mattering

 

 

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The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. 

Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.” 

The intra-actively emergent “parts” of phenomena are co­constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future.

Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name, ατομοσ (atomos), means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. 

Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant.


—Karen Barad

Meeting the Universe Halfway:

Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning excerpts noosphe.re

  

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No, you do not have a thousand years to live. 

Urgency is on you. 

So while you live, while you can, become good.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life.

Now take what is left and live it properly.

—Marcus Aurelius (r. 161 to 180 CE)

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