Sunday, March 6, 2016

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning



I bet you didn't know that there was such a thing as feminist quantum physics, but here you have it.  I love this illustration and the general argument of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway which, like Bruno Latour's work, examines the social construction - the genealogy - of science and the ways of life that such science gives birth to.

In the hierarchy of human dream-worlds this is pretty stratospheric stuff - but it circles around to the foundations, to our most basic relationship with matter itself.  So it really isn't feminist, or it is, but the point being that feminism is not just for women or about women, but as it grows and deepens it has become about all of us, even non-human, non-living matter itself, and how our conception of matter can work itself free from certain cultural assumptions which could be summed up as 'might makes right'.  So we come to understand that we don't discover the universe - we being us mighty humans and the universe being particles that we have the right to experiment upon,  blow up, cause to collide, etc. - but that the kinds of instruments and apparatus that we build to measure the universe determines the universe that we find. And further that the kinds of instruments that we build are shaped by the social world in which we develop, with all of the assumptions encoded in that world.  So for instance a social world that has been set up to reward physical might (and males generally are bigger and stronger than females) will find a universe where physical power - a physics of force and leverage, a biology of competition -  are defining features.  But other possibilities are possible, and feminism helps offer that to everyone.

Quantum physics, in this illustration, looks a bit like one of Lynn Margulis' microbes, don't you think?

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