RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Agonism and Design; Incompletion
“I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.”
Elena Ferranta, cited in Schappell and Ferrante (2015)
Following Ferrante’s lead, it is contended here that designs exist as parts of tangled knots, which they do not seek simply to untangle but to entangle otherwise. In that sense, designs are made out of tangles.
Quantum entanglement
Quantum entanglement was named ‘spooky action at a distance’ by Albert Einstein. It describes the phenomenon of two spatially separated particles influencing each other, even when the distances are large. The entanglement observed at the sub-atomic level in physics labs lasts only a tiny fraction of a second.
As Dean Radin (2007: 606) explains, the most useful mathematics used in quantum theory was wave mechanics. The interesting thing about waves is that they are not precisely located in the way that we regard an object as being specifically located here or there. A wave is spread out in both space and time. The theory predicted that if two particles interacted with each other then, according to the equations used to describe this interaction, the two separate particles would become a single, more complex particle-system. Contrary to common sense, the two particles could no longer be regarded as being completely separate. One consequence of this prediction is that if you perturb one of the two particles after they interacted, then the other particle would respond, regardless of how far apart the two particles were. This makes no sense from a classical physics point of view as we do not often experience the world in that “nonlocal” or interconnected way.
It took a further 30 years before physicist John Bell developed a way of testing this interconnection or entanglement prediction to see if nonlocal connections really did exist. Starting in the early 1970s and continuing until the present time, many laboratory demonstrations of entanglement have taken place. They first demonstrated the phenomenon at the level of photons and electrons and later in larger systems of atoms and molecules. Physicists continue to look for entanglement in larger objects because, in principle, any physical or energetic object, at any size, can become entangled. Once entanglement has occurred, the particles might appear to go their separate ways, but they are actually not quite so separate. They maintain connections that transcend time and space.
Radin, along with other scientists, poses the question of what if the concept of quantum entanglement, which we know exists in elementary particles, extended up through the domains of chemistry, biology and psychology, emerging into the realm of human experience? Could entanglement be useful as a metaphor for explaining some human experiences? Furthermore, what if this idea was more than a metaphor: what if the fabric of reality really was all quantum, all the time?
Extending the notion of entanglement to the mind, Radin (2007: 607) comments,
“What the entangled minds idea suggests is that the universe is not really located outside yourself, because if everything is truly entangled, then there is no clear distinction between inside and outside. Everything arises out of a single, holistic medium.”
Radin (2007: 607)
Intra-active entanglement
A distinct line of thinking about entanglement can be found in the work of Karen Barad (2007). Her notion of entanglement refers to a thoroughly relational account of ontology in which entities never preexist as discrete, atomic individuals with determinate boundaries that subsequently combine or interact with other preexisting individuals. Rather, as the quantum experiments that prompt this account demonstrate, not even atoms are “atomic” entities prior to their measurement or observation, but emerge as either particles or waves only intra-actively, that is, as part of mutually exclusive techno-scientific practices and discourses.
Following Barad, Denise Ferreira da Silva says she prefers the term ‘deep implicancies’ over ‘entanglement. because for Ferreira da Silva entanglement is still informed by the possibility of separation, of disentanglement or a return to a moment before the knot was made. In their film, ‘4 Waters: Deep Implicancy’, Ferreira Da Silva and Arjuna Neumann take implicancy to stand for entangled forms of responsibility that keep the operations of extraction, disposession, segregation, externalisation and optimisation in process.
Entanglement with the more-than-human world
O’Gorman and Gaynor (2020: 727) note that, since archives are teeming with multispecies exchanges, it is important to practice the “arts of noticing” and attentiveness to the entanglements of the more-than-human world in examining such kinds of historical sources. More-than-human histories which take seriously the notion of co-constitution require the abandonment of our commitment, however residual it may be, to the conceptual division between human and nonhuman, society and environment and instead narrate the multi-species and multi-natural entanglements present in all historical processes (O’Gorman and Gaynor, 2020: 728) .
Multi-species entanglement
For Donna Haraway (2008: 106), one of the implications of recognising the outrageousness of human exceptionalism requires working on behalf of the moral entanglements of human beings and other organisms in ways that one judges, without guarantees, to be good, that is, that appear to deserve a future. She seeks to imagine (2008: 273) ongoing animal–human lives that are attentive to complex histories of animal–human entanglements, fully contemporary and committed to a future of multispecies natural-cultural flourishing in both wild and domestic domains.
Communitarian entanglements
Arturo Escobar (2018: 177-178) writes that the Mexican sociologist Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar (2012) has proposed the concept of entramados comunitarios (communitarian entanglements) which she opposes to coalitions of transnational corporations. These are two contrasting modes of the organization of the social. By communitarian entanglements Gutierrez Aguilar means, as translated by Escobar, “the multiplicity of human worlds that populate and engender the world under diverse norms of respect, collaboration, dignity, love, and reciprocity, that are not completely subjected to the logic of capital accumulation even if often under attack and overwhelmed by it”
Terrestrial bias
The term ‘entanglement’ suggests something that can be knotted, like a rope or a vine. It remains a compelling metaphor in environmental humanities research. However, entanglement has a noticeably ‘terrestrial’ bias, as brought to attention by Melody Jue (2020), when used in the context of diffuse substances like water, sound-waves or gases. Understanding such diffuse substances may require a more liquid metaphor, such as ‘saturation’ (Jue and Ruiz, eds, 2021).
Implications for design practices
Forlano (2017: 17) observes that the hybrid figure of the posthuman, as well as related concepts such as post-humanism, the non-human, the multispecies, the anthropocene, the more-than-human, the transhuman and the decentring of the human, greatly expands our understandings of the multiple agencies, dependencies, entanglements and relations that make up our world. The consideration of humanity’s role in environmental and socio-technical changes, and the ways these changes shape humans and the world, makes it possible for us to reflect on the implications of these hybridised notions for epistemology, ontology and ethics. As we develop our understandings of human and non-human knowledge and ways of being in the world, we will also develop corresponding design methods, frameworks and practices that better address the challenges we face as a planetary species.
References
Davies, B. (2021) Entanglement in the world’s becoming and the doing of new materialist inquiry. London, UK: Routledge.
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Forlano, L. (2017) Posthumanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Elsevier, 3(1), pp. 16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.
Gamble, C. N. and Hanan, J. S. (2016) Figures of entanglement: special issue introduction, Review of Communication, 16 (4), pp. 265–280. doi: 10.1080/15358593.2016.1221992
Gutierrez Aguilar, R. (2012) Pistas reflexivas para orientarnos en una turbulenta .poca de peligro. In Palabras para tejernos, resistir y transformar en la época que estamos viviendo, by Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, Raul Zibechi, Natalia Sierra, Pablo Davalos, Pablo Mamani, Oscar Olivera, Hector Mondragón, Vilma Almendra, Emmanuel Rozental, 9–34. Oaxaca, Mexico: Pez en el Arbol.
Haraway, D. J. (2008) When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Jue, M. (2020) Wild blue media: thinking through seawater. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jue, M. and Ruiz, R. (eds) (2021) Saturation: an elemental politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
O’Gorman, E. and Gaynor, A. (2020) More-Than-Human Histories, Environmental History, 25(4), pp. 711–735. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emaa027
Radin, D. (2007) Consciousness and Our Entangled Reality, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 3 (6), pp. 604–612. doi: 10.1016/j.explore.2007.09.005
Schappell, E. and Ferrante, E. (2015). The Mysterious, anonymous author Elena Ferrante on the conclusion of her Neapolitan novels. Vanity Fair, 27 August. Available from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child [Accessed 30 August 2015].
Thiele, K. (2017) Entanglement, in Bunz, M., Kaiser, B. M., and Thiele, K. (eds) Symptoms of the planetary condition: a critical vocabulary. Luneburg, DE: Meson Press, pp. 43–48.
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