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(In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)
Barad argues that, thanks to the principle of complementarity, Bohr succeeds in eliminating the Cartesian subject once and for all. There is never any detached subject that does not at the same time participate in the indeterministic process with openness to the future. There is, according to Bohr, no neutral observer outside the phenomenal processes. And if the observer is always located within the phenomenon, this means that this observer must be regarded as objectively accessible, although not in the classical objectivist sense. Rather, agential realism is concerned with a new kind of objectivity liberated from classical subjectivity, since the theory disqualifies all notions of an external subject as a spectator and neutral measurer of the phenomenon. All equipment for measuring the phenomenon is thus part of the phenomenon itself. The apparatus is itself an agent that intra-actively produces fictives within the phenomena’s floating boundaries. This means that we can forget the old phenomenological pair of antonyms, subject and object. The new objective reality is made possible because objectivity refers to possible agential separabilities and not to an impossible, absolute exteriority. This is why Barad uses the term agential realism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58