I have just had a bath; it's Sunday morning and I'm trying to have a day off from work to make the weekend feel different to the rest of the week. I got out of the bath a bit wet and lay on my daughter's bed and had a little bit of a revelation about reading the Barad book that I've been trawling through. I am about 200 pages in at the start of chapter 5. It's interesting as Gullion's Defractive Ethnography tries to make the same point, but I didn't really get this when I read it. The feelings about the concepts fall apart when they are enacted within descriptions or perhaps representations of projects.
This is it then written on the blog as I know I will not lose it and may be able to find it again as a reminder. It is complicated in some ways but will read rather straightforwardly. It is the essence of Barad's point which she constructs in a strange metaphysical ontological scientism.
The nature of reality is not separate and is not given; agential realism is a real that is created within its enactment - Bloc's 'not yet' - the idea that there are only becomings and not things. Barad locates this within quantum physics and suggests that a critical misconception of this comes from a lay reading of uncertainty principle. She suggests that Heisenberg proposes that we cannot know the momentum and position of a molecule as the measuring of one impacts on the other and this impact is never knowable so it cannot be accounted for in any calculation. The apparatus to measure one interferes with any attempt to measure the other. Niels Bohr, her hero, suggests that counter to Heisenberg's idea that a molecule has position and dimension as a separate "thing" distinct within spacetime, the agentile qualities of the thing are constituted by the apparatus used to measure the apparent affects 9 On bodies) usually a photon and a sensitive surface as we use the quantum double slit experiment as the main exampler.
Barad insists that this foundational principle works at all scales not just the very tiny - this is how she gets around ideas of allegory or representation; she suggests and robustly defends the notion that this is the way a real world operates.
If we unpick this from a structuraist perspective we can say 'the real' is a social construction that depends on the difference of the 'unreal' for its signification so we have a linguistic problem here. Yet Barad, as well as refusing representation, refuses language as one of its modes. The real is not the real of language; the term 'real' points towards it but the unbroken and consistent plane of agential realism does not have an inside or an outside; a cut does not seperate or divide or create a fixed boundary, rather it constitutes the real in the action of the cutting. This is why we are presented with an onto-epistomology rather than one or the other. A system of organising knowledge and moving towards a knowing of its nature - the cut does not divide one from the other which is why a hyphen does not quite cut the mustard.
What does this mean for ethnography or fieldwork? Firstly, we need to take into account that the research is the object of study and the tool for studying, it is part of what constitutes its reality. Simply put - what happens as part of the research would not happen if the research was not taking place.
On the surface this could be seen as reflexive sociology. We know we carry a massively complex epistomological conscious and unconscious. We know and, as ethnographers we are fully aware, that we will influence any sitution or place we enter. Barad is keen to point out that we cannot effectively account for our influence on a situation as we are not only part of that situation, the situation would not exist without our presence. I am not sure this distinction is particularly revelationary; it challenges positivist assumtions and scientific notions of objectiviy but is in line with lots of post qualitative methodologies.
What could be useful for me in thinking of methods is the expanded notion of the 'apparatus' which she lays out. She moves on from Bohr's philosophy of science which as an anthrocentric view of the "observer' or scientist who records the results of the apparatus passively and from outside, to a post human notion of the apparatus. This is a suggestion of something beyond the singular embodied idea of a human subject.
The thread here that is emerging in my research in relation to arts practice is what I have called either 'my practice', 'the mechanism', or more recently in conversation with Abi, 'the artist's secret plan' which is secret even to themselves. If this broad notion of actions or as Barad would say 'intra actions; is viewed as 'apparatus' from the concept outlined in Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway what does this give us ?
It may allow us to consider an artist's practise that is fully part of and immersed within the real world.
It may allow us to accept that any intervention will have an agential affect on the 'things' it interacts with.
It will ask some complex questions about what marks on bodies this work leaves and what, in a discourse beyond representation, can be said about them.
It may allow for a different type of attention to be paid to certain things and an acceptance of others to take place.
I still prefer assemblage though as a thought tool - I didn't really need all that quantum drivel to work out these things.
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