This semester, David & Jakob would like to read Karen Barad's "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" - do you want to join? We meet every two weeks at Kurt Gödel lecture hall in the physics faculty. When you enter the building at Strudelhofgasse 4, that's immideately on the right side.
You can register here to get a mail before each meeting with time+place and you can find the pdf of the book here.
We discussed some general notions of quantum physics and read the first half of the introduction chapter together.
We discussed the second half of the introduction chapter and read chapter 1 until page 46.
We discussed "From representationalism to performativity" (p. 46), "Realism without representationalism" and "Performativity and social and political agency". Foucault's notion of power as well as Butler's conceptions of sex and gender posed some difficulties for our understanding. Performativity, this at least became clear, is central not only in the production of knowledge but also of the subject.
Last meeting before christmas! We are going to discuss the final section of Chapter 1, "Agential realism and quantum physics" (p. 66) - finally, Karen will lead us out of the confusion. These are only four pages, so we would also want want to prepare Chapter 2 (p. 71 to p. 94) and see, how far we get. The double-slit experiment might interfere with any too straight-forward reading anyway... see you there ✨