New
Materialism

Objects or beings aren’t exactly the separate, objectified, bordered, continuous-through-timespace bodies that we so constantly refer to. There are constant exchanges and transformations happening; forces shift, electrons jump, particles are entangled with particles in other spaces without any currently measurable link or force through space. This movement is agency. In order to understand the world, what ‘we’ understand to be a phenomenologically operational body, for instance ‘me’ or ‘you,’ operates itself as an apparatus (a structure through which an outcome can be measured - for instance, a definition) and makes a cut in these agencies, these forces, to identify what will seem close and consistent enough to be imagined within that apparatus-construction as an object/body/being and what, within this, will be other.

This differs from a Cartesian cut in that it does not attempt to “disentangle” the phenomena, or fetishize, but “what the agential cut does provide is a contingent resolution of the ontological inseparability within the phenomenon hence the conditions for... description: that is, it enables an... account of marks on bodies, but only within the particular phenomenon” (Barad, 2007, 348) so as to be able to discuss difference with less positivism and essentialism, things key in enabling oppression. These bodies are forces, gatherings, still always already gathering and connecting with multiplicities. These bodies are perceived nodes in spacetime, congealing together through forces intra-acting, of intersecting; phenomena.

synonym: understanding, objectifying, tangibility, strategic essentialism, choice, difference, description
antonym: difference, objectivity, essentialism, strict categories, binary, positivism
hypernym: ephemerality, phenomenology
hyponym: object, thing, body, definition, family

References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.