What the boundary-making practice excludes – cuts out, cuts away – always remains present, even if it is not knowable to the intelligibility it co-constitutes, cuts together. There is no separability between the boundary-making practice that cuts, the intelligibility it produces, and the matter that uses this intelligibility to make meaning. A category formation limits or enables, effecting those captured within it and those excluded beyond its boundary. A name brings different possibilities of meaning nearer and farther. To give something a name or a category is a boundary making practice. An electron appears as a wave or a particle or both, depending how it is observed. Each cut of a boundary-making practice into matter-discourse excludes certain possibilities in order to make others intelligible. But she extends her point that there is no “outside” from which to observe “objectively” into a call to responsibility based on the collapsing together of ethics, ontology, and epistemology: matter is performative and discourse is material. Each apparatus – boundary-making practice – makes “agential cuts.” Barad is initially writing about observing electrons in the lab how they can behave differently depending on which apparatus is being used to observe them. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) describes how matter and meaning are entangled. Carry over.Ĭutting together and apart (entanglement) Leaning into metaphor so the weight of the tenor holds your body in place in the vehicle makes some of the co-constitution tangible what’s present, what’s excluded, and what’s cutting the present-and-excluded together and apart. My favourite writing often asks the words to hold tightly to the dual roles and responsibilities of tenor and vehicle, to pack a tense density into metaphors that troubles the insistently not-yet-dead Western notion of the separability of matter and meaning. Leaning too hard into the vehicle of metaphors risks cutting away the tenor, the weight, of what they’re describing. Metaphors have several components: the “tenor” is the concept and the “vehicle” is the image that carries it across. Rather than disavowing metaphor, I will seek to engage with it creatively, engaging with its etymological root of “carrying across.” However, while language is indeed an ineffective tool in conveying the complexity of the material world, it is also a tool that I have. ![]() I came to this writing with a fear of metaphor, grounded in feminist critique of the patriarchal and imperialist power of language as representation. I will be mindful of the implicit ideologies embedded into certain metaphors and try to invent alternatives. One day in the past I wrote urgently: I will be as attentive as possible to my use of metaphor in my writing. Metaphors reveal connections that have become embedded within a culture to the point of passing unremarked. If you directly translate a metaphor from another language into the one we are speaking, chances are it will carry the shape of the idea but not the historical context. In living with an awareness of the entanglement of matter and meaning, words have consequences.
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