The Conceptual and Ethical Normativity of Intra-active Phenomena

Abstract

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 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, 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 non-hierarchical: 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