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Describe Barad's agential realism and its relation to the work of Foucault and Butler. How
does this compare to Winner's claim that artifacts have politics? Do these amount to the
same claims? (If not, what makes these claims different?)
Barad’s philosophy initially seems not too different from other work in feminist science studies,
in its posthumanist and new materialist understanding of the world. However, Barad departs
significantly from other science studies by finding inspiration for her philosophical framework in
scientific theory and practice. Analyzing the writings of physicist Niels Bohr, whose work in
quantum physics led him to question the ontological and epistemological assumptions of
classical physics (107). While the details of Bohr’s work is outside the scope of this essay, the
main conclusion she adapts from Bohr is that the primary ontological unit is not bounded,
independent objects but, instead, phenomena (139). These phenomena, which constitute
reality, are “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” and are
“ontologically primitive relations,” that is, the components do not preexist phenomena -- their
properties, boundaries, and meaning are worked out in intra-actions (139). This ontological
shift, as Barad notes, has profound, far-reaching effects for our requires that we rethink “space,
time, matter, dynamics, agency, structure, subjectivity, objectivity, knowing, intentionality,
discursivity, performativity, entanglement, and ethical engagement" (33). In Meeting the
Universe Halfway, Barad works through the implications for many of these concepts. For the
purposes of this essay, however, I will discuss key aspects of agential realism that might
provide a better accounting of technoscientific practices. Other performative accounts of
science, like Actor Network Theory, are also based on a relational ontology and extend agential
capacity to non-humans; nevertheless, Actor Network approaches tend to fall short in
accounting for unequal power relations and exclusion. Constructivist approaches might better
account for power relations, but, as Barad notes, they tend to minimize or ignore the importance
of material, non-human components to the production of scientific knowledge (40).
Epistemology
Building off Neil Bohr’s insight that the indeterminacy of a measurement interaction made it
impossible to separate the “object of observation” from the “agencies of observation,” (108),
Barad concludes that epistemology is inseparable from ontology; that is, knowing is a part of
being (341). Science does not describe an ontologically separate world, but instead, the
process of knowledge production is itself an intra-action that implicates the observer and
observing equipment. “Making knowledge,” she concludes, “is not simply about making
facts but about making worlds, or rather, it is about making specific worldly
configurations—not in the sense of making them up ex nihilo, or out of language, beliefs,
or ideas, but in the sense of materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific
material form” (91).
Ethics
Along with collapsing epistemology and ontology into scientific practice, Barad argues that these
practices inherently involve ethics. Since knowledge involves “world making,” that is, it
articulates specific outcomes of intra-actions in which boundaries between subjects and
properties emerge, Barad argues that we have a responsibility to remain accountable for the
role we play in determining what comes to matter and what is excluded. “Particular possibilities
for (intra-)acting exist at every moment,” she concludes, “ and these changing possibilities entail
an ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world's becoming, to contest and rework what
matters and what is excluded from mattering” (180). Crucially, part of this ethical responsibility
is to understand that humans are not the privileged site of agency, but are only one part of a
larger material configuration that constitutes the world.
Discourse
Focuault
The Body and Materiality
matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than as a property of things (35)
Reckoning
To that end, I will center my discussion on science and technology, for which, from my
perspective, agential realism can provide a more accurate and inclusive account.
Donna J. Haraway, Chapter 9, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 183-201.