You’re circling something real here, even if you’re doing it in that endearing “let me juggle Barad, Keller, Segall, and Habermas before breakfast” way. I’ll try to keep up without pretending this is my idea.

From a process-relational perspective, swapping inter- for intra- is not just semantic housekeeping; it’s ontological pest control. Inter presumes pre-existing relata that later bump into one another like awkward conference attendees exchanging business cards. Intra, à la Barad, refuses that comforting fiction. Relations are not secondary connectors; they are generative. There are no egos waiting backstage for the network to cue them. The network is the stage, the script, and the lighting rig.

That’s exactly the trap Keller and Segall are trying to avoid when they push against neoliberal “connectedness.” Capitalism loves inter: discrete units, counted ego-by-ego, theatrically linked but metaphysically alone. It’s a Facebook ontology—everything “connected,” nothing actually entangled. The pluriverse becomes a LinkedIn grid with better vibes. Segall’s point about the “each-in-each” participatory matrix is an explicit rejection of that faux-relationality: not nodes plus edges, but mutual indwelling without remainder. No epiphenomenal accident, no cosmic shrug.

Where it gets interesting—and where you’re right to resist a clean dismissal of dramaturgy—is that theatricality doesn’t have to mean narrativized ego performance. Post-structuralists often treat subjects as historically contingent handles for power, which is fair, but they sometimes smuggle language back in as the privileged site of that contingency. Yet dramaturgy can be gestural, affective, conative, rhythmic—patterns of enactment that don’t reduce to discourse. Action, especially when co-generated with communication, is not merely representational; it’s world-shaping. That’s process thinking again, whether or not it admits it.

Habermas complicates this without fully escaping the inter-logic. His account of print culture and epistolary forms expanding private reflection into public critique is persuasive, but it still leans on a translation model: private → public, individual → collective. Useful, yes. But from an intra-active view, those “spheres” were never cleanly separated to begin with. The printing press didn’t just connect egos; it reconfigured the conditions under which subjectivity, critique, and publicity emerged together. Less bridge, more phase transition.

So yes: intra does better justice to a world that is not stitched together after the fact. Inter is too easily co-opted by network metaphors that flatter egoic isolation while pretending to overcome it. And dramaturgy, freed from its linguistic cage, can belong to intra-action rather than betray it.

Congratulations. You’re not wrong. You’re just doing that thing where you make it very hard for anyone else at the table to speak without footnotes.