I just finished a meeting with one of my PhD students and we had a long discussion about Karen Barad and her theory of agential realism. I’m not even going to try and get into the details here because, quite frankly, I’m not sure that I understand the point of her work. While I am drawn to some of the ideas expressed in the theory I haven’t yet drunk the Kool-Aid. But the thing is, even though I’m not completely convinced that agential realism offers us anything new, I still want to grapple with its ideas.
Because theory is important. It’s important because it opens up new possibilities for thinking about and in the world. Theory – for me anyway – helps me to think about other ideas using different perspectives than what I might call my default mode. And the more I work with theory the more perspectives it allows me to have. I’m interested not because I think it defines anything about the people who buy into the ideas. From a purely pragmatic point of view, theories – when I understand them – open up my mind to different ways of thinking.
And this is why I’m paying attention to Karen Barad and agential realism. It’s not that I have any emotional attachment to it. I don’t really care if the ideas are “true” or “false” (whatever those words mean when it comes to theory). All that matters is that by forcing myself to engage with the theory, I’m creating a new set of ideas in my cognitive toolkit, and the long term effect is that it adds to my ability to come at ideas from new perspectives.
Theory is important, not because it creates another topic for us to argue about, but because it creates new spaces for us to think in.