The Quantum Dance and the World's ‘Extraordinary Liveliness
Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad's Agential Realism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8074729 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peta Hinton (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 169-189 |
| Publication date | 2013-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Somatechnics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2044-0138 • E-ISSN: 2044-0146 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/soma.2013.0084 |
| OpenAlex | W1963669838 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 7 |
In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in ‘an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility’ (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's ‘philosophy-physics’, Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its ‘extraordinary liveliness’ (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is ‘embodied in the very worlding of the world’ (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what ‘the ethical’ constitutes or should achieve
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Identity (music · Political science · Politics · Posthuman · Realism · Sociology · Philosophy, Science, and History · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Law · Philosophy
Being of Use
Towards a feminist politics of desire
Rethinking Socialization Research through the Lens of New Materialism
If Schrödinger’s cat miaows in the suburbs, will anyone hear
Beyond reflexivity and representation
Die Macht der Materie
Posthuman Ethics with Cary Wolfe and Karen Barad
Embodying of the self during interviews
Feminist Technoecologies
Beyond hierarchical oppositions
Toward a Posthumanist Ethics of Qualitative Research in a Big Data Era
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,92 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2022 (9) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |