Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and MeaningMeeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science. |
From inside the book
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... nonhuman ) . Furthermore , entanglements are not isolated binary co- productions as the example of an author - book pair might suggest . Friends , colleagues , students , and family members , multiple academic institutions , departments ...
... nonhuman agents , including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual . Or perhaps it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of ...
... nonhuman , material and discursive , and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other practices . I draw on the insights of some of our best scientific and social theories , including quantum physics , science studies , the ...
... nonhuman , material and discursive , and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social - material practices , thereby moving such considerations beyond the well - worn debates that pit con- structivism against realism ...
... nonhuman animals ) are conceptualized , produced , and reworked through scientific and technological practices . Needless to say , they don't have to dig very far to find justification for their rejection of humanism , since the news ...
Contents
Part II Intraactions Matter | 95 |
Part III Entanglements and Reconfigurations | 187 |
Notes | 405 |
References | 477 |
Index | 493 |