Notes on: Barad, K. (2003)
Post-humanist Performativity: Toward an
Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
28 (3), 801 – 31.
Dave Harris
[A full account of the 'elaborations' of Böhr into
the stuff on phenomena, intra-action and th like]
Recent 'turns' have given too much power to
language as opposed to materiality. Do we have a
direct access to cultural representations,
however, as opposed to 'the things represented?'
(801). [Apparently based on a critique of Descartes'
method by Rouse -- below] Matter is seen as
passive immutable, or having a potential which
depends on language and culture. There is always
'a linguistic domain as its conditions of
possibility'
Nietzsche was among the first to argue that
language is being granted too much power, that
linguistic structures do not determine our
understanding of the world, especially things like
subject and predicate structures [a strange early
version of linguistic determinism]. There is no
'prior ontological reality of substance and
attribute' (802). This is extended by
representationalism — words can mirror
pre-existing phenomena — and it supporta social
constructivist as well as traditional realist
beliefs, although it is now a matter for some
dissatisfaction both within feminist and STS
circles.
We need a performative understanding of discursive
practices to challenge this belief. We're not
talking about turning everything into words, but
rather using performativity to contest the
excessive power of language. Instead of
questioning correspondence between descriptions of
reality and reality, we focus on practices or
actions, and this will raise fundamental questions
of 'ontology materiality and agency' to replace
the 'geometrical optics of reflection' where
images and epistemology get bounced back and forth
'but nothing more is seen' [I still don't see who
is supposed to represent this trend]. We need
instead physical optics and questions of
diffraction.
We should diffractively read feminist and queer
theory and science studies approaches to rethink
both the social and the scientific. [ie develop a
general philosophy to account for both NOT just
find agreements etc] If we do so, we will see that
there is no absolute exteriority between these two
at all, just as diffraction patterns reveal the
indefinite nature of the boundaries of shadows.
The social and the scientific is a relationship of
'"exteriority within."', a doing, the 'enactment
of boundaries'. Liberal social theories and
conventional notions of scientific knowledge
assume the world is composed of individuals,
independent of the laws of nature which will be
represented. This is 'a metaphysical
presupposition' (804) that underpins
representationalism. It assumes that there is some
ontological distinction between representations
and that which they represent, that that which is
represented is independent of representing, that
there are two different and distinct kinds of
entities. Sometimes there is the third entity the
knower who does the representing and here
representations mediate between independently
existing knower and known. The question then
becomes one of accuracy of representations,
whether languages represent their referent.
There has been challenge from feminists
poststructuralists, postcolonial critics and queer
theorists, such as Foucault and Butler. Butler
uses Foucault to point out that systems produce
subjects, and we have to be careful not to present
women as an effect of feminism itself,
discursively constituted, by the same system that
it claims to break with. Political intervention
[in feminism] in particular needed to break with
representationalism.
In science studies, representationalism seemed
inadequate once we looked at actual productions of
scientific knowledge and the dynamics of the
practice of science. This approach is associated
with science studies rather than the earlier
separate multidisciplinary studies like history of
science and so on. STS does look at how scientific
representations are produced, but there is also an
effort to move beyond. Hacking, for example, or
Rouse interrogated representationalism and its
limits on theorising. Rouse in particular wanted
to go beyond the old debate between the realism
and constructivism and pointed out that these two
positions have more in common, representationalist
assumptions that concepts or data mediate access
to the material world: the differences whether
such knowledge represents things as they really
are, or objects that are produced by social
activities.
Representationalism is deeply entrenched and now
appears as common sense, natural. But it has a
history as Hocking argues, beginning with the
Greeks on atoms and the void — Democritus
suggested a level of reality that was not
immediately apparent, raising a problem about what
representations actually represented — solid
objects or clusters of atoms. Rouse blames
Descartes for dividing internal and external along
the line of the knowing subject — this produces a
'faith in word over world' (806). Rouse also
questions the accessibility of reality to
language, especially that we can know what we mean
or what we have said '"more readily than we can
know the objects the sayings are about"' — it is
all down to Descartes insisting that we can know
the contents of our thoughts better than we know
the external world. [weird interpretationof the
radical doubt experiment, where we doubt sense
data not he external world, but not thought
because that would be a contradiction. Then we
have to bring the world back in -- not just as
empirical data though. ]Representationalism is not
a logical necessity but 'simply a Cartesian habit
of mind' (807).
Performative understandings emphasize discursive
practices rather than linguistic representations.
We find these in feminist and queer studies as
well as STS, in the work of Butler, or in Haraway,
Latour and Rouse. Performative is now ubiquitous,
found in a number of other studies. Perhaps all
performances are performative? There is a
specifically post-humanist notion, however, which
'incorporates important material and discursive,
social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and
natural and cultural factors' because all the
earlier binary categories are destabilised once we
see them as produced by practices.
We have to understand this production, not only of
subjects but also matter, bodies. Foucault goes
some way towards this although he has limits, also
found in Butler [note 8 notes that Austin on the
speech act, and Derrida have also been important.
It is Butler in Gender Trouble that
develops the notion of gender performativity as
doing, a kind of becoming or activity, '"an
incessant and repeated action of some sort"'. It
was apparently Sedgwick who went on to argue that
this is 'inherently queer'].
Foucault has therefore [!] queered Marx, seeing
the body as the locus of productive forces, a site
for the articulation of power and local practices.
However, he has not given sufficient emphasis to
the physical body, sufficient to avoid any
suspicion that the biological and historical are
related just historically. We need to see other
ways in which they are connected and simultaneous,
whether or not biology also has a history. None of
these questions are possible with social
constructivism, and they are inadequately
addressed in Foucault — we need an account 'of the
body's historicity in which its very materiality
plays an active role in the workings of power'
(809). Matter is too passive and this opens the
danger of representationalism again. He has not
adequately theorized the relationship between
discursive and nondiscursive practices — it is not
enough to say that bodies are discursively
constructed, because there are also nondiscursive
practices that affect it. We need to grasp the
full materiality of power, and not restricted just
of the social, to see matter as an active factor.
The 'very atoms that make up the biological body
come to matter' (810). Cultural and
socio-historical forces are inadequate — 'there
are "natural," not merely "social," forces that
matter'. Sometimes forces labelled as social or
cultural or whatever are really
material–discursive, but following disciplinary
habits can miss these 'crucial intra-actions'
among the forces that go beyond disciplinary
boundaries.
We need a proper account of the materialization of
all bodies including nonhuman ones and how their
constitutions are defined by practices. We can
thereby relate the nonhuman to the human, even in
terms of agency as well as grasping all the
productive practices involved. This will be what
she calls agential realism — 'an account of
techno-scientific and other practices that takes
feminist, antiracist, poststructuralist, queer,
Marxist, science studies, and scientific insights
seriously' (810 – 11) [no sociology]
In this way performativity can become 'a
diffraction grating for reading important insights
from feminist and queer studies and science
studies through one another'. Performativity will
also be reworked in a materialist and
post-humanist direction.
Deleuze and Foucault are quoted briefly to show
that the relation between things and words is
problematic, and representationalism says they are
'ontologically disjoint', leaving itself with a
problem of linking them. Maybe the world already
has resemblances, things 'emblazoned with signs'?
(811). More likely, the 'knowing subject is
enmeshed in a thick web of representations' which
captures us within language and within an
imprisoning metaphysics. Representationalism
cannot solve the problem of linkage because it
cannot step out of language.
We should think in terms of 'thingification',
turning relations into things (812), and begin to
think about relations without relata — a 'cultural
proclivity' [which is assumes of course that we
have solved the problem of representationalism
precisely by stepping out of language]. Relational
ontology rejects distinctions between words and
things and acknowledges 'nature the body and
materiality in the fullness of their becoming'. We
can reject optics, notions of transparency or
opacity, absolute 'geometries' of exteriority or
interiority and seeing humans as either pure
causes or pure effects [who does that — extreme
monadism again].
We have to reject 'atomistic metaphysics' begun by
Democritus which postulates 'individually
determinate entities with inherent properties'
[it's hardly a surprise that she has to choose an
example from before modern science]. This idea
also features in 'liberal social theories and
scientific theories'. We understand entanglement
as a matter of 'various/differential
instantiations'. (813) [Which seems to leave no
room for any account of motion, or process or
social change].
Böhr's philosophy physics offered a radical
challenge to this, rejecting atomistic metaphysics
and arguing that there are no inherently
determinate boundaries or properties to 'things'
[glossing the issue of scale here], that words do
not have inherently determinate meanings, and that
the Cartesian distinction between subject and
object has to be replaced. Language is not
transparent nor is measurement, and neither just
mediate representing states of affairs. However
there is no 'nihilism or the sticky web of
relativism' — 'the possibility of objective
knowledge' remains. The work is not just based on
reflection but on new empirical findings [note 17
says that 'on my reading… Böhr can be understood
as proposing a proto-performative account of
scientific practices]. He proposed a new
epistemological framework, but did not explore the
ontological dimensions. Barad has 'mined his
writings for his implicit ontological views and
have elaborated on them' [not diffracted then?] To
develop agential realist ontology.
This advocates 'a causal relationship between
specific exclusionary practices embodied as
specific material configurations of the world
(i.e., discursive practices/(con) figurations
rather than "words") and specific material
phenomena (i.e. relations rather than "things")'.
A causal relationship between these apparatuses is
'"agential intra-action"' (814).
For Böhr, theoretical concepts are physical
arrangements, which cannot be understood in the
abstract but which take on meaning [the example is
position] only 'when a rigid apparatus' is used.
Measuring the position on an apparatus is not the
property of some abstract object but rather 'of
the phenomenon — the inseparability of "observed
object" and "agencies of observation."'. Momentum,
involves material arrangement between movable
parts. What is normally called uncertainty is 'a
straightforward matter of the material exclusion
of "position" and "momentum" arrangements (one
requiring fixed parts and the complementary
arrangement requiring movable parts)' [this is
just conventional exclusion, surely, there is
fixity and movement in both?On the other hand, at
the quantum level, the one does seem to exclude
the other ontologically] [Note 18 tells us that as
a result of this 'single crucial insight, together
with the empirical finding of an inherent
discontinuity in measurement "intra-actions"',
Böhr argued that observer and observed, knower and
known could not be inherently separable]
In an 'elaboration' (815), phenomena are not just
relations of observer and observed but the
'ontological inseparability of agentially
intra-acting "components"' — 'ontologically
primitive. Intra-action 'represents a profound
conceptual shift' — specific ones determine
boundaries and properties of the components,
making them determinate and meaningful. A specific
intra-action 'enacts an agential cut' and it is
that that separates subject and object as 'a local
resolution'. Relata in phenomena also emerge
through specific intra-actions, producing another
enactment 'agential separability — the local
condition of exteriority – within – phenomena'. It
is this form of local separability that produces
the possibility of objectivity. Agential
cuts also produce causal structures among
components, including the marking [or effects] of
agencies on measured objects [or causes], and this
replaces the usual notion of causality [note 21
offers a concrete example of light passing through
to slit grating, producing waves in one
configuration, particle in another. For Böhr this
shows the phenomenon of 'light intra-acting with
the apparatus', not that wave and particle are
inherent characteristics of the object. We have
'different cuts' that relate the measure and
object to the measuring instrument in the form of
'local material resolutions of the inherent
ontological indeterminacy'. So the results do not
conflict but simply 'mark different
intra-actions'].
In a 'further elaboration', (816) we are not just
talking about laboratory exercises engineered by
humans, nor mere laboratory instruments.
Apparatuses themselves have to be newly theorized
to go beyond scientific practices. We want to
explain a number of material–discursive practices,
including those that draw distinctions between the
social and the scientific [note 22 says this is
not just based on an analogy, but rather that
'anthropocentric restrictions to laboratory
investigations are not justified'. What about the
second bit about the social and the scientific
though?].
Apparatuses do not just inscribe or 'mediate the
dialectic of resistance and accommodation' [what a
weird addition!]. They are not neutral probes nor
do they imposed particular outcomes. In her
'further elaboration' of Böhr, they are 'dynamic
reconfigurings of the world… Specific agential
practices/intra-actions/performances through which
specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted'.
There is no outside boundary to them, so closure
is impossible in iterative reconfiguring —
'apparatuses are open-ended practices'.
Apparatuses are also 'themselves phenomena'
[necessarily -- so what marks their boundaries?]
they do not meekly serve a particular purpose. The
practices that constitute them are constantly
being rearranged and reworked as science proceeds
— 'getting instrument to work in a particular way
for a particular purpose' (817). Apparatuses
intra-act with others. And practices themselves
turn into subsequent iterations as 'locally
stabilise phenomena' get enfolded — 'boundaries do
not sit still'. [except when they do, as is common
in the macro world]
Back to phenomena as produced by 'agential
intra-actions of multiple apparatuses'. Humans are
not always involved, because the boundaries
between humans and nonhuman is are constituted by
this practice 'phenomena are constitutive of
reality'. 'The world is intra-activity in its
differential mattering', and there is nothing
other than phenomena. Local structures are
reconfigured and enacted with apparent boundaries
and properties and meanings. This is how one part
of the world 'makes itself differentially
intelligible to another "part" of the world'. It
is 'the making of spacetime itself', an ongoing
process of mattering. Normal notions of time and
space emerge, particular relations of
'exteriority, collectivity, and exclusion are
reconfigured' (818) in changing topologies.
The universe 'is agential intra-activity in its
becoming', material-discursive practices are the
'primary semantic units', while phenomena are the
'primary ontological units'. This is agency. There
are implications for post-humanism.
Discursive practices are not just based on human
language. [If we define them that way] The
boundary between human and nonhuman itself has to
be enacted, taking into account 'questions of
ontology'. If humans are phenomena with
differential becoming, with shifting boundaries
and properties, then discursivity is not uniquely
human [but all that depends on terms like agency
meaning the same for humans as it does for nature
— constructing natural phenomena is just the same
as constructing social ones. Apart from anything
else, there can be no 'free will' -- see below.]
Meaning and 'semantic contentfulness' is achieved
through particular discursive practices. Inspired
by Böhr, we can add 'agential realist points':
meaning is not just ideational but material
because it configures the world; semantic
indeterminacy is also only locally resolvable [as
in pragmatics], by 'specific intra-actions' (819).
Discourse does not just mean language or
linguistic systems — that is representationalist
thinking. Discourse is not what is said, but
rather 'something which constrains and enables
what can be said', and what counts as meaningful.
Statements emerge from a field of possibilities
not from the consciousness of the subject and this
field is' a dynamic and contingent
multiplicity'[more or less the same as structural
linguistics has always argued, together with a bit
of pragmatics in Guattari].
Foucault points to the local sociohistorical
material conditions such as speaking, measuring or
concentrating, and the production of subjects and
objects. For Foucault, the conditions are immanent
and historical, not transcendental or
phenomenological, not relating to the laws of
experience as in Kant, but in 'actual historically
situated social conditions'. There are some
'provocative resonances (and some fruitful
dissonances)' with Böhr on apparatus. [I didn't
notice any fruitful dissonances]. Apparatuses are
particular local physical arrangements acting as
conditions for knowledge practices, and, through
cuts, producing objects of knowledge practices.
This helps break conventional dualisms like
object/subject. This is an emphasis on
'materiality of meaning making', 'that goes beyond
what is usually meant by the frequently heard
contemporary refrain that writing and talking are
material practices' (820) [as in Richardson-type
stuff] . B is more precise than Foucault on how
discourses are supported by material practices,
without insisting that these practices determine
discourse: there is 'more intimate relationship
between concepts and materiality'[Note 26 blames
Foucault for sticking with a social science
demarcation, comparing the discursive with the
social, and Barad finds this 'not particularly
illuminating' compared to post-humanism -- she 'is
not limited to the realm of the social']
However after her elaboration, apparatuses are not
static embodying particular concepts, but material
practices that enact determinacies, 'exclusionary
practices of mattering'. They produce material
phenomena in 'discursively differentiated
becoming'. They produce local determinants of
phenomena, and help to deal with the indeterminacy
of ''words" and "things". Materiality and
discursivity show 'mutual entailment', if we think
of both as 'intra-activity'. We can then translate
discursive practices as specific material
reconfigurings of the world and so on, 'ongoing
agential interactions', fixing local determinacies
and all the rest of it, including local causal
structures so that effects can be seen as marks of
causes in particular articulations. Meaning is
similarly 'an ongoing performance of the world in
its differential intelligibility' [but why should
some parts of the world wish to make themselves
intelligible to human beings, through human
beings? It sounds like Hegel again]. Particular
parts of the world become determinate and
intelligible. This is never ending [but bits of it
have been very stable for eons].
Discursive practices are not linguistic with no
relation to material practices, not
'anthropomorphic placeholders' to reveal the
agency of individual subjects or cultures.
'Indeed, they are not human – based practices'.
Post-humanism operates without a previously-fixed
boundary between human and nonhuman, but insists
on 'a genealogical analysis of the discursive
emergence of the "human"' [some sort of biology of
life?]. Matter is not isolated bits of nature, nor
is it uncontested ground. It is not immutable or
passive and does not require an external force to
complete it. It is 'always already an ongoing
historicity' [note 26 (821 – 2)refers to Butler on
matter, denying any passive blank site awaiting
inscription, although this does still see matter
as' a passive product of discursive practices
rather than as an active agent', and confines
itself to human bodies]. Matter is 'substance in
its intra-active becoming… a congealing of
agency… ongoing intra-activity' (822) and this is
how phenomena 'come to matter'.
Matter is not an effect of human bodies or of
language. Material constraints and exclusions are
important factors in materialization. 'The
dynamics of intra-activity entails
[tautologically] matter as an active "agent" in
its ongoing materialization'. Boundary making
practices, 'that is, discursive practices' are
implicated — 'materiality is discursive…
Inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily
production', including the reconfiguring of
boundaries. Discursive practices are 'always
already material… ongoing material
(re)configurings of the world' [lots of repetitive
circularity here]. There is no external relation
between discursive practices and material
phenomena they are 'mutually implicated in the
dynamics of intra-activity', not reducible. They
mutually entail each other — 'neither is
articulated/articulable in the absence of the
other'. None are ontologically or
epistemologically prior, or privileged. So
apparatuses are material–discursive, and material
discursive practices are 'specific iterative
enactments — agential intra-actions' through which
matter is engaged and articulated, complete with
boundaries. This in turn reconfigures the field of
possibilities. Interactions 'are causally
constraining' (823) enactments involving the
sedimentation of matter and its enfolding.
Material conditions don't just support particular
discourses, but come to matter on their own
account. They are conjoined with discursive ones
in the form of 'constraints conditions and
practices', 'intertwined' and it is pointless to
try and separate them and determine their
individual effect. We can also avoid 'traditional
empiricist assumptions' about the transparency or
immediacy of the world [Deleuze's 'objective
illusion'], and the 'stalemate' that follows if we
just admit that our access to the world is
mediated, with 'precious little guidance about how
to proceed'. Mediation should be replaced by a
better accounting of the empirical world,
something that takes it seriously again, something
that sees that the 'objective referent is
phenomena'.
All bodies come to matter through performativity,
not only the surface of the body but its very
atoms. Bodies do not have inherent boundaries and
properties but are material–discursive phenomena.
'"Human" bodies are not inherently [weasel?
Implying some fixed notion or some 'free floating
ideality'] different from "nonhuman" ones'. We are
not talking about a vague process where some
linguistic practice actually produces something
substantive. There is 'a material dynamics of
intra-activity' (824) where the material is always
material discursive — 'that is what it means to
matter'. It is not just that human bodies are
materialized in some exclusive way — the practices
which constitute them are 'always already
implicated in particular materializations'
implying particular exclusions 'are always open to
contestation'
We need to explore the nature of causality and the
possibilities for agency in the sense of
'intervening in the world's becoming' and this
will get us onto responsibility and
accountability. 'Agential intra-actions are causal
enactments', because an agential cut separates out
different component parts of the phenomenon, one
which can become a cause and the other an effect —
so '"measurement" is nothing more or less than a
causal intra-action'. We can also, 'as a matter of
preference' [only?] Think of it as 'part of the
universe making itself intelligible to another
part' [note 30 argues that 'intelligibility is not
a human based affair. It is a matter of
differential articulations and differential
responsiveness/engagement' and this is apparently
supported by a certain Vicki Kirby. Note 38 says
that it is Kirby who offered the 'remarkable
"materialist" (my description) reading of
Derridean theory' page 829. The key book appears
to be Kirby, V (1997) Telling Flesh: The
Substance of the Corporeal. New York:
Routledge]. The important thing is that causal
interactions leave marks on bodies and
'objectivity means being accountable to marks on
bodies'.
This is not the same as the usual notion of cause
which depends on absolutes of exteriority and
interiority and of 'determinism and free
will'(825). The notion of absolute exteriority, [a
'geometry'] depends on a 'metaphysical
presumption' of an ontological distinction, as in
constructivism, where culture is an external force
acting on passive nature. However, if nature is
pre-discursive, this 'marks the inherent limit of
constructivism'. Sometimes there is a softer
argument that culture shapes nature but does not
actually produce it. If nature does not exist
before human culture, it needs to be explained how
it arises. A further alternative offers 'the
geometry of absolute interiority' where effect is
reduced to cause, or nature to culture, or matter
to language — 'one form or another of idealism'.
Agential separability presents an alternative. It
works with the notion of '"exteriority within"' a
changing topology to replace Euclidean geometry
[note 32 mentions manifolds which change relations
of connection].Tthis is exteriority within
phenomena which are already material–discursive,
so no priority is given to either. There is a
'ongoing topological dynamics that enfolds the
space-time manifold upon itself' rather than
absolute exteriority or idealistic collapse. This
apparently follows because the apparatuses of
bodily production are themselves phenomena and are
thus '(also) part of the phenomena they produce'
(826). This provides a large space of agency, and
not just because we have added nonhuman agency.
Intra-actions entail exclusions, and exclusions
prevent any possible determinism [note 35 refers
us back to the quantum where the exclusivity of
position and momentum radically changes the notion
of classic causality]. Intra-actions constrain but
do not determine — 'the future is radically open
at every turn' and this is inherent in
intra-activity. Apparatuses can reinforce each
other but even here agency 'is not foreclosed' [so
this addresses 'free will'? It is radically
possible although there are constraints? Pretty
conventional and very abstract]
If we look at a post-humanist notion of
performativity we must take into account human,
nonhuman and even cyborg forms of agency, and all
other forms. Agency becomes a matter of changes in
the apparatuses of bodily production. This takes
place through 'various intra-actions' some of
which change the boundaries around what is human.
To insist on a fixed category would be to exclude
possibilities and this is 'eliding important
dimensions of the workings of power' [power has
not been mentioned at all so far --it's effects
are mostly illusory, based on a misunderstanding
of agency?].
Agency is not just a humanist matter, not aligned
with human intentionality or subjectivity. We
don't just add on other agents. It is a matter of
intra-acting, an enactment, not something that
somebody has, not an attribute but a matter of
intra-activity, '"doing"/"being"' (827). Agency
involves enactment of iterative change to
particular practices. It is about possibility and
accountability [have not heard much about this
either so far]. 'Particular possibilities for
acting existed every moment, and these changing
possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene
in the world as becoming, to contest and rework
what matters and what is excluded from mattering'
[so here taking responsibility means activism,
political action to save what matters and to
include more mattering].
In conclusion, lots of people struggle with the
'weightiness of the world' not just science
studies but feminist queer and cultural studies as
well. There is an urge to reclaim matter. For
others, it's not just a matter of advocacy 'on
behalf of the subaltern' but a broader issue of
accounting 'for our own finitude'. Is there a
limit to the productiveness of discourse –
knowledge? Even here, these questions are commonly
addressed not by referring to the unruliness and
open-mindedness of matter, but via a reflection in
mirrors ending either with 'transcendence or our
own image', naive empiricism or the 'same old
narcissistic bedtime stories' [can she mean
Christianity?]
Post-humanism challenges the notion of materiality
as either given or just an effective human agency.
Agential realism suggests that materiality is an
active factor in materialization, not a passive
surface, not the product of cultural performance,
not mute and immutable. Feminists have long
contested the nature/culture dualism, and the
human/nonhuman one is being challenged. Feminists
have argued that the dualism limits the
understanding of both [science studies seem to
supported this]. Yet they are still offering a
limited performative account, with
'anthropocentric values in its foundations'.
A proper performative account would rethink the
relations between discursive practices and
material phenomena. Agential realism sees
discursive practices as material reconfigurings of
the world producing local determinations and
properties. Matter is not fixed but is 'substance
in its intra-active becoming' a congealing of
agency. (828). Performance doesn't just refer to
'citationality' [a term introduced in the
discussion of Butler --referencing meanings?] but
to 'iterative intra-activity'.
In science, the knower is not absolutely external
to the natural world and there can be no exterior
observational point. It is not absolute
exteriority that guarantees objectivity. Instead
we need to think about 'agential separability —
exteriority within phenomena'. We are part of the
world, not detached. Böhr argued this by saying
that we are part of the nature we seek to
understand, although he limits this 'in his
ultimately humanist understanding of the "we"'
[didn't allow for nonhumans]. Kirby, by contrast,
challenges the idea of human identity something
enclosed and finished, not just in nature but
'"inherently unstable, differentiated, dispersed
and yet strangely coherent"' [let's hear more
about this coherency!]. We can't just say it is
nature because that would involve 'prescriptive
essentialism' instead, we need to animate nature
and see it as '"performing itself differently"'.
We cannot arbitrarily construct an apparatus, nor
simply apply 'causally deterministic power
structures' to satisfy particular projects. They
are 'themselves specific local parts of the
world's ongoing reconfigurings' [well we might
have emerged from 'nature', but are there no
emergent human effects? Does human language and
culture make no difference?]. Laboratory
experiments, concepts and other practices are
'part of the material configuration of the world
in its intra-active becoming. "Humans" are part of
the world body space in its dynamic structuration'
[Hegel without God]
Practices of knowing are not entirely human. We
use nonhuman elements, but, more important,
'knowing is a matter of part of the world making
itself intelligible to another part'. Knowing and
being are 'mutually implicated'(829) — 'we know
because "we" are of the world'. Epistemology and
ontology have been separated only by a metaphysics
assuming a difference between 'human and nonhuman,
subject and object, mind and body, matter and
discourse' we should think of instead of an
onto-epistem-ology' — 'the study of practices of
knowing in being' this will help us understand the
ways in which 'specific intra-actions matter'.
[One problem is that I suspect a lot of this is
definitional. Take a phenomenon, something that
has components inside it, interrelated and
co-constituting each other. Intra-actions which
also emanate from within the phenomenon are
capable of agential cuts, however which separate
out the components and put them into more limited
relations, causal ones for example. The thing is
that these separations and relations can be quite
persistent and widespread, as with the effect of
gravity, so what exactly is added by a
philosophical speculation about whether there is
some inner connection as well? Why do we need such
a general ontology, if local effects seem to be
the most important in producing what we can see of
the material world? Barad's argument seems to be
that some possibilities are excluded. Perhaps new
technologies can reawaken some of them, or new
social practices — but everything will depend on
those local practices and what affects and
constrains them and whether they can be changed or
not. Her approach overtheorises
interrelationality.
There is the other issue of tautology. Certain
concepts 'entail' each other, but what sort of
entailment is this? Phenomena entail intra-action,
but is that a definitional matter — phenomena must
contain intra-action or presuppose it, and
intra-action itself works with phenomena not
isolated components. Intra-action both explains
and surpasses normal causality. The whole thing
can look like a philosophical game where
implications are pursued into science fiction. The
possibilities for feminist politics are alluded to
here and there, together with words like 'power',
but does this fulfil the usual function of making
philosophy relevant — as usual, is it necessary
for feminist politics to understand quantum
theory?
NB 'responsibility' here seems limited to
political activism? But we are responsible for and
to everything in the later versions]
back to Barad page
|
|