Reductionism can also be seen as the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents*. Such a position, though, can not be satisfying. As, for example, noted by Mark Buchanan in his work Nexus, to completely understand a system, we also need to know the interactions between parts, that is relations.

Furthermore, he says, interactions between parts in a complex system often lead to global models of organization independently from the single elements. That means that it does not matter what the parts of a system are as long as we have a structure of relations. Incidentally that is pretty much the core of the Structuralism, wich has its roots in the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and, before, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the two fathers of Semiotics.

Are relations really that important? Yep. And what we're doing here it to present a set of images manipulations inspired by the topic. As you might know, a digital image is a finite set of elements, the pixels. With a bit of code it was easy to literally change the relations between them in various ways. So here's the results. Just one more thing before we go: one could think that in this case, at least, elements are as important as relations, but, if you look closely, aren't the pixels themselves lower level relations between the RGB channels? ;)