The Agential Cut

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.