Conversing with the Unexpected: Towards a Feminist Ethics of Knowing
1] The (new materialist) challenge to radically question notions of (human) subjectivity and agency is paradoxical insofar as its protagonists and addressees are a human 'we' who seek to understand nature and who strive for responsible relations with Others. Reading Karen Barad in an affirmative confrontation with the work of Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, this paper sketches possibilities of keeping in a state of permanent tension contradictory theoretical sitings/sightings of human and social agencies, arguing that in terms of a project of refiguring knowledge practices as communicative relations with Others, they are equally necessary. Perhaps our hopes for accountability for technobiopolitics in the belly of the monster turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse (Haraway, Promises 68) [1] Feminist epistemologies can be characterized by the assumption that practices of knowing are inherently political and that ethics is thus an integral part of knowledge production (Rouse; SingerAs Andrea Doucet and Natasha Mauthner point out, the ensuing questions of accountability and responsibility, of "what it means to 'know well' and to 'know responsibly'" (124) are, to an important degree, questions of relationality, of conceptualizing and maintaining relationships with the research subjects which/who can then no longer be approached as objects of knowledge. Turning to Barbara McClintock's research into corn plants, Doucet and Mauthner specifically focus on practices of knowing that are not concerned with humans, to illustrate the ethical importance of developing research practices that operate as communicative relationships, allowing for an opening of unexpected alterity, for that which exceeds assumed patterns and categories: "Not only did McClintock develop and maintain a close and 'loving' relationship with her research subjects, but she also focused in on the uniqueness of each research subject, even those subjects whose characteristics fundamentally challenged the theoretical, ontological and epistemological perspectives that she started out with" (Doucet and Mauthner, 128) In this sense, feminist engagements with knowledge and knowledge production are generally oriented towards a reconfiguring of given practices of knowing in order to achieve greater responsiveness in these relational processes and to thus transform hierarchical, exclusionary, and violent relations. [2] Karen Barad explicitly situates her work within feminist traditions that focus on "the possibilities of making a better world, a livable world, a world based on values of co flourishing and mutuality" "Erasers" 450) In the vein of this ethical and political commitment she makes compelling arguments for reconsidering and refashioning our practices of knowing. With her reading of Niels Bohr's interpretation of quantum physics she argues that "practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world" (Barad, Meeting 91) Her perspective is particularly interesting insofar as she approaches these questions as a physicist from a disciplinary perspective that may appear at least in respect to its subject matter (if understood as natural laws of inorganic matter) furthest away from any social or political considerations. Barad, however, emphatically formulates ethical and political questions of responsibility not as judgments 'after the fact' of scientific discovery, but as an integral part of the subject matter of physics, as a question of research relations with, and responsiveness to, inorganic matter. Practices of knowing, in this understanding, are not modest observations of an independent reality; they are constitutively involved in the material becoming of the world. The material engagement of knowing is thus not conceptualized in terms of interactions between entities but in terms of entanglement and intra action; "we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand" (Barad, Meeting 67) [3] Barad's work carries the assumption that considerations of relationality are not restricted to social relations and human actors beyond the realm of living organisms. She radically questions the anthropocentric conceit implied in conceptions of knowledge based on a separation of knower and known object. This critique of anthropocentrism is at the same time a critique of social constructionism: its aim is "not to expose scientific knowledge as in general contingent and alterable if 'we' chose, but rather to show it as in need of alteration in specific respects, and as potentially open to chances responsive to that need" (Rouse, 207, original emphasis) The 'we' in question thus becomes a highly complicated figure; it is decidedly not a detached human observer in search of transcendental truths or totalizing explanations. In fact, the status of a human subject, as such, becomes problematic. Barad can cogently argue that ethical problems are not simply questions of 'proper' or 'good' human decisionmaking in the processes of knowing. Causality is not a one way street from human activity to material effects 'in the world' the notion of entanglement is a serious challenge to all assumptions about differences between, and properties of separable entities, as well as to any notion of linear causality. The particular ethical stance that Barad proposes is based on the premise of the fundamentally entangled relationality of all being: "Entanglements are relations of obligation being bound to the other enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an 'Other' entails an indebtedness to the 'Other' who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the 'self' a diffraction/dispersion of identity" (Barad, "Quantum Entanglements" 265) The historical entanglement of the ethical demands of responsibility and accountability with humanist assumptions and connotations is thus problematized. Barad does not regard them as specifically human prerogatives or duties: "Responsibility is not ours alone. Responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then" (Barad, Meeting 394) Responsibility and accountability are opened up for reworking; the central connotation is no longer an imperative of taking charge and giving reasons but, rather, an ability to respond to Others. [4] In this paper, I turn to a paradox that constitutes an interesting tension in Barad's work. Barad challenges us to radically question notions of (human) subjectivity and agency and invites us to engage in encounters that are unsettling, uncomfortable, and potentially enriching; that open up vital spaces for "reworking the material effects of the past and the future" (Barad, "Quantum Entanglements" 266) However, the protagonists and addressees of these ethical injunctions are a human 'we' who seek to understand nature and who strive for responsible relations with Others. We experience our engagement in the world in terms of first person narratives, even in our desire to understand and acknowledge that 'we' are not only 'we humans' and that ethics is "not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part" (Barad, Meeting 393) As Barad remarks, the desire to acknowledge 'nonhuman agency' is always poised on the brink of irony: "What kind of move is that to grant agency to other beings? that's giving with one hand and taking back with the other, all in one move" (Barad, "Intra active Entanglements" 17) Paradoxically, the acknowledgment of the agency of Others, the admission that there is no singular subject position of a 'human' has to be conceived as the act of a specific, historically situated, subject. This subject, striving to acknowledge Others, is configured by social and cultural conditions of occidental metaphysics, enlightenment, capitalism, and colonialism, its status as a subject is constituted through processes of othering (cf. de Lauretis; Yegenoglu; Venn) This subject and its potential of an ethical desire to know and to acknowledge Others is thus contingent on the very demarcations and exclusions that constitute these Others. [5] In the following, I will focus on this problematic and elusive figure of the human subject as decentered phantasm and protagonist and addressee of ethical demands. This figure epitomizes a fundamental tension of a feminist ethics of knowing. On the one hand, this ethical stance finds its conditions of possibility in the assumption that social/cultural dynamics can be identified as apparatuses configuring specific historical subjectivities and power differentials. These apparatuses (in the Foucauldian sense of a dispositive) are understood as material semiotic configurations a notion that implies a constitutive role of social/cultural meaning making (language, semiotics) in the processes of becoming. The historical discursive space within which feminist epistemologies operate constitutes the relation of meaning and matter through the enactment of an epistemic gap between words and things. This gap brings forth 'language' as a specific means of meaning making, as a formative agency in the processes of mattering and thus is pivotal for the agency implied in the ethical desire to make a better world. .On the other hand, it seems crucial to avoid the implication that all that is is shaped by social/cultural meaning making, or that the social/cultural is the sole active/formative dimension. As I will argue, Barad's interpretation of quantum physics offers interesting concepts and metaphors for working with this tension without being faced with the necessity of resolving it. At the same time, it is a challenge to rework the very assumption that concepts and metaphors constitute our access to the world. Reading Barad in an affirmative confrontation with the work of Donna Har