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Are we really entangled?
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A theme that I've started to see throughout this course is just how entangled we all are as human beings. After reading and listening to Barad, I wasn't completely convinced of this. Now that we have read Farmer and Butler who write about an "increasingly interconnected world" (Farmer) and how we undo each other (Butler), I feel like I can solidify my thoughts.
I am intrigued at the call to arms that Farmer and Butler both seem to encourage. While Farmer is not as explicit with his call, Butler definitely is. But I have found flaws with both of their arguments. The basis of their demand for more social work seems to stem from their assertions that all human beings are intertwined, entangled and interconnected. But I'm not quite convinced that we are.
Is this entanglement of all human beings just something that we look towards to feel somewhat "safe"? Each and every single one of us has our own mind, our own agency, our own way of looking at things. Thinking of us as entangled seems, to me, somewhat of safety net that lets us rely on each other rather than force us to really be individuals. Yes, it is true that society is highly influencial in the formation of our identities but at the end of the day, we are who we are as a result of, at least some, of our own agency. No matter how hard I try to think of myself as entangled, I keep remembering that nobody can read my thoughts and that I am who I am in my own mind. In essence, I am an individual and although I have been influenced by my environment, my experiences and my thoughts are unique to me and noone else is privy to my thoughts.
Also, If we really were entities that relied solely on other people in order to express our own selves, then wouldn't norms and utopia be found more easily as we would be a collective?
Though I can't fully take apart the claims that we as entities are entangled with each other and with our environments because it just seems so logical to me to an extent, I want to rethink some of the assumptions that we have been making about them. Just how far are we actually interconnected? I find it difficult to believe and fully understand how we could we could possibly be connected to 6,840,507,000 (as of the 27 November 2011) people spread across the globe with each having their own thoughts, ideas and methods of diffraction.