbut the very notion of a binary. The cut isreiteratively cut through, cross-cutting thecutting, reiteratively reconfiguring thought/doing/matter/meaning without end.Dis/continuity is at the core of what I

call agential separability. Agential separabili-ty is a notion that cuts across the sepa-rate/not separate binary. Agential separa-bility is hugely important. It not only pro-vides important insights for physics (like itsusefulness in solving the so-called “mea-surement problem”), but also questionsconcerning the nature of relationality moregenerally. I highly recommend Chapter 7of Meeting where there is an in-depth dis-cussion of agential separability. Chapter 7 isa favorite among physicists, but there ismuch more going on than physics alone(whatever that means). In fact, it’s very rel-evant in thinking about social and the po-litical theory, and questions of ethics andsocial justice.

I: Is seem to me that agential separability isclosely connected to your notion “cutting to-gether apart” and lies at the core of under-standing how quantum physics dissolves thevery notion of a binary?

Karen Barad: Yes. This is another quantumgem. Cutting together-apart (one move)involves a very unusual knife or pair of scis-sors! Classical physics assumes a Cartesiancut, an absolute a priori distinction, be-tween subject and object. Bohr understoodthat this cut did not precede measurement


interactions but was rather produced bythem. In my agential realist elaboration ofBohr, the dynamics is based on intra-ac-tions, not interactions, and the cut is intra-actively enacted. “Cutting together-apart”entails the enactment of an agential cut to-gether with the entanglement of what’s on“either side” of the cut since these are pro-duced in one move. This notion has be-come indispensible for me in thinkingabout questions of indebtedness, inheri-tance, memory, and responsibility. Suppose we consider the quantum eraser

experiment. It’s ironic that the quantumeraser experiment – which experimentallyconfirmed Bohr’s notion of complementary(his indeterminacy principle) as more foun-dational than Heisenberg’s uncertaintyprinciple, giving support to my reading ofhis implicit ontology and the fact that en-tanglements are actual configurations of theworld, not simply epistemological connec-tions – was at first interpreted by physicistsaccording to a classical way of thinkingabout things. Even the very naming of thisexperiment, the quantum eraser experimentsays so much about a very particular way ofinterpreting the experimental results. Ac-cording to the interpretation that was firstgiven, when the experimenter destroys in-formation concerning an event that has al-ready happened (like information concern-ing which slit a particle goes through), theoriginal result that existed prior to the in-formation-gathering event (in this case adiffraction pattern that was manifest beforethe which-slit information was obtained) issaid to have been “recovered”. This sug-gests that we can erase events and their ef-fects, after they occur. Now there’s nodoubt that the quantum eraser experimentsare remarkable, really extraordinary in theirimplications. But an interpretation that un-derstands these events in terms of erasureand recovery seems to me to itself be basedon a kind of erasure – the erasure of thework of tracing entanglements – of the re-sponsibility of being bound by, of being

obligated to the bodies that are marked bythese encounters. It speaks of a politics ofhope for erasing events that we regret, as ifthey could be removed at will. It’s a hopefor a temporality of resurrection, of startingtime anew, starting over, wiping the slateclean, and not honoring and not being ac-countable to what has already happened.The ghosts of the Manhattan project andthe dropping of the bomb on Hiroshimaand Nagasaki surely haunt this kind ofwishful thinking. (Again, I am not makinga claim here about intentions or wishfulthinking on the part of individual physi-cists, but rather bringing out some of thefoundational assumptions that work be-neath the surface in a stealth manner, andremain unacknowledged, precisely becausethey work so happily with particular soci-etal beliefs and hopes.) But erasure of pastevents is not what’s going on in the experi-ment. If you really attend to the data interms of phenomena (as opposed to things,and this very shift is in fact confirmed loudand clear by this very experiment), you seethat the diffraction pattern only shows upagain if you do the work of tracing the en-tanglements. In performing the labor oftracing the entanglements, of making con-nections visible, you’re making our obliga-tions and debts visible, as part of what itmight mean to reconfigure relations ofspacetimemattering. So spacetimematteringcan be reconfigured in a way that reopensthe past, in fact it happens all the timewhether or not it’s something that we di-rectly observe under specific experimentalconditions. But what it says then is that,what is at issue is not the erasure of events,but reconfigurings of spacetimemattering.Indeed, it shows that the universe itselfholds a memory of each event – the factthat the first the particle goes through oneslit or the other of the which-slit apparatus,and then after it hits the screen, the which-slit information is destroyed, and then thepattern on the screen is reconfigured andreanalyzed … all of this is on record. Or to


put it a bit more precisely, the universedoes not have memory, it is the memory ofiterative materializations. This suggests thatthere’s a sense in which even molecules andparticles remember what has happened tothem. The inanimate is always beingshoved to the side, as if it is too far re-moved from the human to matter, but thatwhich we call inanimate is still very muchbodily and lively. It may seem perverse,unimportant, or meaningless, to attributememory to an inanimate happening, butthat speaks of a failure of imagination thatgets stuck at the threshold of one of themost stubborn of all dualisms – the ani-mate/inanimate dualism – that stops ani-macy cold in its tracks, leaving rocks, mole-cules, particles, and other inorganic entitieson the other side of death, of the side ofthose who are denied even the ability todie, despite the fact that particles have fi-nite lifetimes. Who gets to count as onewho has the ability to die? A rock, a river, acloud, the atmosphere, the earth? Howabout viruses, brittlestars and other bound-ary-crossers? What about the fate of carbonand phosphorous? And if these concernssound silly, why? And I don’t mean somekind of strategic vitalism or the welcomingof the other into representationalist formsof democracy in order to get people to payattention to “the environment”. This isabout boundary drawing practices and howthey matter, and who and what gets tomatter. For some time now we have beenentranced by the biological and we have fo-cused on it to the exclusion of chemical,geological, and physical forms or aspects oflife. Feminist research has taken the biolog-ical body to stand in for all bodies, for “thebody”. What are the effects of the constitu-tive exclusion of bodies that get placed onthe other side of life, of liveliness, thosethat aren’t worthy of death, those thatdon’t measure up when it comes to death?What is at stake in securing this dualismand how does its persistence matter?Now the results of the quantum “eraser”

experiment are very profound. For what itdoes suggest is the fact that the past is notclosed, that temporality is not given orfixed, that each materialization in its speci-ficity is re-membered, and that responsibili-ty is about putting in the work to traceworldly entanglements, including all dueattention to our debts and obligations. Inother words, each meeting matters, not justfor what comes to matter but what is con-stitutively excluded from mattering in orderfor particular materializations to occur. Insome cases, a remediative response may beimportant, but it must be remembered thatremediation does not constitute an undo-ing of loss and the recovery of some priorstate of existence, as if the clock could beturned back to an earlier time (for example,before the bomb was dropped). There is nopast that is simply still there that we can goback to, some unadulterated moment intime that is forever more awaiting sometime traveler to drop by. This may seem ob-vious on the face of it, but it undergirdscertain kinds of thinking, even public policyin ways that we may not notice.

I: Can you give an example of this?

Karen Barad: Yes. Alex Mufson, an extra-ordinary undergraduate student who tooksome classes with me, worked with agentialrealism to think about questions of tempo-rality and justice associated with the “rein-troduction” of the wolf (but not the wolfthat was!) into Yellowstone National Park –a “restoration” project with significant sci-entific, political, practical, and social justiceissues at stake. Alex argued that the roman-tic desire to return the world to some “lostnatural state” is an illusion that has notserved conservation efforts well. Not onlyis there no pristine time that can be re-turned to, no identical “environment” toreinsert wolves into, but the wolf that onceroamed Yellowstone, before it was system-atically killed off, no longer exists; in fact,the wolves that were “re”-introduced into


the park were an entirely different species,and even if they were the “same” species,they would now have different material his-tories. This is not a general statementagainst restoration efforts and the like, butit says that all the “re’s”, like “restoration”,“reintroduction”, “rehabilitation”, “reme-diation” must be taken as questions, notanswers, and in doing so policy makersneed to confront the questions of agencyand responsibility, the violence of all cuts(including “restorative” ones), and theirconstitutive entanglements, with all the as-sociated ethical, epistemological, and onto-logical implications of the reconfigurings ofspacetimemattering. These are questions ofreiteration, which is not about recurrenceor reproduction of the same; on the con-trary, reiteration is about the différance ofintra-activity, the reconfiguring of condi-tions of im/possibility. There are also otherissues that come to the fore. For one thing,responsibility and accountability to/forphenomena are crucial ethico-epistem-on-tological matters, where responsibility, isnot about a calculable system of account-ing, but about hospitality as Derrida wouldhave it, about inviting and enabling re-sponse. That is, what is at issue is a matterof responsibility for the violence of the cutand the co-constitution of entangled rela-tions of obligation. What is entailed in mat-ters of justice is paying careful attention tothe ghosts in all their materiality – that is,all the labor, the really hard work, of trac-ing entanglements and being responsive tothe liveliness of the world. An agential cutis not a simple severing, it is a knife-edgethat cuts together-apart, materially as wellas ethically.It seems to me that quantum physics, in

its agential existence as a worldly entity/or-ganism in its own right (not just animateand inanimate beings, but all materializingpractices, like theorizing, formulating, andimagining, are lively practices of worlding),offers these remarkable gifts, and puts for-ward the possibility of thinking things like

separability and discontinuity in unantici-pated directions. What’s so remarkable tome about quantum physics is how astonish-ingly queer it is – it is so queer that itqueers queer, keeping it in motion, some-thing queer activists have seen as vital to itspolitical purchase. Not only specific bina-ries are destabilized, but even the cuts areiteratively cross-cut. Quantum physics in itsiterative material becoming is amazing. It’san awesome thing to watch physics – andthe larger world for that matter! – iterative-ly deconstruct itself in these marvelouslycreative ways. Quantum physics is dis/con-tinuous with classical physics. The specifici-ties of that are really interesting. Newton-ian physics, what used to be called naturalphilosophy, is far more queer than has beengenerally acknowledged. There is this on-going way in that which physics keeps de-constructing itself that has been so muchmore powerful than anything that has goneby the name of cultural critique of physics.So that’s what I feel I’m trying to share.How remarkable it is that the worlding ofworld gives us gifts like this.

I: Yes, and thank you for that effort. Onemight say, that thinking technologies, theo-ries, are part of what makes us into specificbeings – and also specific thinking beings –for example, as I started reading poststruc-turalist feminist thinking the world and Igot put together in altered ways, – and ithappens again reading non-Newtonianthinking of space and time and certainlyyour work. Can you relate to that idea – andhow do you live and breathe your own theo-rizing, so to speak?

Karen Barad: That’s a really wonderfulquestion. Indeed, this is not an academicexercise for me at all; no, this is very mucha part of my lived experience, which I don’tmean in a phenomenological sense but inphenomenon sense! (Laughs) Some peoplehave asked me if I walk around in the worlddifferently as a result of being steeped in


these ideas. And I have to say “yes” withthe qualification that I am neither in theideas nor are they in me. In particular,these ideas are not in my head, rather theyare specific ongoing reconfigurings of theworld in its iterative intra-activity. Theseideas are not outside or inside me, they arethreaded through “me” and “me” throughthem, or rather we are threaded throughone another. I think it makes a differenceto be attuned to phenomena rather thanthings, to be aware of being a particularconfiguration of the world intra-acting withand being reconfigured together with aworld of other phenomena. It’s been veryimportant to me that these ideas arethreaded through my bones, my gut, mylegs, and that they are alive to me at themost mundane levels of my life and themost important areas of my life. It’s impor-tant to me in terms of my teaching, it’s im-portant to me in terms of my relationshipwith my friends and family. I am aware thatwhile we are here in Corfu now, talking to-gether, looking at the sea from this terracethat I’m not some individual who travelsthrough the world as a fixed entity, as if Iwere the same here as I was before I leftCalifornia at the end of the quarter. I’m

constantly being reconfigured. Or ratherthe ongoing reconfigurings of the worldare iteratively remaking “me.” But now itseems we’re back where we started. But ac-tually that isn’t really the case – is it? – be-cause the universe now has our conversa-tion enfolded into its being. Thank you forthis opportunity.

NOTES1. The interview was prepared by Nete Schwen-nesen and Malou Juelskjær in conversation withStine Adrian. The interview was conducted byNete and Malou and edited by Karen, Nete andMalou. 2. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2011): Matters ofcare in technoscience: Assembling neglectedthings, in: Social Studies of Science. vol. 41 no. 1.3. Latour, Bruno (2004): Why has critique runout of steam? From matters of fact to matters ofconcern, in: Critical inquiry. 30:24. Caspers, Monica (1998): The making of the un-born patient: A social anatomy of fetal surgery. NJ:Rutgers University Press5. Barad, Karen (2010): Quantum entanglementsand hauntological relations of inheritance:Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and jus-tice-to-come, in: Derrida Today. 3(2)



Kine Ravn: Casper

an interview with karen barad

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