Introducing Karen Barad’s New Materialism

I was curious about Barad's philosophy of mathematics. It seems she (they) was influenced by Oresme and Leibniz from centuries ago. But I am fuzzy about "intra-action" in that environment. Another source talks of a math learner "enter(ing) a material process of becoming".


From Wiki (Nicole Oresme):

To Oresme, an object moves, but it is not a moving object. Once an object begins movement through the three dimensions it has a new “modus rei” or “way of being,” which should only be described through the perspective of the moving object, rather than a distinct point.

I'm wondering if a definition or theorem only "comes alive" if it is involved in a process in mathematical thought.

Reply to Joshs Thanks. Very interesting.

Intra-action seems interwoven with Science studies and I suppose the teaching of math would necessarily be in the context of societal effects, etc. This might overlap or be similar to Waldorf education.

I have a good friend who years ago helped bring Spacial dynamics to the teaching realm. The teaching of math then becomes more a physical process than a purely mental one.

Otherwise I don't see where agential realism goes. It appears to me be more societal oriented, with emphasis of feminist related issues.

Reply to jgill

[/quote]Quoting jgill

Otherwise I don't see where agential realism goes. It appears to me be more societal oriented, with emphasis of feminist related issues.

Joseph Rouse does a better job than Barad at pointing to the implications for the sciences of an agential realist approach.

[quote]
“Often the stakes in such shifts are fundamental to human self-understanding. Dobzhansky's work helped form the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which not only placed evolution by natural selection at the center of a more unified biology, but also had wider consequences ranging from the biological eclipse of “race” to classifications of intelligence and culture as evolved adaptations. Postmodern quantum mechanics rejects the quasi-theological fundamentalism governing much of recent high-energy physics, abandoning the quest for a unified “Theory of Everything” in favor of more local, situated comprehension. Similarly, the phoenix-like emergence of developmental biology from the ashes of embryology, and the concomitant eclipse of genetics by genomics, challenge the now-familiar conception of genes and DNA as the calculatively controllable “secret of life” and biological surrogate for the soul (Oyama et al., 2001, Keller 1992, Nelkin and Lindee 1995). We need to understand these far-reaching shifts in scientific significance (where “understanding” is meant not narrowly cognitively, but in Heidegger's sense of ability to respond appropriately to possibilities).”

"matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing" -Barad

This seems to fundamentally change materialism from early materialism which perceived a world of substances having a state of static independent being. Materialism implies substances. Substances imply essence. Essence implies individual elements. The issue here is that there is no longer a material by this philosophy until there is "ongoing intra-activity". There are no longer individual elements in the same way as the elements co-exist rather than individually exist. Therefore this theory is "materialsism" (notice plural s) more than materialism. The plurality of this philosophy renders it dramatically different from the original idea of materialism. It would have been better to identify this philosophy as physicalist rather than materialist so as to not broaden the idea of materialism as to be so vague. Let quantum mechanics end materialist philosophy rather than modify it?

Reply to Joshs

Postmodern quantum mechanics rejects the quasi-theological fundamentalism governing much of recent high-energy physics . . .

I tried reading the 1993 paper describing this shift in thinking, but only came away with the idea of using semi-classical methods of approximation to unravel chaos. Supposedly, Barad extends ideas of Bohr into other aspects of physics. I didn't get far. A physicist might explain how this relates to agential realism. That is, if there are any physicists who entertain this concept.

As to Barad's approach to teaching math, I assume it boils down to engaging students in Woke causes mathematically. But I could be wrong. If so, I welcome illumination.

The video didn't do it for me. but this is more clear as a non-starting point to start from.

... it is not so much that I have written this book, as that it has written me. Or rather, "we" have "intra-actively" written each other ("intra-actively" rather than the usual "interactively" since writ­ ing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice ofwriting is an iterative and mutually constitu­ tive working out, and reworking, of "book" and "author"). Which is not to deny my own agency (as it were) but to call into question the nature of agency and its presumed localization within individuals (whether human or nonhuman). Furthermore, entanglements are not isolated binary co­ productions as the example ofan author-book pair might suggest. Friends, colleagues, students, and family members, multiple academic institutions, departments, and disciplines, the forests, streams, and beaches ofthe east­ ern and western coasts, the awesome peace and clarity of early morning hours, and much more were a part of what helped constitute both this "book" and its "author."

https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

The observer and the observed are entangled in the observation, and this observation displays the same entanglement as every observation. The separation of the observer from the observed is never more than a convenient approximation that is never completely true. That this separation has always been the fundamental dogma of science has become an embarrassment with the rise of quantum mechanics, with which it is in direct conflict. The rehabilitation of the observer into the observation and the author into the book, is a really good way to begin to resolve the contradiction that has plagued physics for a couple of generations.

As a beginning, this is a description of the creative process that is recognisable and satisfying to me; this is how I write, how I garden, how I learn. In the beginning was the tangle, and within the entanglement there became discernible the Book and the Author - the theory and the theoriser - the observer and the observed. And the evening and the morning were the beginning of time.

Thus the preface. I hope to be able to come back later with something about the meat of the book, if I can enter into a productive relation with it.

Quoting Joshs

Barad says:
“In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency.

The quote from Barad's book does indeed sound as-if she is moving toward a middle position between Hard Mechanical Materialism and Soft Mental Idealism. This trend may be due to the undermining of classical Materialism by modern Quantum Physics, which is more mathematical than mechanical. Now, the sub-atomic "substance" of reality seems to be more an act of becoming, as an intangible waveform --- when observed --- "collapses" (i.e. transforms) into a measurable particle.

We, flesh & blood, humans still conceive of reality as-if it is a static thing instead of a dynamic process. Our senses typically paint a mental picture of reality that is a snapshot of a fleeting instant of ongoing change. That idealized image (merged into a movie) is what we sense as the material world. But, in reality, the ding an sich remains forever beyond the reach of our physical senses. Only our metaphysical imagination can "see" into the sub-atomic foundations of Reality. :smile:

Idea/ideal : Etymology. The word idea comes from Greek ???? idea "form, pattern," from the root of ????? idein, "to see."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea
Note -- What we really "see" is our own ideas about reality.

Barad : In agential realism, realism is not about something substantialized and fixed or demarcated. Realism instead emphasizes that intra-active agentiality has real effects – effects that become ingredients in new and always also open-ended intra-active agencies.
https://dpu.au.dk/en/research/research-themes/all-themes/agential-realism-new-materialism
Note -- The "Agent" is the Observer who "measures" reality into snapshot concepts

Information Realism :
Artificial Intelligence researcher, Bernardo Kastrup, seems to be finding evidence to support the ancient philosophy of Idealism, which further weakens the equally venerable Atomic & Materialistic paradigms of modern science. He is the author of a book, The Idea of The World, which argues for the “mental nature of reality”, also known as “metaphysical realism” . In this article he discusses “information realism”, and begins by quoting physicist Max Tegmark, author of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. “For Tegmark, the universe is a ‘set of abstract entities with relations between them,’ . . . Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real.” Kastrup then describes how reductive methods failed to find the definitive atom, and instead discovered only amorphous fields. “At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.”
. . . . But in the Quantum realm, scientific certainties get turned upside down. “Indeed, according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation.” The notion of purely abstract information does not compute in a materialistic world.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page18.html
Note -- Information Realism does not deny the feeling of reality that we get from interacting with the abstract fields around us. When we touch a tabletop, we don't feel the field, but merely the substantial surface implied by its resistance to penetration of the atomic force field.

For those interested in the history of these kinds of political projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Still trying to see if there is any meat on this bone, I find

A STRUCTURAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Brian D. Josephson
Mind–Matter Unification Project,
Cavendish Laboratory, J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE

The realist position differs from the usual one adopted in quantum mechanics in that it attempts to describe what actually happens in the case of individual events, rather than simply computing averages. The difference is apparent in the case of a typical high-energy physics experiment in which large numbers of individual events are observed. Quantum theory addresses only statistical averages, whereas one can imagine instead a theory that can describe what happens individual events. In confining oneself to statistics as is the norm, one may be missing crucial information, as would indeed
happen in sciences such as astronomy. This would clearly be the case in astronomy, where for
example a statistical approach to meteor showers would fail to note the occasional peaks in
intensity.

On the other hand, Physics Stack Exchange tries to avoid even discussing agential realism in that science. It seems to have status similar to many-worlds speculations. That is to say nothing has come of it in actual physics.

I welcome any thoughts to the contrary.

If I read this correctly, Barad wants to acknowledge that the world is not independent of us, abstract from our… particularity, situation. But she also wants to maintain the outcomes associated with “objectivity”, “existence” and “reality”. She accounts for these two seemingly disparate goals by claiming it is a misconception that the world is already “fixed”—as I take it: is an already-created object which we just come to know—and that the world actually becomes a certain thing (“determinate”) through our interaction with it.

One thing she is saying does not “pre-exist” are the criteria for judging a thing to be what it is (its “relata”; its “boundaries”), and that “which cuts are enacted” are themselves judged as “a matter of accountability for what materializes, for what comes to be”. But it is just Barad’s position, or wish, that criteria should be held to one standard of “objectivity”.

The idea of a “fixed world” was created by the fear of uncertainty associated with the human (termed “subjectivity”) in order to try to attain the certainty we associate with the standard of “objectivity”. Unless we unravel the desire for objectivity, we will merely continue to tie ourselves into theoretical knots imagining we are hiding the same old wish to avoid the “subjective” human. Notice how careful Barad is to stay away from a first person even though there is a lot of “doing” “enacting” “cutting” “accountability”, etc. Her fear of ‘the human’ (uncertainty) is why I take her to pointedly say “Phenomena are real material beings” and “This is, after all, a realist conception of scientific practices.” (Edit: science’s certainty, it’s “objectivity”, comes from its practice (not “reality”); it’s method leads to, because it requires, repeatability, predictability, uniformity (apart from us, as it doesn’t matter who does science)).

Wittgenstein takes criteria and subsumes them into our lives. Expounding Barad’s words: that the world “come [ s ] to matter”, is to say, implicitly: matter to us. What is meaningful about a thing (in our lives) is reflected in our ordinary criteria for judgment of a thing or activity; as Barad might put it, a things “materialization” is “embodied” with us. So there is no singular standard for our criteria like “objectivity” to make them all certain. Now we can say our criteria are “accountable”, but their change and correction and life and death and misuse and corruption are all a part of our shared lives. Barad says we are not the “condition of possibility for the existence of phenomena” but the possibilities, or options, for a phenomena are our shared interest in it (this is not our “self-interest” or desire). Our interest in politics or morality or art are different than our interest in science (though some would have it different).

Quoting apokrisis

For those interested in the history of these kinds of political projects - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Thanks for the interesting reference apokrisis. But I think the Wikipedia article somewhat misrepresents Lamarckism, especially here: "In contrast, Lamarckism proposes that an organism can somehow pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring, implying that change in the body can affect the genetic material in the germ line.[2][3]".

What Lamarck proposed is that it is the activities of the organism, "habits", which may produce a change in the offspring, not that a change to the parent's body produces a change to the genetic material. I think that this is a critical difference to respect, because the habit doesn't necessarily cause a a change to the physical body engaged in the activity, but it causes a change to the genetic material.

This is relevant to the op because it assigns priority to activity, over changes to the passive material form which are observed as the effect of the activity. But misappropriating the effect of the activity, and assigning it to the body performing the habit (the parent), rather than assigning it to the offspring. is the straw-man representation of Lamarckism which opens it up to ridicule.

Reply to Antony Nickles Quoting Antony Nickles

. She accounts for these two seemingly disparate goals by claiming it is a misconception that the world is already “fixed”—as I take it: is an already-created object which we just come to know—and that the world actually becomes a certain thing (“determinate”) through our interaction with it.

And the world becomes what it becomes not just through human interaction with it but through its own intra-actions with itself. Our knowing the world is a matter of one part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.

Quoting Antony Nickles

. But it is just Barad’s position, or wish, that criteria should be held to one standard of “objectivity”….there is no singular standard for our criteria like “objectivity” to make them all certain.

What would be Barad’s standard of objectivity other than the measurements determined via the criteria offered by contingent configurations of phenomena? These configurations, what Barad calls apparatuses, are entanglements between non-human matter and human conceptions, purposes and goals, which are themselves
produced through cultural-linguistic-material entanglements. Thus, there is no separation between the material and the discursive. There are also no hard and fast distinctions between scientific, political, economic and literary domains. Because the engagement between the human and the non-human revolves around what matters to us in our discursive material practices, ascertaining the real is simultaneously an empirical, ethical and political endeavor.

Scientific apparatuses are constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings. That is part of the creativity and difficulty of doing science: getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose (which is always open to the possibility of being changed during the experiment as different insights are gained)”

In the work of Joseph Rouse , a close collaborator of Barad, one can find a more fully fleshed out explanation of the implications of agential realism for the understanding of the role of scientific objectivity.

“The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. The practice itself, however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted.”

Reply to jgill Quoting jgill

On the other hand, Physics Stack Exchange tries to avoid even discussing agential realism in that science. It seems to have status similar to many-worlds speculations. That is to say nothing has come of it in actual physics.

I welcome any thoughts to the contrary.

Is this surprising? Because of the conventional and generalized nature of its vocabulary, an empirical field like physics is designed to accommodate a wide range of philosophical approaches, but the vast majority of physicists will identify with the more traditional realist accounts.

Quoting Joshs

While there are many forms of new materialism, Karen Barad’s agential realism is the first and most widely cited account. Barad is a physicist and philosopher who has updated Niels Bohr’s interpretation of the two slit experiment in quantum field theory and incorporated it into a model of material reality that re-thinks traditional notions of non-human material reality as well as human linguistic discourse in such as way as to dissolve distinctions between nature and culture, the real and the ideal. I am posting Barad’s ideas there because many of the discussions on the philosophy forum begin from one side or the other of such dualist divides between inside and outside, difference and identity.

I was not acquainted with Barad's novel approach to reconciling Materialism with Idealism. But I am somewhat familiar with physicist (manhattan project) John A. Wheeler's notion of a Participatory Universe*1*2, where object & observer "intra-act", to use Barad's term. Dogmatic Materialists and Idealists may interpret the significance of that assertion by minimizing the contribution of the other side of the equation. But, I prefer to take a monistic BothAnd compromise : to accept that the world consists of both objects & agents, so Information passes in both directions ; in the form of Energy and Ideas. The dynamic system of intra-action includes both Nature & Culture. Humans don't literally create material Reality, but do participate in its creation as a concept. :cool:

*1. Wheeler :
It from bit. Otherwise put, every it—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler

*2. Our Participatory Universe :
[i]This agrees with Niels Bohr‘s suggestion to his students, at the end of a life-time of thinking about our quantum reality, that Man is inside the equation, simply by being there. Man is “entangled” in this “participatory universe”.
And so, it follows, as Wheeler asserted, that the “laws” of the functioning of the Universe (physics) make man’s participation in the flow of events – in the observable material reality – a given. And if that is true, then, it follows, that that participation leads to more “creation” (actions by man) which, as Wheeler put it, is new “information” added to the world (the observable reality) which gives rise to (more) physics (more material effects in the Universe).[/i]
https://medium.com/@tarek_osman/our-participatory-universe-ce640fed6585

Reply to apokrisis :smirk:

I continue to look into New Materialism as it affects math or physics teaching. Here is an excerpt from the Article

Multimodality and New Materialism in Science
Learning: Exploring Insights from an Introductory
Physics Lesson
by Marshall and Conana

A multimodal social semiotics perspective to science teaching and learning considers
the language of science a cultural tool for meaning-making, where the mode used to
inscribe the scientific ideas produces the intended meanings for the meaning-maker
(Kress et al. 2001). Within the field of physics education, social semiotics perspectives
have productively been used to examine student learning. Here, physics learning is
viewed as “becoming fluent in a critical constellation” of modes (Airey and Linder
2009, 27). Each mode (speech, graph, diagram, mathematics, gesture) can be seen to
have different affordances, and meaning-making can be viewed as the effect of all these
modes acting jointly. Volkwyn et al. (2019), drawing on Bezemer and Kress (2008),
describe the movement from one mode to another as “transduction”. Studies show that
a multimodal conceptualisation of science teaching enables students to better access the
semiotic resources needed for successful learning of science (Airey and Simpson 2019).

I'm seeing only a description of common teaching practices from a different POV.

Quoting Joshs

. But it is just Barad’s position, or wish, that criteria should be held to one standard of “objectivity”….there is no singular standard for our criteria like “objectivity” to make them all certain.
— Antony Nickles

What would be Barad’s standard of objectivity other than the measurements determined via the criteria offered by contingent configurations of phenomena? These configurations, what Barad calls apparatuses, are entanglements between non-human matter and human conceptions, purposes and goals, which are themselves produced through cultural-linguistic-material entanglements. Thus, there is no separation between the material and the discursive. There are also no hard and fast distinctions between scientific, political, economic and literary domains. Because the engagement between the human and the non-human revolves around what matters to us in our discursive material practices, ascertaining the real is simultaneously an empirical, ethical and political endeavor.

It’s important to note that there is also no inherent separation between the human and non-human in these material-discursive practices. This is where Barad moves beyond Bohr, seeking to resolve the residual human exceptionalism in his and other explanations of quantum theory.

Determinately bounded and propertied human subjects do not exist prior to their ‘involvement’ in natural-cultural practices…Human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity.

Apparatuses are the practices of mattering through which intelligibility and materiality are constituted (along with an excluded realm of what doesn’t matter).

The apparatus enacts an agential cut - a resolution of the ontological indeterminacy - within the phenomenon, and agential separability - the agentially enacted material condition of exteriority-within-phenomena - provides the condition for the possibility of objectivity.

Reply to Possibility

Quoting Possibility

It’s important to note that there is also no inherent separation between the human and non-human in these material-discursive practices. This is where Barad moves beyond Bohr, seeking to resolve the residual human exceptionalism in his and other explanations of quantum theory.

:up:

RationsQuoting Joshs

What would be Barad’s standard of objectivity other than the measurements determined via the criteria offered by contingent configurations of phenomena?

The point is that there is not one goal or outcome like “objectivity”. The standard of objectivity is certainty with goals like repeatability thus predictability and foreknowledge, basically what you get if you remove the human from the mix like science does (it not mattering which human is involved). The “contingent configurations of phenomena” are the criteria for each kind of thing, but each has its own, thus a moral problem can’t ensure agreement like a scientific one.

Quoting Joshs

There are also no hard and fast distinctions between scientific, political, economic and literary domains.

I’m not sure what “domain” means here, but what matters in each field leads to different criteria without any similar endgame. My point is that requiring certainty is a theoretical desire that strips away ordinary criteria which are different for each type of thing.

Quoting Joshs

ascertaining the real is simultaneously an empirical, ethical and political endeavor.

Well if we’re saying that there are political dimensions to philosophy, or ethical considerations in science, I agree, but the process and criteria, for the identity and correctness or appropriateness or ways in which they fail for each, are different and create the category and structure of a thing or practice.

Joseph Rouse:The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. The practice itself, however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted.

I believe this mirrors my reading to say each practice has its own problems and interests, and maybe “material circumstances” simply means the limits and categorical structure, but it appears to be brought up to defend that there is some solidity or consistency to our practices (like an object but not an object). My point is I find this unnecessary and confusing the issue because it implies that we need and will only accept certainty with any practice.

Quoting Antony Nickles

There are also no hard and fast distinctions between scientific, political, economic and literary domains.
— Joshs

I’m not sure what “domain” means here, but what matters in each field leads to different criteria without any similar endgame. My point is that requiring certainty is a theoretical desire that strips away ordinary criteria which are different for each type of thing.

ascertaining the real is simultaneously an empirical, ethical and political endeavor.
— Joshs

Well if we’re saying that there are political dimensions to philosophy, or ethical considerations in science, I agree, but the process and criteria, for the identity and correctness or appropriateness or ways in which they fail for each, are different and create the category and structure of a thing or practice.

The endgame is responsible and accountable practices, or intra-action.

The categories/domains/fields are themselves apparatuses - “boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced.”

The point is that more is at stake than ‘the results’; intra-actions reconfigure both what will be and what will be possible - they change the very possibilities for change and the nature of change.

Differentiating is not about othering or separating but on the contrary about making connections and commitments. The very nature of materiality is an entanglement.

Regarding teaching of math Barad and others speak of removing or blunting "sharp edges" of definitions and concepts to enable students "entanglement" with the subject.

Sound familiar? Exactly what happens here on TPF when math pops up.

On the other hand this happens frequently amongst professional mathematicians. It's one way the subject advances.

The direct contact with the general relational field does not ground the materiality of discourses. There is no immediate access to a world external to thought. We cannot avoid a communication medium that structures, organizes, and directs what can and cannot be said, assumed or proposed. A discursive formation employs the entire material density of multifarious institutions, rituals, and acts, embedded within the practices of articulations. “What is ‘‘disclosed'' is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world's differential becoming.” ‘The intra-active engagements of our participation’ can become intelligible, expressed, recorded, and then ‘disclosed’ just as the result of the effective discursive recursiveness.

Reply to Number2018 Quoting Number2018

The direct contact with the general relational field does not ground the materiality of discourses. There is no immediate access to a world external to thought

Thought is itself inextricably material and discursive in Barad’s sense of materiality as intra-action. She replaces the notion of a world internal or external to thought to that of a world entangled with itself, and though is just one of infinitely many sites of material entanglement.

Quoting Possibility

The endgame is responsible and accountable practices, or intra-action.

I can understand how I could be held responsible and accountable for, say, an apology I did, held to the criteria for that practice. I can also imagine someone extending the limits or context of what we would consider the practice of comedy (say, its distinction from tragedy), but that would be relaxing the practice, expanding its criteria, though if we are judging a comedy as lacking the classic qualities, we are defending accountability to its practice. But what would be an example were we make a practice more responsible and accountable? And how?

Quoting Antony Nickles

The endgame is responsible and accountable practices, or intra-action.
— Possibility

I can understand how I could be held responsible and accountable for, say, an apology I did, held to the criteria for that practice. I can also imagine someone extending the limits or context of what we would consider the practice of comedy (say, its distinction from tragedy), but that would be relaxing the practice, expanding its criteria, though if we are judging a comedy as lacking the classic qualities, we are defending accountability to its practice. But what would be an example were we make a practice more responsible and accountable? And how?

We don’t really make a practice more responsible - rather we practice more responsibly. A key aspect of Barad’s agential realism is a performative understanding of practices, not as observation-independent objects, but as phenomena, which include all relevant features of the arrangement. A practice, then, is not an object with attributable properties inherently separate from the I who participates in such an intra-action.

A responsible or accountable practice or intra-action is one in which participants take into account relational possibilities as ontologically prior to any and all othering.

“Relations do not follow relata, but the other way around.”

It’s not about responsibility or accountability to a category’s criteria (as if these ‘qualities’ were not simply ‘classic’ but essential, static or a priori), but to each other (human or non-human) in general, regardless of criteria, “for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part”.

It’s about being responsible/accountable for the exclusions we participate in enacting (for example) in setting such criteria or limits as ‘comedy as distinct from tragedy’ via open-ended material-discursive practices: eg. Articulating/re-articulating a list of ‘classic qualities’ as an apparatus - a boundary-making practice, “formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced”.

Learning how to intra-act responsibly as a part of the world means understanding that ‘we’ are not the only active beings - though this is never justification for deflecting our responsibilities onto others.

Human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through open-ended dynamics of intra-activity.

These “apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-action of the world),” and we participate with them in the ongoing reconfiguring of the world.

Responsibility is not a commitment that a subject chooses but rather an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness

We (but not only ‘we humans’) are always already responsible to the others with whom or of which we are entangled, not through conscious intent, but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails.

I think that we practice more responsibly by maximising awareness, connection and collaboration, and by recognising boundary-making practices as agential separability, rather than individuation. “What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us.”

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

what would be an example were we make a practice more responsible and accountable? And how?

For Barad there are no isolated autonomous subjects. Responsive interaction is a given and is prior to situated subjects or objects. What is not a given is the nature of responsive interaction. What is at stake and at issue, that is, what matters within a given set of practices among the participants, is constantly under contestation in partially shared circumstances.Responsive interaction can act to exclude and oppress rather than to coordinate harmonious agreement and justice. Thus, we can learn to become differently accountable and responsible in our interactions so that these coordinations can become more just.


Citing Levinas, Barad says:

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?”What if we were to recognize that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode" of objectivity as well as subjectivity?”
“Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

“Justice, which entails acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly…How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?”

“This work marks a shift from an ethics figured as individual responsibility to an ethics of “response-ability” (see especially Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008;Schrader 2010, 2012). More than a clever play on words, response-ability, Donna Haraway argues, is not about aligning one’s actions with a set of universal ethical principles. Instead, it requires cultivating practices of response. These practices are developed and done with others, both human and non-human, in a process of ongoing exchange. Feminists have written about this kind of responsive ethics in the context of agility training (Haraway, 2008), harmful algae research (Schrader, 2010), brittlestars enlisted in biomimetic and nanotechnology research (Barad,2007), affective and bodily mutual articulation in human-animal co-domestication (Despret,2004), and longterm patterns of relating between orchids and insects (Hustak &Myers, 2012). In each of these accounts, the authors illustrate how skills, knowledge, and even bodies emerge from dynamic choreographies of response, or processes of becoming-with one another (Thompson, 2005).”

There is more here that I agree with than disagree; I think the generalization and something about the non-situational ethical discussion trips me up.

Quoting Possibility

It’s not about responsibility or accountability to a category’s criteria (as if these ‘qualities’ were not simply ‘classic’ but essential, static or a priori), but to each other (human or non-human) in general, regardless of criteria, “for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part”.

I can agree that we are responsible to each other, but I would frame it in the sense that the criteria of a category are what has been essential to it for us (our culture) before you and I get there (a priori as it were). We came into our practices with their criteria already having been sculpted by human life choosing what is important about something being what it is, being done appropriately, what we can be held “accountable” to it for being a threat or an apology or a conclusion, etc.

And I agree this is a process of limitation and exclusion as much as identity and participation, but we do not articulate (decide) our criteria. They aren’t static nor inherent, and are subject to change, but as much as our shared lives are. What makes up an apology may not change as much as what we count as justice (dead to us maybe, or as yet unrealized), or even how we address one another.

Quoting Joshs

What is at stake and at issue, that is, what matters within a given set of practices among the participants, is constantly under contestation in partially shared circumstances.

Although I wouldn’t say it is always, or “constantly”, maybe we could agree that when “what is at stake” in a practice (its criteria) does become contested, we enter the moral realm, in which, I would say, part of it can be philosophy’s reflection on the workings of our practices, say, how we might continue from being at a loss, part of it is whether we continue together at all.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I can agree that we are responsible to each other, but I would frame it in the sense that the criteria of a category are what has been essential to it for us (our culture) before you and I get there (a priori as it were). We came into our practices with their criteria already having been sculpted by human life choosing what is important about something being what it is, being done appropriately, what we can be held “accountable” to it for being a threat or an apology or a conclusion, etc.

What has seemed ‘essential’ for ‘our culture’ in the past has been found on numerous occasions to be no indication of its accuracy, let alone its importance or appropriateness. However, I do get this need to seek a solid, pre-existing foundation to practices - to find a resolution of ontological determinacy and conditions for objectivity. Barad explains that this has not been lost - it’s just not what Newton (or even Einstein) assumed it was. Rather, it’s relation all the way down.

The criteria of a category are themselves apparatuses, “constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings”. That this has been happening long before you and I get there does not render it a priori.

Furthermore, any particular apparatus is always in the process of intra-acting with other apparatuses, and the enfolding of (relatively) stabilised phenomena (which may be traded across laboratories, cultures, or geopolitical spaces only to find themselves differently materialising) into subsequent iterations of particular practices constitutes important shifts in the particular apparatus in question and therefore in the nature of intra-actions that result in the production of new phenomena, and so on.

Practices with their criteria are by no means sculpted in stone - scientific practices are no exception. As Barad says, “boundaries do not sit still”. One of the things that makes Barad’s agential realism so interesting is the methodology of diffractive intra-action across categories, and the insightful reconfigurings of the world this makes possible.

Quoting Possibility

Barad explains that this has not been lost - it’s just not what Newton (or even Einstein) assumed it was. Rather, it’s relation all the way down

Succinct. But merely a curiosity in physics and math. Perhaps most meaningful in sociological settings.

Quoting jgill

Succinct. But merely a curiosity in physics and math.

Sure - until they’re applied or embodied, at least. Or anytime we attempt to describe our understanding of reality in non-mathematical terms.

Quoting Possibility

What has seemed ‘essential’ for ‘our culture’ in the past has been found on numerous occasions to be no indication of its accuracy, let alone its importance or appropriateness.

Our practices can be appropriately done, but they are (mostly) not judged to be “accurate”. You can have an appropriate excuse, but it cannot be an “accurate” excuse. Measuring is accurate, the retelling of the facts of an occurrence can be more or less accurate, but there is no standard against which we would call most of our practices “accurate”. The “conditions for objectivity” have “not been lost”, they were imposed in the first place (from math). The desire for that certainty creates the need for a theoretical solution to what is just the varied conclusions available or not under our ordinary criteria.

Quoting Possibility

”practices… are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings”. That this has been happening long before you and I get there does not render it a priori.

Yes our practices are not fixed, however, as I tried to claim previously, they are not decisions, arrangements, or solutions. They are the ways we have lived our lives over thousands of years; changing our shared expectations that create the implications on which our actions are judged is not resolved intellectually but culturally, over time as we change how we live, judge, and expect. And another point I was trying to make is every practice is different in the means and possibility of its evolution and extension.

And by a priori I am pointing out that there is no reference here, only reasons, interests, what matters; and that we do not easily see these, but must deduce them, reflect on what has been there but is normally overlooked, assumed.

Reply to Antony Nickles Quoting Antony Nickles

there is no standard against which we would call most of our practices “accurate”. The “conditions for objectivity” have “not been lost”, they were imposed in the first place. The desire for that certainty creates the need for a theoretical solution to what is just the varied conclusions available or not under our ordinary criteria.

New materialism revokes the problem of evaluating modes of existence using criteria immanent to the mode itself or to practices as self-sufficient, autonomous arrangements (‘the intra-active engagements of our participation’). Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria? Answering this question, Deleuze formulates his immanent ethics thesis as “There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life.” (Deleuze, ‘What is philosophy,” pg 74).

Quoting Joshs

Thought is itself inextricably material and discursive in Barad’s sense of materiality as intra-action, thought is just one of infinitely many sites of material entanglement.

The new materialistic perspective of the co-constitution of all things in a ceaseless movement of intra-action evacuates distinctive features evaluating thought as a particular site of the highest modes of human existence. If nature is a flow running through everything rather than a prescriptive essence unique to each being or species, it does not seem that anything effectively concerning human ethical or political norms arises from that new materialist realization.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Our practices can be appropriately done, but that is not on a measure with their being “accurate”. You can have an appropriate excuse, but it is not accurate. Measuring is accurate, the retelling of the facts of an occurrence can be more or less accurate, but there is no standard against which we would call most of our practices “accurate”.

Yes, you can have an appropriate excuse in theory, but if delivered incorrectly or without qualitative precision - that is, done without accuracy - it may be deemed ‘inappropriate’ in practice. Accuracy is a qualitative term - one that I use instead of ‘appropriateness’ to avoid a human-centred bias, and to encourage broader accountability then simply what ‘culture’ currently deems appropriate.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The “conditions for objectivity” have “not been lost”, they were imposed in the first place. The desire for that certainty creates the need for a theoretical solution to what is just the varied conclusions available or not under our ordinary criteria.

There’s no desire for certainty here in acknowledging conditions for objectivity - again, there’s a distinct human-centred bias in your choice of words. And I’m not sure what ‘theoretical solution’ you’re referring to. What are ‘ordinary criteria’ but ‘conclusions’ themselves - apparatuses that reconfigure the world by enacting agential cuts?

Objectivity is about accounting for “the constitutive practices in the fullness of their materialities, including the enactment of boundaries and exclusions, the production of phenomena in their sedimenting historiality, and the ongoing reconfiguring of the space of possibilities for future enactments”. It’s about including all of the relevant features of any intra-action, in order to be more responsible and accountable with our involvement.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes our practices are not fixed, however, as I tried to claim previously, they are not decisions, arrangements, or solutions. They are the ways we have lived our lives over thousands of years; changing our shared expectations that create the implications on which our actions are judged is not resolved intellectually but culturally, over time as we change how we live, judge, and expect. And another point I was trying to make is every practice is different in the means and possibility of its evolution.

And bya priori I am pointing out that there is no reference here, only reasons, interests, what matters; and that we do not easily see these, but must deduce them, reflect on what has been there but is normally overlooked, assumed.

I don’t see where I claimed that practices are decisions, arrangements or solutions in the sense of human intentionality. It is human exceptionalism that leads to reasons and interests being assumed or overlooked as ‘a priori’. What cannot be taken for granted is difference - as Barad says, “it is what matters”.

Practices (regardless of human intentionality, intellect or culture) are habitual or embodied intra-actions that are material-discursive in nature. But they are not ‘ours’ to possess, attributing agency necessarily to humans. Barad argues that matter itself is agentive - “mattering is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences.”

So yes, every practice is different, but it is differentiating that constitutes each practice, each reason or interest, and even culture itself - “not just what matters, but what is excluded from mattering”.

Reply to Number2018 Quoting Number2018

Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria?

My point is that we do have criteria for each practice for the judgments we make about them (whether they are appropriate within what we identify as that thing). What is normative is our lives themselves Cavell says. And we can make explicit those criteria for, say, an excuse, an apology, what we would call “following a rule”, or pointing, walking (compared to running)…

Quoting Number2018

nature is a flow running through everything rather than a prescriptive essence unique to each being or species,

But this “if” is flawed in both premises. We are not unique; and it is our “prescriptive” inculcation into a society and history that allows us to judge someone’s act, if necessary, along the criteria of what has come to be essential to that being what it is—to us, for example, identifying an excuse from a reason.

Reply to Possibility

I agree with most everything you are saying and believe we are for the most part preaching past each other to the same choir. However.

Quoting Possibility

There’s no desire for certainty here in acknowledging conditions for objectivity... And I’m not sure what ‘theoretical solution’ you’re referring to

I agree with your description of an “accounting” to the criteria for what are “relevant features”, but that is not the classic conception of what “objectivity” is. Plato and Kant’s idea of a metaphysical “object” for comparison with its “appearance” to us was born of a desire for certainty (exactness), not just responsibility, accountability. This is the theoretical picture which I think is continued through in having “discursive” and “materiality” (the word, then the referent) with a tweak to try avoid the conclusion it is “metaphysical”.

Quoting Possibility

What are ‘ordinary criteria’ but ‘conclusions’ themselves - apparatuses that reconfigure the world by enacting agential cuts?

I’ll take from what I said to Number2018: we do have criteria for each practice for the judgments we make about them (whether they are appropriate within what we identify as that thing). What is normative is our lives themselves Cavell says. And we can make explicit those criteria for, say, an excuse, an apology, what we would call “following a rule”, or pointing, walking (compared to running)…

“Appropriateness” is precise, rigorous, and clear. Accuracy is a judgment to a set criteria, and so imposed onto an ordinary setting. This is how objectivity was created (out of the desire for an outside, higher, predictable, general criteria).

Quoting Possibility

So yes, every practice is different, but it is differentiating that constitutes each practice, each reason or interest, and even culture itself - “not just what matters, but what is excluded from mattering”.

And here I agree as well. To have a something we must push against everything. This speaking is a kind of violence and death. I would also point out that off course the “what” that is excluded is importantly also a “who”.

Quoting Antony Nickles

There’s no desire for certainty here in acknowledging conditions for objectivity... And I’m not sure what ‘theoretical solution’ you’re referring to
— Possibility

I agree with your description of an “accounting” to the criteria for what are “relevant features”, but that is not the classic conception of what “objectivity” is. Plato and Kant’s idea of a metaphysical “object” for comparison with its “appearance” to us was born of a desire for certainty (exactness), not just responsibility, accountability. This is the theoretical picture which I think is continued through in having “discursive” and “materiality” (the word, then the referent) with a tweak to try avoid the conclusion it is “metaphysical”.

Not accountable to the ‘criteria’, but to our inherent inseparability from the world. Objectivity means without bias, judgement or prejudice. Plato and Kant’s ‘object’ demonstrates a striving for a sense of certainty at the cost of accuracy in terms of responsibility and accountability. Kant’s focus on this ‘object-in-itself’ as a given is I think one of two key distortions in his philosophy (the other is its human exceptionalism). Bracketing out uncertainty behind a dualism is a cop-out.

But I think the point being made with ‘material-discursive’ is that there is no inherent distinction between these practices of ‘mattering’ - that the process is structurally the same.

Barad:A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent pre-existing things. Unlike representationalism, which positions us above or outside the world we allegedly merely reflect on, a performative account insists on understanding, thinking, observing and theorising as practices of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being.

Representationalism, the metaphysics of individualism and the intrinsic separability of knower and known - all of these are in question according to quantum mechanics. It’s not a matter of trying to avoid the label of ‘metaphysical’ - it’s about seeing a logical practicality in structural alignment between semantic and ontological theories. It’s nothing particularly new - The Tao Te Ching did this thousands of years ago.

Quoting Antony Nickles

So yes, every practice is different, but it is differentiating that constitutes each practice, each reason or interest, and even culture itself - “not just what matters, but what is excluded from mattering”.
— Possibility

And here I agree as well. To have a something we must push against everything. This speaking is a kind of violence and death. I would also point out that off course the “what” that is excluded is importantly also a “who”.

Sure, but I’m talking about recognising the practice of differentiating a ‘subject’ (‘who’) from an already entangled materiality - not just with other humans, but with everything. The point is that we don’t have to push against everything in order to have a something. We can differentiate without othering or separating.

This is the paradigm shift required - to understand that when I talk about a ‘something’, I’m engaging in a material-discursive practice, not referring to some individual something that exists as such, independently of both of us. In this way, I acknowledge a variability (uncertainty) not just between my intra-action differentiating ‘something’ and yours, but also the possibility of changes occurring to this agential cut as we continue discussions, as we discuss with others, and as this ‘something’ and the various apparatuses I involve in observing/measuring/describing it, continue to intra-act in the world. These are the conditions for ‘objectivity’.

I didn’t say it was easy…

Reply to Antony Nickles Quoting Antony Nickles

Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria?
— Number2018

My point is that we do have criteria for each practice for the judgments we make about them (whether they are appropriate within what we identify as that thing). What is normative is our lives themselves Cavell says. And we can make explicit those criteria for, say, an excuse, an apology, what we would call “following a rule”, or pointing, walking (compared to running)…

It could be understood that your point is based on the premise of a clear and transparent meaning of
‘we.’ When you write: ‘We do have criteria,’ ‘We can make explicit,’ ‘We would call,’ and ‘Our lives,’
there may be an implicit reference to a legitimate community, establishing a comprehensive ground of rationality. Yet, my life interrelates to broader life networks that are not mine. My living
and my practices are embedded into rapidly changing, unstable social, economic, and organic environments that affirm and support their interdependency. Under these conditions, how can one rely upon universal community consensus on Reason and Judgement? From Derrida’s point of view, one should confront the generative, performative moment of decision—the event where one engages in an outcome that’s never guaranteed by the process (in the moment of deliberation, you can’t know if it’s the “right” decision). “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience experiment of the undecidable". (Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, p 116;) Preceding our recourses to a community and objectivity, the event of deciding necessitates their ongoing re-invention and re-explication.

Shallow analysis:

When a group convenes and creates an "object", let's say a social movement, in the process of intra-acting, there is entanglement plus creation.

When two players rack the billiards and play a game of pool, there is intra-acting and entanglement, but the eight ball is the same old eight ball.

Reply to jgill

Quoting jgill

When two players rack the billiards and play a game of pool, there is intra-acting and entanglement, but the eight ball is the same old eight ball.

According to Barad, space, time , and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements, so it can’t be the same old eight ball even apart form the pool game.

Quoting Joshs

so it can’t be the same old eight ball even apart form the pool game

Oh, but it is. It aligns perfectly from my last game. Well, a few more scratches. As for Barad, They are a person who has taken a certain perspective of quantum physics and applied it to feminism, genderism, and other societal issues - perhaps successfully. Elsewhere applied it seems highly speculative and tangential rather than fundamental.

With regard to math education, They seem more concerned with the entire physical, social, familial and emotional environment in which math is learned. Not so much with the nitty gritty of the subject of mathematics as with the entire environmental structure intra-acting. There is some value in that.

Quoting jgill

so it can’t be the same old eight ball even apart form the pool game
— Joshs

Oh, but it is. It aligns perfectly from my last game. Well, a few more scratches. As for Barad, They are a person who has taken a certain perspective of quantum physics and applied it to feminism, genderism, and other societal issues - perhaps successfully. Elsewhere applied it seems highly speculative and tangential rather than fundamental.

If by ‘same’ you mean similar enough to pass for same, that’s fine by me, as long as you recognize that there is nothing intrinsic to an entity that persists identically from one moment to the next, since we’re no longer talking about self-same objects but changing configurations of intra-actions.

As far as the relevance of Barad’s work outside of societal issues, Barad is not intending to revolutionize the practical doing of physics but rather provide a new philosophical interpretation of it. Is this tangential to the real subject matter of physics? Barad doesnt think so.

I part company with my physics colleagues with neopositivist leanings who believe that philosophical concerns are superfluous to the real subject matter of physics. Rather, I am sympathetic to Bohr's view that philosophy is integral to physics. Indeed, Einstein felt much the same way and once quipped: ‘‘Of course, every theory is true, providedyou suitably associate its symbols with observed quantities.'' In other words, physics without philosophy can only be a meaningless exercise in the manipulation of symbols and things, much the same as philosophy without any understanding of the physical world can only be an exercise in making meaning about symbols and things that have no basis in the world. This is why Einstein and Bohr engaged with all their passions about the meaning of quantum theory.

I get the impression that you think the social-philosophical and natural science spheres of knowledge are somehow independent , such that what amounts to a revolution in one sphere may be irrelevant to the interpretive underpinnings of the other.

The practical doing of physics hasn’t changed very much in the past 80 years, according to a number of historians of physics. Meanwhile, there have been important changes in social science and philosophy over that span. This has led to the suggestion that the creative juices in physics have been stagnating. This doesnt prevent physics from ‘working’ in the sense of continuing to solve the same puzzles it has been solving in the same way over the past 80 years. But it keeps the field from finding new and more powerful ways to solve puzzles. I think Barad is a more talented philosopher than physicist. I believe they have started the creative juices flowing , and it will take a brilliant physicist to translate those juices into changes in the way practicing physicists do their job.

Quoting Joshs

it will take a brilliant physicist to translate those juices into changes in the way practicing physicists do their job

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of her ideas. Certainly, quantum theory these days seems more a reifying of mathematics.

Quoting Joshs

I get the impression that you think the social-philosophical and natural science spheres of knowledge are somehow independent

I see physics notions like entanglement applied to social sciences, but the other way around is a bit more obscure. Psychology in physics? The measurement problem? As for mathematics, Barad and her followers suggest a loosening of the framework of the subject, citing the concept of non-Euclidean geometry. But this is always happening in the research community - nothing new here. However, to propose something similar in math education at the early levels is bold, to say the least. Reminds me of the New Math of the 1960s and 1970s.