RelationShaping
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About This Book
Bologna, the 1920s. Giorgio Morandi spends his working life in a small room at 36 Via Fondazza, painting the same bottles and boxes from a low shelf. The objects barely change. The arrangements barely change. What changes across forty years is what Morandi sees in the space between the bottles. London, the 1830s. Michael Faraday spends his working life arranging iron filings on paper around magnets, watching how the patterns shift when the magnets shift. The filings are mundane. The magnets are common. What develops across thirty years is what Faraday sees in the field the iron filings together describe. The two cases occur a century and a continent apart. They share a structure that RelationShaping: Field Studies makes its central subject.
At the heart of the book is a single claim. Relational seeing is a competence, a trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements as the constitutive features of structure, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. The book argues this capacity across ten case studies that range from still-life painting to electromagnetic field theory, from Renaissance counterpoint to mycorrhizal forest networks, from the human microbiome to the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. A single capacity produces a Morandi painting and a Faraday diagram, a counterpoint exercise and a Sign Language utterance, a botanist's reading of a forest floor and an architect's reading of a poché plan. What runs through all of them is the relational structure the book is trying to name.
Across ten chapters, RelationShaping: Field Studies traces the relational-seeing competence through a sequence of paired case studies. Morandi's still-life shelves and Faraday's iron-filing diagrams. Phyllotactic spirals in plant growth and Renaissance counterpoint. The human microbiome and Anni Albers's woven textiles. Topology and architectural poché. Mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors and the turn-taking patterns of conversation analysis. Charles Sanders Peirce's three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. Three closing chapters extend the framework into harder territory: the trained eye in domains where it has not been institutionally named, the methodological problem of attending to relations not yet discovered, and the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure. The book closes with a Hudson estuary case that draws together the temporal and ecological dimensions of the argument.
Relational Seeing as Trainable Competence
The book's central claim operates around a single observation. A trained perceiver attends to the relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure those elements together produce, and the relations are what the trained perception actually perceives. A hay inspector who walks into a barn and reads the bale by color, leaf, stem, mold, and weight performs the same kind of perception as the painter who stands in front of the still-life shelf and sees the field of light between the bottles. The same kind of perception runs through the field theory of physics, through Renaissance music, through the architecture of shelter, through the linguistics of signed languages. This competence is real and acquirable, and it operates below the level of conscious description in any practitioner who has it.
Why This Argument Matters Now
A new technology of automated output has arrived without an obvious place in the existing order of human practice. The technology produces results that approximate, in their surface features, the outputs of trained human perceivers, and the substitution proceeds faster than the institutions that train such perceivers can adapt. Professional opinion confronting these technologies articulates objections in vocabulary that often misses what the technology has and has not done. The substitution covers two distinct kinds of human work: work that humans were happy to be relieved of, and work that depended on perceptual capacities the substitute does not actually contain. RelationShaping equips a reader to recognize the second kind, because the substitute's silence about what it cannot do is exactly the silence that has not had a vocabulary.
The Twenty-Year Lineage
The argument of the book is not a recent one. The blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network has been working on these questions since 2007. Almost twenty years of accumulated writing about specific cases of relational structure across different domains gradually produced the framework that the new book gathers into a single sustained argument. Many of the book's chapters began as blog posts whose claims were tested against new examples and refined across the long span. The blog form, by its nature, could not hold the full argument in one place. The book is the form that could.
Table of Contents
Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents
Author's Note
Introduction: The Always-Already Field
Chapter One. Relational Seeing as Trainable Competence
Chapter Two. The Light Between Things in Morandi and Faraday
Chapter Three. Spirals and Voices in Phyllotaxis and Counterpoint
Chapter Four. The Holobiont and the Loom in Microbiome and Anni Albers
Chapter Five. The Wall as Designed Space in Topology and Architectural Poché
Chapter Six. Hidden Infrastructure in Mycorrhizal Networks and Conversation Analysis
Chapter Seven. Three-Cornered Sense in Peirce and ASL Classifier Predicates
Chapter Eight. The Found Field
Chapter Nine. The Undiscovered
Chapter Ten. The Severed Field
Conclusion: The Discipline of the Between
End Matter: A Note on Sources and Influences · Glossary · Bibliography · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"The form of an object is a 'diagram of forces,' in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it."
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917.
"Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change."
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1902.
"The relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system."
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book that argues for sustained attention and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacity should not lock its argument behind a paywall. The free PDF is a fully formatted reading edition with color typography matching the cover, embedded fonts, a linked table of contents, and the complete text including all chapters, glossary, bibliography, and front and back matter. Two hundred and eighty-two pages of US Letter trim, formatted for screen reading, home printing, or archive. Download it, read it, contest it. The relational-seeing framework is offered to any reader who wants to use it.
Dedication
For Janna Sweenie,
who showed me the between.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The Scientific Aesthetic (Companion Volume) · What the Hay Inspector Sees (Prairie Voice) · The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle (Boles Blogs) · Virtual RelationShaping (Boles Blogs) · The Definition of RelationShaping (Boles Blogs) · Mac Office 2008 RelationShaping (Boles Blogs) · About David Boles