I think I caught Barad Fever...

I had my Barad "Aha!" moment in the beginning of class last week. It happened during our first Judith Butler litany and it took me by surprise. I have to admit, I was skeptical of Barad - I couldn't fathom what it might mean to experience the world like electrons do, and perhaps I don't understand the concept in the way Barad means it, but I've been feeling more electron-like by the minute...

Judith Butler's piece, "Violence, Mourning, and Politics" made me consider the ways in which each of us is both a particle and a wave (and that we are both at once, but the questions we ask - the way we look/measure - can change which "form" we focus on). Butler writes that, “one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed” (21). This definition of mourning struck me as very “wave-like.” We bounce off each other, diffract through one another, imprint ourselves on each other in such a way that when we lose someone, the patterns will change. We are wave-like in that there is something of our presence that is not necessarily visible or finite - we change the world we live in and the people we live with. But there is also a way in which we are discrete – we have a physical presence, we are in a certain way tangible, borders can be drawn around us. I think most of the time, though, when we think about each other or ourselves we consider the wave and particle together – like electrons we are both at once.

It was interesting to have the chance to make the authors “talk to each other” in class last week. Until we read Butler, I didn’t click with Barad. It seems to me that Butler gives Barad some more easily definable context – the way we mourn for instance. Being able to read the two thinkers together was a nice way to try to understand the theories presented to us.