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

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Bernstein, Richard J.: 1983 ,Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Phila: U. of Penn. Press. Barad, K. (2015). TransMaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings. GLQ, 21(2–3), 387–422.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is the most important and exciting book in science studies that I have read in a long time. Karen Barad provides an original and satisfying response to a perennial problem in philosophy and cultural theory: how to grasp matter and meaning or causality and discourse together, without either erasing one of them or introducing an unbridgeable dualism. These theoretical abstractions come alive in Barad’s vivid examples; she shows that uncompromisingly rigorous analysis of difficult theoretical issues need not sacrifice concreteness or accessibility. Her methodological lessons from the diffraction of light and her convincing interpretations of familiar puzzles and recent experimental results in quantum physics also display how science and science studies can genuinely learn from one another. What other book could be a ‘must read’ in such diverse fields as science studies, foundations of quantum mechanics, feminist and queer theory, and philosophical metaphysics and epistemology?” — Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2019). Taking age out of play: Children’s animistic philosophising through a picturebook. The Oxford Literary Review, 41(2), 290–309. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2019.0284 Appendix C Controversy concerning the Relationship between Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Here Barad notes that physical and conceptual constraints of apparatuses are co-constitutive (196) - an apparatus with fixed parts necessarily excludes momentum form having meaning during the experiment, for example. She criticises Foucault's and Butler's theories for not being precise about how matter becomes matter, or rather, the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena. In her model of agential realism, humans are also phenomena, and material-discursive apparatuses that intra-act.The book also discusses some fields of research in quantum physics that lay the foundations for the ideas presented here. Experiments like the quantum eraser experiment are explained in detail and Barad also talks about the partly contradicting theories of Einstein and Bohr. It's interesting how many questions are still left unanswered. Barad, K. (2019). After the end of the world: Entangled nuclear colonialisms, matters of force, and the material force of justice. Theory & Event, 22(3), 524–550. 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.

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. A]n elegant mesh of detailed explanations of social theories, scientific concepts and new pathways of technological innovation; all explored and then rewoven to form the carefully constructed foundation for her theory of agential realism.” — Jennifer M. Wilson, Feminist Review Blog This will then open what Barad dubs agential realism through intra-active/tion diffractive thinking.Thus, employing the famous 'double slit experiment' as her exemplar - in which light appears as either a wave or a particle depending on the 'observer' - Barad pitches herself against the prevailing readings according to which the status of light is simply unknowable or 'indeterminate' until measured (recall Schrodinger's unfortunate cat, both/neither dead and/nor alive until observed). Following Bohr, Barad argues that the situation is in fact far more interesting and far more complex than one can imagine: rather than a deficiency in knowledge, at stake is in fact the very 'being' of light itself, insofar as the very idea of 'determination' only makes sense in the context of an experimental apparatus that would give determinate values meaning in the first place. Scully, Marian O., Englert, Berthold-Georg, and Walther, Herbert: 1991, ‘Quantum Opical Tests of Complementarity’ ,Nature, 351, 111–116. Honner, John: 1987 ,The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bohr, Niels: 1949, ‘Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’, in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp. Evanston: Northwestern U. Press.

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) TSElosophers meeting 15.5.2020. Ekaterina Panina, Erkki Lassila, Kari Lukka, Milla Wirén, Morgan Shaw, Otto Rosendahl, Toni Ahlqvist Barad, K. (1996). Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science (pp. 161-194). Summary 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.Baard takes the partial framework left by Bohr, contrasts it with that of Heisenberg and Einstein to display its characteristics and then build on it. As well as separating it from its humanist origins. Petersen, Aage: 1985, ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr’, in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, ed. French, A. P., and Kennedy, P. J. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press. Agential realism grounds and situates knowledge claims in local experiences: objectivity is literally embodied. In part, this is the insight of postmodernism on modernism, that there is no such thing as neutral, and thus no metanarrative, or at least a pregiven agential arrangement.