We can certainly get behind this, right? Language, viewed narrowly, leads to a limited use of language. Viewed broadly, language is opened to new possibilities.

New apparatuses with which to see and understand the world differently than did the Ancients.

The connection to Barad becomes even more apparent below when Vico calls "critique" an instrument.

Another instrument that Vico uses/alludes to is the act of classification ("set up a distinction," "the orderly reduction of systematic rules").

And just like that, Barad and Siegert come crashing in. Practices shape the agent, yeah yeah yeah, but as the agent continues to practice, the world is shaped as well.

Barad immediately comes to mind; I'm thinking of her charge to doubt the Cartesian scheme in order that it does not continue to exist.

like an apparatus...

I'm struck through here (and the liquor example) how prescient Locke's inquiries are for our own investigations into rhetoric and the question of "what is human?" It feels like he's anticipating Barad's argument that each definition of gold -- its color, its weight, its malleableness, etc. -- creates a cut, a boundary around what gold means for each person that cares to define it. Barad sees these "local determinations" not as final but as fluid, even while being exclusionary (821). Locke is keying in on these exclusionary definitions and the problems they might pose to an empirical approach.

This brings to mind an issue from last week, where we place more trust in words because they are our own construct (see Barad 801: "How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?").

Like Locke, Karen Barad is pushing against the idea of words as representational of things, with her performative model?

"A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things" (Barad 802).

In what ways does performance differ from "mental phenomena"? Mental = internal only where performance = internal and external?

Side note: every time someone says phenomena, I hear this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ytei6bu7kQ

"preceding" is doing a lot of work there. That sounds an awful lot like Barad.

I'm tagging this for my own benefit, really, because here Barad offers an excellent, succinct distillation of this posthumanist thing.

Notice the lack of reference to some "scientific observer" outside of the system who could "measure" meaning. She only refers to what is going on in the actual world.

super helpful summary. Commenting just to tag it.

Since forever, apparently, science has relied on Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," in a sense. Not a god exactly, but some real or imagined unaffected observer whose presence serves as a fixed point from which to accumulate data. Why are we tempted to think this way? Aren't we all moving? What fixed point is there? I'm tempted to go back to the analogy of floating baskets tied together. There is an illusion of being grounded, but we aren't really.

Dr. Rivers, please freaking help.

Am I reading Barad right? Is she saying here "If not only the internal workings of the mind of the subject and the subjects actions are shaped by performativity, but also the physical compilation of the universe, then it is all the more important that we understand performativity and how it causes this shaping of the physical world."

Ok, I think this is it. This is her whole thing; her thesis. And it is one hell of a thesis.

lol, but for real, what Barad is suggesting really is difficult to do, or at least I'm finding it difficult to do.

We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. . .

It seems crazy because our society is so science and tech driven, but she's right. We believe words to be prior (ontologically) to the world around us because they are a part of "us," our own minds.

Distorting Descartes's famous thought experiment here seems to help me understand this. While I suspect the average person could be pushed into admitting the possibility of an evil demon spinning an elaborate hoax for you, deceiving your physical senses and tricking your brain, I can't imagine finding anyone who would admit the opposite. The opposite would be that the external world exists largely as you perceive it. The demon is not manipulating your experience of the natural world at all. Instead, he is tricking you into believing you exist.

We're so Cartesian we can't even conceive of it being otherwise. Perhaps Spinoza would help here, as well as other monist ontologies?

Someone please redeem this annotation I don't even know what is happening anymore.

"What is" instead of "which one?"

Like mholder pointed out, this also speaks to Foucault's "Self Writing." In this case, I think the connection to the notebook and/or letter (correspondence) is important, where the "expanded self" is due in large part thanks to the non-anthropomorphic materials the writer interacts with (a la Barad's intra-activity, if I'm making that connect aright).

This resonates with many of the other articles: Rickert's materialist rhetorics, Barad's materiality, ...

Protagoras's human-measure doctrine strikes again. (Cf. end of Barad article)

I'm tagging this for my own benefit, really, because here Barad offers an excellent, succinct distillation of this posthumanist thing.

I like the word strategy appears here. It suggests a kind of responsiveness that is neither "passive" as Bitzer might have nor "active" as Vatz would have. Perhaps, following Barad, it is "intra-active"?