CONCEPT
Response-Ability
Barad's reformulation of responsibility as the <em>capacity and obligation to respond</em> to the entanglements that constitute us — not the assignment of blame to a pre-existing agent.
Response-ability is Barad's ethical concept for the AI age — though she developed it in work that preceded contemporary AI debates. It names the capacity and obligation to respond to the entanglements in which one is constituted, not the conventional responsibility that assigns blame or credit to a pre-existing subject. The hyphen marks the difference: response-ability is the ability to respond, a capacity that is enacted through specific material-discursive practices rather than possessed as a personal property. For AI, this reframes the question of accountability from who is to blame when things go wrong? to what configurations of human, machine, institution, and culture are producing this phenomenon, and what ongoing response does each configuration require?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The conventional vocabulary of responsibility assumes a stable subject who can be held to account after the fact. Something happens, someone caused it, blame is assigned, consequences are imposed. This structure works reasonably well for simple causal chains with identifiable agents. It breaks down in complex systems — including