Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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.
Taking the writings of the great physicist Neil Bohr, Barad dehumanizes his writing by removing what Meillasoux calls “Ptolomey’s Revenge” in which the sciences (and philosophy) take the human account of things to be the end point of justification. In other words, we take our familiar human account as the basis for determining what is out there. This repetition of a human account out there forms the discursive struggle between wave-particle accounts in quantum mechanics. Barad is very quick to emphasize that discursive practice isn’t a linguistic concept, a concept in words but rather material process that determines what is to be measured and how to measure it. In her words, the agential cut has to do with distinguishing between the material affects of the apparatus of measurement in creating phenomenon.
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 of the discursive practice in formulating an apparatus of measurement determines 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.
While she makes the easy connection between material process and Judith Butler’s performativity theories, she avoids the distinction that such agential realism requires a human consciousness to perceive such distinctions. A human consciousness can provide an apparatus of measurement but the larger reality as a whole provides conditions for knowing itself. The impossibility of being able to objectively account for everything is the problem that in the universe one part of it needs to be “lost” (or in Zizek’s terms, less than nothing) for the other part of the universe to be analyzed.
This is in many accounts a difficult book to read, but Barad walks us through the trickly lines of thought. She doesn’t adhere to an (inter)subjective account of reality but rather mentions that the marks of an apparatus of measurement makes on existing bodies serves as the objective mark, one that is often itself registered in terms of the agencies of observation. In this way, agential realism is a way of noting how the universe meets itself half way, to constantly create the conditions for which unit-hood is registered and made distinct.
While a thick book, Barad has outlined 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 in itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn’t what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation.)
There is so much more I can add, but I think this sums up what the book does and is about, enough for anyone who wants to read about this kind of stuff to pick it up.
