The seven months from June 2016 to December 2016 will go to history as the most stressful period in our nuclear family history. This may sound like quite an outrageous claim in view of previous generations’ struggles – such as my grandmother queuing for five hours to get half a liter of milk for her brother who suffered from tuberculosis. Or the delivery of my father in Ekenäs due to the bombing of Helsinki in February 1944.
In 2016, the most stressful circumstances of a close family member diagnosed with a quickly progressing lethal illness did neither relate to finding milk nor air raids in our closest environment. We were, with great force, struck by the spreading atom bomb of medical knowledge and adherent biopolitical choices. This will bring you into a desperate state of excessive noradrenaline stress hormone production.
Imagine the above spiced up with an alternative survival literature (which we all dismissed but kindly read in line with expectations). But all of this, I have already discussed in a previous post.
Mayday: language lost!
This story begins shortly after, around January/February 2017, when my language started to disappear. This turned out to be somewhat disturbing for a person who has built her career around reading, writing and analyzing text.
When I spoke I couldn’t find words, I made preposition and other basic errors in my own mother tongue (not uncommon among Swedish speaking Finns, so most people didn’t even notice). Writing e-mails started to take a long time. The manuscripts that I used to produce in elegant assembly lines became a struggle. The Finnish language in which I had just started to enjoy new abstract levels of performance was back to the level of a 15-year old.
As my grandmother had suffered from Alzheimer dementia I grew worried that these were the early signs of such a destiny.
At the health care center they assured me that this was very common after stressful life events: people get memory deficiencies (check!); they lose their linguistic capabilities (check!) and it becomes hard to concentrate (check!).
They said that it would pass and things would return to normal again.
While awaiting normality I started to read.
And this is where things got interesting. At least in my nerdy outlook on life.
Finding Barad
When application season was approaching I began contemplating the idea of agency – a concept that I wanted to integrate as a main point in my research proposal. This classic philosophical concept has in its social scientific connotation come to signify individual abilities and capabilities to make independent, enlightened, and good choices, and to realise them with intended effect.
When screening through the literature I came across the work of feminist theorist and quant physicist Karen Barad’s agential realism – a new materialist and also somewhat pragmatist theory, which I had never bothered reading.
Reading Barad was an experience that not only cut straight into my new self-conscious and unsecure non-verbal new self, but also into the very core of the agency/ structure relationship that has so long occupied social scientists.
In her contemporary classic work “Meeting the Universe Halfway..” Barad (2007) draws up a fascinating ontology in which matter and discourse are one and the same. Phenomena in physics — diffraction, quantum entanglements, Niels Bohr’s complementarity and philosophy-physics (I am even unsure of these terms as I write them, this is so out of my league) – serve as metaphors (at least for a non-physicist like myself) of the ways in which we affect objects by approaching them and thus become part of the world we try to study or change. Discourse and matter are the same!
The connection to feminist theory is obvious when you come to think about it: A core idea is that subjects are part of the world that they try to observe or change, which calls for a display of the logic according to which they partake in replicating existing orders. (cf. King’s networked re-enactments Mouffe’s articulations and Sandoval’s and the methodology of the oppressed)
Especially in addiction science, where the approach to phenomena depends on such a small repertoire of unreflective disciplines and methods, the shift in conceptions that Barad introduces seems so promising and innovative.
Matter matters!!
In the end, I came to write my Academy-application along the lines of Barad’s agential realism. I have no clue whether such applications even can acquire funding, but it felt like this was the only thing I could do at this time in my life.
In my daily life I am still capable of performing a relatively high level of agency: I have had successful meetings, I have written new analyses and I have kept presentations at conferences and even served as an opponent at a doctoral defense act.
I have increasingly turned to new media formats for spontaneous expressions of feelings: I started an account on Twitter and I started documenting small parts of my life with pictures on Instagram. The posting of images feels like describing my life in words, while keeping track of it.
But what I have mostly appreciated from my “numbness” is the realization of the extreme emphasis we put on language. Writes Barad (2003; 801):
“What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?”
I will continue to rely on language in my work and in my modus operandi. But I think I might have grown as a person and as a scholar from these new onto-epistemological insights. As a social scientist and humanist, I think I have become too narrow in my ontology.
And, I think I could have a thing or two to learn from quantum physics.
References
Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues pp. 801-831
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press.
