About the Author
As Barad elucidates in an interview, “collaboration is precisely what’s needed for the responsible practice of science. In my own work I have tried to engage constructively and deconstructively (not destructively) with science, where deconstruction is not about taking things apart in order to take them down, but on the contrary, about examining the foundations of certain concepts and ideas, seeing how contingency operates to secure the ‘foundations’ of concepts we cannot live without, and using that contingency to open up other possible meanings/matter-ings. And so, there was a moment when a few of us who long/ed for what we might call the ‘responsible practices of science’, pushed to rename the field ‘feminist science studies’, in an effort to open up and welcome other forms of engagement.“
Barad is convinced that quantum physics (without, of course, assuming that it might “provide an explanation for everything under the sun”) “profoundly disrupts many classical ontological and epistemological notions what we take for granted, and delving into the details of this disruption can open up exciting realms of thought.“
From the idea that everything is entangled and pursuing Niels Bohr epistemology she framed “agential realism”
Sources
- Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning., ISBN 13-978-0-8223-3901-4.
- “Intra-active Entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad” by Malou Juelskjaer and Nete Schwennesen, in Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, Nr. 1-2/2012, 14 (10-24).
Entanglements
There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter? How to understand what is entailed in the practice of meeting that might help keep the possibility of justice alive in a world that seems to thrive on death? How to be alive to each being’s suffering, including those who have died and those not yet born? How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours? How to understand the matter of mattering, the nature of matter, space, and time? These questions and concerns are not a luxury made of esoteric musings. Mattering and its possibilities and impossibilities for justice are integral parts of the universe in its becoming; an invitation to live justly is written into the very matter of being. How to respond to that invitation is as much a question about the nature of response and responsibility as it about the nature of matter. The yearning for justice, a yearning larger than any individual or sets of individuals, is the driving force behind this work, which is therefore necessarily about our connections and responsibilities to one another-that is, entanglements.