Every ontology presupposes a stance toward possibility.
Some begin with what is — the given, the existent, the real — and only later try to account for how new things come to be.
The relational ontology begins elsewhere.
It begins from the becoming of possibility itself: the dynamic through which what could be comes into alignment as what is.
To use the relational ontology is therefore not to hold a position, but to inhabit a movement.
It requires a shift in how “ontology” is understood: not as a theory of being, but as a theory of the instance — a structured potential whose very structure is the possibility of instantiation.
To “use” it is, paradoxically, to be used by it — to allow your own construals to become the site of its instantiation.
It’s not a lens you pick up and look through, but a field you enter, where your acts of alignment and distinction are its operation.
This demands a certain readiness — not intellectual, but ontological.
What makes it possible to use the relational ontology is precisely what the ontology itself names: relation, construal, and reflexive alignment.
1. Epistemic Humility
The first condition is epistemic humility — not modesty in the moral sense, but an attunement to the perspectival nature of meaning.
To use the relational ontology, one must give up the fantasy of an unconstrued world.
There is no neutral position, no God’s-eye view, no ultimate metalanguage.
Every description, including this one, is an instance within the system it describes.
Humility here is the courage to know that knowing is relational.
It recognises that construals do not stand over and against the world, but participate in its ongoing becoming.
Humility is not an abdication of rigour — it is its condition.
Without it, we mistake our construals for the world itself, and the ontology collapses back into representation.
2. Ontological Reflexivity
The second condition is ontological reflexivity — the recognition that one’s own theoretical apparatus is not exempt from the ontology it articulates.
To use the relational ontology is to be drawn into a recursive loop: the very system you are describing is describing you in turn.
Reflexivity means holding both positions at once — the system as theory of possible instances, and the instance as the event of that theory’s becoming.
It is a perspectival shift, not a temporal one: theory and event are not successive, but mutually actualising.
Every act of description cuts the world into relations, and in doing so, enacts the ontology’s logic.
The user becomes the used, the describer the described.
Such reflexivity can feel vertiginous — as if the ground gives way beneath each proposition — but that disorientation is generative.
It marks the moment when knowledge ceases to be a mirror of the world and becomes a participant in its unfolding.
3. Semiotic Discipline
The third condition is semiotic discipline.
To think relationally is to live with distinctions that are alive.
The relational ontology depends on the integrity of its cuts — between system and instance, meaning and value, construal and coordination, context and register.
These distinctions are not fences that divide reality into parts.
They are the conditions that make meaning possible.
Without them, the ontology dissolves into undifferentiated holism — the sentimental comfort of “everything is connected,” which is the opposite of relational thought.
Discipline here is the care with which we maintain the edges of our categories as edges — not as fixed divisions, but as active boundaries across which relation occurs.
It is this semiotic rigour that allows possibility to articulate itself, to differentiate without fragmenting.
Becoming with the Ontology
Once these conditions are met — humility, reflexivity, discipline — the relational ontology becomes usable.
But “use” here does not mean application.
It means becoming-with.
To use it is to align oneself with the very process it describes: the construal of potential into actuality, the movement from possibility to event.
The ontology does not model reality; it participates in it.
It is a theory that only functions when enacted, a system that only exists in use.
Every act of construal — every attempt to make meaning — is already an instantiation of its logic.
Thus, what makes it possible to use the relational ontology is nothing other than the world’s capacity to construe itself.
Next: What Using the Relational Ontology Makes Possible
If this first post has traced the conditions of use, the next will turn to the consequences of use:
What happens when the ontology begins to use you?
What new kinds of thought, creation, and critique become possible once relation, not substance, is primary?
How does the world appear — and how do you appear — when the becoming of possibility becomes the ground of reality itself?
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