ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author develops some ideas of physicist and queer theorist Karen Barad in relation to performance as research and to her practice of performing landscape. She suggests that Karen Barad is especially interesting in the context of performance, as well as artistic research, as she proposes a new understanding of how discursive practices are related to the material world. The author criticizes Judith Butler's theory of performativity for a re-inscription of the nature-culture dualism and for privileging discursive over material concerns. She also suggests that Barad's notion 'agential cut' can be useful in the context of research involving practice. Barad specifies the nature of agential cuts as follows: "Intra-actions enact agential cuts, which are a cutting together-apart, as one move. The agential cut delineates object and instrument, but the role played by any part of the experimental arrangement varies depending on the details of the intra-action, due to the mutual exclusivity of the conditions for definability.
