This series began with a demand for ontological responsibility. It ends by relinquishing ontology as a destination.
Relational ontology was never offered here as a doctrine to be adopted, a picture of reality to be defended, or a final vocabulary to replace others. It was offered as a discipline of attention: a way of noticing how possibilities become actual, how constraints enable intelligibility, and how cuts are enacted—whether we acknowledge them or not.
To live with cuts is to live without metaphysical alibis.
Ontology as Practice, Not Position
Traditional ontology asks: What is there? Relational ontology asks instead: How does something come to be actual here rather than otherwise?
This shift transforms ontology from a catalogue into a practice. It no longer seeks to settle reality once and for all, but to remain responsive to the conditions under which realities are enacted.
What matters is not where one stands, but how one participates.
Participation Without Mastery
Participation is often confused with control. To acknowledge one’s participation in actualisation can feel like a claim to authorship or mastery.
Relational ontology refuses this fantasy.
We do not choose our constraints. We inherit them: biological, social, symbolic, material. Participation occurs within these constraints, not above them. Responsibility lies not in choosing freely, but in choosing lucidly.
To participate responsibly is to:
Act without pretending inevitability
Decide without claiming neutrality
Commit without claiming finality
The Quiet Work of Cuts
Most cuts are not dramatic. They occur in laboratories, conversations, classrooms, spreadsheets, classifications, and daily routines. They rarely announce themselves as ontological events.
Yet each one contributes to the shape of what becomes possible next.
Living with cuts means cultivating sensitivity to this quiet work:
Which distinctions have become habitual?
Which exclusions have become invisible?
Which possibilities have ceased to be thinkable?
These questions are not accusations. They are invitations to attentiveness.
After Critique
Much contemporary theory is trapped in critique: exposing assumptions, unmasking power, revealing contingency. This work was necessary. But critique alone cannot guide participation.
Relational ontology moves beyond critique without disavowing it. It asks not only what has been concealed, but what can now be responsibly enacted.
The task is no longer to stand outside and judge, but to stand within and respond.
No Final Vocabulary
There will be no final language adequate to all cuts. Every vocabulary is itself a construal, enabling some articulations while foreclosing others.
Relational ontology therefore resists canonisation. It does not ask to be installed as the correct framework, only to remain available as a mode of attention.
Its success would be measured paradoxically: not by how often it is cited, but by how little it needs to be named.
Living Otherwise
To live with cuts is to abandon the hope of innocence without surrendering the possibility of care. It is to accept that participation always leaves traces, and that those traces matter.
This is not a call to constant self-surveillance or moral anxiety. It is an invitation to ontological adulthood: acting without guarantees, knowing without nowhere, and participating without alibis.
An Ending That Is Also an Opening
This is the final post in this series, but not a conclusion. Cuts continue to be made. Possibilities continue to be structured and actualised. Responsibility continues to arise wherever something becomes rather than remains merely possible.
If this series has done its work, it will not leave the reader with answers, but with a changed orientation: a readiness to notice, to own, and to participate.
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