Relational Cuts: On Images — 1. What Is Given to Be Seen

There is something given.

It appears as visible.

This statement is more difficult than it first seems.

For it does not yet say what “something” is.

Nor does it say what “given” means.

Nor does it say what “visible” refers to.

It only marks a situation in which these distinctions are already operating.

To say that something is given to be seen is not to describe an object.

It is to register a constraint: that seeing is already underway.

The difficulty is that we tend to begin with what is seen.

A thing.

An image.

A scene.

An arrangement of marks or colours or shapes.

But this beginning already assumes too much.

It assumes that there are things that precede the act in which they become visible.

It assumes that what is seen is separable from the conditions under which it becomes seeable.

It assumes that “what” is independent of “being seen as what.”

None of this is yet justified.

So we do not begin there.

We begin instead with the fact that seeing is not empty.

Something is already differentiated.

Not yet named.

Not yet stabilised.

Not yet separated into units.

But not undifferentiated.

For if nothing were differentiated, nothing would be visible at all.

This leads to a constraint:

whatever “is given to be seen” must already be structured in such a way that differentiation is possible.

But we cannot yet say what structure means.

We cannot assume parts.

We cannot assume relations between parts.

We cannot assume a field in which parts are located.

All of those are later stabilisations.

At this stage, even the word “relation” is too much.

So we proceed more carefully.

There is a situation in which something can be seen.

In order for this to be possible, there must be:

• a capacity for difference
• a way in which difference becomes effective
• a stability sufficient for something to persist as “this rather than that”
• and a boundary condition that prevents everything from collapsing into undifferentiated sameness

We do not yet know what carries these conditions.

We do not yet know whether they belong to objects, to perceivers, or to neither.

We only know that without them, nothing would appear.

So the question is not:

what is an image?

The question is:

what must be true for anything to be given in a way that allows it to be seen as anything at all?

We will not answer this yet.

But we will not stop here either.

For even this formulation already contains an assumption that will need to be examined:

that “anything” and “anything at all” are stable enough to be spoken of in advance of the conditions that make them distinguishable.

We will proceed by refusing that stability wherever it cannot be earned.

What remains is not a theory.

It is a constraint.

Something is given to be seen.

We do not yet know what this means.

But we will stay with it.