Karen Barad and the Unresolved Challenge of Collectivity: A Case for New Materialisms

In this paper, I start by pointing out that despite their differences, Slavoj Žižek and Karen Barad share an understanding of the notions of relationality, processuality, and immanence as central tenets of materialist philosophy. As I argue, however, it is collectivity that acts in both Žižek’s and Barad’s works as a safety valve that lends immanence, processuality, and relationality their materialist quality. To support this argument, I demonstrate that certain forms of collectivity underlie the passage from Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty to Niels Bohr’s indeterminacy in Barad’s interpretation of Bohr’s ‘philosophy-physics’. I call those forms of collectivity "collectivity as ontological necessity" and "collectivity as methodological necessity" respectively. However, I claim that there is a further form of collectivity, which I call ‘collectivity as inclusive and holistic overdetermination’, that Barad overlooks and that conditions the indeterminability of indeterminacy. As I argue, the latter also has implications for political agency. I conclude by briefly sketching out how these forms of collectivity can determine the production of subjectivity and, as a consequence, shape the subject’s collective action.

3 from completely grasping itself by dirempting it from itself, thus opening up a gap between the subject and itself. This is because "materialist" is a term that can apply to anything that is already given (and therefore immanent) and that, by being internalised, prevents the subject from becoming finite, that is, from being identified and determined.
These topics are again taken up in more detail in Zizek's The Parallax View (2006). Two additional elements are added to that of immanence in order to form what we might call the materialist triad: relationality and processuality. Whereas immanence answers the question of "how, from within the flat order of positive being, the very gap between thought and being, the negativity of thought, emerges," 6 Žižek (echoing Kierkegaard) defines processuality in terms of the need "not to overcome the gap that separates thought from being, but to conceive it in its 'becoming.'" 7 Concerning relationality, the subject acquires its processual mode of perpetual be(com)ing because it appears as the "reflexive twist," a "necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my 'material existence.'" 8 These three characteristics constitute what Žižek calls the parallax moment, which encapsulates the following insights: (a) what we know as the subject is the result of the strained relation between the subject and its potential self (relationality); (b) the subject, therefore, sees itself as forced to remain open and in a state of iterative becoming (processuality); (c) the external determinant of the subject will be internalised and-more importantly-will appear as having always been an integral part of the subject's identity (immanence). Seen in this way, the parallax moment is not a concrete moment or instance within the subject's temporal process of be(com)ing. Rather, it corresponds to the realization that subjectivity is tantamount to the chasm that necessarily emerges as soon as thought tries to conceive of itself, or-as Žižek puts it: a "gap which separates the One from itself." 9 In what follows, I argue that it is collectivity that must be acknowledged as the safety valve that guarantees that immanence, processuality, and relationality can avoid the idealist pitfalls and unfold their materialist qualities. To substantiate my argument, I turn to the work of Karen Barad, one of the leading thinkers on new materialisms, whose understanding of materialism is also permeated by the notions of relationality, processuality, and immanence. 10 As I demonstrate, collectivity underlies-in two subtle   but unequivocal forms-Barad's explication of the transition from Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to Niels Bohr's indeterminacy principle. However, there is a third form of collectivity that both conditions and serves as a foundation for indeterminacy, thus accounting for indeterminacy's indeterminability. I call this form "collectivity as inclusive and holistic overdetermination," and it is striking that Barad does not seize the opportunity to harness the promise of collectivity in this form. As I contend, however, in accordance with Dorothea Olkowski (2016), the latter has important repercussions both for the subject's political agency and for the concrete forms of political practices that could be derived from it since it robs Barad of the chance to rethink the interdependence of the subject and its/ the Other within this collective paradigm. 11 As will be shown, this disregard is more of a consequence of Barad's understanding of materialism as informed through Jacques Derrida's radical alterity than mere neglect. Therefore, in the last part of the article, I will try and sketch how thinking collectivity as "an inclusive and holistic overdetermination" could help us reconsider not only the subject's structuration but also the way it relates to the Other as well as, ultimately, the kind of practices that could be derived from this collective structuration of the subject and the Other as a collective.

II. From Uncertainty to Indeterminacy: Collectivity as Ontological and Methodological Necessity
The significance of Barad's contribution within and beyond the context of new materialisms cannot be put into question. 12 For the purposes of our discussion, Barad's concept of agential realism seems to fulfil all three of Žižek's criteria for materiality. Within the framework of her agential realism, matter is processual because it "does not refer to a fixed substance" but is rather "substance in its intraactive becoming-not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity." 13 Further, and unlike traditional ontologies, matter's agency manifests  Barad," Soziale Welt 66, no. 3 (2015): 261-280. 13 Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 822; see also Karen Barad, "Nature's Queer Performativity," Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 125. itself as a dynamism of forces. Bringing about the end of the constructionism that the discursive turn instantiated, Barad argues that the primary semantics of matter are neither material nor discursive but "material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted." 14 Therefore, they are "strictly" 15 relational, meaning that matter exists simultaneously as a relation and in a relation where all designated "things" are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. The third element of Žižek's materialist triad, immanence, is equally obvious.
Were matter decipherable through its qualities, e.g., the positive or negative potentiality to act or cause (agency), then the results that matter brings about would be determinable and identifiable in advance. This would render agency external to matter since the actions and their results would be presumable before being materialised. As Barad claims, however, agency is neither "something that someone or something has" 16 nor "an attribute." 17 Rather, it is "the ongoing reconfiguration of the world" 18 and, therefore, a performative, immanent "enactment." 19 As we have seen, however, these three notions would not be materialist without an underlying understanding of collectivity that lends them their materialist character. To ascertain the latter, we must turn to Barad's radical rereading of Bohr's theoretical writings.
Barad's goal in revisiting Bohr's philosophy-physics is to develop a "coherent framework." 20 To this end, she proposes agential realism as an overarching paradigm to bridge and address "both the epistemological and [the] ontological issues" 21 at stake. The first part of Barad's argument consists of unmasking Heisenbergian uncertainty as a mere epistemic assumption. As Barad's rendition of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle lays bare, "a determinate value of the electron's momentum is assumed to exist independently of measurement, but we can't know it; we remain uncertain about its value, owing to the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement interaction." 22 Bohr, however, is unsatisfied with such a merely epistemic assumption of uncertainty and articulates the need to corroborate it ontologically so as to authenticate it. The reason, according to Barad, is that concepts like uncertainty "are meaningful" for Bohr-"that is, semantically determinate, not in the abstract but by virtue of their embodiment in the physical arrangement of the apparatus." 23 From this perspective, uncertainty, too, must be divested of its pure epistemic character since the latter is the result of certain "conditions of possibility." 24 Uncertainty may well express an epistemic necessity, but this is neither metaphysically nor transcendentally, but rather ontologically conditioned. And this leads Bohr (and Barad) to shift the conceptual framework and supplement uncertainty with indeterminacy. While uncertainty could be misunderstood as connoting a stage of "unknowability per se," indeterminacy should make clear that what only seems unknowable in reality designates the impossibility of pinpointing it to a single measurement because of "what can be said to simultaneously exist." 25 Uncertainty thus becomes the epistemic form of an unavoidable delimitation imposed upon our cognitive horizon by the simultaneous (i.e., synchronous) existence of matter, rendering it not just uncertain but indeterminate.
It is not impossible to know; nor is it uncertain whether we can know. On the contrary, what we know is indeterminate because it assembles as or in itself and bears within it, at each and every moment, the simultaneous co-existence of more than one measurement, meaning and location, making it impossible to single out which of those measurements, meanings and locations is uniquely responsible for what we know. In this light, indeterminacy is not the impossibility of determining something. Rather, it describes the awareness that what exists consists of more than one property, quality, or measurement.
This accomplishes the paradigm shift from uncertainty to indeterminacy. By acknowledging that "what can be said to simultaneously exist" 26 functions as the ontological "condition of possibility" of what can be known to exist, Bohr (and Barad) found themselves obliged to supplement uncertainty with indeterminacy. However, as I will presently show, it is collectivity that conditions not only the paradigm shift from uncertainty to indeterminacy but also the conditions of indeterminacy, thus becoming the reason for indeterminacy's indeterminability. In order to comprehend this, however, we need to take a step back and examine the forms of collectivity that permeate Barad's reconstruction of Bohr's philosophy-physics.
Thus far, collectivity has already appeared-subtly, but unequivocally-twice. It first appeared in the form of a methodological necessity. By postulating, with Bohr, that uncertainty needs to be understood as the result of an ontological structuration, Barad draws attention to the fact that in order to comprehend what is observed, we need to analyse it by taking into account not only its epistemic complexities (pertaining to how knowledge is possible) but also its ontological structuration (pertaining to what lies at hand and needs to be learned). Pure or abstract epistemological axioms on their own are not without epistemic interpretation. For Barad, theoretical principles-no matter how painstakingly reconstructed-must be corroborated by empirical reality. 27 And epistemology must be rectified with a collective understanding in which theory and practice inform each other in a reciprocal, mutual, and egalitarian fashion.
The second time collectivity springs forth is when both the essence of the structural mode and the organisational structure of this material reality is itself recognised as being collective in its structuration.
Not only does the method of observation need to leave its solipsistic character behind and become collectivized. More importantly, the material reality in question is to be regarded as a collective one since what exists can only be asserted as existing in a simultaneous manner. This bears witness to the existence of more than one matter, meaning that if we are to grasp matter in its complexity, we must take into account its plurality, as well as the ways in which (types or bits of) matter relate(s) to (other types or bits of) matter. Matter's mode of existence is simultaneity, and as such, it is impossible for matter to persevere solipsistically on its own. Whereas the form of collectivity as a methodological necessity refers to the metatheoretical framework necessary for approximating matter, this second form of collectivity refers to how matter is structured. This is not to say that this form of collectivity is the result of a mental or conceptual perception process that dogmatically dictates us to impose upon the material reality a collective mode of its organisation. Rather, it is the differential, diverse, and simultaneous co-existence of different types of matter that forces our perception to collectivise our epistemological tools in order to grasp it in its variety and plurality. For this reason, it is appropriate to speak of this type of collectivity as an ontological necessity.
If this diagnosis is correct, then the forms of collectivity that underlie Barad's reconstruction of Bohr's philosophy-physics cast a new light on two elements that are also crucial to Barad's theory of agential realism: her theory of subjectivity and her concept of agential cuts. Barad is undoubtedly right to seek 27 Therein, Barad is still close to the classic or Western Marxist understandings of epistemology. For the young Marx, epistemic truths can assume themselves as such only if confirmed (bestätigt), as he says, from the empirical reality they attempt to capture and only by acknowledging the limitations that the social context and social interactions within which were generated impose upon them (see See Karl Marx, Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts of 1844 andThe Communist Manifesto (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 104-5). Similarly, Theodor W. Adorno disowns scientistic solipsism, i.e., the idea that science is to be understood as a self-contained system of principles and deductions and that this method can be applied in an undifferentiated manner to both the natural and the social sciences. Instead, he pleas for constellational thinking, as he terms it, leaning on Benjamin, that underscores the dependency of scientific thought on societal presumptions that are framed within concrete ideological limitations (see Theodor W. Adorno, "Why still Philosophy?" in Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, ed. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 5-18).

Thomas Telios
8 to put an end to "the metaphysics of individualism." 28 By illustrating, via her notion of intra-action, that the individual is not an integral entity but instead an entanglement-and therefore subject to processes and mechanisms of continuous and incessant re-articulation, reconfiguration, and recalibration-she makes an invaluably plausible contribution to the ongoing debate on decentering subjectivity. The forms of collectivity as ontological and methodological necessity help to elucidate some of the most difficult and hermetic passages of Barad's conceptualisation of subjectivity. Take, for instance, Barad's assumption-a direct critique of Butler's understanding of subjectivity as a "place-holder" 29 -that there is "no discrete 'I' that precedes its actions" 30 or that there is "no 'I' separate from the intra-active becoming of the world." 31 The notion of collectivity as an ontological necessity helps to relativise the metaphysical tone that such an assumption could implicate by highlighting the processual and historical nature of intra-actions. Intra-actions, just like the mechanisms that condition their emergence and the indeterminacy that characterises their interplay, are not metaphysical assumptions that need to be presumed. If this were the case, then Barad would have to fall back on the epistemic metaphysicalism of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which was merely declared but not ontologically corroborated until Bohr undertook and fulfilled this task. Rather, indeterminacy and intra-actions exist and can unravel their interminable functionality only thanks to a prefigured collection or assemblage of entities that will subsequently, at a later stage, intra-act with one another. Further, it is thanks to the underlying, this time methodological, form of collectivity that we can make sense of Barad's argument that "our (intra)actions […] never leave us" but are instead "sedimented into our becoming." 32 And for Barad, it is, of course, the subject as a collective sedimentation that springs forward from the interplay of the different intraactions and that comprises the innumerability of intra-actions that brought it forward. Barad calls such phenomena agential cuts and defines them as "boundary-drawing practices." 33 They allow us to conceive of the subject's structuration from within, i.e., by taking, each and every time, a different interplay of intra-actions as the dominant causality of the subject's emergence without having to appoint and elevate one of these different causal explanations to the subject's sole causality. This notwithstanding, the agential separability that enables a viewpoint of "exteriority-within-phenomena" 34 does not render the subject non-determinable. Rather, the subject must be approximated as an indeterminate entity, meaning that it emerges as a complex entity that bears within it all possible significations that were "sedimented into [its] becoming," demanding-in the spirit of what was diagnosed as the underlying form of methodological collectivity-to be approached, not by clinging to a single dominant narrative but by incorporating as many viewpoints as were entangled in the subject's process of structuration.
If, as Barad postulates, entanglement leads to "cutting things together and apart," 35 then there must nevertheless be a moment, albeit a fugitive one, where the elements that were cut together and apart can be thought of as already existing in a sort of relationship and not as just floating in a state of unidentified and unidentifiable limbo before entering new processes of articulation. 36 This logical observation demands that a further model of reflection be introduced-one that is capable of theorising this inherent relationality and interdependence of the different material units on one another by bringing to the fore this necessary operation of keeping apart what cannot but be considered jointly.
As will be imminently shown, this preexisting interwovenness of matter can neither be addressed as an amorph mass nor be exhausted in bipolar or binary inter-elemental relationships. Rather, matter exists and appears through entanglements of matter and then again through entanglements of the entanglements by mode of collectivity. Within this framework, not only is indeterminacy manifested as the result of intra-action, but intra-actions should also be seen as the result of collections of matter that provide the material for entanglements, and that must be acknowledged as having to exist both prior to and through entanglement. In this light, emphasising the dependence of intra-action on the collectivity of matter that precedes it is not tantamount to arguing for "the prior existence of separately determinate entities," 37 which would indeed be a characteristic of metaphysical individualism, of which Barad is right to warn us. 38 On the contrary, making intra-actions conditional on an already prefigured collectivity of matter runs counter to the metaphysics of individualism because it opposes the metaphysical solipsism of individualism to the preexisting plurality and complexity of collectivism.
As soon as not only subjectivity but every material entity must be understood as being part of a preexisting collectivity to which it must be juxtaposed, a third type of collectivity begins to shimmer through. This model of collectivity acquires the form of an inclusive and holistic overdetermination that neither simply ontologically conditions the subject's (or mutatis mutandis the matter's) epistemic indeterminacy nor simply demands that a plural methodology be applied to render it decipherable. More fundamentally, this type of collectivity seems to serve as a condition of indeterminacy, thus functioning as indeterminacy's indeterminability. In order to grasp where the third form of collectivity emanates from, we need to revisit the-hitherto only roughly mentioned -notion of inseparability, which is central to Barad's account of Bohr's philosophy-physics.

III. From Indeterminacy to Indeterminability: Collectivity as Holistic and Inclusive
Overdetermination Turning now to Barad's notion of inseparability, it is important to mention that Barad does not introduce this concept to designate a state in which, due to the inherent complexity of entities that intertwine or overlap with one another, it is impossible to ascertain where the traces of agency lead back to. Rather, inseparability arises because those traces of agency that produce matter are overdetermined and therefore lead back to more than one etiological causae. In this light, inseparability does not connote the ontological quality of the inability to decipher and discern, which then renders the identification of matter impossible. Instead, inseparability confirms and acknowledges the epistemological insecurity of providing a sole and exclusive account of the production of matter. This renders the different accounts, retellings and narratives of how matter comes into being -processualy, relationally and immanently -contingent, as Barad correctly asserts. Nevertheless, the surrounding collectivity of matter, which sets in motion the processes of entanglement from which matter emanates and which provides the framework out of which these contingent narratives unravel, must be acknowledged as having to be necessarily 'always-already' 39 at play. Therefore, while the different narratives of how matter comes to be are contingent, the collectivity is not contingent but necessary. In other words: The different accounts of how matter comes into existence or the alternative paths it could have taken may be contingent and as such indicative of the openness of matter production. The diversity of matter production, as well as the singularity of the produced matter, necessarily depend, however, on the collection of various preexisting elements which enframe them. 40 But that's not all: In the framework sketched here, the notion of contingency also needs to be revisited since it does not designate amorphousness or uncertainty. Rather, it refers to the infinite variations of overdetermination that cannot but be logically assumed to entangle with one another in a parallel and simultaneous -this is, necessarily collectiveway. Only from this perspective, can materialism deal a fatal blow to the metaphysics of individualism.
By historicizing the subject upon conditioning it from (a form of) collectivity that is both holistic and inclusive, materialism appears as a form of analysis that can accommodate all matter, leave nothing outside, and, by convoluting the etiological chains of matter's emergence, forces matter to become (and -more importantly -remain) overdetermined since it can never again be thought of in its individuality but as the result of entangling collectivities. 41 It is in this additional form as holistic and inclusive overdetermination that collectivity concludes the paradigmatic shift from uncertainty to indeterminacy and from indeterminacy to indeterminability.
If uncertainty were found to be the epistemic guise of an ontologically conditioned indeterminacy that was the result of entanglements that needed a complex and plural methodological framework in order to be deciphered, then the collectivity of matter that preexists its every dis-entanglement would be the raison d'être and condition of indeterminacy. The holism of collectivity as overdetermination debunks the individualism of matter by demonstrating how matter is entanglement per se and how, behind the façade of matter's singular appearance, there is always collectivity at play, which at the same time ensures that individualism will not appear by supplementing metaphysics with historical processuality. Matter combines within itself the collective character of its eventuation and its solipsistic and individualistic appearance by hiding the former behind the latter. In parallel with the forms of collectivity as a methodological and an ontological necessity, collectivity expresses, in the form of holistic overdetermination, the logical necessity (i) of keeping apart what at a second stage will be considered entangled and (ii) of searching for the entanglements that always lie behind an individualist façade. However, if collectivity's holism functions as the structural conditionality of indeterminacy by overdetermining it, as we have seen, then collectivity as not only holistic but also inclusive overdetermination conditions the politicality of collectivity. In order to address the latter, we need to reexamine the role that the concrete social Other plays within Barad's theoretical framework.

IV. Rethinking Alterity: On Collectivity as a Political Program
In her most recent work, Barad defends some of her most relevant earlier concepts from critiques they have received. First, Barad redefines and strings together her notions of agential cuts, intra-actions, 41 At this point, Barad is very close to Judith Butler's counter-offensive against those involved in "a war on the idea of interdependency" (see Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 67). At the same time, and as Kathrin Thiele accurately points out, she is also very close to "the quest of immanence" that Deleuze and Guattari initiated when they conceived of "an ontology that … imagines an 'immanence immanent only to itself'" (see Kathrin
Agential cuts radically rework relations of joining and disjoining. Separability in this sense, agential separability, is a matter of irreducible heterogeneity that is not undermined by the relations of inheritance that hold together the disparate without reducing difference to sameness.
Entanglements are not a name for the interconnectedness of all being as one, but rather specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. 42 In addition to rethinking some of her own older notions, Barad introduces two new notions: that of "cutting together/apart" 43 and that of "(be)coming together-apart." 44 These two neologisms connote the "iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling," 45 the "coming together of opposite qualities within, not as a flattening out or erasure of difference, but as a relation of difference within," 46 and, last but not least, a "dis/jointed movement … that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements." 47 The latter formulations can be interpreted as alluding to traits and fundamental operations of materialism as a collective science in the above-sketched way. When Barad emphasizes that cutting together-apart designates "one move" 48 or that-as quoted above-differentiating and entangling consist of one sole move rather than successive moments in a (mono-)linear process, we can interpret this as implying the form of ontological collectivity. There, just as here, cutting togetherapart could be assumed to indicate the collective movement that pertains to bringing distinctive matter together and letting it merge and entangle, before dispersing it and gathering it anew. Furthermore, superposition, although not a new concept, seems to slowly move us away from the idea of representing "ontologically indeterminate states," 49 coming closer to what Barad only recently described as the ability to be at the same time here and there, now and then, dead and alive, 50 and which was referred to here as collectivity in the form of holistic and inclusive overdetermination. Last, but not least, the notion of multiplicity-though not stricto sensu a technical term in her earlier work-seems to gradually move to the foreground and connote something like a collective methodology. These similarities should suffice not only to substantiate Barad's alleged "Derridean turn" 51 but to point towards a "collective turn" in Barad's work that should not go unnoticed. As I argue, though, it is exactly due to this novel but discernible recent trend in Barad's work that her theory becomes vulnerable to critique. Thus far, I have shown that although Barad seems to acknowledge collectivity as both a methodological and an ontological necessity, she overlooks collectivity in the form of a holistic and inclusive overdetermination, which ultimately leads her to misjudge necessity as a modality inherent to collectivity. As mentioned in the introduction, this has serious consequences for forms of political agency and forms of political practice. Moving on now to address the latter, we must approach this issue independently of the question of whether Barad is aware of the collectivist paradigm underlying her work. Regardless of whether Barad would concede that a collectivist paradigm underlies her work, she is nevertheless conscious of the fact that, within her new-materialist, feminist body of thought, every conventional notion is to be subjected to reconceptualization. As she emphatically declares: "Quantum entanglements are not the intertwining of two (or more) states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of two-ness, and ultimately of one-ness as well. Duality, unity, multiplicity, being are undone. 'Between' will never be the same. One is too few, two is too many." 52 Furthermore, it would be unfair to presume that the potential for an actualized concept of collective and political agency or an actualized catalogue of collective practices has eluded Barad's attention. As she states, commenting on Butler and echoing Badiou: "Any proposal for a new political collective must take account of not merely the practices that produce distinctions between the human and the nonhuman but the practices through which their differential constitution is produced." 53 This last quote should suffice to show that recognizing and theorizing the role and functionality of collectivity at play also serves Barad as a propaedeutic for carving out a new framework for political agency and new forms of collective practices. Within this collective framework, however, which seems to increase in importance in her recent work, the hitherto modes of entanglement between the Other and the subject must be recalibrated so as to account for the different circumstances in which the subject and the Other encounter each other. It is through the lens of the Other, of how the Other is addressed, of how the subject relates to its/the Other and, potential of Barad's understanding of materialism. The reason is that if collectivity, as argued so far, is the necessary methodological, ontological, and normative warrant of materialism's materiality that protects materialism from regressing to a reverse idealism, then the political practices of such an inherently collective materialism can only be collective which means that they must be carried out from the subject in cooperation and solidarity with its/the Other. While this is undoubtedly still a very abstract way of talking about politics, I think that the framework that will be provided will still suffice in order to inspire considerations on the concrete forms of political practices that could be extrapolated from such a grounding of the Political.
Unfortunately, Barad does not take the step of fundamentally rethinking the functionality of Otherness and the role of the Other in her theory. Instead, she remains confined to the all too familiar post-Derridean (ethical) politics of alterity. As she writes, echoing Derrida's radical alterity program of the 1980s and 1990s: Entanglements are relations of obligation -being bound to the other -enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an 'Other,' entails an indebtedness to the 'Other,' who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the 'self' -a diffraction/dispersion of identity. "Otherness" is an entangled relation of difference (différance). Ethicality entails noncoincidence with oneself. 54 Failure to overcome the intrinsic limitations of the Derridean framework does not mean that the politics of alterity have forfeited their radicality or that they have run out of steam. Quite the contrary: Alterity, just like critique, retains (the latter even contra Barad and Latour whom Barad directly quotes in an interview at the advent of the new-materialist turn) 55 its radical political potential -perhaps scathed, but certainly intact. Nevertheless, and unlike recent conceptualizations that have probed the challenges and newly found potentialities of the collectivist paradigm for thinking of notions such as alterity and critique, 56 Barad thinks that the Derridean framework of an ethics of radical alterity also encompasses her own new-materialist and feminist onto-epistemological framework. The latter pertains to her clearly Derridean assumption that entanglements oblige: by declaring that the subject comes into being only through entanglements, Barad allows for a shifting and deferment between the subject's actual, not- 15 yet-entangled form and its prospective, entangled and accomplished form. This generates a gap within the subject where its previous, former form becomes dependent on its prospective, consequent form.
For Barad, this diremption connotes an understanding of ethicality which "entails noncoincidence with oneself." 57 Derrida had claimed something similar for himself when he argued that "what I have attempted can also be inscribed under the rubric of the 'critique of idealism.' Therefore, it goes without saying that to the extent that dialectical materialism also operates this critique, it in no way incurs my reticence, nor have I ever formulated any on this subject." 58 By equating, as I think we should, Derrida's critique of idealism with Barad's attempt to put an end to "the metaphysics of individualism," it should be obvious why Barad feels comfortable moving within the Derridean paradigm. 59 However, it is precisely this identification with Derrida that prevents Barad from harnessing the full potential of the collective paradigm when it comes to sketching out ethical and political "questions of responsibility and accountability [that] lie at the core of scientific practice." 60 This is not to say that Barad disregards or discards collective action and agency as agential possibilities of her entangled materialism since that would mean that she forfeits her anti-humanist, anti-essentialist and anti-idealist framework.
As she undoubtedly claims: "Agency is not about choice in the liberal humanist sense; agency is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including the boundary articulations and exclusions that are marked by those practices." 61 Further, echoing herein Badiou, 62 Barad clearly intends to ground collective actions holistically and immanently, i.e., as actions that leave no one behind and are performative-historical in their origination, meaning that they are not metaphysically or representationally grounded. In addition, it must be added 62 This point bears a further uncanny similarity to Alain Badiou, particularly to his dictum that revolution must "impose itself on all the elements that help to bring about its existence;" Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010), 208.
how privileging collectivity and accepting the eventual loss of singularity within such superindividual structures may bear witness to the existence of a certain "discourse power-knowledge nexus" 64 that countenances discursive constructionism over materialist objectivity. 65 To what extent, then, does Barad's alignment with Derrida in regard to the relationship of the subject to alterity and Otherness prevent Barad from realising the expectations generated by the collectivist paradigm that lies in the background of her work? In my view, this pertains to the fact that by clinging to an incommensurable and irreducible Other, Barad cannot go all the way to collectivise the subject and to extrapolate a theory of collective-materialist subjectivity that acknowledges in the Other not only an obligor but the vector of the subject's subjectivation, and therefore, also the conditioning element of the subject's collective agency. Instead, for Barad, the Other cannot but remain asymptotic to the subject. The subject orbits around the Other but is never entangled by it. The subject and its Other inter-act but do not intra-act. 66 By contrast, and in light of the above analysis of the three forms of collectivity, a proper materialist entanglement such as those identified by Barad would extrapolate out of the subject an entity that is permeated by the Other to such an extent that it is impossible to differentiate between the subject and its/the Other. It would require that we acknowledge the interdependence of the subject and the Other and that we involve in our analysis of the subject's becoming all entangled modes of subjectivity production that encounter, intersect and in-form one another in/as the subject. At the same time, it would acknowledge the Other as more than a vector of these subjectivation processes. Rather, it would explicitly stress the necessity of including the Other in the subject's practices, since the subject only exists through the entanglements it experiences due to the Other's simultaneous existence. Finally, there could be no emancipation of the subject and its/the Other from each other but, as Martin Saar puts it, "collective self-determination" 67 of the subject and its/the Other through each other.  (2012) can be considered as precursors of collectivity as methodological necessity.
Let me now briefly sketch what we win by addressing the subject as a collective that needs to include its/the Other in order to (collectively) self-determine itself. The first key insight of a collectivist understanding of subjectivity and at the same time an insight that also serves to undermine the theoretical foundations of identity politics, is that subjectivity is an intersectional, i.e., overdetermined, entity. 79 This carries with it two implications: first, subjectivity comprises more than one identity, which corresponds to different ways of subjectivity production; second, all of these identities encounter each other in the subject's body. In order to gain a complete picture of the identities that the subject's body discloses, all existing modes of subjectivity production need to be taken into consideration. Not only language and linguistic discourses but also semantization processes, biological delimitations and conditions, procedures of aesthetic and ethical value production, class demarcations, geographical and climatic differences, social institutions and political apparatuses must be considered, since all of these run through the allegedly indivisible individual to subjectivate it and bring it forward as a collective being-in-common (methodological collectivity). To do this, however, and this would be the second key insight of a collectivist understanding of subjectivity, we need to address these modes of production in their irreducibility and incommensurability, before moving on to scrutinize the ways in which these identities entangle themselves to effectuate the singularity of every particular subject. In this light, institutions and apparatuses, just like the "Other" and "otherness", become simultaneously acting particles and constitutive elements, the entanglement and intertwinement of which allows subjectivity to spring forward (collectivity as ontological necessity). This heteronomous constitution of the subject as a collective demands, however, an ultimate third key insight: the subject gives up the liberal chimaera of it ever reappropriating itself as a free individual. The collective subject cannot emancipate itself from being determined. Instead, what it, nevertheless, can, is to give in to its collective structuration and to its dependence on its/the. Other in order to enter collective actions and "collectively self-determine" 80 itself. In doing so, the subject does not only get to reconfigure itself by acknowledging its dependence on its/the Other. More importantly, the subject gets to realize that its "collective self-determination" cannot but implicate also the "collective self-determination" of its/the Other (collectivity as inclusive and 77 Theodor W. Adorno, "Parataxis," in Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109-149. holistic overdetermination). This is, in conclusion, the contradictory, dialectical, promise of collectivist materialism: that only by succumbing to its heteronomous and collective structuration as a collective and only by acknowledging that the "collective self-determination" of the Other -on whom the subject structurally depends in order to be constituted-as the precondition of the subject's own "collective self-determination"-can the subject reconcile itself and come to terms with its own way of production.
There is, undoubtedly, a lot left to be said. Yet, going back to where we started, it should now be clear why the concept of collectivity that saturates Barad's work ensures that processuality, relationality and immanence retain their materialist character inasmuch as they prevent the subject's thought from completing the circle of its identification with itself by collectivizing this process. Subjectivation remains an open and ongoing process, since the entanglements of the different material elements that contribute to its origination are forced to remain infinite (processuality). Furthermore, subjectivation as a collective process highlights how all modes of subjectivity production that are prior to the subject assemble each other in/as the subject (relationality). Finally, it is this preexisting social collectivity of (i) social and political institutions, (ii) the concrete social Other as a vector of subjectivation, and (iii) collective struggles embodied in the subject's body that sets the scene for the subject's emergence (immanence).