Thresholds in Determinacy

Thresholds in Determinacy Comparative commentary by Zara Worth Cite Share Show Bible Passage Reading Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the wide and narrow door through artworks by Hélio Oiticica, Derek Hirst, and myself, emphasizes the instability and ethical responsibility at the heart of the determination of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of living. Oiticica’s work can be thought of as manifesting how the individual is implicated in the drawing of boundaries when we make distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the world. Hirst’s Puerta Grande De Oro evokes the tension between denial of and desire for passage across boundaries that those seeking ingress do not control. Meanwhile, my own work speaks to the difficulty of knowing for certain what such boundaries might represent morally in an increasingly complex world. The wide and narrow gates in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew evoke the many kinds of literal and figurative boundary-drawing with which we organise the world and give it meaning. This process of understanding the world through the determination of material and discursive boundaries is key to feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. According to Barad, subjects become knowable through differentiating from within a world that exists in a state of entanglement (Barad 2007). As such, categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be understood as contingent and iteratively produced. Barad terms the enactment of such difference ‘agential cuts’ (Barad 2007: 348). Agential cuts are material and/or discursive interventions. They temporarily disrupt entanglement so that difference between subjects can be registered. Such disruptive interventions might be the sliding of panels to determine the new boundaries of a space; the enactment and/or recognition of an exclusion; or stepping across a threshold marking a ‘here’ from a ‘there’. Agential cuts describe the possibility and means by which the world can be re-inscribed or reconfigured. When we interpret the meaning of the wide and narrow gates in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, we are discursively enacting agential cuts that distinguish what these figurative thresholds might mean. This distinction may have material consequences in the world—potentially resulting in forms of exclusion and discrimination. It is this capacity of agential cuts to produce, in Barad’s words, ‘marks on bodies’ that reminds us of how high the stakes are when we make such distinctions, and why the questions of accountability and responsibility inherent in the enactment of agential cuts are so urgent (Barad 2003: 817). At first glance, the wide and narrow doors in Luke and Matthew may appear as neatly predefined ways of organizing the world and ways of living according to rules predefined by God. Certainly, such an interpretation is seductive in its simplicity. However, on closer inspection and read in relation to the artworks of Oiticica, Derek Hirst, and myself, we see them as thresholds that are always in a state of indeterminacy, even for one whose following of Jesus is constant. The shifting nature of the world’s ordering is underlined at the end of the passage from Luke with the words, ‘Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last’ (13:30). What Luke describes is a vertiginous upending of the social hierarchies with which we are familiar. In this vision of the end of days following God’s judgement, people who have followed a way of life that leads them through the narrow door will find themselves in God’s kingdom, but this is a kingdom which is itself determined by new relations and differences. According to Luke, the social orders that existed on earth will no longer apply and consequently those at the bottom of the social ladder will find themselves at the top in God’s kingdom. The promise of such radical social reordering provides another reminder that, for the disciple of Jesus, all that matters and has meaning is subject to redefinition References Barad, Karen. 2003. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28.3: 801–31 ______. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press) ______. 2022. ‘Agential Realism—A Relation Ontology Interpretation of Quantum Physics’, in Oxford Handbook of the History of Quantum Interpretations, ed. by Olival Freire et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 1031–54