Karen Barad:
Re-membering the Future, Re(con)figuring the Past — Temporality, Materiality, and Justice-to-Come
Keynote Lecture | Feminist Theory Workshop | Duke University, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies | 2014
Delivered as the keynote at the 2014 Annual Feminist Theory Workshop at the Women’s Studies Department of Duke University, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad outlines some of her most innovative concepts, such as “spacetimemattering” (matter as the ongoing differentiating of the world) and “quantum entanglement.” These traverse physics and philosophy, situating Barad’s main concern in this talk, which is to establish an empirical dimension for a Derridean ethics of “justice to come,” pursued through the Derridean means of showing nature “deconstructing” itself. Barad takes the audience on a vertiginous trip through the history of quantum physics from the 19th century inventor of the “Two-Slit Experiment,” Thomas Young, to the 1990s “quantum eraser” experiment. These two moments bookend the narrative of the contested nature of light as a particle or a wave and culminate with the disagreement of Einstein and Heisenberg, coiner of the “uncertainty principle”—an epistemological constraint for scientific observation—with Nils Bohr’s ontology of indeterminacy, wherein object and apparatus of observation mutually determine one another and neither pre-exists the other. Recent experiments have confimed Bohr’s intuition, with light behaving as a particle or a wave depending on the configuration of the measuring device. This is termed by Barad “intra-action” rather than interaction, which assumes pre-existing, discrete entities. The political and ethical inference Barad draws from this is summed up in her conclusion that “identity is undone by the dis/continuity at the heart of matter itself.” This also has implications for how we understand temporality, with matter performatively materializing time and space rather than unfolding within them.
The fascination exerted by Barad’s work rests in her experimental meta/physics, with the attempt to establish discontinuity, rupture and a “quantum queering” as fully part of the natural world, rather than using the familiar critical technique of exposing how science naturalizes the social and is deployed instrumentally for those ends by powerful forces in society. She is more interested in abolishing all dualities between the natural or physical and the socal and political, and in the political possibilities of destabilizing the authoritative stance of science on grounds which, as a scientist, she requires to be “epistemologically robust.” There is a sense that such a project may have a high potential for metaphoricity and re-discription, relying on well-established tropes such as Derrida’s “hauntology” for an account of the links between responsibility, the other, and temporality. Nonetheless, there seems to be great mileage for a compelling and detailed poetics of the real, particularly in its materialism of the unknown. Not explicitly discussed in this lecture is Barad’s theory of “agential realism,” which posits ontology, epistemology and ethics as part of the same movement of matter emerging through and differentiating in “intra-action,” and which entails “cuts” or exclusions to enable analysis.
(Source Abstract: www.artandeducation.net)