Relations

Macfarlene refers to Henry James's "circle of relations". What is it?

It seems the idea here is internal, formal or perceptual coherence instead of indeterminacy of the world. So, it is a problematic concept and an exclusionary one.

“Relations stop nowhere.” From Henry James’s preface to Roderick Hudson.

“… the painter’s subject consisting ever, obviously, of the related state, to each other, of certain figures and things. To exhibit these relations, once they have all been recognised, is to ‘treat’ his idea, which involves neglecting none of those that directly minister to interest; the degree of that directness remaining meanwhile a matter of highly difficult appreciation, and one on which felicity of form and composition, as a part of the total effect, mercilessly rests. Up to what point is such and such a development indispensable to the interest? What is the point beyond which it ceases to be rigorously so? Where, for the complete expression of one’s subject, does a particular relation stop—giving way to some other not concerned in that expression?

“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.”

In Biology and Ecology

Cf. Biosemiotics

Relationships are primary, rather than mechanisms that lead to redaction. In a living world, a relationship encourages/makes participants to continue. Separately, they would have no advantage.

Relationality in Science and Its Concequences

Kurki, Milja. International Relations in a Relational Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

References

Marmodoro, Anna, and David Yates. The Metaphysics of Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.