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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... practices and the material world . I also do not assume that a meaningful answer to the questions about the relationship between science and ethics can be derived from what physics alone tells about the world . Physics can't be ...
... scientific and other practices . I draw on the insights of some of our best scientific and social theories , including quantum physics , science studies , the philosophy of physics , feminist theory , critical race the- ory ...
... scientific and other social practices . In particular , Bohr's naturalist commitment to understand- ing both the nature of nature and the nature of science according to what our best scientific theories tell us led him to what he took ...
... 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 serves up daily reminders that science and technology are actively ...
... practices or performances of representing , as well as on the productive effects of those practices and the conditions for their efficacy . In recent years , both science studies scholars and critical social theorists have pursued ...
Contents
Part II Intraactions Matter | 95 |
Part III Entanglements and Reconfigurations | 187 |
Notes | 405 |
References | 477 |
Index | 493 |