Discussion of Karen Barad's Getting Real

Owen Thomas says

This looks like another fascinating discussion in progress. Building on the comments thus far I think there are two points I'd like to develop further.

Point one: On volcanoes and change

Picking up on the questions posed by Nadine and Claudia’s response. I think I agree this Claudia’s analysis, Barad’s main intervention here is to dissolve the subject and object into a intra-action producing the ‘referent’ phenomena with it’s own onto-epistemology. I suppose I agree that Barad might find the charge of anthrocentrism somewhat irrelevant to her project as she seems to suggest that no human/non-human or discursive/material divide exists independently of individual phenomena.

The question for me then becomes, and I think both Nadine and Claudia raise this too, how do certain intra-actions and phenomena appear and not others. I think Claudia is right that for Barad it has something to do with these ‘power/knowledge systems.’ I found the following quote interesting,

“materialization is an iteratively intra-active process whereby material-discursive bodies are sedimented out of the intra-action of multiple material-discursive apparatuses through which these phenomena (bodies) become intelligible” Barad p.117

‘Iterative’ seems to imply movement toward a goal – the goal defined by ‘power/knowledge’ practices. To me, this would imply discursive formations – given Barad’s attention to Foucault. What confuses me slightly then is that this would seem to implicitly privilege discourse over the discursive-material intra-actions as the guiding light to these iterations. Like others, I’m not entirely sure I fully understood Barad here, but it seems to me that whilst Barad is keen to dissolve the intrinsic status of materiality and discourse in the production of ‘things,’ in answering the question ‘how do certain phenomena – and their political functions – come to be? Barad’s answer must rely on discursive practices.

Put simply then, I like how Barad uses intra-activity to explain how a seeming ‘things’ exerts political power. But to move from a synchronic to a diachronic perspective, what agency makes new phenomena, new ‘things’? If Barad suggests that ‘reality is not ‘composed of things-in-themselves’ and that seemingly material things are the phenomena of material-discursive intra-actions, then it seems we are only left with the possibility that the agency of the apparatus originates in a distinctively social realm.

This would imply therefore that the change of danger of the phenomena of volcanic ash, or as Nadine so neatly surmised the imaginative geography of danger, is first and foremostly an exercise of discursive agency. I welcome your responses to that proposition, I may have misread Barad but that was the implication I found.

Point two: Barad and Foucault/Hacking

The second point relates to Claudia's last point on Foucault's dispositif and Ian Hacking. I too had noted a couple of parallels and had written a few notes which for what they're worth I put below.

I think we have discussed before that the notion of dispositif (apparatus) is one way to probe the relationship between discourse and materiality – as a ‘play of power’ or set of strategies that achieve a given function. I want to briefly quote a couple of paragraphs from Foucault,

"What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.

Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality. In short, between these elements, whether discursive or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely.

Thirdly, I understand by the term “apparatus” a sort of–shall we say–formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function. This may have been, for example, the assimilation of a floating population found to be burdensome for an essentially mercantilist economy: there was a strategic imperative acting here as the matrix for an apparatus which gradually undertook the control or subjection of madness, sexual illness and neurosis."

(Foucault “The Confession of the Flesh” in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1980) pp. 194-195).

Foucault is very clear that the dispositif is not an ensemble of discourses but the connection between elements of the ensemble – some of which we might describe as material, some discursive – that creates a power relation. It is this power relation, and the invisible and visible constraints imposed by it that is so often the focal point of critical analysis.

Developing the Foucauldian idea of the apparatus clearly influences Barad’s thought, and her agential realism bears striking parallels to the message conveyed above by Foucault. Barad’s phenomena are the product of the intra-active connections and have no independent identity outside of the inter-action.

I suppose the very simple point I’m trying to make here is that, in terms of the usefulness this debate has for our consideration of security practices and the methods and methodology used to understand them, perhaps we should take from Barad's emphasis a message to consider security practices as the connection between discourses and materialities. Thus we should not suppose that the effects on political and social behavior are not the intrinsic features of either. In seeking to treat with security practices, perhaps we need to move toward a more developed theorization of the dispositif/apparatus/assemblage.

We may have discussed this before, but I wonder whether part of the problem that we are investigating is a product of this material-discourse dualism in which materiality and discourse appear as independent elements at two ‘poles’ of a spectrum or linear continuum. By speaking of materialities and discourses I wonder whether we end up reinforcing their separation. I think this is where Barad’s inclusion of Bohr (and implicitly Heisenberg) helps, because Barad necessarily needs to bring the two elements together as material-discursivities and ‘onto-epistemologies.’ If we are thinking about a new ‘grammar’ to think about materiality and discourse in secuirty studies then perhaps this is one possibility.

Of course this all assumes that we are comfortable with rejecting the idea of discourses and materialities that do not have intrinsic characteristics – particularly in terms of material agency (even if this may be unobservable).

Secondly, on Hacking.

I don't know whether this is what Claudia was referring to (?) but I certainly saw a striking connection between Barad’s intra-activity and Hacking’s use of Hilary Putnam's theory of meaning. Although it seems the two differ wildly in their final ontological commitments

Hacking’s argument in ‘The Social Construction of What?’ proposes an ontology of reality divided into ‘indifferent’ & ‘interactive’ kinds. Interactive kinds, such as human beings, react to their classification, but the classification ‘quark’ is indifferent because “calling a quark a quark makes no difference to the quark.”

Hacking explains how it is possible for a kind to be both interactive and indifferent. Adopting the theory of meaning developed by Hilary Putnam, Hacking suggests that every classification is constructed from a ‘stereotype’ and an ‘extension.’ In the case of carbon monoxide for example, the stereotype contains the natural properties of ‘CO’ – gas, colorless, poisonous and so on. The extension is the class of phenomena to which the term applies – in this case all molecules with one carbon atom and one oxygen atom sharing a covalent double bond and a covalent dative bond. Hacking suggests that “autism,” and indeed all phenomena that include both indifferent and interactive possibilities, have an augmented stereotype that includes “the current idea of autism – prototypes, theories, hypotheses, therapies, attitudes” – in other words the consequence of the classification – and the extension contains those people with intrinsic pathological trait to develop autism. Thus one could,
“…perfectly well maintain (a) there is probably a definite unknown neuropathy 'P' that is the cause of prototypical Childhood Autism (b) the idea of childhood autism is a social construct that interacts not only with therapist and psychiatrist in their treatments, but also interacts with autistic children themselves, who find the current mode of being autistic a way for themselves to be” (Hacking).

By using Putnam’s theory, Hacking provides a way to consider all phenomena in terms of their degree of social construction, what properties of a phenomena are indifferent – and thus an inevitable fact of our existence – and what properties are interactive – and thus socially constructed and evitable. Considering social construction in terms of degree seems to mitigate those who object principally to a seemingly arbitrary distinction that all classifications of social science produce social constructions and classifications of natural science do not.

So to put all of this into Barad's example of the sonagraphed fetus, I suppose Hacking would argue as follows. The classification of a fetus by the sonagraph can be characterized as the extension - that is, all the intrinsic natural science features such as cells, DNA etc – and an augmented stereotype including socially constructed ideas such as ‘person’ ‘object of human rights’ ‘girl’ ‘feminine’ etc.

So both Barad and Hacking commit to explain socially important phenomena in terms of the connection between discourse and materiality and not on the basis of discursive effects and material effects. One difference though is that Hacking's stereotype/extension tool still maintains that there is a distinction between what he terms interactive and indifferent kinds. In other words, pathology for autism, or the corporeal forms of fetus, exists independently of discourse. But it is only through the effects of social construction that discursive formations arise around the fetus to produce the effects of 'girling.' So Hacking’s ‘augmented stereotype’ is similar to Barad’s ‘intra-actions.’ However Barad seems to imply, as Claudia notes, that it is just not meaningful to talk about the material status of the fetus outside of this intra-active connection. So the two ontologies are somewhat reconcilable.

What is interesting though is that I think this once again points to the existence of multiple theorizations of the material/discourse dualism, as subject/object, human/nonhuman, interactive/indifferent, and so on. The problem of this dualism seems to be a continual feature in our discussions.

Two questions then:
1) Whilst Barad is helpful synchronically to explain how discourses and materiality connect to produce phenomena with deep political power, how do we understand their process of intensification or disruption diachronically?
2) Is it too crude to use a dualism like material and discourse? Does a concept like Barad’s intra-actions or Hacking’s augmented stereotype possess greater explanatory power? How?

25 May 2010, 19:21