Description
The work of Karen Barad, notably her impressive Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, has gained widespread recognition for lying at the base of the so-called ‘materialist turn’ in the humanities. The work has done so by outlining an ‘agential realism’ that seeks to think together ‘words’ and ‘matter’ through an inventive retelling of Niels Bohr’s interpretation of the quantum experiments. Meeting the Universe Halfway moreover starts with a long intervention in Michael Frayn’s theatre play Copenhagen on the debate between Bohr and his colleague Werner Heisenberg about the role of physics in nuclear war, in which Barad claims that Frayn misrepresents Bohr’s standpoint and misses certain crucial aspects of this debate. Interestingly therefore, while Barad founds her alleged epistemic shift on an empiricist paradigm within physics via Bohr’s ideas about an objective, if non-representational, realism as well as on his belief in the reproducibility of and falsification via experiments, she also uses storytelling as a crucial rhetorical device to ground these scientific claims. This paper seeks to situate the aporetic tension between narrative and science in Barad’s work in what it with Jacques Derrida identifies as the larger ‘auto-immune’ aspect of academia, in which academia’s problematically progressivist outlook gets accelerated via the dialectical enactment of this tension’s discursive and material conditions. It will illustrate this by teasing out how Barad uses stories to make an argument for ‘agential realism’ while obscuring its own material-discursive situatedness. This paper in turn supplements Barad’s version of quantum physics by setting up an alternative dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Heisenberg, eventually implicating Barad’s productive yet oppressive crossover between the sciences and the humanities in the cybernetic and nuclear acceleration of contemporary academia.| Period | 8 Nov 2017 |
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| Event title | Forms of Knowledge: Literature and Philosophy Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |