“The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism. Or, to put the point the other way around, representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented…Atomism poses the question of which representation is real. The problem of realism in philosophy is a product of the atomistic worldview…A performative understanding, which shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices, is one such alternative.
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I present a relational ontology that rejects the metaphysics of relata, of ‘words’ and ‘things’. On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role ‘we’ play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming…On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’… It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful…agential realism offers an understanding of the nature of material-discursive practices, such as those very practices through which different distinctions get drawn, including those be- tween the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’.” - Barad, K.M., 2003. Posthumanist Performativity. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp.1–31.
I like this. What does it say about the worker/manager relationship in organizations? How can this philosophical concept be made actionable?
ReplyDeleteI'm just starting to get into it, so I cannot answer your question with any sense that my thoughts are well-developed at this stage. Having said that, my reading is that she argues that both people and objects “intra-act” producing particular outcomes. It therefore suggests that changes to relationships (for example positionally or affectively), outcomes will change as well. That may seem like common sense, but this is because we forget that many representations are privileged with more attention is paid to them (e.g. winners / losers), which has the effect of occluding existing relationships which also exist that might be worth exploring.
ReplyDeleteIn this notion of occlusion, the way this article left me thinking about it, human understanding can be conceived as working sort of the way a software interface works. If one's understanding is based on a particular “interface” / (ideology), it’s simply not possible to call functions the interface does not expose even if such functions / interpretations might be possible / available. The way Barad said it was with the term “apparatus”, which she defined as “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-ctions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted.”
As far as application, I am reading this first and foremost to inform my research approach. I plan to use these ideas as scholarly support for a work practice research approach that explores relationships between humans and non-humans in situ as a way to explain what is not readily visible from other research approaches, such as those which are statistically-based where conclusions are drawn from surveys or aggregate measurements. I see Barad’s thinking mainly as a potential theoretical lens that may be useful to inform and interpret the ethnographic data I will collect.
Barad's background is interesting. She has a PhD in particle physics but has moved to a much more interdisciplinary space, applying her background and skills to the feminist studies and philosophy. She has a book I've not yet read entitled "Meeting the Universe Halfway" that might interest you.
Yes, I am finding myself being drawn into this piece although I find it rather dense. And I can vaguely see what you mean about using this as a way of diffracting the information to bring something so far unseen into focus. Very interesting.
ReplyDeleteRe: interfaces, I am still drawn to the weak form of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis so I can agree up to a point. APIs, of course, are primarily concerned with the syntactic accessibility and say nothing about the semantics of the underlying objects to which they provide access. And this piece really hammers away at the barriers to semantic understanding when we may all have our own internal representations. Yet, we know that we seem to eventually learn to communicate some rather abstract concepts quite effectively even though this piece shows how poorly this may work at times.
This section also struck me...
"Representationalism separates the world into the ontologically disjoint domains of words and things, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage such that knowledge is possible. If words are untethered from the material world, how do representations gain a foothold? If we no longer believe that the world is teeming with inherent resemblances whose signatures are inscribed on the face of the world, things already emblazoned with signs, words lying in wait like so many pebbles of sand on a beach there to be discovered, but rather that the knowing subject is enmeshed in a thick web of representations such that the mind cannot see its way to objects that are now forever out of reach and all that is visible is the
sticky problem of humanity’s own captivity within language, then it begins to become apparent that representationalism is a prisoner of the problematic metaphysics it postulates. Like the frustrated would-be runner in Zeno’s paradox, representationalism never seems to be able to get any closer to solving the problem it poses because it is caught in the impossibility of stepping outward from its metaphysical starting place. Perhaps it would be better to begin with a different starting point, a different metaphysics." (ibid)
I will not pretend to completely comprehend this piece. But for me, the dilemma of representation is functionally answered by the work of Lakoff and Johnson. (Metaphors We Live By, Where Does Mathematics Come From?, Philosophy in the Flesh) All knowledge is a metaphoric extension of our embodied state. Even more, other writers suggest that not only our rational life, but our emotional life as well shapes our representations.
Since I'm not a philosopher or social critic, this is only interesting to me since software faces the same dilemma. The thing that can be named is not the real thing. (Lao Tzu) Large software systems, perhaps all large systems, have representations that necessarily abstract away many things. Then the representation becomes the thing. If that which was abstracted away is never needed, the model of the need matches the behavior that is desired. But inevitably some part of the model is incomplete and it must be revisited so the software artifact can be fixed.
I've noticed that phenomenon too; that the representation becomes the thing. I have a special term for it but will hold back on writing it now as it it destined for my thesis.
ReplyDelete