The Cut That Makes Meaning: 6 Why the Cut Cannot Be Removed

In the previous posts, we have traced a precise trajectory:

• Meaning begins as possibility (Post 1).

• Possibility requires articulation through a cut to become intelligible (Post 2).

• Instantiation is the system seen under a perspectival cut (Post 3).

• Foregrounding one articulation necessarily backgrounds others, yet exclusion is not loss (Post 4).

• What appears under a cut is a phenomenon, not an object (Post 5).

We now arrive at a critical juncture: can the cut be removed? Could meaning exist without it? Could phenomena be experienced without exclusion?

The answer, for reasons already implicit, is: no.

To attempt to remove the cut is to imagine a phenomenon that appears without distinction, a determinate meaning that does not foreground one articulation against others, a perception that is simultaneously everything and nothing. Such a world is unintelligible. There is no form, no texture, no first-order meaning. Possibility without a cut is the absence of appearance. Attempting to deny the cut is already an exercise performed under a cut—it cannot be escaped.

The cut is unavoidable because it is the condition of intelligibility itself. Every phenomenon presupposes distinction; every instance is the system under a perspective; every foregrounding presupposes backgrounding. No matter how one might wish to imagine a seamless or “unbroken” world, the intelligibility of that world depends on the cut being operative.

This has two important consequences:

1. The cut is neither imposed nor optional.
   It is not an act, event, or decision. It is a condition that cannot be suspended without rendering experience impossible. To ask whether the cut “should” exist is to misunderstand the nature of meaning itself. The cut is not contingent; it is ontologically necessary.

2. Exclusion is generative, not destructive.
   Because every instance foregrounds one articulation, the cut necessarily backgrounds others. This is not a loss, a negation, or a deficiency. The unrealised possibilities persist as structured potential, giving coherence, texture, and depth to the phenomenon that appears. The cut is the mechanism through which meaning can appear at all, without destroying the richness of what remains unactualised.

Viewed in this way, the cut is not a limitation, but a structural enabling. Meaning arises because possibility is cut; phenomena appear because the system is articulated; exclusion sustains intelligibility. Without the cut, nothing could appear as meaningful.

To resist the cut is conceptually incoherent. To attempt to bypass it is to operate under a cut without acknowledging it. The very attempt demonstrates the unavoidable nature of the cut: it is inescapable, fundamental, and constitutive.

In closing, the series makes the following argument explicit:

• Possibility alone does not yield phenomena.

• Determinacy requires articulation.

• Articulation is a perspectival cut.

• Foregrounding entails exclusion, which is not loss.

• Phenomena are first-order meanings, not objects.

• Therefore, the cut cannot be removed; meaning itself depends on it.

The cut is the structural condition of all intelligibility. It is not a feature that can be chosen, suspended, or ignored. It is the ground on which meaning is possible, the lens through which phenomena appear, and the frame without which the system of possibilities cannot articulate itself.

With this, the logic of the cut is complete. Future explorations can now take this principle as foundational: from anti-representational accounts to the articulation of constraints, from the structure of systems to the evolution of possibilities, the cut remains the irreducible condition under which all phenomena appear intelligibly.

Meaning, in short, cannot exist without the cut.