The Conceptual and Ethical Normativity of Intra-active Phenomena

This essay addresses three aspects of Barad's views about meaning and normativity: her 'post-humanist' insistence that the agential cuts that constitute phenomena need not incorporate human beings as observers, measurers, speakers, or concept-users; her alternative account of the objectivity of measurement, which also specifies the meaning of what she calls 'theoretical' concepts; and her claim that agential participation in phenomena entails ethical accountability for the real consequences of the intra-actions and associated exclusions in which we participate. The aim is to show why Barad's posthumanism should still recognize significant differences between human and other agencies, which simultaneously constitute both 'theoretical' conceptual articulation and the ethical responsibilities that are entangled with such theoretical understanding, and to explain why appropriate recognition of this difference does not reinstate in new guise the humanism she objects to. [1] In this essay, I consider the relations between three aspects of Karen Barad's views about meaning and normativity. First, Barad's account of agency is 'post-humanist', in the sense that the agential cuts that constitute phenomena need not incorporate human beings as observers, measurers, speakers, or concept-users. Second, Barad takes her agential realism to provide an alternative account of the objectivity of measurement, which also specifies the meaning of what she calls 'theoretical' concepts. Third, agential participation in phenomena entails ethical accountability for the real consequences of the intra-actions and associated exclusions in which we participate. [2] My aim in this consideration is to show why Barad's post-humanism should still recognize significant differences between human and other agencies, which simultaneously constitute both 'theoretical' conceptual articulation and the ethical responsibilities that are entangled with such theoretical understanding. This difference nevertheless does not reinstate in new guise the humanism she objects to, for two reasons. First, the 'human' in this sense is not just people in isolation, but the larger worldly phenomena to which we humans belong and with which 'we' (in the narrower sense that just refers to human bodies) are interdependent. Second, the difference between humans and other organisms is nonhierarchical: theoretical understanding and ethical accountability are not something that non-human organisms or other agential patterns 'lack' as a deficiency. [3] I will first review several features of Barad's metaphysics that are needed for the remainder of my discussion.[1] Barad argues for a metaphysics of phenomena: The primary [metaphysical] unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries, but rather ... 'phenomena'. In my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.[2] (Meeting 33, original emphasis) [4] This approach is thoroughly naturalistic, albeit in a sense that eschews naturalism's usual associations with scientism and representationalism.[3] Barad seeks to account for semantic/epistemic and ethical normativity as materially enacted within naturalcultural phenomena.[4] Object-boundaries, conceptual contents, and their objective accountability are enacted within phenomena. In place of representational/signifying relations between words and things or sentences and states of affairs, she insists upon a relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted (i.e., discursive practices, in my posthumanist sense) and specific material phenomena (i.e., differentiating patterns of mattering). (Meeting 139, original emphasis) [5] This insistence is constitutive of the sense in which Barad is a naturalist. Inherent boundaries between objects, or representational contents that are not determined within an intra-action with what they are 'about', are what Donna Haraway (Simians ch. 9) calls 'god-tricks', impossible (and thus, merely apparent) erasures of agency and intra-active involvement in the world. Conceptual content is not a representation of an object, but a material articulation of a phenomenon, which encompasses both meaning and what is meant. [6] The most basic, constitutive articulation of boundaries within any phenomenon is a 'cut' between a defined, measured object and what Barad (Meeting ch. 3) calls the 'agencies of observation'. Both objects and the agencies of observation are materially marked by their intra-action (Barad talks about 'marks on bodies'). Here Barad's account partially overlaps with Wesley Salmon's 'causal mechanical' account of causal interactions: When there is an intersection between two processes in which both are modified, and the modifications persist beyond the place of intersection, this intersection qualifies as a causal interaction. One uses a causal interaction to produce a mark in a process. (Salmon, Causality 17) [7] Their differences are nevertheless instructive; Salmon's account broke down precisely because it presupposed several problematic 'god-tricks'. First, the assumed spatiotemporal isolation of two separate but intersecting 'processes' illegitimately erased their other causally intra-active entanglements (causal isolation doesn't happen magically, but requires further apparatus within the agencies of observation; this erasure exposed Salmon's model to notorious, devastating counter-examples). Second, Salmon took a spatiotemporal framework as given, rather than itself configured within the phenomenon. This presumption then required the interacting processes to be identified by spatiotemporally continuous trajectories, with the embarrassing consequence that quantum mechanical interactions were interpreted as mysteriously acausal. Finally, the apparent symmetry between two causally interactive processes arose in his model because Salmon implicitly presumed the registration of the constitutive marks on bodies from a gods-eye standpoint that required no further measurement intra-action. He thereby erased what constitutes one side of any intra-action as the 'agencies of observation', along with the asymmetry between causes (objects-in-phenomena) and effects (marks on bodies in an apparatus). This third assumption would also violate quantum mechanics, by allowing all properties of a system to be fully determinate within the same material arrangement. [8] These differences between Barad and Salmon also highlight one further crucial point. Phenomena are not just more complicated, articulated objects that contain an internal 'cut' between their agential and objective components, in addition to a boundary that demarcates one phenomenon as distinct from others. Phenomena have no such defining boundary, no 'outside boundary' in Barad's terms (Meeting 142-145). They are not objects within the world, but articulations of the world from within. A phenomenon is focused by/around the agential cut, such that its various worldly components matter differently within that phenomenon (Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity" 817). Like a power series whose later terms make relatively insignificant but non-vanishing contributions to the whole series, the more 'distant' (in terms of how they matter rather than spatiotemporal distance) entanglements within a phenomenon are relatively insignificant, but not thereby disconnected.[5] [9] Turning now to Barad's anti-humanism in terms of intentionality and meaning, the phenomenon of the brittlestar exemplifies this aspect of her conception: The brittlestar is a visualizing system that is constantly changing its geometry and its topology—autonomizing and regenerating its optics in an ongoing reworking of its bodily boundaries. Its discursive practices—the boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates itself from the environment with which it intra-acts, and by which it makes sense of its world, enabling it to discern a predator, for example—are materiality enacted. (Meeting 375) [10] The brittlestar does not have a visual system—it is one. It has no 'central processor' where representations could intervene between perceptual uptake and practical response, which are mutually entangled all the way down. The brittlestar's optics is also thoroughly diffractive (and hence materially intra-active with environing photons rather than geometrically reflective of abstract 'rays' of light). It lacks all the markers of humanist subjectivity, and yet in its very being is an intentional directedness toward relevant features of its environment, in ways that are ineliminably normatively accountable: "A brittlestar is not some ideal Cartesian subject, but through specific practices of intra-active engagement, it differentially responds in ways that matter [with] life-and-death stakes in getting it wrong" (Barad, Meeting 380). [11] To whom or what do these ways of getting something right or wrong matter? Clearly, to the brittlestar. But what (or who) is that? The 'brittlestar' ambiguously names both an entity and the iteratively enfolded phenomena that constitute it as the entity it is, an organism. It (the phenomenon) continuously enacts an 'internal' differentiation between the organism, and what thereby becomes its environment or 'outside', but neither side of that difference can be specified non-relationally. Brittlestars are a process of making a living in responsive intra-action with what is thereby differentiated from it, doing so for example by "changing its geometry and its topology" (Barad 2007, 375) in ways that also seek, discern, and respond to surrounding threats or opportunities. But its surroundings only become an environment, a field of possible threats, opportunities, and indifferences, in relation to the way of life they enable, threaten, or indifferently pass by.[6] The cut between organism and environment is thus not a separation, but an iterative entanglement. The organism as phenomenon constantly traffics across the boundary it constitutes, taking in energy and other resources, exporting entropy and 'waste' products, which, of course are also iteratively entangled in different ways within other phenomena. An organism's way of life is 'agential' precisely in the sense that it is a material system that functions as a whole in a way that is differentially responsive to changing circumstances so as to maintain that very pattern of differential