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Barad, Karen
The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.
The relationalist philosophers Karen Barad, Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux push through and past relativism when, at the start of the 3rd millennium – inspired by pioneers such as the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the physicist Niels Bohr – they construct a speculative materialism that attacks the entire correlationalist paradigm and its fixation with an original subject that correlates with an original object as its ontological foundation. They are quite simply searching for a deeper foundation beyond this premise, which has dominated phenomenology ever since Kant’s heyday. While relativism settles for stating that the relations between the fixed objects are relative – what we call an interactive ontology – the relationalist philosophers maintain that the relations within the phenomena are also mobile in relation to each other – that is, they advocate an intra-acting ontology. There are no discrete objects whatsoever in the Universe. Not even at the minutest micro level. Thus, nor are there any Kantian objects in physical reality, not even any noumenal such; what really exists is merely pure relata, or relations without their own inner substance between and within abstract fields of irreducible multiplicities.
In Karen Barad’s radically universocentric onto-epistemology, we abandon the dividual identity and shift our focus to the Universe itself. Inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy and in particular with support from Bohr’s quantum physics, Barad completely pulverises transcendental correlationism which had dominated Western thinking since Kant. By pitting Bohr’s ontic principle of determinism against Heisenberg’s epistemic uncertainty principle, Barad opens the way for agential realism, a relationalist philosophy driven by a radical pathos for a completely new kind of potential objectivity. As for Bohr before her, the renowned waves and particles of quantum physics are only abstractions for Barad. The most important thing is not that the waves and particles are contradictory but that they are complementary. This is what is called Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle. Phenomenologically we express this by saying that the wave is a mobilist phenomenon, while the particle is an eternalist phenomenon.
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.
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
Baradian phenomenology is based on a constantly ongoing intra-activity within phenomena rather than an inter-activity between various distinct subjects and objects. Every individual phenomenon is both a fundamental building block in existence and concurrently intra-acting, filled with internal activity in all directions. Barad wants to kill off Kantian representationalism and its fixation with the patriarchal reflection. Representationalism is an obvious by-product of Cartesianism. Representations have constantly been prioritised at the expense of what they are presupposed to represent. By instead building first from Foucault’s and later also Latour’s and Butler’s post-structuralist ideas of performativism, we open the way for a philosophy that shifts its focus to direct engagement in material reality. All phenomena are constantly affected by the performativity of their environment. Large quantitative differences in performativity create phenomena with radically different properties.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
According to Barad, the phenomena arise as intra-acting and agential entanglements. Instrumental measurements expand rather than see through collapsing entanglements. This means that quantum mechanics is really about non-separability, not non-locality. Quantum physical non-locality is not necessarily the same thing as physical non-locality. Agential separability is quite simply an exteriority within and not outside the phenomena. Phenomena are the basic units of both ontology and epistemology, but at the same time intra-acting and above all fundamentally plural. They are irreducible multiplicities which thus do not allow themselves to be reduced to isolated units. Not because this inspires some charming philosophy to contemplate in splendid isolation, but because physics actually functions precisely in this way. Here Barad resembles other philosophers with a strong involvement in the new physics, such as Ian Hacking and Joseph Rouse. Bohr’s realism and objectivism constitute a solid ground on which to build further, since it is solely about factual, material embodiments of theoretical concepts. It is the Universe that speaks through us rather than the other way around in Bohr’s life’s work as a physicist and philosopher. Niels Bohr is the syntheist agent par excellence. And Karen Barad is his prophet.
Barad’s agential realism may to good effect be pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s psychoanalytic version of the transcendental subject; syntheologically it would correspond to Barad’s Pantheos being pitted against Lacan’s and Zizek’s Atheos. It is historically necessary for Barad to act as a radical mobilist in order to once and for all divest herself of Kantian representationalism and think her way fully through the consequences of the quantum physics revolution. Rather, she therefore operates as a personified oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos. No thinker succeeded in taking mobilism to its furthest extremity before Barad – not even radical mobilists such as Whitehead and Deleuze – in order thereby to create the necessary opposite to eternalist thinking which together enable the syntheological consummation. Thus, Barad thus does not operate in any kind of opposition to Atheos’ two prophets Lacan and Zizek. Rather, she fills the tragically large intellectual void that is the necessary antithesis to their own highly intellectualised void within the syntheological pyramid.
Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).
Deleuze prophetically sees how the onrushing Internet age – which he consistently refers to as capitalism with schizophrenia in his key works Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux, authored with Felix Guattari – rules out the classical majoritarian claims to power. Baradian relationalism goes a couple of steps further in the same direction. There are no secure majoritarian identities left when we start to apprehend the extent of the quantum physics revolution. All remaining identities, except the Universe itself, are quite simply minoritarian with Barad. In order to produce an identity other than that of the Universe, there needs to be a clear minoritarian difference, which is why only the strongest minoritarian identity can generate what Lacan’s and Zizek’s predecessor Hegel calls the universal singularity.
The unifying narrative can only be told by the subservient agent with which all other agents can identify. When the Deleuzian dividual is placed before the enormity of Pantheos, capitulation is the only logical response. But it is then not a question of just any old capitulation. Because it is about a kind of Spinozist capitulation, which in turn enables a dialectical continuation in the shadow of Pantheos through the establishment of Syntheos in conjunction with the other particularities of the universal subject. Therefore Zizek and Deleuze are united in their passionate search for the Internet age’s revolutionary utopia, where it is Deleuze in his capacity as the voice of Entheos – in relation to Zizek as the voice of Atheos’ and Barad as the voice of Pantheos – who is closest to the realisation of Syntheos within the syntheological pyramid.
But inside the syntheological pyramid, there is also movement from Syntheos in the direction of Atheos. Therefore it is interesting to introduce and study a rigidly atheistic nihilist as an interlocutor to Deleuze’s and Barad’s relationalist metaphysics. The exceptionally learned and colourful Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound champions the thesis that Nietzsche and Deleuze guilty of a kind of wishful thinking mistake when they place existential ecstasy before existential anxiety. Like the Buddha, Brassier instead sees anxiety as primary for existence – pain always surpasses pleasure – and he constructs a kind of Freudian cosmology out of the conviction that the empty, blindly repetitious drive is the engine of existence. The focus of Brassier’s negative theology lies in the Universe’s future self-obliteration, which according to him must govern all values and valuations until then. Here he takes his starting point in the human being’s will to nothingness which emerges from the increasingly leaky subconscious and constantly makes itself felt as a theme among the rapidly growing subcultures of the Internet age.
The physicist and philosopher Karen Barad champions the radical thesis that all philosophy that is produced prior to the advent of relationalism is all too anthropocentric and thereby misleading. The only way out of this fatalist cul-de-sac is to construct a completely new ontology with the existence of the Universe and not the human being as primary. Phantasmic anthropocentrism must be replaced by realistic universocentrism. The shift from anthropocentric to universocentric metaphysics is equivalent to the shift from Man to the network as a metaphysical centre. God is thus not in fact dead, it is just the human God who could only live under very special circumstances that has left us. The literally inhuman God lives and thrives and is at last being discovered and analysed by us humans. The inhuman God, the Universe as a glittering network, lives and thrives at the centre of the syntheological pyramid: God is a network.
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
The thing in itself cannot be experienced as an object, since it is de facto not an object, but merely a highly arbitrary eternalisation. It is not the thing in itself but the eternalisation of the thing that must be regarded as the real conjuring trick in Kantian correlationism. Once we understand this, we need no longer accept the Kantian axioms. A new kind of ontological realism at once becomes possible, what Barad calls agential realism and Stephen Hawking names model-dependent realism. The relationalist response to Kant is that the phenomena are fields rather than particles. The fields consist of intensities and probabilities and in fact never have any clear boundaries. For physics per se has no use whatsoever for clear boundaries. The clear boundaries must rather be viewed as an expression of narcissistic wishful thinking in an anthropocentric world view which is wrestling with its lack of processing capacity in relation to the inexhaustible oceans of information in existence. Every time we are forced to hear the clichés about quantum physics being obscure, mysterious and startling – or see how it is accused of being some kind of shallow forgery of reality, a mirage which clearly hides a more intuition-friendly and therefore more real reality, hidden behind some kind of cosmic, mysterious veil – it is Kant’s voice within us and in the prevailing culture that is speaking.
However, it is the eternalistic background that is the real chimera in this context. To take one example, there are of course lots of local subsystems but no isolated systems anywhere in the Universe. This means that all the theories that require the existence of isolated systems collapse sooner or later. As a consequence of this, it is pointless to go further into physics with theory building that is not background-independent, because if they are the least dependent on a fixed eternalised background, these theories do not hold up to closer scrutiny. In fact, the Universe displays no need whatsoever for fixed backgrounds. The eternalist background is merely a fiction, the last remnant of the Abrahamic and Platonist fantasy of the God that precedes the Creation. But such a God of course does not exist, as we know. He died. The Universe does not need the eternalist background any more than it needs God the creator. Whitehead, Bohr, Barad and Smolin understand this, and their predecessor Leibniz understands it much earlier, but it turns out that this is something so extremely hard to accept for Einstein, who both idolises and is intoxicated by mathematics, which explains why from the point of view of the philosophy of science he clings onto relativism and is not able to move on to relationalism.
Let us go to the history of philosophical vitalism in order to seek an answer. The difference between the individualist and the dividualist paradigms could not be any clearer than the difference that exists between the otherwise closely-related French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s classical vitalism steadfastly sticks to the idea of the sacredness of life as an ontological foundation. For Deleuze however, the celebration of life becomes yet another banal anthropocentrism in a Cartesian universe that has been closed off and anaesthetised for no good reason. Instead, he sees the active intensity itself as the Universe’s fundamental expression for its existence in relation to itself. Deleuze’s pantheist rather than anthropocentric vitalism therefore remain – in the narrative about the Universe’s magnificent capacity for creativity and multiplicity – as much with the marvellous in quantum physics and cosmology as with the marvellous in plants and animals. Therefore it seems quite reasonable that Karen Barad’s, Manuel De Landa’s and Robert Corrington’s intensity-fixated variants of relationalism start from Deleuzian rather than Bergsonian vitalism. It is nature and not what is most closely related to Man that is the vital, and nature is vital in itself based on its own intensity. Therefore Deleuze, Barad and De Landa are naturalist philosophers. The self-confessed syntheist Corrington even calls his philosophical orientation ecstatic naturalism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58