On Relation Without Representation: 2 Relation Before Reference

If representation is the wrong starting point, the immediate question becomes unavoidable: what replaces it? What, if not reference, lies at the foundation of intelligibility?

The answer is relation — but not relation understood as a linkage between pre-existing entities. That familiar conception simply reintroduces representation through the back door. What is required is a more radical shift: relation is ontologically prior to relata. Entities do not come first and then enter into relations; rather, entities stabilise within relational fields.

This claim runs counter to a deeply ingrained metaphysical habit. We are accustomed to thinking that there are things, and that relations describe how those things are connected. But this picture already assumes determinate identities, boundaries, and persistence — precisely the features that require explanation. Relation, in this traditional sense, is explanatory garnish added after the real work has supposedly been done by objects.

A relational ontology reverses this order.

Relations are not secondary connections; they are the conditions under which anything can appear as distinct, stable, or identifiable at all. What we later describe as “entities” are patterns of relational consistency — regions of stability that emerge within structured potential. They are not ontological atoms; they are relational achievements.

Once this reversal is made, reference loses its foundational status.

Reference presupposes that there is something already there to be referred to: an object, a state of affairs, a determinate target. It also presupposes a stable perspective from which reference can succeed or fail. But both of these presuppositions depend on prior relational articulation. Before a term can refer, a field of intelligibility must already be in place in which distinctions matter, identities persist, and contrasts are meaningful.

Reference does not create this field. It exploits it.

Seen this way, reference is a specialised relational practice that arises within already-articulated systems. It is not a bridge between language and world; it is a pattern of coordination within a relational field that has already produced the appearance of both “language” and “world” as distinct domains. The apparent gap that reference is meant to cross is itself a product of prior relational stabilisation.

This is why attempts to ground meaning in reference repeatedly stall. They try to explain intelligibility by appeal to a mechanism that already depends on intelligibility. No account of pointing, denotation, or correspondence can explain how distinctions come to matter in the first place. Reference assumes that work has already been done.

Relation, by contrast, operates at the level where that work occurs.

Relational articulation does not point outward; it differentiates inwardly. Under constraints, cuts foreground some possibilities and background others, producing phenomena that are intelligible as such. Stability emerges through repetition, sedimentation, and successful coordination. Identity is not given; it is maintained. Distinction is not discovered; it is enacted.

From within such a system, reference can emerge as a reliable pattern: a way of coordinating across instances by treating certain stabilisations as if they were independent objects. This “as if” is crucial. Reference works because systems can sustain stable relational patterns over time, not because they have direct access to a pre-articulated reality.

To say that relation is prior to reference is therefore not to deny reference its efficacy. It is to deny it ontological primacy.

Reference is downstream. It depends on:

• a structured field of possibility,

• sedimented constraints,

• stable relational patterns,

• and the successful articulation of phenomena.

Remove these, and reference has nothing to latch onto.

This shift also clarifies why representational thinking feels so compelling. Once relational stabilisations have sedimented sufficiently, the world appears object-like. Reference then feels natural, even obvious. But this apparent obviousness is an achievement of the system, not a window onto its foundations.

In this light, the task of a theory of meaning is not to explain how symbols reach outward to the world, but to explain how relational fields generate the very conditions under which “symbols” and “world” can appear as separable at all.

Relation comes first.

Reference follows.

In the next post, we will take the final step that this claim demands and examine a consequence that is often resisted even by relational accounts: meaning is not fundamentally about anything. Aboutness, too, will turn out to be a derivative effect — intelligible, powerful, and useful, but not ontologically basic.

That move will be uncomfortable for some readers.

Which is how we’ll know it’s doing its job.