Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

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Here's a tentative attempt to put into words what I got from this book, in a sort of "if you can explain / teach it, you understand it" way. Juelskjær, M., Plauborg, H., & Adrian, S. (2021). Dialogues on agential realism: Engaging in worldings through research practice. Routledge. Mayberry, M. (1998). Reproductive and resistant pedagogies: The comparative roles of collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy in science education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching: the Official Journal of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, 35(4), 443–459. My tips would be, to mark the overview of the book in the beginning and return to it every now and then. Every time you start a new chapter, just look in there to see what your about to read.

Another issue that has brought interesting discussion is Barad’s notion of objectivity as reproducible and unambiguously communicable (in contrast to Newtonian objectivity indicating observer independence). TSElosophers wondered if even this conception of objectivity might not be suitable for social science. When the object of research are humans with their own subjective meaning-structures, the question of reproducibility becomes a difficult one. Developing on Heraclitus’s thought: “no man ever steps in the same river twice”, one can wonder if even with unambiguous communication the reproduction of social phenomena is impossible and hence objectivity is impossible to reach. The subjectivity of the researcher and the concepts seem to be underexplored in this paper, perhaps due to the fact that some of the starting points of paper are in physics. As a counterargument, TSElosophers emphasized that the significance of differences in the object of study should be questioned and included in the description of the boundaries. What are the consequences the differences in the reproducible object of study make? What matters? The objectivity here relates to the description one is making, to drawing the boundaries. Objectivity in terms of unambiguous communication and critical reflexivity is more important here than perfect reproducibility.Murris, K. (2019). Choosing a picturebook as provocation in teacher education: The ‘posthuman family’. In C. R. Kuby, K. Spector, & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education: Knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 156–170). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106083 Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2019). Taking age out of play: Children’s animistic philosophising through a picturebook. The Oxford Literary Review, 41(2), 290–309. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2019.0284 Likely the most interesting stuff in this book was Barad’s description of Leela Fernades’s work on Calcutta jute mill workers which as a section opens with this E.P. Thompson quote:

Here Barad notes that physical and conceptual constraints of apparatuses are co-constitutive (196) - an apparatus with fixed parts necessarily excludes momentum form having meaning during the experiment, for example. She criticises Foucault's and Butler's theories for not being precise about how matter becomes matter, or rather, the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena. In her model of agential realism, humans are also phenomena, and material-discursive apparatuses that intra-act. While she makes the easy connection between material process and Judith Butler's performativity theories, she avoids the distinction that such agential realism requires a human consciousness to perceive such distinctions. A human consciousness can provide an apparatus of measurement but the larger reality as a whole (including consciousness) provides conditions for knowing itself. The impossibility of being able to objectively account for everything is the problem that in the universe one part of it needs to be "lost" (or in Zizek's terms, less than nothing) for the other part of the universe to be analyzed.Haraway, Donna: 1985, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ ,Socialist Review, 80, 65–108, (reprinted in Haraway, 1991). Barad is a professor of feminist studies using this chunk of a book to explain her interpretation of Niels Bohr's thought experiments. Niels Bohr was both a physicist as well as a philosopher and made foundational contributions to the way we understand quantum physics today. Drawing from his thought experiments, Barad introduces the concept of agential realism, which challenges the way we humans perceive and interact with our environment. This chapter is an extraordinary meeting with Karen Barad. Diffracting through their own posts on social media, YouTube videos, and scholarly writing Barad is introduced. The chapter articulates a deep respect for how Karen Barad enacts their agential realist philosophy as a non-binary way of life, including how they teach and write—disrupting individualism, competitiveness, human exceptionalism, and human-centred educational practices. Resisting the kind of criticism normalised in academia, Barad’s passionate yearning for complexity shows how agential realism can work affirmatively and relationally and how it re-works concepts such as time, disease, memory, identity, family, and difference. Living a feminist, agential realist way of life demands attention to the ethical fibre that runs through the fabric of the world. Through other-than-human characters, such as magnets, 1945, slime moulds, nuclear bombs, stardust, constellations, SARS-CoV-2, lightning, and queer atoms, Barad invites the reader to meet the question How can I be responsible for that which I love? Barad’s care for differences that matter in their specificity and the Slow scholarship this entails are a true inspiration. Keywords

Agential realism privileges neither the material nor the cultural. The apparatus of bodily production is material-cultural, and so is agential reality. Barad, Karen: 1995, ‘A Feminist Approach to Teaching Quantum Physics’, in Teaching the Majority: Breaking the Gender Barrier in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering, edited by Sue V. Rosser. NY: Teachers College Press. Comps reading. Sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes interesting, sometimes fairly divergent from my own political and theoretical commitments. If someone asked me to explain what Barad was trying to say in this book, I honestly don’t think I could. That is a problem, though overall, I thought this was still a fairly enjoyable book to read. And Barad's re-reading of Bohr's work was really fascinating and they did some interesting ontological and metaphysical elaborations of Bohr's specific strain of realism.Haraway, Donna: 1991 ,Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Inspired by the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, Karen Barad introduces the new notion of realism, which she calls agential realism. She positions herself in relation to scientific realist and feminist-constructivist approaches, and argues for inseparability of ontological and epistemological issues. Barad’s insightful reading of Bohr’s understanding of quantum physics preludes the introduction of the onto-epistemological framework of agential realism. By considering such broad philosophical issues as the role of natural and cultural factors in scientific knowledge production, conditions for objectivity and the efficacy of science, Barad proposes a framework that is widely applicable across disciplines.

To the extent there is a story being told in this book, it begins with the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, which in turn is often dated to 1927, the date of the Fifth Solvay Conference. Entitled “Electrons and Photons,” the conference drew 19 of the most prominent physicists in the world together: Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein were the informal spokesmen for two differing views of how to interpret troubling but unavoidable conflict in recent experimental evidence: light could apparently be either a wave or a particle, depending on how it was measured. The discussion involved Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty, Bohr’s understanding of complementarity, the nature of the physical evidence under consideration, and the role of the scientist, the experimental apparatus, the expectations and assumptions that govern the structure of experiments, the status experimental results and the vast implications for our understanding of reality. The implication of this is that everything is connected. We humans can't separate ourselves from our environment, as we are our environment. As a result, we should be questioning our ethics, as the otherness we perceive needs to be understood as something way more familiar. Class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works . . . the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise.... class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”Bohr, Niels: 1963a ,The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. I: Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Woodbridge, Conn: Ox Bow Press. Barad then introduces her metaphysics of "agential realism". In her metaphysics, phenomena (or more precisely, quantum entanglements) are the basic ontological unit. At its most fundamental, this metaphysics is about how material cuts (or distinctions) performed as part of the ongoing becoming of the universe can lead bodies to leave marks on one another (cause and effect) within each entanglement. Within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, a body which is marked is part of the "agencies of observation" whereas the bodies leaving marks are the "objects of observation". But a crucial point here is that both are parts of one and the same entanglement (phenomenon). This "exteriority within phenomena" is what secures objectivity for science without forcing the human to be on the outside looking in. Another crucial point here is that controlled laboratory experiments are merely a special case of entanglements and that material cuts within entanglements are routinely performed by the universe outside of controlled experiments. (Since humans are part of the universe, they may enact these cuts - but then again so may other parts of the universe.)