Last month I left you with a cliffhanger, dear reader. We meditated on the iteratively unfolding enactment of sensemaking that is agency and about agential flows resolving into determinacy. That idea flows into a freeze frame, into perspectives etched in time, into agency realized, into a delicious metaphor:
Dough. Squishy, gummy, elastic, puffy, dense, delightful, and sometimes leavened; dough. If I were to plop a ball of dough in front of you and ask you what it was, how would you generate a response? How would you define the amalgam of wheat, water, sugars, and spices – or is it rye?
You, my clever readers, my scientific friends, would build some sort of classification scheme. Perhaps you would start with the sensorial. Is it light and puffy pizza dough, malleable, smelling slightly of fermentation? Is it hefty and dense ready to be made into holiday cookies, dark, reeking of heavenly spice and molasses? Is it eggy and firm, ready to be braided into Saturday’s challah?
If you were stumped you might try an experimental approach. Does the dough burn at high temperatures? Does it rise in the oven? Does it from a crust? Split? Can it be cooked on the stovetop? in oil? Can it be boiled? Maybe, if you’re inclined to trust balls of dough placed in front of you by academics with no baking qualifications to speak of, you would taste it and you would be sure. That’s gingerbread, focaccia, sourdough, pita, wholegrain, chocolate chip, blueberry muffin – that dough, God help me and my arteries, is sufganiyah.
This gluten-fueled endeavor would require you to make dozens of momentary stabilizations, cutting which phenomena are inside or outside of, in this case, the dough you are analyzing. You would have made agential cuts. You would have done so using a number of apparatuses; sight, smell, taste, application of energy on the stove or in the oven, and so on.
Making these cuts is both human nature and a habit of practice. It can be both a smooth-muscle process that is as unconscious as breathing as well as a conscious act of division as intentional as the gulp of air held before a plunge. Agential cuts inherently contain some level of basic assumption, that isn’t a bad thing per se. As I’ve previously discussed on these digital pages, some degree of onto-epistemological stability is necessary just to get out of bed in the morning. However, the more aware we are of the way we make agential cuts the more justly we can relate to our entanglements i.e. the people, beings, and things around us. Not least of all because agential cuts can never be unmade, only reconfigured. If you add a sprinkle of cocoa powder to cake mix it doesn’t change the fact that the cake was once plain vanilla. If you are initially categorized as a friend by a love interest hooking up doesn’t unwind the past.
Naturally, not all agential cuts are identical. Different apparatuses make different agential cuts, for instance. If you cut our hypothetical ball of dough on sight alone it would be easy to distinguish the phenomenon we call chocolate chip cookie dough from that we call whole wheat bread. The eye is a less faithful apparatus for distinguishing sough dough from pizza dough though. Your tastebuds, on the other hand, are perfectly suited to the task.
To give you an example from the disability world, the naked eye might not be able to detect a new, top-of-the-line lower-leg prosthetic. Someone observing the wearer of said prosthetic might not immediately cut the wearer as a person with a disability. A radiology tech behind the screen of a CAT scan, on the other hand, will cut the wearer as a crip ten times out of ten.
Additionally, agential cuts push and pull the lives of those who are cut as part of a phenomenon and the lives of the cutters with varying degrees of power. Generally speaking, no cut between one type of dough and another is going to materially impact your life beyond the scope of a bad meal. Though one can never discount the possibility that a bad meal leads your in-laws to cut you as an unsuitable match for your partner. (There is also room here for a spiritual digression on matzah and the Israelites fleeing bondage, Jesus and the miracle of loaves and fishes, and the broader role that dough plays in the human pursuit of meaning – perhaps another day, dear reader).
However, not all agential cuts are so inconsequential. For instance, if you are agentially cut into the category of woman in the 21st century United States your labor, on average, is compensated at a rate of 82 cents per every dollar earned by those cut into the category of man. Similarly, being agentially cut as Black in the first half of the 19th century dramatically increased the likelihood of personal misery and exposure to any number of negative outcomes just about anywhere on Earth.
To provide a further example, if your citizenship falls at the terminus of the agential figuration (a series of interdependent agential cuts necessary to reach some configuration of agency – in this case, in order to have countries one must accept the idea of sovereignty, the configuration of borders, the legal system that underpins international relations and so on) that defines the United Kingdom you have access to free, quality, and guaranteed primary and secondary education; a (mostly) functional public healthcare system, and the ability to operate in one of the world’s most sophisticated financial hubs if you are sufficiently capacitated (or connected) to do so. On the other hand, the average person residing in the agential configuration that defines North Korea is exceedingly unlikely to ever set foot inside the UK, let alone have effective access to any of the trappings of the modern, Western-style welfare state.
Beyond the apparatuses used to make agential cuts and the power of the cuts themselves agential cuts also vary in their depth. At its core, the depth of an agential cut is measured by the amount of directed agency needed to reconfigure said cut. Put another way, if you accidentally over-hydrate pizza dough you can reconfigure it by simply adding more flour and a pinch of salt. Initially, you would have categorized the mixture as inedible slop and, following your addition of flour, your cut of the dough has been reconfigured to ‘oven-ready goodness.’
Obviously, duration and scale are important factors to take into account here as well. Adding flour to the over-hydrated dough after it has come out of the oven will certainly reconfigure the slop, just not in the way you were hoping for. To reconfigure baked slop into pizza dough would take considerably more effort than adding the flour earlier in the process. By the same token, as a matter of scale your home kitchen foul-up is far easier to fix than the same problem at the DiGiorno factory.
The effects of scale and duration partially account for the intractability of problems like systemic racism. Not only are cuts around important identity factors like gender, race, and ability powerful but, like a millennia’s-worth of water tickling downhill until etching rivers into the landscape, repetition wears grooves into our collective consciousness making some cuts difficult to reconfigure. Note, difficult, not impossible. While it is certainly easier to reconfigure a sandcastle moat than the Colorado River man did build the Hoover Dam.
For all their variety agential cuts do share a few core characteristics. No agential cut changes the amount of agency nor does the act of cutting cause distinct phenomenon to appear. Rather, performing cuts gives distinct forms to agency. To put the icing on top of our dough metaphor; imagine you have a batch of cookie dough rolled out in front of you. Sugar cookies, if that helps get the imagination flowing. The dough is flat and even, it weighs 32 ounces. To your right, there is a box of cookie cutters. You reach in and grab one at random, a star. You press the star lightly into the dough, unconvinced of the adequacy of that particular shape at this particular moment. You admire the dough, the star looks nice. You’ve made a cut. A shallow one, to be certain, wiped clean with a flick of a rolling pin. However, nobody would say that because of your cut, there is less dough. The matter remains unchanged. Yet, by the same token, nobody would say that the imprint of the star isn’t real. A distinctive shape has been formed.
The same would be true if you pressed the star hard, punching the shape out of the dough. Sure, the cut is deeper. Sure, it would take more effort to reconfigure the cut. But, in the event that you decided snowmen were a more appropriate shape you could simply gather the dough into a ball and roll it out again – the amount of dough unchanged, the agential cuts made and reconfigured.
Finally, it is important to recognize the ways in which agential cuts shape lives, societies, and our collective consciousness. For instance, cutting my walker as part of my body, as another appendage, can be tremendously empowering. Just as reconfiguring that cut when I hand my walker to the person working in coat check is a potent act of awareness. Capacital realism privileges this first-person perspective and, in doing so, diverges from agential realism. The two coincide in their recognition that agential cuts have no inherent moral content, they are not a system of judgment; no lady justice with tipped scales. We must work to reconfigure cuts, such as those around race, gender, and ability, that conflict with our values, and work to deepen emerging cuts, such as emerging norms around consent, that are in alignment with the people we want to be and how we want society to function.
You are now excused to get some bread.