Lightning is a reaching toward, an arcing dis/juncture, a striking response to charged yearnings.[1]
A dark sky. Deep darkness, without a glimmer of light to settle the eye. Out of the blue, tenuous electrical sketches scribbled with liquid light appear/disappear faster than the human eye can detect. Flashes of potential, hints of possible lines of connection alight now and again. Desire builds, as the air crackles with anticipation. Lightning bolts are born of such charged yearnings. Branching expressions of prolonged longing, barely visible filamentary gestures, disjointed tentative luminous doodlings – each faint excitation of this desiring field is a contingent and suggestive inkling of the light show yet to come. No continuous path from sky to ground can satisfy its wild imaginings, its insistence on experimenting with different possible ways to connect, playing at all matter of errant wanderings in a virtual exploration of diverse forms of coupling and dis/connected alliance. Against a dark sky it is possible to catch glimmers of the wild energetics of indeterminacies in action.
Like lightning, this article is an exploration of charged yearnings and the sparking of new imaginaries. It is an experimental article about matter’s experimental nature – its propensity to test out every un/imaginable path, every im/possibility. Matter is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings: one might even dare say, imaginative. Imaginings, at least in the scientific imagination, are clearly material. Like lightning, they entail a process involving electrical potential buildup and flows of charged particles: neurons transmitting electrochemical signals across synaptic gaps and through ion channels that spark awareness in our brains. This is not to suggest that imagination is merely an individual subjective experience, nor a unique capacity of the human mind. Nor is it to rely solely on a scientific imaginary of what matter is, nor a materialism that would elide questions of labor. Nor is the point to merely insist on an accounting of the material conditions of possibility for imagining, though this is surely important. Rather, what is at issue here is the nature of matter and its agential capacities for imaginative, desiring, and affectively charged forms of bodily engagements. This article explores the materiality of imagining together with the imaginative capacities of materiality – although it does so less by linear argumentation than by the zig- zagged dis/continuous musings of lightning. Electrical energy runs through disparate topics in what follows: lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, Frankenstein, trans rage, queer self-birthing, the quantum vacuum, virtual particles, queer touching, bioelectricity, Franken-frogs, monstrous re/generations.
This is an experimental piece with a political investment in creating new political imaginaries and new understandings of imagining in its materiality. Not imaginaries of some future or elsewhere to arrive at or be achieved as a political goal but, rather, imaginaries with material existences in the thick now of the present – imaginaries that are attuned to the condensations of past and future condensed into each moment; imaginaries that entail superpositions of many beings and times, multiple im/possibilities that coexist and are iteratively intra-actively reconfigured; imaginaries that are material explorations of the mutual indeterminacies of being and time.[2]
Electrifying Origins/Flashes of Things to Come
“During this short voyage I saw the lightning playing on the summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful figures.”
– Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Lightning is an energizing play of a desiring field. Its tortuous path is an enlivening exploration of possible connections. Not a trail from the heavens to the ground but an electrifying yearning for connection that precedes this and that, here and there, now and then.[3]
Lightning is a striking phenomenon. It jolts our memories, flashing images on the retina of our mind’s eye. Lightning arouses a sense of the primordial, enlivening questions of origin and materialization. It conjures haunting cultural images of the summoning of life through its energizing effects, perhaps most memorable in the classic films Der Golem (1920) and Frankenstein (1931). And it brings to mind credible (if not uncontroversial) scientific explanations of the electrifying origins of life: nature’s fury shocking primordial ooze to life, an energizing jump start. Lightning, it seems, has always danced on the razor’s edge between science and imagination.
Working with his mentor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, in 1953, the chemist Stanley Miller began a series of experiments that would lend support to Alexander Oparin and J. S. B. Haldane’s hypothesis that primitive conditions on earth would be favorable for the production of organic molecules (the basis for the evolution of life) out of inorganic ones.[4] Miller used a sparking device to mimic lightning, a crucial ingredient in this genesis story. Filling a flask with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, Miller sent electrical currents through the mixture. Analyzing the resulting soup of chemicals, he found the evidence that he was looking for: “a brown broth rich in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.”[5] “It was as if they were waiting to be bidden into existence. Suddenly the origin of life looked easy.”[6]
Marking the beginning of experimental research into the origins of life, the Miller-Urey experiment did not seal the deal, but it was powerfully evocative of what might (yet) have been. The theory of the electrical origins of life – inorganic matter shocked into life’s organic building blocks by an electrifying energy (whose own animacy seems to belie the alleged lifelessness of so-called inanimate matter) – is a controversial piece of science that created a fair amount of heat during Miller’s lifetime. But no matter how many times skeptics claim to have put it to rest, it continues to be revived.
Miller’s latest experiment was completed in 2008. He was dead by then. The experiment had begun fifty-five years earlier. Miller’s intellectual offspring discovered, after his death, that he had not analyzed all his data. Opening the well-marked vials that lay dormant for decades, the researchers performed the analysis. They were shocked and delighted to be able to draw a significantly more compelling result from a once-dead experiment that would breathe new life into the theory: Miller’s data revealed not five but twenty-three amino acids!
Characterizing Miller’s experimental apparatus as a “Frankensteinesque contraption of glass bulbs,” Scientific American completes the electrical circuit of cultural associations.[7] Shocking brute matter to life. What makes us think that matter is lifeless to begin with?
Lightning mucks with origins. Lightning is a lively play of in/determinacy, troubling matters of self and other, past and future, life and death. It electrifies our imaginations and our bodies. If lightning enlivens the boundary between life and death, if it exists on the razor’s edge between animate and inanimate, does it not seem to dip sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide?
It was in witnessing lightning’s enormous power that Victor Frankenstein took upon himself the mantle of science.
“When I was about fifteen years old,… we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump…
Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me.”[8]
And thus Victor Frankenstein was converted to galvanism.
Galvanism inspired both Mary Shelley and her famed protagonist. Shelley was fascinated by the experiments of her contemporary, Luigi Galvani, an eighteenth-century physician, anatomist, and physiologist who, while preparing dinner on his balcony one stormy night – the atmosphere crackling with electrical buildup – noticed something uncanny that would change the course of his scientific studies. As he touched the frog legs – strung out on a line before him – with a pair of scissors, they twitched. Thereafter, he took it upon himself to study in a systematic fashion the application of electricity –the “spark of life,” as Shelley referred to it – to frog legs and other animal parts. Galvani concluded that electricity was an innate force of life, that an “animal electricity” pervaded living organisms. As Jessica Johnson writes, “Galvani proved not only that recently-dead muscle tissue can respond to external electrical stimuli, but that muscle and nerve cells possess an intrinsic electrical force responsible for muscle contractions and nerve conduction in living organisms.”[9]
It was a short leap from there to consider that if dead frog legs could be animated by electricity – the secret of life – the harnessing of nature’s fury might be used to resurrect the dead or even give life to a creature made of human parts gathered from an array of different corpses. In the introduction to Frankenstein, Shelly writes, “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.” Galvani’s experiments sparked the interest of other scientists, and soon severed limbs and an assortment of dissected and expired animals and animal parts were animated by electrical impulses. Perhaps most (in)famously, his nephew, the physicist Giovanni Aldini, stimulated animal parts like those of cows, dogs, horses, and sheep.
Electrified by galvanism, Aldini was ready to shock nearly anything, alive or dead, that he could get his hands on. He was among the first to use electroshock treatment on those deemed mentally ill, and reported complete electrical cures. Not satisfied with his experiments on animal corpses, he performed his shock treatments on executed criminals. He recorded the findings of his 1803 experiment on the executed body of George Foster:
The jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened. The action even of those muscles furthest distant from the points of contact with the arc was so much increased as almost to give an appearance of reanimation. Vitality might, perhaps, have been restored, if many circumstances had not rendered it impossible.[10]
It is not difficult to complete the circuit of sparking disjuncture between Aldini’s ghoulish experiments and Dr. Frankenstein’s ones. Even while Shelley labored to write Frankenstein, the scientific atmosphere crackled with controversy over the nature of the relationship between life and electricity.
Bioelectricity was in the air, sparking the imagination of nineteenth- century scientists. As Cynthia Graber reports, “Many efforts, including using electricity to treat hysteria and melancholia, amounted to little more than quackery.”[11] But some explorations gained scientific credibility and established the basis for current medical practices. For example, a textbook published in 1816 suggests the use of electric shock to revive a stopped heart.[12]
Monstrous Selves, Transgender Empowerment, Transgender Rage
“The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.”
– Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows
Electricity can arrest the heart. It is also capable of bringing a heart back from a state of lifelessness. It can animate its rhythmic drumbeat – the periodic pulsing of life’s electrical song – in once arrested or arrhythmic hearts. Monstrosity, like electrical jolts, cuts both ways. It can serve to demonize, dehumanize, and demoralize. It can also be a source of political agency. It can empower and radicalize.
In an unforgettable, powerful, and empowering performative piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” Susan Stryker embraces the would-be epithet of monstrosity, harnessing its energy and power to transform despair and suffering into empowering rage, self-affirmation, theoretical inventiveness, political action, and the energizing vitality of materiality in its animating possibilities.[13] Remarking on her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster, she writes:
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.[14]
Making political and personal alliance with Frankenstein’s monster, she intervenes in naturalizing discourses about the nature of nature, an emphasis that resonates with themes in this essay.
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature… as I have been compelled to confront mine.[15]
This passage speaks with razor-sharp directedness to those who would position their own bodies as natural against the monstrosity of trans embodiment: examine your own nature, stretch your own body out on the examining table, do the work that needs to be done on yourself (with all this charge’s intended multiple meanings), and discover the seams and sutures that make up the matter of your own body. Materiality in its entangled psychic and physical manifestations is always already a patchwork, a suturing of disparate parts.[16]
Toward the end of the piece, Stryker embraces the fecundity of the “chaos and blackness”– the “anarchic womb”– as the matrix for generative nonheterosexual-reproductive birthing, “for we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.”[17] This is a reference to the entangled birthing story that Stryker tells. She begins by sharing with the reader the joys and the pain of being in intimate connection with her partner while she was giving birth. This is a birth born of queer kinship relations: not the product of a heteronormative coupling, but a phenomenon rich with multiple entanglements, including a markedly nonnormative delivery room support team. Stryker is attuned to her partner during the birth, bodily and emotionally, yet she is also painfully aware that the physicality of birthing a being from her own womb is denied to her by the specificity of her constructed enfleshment. She describes the raw pain of being part of a process that she could not bring to fruition in the bodily way that she yearns for. This gives way to a painful birthing of transgender rage that becomes, in turn, the womb through which she rebirths herself. This radically queer configuring of spacetimemattering constitutes an uncanny topological dynamic that arrests straight tales of birthing and kinship, and gives birth to new modes of generativity, including but not limited to the generativity of a self-birthed womb. It is nearly impossible not to feel the tug of other entanglements in this queer origin story. In particular, this story reverberates with a queer reading of the Genesis moment when the earth emerges out of the chaos and the void, from a chaotic nothingness, an electrifying atmosphere silently crackling with thunderous possibilities. Nature emerges from a self-birthed womb fashioned out of a raging nothingness. A queer origin, an originary queerness, an originary birthing that is always already a rebirthing. Nature is birthed out of chaos and void, tohu v’vohu, an echo, a diffracted / differentiating / différancing murmuring, an originary repetition without sameness, regeneration out of a fecund nothingness.
Quantum Field Theory: Nothingness as the Scene of Wild Activities
“Physicists… took the vacuum as something substantial… the scene of wild activities.”
– Cao and Schweber
Nothingness. The void. An absence of matter. The blank page. Utter silence. No thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility.[18]
From the viewpoint of classical physics, the vacuum is complete emptiness: it has no matter and no energy. But the quantum principle of ontological indeterminacy calls the existence of such a zero-energy, zero-matter state into question or, rather, makes it into a question with no decidable answer. Not a settled matter or, rather, no matter. And if the energy of the vacuum is not determinately zero, it is not determinately empty. In fact, this indeterminacy not only is responsible for the void not being nothing (while not being something) but may in fact be the source of all that is, a womb that births existence.
Birth and death, it turns out, are not the sole prerogative of the animate world; so-called inanimate beings also have finite lives. “Particles can be born and particles can die,” explains one physicist. In fact, “it is a matter of birth, life, and death that requires the development of a new subject in physics, that of quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is a response to the ephemeral nature of life.”[19]
Quantum field theory (QFT) was invented in the 1920s, shortly after the development of (nonrelativistic single-particle) quantum mechanics. It is a theory that combines insights from the classical theory of electromagnetic fields (mid- nineteenth century), special relativity (1905), and quantum mechanics (1920s). QFT takes us to a deeper level of understanding of quantum physics.[20] It has important things to say about the nature of matter and nothingness and the indeterminateness of their alleged distinguishability and separability. QFT is a call, an alluring murmur of the insensible within the sensible to radically work the nature of being and time. According to QFT, the vacuum cannot be determinately nothing because the indeterminacy principle allows for fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. How can we understand “vacuum fluctuations”? First, it is necessary to know a few things about what physicists mean by the notion of a field.
A field in physics is something that has a physical quantity associated with every point in space-time. Or you can think of it as a pattern of energy distributed across space and time. It may be difficult to grasp this notion without specific examples. Consider a bar magnet with iron filings sprinkled around it. The filings will quickly line up in accordance with the strength and direction of the magnetic field at every point. Or consider an electric field. The electric field is a desiring field born of charged yearnings.[21] When it comes to mutual attraction the rule is opposites (i.e., opposite charges) attract. The notion of a field is a way to express the desires of each entity for the other. The attraction between a proton (a positively charged particle) and an electron (a particle with negative charge) can be expressed in terms of fields as follows: the proton emanates an electric field; the field travels outward in all directions at the speed of light. When the electric field of the proton reaches the electron, it feels the proton’s desire pulling it toward it. Likewise, the electron sends out its own field, which is felt by the proton. Sitting in each other’s fields, they feel a mutual tug in each other’s direction.[22]
Now we add quantum physics and special relativity to classical field theory. Quantum physics enters into QFT most prominently in terms of the discretization of physical observables (quantizing or making discrete physical quantities that classical physics assumed were continuous), and the play of indeterminacy in energy and time. And special relativity speaks to matter’s impermanence: matter can be converted into energy and vice versa. Putting these ideas together, we get the following. Fields are patterns of energy. When fields are quantized, the energy is quantized. But energy and matter are equivalent. And so an essential feature of QFT is that there is a correspondence between fields (energy) and particles (matter). The quantum of the electromagnetic field is a photon – a quantum of light. And electrons are understood to be the quanta of an electron field. (There are many other kinds of quanta. For example, the quantum of the gravitational field is a graviton.)
Now let us return to our question: what is a vacuum fluctuation? When it comes to the quantum vacuum, as with all quantum phenomena, ontological indeterminacy is at the heart of (the) matter and no matter. Indeed, it is impossible to pin down a state of no matter or even of matter, for that matter. The crux of this strange non/state of affairs is the so-called energy-time indeterminacy principle, but because energy and matter are equivalent we will sometimes call it the “being- time” or “time-being” indeterminacy principle. The point, for our purposes, is that an indeterminacy in the energy of the vacuum translates into an indeterminacy in the number of particles associated with the vacuum, which means the vacuum is not (determinately) empty, nor is it (determinately) not empty. These particles that correspond to the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, that are and are not there as a result of the time-being indeterminacy relation, are called “virtual particles.” Virtual particles are quantized indeterminacies-in-action. Virtual particles are not present (and not absent), but they are material. In fact, most of what matter is, is virtual. Virtual particles do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. They do not exist in space and time. They are ghostly non/existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely fine blade between being and nonbeing. Virtuality is admittedly difficult to grasp. Indeed, this is its very nature.
Virtual particles are not in the void but of the void. They are on the razor’s edge of non/being. The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The void is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what might yet (have) be(en). Vacuum fluctuations are virtual deviations/variations from the classical zero-energy state of the void. That is, virtuality is the material wanderings/wonderings of nothingness; virtuality is the ongoing thought experiment the world performs with itself. Indeed, quantum physics tells us that the void is an endless exploration of all possible couplings of virtual particles, a “scene of wild activities.”
The quantum vacuum is more like an ongoing questioning of the nature of emptiness than anything like a lack. The ongoing questioning of itself (and itself and it and self ) is what generates, or rather is, the structure of nothingness. The vacuum is no doubt doing its own experiments with non/being. In/determinacy is not the state of a thing but an unending dynamism.
Pace Democritus, particles do not take their place in the void; rather, they are constitutively inseparable from it. And the void is not vacuous. It is a living, breathing indeterminacy of non/being. The vacuum is an extravagant inexhaustible exploration of virtuality, where virtual particles are having a field day performing experiments in being and time.[23]
Electric Interlude: Virtual Touch
Touch, for a physicist, is but an electromagnetic interaction.[24] A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing it does not involve is… well, touching. That is, there is no actual contact involved. You may think that you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug.
Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or seem to), but what you are actually sensing, physicists tell us, is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. (Electrons are tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms, and having the same charges they repel one another, much like powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them – say, between the electrons that constitute the outer edges of the atoms of your fingers and those of the mug – the repulsive force increases.) Try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other.
The reason that the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic field, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom, hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact. Electromagnetic repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance push each other away. That is the tale physics usually tells about touching. Repulsion at the core of attraction. See how far that story gets you with lovers. No wonder the Romantic poets had had enough.
Lightning: Responses to a Desiring Field
Lightning is an energizing response to a highly charged field. The buildup to lightning electrifies the senses; the air crackles with desire By some mechanism that scientists have yet to fully explain, a storm cloud becomes extremely electrically polarized – electrons are stripped from the atoms that they were once attached to and gather at the lower part of the cloud closest to the earth, leaving the cloud with an overall negative charge.[25]
In response, the electrons that make up atoms of the earth’s surface burrow into the ground to get farther away from the buildup of negative charges at the near edge of the cloud, leaving the earth’s surface with an overall positive charge. In this way a strong electric field is set up between earth and cloud, and the yearning will not be satisfied without the buildup being discharged. The desire to find a conductive path joining the two becomes all-consuming.
The first inklings of a path have a modest beginning, offering no indication of the lightning bolt to come. “It begins as a small spark inside the cloud five miles up. A spurt of electrons rushes outwards, travels a hundred meters then stops and pools for a few millionths of a second. Then the stream lurches off in a different direction, pools again, and again. Often the stream branches and splits. This is not a lightning bolt yet” (my emphasis).[26] These barely luminous first gestures are called stepped leaders. But the buildup of negative charges (electrons) in the lower portion of the cloud does not resolve itself by a direct channel of electrons making their way to the earth in this fashion. Instead, the ground responds next with an upward signal of its own. “When that step leader is within ten or a hundred meters of the ground, the ground is now aware of there being a big surplus” of charge, and “certain objects on the earth respond by launching little streamers up toward the stepped leader, weakly luminous plasma filaments, which are trying to connect with what’s coming down.” This is a sign that objects on the ground are attending to the cloud’s seductive overtures. When it finally happens that one of the upward responses is met by a downward gesture, the result is explosive: a powerful discharge is effected in the form of a lightning bolt. But even after a connecting path has been playfully suggested, the discharge does not proceed in a continuous fashion: “The part of the channel nearest the ground will drain first, then successively higher parts, and finally the charge from the cloud itself. So the visible lightning bolt moves up from ground to cloud as the massive electric currents flow down.”
An enlivening, and indeed lively, response to difference if ever there was one. The lightning expert Martin Uman explains this strangely animated inanimate relating in this way: “What is important to note . . . is that the usual stepped leader starts from the cloud without any ‘knowledge’ of what buildings or geography are present below. In fact, it is thought… that the stepped leader is ‘unaware’ of objects beneath it until it is some tens of yards from the eventual strike point. When ‘awareness’ occurs, a traveling spark is initiated from the point to be struck and propagates upward to meet the downward moving stepped leader, completing the path to ground.”[27] What mechanism is at work in this communicative exchange between sky and ground when awareness lies at the crux of this strangely animated inanimate relating? And how does this exchange get ahead of itself, as it were?[28] What kind of queer communication is at work here? What are we to make of a communication that has neither sender nor recipient until transmission has already occurred? That is, what are we to make of the fact that the existence of sender and receiver follows from this nonlocal relating rather than preceding it? What strange causality is effected?
A lightning bolt is not a straightforward resolution of the buildup of a charge difference between the earth and a storm cloud: a lightning bolt does not simply proceed from storm cloud to the earth along a unidirectional (if somewhat erratic) path; rather, flirtations alight here and there and now and again as stepped leaders and positive streamers gesture toward possible forms of connection to come. The path that lightning takes not only is not predictable but does not make its way according to some continuous unidirectional path between sky and ground. Though far from microscopic in scale, it seems that we are witnessing a quantum form of communication – a process of iterative intra-activity.[29]
Back to Quantum Field Theory: a Touchy Subject
When it comes to quantum field theory, it is not difficult to find trouble – epistemological trouble, ontological trouble, a troubling of kinds, of identities, of the nature of touching and self-touching, of being and time, to name a few.[30] It is not so much that trouble is around every corner; according to quantum field theory, it inhabits us and we inhabit it, or rather, trouble inhabits everything and nothing – matter and the void.
How does quantum field theory understand the nature of matter? Let us start with the electron, one of the simplest particles – a point particle – a particle devoid of structure. Even the simplest bit of matter causes all kinds of difficulties for quantum field theory. For, as a result of time-being indeterminacy, the electron does not exist as an isolated particle but is always already inseparable from the wild activities of the vacuum. In other words, the electron is always (already) intra-acting with the virtual particles of the vacuum in all possible ways. For example, the electron will emit a virtual photon and then reabsorb it. This possibility is understood as the electron electromagnetically intra-acting with itself. Part of what an electron is, is its self-energy intra-action.[31] But the self-energy intra-action is not a process that happens in isolation either. All kinds of more involved things can and do occur in this frothy virtual soup of indeterminacy that we ironically think of as a state of pure emptiness. For example, in addition to the electron exchanging a virtual photon with itself (that is, touching itself), it is possible for that virtual photon to enjoy other intra-actions with itself: for example, the virtual photon can metamorphose/ transition – change its very identity. It can transform into a virtual electron-positron pair, that subsequently annihilate each other and morph back into a single virtual photon before it is reabsorbed by the electron. (A positron is the electron’s antiparticle – it has the same mass but the opposite charge and goes backward in time. Even the direction of time is indeterminate.) And so on. This “and so on” is shorthand for an infinite set of possibilities involving every possible kind of intra-action with every possible kind of virtual particle it can intra-act with. That is, there is a virtual exploration of every possibility. And this infinite set of possibilities, or infinite sum of histories, entails a particle touching itself, and the particle that transmits the touch transforming itself, and then that touching touching itself, and transforming, and touching other particles that make up the vacuum, and so on, ad infinitum. (Not everything is possible given a particular intra-action, but an infinite number of possibilities exist.) Every level of touch, then, is itself touched by all possible others. Particle self-intra-actions entail particle transitions from one kind to another in a radical undoing of kinds – queer/ trans*formations.[32] Hence self-touching is an encounter with the infinite alterity of the self. Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is. Polymorphous perversity raised to an infinite power: talk about a queer/trans* intimacy!
What is being called into question here is the very nature of the “self,” and in terms of not just being but also time. That is, in an important sense, the self is dispersed/diffracted through time and being.
Commenting specifically on the electron’s self-energy intra-action, the physicist Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel prize for his contributions to developing QFT, expressed horror at the electron’s monstrous nature and its perverse ways of engaging with the world: “Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!”[33] This self-energy/self-touching term has also been labeled a perversion of the theory because the calculation of the self-energy contribution is infinite, which is an unacceptable answer to any question about the nature of the electron (such as what is its mass or charge?). Apparently, touching oneself, or being touched by oneself – the ambiguity / undecidability / indeterminacy may itself be the key to the trouble – is not simply troubling but a moral violation, the very source of all the trouble.
The “problem” of self-touching, especially self-touching the other, is a perversity of quantum field theory that goes far deeper than we can touch on here. The gist of it is this: this perversity that is at the root of an unwanted infinity, that threatens the very possibility of calculability, gets “renormalized” (obviously – should we expect anything less?!). How does this happen? Physicists conjectured that there are two different kinds of infinities/perversions involved in this case: one that has to do with self-touching and another that has to do with nakedness. That is, in addition to the infinity related to self-touching, there is an infinity associated with the “bare” point particle, that is, with the metaphysical assumption we started with that there is only an electron – the “undressed,” “bare” electron – and the void, each separate from the other. Renormalization is the systematic cancellation of infinities: an intervention based on the idea that the subtraction of (different size) infinities can be a finite quantity. Perversion eliminating perversion. The cancellation idea is this: the infinity of the “bare” point particle cancels the infinity associated with the “cloud” of virtual particles; in this way, the “bare” point particle is “dressed” by the vacuum contribution (that is, the cloud of virtual particles). The “dressed” electron – the electron in drag – that is, the physical electron, is thereby renormalized, that is, made “normal” (finite). (I am using technical language here!) Renormalization is the mathematical handling/taming of these infinities. That is, the infinities are “subtracted” from one another, yielding a finite answer. Mathematically speaking, this is a tour de force. Conceptually, it is a queer theorist’s delight. It shows that all of matter, matter in its “essence” (of course, that is precisely what is being troubled here), is a massive overlaying of perversities: an infinity of infinities.[34]
To summarize, quantum field theory radically deconstructs the ontology of classical physics. The starting point ontology of particles and the void – a foundational reductionist essentialism – is undone by quantum field theory. According to QFT, perversity and monstrosity lie at the core of being – or rather, it is threaded through it. All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others, including the “self,” and touching the “self” entails touching the stranger within. Even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude. Each “individual” always already includes all possible intra-actions with “itself” through all possible virtual others, including those (and itself) that are noncontemporaneous with itself. That is, every finite being is always already threaded through with an infinite alterity diffracted through being and time. Indeterminacy is an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of non/being.
Electrons, for example, are inherently chimeras – cross-species cross-kind mixtures – made of virtual configurations/reconfigurings of disparate kinds of beings dispersed across space and time in an undoing of kind, being/becoming, absence/presence, here/there, now/then. So much for natural essence. The electron – a point particle without structure – is a patchwork of kinds sutured together in uncanny configurations. Trying out new appendages made of various particle-antiparticle pairs, producing and absorbing differences of every possible kind in a radical undoing of “kind” as essential difference: its identity is the undoing of identity. Its very nature is unnatural, not given, not fixed, but forever transitioning and transforming itself. Electrons (re)birth themselves in their engagement with all others, not as an act of self-birthing, but in an ongoing re-creating that is an un/doing of itself. Electrons are always already untimely. It is not that electrons sometimes engage in such perverse explorations: these experiments in intra-active trans*material performativity are what an electron is.[35]
Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. How strange that indeterminacy, in its infinite openness, is the condition for the possibility of all structures in their dynamically reconfiguring in/stabilities. Matter in its iterative materialization is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open. Closure cannot be secured when the conditions of im/possibilities and lived indeterminacies are integral, not supplementary, to what matter is. In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of responses, of response-ability.
Each bit of matter is constituted in response-ability; each is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other. Matter is a matter of untimely and uncanny intimacy, condensations of being and times.
[1] TransMaterialities is a term that arose in the planning of UCSC’s 2009 “TransMaterialities: Relating across Difference” Science Studies Cluster graduate student conference, co-organized by Harlan Weaver and Martha Kenney, with faculty sponsors Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. The first time I saw the playful term matterealities was at a conference run by Monika Buscher at Lancaster University in 2007.
[2] Inspired by QFT’s understanding of each moment as a condensation of other beings, places, and times, this ontological-political project resonates with Marco Cuevas-Hewitt’s call for a “futurology of the present”: “The futurology of the present does not prescribe a single monolithic future, but tries instead to articulate the many alternative futures continually emerging in the perpetual present. The goal of such an endeavor is to make visible the living, breathing alternatives all around us” (“Futurology of the Present: Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Protest 8 [Winter 2011–12], joaap.org/issue8/futurology.htm).
[3] For more on lightning’s queer quantum nature, see below, and also Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity (the authorized version),” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning/Women, Gender, and Research 1–2 (2012): 25–53; and Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[4] Charles Darwin seems to have suggested as much. See, for example, Helen Fields, “The Origins of Life,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Origins-of-Life.html.
[5] Douglas Fox, “Primordial Soup’s On: Scientists Repeat Evolution’s Most Famous Experiment,” Scientific American, May 28, 2007, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=primordial-soup-urey-miller-evolution-experiment-repeated.
[6] Nick Lane, quoted in Cynthia Graber, Electric Shock: How Electricity Could Be the Key to Human Regeneration (2012), readmatter.com.
[7] Douglas Fox, “Primordial Soup’s On.”
[8] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (n.p., 1818), 15.
[9] Jessica P. Johnson, “Animal Electricity, circa 1781,” Scientist, September 28, 2011, www.the-scientist.com/articles.view/articleNo/31078/title/Animal-Electricity—circa-1781/.
[10] Aldini quoted in Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science,” in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, 287–312, eds. George Lewis Levine and Alan Rauch (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 304.
[11] Graber, Electric Shock.
[12] J. D. Roger, “1816 Textbook Suggests Use of Electric Shock in Treatment of Cardiac Arrest,” Canadian Journal of Cardiology 20, no. 14 (2004): 1486.
[13] Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,”
GLQ 1 (1994): 237–54.
[14] Stryker, “My Words,” 238.
[15] Stryker, “My Words,” 240–41.
[16] For one thing, as Judith Butler points out, “Not only is the gathering of attributes under the category of sex suspect . . . indeed, the ‘unity’ imposed upon the body by the category of sex is a ‘disunity,’ a fragmentation” (quoted in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007], 60). But there is much more to this point. For more details on an agential realist reworking of the nature of nature, matter/ing, and the cutting together-apart of disparate parts, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
[17] Stryker, “My Words,” 251. I am left wondering why Stryker talks about the womb as a place of “blackness” rather than say “darkness,” or even, as I suggest, “nothingness” (the void). Part of my political investment in enlarging the scope of my project to include quantum field theory (QFT) is its ability to trouble the underlying metaphysics of colonialist claims such as terrae nullius – the alleged void that the white settler claims to encounter in “discovering undeveloped lands,” that is, lands allegedly devoid of the marks of “civilization”– a logic that associates the beginning of space and time, of place and history, with the arrival of the white man. In contrast to this doctrine, according to QFT the void is full and fecund, rich and productive, actively creative and alive. Which, of course, is not the only way to contest the racist and colonialist impulses at work but is to try to further unearth and unsettle how space and time are themselves racialized.
[18] Parts of this section are borrowed from Karen Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice / Was ist das Maß des Nichts? Unendlichkeit, Virtualität, Gerechtigkeit, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes—100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen— 100 Gedanken | Book Nº099, English and German edition (2012).
[19] A. Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4.
[3] Quantum field theory does not negate the findings of quantum mechanics but builds on them. Similarly, these explorations help further articulate agential realism. As I argue below: QFT entails a radical deconstruction of identity and of the equation of matter with essence in ways that transcend even the profound un/doings of (nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics.
[21] The more general term electromagnetic field, rather than electric field, is sometimes used. The interchangeability is due to the fact that electricity and magnetism were unified into a single electromagnetic force in the mid-nineteenth century.
[22] While the idea of a field may seem like a convenient fiction, and was in fact originally introduced as an imaginary construct to facilitate calculations, physicists in the nineteenth century began to embrace the idea that fields are real. This shift was a result of the finding that light is an electromagnetic wave made of (nothing but) changing electric and magnetic fields.
[23] This is a subtle point that I develop further elsewhere (Barad, “On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” differences 22, no. 3 [2012]: 206–23): namely, the difference between the play of indeterminacy and a rapid appearance and disappearance of particles as the hallmark of virtuality. I would argue that “flashes” of potential are traces of virtuality synchronized to clock time, but this very particular manifestation is far from the only set of possibilities in the play of virtuality. I address these issues further in a forthcoming publication.
[24] Parts of this section are borrowed from Barad, “On Touching.”
[25] Parts of this section are borrowed from Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity.”
[26] All quotations in this paragraph are from the Discovery Channel television program “Discovery Wonders of Weather: Lightning Phenomena,” September 2007, www.discovery.com/video-topics/other/lightning-phenomena.htm.
[27] Martin Uman, All about Lightning (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1986), 49–50.
[28] I am indebted to Vicki Kirby’s writings on lightning, and in particular her attention to the untimely nature of lightning’s connective engagement. See Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[29] I have repeatedly made the point that quantum phenomena are not restricted to some alleged “micro” domain. Perhaps a(nother) large scale example like this one will help to defeat that misconception.
[30] Parts of this section are borrowed from Barad, “On Touching.” See also Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1),” in Power of Material/ Politics of Materiality, eds. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstn Stakemeier (Zurich Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015).
[31] The virtual photon can also be absorbed by another particle, and that would constitute an electromagnetic interaction between them, but that is not my focus here, which is how to understand an “individual” particle.
[32] Trans* is a term that employs the wildcard symbol (*) for internet searches. It is at once a term meant to be broadly inclusive (e.g., transgender, transsexual, trans woman, trans man, trans person, and also genderqueer, Two Spirit, genderfuck, gender fluid, masculine of center) of an array of subversive gender identities, and also self-consciously tuned into practices of exclusion. As “Anony Mouse” notes in a response to a posting on the Q-Center of Portland web page: “When you see a [starred] word or sentence while reading [a] book or articles, you automatically look [to] the
margin to see if it has any more meaning to it.” See, for example, www.pdxqcenter.org/bridging-the-gap-trans-what-does-the-asterisk-mean-and-why-is-it-used/ (written by Addie Jones, “Bridging the Gap — Trans*: What Does the Asterisk Mean and Why Is It Used?,” posted August 8, 2013).
[33] Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 115–16.
[34] Renormalization is a sign of physics’ ongoing (auto)deconstruction. Physics continually finds ways to open itself up to new possibilities, to iterative re(con)figurings.
[35] Electrons are not an arbitrary choice for this article. Electrons are not only the source of our body electric, the genesis of our own inter- and intracellular lightning flashes; in an important sense, “electrons R us”: we are made of electrons and their wanderings. Note: to suggest that electrons are trans/material configurations/reconfigurings is not to naturalize trans (or queer for that matter), but rather to acknowledge the radically transgressive potential of nature itself in its own undoing/deconstruction of naturalness (sufficiently subversive, in this case, to instill “horror” in those who would propose to know it fully).