220THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER“important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and
nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors.”^67 Boundaries between the
human and the nonhuman are thus prodded through the consideration
of a host of material-discursive forces constituting the processes of mate-
rialization. The focus is placed on the relationship between discursive
practices and material phenomena. Therefore, agential realism rejects
representationalism as that which ontologically structures domains of
words and things as separate, proposing instead the forming of the subject
as part of a web of representations that generates a conception of a differ-
ent metaphysics than that of relata.^68 The causal relationship between
the dispositifs that produce bodies and the phenomena produced, Barad
argues, relies on a dynamic of agential intra-action.^69 In this sense, “phe-
nomena become the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting
‘components’ ”^70 where bodies do not precede their interactions but in-
stead emerge as the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. It is in
this sense that the manipulation of animal form that characterizes all the
works discussed in this chapter can be better understood as alluding to
agential forces whose origins might be impossible to precisely situate
geographically, historically, physically, and temporally. The semantic and
ontological indeterminacy that ensues thus results in Barad’s conception
of meaning as that which no longer is “a property of individual words or
groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differen-
tial intelligibility.”^71