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October 7, 2012

Thinking With Barad Part 1: Philosophy Physics and Posthuman Performativity

In between work and other writing commitments I have been slowly chipping away at Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. My original intent was to post or publish a full essay on Barad’s work and how it interfaces with various other new materialisms, speculative realisms, and object-oriented philosophies. However, because Barad’s work has become a central topic of discussion recently it seems apt to post my take on her work sooner rather than later. I’m posting my review of her book in two parts: Part 1 will focus on setting up Barad’s “ontoepistemology” (her term) and will introduce some of her central influences. In Part 2 I will focus on discussing Barad’s work in relation to other contemporary philosophical developments in ontology. Part 1 is posted below and I hope to have Part 2 up within a week or two.

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June 18, 2012

Barad’s Agential Realism (Part 2)

Another paragraph from the essay on Meeting the Universe Halfway that I am slowly putting together:

There is no doubt that Butler’s work on performativity features as a strong influence in Barad’s book; by extension, Foucault’s analysis of regulatory power and discursive practices feature here as well (cf. pp. 133 – 135 and pp. 145 – 153). If Butler’s work can in some sense be seen as a deepening of Foucault’s, we might likewise see some of Barad’s work as an extension of Butler’s (to be sure all three make important contributions on their own, but a lineage of sorts can be detected nevertheless). The best part of Barad’s reading of Butler and Foucault is that it’s written in the mode of a generous critique. Barad’s intent is stated in advance, “One of my main aims is to contribute to efforts to sharpen the theoretical tool of performativity for science studies and feminist theory endeavors alike, and to promote their mutual consideration” (pp. 135 – 136). Barad continues, “Crucially, an agential realist elaboration of performativity allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity” (p. 136). These quotations reveal Barad’s sympathy towards performativity, and the means by which she seeks to extend it. Pivotal to this extension is Barad’s serious engagement with ontology—with reconceptualizing how we consider matter and agency. In this regard, “The space of agency is not only substantially larger than that allowed for in Butler’s performative account, for example, but also, perhaps rather surprisingly, larger than what liberal humanism proposes” (pp. 177 – 178).

June 8, 2012

Barad’s Agential Realism

I’m just about finished with a review of Karan Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway. The book was published back in 2007, but I am still going to shop the review around to see if anyone will publish it. Here’s a small bit from my review dealing with Butler and Foucault:

Barad’s move towards an extended account of performativity is captured in her proposed “posthumanist performative” framework (p. 135). Posthumanist performativity offers an, “approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism” (p. 135). We might then view Barad’s posthumanism as an appreciation for the way performativity has refigured representational theories of truth (by understanding them as the outcomes of material-discursive practices enacted by situated actors), but also as an expansion for what’s missing in the critical theories of Butler and Foucault (namely, a greater focus on nonhuman materiality). In this regard, one of Barad’s unique contributions is a refiguring of Foucault’s notion of the “apparatus” (or “dispositif”). The critique reads thusly, “for both Butler and Foucault, agency belongs only to the human domain, and neither addresses the nature of technoscientific practices and their profoundly productive effects on human bodies, as well as the ways in which these practices are deeply implicated in what constitutes the human, and more generally the workings of power” (pp. 145 – 146). Further, in terms of Barad’s agential realism Foucault’s discursive practices are extended so that, “agential realism’s posthumanist account of discursive practices does not fix the boundary between human and nonhuman before the analysis ever gets off the ground, but rather allows for the possibility of a genealogical analysis of the material-discursive emergence of the human” (pp. 149 – 150).

If I can’t find a publisher for the review I’ll be sure to post the whole paper up here. In general I am very sympathetic to Barad’s work, and only have a few criticisms here and there.

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