The Conceptual and Ethical Normativity of Intra-active Phenomena

Abstract

This essay addresses three aspects of Barad's views about meaning and normativity: her 'post-humanist' insistence that the agential cuts that constitute phenomena need not incorporate human beings as observers, measurers, speakers, or concept-users; her alternative account of the objectivity of measurement, which also specifies the meaning of what she calls 'theoretical' concepts; and her claim that agential participation in phenomena entails ethical accountability for the real consequences of the intra-actions and associated exclusions in which we participate.The aim is to show why Barad's posthumanism should still recognize significant differences between human and other agencies, which simultaneously constitute both 'theoretical' conceptual articulation and the ethical responsibilities that are entangled with such theoretical understanding, and to explain why appropriate recognition of this difference does not reinstate in new guise the humanism she objects to.[1] In this essay, I consider the relations between three aspects of Karen Barad's views about meaning and normativity.First, Barad's account of agency is 'post-humanist', in the sense that the agential cuts that constitute phenomena need not incorporate human beings as observers, measurers, speakers, or concept-users.Second, Barad takes her agential realism to provide an alternative account of the objectivity of measurement, which also specifies the meaning of what she calls 'theoretical' concepts.Third, agential participation in phenomena entails ethical accountability for the real consequences of the intra-actions and associated exclusions in which we participate.[2] My aim in this consideration is to show why Barad's post-humanism should still recognize significant differences between human and other agencies, which simultaneously constitute both 'theoretical' conceptual articulation and the ethical responsibilities that are entangled with such theoretical understanding.This difference nevertheless does not reinstate in new guise the humanism she objects to, for two reasons.First, the 'human' in this sense is not just people in isolation, but the larger worldly phenomena to which we humans belong and with which 'we' (in the narrower sense that just refers to human bodies) are interdependent.Second, the difference between humans and other organisms is nonhierarchical: theoretical understanding and ethical accountability are not something that non-human organisms or other agential patterns 'lack' as a deficiency.[3] I will first review several features of Barad's metaphysics that are needed for the remainder of my

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