Relational Ontology: From Things to Participations

1 What Is a Relational Ontology?

Ontology concerns itself with the question of being — of what exists and in what manner. It is not a question of what we know, nor of what we value, but of the fundamental presuppositions we bring to our engagement with the world. This series addresses such presuppositions explicitly, with a focus on what we will call relational ontology.

Traditionally, Western thought has been dominated by a substance ontology: a metaphysical stance that treats entities as primary and their relations as secondary. According to this view, the world is composed of discrete objects, each possessing intrinsic properties, and any relation between them is incidental or externally imposed.

By contrast, a relational ontology begins with the premise that relations are prior to relata. That is to say, it is not things that relate, but relations that bring things into being. “Things,” on this view, are not foundational elements of reality, but emergent phenomena: transient stabilisations within ongoing patterns of interaction. From this standpoint, reality is not composed of self-contained units but of events, processes, and participations. It is not the presence of substance that grounds being, but the ongoing actualisation of potential through relation.

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Ontology and Everyday Assumptions

While the term may suggest abstract metaphysical speculation, ontology has direct and pervasive implications. It conditions the frameworks within which we conceptualise knowledge, identity, language, ethics, science, and more. Consider the contrast:

• If knowledge is construed as the accumulation of facts by a detached observer, then inquiry becomes a matter of acquisition. If, instead, knowledge is relationally constituted — a matter of participation — then inquiry becomes a practice of attunement.

• If the self is imagined as an autonomous, bounded entity, then sociality becomes secondary, even optional. But if selfhood is emergent within relation, then sociality is constitutive of subjectivity.

• If language is seen as a code for representing pre-existing objects, then meaning appears static. But if meaning is realised through relational instantiation, then language is an unfolding of interaction, not a mirror of the world.

These examples indicate the far-reaching consequences of one’s ontological commitments. A shift in ontology is not simply philosophical — it is transformative.

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Toward a Participatory World

The position we wish to articulate in this series is that participation is prior to presence. What exists is not first a set of entities and only later their relations, but rather a field of unfolding potential, in which instances of meaning, action, and being are co-actualised through relation. This is a world not of fixed realities but of emergent configurations — not of static identities, but of mutual becoming.

This orientation is informed by several disciplinary commitments:

• A systemic functional linguistic account of meaning as relationally stratified and contextually instantiated;

• A neurobiological model of consciousness as selection within nested systems of coordination;

• A quantum theoretical framework in which observation constitutes, rather than merely records, phenomena;

• And an overarching commitment to understanding reality not as objective presence but as semiotic participation.

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Looking Ahead

This first post offers an outline. The five that follow will articulate this ontological orientation in more detail. They will address the priority of relation, the ontological status of potential and instance, the world as participatory event, and the implications of grounding without foundation. A final post will draw these threads together in reflection.

For now, we will close with a proposition that frames what follows:

If there are no things prior to relation, then ontology is not a study of what is, but of how being is made possible through participation.

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2 The Priority of Relation

At the heart of relational ontology lies a reversal: rather than beginning with entities and asking how they relate, we begin with relation itself. This reversal is not simply theoretical; it reconfigures how we understand existence, agency, and structure. It challenges us to see that relations do not connect pre-existing things — they bring things into being.

In this view, relation is ontologically prior to relata. That is to say, what we think of as “things” — bodies, selves, objects, identities — do not pre-exist the network of relations in which they participate. They are not the source of relation but its effect. This is not merely a re-description; it is a different metaphysical stance, one that refuses the assumption of atomism and posits instead a world constituted in and through ongoing interaction.

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Emergence, Not Construction

To say that entities emerge through relation is not to say they are constructed in the sense of being artificial or illusory. The charge of “anti-realism” often levelled at relational perspectives mistakes emergence for fabrication. But relational ontology does not deny the reality of things; it denies their independent reality. It insists that what is real is real as a function of relation — and that to understand anything apart from the relations that make it possible is to misunderstand it fundamentally.

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The Individual as Emergent Node

Take the example of the self. In a substance ontology, the self is a bounded individual, self-identical across contexts, capable of standing apart from its environment and engaging it at will. In a relational ontology, the self is a node in a field of relations — not reducible to that field, but not separable from it either. Its identity is not given once and for all but enacted through patterns of participation.

This view resonates with certain traditions in systems theory, cognitive science, and anthropology. But here we are framing it ontologically: not simply as a way the self behaves, but as a condition of its being.

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Meaning as Relational Actualisation

The same applies to meaning. Meaning is not a property of signs, nor a correspondence between language and world. It is a relation — a triadic relation in which a sign functions for an interpreter in a given context. Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a particularly powerful model of this process, understanding meaning not as pre-existing but as instantiated in and through contextually motivated choices within a structured potential.

Meaning, then, is neither located in the signifier nor in the signified, but in the relation between potential and instance, between system and situation. It is a process of actualisation — always dependent, always situated.

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Implications for Knowledge

When relation is given ontological priority, knowledge cannot be the apprehension of fixed truths about independent objects. Instead, knowing becomes a relational practice — an act of coordination, participation, and co-emergence. It is not that the world is unknowable, but that what we know of it is inseparable from how we come to know. This is not relativism. It is a call for reflexivity, for attentiveness to the ways in which knowing is always already embedded in relation.

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A World Made of With

Relational ontology insists that we live not in a world of things, but in a world of with. We are never alone, never outside. We are in relation — and through relation, we become.

The next post will extend this line of thought by examining the ontological status of potential. If relational ontology begins with relation, what does it mean to speak of the potential from which instances emerge?

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3 The Ontological Status of Potential

If relational ontology begins with relation, it must also account for that which can come into relation. This brings us to the concept of potential. What is potential, and how does it differ from — yet condition — the actuality of things?

In a substance ontology, potential tends to be treated as secondary or derivative: the possible is simply that which is not yet actual. In a relational ontology, by contrast, potential is a mode of being in its own right. It is not the negation of actuality, but the field from which actualisation becomes possible. This view requires a careful rethinking of both potential and instance, and of the relation between them.

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Potential Is Not a Shadow of the Actual

To approach potential relationally is to reject the idea that the actual is more real than the possible. Instead, potential is what makes actualisation possible. It is not what things lack before they come into being; it is the structured horizon of becoming — the web of affordances, constraints, and systemic tendencies from which instances emerge.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, this is the distinction between meaning potential and meaning instance: the potential is structured, not amorphous; and the instance is an actualisation, not an exception. The same applies at the ontological level: the potential is not an unformed void, but a differentiated field of possibilities shaped by patterns of past actualisations and the systems that make them available.

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Instantiation as Ontological Process

The process by which potential becomes instance — instantiation — is not merely a linguistic phenomenon. It is an ontological principle. Actual entities are not static things but emergent outcomes: instances of relational actualisation. They do not stand apart from the field of potential; they express it. Each instance reconfigures the potential from which it emerged, just as each utterance in language shifts the probabilities within the meaning system for future utterances.

In this way, instantiation is not a linear unfolding from possibility to reality; it is a recursive process, a dynamic interplay between what has been and what may yet become.

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The Temporality of Potential

Potential is inherently temporal. It is what could happen, not in some detached logical sense, but in the thick present of the unfolding world. It is always situated — conditioned by history, shaped by pattern, and open to contingency. In quantum physics, for instance, the wavefunction describes a field of potential outcomes, and measurement instantiates one among them. But the wavefunction is not “less real” than its collapse. It is a different mode of reality: a reality of openness and relation.

Similarly, in the relational ontology articulated here, potential is the mode in which relational configurations can take shape. It is not inert. It is active possibility.

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From Possibility to Participation

To understand potential relationally is to recognise that possibility is not a neutral backdrop against which action occurs. It is a product of past actualisations and an invitation to future ones. It is not that we act upon potential; we participate in its unfolding. Thus, the shift from a substance to a relational ontology is also a shift from acting on the world to participating with it.

The instance is not a singularity but a node — a moment of coalescence that draws from, and returns to, the field of potential. And that field, in turn, is not fixed, but continuously reshaped through participation.

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Looking Ahead

The next post will explore the consequences of this view for how we understand the world itself — not as a set of objects, but as a participatory event. If all beings are emergent from relation, and all relations unfold from a field of potential, then what is the world but the ongoing play of their co-actualisation?

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4 The World as Participatory Event

If relational ontology gives ontological primacy to relation and recognises potential as a mode of being, then it follows that the world itself is not a static container filled with things, but a dynamic unfolding of participatory events. This view entails a radical reconfiguration of what we mean by “world.” The world is not a stage on which entities act, but the ongoing relational becoming of those entities — an event continually co-composed by its participants.

This is not a metaphor. It is a metaphysical claim: the world is not made of things, but of the relations that instantiate things in particular ways at particular times.

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Against the Background/Foreground Divide

In substance ontology, the world is often conceived as a backdrop — an objective, external environment in which subjects and objects appear. This assumption underwrites many dualisms: mind/world, subject/object, figure/ground. But a relational ontology resists this division. There is no neutral background against which things stand out; what appears does so only through participation.

The world is always already involved. It is not a setting for events but their condition — not external to relation, but its expression. To exist is to participate in the event that is world-making.

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Participation as Ontological Category

In this view, participation is not an epistemological feature (how we know the world), but an ontological one (what the world is). To be is to participate. This applies not only to human beings, but to all entities, forces, and processes — from cells to stars, from atoms to meanings. Nothing is outside relation. Nothing is outside the world-event.

Participation is thus the mode in which all actuality occurs. And crucially, it is non-isolable. No entity can be wholly disentangled from the relations through which it comes to be. Even attempts to define or delimit something — to draw a boundary — are themselves acts of participation, reconfiguring the potential for what can be seen, said, and done.

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The World as Recursively Co-Actualising

If the world is an event of participatory unfolding, then it is not simply happening to us. We are happening with it. This “with” is not additive — it is generative. Our participation does not occur within a pre-given world; our participation is the world, or more precisely, a moment in its continual becoming.

This has profound consequences. It means the world is never finished. It is not the sum of all that exists, but the ongoing play of emergence, collapse, and reconstitution — a recursive negotiation between potential and instance, where each instance modifies the potential for future participation.

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The Ethics of Co-Becoming

To frame the world as participatory event is also to reframe responsibility. If we are always already participants, then our task is not to seek a position of objective neutrality, but to cultivate attentiveness to the patterns we co-actualise. Knowing is no longer a matter of standing apart, but of leaning in — carefully, critically, and with care for what we bring into being.

This is not simply a philosophical point. It is a call to engage differently — with each other, with the more-than-human, with the systems and structures through which meaning and matter take shape.

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Next: The Limits of Objectivity

The next post will confront a central implication of this view: if the world is participatory, what becomes of objectivity? Is it still possible to speak of knowledge that does not collapse into mere perspective? We will argue that the problem lies not in abandoning objectivity, but in rethinking what it can mean — not as detachment, but as accountable participation.

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5 Rethinking Objectivity

The idea that the world is a participatory event invites a pressing question: what becomes of objectivity? If all knowledge is situated within relational unfolding, does this collapse truth into relativism? In a relational ontology, the answer is no — but only if we are prepared to rethink what objectivity means.

Objectivity is not abandoned. It is transformed. It ceases to be the view from nowhere and becomes a practice of accountable participation. The goal is not to escape relation, but to recognise and reckon with our place within it.

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From Detachment to Situatedness

In substance-based ontologies, objectivity is often associated with detachment: the ability to observe without interference. But in a relational ontology, such detachment is impossible. Observation is always an act of participation. We do not merely receive data; we enact selections, set parameters, collapse potentials into actuals. This is not a failure of objectivity — it is its condition.

What shifts is the ideal. The aim is no longer to erase the observer, but to foreground the structure of participation: to trace how our perspective has come to be, what it opens up, and what it forecloses.

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Epistemology Within Relation

Knowing is not a disembodied achievement. It is a mode of being-with. Every act of knowing is situated in a nexus of relations — historical, material, symbolic, affective. The question is not whether we can remove ourselves from these, but how we can move within them with greater precision, humility, and care.

This is what accountable participation means. It is not a denial of objectivity, but a commitment to an objectivity that begins with situatedness — one that asks not only what is true? but also how does this truth come to matter? and for whom?

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Patterns of Recurrence and Inference

Importantly, relational ontology does not deny regularity, repeatability, or inference. Quite the opposite. Patterns emerge precisely through the recurrence of relational configurations. What changes is the status of such patterns: they are not features of a world out there, but expressions of the system’s actualisations over time. They can be tracked, modelled, and made increasingly robust — but they remain contingent upon the relations that produce them.

This is not relativism. It is realism — but of a kind that recognises the world as dynamically co-constructed rather than statically pre-given.

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Reflexivity and the Practice of Objectivity

A relational approach demands reflexivity: a continual awareness of the conditions and consequences of our participation. This includes the disciplines we work within, the tools we use, and the metaphors we inherit. It is not enough to speak of “data” or “facts” as if they emerge unshaped. Every fact is the outcome of selection, framing, and interpretation. This does not make facts unreal; it makes them relationally real.

Objectivity, then, becomes a virtue of openness: openness to revising frames, testing assumptions, and acknowledging entanglements. It is a practice, not a position.

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Toward a Relational Epistemology

In this light, epistemology itself must be rethought. Knowing is not the accumulation of representations, but the cultivation of capacities to participate meaningfully in a co-actualising world. It is not a conquest of the unknown, but an invitation to enter more deeply into the unfolding of relation.

The final post in this series will explore the implications of this view for what it means to know with — to understand not as possession, but as mutual emergence.

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6 Knowing With — Toward a Relational Epistemology

If the world is constituted through relation, and objectivity is a practice of accountable participation, then knowing is not a private act of acquisition, but a shared process of co-becoming. In this final post, we articulate a relational epistemology: not knowing about, but knowing with.

To know is to enter into relation — to be changed by what one seeks to understand. This is not a failure of rigour; it is its fulfilment. In a relational world, epistemology becomes a mode of responsiveness: a way of living attentively in the presence of others, human and more-than-human, where every act of understanding is also an act of world-making.

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Knowledge as Participation

In traditional models, knowledge is possession: one gains knowledge, accumulates facts, builds conceptual systems. But within a relational ontology, this metaphor no longer holds. Knowledge cannot be owned. It is not a static entity that sits in a mind or on a page. It is a process — a pattern of co-actualisation between knowers and knowns.

Knowing, then, is not separable from being. To know something is to become-with it, to let its potentials shape one’s own. Knowledge is not what I have about the world, but what we come to be together through our mutual engagement.

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From Representation to Intra-Action

This shifts the function of knowledge from representation to intra-action — a term that underscores how entities do not pre-exist their interactions but emerge through them. Knowing is not the mirroring of a world already made; it is a participation in the making of the world. To know is to intervene, to co-compose, to respond.

This entails responsibility. What we bring into view is not neutral. It is a commitment — a participation in particular worldings, with their own inclusions, exclusions, and consequences.

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Knowing-with as Ethical Practice

Relational epistemology is inseparable from ethics. If knowledge is participation, then all knowing is also a form of relating — and all relations carry ethical weight. What matters is not only what we know, but how we participate in the knowing: whether we make space for the other, whether we flatten difference, whether we listen or extract.

This is not a call to abandon analysis, but to deepen it — to let rigour and relationality inflect one another. Knowing-with is rigorous not because it pretends to be neutral, but because it strives to be reflexive, situated, and attentive to the difference that makes a difference.

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Knowledge as World-Making

In this framework, knowledge becomes a form of world-making. Not because it invents reality from nothing, but because it selects, frames, and instantiates potential into particular actualities. Our categories, our questions, our models — all participate in shaping the world we inhabit and inherit.

This is not to say that anything goes. It is to say that everything matters. Each act of knowing is an intervention in the unfolding of relation. As such, the epistemic is always also the ontological and the ethical.

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An Invitation

Relational ontology does not give us a stable platform on which to stand. It invites us into a practice of becoming-with — of living knowledgeably and responsibly in a world that is never merely given, but always in the making.

To take this seriously is not to despair over the loss of certainty. It is to recognise that we are always already involved, and to ask: what kinds of worlds do we want to participate in bringing forth?

Relational Epistemology: Knowing as Becoming-With

1 Knowledge as Relation, Not Possession

Reframing epistemology in a co-emergent world

What does it mean to know, when knowledge is not a possession but a relation?

In many dominant traditions, knowledge has been imagined as a kind of object — something we acquire, hold, store, and transfer. We “gain” knowledge, “possess” insights, and “accumulate” information, as if understanding were a commodity and the knower a solitary collector.

But this metaphor of knowledge-as-possession arises from — and reinforces — a particular ontology: one in which entities are discrete, self-contained, and fundamentally separate from one another. From this view, to know something is to stand at a distance, to observe without entanglement, and to translate the world into representations we can control.

What if that picture no longer holds?

In this series, we want to explore what happens when we reimagine knowing through the lens of a relational ontology — one in which entities emerge through relation, not apart from it. In such a world, to know something is not to stand outside it, but to participate in its becoming. Knowledge is not the mapping of a pre-existing terrain, but the unfolding of meaning in and through relation.

This idea is not without precedent. Indigenous epistemologies, feminist science studies, Buddhist interdependence, and ecological thought have all questioned the myth of the isolated observer. In relational systems, objectivity is not neutrality, but accountability. And knowing is no longer an act of extraction, but of entanglement.

Our own model emerges from this same impulse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, neuronal group selection, and relational process thought, we view meaning as not pre-given but semiotically co-actualised — a product of shared potential and local instantiation. From this vantage point, to know is to bring forth a world together.

In the posts to come, we’ll explore:

• how the subject–object divide collapses in a relational universe

• how language mediates shared becoming

• why all knowledge is situated, embodied, and historically contingent

• what kind of ethics emerge from epistemic entanglement

• and how reverence for the unknowable may be the most relational epistemic act of all.

We invite you, then, not to acquire these ideas, but to enter into relation with them. Let them change you — even if slightly. Let them listen back.

Because to know is not to have —

It is to become with.

2 The Collapse of the Subject–Object Divide

From observer to participant in the act of knowing

The modern Western tradition has long been shaped by a powerful epistemic split: the division between subject and object, knower and known. This binary underlies many of our institutions and practices — from the scientific method to legal discourse, from education to economics. It frames the world as a collection of objects, and the self as a separate subject that can stand outside, observe, and represent.

But from a relational perspective, this split begins to unravel.

If beings come into being through relation, then there are no subjects without objects, and no objects without subjects. The distinction itself is an artefact of a particular mode of meaning-making — one that favours distance, fixity, and control. In reality, the knower and the known are co-constituted in the act of knowing.

To observe is already to participate.

We see this clearly in quantum mechanics, where the act of measurement collapses the wavefunction — not because the observer’s consciousness imposes itself, but because the very framework of observation brings forth a particular actuality from a field of potential. But this is not limited to physics. Every act of perception, of language, of meaning, is an actualisation of shared potential — an event in which world and mind emerge together.

In systemic functional linguistics, meaning arises from the interplay of potential and instance, and unfolds across strata: from experience to semantics, from semantics to wording. There is no pure observer; there is only the unfolding of meaning as relation. The speaker is not a solitary source, but a node in a network of historical, cultural, and intersubjective potentials.

And in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, consciousness itself is not the mirror of a pre-given world, but the emergent property of a nervous system undergoing experience-dependent selection. What the self “knows” is inseparable from how it has become.

This means that to know is not to grasp a pre-existent object, but to enter into relation — to instantiate one possibility among many, co-shaped by one’s perspective, location, and history.

In a relational epistemology:

• Knowledge is process, not product.

• The subject is enmeshed, not removed.

• The world is responsive, not passive.

• And every act of knowing changes both the knower and the known.

This is not the end of rigour or clarity. It is the beginning of accountable entanglement.

It is the shift from knowledge as certainty, to knowledge as participatory unfolding.

Next, we’ll look at how language makes this possible — how it not only mediates meaning, but enacts the relationality at the heart of knowing.

3 Language as Relational Act

Meaning arises in the space-between

If knowledge is not possession but participation, then how does this participation take form?

Through language.

Language is often imagined as a code — a tool for labelling objects and transmitting information from one mind to another. But from a relational epistemology, this model fails to capture the generative role of language in world-making. Language does not simply represent a world already there. It co-creates it.

In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language is a semiotic system — a system of meaning potential that is instantiated in concrete acts. These acts unfold across multiple strata (semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) and serve three simultaneous functions:

• Ideational: construing experience

• Interpersonal: enacting relationships

• Textual: weaving meaning into flow

What we call a “fact” is already a construal — the result of selections from a system of potential meanings. And these selections are never neutral. They enact positions, relationships, values, and ontologies.

Language, then, is not a mirror but a gesture: a semiotic act that brings forth a world in dialogue with others. Each utterance is a thread in the web of shared becoming. It presupposes a listener, anticipates a response, and is shaped by the histories of meaning that precede it.

From this perspective, language is not in the mind. It is a relational field:

• An attractor space of shared habits, histories, and resonances

• A zone of tension between what is known, what is possible, and what is becoming

• A medium in which knower and known meet, not as fixed entities, but as co-emergent presences

Even the notion of a “subject” relies on language. In SFL terms, the self is not the origin of meaning but an interpersonal enactment: the I that says “I” exists because it is said, not before. The self is a semiotic figure — an ongoing performance in a field of voices.

And just as potential meanings are actualised through instantiation, so knowledge itself is always instance-bound: specific to its conditions of utterance, yet drawing on collective resources.

To know, then, is not simply to internalise. It is to enter a dialogue, to respond, to take up a position in a web of meanings that precedes and exceeds us.

We become knowers by participating in the language-worlds of others.

In the next post, we will explore the implications of this view for objectivity, and what it might mean to be “rigorous” in a relational universe.

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4 From Observation to Participation: Rethinking Objectivity

The story of Western knowledge has often been told as a progressive refinement of objectivity. To know truly, we were told, was to see without bias, to stand apart from the world, and to observe it as it is — unclouded by our subjectivity. This myth of the detached knower brought powerful tools and a certain kind of mastery. But it also obscured something vital: we are never not part of the world we seek to know.

The Observer is Always Embedded

In a relational ontology, there is no Archimedean point — no view from nowhere. Every act of knowing is situated. We know from somewhere, with others, and through the lenses of meaning systems we inherit and co-create.

Science itself has recognised this. In quantum mechanics, the act of measurement collapses potentiality into actuality. In ecology, the observer is part of the system. In anthropology, knowledge is inseparable from cultural standpoint. Across disciplines, cracks have appeared in the illusion of detachment — and through them, a richer vision of participation is emerging.

Knowing as Intra-action

Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action replaces the notion of interaction between pre-existing entities. It suggests that entities do not pre-exist their relations — they emerge through their relations. In this light, knowing is not about mapping an independent world; it’s about becoming-with the world through patterns of entanglement. Epistemology becomes relational practice.

Objectivity, then, must be reframed. Not as distance from, but as accountability to. Not as removal of the self, but as conscious inclusion of one’s position, values, and relational responsibilities. In this sense, objectivity becomes a stance of ethical situatedness — not erasure of perspective, but clarity about how one’s perspective shapes the knowing.

The Relational Epistemic Stance

To know relationally is to shift from observer to participant, from explanation to engagement, from certainty to attunement. It asks:

• What are the relations that make this knowing possible?

• How do I participate in the emergence of this knowledge?

• What does this knowledge make possible — and what does it foreclose?

Such questions do not undermine rigour — they deepen it. They invite humility, curiosity, and responsiveness. They make space for other ways of knowing — Indigenous, poetic, embodied — that have long been marginalised by the myth of dispassionate observation.

Knowing is a Form of Care

In this view, knowing is not just cognitive but ethical. It is a form of care — a way of relating that transforms both the knower and the known. To know something is not simply to grasp it, but to participate in its becoming, to be shaped by its presence, and to respond to its needs.

In relational epistemology, knowledge is not a possession. It is a practice of participation, grounded in the shared world we co-create.

5 Learning as Transformation: Becoming-with What We Know

If knowing is a form of participation, then learning is not simply the accumulation of information. It is a transformation of who we are, through our entanglement with what we come to know. In a relational ontology, learning is not just acquiring knowledge — it is becoming-with the world.

From Acquisition to Transformation

Traditional models of education often cast learning as transfer: knowledge is a commodity held by one party and passed to another. But this assumes that the learner remains fundamentally unchanged — a stable self that merely receives.

In contrast, relational epistemology frames learning as ontogenetic — it changes the knower. To learn something deeply is to reconfigure one’s patterns of attention, action, and relation. The learner is not an empty vessel but a node in an unfolding web of becoming.

This shift echoes what happens in developmental systems theory and in Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection: new patterns emerge not from imprinting but from dynamic reorganisation. Just as neural circuits are strengthened through lived experience, our ways of meaning-making are sculpted through our participation in meaningful practices.

Co-Transformation and Mutual Becoming

Relational learning is not individualistic. It happens in relation: with others, with environments, with texts, with traditions. And in each of these relations, something shifts — not only in the learner, but in the world.

When we engage with a concept, a story, a landscape, or a community, both parties are changed. The world becomes differently knowable through us, and we become differently possible through it. This is co-transformation — learning as a mutual unfolding.

This view challenges the false neutrality of traditional schooling, which too often treats learning as assimilation into pre-existing structures. A relational pedagogy asks: What is being transformed? What is being sustained? What is being silenced?

The Temporality of Learning

Learning unfolds in time — but not clock time. It unfolds in meaningful temporality, the felt rhythm of processes of change. From this angle, learning is less like crossing off outcomes and more like tending a garden: slow, recursive, attuned to conditions and possibilities.

In relational temporality, learning is not linear progression. It is spiral, recursive, dialogic. We revisit ideas in new contexts, re-make meanings through new relations, re-compose ourselves again and again.

Learning as Ethical Becoming

To learn relationally is to enter into a practice of care. It matters what we learn — and it matters how we are changed by that learning. Not all transformations are life-affirming. Not all knowledge nurtures the possible.

Thus, relational learning is not just a pedagogical theory. It is a practice of discernment: Which relations do I enter? Which knowings do I deepen? How do I stay accountable to what I become-with?

In this view, education is not the production of skilled individuals for a system. It is the cultivation of relational beings who can respond wisely and compassionately to the worlds they co-create.

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6 Beyond the Mirror: The Limits of Objectivity in a Co-Emergent World

We often imagine knowledge as a kind of mirror — a faithful reflection of the world "out there." Science, in this view, is the supreme polisher of the mirror, offering an ever-clearer image of reality. But what if there is no static reality to reflect? What if the world, and the knower, are co-emergent?

Objectivity as Distance

The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity promised detachment. To know truly, one must step back, set aside bias, and observe from a neutral vantage point. The ideal observer is outside the system, unaffected by what is observed.

But in a relational universe, such detachment is a fiction. All knowing is entangled — situated in bodies, cultures, ecologies, languages. The very act of observing is also a way of participating. To observe is to select, to frame, to relate.

This is not a failure of objectivity — it is a revelation of how knowing works.

Entangled Observation

Quantum physics has long taught us that the observer affects the observed. But this is not just a quirk of subatomic particles. In human meaning-making, too, our ways of seeing shape what is seen. Theories are not just mirrors — they are tools that cut grooves into the world, making some pathways possible and others invisible.

In this light, knowledge is not neutral representation. It is intra-action (as Karen Barad puts it): a coming-into-relation that brings both knower and known into being.

We do not find truth lying there in the world, untouched. We enter into a relationship with what is. And in that relationship, both the world and the knower are transformed.

Situated Knowledges

Feminist epistemologists such as Donna Haraway have insisted on situated knowledges — an alternative to the view-from-nowhere. All knowledge arises from a location, a history, a set of relations. This does not make it false; it makes it accountable.

From a relational perspective, knowledge gains its richness not from abstract distance but from concrete engagement. A farmer knows the soil differently than a satellite does. A patient knows pain differently than a clinician. Both knowings are valid — and partial.

Objectivity, then, is not purity from relation. It is responsibility within relation. It means being answerable to the ways our knowing shapes the world and to the consequences of our conceptual tools.

Knowing Otherwise

In a co-emergent world, there is no God's-eye view. But there are many eyes, many voices, many ways of knowing. Rather than striving for control over truth, we can listen across difference, learn in dialogue, and co-create more livable futures.

This does not mean “anything goes.” It means we go together, carefully, aware that knowledge is never solitary. It is always a weaving — of bodies, histories, ecologies, and desires.

In the end, to know relationally is to enter the dance: not mastering the steps, but moving responsively, attuned to the rhythms of the world and to the calls of others.

7 Wisdom as Relational Attunement: Knowing-with in a Living World

As we arrive at the end of this inquiry, we find ourselves far from the domain of static facts and finished truths. In their place, we encounter something more fluid, more fragile, and more alive: wisdom — not as a body of knowledge, but as a practice of attunement.

From Knowing About to Knowing-With

We began by unseating the myth of the solitary knower, the one who stands outside the world and names it from a distance. What emerged instead is a vision of knowledge as relational: we know with, not just about. We become part of what we seek to understand.

In this shift from separation to entanglement, we discover that wisdom lies not in control, but in participation. It’s not the accumulation of facts, but the deepening of responsiveness — the ability to notice, to care, to respond in kind to the needs of a moment, a community, a living world.

The Rhythms of Attunement

To attune is to move in resonance with others — not only with other humans, but with animals, forests, rivers, ancestors, symbols, dreams. In a relational epistemology, all of these become sites of knowing. They are not passive objects of study, but active participants in the unfolding of understanding.

Wisdom listens. It senses shifts in tempo, texture, and tone. It recognises that meaning is emergent, and that knowing means staying open — porous — to what has not yet fully arrived.

Attunement requires slowness. Stillness. The relinquishing of the desire to grasp. It is a posture of receptive presence, of abiding-with.

The Ethical Dimension

Because knowing is never neutral, wisdom bears an ethical charge. It asks not just Is this true? but What is this relationship asking of me? It is not about possessing knowledge, but being answerable to it — recognising that knowing reshapes both the world and ourselves.

This moves us from epistemology to ethics, from understanding to care. If we are always becoming-with, then we are also always responsible-for. The world we come to know is not something we can leave unchanged. It changes with us.

Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing

In a relational universe, knowing is not just mental. It is affective, bodily, symbolic, storied. It participates in the sacred — not as a separate domain, but as the depth dimension of all becoming.

To know wisely is to honour this depth — to treat the world not as object, but as thou. In this spirit, wisdom is not cleverness. It is reverence. It is humility in the face of complexity, and trust in the co-arising of understanding through relation.

We might even say that wisdom is what knowing becomes when it has been softened by love.

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The Way Ahead

As we conclude this series, we offer not a map but an invitation. To know is not to conquer mystery, but to walk with it. To live relationally is to live in meaning — not as a thing we hold, but as a space we co-inhabit and co-create.

Let us meet the world, not as masters, but as kin. Let us listen, attend, respond — and in so doing, let us become wise.

Temporalities of Meaning: Relational Time and Becoming

1 Time as the Unfolding of Process — A Relational Reframing

In the modern scientific worldview, time is often imagined as a uniform container — a linear continuum in which things happen. Physics treats it as a fourth dimension alongside the three of space, something we move through or are moved by. But from a relational and semiotic perspective, time is not a container. It is not an empty backdrop against which processes unfold. Rather, time is the very dimension of unfolding itself — the relational axis of becoming.

This view reframes time as neither objective nor subjective, but as inherently semiotic. That is, it is a meaning dimension, emerging from and with the processes it organises. A process is not located “in” time; it constitutes time — just as a conversation constitutes meaning through the very act of being spoken.

From this perspective, time is not a fixed sequence, but a dynamic arising:

• It unfolds as processes unfold.

• It becomes through instantiations of potential.

• It is felt in and through consciousness, not as a clockwork metronome, but as the lived rhythm of meaning.

Potential and Instance

In a relational ontology, we distinguish between potential and instance. This is not just a distinction between the general and the particular, but between structured affordance and actualised relation. In temporal terms:

• Potential time is the structure of temporal meaning available to be instantiated.

• Instance time is the actual unfolding of a process — a stretch of becoming that occupies a place on the cline between potential and instance.

For example, the structure of narrative offers culturally shaped potentials for past, present, and future. But these do not exist independently; they are instantiated in texts, in utterances, and in experiences. Narrative time isn’t “in” the story — it is the unfolding of the story itself.

Time and Consciousness

If time is the dimension of unfolding, then consciousness is a process of temporal actualisation. In our neural model — grounded in Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection — consciousness is not a substance but a processual selection of patterns. These selections are both temporal and semiotic. They occur over time, but they also constitute time.

Our experiences of flow, delay, anticipation, memory, and repetition are not distortions of objective time — they are the very fabric of meaning-in-becoming. And meaning systems — from language to ritual, from culture to mythology — are the semiotic scaffolds through which such temporal experiences are shaped, shared, and re-actualised.

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Toward a Semiotic Cosmology

In this reframing, we are not placing time “within” the world. Rather, we are locating the world — the world as construed — within time as semiotic unfolding. Time is not an object; it is the temporal dimension of meaning itself. And just as meaning is always relational, always patterned and always instantiated anew, so too is time.

In the posts to follow, we will explore how different meaning systems shape temporal experience, how grammar enacts time through tense and aspect, how subjectivity emerges through temporal orientation, and how social structures and imaginative acts give rise to collective temporalities of memory, anticipation, and transformation.

2 Grammatical Time and the Semiotics of Tense

If time is the dimension of the unfolding of processes, then language is one of the primary ways we organise, construe, and enact that unfolding. Every time we speak or write, we are not merely describing time — we are doing time. Through grammar, we instantiate temporal relations, selectively activating patterns of meaning from our cultural and linguistic meaning potential.

At the heart of this linguistic temporality is tense — a system that locates a process in relation to a speaking event. But tense is not simply a representation of clock time. It is a semiotic resource for positioning experience in relation to the act of meaning itself.

The Grammar of Temporal Relation

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, tense is not a label attached to verbs — it is a system of interpersonal and experiential meaning. It allows speakers to construe events as having happened, happening, or about to happen, always from a particular vantage point.

Tense structures time in three primary ways:

• It positions processes relative to the “now” of the speech event.

• It orders sequences of events or states — establishing before, after, or simultaneous relations.

• It frames meanings of completion, continuation, or anticipation through aspectual choices.

In other words, grammatical time is a relational map of becoming — not a neutral record of when something occurred, but a semiotic act of patterning experience.

Tense as Instantiation of Temporal Potential

Every tense selection — whether present perfect, future progressive, or past simple — is an instantiation of potential temporal meaning. The system of tense offers structured affordances for construing temporality, and speakers activate these selectively and creatively.

In this way, tense is not a representation of time in the physical world. It is a social-semantic technology: a cultural scaffold for making temporal distinctions that matter to us — to our purposes, our stories, and our interactions.

Becoming Through Language

In a relational ontology, meaning is always emerging — always on the move between potential and instance. Tense participates in this motion. It allows us to construe what has become, what is becoming, and what may yet become. And it does this not by referring to external clock-time, but by articulating position within the unfolding of meaning itself.

Grammatical time is thus a form of temporal individuation. Each utterance not only positions events in relation to others — it positions us. It creates a self who remembers, a self who anticipates, a self embedded in a fabric of unfolding meaning.

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Beyond Tense: Time as Social Semiotic

Tense is only one resource among many. Languages also use modality, mood, temporal adverbials, and narrative structure to construe time. These are not just linguistic conventions — they are ways of inhabiting time. In the posts to come, we’ll explore how these patterns shape subjective and collective temporalities — and how time, far from being uniform or objective, is always situated, enacted, and shared.

3 Subjective Time — Consciousness and the Rhythm of Meaning

If grammatical time is a semiotic system for construing temporal relations, then subjective time is the lived dimension in which those meanings unfold. It is the inner rhythm of becoming — the pulse of consciousness as it moves, not through a fixed timeline, but through streams of experience.

In a relational ontology, time does not exist independently of processes. It is the dimension of their unfolding. And conscious processes — mental and verbal — are no exception. When we attend, remember, imagine, or speak, we do so in time. But not in a time that simply “passes.” We do so in a time that is enacted.

The Pulse of Mental Processes

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, consciousness is not a continuous stream, but a sequence of selections — discrete moments of neuronal integration that form higher-order patterns. Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection shows how neural processes are selected and stabilised through experience. These momentary integrations give rise to what we call attention, memory, and awareness — and each has its own temporal signature.

In this light, subjective time is rhythmic. It pulses with the dynamic recurrence of processes:

• Attention flares and fades.

• Memories surface and retreat.

• Thoughts spiral, stutter, or leap.

Rather than ticking forward like a metronome, time in consciousness is modulated by the patterns of meaning we instantiate.

The Temporalities of Projection

In language, we enact these rhythms through projection — one clause projecting another in mental, verbal, or emotive processes:

• I remember that she left.

• He says it’s raining.

• We believe they’ll return.

Each of these projected structures marks a temporal shift: not from present to past, but from immediate to distanced, from shared to internal, from the outer world to the inner theatre of experience. Here, time is not measured — it is layered.

Becoming Through Conscious Process

What, then, does it mean to become, in the semiotic space of consciousness?

To become is to mean — to actualise potential into instance through attention, reflection, desire, or action. Time, in this view, is not a stage on which we act. It is a trajectory of instantiation — a continual flow from potential experience into actualised meaning.

In this unfolding, the self is not a fixed point. It is a dynamic attractor, stabilised momentarily by recurrent patterns of meaning, memory, and intention. Subjective time is thus the rhythm of this self-organising flow — the way in which becoming is felt, enacted, and known.

4 Collective Time — Cultural Rhythms and Temporal Habitus

If subjective time unfolds in the rhythms of consciousness, then collective time arises in the patterned flows of cultural life. We don’t simply inhabit time — we inherit it. We are inducted into it through practices, rituals, technologies, calendars, and clocks. These are not neutral instruments. They are semiotic artefacts that coordinate shared temporal experience — synchronising bodies, meanings, and social orders.

The Social Construction of Time

Time is not experienced the same way across all cultures or historical periods. It is shaped by collective patterns of meaning:

• Some cultures organise time cyclically, emphasising return and renewal.

• Others emphasise linearity, with beginnings, progress, and ends.

• Still others live by event time, where processes dictate the flow, not the clock.

These orientations are not simply mental. They are encoded in language, myth, ritual, and practice. In this sense, time is a habitus — a relational field of dispositions shaped by the historical and social structures we live within.

Calendars, Rituals, and the Temporalisation of Meaning

A calendar is not merely a tool for marking days — it is a symbolic scaffold for collective becoming. It tells us:

• When to celebrate and mourn.

• When to plant, harvest, or migrate.

• When to pause, reflect, or begin again.

Religious rituals, national holidays, academic semesters, fiscal years — all of these instantiate temporal meanings that organise our lives. They do more than coordinate schedules; they shape our very sense of significance. They synchronise meaning potentials across individuals and groups, creating shared attractor spaces for cultural identity and action.

Time as a Semiotic Field

In this view, time is not a backdrop for culture — it is a product of semiosis. The meanings we give to birth and death, success and failure, youth and old age, all unfold within temporal categories that are learned, enacted, and inherited.

Just as grammar gives us resources to construe temporal relations in language, so cultural systems give us symbolic resources to construe time in life. These systems evolve through the same dynamics of selection and instantiation that shape the brain and the self. In this way, collective time is not imposed from above — it is continually being remade from within.

5 Nonlinear Time — Memory, Recurrence, and the Spiral of Becoming

Not all processes move in straight lines. Many of the most significant rhythms of human life — growth, grief, healing, insight — unfold in nonlinear time. These are not sequences of cause and effect, but recursive patterns of becoming. In a relational ontology, time is not merely duration, but difference unfolding — and that difference does not always follow a clock or a calendar.

Memory as Temporal Recursion

Memory is not a passive recording of what has passed. It is an active semiotic process — a re-instantiation of past meaning within a present context. In remembering, we do not retrieve static events; we re-enter attractor spaces of experience. What returns is not the past itself, but its relevance to the now.

This recursive quality of memory makes time spiral rather than linear. Old meanings are revisited, revised, revoiced. We do not simply move forward — we turn, we double back, we reframe. Personal identity emerges not from continuity alone, but from this dynamic interplay of past potential and present actualisation.

Mythic and Archetypal Time

Cultures also encode nonlinear time through myth. Myth does not recount history in chronological order. It dramatises eternal recurrence — the patterns that shape meaning across generations. These stories are not bound to once-upon-a-time. They are always now — available for re-enactment in ritual, imagination, and dream.

Archetypes, likewise, are not fixed templates but deep attractors in the collective semiotic field. They recur not because they are eternal substances, but because they offer resonant patterns for making sense of experience — especially in times of crisis or transformation.

The Spiral of Becoming

In this view, time is not an arrow, nor a circle, but a spiral: a recursive unfolding in which each turn builds on what came before, without ever returning to the same point. Transformation is possible precisely because meaning does not repeat identically. Even when we revisit old terrain, we do so from a new perspective — a different position in the unfolding relation.

This spiral temporality allows us to see human development, cultural history, even cosmic evolution not as straight progressions but as recursive self-organising systems — where the future emerges through the creative return of the past.

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6: Thresholds of Time — Crisis, Kairos, and Moments of Transformation

Not all moments are created equal. Some shimmer. Some rupture. Some rearrange the whole structure of our becoming. In this post, we explore thresholds of time — liminal moments that defy linear unfolding and mark the emergence of new meaning potentials.

Kairos: Time as Eventfulness

While chronos measures time in quantity — minutes, hours, years — kairos names a different kind of temporality: qualitative time, the right or ripe moment. In a relational ontology, kairos can be understood as a semiotic condensation — a moment when multiple trajectories intersect and a new attractor crystallises.

These are moments when reality feels charged — when the stakes are high, and the next move matters. They may be born of crisis or creativity, suffering or revelation. What makes them threshold moments is not their objective duration, but their transformative potential.

Crisis and Reconfiguration

Crisis literally means "turning point." It is not just a breakdown, but a bifurcation — a moment in which a system becomes unstable enough to shift into a new pattern. In such moments, the attractor landscape of meaning destabilises. Old semiotic patterns no longer hold; new ones are not yet stabilised.

From a relational perspective, this is not collapse but creative disintegration. It is the opening of new possibility — though that opening may be painful, disorienting, or traumatic. Transformation is not guaranteed. But the potential is there.

Rites of Passage and the Ritualisation of Thresholds

Many cultures have recognised the potency of these thresholds and marked them through ritual. Rites of passage frame transitions — birth, adolescence, marriage, death — as semiotic transformations: not just events in time, but reconfigurations of being. They help hold the uncertainty of the in-between, offering symbolic structure for what cannot be managed by chronology alone.

In modern life, we often lack such ritual containers, and so personal thresholds — illnesses, losses, awakenings — may be lived as private chaos. But even in silence, these moments continue to perform their work: to loosen the grip of old forms and open space for the new.

Time at the Edge

Thresholds are temporal edges. They reveal that time is not merely flow but field — patterned, punctuated, marked by intensities. The event is not a dot on a timeline but a relational convergence — a point where multiple potentialities touch down in experience.

To live relationally is to recognise and honour these edges — not to fear the thresholds, but to walk them with awareness, and with care for the meanings that are trying to emerge.

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7 Future-Bearing Time — Anticipation, Intuition, and the Pull of Potential

What if the future is not something “out there” waiting to arrive, but something already active within us — a field of potential that calls us forward? In this final post, we explore how meaning systems not only interpret time but participate in the generation of futures.

The Future as Semiotic Gradient

In a relational-semiotic ontology, the future is not an empty space ahead on a clock. It is a gradient of possibility — structured by the meanings we inherit, the patterns we instantiate, and the trajectories we imagine.

Anticipation is not passive waiting. It is attunement to affordance — the capacity to sense what might become, and to orient meaning-making accordingly. Just as physical systems follow gradients of energy, semiotic systems follow gradients of potential meaning.

This is how the future pulls: not as an external force, but as a relational tension within the attractor landscape of consciousness.

Intuition and the Shape of What Is Coming

Intuition may be one way this tension becomes felt. It is not irrational but pre-rational: the resonance of a not-yet-actualised pattern within our current configuration. Intuition gives form to the vague — an inkling, a hunch, a symbolic dream.

We might say that intuition is the semiotic pressure of the future, registering as embodied sense before it becomes articulated in thought or speech.

From a neuronal perspective, this may be the forward reach of dynamic repertoires. From a linguistic perspective, it is the shaping of future speech by the affordances of past and present meaning. Either way, the future is not separate from the present — it is emergent within it.

Imagination as Temporal Agency

Imagination, in this light, is not a detour from reality but a constitutive act. When we imagine a future, we are not simply picturing it; we are participating in its potential actualisation. We reconfigure attractor landscapes. We shift the probabilities of what will come to pass.

This is why storytelling, art, dreaming, and theorising matter. They are practices of future-making — not in the predictive sense, but in the world-forming sense. Every imagined possibility we take seriously begins to alter the field of what seems possible.

Becoming With the Future

To live with future-bearing time is to be aware that the present is not only a product of the past, but a participant in the future. It is to understand becoming as a process not merely of unfolding but of emergent alignment — tuning ourselves to what wants to happen through us.

In this sense, the future is not fate but field — not fixed endpoint but dynamic invitation.

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And so we conclude this journey into the temporalities of meaning. In the unfolding of relation, time is not a container, but a participant — a rhythm, a threshold, a lure.