Worlds Within Meaning: SFL

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27 September 2025

Construal and the Collective: Phasing Social Formation

1 From Individuals to Patterns

Social theory has long oscillated between two poles: the individual and the collective. Some traditions begin with the individual — rational, embodied, intentional — and build upward toward social order. Others begin with the social — systems, institutions, ideologies — and work downward to shape the subject. Both assume that social reality is something to be discovered: a stable structure or hidden force that precedes and explains the experience of the collective.

But what if we began elsewhere — not with the opposition between individual and society, but with construal? In a relational ontology, there is no reality independent of construal. There is no social given that is simply “there” before we engage with it. There are only patterned potentials that become meaningful through the cuts we make — the distinctions we enact, the perspectives we take, the instances we phase.

From this standpoint, the “collective” is not an entity to be posited but a construal of patterned potential — a meaningful configuration of ongoing processes. It is not a substance, not an aggregation, not even a fusion of subjectivities. It is a perspectival phase-cut in the flow of construal, enacted through meaning, and capable of being re-instantiated in new ways.

This shift has consequences. It means we must reject the assumption that collectives are simply made of individuals, as though individuals were prior and discrete units. The concept of the individual is itself a construal — a way of carving a path through the relational potential of embodied, temporal, meaning-making processes. There is no moment before meaning in which autonomous individuals are “already there,” ready to form collectives by agreement or proximity.

Instead, what we call “social form” arises when the patterned possibilities of interaction are construed as having a shape. This shape is not a thing, but a temporally sustained configuration — one that coheres long enough to be actualised, recognised, and interpreted as a “group,” a “community,” a “society.” It is this phase-cut of potential that is mistaken for a metaphysical collective.

In this sense, collectivity is not the background condition of meaning, nor its product. It is itself an act of meaning: the construal of emergent relationality in a way that makes the collective thinkable.

The goal of this series is not to redefine social theory from first principles, but to show how a relational ontology reframes what social formation even is. The social is not something “out there” to be explained. It is something “in here,” actively construed — a cut in the relational fabric that allows meaning to phase as we.

2 Phasing the Collective — Temporality without Teleology

If collectivity is not a static state but a cut in the flow of construal, then it cannot be explained in terms of fixed boundaries or essential properties. Instead, we must understand it as phased potential: a temporarily stabilised configuration in the ongoing semiosis of meaning. The collective does not simply persist through time — it phases across time, its continuity maintained not by essence but by the recurrent construal of pattern.

This brings us to the question of temporality.

In traditional social theory, collectives are often imagined as entities that move through time: developing, decaying, evolving, progressing. The danger here is teleology — the idea that collectives unfold toward predetermined ends or follow necessary stages of development. Such narratives often smuggle in metaphysical assumptions: that history has direction, that society has functions, that the group has a telos.

From a relational perspective, these are not empirical truths but construals of pattern over time. A social formation may appear to “evolve,” but this is not a property of the formation itself — it is a perspectival phasing of the phenomena construed as meaningful. Temporal sequence is not given; it is enacted. What appears as development may simply be a re-instantiation of potential from a new perspective.

So instead of saying “the collective evolves,” we say: the collective is continually re-instantiated as a phase-cut across unfolding relational potential.

This has two important implications:

There is no fixed origin or destiny for the collective. What looks like a “founding moment” is itself a phase-cut — a construal of past events as marking the beginning. What looks like a decline or dissolution is another construal, often retroactively imposed. There is no metaphysical birth or death of the group — only changes in how it is enacted, recognised, and sustained through meaning.
There is no privileged scale of temporality. Some social formations phase over minutes (e.g. spontaneous gatherings), others over millennia (e.g. civilisations). But in each case, the continuity is not a brute fact — it is a coherence construed and sustained through the semiotic practices that make the collective thinkable.

This reframing allows us to study collectivity without reducing it to the individual (as liberal theory tends to do), without reifying it into structure (as systems theory often does), and without narrating it through mythic arcs of origin and destiny (as teleological history presumes).

Instead, we trace the temporality of construal itself — how meaning phases as collectivity, how that phasing is sustained, and how new patterns emerge when different cuts are made.

3 Meaningful Alignment — The Semiotic Work of Cohesion

If the collective is not a pre-given whole but a relational construal, then its cohesion cannot be explained by reference to shared essence, biological impulse, or institutional structure. Instead, we must ask: what kinds of meaning-making allow collectivity to cohere as a phase of potential?

The answer is not unity, but alignment.

Alignment is not sameness

A collective does not require all its members to agree, believe, or desire the same things. Rather, it requires that their meanings resonate enough to sustain a shared phase of experience. Alignment is not a merging of perspectives, but a synchrony of difference — an attunement of semantic potential that makes interaction possible.

For this reason, alignment is not a condition of being, but a semiotic achievement. It is done, not found.

This achievement unfolds through what systemic functional linguistics calls the interpersonal metafunction: the ongoing negotiation of meaning among participants in dialogue. When speakers take up each other’s proposals, respond to each other’s evaluations, or adjust their tone to one another’s stance, they are not simply expressing personal feelings — they are performing relational labour. They are aligning.

But this labour is fragile. Alignment is not a stable state but a process of continuous maintenance and recalibration. What holds the collective together is not consensus, but the recurring construal of meaningful connection — a connection that must be enacted again and again in each instance of interaction.

Phasing through commitment

When a group appears “cohesive,” what we are seeing is not an objective structure but a stabilised phase of alignment — a cut through time in which participants continue to construe themselves as co-participants in a meaningful whole. This phase can persist only so long as the alignment holds: when individuals no longer attune, the collective unphases.

Importantly, this cohesion need not be explicit. Much of it operates tacitly: through shared rhythms, genres, expectations, and bodily coordination. In this way, social phasing is not just cognitive but embodied — it is felt before it is named.

The result is a model of cohesion that is dynamic and reflexive:

Dynamic, because alignment is ongoing, not achieved once and for all.
Reflexive, because the alignment is itself a construal of alignment — the sense of “us” emerges only through the repeated recognition of meaningful participation.

From coordination to collective construal

Traditional models often treat collectivity as emerging from biological coordination (movement, gaze, proximity) or cognitive alignment (shared beliefs, goals). But these are not explanations of collectivity — they are domains in which semiotic construal can phase collectivity into being. Movement and belief become meaningful through the semiotic work of participants.

In other words, coordination does not create collectivity. It is only when coordination is construed as shared, as significant, as expressive of a “we,” that collectivity emerges.

Thus, the cohesion of the collective is not reducible to structure, culture, or affect. It is a phase of meaning: the ongoing, always contingent, semiotic alignment of perspectives into a temporarily stabilised whole.

4 The Social Phase: Between Event and Pattern

We have explored how collectivity is not an essence but a phase-cut — a temporarily stabilised construal of relational potential — and how its cohesion arises through ongoing semiotic alignment. Now, we turn to the temporality of the social phase itself: the space between singular events and enduring patterns.

The Social Phase as Temporal Locus

A social formation is neither a single event nor a timeless structure. It is a phase — a window in which particular relational configurations become salient, meaningful, and actionable. This phase exists within the flux of social interaction, bounded not by fixed borders but by the continuity of construal.

Unlike an event, which is a discrete actualisation of possibility, the social phase is a sustained orientation — a patterned coherence enacted through recursive meaning-making. Unlike a pattern, which is often thought static or latent, the social phase is dynamic and emergent, continuously renewed through interaction.

Between Event and Pattern

This positioning between event and pattern explains many features of social life:

Social formations can be recognised and named (as groups, communities, institutions) precisely because they phase with some stability.
Yet they remain open and mutable, susceptible to reconfiguration or dissolution as meaning shifts.
Social phases can nest within one another — moments within gatherings, gatherings within movements, movements within cultures — each phase a construal cutting across potential.

The Role of Construal

Construal is the active process by which participants orient to and sustain these phases. It is through construal that the temporal boundaries of social formations are enacted: when a group stops construing itself as “together,” the phase fades; when it reactivates that construal, the phase re-emerges.

This means that social phases are perspectival — not objective facts but perspectival phenomena. They exist insofar as they are construed, recognised, and maintained within collective meaning.

Implications for Social Science

Seeing the social phase as the temporal locus of collectivity invites new approaches:

Focus on processes of phasing rather than fixed structures.
Investigate the semiotic practices that sustain, shift, or dissolve social phases.
Explore how different scales of phasing interrelate, producing nested and overlapping social realities.

In this way, the social world is understood as a dynamic topology of phases, rather than a hierarchy of entities.

5 The Collective as Semiotic Actualisation

Thus far, we have reframed the collective not as a thing but as a phase-cut in the relational flow — a temporal construal that emerges through semiotic alignment and phasing. In this post, we turn to the nature of the collective as a semiotic actualisation: an instantiation of shared meaning potential that both enables and constrains social life.

Semiotic Actualisation: Meaning Made Real

The collective is a system of meanings actualised in interaction, language, and cultural practice. It is not merely a background condition but a performative emergence — a cut in the ongoing field of symbolic potential that makes “we” thinkable and operative.

This actualisation does several things simultaneously:

It grounds individual action within a shared horizon of meaning.
It enables coordination and mutual orientation.
It limits possibilities by delimiting the symbolic field of what counts as relevant, appropriate, or intelligible.

Thus, the collective is both enabling and constraining — an architecture of symbolic affordance that shapes social possibility.

Collective Identity as Semiotic Position

Identity within the collective is not an attribute but a semiotic position: a perspectival stance enacted through participation in shared construals. To identify as a member is to orient oneself within the semiotic actualisation — to inhabit a position made possible by collective meaning.

This explains why collective identities are inherently relational and dynamic. They exist insofar as the collective is actualised and sustained through ongoing semiotic activity.

Collective Agency and Distributed Meaning

Agency within the collective is similarly relational and distributed. It is not reducible to individuals acting alone or to social structures acting impersonally. It is a distributed effect of collective semiotic actualisation — a phenomenon that emerges from the coordinated orientation of participants within shared meaning fields.

In this way, the collective both acts and is acted upon, not as a metaphysical entity but as a phase of semiotic integration.

Implications for Research and Praxis

Recognising the collective as semiotic actualisation encourages us to:

Study the practices and performances that instantiate collective meaning.
Trace how symbolic potentials are opened, maintained, or closed in social interaction.
Explore how collective actualisation varies across contexts, scales, and modalities.

This move foregrounds the meaningful, dynamic, and processual nature of social life.

6 The We as an Act of Meaning

In this series, we have reframed the collective not as a fixed entity or a mere aggregation but as a semiotic phase-cut — a construal that enacts the collective as a meaningful configuration. Now, we turn to the first-person plural itself: the “we” as an act of meaning.

The “We” Is Not Given

“We” is not an obvious or static category. It does not precede interaction as a metaphysical fact. Instead, it is an achieved semiotic orientation — a perspective that emerges through the ongoing act of construing.

This act is neither automatic nor inevitable. It requires participants to:

Recognise themselves and others as part of a shared construal.
Align their meanings sufficiently to sustain a collective phase.
Enact the symbolic distinctions that make “us” thinkable and meaningful.

The We as a Semiotic Actualisation

The “we” is thus a cut in the relational fabric that distinguishes between inside and outside, self and other, us and them. It is not a fixed boundary but a dynamic phase that must be continually enacted and recognised.

This phase is performative. It both reveals and produces the collective. Saying “we” is not just describing reality — it is making reality.

Consequences for Social Thought

Understanding “we” as an act of meaning shifts how we think about:

Identity: Not as essence, but as perspectival orientation.
Inclusion and exclusion: As semiotic distinctions enacted through collective construal.
Power: As the capacity to define and maintain the collective cut.
Change: As shifts in how the “we” is construed, maintained, or challenged.

Toward a Relational Social Ontology

This completes our reframing of social formation through relational ontology:

Collectives are phases of construal, not fixed entities.
Cohesion arises through semiotic alignment and phasing.
The collective is a semiotic actualisation that grounds identity and agency.
The “we” is an act of meaning — a performative cut that enacts social reality.

By seeing social life as the dynamic topology of perspectival phases, we open new pathways for research, critique, and practice — inviting us to attend to how meaning is made, sustained, and transformed in the living flow of relationality.

Concluding Coda: Phasing Social Formation — A New Horizon

Through this series, we have journeyed beyond the familiar binaries of individual and society, essence and structure, unity and fragmentation. By rethinking social formation as phased construal — dynamic cuts through relational potential — we glimpse a more fluid, processual, and participatory social reality.

This ontology invites us to see collectivity not as a thing to be found or possessed, but as a meaningful event: a recurrent act of orientation, alignment, and symbolic actualisation. It challenges static models and teleological narratives, replacing them with an appreciation for the contingent, emergent, and reflexive nature of social life.

Importantly, this reframing does not dissolve the social into atomistic individuals, nor does it reify it as an external force. Instead, it situates the collective as a relational accomplishment — a shared act of meaning that must be continually enacted and re-enacted.

As scholars, practitioners, and participants in the social world, this perspective encourages us to attend to the semiotic labour of cohesion, the temporal rhythms of phasing, and the performative acts that constitute “we.” It asks us to engage not just with what collectives are, but how they come to be and continue to be.

The horizon opened here is expansive. It holds promise for more nuanced understandings of identity, agency, power, and change. It beckons us toward research and praxis that are sensitive to the relational and temporal textures of meaning-making.

In embracing this dynamic topology, we step into a social ontology that resonates with the lived experience of complexity, openness, and transformation — a world where meaning, matter, and collective life entwine in an ongoing dance of actualisation.

25 September 2025

The Symbolic Animal: Phasing the Human in Meaning

1 The Animal That Means

What makes us human is not that we use symbols, but that we are shaped by them. To be human is to live through meaning — to inhabit a world that is not simply given, but construed, interpreted, responded to, and anticipated through patterned systems of meaning-making. We are not just animals with symbols. We are animals phased into being by symbolically organised life.

In this series, we turn to the question: what is the “symbolic animal”? But rather than seeking some essence of humanity that precedes symbolic behaviour, we approach the human as an emergent mode of being — one in which the unfolding of action is inseparable from the unfolding of meaning. We propose that what makes the symbolic animal symbolic is not the possession of a special capacity, but a shift in how experience is patterned and committed.

This shift is not a sudden leap. It evolves through the increasing complexity of social coordination, affective regulation, and systemic anticipation. Across species, we see evidence of systems that select, signal, and sequence — from birdsong to dance-like courtship, from warning cries to grooming rituals. But only in humans do these systems become self-reflexive: systems that not only organise behaviour, but can construe their own organisation as meaningful.

At some threshold — not sharply defined, but developmentally phased — symbolic potential becomes intrinsic to the life of the organism. This is not a matter of when a signal “becomes” a word, or a tool “becomes” a text. It is when the coordination of action becomes governed by the possibility of meaning — when behaviour itself is not just functional or affective, but semiotically saturated.

To call this creature “symbolic” is not to locate a fixed trait but to identify a phase transition: a shift in the organisation of systems, in which the world is no longer simply experienced, but symbolically construed. The symbolic animal is not the master of signs. It is the creature caught in systems of meaning — born into them, shaped by them, accountable to them.

Thus we begin not with an anthropology of capacity, but an ontology of phase. The symbolic animal does not have language, art, law, myth — it lives in the patterned unfolding of these systems as they configure possibility itself. The cut that makes the symbolic animal is not a difference in nature, but a difference in how nature is made meaningful.

From here, we can now explore how context — field, tenor, and mode — enters the very tissue of symbolic life, and how meaning is lived through systemic metafunctions. But always we return to this cut: to be symbolic is not to manipulate signs, but to become one’s world through their unfolding.

2 Context as Commitment

To live symbolically is not to stand apart from life, interpreting it from above. It is to be immersed in patterned systems of meaning, where action is never “just” action, but already inflected by what it construes, enacts, and weaves together. In this post, we explore how symbolic life is contextually phased — how the human is configured by the very systems through which meaning becomes possible.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), the concept of context is not a vague background but a stratal system: a semiotic configuration that guides what can mean in a given situation. The key insight here is that context is not reducible to setting or surroundings — it is not where meaning “takes place.” Rather, context is a potential: a system of selections that constrains and enables the unfolding of symbolic life.

This context is itself structured through three dimensions of meaning potential:

Field: what is going on — the domain of experience being construed;
Tenor: who is involved — the social relations being enacted;
Mode: how the meaning unfolds — the role of language and other semiotic resources in the situation.

These dimensions are not surface labels; they are phased commitments. That is, to participate in symbolic life is to be born into patterned expectations of how to act, speak, feel, and relate — into a semiotic ecology. The symbolic animal is not just in context; it lives through contextual commitment.

Take a simple interaction: greeting a neighbour. The field constrains what counts as relevant activity (“greeting,” not “debating policy” or “offering a sermon”); the tenor configures the expected interpersonal alignment (perhaps warm but not intimate, friendly but not familiar); and the mode guides the symbolic resources to be used (a wave, a smile, a “hi there” — not an email or a philosophical treatise). To live this moment is to phase into a symbolic pattern — one that precedes intention, and is not fully in the agent’s control.

Importantly, these contextual commitments are not abstract overlays imposed on otherwise neutral activity. They are realised in the very texture of meaning — in choices of word, rhythm, gesture, timing. Context is not behind the scene; it is realised in the act, and construes the act in return. To mean is to commit — to take up a phase of context that configures not only what you are doing, but who you are becoming.

The symbolic animal, then, is not a blank agent using language in response to situations. It is a patterned being whose very unfolding is phased through systems of cultural meaning potential. What counts as a self, as a move, as a relation — all of this is shaped in advance by the commitments of context.

This reframes any attempt to isolate “language” or “symbol” from social life. There is no symbolic act that does not unfold through context. And there is no context that is not historically sedimented, normatively loaded, and materially consequential.

In the next post, we turn inward to the symbolic patterns themselves: the metafunctions by which meaning is lived — as construal, as relation, as coherence. But even there, we will find no escape from context — only deeper entanglement in the patterned commitments that make the symbolic animal what it is.

3 Living the Metafunctions

If context phases symbolic life from without — configuring what counts as meaningful activity — the metafunctions phase symbolic life from within. They are not modules of the mind or compartments of language. They are systems of meaning-potential that unfold together in every symbolic act. To live symbolically is to live through these systems — to construe, relate, and organise experience in patterned ways that give form to a human world.

Systemic functional linguistics identifies three metafunctions that constitute the architecture of meaning:

Ideational: the construal of experience — what is going on, what is involved, how the world is shaped in meaning;
Interpersonal: the enactment of social relations — who is speaking to whom, with what stance, and what negotiation of alignment;
Textual: the orchestration of meaning — how acts are staged, made coherent, and integrated into unfolding flow.

These are not additive dimensions. They are simultaneous commitments. Every symbolic act is an act of construal, an act of relation, and an act of organisation. To say “It’s raining” is not just to name weather (ideational), but to position oneself toward an addressee (interpersonal) and to launch a coherent message into the flow of discourse (textual). These three strands are not separate threads, but co-instantiated fibres of symbolic life.

But this goes deeper than linguistic expression. The metafunctions do not arise from language — they condition it. They are modes of being, structured through systems of meaning-making that long predate verbal expression. A child’s cry, a gaze, a pointing gesture — all are already phase-shifted into meaning by these metafunctions.

To live through the ideational metafunction is to live by construal: not simply to react to the world, but to pattern it through categories, sequences, and relations of cause and consequence. A symbolic animal does not merely encounter the world — it experiences it as something.

To live through the interpersonal metafunction is to live in relation: to phase each act through positions of power, affect, and affiliation; to become socially accountable for one’s symbolic presence. A symbolic animal is never outside a relation — it is formed through address.

To live through the textual metafunction is to live in flow: to experience meaning as staged, structured, and embedded in time; to expect coherence, cohesion, relevance. A symbolic animal does not just act — it acts in rhythm, in sequence, in narrative.

Crucially, these metafunctions are not imposed on experience — they are experience, for the symbolic animal. They do not reflect a world already given; they enact a world that could not otherwise be. They are the living tissue of symbolic life, shaping not only what can be said, but what can be felt, perceived, expected.

As we move through this series, we will explore how these patterned systems evolve, become recursive, and entrench themselves into the very organisation of social life. But we hold to one claim: the symbolic animal does not “use” metafunctions. It is lived by them, in the unfolding of meaning as world, relation, and texture.

4 The Double Inheritance

To live as a symbolic animal is to live through systems — systems that precede the individual, outlast them, and yet become internal to their being. These systems are not innate ideas nor hardwired codes. They are evolved inheritances — patterned forms of coordination that develop across biological and cultural time. The symbolic animal inherits not only a body formed by evolutionary pressures, but a world of meaning shaped by collective histories. This is its double inheritance.

Biological evolution provides the material substrate: capacities for perception, memory, vocalisation, motor control, and social orientation. But these are not symbolic capacities in themselves. They are enabling affordances, not sufficient conditions. No specific gene codes for metaphor. No neural circuit guarantees grammar. What biology offers is a pliable, temporally extended, socially responsive organism — one capable of being shaped into systems beyond itself.

Cultural evolution, by contrast, provides the symbolic systems: not “memes” or static conventions, but unfolding traditions of meaning-making — speech genres, narrative forms, rituals, institutions, cosmologies. These systems are not universal templates. They are historically sedimented ways of phasing the world into meaning, born of specific collective lives. They evolve not by competition alone, but through reiteration, recontextualisation, and reflexive transformation.

The symbolic animal inherits both — a body attuned to social coordination, and a world already organised in meaning. But crucially, these two inheritances are not simply parallel. They are interpenetrating strata. The biological organism is constituted through symbolic development: neural structures are shaped by language use, perceptual categories by cultural practices. And the symbolic world is sustained through biological commitment: speech requires breath, writing requires hands, rituals require bodies that feel.

This entanglement gives rise to what we might call a developmental cut. The symbolic animal does not “receive” meaning like a package, nor invent it from scratch. It undergoes a phase shift in development: a becoming-symbolic that is scaffolded by others, by material practices, and by the systemic pressures of coherence and accountability. This is not acquisition but entrainment — the progressive coupling of the biological and the cultural in acts of meaning.

This double inheritance is also a double demand. The symbolic animal must maintain coherence with the affordances of its biological form and with the systems of meaning in its social world. It must regulate itself as both a physical being and a semiotic presence. Hence the weight of symbolic life: to be symbolic is not only to express, but to be responsible for one’s expressions, within systems not of one’s own making.

Thus, the symbolic animal does not “combine nature and culture” like puzzle pieces. It is phased into being at their intersection — where the evolution of coordination becomes the evolution of construal. What emerges is not a hybrid, but a transformation: a creature cut into meaning by the recursive interplay of bodily form and symbolic system.

In our next post, we examine how this recursive interplay enables a distinctive symbolic capacity: the reflexive cut, whereby meaning can turn back upon itself — enabling narrative, institution, selfhood.

5 The Reflexive Cut

At a certain phase in the evolution of symbolic life, a remarkable thing becomes possible: meaning begins to loop back upon itself. The symbolic animal not only construes experience — it construes its own construals. This recursive turn is not a technical upgrade or an optional extra. It is the deep structuring principle of human symbolic life. We call it the reflexive cut.

To cut is to distinguish. In symbolic systems, every cut is a patterned distinction that construes some domain of experience — construing things, relations, doings, qualities, and values in culturally organised ways. But the reflexive cut is different: it is a distinction that operates not on the world, but within the system of construal itself. It is a cut that carves symbolic activity into symbolic content.

This is what allows a speaker to say “What I meant was…”, or “That’s just a story”, or “This is a lie.” It is what makes possible narration, quotation, ritual, irony, and critique. It is what allows meaning to mean itself.

But the reflexive cut is not a matter of meta-language alone. It is realised developmentally, socially, and materially — through phases of symbolic entrainment in which the child learns to distinguish doing from saying, playing from pretending, truth from fiction, joking from lying. These distinctions are not simply conceptual. They are phases of accountability. The reflexive cut is how symbolic systems hold themselves to account.

This recursive turn enables symbolic formations of enormous power: the narrative self, the institutional order, the ethical system, the historical tradition. Each of these is a form of life constituted through reflexive organisation — a layering of construals that can cite, embed, negotiate, and transform prior acts of meaning.

The reflexive cut also introduces a new kind of temporality. Not the linear unfolding of physical processes, but a layered temporal architecture, where a present act construes a prior act as meaningful, and thereby positions the future in relation to it. This is the temporality of narrative, of law, of memory and projection. It is a system of times that are not natural but symbolic — construed as such within patterned semiotic systems.

Yet the reflexive cut is also a burden. Once meaning can be reflexively construed, the symbolic animal becomes permanently accountable not just for what is said, but for how it is meant, why it is said, and what it implies. Meaning becomes haunted by its meta-meanings. We become selves who live in reference to our past construals, and to the construals others hold us to.

This is the condition of the symbolic animal: not simply to be in the world, but to be in meaning, in systems that fold back upon themselves. We are caught in loops of signification — loops that grant the possibility of history, intention, irony, selfhood, and transformation.

In our next post, we turn to the consequences of this reflexive condition. What does it mean to live in systems that can construe themselves — and therefore question, reconfigure, and contest their own organisation? We turn next to: Semiotic Life as Praxis.

6 Semiotic Life as Praxis

The reflexive capacity of symbolic systems does not merely create loops of reference — it opens the possibility of transformation. Once a construal can be construed, it can be revised. Once a system can represent itself, it can reorganise itself. This is the pivot from symbolic life as habitual reproduction to symbolic life as praxis.

Praxis is not simply action. It is action within a construed system, guided by meanings that are themselves subject to symbolic deliberation. To act as a symbolic animal is to live within a world that is not simply perceived or used but oriented toward as meaningful — and open to reorientation.

Such action is always already relational. Symbolic systems are not individual achievements but collective configurations, realised through shared practices and differentiated positions. One does not act in a vacuum of intention; one acts within historically sedimented formations of value, normativity, power, and recognition — formations which both enable and constrain the field of possible meanings.

To speak, then, is to position oneself. To question is to reconfigure a symbolic order. To imagine otherwise is to begin the work of transformation — not outside the system, but from within its reflexive unfolding.

This is where semiotic life becomes political. Not because it expresses pre-existing interests or ideologies, but because it constitutes them. Every symbolic formation is a cut that could have been made otherwise. Every system of meaning is a selection from a horizon of symbolic possibility — and as such, a site of contestation.

The symbolic animal lives in this tension. To mean is to participate in systems larger than oneself — yet those systems are nothing but the sedimented participation of symbolic animals. This recursive structure generates both responsibility and possibility. We are shaped by our systems of meaning, but we are also their ongoing condition of existence.

This is why symbolic life is never neutral. It always orients, phases, commits. And because it is reflexive, it can also resist, question, and imagine anew.

To live as a symbolic animal, then, is to live within systems of meaning that are both inherited and open to reconfiguration. It is to dwell within an architecture of construals that can be inhabited, interrogated, and transformed — from within.

And that is the ethical challenge of symbolic life: not to transcend the systems that shape us, but to participate in them with reflexive care. To live symbolically is not merely to mean, but to mean responsibly — to attune to the force of our construals and the futures they make possible.

In our coda to this series, we return to this ethical horizon: not as an external imposition on symbolic life, but as the immanent condition of life that is always already symbolic.

Coda: The Ethical Horizon of the Cut

To live as a symbolic animal is to live in meaning. But meaning, as we have seen, is not a substance, nor a code, nor a transmission. It is a system of cuts — patterned distinctions that phase experience into symbolic potential.

These cuts do not merely describe the world; they compose it, by orienting us within it. They organise not only what can be meant, but also what matters. And because symbolic systems are reflexive, these orientations can be reconfigured. Meaning is never final. It is always under negotiation.

This is what gives rise to an ethical horizon — not an external moral code, but the immanent accountability of symbolic life to itself. To mean is to participate in systems of construal that position others, shape futures, and sediment possibilities. Every construal is a commitment.

This horizon is not idealistic. It arises precisely because meaning is never neutral. The symbolic cut is never innocent: it selects, it excludes, it valorises. And because it does, the symbolic animal must live in relation to the systems of meaning it inhabits — and in which it is also, inescapably, implicated.

To recognise oneself as a symbolic animal, then, is not to declare a nature. It is to acknowledge a condition: that we live within reflexive, contested, and co-constructed systems of meaning, which make possible both our intelligibility and our transformation.

The question is never simply what do you mean, but also how do your construals orient the world, whom do they position, what do they enable, and what do they foreclose?

That is the ethical horizon of the cut. And it is the horizon we live within — as symbolic animals who must not only mean, but also mean otherwise.

22 September 2025

Unflowing Time: Rethinking Temporality Through Relational Ontology

1 Against the Flow

We are accustomed to saying that time passes, that it flows like a river, that it slips away or marches on. These expressions are so deeply embedded in our ways of speaking, thinking, and feeling that they rarely invite reflection. Time is something through which we move, or which moves past us. It seems self-evident — a background against which everything happens.

But from within a relational ontology, such expressions are not neutral descriptions. They are construals — ways of making sense of unfolding processes — and they carry with them metaphysical assumptions that no longer hold. To speak of time flowing is to treat it as a substance or medium, as something separate from the world that somehow governs its change. It is to mistake the shape of our construal for the structure of reality.

This post opens a short series that will dismantle the metaphor of time’s flow — not just as a linguistic habit, but as a model of thought that underpins physics, psychology, and everyday life. Our aim is not to eliminate time from our vocabulary, but to reconstrue it more carefully: not as something that exists apart from systems, but as the perspectival unfolding of those systems themselves.

Time as Reified Metaphor

Consider what is implied by the phrase “the flow of time.” It invites us to imagine time as a stream, with entities either moving through it or being carried along by it. It presupposes:

a direction (from past to future),
a uniform medium (time as an independent continuum),
a fixed rate (something that can speed up or slow down).

But none of these are observable features of reality. What we actually observe are systems in motion, in change, in unfolding. A plant grows, a body ages, a wave rises and falls. These are all events within systems. Time, as we speak of it, is not something in addition to these changes; it is how we construe the phases and sequences of their unfolding.

The metaphor of time’s flow, then, reifies a construal — it turns an abstraction into an entity. We come to treat time as something with its own properties, separate from the phenomena that give rise to it. In this way, construal is mistaken for substance, and temporality becomes ontologised as a kind of invisible fluid.

From Flow to Unfolding

In contrast, a relational ontology does not treat time as a container, a current, or a fourth dimension. Instead, it begins with the premise that systems are structured potentials — that what exists is the unfolding of possibilities within systems in relation. To speak of "time" is simply to cut across this unfolding from a particular perspective, tracing how processes become actualised.

Time, then, is not a medium in which systems exist; it is the construal of systems as unfolding.

This reframing has significant consequences. It means:

There is no independent variable called “time” that ticks away in the background.
There is no "flow" of time, only the perspectival construal of change.
There is no ontological "past" or "future" — only phases of potential as construed from particular cuts.

To say that time flows is to impose a metaphor of movement onto something that is already movement — to construe the construal.

What’s at Stake

This is not just a semantic quibble. The metaphor of flowing time underwrites everything from physical theory to personal identity. It shapes how we model the universe and how we understand our own becoming. If that metaphor is misleading — if it treats second-order construals as if they were first-order phenomena — then it needs to be held to account.

In the next post, we will develop this critique further, showing how time as construed unfolding allows us to move beyond both everyday metaphor and scientific reification. We will trace how temporality emerges from relational processes — not as a dimension or substance, but as a perspectival effect of construal.

Time does not pass. Systems unfold. And that difference matters.

2 Time as Construal

In the previous post, we challenged the idea that time “flows” — arguing instead that what we call time is a construal of unfolding systems. But what does it mean to say that time is a construal? What exactly is being construed, and from where?

In this post, we build the foundations of a relational theory of temporality. We move away from time as a dimension or quantity, and toward time as a perspectival cut across the unfolding of systems in relation. Here, time is not something that exists independently of experience, nor something that structures reality from the outside. It is the way in which reality is brought into phase — by and for a perspective.

1. From Events to Systems

The dominant image of time in many traditions — including classical physics — treats the world as a collection of entities that change over time. But from a relational standpoint, this is already a misstep. There are no isolated entities “in” time. There are only systems in relation, and each system is a structured potential for unfolding — what we might call system-as-theory-of-its-instance.

An unfolding, in this sense, is not a trajectory through time. It is what time becomes — the construal of that system from a perspective that traces its actualisation phase by phase.

To say “this system has a history” is to say that it can be construed as unfolding — not that it moves through an independently existing temporal field.

2. The Cut That Makes Time

So how does time arise? Time arises through what we call a relational cut — a perspectival construal of difference within a system’s unfolding. That is: time is not a process, but a way of construing process. It is not the sequence of changes itself, but the construal of those changes as successive.

In this view:

The “past” is not behind us — it is the potential we construe as already actualised.
The “future” is not ahead of us — it is the remainder of the system’s potential, not yet cut into phase.
The “present” is not a moment in time — it is the standpoint of construal itself, the cut that gives temporal shape to the unfolding.

There is no ontological timeline. There is only the structured possibility of unfolding, and the perspective from which that unfolding is construed as time.

3. Time as Semiotic Resource

This has strong affinities with linguistic theory — particularly systemic functional linguistics, where time is not a thing but a meaning potential. In the grammar of tense, aspect, and phase, we find tools for construing experience as temporal. These are not windows onto a pre-existing dimension; they are semiotic resources for construing experience as if it were distributed across past, present, and future.

In this sense, grammar does not merely describe time — it helps constitute our experience as temporal. Our orientation to time is not given by the world but realised in the way we construe the world.

This does not reduce time to language. It situates time in a broader category of semiotic construal — ways of meaning that arise through systems in relation. Time is just one way of cutting experience; a powerful one, but not a neutral or universal one.

4. Implications: No Time Outside the Cut

If time is construal, not substrate, then it follows:

There is no temporality that is not perspectival.
There is no “objective” passage of time — only the unfolding of systems and the ways they are brought into phase.
Every experience of time is already a cut — a construal of difference and phase in a relational system.

This cuts across both common-sense metaphors (“time flies”) and scientific models that treat time as a fixed variable (“t = 0”). In both cases, the construal is mistaken for the structure. We reify the cut as a dimension, forgetting that it is made — not found.

In the next post, we’ll turn directly to the language of temporality. Phrases like “time passes,” “time heals,” or “time is running out” are more than figures of speech — they are metaphysical commitments smuggled into grammar. By examining the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, we’ll expose the hidden ontology that underwrites our temporal thinking — and begin to imagine other ways of cutting.

3 The Ontology Behind the Idiom

By now we’ve seen that time, in a relational ontology, is not a substance that flows but a perspectival construal of unfolding. What we call “time” emerges from the ways we cut across processes and bring systems into phase. It is not something we move through, but something we construe in the movement of things.

So what are we to make of our everyday expressions — “time flies,” “time is running out,” “time will tell”? These idioms are not innocent. They do more than decorate thought — they shape it, and in doing so, they reproduce an ontology in which time is treated as a thing. In this post, we trace the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, and expose the metaphysical sleight of hand it performs.

1. Time as Space

One of the most pervasive metaphors for time is spatial:

We’re approaching the deadline.
We’ve moved past that stage.
A long time ago…

Here, time is construed as a linear spatial path. Past, present, and future become locations along a trajectory. This invites two reciprocal metaphors:

Time moves past a stationary observer (“time marches on”).
The observer moves through a stationary landscape of time (“we’re coming up to August”).

These are not mere figures of speech. They enact a model in which time is an objective terrain through which events or agents move — a container, an axis, a medium. They give time a kind of dimensional solidity, as if it existed independently of the systems that are construed within it.

From a relational standpoint, this is an error of category: it treats the construal of unfolding as if it were a thing that unfolds.

2. Time as Resource

Another common metaphor construes time as a scarce commodity:

I don’t have enough time.
We’re wasting time.
She gave me her time.

Here, time is imagined as something we can possess, lose, save, spend, or allocate — a kind of quantifiable resource. This model underwrites entire systems of labour, efficiency, and value. But again, the metaphor obscures its own origins: time is not something we own or use. What is being counted is not time, but the unfolding of processes brought under a particular construal — one that slices them into abstract, exchangeable units.

This is not a metaphysical claim about time itself. It is a cultural construal that allows some kinds of activity to be measured and coordinated — often at the cost of obscuring their actual systemic dynamics.

3. Time as Agent

Then there are idioms that construe time as an active force:

Time heals all wounds.
Time will tell.
Time destroys everything.

These expressions personify time, attributing to it the power to act, to change, to reveal. Time becomes not just a medium or a measure, but a subject — an agent that performs.

In relational terms, this is the most extravagant error: time is not a thing, nor a quantity, nor a being. To ascribe agency to “time” is to displace the actual agencies involved — to treat construal effects as causal forces. It amounts to a metaphysical evacuation: replacing the dynamics of real systems with an abstract spectre called “time.”

4. Metaphor as Ontological Commitment

These idioms are not ontologically neutral. Each one recruits a familiar construal — of space, substance, motion, agency — and applies it to unfolding processes. In doing so, they:

obscure the perspectival nature of time,
reproduce the fiction of time as independently existing,
naturalise a model in which systems are subordinated to temporal “laws.”

We are not arguing for a purging of metaphor. Metaphor is how meaning happens. But we must distinguish between metaphor as construal and metaphor as ontological smuggling. When metaphors about time are taken as literal descriptions of reality, they collapse second-order construals into first-order fact — and this is precisely what a relational ontology resists.

Toward a New Temporality

What if we treated these idioms not as truths, but as testimonies to our ways of cutting? What if we read them not for what they say about time, but for what they reveal about the construal of process?

Then, instead of saying “time is running out,” we might ask: Which systems are unfolding, and how are we positioned within them?

Instead of saying “we’re approaching the end,” we might ask: Which construal is framing this phase as an “end,” and from what standpoint?

In the next post, we’ll shift from metaphor to mechanism — exploring how the invention of clocks, calendars, and symbolic timelines gave rise to a materialised construal of time as regular, divisible, and objective. These technologies did not simply measure time — they helped to constitute it, and in doing so, reinforced a particular ontology. We’ll ask what it means to cut systems according to symbolic regularity, and what is lost in the process.

4 Clocks, Cuts, and Calendars

In our previous posts, we’ve argued that time is not a thing that flows or a dimension we occupy, but a perspectival construal of unfolding systems. We’ve seen how everyday metaphors treat time as space, resource, or agent — reifying construal into substance. But how did this reification become so dominant, so infrastructural to our ways of living?

In this post, we turn to the material side of temporal construal — to the technologies that have enabled and sedimented the illusion of time as objective, regular, and divisible. Clocks, calendars, and timelines did not merely track time; they enacted a symbolic cut across systemic unfolding, and in doing so, helped produce the very temporality they claimed to measure.

1. The Symbolisation of Regularity

Every system unfolds in relation — with internal rhythms, thresholds, and phases. A day-night cycle, a growth phase, a seasonal pattern: these are not “in time,” but temporalised by construal.

The symbolic move comes when we begin to abstract recurrence from these systems — to treat a particular pattern as a unit, and then impose that unit back onto other systems. A clock does not simply reflect unfolding; it regularises it. It cuts the continuous into discrete intervals and overlays these intervals across domains.

Thus:

A sundial maps solar movement into a flat surface.
A mechanical clock converts rotational motion into ticks.
A calendar reduces ecological cycles to a repeatable grid.

These are not neutral devices. They materialise a theory of time — one that treats temporal unfolding as uniform, universal, and external to systems.

2. From Phase to Schedule

This symbolic reconfiguration of unfolding has deep consequences. Consider the difference between a phase and a schedule:

A phase is a systemic threshold: a stage within the unfolding of a particular system (e.g. germination, migration, digestion).
A schedule is an imposed cut: a regularised interval that determines when phases should begin and end (e.g. 9:00am meeting, fiscal quarter, delivery window).

The schedule overrides the system’s own dynamics. It imposes a symbolic order that may or may not align with the system's actual potential. In doing so, it creates the illusion that time exists outside the systems it organises.

This is not just a practical convenience — it is a disciplinary move. It allows institutions to coordinate labour, regulate bodies, enforce norms. It replaces systemic potential with symbolic command.

3. Clocks as Cuts

In relational terms, the clock is not a measure of time but a cut across systems. It does not reveal how a process unfolds; it imposes a construal that detaches unfolding from its local dynamics and aligns it with an external symbolic order.

This cut is not simply epistemological — it is material. Clocks discipline not only thought, but action:

The worker must conform to the shift, not the body’s rhythm.
The student must submit to the timetable, not the arc of learning.
The event must happen “on time,” regardless of its readiness.

The symbolic regularity of clock time thus becomes a means of control, a way of abstracting systems from their potentials and rendering them legible, predictable, governable.

4. When Symbols Forget Themselves

Over time, symbolic timekeeping systems come to forget their own origins. The clock is no longer seen as a model or a tool — it is seen as reality itself. We no longer ask which systems are unfolding in what ways; we ask what time is it? As if the tick of a device captures the essence of change.

This is a metaphysical reversal. A symbolic construal of unfolding is taken as ontologically primary, while the systems it cuts across are treated as secondary, or as noise to be normalised.

Thus, relational potentials are subordinated to symbolic rhythms. The construal becomes law, and time becomes a fiction we live as if it were fact.

Toward Other Cuts

What would it mean to reverse this process — to treat symbolic time not as reality but as construal, open to revision?

It would mean:

Returning to the unfolding of systems as the basis for temporality.
Treating clocks and calendars as tools for coordination, not truth.
Attending to local phases, rhythms, and thresholds rather than imposed intervals.
Making visible the cuts we make — and recognising them as cuts, not structures of the real.

In the next post, we’ll turn our gaze to physics — a domain in which time is most rigorously formalised as a variable, a dimension, or an illusion. But we’ll ask: what remains of physics when time is no longer granted ontological priority? Can the universe be redescribed not as evolving in time, but as a relational field of unfolding systems — where time, once again, is the cut?

5 Time in Physics — A Friendly Dismantling

Physics is often treated as the ultimate authority on time. Nowhere else has time been so meticulously measured, modelled, and theorised. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s spacetime continuum to contemporary debates about the “arrow of time,” the discipline has produced a rich and rigorous tradition — and one that appears, at first glance, to have little interest in metaphor.

But even here, we find reifications at work. Physics inherits — and codifies — a model of time that treats it as an independent variable, a dimension of the universe, or, in some recent formulations, a psychological illusion. In this post, we offer not a rejection of physics, but a dismantling of its temporal ontology — a friendly one, grounded in the same commitment to rigour, but from a relational standpoint.

We ask: What happens to physical theory when time is no longer treated as a structure of the universe, but as a construal of unfolding?

1. The Variable That Structures the World

Much of classical physics treats time as a parameter:

Position changes over time.
Forces act across time.
Systems evolve as functions of time.

This model treats time as a neutral backdrop — a uniform parameter within which change can be described. But as we've seen, this is already a construal: it imposes a one-dimensional regularity across heterogeneous systems, cutting their unfolding into commensurable intervals.

More subtly, it assumes that all systems are embedded in the same time — that there is a single, shared temporal field in which all events occur. This assumption is ontologically incoherent from a relational point of view. Systems do not unfold within a universal clock; their unfolding is their time, and no system’s unfolding can be ontologically subordinated to another’s symbolic regularity.

2. Relativity and the Persistence of Time

Einstein’s theory of relativity destabilised Newtonian time by showing that temporal intervals depend on the observer’s frame of reference. Simultaneity is no longer universal; time dilates, stretches, bends. But even here, time remains a dimension — integrated into the four-dimensional geometry of spacetime.

This is often hailed as a radical shift, but it still treats time as a thing — a structure with measurable properties, woven into the fabric of reality. It refines the model, but does not abandon the ontological assumption.

From a relational standpoint, this is still a reification. What relativity captures is not time’s curvature, but the relational perspectivity of unfolding systems — the fact that no cut across systems is absolute. In this sense, relativity affirms our model more than it contradicts it — but physics continues to construe the cut as a structure, not a perspective.

3. The Block Universe and the Denial of Becoming

Contemporary physics often embraces the block universe: a model in which all events — past, present, future — co-exist in a static four-dimensional structure. In this view, the flow of time is an illusion. Nothing happens in the universe; everything is.

This model achieves ontological elegance by abolishing becoming altogether. But in doing so, it obliterates the very unfolding that gives rise to our sense of time. The block universe is a geometry, not a world; it captures the structure of relations, but erases the perspectival cuts that constitute experience.

In our terms, this model mistakes a second-order abstraction (a totalising construal of all cuts at once) for a first-order ontology. It denies process in the name of completeness — and in doing so, forgets that process is the ground from which all cuts arise.

4. Physics Without Time?

Some physicists — particularly in quantum gravity — now speculate that time may not be fundamental at all. In certain formulations, it drops out of the equations entirely. Others propose that time emerges from entanglement, thermodynamic irreversibility, or informational complexity.

These moves open space for a relational reframing — but often without breaking the reifying habit. “Time is emergent,” we are told — but emergent from what? If it emerges from systems in relation, then we are already in our framework: time is not a variable to be found; it is a construal to be made.

A physics that begins here would not look for time in the world, but for the conditions under which construals of unfolding become meaningful. It would treat temporal form not as structure, but as a perspectival alignment of systems in relation.

5. What Remains

Physics remains a powerful means of construal — a symbolic system for bringing certain domains of unfolding into alignment. But it is not an ontology. It is a modelling practice grounded in cuts — and like all cuts, it is perspectival, selective, and system-specific.

What remains, once time is released from its metaphysical role, is not less science — but a science grounded in process, relation, and perspectival construal. A physics without time is not a void. It is a field of unfolding systems, cut differently.

In the next post, we’ll turn from the theoretical to the existential. What does it mean to live without the flow of time? How does this reconfiguration shift the way we understand urgency, change, loss, and becoming? Without the scaffolding of “past,” “present,” and “future,” what becomes of the self — and of the world?

6 Living Without Flow

To live without the flow of time is not to live without change. It is to live without a fiction — a fiction that imagines time as something that slips away, runs out, or carries us forward. What we have been dismantling in this series is not experience itself, but a particular construal of experience: one that cuts the unfolding of the world into “past,” “present,” and “future,” and then treats these phases as locations in a larger, invisible medium called “time.”

But once that scaffolding is removed — once time is no longer flowing, no longer passing — what are we left with?

We are left, simply, with systems in relation, unfolding from within their own structured potentials. We are left with phases, thresholds, actualisations. We are left with a world that becomes, but not “in” time — a world whose becoming is the ground for everything we construe as temporal.

This post explores what it means to inhabit that world.

1. Urgency Without Time Pressure

Much of modern life is governed by temporal urgency: deadlines, countdowns, expiry dates, diminishing windows of opportunity. These are not inherent features of reality — they are symbolic construals imposed upon systems by calendars, clocks, and economies.

To live without flowing time is not to deny the reality of thresholds — a seed rots if left unplanted, a tide turns, a window closes — but it is to relocate urgency. Urgency is not the pressure of time itself; it is the phase-specific sensitivity of unfolding systems.

Instead of asking “how much time do we have left?”, we might ask:

What is this system’s phase potential?
Which conditions make a particular shift possible or impossible?
What unfolding is imminent, latent, delayed?

Urgency is no longer a race against time, but an attunement to the relational readiness of systems to shift.

2. Memory Without the Past

We often think of memory as a bridge to the past — a way of accessing a part of the timeline behind us. But in a relational ontology, the past is not “behind” us at all. It is not a location or container. What we call the past is simply the traces of prior actualisations — configurations of meaning, form, and relation that have left their imprint within a system.

Memory is not travel. It is reconstrual — the act of cutting across a system to bring forward a pattern that was already latent, already folded into the system’s unfolding.

To live without flowing time is to stop treating memory as a window onto another realm. It is to treat it as a perspective enacted in the present — a present which is not a point in a sequence, but a cut through unfolding.

3. Anticipation Without the Future

Similarly, anticipation does not require a future. The future is not “ahead of us.” There is no “ahead.” There is only potential yet to be actualised — patterns not yet brought into phase.

Anticipation is the modelling of potential within a system’s unfolding. It is not foresight into an ontological domain called the future. It is construal: an act of alignment between one’s current perspective and a system’s possible shifts.

This reframing has ethical implications. It rescues anticipation from fatalism — the belief that the future is already “out there” waiting to arrive — and returns it to participation: to the choices we make in how we cut, construe, and engage with unfolding systems.

4. Loss Without Linear Time

What of grief, decay, and loss? These too are often construed through flowing time — as things “left behind,” “gone forever,” or “lost to time.” But again, the loss is not to time. It is a change in the unfolding of systems — a shift in what can and cannot be brought into phase.

Loss is not the disappearance of an object down a temporal river. It is the reconfiguration of relational potential. A system is no longer available to be construed in the way it once was. But traces remain. Cuts can be re-made. Meaning can be re-aligned.

To mourn without flowing time is not to mourn less. It is to mourn differently — not as a sequence of stages to “move through,” but as an ongoing negotiation with unfolding and construal.

5. Becoming Without a Timeline

Finally, what becomes of becoming itself?

In place of a linear timeline, we have the perspectival cline between what is possible and what is actual. Becoming is not movement along a path; it is the shifting of phase space within and across systems. It is the actualisation of new potentials, the emergence of new construals, the formation of new relational cuts.

To live without flowing time is not to live without becoming. It is to live within becoming — no longer framed by the fiction of temporal movement, but by the lived reality of unfolding.

In our final post, we will return to the question of the “present.” Often treated as the most immediate and real slice of time, the present is still a metaphorical cut — still framed by the assumptions we have now left behind. We’ll ask: What becomes of the present when time no longer passes? And can we speak of “now” at all, if there is no flow?

7 No Time Like the Present?

Of all the temporal metaphors, none feels more immediate — more real — than the present. It is the locus of attention, the threshold of action, the vanishing point between memory and anticipation. Even those who doubt the reality of the past and the future tend to anchor themselves in the now. The present, we are told, is what we have.

But what is “the present,” exactly? Is it a moment? A slice? A duration? A flicker between the no-longer and the not-yet? Or is it — as we have come to suspect — another construal, another cut, shaped by the very metaphors we’ve been dismantling?

In this final post, we turn our attention to the metaphysics of now. We ask what becomes of the present when time no longer flows — and whether there is anything left to call the present once we stop mistaking construal for reality.

1. The Present as Cut, Not Container

The common image of the present is that of a moving spotlight: a narrow beam sweeping along a timeline, illuminating each moment as it arrives. This is the metaphor of the sliding now — the ever-advancing front edge of time’s flow.

But if time does not flow, then there is no beam, and no timeline to sweep across. There is only unfolding — and the cut we make when we construe a phase of that unfolding as present.

In this model:

The present is not a moment that exists.
It is a construal we perform.
It is not the location of reality.
It is a perspectival cut across systems in relation.

The “now” is not a thing. It is a way of orienting to unfolding — a construal that traces what is currently being brought into phase.

2. The Duration Illusion

Some try to salvage the present by expanding it: the “specious present,” the “lived present,” the interval of awareness that feels real. But this too is a metaphor — one that treats time as measurable stuff, capable of being portioned out and assigned width.

From a relational standpoint, such attempts miss the point. There is no objective width to the present, because there is no objective temporal field to measure. Different systems unfold on different scales, and different construals cut across them in different ways. What is construed as “now” in one context may be vastly broader or narrower than in another — not because reality changes, but because our construals do.

3. The Present as Synchronisation

Instead of thinking of the present as a universal moment shared by all systems, we can think of it as a mode of alignment:

When multiple systems are brought into phase — when their unfoldings are construed together — a “present” is forged.
This present is not in the world; it is in the relation.
It is a synchronisation, not a timestamp.

This has profound implications. There is no singular “now” ticking along universally. There are as many “presents” as there are perspectives — as many cuts as there are construals. And each present is the outcome of a relational configuration, not a metaphysical fact.

4. Letting Go of Now

This may sound disorienting. To let go of the present seems to threaten the very ground of experience. But what we are letting go of is not experience — only the fiction of a metaphysical now, detached from systems, hovering over unfolding like a spotlight.

What remains is far more robust:

The actuality of unfolding systems.
The perspectival cuts we make as we engage with them.
The meaningful phases we construe — some emergent, some recurring, all situated.

To “live in the present” is not to inhabit a fixed temporal location. It is to engage with unfolding systems from within the perspectives available to us, to attend to what is becoming phaseful, to trace the contours of actualisation as they emerge.

5. After Time

If time does not flow, then the present does not pass. It is not a fleeting gift to be clutched, nor a shrinking platform from which we glimpse the abyss of the future. It is simply a perspectival act — one among many — through which we cut across unfolding and make it meaningful.

And with that, the metaphysical drama of time dissolves. No more past slipping away. No more future bearing down. No more present poised on the edge of oblivion.

What remains is relation, construal, unfolding. What remains is a world not in time, but becoming through systems and cuts.

Coda: Living the Unflowing

This series began with a question: what if time does not flow? We have answered it not with a new theory of time, but with the dissolution of time as theory. We have shown that temporality is not an underlying structure, but a semiotic act — a way of cutting across the world’s unfolding in order to construe phase, pattern, potential.

To live without the flow of time is not to live without meaning. It is to recognise that meaning is not in time — time is in meaning. It is the name we give to certain kinds of construal, made from certain standpoints, over certain systems.

And when those construals are no longer mistaken for reality, we are free to cut differently.