Against the Fabric of Spacetime

Physicists love their cloth. Textbooks and documentaries spread out a chequered grid — stretched, bent, or indented by heavy spheres. “The fabric of spacetime,” we are told, is the stage on which events unfold. It is woven, elastic, and pliable, a kind of cosmic cloth.

But this metaphor is not innocent. A fabric is a backdrop: inert, extended, already there. It suggests that reality is underpinned by a passive canvas upon which matter merely leaves its marks. In this image, spacetime is something like a theatre curtain, rippling as the play unfolds, but never itself the action.

Relationally, this is exactly backward. Events are not embroidered onto a pre-given cloth. What we call “spacetime” is nothing over and above the structured potential of events themselves. The “fabric” does not exist apart from the weave of actualisation; it is nothing but the patterning of relations as they take form.

The cloth metaphor also smuggles in a false substance. It tempts us to reify spacetime into a thing that can stretch, tear, ripple. But what actually stretches or curves are not bolts of metaphysical fabric — they are the relational possibilities of alignment, cut by events. The metaphor invites us to picture spacetime as a physical medium, when in truth it is an abstraction, a system of construal that tracks how possibilities interrelate.

To persist in speaking of fabric is to cling to Newton’s absolute stage — a grid that endures even if nothing happens upon it. To cut with relational ontology is to invert the image: the “fabric” is not what underlies events but what emerges from their alignment. No cloth, no backdrop, no loom: only the ongoing weaving of relational potential into actual events.

So the aphoristic cut is this:

There is no cosmic cloth — the only fabric is the weave of events themselves.