Meeting the Universe Halfway

Language has been granted too much power. Adventures in agential realism.

[materially-discursive]

Currently obsessed with creating frameworks for teachers to practice agential realist boundary-making with kids.

[bluewillowmoon]

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”

— Ruth Ozeki, from A Tale for the Time Being (Viking, 2013)

[15seconds2imagine]

Karen Barad: "Nuclear Hauntings & Memory Fields, For the Time-Being"

[materially-discursive]

"It is possible to engage in practices of doing physics differently, in particular by incorporating insights derived by theories of justice."

[wacosinker]

In the first place, we must recognize that a measurement can mean nothing else than the unambiguous comparison of some property of the object under investigation with a corresponding property of another system, serving as a measuring instrument, and for which this property is directly determinable according to its definition in everyday language or in the terminology of classical physics.

— Niels BOHR, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr

(as quoted in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

[mfbranksspatialmajor-blog]

AGENTIAL REALISM

Coined by KARAN BARAD

“agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped.”

“Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.”

“Additionally, Barad emphasizes that matter is not just passive material that is shaped by agents; it undergoes a process as it “stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface.”

Barad identifies phenomena as the smallest unit for this intra-action and thus the building blocks for reality, which “is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena.” (104) Phenomena represent the inseparability of an object and observations of it.

“In summary, the primary ontological units are not "things” but phenomena - dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the world.“

“Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation.”

“By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.”

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming.”

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Agential+Realism+%28Weiss%29#Real

[materially-discursive]

Foundational material for combatting the AI crisis, especially in education:

Taking Responsibility for Meaning and Mattering: An Agential Realist Approach to Generative AI and Literacy

By Priya Kumar, Kelley Cotter & Laura Y. Cabrera

"Posthuman perspectives further urge an unmooring of literacy studies from questions of what literacy means or what knowledges or capacities it entails to treat it as something that is actively produced through intra-action of human, non-human, and more-than-human forms (Kuby & Rowsell, 2017). This shift encourages the destabilization of literacy in order to see how different entanglements of learners, educators, technologies, languages, and physical environments dynamically configure literacy as a practice situated in time and space. From this perspective, the introduction of generative AI does not require a radical reimagining of literacy, as some might suggest. Rather, it invites us to ask questions about how generative AI systems are reconfiguring literacy practices. For instance, what material and discursive processes are at work in prompting generative AI systems, in evaluating the output of these systems, and in integrating their output into assignments, creative work, and other forms of expression. What boundaries are phenomena involving generative AI systems crossing, erecting, and/or dissolving? How does the material from such systems come to matter?"

[raffaellopalandri]

Living the Interdependent Self: From Conceptual Realisation to Embodied Wisdom - Part 1

Having traversed the vast theoretical terrains that unravel the illusion of the autonomous, bounded self—from Enlightenment individualism to post-structural decentring, from Buddhist concept of anātman / अनात्मन् (non-self) to Stoic radical cosmopolitanism, from Indigenous relationality to ecological embeddedness, we now stand before a different kind of threshold: not epistemological, but…

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[materially-discursive]

"To apprehend the self as relational is one thing; to live as a relational self is another. Between the two lies a chasm that only praxis can bridge."

[noosphe-re]

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are co­constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning