CONCEPT
The Agential Cut
Barad's term for the boundary-making practice through which distinct entities are produced from entangled phenomena — a cut that is real, consequential, and enacted rather than discovered.
The agential cut is the specific operation through which intra-action produces determinate entities from entangled phenomena. It is Barad's philosophical rigorization of what happens when a measurement is taken, a category is applied, or a boundary is drawn: the apparatus enacts a cut that separates what had been entangled, producing on one side a determinate subject and on the other a determinate object. The cut is real — it has material consequences, distinguishes what counts as signal from what counts as noise, enables certain actions and forecloses others — but it is enacted rather than discovered. It could always have been made differently. For the AI transition, this reframes the question of authorship, responsibility, and the human-machine boundary as questions of which cuts we choose to enact and what those cuts include and exclude.
In The You On AI Field Guide
In quantum mechanics, Bohr demonstrated that the properties of quantum objects — position, momentum, spin — become determinate only through specific experimental