From Object to Relation: A Copernican Revolution

Physics, sociology of art, anthropology and economics converge on what we can call, following Kuhn, a “paradigm shift”: it is the relation that makes the object, not the object that makes the relation. For Norbert Elias, the “relation” is not reducible to the “interactions” dear to a certain current of American sociology, but involves a more radical “interdependence” in which we are faced, not with pre-existing objects linked by relations, but with objects constituted by and through relations. The same goes for Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift, where the object is only the pretext for maintaining a relation through the act of giving, receiving, and giving back.