Category: Barad

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Politics, Neoliberal academy, and, and, and

I have been trying to stay away from politics, but it is a difficult thing to do–they sip through interactions with others. I hate it because it demands of me a political stance, and I resist it because I know the world is much more complicated than that. I could care less where I stand–I have become wary of choosing packs and having to conform to the conventions, expectations, and rules that come with its membership. I tried belonging–grew up as a Soviet, then later, I was a Christian; enough said–I do not like memberships.

…I am not a troublemaker, I am simply curious. And now, way beyond my passionate twenties, I no longer want to change the world–I just want to make it better, help everyone co-exist, find ways for everyone to get along and thrive somehow. Yet, Trump’s election broke me–I became so emotionally invested that the night Trump won, I felt dead. Specifically, what died was the part that believed in human’s virtue, respected opposing points of view. In its wake, I felt disgust, disbelief, disappointment with other fellow humans, and anger.  With time, the pain had subsided, but not the disgust, nor the constant awareness of my ethically problematic position as a Russian national and a permanent resident of the United States. Once again, I feel like I am forced to choose camps, and I refuse to do it.

When I became aware of the term “neoliberal academy” about a year ago, I knew in which camp I belong. My enculturation into the academic persona was easy–I am easily persuaded and sensitive to the affective power of the written word, and academic literature is no exception. When I read, I always search for the protagonists, the antagonists, for stances, philosophies, messages, and so forth; I like to know where I step next.

Neoliberal is bad. The principle of parsimony is impotent. Complexity and ambiguity are the answer. If I had a bow, I’d slap it on this neat package and put it on display to enjoy it.

Today, I question the evilness of neoliberal. What would my world, my time look like without the efficiency, the productivity of the neoliberal paradigm? Would I be able to reconcile my yearning for a simpler life on a small farm with my desire to be a part of bustling city life, the modern conveniences and comforts afforded by financial security? How do I work out the gravitational pull of adventure and cultural explorations through food and long-distance travel while I worry about the pollution I create when I fly or drive, or enjoy imported foods? I am as much a product of the environment as the producer of the environment. I am a phenomenon, and so is the neoliberal order, and the ecologies, and the species, and all the things, concepts, and events that I hate, love, or constantly interrogate in order to decide whether I should hate or love them.

I am entangled with politics and world orders, but I do not need to hate them, love them, or devote my life to changing or preserving them–I want to live in the moment, becoming with the world around me as it becomes with me. I do not want to be anxious about my employability after graduation–I want to stay curious and see where it takes us as a family.

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Barad Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

“The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. Indeed, the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs.” p.802

“A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the re-
presentationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting
things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn
everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, per-
formativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to
language to determine what is real. Hence, in ironic contrast to the mis-
conception that would equate performativity with a form of linguistic
monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is
actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant lan-
guage and other forms of representation more power in determining our
ontologies than they deserve.” p.802

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Barad, intentionality according to Bohr, and QMT

Stil in the first chapter of “Meeting Universe Half Way”  that impressed me so much from the getgo and new directions for my thinking are opening up as fast as they can. I like Barad’s exercise in analogical thinking, though she exposed such thinking as one of the major flaws in Frayn’s work in addition to unapologetically turning a blind eye to actual historicacl accounts. On page six, Barad writes about analagical thinking:
“analogical thinking (…) so often produced unsatisfactory understandings of the relevant issues.”

Later, she uses it to demonstrate what this kind of thinking can still produce if the thinker actually bothers to apply the theory correctly. She expands on the principle of complimnetarity proposed by Bohr, and shows how it leads to very different conclusions from Frayn’s. She writes,

“according to Bohr, we shouldn’t rely on the metaphysical presuppositions of classical physics (which Bohr claims is the basis for our common-sense perception of reality); rather, what we need to do is attend to the actual experimental conditions that would enable us to measure and make sense of the notion of intentional states ofmind. In the absence of such conditions, not only is the notion of an ‘‘intentional state of mind’’ meaningless, but there is no corresponding determinate fact of the matter. To summarize, the crucial point is not merely that intentional states are inherently unknowable, but that the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought.” (pp. 21, 22)

Her exercise illustrates both the folly of Frayn’s logic and the way Bohr’s principle of complimentarity relate to philosophy. Brilliant!

So what of intentionality? As I read Barad’s application of this principle in the Frayns play context, i thought about how traditional research methods (both qual and quant) often focus on causality, the need to arrive at the root of things, but when it comes to social science these goals actually assume that an action or a behavior was intentional.

Here is another, more practical example: cover letters, or how abobut the times when i had to write several letters to explain why i want to be in this grad program or that one. Every time i struggled to find words. Now I realize that the trouble came from the obligation to explain my intentions, but intentions, as it turns out, are a very complicated matter. Each time, I managed to free a strand or two from the tangled up mess I encountered as I wrote, but I could never bear to go back to re-read my letters of intention after I submitted them. The thought of reading them again causes me a very-near-physical pain; they make me cringe. It is a highly reflexive process, and I muse at how other people do it. I never heard anyone complain about how writing a cover letter is a deeply conflicted activity.

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My first impressions of Barad

Reading the first chapter of the “Entangled Beginnings.” OMG, I had to stop and write my first impressions out because her words are so profound. In the first portion of the chapter, as she rounds up her argument about how the Quantum Mechanics Theory is being used in other contexts, such as the play that features the meeting of two famous physicists in Nazi Europe. She makes an importnat disctinction between the purpose of the play and purpose of the actual quantum physics studies. Barad goes on to hypothesize why we as a race are so smitten with QM, and I now totally get it: we simply do not understand it, but are drawn to it because of its potential to explain the numerous messy connection, relations, structures that traditional science and qualitative methods cannot explain. Or even worse, due to political reasons:

“Public fascination with quantum physics is probably due in large part to several different factors, including the counterintuitive challenges it poses to the modernist worldview, the fame of the leading personalities who developed and contested the theory (Einstein not least among them), and the profound and world-changing applications quantum physics has wrought (symboized by the development of the tomic bomb)” p.6.

Because ” The interpretative issues in quantum physics (i.e., questions related to what the theory meansand how to understand its relationship to the world) are far from settled.” p. 6

Barad’s next point about how we just use QM concepts, though we do not even understand them, hits very close to home. This the question of rigor and integrity. This is why I raised my brown at Manning’s (very liberal) use of music theory when she first introduced the Minor Gesture, this is why Hein’s reference to sound as a molecular structure (which he, in turn, seems to have picked up from Deleuze) is misleading. I think in our pursuit of crossing interdisiplinary boundaries we forget to check facts or at least make an attempt to gain some expertise in the field we seek to incorporate in our studies. Great point, Barad!

She next brings forth the problem of analogical thinking that results in “unsatisfactory understandings of the relevant issues” This one cuts me deep because my sense-making strategy is amost exclusively dependent on creating analogies. Guilty as charged, for sure. So how do i change that?