Meeting the Universe Halfway
by Karen Barad
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
And we're back! Returning for a 2nd yr of working to mobilize, theorize & build community we're doing so with a new bent & fervor.
Once again a word of thanks must be given to Patrick Henry who has signed on as the MATCH Working Group Co-Director (you will be hearing from him shortly), and Leigha McReynolds who continues to act as a point person for the KINDLING essay collection project.
This year we are kicking off an initiative called "A Season with the Sciences" where we will be exploring the intersections where the Humanities and other disciplines meet and where they branch off to find productive ways to think, work and live together.
As a way into Science Studies & the Humanities, we read the intro to Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy and the History of Consciousness, Barad demonstrates that a doctorate in theoretical particle physics (or any other specialized degree) should not limit one's imagination on the job market. While there is reason and value in abundance to seeking out one's own discipline, our expertise may be in greater demand in other areas where the population is less saturated with like-minded thinkers.
The formal structure of the book also reflects skills useful in bringing communities together. Barad writes with excellent prose and a critical sense of the poetry of formulas, inventions and theorems. Even better, she boasts the abilities to understand them!
Charts, statistics, and mathematical formulas populate the text and carry on the argument - in places reiterating what has been said in a language more familiar to scientists and in other places putting forth a new point in a fashion which requires readers to adopt and utilizer a more scientific way of thinking.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
A key feature of Barad's argument is a rethinking of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The quantum observation that one can either determine a subatomic particles position or its momentum, but not both, Barad claims has much wider implication for the way in which we think about the world and each other.
When we observe certain elements of the world, we inhibit our ability to observe other elements. To translate this in terms borrowed from Robert McRuer on difference and dis/ability: every way of knowing is also a way of not knowing something else.
We can consider a persons actions or watch their intentions, but not both simultaneously. Likewise with ourselves. We can act or think about acting, but doing both is often worse than trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. Thinking, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking becomes not only recursive but each replaces one another in the process. At a certain point, if we are to act, speak, or perform an experiment, we must be willing to take the risk that we cannot be also be fully on the watch. Momentum and position cannot be expressed simultaneously.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
This allows us to break from being frozen in a space of language, thought and impotent potentiality and draw back from the bridle of unconscious action, by embracing our own uncertainty. We must likewise be willing to acknowledge the same for others. "Uncertainty," writes Barad, "is not our undoing but our savior: it is the very unknowability of intentions, that is, our principled inability to truly judge one another, that saves our wear souls" (17).
Faith and good works, the social and the natural, subject and object, relativism and absolutism, the humanities and science, epistemology and ontology, becoming and being may all be aspects of every body that acts in the world but may not be considered in their totality by any of us. This puts limits and caution on what we do, but even better, it allows us to actually do something. It allows us to come together without biting each other's heads off. The discussion can start and something can happen.
"Matter and meaning are not separate elements ... Matter is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps that is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant." (3).
