Has anyone read this or any other Karen Barad? (I’m looking at you, fluvicoline.) I think I really need to read her. Like um, feminist theoretical physicist? COOL.
Wikipedia says this and it really excites me
According to Barad’s theory of agential realism, the world is made up of phenomena, which are “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies”. Intra-action, a neologism introduced by Barad, signals an important challenge to individualist metaphysics. For Barad, things or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, ‘objects’ emerge through particular intra-actions. Thus, apparatuses, which produce phenomena are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory), rather they are the condition of possibility of ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, not merely as ideational concepts, but in their materiality. Apparatuses are ‘material-discursive’ in that they produce determinate meanings and material beings while simultaneously excluding the production of others. What it means to matter is therefore always material-discursive. Barad takes her inspiration from physicist Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics. Barad’s agential realism is at once an epistemology (theory of knowing), an ontology (theory of being), and an ethics. Barad coins the term onto-epistemology. Because specific practices of mattering have ethical consequences, excluding other kinds of mattering, onto-epistemological practices are always in turn onto-ethico-epistemological.
Also today I thought up the term onto-epistemological because my advisor critiqued my use of “ontology and epistemology” arguing that their being discreet categories is a western construct so I was like OK how do I merge them? I google it and she shows up. I already wanted to read her but her having coined the term I later thought up because I needed it… well, pretty sure it was meant to be.