| View Larger Image | Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
| Paperbackby Karen Barad (Author)
| List Price: | $27.95 | | Price: | $18.20 | | You Save: | $9.75 (35%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Duke University Press | | Page Count: | 544 Pages | | Publication Date: | July 01, 2007 | | Sales Rank: | 192,505nd |
|
FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780822339175
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
|
EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 4 reviews)
|
Expectations by C. Spalding  4 Stars
January 07, 2008
I think that all in all, this product lived up to all of my expectations.
| |
Inelegant proof at best by Not a Clue (Redondo Beach, CA USA)  2 Stars
November 19, 2007
The description and reviews are enough to rate this. Any intellectually astute atheist since Spinoza could tell you absolute freedom was impossible, and determinism has been defeated both mathematically and by quantum mechanics. No recondite postmodern obfuscation is necessary.
| |
it is worth it by Feminist Review blog (worldwide)  5 Stars
September 24, 2007
In the preface to Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad says, "This book is about entanglements. To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence."
The subsequent pages are an elegant mesh of detailed explanations of social theories, scientific concepts and new pathways of technological innovation; all explored and then rewoven to form the carefully constructed foundation for her theory of agential realism. A theoretical framework wherein human, machine and interactions between, are all actually phenomenon that make up the world as agents in a dynamic of change, where "...knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world."
A scholar of Neils Bohr's writings and work, she explains how the man who won the Nobel Prize for his model of the atom did not believe "in the inherent distinction between subject and object, knower and known," and how he struggled to rectify problems with quantum theory, problems with measurement and even got Heisenberg to postscript an admission of inadequacy in his uncertainty principle (although it is for the most part ignored). Yet Bohr was too human-centric in his viewpoint to see a way out. With agential realism, she picks up where he left off and takes us to a post-humanist world where "reality is composed of things-in-phenomena." She "propose(s) an interpretation of quantum physics based on agential realism."
While Barad is careful to maintain that she does not `write down' to a general audience, and that any reader must do the labor required to follow her descriptions of theoretical physics and several gedanken (thought) experiments performed by the likes of Einstein and Schrodinger, she encourages the work, and it is worth it.
Examples of how recent advances in nanotechnology, biomimicry, cyborg development and quantum physics all predict a future (world as growing into a changed state) where the presumed boundaries between human and non-human may become blurred beyond recognition and new ways of thinking about relationships and the fabric of the world will become necessary. Like the discovery of the brittlestar, a cousin to the starfish and sea urchin, it is a creature that has no brain or eyes, and yet functions as an organism that is all eyes... a skeletal system that acts as a visual system. "Brittlestars don't have eyes; they are eyes."
When viewed through Judith Butler's theory of performativity and body as matter, physicist Richard Feynman's call to question bodily boundaries and Leela Fernandes's study of the structural relationships of power on the shop floor of a Calcutta jute mill, Barad's call to a new way of looking at (and through) the world becomes an exciting herald of possibility. For if we are all a part of a reality, and every action, every measurement is a new event that effects all other aspects, no one should ever again feel isolated or removed from society or the world at large.
"The point of challenging traditional epistemologies is not merely to welcome females, slaves, children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled from the land of knowers by Aristotle more than two millenia ago) into the fold of knowers but to better account for the ontology of knowing. ...ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self."
| |
Exceptional Work by Terrence Findlay (Keremeos, British Columbia Canada) 5 Stars
September 11, 2007
Meeting the Universe Halfway is a remarkable accomplishment. In it the author presents her philosophy-physics agential realism. As developed in this book, the power of agential realism to resolve paradoxes of quantum physics that have, until now, defied explanation is quite amazing; as is its application in fields such as sociology, epistemology, and ethics. In fact, there seems to be no realm of consideration that agential realism does not touch. Moreover, the repercussions for everyday living are profound. An agential realist point of view changes everything, including the entangled viewer's sense of self and place in world.
I find agential realism's defeat of both determinism and absolute freedom to be essentially optimistic. In a recent discussion with a friend I defended science as the best hope for our survival as a species. Meeting the Universe Halfway, particularly agential realism's take on ethics, has confirmed my belief that this is indeed the case. This book is a challenging but immensely rewarding read. The importance of this work, in terms of our understanding of the world and the responsibility we all bear as integrated phenomena of and within it, cannot be overstated.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| When Species Meet (Posthumanities)
by Donna J. Haraway (Author)
“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and...
| 
| The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979
by Michel Foucault (Author), Michel Senellart (Editor), Arnold I. Davidson (Editor), Alessandro Fontana (Editor), Francois Ewald (Editor), Graham Burchell (Editor)
this liberal governmentality. This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed: "Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics".
What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the Eighteenth century? What crisis of governmentality characterises the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to? This is the diagnostic task...
| 
| The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Science and Cultural Theory)
by Annemarie Mol (Author), Barbara HerrnsteinSmith (Series Editor), E. RoyWeintraub (Series Editor)
The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things as well. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment to the next, a slightly different...
| 
| Reports From a Wild Country: Ethics of Decolonisation
by Deborah Bird Rose (Author)
Reports from a Wild Country explores some of Australia's major ethical challenges. Written in the midst of rapid social and environmental change and in a time of undertainty and division, it offers powerful stories and arguments for ethical choice and commitment. The focus is on reconciliation between Indigenous and "Settler" peoples, and with nature. With a distnictive and powerful voice, Deborah Bird Rose draws on case studies from across Australia to show pathways toward...
| 
| Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)
by Sarah Franklin (Author)
While the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world’s most famous clone, triggered an enormous amount of discussion about human cloning, in Dolly Mixtures the anthropologist Sarah Franklin looks beyond that much-rehearsed controversy to some of the other reasons why the iconic animal’s birth and death were significant. Building on the work of historians and anthropologists, Franklin reveals Dolly as the embodiment of agricultural, scientific, social, and commercial histories which are, in...
|
|
|
