Matterealities part 1

On Monday I went to Karen Barad's lecture at the matterealities conference. She discussed Niels Bohr's realisation in quantum physics that the behaviour of electrons depends upon the way they are measured. The very act of perception disrupts notions of cause and effect.

I need now to read Karen's book to understand why adding 'delayed cause' then completely disrupts linear notions of past present and future. Stingrays evidence this by altering their behaviour in anticipation of a message that has not yet been sent. (A promise to this blog: if no comment clarifies this I will come back to it when I've read the book.) Meanwhile, here's Brian Hackett's photo of a stingray from his fabulous underwater photography collection.

I find Karen Barad's philosophy a profound underpinning of ethnography, locating the global in the local and the local in the global. She argues that the very act of perception is profoundly ethical.

Julia