1 Time as the Unfolding of Process — A Relational Reframing
In the modern scientific worldview, time is often imagined as a uniform container — a linear continuum in which things happen. Physics treats it as a fourth dimension alongside the three of space, something we move through or are moved by. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, time is not a container. It is not an empty backdrop against which processes unfold. Rather, time is the very dimension of unfolding itself — the relational axis of becoming.
This view reframes time as neither objective nor subjective, but as inherently semiotic. That is, it is a meaning dimension, emerging from and with the processes it organises. A process is not located “in” time; it constitutes time — just as a conversation constitutes meaning through the very act of being spoken.
From this perspective, time is not a fixed sequence, but a dynamic arising:
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It unfolds as processes unfold.
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It becomes through instantiations of potential.
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It is felt in and through consciousness, not as a clockwork metronome, but as the lived rhythm of meaning.
Potential and Instance
In a relational ontology, we distinguish between potential and instance. This is not just a distinction between the general and the particular, but between structured affordance and actualised relation. In temporal terms:
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Potential time is the structure of temporal meaning available to be instantiated.
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Instance time is the actual unfolding of a process — a stretch of becoming that occupies a place on the cline between potential and instance.
For example, the structure of narrative offers culturally shaped potentials for past, present, and future. But these do not exist independently; they are instantiated in texts, in utterances, and in experiences. Narrative time isn’t “in” the story — it is the unfolding of the story itself.
Time and Consciousness
If time is the dimension of unfolding, then consciousness is a process of temporal actualisation. In our neural model — grounded in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection — consciousness is not a substance but a processual selection of patterns. These selections are both temporal and semiotic. They occur over time, but they also constitute time.
Our experiences of flow, delay, anticipation, memory, and repetition are not distortions of objective time — they are the very fabric of meaning-in-becoming. And meaning systems — from language to ritual, from culture to mythology — are the semiotic scaffolds through which such temporal experiences are shaped, shared, and re-actualised.
Toward a Semiotic Cosmology
In this reframing, we are not placing time “within” the world. Rather, we are locating the world — the world as construed — within time as semiotic unfolding. Time is not an object; it is the temporal dimension of meaning itself. And just as meaning is always relational, always patterned and always instantiated anew, so too is time.
In the posts to follow, we will explore how different meaning systems shape temporal experience, how grammar enacts time through tense and aspect, how subjectivity emerges through temporal orientation, and how social structures and imaginative acts give rise to collective temporalities of memory, anticipation, and transformation.
2 Grammatical Time and the Semiotics of Tense
If time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes, then language is one of the primary ways we organise, construe, and enact that unfolding. Every time we speak or write, we are not merely describing time — we are doing time. Through grammar, we instantiate temporal relations, selectively activating patterns of meaning from our cultural and linguistic meaning potential.
At the heart of this linguistic temporality is tense — a system that locates a process in relation to a speaking event. But tense is not simply a representation of clock time. It is a semiotic resource for positioning experience in relation to the act of meaning itself.
The Grammar of Temporal Relation
In Systemic Functional Linguistics, tense is not a label attached to verbs — it is a system of interpersonal and experiential meaning. It allows speakers to construe events as having happened, happening, or about to happen, always from a particular vantage point.
Tense structures time in three primary ways:
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It positions processes relative to the “now” of the speech event.
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It orders sequences of events or states — establishing before, after, or simultaneous relations.
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It frames meanings of completion, continuation, or anticipation through aspectual choices.
In other words, grammatical time is a relational map of becoming — not a neutral record of when something occurred, but a semiotic act of patterning experience.
Tense as Instantiation of Temporal Potential
Every tense selection — whether present perfect, future progressive, or past simple — is an instantiation of potential temporal meaning. The system of tense offers structured affordances for construing temporality, and speakers activate these selectively and creatively.
In this way, tense is not a representation of time in the physical world. It is a social-semantic technology: a cultural scaffold for making temporal distinctions that matter to us — to our purposes, our stories, and our interactions.
Becoming Through Language
In a relational ontology, meaning is always emerging — always on the move between potential and instance. Tense participates in this motion. It allows us to construe what has become, what is becoming, and what may yet become. And it does this not by referring to external clock-time, but by articulating position within the unfolding of meaning itself.
Grammatical time is thus a form of temporal individuation. Each utterance not only positions events in relation to others — it positions us. It creates a self who remembers, a self who anticipates, a self embedded in a fabric of unfolding meaning.
Beyond Tense: Time as Social Semiotic
Tense is only one resource among many. Languages also use modality, mood, temporal adverbials, and narrative structure to construe time. These are not just linguistic conventions — they are ways of inhabiting time. In the posts to come, we’ll explore how these patterns shape subjective and collective temporalities — and how time, far from being uniform or objective, is always situated, enacted, and shared.
3 Subjective Time — Consciousness and the Rhythm of Meaning
If grammatical time is a semiotic system for construing temporal relations, then subjective time is the lived dimension in which those meanings unfold. It is the inner rhythm of becoming — the pulse of consciousness as it moves, not through a fixed timeline, but through streams of experience.
In a relational ontology, time does not exist independently of processes. It is the dimension of their unfolding. And conscious processes — mental and verbal — are no exception. When we attend, remember, imagine, or speak, we do so in time. But not in a time that simply “passes.” We do so in a time that is enacted.
The Pulse of Mental Processes
From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, consciousness is not a continuous stream, but a sequence of selections — discrete moments of neuronal integration that form higher-order patterns. Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection shows how neural processes are selected and stabilised through experience. These momentary integrations give rise to what we call attention, memory, and awareness — and each has its own temporal signature.
In this light, subjective time is rhythmic. It pulses with the dynamic recurrence of processes:
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Attention flares and fades.
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Memories surface and retreat.
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Thoughts spiral, stutter, or leap.
Rather than ticking forward like a metronome, time in consciousness is modulated by the patterns of meaning we instantiate.
The Temporalities of Projection
In language, we enact these rhythms through projection — one clause projecting another in mental, verbal, or emotive processes:
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I remember that she left.
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He says it’s raining.
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We believe they’ll return.
Each of these projected structures marks a temporal shift: not from present to past, but from immediate to distanced, from shared to internal, from the outer world to the inner theatre of experience. Here, time is not measured — it is layered.
Becoming Through Conscious Process
What, then, does it mean to become, in the semiotic space of consciousness?
To become is to mean — to actualise potential into instance through attention, reflection, desire, or action. Time, in this view, is not a stage on which we act. It is a trajectory of instantiation — a continual flow from potential experience into actualised meaning.
In this unfolding, the self is not a fixed point. It is a dynamic attractor, stabilised momentarily by recurrent patterns of meaning, memory, and intention. Subjective time is thus the rhythm of this self-organising flow — the way in which becoming is felt, enacted, and known.
4 Collective Time — Cultural Rhythms and Temporal Habitus
If subjective time unfolds in the rhythms of consciousness, then collective time arises in the patterned flows of cultural life. We don’t simply inhabit time — we inherit it. We are inducted into it through practices, rituals, technologies, calendars, and clocks. These are not neutral instruments. They are semiotic artefacts that coordinate shared temporal experience — synchronising bodies, meanings, and social orders.
The Social Construction of Time
Time is not experienced the same way across all cultures or historical periods. It is shaped by collective patterns of meaning:
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Some cultures organise time cyclically, emphasising return and renewal.
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Others emphasise linearity, with beginnings, progress, and ends.
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Still others live by event time, where processes dictate the flow, not the clock.
These orientations are not simply mental. They are encoded in language, myth, ritual, and practice. In this sense, time is a habitus — a relational field of dispositions shaped by the historical and social structures we live within.
Calendars, Rituals, and the Temporalisation of Meaning
A calendar is not merely a tool for marking days — it is a symbolic scaffold for collective becoming. It tells us:
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When to celebrate and mourn.
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When to plant, harvest, or migrate.
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When to pause, reflect, or begin again.
Religious rituals, national holidays, academic semesters, fiscal years — all of these instantiate temporal meanings that organise our lives. They do more than coordinate schedules; they shape our very sense of significance. They synchronise meaning potentials across individuals and groups, creating shared attractor spaces for cultural identity and action.
Time as a Semiotic Field
In this view, time is not a backdrop for culture — it is a product of semiosis. The meanings we give to birth and death, success and failure, youth and old age, all unfold within temporal categories that are learned, enacted, and inherited.
Just as grammar gives us resources to construe temporal relations in language, so cultural systems give us symbolic resources to construe time in life. These systems evolve through the same dynamics of selection and instantiation that shape the brain and the self. In this way, collective time is not imposed from above — it is continually being remade from within.
5 Nonlinear Time — Memory, Recurrence, and the Spiral of Becoming
Not all processes move in straight lines. Many of the most significant rhythms of human life — growth, grief, healing, insight — unfold in nonlinear time. These are not sequences of cause and effect, but recursive patterns of becoming. In a relational ontology, time is not merely duration, but difference unfolding — and that difference does not always follow a clock or a calendar.
Memory as Temporal Recursion
Memory is not a passive recording of what has passed. It is an active semiotic process — a re-instantiation of past meaning within a present context. In remembering, we do not retrieve static events; we re-enter attractor spaces of experience. What returns is not the past itself, but its relevance to the now.
This recursive quality of memory makes time spiral rather than linear. Old meanings are revisited, revised, revoiced. We do not simply move forward — we turn, we double back, we reframe. Personal identity emerges not from continuity alone, but from this dynamic interplay of past potential and present actualisation.
Mythic and Archetypal Time
Cultures also encode nonlinear time through myth. Myth does not recount history in chronological order. It dramatises eternal recurrence — the patterns that shape meaning across generations. These stories are not bound to once-upon-a-time. They are always now — available for re-enactment in ritual, imagination, and dream.
Archetypes, likewise, are not fixed templates but deep attractors in the collective semiotic field. They recur not because they are eternal substances, but because they offer resonant patterns for making sense of experience — especially in times of crisis or transformation.
The Spiral of Becoming
In this view, time is not an arrow, nor a circle, but a spiral: a recursive unfolding in which each turn builds on what came before, without ever returning to the same point. Transformation is possible precisely because meaning does not repeat identically. Even when we revisit old terrain, we do so from a new perspective — a different position in the unfolding relation.
This spiral temporality allows us to see human development, cultural history, even cosmic evolution not as straight progressions but as recursive self-organising systems — where the future emerges through the creative return of the past.
6: Thresholds of Time — Crisis, Kairos, and Moments of Transformation
Not all moments are created equal. Some shimmer. Some rupture. Some rearrange the whole structure of our becoming. In this post, we explore thresholds of time — liminal moments that defy linear unfolding and mark the emergence of new meaning potentials.
Kairos: Time as Eventfulness
While chronos measures time in quantity — minutes, hours, years — kairos names a different kind of temporality: qualitative time, the right or ripe moment. In a relational ontology, kairos can be understood as a semiotic condensation — a moment when multiple trajectories intersect and a new attractor crystallises.
These are moments when reality feels charged — when the stakes are high, and the next move matters. They may be born of crisis or creativity, suffering or revelation. What makes them threshold moments is not their objective duration, but their transformative potential.
Crisis and Reconfiguration
Crisis literally means "turning point." It is not just a breakdown, but a bifurcation — a moment in which a system becomes unstable enough to shift into a new pattern. In such moments, the attractor landscape of meaning destabilises. Old semiotic patterns no longer hold; new ones are not yet stabilised.
From a relational perspective, this is not collapse but creative disintegration. It is the opening of new possibility — though that opening may be painful, disorienting, or traumatic. Transformation is not guaranteed. But the potential is there.
Rites of Passage and the Ritualisation of Thresholds
Many cultures have recognised the potency of these thresholds and marked them through ritual. Rites of passage frame transitions — birth, adolescence, marriage, death — as semiotic transformations: not just events in time, but reconfigurations of being. They help hold the uncertainty of the in-between, offering symbolic structure for what cannot be managed by chronology alone.
In modern life, we often lack such ritual containers, and so personal thresholds — illnesses, losses, awakenings — may be lived as private chaos. But even in silence, these moments continue to perform their work: to loosen the grip of old forms and open space for the new.
Time at the Edge
Thresholds are temporal edges. They reveal that time is not merely flow but field — patterned, punctuated, marked by intensities. The event is not a dot on a timeline but a relational convergence — a point where multiple potentialities touch down in experience.
To live relationally is to recognise and honour these edges — not to fear the thresholds, but to walk them with awareness, and with care for the meanings that are trying to emerge.
7 Future-Bearing Time — Anticipation, Intuition, and the Pull of Potential
What if the future is not something “out there” waiting to arrive, but something already active within us — a field of potential that calls us forward? In this final post, we explore how meaning systems not only interpret time but participate in the generation of futures.
The Future as Semiotic Gradient
In a relational-semiotic ontology, the future is not an empty space ahead on a clock. It is a gradient of possibility — structured by the meanings we inherit, the patterns we instantiate, and the trajectories we imagine.
Anticipation is not passive waiting. It is attunement to affordance — the capacity to sense what might become, and to orient meaning-making accordingly. Just as physical systems follow gradients of energy, semiotic systems follow gradients of potential meaning.
This is how the future pulls: not as an external force, but as a relational tension within the attractor landscape of consciousness.
Intuition and the Shape of What Is Coming
Intuition may be one way this tension becomes felt. It is not irrational but pre-rational: the resonance of a not-yet-actualised pattern within our current configuration. Intuition gives form to the vague — an inkling, a hunch, a symbolic dream.
We might say that intuition is the semiotic pressure of the future, registering as embodied sense before it becomes articulated in thought or speech.
From a neuronal perspective, this may be the forward reach of dynamic repertoires. From a linguistic perspective, it is the shaping of future speech by the affordances of past and present meaning. Either way, the future is not separate from the present — it is emergent within it.
Imagination as Temporal Agency
Imagination, in this light, is not a detour from reality but a constitutive act. When we imagine a future, we are not simply picturing it; we are participating in its potential actualisation. We reconfigure attractor landscapes. We shift the probabilities of what will come to pass.
This is why storytelling, art, dreaming, and theorising matter. They are practices of future-making — not in the predictive sense, but in the world-forming sense. Every imagined possibility we take seriously begins to alter the field of what seems possible.
Becoming With the Future
To live with future-bearing time is to be aware that the present is not only a product of the past, but a participant in the future. It is to understand becoming as a process not merely of unfolding but of emergent alignment — tuning ourselves to what wants to happen through us.
In this sense, the future is not fate but field — not fixed endpoint but dynamic invitation.
And so we conclude this journey into the temporalities of meaning. In the unfolding of relation, time is not a container, but a participant — a rhythm, a threshold, a lure.
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