156 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
Karen Barad (2007) reconfigures relations between time, space, and
matter as an entanglement that does not allow for a clear distinction to be
made between our sense of each of these terms. Moving beyond classical
definitions of ontology that propose that we as individualized and bounded
entities move through linear time and quantifiable space, Barad (2007)
suggests “spacetimemattering” as the actuality of lived experience in
which there is no real way to differentiate the compositional elements of a
singular event. For Barad (2007), the nature of things is comprised of an
infinite set of virtual capacities that operate performatively as a set of
relations composed of interactions between multiply agentic agents and
indeterminant conditions. As compositional elements are thrown together,
each with its own sets of idiosyncratic capacities, there emerges a process
that simultaneously differentiates and entangles elements. Our
phenomenological experience is the antecedent to what in Barad (2007)
might be called: “matter-in-the-process-of-becoming.” In relation to the
body’s movement across the lifespan, spacetimemattering would imply
that our identity is composed over a field of indeterminate compositional
capacity shaped by a multiplicity of agential agents inclusive of all the
ecological elements (human and more-than-human) in each moment of our
becoming. In this sense, who we imagine our ‘self’ to be is very possibly
the least relevant aspect of our identity. Who we are experientially, outside
the social logic of a system of abstract code such as capitalism, becomes
radically indeterminate and focused on our sheer capacity to act
compositionally. This phenomenologically-based subject stands opposed to
overcoding our actions into the money sign.
This notion of differentiated entangled becoming is echoed in the work
of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) in her refusal of a singularly differentiated
identity derived from either space or time. In her accounting, the self is a
multiplicity that refuses fragmentation. There is a plurality to who we are
that encompasses both binary social categories and conventions, as well as
how each of these categories is utterly inadequate in describing the
compositional force of their entanglement. For Anzaldúa (1987), the space
we inhabit is always a contingent element in the body’s movement across
the lifespan. Space as geography brings with it certain affinities for