The Relations of Possibility: I. A Relation Is Not a Connection

We ordinarily think of relations as connections between things.

There is a tree, and beside it there is a rock. The tree is near the rock. The rock is heavier than the tree. Two things exist, and a relation connects them.

It is an intuitively attractive picture.

But it quietly assumes that the things come first.

The relation is then something added afterwards: a connection between entities that already exist independently of it.

What happens if we reverse the order?

Consider something as simple as a doorway.

The doorway is not merely an object standing between two rooms. It establishes a relation between spaces: passage and obstruction, inside and outside, here and there. Its significance depends upon what can pass through it, for whom, and under what conditions.

The relation is not simply between already meaningful things.

It helps constitute what those things can be for one another.

This becomes clearer when we consider that changing a relation can change what is possible without changing the things themselves.

A locked door and an open door may be physically almost identical objects. What has changed is the relation.

Yet the field of possibility has changed dramatically.

Passage has become inaccessible.

The important difference, then, is not between two things. It is between possibilities generated by different relations.

This suggests that a relation is more than a connection.

A connection joins.

A relation differentiates.

It establishes ways in which something can be situated with respect to something else, and in doing so it can alter what becomes possible.

That does not mean that things disappear into relations. It means that what a thing is cannot always be separated from the relations through which it participates in a world.

And once we see this, a further question appears.

If relations can make some possibilities available and others unavailable, then relations are not merely descriptions of how the world is arranged.

They are part of how the world can become.

That is a much more consequential claim.

For possibility does not arrive after relations.

Perhaps possibility begins with them.

And if that is so, then the question is no longer simply:

What is related to what?

It becomes:

What differences do relations make possible?