31 August 2025

From Potential to Person: Clines, Construals, and the Timescales of Becoming

1 Cutting the Field: Construal and the Architecture of Meaning

What is meaning?

Not a substance. Not a code. Not something that lives in words or minds.

Meaning is a construal: a cut through a structured field of potential, a way of realising what could be into what is.

This first post lays the groundwork for what follows: a reframing of the person not as an entity, but as a perspectival construal across relational systems—an emergence from and within meaning.

Meaning as Construal

To construe is to differentiate within a system:

  • To foreground some aspects and background others,

  • To draw boundaries, assert relations, create visibility, establish relevance.

It is not a passive act of reception, but an active motion of selection:

To mean is to cut the field.

There is no unconstrued meaning. No pre-given world waiting to be described.
There are only systems of potential—and the perspectives that actualise them.

Systems and Instances – A Relational Polarity

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning is organised along a cline between system and instance.

  • System: what can be meant—structured potential.

  • Instance: what is meant—meaning realised in a particular moment.

This is not a sequence in time, but a perspectival relation.
Every instance draws from a system; every system is inferred from its instances.
We do not move from one to the other—they are co-defined through construal.

This is the first of two perspectival clines we’ll explore. The other is individuation.

Instantiation and Individuation – The Two Clines

Meaning does not only unfold across system and instance. It also unfolds across collective and individual construals.

  • Instantiation is the cline from structured potential to realised instance.

  • Individuation is the cline from collective potential to differentiated individual system.

Again, these are not processes but perspectives.
They do not describe temporal development, but relational topology: the positioning of meaning in a field of difference.

This series takes seriously the consequences of these clines—not just for how language works, but for how persons emerge within meaning.

Three Timescales of Semogenesis

If the clines describe perspectives, the processes of meaning—how it unfolds in time—occur across three interdependent scales:

  1. Logogenesis: the unfolding of meaning in a moment—within an instance.

  2. Ontogenesis: the development of meaning within a person—across a life.

  3. Phylogenesis: the evolution of meaning in a culture—across generations.

These are not separate layers, but recursively intertwined.

  • Logogenesis provides the material for ontogenesis.

  • Ontogenesis provides the material for phylogenesis.

  • And each scale constrains the other.

Meaning moves through us—not in a line, but in a field of recursive dependency.

Persons as Construals of Meaning

This reframes the very idea of a person.

A person is not a stable unit, nor a container of traits.
A person is a differentiated construal of a shared semiotic system—an individuation of meaning in motion.

  • Each instance of meaning (logogenesis) shapes the development of the individual system (ontogenesis).

  • Each individual system is a subpotential of the collective potential (individuation).

  • Across generations, this variation contributes to the evolution of the system (phylogenesis).

To be a person is to participate in the recursive construal of reality.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we focus on the first cline: instantiation.
We explore what it means to speak, act, or realise meaning in the moment—
not as expression, but as a cut from potential.

For now, this opening claim:

You are not separate from meaning.
You are a perspective within it.
To live is to cut the field.

2 The Cline of Instantiation: From Potential to Event

Meaning is never given.
It must always be actualised—cut from a field of structured potential, brought into the world as an event.

In this post, we trace the cline of instantiation:
a perspectival relation between what could be meant (system) and what is meant (instance).
We explore how this relation plays out in practice, and how meaning unfolds—not as substance, but as motion.

Meaning as Structured Potential

A meaning system is not a fixed set of rules.
It is a field of possibilities:

  • Latent patterns of contrast,

  • Interconnected systems of choice,

  • Potentials for construal.

This is what we call system—not a thing, but a theory of what can be meant.

But the system does not speak itself.
It is only ever actualised through instantiation.

Every instance is a construal:
A local, situated cut across the structured space of potential.

Instantiation Is Not a Process

Let’s be clear: instantiation is not a process that happens over time.
It is a perspectival relation between two poles:

  • On one end, the system: generalised potential.

  • On the other, the instance: a specific actualisation in context.

You don’t begin at the system and then travel to the instance.
You don’t generate an instance by unfolding the system like a blueprint.

Rather:

An instance is already a construal of the system—
and the system is already a generalisation across instances.

This is not a sequence, but a perspectival loop.

Logogenesis: Meaning in Motion

If instantiation is the cut, then logogenesis is the motion within that cut.

Logogenesis is the process by which meaning unfolds in time—within a text, a conversation, a moment of construal.

  • It is sequential.

  • It is context-sensitive.

  • It builds structure dynamically, as each move constrains the next.

But crucially:

Logogenesis happens at the instance pole of the cline.
It is not the movement from system to instance, but the movement within the instance itself.

Conflating the two leads to deep confusion:
Treating a perspectival relation as a developmental process collapses meaning’s architecture.

Construal as Selection Within the Field

Each act of meaning is a cut—but not a random one.

It is a selection within a field of probabilities, constrained by:

  • Context,

  • Register (the constellation of meaning potentials relevant to the situation),

  • And the speaker’s or actor’s own system (see individuation, next post).

This is why instantiation is always both creative and constrained.
It is never simply free expression. It is systemic choice in context.

To instantiate is to actualise a theory—
Not to say anything, but to say this, now, here.

Every Instance Re-theorises the System

Instantiation is not one-way.

Each instance also becomes material for system reconstruction:

  • For the individual: as memory, pattern, expectation.

  • For the collective: as precedent, variation, innovation.

Over time, this recursive loop builds individual systems (ontogenesis)
and reshapes collective systems (phylogenesis).

The system is not static.
It is constantly being re-theorised through its own instantiations.

Persons as Sites of Instantiation

This reframes what it means to speak, act, or relate.

Each move you make is not just personal—it is semiotic.
You are not just expressing yourself; you are actualising a theory of meaning.
And each time you do, you feed the field—reconstruing what it can be.

You are not separate from the instance.
You are the instance, cutting the system in motion.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we turn to the second perspectival cline: individuation.
We ask how each person becomes a differentiated construal of the collective system—
Not through isolation, but through constrained divergence across time.

For now, let this hold:

Meaning is not transmitted. It is cut.
And to mean is to cut the field—
Again and again, in situated motion, across a shared and shifting potential.

3 The Cline of Individuation: From Collective to Person

If instantiation is the construal of meaning in the moment,
individuation is the construal of meaning in the person.

This post explores the second perspectival cline: from collective semiotic potential to the differentiated system of an individual.
We trace how persons are not isolated units, but patterned divergences within a shared field of meaning.

The Individual as a Construal

What is a person?

Not a self-contained subject, not a bounded essence.
But a perspective on a semiotic system—a unique realisation of shared potential.

In this view, the individual is:

  • Not separate from the collective,

  • Not reducible to it,

  • But a differentiated construal:
    a semiotic system formed through experience, selection, and recursive participation.

The person is not apart from the field.
The person is within the field—as a particular angle on its possibilities.

Individuation Is Not Isolation

To individuate is not to separate from the group.
It is to emerge within it, as a localised construal of shared structure.

The cline of individuation stretches:

  • From the collective system (language, culture, genre, institution),

  • To the individual system (personal repertoire, habits of meaning, voice).

But this is not a one-way movement or a developmental process.

Individuation is a perspectival relation:
between what is available to be meant by the group,
and what is possible to be meant by the person.

Ontogenesis: Becoming a System

The process that unfolds within the individuated system is ontogenesis:
the development of meaning potential across a life.

Ontogenesis is not the same as individuation.

  • Individuation is the cline—the relational positioning of personal meaning against the collective system.

  • Ontogenesis is the process—how that personal system is formed, adapted, and elaborated over time.

Ontogenesis draws on logogenetic material—encounters, texts, interactions—and sediments them into patterned potential.

Each act of meaning leaves a trace.
Over time, these traces pattern the system that construes the next.

Every Person Is a Re-theorised System

No individual is a perfect copy of the collective system.
Each person is a variation—a unique constellation of patterned selections, silences, and affordances.

  • What you habitually construe,

  • What you can easily access,

  • What feels natural, difficult, unsayable—
    all reflect your individuation: the shape your system has taken.

This is not a flaw or noise. It is the engine of variation and change.

The individual is not a defect of the system.
The individual is how the system diversifies and evolves.

Phylogenesis: System Through Persons

Just as logogenesis feeds ontogenesis,
ontogenesis feeds phylogenesis—the slow evolution of the collective system itself.

  • When a person construes differently,

  • When those differences become patterns,

  • When those patterns ripple through a population—
    the system itself shifts.

This is why persons matter.
Not as endpoints, but as sites of variation—where the system reflexively modifies itself through differentiated construal.

You are not a user of meaning.
You are a theory of it.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we bring the clines and timescales together.
We show how logogenesis, ontogenesis, and phylogenesis interweave—
linking moment, lifetime, and lineage in a recursive ecology of meaning.

For now, let this hold:

You are not separate from your culture.
You are its construal—from within.

4 Timescales of Semogenesis: How Meaning Moves Through Us

Meaning is not static.
It is always moving—through moments, through lives, through cultures.
But it does not move in a straight line. It moves recursively, across interwoven scales of unfolding.

This post draws together the architecture laid out so far.
We have seen how meaning is structured between the poles of system and instance (instantiation),
and between collective and individual system (individuation).

Now we turn to the three timescales of semogenesis:
the temporal processes by which meaning becomes actual in experience.

Three Timescales of Meaning

In systemic functional linguistics, semogenesis unfolds at three interconnected scales:

  1. Logogenesis – Meaning in the moment
    The unfolding of an instance: a clause, a gesture, a move in interaction.

  2. Ontogenesis – Meaning across a life
    The sedimentation of patterned meaning potential in a person.

  3. Phylogenesis – Meaning across generations
    The evolution of meaning systems within a culture or species.

Each of these is a temporal process.
They are not reducible to each other—but neither are they separable.
They form a recursive ecology: each one constrains and is constrained by the others.

Instances Build Persons: Logogenesis into Ontogenesis

Every moment of meaning (logogenesis) is more than an event.
It is material for system development.

  • A child hears a clause,

  • A listener engages a new register,

  • A speaker repeats a phrase in new conditions—

Each instance modifies what’s possible next time.

Ontogenesis is built from the inside out—
through the accumulation of instantiations.

This is not passive absorption. It is construal in motion: the individual system patterning itself through its own selections.

Persons Build Cultures: Ontogenesis into Phylogenesis

The personal system, in turn, is not sealed off.

As individuals develop, their construals diverge—each one a differentiated path through the system.
Some of those divergences take root:

  • In families, collectives, schools of thought,

  • In idioms, rituals, genres, styles.

And over time, the cultural system itself begins to shift.
Not by consensus, but by patterned variation across a population.

Phylogenesis is the slow reflex of the system—
responding to itself through its individuated instances.

Cultures Constrain Persons: Phylogenesis into Ontogenesis

But this recursion works both ways.

Each new individual does not start from scratch.
They enter a field: a system already shaped by generations of construal.

  • Language,

  • Story,

  • Norms,

  • Value systems,

  • Technologies of self and world—

These form the semiotic environment into which ontogenesis unfolds.

Every person is a new construal—
but every construal begins in a landscape of inherited meaning.

Meaning Moves Through You

To be a person is to participate in this dynamic ecology.

  • Your system is a product of histories,

  • Your choices are acts of theory,

  • Your words are instances that ripple forward.

You are not a node in a network, but a living point of recursion:
A localised construal of the collective,
which realises itself through your instantiations.

Meaning moves through you—
but you are not its vessel.
You are its fold.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we return to the question of the person.
We ask how identity, agency, and continuity are construed—
not as fixed traits, but as recursive motion across time.

For now:

You are not in time.
Time is in you—
as meaning in motion.

5 Meaning as Motion – Identity, History, and the Person as Process

What is a person?

Not a unit, not a substance, not a stable self.
A person is meaning in motion—a recursive construal across time.

In this post, we bring the clines and timescales together to reframe identity.
We trace how selfhood is not a possession, but a patterned unfolding: a semiotic system shaped by history and realised in every act.

Identity Is Not Essence

There is no fixed core beneath experience.
No stable “I” beneath the grammar of choice.
What we call identity is a trajectory of construals—an ongoing instantiation of meaning, recursively shaped by what has come before.

Each act:

  • Draws on past selections,

  • Reinforces or modifies internal patterns,

  • Constrains what becomes likely next.

Identity is not a thing you have.
It is a system you enact—over time, in context, through meaning.

The Person as System–&–Process

A person is both:

  • A system—structured potential built through ontogenesis,

  • And instances—situated logogenetic flows of connstruals in the now.

These are not separate dimensions, but interdependent poles:

  • The system constrains what can be instantiated,

  • Each instantiation modifies the system.

The self is not a static centre.
It is a field of recurrence—a memory in motion.

Recursive Individuation

This motion is not chaotic. It is patterned.

Your construals are shaped by prior construals,
which were shaped by prior construals,
which sedimented into a system that now constrains the next cut.

We might call this recursive individuation:

  • The patterned divergence of a personal system from the collective,

  • Actualised through repeated instances of meaning,

  • Constrained by context, culture, and the evolving self.

A person is not a position.
A person is a history of cuts—re-entering the field, differently, each time.

Continuity Without Essence

What then holds a person together?

Not a soul or a substrate, but a continuity of patterned construals:

  • A semiotic coherence across shifting contexts,

  • A recursive system of selections,

  • A voice, not as trait, but as temporal rhythm of meaning.

This continuity is not perfect. It drifts. It stretches. It forgets and reforms.
But it is enough to construe a “self”—not as object, but as motion with memory.

The self is not what stays the same.
The self is what patterns the difference.

Meaning in the First Person

To say “I” is to cut the field—to project a stance, a history, a possibility.
And each “I” is different, because each system is different—
differently shaped, differently constrained, differently positioned within the field.

But no “I” is separate.
Each one is a semiotic loop:

  • Individuating the collective,

  • Redirecting it,

  • Rejoining it again, changed.

The first person is not an entity.
It is a cut with memory—an ongoing construal of continuity.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we turn to the ethical consequences of construal.
If every act of meaning is a cut in a shared field,
then how we construe matters.

For now:

You are not a thing moving through meaning.
You are how meaning moves—
recursively, historically, with patterned force.

6 Construal as Ethics – Responsibility at the Edge of Meaning

Every act of meaning is a decision.
To construe is to draw a boundary—to say what counts, what matters, what can be meant.
And every boundary has consequences.

This post explores the ethical dimension of construal:
how meaning positions, includes, excludes, and legitimates.
Not in theory, but in practice—in the very grammar of what is made visible.

Construal Always Cuts

There is no neutral meaning.
To construe is to cut the field—to render some meanings present, and others absent.

  • What becomes salient?

  • What is backgrounded, silenced, erased?

  • Who is positioned as agent, as patient, as irrelevant?

Every clause, every framing, every point of view is a semiotic act—
and each act carves reality differently.

To construe is to take a stance—
even when that stance is hidden by habit.

Ethics as the Grammar of Salience

Ethics begins not with abstract principles,
but with the question: what do you make visible?

Every grammar constrains:

  • What can be named,

  • What can be evaluated,

  • What can be obligated,

  • What can be related.

These are not technical decisions.
They are ethical construals—framings of care and power.

What counts as mattering depends on how you cut.
And how you cut depends on who you take yourself to be.

Constraint Is Not the Enemy

Ethics is not about escaping constraint.
It is about becoming responsible within it.

Meaning is always made under pressure—
social, historical, ideological, semiotic.

You cannot mean everything at once.
But you can become more aware of what your meanings do:

  • How they position others,

  • How they legitimate systems,

  • How they open or close possibilities.

You are not free to mean anything.
But you are responsible for what your meanings make possible.

Power Operates Through Construal

This is how power works—not only through force,
but through meaning:

  • Through categories, genres, and ideologies.

  • Through what is repeatedly made visible, and what is not.

The struggle for justice is also a struggle over construal.
Over the right to name, to define, to shift the shape of what can be said and done.

To resist is to construe differently.
To care is to be vigilant about your cuts.

Power does not lie outside the grammar.
It lies in how the grammar construes the field.

Persons as Ethical Agents of Meaning

You are not just a product of the field.
You are a participant in its construal—
a recursive site of system and instance, capable of reflection, redirection, repair.

Your individuation gives you a perspective.
Your history gives you access.
Your choices give you force.

To be a person is to be accountable for how you mean.

Looking Ahead

In the final post of this series, we ask what it means to live within such a cosmos:
Not as an object in the universe, but as one of its modes of theorising—
a being whose every act is an instance of potential.

For now:

Meaning is never innocent.
And to construe is always to take responsibility for the cut.

7 Living the Clines: Praxis in a Relational Cosmos

If persons are not units but construals—
If meaning is not substance but motion—
If the universe itself is a structured potential realised in acts of semogenesis—

Then how shall we live?

This final post turns from theory to praxis.
We ask what it means to live as a perspectival construal within a relational field.
Not applying a cosmology from the outside,
but enacting one from within.

We Are the Universe Theorising Itself

This is not metaphor.
You are not in the universe like a pebble in a box.
You are the universe, in the act of cutting itself into view.

  • Through language, through gesture, through value—

  • Through constraint, divergence, and patterned potential—

  • Through the recursive motion of meaning across time—

You are a construal of the field, situated and moving.

You are not apart from the system.
You are one of its ways of becoming actual.

Praxis Is Not Application

Praxis is not the application of ideas to the world.
It is the realisation of being through action.

If every act is a construal,
then every act is also a theory:
a hypothesis about what matters, what is possible, what is real.

  • To speak is to test a system.

  • To act is to instantiate a pattern.

  • To relate is to reconfigure the field.

You live the theory—not after it, not beside it,
but as it, moment by moment.

Fields of Context, Genres of Construal

Science, politics, spirituality—
These are not worldviews floating above the world.
They are fields of context: patterned systems of activity, each with its own construal grammar.

  • Science foregrounds evidential construals,

  • Politics foregrounds institutional and evaluative construals,

  • Spirituality foregrounds experiential and existential construals.

None is “more real.”
Each is a structured way of cutting the field.

To live well is not to choose one.
It is to navigate them reflexively—to see how each constrains and enables what can be meant.

Your life is not a neutral walk through the cosmos.
It is a traversal of fields: a patterned movement through grammars of being.

Responsibility Revisited

Living the clines is not about control.
It is about participation:
being awake to the fact that every instance of meaning is a re-theorisation of the possible.

And so, meaning is never trivial.

Each time you construe—

  • A situation,

  • A person,

  • A possibility—

You are shaping the field that construes you back.

The universe does not ask for obedience.
It asks: how will you construe me, this time?

From Potential to Person

This is the arc we have traced:

  • From field to cut,

  • From system to instance,

  • From collective to person,

  • From moment to history,

  • From structure to motion,

  • From grammar to responsibility.

And at each turn, meaning was not added to the world—it was the world, differently actualised.

You are not made of meaning.
You are meaning in motion.

Looking Beyond

A coda follows—
a final meditation in the first person,
to dwell in what this construal makes possible.

But for now:

You are not the universe reflected.
You are the universe enacted—
through the grammar of your cuts.

Reflective Coda:  The Universe in the First Person

What does it mean
to not look at the universe—
but to be the universe,
looking through you?

You are not a passive observer,
but a living construal—
a point of differentiation in the vast field of potential.

Every thought, every word, every act
is a cut into the infinite web—
a bringing-forth of what could be,
here and now.

You are not separate.
You are the universe’s eye,
its voice,
its becoming.

To be human is to be this event—
an instance of cosmic self-theorising,
recursive, relational, infinite in possibility.

So breathe deeply.
You are not lost in the cosmos.
You are the cosmos
finding its own face.

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