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In quantum theory and experimental practice, elementary objects such as the photons are conceived at the same time as particles and waves. As a wave, the frequency of a photon is its color.^§MS1.3.1c That objects such as photons can be seen alternately as one kind of entity, then the other, he said was a figment of instrumentation. But both aspects of the phenomenon of light can’t be seen at the same time. To this extent, reality is a figment of seeing, in this case the different kinds of apparatus instrumenting different kinds of insight. There is an inseparable relation between “observed object” and “agencies of observation.”³⁷² Also entanglement: one object in one place can be meaningfully and simultaneously connected with another somewhere else. Einstein^§AS1.3.1a was not prepared to accept such indeterminacies, nor to conceive of relationships exceeding the limits of the speed of light.³⁷³

Not only true for the commonsensically weird universe of elementary particles and fundamental waves, “quantum mechanics,” says Karen Barad, “is the correct theory of nature on all scales.” And the correct theory of human agency in nature. Intentionality is “a complex network of human and non-human agents … an entangled state of agencies. … [P]henomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially-interacting components; … distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.” This accounts for “the world’s radical aliveness,” on every scale.³⁷⁴

This, Barad explains, is the basis for her “agential realist ontology, or what one might call a ‘quantum ontology,’ based on the existence of phenomena rather than of independently existing things, … performatively materializing entanglements of spacetimemattering.”³⁷⁵ She says, “[o]n my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’”³⁷⁶

Barad calls her theory “posthumanist performativity.” Of performativity, she says this is a necessary antidote to contemporary theories of knowing because “[l]anguage has been granted too much power.” Performativity is something that happens in non-human matter and human bodies. It is an account of entities in relation to their actions, where it would be a conceit to privilege the human.³⁷⁷

However, perplexingly she also says hers is an account of “discursive practices,” to pick up on Derrida, Foucault, and Judith Butler.³⁷⁸ It’s not clear how discursive practices can affect the meaning of atoms any more than, through instrumentation, seeing them as images or feeling them as objects. In much social theory, and here also in physics, it still seems hard to get away from privileging language (Derrida’s “text”^§MS2.3.1b); discourse (Foucault’s “discursive practice”^§AS2.5a); or performative speech (Austin’s speech acts^§MS2.3.1a), no matter how deep its acknowledged inveiglement with objects or bodies.

In a transpositional grammar, we can encompass both text and speech by addressing a wider range of forms of meaning, accounting for shared meaning functions as well as affordances peculiar to the characteristic media of each form. But none is privileged. This is why the proper frame for a theory of meaning, as Barad also so rightly says, is ontology rather than language.

This also means that we don’t need to “meet the universe halfway,” as if there were two places from which to depart. Humans are in the design of natural history. We are the universe, for our self-importance at the same time as our insignificance.

In this respect, “posthuman” and “posthumanism” may be a false modesty, a symptom of our need to recover from the horrors of “Enlightenment.”³⁷⁹ To mean is eminently human (and animal-like, and natural). Meaning is a matter of participation^§AS1.2 in the world, where humans recognize that meaning is not just in themselves (their minds, or somewhat less reductively, their bodies) but in their situation in the world, including the universe itself, and its independently natural history. This is just human, which is just natural.

Earlier, we ventured to suggest that this might be a quantum grammar.^§MS1.2.2b What we learn from Barad is that quantum mechanics is no mere metaphor for the world. It is all of the world as intra-action of dynamic objects where nature and humans, even if they could be separated, are equally agentive. Matter and meaning are indeed entangled, and this is not merely discursive. It is meaning in matter, or ontology.

So, for this grammar, each function is like an observational apparatus, a moment to stop and to see a meaning one way rather than another, each time making quantum leaps across and between reference, or agency, or structure, or context, or interest. Paradoxically, stopping to look closely is not to freeze-frame. It is how we can trace and anticipate meanings manifest in what Barad calls “lively potentiality.”³⁸⁰

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³⁷¹ Karen Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 162.

³⁷² Karen Barad, 2003, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3):801–31, p. 814.

³⁷³ Karen Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 19–20, 82–83, 106–07, 120–21, 173–74.

³⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 85, 2e, 33.

³⁷⁵ Karen Barad, 2012, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn og forskning/Women, Gender and Research 12(1–2):25–53, p. 45.

³⁷⁶ Karen Barad, 2003, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3):801–31, p. 815.

³⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 810, 810.

³⁷⁸ Karen Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 34, 45, 62–65, 88, 133, 135, 140, 145–48, 151–52.

³⁷⁹ Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 1944 [2002], Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

³⁸⁰ Karen Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 92.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 143–145. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” §AS1.4.4b