Status Updates From Meeting the Universe Halfwa...

Wow!

I'd almost forgotten that I'd started reading this book, but today I stumbled across a quote from it in an article on posthuman agency in fiction… lol…… thanks, I didn't think it would turn out to be useful to me in an academic sense.

The point of challenging traditional epistemologies is not merely to welcome females, slaves, children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled from the land of knowers by Aristotle more than two millennia ago) into the fold of knowers but to better account for the ontology of knowing.

Natural law arguments for social policy abound, and there are copious examples of misguided attempts to enlist nature as a justification for every possible social prejudice, including racism, sexism, and homophobia.

But through our advances, we participate in bringing forth the world in its specificity, including ourselves. We have to meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming. All real living is meeting. And each meeting matters.

What is a quantum entanglement? Entanglements, like superpositions, are uniquely quantum mechanical—they specify a feature of particle behavior for which there is no classical physics equivalent. In essence, the notion of an entanglement is a generalization of a superposition to the case of more than one particle.

The existence of the quantum discontinuity means that the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming. Becoming is not an unfolding in time, but the inexhaustible dynamism of the enfolding of mattering.

The quantum disrupts this tidy affair. A bit of a hitch, a tiny disjuncture in the underlying continuum, and causality becomes another matter entirely.

If, according to Foucault, power is not simply constraining but also productive, if it does not act as an external force on a subject but rather operates through the very constitution of the subject, then how is it possible to even begin to address the issue of causality?

Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its diffrential becoming. The separation of epistemol-ogy from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body...

Heisenberg did nothing wrong. As long as you ignore history and expert opinion in favour of a vague principle according to which we can't possibly hold anyone accountable (except Bohr, fuck that guy).