Any relational account of gravity must begin with a refusal.
Gravity cannot be a force.
This is not a provocative redefinition, nor a claim about empirical adequacy. It is a consequence of the ontology already in place. Once systems are treated as structured potentials and instantiation as a perspectival cut, force becomes an incoherent explanatory category.
What force presupposes
To speak of a force is already to assume:
discrete objects with intrinsic properties,
trajectories through a background arena,
a medium (space or spacetime) within which action propagates,
and a causal story in which something acts on something else.
Force explanations presuppose a world of things in motion, embedded in a container. They may differ in sophistication — Newtonian, field-theoretic, geometric — but they share this basic grammar.
A relational ontology rejects that grammar at the outset.
No container, no trajectory, no action
If instantiation is a perspectival cut rather than a temporal process, then:
there is no pre-existing space in which things move,
no time along which motion unfolds,
no intrinsic mass that could be acted upon.
What exists are phenomena actualised under constraint. Persistence across perspectives is not explained by motion through an arena, but by the coordination of cuts within a structured potential.
In such a framework, force has nothing to do.
The explanatory dead end of force
One might try to retain gravity as a force metaphorically — as a convenient shorthand. But this quickly collapses.
If gravity is a force, then:
it must act through space (which is no longer a container),
it must act over time (which is no longer a flow),
and it must act on mass (which is no longer intrinsic).
Each of these terms has already been reconceived relationally. Retaining force would require reintroducing exactly the metaphysics the ontology has ruled out.
This is not parsimony; it is inconsistency.
What remains once force is removed
Removing force does not remove gravity. It removes a mode of explanation.
What remains is the question that replaces it:
What constraints must be in place for phenomena to persist across perspectives in the presence of high resistance to reconstrual?
Gravity, if it exists, must answer to this question — not to one about attraction, action, or motion.
Setting the task ahead
This series will proceed by taking that question seriously.
We will show that:
gravity emerges necessarily from mass understood as resistance to reconstrual,
attraction is a phenomenal effect, not a causal mechanism,
and what appears as motion is in fact constrained re-cutting within a thickened relational architecture.
For now, the point is simpler and more exacting:
If gravity exists in a relational ontology, it cannot be a force.
Anything else would already be a retreat.
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