Karen Barad's work is an important influence for the reflections expressed here. She invites us to think of new ontologies that overcome the old debates and dichotomies of the search for the "natural" versus the "cultural" or "things" versus "words." Under her approach, technology, objects, non-human entities, and even human ones are material-discursive practices. I found this perspective very useful to think about agency as something always related. Like she says, “[a]gency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is “doing”/ “being” in its intra-activity.” (2003, 144).
Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter", contributed by Emilia Ruvalcaba de la Garza, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 15 August 2019, accessed 20 April 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/posthumanist-performativity-toward-understanding-how-matter-comes-matter
Critical Commentary
Karen Barad's work is an important influence for the reflections expressed here. She invites us to think of new ontologies that overcome the old debates and dichotomies of the search for the "natural" versus the "cultural" or "things" versus "words." Under her approach, technology, objects, non-human entities, and even human ones are material-discursive practices. I found this perspective very useful to think about agency as something always related. Like she says, “[a]gency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is “doing”/ “being” in its intra-activity.” (2003, 144).