Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming Page: 65
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shown to be the engine of material freedom and, accordingly, exists in its full system-disrupting
potential at the core of every instantiation of organization.
Agential Causation
Barad's notion of causation rests on the specification of the agential apparatus, the cutting
apart/cutting together of change and possibility which temporarily closes off some possibilities
and opens others.136 This is never permanent but only a part of the continual process of causal
becoming. The notions of time and space are not implicated as containers of agential becoming
within which agential cuts are made, but as manifestations of various cuts themselves. In this
way, the past is never locked in place and the future never inaccessible; there is never bounded
off from here and space itself is an iterative participation in intra-active selection.137 For Barad,
causation refers to the entirety of the situation through which the universe comes to meet itself in
the ephemerally separating apparatus and effects are the marks left on bodies by that
apparatus.138 The ways in which the universe comes to meet itself occurs through the continual
implementation of various agential cuts which mark bodies of co-constituted meaning and
matter. Cuts are placed through this vast web of material-semiotic agency which allow various
components to be revealed. Certain possibilities are rendered open by each cut and others closed;
the future is open, but this does not mean that absolutely anything is possible.139 To summarize,
all of this captures the process of becoming through which various iterations of material-semiotic
agency come to matter in the marks of agential cuts.
The scope of agency involved in the enactment of this apparatus is vast, as the universe
136 Barad, Meeting the Universe Hatfway, 179.
137Ibid., 181.
138 Ibid., 140.
139Ibid., 177.65
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Grossman, Jacob Wayne. Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming, dissertation, December 2021; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1873811/m1/71/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .