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Reading Notes: Barad, "Agential Realism"
This is the one I have to present on. I picked it because it mentioned physics and I figured I was probably better equipped to deal with it than the rest of the class, which might be true although ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chagrined is more of a nerd than xie believes and may be competitive in this category. :) In case you're curious, the way the presentation works is that I take notes here (I don't actually post all of my notes publically by the way, I sometimes use private posts when things are personal, embarrassing, or just crap), then I spend a couple of hours polishing those into quotes and discussion questions, and then I publish that elsewhere for all the students to read before class, and then we ignore most of what people have said in favor of having a hilariously meandery awesome conversation. ;)
Anyway, so there's this paper.
"Language matters. Culture matters. Discourse matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn't seem to matter anymore is matter." KAREN BARAD I LOVE YOU.
"Performativity, properly constructed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real." Barad is willing to go so far as to say that we give language more power than it deserves.
"Representationalism, metaphysical individualism, and humanism work hand in hand" to allow mankind to construct ourselves as the center of everything, the narrative observer, the "individual apart from all the rest." Various branches of theory try to pull our perspective away from this but ultimately get caught up in it. She suggests a "posthumanist performative approach," that is one focused on "practices, doings, and actions" rather than on the relationship between the symbolic and the real. "Questions of diffraction rather than reflection." Page 7/136 has a detailed definition of posthuman that I don't want to copytype but is worth coming back to. The gist is that human exceptionalism is problematic, and nature and culture are not divided cleanly. In fact, nothing is separate from anything else! ...Well, there's no presumed separation, anyway. I expect thta a detailed analysis of matter could demonstrate separation? We'll see what she goes on to say. Yes. OK, good.
Representationalism as flawed like Zeno's paradox cannot help but bring me to Godel, Escher, Bach. Also, I didn't know Bohr spoke out against Cartesian duality.
She intends to advocate "a relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differently enacted and specific material phenomena." OK! I can get behind that. (It's been nine pages, please talk about a material configuring of the world or a material phenomenon?) "According to Bohr, theoretical concepts (eg position and momentum) are not ideational in character but rather specific physical measurements." "The inseparability of the the object and the measuring agencies." So I agree with this to a point, even without her going and proving her point. If you measure the momentum of a ball, you are actually measuring the actual momentum of that actual ball. It's not an idea. It's a vector. But if you say "momentum" and you are thinking "m * v" that's... conceptual, isn't it? The idea that position and momentum require different conditions to be measured and that's why you can't know both, OK, sure. But. Momentum, in general, isn't an idea?
intra-action versus interaction in order to not assume boundaries between entities. Um, OK. Agential rather than Cartesian cut between subject and object. "apparatuses are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices --- specific material (re)configurings of the world --- which come to matter." You could say the same about theoretical perspectives, that they're not just observational tools but are actually generating the picture that we see when we use them. I don't think that's where she was going, but it's where I went. (Later: Oh no maybe it is where she is going.)
"Phenomena are constitutive of reality."
What is an apparatus? "Apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." Iteratively. Why iteratively? Because the apparatus is used to measure something, but also changes it, such that the next time the measurement is taken, the relationship of the apparatus to the measurement is different, and so on? (see apge 32/161 for a sort of answer)
Bohr recognizes that the apparatus makes a conscious subject/object split, but doesn't address where the apparatus ends and the observer begins. This places the observer at the center, like described at the beginning, except in the picture instead of out of it. He also treats the apparatus as hermetically sealed and unstuck in time. So... are we part of the apparatus? Is that where we are going?
Butler and Foucault are too limited by the human. That is an objection to Foucault I have not seen before. Good on you, Barad.
"Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said."
"Human bodies and human subjects do not pre-exist as such; nor are they mere end products. Humans are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming." Huh. This is philosophy. You told me we were doing physics. It's interesting philosophy, though. This brings me back to those Deleuzian vectors I think. There's a Deleuze/Guattari paper this week, I'll have to see if it connects here at all. --- Wait, later she says "What constitutes the human (and the nonhuman) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but neither is it a free-floating ideality." That conflicts! That's _great_, I can pit these two ideas against each other. What does she say it _is_? "not some ill-defined process by which human-based linguistic practices (materially supported in some unspecified way) manage to produce substantive bodies or bodily substances, but rather the dynamics of intra-activity in its materiality." OK... this seems like a jab at Deleuze to me, or at least at that idea of the plane of the ideal. Everything, I think she is saying, is tied up in the real and in the world we live in. I think I like this idea, but I'm not sure.
Phenomena as the smallest material units? HUH.
Boundaries of the body as a major question. Boundaries emerge through practice; our visual processing creates boundaries where there aren't boundaries. If you hold your hand to something, it's not X atoms of hand and X atoms of thing. There's also a cyborg theory/disability studies thing going on here, which reminds me that I should call Erin from Brandeis one of these nights and talk shop now that I've actually read any of this stuff at all. Prostheses become part of the body as they are used; I get this feeling sometimes about things I use/am, my bicycle in particular, once I'm on it I don't tend to think of it as a tool so much as I think of it as a posture. And that's, what, 30-60 mintues a day? I expect if I spent 8-16 hours a day using some sort of mobility technology I would integrate it way more. (Also I don't have to just expect it, there's a quote from someone who has had this experience, although I suppose that's not a guarantee the same thing would happen to me, either.) "It is often only when things stop working that the apparatus is first noticed." This is totally how I relate to a _bunch_ of technology.
The Stern-Gerlach experiment is a great story. Apparently bad cigars are a crucial part of the experimental apparatus.
"Responsibility is not the exclusive right, obligation, or dominion of humans." ...I'd really like to believe this but I'm not convinced. Let's see if she backs this up. (Answer, I don't think so, at least not in a practical sense. At a very theoretical level, maybe.)
OK, so how do you create objectivity? I would have expected from a different paper the answer "you don't" but Barad pushes harder than that and actually I like what she comes up with. She says: "what replaces Einstein's favored spatial separability as the ontological condition for objectivity is agential separability --- an agentially enacted ontological separability within the phenomenon." Rather than a person enacting a Cartesian cut, the apparatus itself enacts the cut "within the phenomenon." (Is there potential a la Kristeva for a rupture in this binary?) "Differential agential cuts produce different phenomena."
"What is the nature of causality according to this account?" Page 49 talks about an ethics of knowing, which honestly doesn't make any sense to me but is worth bringing up in class and saying "Hey people who understand ethics AT ALL, what does this mean?"
"Matter isn't situated in the world'; matter is worlding in its materiality." This lines up with the way I understand the Big Bang and universe expansion, which may or may not be, you know, _correct_.
In a footnote, on why she picked posthumanism as a word: "transhumanism has already been appropriated for unreflective technophilic purposes and suggests a transcendent position."
In another footnote: "Apparatuses may (but need not) include both humans and nonhumans. In any case, apparatuses are not to be understood as assemblages of preeexisting separately determined individuals of one kind or another."
chagrined is more of a nerd than xie believes and may be competitive in this category. :) In case you're curious, the way the presentation works is that I take notes here (I don't actually post all of my notes publically by the way, I sometimes use private posts when things are personal, embarrassing, or just crap), then I spend a couple of hours polishing those into quotes and discussion questions, and then I publish that elsewhere for all the students to read before class, and then we ignore most of what people have said in favor of having a hilariously meandery awesome conversation. ;)Anyway, so there's this paper.
"Language matters. Culture matters. Discourse matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn't seem to matter anymore is matter." KAREN BARAD I LOVE YOU.
"Performativity, properly constructed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real." Barad is willing to go so far as to say that we give language more power than it deserves.
"Representationalism, metaphysical individualism, and humanism work hand in hand" to allow mankind to construct ourselves as the center of everything, the narrative observer, the "individual apart from all the rest." Various branches of theory try to pull our perspective away from this but ultimately get caught up in it. She suggests a "posthumanist performative approach," that is one focused on "practices, doings, and actions" rather than on the relationship between the symbolic and the real. "Questions of diffraction rather than reflection." Page 7/136 has a detailed definition of posthuman that I don't want to copytype but is worth coming back to. The gist is that human exceptionalism is problematic, and nature and culture are not divided cleanly. In fact, nothing is separate from anything else! ...Well, there's no presumed separation, anyway. I expect thta a detailed analysis of matter could demonstrate separation? We'll see what she goes on to say. Yes. OK, good.
Representationalism as flawed like Zeno's paradox cannot help but bring me to Godel, Escher, Bach. Also, I didn't know Bohr spoke out against Cartesian duality.
She intends to advocate "a relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differently enacted and specific material phenomena." OK! I can get behind that. (It's been nine pages, please talk about a material configuring of the world or a material phenomenon?) "According to Bohr, theoretical concepts (eg position and momentum) are not ideational in character but rather specific physical measurements." "The inseparability of the the object and the measuring agencies." So I agree with this to a point, even without her going and proving her point. If you measure the momentum of a ball, you are actually measuring the actual momentum of that actual ball. It's not an idea. It's a vector. But if you say "momentum" and you are thinking "m * v" that's... conceptual, isn't it? The idea that position and momentum require different conditions to be measured and that's why you can't know both, OK, sure. But. Momentum, in general, isn't an idea?
intra-action versus interaction in order to not assume boundaries between entities. Um, OK. Agential rather than Cartesian cut between subject and object. "apparatuses are not mere observing instruments but boundary-drawing practices --- specific material (re)configurings of the world --- which come to matter." You could say the same about theoretical perspectives, that they're not just observational tools but are actually generating the picture that we see when we use them. I don't think that's where she was going, but it's where I went. (Later: Oh no maybe it is where she is going.)
"Phenomena are constitutive of reality."
What is an apparatus? "Apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." Iteratively. Why iteratively? Because the apparatus is used to measure something, but also changes it, such that the next time the measurement is taken, the relationship of the apparatus to the measurement is different, and so on? (see apge 32/161 for a sort of answer)
Bohr recognizes that the apparatus makes a conscious subject/object split, but doesn't address where the apparatus ends and the observer begins. This places the observer at the center, like described at the beginning, except in the picture instead of out of it. He also treats the apparatus as hermetically sealed and unstuck in time. So... are we part of the apparatus? Is that where we are going?
Butler and Foucault are too limited by the human. That is an objection to Foucault I have not seen before. Good on you, Barad.
"Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said."
"Human bodies and human subjects do not pre-exist as such; nor are they mere end products. Humans are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming." Huh. This is philosophy. You told me we were doing physics. It's interesting philosophy, though. This brings me back to those Deleuzian vectors I think. There's a Deleuze/Guattari paper this week, I'll have to see if it connects here at all. --- Wait, later she says "What constitutes the human (and the nonhuman) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but neither is it a free-floating ideality." That conflicts! That's _great_, I can pit these two ideas against each other. What does she say it _is_? "not some ill-defined process by which human-based linguistic practices (materially supported in some unspecified way) manage to produce substantive bodies or bodily substances, but rather the dynamics of intra-activity in its materiality." OK... this seems like a jab at Deleuze to me, or at least at that idea of the plane of the ideal. Everything, I think she is saying, is tied up in the real and in the world we live in. I think I like this idea, but I'm not sure.
Phenomena as the smallest material units? HUH.
Boundaries of the body as a major question. Boundaries emerge through practice; our visual processing creates boundaries where there aren't boundaries. If you hold your hand to something, it's not X atoms of hand and X atoms of thing. There's also a cyborg theory/disability studies thing going on here, which reminds me that I should call Erin from Brandeis one of these nights and talk shop now that I've actually read any of this stuff at all. Prostheses become part of the body as they are used; I get this feeling sometimes about things I use/am, my bicycle in particular, once I'm on it I don't tend to think of it as a tool so much as I think of it as a posture. And that's, what, 30-60 mintues a day? I expect if I spent 8-16 hours a day using some sort of mobility technology I would integrate it way more. (Also I don't have to just expect it, there's a quote from someone who has had this experience, although I suppose that's not a guarantee the same thing would happen to me, either.) "It is often only when things stop working that the apparatus is first noticed." This is totally how I relate to a _bunch_ of technology.
The Stern-Gerlach experiment is a great story. Apparently bad cigars are a crucial part of the experimental apparatus.
"Responsibility is not the exclusive right, obligation, or dominion of humans." ...I'd really like to believe this but I'm not convinced. Let's see if she backs this up. (Answer, I don't think so, at least not in a practical sense. At a very theoretical level, maybe.)
OK, so how do you create objectivity? I would have expected from a different paper the answer "you don't" but Barad pushes harder than that and actually I like what she comes up with. She says: "what replaces Einstein's favored spatial separability as the ontological condition for objectivity is agential separability --- an agentially enacted ontological separability within the phenomenon." Rather than a person enacting a Cartesian cut, the apparatus itself enacts the cut "within the phenomenon." (Is there potential a la Kristeva for a rupture in this binary?) "Differential agential cuts produce different phenomena."
"What is the nature of causality according to this account?" Page 49 talks about an ethics of knowing, which honestly doesn't make any sense to me but is worth bringing up in class and saying "Hey people who understand ethics AT ALL, what does this mean?"
"Matter isn't situated in the world'; matter is worlding in its materiality." This lines up with the way I understand the Big Bang and universe expansion, which may or may not be, you know, _correct_.
In a footnote, on why she picked posthumanism as a word: "transhumanism has already been appropriated for unreflective technophilic purposes and suggests a transcendent position."
In another footnote: "Apparatuses may (but need not) include both humans and nonhumans. In any case, apparatuses are not to be understood as assemblages of preeexisting separately determined individuals of one kind or another."
no subject
no subject
Anyway, I suspect that I wouldn't get on with this paper too well. I take the more existentialist position that every subject is their own center of everything, and that injustice starts when we deny the fundamental seperateness/everything-ness of any given subject.
no subject
That's a nice change from some of the "symbols all the way down!" notes that've wandered past.
You could say the same about theoretical perspectives, that they're not just observational tools but are actually generating the picture that we see when we use them.
This feels like a thought worth chewing on. Having an equally solid grip on multiple theoretical perspectives is tricky!
I am enjoying your notes.
no subject
no subject
I wish I could remember the book which I read that discussed how neurological pathways get reprogrammed to take advantage of prostheses (medical and not). Tried to look it up, but no dice.
"Responsibility is not the exclusive right, obligation, or dominion of humans." ...I'd really like to believe this but I'm not convinced.
I was thinking about this the other day after having read "Last Chance to See," which is about very specific animals going extinct and the very specific scientists trying to save them. I am not convinced that a small number of other species do not have some concept of responsibility (chimpanzee group, for instance, I don't think could function without some rudimentary understanding of "if I do this, you do that," which I think is the basic impulse that becomes responsibility in either its positive or negative forms) but I am becoming convinced that even those animals cannot take much responsibility for anything other than other members of their species (and, perhaps, a few specific other species). I am pretty convinced that humans are not the only ones with language, or tools, or some form of morality or responsibility--but I am becoming more and more convinced that humans are the only ones who have the capability of feeling responsibility toward things that are not like themselves at all (plants, for instance), or things that are inanimate.
I'm glad that she critiqued transhumanism that way; I always shied away from using the word because I wasn't the kind of dragon who wanted an iPod implanted into my skull.
no subject
And I would not characterize the boundary between my hands and this laptop to be a function of my visual processing, but I did spend a bunch of time today mapping the concepts involved in the electronic structure of solids, so.
I'm glad that someone has translated quantum mechanics for this audience, but I'm worried that some nuances were lost in the process :/
no subject