Interactive Ontology

Caleb Faul's (2024) coined term for the metaphysical view his reading of Rothenberg's Three Heads through MP's institution-logic motivates. Things are neither static (complete all at once) nor self-contained (sealed off from interaction); they "turn into themselves" only through interaction, and individuality is "a reaching beyond [the thing] itself, a manner of interacting" (faul-2024-ontologically-interactive-painting p. 197). The concept is single-source on the wiki and novel in epistemic status — it is Faul's interpretive synthesis-term, not yet engaged by other secondary literature.

Key Points

Coined term: Interactive ontology is Faul's synthesis-term, not Merleau-Ponty's. It names the metaphysical commitment Faul argues the institution-reading of painting requires.
Core thesis: A thing's individuality is not what is contained within it but what reaches beyond it; things are interactive in their constitution, not just in their relations. To be a unified thing is "to become different, or, put otherwise, to be something is to become something. A thing must turn into itself" (Faul p. 191; raw line 40).
Two negative commitments:
1. Anti-static: Things are not complete all at once; what they are includes what they will become.
2. Anti-self-containment: Things are not closed off from interaction; their constitution is partly the constitution of how they relate.
The painting case: Faul argues this metaphysics is visible in Three Heads. The horses do not "open onto" Rothenberg from within a self-contained horse-being; they are in being constituted by the connection Rothenberg's painting institutes. "The horses are revealed to us through being taken up by Rothenberg, who herself is revealed to us by virtue of her painterly power being applied to the subject matter of horses" (p. 196).
"Everyday mysticism": Faul anticipates the worry that the thesis sounds mystical and qualifies — "this is a thoroughly everyday mysticism, one which even the most basic perceptual experience can teach us" (p. 197). The closing image (someone struck by a perceptual possibility, rushing to a friend, "Look!") is meant to perform the thesis at the level of ordinary perception.
Sketched, not defended at length: Faul self-acknowledges (footnote 60) that "this is a necessarily brief sketch or preliminary articulation of the point. Clarifying what such an interactive view of individual specificity implies will require future work."

What the Concept Does

Interactive ontology performs three distinguishable kinds of work in Faul's argument:

It generalizes the institution-logic of painting into a metaphysics. MP's "every theory of painting is a metaphysics" (E&M 132) is the warrant; Faul's move is to extract the ontology implicit in the institution-reading of painting and articulate it as a thesis about things in general. The institution-logic, applied to the painter-world relation, requires that perceptual things be open (not self-contained) and developmental (not static); these requirements are the interactive ontology.
It makes the "horses themselves participate" claim less metaphysically strange. The most counterintuitive claim of Faul's paper is that the horses themselves "open the perspective" from which they appear in the painting (p. 194). Without an interactive ontology, this claim risks anthropomorphism or panpsychism. Within an interactive ontology, the claim becomes structural: perceptual things have institutional openness because that is what being a perceptual thing is. The claim is no longer attributing consciousness to horses but stating the ontological character that lets the institution-logic apply to them.
It corrects the subjective/objective framing of art-commentary. The "ambiguous balance" reading of Rothenberg (Karl Ruhrberg) accepts the subject/object distinction it should question. Faul's interactive ontology dissolves the framing: there is no walled-off objective horse-being and no walled-off subjective Rothenberg-being whose contributions could be "balanced"; both are revealed as constituted through their interaction in the painting. The metaphysics directly underwrites Faul's polemical move at the level of art-criticism.

What It Rejects

Substance-ontology: Things as self-enclosed presences with their identity contained within themselves. Interactive ontology rejects the picture of things as bound by their boundaries; things are bound up with what they interact with.
Pure-flux ontology: Things as nothing but transformation. Interactive ontology preserves a sense of individuality and specificity ("This is not to say that there is no individual specificity," p. 196) while denying that the specificity is contained within.
Subject-object framings of art: Painter as locus of agency, world as passive given. Faul's polemical target throughout: Karl Ruhrberg's "outbreak of subjectivity" reading of modern painting; Malraux's claim (via Ruhrberg) that a Manet portrait "contains more of the painter than of the person portrayed."
The "ambiguous balance" reading of Rothenberg: Acknowledging both poles without challenging the framing. Faul's stronger move is that her work challenges the very distinction, not that it occupies a midpoint within it.

Stakes

If interactive ontology is accepted as the metaphysical view to which the institution-reading of painting commits us:

The institution-logic generalizes from artwork-and-interpretation to world-and-painting without metaphysical embarrassment. Faul's paraphrase-extension of E&M 139 (the structural argumentative move of his paper) presupposes that perceptual things have the same institutional openness that artworks do. Interactive ontology is what makes this presupposition coherent.
Painting becomes a privileged metaphysical site. The painter does not report on an interactive ontology; she enacts it. Each painting is an instance of the metaphysics in operation. This gives Faul a strong claim about why painting is philosophically important: it is not exemplifying a thesis from elsewhere but is the site at which the thesis becomes visible.
Individuality is reconceived non-containerly. Individuality is "a reaching beyond [oneself], a manner of interacting" (p. 196) — not what one has within oneself but how one relates. This has consequences for any topic where individuality is at stake (personal identity, biological organisms, cultural traditions); Faul does not pursue these but flags the future-work direction.
The wiki's reading of MP's late ontology gains a contemporary commentator. Faul places himself in the institutional camp of MP secondary literature (alongside Kaushik); his interactive ontology is the painter-world version of what the wiki reads under chiasm / ineinander / stiftung in MP's late vocabulary. See claims#faul-institutional-camp (live).

Problem-Space

The concept addresses a recurring philosophical problem: how should we conceive of perceptual things such that they can call forth (and not merely undergo) painterly transformation? Faul reformulates this as: what ontology of the perceptual allows the institution-logic of artworks-and-interpretations to apply also to world-and-paintings? The problem-space recurs across:

chiasm / reversibility — the seeing-seen reversibility-without-coincidence requires perceptual things to be neither closed nor open in the binary sense.
*pregnance* / generative-passivity — perceptual things as ready-for-development, not as inert.
interanimality — animal beings as participants in shared sensible fields.
ineinander — mutual inherence of subject and world.
embodied-act-of-framing (van Sorge 2025) — addresses the subject-side of the same problem-space (the painter's embodied framing-decision under undecidability), where Faul addresses the world-side (the perceptual things' openness).

Connections

was developed by Faul 2024 — wiki's only source for this concept; the page is novel, single-source.
is the metaphysical upshot of institution applied to the painter-world relation — Faul's argumentative move from §2 / Part 1 (institution exposition) through §3 / Part 2 (Three Heads case study) to §4 / Part 3 (interactive ontology) is the wiki's anchor for this connection.
generalizes coherent-deformation into a metaphysics — Faul's "coherent deformation of the perceptual world" (raw line 72) requires perceptual things to be the kind of things that can be coherently deformed; interactive ontology is the answer.
applies advent-vs-event to perceptual things — what an advent does to interpretations, the perceptual world's openness does to paintings; both are forms of openness rather than closures.
underwrites Rothenberg's connection register — connection is what practical interaction looks like under interactive ontology; the painter does not project onto a closed-off subject matter or copy from a passive given but connects with a thing whose individuality is itself a manner of interacting.
is structurally parallel to embodied-act-of-framing (van Sorge 2025) — both correct MP's painterly rhetoric where it slides toward universal presence. The corrections converge at "painting is partial, non-totalizing, responsibility under undecidability" but diverge at the operative figure: Faul routes the correction through the world's openness (institution / coherent deformation); van Sorge routes it through the embodied subject's framing-decision (parergon / Derrida). See claims#faul-vansorge-corrective-convergence (candidate) for the structural-parallel articulation, and embodied-act-of-framing §"Connections" for the back-link.
contrasts with substance-ontology — the wiki has no dedicated substance-ontology page; the contrast is recorded here as a polemical-target.
false-friend caution against Latour-style actor-network theory (ANT) — both ANT and interactive ontology emphasize relational constitution, but ANT presupposes a flat ontology of actors with symmetric agency; Faul's interactive ontology is non-symmetric — Rothenberg paints, the horses do not. The "openness" of perceptual things is making-possible, not agency. ANT and interactive ontology are different problem-spaces sharing surface vocabulary; ANT's "actant" is not Faul's connection.
false-friend caution against panpsychism — Faul anticipates the worry (footnote 60) but does not extensively defuse it. Within Faul's framework, the perceptual world's openness is institutional (call-to-follow, demand-of-a-future), not consciousness-attribution; the worry stands as an open question rather than a settled refutation.

Open Questions

Does interactive ontology require panpsychism, and if not, why not? Faul gestures at the making-possible / agency distinction but does not develop it. A reader sympathetic to panpsychism could read Faul's "horses themselves opening the perspective" as evidence for a panpsychic reading; Faul's answer must be that institutional openness ≠ consciousness, but this answer is sketched, not argued.
Is interactive ontology consistent with chiasm's reversibility-without-coincidence? The structural fit looks good (both reject substance-ontology, both insist on relational constitution), but Faul does not engage MP's late ontology's working notes (V&I, PoP) to test the fit. Whether interactive ontology is the same view as the late MP's reversibility ontology, or a related but distinct view, is unaddressed.
What is the relation to stiftung as diachronic mechanism? Faul does not use Stiftung (writes only "institution" in English). Whether interactive ontology requires the wiki's Phase 1–8 reading of Stiftung as diachronic mechanism (and chiasm as synchronic intelligibility-condition), or whether it is compatible with a different reading of the late ontology, is open.
Can the metaphysics be generalized beyond the painter-world relation? Faul gestures (footnote 60) at "individuality" as a future-work topic; the implicit claim is that interactive ontology applies to personal identity, biological organisms, cultural traditions, etc. Whether each of these generalizations requires its own argument or whether they all follow from the painting case is unaddressed.
Single-source caution: this page is novel, single-source. The page should not be cited on other pages as if it were a settled concept; treat it as a live thesis (concept-page analogue of a live claim). Promotion to settled status requires either (a) a second secondary source engaging the term, or (b) an argument that the term is the wiki's own synthetic interpretation of a recurrent corpus phenomenon.

Sources

faul-2024-ontologically-interactive-painting — the wiki's only source for this concept. The argument is articulated in §4 / Part 3 (pp. 195–197); the case-study basis is §3 / Part 2 (pp. 192–195); the conceptual apparatus from MP is §2 / Part 1 (pp. 187–192).

Single-source page: this is a novel concept developed by one source on the wiki. The epistemic-status caution applies to all citations of this page from elsewhere on the wiki.