Working Title/Encountering's : Barad, Zornberg, Lingis~Troubling Bodies~Murmuring Depths

Troubling Bodies of Inquiry ~ Barad / Zornberg / Lingis

This inquiry considers the encounter as an elemental touching through which bodies become implicated in relations that exceed their own boundaries. Drawing on the shared horizons of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Murmuring Deep, Karen Barad’s queer inhuman~transmaterialities, and Alphonso Lingis’s phenomenology of primary communication, it approaches touching not as the transmission of settled meanings, but as an acknowledgement of an otherness related to our own. Earth, light, air, photographic traces, material surfaces, and bodily remains become situated participants in an indeterminate field of correspondence. Through these troubling bodies, the relations between interiority and exposure, hospitality and alienation, human and inhuman are brought into play.

Diffraction~Hospitality~Alienation~Atmosphere names an emergent spatial matrix through which these encounters can be sensed and reconsidered without resolving their differences. Making becomes a way of remaining attentive to what persists, what withdraws, and what cannot be fully known: a tentative transmaterial practice in which bodies touch, alter one another, and open towards further relations.

Alphonso Lingis’s philosophy of the elemental register grounds this encounter in raw, bodily exposure, finding a profound echo in Zornberg's concept of the unconscious murmur. As Lingis demonstrates, light, earth, air, and warmth are not simply environmental conditions surrounding human experience. They are what bodies share, encounter, and communicate through their situated existence. We orient one another within these physical elements before, or beyond, any exchange of clearly defined linguistic meanings.

Barad's Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings introduces a more troubling implication to this physical matrix. The inhuman is not safely located outside the human, as an external other that can be observed, classified, or accommodated. It is already implicated in what we are and how we become. The insensible, irrational, unfathomable, and incalculable are not merely limits to be overcome in the production of knowledge. They trouble the fantasy that we could ever become fully self-contained, transparent, or in control.

Read together, these three perspectives allow us to reconsider the earlier spatial gatherings as more than provisional arrangements of objects, images, and architectural elements. They become situations of elemental touching in which the boundaries between bodies remain deeply consequential but cannot be secured in advance.

The connection is particularly strong with your 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk: leper graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper. Here, contact is not only an idea. It is materially enacted. Grasses touch the photosensitive surface; light participates in the exposure; the resulting image bears traces of a meeting between bodies that do not share the same material condition or agency. The image is indexical, but it does not transmit the encounter in its entirety. It carries a trace of an event whose relations exceed what the image can disclose.

This is where Making~Transmaterialities becomes more than a description of work across materials. It names a condition in which touching is simultaneously intimate and alienating: an encounter with what is related to us without being reducible to us.

Spatial Practice.

Interiority/Atmosphere.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

Waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we are, to a recognition that it may well be to the inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depths of what responsibility entails.

A cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings, diffracted through different spacetimes.

The nothingness is always already within us, it lives through us, we cannot shut it out, we cannot control it. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear in the hopes of a more orderly world.

But this does not mitigate our responsibility, on the contrary it is what  makes it possible. Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plenitude of nothingness.    

Karen Barad.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

The encounter does not live on or transmit clear meanings. Rather it rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own. 

We do not relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sensibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light our eyes know. The ground that sustains our postures, and the air and warmth with which we speak. We face one another as condensations of earth, light, air and water, and orient one another in the elemental in a (its) primary communication.

The Murmuring Deep.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Barad, The Queer Inhuman~Transmaterialities

Trans/Matter/Realities

Queer Political Imaginings. 2015

Research situation, open studios Norfolk 2018. Lever graves, indexical bodies with meadow grasses on cyanotype contact paper.

Interested in these gatherings of Moretons spatial matrix, as a troubling that is also becoming a tentative transmaterialities a queering of relations and of bodies around the inhuman (Barad). 

What interests me in these two gatherings is that they make the spatial matrix appear less as a set of concepts applied to objects and more as a materially assembled field in which bodies, spaces and relations become uncertain together. 

The troubling is not simply a subject represented by the work. It is something the work performs: a disturbance of the distinctions through which we ordinarily recognise bodies, organise interiors and decide what belongs.

The two images seem to offer different but corresponding conditions for this.

The first gathering: a provisional apparatus of bodies.

Making~Transmaterialities : An infinite touching alterity that lives  in, around, and through us.

This image stages an interior through a collection of supports, rods, timber, metal, a suspended or angled form, and a photographic image of human bodies. These elements do not settle into a single architectural or sculptural identity. They make an arrangement that seems at once constructed, provisional and bodily.

Spatial gathering: supports, image, material elements and an unstable field of relations.

The rods are especially interesting. They cross, lean, meet and distribute weight. Their lines are not simply drawn upon a space; they actively organise the space through their material presence. The photographic image introduces another bodily register, but not a body physically present in the same way as the timber, metal or floor. 

The photographed bodies are present through an image that is itself caught within the arrangement.

This is already a troubling of presence and absence, human and nonhuman, image and material, structure and gesture. 

The photograph does not merely represent a body for the installation. It becomes another body within the apparatus, entering relations with materials that neither share its substance nor submit to the same mode of presence.

The gathering is therefore not unified by a common identity. Its elements become spatially consequential through their differences.

A tentative proposition: the apparatus does not contain a pre-existing spatial relation; it makes relations perceptible by assembling bodies that cannot be reduced to one another.

The second gathering: interiority as a relation in formation.

The Encounter : A touching that rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental otherness, that is related to our own.

This second image produces a different spatial condition. A large blue work occupies the wall; chairs, cushions, a small table, papers and a container of material gather in front of it. An open doorway admits daylight and exposes the room to an exterior beyond its immediate boundaries.

Here, the room seems to be both an interior for inhabitation and a provisional apparatus for thinking. The table and chairs suggest gathering, conversation or study, but the space is not fully prescribed by these functions. The large blue surface changes the room's atmosphere, while its dark, irregular lines establish a movement that exceeds the furniture's arrangement. The doorway makes the interior porous to another spatial and atmospheric condition.

What matters is the mutual disturbance of these elements. The blue work is not simply a backdrop; the furniture is not simply functional; the doorway is not merely an exit. Each changes how the others can be encountered.

The room becomes a tentative interiority: gathered sufficiently to sustain an encounter, but not resolved into a final arrangement.

There is also a significant difference between the two images. In the first, lines of support appear to construct a provisional spatial apparatus in the room. In the second, the large blue surface seems to reorganise an already inhabitable interior. One gathers through crossing and bracing; the other through a field of colour, a diagrammatic movement and the coexistence of inside and outside.

These are different spatial operations, but both unsettle the idea that architecture is simply a container within which objects and bodies are placed.

Queering relations: troubling the distribution of bodies.

I think queering becomes useful here if it names more than an aesthetic quality or a reference to identity. It can describe an operation through which established relations are made less certain: the distinction between artwork and apparatus, architecture and furniture, human and nonhuman, interior and exterior, presence and absence.

The images do not necessarily abolish these distinctions. Their interest lies in making them provisional.

In the first gathering, the photographed human body enters an arrangement with timber, metal and architectural supports. In the second, the room becomes an active participant in the encounter between a painted surface, furniture, papers, light and the exterior. Neither gathering requires the human subject to disappear. 

Rather, the human is no longer the sole measure through which the space becomes intelligible.

This is where your interest in Barad's inhuman becomes productive. The inhuman need not be understood as the opposite of the human. It directs attention towards material agencies and relations that do not originate in human intention, even when they become entangled with human activity. Weight, gravity, light, surface, support, resistance and spatial arrangement participate in what becomes possible.

The resulting queering is material and relational. It troubles the assumption that bodies arrive as already constituted entities and subsequently enter into relations. Instead, the gathering allows us to consider how bodies acquire their particular capacities and significance through the relations in which they participate.

Bodies do not merely meet within a space; their meeting helps produce what each body, and the space itself, can become.

Tentative transmaterialities.

I would place tentative transmaterialities at the hinge between these observations and your wider spatial matrix.

By transmateriality, I understand a movement across material differences without assuming that those differences disappear. Timber does not become metal, the photograph does not become a human body, and the painted surface does not become architecture in any literal sense. Yet each can alter the spatial capacities of the others.

The term tentative matters because these relations are not entirely predetermined. The apparatus may suggest a structure without becoming a stable architectural proposition. The room may offer a place for gathering without fixing the gathering's purpose. The materials make relations possible, but do not exhaust their possible outcomes.

This is also a useful point of correspondence with your clay~ceramic practice. Clay is not simply another material added to a pre-existing spatial arrangement. Its plasticity, resistance, drying, apertures and eventual firing change the conditions of the gathering. Once fired, the ceramic body persists, but the relations it makes possible remain open to further encounters.

The two installations can therefore be approached as earlier spatial propositions in which a central concern was already emerging: how might bodies gather without being gathered into a single, settled identity?

The matrix in operation.

The four movements of your matrix become particularly legible here.

Diffraction.

Different material and spatial registers alter one another. The photographic image, supports, painted surface, furniture and doorway do not simply add up; their differences change what becomes perceptible.

Hospitality.

The apparatus and room provide provisional conditions for encounter. They gather bodies and materials without fully determining how these relations will unfold.

Alienation.

The elements do not become entirely familiar or assimilated. The photograph remains an image, the structure retains its material resistance, and the interior remains exposed to what exceeds it.

Atmosphere.

The gathering acquires a sensate character through colour, light, shadow, texture, spacing and the felt organisation of the room. Atmosphere is produced through these relations, not added to them.

The matrix is not a sequence through which an artwork passes. Each movement is active in the others. Hospitality can expose a body to alienation; alienation can make difference perceptible; diffraction can alter the conditions of hospitality; atmosphere can make these relations felt before they are conceptually resolved.

This last point is important for your emphasis on sensate heuristic inquiry. The spatial proposition is not necessarily understood first and then experienced. Its relations may be encountered bodily—through an inclination to approach, a sense of obstruction, a pause, a shift of attention—before they become available as explicit thought.

A reading apparatus for these earlier works.

Troubling Gatherings ~ Tentative Transmaterialities ~ Queering the Spatial.

These spatial gatherings can be approached as provisional apparatuses through which bodies, materials and architectural relations become available for further encounter. Supports, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and light do not occupy a neutral space. 

They participate in its formation, altering the conditions through which bodies become perceptible to one another.

The gatherings trouble the distinction between a space that contains and the bodies it contains. In one arrangement, intersecting supports establish an unstable field of spatial relations in which the photographic body enters correspondence with timber, metal and architectural structure. In another, a large painted surface, furniture, working materials and an open doorway produce an interior whose boundaries remain sensate and provisional. 

Neither gathering resolves into a single architectural identity. Each allows different material registers to remain active within a shared spatial proposition.

A queering of relations emerges through this refusal of settled identities and functions. Artwork, apparatus, architecture and furniture remain distinguishable, but their capacities are altered through proximity. The human body is no longer the sole measure of spatial organisation; material forces, surfaces, supports, light and resistance participate in the production of the encounter. The inhuman is not external to the human, but implicated in the relations through which human and nonhuman bodies become capable of affecting one another.

Tentative transmaterialities name these movements across material differences without requiring their convergence. The gathering is hospitable because it makes encounter possible, yet troubling because encounter does not guarantee familiarity, belonging or agreement. Alienation remains active within hospitality. Diffraction allows these relations to be reconsidered through their differences, while atmosphere emerges as their sensate and spatial intensity.

These earlier works can therefore be encountered as persistent spatial propositions rather than preliminary stages in a settled practice. They gather relations without exhausting them, making available a mode of spatial inquiry in which bodies remain capable of becoming otherwise through their encounters with other bodies.

I would keep this reading close to the images rather than claim that they already articulate the whole of the later matrix. Their value is that they provide material situations through which the matrix can now be developed.

The continuity is not necessarily a consistent visual language. It is an operative concern: gathering without convergence, hospitality without guaranteed belonging, and material correspondence without the erasure of difference. The later ceramic bodies can be understood as another intensification of this concern, acquiring persistence through firing while remaining available to further spatial and sensate encounters.

The Encounter ~ Elemental Otherness ~ Queer Inhuman

The encounter rests on an acknowledgement of elemental otherness: a touching through which bodies become responsive to what is related to their own existence without becoming the same. As Zornberg suggests in The Murmuring Deep, we encounter and communicate through the light, earth, air and warmth that sustain our bodies. These elements are not simply external conditions of experience. They participate in the ways bodies orient one another, making encounter possible beyond the transmission of clear meanings.

This elemental correspondence offers a further reading of the spatial gatherings. Timber, metal, photographic images, painted surfaces, furniture, apertures and bodies do not simply occupy a common space. They participate in a material situation whose relations cannot be exhausted by identifying the elements or interpreting their arrangement. The gathering becomes a touching through which differences acquire spatial and sensate consequence.

Barad's queer inhuman intensifies this proposition. The inhuman is not a separate realm opposed to the human, but an unsettling of the boundaries through which the human is understood as autonomous, rational and self-contained. In Trans/Matter/Realities: Queer Political Imaginings (2015), indeterminacy becomes an affirmation rather than a lack: the incalculable and unfathomable are implicated in the conditions through which responsibility becomes possible. The encounter does not promise mastery over otherness. It demands an attentiveness to relations whose consequences cannot be completely known in advance.

The 2018 research situation at Open Studios Norfolk, involving lever graves, meadow grasses and cyanotype contact paper, offers a material instance of this troubling. Contact between grasses, photosensitive paper and light produces an indexical trace, but the image cannot contain the encounter from which it emerges. Its surface makes a relation perceptible while leaving much of that relation unresolved. The image persists as a body of contact, available to further encounters without becoming a transparent account of what took place.

Making~Transmaterialities therefore names an infinite touching of alterity that lives in, around and through bodies. It is not a claim that all matter becomes indistinguishable, nor that every encounter produces harmony. It is an acknowledgement that bodies are constituted and altered through relations with what they cannot wholly assimilate or know. Hospitality becomes a willingness to remain exposed to this otherness; alienation names the difference that persists within such intimacy; diffraction allows the encounter to generate further differences rather than converge upon a final meaning; and atmosphere becomes the sensate field through which these relations are felt.

The spatial proposition is consequently not a stable arrangement of bodies, nor a representation of their entanglement. It is an apparatus through which elemental, material and affective relations become available for encounter. The apparatus gathers, but cannot contain, the indeterminacy it makes perceptible. Its hospitality remains troubled; its boundaries remain consequential without being absolute.

To make, within this field, is to participate in relations whose outcomes are neither entirely given nor wholly controllable. The responsibility that follows does not arise from achieving complete knowledge of other bodies. It emerges from recognising that one's own existence is already implicated in relations with what remains unfamiliar, insensible or beyond calculation.

Spatial Practice, Karen Barad, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, Queer Inhuman, Transmaterialities, Elemental Touching, Troubling Bodies, Indexical Bodies, Sensate Inquiry, Diffraction, Hospitality, Alienation, Atmosphere, Interiority, Material Correspondence, Inhuman Correspondence, Negative Capability, Persistent Bodies, Making,

Diffractive Surfaces/Visitors : Imaginative Cartographies/Spatialities/Fictions/Epistemologies

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Outpost Studio : 03082021

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold

Visual Diffractions~Water~Abbey : Orthoclase, or orthoclase feldspar.

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice.

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Google Lens.

The image displays a large black-and-white photograph of what appears to be an abstract or textured surface, potentially a wall or rock formation, mounted on a sheet of paper with various textual annotations and clippings. 

Textual elements in the background include references to the film "VISITORS" directed by Godfrey Reggio, and a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: "We have art that we may not perish by the truth".

Other text fragments mention architecture and specific locations like Suchumi.

The primary image itself is a high-contrast, grainy depiction of a rough, dark surface with lighter, irregular patches.

The overall composition suggests an artistic or documentary presentation, possibly an exhibition piece or a study of texture and decay.

Discursive Reading (against linearity)/New Modalities of Inquiry

New Generative Boundaries/Situatedness

Wayfinding and Heuristic/Everyday Practices

Reading is also thinking through the body

Viscous Porosity/Flesh of the world

Enfleshed Materialism/Membranes that affect interactions

Words Become Material

Troubleyn Laboratorium/Jan Fabre

In this moment the words become a performative agent writing and acting on the body

Installing ourselves in the event, that emerges in our reading

Reading diffractively means that we try to fold these texts into one anther in a move that flattens out our relationship to the material. In so doing we install ourselves into its/our becoming

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research/Barad Thinking with intra-action

Alecia Y. Jackson, Lisa A. Mazzei

Paintings/Art Works are boundary making apparatusses

The Diffractive Apparatus/Analysis of Intra-ventions/actively/entanglements

Phenomena and Thresholds from which to create new analytical questions/forms

An entangled state of agencies, that which exceed the traditional notion of how we conceive of agency, subjectivity, and the individual.

Agency is an enactment, not something that someone has. Such entanglements require an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together.

Barad

Diffraction

Two major authors write about the metaphor of diffraction, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
They explain how diffraction is a method for reading and writing based upon the physical phenomena. Diffraction is a way of coping with epistemological problems of representation (invisible knowledge maker as a false sense of objectivity, self-vision of reflexivity as totalizing and undermining knowledge claims).

To paraphrase Haraway, from "Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" diffraction is an attempt to make differences while recording interactions, interference, and reinforcement. It does not have an origin and has a heterogeneous history. In addition, the practice of diffractive reading and writing never sediments the relationship between signifier and signified. Van der Tuin explains, "Diffraction is meant to disrupt linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘‘more promising interference patterns’’ (26). She also explains that this can be practiced by reading texts through one another, and rewriting.This disrupts the temporality of a piece of writing, transverses boundaries such as discipline, and can change meanings in different contexts opening up meaning.

https://newmaterialistscartographies.wikispaces.com/Diffraction

Diffracting Photography/Painting/Collage Works

Heuristic reconfigurations through making/understanding/encounters with material









Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005


Collage Works, A Hut of Ones Own

Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.


A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline


Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Material Discursive Practices : The Edge its borders and boundaries : Richard Sennett

Diffraction, as a physical phenomena and a tool for analysis that attunes us to ongoing differences of the worlds continous becoming.

A Diffractive Methodology/Performativity

Knowledge Making Processes

The Agency of/and Cutting Together/Apart

Agency is doing/being in its intra-activity

Performing phenomena entails investigations of the material-discursive boundary-making practices that produce 'objects' and 'subjects', and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality.

A phenomena is a specific intra-action of an 'object'; and the 'measuring agencies'; the objectand the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.

Karen Barad

The central idea is that 'the thing' 'we' research, is enacted in entantanglement with 'the way' we research it.

Agencies emerge with specific qualities, this means that we might recognize agency in different forms as relations, movements, repetitions, silences, distances, architecture, structures, feelings, things, us/them/it, words 

Sofie Sauzet, Phenomena-Agential Realism

Spatial Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

 Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.

It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity

is conceptual...

Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin

with the same concept,

they do not have the same concept of beginning...

Every concept has an irregular

contour defined by the sum of its components,

which is why,

from Plato to Bergson,

we find

the idea of the concept being a

matter of articulation,

of cutting and

cross-cutting.

The concept is a whole because it totalizes

its components, but it is

a fragmentary whole.

Only on this condition can it escape the

mental chaos

constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Assemblage (Wilcox)

As opposed to concepts like structure, culture, science, objectivity, production, agency, technology, and nature, the idea of assemblage emphasizes the material-discursive heterogeneity of which the cosmos is constituted. As Deleuze explains:

In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by ‘hodgepodges’ and ‘verdicts.’ [i]

Fortun and Bernstein (1998) use the term “realitty” to describe the complex, messy world made up of assemblages and trace the genealogy of the concept throughout the twentieth century’s continental philosophical traditions. Beginning with Frankfurt School critical theorists like Walker Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who coined the term “constellation,” and moving through Foucault and Deleuze, Fortun and Bernstein characterize the concept of the assemblage thus:

In an assemblage, nothing explains it all: not the sciences, not the social sciences, not the human sciences. There isn’t anything that is first or fundamental in an assemblage—nature, language, culture, institutions, whatever—it’s all at once, and we with our questions come after it. Meaning that we are both assembled by it, and in pursuit of it. Even though we’re consigned to come after the assemblage has been assembled, both with and without our intentionality, that doesn’t stop us from going after it, too.[ii]

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+%28Wilcox%29

Assemblage (Weiss)

(Disambiguation: Assemblage (Wilcox))

The assemblage is introduced as a heuristic tool to map out the realitty of an idea: the conceptual connections surrounding and contributing to the formation of a topic, such as Darwin's theory of evolution. The primary source text for this idea is Muddling Through by Fortun and Bernstein.

There are four general characteristics of assemblages:

1) Assemblages are a kind of infrastructure (1, 2) - "a complex, crazily reticulated transportation system" (105) - that, like roadways, facilitate (conceptual) movement in certain directions while constraining movement in other ways.

2) Despite the constraining nature of assemblages, they still allow for some elements of power and agency to be exercised. If you have the ability, granted by some modes of thinking, to go "off-road" or to start a new chain of self-organizing "roadwork", then you are able to recoup more agency in choosing which direction to think in. (105)

3) An assemblage is always in some type of restricted motion as various nodes are afforded slight shifting within the constraints of their linkages. "The lobster form is not entirely whimsical, but a deliberate reminder that the sciences are in motion and, indeed, composed of linked motions." (106) Stabilization is possible in small regions of an assemblage through stronger interconnections made between nodes of institutions, concepts, and activities, such as those found in the sciences. It is important to recognize that this stabilization effect comes not from reality, but from realitty, the social elements that contribute to a sense of fact or truth. This movement also emphasizes that visual representations are "diagrams of contingency" - the elements are all interdependent upon connections to other elements and that shifts in force or direction will transfer across the diagram, sometimes in indirect ways. (107)

4) The representation of an assemblage is itself a kludged tool to aid our understanding of and inquiry into scientific activities. Rather than providing answers or hard-and-fast explanations, assemblages are meant to provoke questions and to open up possibilities in thinking about events and topics in new ways.

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+(Weiss)

Agential Realism

A theory coined by Karen Barad, agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped. 

" [Agential realism] is an epistemological and ontological framework that extends Bohr's insights and takes as its central concerns the nature of materiality, the relationship between the material and the discursive, the nature of "nature" and of "culture" and the relationship between them, the nature of agency, and the effects of boundary, including the nature of exclusions that accompany boundary projects.

Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms - "agency" and "realism" - and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates." (89)

Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” (112) 

Niels Bohr's Quantum Physics

“Bohr’s epistemology calls into question several foundationalist assumptions that Western epistemology generally takes as essential to its project; among these are an inherent subject/object distinction and the representational status of language.” (89) 

Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation. He also resolved the "wave-particle" duality paradox (97) by positing that the paradox existed because the methods used by scientists to measure light as a wave versus as a particle were mutually exclusive.

By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.” (95)

Apparatus

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." 

“...apparatuses are not mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world, or determining structures of a social nature, but neither are they merely laboratory instruments or social forces that function in a performative mode." 

Barad uses the example of the transducer in a sonogram machine that is used to "view" a fetus: 

"the transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is "part of" the body it images.” (101)

A transducer in a sonogram is not merely a passive instrument; it actively participates in the production of an image of a fetus, both in how it transforms auditory input (sound waves) into visual outputs on a screen, but also in how it makes the fetus seem to be more real and existent than it would have been without. 

Diffraction

Another key idea behind agential realism is Barad's emphasis on a transformative and transgressive diffraction, not just reproducing reflection:

"In this regard, it is important not to confuse the fact that I am drawing on an optical phenomenon for my inspiration in developing certain aspects of my methodological approach ... with the nature of the method itself. In particular, calling a method 'diffractive' in analogy with the physical phenomenon of diffraction does not imply that the method itself is analogical. On the contrary, my aim is to disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical metaphor - namely, reflection - that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between separate entities. By contrast, diffraction, as I argue, does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements." (87)

Again, Barad's posthumanist expansion of performativity to include nonhumans comes into play:

"I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism. The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doings, and actions." (135) 

Barad clarifies that her posthumanism is not celebrating "after humans", but more challenging the prima facie segregation and privileging of humans over and from other beings:

"Posthumanism, as I intend it here, is not calibrated to the human; on the contrary, it is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)" (136) 

Hearkening back to her physics roots, Barad compares the conceptual diffraction to optical diffraction versus reflection, explaining that diffraction allows for more insight because it transforms (conceptual) images:

"Such an approach also brings to the forefront important questions of ontology, materiality, and agency, which social constructivist and traditional realist approaches get caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection where, much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen.

Moving away from the representationalist trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus to physical optics, to questions of diffraction rather than reflection. Diffractively reading the insights of poststructuralist theory, science studies, and physics through one another entails thinking the cultural and the natural together in illuminating ways." (135) 

This diffraction challenges the singularity and solidity of boundaries, making what was sharply delineated a zone of fuzzy regions that have questionable divisions held in place by iterative performativity:

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Agential+Realism+%28Weiss%29