When Young observed the final product, he noticed bands of light or “interference fringes”—confirming, after all, that light was indeed a wave. And that might have been the end of it were it not for the meddling interventions of Danish philosopher-physicist Niels Bohr and his “rival” of sorts, the more popularly known Albert Einstein. More than a century after Young showed diffractive patterns with his experiment, and in a time when the science of infinitesimally small things or quanta was all the rave, Bohr—some of whose philosophies are transposed20 in Karen Barad’s account of a queer world—proposed the abominable to a classically trained Einstein: light, or anything for that matter, has no inherent properties. Light is neither inherently a wave nor a particle. What it “is” emerges from the measurement performed. Change the measuring apparatus and the thing-that-is-measured will change as well. Barad writes up an engaging fictionalized account of the moment Bohr relates his hair-splitting idea to Einstein and, in fact, the rest of the sane world, who know that such things are nonsense:
Einstein is getting irate. Bohr insists that using a two-slit apparatus he can show that with one arrangement of the two-slit apparatus light behaves as a wave, and with a complementary arrangement light behaves as a particle. He explains that entities are not inherently “wave” or “particle,” and that it is possible to produce wave and particle phenomena/behaviors/performances when the entity in question “intra-acts” with the appropriate apparatus.21
Bohr recommends a “which-slit” experiment, or a particular modification of the measuring apparatus that effectively allows an experimenter to observe which slit the photon (a bit of light) passes through. Moved by his quantum theory, he insists that the ability to make that observation will cancel the interference pattern on the screen, showing light to be particulate, not wavelike at all. He notes that under certain conditions light will behave like a wave, while under complementary conditions, light will behave like a particle. Each contingent arrangement excludes its complementary possibility from mattering simultaneously.
(Are you still there, dear? Your mum often rolls her eyes when I start to speak about Bohr and his thought experiment. Don’t you abandon me to my devices!)
Einstein is understandably disgusted by the mere thought, because it presents itself to his mind as evidence of a world that is whimsical and mad. He had devoted his capacities to the description of a world that adhered strictly to elegant mathematical laws. Such a world required a fixed and stable ontology. But here, Bohr was suggesting some kind of “ontological indeterminacy” to reality, a weirdness at the heart of everything, a world without conservative values or immutable foundations. A spooky place. As the scene fades, Barad’s dramatized Einstein reacts:
So what you are saying is that the very nature of the entity—its ontology—changes with the experimental apparatus used to determine its nature? Or worse, that nothing is there before it is measured, as if measurements conjure things into existence?22
Though Bohr and Einstein did not have the wherewithal to operationalize their thought experiment, hundreds of experiments have been conducted ever since demonstrating that Bohr was right. For example, in 1991, Leonard Mandel co-published a paper reporting his which-slit experiment.23 The paper itself looks like the doodle-ridden napkin of a bored preteen in a diner, what with its equations and diagrams. Mike May cuts through its inaccessibility to write about the confirmatory observations of Mandel and his team:
In essence, they generated two beams of light derived from a laser and caused them to interfere, which is a wavelike phenomenon. But if they used an arrangement that allowed the path of the light to be determined, the interference disappeared, whether or not this determination was actually made.24
Let me put all of this another way, using objects that might be more recognizable to you. Balloons and balls have been some of your favorite things to play with—often to my irritation because you often leave them scattered about. Let’s say we play a game when we both agree to dispose all these balls—a hundred or more—by tossing them at a freshly painted wall through the window. We do it blindfolded—just for the fun of it. When we open our eyes, we’d expect that most of the balls would have gone through the window and hit the wall. We’d expect to see the stain marks of the balls on the part of the wall that is directly perpendicular to the window.
The results shouldn’t be markedly differently if, instead of one window, we threw away all the balls—all at the same time with a heave-ho!—through two windows facing our painted wall. Like before, when we open our eyes, we’d expect that some balls didn’t go out of the room at all, but hit the doorposts. And we’d expect that those that made it through one window or the other formed twice the previous pattern: two clumps of stains on the wall directly opposite the windows. But what if instead of two neat ridges of stains, we find ten ridges showing an undulating pattern of stains, as if we threw the balls through ten windows? We’d conclude that something strange was happening—for how could discrete balls make wavelike patterns on a wall?
So what you might then decide to do is to throw each ball, one at a time, to see what happens. So we cover our eyes again, take a ball, and throw it in the direction of the two windows. We don’t pick another ball until we are sure the previous one has made its mark on a surface. What if we did this, one after the other, each newly launched ball following the previous after a couple of seconds—and then removed our blindfolds … only to find the same outrageous pattern? If I know both your grandmas well enough, I can bet my dimpled cheeks they’d start to pray out of fright.
But it gets even stranger. What if—in a bid to resolve this fiasco—we ask one of your grandmas to stay by the windows, making sure she protects her face with a helmet or visor so the balls don’t knock out her teeth? Her job would be to simply observe which window each of the balls are going through—and not to interact with them. We take the balls and start throwing again—all at once or one by one, it doesn’t matter—and then we open our eyes. Your grandma is really praying now. She’s spooked. We move closer to the windows and look at the wall beyond them. Now, instead of the many fringes like before, we see two clumps of stains where the balls struck. It’s almost as if the balls knew grandma was watching, and then decided to behave differently.
Well, what Mandel saw (which Bohr predicted to be the case) with his “balls” was exactly this strange complementarity. When the balls—sorry, particles—are sent through without any knowledge of which slit they are headed through, their instruments measured an interference pattern consistent with a wave’s rippling effects. But when a detector was added, a noninterfering detector designed to note which slit the particles go through, the registered pattern was consistent with particle behavior. The implications? Not that matter is illusory, but that matter is fluid, ontologically undetermined, and always co-emergent with the measurements made. The nature of nature depends on the measurements made. Nature is not natural.
Mandel’s experiment is one out of many that sides with Bohr: ontology is nonessential. It’s very strange, actually: “things” only emerge in the context of intra-acting relationships. This fact is demonstrably compelling for very little things, but it queers the line that supposedly locks away this strangeness to the quantum world, for if everything spills through, if bodies are not stoic mannequins with glossy exteriors and hard ontologies, then everything is entangled. Man and woman. Tree and mountain. The chemical secretions of a virus and the market price fluctuations of a commodity. The particular biological (and ghostly) incarnations of dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida and the fishing economy of an eastern American coastal town. The world is a mangle of streams, a constantly unceasing, unfolding flow of co-emergent practices and co-enactments that does not privilege ontology over epistemology or the other way around. It is only by virtue of intra-acting focal practices (which are not necessarily human) that things gain resolution and definition. We therefore cannot define a thing apart from the relationships it is part of, and to attempt to
extricate a thing, to find its essence apart from the processes that make it, is merely to introduce different processes. Nothing emerges as a “thing” except within the stream of becoming.
Barad’s notion of “material-discursivity” highlights the ways apparatuses produce material beings and intelligibility while simultaneously excluding other productions. This is a defining feature of Bohr’s principle of complementarity as well: things do not come preinstalled with meaning. The meaning of a thing or its intelligibility is also constituted diffractively to the exclusion of other possible meanings. Computers, consumers, and capitalism only make sense because of the particular social-political-scientific-ethical-material circumstances that render them intelligible.
This is the hallmark of Barad’s “agential realism,” then: not only that everything is entangled—both matter and meaning, both subject and object, both inside and outside—but that things derive their meaning, materialization, intelligibility, and physical characteristics from “agential cuts” co-enacted by human and nonhuman agencies. In other words, what it means to be human, for instance, is not set in stone in any final sense—as one would expect to be the case if we were living in a Cartesian universe.
To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.25
As if possessed by my own ancestors, elders whose bonfire narratives about a universe too intricate to be at the mercy of humans were snuffed out by the arrival of ships and mirrors and gunpowder and Bibles, Barad’s exposé on queer matter disturbs our commonsense accounts of reality, and speaks of the world as a gushing series of intersecting practices that spill into the supposedly “other,” a breaching of boundaries … a world that strays from the Cartesian logic of quid pro quo causality. A world where relata (or “things”) and their properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way round. A world of co-becomings so penetratingly deep that it leaves in tatters the Newtonian myth of independent objects, and the myth that proclaims humans to be ontologically unique, separate from animals and environment, and in control.
Depth after enthralling depth, we would not have “arrived” at the heart of the matter, that fabled “fountain” of truth—for reality is a hesitant allegory, a precocious child beholden to no particular tune, and with no final lessons. Even the manic search for meaning is itself a clever ruse, and the finding … a fool’s convenience. The hole goes even deeper—and yet it is not the kind of depth that “arrives,” it is a depth that presses on, loops up away from the ground, and takes flight into the air—its journey tracing out the majestic arc of a fathomless, uncircumcised circle.
What tugs at our strings is a reimagination of things, not as objects, but as participants. And what goes along with this resacralization of things is a redescription of the “human” as a “becoming,” not a final product. A doing, not a noun. An embodied gerund in a sentence of gerunds whose final meaning is always yet to come. As such, we do not have language (language is not a property); we do not think except with others (intra-thinking!); memory is not a mysterious effluvium floating somewhere in the brain. Old scientific efforts to locate essential human attributes and functions within the “human person” fail to account for the incredible complexity and influence of what we like to call “the environment.” Today, acknowledging that complexity, commentators write about “mangled objects,” “flat ontologies,” “a democracy of things,” “intra-action,” and “vibrant materialities” to hint at this rupturing at the heart of our ideas about the world.
Before you came into the scene, I had nerdish sci-fi fantasies of a posthuman future—I do hope you do not live there now—where different and bizarre assortments of man-machine assemblages are possible, and the meaning of the word human becomes radically different because of the combinatory agencies of life-sustaining technologies, perhaps due to an environment that is so hostile to life that one cannot perform simple biological functions we take for granted today. Taking the dreadful vision farther, I have often tried to imagine the legal ramifications of defining what a human is in this imaginary world: would their dystopian courts still consider a defendant human if he had all his legs and arms surgically removed, and if he depends on a metal bipedal frame? What if all his body parts but his head were biomechatronic? Could a robot crab that demonstrated sentience, humor, and all other frailties associated with “humanness” pass for a human? Is a brain in a vat—sustained by life-giving fluids—still human? Why or why not?
Where does being human stop and being animal begin? What impenetrable cosmic barrier prohibits one from the other? Where does the “self” stop and the environment begin? When does a man become machine or a cyborg? Is an old man with a pacemaker halfway to being a cyborg? Does Craig Lewis, a fifty-five-year-old amyloidosis patient in 2011, who lives without a heart and a pulse, and for whom Texan doctors built a humming “continuous flow” device largely from homemade materials, still have the right to rule so sharp a line between himself and his environment?26 Between the calm smartphone device and the obsessed flurry of thumbs and glazed look of a modern teenager, who is the user and who is the tool? At what point is a fetus gestating in the mother’s womb considered a baby? At what exact moment do a few grains of sand, being dropped to the ground one grain after another, become a heap?
Where do “we” draw the line in the sand?
Because we are immersed in a world of doings—where “things” are performances lacking central essences—raising such questions becomes interesting. I want to say that very carefully: we are immersed in a world of doings, which is to say that we are the world’s doings. Again the world isn’t a container of objects, but a differential flow of performative becomings. A stone has no “essence”; it is as much a doing as is a “human being”—a doing that tugs at the whole web. But again, if everything is entangled, does this mean there are no distinctions? What agential realism suggests is that the lines in the sand are constantly being redrawn, not fixed: differences between humans and nonhumans, between objects, between being at home and being adrift, are the constant productions of multiple “material-discursive” forces. Resolutions in the cumbersome tapestry of entanglement are locally enacted—that is, things gain their thingness in very specific intra-actions, but they never do this in a final way. Where Descartes cut cleanly through things, thus essentializing separation, we come to notice a lot more happening than empty gaps should permit. In a differentially entangled world, separation is never totalizing. It is not something to solve.
What new materialisms point to, then, is a different understanding of matter. A dynamic, vital, agential notion of matter that is far from the clockwork dormancy of Cartesian matter.
Let’s breathe a moment.
Remember that feminist theory refused to cede ground to modernist epistemology because the theorists were (rightly) wary that such a move might allow the “body” to become a Trojan vector for essentialism, determinism, and their political corollaries: sexism, racism, colonialism, and ecocide. If matter, this reliquary of postmodern disgust, were allowed to gain primary status, if it crashed upon the shore first, it would undo the great advances feminists had made in undercutting the foundations of a political arrangement that justified suffering on the grounds of nature. So they swung their side of the seesaw way too high, propped it up so it never came down again, and nailed matter�
��s side of the seesaw to the floor. What feminism’s antiessentialism did not anticipate is a description of matter in nonessential ways—a description that ennobles matter with its own vitality and dynamics that are not derived from human culture. Frost writes that the “new materialists”
consider matter or the body not only as they are formed by the forces of language, culture, and politics but also as they are formative. That is, they conceive of matter or the body as having a peculiar and distinctive kind of agency, one that is neither a direct nor an incidental outgrowth of human intentionality but rather one with its own impetus and trajectory.27
Feminist new materialists like Karen Barad are advocating for the reclamation of matter as agential, and the dissolution of the binary configuration of the world promulgated by Descartes.
That matter turns, beats, moves, wrestles, swaggers, resists, intends, persists, writhes, experiments, and summons might be a shocking thing to accept to the modern mind—because this suggests, rather rudely, that matter isn’t as mindless or as banal as we think. As we need to think. Such a proposal is reminiscent of an old panpsychism, which postulates that some kind of proto-consciousness inhabits all objects, making even the most banal everyday item “aware.” While some new materialists are willing to accept some kind of speculative panpsychic theorization about the vitality of the corporeal, others take this general curiosity about the inner life of things as evidence that the tide is turning: matter is coming “back” to reckoning.
We are used to thinking that the world swirls around us, that the quotidian movements of objects around us follow tedious empty laws while we gaze out from our passive sentience, free-willed and untethered. We suppose that to know the world properly we can assume some unmoving stance and gaze out at it, as if knowledge is gained in such static ways. We seem to have had plenty of success as a result of thinking of the world in this way too: we’ve constructed impressive cities; we’ve conquered the mechanics of motion and can move at terrific speeds; we’ve gone to the moon and back; we daily straddle virtual worlds, and reconfigure the fundamentals of hyperspace with the twiddling of restless thumbs; and, with scientific advances in biotechnology, it is now possible literally to engineer bodies and produce recombinant proteins and chemicals useful to our militarized consumer frameworks. We have proven time and time again that life is a matter of human achievements, an instance of teleological movements from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated. And the way we have done this is by applying vibrant mind to dead passive matter. So why this uncouth idea that the corporeal is more than it is, that the chair I sit on to write these letters to you is anything more than a dead mesh of atoms? Why say chairs are intentional? Why deny that the world’s sole agency is human? That we are alone?
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 16