What is the Matter with Matter? Barad, Butler, and Adorno

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a speciﬁc focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism ﬂuctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth.


Introduction
Since the early 1990s, Butler has been the figurehead, at least for some critics, of a branch of post-structuralist or social constructivism feminism claiming that everything is cultural and mediated through language (Butler, 1999).Butler even goes as far as implicitly invoking comments of Engels and Marx on consciousness and ideology (Marx & Engels, 1975, pp. 43-45) when referring to Althusser's statement that "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and … [t]his existence is material" (Althusser, 1971, p. 166, cited in Butler, 1997, p. 275).However, despite Butler's attempts to challenge this interpretation, it persists.The critics I want to engage with, diverse as their critiques may be, can be grouped under the umbrella of New The critique of social constructivism central to this article is found in "Meeting the Universe Halfway" (Barad, 2007) and in an essay bearing a similar title published eleven years earlier (Barad, 1996).In both texts, Barad claims that social constructivists, despite their intentions, have principally focused "on cultural factors" (Barad, 1996, p. 162), neglecting an account of materiality/matter.
Barad argues that the dichotomy between culture and nature, language and matter, is mistaken and proposes that "[w]e need to understand the technologies by which nature and culture interact" (Barad, 1996, p. 163).To do so, Barad draws on the writings of Niels Bohr, whose concepts of "philosophy-physics" (Barad, 1996, p. 165) and "Complementarity" (Barad, 1996, p. 168;190 [note 9]) examine the gap that separates physics (matter, materiality, and nature) from metaphysics (concept, theory, and culture).
According to Bohr, whom Barad relies on in both texts, we cannot neglect the interaction between the object and the instrument of observation, the question of the possibilities of observation again comes to the foreground.Thus, we meet here, in a new light, the problem of the objectivity of phenomena which has always attracted so much attention in philosophical discussion (Bohr, 1961, p. 93).
Barad takes Bohr's comments about this problem to indicate the fruitfulness of "read[ing] Bohr's philosophy-physics as an argument for the necessity of including practice within theory" (Barad, 1996, p. 166).
Nevertheless, Barad diverges from Bohr by introducing "agential realism as a framework that ties together the epistemological and ontological issues … [in an effort] to address particular concerns that social constructivist approaches to science make apparent" (Barad, 1996, pp. 167-168).
In Barad's "Bohrian ontology" (Barad, 1996, p. 176)  Barad then proceeds with developing a theoretical position called agential realism (Barad, 1996, pp. 175-186;2007, pp. 132-185), which is, in part, inspired by Bohr's onto-epistemological suggestions and which accepts that a multitude of contravening theoretical positions may describe the same object.In this regard, Barad is in full agreement with Bohr, who stated that "it appeared to me to be of interest to point out that also in other regions of human knowledge we meet apparent contradictions which might seem to be avoidable only from the point of view of complementarity" (Bohr, 1937, pp. 294-295).

Barad's Bohrian-inspired onto-epistemology: Agential realism
Containing some preliminary comments on the connections between Barad, Butler, and Adorno, the following section may be skipped by readers already familiar with agential realism.
The aim of this article -to look for similarities in Barad and Butler -therefore follows in the footsteps of Barad's own understanding of reading and theorising diffractively, even if the main gist of the article comes from the traditions of Critical Theory (Adorno) and post-structuralist (Butler).
At this point, it is important to remember that, for Barad and Bohr, Complementarity means that an object and how it is measuredexperimental arrangements -are inseparable (Barad, 2007, p. 139).From this claim, Barad priority of culture over nature, and I've tried to clear that up in subsequent writings" (Kirby, 2007, p. 144).However, Barad charges post-structuralism and Butler (Barad, 2007, p. 135) with only having changed their outlook on the world (from biology to culture), rather than taking a stance against the mistaken representationalism that is central in both biologically and culturally centred 'feminisms'.(Adorno, 1990, pp. 146-148).
On the one hand, Adorno, not unlike Barad, sought to destabilise the primacy of the   On the other hand, I want to make it clear that Butler engages in a similar line of thought in their books "Gender Trouble" (1999), "Bodies That Matter" (2011), and "Subjects of Desire" (2012b).These texts comprise a body of literature that does not seek to 'subsume everything to language', as some of Butler's critics have suggested.Instead, Butler seeks to account for how bodies come to matter (Meijer et al., 1998).In the following, I will draw specifically on Butler's understanding of 'the many modalities of matter' (Butler, 2011), suggesting not only that Butler's account of the materialisation of gender is compatible with Barad's agential realism, but also that Butler read with negative dialectics provides a clearer account of why it is a mistake to read Butler as a linguistic idealist (Hull, 1997) (Adorno, 1990, p. 5), or as Butler puts it, [i]f one 'is' a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive ... because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts … and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities (Butler, 1999, p. 6).

Barad and Butler
Adorno can help Butler insofar as the latter's negative dialectics sidesteps the danger of 'throwing the dialectical baby out with the bath water' (Adorno, 2005a, pp. 43-45[ §22]) when criticising positive dialectics -i.e.
Identity Thinking.Thus, whereas Butler claims that dialectics is "phallogocentric" (Butler, 1999, p. 15), thus throwing the baby out with the bathwater, negative dialectics aims to think non-identical within a dialectical frame of reference able to understand how conceptuality might never fully describe its object of inquiry, thereby making Adorno's position similar to Complementarity.
However, whereas negative dialectics was primarily a theoretical-philosophic endeavour, "Gender Trouble" was written to criticise biological essentialism (Butler, 1999, pp. 135-141) and the exclusions caused by second-wave feminism's reliance on it.
By arguing that earlier feminism had become ossified around a mode of thinking that could easily be described as Identity Thinking,

Performativity, knowing, and becoming
In "Posthumanist Performativity" (Barad, 2003), Barad writes that "[o]n an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming … while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role 'we' play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming" (Barad, 2003, p. 812).Here, Barad criticises the separation of nature and culture, alluding instead to the fact that within the framework of agential realism, body and mind, nature and culture are intertwined.Among new materialist thinkers, Gill Jagger also understands that nature and culture are intertwined and writes that "Butler's work is criticized for not allowing an adequate role for the materiality of the physical body in the process of its materialization" (Jagger, 2014, p. 321).Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook continue this idea when they write that "Butler's challenging discursive account of sex still posits a duality between signification and matter, where matter is seen as radically anterior" (Bray & Colebrook, 1998, p. 44).
There seems therefore to be a consensus  I understand Barad's 'ethics of knowing' as suggesting something similar to Butler's interpretation of Foucault's oddly brave gesture (Butler, 2002, p. 224).According to Butler's reading of Foucault freedom is performed as a speech act that functions as an act of risk-taking which is virtuous in those circumstances where it "exceeds the limits on intelligibility that powerknowledge has already set" (Butler, 2002, p. 224).Such a statement Materialism.While Barad does not consider themselves part of what is generally understood as New Materialism, this term may still be applied to agential realism, since it has become commonplace within the humanities and social sciences to include Barad's theory under this umbrella (Adrian, 2016, p. 77).The following does not seek to account for all the nuances among new materialists.Instead, the aim is to position Barad in particular, and new materialisms in general, in tension with Butler's (mistakenly) stipulated 'primacy of language'.
even when they examine the same phenomenon or object.From Bohr's epistemological findings, Barad then paraphrases Bohr's notion of philosophy-physics as accounting for how "[p]henomena are constitutive of reality.
the material world, the Kantian thingsinthemselves, are therefore always already mediated by a given experimental arrangement.Barad presents reality as a kind of phenomenological objectivity specific to an observer's perspective or experimental arrangements.Cognition is always of a phenomenon wherein things or objects become according to the ontoepistemology situation that governs the arrangement of this or that experiment.

[
D]iffraction … denote[s] a more critical and difference-attentive mode of consciousness and thought … a more 'critical consciousness' than reflexivity, as it gives us the opportunity to become more attuned to how differences are being created in the world, and what particular effects they have on subjects draws an important parallel which I would paraphrase cautiously as: discursive practices function as apparatuses in the 'quantum experiment called life' (I am of course being metaphorical here and not trying to question the realness of reality, as this would not serve the argument of this text).Diffraction and Complementarity both constitute the core around which Barad builds the onto-epistemology of agential realism -an account of being (ontology) an agent, of having agency, always related to a specific local situation or experience.The same situations or experiences used by scientists to gather evidence for their knowledge claims (epistemology).Hence, diffraction (as a critical theory or mode of inquiry) can be thought of as part of the critical feminist tradition (Butler) that resembles Adorno's focus on non-identity and objective suffering(Adorno, 1990, p. 202).However, it must be emphasised that neither agential realism nor new materialisms are, in any way, strongly connected to those What is the Matter with Matter?Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 9 (2024) www.revistes.ub.edu/matter / ISSN: 2604-7551(1) philosophical traditions that hail from Kantian Kritik (Kant, Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Derrida, etc.).Hence, a central goal in this article is to highlight how it is possible to short-circuit two 'far removed' theoretical spheres.The modus operandi of Barad's critical gist seems, therefore, to be similar to that of Critical Theory, as both engage in criticising their object immanently.Or, as Barad writes, "[t]he two-slit diffraction experiment queers the binary light/darkness story[ 1 ] … Diffraction queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference" (Barad, 2014, p. 171, my emphasis).The second characteristic concerns the fact that since agential realism comes down neither on the side of nature nor of culture, it is an onto-epistemological position where bodily production cannot be described neatly as one or the other.According to agential realism, both natural and cultural explanations of reality are concerned with the same.However, the discrepancy between the two kinds of explanations depends on their diverging Weltanschauung.Barad then proceeds to single out Butler and Foucault as representatives of "the representationalist belief that in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist … beliefs, perpetuating the endless recycling of untenable options" (Barad, 2007, p. 133out Butler seems a controversial move, since Butler is in fact aware of the charge of representationalism and even admits that: "I [Butler] think perhaps mainly in Gender Trouble I overemphasize the 1 "Electrons are queer particles, mita' y mita' [half and half].They are particles.They are waves.Neither one nor the other.A strange doubling.A queer experimental finding"(Barad, 2014, p. 173).
subject by giving primacy to 'objective suffering', whilst simultaneously warning against naïve materialism becoming a substitute for subjectivism.Negative dialectics discerns the presence of a fluctuating movement within the dialectical tradition whereby the tradition continuously repeats a back-and-forth movement between idealistic and materialistic positions.Elsewhere, Adorno talked about this fluctuation: "[d]ialectics is not ashamed to recall the famous procession of Echternach: one jump forward, two jumps back" (Adorno, 1990, p. 157).A fluctuation or oscillation that has flowed continuously since it was described by the ancient Greek philosophers (Atomism, Socrates, Plato, etc.).In Barad, something similar happens when social constructivism (Butler and Foucault) is criticised.Each of these terms occupies an extraneous position in a dialectical dichotomy.Barad, nevertheless, seems unaware of negative dialectics and thus of its critique of the division between concept and matter, subject and object.With this remark, I am thinking in particular of how agential realism seems to bridge the subject/object divide at that specific moment when it is dictated by the experiment's theoretical foundations (its discourse).Because negative dialectics is absent in Barad, Adorno's critique of the division between concept and matter, subject and object (Adorno, 2005b), is a missed opportunity to think about agential realism and new materialisms dialectically with social constructivism.I am thinking in particular of other results.Bohr defined 'ordinary language' as the "use of words where a sharp separation between subject and object can be maintained"(Favrholdt,   1993, p. 8).Hence, ordinary language sustains a kind of Cartesian duality, a separation of mind and body.The subject (the 'I' in identity) describes the world (the non'I'dentical) through this distinct separation.
suggest that the critical enterprises mentioned so far converge because each of them could be used fruitfully to improve the others.Hence, the aim is now to suggest that Butler with Adorno could be compared with new materialisms via their shared concern with 'the good life'(Butler)  or what Barad calls 'an ethics of knowing'.With this, I want to suggest that Barad's notion of an ethics of knowing (how an ethical need in the production of knowledge must become central) is directly relatable to the role that knowledge production plays in shaping our understanding of social realities.
account for the (to use Butler's Althusserian phrase) 'many modalities' of scientific knowledge.In "Merely Cultural", Butler writes that poststructuralism, which is a way of reading that lets us understand what must be cut out from a concept of unity in order for it to gain the appearance of necessity and coherence and to permit difference to remain constitutive of any struggle … This resistance to 'unity' may carry with it the cipher of democratic promise on the Left(Butler, 1997, pp.276-277, my emphasis).To better contextualise the quote above it seems necessary to point out that "Gender Trouble" constitutes a critical reproach of the rigid sex/gender dichotomy set up by second-wave feminism, which had until then helped feminists secure certain rights and emancipation for 'women' as a unified political category.Butler's criticism of second-wave feminism and new materialisms' criticism of Butler's social constructivism both constitute selfreflective and immanent criticisms that, albeit occupying a 'far removed' theoretical sphere, are both part of a broader feminist surge within the academy and society at large.What unites Butler and Barad is their shared concern or interest in the many ways life goes on beyond specific experimental arrangements that make up a given account of the social status quo.Moreover, by interpreting Barad as continuing a dialectical fluctuation between idealism (Butler) and materialism (new materialisms) we can better see how new materialist theories (including Barad's) can be interpreted productively as a moment in the genealogy of dialectics.Thus, Butler's linguistically focused critique of the unity of the subject of feminism occupies what could be called an 'idealist' position, if this position in relation to both the earlier 'materialist' position of second-wave feminism and the novel position of new materialisms then inscribe themselves within this fluctuation when they, rightfully, criticise Butler's presumed linguistic idealism and

neither the What is the Matter with Matter? Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 9 (2024)
1) agential realism grounds and situates knowledge claims in local experiences: objectivity is literally embodied; (2) agential realism privileges

What is the Matter with Matter? Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 9 (2024)
(Barad, 1996, p. 182, my emphasis).Such a meta-critique, if read with the two-slit experiment in mind, leads to the changing of 265).Here Kirby frames Butler's criticism in a way that seems comparable with Barad's, since both thinkers would agree that 'mutually exclusive phenomena' dictate possible knowledges in specific situations and I am not arguing that Adorno set out to develop negative dialectics into a novel kind of ontology (this isBarad's aim, not Adorno's)nor that Butler's position is wholly subsumable within either negative dialectics

What is the Matter with Matter? Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 9 (2024)
use Barad's terminology) that Butler uses when engaging critically with second-wave feminism.Moreover, there is a possible convergence between Barad's Bohrian-inspired claim that agential realism

What is the Matter with Matter? Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 9 (2024)
materialism.Instead, each position is in the other as that against which it is developed.In its context -the 1990s -Butler's idealist argument was warranted in order to correct the thinking in the second-wave feminist discourse of 'women' as a universal category.