We have been following a gradual displacement.
Things need not be understood as entirely independent substances.
Being can be understood through becoming.
Difference can be generative.
The knower itself can be understood as a participant in the world rather than as an observer standing outside it.
But another possibility now becomes visible.
Relations can persist.
A relation between two people may disappear when they do. But a social relation can survive the individuals who occupy it. A language continues after its speakers die. An institution persists when its members are replaced. A market continues operating although no particular person created it.
Relations can therefore become more than events between particular things.
They can acquire a relatively stable organisation.
They can become structures.
And once relations become structures, something peculiar happens.
The relations created by things can begin to shape the possibilities of the things that participate in them.
The structure becomes a condition of action.
From relation to pattern
A single relation is an event or connection.
A structure is something more persistent.
Consider language.
Two people can associate a sound with something they wish to communicate. But a language is not simply the sum of all such individual acts.
The words acquire their possibilities through their relations to other words.
A word means something partly because it differs from other words and because it participates in patterns of use shared by a community.
The speaker therefore inherits a structure they did not create.
Yet the structure is not independent of speakers.
It exists because people continue to use it.
This produces a curious circularity.
People sustain the structure, while the structure sustains the possibilities of what people can say.
The relation has become constitutive in both directions.
Saussure and the relational sign
Ferdinand de Saussure makes one aspect of this especially clear.
The value of a linguistic sign does not reside simply in some intrinsic property of the sound or word.
It depends upon its differences from other signs within the system.
Language is therefore not merely a collection of names attached to independently existing things.
It is a system of differences.
This is a major conceptual development for relational thought.
The identity of a sign is partly determined by its place within a structure.
Change the relations among the signs and their values change.
The individual word does not have a completely self-contained identity that remains untouched by the language around it.
Yet language is not simply a structure imposed from outside.
It exists through use.
The system constrains speakers, but speakers also reproduce and transform the system.
The relation has become structural without becoming independent of participation.
Durkheim and the social fact
Émile Durkheim makes a similar possibility visible in social life.
A society cannot simply be reduced to the individuals who compose it.
Social norms, institutions and practices have a reality that is not exhausted by any particular individual's intentions.
A language exists before an individual speaker is born.
A legal system confronts a person as something already there.
A social convention can shape behaviour even when nobody consciously endorses it.
This gives social structures a peculiar character.
They are human creations, but they are not therefore under the immediate control of individual humans.
Something collectively produced can acquire powers that no individual possesses.
This is one of the most important insights for a relational ontology.
A relation can become a condition.
Once a pattern of relations becomes sufficiently stable, it can constrain the possibilities available to its participants.
Marx and relations of production
Karl Marx takes this problem into economic and political life.
His concept of capital is especially revealing.
Capital is not simply a collection of machines, buildings, money and commodities.
It is a social relation.
A machine sitting in a warehouse is not capital merely because it is a physical object. It becomes capital within a particular organisation of production, ownership and exchange.
Likewise, labour is not simply an activity performed by an individual human being.
Under particular social conditions it becomes wage labour.
The categories themselves therefore depend upon relations.
Yet once established, these relations confront individuals as objective conditions.
People enter a labour market they did not create.
They encounter prices they did not individually determine.
They depend upon institutions whose rules precede them.
The social structure is produced through human activity, but it acquires a relative autonomy from any particular human intention.
This is a profound relational paradox.
What we collectively produce can come to organise us.
The structure acts without an agent
This helps explain something that can otherwise seem mysterious.
We often say that a society does something.
The market rewards.
The institution excludes.
The economy demands.
The state permits.
But who, exactly, is acting?
Sometimes there is an identifiable agent.
Often there is not.
The structure produces effects without possessing a mind of its own.
This does not mean that structures are supernatural entities.
It means that organised relations can generate consequences that no participant individually intends.
A market can emerge from innumerable exchanges without anyone designing the overall price structure.
A bureaucracy can develop procedures that nobody particularly wanted but that everyone follows.
A language can develop grammatical patterns that no speaker consciously invented.
A city can acquire traffic patterns that no driver planned.
The whole has properties that cannot be attributed straightforwardly to any single part.
This is emergence in a particularly important relational sense.
Structure is not simply constraint
There is a danger, however, in speaking only of structural constraint.
Structures do not merely prevent things from happening.
They make things possible.
A language restricts the combinations a speaker can easily produce, but it also gives the speaker an enormous repertoire of distinctions.
A legal system limits certain actions, but it also creates rights, contracts, procedures and forms of protection that would not exist without it.
A musical scale constrains available pitches, but it simultaneously makes certain kinds of musical organisation possible.
A game has rules, but without rules there is no game to play.
Constraint and affordance therefore belong together.
A structure narrows some possibilities while opening others.
This is crucial for our developing conception of relation.
A relation becomes structurally significant not merely when it restricts behaviour, but when it organises a field of possibilities.
Structure and identity
Structures can also shape the identities of their participants.
A person can be a citizen only within a political structure.
A teacher exists as a teacher within an educational relation.
A buyer and seller acquire their roles within a market relation.
A parent and child are not simply two individuals who happen to have a particular emotional connection. Their relationship constitutes a set of expectations, responsibilities and possibilities.
This does not mean that individuals are nothing but their social roles.
They can resist them.
Combine them in unexpected ways.
Change them.
Refuse them.
But the very possibility of resistance depends upon the structure against which resistance occurs.
Identity is therefore neither wholly internal nor wholly imposed.
It emerges through participation in structured relations.
The strange autonomy of structure
Here we encounter a particularly interesting phenomenon.
A structure can be dependent upon its participants while constraining those same participants.
A language requires speakers.
Yet the speaker does not normally decide what words mean.
A market requires buyers and sellers.
Yet no buyer or seller controls the market as a whole.
A political institution requires people to enact its rules.
Yet the rules can constrain the people who enact them.
This can look paradoxical only if we assume that something must either be independent or be completely under the control of those upon whom it depends.
But relation gives us another possibility.
Dependence does not eliminate autonomy.
A pattern can depend upon its elements without being reducible to any one of them.
A whirlpool depends upon water, but the pattern of the whirlpool is not identical with any particular parcel of water.
A language depends upon speakers, but no individual speaker is the language.
A society depends upon people, but no individual is society.
The structure has a reality of its own kind.
The relation becomes recursive
We can now see how the relational picture has become more complicated.
At first we imagined:
things → relations → things
Then:
relations → relatively stable things
Now we have:
things participate in relations → relations form persistent structures → structures alter the possibilities of things → altered things reproduce or transform the structures
The loop has become recursive.
There is no single point at which we can say:
“This is the real thing, and everything else is secondary.”
The parts constitute the whole.
The whole conditions the parts.
And the relationship can change through the activity of the parts it conditions.
This is much closer to a genuinely relational ontology.
Marx's historical contribution
Marx adds another dimension.
Structures have histories.
A particular organisation of property, labour or exchange is not simply a fact of nature.
It has emerged.
And because it has emerged, it can change.
This is where structure connects directly to our earlier discussion of becoming.
A structure is relatively stable, but it is not necessarily permanent.
It is an achievement of historical relations.
Its persistence depends upon continued reproduction.
And the very activities that reproduce it can also generate tensions that transform it.
Here Marx and Hegel converge, despite their profound differences.
A structure can contain relations that alter the conditions of its own continuation.
History therefore becomes a study of changing relational organisations.
But structures are not destinies
There is an important qualification.
To say that structures constrain possibilities is not to say that they determine them completely.
A social structure can make some actions easier and others harder.
It can distribute resources unequally.
It can make some futures difficult to imagine.
But people remain capable of improvisation, resistance and invention.
Indeed, structures change precisely because participants sometimes act in ways that the structure did not anticipate.
The relationship between structure and agency is therefore not:
structure determines action
nor:
individuals freely create structure.
It is recursive.
Structures condition action, and action reproduces or transforms structures.
This is not a compromise between two opposing theories.
It is a different way of framing the problem.
The question becomes one of mutual constitution.
The structure can outlive its origin
There is another consequence.
Once a relational structure has become established, its original history can disappear from view.
People can experience an institution as simply “the way things are.”
A linguistic distinction can seem natural.
A social hierarchy can appear inevitable.
An economic arrangement can seem like a feature of reality itself.
This is one reason structures can be powerful.
Their history becomes invisible.
The relation that was once produced through particular circumstances comes to appear as a property of the world.
Genealogy can therefore become a form of relational analysis.
It asks:
What relations produced this structure?
And then:
What possibilities does the structure now produce?
The second question is just as important as the first.
A structure is not merely the residue of the past.
It is an active condition of the future.
The same pattern beyond society
The insight need not remain confined to social theory.
Biology offers structures maintained through relations among organisms, cells and environments.
Ecology offers networks in which the persistence of one population can depend upon the persistence of others.
In cognition, concepts form systems in which changing one distinction can alter the significance of others.
In technology, infrastructures create fields of possibility that shape subsequent innovation.
In science, theories, instruments and experimental practices form structures that determine which questions can be asked easily and which phenomena can be detected.
In each case, relations can become sufficiently organised and persistent to function as conditions.
The structure is neither an independent thing nor a mere collection of interactions.
It is a pattern of relations with temporal persistence and causal consequences.
From structure to possibility
This may be the most important step so far.
We began this genealogy by asking whether relations merely connect things.
Now we can say something stronger.
Relations can constitute things.
They can organise becoming.
They can generate differences.
They can structure knowledge.
And they can themselves become relatively stable patterns that shape what their participants can do.
The ontology is beginning to acquire a distinctive form.
Reality is not simply a collection of entities.
Nor is it an undifferentiated web in which everything is equally related to everything else.
It is a differentiated field of relations in which relatively stable entities, processes and structures emerge, persist and transform.
And those structures organise possibilities.
What something can do depends partly upon the relations in which it participates.
What those relations can become depends partly upon the structures in which they are embedded.
And what the structure can become depends upon what its participants do within it.
Possibility therefore travels through levels.
The philosophical inheritance
This is why Marx, Saussure and Durkheim belong in a genealogy of relational thought even though none of them offers the relational ontology we are seeking.
They each make a different possibility visible.
Saussure shows how identity can arise from differences within a system.
Durkheim shows how relations can acquire social reality beyond individual intention.
Marx shows how social relations can become objective structures that shape the possibilities of those who reproduce them.
None of these insights needs to be accepted wholesale.
Their value lies partly in the questions they make unavoidable.
How can relations become durable?
How can something produced through relations acquire relative autonomy?
How can a structure constrain the participants whose activities sustain it?
And perhaps most importantly:
How can a structure that has become relatively stable also remain capable of transformation?
That last question will take us somewhere different.
For if structures are patterns of relations that persist through time, then we need to understand not only how they constrain and reproduce themselves, but how they can generate genuinely new forms.
We have already seen becoming.
We have seen generative difference.
We have seen participation.
Now we are ready to ask what happens when process itself becomes fundamental.
That is where Bergson and Whitehead will take the relational question further.
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