Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and other related) fields, which posits her work as an advance over the history of “representationalism” and “social constructivism.” In turn, this one-sided materialism produces a skewed reading of the quantum mechanical phenomena (...) with which she engages. Her attempt to create an ontological (not epistemological) interpretation of quantum mechanics proves deconstructible. Instead, a science of undecidability or science of quant à helps us to understand debates among scientists and philosophers over the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics and its epistemological or ontological status – by demonstrating that these questions will necessarily remain unresolved. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the posthumanist vision of a new level of life is a plausible idea or a mere utopia. On a philosophical metalevel, there is always a discussion about the anthropological and thus also ontological and natural philosophical assumptions underlying posthumanism, aimed at assessing the strong presuppositions informing the posthumanist goal of a next level of life. From the perspective of Helmuth Plessner’s grounding of the different levels of organic life in a philosophy of nature, theoretically substantiating the (...) new level appears less simple than current technophilosophical discussions surrounding posthumanism and the cyborgization of the human would have us think. Thus Jos De Mul, pursuing a line of argument that follows Plessner’s logic of levels culminating in excentric positionality, has attempted to designate the melding of the human with telepresence technologies as a new level going beyond excentric positionality. The contribution intervenes here. I will argue that De Mul did not in fact succeed in grounding a new level of life following Plessner’s logic of levels, and I will show along Plessners figure of doubleaspectivity why a further posthuman level cannot be grounded within the framework of Plessner’s levels. (shrink)

A growing body of research incorporates children’s perspectives into the research process. If we are to take children’s perspectives seriously in education research, research methodologies must be capable of addressing issues that matter to children. This article engages in a theoretical discussion that considers how a posthuman research methodology can support such an effort. Piaget’s early and lesser known qualitative studies on children’s conception of the world are re-read along with Karen Barad’s posthuman theory, using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. (...) Through a plastic reading of Piaget and Barad, I consider how a posthuman theoretical framework might contribute to research seeking to access children’s perspectives. Before concluding, I reflect on some ethical concerns regarding posthuman research in education. (shrink)

The theoretical movement known under the heading of posthumanism has entered the academic field. Posthumanisms most prominent feature is to retrieve the concept of matter into the analytical framework. Matter is understood to be under-theorized within the social sciences as a result of the permeative focus upon language and discourse. A prevailing understanding of posthumanism that has been used within educational science and philosophy thus consists of moving the searchlight from language/discourse onto matter. Notably, these scholars are turning to the (...) philosopher Karen Barad in order to spell out their posthumanistic implications. The aim of the thesis is to give an account of the philosophy of Karen Barad in contrast to other prevailing renderings of her. The analysis is carried out using a contrastive methodological approach. In this study I demonstrate how my reading of Barad differs from the scholarly readings that I choose to engage with. The results show that with an alternative conceptual understanding of Barad’s posthumanistic theory the analysis is being steered towards the entanglement of matter and discourse rather than towards the materialistic components of a posed problem. In addition, the results also show how a focus on the ontological underpinnings of Barad’s theoretical framework can give crucial contributions when it comes to understanding the generative conditions of science and knowledge-making. (shrink)

Humanism is blurry. It can have some clarity, but it is mainly blurry. To say anything otherwise is to fool oneself. Yes, we can construct reasonable humanistic theories that attempt to organize our understanding, such as methodologicalhumanism where one unifies discourses or practices according to human subjects or substantivehumanism that touts the importance of humanity via some shared attribute or substance. But to suggest that one can delineate and define the full salience of humanity, whether great or small, in the (...) world we live and understand is to suppose a divine clarity that eludes our possession. Theorists use terms like ‘social causes,’ ‘matter,’ ‘construction,’ and ‘interpretation’ to help us figure out how our cognition and rationality work, and yet they woefully fail to capture the richness of our experiences, which blur distinctions between society and matter all the time. Every account of humanism should take stock of this difficulty, being careful to say only what one. (shrink)

My remarks in this brief commentary focus on Chris Calvert-Minor’s (2014) article on Karen Barad’s philosophical writings, and are only indirectly relevant to an assessment of Barad’s work. I have limited acquaintance with Barad’s writings, and even less with Nils Bohr’s. Barad explicitly borrows from Bohr’s theoretical writings when developing her version of feminist epistemology. Barad’s recruitment of Bohr to support her philosophy creates a dilemma for me and other readers who are not conversant with Bohr’s physics/philosophy. To my understanding, (...) the general lessons that Barad draws from Bohr about physical phenomena seem roughly in line with Husserl’s conception of phenomena or Merleau-Ponty’s account of “the intertwining,”Barad is not the first to identify a phenomenological position with a feminist standpoint (see Smith 1992). Although she refers to the tendency to feminize “nature” as the passive object of science, she distinguishes her feminist view of “nature as agent” from. (shrink)