“Don’t ask what lies between things. Ask what holds them in relation.”
The idea that space is a kind of invisible container — a “room” between objects — is deeply entrenched in everyday thinking. To help shift that intuition, we can draw on metaphors and analogies that restructure the imagination, while remaining faithful to the relational ontology we’ve been building.
Here are several ways to reframe the concept of space — not as a medium or void, but as a topology of relation.
1. The Spider Web
Imagine a spider web stretched across a window frame. The web isn’t “in space” — it is a pattern of relation between anchor points. There’s no medium “between” the threads; what exists is the structure created by their interconnections.
Now picture two flies caught on opposite strands. The distance between them isn’t a measure of emptiness — it’s a function of the web’s tension and design. If one part shifts, the whole web vibrates.
Space is the web, not the air between.
2. A Dance, Not a Stage
In ballet or martial arts, movement takes place across a stage. But imagine now there is no fixed floor — only the dancers. Their movements shape the choreography’s spatiality. When they move closer, or mirror each other, the geometry of the dance emerges from their relation.
Take away the dancers, and there's no “space” left — just emptiness. But take away the relational unfolding (even if dancers remain still), and the space collapses too. The stage is not necessary for there to be a spatial configuration — only the interaction is.
Space is the dance, not the stage.
3. Threads in a Loom
A woven textile is made of interlaced threads. There is no cloth without these crossings — and no “empty cloth” into which they are placed. In this metaphor, each thread is a process, and the fabric is their co-instantiation.
If you remove a thread, the relational pattern changes. If the threads are loosely spaced, there is “more room,” but that “room” is still structured by the relations of what remains.
Space is the weave, not the gap between threads.
4. A Network, Not a Highway
In a neural or social network, the topology isn’t “in” anything — it is the set of relations among nodes. If you know the connections, you know the shape of the system. There is no need to imagine an invisible webbing that connects the parts — the relation itself is all that exists.
In physics, too, when we talk about fields, particles, or gravitational influences, we should not imagine an invisible substance stretching between them, but a network of ongoing constraints.
Space is the map of relations, not the terrain beneath it.
Why These Metaphors Matter
Each of these metaphors pushes back against the intuitive idea that space is a background medium — a place “between” things. Instead, they ask us to imagine space as:
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A configuration of tension (web)
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A dynamic unfolding (dance)
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A relational pattern (weave)
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An abstracted topology (network)
All of them share one message: if there are no relations, there is no space.
An Exercise in Reimagining
Try applying this thinking to familiar phenomena:
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A falling apple is not moving through space, but reconfiguring its relation to the Earth in a gravitational topology.
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Light does not cross a distance, but instantiates relation between source and receiver.
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The expansion of the universe is not objects flying apart into empty space, but a relational unfolding where the topology itself is reconfiguring.
These are not poetic metaphors — they are ontological corrections to inherited misframings.
Final Thought: Language as a Relational Field
Just as we mis-construe space when we imagine it as a substance, we often mis-construe language in the same way — as a container for ideas. But like space, language is a structured unfolding of relation: of sound to meaning, clause to clause, self to other.
So too with space: it is meaningful only in relation. It is never empty — because it is never “there” at all, unless something co-instantiates it.
Space isn’t a thing. It’s a way things relate.
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