The Cut That Makes Meaning: 2 The Ontological Status of the Cut

In the previous post, we argued that meaning as possibility is insufficient on its own. If meaning is to be encountered as determinate—if phenomena are to appear at all—then possibility must be articulated. That articulation was named the cut.

At this point, a danger emerges. The term “cut” invites misunderstanding. It suggests an act, a boundary, a rupture, perhaps even a violence. It tempts the reader to imagine something done to reality: a division imposed on an otherwise continuous world. If the cut is taken this way, the entire framework collapses back into the very pictures it was meant to avoid.

So before the cut can be used, it must be stripped of the wrong ontological clothing.

The cut is not a thing.

It is not an object, a structure, or a hidden component of the world. There is nowhere one could point and say: here is the cut. Treating it as such would simply add another entity to an already overcrowded ontology.

The cut is not an event.

It does not occur in time, does not happen at a moment, and does not transform one state of the world into another. Nothing “before the cut” later becomes “after the cut”. Temporalising the cut turns it into a causal story, and causal stories are precisely what this account does not rely on.

The cut is not an act.

It is not performed by a subject, an observer, a speaker, or a mind. No agent stands outside possibility and carves it up. To imagine such an agent is to smuggle in a representational subject whose job is to impose form on an otherwise formless reality. That move will not be made here.

The cut is also not a boundary.

Boundaries presuppose already-constituted regions that need separating. The cut does not divide a pre-existing whole into parts. It is what makes it possible for anything to count as a part, a whole, or a region in the first place.

If the cut is none of these things, what is it?

The cut is a perspectival distinction within structured potential.

This formulation matters. The cut does not act on possibility from outside; it is a distinction within possibility. It does not introduce structure into an otherwise amorphous field; it articulates a structure that was already there as potential. And it does not operate by transforming reality, but by shifting perspective—from system-as-potential to phenomenon-as-actualised.

Under a cut, a field of possibility is seen as something. Not represented, not mirrored, not labelled, but encountered as determinate. A phenomenon appears. Nothing new is added to the world. Nothing is removed. What changes is the mode of intelligibility.

This is why the cut must be understood as ontological rather than epistemic. It is not a matter of how we come to know something, but of how anything can appear as something at all. Knowledge, interpretation, and description are all downstream of this more basic articulation. Without the cut, there would be nothing for them to take up.

It is tempting to ask: what causes the cut?

But this question already misfires. Causes operate on events; the cut is not an event. Asking for its cause is like asking what causes a perspective to be a perspective. The demand for causation here is a residue of a mechanistic imagination that assumes every distinction must be produced by something else.

The cut is not produced. It is presupposed.

To experience anything—to encounter a sound as a melody, a mark as a word, a sensation as pain—is already to be operating under a cut. The distinction is not optional, nor is it something that could be suspended to reveal a more fundamental layer of reality underneath. There is no unconstrued remainder waiting beyond articulation.

This also means that the cut is not arbitrary. Because it articulates structured potential, not chaos, it is constrained by the system it actualises. Not every cut is possible at every point. Some distinctions are available; others are not. What can appear under a cut is shaped by the relations already in play within the system-as-potential.

The cut, then, is neither imposition nor invention. It is articulation.

To insist on this is not to deny the plurality of possible cuts. Different phenomena can be actualised from the same system under different distinctions. But plurality should not be mistaken for arbitrariness. Each cut is intelligible precisely because it makes sense of the potential it articulates.

The work of the next post will be to make this more precise by examining instantiation itself. If the cut is the ontological condition under which a phenomenon appears, then instantiation is not a process that unfolds in time, but a perspectival shift that makes the system visible as an instance.

For now, it is enough to be clear on this point:

the cut is not something that happens to meaning.

It is what it is for meaning to appear at all.