Dialogues on Agential Realism

Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice

Malou Juelskjær, Helle Plauborg, Stine W. Adrian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429557026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Investigación y metodología en psicología

Dialogues on Agential Realism is built up around dialogues with key scholars in the field: Magdalena Górska, Astrid Schrader, Elizabeth de Freitas, Ericka Johnson and Karen Barad. The book investigates agential realist-inspired research practices and provides illustrations of what response-able knowledge production may involve.

Based on thorough readings of the scholars' work, careful dialogues concerning the challenges, messiness, thrill and inventiveness of research processes are brought to the fore. The dialogues with Górska, Schrader, de Freitas and Johnson were based on specific research projects, which drew inspiration from agential realist theory, in combination with the ideas of other thinkers. The dialogue with Barad focuses on the continuous development of agential realism. In addition, the book consists of a chapter that introduces agential realism and a closing chapter focusing on some of the main insights agential realism has to offer in relation research practices.

The book offers new entry points to agential realism and the conduct of research. It may vitalize methodological prudence and creativity and spark new and previously unimagined ways of thinking and doing research. As such, it will be an essential resource to both newcomers and scholars and students who are already familiar with the theory of agential realism.

1
AN INTRODUCTION TO AGENTIAL REALISM

Engaging in agential realist research practices

In this chapter, we will focus on what agential realism has to say about research and research practices, and we will use this approach as an entry point to introduce agential realism. Our aim is to stay with the overall ambition of the book, which is to engage the reader in exploring how the reading and take-up of theory is always a specific and situated practice. The chapters featuring research dialogues attest to this statement. Therefore, in this introduction to agential realism, we will try not to stand in the way of the multiplicity of readers who are reading and thinking with theory, and all the while, we intend to offer crucial entry points for further engagements with agential realism and with research practices inspired by it.

We start by briefly stating some core conditions of agential realism: first, how the notion of diffraction is enacted in and constitutes agential realism. This is also a key to how one may think of one’s own research endeavors, as these are of course always already constituted by more and other-than agential realist thinking. Working diffractively with different theories and ideas in light of the specificity of the diffraction is one very productive way to work, as the dialogues of this book also both implicitly and explicitly attest. Second, we underline quantum entanglement as the basic “unit” of processes of mattering – and this has profound consequences for research practices inspired by agential realism. Third, we exemplify this through a few agential realist concepts and concepts with an agential realist profile: performativity, phenomenon, intra-action and agency. Then, we touch upon how researcher and researched are considered to be constituted in the process of research. Finally, we turn to the role of ethics and justice in agential realism and in agential-realist-inspired research processes.¹

Agential realism: the achievement of diffractively reading feminist thinking and quantum physics

The term agential realism was launched in Karen Barad’s texts between the late 1980s and mid-1990s and unfolded in what can be seen, to date, as their major work, namely Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, published in 2007. However, as the reader will come to appreciate by reading the dialogue with Karen Barad in Chapter 6, agential realism is not only a theory or a fully formed and finished piece of thinking. It is also an ongoing endeavor, as “[a]gential realism is not a static givenness, as that would bely the nature of theorizing in its materiality as practices of mattering. Theorizing is a continual re-turning, further elaborating, interrupting, continuing to put it in dialogue with other crucial insights, projects, practices” (Chapter 6, p. 134).

Agential realism is crafted through Barad’s deep and passionate simultaneous engagement with quantum physics (that is, both quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) and feminist theory, feminist theories of science, post-structuralist and postcolonial thinking and other resources of critical social theorizing as well. This simultaneity creates the conditions for a rich theorizing.

Agential realism is situated within the domains of the natural, human and social sciences, while notably not considering these as separate domains but as entangled, as always already inside one another and co-conditioning one another. The notion of disciplinary boundaries is re-thought in agential realism. This not only makes agential realism transdisciplinary; it also implicitly contributes to a rethinking of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. We noted earlier that Barad works simultaneously with quantum physics and feminist and other critical social theories. However, it would be more precise to say that this work diffracts quantum physics and feminist and critical social thinking in order to continually develop agential realism and to conduct agential realist analyses of diverse empirical materials. A diffractive practice reads insights through one another instead of against one another, while attending to the specificities of the materials enacted through the diffraction (Haraway, 1988, 1992, 1997). It was Donna Haraway – inspired primarily by Trinh T. Min-ha’s thinking – who gave diffraction its critical and productive potential for conceptualizing difference and for studying different configurations of difference (Haraway, 1988, 1992, 1997; Barad, 2014). Haraway introduced diffraction as an alternative optical metaphor to “reflection.” This conceptual development highlights a feminist research (and activist) ambition of enacting social change, as opposed to research that mainly reflects/mirrors existing inequalities, thus by and large contributing to the reproduction of those very same inequalities. Haraway (and many others) also took inspiration from Minh-ha’s concept of inappropriate/d Others (1986, 1989, 1997) in thinking difference in relation to diffraction. The concept inappropriate/d Others problematizes the idea of pure and essential categories; “the First” and “the Other” are constituted through and enfold one another, as opposed to being separated from and external to one another.

In agential realism, the sensitivity to the production of differences that is enabled by the concept of diffraction underscores entanglements. Differences are always specifically entangled, and the foundational way of understanding the quality of those entanglements is conditioned by the fact that diffraction, when enacted in agential realism, is primarily a quantum-physical phenomenon related to how the world worlds itself:

Diffraction is not a singular event that happens in space and time; rather, it is a dynamism that is integral to spacetimemattering. Diffractions are untimely. Time is … broken apart in different directions, noncontemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity…. “Now” is … an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime in its ongoing iterative repatterning.

(Barad, 2014, p. 169)

In other words, diffraction is a very rich concept to think with and is central to agential realism – as a quantum-physical phenomenon and a methodology both for how to read stuff of all sorts (theories, phenomena, empirical material, concepts, etc.) through one another and for paying close and careful attention to the making of differences and differentiations – in entangled becoming. This also requires careful attention to questions of ethics, politics and justice. It furthermore demands that the researcher remains aware that both research and researcher are always already threaded through with multiple spacetimematterings, which are agentic in the research processes and research products (see Chapter 7 for an elaboration of diffraction).

Agential realism offers a radical deconstruction of identity through this queered quantum thinking. It is a theory that unsettles fixed binaries, fixed scales (e.g., micro-macro) and separations. Agential realism enables an investigation into the specificities, the ongoing enactment of such separations or agential separabilities, a concept emphasizing that agential cuts do not cut things apart but “together-and-apart.” This further means that there is no “outside” in agential realism,² but an ever-present vibrant ontological indeterminacy of being/nonbeing of all possibilities of this (Barad, 2012b, 2012c, 2018) (Juelskjær, 2019, p. 86).

What do the diffractive readings do?

Barad’s diffractive reading of quantum physics and feminist and critical social theory through one another is thus also a methodology that permits transdisciplinary work that enables them to contribute to various domains of thinking. In the context of this book, such transdisciplinary work may also be underlined as a source of inspiration: to see where the research phenomenon may take you, without abiding by the restrictions of a specific discipline, but instead reading discipline/s through the phenomenon and vice versa; that is, through one another, in order to make the research, its questions and contributions as “rich” as possible. Or, framed in the virtue of – the science political agenda of – agential realism, researching means to participate in worldmakings, and the “richness” of your research will therefore also be evaluated on its ability to contribute to the enactment of more just worlds (and to justice-to-come).

In agential realism, quantum physical experiments and physics philosophy discussions are read differently; that is, Barad underlines how this reading of quantum physics is not “straight” (see for example Barad, 2010, 2012a). Rather it is queered, employing agential realism to contribute with new physics interpretations vis-à-vis the sensitivity to difference, power dynamics, subjectivity and situatedness embedded in feminist theory, postcolonial thinking, queer studies and other critical social theories.³ For example, Barad analyzes how colonial thinking is entangled in the physics, and to what, ongoing, effect (see Chapter 6 for an elaboration of this).

At the same time, diffractive practice enables agential realism to contribute to a thinking that takes into account the quantum theoretical thinking underpinning the conceptualization of the performativity of materiality in the ongoing becoming of natureculture worlds. It contributes to how to conceptualize and analyze the ways in which socio-cultural and other forms of difference are made and come to matter and meaning, as well as fundamentally how space, time and matter (spacetimemattering) partake in the enacting of the specificities of differences.

These transdisciplinary endeavors are (always already) folded and re-folded into feminist notions of how to consider and practice ethics and responsibility in research. As such, as already highlighted, agential realism is based on a strong commitment to questions of ethics and justice and to how research may be a practice of response-ability (see Chapter 7 for an elaboration of response-ability).

Note that agential realist diffractive practices attest to how to understand that the natural, human and social sciences live inside one another, specifically. When Barad investigates – and queers – physics, this simultaneously opens up space for feminist and queer thinking and for critical thinkers in general to enter into the conversation.⁴ It is a conversation about how matter and meaning come to matter, and about how the world worlds itself, and us with it, and vice versa, which, again, are not separate activities but already entangled (Juelskjær, 2019, pp. 32, 54). In addition, as a final note on this subject, we have borrowed this quote:

I have been particularly interested in how matter comes to matter. How matter makes itself felt. This is a feminist project whether or not there are any women or people or any other macroscopic beings in sight.

(Barad in interview with Van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012, p. 59)

Ontology and epistemology: agential realism foregrounds entanglement

Fundamentally, agential realism undoes the division between being and knowing – ontology and epistemology. This undoing is marked by the concept of onto-epistemology: knowledge practice is a practice of worlding; the world, and “us”⁵ with it, are continuously performed; that is, continuously coming into being. Research is of the world, is part of the world’s ongoing reconfiguration. This fundamental enactment also makes way for a specific underlining of ethics in research practices, marked by the agential realist concept of ethico-onto-epistemology: the inseparability of ethics, epistemology and ontology. This concept furthermore forefronts research engagement with questions and issues of justice as an ongoing, temporalizing process: a “justice-to-come,” a term Barad borrows from Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1994).

Agential realism is thus based on a performative, relational ontology. Importantly, then, it does not begin with divisions that must be overcome; divisions such as structure/agency, mind/body, nature/culture, world/representations. Rather, agential realism starts out in a fundamental connectivity or entanglement. A quantum entanglement. The thinking/theory as such, and all agential realist concepts, are designed and defined through this premise of entanglement and more-than, less-than or other-than human performativity (Juelskjær, 2019, pp. 24–5). This is how agential realism challenges and offers alternatives to representation-alist thinking. Through quantum entanglement, we note that the constitution of space, time and matter in its specificity is part of the nature and workings of the entanglements and the phenomena they enable and are enabled by. Furthermore, what is foregrounded as a foundational quality of quantum entanglement is quantum indeterminacy, an ever-present vibrant ontological indeterminacy of being/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 An introduction to agential realism
• 2 Dialogue with Magdalena Górska
• 3 Dialogue with Astrid Schrader
• 4 Dialogue with Elizabeth de Freitas
• 5 Dialogue with Ericka Johnson
• 6 Dialogue with Karen Barad
• 7 Engaging in agential realist research practices
• Index