The enactment of a temporary, contingent separation within a phenomenon that makes some things matter and become intelligible while excluding others; A situated boundary-making that enacts a temporary determinacy within an entangled phenomenon, “cutting together-apart” to produce what counts as object, instrument, cause, and effect in a given apparatus
The agential cut, a core concept in Barad’s agential realism, is the material-discursive practice that resolves an inherent indeterminacy within a phenomenon. It is not a cut made by an external agent but is enacted within the world’s ongoing intra-actions. Barad characterizes this as “cutting together-apart,” an onto-epistemological doing that simultaneously distinguishes and connects, producing a temporary, provisional boundary between concepts like “subject” and “object” or “cause” and “effect” where none pre-exists. This is an important departure from a Cartesian cut, which assumes separate, pre-existing entities; here, separability is agential, not ontological. The cut is always specific to the apparatus, the material-discursive configuration, that enacts it. Because apparatuses are world-making practices, reconfiguring the apparatus changes the cut, thereby reconstituting what becomes intelligible, measurable, and accountable. This process carries significant ethical weight, as every cut involves constitutive exclusions that leave “marks on bodies” and forge accountability.
This account is indebted to Bohr’s insights on complementarity and to Haraway’s commitment to situated, accountable practices of knowing. In Bohr’s sense, mutually exclusive material arrangements (for example, those needed to mark momentum versus position) enact different phenomena; in Barad’s terms, the agential cut organizes which differences come to matter, and how. Cuts need not be human-willed: nonhuman configurations, from optical benches to ecosystems, enact boundaries and causal pathways. The ethical force of the concept lies in recognizing that objectivity is not a view from nowhere but responsibility for the cuts one is part of enacting, including what is included, excluded, amplified, or silenced.
For postqualitative inquiry, the agential cut reframes research design, analysis, and ethics as practices of apparatus-building that produce the very phenomena under study. Sampling frames, prompts, interfaces, protocols, coding schemas, and theoretical lenses are no longer seen as only outside “data”, but rather as elements of the apparatus that enact agential separability and shape causal intelligibility. Method thus becomes an ethico-onto-epistemological practice: attending to which cuts a study enacts, how they distribute agency, where they draw boundaries, and what worlds they help stabilize. Rather than seeking to control bias from an external standpoint, researchers trace and account for constitutive exclusions, recognizing that different apparatuses will materialize different phenomena and responsibilities.
In AI-entangled writing classrooms, pedagogical choices function as agential cuts that materially-discursively configure what counts as authorship, creativity, collaboration, and assessment. Establishing “AI-free” assignments, mandating detectors, or prohibiting certain tools enacts a cut that stabilizes the LLM as external instrument and the human writer as sole origin, producing specific accountability regimes and affective climates. Designing process-facing tasks that require prompt design, interaction logs, and reflective commentary enacts a different cut: writer–LLM as coupled subject engaging a shared problem-space, making distributed agency and entangled creativity intelligible and assessable. Iterative, inquiry-driven studio practices that foreground how prompts, interfaces, peer responses, and revision trails co-constitute composing enact a cyborgian cut in which the subject is a flow of becoming rather than a stable locus, rendering learning as ongoing reconfiguration of the assemblage. Across these cases, the cut does consequential work on lived experience (for example, anxiety, relief, curiosity), on the legibility of creative labor, and on the performativity of classroom artifacts, from rubrics and syllabi to platform affordances and logs.