Agential Realism: (entry for Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition, ed. George Ritzer)
Abstract: In placing the agential cuts — that is, the distinctions we make between subjective and
objective “things,” in different places at different times in our inquiries — do not uncover pre-existing
facts about such independently existing “things,” we bring different versions of such “things” into
existence.
Keywords: agential cuts; intra-actions; dynamic stabilities; before-the-fact understandings
Central to Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) account of agential realism, is a changed, fundamental assumption
to do with the nature of the reality within which we have our being as the social beings we are. Rather
than having our existence within a realm of self-contained, basic, namable entities essentially related to
each other in a mechanical fashion, whose ‘workings’ we observe from the outside, we need to think of
ourselves as existing within a realm of stranded, flowing activities which, in the course of their continual
intra-mingling, create ever-changing, dynamic stabilities very like the vortices, ripples, waves, splashes,
etc. we can see occurring in a fast-flowing river or stream — with even ourselves existing as such a
dynamic entity. Although in our talk we can abstract such ‘entities’ perceptually from the overall flowing
movement within which they occur, they cannot, of course, be extracted existentially.
This means, as Barad (2007) puts it, that “.... we do not uncover pre-existing facts about
independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world.
Rather, we learn about phenomena — about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming. The
point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world... but to understand and take account
of the fact that we too are part of the world’s differential becoming. And furthermore, the point is not
merely that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are specific
material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. Which practices we enact matter — in
both senses of the word” (pp.90-91).
In other words, the sociological “things” that we name as “society,” as “culture,” as “trends or
“attitudes,” as “social class or stratification,” as “organizations or institutions,” as “globalization,” and so
on, and study as products of processes hidden within our “social relations,” and in our relations to our
surroundings, are better talked of as emerging within material intra-actions occurring out in the world at
large. Furthermore, the placing of our agential cuts — that is, the distinctions we make between
subjective and objective “things,” in different places at different times — do not uncover pre-existing
facts about such independently existing “things”: instead, we are thereby bringing ever different versions
of such “things” into existence. For in all our conceptualizations, we separate out and focus on features of
our otherwise ‘fluid’ circumstances — aspects to which we then attach a name — while excluding their
relations to the larger context from within which they have emerged into existence.
But clearly, these accounts are after the fact accounts, plausible explanations of influences that
can be seen as having been at work in people’s activities only after they have been performed — and this
is the case with many of our topics of study in sociological research. Something, somewhere else
altogether, is guiding people in the performance of their actions in relation to their surroundings, rather
than the “named things” we claim to have discovered in our research. The importance of Barad’s Agential
Realism is that it points up the nature of these “before the fact” processes, thus enabling them to be
publicly studied and described.
References:
Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28(3), pp.801-831.
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Further reading:
Pinch, T. (2011) "Karen Barad, Quantum Mechanics, and the Paradox of Mutual Exclusivity," essay review
of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,
by Karen Barad, Social Studies of Science, 41: 431-441.
Shotter, J. (2014) Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings:
sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns, Theory & Psychology, 24(3): 305–325