Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics And the Entanglement of Matter And Meaning - Brossura

Barad, Karen

Brossura

ISBN 10: 082233917X ISBN 13: 9780822339175

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2007

Riassunto

Meeting the Universe Halfway

is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has a doctorate in theoretical particle physics.

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Meeting the Universe Halfway

QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE ENTANGLEMENT OF MATTER AND MEANINGBy KAREN BARAD

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3917-5

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction The Science and Ethics of Mattering............................................................................................................3One Meeting the Universe Halfway...................................................................................................................39Two Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter........................................................................71Three Niels Bohr's Philosophy-Physics: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Knowledge and Reality.......................................................97Four Agential Realism: How Material-Discursive Practices Matter.....................................................................................132Five Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality....................................................................189Six Spacetime Re(con)figurings: Naturalcultural Forces and Changing Topologies of Power............................................................223Seven Quantum Entanglements: Experimental Metaphysics and the Nature of Nature.......................................................................247Eight The Ontology of Knowing, the Intra-activity of Becoming, and the Ethics of Mattering...........................................................353Appendix A Cascade Experiment, by Alice Fulton............................................................................................................397Appendix B The Uncertainty Principle Is Not the Basis of Bohr's Complementarity...........................................................................399Appendix C Controversy concerning the Relationship between Bohr's Principle of Complementarity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.....................402Notes........................................................................................................................................................405References...................................................................................................................................................477Index........................................................................................................................................................493

Chapter One

Meeting the Universe Halfway

Because truths we don't suspect have a hard time making themselves felt, as when thirteen species of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females stay undiscovered due to bias against such things existing, we have to meet the universe halfway. Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade. The sky's high solid is anything but, the sun going under hasn't budged, and if death divests the self it's the sole event in nature that's exactly what it seems. -ALICE FULTON, "Cascade Experiment"

On the morning after giving an invited lecture on the constructed nature of scientific knowledge, I had the privilege of watching as an STM (scanning tunneling microscope) operator zoomed in on a sample of graphite, and as we approached a scale of thousands of nanometers ... hundreds of nanometers ... tens of nanometers ... down to fractions of a nanometer, individual carbon atoms were imaged before our very eyes. The experience was so sublime that it sent chills through my body-and I stood there, a theoretical physicist who, like most of my kind, rarely ventures into the basements of physics buildings that experimental colleagues call "home," conscious that this was one of those life moments when the amorphous jumble of history seems to crystallize in a single instant. How many times had I recounted for my students the evidence for the existence of atoms? And there they were-just the right size and grouped in a hexagonal structure with the interatomic spacings as predicted by theory. "If only Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, and especially Mach could have seen this!" I exclaimed. And as the undergraduate students operating the instrument (which they had just gotten to work the day before by carefully eliminating sources of vibrational interference-we're talking nanometers here) disassembled the chamber that held the sample so that I could see for myself the delicate positioning of the probe above the graphite surface, expertly cleaved with a piece of Scotch tape, I mused aloud that "seeing" atoms will quickly become routine for students (as examining cells with visual-light microscopes, and in turn the structure of molecules by electron microscopes, became routine for earlier generations) and that I was grateful to have been brought up in a scientific era without this particular expectation.

At this point in my story, I imagine there will be scientific colleagues who will wonder whether this presented a moment of intellectual embarrassment for your narrator, who had on the previous night insisted on the constructed nature of scientific knowledge. In fact, although I was profoundly moved by the event I had just witnessed, standing there before the altar of the efficacy of the scientific enterprise, I was unrepentant. For as constructivists have tried to make clear, empirical adequacy is not an argument that can be used to silence charges of constructivism. The fact that scientific knowledge is constructed does not imply that science doesn't "work," and the fact that science "works" does not mean that we have discovered human-independent facts about nature. (Of course, the fact that empirical adequacy is not proof of realism is not the endpoint, but the starting point, for constructivists, who must explain how it is that such constructions work-an obligation that seems all the more urgent in the face of increasingly compelling evidence that the social practice of science is conceptually, methodologically, and epistemologically allied along particular axes of power.)

On the other hand, I stand in sympathy with my scientific colleagues who want science studies scholars to remember that there are cultural and natural causes for knowledge claims. While most constructivists go out of their way to attempt to dispel the fears that they are either denying the existence of a human-independent world or the importance of natural, material, or non-human factors in the construction of scientific knowledge, the bulk of the attention has been on social or human factors. To be fair, this is where the burden of proof has been placed: constructivists have been responding to the challenge to demonstrate the falsity of the worldview that takes science as the mirror of nature. Nonetheless, as both the range and sophistication of constructivist arguments have grown, the charge that they embrace an equally extreme position-that science mirrors culture-has been levied against them with increasing vigor. While few constructivists actually take such an extreme position, science studies scholars would be remiss in simply dismissing this charge as a trivial oversimplification and misunderstanding of the varied and complex positions that come under the rubric of constructivism. The anxiety being expressed, though admittedly displaced, touches on the legitimate concern about the privileging of epistemological issues over ontological ones in the constructivist literature. Ontological issues have not been totally ignored, but they have not been given sufficient attention.

The ontology of the world is a matter of discovery for the traditional realist. The assumed one-to-one correspondence between scientific theories and reality is used to bolster the further assumption that scientific entities are unmarked by the discoverers: nature is taken to be revealed by, yet independent of, theoretical and experimental practices, that is, transparently given. Acknowledging the importance of Cartwright's (1983) philosophical analysis decoupling these assumptions and her subsequent separation of scientific realism into two independent positions-realism about theories and realism about entities-Hacking (1982), like Cartwright, advocates realism toward entities. Shifting the focus in studies of science away from the traditional emphasis on theory construction to the examination of experimental practice, Hacking grounds his position on the ability of the experimenter to manipulate entities in the laboratory. That which exists is that which we can use to intervene in the world to affect something else: electrons are counted as real because they are effective experimental tools, not because they have been "found." Galison (1987) also centers experimental practice in his historical analysis comparing three different periods of twentieth-century physics experimentation, wherein he generalizes Hacking's criterion for the reality of entities by underlining the importance of the notions of stability and directness. Other approaches go further in interrogating the immediate thereness of nature. Latour (1993) prioritizes stability as well, posing it as one variable of a two-dimensional geometry whose other axis connects the poles of Nature and Society. Essence thus becomes the trajectory of stabilization within this geometry that is meant to characterize the variable ontologies of quasi-objects. In contrast, Haraway (1988) emphasizes instability: it is the instability of boundaries defining objects that is the focal point of her explicit challenge not only to conceptions of nature that claim to be outside of culture, but also to the separation of epistemology from ontology. The instability of boundaries and Haraway's insistence that the objects of knowledge are agents in the production of knowledge feature her notions of cyborgs (1985) and material-semiotic actors (1988), which strike up dissonant and harmonic resonances with Latour's hybrids and quasi-objects (1993). Moving to what some consider the opposite pole of the traditional realist position are the semiotic and deconstructionist positions. To many scientists as well as science studies scholars, the theories of semiotics and deconstruction, which call into question the assumed congruity of signifier and signified, insisting on the intrinsic arbitrariness of the sign or representation, seem to be the ultimate in linguistic narcissism. However, while insisting that we are always already in the "theater of representation," Hayles (1993) takes exception to extreme views that hold that language is groundless play, and while she does not provide us with access to the real, she does attempt to place language in touch with reality by reconceptualizing referentiality. Hayles's theory of constrained constructivism relies on consistency (in opposition to the realist notion of congruence) and the semiotic notion of negativity to acknowledge the importance of constraints offered by a reality that cannot be seen in its positivity: as she puts it, "Although there may be no outside that we can know, there is a boundary" (40; italics in original).

These attempts to say something about the ontology of our world are exceptions rather than the rule in the science studies literature. What is needed is a deeper understanding of the ontological dimensions of scientific practice. It is crucial that we understand the technologies by which nature and culture interact. Does nature provide some template that gets filled in by culture in ways that are compatible with local discourses? Or do specific discourses provide the lenses through which we view the layering of culture on nature? Does the full "texture" of nature get through, or is it partially obliterated or distorted in the process? Is reality an amorphous blob that is structured by human discourses and interactions? Or does it have some complicated, irregular shape that is differently sampled by varying frameworks that happen to "fit" in local regions like coincident segments of interlocking puzzle pieces? Or is the geometry fractal, so that it is impossible for theories to match reality even locally? At what level of detail can any such question be answered, if at all? And what would it mean? Is it possible to take any of these questions seriously in the academy in the early twenty-first century? Won't this still sound too much like metaphysics to those of us trained during the various states of decay of positivist culture? And if we don't ask these questions, what will be the consequences? As Donna Haraway reminds us, "What counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about" (1988, 588). I seek some way of trying to understand the nature of nature and the interplay of the material and the discursive, the natural and the cultural, in scientific and other social practices. Consequently I will place considerably more emphasis on ontological issues than is common in science studies, although I will not ignore the epistemological issues either, since there is good reason to question the traditional Western philosophical belief that ontology and epistemology are distinct concerns.

After articulating a new "ontoepistemological" framework, I will own up to its realist tenor. After a resurgence of interest in scientific realism in the 1980s, its popularity seems to have waned once again, if not because of the death knell sounded by Fine's (1984) clever accounting of the metatheoretical failure of arguments for realism, then at least because of the commonplace tendency on the part of constructivists to present scientific realism as naive, unreflexive, and politically invested in its pretense to an apolitical posture. In fact, the pairing of constructivism with some form of antirealism has become nearly axiomatic: if we acknowledge the cultural specificity of scientific knowledge construction, are we not obligated to relinquish the hope of constructing theories that are true representations of independent reality? For example, in offering a concrete case of the underdetermination thesis, Cushing (1994) argues that the fact that distinctive theories can account for the same empirical evidence means that realists are hard-pressed to make an argument for theoretical access to the actual ontology of our world. For the most part, constructivists have expressed either outright disdain for, or at least suspicion toward, realism and have explicitly adopted antirealist positions, or they have refused the realism-antirealism debate altogether either because they feel limited by this very opposition (see, for example, Fine 1984; Pickering 1994) or because they have thought it more fruitful to focus on other issues. I must confess to having sympathy particularly with the latter positions, but I also think that realism has all too quickly been dismissed. Realism has been invoked to support both oppressive and liberatory positions and projects, and my hope is that at this historical juncture, the weight of realism-the serious business and related responsibility involved in truth hunting-can offer a possible ballast against the persistent positivist scientific and postmodernist cultures that too easily confuse theory with play.

Realizing the multiplicity of meanings that realism connotes, at this juncture I want to clarify how I take realism in the first instance. As a starting point, I follow Cushing's lead:

I assume, perhaps unreasonably, that a scientific realist believes successful scientific theories to be capable of providing reliable and understandable access to the ontology of the world. If one weakens this demand too much, not much remains, except a belief in the existence of an objective reality to which we have little access and whose representation by our theories is nebulous beyond meaningful comprehension. In such a situation, is it worth worrying about whether or not one is a realist? (Cushing 1994, 270n26)

Although I will ultimately add substantive qualifications to this definition, I do not intend to weaken what I take to be the spirit of Cushing's demand, and I have therefore selected this starting point to clarify the sense of realism with which I mean to engage, as separate from some other more general uses in the science studies literature, including discussions that oppose realism to relativism, or realism to linguistic monism, or realism to subjectivism. My first concern is not with realism in these senses: I grant that there are forms of antirealism that are not relativist, that do not deny the existence of an extralinguistic reality, and that are compatible with various notions of objectivity. That is, in the spirit of Cushing's query, I want to limit the elasticity of the meaning of realism for my initial purposes. Science studies scholars have labored long and hard to articulate moderate constructivist positions that reject the extremes of objectivist, subjectivist, absolutist, and relativist stances, but it is perhaps inappropriate to label these as realist on just such bases alone. That is, I do not want to turn these accomplishments aside by setting up realism as the foil to the entire family of apparitions, including some that scientists find most haunting. In this regard, it is perhaps important to acknowledge that feminist science studies scholars in particular staunchly oppose epistemological relativism, with an intensity shared by scientists (a fact that may come as a surprise to scientists and others who have not studied the feminist literature), though few have embraced realist positions. Seeing epistemological relativism as the mirror twin of objectivism, and both as attempts to deny the embodiment of knowledge claims, feminist theories of science, including Haraway's theory of situated knowledges (1988), Harding's strong objectivity (1991), Keller's dynamic objectivity (1985), and Longino's contextual empiricism (1990), articulate nonrelativist antirealist positions. Consequently, although my discussion of realism is concerned with the sense in which direct engagement with the ontology of our world is possible, I will also attempt to satisfy the high standards that have already been set by specifying the ways in which the new form of realism that I propose rejects these other extreme oppositions.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 082233917X
• ISBN 13: 9780822339175
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 524
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile