Gerhard’s Reviews > Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning > Status Update

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.

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...

‘‘Things’’ don’t preexist; they are agentially enacted and become determinately bounded and propertied within phenomena. Outside of particular agential intra-actions, ‘‘words’’ and ‘‘things’’ are indeterminate. Matter is therefore not to be understood as a property of things but, like discursive practices, must be understood in more dynamic and productive terms—in terms of intra-activity.

'Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘‘thing’’—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.'


Wow. I am gobsmacked. So 'science' is Barad's answer to 'true' representationalism? [Given 'science' is framed through language.]

I will argue that a diffractive mode of analysis can be helpful in this regard if we learn to tune our analytical instruments (that is our diffraction apparatuses) in a way that is suffciently attentive to the details of the phenomenon we want to understand.