The Quantum Dance and the World's ‘Extraordinary Liveliness’: Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad's Agential Realism

Abstract

In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in ‘an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility’ (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's ‘philosophy-physics’, Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its ‘extraordinary liveliness’ (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is ‘embodied in the very worlding of the world’ (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what ‘the ethical’ constitutes or should achieve.

Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery

“…Thinking with Haraway, Barad and other feminists we find the metaphor of diffraction useful in a number of ways -as an analytic technique and a way of thinking about recovery in terms of the multiplicity of relations that diffract subjectivity. Moving in a new materialist direction has involved us re-turning to ontological questions about how we think with theory and everyday stories to acknowledge the "cuts" that mediate all knowledge practices in our desire to address the limitations of interpretative humanist research (Barad, 2003;Hinton, 2013;E. A. St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016).…”

Beyond hierarchical oppositions: A feminist critique of Karen Barad’s agential realism

“…Thus Sara Ahmed has argued that some writers associated with new materialism, such as Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Wilson and Karen Barad, risk reproducing this duality when they portray earlier feminist or poststructuralist work as having privileged culture onesidedly to the detriment of an adequate account of materiality, which only new materialism is supposedly equipped to provide (Ahmed, 2008; see also: Hemmings, 2011: 101;McNeil, 2011: 436;Bruining, 2013). Yet exactly what it is about such dualities that makes it necessary to move beyond them from a feminist perspective is not spelled out by the contributors to this debate, with the exception of Peta Hinton (2013;see below). Accordingly, it is less than clear what theoretical strategies are most suited to accomplishing this goal.…”

Embodying of the self during interviews: An agential realist account of the non-verbal embodying processes of elderly people

“…However, since the embodying of the self emerged between the dualistic poles of female and male, young and old, healthy and sick, these ideas of the body are intra-related: health, for example, depended upon illness, and illness in turn was constitutively healthy; even if illness was excluded during the enactment of health, illness and health co-constituted each other within the interview apparatus of this study (cf. Hinton, 2013: 186; for a critique on dualistic classifications, see Irni [2010], who stresses the benefits of connecting Queer Studies and Age Studies to map the complexity of ‘apparatuses of ageing’). Gender, age, health, and illness are by no means determined and steady, as traditional theories of the sociology of aging tend to assume (Baltes, 1996) and as some of the elderly participants indeed articulated.…”

“…In view of the analyzed intra-actions, the popular separation of epistemology from ontology does not hold because scholars of interview research are part of the world that they seek to understand (Barad, 2007: 67); they gain their knowledge through their participation within their research practices. Since their discursive knowledge is already material knowledge influencing interview apparatuses and the phenomena to be measured, they should not be ‘caught in the epistemic momentum … putting aside a more robust engagement with the ontological dimensions of (their) own, and (their) interlocutors’ (Hinton, 2013: 173) – a demand which this analysis attempted to satisfy in the empirical section.…”