BOW & CS Notes: Meeting the Universe Halfway, K.Barad, 2007 (Intro & Chpt. 1)

This book is vast and complex so I think I might try to make notes as I go. Although there is a risk in reading it that I will be carried away in unhelpful albeit exciting directions, I think it is worth taking because as I move through it I am beginning to have specific ideas about what I’m aiming to explore – and it’s very much linked to ‘seeing’. In DI&C A3 (2019) I began to explore the tendency for photography (both academic and more popular forms) to engage in hierarchical thinking, despite the fact that individuals within it often make great claims about using photography to interrogate society. This results in photography reinforcing rather than dismantling segregation of various forms.

Equipment and output are (perhaps catastrophically?) ‘entangled’ with the history and uses that engendered photography’s invention. I quoted Ariella Azoulay’s blog posts Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2018) which I now see are influenced by the same undoing of a Cartesian mindset that exists in Barad’s writing. I will also need to revisit Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012) as the ‘apparatus’ – i.e. the social and economic machine in which the camera exists seems relevant.

So here are some bullet points notes for now:

• Begins with an analysis of Frayn’s play Copenhagen (first performance 1998) (rave reviews and repeated runs across the globe) which she says is beautifully written but flawed – then goes on to say why, effectively lumping it alongside a ‘plethora of popular accounts that have sacrificed rigor (sic) for the sake of accessibility, entertainment, and if one is honest, the chance to garner the authority of science to underwrite one’s favourite view’ (6) I can imagine Frayne taking umbrage with this as it potentially says films such as Marvel’s Into the Spiderverse (2018) for instance which also uses a backdrop of multiple universes and fluid realities for its well-worn but nevertheless entertaining narrative structure are no different to his intellectual production. (I’ve not seen the play but really love Into the Spiderverse, incidentally…)
• re the play, ‘we are left wandering aimlessly […with] only an empty feeling that quantum theory is somehow at once a manifestation of the mystery that keeps us alive and a cruel joke that deprives us of life’s meaning’ (17)
• However, Neils Bohr, in particular, has called into question ‘an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own set of determinate properties. The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics  is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties Newtonian physics assumes’ […] “Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or the will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.”
• ‘the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought’ (22) i.e. we can assume nothing in isolation and the network/schema/surrounding landscape in which an intention emerges is always intra-dependent. (I will get to the use of intra-rather than inter shortly)
• ‘intentions are not pre-existing determinate mental states of individual human beings’ & intentionality “might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman [cameras for instance and the companies that make them] agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’. (23)
• ‘an entangled state of agencies’ (23)
• She avoids analogies  – especially between people and particles and I will do well to heed her warning against doing so – reductive and simplistic
• is interested in ‘conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world’  (24) This is where I am having some issues. First of all, because I had to get my head around ‘discursive practices’ as opposed to discursive writing – the latter is a description of a type of writing that flits from one subject to another and is a pejorative term (my writing!)  The former is a complex Foucaldian term which is very difficult to comprehend… discourse-related performative actions in human behaviour in which power-relations are played out. The most useful description is as follows: 

‘The discursive practice approach is grounded in four insights concerning discourse. One is the affirmation that social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed. The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The fourth is the understanding that meaning is negotiated in interaction, rather than being present once-and-for-all in our utterances.’ From http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Discursive-practice.pdf

My problem – and this runs throughout the Barad and New Materialism material I’ve read (still reading, still trying to understand and a way to go) is that, while I appreciate that language has been given more attention than material/matter as Barad argues in debates about power – language and verbal action are in my understanding material and that distinction between the two is what prevents people up from valuing digital language (code, digital photography) which they see as non-material and therefore less worthy (in art especially). (See Lupton, 2019, How data came to matter (79)) The other thing is, assemblages and intra-actions which include discursive practices, as well as matter, don’t exist in isolation which is the base of her world view (which also tallies with systemic theories as far as I can see – again, based on very basic knowledge). I am aware I have not yet got the gist of Barad’s arguments about matter so – watch this space  – I might get it eventually.

• diffractive approach  – this suits my way of thinking and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the issues with photography writing in some instances is that it seems to have tunnel vision and excludes all else at times leading to phrases such as ‘photography changes everything’ which I briefly dismantled in DI&CA3. Photography then ends up being seen as a holy grail in some people’s minds when in fact it is one mechanism amongst many that contribute to meaning – and the flat, still, decisive moment kind might just be the most irrelevant and in Elkin’s terms ‘boring’ example of reality out there nowadays. (2011) Again, Lupton’s explanation of a diffractive approach, which refers to Barad, is useful. (29)
• ‘a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials [ideas = materials] in ways that reflexive methodologies are not (29)
• agential realism – recognises agents both human and non-human that exists in and acknowledge the real but eschew both anti-realism/constructivism as well as realist insisters “a philosophical framework that […] entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time’ (26) – See page 48 for more inc. ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that has taken on a common-sense appeal’ (48) What’s the alternative? Describe/how does photography reinforce this and can it help to critique it, if so how? – performative approaches
• central – ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than a property of things’ (35)
• Bohr: ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’. ‘part of the phenomena we describe’ (26)
• NBNBNBNB ‘Performative approaches call into question the basic premises of representationalism’ (28)
  ‘representationalism in the belief in the ontological distinction between representation and that which they purport to represent’ (46) [I think revisit Rubenstein’s crit of Freid – Failure to Engage for more on this]
  ‘ther are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’ (46)
  ‘Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing’ (49) Knowledge comes from ‘direct material engagement’ (49)
  See page 50 for Realism without Representation – where does all this tally with Hoffman’s theory in which our only access to the world is via representation alone. His representation is wholly constructed, it does not accurately describe the real but fulfills our needs for existing within it – therefore it is our real because its the only one we have.
  ‘Theorists who adopt a performative approach are often quick to point out performativity is not the same as performance, and to merely talk of performance does not make an approach performative’ (60)
• Intraction – 33. ‘The neologism signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ – a good deal of photography-related critical theory seems not to recognise this mutuality. ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms phenomena. ‘The shift from the metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological and ethical issues more generally’. (33)
• ‘realism is often saddled with essentialism’ (55)
• ‘theorising and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of the phenomena produced’ (56)
• builds on ‘Foucault’s critique of representationalism and Bulter’s gender performativity’  – ‘gender is not an attribute of individuals’ (57) This would apply to poverty, class distinction, ‘race’, sexuality  – all emerge as ‘a doing’ – performing
• ‘what is at stake in this dynamic conception of matter is an unsettling of natures presumed fixity and hence an opening up of the possibilities for change’ (64)

See Fred Ritchin’s final chapter After Photography (2010) as a possible intro into finding ways to use digital photography to bring these quantum influenced ideas into the discourse beyond scientific circles.

Think Zizek has critiqued Barad and will need to find it and see what he has to say… Been comparing what I recall of A Systemic View of Life 

Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.