Ici THK — Les Forces Francaises de l'Interieur parlent aux francais

About the Author

Sources

+ Karen BARAD, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning., + ISBN 13-978-0-8223-3901-4. +

Quotes

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There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing + practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each + intra-action, so that we might use our ability to + respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe + life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The + world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in + each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in + helping constitute who and what come to matter? How to + understand what is entailed in the practice of meeting + that might help keep the possibility of justice alive in + a world that seems to thrive on death? How to be alive + to each being's suffering, including those who have died + and those not yet born? How to disrupt patterns of + thinking that see the past as finished and the future as + not ours or only ours? How to understand the matter of + mattering, the nature of matter, space, and time? These + questions and concerns are not a luxury made of esoteric + musings. Mattering and its possibilities and + impossibilities for justice are integral parts of the + universe in its becoming; an invitation to live justly + is written into the very matter of being. How to + respond to that invitation is as much a question about + the nature of response and responsibility as it about + the nature of matter. The yearning for justice, a + yearning larger than any individual or sets of + individuals, is the driving force behind this work, + which is therefore necessarily about our connections and + responsibilities to one another-that is, entanglements.

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Haraway does not take location to be about fixed + position (though unfortunately many readers who cite + Haraway conflate her notion of "situated" with the + specification of one's social location along a set of + axes referencing one's identity). She reiterates this + point in different ways throughout her work. For + example, in "Situated Knowledges" she writes: "Feminist + embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a + reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in + fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility + for difference in material- semiotic fields of meaning. + Embodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot + be about fixed visions when what counts as an object is + precisely what world history turns out to be about." + Situated knowledge is not merely about knowing or seeing + from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about + taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment + of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus + matters to practices of knowing. And ifher use of the + "@" sign in Modest_Witness can be understood as a mark + of the specificity of location, then we can conclude + that location is not equivalent to the local, but + neither does the globality of the Net imply universality + but rather points to its distributed and layered nature + (1997, 121): "The '@' and '.' are the title's chief + signifiers of the Net. An ordinary e-mail address + specifies where the addressee is in a highly + capitalized, transnationally sustained, machine + language-mediated communications network that gives byte + to the euphemisms of the 'global village.' Dependent + upon a densely distributed array oflocal and regional + nodes, e-mail is one of a powerful set of recent + technologies that materially produce what is so blithely + called 'global culture.' E-mail is one of the passage + points — both distributed and obligatory — + through which identities ebb and flow in the Net of + technoscience" (Haraway 1997, 4; italics mine). + Location, for Haraway, may be about the specification + ofwhere the addressee is in the Net, but the Net is not + fixed, and neither are identities or spacetime. Though + Haraway doesn't seem to go as far in making the + ontological points I want to emphasize here, in both + accounts it seems that while location cannot be about + occupying a fixed position, it may be usefully + (con)figured as specific connectivity. See chapter 4 on + the agential realist conception of objectivity not as a + view from somewhere but as a matter of accountability to + marks on bodies. Objectivity is not solely an + epistemological matter (a matter of seeing, albeit + specifically embodied sight) but an ontological + (ontoepistemological) one.

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