Unsettling Responsibility in Science Education by Marc Higgins

Author:Marc Higgins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030612993
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The experiment functioned. What Barad makes clear is that the very boundaries that constitute the apparatus through which phenomena stabilize and make themselves intelligible are not so easily determined, or at least enclosed within that which is usually referred to as “equipment” within a laboratory report. Here, when asking the question of what constitutes the apparatus through which the phenomena was enacted, we would necessarily have to consider not only the material agency of the cigar, but also questions of gender, class, and economics through which that particular type of cigar came to be included. As Barad (2007) cautions, this “is not to say that all relevant factors figure in the same way or with the same weight. The precise nature of this configuration (i.e., the specific practices) matters” (p. 167). Accordingly, “apparatuses are not static laboratory setups but a dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured”. (p. 167). The apparatus is the enactment of a singular multiplicity that enfolds multiple bodies of meaning and matter that comprises each of their respective material and discursive historicities. As such, these constitutive bodies do not simply interact between one another, but rather intra-act within this re(con)figured body which is the experimental apparatus. Barad refers to this type of co-substantiation that occurs with/in the apparatus, as well as the phenomena under observation, as one of quantum entanglement:Quantum entanglements are generalized quantum superpositions, more than one, no more than one, impossible to count. They are far more ghostly than the colloquial sense of ‘entanglement’ suggests. Quantum entanglements are not the intertwining of two (or more) states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of two-ness, and ultimately of one-ness as well. Duality, unity, multiplicity, being are undone. ‘Between’ will never be the same. One is too few, two is too many. No wonder quantum entanglements defy commonsense notions of communication ‘between’ entities ‘separated’ by arbitrarily large spaces and times. Quantum entanglements require/inspire a new sense of a-count-ability, a new arithmetic, a new calculus of response-ability. (Barad, 2010, p. 251, emphasis in original)32

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