Yes, the concept of agency in Karen Barad’s Agential Realism indeed goes beyond human agency to include animal agents, plant agents, and matter itself as an agent. While this might sound like pantheism at first glance, there are crucial distinctions that separate Barad’s framework from religious or spiritual traditions like pantheism.
1. Agency in Agential Realism
In Agential Realism:
• Agency is Distributed:
• Agency is not an inherent property of humans or other beings; rather, it emerges from intra-actions—the dynamic entanglements of entities within a phenomenon.
• Example: A storm is not just the result of atmospheric conditions but an agentive event involving air pressure, temperature, water molecules, and planetary dynamics.
• Matter Has Agency:
• Barad emphasizes that matter is not passive or inert. It has the capacity to participate in the unfolding of phenomena.
• Example: The way molecules interact in a chemical reaction or how particles behave in quantum experiments demonstrates that matter plays an active role in shaping reality.
• Posthuman Agency:
• Animals, plants, ecosystems, technologies, and even abstract entities (like laws or concepts) are part of the agentive process.
• This decentralizes the human and shifts focus to a more relational understanding of agency.
2. Is This Pantheism?
Pantheism is a belief system that equates God with the universe, suggesting that all things collectively form a divine unity. While there are similarities, Agential Realism is not pantheistic in the traditional sense. Here’s why:
Key Similarities:
1. Relational Ontology:
• Both pantheism and Agential Realism recognize the interconnectedness of all things.
• Example: In pantheism, everything is part of the divine; in Agential Realism, everything participates in the co-constitution of reality.
2. Non-Hierarchical Worldview:
• Both reject human exceptionalism, valuing non-human entities as integral to existence.
Key Differences:
1. Absence of Divinity:
• Barad does not attribute divine qualities to matter or the universe. Her framework is materialist and scientific, rooted in quantum physics and feminist theory, rather than theology.
• Agency in Agential Realism is not sacred or spiritual but an emergent property of relational entanglements.
2. Epistemological Focus:
• Pantheism often implies a metaphysical or spiritual unity of all things. Agential Realism, in contrast, is concerned with how reality is materially and discursively produced through intra-actions.
• Example: Barad analyzes phenomena like wave-particle duality scientifically, rather than invoking metaphysical unity.
3. Non-Universalism:
• Pantheism tends to emphasize a universal oneness or coherence, while Agential Realism focuses on the specificity of phenomena and the localized nature of agency.
3. A Better Comparison: Panpsychism
Rather than pantheism, Barad’s ideas might be closer to panpsychism, the philosophical view that consciousness or agency is a fundamental feature of all matter. However:
• Barad stops short of claiming that all matter has “mind” or “consciousness.”
• Instead, she emphasizes agential entanglements where agency is not an individual attribute but a product of relations.
4. Ethical and Philosophical Implications
Barad’s expanded notion of agency has profound implications:
1. Ethics:
• If matter, animals, and ecosystems have agency, human actions must be rethought in terms of their entanglement with non-human entities.
• Example: Climate ethics would involve recognizing the agency of atmospheric systems and their intra-actions with human activity.
2. Ontology:
• The world is no longer composed of discrete entities but of phenomena—dynamic, relational events where agency is co-produced.
• This resonates with Indigenous worldviews that emphasize the living, active nature of the land and its non-human inhabitants.
3. Politics:
• Acknowledging non-human agency could challenge anthropocentric power structures, advocating for more inclusive frameworks for environmental and social justice.
Conclusion: A Posthumanist, Not Pantheist, Perspective
While Agential Realism shares some thematic overlaps with pantheism—such as relationality and the decentering of the human—it is fundamentally a posthumanist, materialist framework:
• It reframes agency scientifically and relationally, avoiding spiritual or metaphysical claims.
• The universe is not divine but agential, where meaning and matter co-produce each other through intra-actions.
However, one might say that Agential Realism resonates with pantheistic intuitions, particularly the idea that everything is interconnected and participatory in the unfolding of reality. Would you like to explore how this idea might align with other philosophical traditions or its implications for specific fields?
