Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

I start in the middle, and look forwards and backwards simultaneously, growing smaller and larger at the same time.

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New Materialism in the human and social sciences invokes an appeal to humanity’s “entanglement” with the nonhuman world as the basis for a posthumanist ethics and politics. The legacy of the overreliance and dominance of poststructuralist discourse theories (“linguistic turn”) where the Other, defined by a string of social justice issues concerning gender/sex, race, ableism, colonialism, has now been expanded to include the more-than-human. Its trajectory is posthumanist, meaning that the attempt to “de-anthropocentralize” the “human” and to question the exceptionalism of the genus Homo results in a recognition that it is impossible to become oblivious to the overwhelming power and dominance this species has had on the planet; namely, the anthropogenic labor that has prompted the misnomer of the Anthropocene. Variations of anthropomorphism, new animism, and claims to “distributive agency” of matter have become almost doxa among social humanities. There is an accompanying ethics of care, responsibility, and attunement to the more-than-human, mapped against an “affective turn.”

I shall argue, however, that this “new” embracive signifier of New Materialism forwards a redemptive creative vitalism at the quantum levels that may well be inadequate to the extraordinary challenges of the Anthropocene as the majority of its theorists repress, disregard, or perhaps assume it is unnecessary to recognize another form of life, another quantum vitalism that is contra to the onto-epistemological-ethical initiative that is so persuasive. What if this call for a “new” vibrancy, to enliven bodies-things-objects, just proliferates and repeats, rather than ruptures the global structure of fatigue? This “redemptive vitalism” strokes creativity, especially in a pandemic and “climate crisis,” to “sustain” globalized capitalism via “climate realism” wherein the call for its modification or overcoming, and even elimination is but an alibi so that the unending production of work can continue. After all, the new panacea seems to be green technologies for a sustainable future.

Against this encapsulation of the “state of affairs” emerging from the wider “speculative turn” in philosophy, the extraordinary proliferation of literature across any number of disciplines under the new materialist signifier has drawn on the influential quantum speculations of Karen Barad (2007) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987 [TP]). Barad’s diffractive methodology is paradigmatic of a neo-deconstructivism (rather than an alleged post-deconstructivist position), much like many post-qualitative research methodologies which draw on Deleuze|Guattari are better understood as neo-qualitative in their approach (jagodzinski, 2017). Neither diffractive methodology nor post-qualitative research introduces a difference in kind, but one of degree from the foundations they draw on: Derridean deconstruction and continental philosophy as spearheaded by Husserlian phenomenology. A difference in kind would institute an entirely originary and sufficient “philosophical decision” with new conceptualizations, with a further recognition that a world-for-itself, what François Laruelle’s (2017) non-standard philosophy refers to as a “radical Real” (as One), remains inaccessible and cognizant of its own “fictioning.”

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The two theorists I dwell on most, Karen Barad and Deleuze|Guattari, are often mentioned as being comparable to each other without much concern for their different ontologies, politics, ethics, and conceptualizations of matter, or time|space configurations. Félix Guattari extended quantum creative thought through his notions of transversality and metamodeling, an ecosophy of aesthetics and ethical practice that further differentiates itself from variations of “new materialism” such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Rosi Braidotti. ¹ What all these positions have in common is the recognition of a quantum level as some form of naturalism: as Real (virtual real), as an immanent plane, as a vacuum tube or void (physics), as hyper(chaos), as a metaphysical no-‘thing’ that is some-‘thing.’ There is a recognition of “touchability” throughout, “locally” or “at a distance” as “relations without relationality,” an exchange that is not defined by a logic of recognition as classical forms of logic no longer apply. This necessitates embracing quantum superposition, the simultaneous existence of two different states. In Barad’s case, this is “resolved” through “intra-relationality” as an all-encompassing term; Laruelle’s incorporation of quantum superposition results in a “unilaterality.” The impossible access to a radical Real results in a non-relation that is asymmetrical and irreversible with it. Whereas, for Deleuze (1990, p. 174), difference-in-itself refers to “pure intensive relations” of non-being, of “chaosmosis” from which Being is actualized. Given that Quantum Mechanics (QM) has not been reconciled with the gravitational implications of General Relativity (GR), all such quantum positions are fictions, varying in degrees of differentiation, their ethical and political consequences engrained within them. In Laruelle’s case, this is referred to as “philo-fiction” and “photo-fiction” in his negative critique of philosophy and photography. Barad’s fictions appear as diffractions, while Deleuze and Guattari offer the perpetual exchanges between the virtual and actual through “events.” As onto-fictions, they are “levelled” by belonging on the same plane of mythopoesis as do other cosmologies of creation throughout indigenous worlds (Burrows & O’Sullivan, 2019).

The conflation of these various quantum positions with their accompanying notions of creativity in many new materialist writings reinforces the touchstones between them that can certainly be identified and made to intensify a particular vitalist trajectory of creative life. Exemplary of such an approach is Bronwyn Davies (2021) who draws on Barad, Bergson, and Deleuze|Guattari’s affect and assemblage theory to make her case for “living-and writing-as-inquiry” as a creative approach to new materialism. This conflation generally promotes an “affirmative Deleuze” where amelioration, connectivity, consilience, and symbiosis are forwarded. As Davies (2021) succinctly puts it, “that capacity to endure depends on invention and creativity [ . . . ] invention and creativity do not exist independent of the repetitions and rituals that make up much of everyday life” (p. 2, original emphasis). Her position is consonant with Barad (Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2013, pp. 49–53), who also has aversion to any forms of negativity and critique that are contra to deconstructive diffractive readings. Post-critique pervades New Materialism, dismissing critique as both combative and non-productive. It is also pervasive of much of the way Deleuze|Guattari’s “tool kit” has been picked up by post-qualitative research, especially in the arts, art education, and in education generally where striving to find inspiration, the poetics of embodied living, expressing un-actualized potentials, passion to reconfigure thinking, sensing, and “critical autobiography” are common tropes throughout (jagodzinski, 2017).

Barad and Deleuze|Guattari “entanglement” (perhaps kinship) is also found in the many writings of Elizabeth St. Pierre (2019), who maintains (ironically perhaps, one is not sure from the explanatory footnote) that she “‘invented’ post qualitative inquiry in 2010” (p. 3, original emphasis). St. Pierre and those who follow her lead forward a creative vitalism of ontological immanence where “data” is alive, and “concept creation” is given its full support as breaking with any established forms of methodology. This last strategy raises questions as to whether Deleuze’s (1968/1995) Ideas as the formation of a “problematic,” which “forces” thinking is indeed enacted, or whether such concepts invented fall into an innovative banality? Deleuze questions communication (coded technology of language especially as information) where he raises the uselessness of “discussion” versus “conversation.” The latter is more of a schizophrenic experience that moves one out of the normality of doxa. In “What is the creative act?” Deleuze (1987) maintains that having an Idea is not on the order of communication, which is information: the order of doxa. Creating is always apart from communicating already hijacked by media industries. In this respect, we are “choking” on creativity via the glut-exhibition of screen images, selfies, and home pages on display. He calls for the creation of “vacuoles of non-communication,” “circuit-breakers” to elude control. This “line of flight” draws on a vitalism quite at odds with vitalisms that stress intra-relationships of constant connection, pervasive throughout neo-qualitative research that select Deleuze|Guattari’s toolbox for affirmative ends in the name of the “new,” whereas more distancing (as unlearning) should go on. How many “creative concepts” resist in such research? Are the “people . . . still missing” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 217, emphasis added)?

An “active’” vitalism that is pervasive in these new materialist developments under-theorize and often suppress the difficulties attributed to anorganic life, ² that is life that is not controllable, and which is excessive and destructive in its force. Both Deleuze and Guattari forward this vitalism where the difficulty of the “death drive” is not avoided but cosmologically affirmed as part of creative destruction. Their formulation, “monism=pluralism” has ended up in the suffocation of intra-relationships where creativity becomes perpetual labor of production. Matter, in their logic, is not substantive but differential through intensive forces as sensation that impact “bodies” whose habituated rhythms and patters are both disturbed, violated, as well as integrated into metastable states of movement and speed. Above all, it is the problematization of time in relation to “events” that enables Deleuze to invert Kantian system of transcendental idealism through an empiricism that is cognizant of the way the morphogenetic capability of matter undergoes “phase changes” as conditioned by far-from-equilibrium conditions.

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Deleuze|Guattari’s articulation of agencement (assemblage) is quite at odds with Barad’s apparatus theory, an example of creative “makers knowledge,” which Deleuze|Guattari develop as the cosmic artisan carried to ecological ends by Guattari. There is merit to thinking the creativity of science this way, but only by skewing and radicalizing what is at the heart of “laboratory” experimentation that is overlooked as it takes us out of its clinical and controlled socio-political veneer. The “minor” science that escapes this common formulation is “aestheticized” as “scienceart,” neither discipline exists as it is currently institutionalized. The reverse is also possible; this is to say “artscience” where “science” is forwarded as the “outside” of art as in bioart, rather than art (aisthesis) being outside of science as being suggested here for a “true” creative event to take place. Here, the laboratory experiment as an “art” is set up in such a way that its results—its findings—have yet to be established, which in Barad’s terms would be “phenomena,” which are not yet recognizable, there is no discursive merit to their articulation, no “meaning” that matters. The “discovery” of a new phenomenon would be creative in this sense. Now: would such a phenomenon be a “thing” or a “relationship”? In Barad’s apparatus theory, it is only the configuration of new relationships. I dare to call this simply innovation through the rearrangement of the “intra-actions” of the agents in play. In what would be an assemblage “breaker” in Deleuze|Guattari’s terms (n-1), such a discovery has to be understood as a “disruption” of known doxa. Minor science resists and draws on a different vitality, on “measures [that] belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. . . . To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 41), contra affirmation. ³

A recent example is the disruption of quantum theory by the effects of the muon particle in a vacuum tube (Muon g-2 Theory Initiative, 2021). The team of physicists follow a quantum “realist” position; that is, the structure of reality as identified independently of humans by privileging the mathematical and information-theoretic determination of fractal-like behavioral patterns at quantum levels. Scientific realism in this case is strongly eliminativist and highly relational. Unlike agential realist “patterns” that are advocated and upheld by Barad subject to discursive interpretation by “embedded and embodied” researchers in the quest to intuitively highlight found differences, these patterns are experimentally “real.” While there is a recognition that “reality” is endlessly a relational structure of “fields” that are subject to constant mathematical analysis, this is not to say that discoveries of nature-in-itself are not possible. Such discoveries rely on the ingenuity of the setup of the experiment (in this case the extraordinary structure of the Fermilab), and the contingency of the event itself. The Muon g-2 experiment requires the threshold of a 5-sigma probability to “count” as a condition for a discovery. But the g does not exactly equal 2. Quantum Field Theory recognizes the incompleteness of its theory to account for a “radical Real.” No declarative statements are allowed in these experiments. Thus far only 4.2 sigma have been reached by the Muon g-2 initiative. It may well be that this ends in “failure” as the standard QM paradigm is not toppled.

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Such a position is contra to Barad’s claim, at least in one sense: Barad offers an ontic structural realism. The world is “disclosed” (Barad, 2007, p. 361) in a particular way. It is not “revealed” in a Heideggerian sense. Barad writes that such a disclosure “is the effect of the intra-active engagement of our participation with/in and part of the world’s differential becoming . . . This is . . . a realist conception of scientific practices” (p. 361). This seems consistent with the muon g-2 initiative. But Barad then proceeds, “‘[O]bjectivity’ is not pre-existent . . . Objectivity is a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be. It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts can enact different materialized becoming” (p. 361). An odd paradox emerges from this claim. Barad’s idea is that under the same conditions—the same apparatus (now broadly understood as the specific material configurations), which would mean a repetition of the same objects and observers—the experiment should have observers witness the same phenomenon, or better still, the production of the same phenomena should happen. Yet, “objectivity” is being constructed by the entire scenario of material “agencies” in a lab-situation, and that construction is now accountable to a particular ethics, with the further question who judges such results, and is it ever truly possible to repeat any lab-experiment under the same conditions when the full extent of which material conditions are the “true” agents of the experiment have all been accounted for? Barad’s conception of objectivity has been severely criticized by physicists of note, as has her interpretation of Niels Bohr (Faye & Jaksland, 2021).

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For Deleuze and Guattari the Muon discrepancy is an “event.” Without this aspect, Barad’s apparatus theory falls into a variation of structuralism in the shadow of the “post.” In Deleuze’s (1968/1995) case, the presence of matter is sensible, able to be sensed, and intuited as an Idea, not yet thinkable, or rather unthinkable. These are unthinkable events at the level of matter or sensation as he calls it, which provoke us to reach beyond the actual into a different mode of temporality, into virtuality so that “thought” becomes creative. “What is called thinking,” is an encounter with something unrecognizable that propels us into the virtual of Ideas; that is, those “n-dimensional,” continuous, as yet undefined multiplicities. Thinking in this case is not simply recognizing but creating and drawing from the virtual forces of quanta that might prove adequate to as yet unthinkable and impossible “problems” that are constructed. This, again, is quite a different understanding of “concept creation” as developed by many neo/post-qualitative research agendas. Few researchers achieve this level (Rousell, 2021). The muon initiative, to make its breakthrough, requires reaching exhaustion in its quest for a new physics. Exhaustion rather than tiredness, Deleuze (1996) maintains, works through all possibilities. Creative life of resistance can only come about through exhaustion. This is not to deny failure as failure and defeat are wedded to exhaustion, and to the creative process itself. An “outside” becomes available that escapes any intra-action. Such an “outside” is not spatial, but virtual. For creativity to take place the forces of the virtual have to emerge. In this way, the muon team would “become worthy of the event” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 149). That has yet to happen.

For Deleuze|Guattari, for an assemblage to change an element it has to disrupt its metastructure so that the entire structure dissipates into something else. This would be a creative (witch’s) line of flight—an n-1 where the virtual unknown can be tapped rather than an n+1 that adds to the assemblage without change. It is also one of disconnection and negation, destructive in its force, the vitalism of anorganic life. But this is not possible in the way phenomena are theorized by Barad. Apparatus in Barad’s case would need to be radicalized as an agency of disturbance. Minor science is littered by such schizo-experiments. Today, it would be to question the algorithmic makeup of instrumentation and apparatus that structure laboratory experiments in such a way that indeed something “new” emerges as phenomenon, rather than repeated novelty via the re-organization and reconfiguration of the “experiment” as she suggests. This “crazy” sort of experimentation is taking place mostly in the bio-realms where hackers are experimenting with mail-order “home CRISPR-Cas9 kits” that enable “playing” with DNA. Artscience once more becomes dangerously creative.

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To treat deconstruction in its neo-forms (diffractive methodology) is to forward a commitment to “text” (trace, writing, and difference) as a performative “process,” a particular reading of Derrida’s materialism that is opposed to anything like a substance or a foundational ontology as matter cannot be known in-itself. Matter (as formed “phenomena” for Barad) is given by way of mediating systems of concepts, stabilities of language, the laboratory setup, and so on; that is, “apparatus” understood in its widest sense of terms. “Text” as phenomena become the possibility of relations of forces that produce networks (intra-actions, intra-relations) of relative stability. “Text” in this reading is the “emergent.” Agential realism needs no “ideality.” There is no “matter” as a foundational presence that would be differentiated by mind, time, or language. All is “actualized” as quantum virtuality is of no “real” consequence except for its indeterminacy and capacity in the creation of phenomena. “Relata” only come into “being” through intra-action and intra-relationality. Barad recognizes the virtuality of a vacuum tube (zero-energy state). This is standard fare. As she writes of this virtual state, “the indeterminacy of being/nothing, a ghostly non/existence [ . . . ] virtual particles are quanta of vacuum fluctuations. That is, virtual particles are quantized indeterminacies-in-action” (Barad, 2012b, pp. 11, 12, original italic). But this is not of key interest as much as the “result” of these indeterminacies, that is, the emergence of phenomena. There are no concepts a “subject” possesses to differentiate that which is undifferentiated; that which is devoid of presentability, quanta itself. All “realist” QM theories are dismissed. (Barad’s dismissal of Einstein and Bohm as “realists” cannot be taken up here.) Matter does not require ideality to come into being. There is no eidos, no properties of “objects,” ‘things, “essences” or, put another way: no “in-itself” that is (tautologically) in itself. We have the strong Kantian sense of appearances of “phenomena,” a radicalized phenomenology “without phenomenology,” so to speak, as subject-object dualism is no longer an issue, nor is matter and ideality, as they are simply “entangled” with one another as some topological form of hybrid natureculture. As Barad (2007) speaks of her paradigmatic example, the brittlestar: “There is no res cogitans . . . no optics of mediation, no noumena-phenomena distinction, no question of representation” (p. 375).

My point is not that there has been an outright dismissal of the incorporeal virtual (an ideal that is “real” for Deleuze). Barad speaks of the “virtual” but does so in relation to a materiality from which phenomena intra-act together forming the apparatus. Her key example is the celebrated Stern-Gerlach space quantization experiment (Barad, 2007, pp. 161–168), which has the problem of articulating all the “agents” in play, as well as delimiting the scope of such agents influencing this experiment. Barad concludes that “gender performativity” (p. 168) was a key material factor in what is an expanded understanding of what constitutes an apparatus. It is again, a question of event and rupture. From a schizoanalytic perspective, a “warm” bed, cigar smoke, a postcard to a donor (Goldman), a railroad strike and the delayed realization of their quantum discovery (electron spin) form a series of heterogeneous events “outside” any of their control. Their “story” vivifies the “delirium” of experimentation with is “breakdowns” and “breakthroughs” that Deleuze forwards. Their discovery (electron spin) was unknown to them. It came “after” the event, which is to say, this phenomenon, at that time, was “meaningless.”

Guattari (2012) calls on a “chaotic psychoanalysis” that brings subjects to points of bifurcation, to points which are states far from equilibrium. This strikes me more in keeping with the Stern-Gerlach “story” exemplary of scienceart. A new chaotic aesthetics is proposed: “the work of art [ . . . ] is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense [ . . . ] which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself [generating fields of possible] ‘far from equilibria of everyday life’ (p. 131). Barad and her followers overlook this “other” order of vitalism that Guattari draws from, a QM that is at odds, not only with agential realism but with that swath of creative Deleuzians of “life” who persist in an affirmative vitalism (inadvertently?) reinstating a world-for us.

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In “Nature’s Queer Performativity” (Barad, 2012a), written some 5 years after her seminal book, and in “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Material/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” written 3 years later, Barad (2015) presents an update of her position. In the second essay, she starts off with a lightening “metaphor.” “Lightening is a reaching forward, an arcing dis/juncture, a striking response to charged yearnings” (p. 388). Barad’s trope provides a stunning description of vital creativity. Who does not “nod” their heads in the wonderment of it all? Lightening is the creative surge of matter (Nature) that produces “phenomena” by its determining “cuts.” Lightning is the virtual-material entanglement of “spacetimemattering” (nature/naturing). As an electrical body it is actualized out of the dark. In its “emergence” out of the “vacuum-void” of quanta, it cannot be localized; its “branching” agencies appear to have no lines of decent or any reproductive goal, a “dis/connected alliance.” “No continuous past from sky to ground satisfy its wild imaginings” (p. 387). This is a virtual “desiring field” of relational potentialities, anthropomorphized as “agentially” living. Throughout the essay, lightning in relation to electricity and the electromagnetic field is dwelled on to illustrate the “queerness” of nature, the way “it” animates and opens up creative potentials that are yet to be realized. “The electric body—at all scales, atmospheric, subatomic, molecular, organismic—is a quantum phenomenon generating new imaginaries, new lines of research, new possibilities” (p. 411).

Barad both “sexualizes” and anthropomorphizes matter of the quantum field as queer trans*formations, as “polymorphous perversity raised to the infinite power . . . queertrans* intimacy.” Electrons are chimeras, “cross-species cross-kind mixtures” (p. 401). The “self-touching” of virtual particles becomes an “encounter with the infinite alterity of the self,” which (as Kristeva might have said) “entails touching the stranger within” (Barad, 2015). “Matter is an enfolding, an involution” (p. 399, original emphasis). Barad’s overly sexualized quantum does not address the in|difference that touching can also produce: the non-touching of withdrawal, depression, and refusal. Rather, “Matter is a matter of untimely and uncanny intimacy, condensations of being and times” (p. 402, original italic, my non-italic). The quantum field becomes a metonym for the self as there is a tendency, to “humanize” quanta: “electrons R us” (p. 419n35). This slippage of personification of matter is perhaps due to her discursivity and meaning that pervades agential realism. A particularly obvious example of this: “Matter is a wild exploration of trans*animacy, self-experimentations/self-re-creations, not in an autopoietic mode, but on the contrary, in a radical undoing of the ‘self,’ of individualism” (p. 411). This “undoing” refers to the recognition of the poststructuralist Other. The “rupture” of the self through an event is not theorized.

Barad hints that this “perverse” phenomenon may be “a moral violation” (p. 400). To call nature “promiscuous and perverse” (“Nature is perverse at its core” [p. 412]) is thinkable only if nature has intrinsic or God given ends. One could assume that perversity “should” or “would” refer only to mutations, where alterations occur, but mutations are part of nature. To personify nature (more specifically quanta) would be to acknowledge that to pervert life is to divert a thing from its proper aim or natural state, rather than just to acknowledge the fundamental paradox of matter itself—its superpositions and mutations. Such personification is indicative of the always already of materialized phenomena of agential realism that follows Derridean aporias of the “undecidable” of deconstruction via the decoherence of phenomena.

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We can well understand the creativity of quanta in its continual becoming. This in itself is not controversial, neither is “touching.” To say it tautologically, “its very nature is unnatural” (p. 401). Barad calls this “trans*material performativity” to keep the connotations of queering. This has affinities with Deleuze|Guattari as matter has indeed been sexualized into an open-ended proliferation of “n-sexes” to quote Grosz (1993). However, n-sexes do not lie in historical or psychic rearrangements (the imaginary and symbolic, in Lacan’s terms), but are aligned at the levels of “molecular transsexuality” where n-1 sexes (Berressem, 2006) are in play, wherein any category can be schizophrenized. In this way, Deleuze|Guattari go further than Barad in two ways:

First, in terms of axiology: the question remains in an evolutionary sense whether aesthetics precedes ethics. Ethics certainly continues to be explored and attributed to the more-than-human levels as a homologous development. Yet, perhaps aesthetics and ethics become indistinguishable at the levels of viruses and bacteria where “reproduction” is no longer in the domain of sexuality, even when radicalized as in Luciana Parisi’s (2004) “abstract sex.” Parasitic and self-generating reproduction changes the axis of thought. There are other levels of heterogeneous assemblages, which for Deleuze|Guattari, end up as their attempt to conceptualize machinic “material desire” stripped of the common doxa of sexuality as certain aesthetic signs of attraction no longer seem to apply. The molecularization of pheromones, the attraction of viruses to proteins, and the binary fission of bacteria, all complicate aesthetic-ethic exchanges. Desire is simply chaos in its “pure-form,” simply an unknown force, which would include aisthesis where signs of attraction are outside the doxa of human aesthetics. Deleuze|Guattari radicalize sexuality as “machinic coupling and uncoupling” (or breakdown), something “beyond” when it comes to the “other side” of production as non-reproduction where, again, creative destruction comes to fore—as in parasitic survival, and the uncomfortable issues of violence and species “fitness” to survive in the “wild.”

This leads me to the second differentiation from Barad’s creative quantum of queering: Sign-particles as “natural” codings operate “without signs” and as “sign-signifiers” (Deleuze, 1992). Whereas the symbolic order is always producing n+1 sex-genders, as in the continual proliferation of identity signifiers that define a “spurious” infinity, where an impossible utopia of pure different singularities will be reached, and the coded alphabet will somehow be broken (the “count” will stop), Deleuze’s focus is certainly not on forms, but on the material particles themselves. Barad’s “electrons R us” is turned into individualities in-and-of-themselves, singularities subject to “a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 626).

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The violence of “cuts” and the damage lightening does on the “ground” is not considered by the creativity of Barad’s lightening flurry. Repression of “horror” and destruction, which Barad recognizes but then “tames.” “Can we cultivate bioelectrical science’s radical potential, subverting Dr. Frankenstein’s grab for power over life itself, aligning (neo)galvanism with trans* desires . . . ?” (Barad, 2015, p. 411). This question is followed by a series of other “can questions,” no less than six in total, to map out a creative agenda for a future trajectory.

Such questions heighten the crux of the “matter”: the oppositional stance between creative vitalism of New Materialisms and the anorganic deterritorializing vitalism of Deleuze|Guattari. These are two differing understanding of quanta; the positive, connective vitalism (Barad’s lightening), a reparative approach that dwells on life made of assemblages, flows, interconnections, and networks, as contrasted to anorganic life, a vitalism that is non-optimistic in its view: the “just is” of non-being, yet offers a creativity that avoids sinking into nihilism. Such creativity is understood through the broader paradoxes of aisthesis, rather than institutionalized “art” per se, although Deleuze|Guattari draw their examples from “art” to illustrate the consequences of anorganic life, which is best thought as the world-without-us. It is fundamentally cosmological in terms of the forces of the Earth that must be faced, especially in its current phase change. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze|Guattari (1987) articulate such a creative “line,” worrying the usual way creativity is presented as empathy and care that are primarily psychological and anthropological concepts that serve to characterize a particular will to art (Kunstwollen). The question of the “will” is especially problematic in their understanding of the creative act of “concept creation,” and the entire question of aisthesis which works with the percepts and affects of anorganic life as the nonhuman cosmic forces that grapple with “in|difference ⁴ ” itself. Here a quite different order of passions unfolds. The pain of creation is related to suffering, cruelty, violence, delirium, death, nihilism, unbeing, depression—the conatus of a radicalized vitalism. Difference here is de-subjectivation. The act of creation is not “joyful” but transformative. Encounters—as events—are in themselves impossible lived experiences. The artist’s own impotence, or perhaps shame, is often on the line. Success, pleasure, and joy are not the “signs” of creativity; they are more the “signs” of symbolic social status, an increase in potency or narcissistic success. The novelty generation of the “creative industries” has already coveted this side of creative affect (Clough, 2018).

Creativity is not about reconfiguring connections as if they are all equivalent in their novelty. Becoming is not a satisfaction to be cherished. The paradox is not to “will” art (the idealist understanding of Kunstwollen), but to embrace the will to abandon it. Only then does one arrive at a point that did not pre-exist, which only emerges when one “arrives” there, and when one arrives “there” it no longer exists! We can only look back as to what had “happened,” like the story that is told of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Such de-subjectivation means an abandoning of the “self”—to suffer a thousand and one little “deaths” or “cuts” as one’s “body without organs” is rearranged. It is to follow an anorganic “line” that has no method, and no set formula; it emerges as a “style” that can only be traced “after” the “fact.” This is to reach a limit so that something “different” opens up. In this view of creativity, based on difference in-and-of itself, one faces a breakthrough or a breakdown as failure as a necessary part of this processual performance. Why failure? Because the body does not know its limits, its addictions, its drive (Trieb), its being toward death: any “one” organ can “rebel” as so many pathologies show (Deleuze, 1991). Delirium and “madness” are not unknown to such a creative process. In this sense, creativity is not a question of violating rules of a system, but to pointing out that such rules were unnecessary to begin with, a move from an off-centered existence to an un-centered one where there is an undoing of codes. This is not a “willing,” but a form of “cruelty” that is inflicted on ourselves in a process of becoming, a becoming that is not “just” transformative change which happens in chronological time. Creative thought only “thinks” when it encounters the cruelty of what is not-thought, the violence of that which is disparate, and not comforting. Queer performativity is unquestionably a confrontation that raises the specter of anorganic life. Aisthetics becomes an ethics—both creative and destructive so as “to be worthy of the event.”

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In relation to the Anthropocene, the embracing of the non-being of anorganic life is to undo the conceit of our “humanness” by facing our impotence. Existence in the cosmological sense becomes a move from “art” to aisthetics, which itself is an ethical act only in the sense that there is difference, which is to say, the thought of difference as rupture with respect to anorganic life’s indifference to every difference wherein I become “another” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 309, p. 315) (and not simply recognize the Other’s “face” where the Other is a condition of the Self as in Barad’s call on Levinas). As Deleuze|Guattari put it, “The becoming-imperceptible is the end of becoming, its cosmic formula” (TP, p. 279, emphasis added). In the context of anorganic creativity, they say of the artist J. M. W. Turner, in his later life he did not exhibit, he kept the works within his studio, he changed his name by taking on the name of his companion: the artist “disappeared” at the height of his fame. This is becoming imperceptible as staged by the contemporary performance artist Tehching Hsieh in his last performance, Thirteen Year Plan (1986–1999), or perhaps, Duchamp’s withdrawal into chess.

This is not to claim that an affirmative vitalism is complicit with the forces of capitalism, fascism, commodification, and so on. It is to worry the constant appropriation of immanent vitalism for production rather than that other difficult claim, a negative philosophy that confronts the groundlessness of being itself, where the production of nothing becomes a refusal, like Turner, Hseih, and Duchamp, whose non-production initiates an n-1—a subtraction—that changes the assemblage. In doing so, they become “generic” in their “posture” enacting a non-standard aesthetics, their subtraction being an “onto-vectorializing reduction” (Laruelle, 2017). Theirs is a non-relation, closer to Bartleby, the scrivener: “I would prefer not to,” which received wide theoretical attention. One such attempt is provided by Curt Cloininger (2021) who describes works of art that are apophatic apparatuses in their attempt to produce or make “nothing” at the same time introducing a hesitancy, an oscillation or a break in “becoming” through non-Derridean tactic of “perpetual deferral” (p. 188) and deformation; these art apparatuses he describes make nothing; via an “attitude of indifference” (p. 190) and the manufacturing of a “cognitive aporia” (p. 193).

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Barad’s (2018, 2019) reply to the Anthropocene is to focus on the event of the unleashing of the power of the atom that directly ties in quantum physics, a trope that is extended to include a series of entanglements that continue to press (as the past) on the present, highlighting the problematic of nuclear energy. The 2018 essay focuses on a novella by Kyoto Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, narrated by an “older unnamed woman on a spiritual-political pilgrimage to the bombing of Nagasaki” (p. 221). The essay is both a rehearsal and an illustration of a “diffractive” neo-deconstructive reading strategy, wherein “readers” extract (becomes attuned to) what “they” intuit to be a particular pattern of “difference/différance—differentiating-entangling” (p. 216) that makes a difference at the expense of other possible patterns concerning a text’s performative impact. Dispersed throughout are previous accounts of quanta theory Barad had already written.

In relation to Deleuze’s (1990, p. 148) account, the “wound” Hayashi carries as a 14-year-old returning to Nagasaki in the aftermath of the bomb is counter-actualized through this novel. This is one way of working through her trauma. As Deleuze (1997) writes, “The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums” (p. 228). Such counter-actualizations are the way artists face the catastrophes of life, a way to avoid destructive nihilism; to recognize a fundamental impotency when it comes to anorganic life. It is a way to overcome the ressentiment that “eats” at the souls of the hibakusha. The ethico-political act of mourning as counter-actualized by Hayashi cannot be denied.

Barad (2018) seems to agree here: “What does it mean to swallow an event? Perhaps this is the evocation of the ouroboros, the mythical symbol of the serpent biting its tail, representing ‘creation out of destruction, Life out of Death’” (p. 237). This fingers anorganic life that Deleuze|Guattari develop. It is one of the few moments that one can say that there is agreement, even if Barad is only speculating with a question mark. Her insight follows by, no less than, four doubts as to such a position. To answer each doubt from Deleuze’s vitalist perspective: (a) “Perhaps it is about the im/possibility of metabolizing the trauma, transforming the self from victim to survivor” (Barad, 2018, p. 237). To which a reply would be that it is precisely the impotency that requires the artist to face impossibility, which may perhaps end in failure rather than breakthrough. (b) “Perhaps it is a way of un/doing the self, of touching oneself through touching all others, taking in multitudes of Others that make up the very matter of one’s being in order to materially transforms the self and one’s material sense of self” (Barad, 2018, p. 237). To which a Deleuzian reply would be that there needs to be an event by which a “similar Other” can emerge, which is to say that not every hibakusha will necessary counter-actualize their “wound.” There are no guarantees of transformative change. (c) “Perhaps it is about the willingness to put oneself at risk, to place one’s body on this wounded land, to be in touch with it, to have felt the sense of its textures, to come to terms with a shared sense of vulnerability and invisibility, to feel the ways this land, this void, which marks the colonizer’s continuing practices of avoidance, always already inhabits the core, the nucleus of your being” (Barad, 2018, p. 237). To which a Deleuzian reply would be a resounding “yes,” given that affects and percepts are the material of life that a cosmic artist must work with. An impotency is recognized.

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Yet, it does appear that such a direction was an anomaly. In a 2019 follow-up essay, which, in a similar vein discusses the bomb tests that took place on the Marshall Islands (Bikini Islands), Barad returns to a reparative vitalism, forwarding the concept of radical hospitality, drawing on Derrida. Again, Barad’s dispersed forays into the quantum reiterate passages from previous texts. And again, Barad ends with a conclusion that links hospitality with quantum theory and the ethics of the Other drawn from Levinas and Derrida. The post-structuralist claim that the “self” is constituted through the incorporation of the Other within the “self” when it comes to identity formation is reiterated, and where the openness of infinity that impinges or irrupts within the finite is hospitality itself. From this, Barad jumps to claiming that quantum field theory (QFT) shows us that “matter [is] a matter of hospitality in its very constitution” (p. 541, original emphasis). Matter as a multiplicity (infinity) entails the very structure of un/doing identity as (one presupposes) the hostile/hospitality paradox in superposition is in play. In this view, the “self” is a superposition of Self/Other where Other would be selected from what could be an infinite multiplicity. A Derridean conclusion of the makeup of the Self is reached.

Barad claims that this structure of “matter as hospitality” can be extended to a point where “it is in the very nature of nature’s radical hospitality that the self’s constitutive outside interrupts and irrupts within the self” (p. 542, original emphasis). The dynamism of ontological determinacy of such a radical hospitality precedes and undoes identity. By maintaining this stance, Barad is very close to Deleuze with perhaps one major exception: the emphasis on an event (as a singularity) that is indeterminately related as a disruption from the outside, coming either too early or too late, but never in the present, forcing us to think and form a problematic. Silence, for instance, which Barad also acknowledges (“Silence may not be exterior to language, but this is not a walling in” (p. 543)) has a paradoxical position when it comes to “matter.” Barad personifies it: “it is matter in its inseparability from the speaking silence of the void” (p. 543, original emphasis). The paradoxical claim, “speaking silence of the void,” is not clarified. Nevertheless, Barad is cognizant of the “hostile” in hospitality, but merely lists the hostility that exists: capitalism, neocolonialism, racism, militarism all “within the nucleus of the atom” (p. 543, original italic). Barad does not explore the full extent of this Other “stranger” despite its recognition.

Put another way, when calling on quanta there is no “event horizon” of a black hole as Barad has already named it as the explosion of the atom bomb, but it does not return to its full “quantum” supposition, namely its coldness of in|difference, only a “groundless abyss” (the physics void as Barad mentions) which is “rebellious,” and “devouring” as Deleuze (1990, p. 306) says, “Nothing but Elements.” Extinction and suicide, as part of quanta, in short, a world without the Other where there are no potentialities or virtualities, no infinity of the possible. Here we are confronted once more with in|difference of the anorganic. It is not of the “nature” of hospitality. Such a quantum level cannot be personified (“the nucleus of the atom is an implosion of violent legacies,” p. 543, original italic), nor anthropomorphized and cannot, as Barad claims, be extended to all nonhuman, or more-than human. Not only Levinas, but Derrida and Barad do not know what to do with the “wholly Other,” the absolute and singular Other (Laruelle’s One) that points to the catastrophe that, as already mentioned, is the extinction event itself (the Bomb). Rather than radical hospitality, what is more difficult is radical hostility, the indeterminacy of radical evil that must be grappled with after the event (of the atom bomb). What about “mad” or “schizophrenic” matter if it is to be personified, as Barad does? The horror of Thanatos continues to be repressed as it is acknowledged, if only to condemn it.

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We can move from Barad’s Bikini Island to Deleuze’s (1990, pp. 301–320) “Desert Island” where he thinks through identity by dwelling on Tournier’s Robinson Crusoe book. This is also a question of creation, and notably a tale of ends rather than origins as in the title of Barad’s own essay addressed above: “After the End of the World.” Deleuze problematizes the poststructuralist Other and its psychoanalytic variant, the big Other that designates radical alterity of the symbolic order. He makes a distinction between the transcendental surface and transcendental depth, which transposes as nonsense and sense; between them there is “an original type of intrinsic relation, a mode of co-presence” (p. 68) so that nonsense is the generic element of sense. When it comes to perception and the imagination, transcendental depth is required. For a possible world to exist a “similar Other” is necessary. “In short, the Other, as structure, is the expression of a possible world. [ . . . ] ‘Other = an expression of a possible world’” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 308, original italic, p. 310). Such a position appears consonant with Barad, Derrida, and Levinas.

Deleuze then goes on to query what happens with the separation of this transcendental surface or “surface-other” from transcendental depth: the situation of Crusoe on the desert island. What are the consequences of no Other? A world without others means no transcendental depth. The ego or subject is no longer bound by a normativity to the Other. A spectrum of neurodiversity becomes possible at this preindividual level. Tournier’s Crusoe “becomes” the island, his vision reduced to the individuation of things. He can only imagine their surfaces and, at other times his perceptions result only in dwelling on singular objects without his ability to generalize or categorize them. Each flower in a field, for instance, is fixated on, each can be named in its specificity. Perception in such cases is unable to “subtract” and frame the world as its intensity overwhelms it. This is the horrific confirmation of quanta as in|difference, not subject to “queering,” personification, nor anthropomorphization. An identification with the island, however, can also be construed as an unconscious, mythical elan for isolation and infinite creativity and imagination, a blank slate to dream with as the island becomes the material transcendental field pushing it into depthlessness or sans-fond (without ground, a bottomless abyss). While a full dissolution of the structure of the Other can lead to forms of psychosis, there is also the possible creation of contra-imaginaries, what Lacan developed as a sinthome in his 23rd Seminar on Joyce in reply to the challenge posed to psychoanalysis by Deleuze and Guattari.

While certainly a contentious inference, the extraordinary array of neurological behaviors that fall under the contested medical term, autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is an important consideration to raise here. Both Guattari at La Borde and Deleuze recognized the significance of the pedagogical work with autistic youth by Fernand Deligny. There has been a long-standing recognition of a link between creativity and certain forms of non-normative neurological dispositions in the autistic spectrum (Pennisi et al., 2021). The paradigm case of so-called “savant artists” (Pring et al., 2012) with autism is that of “Nadia” (Selfe, 1977) whose creativity seemed to digress as her language acquisition increased. I conclude this section then with a speculation: What if the imagination in the “true” sense of creativity is rooted in the reconfigurations of anorganic life? To access singularity and difference means to abandon, yet not dissolve the “similar Other,” to be on a “desert island” and read its “signs” but without going “mad,” just enough to see “surfaces” otherwise without their accompanying depth that the Other normalizes. It seems “risky” yet telling why creativity proper is so rare.

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