CONCEPT
Matter and Meaning (Entanglement of)
Barad's insistence that material conditions and discursive frames are not separate domains but mutually constituted — matter is never neutral substance awaiting human interpretation.
The subtitle of Barad's 2007 landmark — Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning — names a commitment that runs through every chapter of her work. Matter and meaning are not two domains that happen to meet at the surface of things. They are co-constituted through the same material-discursive practices, and attempts to analyze one without the other produce partial, distorting accounts. The framework has direct consequences for AI: the language models that operate in the domain of meaning also operate through specific material substrates (chips, power, cooling, labor), and the meanings they produce bear the marks of those material conditions whether users recognize them or not.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The separation of matter and meaning has structured Western thought since Descartes distinguished res extensa from res cogitans — extended substance from thinking substance. The Cartesian split made modern science possible by giving it a clean object (matter, understood as passive extension) and a clean method (observation by