OTHER MATTERS

Abstract

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and other related) fields, which posits her work as an advance over the history of “representationalism” and “social constructivism.” In turn, this one-sided materialism produces a skewed reading of the quantum mechanical phenomena with which she engages. Her attempt to create an ontological (not epistemological) interpretation of quantum mechanics proves deconstructible. Instead, a science of undecidability or science of quant à helps us to understand debates among scientists and philosophers over the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics and its epistemological or ontological status – by demonstrating that these questions will necessarily remain unresolved.

Keywords:

• quantum mechanics
• deconstruction
• philosophy of science
• New Materialism
• entanglement
• Karen Barad

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The “phenomena,” which Barad describes as the “basic units of existence” (Meeting 333), are supposed to preexist any subject–object divide and entangle the relations of what will later be sorted out as a material object in its intra-actions with a measuring apparatus. Nonetheless, she frequently makes reference to “material phenomena” as a contrast class to “discursive practices” (34, 45, 66, 146, 151, etc.). It should not be possible to designate a phenomenon as material or distinguish it from something discursive, unless the presupposition has been made that we know what matter is already and that it precedes any relationship to discursivity. Barad goes on to ground the discursive in the material, “The shift I propose from linguistic concepts to discursive practices (which are specific material practices) places the emphasis on the dynamics of material practices” (334; my emphasis).

When an “electron” interacts with a measuring apparatus, for example, how are we to establish what is material, independent of our preconceptions, from what is sorted out after the fact by means of the application of scientific hypothesis and formula, by discursive construction? It is forever undecidable, especially when one considers how frequently the constructions of science are transformed, what belongs to either category. Which is not, by any means, to say that discourse or culture is fundamental.

2 A similar dogmatism or one-sidedness can be identified in all of the authors who Davis would like to exempt from Ahmed’s criticism. For this reason, I offer this reading of Barad not as an individual critique but a testing of the hypothesis that any work invoking a corralation to justify its own novelty will arrive at similarly arbitrary suppressions of the differences inside and outside itself.

3 Barad attributes these ideas to Butler but endorses them herself.

4 Barad acknowledges, whenever she discusses the pairing of Foucault and Butler, that they set out to challenge representationalism (refusing to posit matter or nature as a ground prior to some inscription), but concludes that they deny matter’s agency by making it a product of cultural forces. For example,

For all of Foucault’s emphasis on the political anatomy of disciplinary power, he fails to offer an account of the body’s historicity in which its very materiality plays an active role in the workings of power. This implicit re-inscription of matter’s passivity is a mark of extant elements of representationalism that haunt his largely postrepresentationalist account. (Barad, Meeting 65; my emphasis)

The problem of invoking the “very materiality” of the body (Barad invokes an almost identical phrase, “the very matter of bodies” in objecting to Butler’s account of materialization (64)) is that precisely in a “postrepresentationalist” account in which matter is always “material-discursive,” one should never know exactly where the “very matter” lies, or one should know in advance that one can never find matter itself or in itself. How can one refer to the “very atoms” of a body without an account of where the body begins and ends that is necessarily entangled in discursivity (Barad, Meeting 66)? This refrain of the “very” is an appeal to a material substance outside discourse, a “representationalist” gesture.

5 A careful reading of her account of the brittlestar in ch. 8 of Meeting the Universe Halfway would show that in order to make experience something matter can have of itself, Barad must separate it entirely from a thinking substance she reserves for humans or at least animals with brains. For a reading of Barad’s brittlestar that makes its humanism and logocentrism apparent (without finding them problematic), see Joseph Rouse’s “The Conceptual and Ethical Normativity of Intra-active Phenomena.”

Žižek poses the question of how this humanist or cerebralist subject emerges from an agential realist account in the fourteenth chapter of Less than Nothing, “The Ontology of Quantum Physics” (948–49). As is customary of his thinking and of any thinking whose fundamental gesture is reversal, he responds both by making the empirical absolute and the absolute empirical. The difference between agential realism and representationalism is posited both as a “transcendental a priori” by Žižek and, in the language of immanentism, as “the very movement of constitution of the One” (949). The symptoms of his transcendentalism are his maintenance of ultimately classical distinctions such as that between quantum phenomena and “ordinary reality,” or an animal sex without sexuality defined by “bodily content” and a “human sexuality” which affects activities described as having “nothing to do with sexuality” (960). On the other hand, his immanentism results in the facile equation of categories such as the nothing of quantum physics with the Void or non-All “in-itself” (925).

6 Clayton Crockett’s claim that Derrida wrote about “linguistic” différance, and can be suitably supplemented by Barad and other New Materialists’ theories of physical or materialist différance is based on a similar misreading (137–38). Barad’s valuation of deconstruction has changed since writing Meeting the Universe Halfway. See “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am” and “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance.”

7 For Barad’s account of this and related experiments, see chs. 3 and 7 of Meeting the Universe Halfway.

8 Barad would also like to generalize the conclusions of quantum mechanics, finding entanglements and indeterminacies at work in the formation of, for example, economic praxis. She adopts the more (so-to-speak) physical method of generalization of these principles, suggesting that these conclusions should be drawn at least in part because quantum mechanics is valid across twenty-five orders of magnitude (Barad, Meeting 110). Such extrapolations would only be legitimate if one could derive and calculate economics (for example) from the principal equations of quantum mechanics. I would argue that considering the conditions of possibility of such knowledge provides more valid grounds for generalization. For other objections to Barad’s leveling of scale, see The New Politics of Materialism (Ellenzweig and Zammito, chs. 8–10).

9 This description of the inextricability of being and thinking within science (or, within nature) shares a close resemblance to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On the one hand, Kuhn does maintain the idea and language of a nature existing outside scientific practice against which it is verified: “The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other” (78). On the other hand, he ultimately demonstrates that paradigm shifts require or perhaps are transformations of nature and the world itself:

Nevertheless, paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world. (111)

This is not to suggest that there is no “nature” in the sense of something outside the willful legislation of the scientist; rather, it is to place that nature at the greatest remove from our constructions, in order to preserve its alterity.

10 Woolgar and Lezaun cite Barad’s work in the course of a criticism of the turn to ontology in New Materialist studies more broadly (325–26). They rightly tie the impetus toward ontology to her effort to discover agential and causal primacy in matter. They suggest a reversal, seeing what counts as matter as the contingent outcome of scientific practices, which, of course, is also one of Barad’s theses. Instead of reversing the ontology/epistemology and matter/thought binaries, we should consider what happens to our notions of scientific practice and matter if it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.

11 For example, in the paper where Heisenberg defines his famous uncertainty principle, one finds several invocations of the necessity of experimentability for the definition of concepts, for example:

If we want to clearly understand what is meant by the word “position of the object” – for instance, an electron – (relative to a given reference system), then we must indicate the definite experiments by means of which we intend to determine the “position of the electron.” Otherwise the word is meaningless. (“Actual Content” 4)

Such a formulation sounds quite similar to the relational view Barad equates with complementarity. Barad would likely respond that the difference lies in whether this experimentability is thought to disturb a preexisting property or to co-constitute the property’s origin. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that Bohr’s complementarity also describes how an experimental apparatus effaces (or doesn’t) a given property. Bohr’s response to Heisenberg, for example, is not that the electron has no position or momentum to be disturbed, but that a disturbance such as the one described by Heisenberg could be exactly calculated (and so could not be the ground of a position/momentum uncertainty): “Indeed, a discontinuous change of energy and momentum during observation could not prevent us from ascribing accurate values to the space-time co-ordinates, as well as to the momentum-energy components before and after the process” (Bohr, “Quantum Postulate” 583).

12 Bohr compares Einstein’s relativity theory and his own complementarity to classical mechanics on these grounds, “the decisive point is that in neither case does the appropriate widening of our conceptual framework imply any appeal to the observing subject, which would hinder unambiguous communication of experience” (Essays 7). In fact, Bohr’s account is not that objectification, being tied to classical concepts/terminology, is thereby dependent on humanity, but that precisely the transhumanism of physical investigation is owed to language.

13 Trevor Pinch offers an insightful critique of how Barad’s view of reproducibility avoids grappling with any of the difficulties scholars in Science and Technology Studies have raised with the concept and assumes a natural, immediate status for what should be presented as (in Barad’s terms) entangled, “Once it is realized that repeatable experiments themselves come from a culture of trust, a shared form of life and shared practices, including tacit knowledge, learnt and passed on in communities of practice, then the orientation is focused once more on humans” (Pinch 439). By focusing on the conceptual presuppositions (an unacknowledged hylomorphism) of what Pinch pictures according to a sort of contract theory as an empirical intersubjective consensus, I hope to show that there are factors circumscribing any such agreement that are not necessarily human in their origin, though they cannot therefore be attributed to ontology, nature, or matter. Calvert-Minor also argues that a robust account of objectivity requires humanism in “Epistemological Misgivings of Karen Barad’s ‘Posthumanism.’”

14 But say an interlocutor were to approach us with the following objection:

Certainly, matter is a concept. And each individual material – wood, metal, and so on – each is a concept; a trivial point. Surely you wouldn’t try to attribute the results of any experiment, the outcome of the encounter of an electron and a photographic plate, for example, to the concepts of the materials involved – or would you try to nourish yourself with the concept of food? To do so would be the worst idealism.

Such an objection misses two essential points: (1) At stake is not merely the production of a result, the trace of the inter- or intra-action of two substances, but of an experimental result, the reproducible, conceptual-objective response to a hypothesizing, universalizing call. We cannot arrive at a universal or even momentarily reproducible concept through matter alone, nor can we do so through form or concept alone, but only through an undecidability of form and matter which is the deconstruction of hylomorphism. (2) But can we say, perhaps in retrospect, that it is not the concept of photographic plate, but the matter of that plate that has produced our result? Given that we can ultimately have only empirical concepts (always subject to revisability) of the substances we attribute to nature, it is impossible to say where matter or form begins or ends, and thus on which of the two we base our interpretations (consider how Leibniz employs his favored example of gold in New Essays on Human Understanding). No two things or experiences could ever be identified as related in any way unless the concepts or at least the conceptuality governing those similarities somehow preexisted our experiences of them – though we can never say with certainty what part of our cognition, if any, is a priori.

15 On the relation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to the possibility of experience, see the Second Analogy of Experience from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “The principle of sufficient reason is thus the ground of possible experience, that is, of objective knowledge of appearances in respect of their relation in the order of time” (A201/B246).

16 “[M]aterial apparatuses produce material phenomena through specific causal intra-actions” (Barad, Meeting 153). “Different agential cuts produce different phenomena” (175). “Phenomena are sedimented out of the process of the world’s ongoing articulation through which part of the world makes itself intelligible to some other part” (207). For another criticism of Barad’s use of the term “world,” see Savransky’s “Modes of Mattering,” ¶ 19.

17 Heisenberg reports Einstein as saying, “it is the theory which decides what can be observed” (“Theory” 40, 47).

18 A method for relating mathematical representations from quantum mechanical theory to physical properties has been put forward by Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph. They argue for the ontological status of a quantum state by demonstrating that any ambiguity in its relationship to a physical state contradicts quantum theory (i.e., they prove two different quantum states cannot correspond to the same physical state of a system). Such a conclusion may very well prove provocative for quantum mechanical inquiry (cf. Gao 18–21, 29–41), but it can only obscure the question of the relationship of scientific theory to the real. By this logic, one could easily prove the reality of Newtonian time and space, the luminiferous ether, etc.

19 One of Barad’s attempts to do so can be found in Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 263–64.

20 One index of the domestication of this beyond is the description Barad gives of the touching of a particle with a virtual particle in “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” She describes this contact, which occurs entirely within the legislative framework of quantum field theory, as “infinite alterity” and “radically queered” (Barad, “On Touching” 213, 212). Elizabeth A. Wilson, in “Acts Against Nature,” shows how bringing the queer within nature in this way limits its transgressive potential.

21 As Barad makes clear, there is anything but consensus on the logical and physical relationship between the complementarity and uncertainty principles among practicing physicists. It is customary to speak of complementarity being “enforced by” uncertainty.

22 One sign of this undecidability is the frequency with which neuronal interactions, states of consciousness, and even the “vocal apparatus” of observers are incorporated into quantum states. See, e.g., Peter Lewis’ Quantum Ontology, pp. 80–81, 91–92, 130–35. On the impossibility of physical laws distinguishing between measurement and nonmeasurement, see p. 50.

23 Qian, Vamivakas, and Eberly, in a 2018 paper, claim to have completed Bohr’s formulation of complementarity, precisely by means of the role entanglement plays in mediating the duality between wave and particle. Whether or not their result stands, it cannot decide between the ontological or epistemological agency of entanglement, in the sense Barad speaks of it.

24 Individual scientists may disagree about whether they hold such an objective themselves or believe it possible. For one example of a particle physicist who holds his field to be the best candidate for a unifying theory of everything, see Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory, especially ch. 1. That being said, in invoking such doctrinal coherence I am less concerned whether it is the consciously held telos of practitioners than I am to examine whether it is a presupposition of the form of any possible science, whose roots must be traced much further back. To contradict this presupposition of progress toward a unified system of laws, there would have to be a science that could take the conflict of its principles amongst themselves or with observed data as a positive ground of their truth, or at least as no impetus to further investigation. The nomothetic form of all scientific explanation, and the universality and necessity constitutive of the law, prescribe the following forms as the possible results of science: (1) all laws are derivable from highest principles that are in turn in no need of derivation or explanation; (2) nature, as it is represented by science, contains ruptures – as we pass from one realm of beings to another laws change abruptly, without explanation or mediation; (3) science will endlessly work to extend these vertical and horizontal limits, without ever being able to arrive at highest principles that do not allow for further investigation. Even if practitioners understand science in this third sense as an endless task, it remains an open question whether the ideal unity from which such work takes its direction, as opposed to the waystations at which we find ourselves, is the only science worthy of the name. To give one indication of the age and provenance of this question, Aristotle examines the relation of scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) to its first principles in Posterior Analytics I.3.