I spent (a portion of) Valentine’s Day with Karen Barad. I was fortunate enough to attend “Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism,” a two-day conference that took place at the CUNY Graduate Center this past week. Karen Barad delivered the keynote address at the conference, and the panels at the conference spoke to and were inspired/influenced/complicated by Barad’s work. Given that my own research is diffracted through material feminist thought and Barad’s agential realism in particular, “Mattering” was an ideal experience for me in that it provided me first-hand access to Barad and an interdisciplinary mix of scholars drawing from her work.

Before I continue with some reflections on her keynote address, I want to share that Barad attended panels at this conference in addition to delivering her keynote. Seeing her in the audience at panels, taking notes and asking questions of the presenters, was quite an experience for me–Karen Barad as co-learner. It was after one of the panels that I first met and conversed with her in person.

Barad’s keynote address was a multimodal, abbreviated version of her article, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” She opened with the concern that she had inadvertently given readers permission to “not read chapter seven” of Meeting the Universe Halfway. Though she didn’t elaborate, I’m guessing this “permission” came from her encouragement in the introduction of the book that “less scientifically inclined readers, or readers who may think of themselves as not very interested in the details of the philosophical issues in quantum physics” at least give a “cursory reading” to chapter seven (Meeting 37-38). Chapter seven, “Quantum Entanglements: Experimental Metaphysics and the Nature of Nature,” is a lengthy (just over 100 pages), physics-heavy chapter in which Barad, through examples and discussion of physics experiments, essentially establishes a quantum framework for a relational ontology. So in part, her keynote was a physics lesson, and I have to say, a physics lesson from Karen Barad is an intense, stimulating, and surprisingly unintimidating experience–even for someone like me who did read chapter seven, about seven times actually.

While much of the keynote was review for me, because I had read the quantum entanglements article and chapter seven of Meeting the Universe Halfway, I was not in the least disappointed. Reading Barad’s ideas are one thing, but watching her perform those ideas was something else entirely. She immediately starting making connections between science and politics, science and justice, and science and ethics and stated that “science and justice are not separate elements that interact every now and then.” She said that her theory of agential realism is a “diffraction grading to read science and politics through one another so that neither is given authority over the other” and that agential realism reveals possibilities of/for “justice to come.” Barad claimed that matter is always about trans-materiality and what’s at stake in a notion of trans-materiality are questions of being, knowing, and getting along together. Given my own research interests, Barad’s keynote spoke to exactly what I needed it to speak to–the ethical and political implications of relational ontology overall and agential realism in particular. Again, while she discusses ethics and politics at numerous places in her writings, watching her elaborate on those discussions (and having the opportunity to ask questions of her) really helped me fill in some of the gaps in my understanding.

Another point Barad made, and one that was also taken up by one of the presenters on an earlier panel, was the idea of possessing an awareness of and having an accountability to the concepts we use in our work. Barad stated that “concepts are specific material arrangements. Matter and meaning entail one another.” This emphasis on understanding the concepts we use and how we use them and on being accountable to the kinds of worlds that we participate in (re)materializing through our use of those concepts is so refreshing to me. So often, we use concepts without even understanding what we mean by them, let alone with having any kind of understanding of the mattering we’re participating in through our use of them (or even any knowledge that we’re participating in a mattering process/dance/event/activity). For instance, the crucial and apocalyptic concepts of “human” and “nonhuman” are thrown around without regard, explanation, or distinction even amongst scholars who participate in work that implicitly or explicitly undermines those concepts. So to hear Barad discuss concepts as mattering practices was like a lightbulb moment for me. I wanted to stand up and cheer (no, I’m not exaggerating).

In the Q & A portion, Barad responded to the question of scale in her work, that is, the question of how a theory inspired by occurrences at the quantum level is applicable to bodies in the world. To that question, reminding us of her comments about concepts, Barad asked, “What is scale?” She said that if we take the electron seriously as a phenomenon, the electron entails the history of the world–all the bodies, instruments, ethics, politics, controversies, and (re)configurings that exist in the electron as phenomenon exist in everything. So, it’s not the case that the electron or quantum physics exists in a vacuum like questions of scale would lead us to believe, and to understand the electron and/or quantum physics as existing in a vacuum is to misunderstand or to undermine Barad’s theory of phenomena as primary ontological units.

In response to a question about Barad’s own ethical inquires, she stated, “I’m very interested in what people don’t see and why they don’t see it.” Barad then spoke about issues of containment and concealment and ways in which what we want to contain and conceal (and I would add how we go about that containment and concealment) might reveal to us about how we intra-act. She responded to questions about her being classified as a “new materialist,” and she urged the audience to “please be generous” in our theoretical and disciplinary boundary drawing.

By far, the highlight of the keynote and the Q & A for me on a personal level was when Barad, after commenting on all the faces she got to see by attending this conference and the reception her work has received, said, “There was a time when I couldn’t find anyone to talk to.” For me, studying rhetoric through a posthumanist and material feminist lens and diffracting that study through Human-Animal Studies (though I still hate that name) sometimes, many times, leaves me feeling like I can’t find anyone to talk to or like I have to work harder to make others see why my research is relevant. To hear Barad, at a conference organized around her work, talk about a time when no one seemed interested in what she had to say was exactly the kind of encouragement I needed to hear at this most important time when I’m beginning research for what will be my dissertation project.

Overall, the keynote left me wanting more Barad, not because it was deficient in any way but because it inspired a plethora of additional questions. But then, I guess that’s the sign of a successful address.