Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

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Barad, K. (2012a). Nature’s queer performativity (the authorized version). Kvinder, Køn & Forskning/women, Gender and Research, 1–2, 25–53. Murris, K. (2021a). Making kin: Postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist research. In K. Murris (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist terrain across disciplines: An introductory guide (pp. 1–22). Routledge. Harding, Sandra: 1990, ‘Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson. NY: Routledge. So the two strands of this book that are most interesting to me are the strand about interpretation and knowledge, and the strand about materiality and semiosis. Which are interconnected, because how could they not be?

This will then open what Barad dubs agential realism through intra-active/tion diffractive thinking. Although the “Copenhagen Interpretation” is often taken to be a common understanding among physicists, Barad denies that there ever was any single interpretation or any durable agreement about it. The open issues ordinarily do not impede continuing research in physics, but they matter in ways that may have far more immediate implications for our interactions with our environment, our apparatuses, and with one another: she goes on to examine which open questions have been experimentally resolved, but more broadly what questions arise when we accept the findings of the Solvay conference, namely that is ultimately impossibility for a researcher to truly withdraw from either the tools or the object of his or her work. Murris, K. (2021b). The ‘missing peoples’ of critical posthumanism and new materialism. In K. Murris (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist terrain across disciplines: An introductory guide (pp. 62–85). Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine: 1993, ‘Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation’, in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. by George Levin. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Drawing from Bohr, Barad argues that reality is the stuff of intra-actions, meetings between mutually constituting bodies in a non-causal world, rather than some external, preexisting thing to be observed, represented, or cleanly reflected. The argument is interesting and her use of quantum physics to try to prove it more so, but the question lingers: How does one prove an ontology? Her argument assumes prima facie that ontology, epistemology, and semantics are entangled, constituting one another... Which leaves this lingering question uncomfortably evaded. On the other hand, if it is true that there is no preexisting reality, then how can we definitively prove such a thing when such reality is, in its prima facie assumptions, at best only partially accessible to empirical methods of evidence because of the separateness/preexistence that defines it? Thus is the unresolvable dilemma of ontology (at least for a logician...Al-Ghazali would refer to "dhawq," fruitional experience, as a realm of knowledge above rationality). Barad's description of agential realism is interesting but, like those it argues against, it remains an idea. True, she contends that ideas are ultimately "marks on bodies," -- but I would say that that description in itself is also an idea; how would we even know what these marks were if we are all entangled?...I understand her desire to complicate the picture, but here I feel that we reach the problem of being left "without definition," so to speak, and while I don't appreciate critiques that dismiss arguments as "not useful" or "not provable," I think in this case the character and force of Barad's argument itself becomes weak and unnecessarily ambiguous. It fails to recognize that, in an important sense beyond the academic jibber jabber of empirical/nonempirical intellectual persuasions, everything is epistemic. She might view this as too humancentric a perspective...but, by definition, aren't all perspectives we know humancentric because we, as humans, are the perceivers? Even if we recognize nonhuman entities as shaping our "humaness", that recognition is, perhaps, a human one. If there is a way out of this problem, I'm not sure an appeal to science and evidence, as Barad does in chapter 7 especially, is effective (again, see Al-Ghazali); in fact, this use of evidence seems to contradict her other challenges to empiricism in the first place. TSElosophers meeting 15.5.2020. Ekaterina Panina, Erkki Lassila, Kari Lukka, Milla Wirén, Morgan Shaw, Otto Rosendahl, Toni Ahlqvist Barad, K. (1996). Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science (pp. 161-194). Summary Haraway's critique of models of spatialization that reify complex prac­tices and make them into things inside containers captures some of the key elements of the kinds of shifts in refiguring space, time, and matter that I am interested in exploring here, including the dynamic and contingent material­ization of space, time, and bodies; the incorporation of material-social fac­tors (including gender, race, sexuality, religion, and nationality, as well as class) but also technoscientific and natural factors in processes of material­ization (where the constitution of the "natural" and the "social" is part of what is at issue and at stake); the iterative (re)materialization of the relations of production; and the agential possibilities and responsibilities for recon­ figuring the material relations of the world. I offer a systematic development and further elaboration of these and related ideas. I consider how agential realism can contribute to a new materialist understanding of power and its effects on the production of bodies, identities, and subjectivities. Central to my analysis is the agential realist understanding of matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things. I de­velop and explore these ideas in relation to the political theorist Leela Fer­nandes's ethnographic study of the materialization of the relations of production, where questions of political economy and cultural identity formation are both at work on the shop floor. Scully, Marian O., Englert, Berthold-Georg, and Walther, Herbert: 1991, ‘Quantum Opical Tests of Complementarity’ ,Nature, 351, 111–116.

Agential realism privileges neither the material nor the cultural. The apparatus of bodily production is material-cultural, and so is agential reality. This is one of the greatest philosophical books I have ever read. Karen Barad draws on figures such as Judith Bulter, Donna Haraway, and Michel Foucault to investigate the ontological implications of the insights in quantum physics of Niels Bohr. She argues for a completely new way of looking at the world, which she calls "agential realism," where the relationship preexists and constitutes the relata. Subject and object (or rather, the "agencies of observation" and the "object of observation") are not independently existing individuals, but exists on in their "intra-action." Barad criticizes the metaphysics of individualism, which is responsible for problematic representationalist and humanist presuppositions, while reconceptualizing notions such as causality, agency, objectivity, and responsibility.Thus Barad outlines an approach that is sure to provide a new framework for understanding why the experience of reality is different for so many, as our material practice is the conceptual condition by which discursive practices actualize... not as representations of a transcendentalism but through the conditions of materiality itself, entangled within itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn't what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation of a baby as a complete whole.) Bohr, Niels: 1963a ,The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. I: Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Woodbridge, Conn: Ox Bow Press.