Against the Background Field

Electromagnetic and gravitational fields are often pictured as pre-existing stages on which matter moves, as if they were inert canvases. This metaphor misleads. Fields are not backgrounds; they are relational potentialities — patterns of influence instantiated only through interaction. There is no field independent of its relations. To imagine them as passive scenery is to confuse potential with substance, and to obscure the mutual co-constitution of what we call “matter” and “field.” The universe is not matter moving through empty space; it is a network of relational events in which potential is continuously actualised.