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Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity

Relations between scientific and social are result of a ‘doing’ through the enactment (performance?) of boundaries.

Problem of representationalism: Representation produces that/who is represented (Butler, Foucault)  

Rouse: representationalism is a Cartesian by-product, a particularly inconspicuous consequence of the Cartesion division between “internal” and “external”.

3D bodies: The represented body (scanned) is more accessible to us than the body it is supposed to represent. But really? If we vannot understand it without representation, why can we do it through representation? (Rouse uses ‘language’, not sure it is really the same thing/interchangeable. Words vs. math/computation, calculation – representation)

Descartes: direct access to our thoughts. Calling it: “a Cartesian legacy”. Barad: Assymetrical faith

Question: how does Cartesian xxx (X, Y, Z) relate to the Cartesian legacy?

How is the discursive construction of the body related to nondiscursive practices, how do they co-construct? (matter is not just an end-product)

[story in three-body problem: simulating the world without life]

Zeno’s paradox ?

“On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming.”

atoms = the uncuttable, the inseparable (the smallest part)

Cartesian = belief in inherent distinction between subject and object, knower and known

Bohr: language and measurement are not mediating (but …)

“A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object.” That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeter-
minacy. In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata- within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions.”

Question: How are the cuts in Slicer local, and specific?

Intra-actions – a local causal structure.

Apparatuses (software?) are open-ended practices. No inherent inside/outside (guts hanging out?)  

“Boundaries do not sit still”

phenomenon:


Discourse (is not language!) defines the field of possibilities. In that way, it produces “objects” and “subjects”. It is about the conditions of possibility. Discourse = boundary-making practice. They mutually articulate (Haraway).
“apparatuses are the exclusionary practices of mattering through which intelligibility and materiality are constituted.”
Discursive practices are not speech acts (??)

“In Descartes’ terminology, the Cartesian cut splits the entirety of reality into a material component (res extensa) and a non-material component (res cogitans) (Descartes 1897–1913). These labels, literally translated, characterize the realms of “extended substance” and “thinking substance”.  

“An issue that will certainly be involved in such an approach is the issue of decomposability. It is fairly obvious that the property of being complex is not appropriately treatable by an investigation of a system in terms of its decomposition into parts. The same applies to the meaning of a message, a situation, or anything else. This does not merely amount to the phrase that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, but it points to a totally different perspective if the whole is to be studied instead of its parts.”

RELATED READING NOTES

Complexity, meaning and the cartesian cut https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233670297_Complexity_meaning_and_the_cartesian_cut

Academic texts may talk about strange things, but their tone is almost always calm.
the endless mobilization of this single trope, in which simplification figures as a reduction of complexity, leaves a great deal to discover and articulate. We need other ways of relating to complexity, other ways for complexity to be accepted, produced, or performed.

When investigators start to discover a variety of orders — modes of ordering, logics, frames, styles, repertoires, discourses — then the dichotomy between simple and complex starts to dissolve. This is because various ‘‘orderings’’ of similar objects, topics, fields, do not al- ways reinforce the same simplicities or impose the same silences. Instead they may work — and relate — in different ways.
? grouping together but not ‘taming’
? definition of complexity: things that appear together

For the inventory thinking: THE LIST

Items in the list aren’t necessarily responses to the same questions but may hang together in other ways, for instance socially, because a list may be the result of the work of different people who have each added something to it. Yet it remains open, for a list differs from a classification in that it recognizes its incompleteness. It doesn’t even need to seek completeness. If someone comes along with something to add to the list, something that emerges as important, this may indeed be added to it.

Time flies, but it flies like a swallow, up, down, o? quickly and then coming slowly back again. Attending to such a time brings complexity into play, for simple orders may be made visible by snapshots of frozen moments. But they are only snapshots. What is visible in them may be hidden on the next image—and then become visible again a little later— and even snapshots may show traces of what is but also isn’t there, of complexities that surface earlier, later, at and in some other time.