Cuts Without Knives: 1 The Cut Is Not a Boundary

We begin with a commonplace image: the cut. It is everywhere in thought, in talk, in writing. We speak of boundaries, separations, edges. We carve distinctions as if they were slices of a prior whole. We believe that to cut is to divide; that the act of marking a limit is the act of isolating something from what surrounds it.

This is wrong.

The cut is not a boundary. Not literally, not metaphorically, not even figuratively. It does not split, it does not sever, it does not leave behind a gap. What the cut does is actualise a perspective. It performs a selection within a structured potential, a field of possibilities that is neither “whole” nor “fragmented,” but simply possibility itself in relation.

Notice the subtlety. A boundary presupposes a prior whole. A cut presupposes nothing except the capacity to take a perspective. The field from which a cut arises is not a container waiting to be opened; it is an ongoing structured potential, in which distinction is one of many ways of actualising difference. To speak of edges is to project a metaphor of closure onto what is fundamentally open and relational.

Consider language, often the first place we reach for knives. We talk of sentences, clauses, words, and phonemes as if these were pre-existing units awaiting our scalpel. But units are effects of cutting, not preconditions. Words do not exist before they are actualised in construal; clauses do not lie in wait. The act of cutting does not discover; it co-individuates — perspective and phenomenon emerge together.

This is why the cut is not a boundary. It does not separate because there is nothing separate to separate. It does not isolate because isolation requires a prior containment. It does not leave behind fragments because the field never existed as a sum to be fractured. The cut takes place, and in that taking, it produces its own intelligibility.

To think otherwise is to invite a quiet violence into thought. Boundaries demand division, edges demand conflict, separation demands loss. Perspective, in contrast, demands only attentive actualisation. A cut is a gesture, a co-creative act, a tuning of possibility to view. It does not wound; it illuminates.

In the coming posts, we will explore the subtle but profound consequences of abandoning the boundary metaphor. We will show that distinction does not presuppose difference; that multiplicity does not require parts; and that perspective is an ontological operator rather than an epistemic limitation. But here, at the first step, we simply relinquish the knife.

The cut is not a boundary. It never was. And in learning to live with this truth, we begin to see possibility as it truly is: always relational, never fractured, quietly luminous in its own becoming.