“During an evening walk with a close colleague of Bohr’s, Einstein once asked: “Do you really believe the Moon is not there if nobody looks?” From Barad’s perspective, it isn’t that the Moon isn’t there when we aren’t looking, it’s that when we do look, a new Moon, and a new me, emerge in the encounter. It turns out that the idea of separability itself was only ever a convenient fiction, whether we are talking about the level of protons or persons. The very notion of a isolated “thing” (a classical particle or body-bound observer) has been undone by Barad’s “agential realism,” wherein the final realities are “intra-active” agencies rather than isolable entities. These agencies or creatures (to use Whitehead’s favored term) are not dissolved into their relational intra-actions, “rather, the creature emerges within the creative field that it differentiates [such that] the attributes that make one creature different from another [are] acts of differentiation [and not] inherent properties of a discrete substance.”8 Acts or performances of differentiation are what individuate us moment by moment; our identities are always established through intra-active relationship.”

The above passage comes from Matt Segall’s review of Catherine Keller’s book Cloud of the Impossible (which I’m embarrassed to say I still haven’t read! ((I am, however, reading Keller’s political theology book right now and it’s marvelous)))), and in this particular section he discusses Keller’s utilization of the work of physicist Karen Barad. Great stuff!

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Painting above by Alicia Dunn

Tags:agential realismcatherine kellerKaren BaradMathew Segallphysicsprocess philosophyprocess theologyQuantum Entanglement