Unavoidable Pressures: 3 Thinking With Cuts

If thinking has no ground, and if its interventions are irreversible, then another pressure emerges that can no longer be deferred.

Cuts are not accidents.

They are not side effects.

They are the very form of thinking itself.

To think is to cut.

The Illusion of Gentle Thought

Much contemporary theory prefers to imagine itself as exploratory rather than decisive. It speaks of openings, horizons, multiplicities, and possibilities, as though thought could expand the world without ever dividing it.

This is an illusion.

Every opening is also a closure.

Every horizon excludes what lies beyond it.

Every possibility is articulated at the expense of others.

Cuts are unavoidable.

What a Cut Is (and Is Not)

A cut is not simply a distinction between pre-existing things. It is not a boundary discovered in the world and faithfully reported.

A cut is an enacted distinction that brings a configuration into being.

It creates relata rather than separating them.

It reorganises relevance.

It establishes what can count, what can matter, and what can appear.

Cuts are not descriptive.

They are constitutive.

Thinking Inside the Cut

Once this is acknowledged, thinking can no longer imagine itself as operating from outside its own distinctions.

There is no meta-position from which cuts can be surveyed without remainder.

No vantage point from which their consequences can be fully anticipated.

Thinking occurs inside the cut it enacts.

This does not mean that cuts are arbitrary. It means they are situated, partial, and exposing.

Against the Displacement of Responsibility

One common response to this condition is to displace the cut elsewhere:

• onto language (“it’s just how we speak”),

• onto culture (“that’s how things are framed”),

• onto systems (“the structure demands it”),

• or onto critique (“I’m only analysing, not endorsing”).

These moves soften the cut rhetorically while leaving it operative in practice.

They avoid ownership without avoiding consequence.

The Third Unavoidable Pressure

The third pressure follows directly:

Thought must own the cuts it enacts.

Not by justifying them in advance.

Not by claiming neutrality or necessity.

But by remaining answerable to what they do.

Ownership here does not mean control. It means refusing to pretend that the cut came from elsewhere.

Living With the Cut

To think with cuts is to accept exposure.

To know that one’s distinctions will be taken up, resisted, misused, and transformed.

To know that one cannot determine their future effects.

And yet to draw them anyway.

What follows from this is not mastery, but a new kind of restraint — one that does not evade action, but stays close to consequence.

The next pressure sharpens this further. If cuts are enacted and owned, then thinking must confront what it is now bound to.

The next post turns to this directly: Thinking Under Responsibility.