In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 ■ Living in a Posthumanist Material World Lessons from Schrödinger’s Cat KAREN BARAD I n preparing the material that eventually became this chapter, I went in search of a little book called What Is Life? (Schrödinger [1944] 1967), authored by one of the founders of quantum physics. A nagging sensation in my brain kept telling me I needed to find the book. I tried to shake oª the feeling, but it wouldn’t release me. I was caught between a desire to get my hands on this book and the visceral sense that it already held me in its grip. I went into my local bookstore to inquire about the title and cheerfully spelled “Schrödinger” for the clerk. Without looking up from his computer terminal, he replied that he didn’t have it, but then, with sudden animated attention, he lifted his face toward me and added, “Is that the guy with the weird cat?” “Yes,” I replied heading out the door, “he’s the guy with the weird cat.” Schrödinger’s What Is Life? has been described as one of the most influential writings of the twentieth century, and some regard it as the defining contribution of an Oedipal birthing of the new biology by modern physics. Evelyn Fox Keller (1992) and other historians of science have remarked on the extraordinary eªect that physicists had on the development of the field of molecular biology: It begins with the claim of a few physicists—most notably, Erwin Schroedinger [Schrödinger ], Max Delbruck, and Leo Szilard—that the time was ripe to extend the promise of physics for clear and precise knowledge to the last frontier: the problem of life. . . . Emboldened by the example of these physicists, two especially brave young scientific adventurers , James Watson and Francis Crick, took up the challenge and did in fact succeed in a feat that could be described as vanquishing nature’s ultimate and definitive stronghold. Just twenty years earlier Niels Bohr had argued that one of the principal lessons taught by quantum mechanics was that “the minimal freedom we must allow the organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us” (Bohr 1958). 165 Now, as if in direct refutation of Bohr’s more circumspect suggestion, Watson and Crick showed, with the discovery of DNA, and accordingly, of the mechanism of genetic replication , that areas apparently too mysterious to be explained by physics and chemistry could in fact be so explained . . . [and so] Watson and Crick embarked on a quest that they themselves described as a “calculated assault on the secret of life” [Keller 1992: 41–42]. In Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, Keller (1992) examines the parallel functioning of secrets in matters related to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the making of the atomic bomb. She argues that perhaps the most important eªect that physicists had on the development of contemporary biology was not the transfer of any particular technology—instrumental or mathematical—from physics to biology so much as a transformation of the biologists’ philosophical stance toward the question of life: “To historians of science, the story of real interest might be said to lie in the redefinition of what a scientific biology meant; in the story of the transformation of biology from a science in which the language of mystery had a place not only legitimate but functional, to a diªerent kind of science—a science more like physics, predicated on the conviction that the mysteries of life were there to be unraveled, a science that tolerated no secrets” (Keller 1992: 42). Secrets, in their flirtatious play of the visible and the invisible, reveal something of the erotics of knowledge seeking and the seductive lure of epistemological temptation . But the persistence of this metaphor, the hold it has on our technoscientific imaginary, may ultimately reveal as much about ethics as about epistemology.1 From the Enola Gay (the aircraft that hid the Manhattan Project’s “baby” in its “womb” before revealing it to the world in an explosive announcement that shattered the lives of tens of thousands living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki2) to ultrasound technologies (touted by antiabortion groups as disclosing the hidden Truth of Life, laid bare to the masculine gaze of science), the image of science as the great revealer persists, despite its expanding role as the great technician; mastery...

Share