Objects and Images: Contextualized and De-contextualized Fixation as Ontological Regimes

Contemporary technical, scientific, and institutional practices routinely circulate identical symbols, values, and measurements across heterogeneous settings. Despite their formal similarity, such distinctions often fail to persist when removed from the conditions under which they were produced. These failures are commonly attributed to misinterpretation, insufficient information, or methodological error. This paper argues that many such failures are ontological in nature and result from the conflation of distinct regimes governing admissible recurrence. Presupposing an ontology of fixation, the paper examines a distinction between two ontological regimes: objects and images. These regimes are not defined by meaning, representation, or epistemic access, but by the conditions under which the recurrence of a distinction remains admissible. Objects arise under regimes that admit detachment, allowing recurrence independently of the generative conditions of fixation. Images arise under regimes in which recurrence remains admissible only within those conditions. The paper analyzes how each regime persists and fails, showing that objects fail through drift while images fail through collapse. Systematic errors arise when distinctions stabilized under one regime are treated as if governed by the other. Such errors cannot be diagnosed at the semantic or epistemic level, since symbols and values may remain unchanged while admissibility silently fails. By articulating ontological regimes of admissible recurrence, the paper provides a basis for diagnosing a class of structural failures that arise in characteristic of contemporary technical systems, data representations, and experimental contexts. The distinction articulated here operates at a pre-semantic level and specifies conditions that precede and constrain semantic, structural, and processual descriptions.