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

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Harding, Sandra: 1990, ‘Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson. NY: Routledge. Scully, Marian O., Englert, Berthold-Georg, and Walther, Herbert: 1991, ‘Quantum Opical Tests of Complementarity’ ,Nature, 351, 111–116. Agential realism grounds and situates knowledge claims in local experiences: objectivity is literally embodied.

Folse, Henry: 1985 ,The Philosophy of Niels Bohr: The Framework of Complementarity. NY: North-Holland.Finally, agential realism emphasizes that constructed knowledges have real material consequences, which introduces the topics of accountability, responsibility, and ethics of knowing. Our discussion It's hard to overestimate the tremble of excitement that attended the publication of Karen Barad's Meeting The Universe Halfway when it first came out nearly ten years ago. Here was the work of a physicist-cum-philosopher conversant in the 'high-theory' of post-structuralism no less than the intricacies of quantum theory, a writer of exceptional clarity at home in the fields of feminist theory no less than the philosophy and practice of science. A work, moreover, that promised to rethink and reconceptualize our ideas of "space, time, matter, dynamics, agency, structure, subjectivity, objectivity, knowing, intentionality, discursivity, performativity, entanglement and ethical engagement." Spatialization as a never-ending, power-laced process engaged by a motley array of beings can be fetishized as a series of maps whose grids nontropi­cally locate naturally bounded bodies (land, people, resources-and
inside "absolute" dimensions such as space and time. The maps are fetishes in so far as they enable a specific kind of mistake that turns process into nontropic, real, literal things inside containers." (1997, 136) This chapter is an extraordinary meeting with Karen Barad. Diffracting through their own posts on social media, YouTube videos, and scholarly writing Barad is introduced. The chapter articulates a deep respect for how Karen Barad enacts their agential realist philosophy as a non-binary way of life, including how they teach and write—disrupting individualism, competitiveness, human exceptionalism, and human-centred educational practices. Resisting the kind of criticism normalised in academia, Barad’s passionate yearning for complexity shows how agential realism can work affirmatively and relationally and how it re-works concepts such as time, disease, memory, identity, family, and difference. Living a feminist, agential realist way of life demands attention to the ethical fibre that runs through the fabric of the world. Through other-than-human characters, such as magnets, 1945, slime moulds, nuclear bombs, stardust, constellations, SARS-CoV-2, lightning, and queer atoms, Barad invites the reader to meet the question How can I be responsible for that which I love? Barad’s care for differences that matter in their specificity and the Slow scholarship this entails are a true inspiration. Keywords This chapter includes a (to my eyes) brutal criticism of linguistic and cultural turns, on the basis that they all ignore the importance of matter (132). Barad's intervention is to emphasise the notion of performativity (intra-acting with things) rather than representationalism (words and symbols meaning things by themselves). This is quite clear and convincing (although I’m not sure if her definition of “apparatus” (142) can get any more obnoxious! That might be me though). Apparatuses are in Barad’s words the material conditions of possibility and impossibility (148). Her definition of “matter” (151) is perhaps even more obnoxious. I wonder whether it’s just my unfamiliarity with academic-philosophical language that makes me think that though. It could be that this reflex is caused by a kind of Occam's Razor instinct: surely a less complicated and abstruse definition for something so fundamental and mundane can be found? To her credit though, I do like the style of how Barad is introducing her little bits of the definition, frequently returning to her existing definition and adding little bits of information once we get them. I suppose I’m a little annoyed at how open-ended the definition is.

Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. In G. Dahlberg & P. Moss (Eds.), Contesting early childhood series. Routledge. 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.) 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.Honner, John: 1987 ,The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. I don’t think people like Barad are as antagonistic towards Marxists as some of them seem to believe, though I understand why they are critical of new materialism generally. Most of the time Barad mentions Marxism it is rendered awkwardly as (post-)Marxism. Bohr, Niels: 1963b ,The Philosophical Writings Of Niels Bohr, Vol. II: Essays 1933–1957 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Woodbridge, Conn: Ox Bow Press. 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.

Bohr, Niels: 1963c ,The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. III: Essays 1958–1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Woodbridge, Conn: Ox Bow Press.

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.” This book challenges the entire epistemological framework with which we think. It explains the history and workings of quantum mechanics and uses it to build this framework.

Bernstein, Richard J.: 1983 ,Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Phila: U. of Penn. Press. Kondo, Dorinne: 1989 ,Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press. The implication of this is that everything is connected. We humans can't separate ourselves from our environment, as we are our environment. As a result, we should be questioning our ethics, as the otherness we perceive needs to be understood as something way more familiar.

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 presents an account of reality she calls agential realism. While intuitively we understand this in pop explanations as "point of view" she radicalizes this account by extending it into the formal fields of post-structural philosophy and quantum physics.