ABSTRACT
In their 2003 essay “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Karen Barad introduces agential realism as a turn away from representationalist ontologies that assume the pre-existence of, on the one hand, representation and, on the other, entities to be represented (Barad 2003). In place of ordering systems that designate ontologically separate entities as relata, posthumanist performativity suggests that relations come before relata. Drawing on the work of the quantum physicist Niels Bohr, for whom objects and phenomena do not have inherently determinate boundaries, Barad adapts the object’s or phenomenon’s ability to affect the world to posthumanist performativity, with intra-action as their key term. Barad writes:
[a]gential intra-actions are specific causal material enactments that may or may not involve ‘humans’; indeed, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans’, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ are constituted.
(817) Not presuming the “separateness of any-‘thing’, let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans apart” (Barad 2007, p. 136), agential realism is an onto-epistemology concerned with immanent, material knowledge. Material knowledge is entwined with the world’s continuous differential becoming, as well as inseparable from observational and measuring apparatuses – material-discursive processes that produce determinate meanings and material beings. This view is very different from that espoused by the largely representational Newtonian and Cartesian sciences, in which the observer is separate from the observed, apparata are invisibilised – excluded from the account of knowledge production – and the ‘knower’ is separate from ‘the known’.