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

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It is clear why Barad liked this quote by E.P. Thompson and Newman goes into this anti-essentialist emphasis in post-structuralist thought which was a useful move as applied to gender, but had severe limitations when elaborated in other contexts.

Class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works . . . the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise.... class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”Another key section which was an important part that I had to work through when writing a review of Andrea Ballestero’s book A Future History of Water was this section where Barad traces a genealogical lineage from Lefebvre through to David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, into her own work:

Agential realism grounds and situates knowledge claims in local experiences: objectivity is literally embodied. Barad, K. (2017a). No small matter: Mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering. In A. Lowenhaupt Tsing, H. A. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene (pp. G103–120). University of Minnesota Press.Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Quantum Physics is a strangely intimidating topic, even though it just makes a whole lot of sense once you dig into it. In this publication, Karen Barad presents a worldview that has far-reaching implications for the way we humans should interact and treat our environment. Barad, K. (2012a). Nature’s queer performativity (the authorized version). Kvinder, Køn & Forskning/women, Gender and Research, 1–2, 25–53. Murris, K. (2019). Choosing a picturebook as provocation in teacher education: The ‘posthuman family’. In C. R. Kuby, K. Spector, & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education: Knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 156–170). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106083 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna (editor): 1993 ,The “Racial” Economy of Science: Towards A Democratic Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bohr, Niels: 1949, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’, in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp. Evanston: Northwestern U. Press.

A]n elegant mesh of detailed explanations of social theories, scientific concepts and new pathways of technological innovation; all explored and then rewoven to form the carefully constructed foundation for her theory of agential realism.” — Jennifer M. Wilson, Feminist Review Blog Murris, K., & Muller, K. (2018). Finding child beyond ‘child’: A posthuman orientation to foundation phase teacher education in South Africa. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, M. Zembylas, & T. Shefer (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education (pp. 151–171). Palgrave Macmillan. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. In G. Dahlberg & P. Moss (Eds.), Contesting early childhood series. Routledge.

She doesn't take phenomenon to be as opposed to noumenon in the Kantian sense but opposed to objects in the subject-object distinction. While she puts scare quotes around "subject" and "object" distinction, these scare quotes are meant to present such terms in their generic specificity rather than their philosophical baggage. Objects don't exist out there. Rather than material construction determining how something exists directly, Barad's take is that discursive practice formulates an apparatus that entangles materiality to determine what exists "out there". While science is suspect to conception (theories), Barad want show that what's at stake in agential realism is that our conception of the entire situation doesn't simply highlight the terms of the concept but it also highlights the condition upon which we presume truth to be available. In her Introduction Barad wants to understand the epistemological and ontological issues that quantum physics forces us to confront, like what it means to be objective, what the nature of measurement is, or the meaning of “making”(24). She says she wants to employ a “diffractive” method (25) in her study, reading insights from different social and scientific theories through each other. The ambition in this is evident, as she explicitly explains that her model of "agential realism" - her core theoretical framework – applies equally to the realm of physics as it does to the realm of social science ("new interpretation of quantum physics" (36), which initially I thought was pretty nuts). The “diffractive” in that methodology is inspired by the likes of Donna Haraway, who argue that we need to diffract rather than “reflect” in social science methodology (29 – there is a nice but slightly misleading table visualising this on pp. 89-90). A term that frequently reappears is "intra-action", which is Barad’s alternative to the common notion of interaction, which necessarily implies two separate entities bridging some kind of divide to affect one another (33). Instead, most of the phenomena she talks about in her book involve actions of matter/beings that cannot be “objectively” (in the traditional, Einsteinian sense of the word) be distinguished. These concepts of “diffraction”, “infra-action”, and “objectivity” reappear frequently throughout the book. Agential realism privileges neither the material nor the cultural. The apparatus of bodily production is material-cultural, and so is agential reality. I first read some chapters from this book in a Marxist reading group maybe a year ago, and most people in the group were very critical of this text. I very recently read a critique of Barad and new materialism more broadly in the same reading group. We read a text by Stuart Newman, a cell biologist and anatomy professor at New York Medical College, who wrote a critique of new materialism in the journal Marxism and Sciences. His main critique is summarized fairly well in the last two paragraphs of the paper:Murris, K., & Borcherds, C. (2019b). Childing: A different sense of time. In D. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist post-qualitative research for 21st childhoods (pp. 197–209). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350056602 Murris, K. (2020). Posthuman de/colonising teacher education in South Africa: Animals, anthropomorphism and picturebook art. In P. Burnard & L. Colucci-Gray (Eds.), Why science and art creativities matter: STEAM (re-)configurings for future-making education (pp. 52–78). Brill Publishers. https://brill.com/view/title/54614 Mayberry, M. (1998). Reproductive and resistant pedagogies: The comparative roles of collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy in science education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: the Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 35(4), 443–459. Appendix C Controversy concerning the Relationship between Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Juelskjær, M., & Schwennesen, N. (2012). Intra-active entanglements: An interview with Karen Barad. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 21(1–2), 10–23.