Ecocriticism and Moral Responsibility: The Question of Agency in Karen Barad’s Performativity Theory

Karen Barad’s quantum revision of Judith Butler’s performativity theory casts matter and discourse as co-constituting intra-active phenomena. While Butler’s theory challenges cultural determinism, allowing subjects to freely stylize acts of gender performance, Barad’s theory challenges scientific determinism, allowing people to morally intervene in the reconfiguration of phenomenal boundaries. By presenting causality and human freedom as oppositional, both theorists grant the human will a level of autonomy, or self-origination. The problem is that their performativity theories are themselves deterministic and, for this reason, foreclose the possibility of an autonomous, self-originating will. In order to resolve this ostensible contradiction, the author argues that both theorists should adopt a compatibilist freedom that positions volition as the natural outworking of deterministic forces. Doing so paradoxically makes sense of moral culpability while denying free will, or the capacity to autonomously intervene in the reconfiguration of phenomenal boundaries. A compatibilist revision of agential realism may therefore, the author concludes, prove significant to the ethics of material ecocriticism.