The Things had travelled a long way.
They had once believed themselves to be alone.
Stone had thought itself Stone before it met River. Tree had thought itself Tree before it met soil, air, rain, insects, birds and light. Bird had thought itself Bird before it discovered that flight depended upon air, that food depended upon plants and other creatures, and that even its songs changed according to who was listening.
But the Things had learned.
A Thing was not necessarily something that first existed and then entered into relations.
Sometimes relation was already part of what made the Thing what it was.
They had learned, too, that becoming was not merely something that happened to Things. River was not a Thing that happened to flow. Tree was not a Thing to which growth was subsequently added. A Thing could be a relatively persistent pattern of becoming.
Then they had discovered that difference could do more than distinguish.
It could generate.
A difference could alter a relation; the altered relation could change the Things involved; and the changed Things could alter the possibilities of what happened next.
They had learned that knowing was no exception.
The Knower could not simply step outside the world and look in.
Every act of knowing was already something happening in the world: an encounter, a question, an experiment, a measurement, a distinction. The world could answer back, resist, surprise.
Then they had discovered something stranger still.
Some relations could remain.
A path could outlast the walkers who made it. A language could outlast the people who spoke its earliest words. A practice could continue after its origin had been forgotten. A structure could constrain and enable those who participated in it without belonging to any one of them.
And finally they had learned that even these structures were not fixed.
They persisted by being enacted, reproduced, altered.
The Things had begun to suspect that nothing stood quite where they had once thought it stood.
But one question remained.
Where did all these relations happen?
They gathered at the edge of the world.
There was no wall.
There was no gate.
There was no sign saying Beyond Here.
Still, the Things could imagine one.
“What if the world has an outside?” asked Stone.
“Then perhaps,” said Bird, “we could stand there and see the whole of it.”
River was unconvinced.
“Stand where?”
“Outside.”
“Outside what?”
“The world.”
River waited.
“And if you stood there,” River asked, “would you still be in reality?”
Bird hesitated.
“Of course.”
“Then how would it be outside?”
Bird thought about this.
“Perhaps it would be outside the world but still part of reality.”
Stone frowned.
“That sounds like a very large world.”
River continued.
“And if it were not part of reality?”
“Then we could finally stand outside everything.”
“But how would you know it?”
The Things were silent.
A Thing could encounter something only if there were some relation between them.
But if the outside had no relation to the world, there could be no way for anything in the world to encounter it.
And if there were a relation between the outside and the world, then the outside would already belong to a larger reality containing both.
The Things had discovered an uncomfortable possibility.
Perhaps “outside the world” was not a place they had failed to find.
Perhaps it was an idea that could not quite be made coherent.
They tried another way.
They imagined the world as a great container.
Inside it were Things.
Inside it were Rivers and Trees, Birds and Stones, organisms and societies, languages and institutions, stars and planets.
Relations happened between the Things.
Processes unfolded within the container.
Structures formed.
Knowledge occurred.
And the world contained all of it.
But then River asked:
“What contains the container?”
No one answered.
“If the world is a Thing that contains everything else,” River continued, “then there must be something in which the world itself exists.”
Stone looked toward the horizon.
“And what contains that?”
The Things began to see the problem.
The world could not simply be one more Thing among Things.
It was not a box in which reality happened.
The world was not where relations occurred.
It was closer to the changing field of relations through which Things, processes and structures became determinate at all.
This was a more difficult thought.
It meant that there was no final layer beneath relation at which the Things could finally arrive and say:
Here is what exists independently of all this.
They had once imagined that relations connected Things.
Now they were beginning to suspect something stronger.
Relations did not merely connect what already existed.
They participated in making a world in which anything could become determinate.
The Things then turned to the problem of knowing.
Stone had always found this particularly troublesome.
“If there is no outside,” it said, “how can we know the whole?”
“Perhaps we cannot,” said Bird.
“That sounds like giving up.”
“No. It sounds like remembering where we are.”
Stone was not satisfied.
“If we cannot step outside the world, then every account of the world must come from somewhere within it.”
“Yes.”
“And every instrument we use belongs to the world.”
“Yes.”
“And every concept we use.”
“Yes.”
“And every observer.”
“Yes.”
Stone was quiet for a while.
“Then how can we distinguish knowledge from imagination?”
River answered.
“Ask whether the world can answer back.”
Stone looked at River.
“The world can resist our expectations. A measurement can fail. An experiment can surprise us. A prediction can be wrong. Another observer can find what we missed. A different instrument can reveal something we could not see.”
Bird added:
“And our own ways of knowing can change because of what we encounter.”
The Things remembered the day Bird had predicted where River would flow.
The prediction had been wrong.
The river had changed course after heavy rain.
Bird had not therefore discovered that rivers were imaginary.
It had discovered that its understanding was incomplete.
The failure had become knowledge because the world had answered.
The Things began to understand objectivity differently.
Objectivity did not require the disappearance of perspective.
It required relations in which perspectives could encounter what exceeded them.
The more carefully they entered such relations, the more capable they became of discovering where their own understanding failed.
There was no view from nowhere.
But there could be better and worse ways of being situated somewhere.
The Things then wondered whether they could at least construct a complete description of the world from within it.
They imagined a great map.
The map would contain every Thing, every relation, every process, every structure.
Nothing would be omitted.
They worked for a very long time.
At last, Stone looked at the map.
“Is the map part of the world?”
“Yes.”
“Then it must appear on the map.”
The Things looked.
There was the map.
But then:
“Does the map include the act of making the map?”
“Yes.”
“And does it include our discussion about whether the map includes the act of making the map?”
The Things looked at one another.
The map was becoming very crowded.
They laughed.
It was not that a complete account was simply too large.
Something more fundamental was happening.
Any account of the whole was itself an event within the whole.
The map could represent much.
It could even represent its own making to some extent.
But it could never become an outside from which the world was finally surveyed.
The world could become more articulated through its maps, models, theories and concepts.
But it could not become an object standing wholly outside itself.
The Things realised that this was not a defect in knowledge.
It was a consequence of being part of what they were trying to know.
They began to think differently about the unknown.
For a long time, they had imagined the unknown as something beyond the boundary of the world.
Beyond what they knew lay the unknown.
Beyond the unknown, perhaps, lay something still further.
And perhaps beyond that—
But now they wondered whether the unknown had to be somewhere else.
What if the unknown was not another world?
What if it was the capacity of this world to exceed its present articulation?
A seed could become a tree in ways no seed could fully specify.
A river could open a new channel.
A species could encounter an environment in which previously insignificant differences became consequential.
A language could acquire a distinction no one had deliberately planned.
A concept could make a previously invisible possibility visible.
A structure could change the conditions under which it persisted.
The unknown was not necessarily an outside waiting beyond reality.
It could be the future becoming possible within reality.
The Things had learned something subtle.
The world could have no outside without being closed.
Indeed, perhaps the opposite was true.
Because there was no outside, there was always more world.
They returned to the horizon.
It looked different now.
Not because anything had appeared beyond it.
Nothing had.
But the Things no longer mistook the horizon for a boundary.
It was the edge of what they could presently articulate.
Beyond it lay not another world, but further possibilities of this one.
Stone looked at River.
“Then everything is connected?”
River shook.
“No.”
Stone was surprised.
“But if there is no outside—”
“That does not mean everything is connected to everything else.”
The Things understood.
A relation was always determinate.
This Thing affected that Thing in this way, under these conditions.
A boundary could separate as well as connect.
A constraint could prevent one possibility while making another possible.
A difference could distinguish without isolating.
A structure could organise some relations and exclude others.
The absence of an outside did not dissolve differences into an undifferentiated unity.
It made their belonging to one world more significant.
Things could be genuinely different without being independent of everything else.
Processes could have their own histories without existing outside relation.
Structures could acquire relative autonomy without becoming self-sufficient.
The world was not One Thing.
Nor was it an infinite collection of disconnected Things.
It was a world in which differences belonged to one another.
The Things now looked back over everything they had learned.
They had begun with Things.
Then relations had appeared.
Relations had become constitutive.
Becoming had become inseparable from being.
Difference had become productive.
Knowing had become participation.
Relations had become structures.
Structures had become achievements of continuing processes.
And now relation itself had become something more than one category among others.
It had become a condition under which the categories could appear.
Thing.
Relation.
Process.
Structure.
Difference.
Boundary.
Possibility.
Knowledge.
None had disappeared.
But none could claim to stand entirely on its own.
Each had acquired a history.
Each had become intelligible through relations.
The Things had begun to understand that a genealogy was not a straight line leading toward a final answer.
Each possibility could make another possibility available.
Each actualisation could change the field in which subsequent actualisations became possible.
The world did not merely contain possibilities.
It continually altered the conditions under which possibilities could become possible.
And so the Things finally understood why their journey had never really been about finding the first relation.
There was no first relation waiting somewhere behind everything else.
There was only the ongoing becoming of a world in which relations could generate Things, Things could alter relations, relations could become structures, structures could change the field of possibility, and new forms could emerge.
The world did not stand behind this process.
It was not another Thing underneath it.
It was the whole unfolding.
The Things stood together for a while without speaking.
Then Bird asked:
“Where are we?”
River moved around Stone.
Tree moved in the wind.
The air moved through Bird's feathers.
Stone remained where it was, though even Stone was changing.
No one answered.
The question no longer seemed to require an answer.
There was no place outside from which they could have asked it.
There was only this.
This relation.
This history.
This moment.
And whatever this moment might make possible next.
The horizon remained.
But it was no longer a wall.
It was an opening.
The Things had once thought that if the world had no outside, it must therefore be closed.
Now they understood the opposite.
There was no outside because there was always more world.
More relations.
More becoming.
More difference.
More possibility.
And perhaps that was what it meant for a world to be without an outside:
not that everything had finally been contained,
but that nothing needed to be.
The Things looked toward the horizon.
And for the first time, they did not ask what lay beyond it.
They asked:
What is becoming possible here, through the relations in which we already find ourselves?
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