CONCEPT
Representationalism
The philosophical tradition that Barad's framework rejects — the assumption that reality consists of pre-existing entities awaiting accurate representation.
Representationalism is Barad's name for the dominant epistemological assumption in Western thought: that the world consists of pre-existing entities with determinate properties, and that the task of knowledge is to develop increasingly accurate representations of those entities. The assumption structures most philosophical debates about truth (is the representation accurate?), most scientific practice (the instrument reveals what was already there), and most popular discussions of AI (will the machine replace the human worker whose capabilities are fixed and known?). Barad's agential realism rejects representationalism as a whole, replacing it with a performative alternative that recognizes reality as produced through practice rather than existing prior to it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Representationalism has roots deep in Western philosophy — in Plato's theory of forms, in Descartes' mind-body dualism, in the empiricist assumption that sense-data represent an external world. Its modern form, shaped by scientific practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, assumes a clean separation between the knowing subject and the known object, between language and the world it describes, between the instrument and the