Darbagel Delingus

Darlene McCoy

Karen Barad

FMST 80K

11 May 2011

Week 6 Readings

            I found Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics to be a new way of thinking about how things as humans see them are “real” or not. I really like his concept of a thing is only “real” if it can show its capability to intra-act with an apparatus. I enjoyed his definitions of position and momentum because now that I think about them, and how they are defined, I can’t figure out how I defined position and momentum before. I suppose they were just numbers that meant something on a lab report in high school. I never actually thought to myself, “What is momentum?” I also just adore the fact that if a person is measuring a particle’s position, its momentum cannot be calculated, and I think that Karen linked it to the feminist idea that “something is always excluded” very well.

I also found Niels definition of the difference between subject and object to be fantastic. I mostly enjoyed it because his example made sense to me. The idea that a walking stick is an extension of the subject because said subject is using it to see versus the idea that if a subject were to just be feeling the walking stick it would be the object allowed me to understand what he was speaking of.

            Karen’s piece on Agential Realism was a great thing to read before class. I feel like I would’ve been much more confused if I hadn’t. I think that what we’re attempting to do with our projects in class is look at the material-discursive practices that went into making our object a material reality today. Because my object is a supernova, I found quite a bit of things that relate to it in some sort of way. For example: I figured that if the Scientific Revolution and Nicolas Copernicus did not happen, the supernova as I know it now might be different – different in the sense that it might not exist, might be called something else, may be portrayed in a different way – whatever. I just feel like Copernicus’ actions were part of the material discursive practices that went into construction the idea of a supernova in my head today. I feel like I’m on the right track with this project, but I’m still sort of shaky on what exactly a material-discursive practice is. I feel like the material part is what physical objects are being used to measure a phenomenon, and the discursive part is what social implications are behind the making of the object, why the research is being done, etc.