Karen Barad’s transposition of poststructuralism to quantum physics
Barad develops her project of ‘agential realism’ on the basis of Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen school of quantum physics, which views the dynamics of material processes from their subatomic side and thus does away with reified ideas of ‘matter’.
Already in the 1930s and 1940s, Ernst Bloch had criticised such reified notions of matter as ‘mechanical clod’.[160] According to him, quantum theory provides a new terrain for dialectics that the Hegelians and Engels hardly dared to dream of – in it, dialectics is ‘on the doorstep’, because it shows that atoms and electrons are not immutable elements either, ‘on which the forces of nature only act from the outside […]; but they themselves are […] in their finest parts subject to fine flowing changes’.[161] Instead of appearing as rigid opposites, wave and particle are themselves ‘moments of change that condition each other, that turn into each other’.[162] However, the physical matter of quantum theory is still completely ‘unmediated’ with the historical matter of our mesocosm
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/like-a-face-drawn-in-the-sand-at-the-edge-of-the-sea-on-the-antihumanist-trajectory-of-posthumanism/
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