‘Temporality is produced through the iterative enfolding of phenomena marking the sedimenting historiality of differential patterns of mattering … Time has a history. Hence it doesn’t make sense to construe time as a succession of evenly spaced moments or as an external parameter that tracks the motion of matter in some preexisting space. Intra-actions are temporal not in the sense that the values of particular properties change in time; rather, which property comes to matter is re(con)figured in the very making/marking of time.’ (Barad 2007, p. 180)
Karen Barad’s quantum exploration of the enfolding of matter in space time offers different perspectives on the interconnections of the time and temporality of texts. How far does a quantum poetics allow a classification of textual materiality as matter, so that a text is an event-happening comprising historial sedimentation as well as patterning a difference of becoming? How does enfolding of the creative and critical in a text re(con)figure, make and mark time?
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Duke University Press: Durham, 2007)