Fields of Meaning: Scientific Modelling Through a Relational Lens

1 What Is a Model?: From Compression to Construal

Scientific models are often thought of as simplified representations—“maps” or “pictures”—of reality, tools that help us navigate complexity by reducing it to manageable form. But within a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), models can be understood far more profoundly: not as static mirrors, but as dynamic instances of meaning potential that both compress and construe the unfolding coherence of phenomena.

Compression as Coherence

At their core, models are compressions of relational processes and fields of unfolding. Just as particles emerge as compressed patterns within continuous fields, models condense vast webs of interaction and variation into structured, accessible forms. This compression is not arbitrary but is shaped by coherence: the patterned relations that hold together phenomena across dimensions of space, time, and causality. Models extract and amplify these coherences, enabling observers to grasp and work with them.

Construal as Meaning-Making

But compression alone is not modelling. For a model to function as a semiotic system—one that is meaningful and usable—it must be construed by conscious agents within communities of practice. This construal draws on value systems, purpose, and shared conventions to interpret the compressed patterns as meaningful configurations, whether numerical, visual, conceptual, or linguistic.

Models as Semiotic Instances

This perspective reframes models from static “pictures” to semiotic instances: dynamic, interpretable construals arising from material coherence but transcending mere physicality. Models are not simply “out there” but are enacted through the interaction of observer, community, and the phenomena under study. They instantiate meaning potentials shaped by cultural, cognitive, and methodological systems.

Implications

Understanding models as compressed and construed relational processes invites a new epistemology: one that foregrounds the role of the observer, the semiotic system, and the collective meaning potential from which models emerge. It also opens paths to explore how models evolve, how they relate across domains, and how they mediate the unfolding of scientific knowledge.

2 The Model in Practice: Interactions, Limits, and the Ecology of Knowledge

Building on our understanding of models as compressions and semiotic construals, we now turn to the practical dimensions of modelling in science and knowledge-making. How do models operate within fields of interaction? What are their limits? And how do they participate in the broader ecology of knowledge?

Models as Interactional Processes

Models are not isolated artefacts; they emerge, evolve, and function through ongoing interactions among observers, instruments, data, and phenomena. Each iteration—whether a mathematical formula, a conceptual framework, or a computational simulation—is shaped by this relational interplay. Models adapt to new observations, refine predictions, and respond to challenges, reflecting the dynamic and situated nature of knowledge.

Limits and Boundary Conditions

Every model embodies constraints—boundary conditions that define its domain of applicability and the assumptions it carries. These limits are essential: they acknowledge that models compress complex realities and that no model can capture every detail. Recognising these boundaries prevents the conflation of second-order semiotic reality (the model) with first-order material reality (the processes being modelled), and invites continual critical engagement and revision.

The Ecology of Models

Models coexist within an ecology of knowledge, interacting with other models, theories, and practices across disciplines. This ecology is not hierarchical but networked, with models influencing and transforming one another. Interdisciplinary dialogues reveal complementarities and tensions, highlighting how models mediate meaning across contexts.

The Role of Meaning and Value

As semiotic construals, models also carry meaning potentials that extend beyond empirical fit. They embody values, priorities, and interpretive frameworks that influence how phenomena are understood and acted upon. Awareness of these dimensions enriches the practice of modelling, situating it within human purposes and cultural contexts.

Towards Reflexive Modelling

Informed by a relational ontology, reflexive modelling acknowledges the mutual shaping of models and observers. It encourages openness to alternative perspectives, iterative refinement, and the embracing of complexity without succumbing to reductionism.

3 Compression and Coherence: Modelling as Meaning-Making

Having explored models as relational construals and situated practices, we now turn to the underlying dynamics that allow models to function at all: compression and coherence. In the relational ontology we are developing, these are not just technical or cognitive processes — they are meaning-making activities, unfolding within and across fields of potential.

Compression: From Process to Pattern

To model is to compress unfolding phenomena — to abstract patterns from complex processes. This is not simplification for its own sake, but a necessary condition of intelligibility. Just as language compresses experience into meaning, models compress relational unfoldings into selective representations. A model, then, is not a mirror of reality, but an enactment of coherence within constraint.

Compression does not negate complexity; it manages it. By selecting what differences make a difference, models allow us to interact meaningfully with the world — to anticipate, to question, to interpret. But every act of compression implies exclusions: unmodelled variables, unacknowledged assumptions, unseen interactions.

Coherence: Holding Meaning Together

If compression makes a model functionally possible, coherence makes it meaningful. A model must hold together across its internal structure and its external deployments. It must cohere with other models, with empirical observations, and with the broader systems of knowledge in which it operates.

Coherence is not reducible to consistency or predictive success. In a relational ontology, coherence is the resonance of a model within a field of meaning — its capacity to stabilise intelligibility across instances. A model coheres when it enables understanding, links phenomena, and supports purposeful action, even if it is partial or provisional.

The Model as Semiotic Instance

From this perspective, each model is an instance of meaning — not a derivation from reality, but an actualisation of meaning potential in a particular relational configuration. It is a semiotic act, grounded in material processes but structured by symbolic systems. This holds whether the model is a graph, a mathematical expression, a verbal explanation, or a simulation: all are instances of construal.

This view also dissolves the divide between scientific and everyday models. The child’s mental model of gravity, the engineer’s stress diagram, and the physicist’s field equations are all compressions of potential into instance, meaningful because they resonate within their contexts.

A Modelling Ethic

If models are acts of meaning, they carry responsibility. We must attend not only to how well a model works, but also to what it foregrounds, what it hides, whom it serves, and how it might evolve. Modelling, then, is not just a methodological activity — it is an ethical and ontological one.

Reflective Coda — Modelling as Construal, Relation, and Responsibility

Throughout this trilogy, we have re-examined scientific modelling through the lens of relational ontology: not as a search for ultimate reality, but as a patterned unfolding of meaning. Models, in this view, do not depict things-in-themselves but instantiate relational coherences — selective construals of experience within specific fields of potential.

We began by reframing models not as mirrors of reality, but as relational construals: semiotic instances that emerge from the activation of social and cognitive potentials. These construals are not arbitrary. They compress patterned regularities across processes, stabilising meaning within a shared context of interpretation.

We then examined the situated practices through which models are produced and refined — not as neutral activities, but as forms of social semiosis shaped by tools, traditions, constraints, and purposes. The scientist does not merely extract truth from the world but configures meaningful relations within it. Modelling, like all meaning-making, is a material and symbolic process.

Finally, we turned to compression and coherence as fundamental operations in modelling. Compression renders complexity tractable; coherence holds meaning together across time, context, and application. Modelling is thus always perspectival: it selects, relates, omits, and reframes. Its power lies not in its completeness, but in its meaningful partiality.

This relational approach does not weaken the epistemic power of science — it situates it. By understanding models as semiotic acts within unfolding systems, we gain a clearer view of both their capacity and their limits. We can ask not just whether a model works, but how and why it means what it does, for whom, and with what consequences.

The implications are both theoretical and ethical. To model is to construe. And to construe is to take a stance within a world of unfolding relations.

Beyond the Particle: Matter, Meaning, and Relational Physics

1 From Fields to Particles — Unfolding and the Appearance of Discreteness

In the traditional ontology of physics, particles are understood as fundamental entities—discrete units of matter and energy, each with defined properties and behaviours. But when viewed through the lens of our relational ontology, this framework is upended. The ontology we’ve developed does not begin with things. It begins with unfolding processes, with fields of potential that give rise to instances of coherence. In this view, what we call a “particle” is not a basic building block, but a compressed pattern—a local coherence within a field of unfolding.

Just as language users select features from a meaning potential to instantiate a clause, so too do physical processes instantiate coherent patterns from physical potentials. A particle is not “there” until it emerges as a stable instantiation within a wider network of relational constraints. Its apparent discreteness is an effect, not a premise.

Fields as Meaning Potentials

The Standard Model of particle physics is built on the notion of fields. Each particle is associated with a quantum field that permeates space. What we observe as a particle is an excitation of the corresponding field—an instance of potential becoming actual. This fits naturally within the relational ontology:

• A field is a structured potential—like a system network in SFL.

• A particle is an instance of that potential, actualised in unfolding processes.

• The stability of a particle is the resonance of that instantiation across time—its recursive compatibility with the wider field relations.

Importantly, there are no isolated “things”. The ontology recognises only relational patterns—fields as structured possibilities, and particles as coherent instantiations that endure (however briefly) in the unfolding.

Compression and Coherence

When a pattern of unfolding compresses into a coherent configuration—localised, stable, and recurrent—we name it a particle. This compression is not imposed from the outside, nor does it involve a hidden substance underneath; rather, it is a self-organising dynamic. Much like how a melody takes shape from the interplay of musical values, a particle arises as a local coherence in a relational field.

In this view, mass, charge, and spin are not intrinsic properties, but features of the coherence—ways of modelling the nature of the instantiation and its interaction with other fields. This has profound consequences:

• Mass is not a substance, but a measure of how strongly the coherence couples to the unfolding gravitational potential.

• Charge is a pattern of relational interaction within the electroweak potential.

• Spin is a topological feature of the field's unfolding around the instantiation.

Each of these can be modelled not as intrinsic traits, but as relational qualifications of a compressed field instance.

From Discreteness to Disposition

This model helps us reframe a longstanding philosophical tension: how do continuous fields give rise to discrete particles?

In the relational ontology, this isn’t a metaphysical mystery. Discreteness is a construal—a categorisation of recurrent instantiations. We treat a stable field compression as an individual for the purposes of scientific modelling, but this does not mean it is a self-sufficient entity.

We no longer need to ask “What is a particle made of?” but rather:

How does a particle instantiate relational coherence from a field of potential?

This subtle shift has major implications for how we understand matter, interaction, and the role of modelling itself. It repositions physics not as a catalogue of fundamental things, but as a semiotic system that construes patterned instances of unfolding.

2 The Electron as a Relational Instance

In classical and even early quantum physics, the electron is treated as a particle: a negatively charged point mass orbiting a nucleus, scattering through space, or probabilistically “smeared” across a field. But from the perspective of our relational ontology, the electron is not a thing but an instance—a patterned coherence within a field of potential. To understand the electron, then, is to trace how its recognisable features emerge from and participate in relational unfolding.

Electron Potential and Instantiation

The electron field is a quantum field that spans what physics construes as space. In standard formulations, this field can be excited to produce a quantum—an electron—which interacts with other fields according to fixed rules. In the relational ontology, we reframe this process:

• The electron field is a structured potential, defined not by space but by its topology of interaction—the dimensions along which its potential can be instantiated in unfolding relation.

• An electron is a local coherence within this topology—an actualisation of the field that attains stability across a region of unfolding.

This instance is not separate from the field. It is the field, in a particular configuration—compressed, resonant, and qualified by its relational position. What we call the “electron” is a token of this coherence: something we recognise and semiotically distinguish across contexts.

Charge, Mass, and Spin as Relational Effects

In standard physics, the electron is said to have intrinsic properties: a negative electric charge, a specific mass, and a half-integer spin. In relational terms, these are not substances or hidden essences but relational qualifications:

• Charge arises from how the electron field couples to the electromagnetic field. The electron is negatively charged because its instantiation resonates in a specific way within the electroweak potential. The sign and magnitude are systemic features—values selected within the broader field grammar.

• Mass is not a thing the electron “has,” but a measure of its inertial relation—how tightly or loosely the electron’s instance coheres across the gravitational unfolding. In this view, mass is the degree to which unfolding is resisted, compressed into a consistent pattern of activation.

• Spin is a topological property of the field’s mode of unfolding. In the relational model, it indexes how the coherence circulates around itself in spacetime-like interactions. It is a pattern of relation, not a literal rotation.

These qualifications don’t define what an electron “is”—they describe how its instantiation relates to other fields and patterns. The electron is thus not a miniature marble with a charge label, but a knot in the relational fabric—a recurrent field pattern with certain dispositional effects.

Individuation and Generalisation

Every electron instantiation is singular—it unfolds in a particular context. But its recognisability comes from its participation in a collective potential. There is a meaning potential of “electronhood” within the field—a set of system features that are reliably selected and instantiated.

This duality maps cleanly onto the ontology’s clines:

• Individuation: Each electron instance is individuated—it is a local construal of a broader potential. But it is also generalisable, as it instantiates the same features across contexts.

• Instantiation: The field has a continuous potential. The electron is a point of actualisation—a construal that has coherence.

From this view, the idea of a “fundamental particle” gives way to a typology of stable relational instances. The electron is not a substance under the microscope, but a recurring semiotic event in the field grammar of physics.

3 From Particle Zoo to Relational Grammar

The Standard Model of particle physics has long been described as a “zoo” of particles—a crowded menagerie of quarks, leptons, bosons, and more, each with a catalogue of properties and interactions. But within the relational ontology we’ve been developing, these particles are not elementary things. They are instantiations of structured field potentials, and the so-called zoo is better understood as a grammar of unfolding relations.

Particles as Instantiations

In this framework, each “particle” is a coherence pattern—an instance of particular features selected from the potential of one or more fields. These patterns become salient in relation to other unfolding processes. Their apparent discreteness (mass, charge, spin, etc.) is not ontological but semiotic: they are recognisable tokens of patterned relational dynamics.

• A quark is not a part of matter but an instance of the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) potential, qualified by colour charge and confined within broader relational structures (like baryons).

• A boson is not a particle that “carries force” but an instance of a mediating potential—an unfolding relation that enables interaction between cohering field patterns.

What we call a “particle” is thus an abstraction from process—a construal that stabilises certain qualities of relational unfolding into repeatable roles.

The Grammar of Fields

Instead of treating particles as fundamental and fields as their backdrop, the relational model reverses the hierarchy:

• Fields are the structured meaning potentials of physical reality. They define dimensions along which relational patterns can be instantiated.

• Particles are instances—coherences actualised within these fields in a way that persists long enough to be individuated, named, and measured.

This allows us to treat the Standard Model not as a list of ingredients but as a semiotic grammar: a set of system networks whose features instantiate as relational configurations with particular consequences.

• The electroweak grammar governs how weak and electromagnetic interactions unfold and co-qualify their instances.

• The QCD grammar governs how colour charges interact, giving rise to confinement, gluon dynamics, and hadron formation.

• The mass grammar arises from how the Higgs field constrains the coherence of field configurations, rather than "giving mass" as an ontological act.

In this way, the Standard Model becomes a relational semiotic—a system of structured potentials from which recognisable, individuated patterns (particles) can be instantiated and organised.

From Measurement to Meaning

When physicists describe particles through their interactions—via cross-sections, decay channels, or collision signatures—they are tracing meaning instances: selections from a potential field system, rendered measurable through technology.

But just as meaning in language cannot be reduced to lexicogrammar, the coherence of particles cannot be reduced to numeric outputs. What’s measured is not a thing but a token of relation—an actualised point in a topologically unfolding system.

This reframes physics itself as a construal of meaning: not a discovery of fundamental building blocks, but a disciplined semiotic system for naming, measuring, and modelling unfolding relational processes.

Reflective Coda

Across this trilogy, we have sought to move beyond inherited metaphors that portray the world as made of things — discrete, independent particles in fixed space and time — and instead foreground an ontology of unfolding: where what we call “particles” are compressions of processual relations, and what we take as “matter” is the patterning of coherent interactions across fields of potential.

This shift matters. It reconfigures the very premises of physics, not by discarding its achievements, but by re-situating them in a broader account of meaning, instantiation, and consciousness. From this perspective, the so-called building blocks of nature are not ultimate entities but phase-bound construals — semiotic compressions of value, stability, and transformation within unfolding systems.

We have reframed quantum fields not as abstract mathematical surfaces but as relational potentials — structured landscapes of possibility, instantiated by processes and patterned by coherence. And we have traced how apparent “particles” emerge not as atoms of substance, but as the crossings and recursions of fields in relation.

This is not a new physics, but a new orientation toward physics — one that places observer, meaning, and relational process at the heart of the model. It asks not what things are, but how coherence unfolds, and in doing so, it clears ground for a more integrated view of science, semiosis, and self.

To go beyond the particle is not to deny its usefulness, but to recognise its place: not as the foundation of reality, but as a symbolic compression within the unfolding of relation.

A Relational Reimagining of Cosmology

1 Cosmology as Construal

In developing a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by theories of process, perception, and meaning, we have consistently challenged the assumption that science describes a mind-independent reality. Instead, we have treated scientific models as semiotic construals: disciplined, symbolic enactments of meaning within specific contexts of inquiry. Nowhere is this perspective more needed—and more revealing—than in the domain of cosmology.

Cosmology, on first encounter, appears to be the most objective of sciences. It concerns itself with the large-scale structure of the universe, the passage of cosmic time, and the origin and fate of everything. Yet these grand narratives emerge not from detached observation but from a deeply mediated process of semiotic work. Every model of the cosmos is a meaning instance within a historically evolving field of scientific meaning potential—a construal, not a mirror.

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The Universe as a Field of Potential, Not a Container of Things

Classical cosmology operates on a foundational metaphor: the universe as a vast container filled with matter, energy, and fields. But our relational ontology begins elsewhere. It views the universe not as a container but as a field of unfolding processes, each related to others through coherence, resonance, and instantiation. Space is not a backdrop, but a topology of relations. Time is not a separate dimension, but the axis along which processes unfold.

From this view, cosmology is not the description of an objective universe out there, but the attempt to instantiate semiotic coherence across the relational fields that unfold around us and within us.

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From Observation to Meaning Instance

Scientific cosmology is built on observation—but observation is always mediated. Photons arriving from distant stars are captured, filtered, interpreted, and modelled. What we call “data” is not raw input but already-semiotic material. The “cosmic microwave background” is not a discovered thing but a construed field: a patterned construal that emerges through recursive meaning-making between instrumentation, theory, and interpretation.

To claim, then, that we “know” the age of the universe or the structure of space-time is to confuse semiotic model with material process. This does not reduce the validity of cosmological inquiry—it sharpens it. The task is not to describe some imagined reality beyond construal — a metaphysical fiction — but to understand how meaning is instantiated across systems as they unfold in relation.

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A Semiotic Ecology of Models

Models like the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, dark matter, and dark energy are not isolated conjectures but part of a semiotic ecology. Each draws on shared systems of meaning: mathematics, physics, observational technologies, philosophical assumptions. Each brings certain aspects of the cosmos into focus while rendering others backgrounded or unmodellable.

Our relational ontology invites us to treat these models not as approximations of truth but as expressions of individuation within the scientific community. They are ways of constraining potential into instance, shaped by material affordances, social imperatives, and the ongoing evolution of meaning.

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Looking Ahead

In the posts that follow, we will revisit some of cosmology’s most profound constructs—black holes, the Big Bang, and cosmic expansion—through this relational lens. We will ask not what they are, but how they instantiate across relational fields. We will treat them not as objects of knowledge, but as meaningful compressions of unfolding processes, whose very intelligibility depends on the semiotic systems in which they are embedded.

Cosmology, then, is not the story of what the universe is. It is the story of how we, as semiotic beings embedded in unfolding processes, make meaning at the outermost edges of what we can construe.

2 Black Holes and the Collapse of Construal

In the previous post, we proposed a reframing of cosmology as a semiotic enterprise: not a mirror of an objective cosmos, but a set of disciplined construals that instantiate meaning from potential. In this frame, cosmological constructs like black holes must be understood not as fixed entities “out there” in a pre-given universe, but as meaning instances that compress and coordinate fields of experience within the scientific community. Few cosmological construals test this perspective more profoundly than the black hole.

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From Prediction to Construal

Black holes entered scientific discourse not as observations but as mathematical inferences—solutions to the equations of general relativity under extreme conditions. Their subsequent evolution, from speculative singularities to central objects in astrophysics, illustrates the semiotic power of modelling. The black hole is not a thing; it is a boundary condition of a model—a projection of relational stress within an unfolding field.

From a relational-ontological perspective, the black hole instantiates the collapse of construal: it marks the limit at which the semiotic systems used to model gravitational interaction can no longer produce coherent symbolic interpretation. The breakdown of spacetime geometry at the singularity is not a feature of the material cosmos but a signal that the model’s meaning potential has reached its outer bound.

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Event Horizon as Semiotic Boundary

The event horizon—often described as the boundary beyond which nothing can escape—is better understood as a boundary of construal. It marks the point beyond which observational processes can no longer instantiate meaning in the classical sense. What happens beyond the horizon cannot be modelled by light-based observations, and thus resists integration into the shared meaning potential of our scientific systems.

In this sense, black holes don’t just curve geodesics; they curve the field of construal itself, pulling semiotic coherence toward a singular limit. They instantiate relational compression so extreme that time, space, mass, and even process lose their conventional semantic coherence.

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The Semiotics of Collapse

At its heart, the black hole is a semiotic paradox: it is the most predicted and indirectly observed entity in astrophysics, yet it fundamentally resists direct construal. The tension between prediction and observability forces the scientific community to instantiate coherence across models—linking gravitational lensing, accretion disk radiation, and gravitational wave signatures into a shared constellation of meaning.

This isn’t error; it’s how science functions as a semiotic ecology. The black hole emerges not as an ontological substance but as an effect of coordinated construal across multiple, interacting systems of interpretation.

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Meaning Beyond the Horizon

So what lies beyond the black hole’s horizon? From our relational perspective, the better question is: what does it mean to posit such a region? The singularity is not a place; it is a collapse of coherence, where potential meaning cannot be instantiated with our current systems.

Black holes thus reveal something fundamental about the ontology of science: that every field of inquiry has limits of construal, and that these limits are not failures but structural boundaries of meaning-making. The more extreme the compression of relational fields, the more radically our semiotic systems are tested—and perhaps transformed.

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A Space for New Construals

The continuing study of black holes—especially in relation to quantum mechanics and information theory—presses on the outermost edge of scientific meaning potential. It invites the development of new systems of construal: not merely extensions of general relativity or quantum theory, but novel architectures of meaning, able to hold together previously unconnected fields.

What we observe is not a collapse of reality, but a demand for deeper coherence. In this way, black holes are not just phenomena to be explained; they are generators of semiotic innovation, forcing us to rethink what it means to know.

3 Cosmological Expansion and the Scaling of Meaning

If black holes represent the collapse of construal—points at which semiotic coherence reaches a relational singularity—then cosmological expansion presents the opposite challenge: not compression, but scaling. The expanding universe does not rupture our models through intensity, but through scope. It asks how far meaning can extend before its coherence thins into abstraction.

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What Expands in Expansion?

Standard cosmology construes expansion as the stretching of spacetime itself: galaxies are not moving through space so much as space unfolding between them. From a relational ontology, this construal is already highly abstracted: it interprets redshift, background radiation, and spatial distribution through a semiotic system—not as reality itself, but as a way of coordinating observations across time and frame.

But what does “expansion” instantiate in a system that models reality as unfolding relations? Not a ballooning of substance, but a scaling of relational topology. The fabric of co-unfolding processes spreads, not as metric extension, but as the increasing separation of interactive potential.

In other words, expansion is not of a container (space), but of the relational field that coordinates processual interaction.

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Scaling Meaning Potentials

This scaling creates a unique semiotic challenge: how do we maintain coherent construal across increasing separation? How do we relate observations from early universe microwave background to current galactic structures without losing the meaning potential of either?

In the SFL-based framework, such work requires realising coherence across strata. In cosmology, coherence is realised across systemic models: from inflation theory to dark energy parametrisation to standard candles. Each instantiates meaning from a distinct set of potential, yet all are held together as instances of a single construal of unfolding.

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The Horizon Problem as Semiotic Discontinuity

The horizon problem, for example—why regions of the universe not in causal contact display similar properties—can be reframed not just as a physical puzzle, but as a semiotic inconsistency: a mismatch in the instantiation of coherence across a relational field.

Inflation theory attempts to resolve this by reconfiguring the unfolding itself. It introduces a new construal of early process, compressing relational proximity into a prior epoch of co-interaction. This shows how cosmology innovates not just by observing more, but by reshaping the field of meaning to restore semiotic consistency.

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Dark Energy and the Strain of Abstraction

The concept of dark energy represents a new form of semiotic strain. It is not observed directly; it is invoked to sustain coherence between the model and the observed acceleration of expansion. In relational terms, dark energy is a placeholder for a missing processual relation—an inferred dynamic necessary to uphold the model’s integrity across scale.

Like the singularity of a black hole, dark energy reveals the limits of current construal. It marks a region of potential that remains uninstantiated—a gap in meaning that propels the ongoing evolution of the semiotic system we call physics.

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Expansion as a Semiotic Pressure

Thus, cosmological expansion is not just a physical phenomenon; it is a semiotic pressure. It demands the coordination of increasingly disparate instances of observation into a shared meaning potential. The challenge is not just to explain more, but to maintain coherence across scale, to trace unfolding relations even as their proximity thins.

In this sense, the expanding universe becomes a metaphor for the task of knowledge itself: not to capture the whole in a single frame, but to sustain meaningful construal across diverse and widening perspectives.

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The Cosmos as Construal

In the relational ontology we are developing, the cosmos is not a container of things but a field of co-unfolding processes. Cosmology, then, is the attempt to instantiate coherence across that field—to construe unfolding at the limits of scale, time, and relation.

What expands is not space alone, but the field of semiotic engagement. And what science accomplishes is not the mapping of reality, but the organised construal of its unfolding.

Reflective Coda: Construal at the Edge of Everything

Across this trilogy, we have reframed three of cosmology’s most foundational concepts—black holes, the big bang, and expansion—not as brute physical realities, but as semiotic construals: patterned interpretations of how processes unfold and relate at different scales.

Each concept, in its own way, presses on the boundaries of our relational ontology:

• Black holes reveal the compression of meaning, the limits of construal where processual coherence breaks down under intensity.

• The big bang reframes origin not as a substance-based event, but as an inflection in the topology of unfolding: a convergence of potential and interaction whose reverberations persist in every instance of process.

• Cosmological expansion shows that what unfolds is not space as container, but relation as field. The challenge is not tracking material drift, but maintaining semiotic coherence across widening scales.

Together, these re-interpretations lead us to a radical insight: cosmology is not the study of a thing called ‘the universe’ but the organised construal of how relational processes unfold at scale.

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From Physics to Semiotics

This shift has significant consequences. What has long been treated as physics—the modelling of space, time, mass, energy—is here reunderstood as a semiotic system: a disciplined language for instantiating meaning from the field of observable process. What we call “laws of nature” are not directives from the cosmos but constraints on coherent construal within that system.

This is not relativism. It is not to deny the consistency of experience or the success of scientific modelling. It is to ground that consistency in relation, not in substance; in the logic of meaning-making, not the assumption of mind-independent objects.

The cosmos unfolds. Meaning construes. And what we call cosmology is their intersection.

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A New Vision of the Universe

To see the universe through this lens is not to diminish its majesty. On the contrary, it draws us more deeply into its logic. We are no longer outside observers looking at a universe. We are participants in a field of unfolding, whose own meaning potentials instantiate the construals by which the universe comes to mean.

In this view, the universe is not something we find, but something we unfold with—a field of meaning instantiated process by process, relation by relation, across the clines of time, individuation, and semiotic abstraction.

The universe is not a noun. It is a clause complex.

Beyond the Photon: Light, Relation, and the Ontology of Unfolding

1 Light at the Limit: A Relational Ontology of Process and Boundary

In classical and modern physics alike, light has long posed a conceptual challenge. Is it a wave or a particle? Is it a medium or a messenger? In the relational ontology we’ve been developing—grounded in unfolding processes, perspectival instantiation, and topology of interaction—we propose a different starting point altogether. We ask not what light is, but how it instantiates across relational fields.

From Entity to Boundary Condition

Rather than treating light as a thing—some substance, particle, or vibration—we treat it as a boundary condition: the maximal relational configuration that can be instantiated between co-unfolding processes. That is, light marks the limit of how one field of unfolding can interact with another. It is not what moves between locations, but what constitutes the conditions under which interaction can occur.

In this view, light is not a bearer of energy or information in space, but a constraint that arises within the very topological relations that are space. That is, space itself is the relation between co-unfolding processes, and the “speed of light” is not a velocity in pre-existing space, but the maximum degree of co-instantiability of processes within that relational field.

Unfolding, Not Transmission

What we call a “light signal” is not something moving through space; it is a pattern that unfolds across relational topologies. In this unfolding, the “distance” light covers is not a container to be traversed, but a relational network reconfiguring itself.

From this perspective, the constancy of light's speed across frames of reference—so counterintuitive in classical models—makes perfect sense. If light is not an entity in motion, but the outermost condition of relational interaction, then all measurements of its “speed” are constrained not by what light is, but by how processes can co-instantiate meaning in relation to each other. The constancy is not a property of light but a property of unfolding relationality.

Light and the Limits of Observability

Light in this model becomes not only a boundary condition for physical processes but also for observation itself. To observe is to instantiate a relation between potential and instance. Since the relational ontology defines reality as the unfolding of processes whose topology is perspectival, light marks the furthest edge of what can be coherently instantiated from potential.

This rethinking dissolves the wave-particle dilemma and frees us from trying to describe light as a ‘thing’ with contradictory properties. Instead, light is relational resonance at the limit of co-instantiability—the boundary where material unfolding, spatial topology, and temporal dimensionality are most tightly bound.

2 Unfolding Time, Contracting Space: Light, Mass, and Relational Distortion

In our relational ontology, light is not a particle, a wave, or a medium. It is a boundary condition—a limit case of process co-instantiability. This radically reframes not only how we think about light itself, but also how we understand space, time, and mass as relational distortions in fields of unfolding.

From Curved Space-Time to Curved Geodesics

In general relativity, gravity is described as the curvature of space-time caused by mass. But from a relational point of view, this formulation reverses the terms of explanation. Space and time are not absolute containers that can be bent or warped; they are perspectival dimensions of unfolding processes—time being the dimension of unfolding itself, and space being the topology of interaction among those processes.

Mass, in this account, is not a substance but a relational concentration of unfolding potential. It reconfigures the topology of interaction: the closer a process unfolds in relation to this gravitational field, the more tightly it is coupled into the configuration. This tighter coupling leads to contracted spatial intervals and expanded temporal intervals—in other words, spatial contraction and time dilation are expressions of altered relational topology, not distortions of an independent space-time substance.

Hence, it is not space-time that is curved, but the geodesic—the path that marks how an instance unfolds relationally in the presence of gravitational potential. The geodesic is not a line through space-time, but a configuration of maximal co-instantiability. It is curved because the topology of the unfolding field is reweighted by relational mass.

Light at the Edge of Distortion

Light provides a crucial clue to this relational model. Because it instantiates the limit of interaction between unfolding processes, it reveals where topological relations approach maximal coherence. In the presence of gravitational potential, light does not bend in a passive medium; rather, the geodesic along which it unfolds is reweighted, such that its path expresses the relational constraints of the unfolding field.

Thus, the so-called bending of light near a massive object is not a bending of space, nor a force acting upon light, but a reinstantiation of the boundary condition—now relativised by the altered topology of the field.

The Proportional Relation

In this model, spatial contraction and time dilation are not independent distortions, but mutually conditioned aspects of unfolding processes in a gravitational field. The faster time unfolds (from a distant perspective), the more spatial relations are contracted near the mass, and vice versa. The specific proportional relation is governed by the relational potential of the mass field—i.e., how much the unfolding of other processes is absorbed into, or refracted by, the gravitational topology.

This proportional relation echoes the Lorentz transformations in special relativity, but reinterprets them not as coordinate shifts in an invariant space-time, but as semiotic construals of perspectival reconfiguration within a field of unfolding.

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In this reframing, mass and light are not things in space-time—they are expressions of how unfolding is distributed within the relational fabric of reality. Gravity does not act on light; rather, light and mass co-determine the geometry of co-instantiation at the edge of what can be coherently actualised.

3 Light and the Threshold of Actualisation

In our previous posts, we reframed light not as a physical substance or particle, but as a boundary condition of process interaction—a relational limit at which the co-instantiability of unfolding processes is maximised. Now we deepen this view by examining what light tells us about the transition from potential to instance, and what it means to approach the threshold of actualisation.

The Limit of Massless Unfolding

Light is often described as massless. But in our ontology, this does not mean it is weightless in a gravitational sense. Rather, it means that light does not contribute to the reconfiguration of the relational field in the way mass does. It does not alter the geodesic; it follows the geodesic as the purest expression of the topology of unfolding.

Because it does not engage in mutual resistance (as mass does), light occupies a unique position: it unfolds without delaying, and therefore does not contract space or dilate time in relation to itself. It moves as fast as possible—not because it is a privileged object, but because it marks the horizon of co-instantiation.

In this way, the speed of light is not a feature of light itself, but a relational limit: the maximum rate at which any two co-unfolding processes can interact. This limit is set not by the properties of light, but by the structure of relational potential in the universe.

From Potential to Instance: Light as Actualisation

In our model, all meaning arises through the instantiation of potential. This is a perspectival relation: the world is not made of fixed things, but of structured fields of possibility (potentials) that are actualised as instances through unfolding processes. Light is the boundary condition at which this transition becomes most immediate.

When a photon is detected—say, by the retina or a photodetector—it ceases to be potential and becomes instance. But it does so not because it travelled like a billiard ball from point A to point B, but because the conditions for relational coherence were met: an unfolding field (the observer) configured itself in such a way that the potential for interaction with the electromagnetic field became actualised.

Light is not a substance observed, but an interaction instantiated. It marks the moment where relational potential is made definite in and through observation—not as an epistemic act, but as a processual closure of unfolding.

Light, Consciousness, and the Co-Instantiability of Fields

Because light represents the maximum coherence of process unfolding, it provides a bridge between material systems and semiotic construal. Its arrival often triggers conscious interpretation—a scene illuminated, a colour perceived, a memory awakened.

But in our ontology, this interpretive act is not layered on top of physical reality. It is part of the same field of relational instantiation. Consciousness does not add meaning to light; it construes the relational significance of light’s interaction with the body.

This means that even though light is not itself a semiotic system, it enables semiosis—not by symbolising, but by actualising conditions for further construal. It draws the boundaries of what can be seen, what can be enacted, what can be brought into the field of conscious relation.

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Reframing the Question

So instead of asking what is light?, we ask:

• What role does light play in structuring the co-instantiability of unfolding fields?

• How does light reveal the topology of gravitational and relational constraints?

• How does light’s actualisation participate in the ecology of meaning?

Light, then, is not a thing in the world—it is a relational articulation of the world’s coherence. It is what happens when the potential for interaction becomes fully actualised at the boundary of massless unfolding. It is a pulse at the edge of possibility, signalling that something can be—and now is.

Coda: Light at the Threshold of Meaning

In this three-part exploration, we have taken one of physics’ most familiar phenomena—light—and reoriented it entirely within a relational ontology. Not by denying what physics describes, but by re-situating those descriptions within a different kind of inquiry: one grounded not in the properties of independent entities, but in the co-instantiation of unfolding processes.

Light emerged not as a thing, but as a relational threshold: a boundary condition at which the coherence of multiple unfolding fields becomes actual. In reframing light this way, we shifted the question from what is light? to how does light unfold, co-relate, and instantiate across fields of potential?

From this perspective:

• The speed of light is not a property of a particle, but a relational limit—the maximum coherence that can be achieved between co-unfolding processes.

• Masslessness does not mean insubstantial, but non-resistant—free from the constraints that delay or distort co-instantiation.

• Light's interaction with consciousness is not symbolic but somatic and immediate: an activation of potential meaning, not its representation.

• And crucially, light’s path does not curve through a container of space-time, but expresses the topology of unfolding fields—the mutual configuration of gravitational, biological, and perceptual systems.

By shifting the frame in this way, we preserve the empirical achievements of physics, but embed them within a richer ecology—one that includes not just measurement and prediction, but meaning, value, and perspective.

A Broader Implication

What this trilogy reveals is that light is exemplary, not exceptional. It shows us what it means for relational fields to actualise—to become momentarily definite within an ongoing web of potential. And in doing so, it opens a path to rethink not just physics, but our models of matter, life, mind, and meaning.

This is not a retreat from science, but a deepening of its foundations. It reminds us that every measure, every concept, every photon that reaches a detector, is not a glimpse of an external reality, but an instance of relational unfolding—selected, situated, and meaningful within the field of conscious construal.

Light, then, is not just what illuminates the world. It is how the world becomes visible—in relation, in interaction, in the interplay of what could be and what, for a moment, is.

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If light, in this relational ontology, no longer travels through space but structures space-time as a synchronising limit of interaction, then the question shifts. No longer do we ask “What is light?” but “What does light make possible?” This reframe opens new lines of inquiry—not least into phenomena like black holes and cosmic horizons, where light itself becomes the threshold of what can unfold. In the companion piece that follows, we pause to deepen this insight, before venturing further into the gravitational and cosmological dimensions of relational unfolding.

Resonant Systems: Music, Value, and Meaning

In our ongoing development of a relational ontology grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and informed by Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we’ve taken a fresh look at the nature of music—what it is, what it does, and how it means.

A key clarification in this view is that music is not itself a semiotic system. It does not consist of signs that symbolise meanings in the way language, mathematics, or gesture do. Rather, music is a social system that selects and activates patterns of biological value. These values are inherited biases in neural functioning—evolutionarily selected tendencies that guide attention, behaviour, and learning according to what has proven adaptively advantageous to our ancestors. Musical sound targets the functioning of value systems directly.

So while music does not construe meaning in the sense used in SFL, it does activate the systems from which symbolic meaning can be construed. It brings somatic potential into shared social space, where consciousness may interpret its effects through the lens of emotion, memory, or other mental processes. In doing so, music participates in the broader ecology of meaning—not by encoding messages, but by resonating across bodies and contexts in ways that matter.

This resonance is not symbolic but somatic: a functional synchrony between two complex systems operating in time. The patterned material dynamics of music unfold in ways that can entrain the listener’s own biological rhythms—heart rate, breath, neural oscillation. When these dynamics resonate with the dynamics of value systems, they amplify or modulate value-category activations. These activations are the basis of what consciousness later construes as feeling, emotion, or drive.

Emotion, in this view, is a mental process that interprets these activations semiotically. And when language enters the scene, it gives symbolic form to these construals—projecting them into shared meaning and memory.

This account allows us to preserve the crucial distinction between symbolic systems (like language) and value-selecting systems (like music), while also recognising that both are part of the complex network of meaning-making in human life. Music, in this view, becomes a site where biology, culture, and consciousness meet—not in signification, but in activation and resonance. It operates not by representing meaning, but by resonating with the very systems from which meaning is ultimately construed.

The Ontology of the Audience: Listening as Field, Process, and Value Coalescence

1 Beyond the Listener: Audience as a Collective Field

In most everyday talk, we speak of “the audience” as if it were a list of individuals. People sitting in chairs. Users with headphones. Consumers of content. Yet beneath this common sense view lies a richer reality — one that becomes visible when we reframe music not simply as sound received, but as a process of value coalescence in time, unfolding within and through those who listen.

This post begins a new series on The Ontology of the Audience, in which we propose a shift in how we understand what it means to listen. Instead of taking the listener as a passive endpoint for musical transmission, we explore the audience as a dynamic field — a social-material formation in which value is not merely received but realised through resonance.

From Listener to Field

In earlier series, we developed a relational ontology of music in which musical practices generate attractors of value — recurring patterns, motifs, textures or gestures that draw affective and social investment. Music functions not by meaning something in the semiotic sense, but by activating value within collective fields.

The audience, then, is not merely a backdrop to this activation. It is where such value takes shape. The listener does not stand outside the music, decoding it. Rather, they are inside the process — participating in the very field of resonance that makes the music socially real.

In this view, listening is not reducible to individual perception. It is a relational process — one that spans bodies, technologies, spaces, and shared histories. The audience emerges as a temporally unfolding phenomenon, shaped by how attention is distributed, how resonance occurs, and how collective dispositions orient toward what is heard.

Listening as Process, Not Point

To speak of “a listener” risks freezing the act of listening into a static moment or isolated subject. But listening is not a point; it is a process that unfolds in time. It includes anticipation, attention, recognition, absorption, repetition — all of which stretch across a duration. Listening begins before the music starts and continues long after it ends, as traces reverberate in memory, discussion, or embodied response.

This temporal unfolding is central to the ontology I’m developing here. Just as music is a process that takes time, so too is listening — not merely as reception, but as participation in the generation of collective value.

The Audience as a Field of Resonance

To call the audience a “field” is to invoke a different kind of entity — one that is extended, dynamic, and responsive. A field is not a container, but a set of relations in motion. The field of the audience is shaped by:

• how bodies are gathered (spatially, technologically, culturally),

• how attention is patterned (individually and collectively), and

• how value is activated through resonance with the music.

In this sense, the audience is not simply “there”; it is constituted in the event of listening. It does not exist in advance of the music, but arises through its unfolding. And its boundaries are fluid — stretching across headphones, livestreams, dancefloors, or public rituals, depending on the configurations of the event.

Toward a New Theory of Listening

In the coming posts, we’ll explore how this ontology of the audience unfolds across attention, technology, individuation, and time. We’ll ask how listeners coalesce or diverge in their resonances, how technologies mediate listening fields, and how the traces of listening persist after the sound has faded.

By rethinking the audience as a co-constitutor of musical value, we shift the focus from reception to participation — and from the individual ear to the collective field of listening.

2 Attention and Resonance: How Listening Coalesces Value

If the audience is a dynamic field rather than a collection of isolated individuals, then we must ask: What moves within that field? What animates the process of collective listening such that value becomes actualised? In this post, we propose that attention and resonance form the core dynamics of this process — not as internal states of individual minds, but as patterned relational phenomena within social-material fields.

Listening as the Distribution of Attention

Attention is often construed as a limited resource belonging to the individual — something we “pay” to particular stimuli. But in a relational ontology, attention is not a commodity; it is a pattern of alignment. It involves bodies orienting, affectively and materially, toward unfolding events in time. In collective settings, attention becomes distributed — sometimes converging in synchrony, sometimes fragmenting across divergent foci.

When listeners attend to music, they do not merely perceive sound; they enter into temporal coordination with its unfolding. Attention brings potential into instance. It is by attending that the listener actualises a particular attractor of value — a rhythm, a timbral shift, a harmonic turn — from the field of sonic possibility.

This is true not only at the level of individual perception, but across the field of the audience. A song does not become “an anthem” because of its internal structure alone. It becomes one when a critical density of attention coheres around it, generating collective resonance. In such moments, attention itself functions as a binding force — a means by which music becomes socially charged.

Resonance as Value Actualisation

Resonance, in this framework, is not metaphorical. It names the material-affective process by which the field of the audience responds to music’s attractors of value. It is not simply that the audience identifies with the music, nor that they interpret it. Rather, resonance describes how particular musical phenomena become co-extensive with listeners’ dispositions, histories, and embodied states.

Resonance is neither wholly personal nor entirely shared. It operates across a gradient: some listeners resonate deeply, others superficially; some in synchrony, others asynchronously. But where resonance occurs, it actualises value. The attractor draws not only attention, but investment — a binding of social, emotional, and material energies to a particular sonic formation.

This is the point at which music’s social function takes shape. The process is not one of decoding meaning, but of generating collective coherence. Through resonance, the audience does not merely react to the music; it participates in its actualisation as a social event.

The Social Patterning of Attention and Resonance

Neither attention nor resonance is random. Both are socially patterned — shaped by cultural codes, prior experience, spatial arrangements, and technological mediation. A listener’s capacity to attend to a particular timbre, rhythm, or gesture is not natural or universal; it is cultivated through habituation, exposure, and embodied training.

Similarly, resonance is structured by social position. What resonates for one listener may be imperceptible to another, not because of personal taste alone, but because of differing social histories, affective investments, and interpretive repertoires.

Yet these differences do not preclude collective resonance. Rather, they give it its contour. A crowd at a concert, a family in a living room, or a dispersed online audience may resonate with different aspects of the same music — but in doing so, they contribute to the formation of a value field that is shared precisely because it is internally differentiated.

From Attention to Coalescence

In sum, attention and resonance are not static attributes of individual listeners, but dynamically unfolding processes within the collective field of the audience. They are the means by which music becomes more than sound — by which it is taken up, responded to, and co-actualised as a site of value.

In the next post, we will turn to the role of technology in mediating this field. How do different listening contexts — from headphones to stadium speakers — configure the possibilities for attention, resonance, and value coalescence?

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3 The Technologies of Listening: Mediation and the Shaping of Audience Fields

If attention and resonance are central to how listening actualises value, then technologies of listening must be seen not as peripheral supports but as constitutive constraints and affordances. They do not simply carry music to the listener; they participate in shaping the very conditions under which listening — as a relational and temporal process — can occur.

In this post, we explore the role of technological mediation in the formation of audience fields. We examine how the material forms of sound reproduction — from concert halls to headphones, vinyl records to streaming platforms — condition the temporalities, spatialities, and collectivities of listening.

Technologies as Co-Constitutive of the Audience

A common tendency is to treat technologies of listening as neutral containers. In such views, a piece of music remains essentially the same whether heard live, streamed, or played on vinyl — and the audience remains a pre-existing group that listens through technology.

Yet from a relational ontology, technologies are not transparent channels. They are active mediators: they afford certain kinds of attention and inhibit others; they produce particular kinds of resonance and preclude others. In short, they help constitute what the audience is — how it is distributed, how it listens, and what kinds of value are likely to coalesce.

This shifts our focus: rather than asking what technology does to listening, we ask how it configures the field in which listening can happen.

Isolation and Co-Presence

Consider the contrast between a pair of headphones and a live concert venue. Both can be sites of intense attention and resonance. But they construct radically different audience fields.

Headphones isolate the listener — not necessarily in a social sense, but in the sense of containment. The sonic environment is bounded, often privatised, and relatively free from immediate external distraction. The resonance here is often inwardly felt, embodied in solitude, and intensified by repetition.

A live venue, by contrast, is a site of co-presence. The spatial field of the audience is physically constituted, and resonance can become synchronised across bodies — through cheers, dance, collective silence. Attention becomes both individually maintained and socially reinforced. The energy of others is not an intrusion but a medium.

These differences are not merely surface phenomena. They are ontological: they shape the very temporality and materiality of the listening process. They determine not just how music is received, but what kind of experience it becomes.

Standardisation and Platformed Listening

With the advent of digital platforms, listening has become increasingly structured by algorithms, interfaces, and recommendation systems. These systems are not neutral curators. They orient attention, narrow resonant possibilities, and consolidate audience fields around predictive logics.

In doing so, they enable new forms of value coalescence — rapid, large-scale, but also more uniform. The emergence of viral tracks, curated moods, and globally standardised genres are not purely cultural trends; they are technical achievements of platform architecture.

Platformed listening alters not only what is heard, but how resonance circulates. The audience field becomes fragmented into micro-clusters, each shaped by algorithmic attractors. While this allows for new modes of individuation, it also introduces structural constraints on the scope and diversity of value realisation.

Residual Materialities

Even in digital contexts, technologies retain residual materialities. A smartphone speaker is not a neutral output device; it flattens frequencies, compresses dynamics, and shapes what can resonate. A concert hall, designed with specific acoustic ideals, favours certain kinds of musical temporalities and excludes others. Vinyl introduces noise, fragility, and sequencing — all of which become part of the listening field.

These materialities matter because resonance is embodied. It is not just a cognitive response to symbolic form, but a material process of alignment. The device, the room, the format — each helps determine what can be attended to and what can resonate.

Technologies as Value-Shaping Fields

In sum, listening technologies are not backdrops to audience formation; they are active participants in the shaping of audience fields. They help determine how attention is distributed, how resonance occurs, and what values are likely to coalesce. They contribute to the individuation of listening subjects and the collectivisation of listening fields.

In the next post, we will turn to scale — asking how audience fields overlap and diverge, and how listening operates across nested formations from private to public, local to global.

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4 Scales of Listening: From Intimate Fields to Public Resonance

In previous posts, we explored the dynamics of attention and resonance, and the role of technology in shaping the audience field. In this post, we extend this framework by considering scale — not merely as size or reach, but as a structuring principle in the constitution of listening. What does it mean to say that an audience is local or global, intimate or massive? And how do different scales of listening interact, overlap, or conflict?

Our claim is that audience fields are multi-scalar and nested, rather than flat or mutually exclusive. They are constituted across orders of proximity and distribution, with different attractors of value becoming salient depending on the social and material scale of engagement.

The Myth of the Unified Audience

It is tempting to speak of “the audience” as a single, bounded entity — the concert crowd, the streaming demographic, the fan base. But in a relational ontology, no audience is ever fully unified. Rather, audience fields are formed through processes of alignment and divergence, across multiple layers of coalescence.

At a live event, for example, resonance may synchronise some bodies in rhythmic movement or chant, while others remain still, withdrawn, or attuned to different features of the sound. These listeners do not form separate audiences; they occupy different scales of attunement within a shared field.

This fractal structure holds at larger scales. The viral success of a track on a global platform may suggest mass uptake, but closer inspection reveals differentiated fields of listening — regional inflections, subcultural appropriations, divergent modes of resonance — all nested within what appears as a singular event.

Intimacy and Micro-Audiences

At the most immediate level, we can think of listening as forming intimate fields — a single person wearing headphones, a small group sharing a playlist, a private moment of musical attachment. These are not simply scaled-down versions of mass audiences. They involve different kinds of resonance: more durational, less synchronised, more affectively recursive.

These micro-audiences are not private in the sense of being untouched by social forces. They are deeply structured by prior experiences, cultural memory, and technological mediation. But they exhibit a different tempo of value coalescence — often slower, more contingent, and oriented around individuation rather than collective identity.

Yet they also scale up. Intimate listening practices can give rise to public rituals — as when a deeply personal track becomes an anthem, or a niche genre develops communal significance. The movement from intimate to collective is not linear, but recursive: collective resonance feeds back into individual listening, and vice versa.

Assemblages of the Public

At larger scales, audience fields become public assemblages. These are not totalising publics, but contingent alignments across space, platform, and affective investment. A festival audience, a national media moment, a global fan culture — each forms a different kind of assemblage, constituted through shared orientation toward a musical event or figure.

These publics are rarely coherent. They are held together by attractors of value — stylistic motifs, cultural associations, iconic performances — but remain internally differentiated. Importantly, the same attractor can function differently across scales: a sonic motif may be an insider signal at the local level, and a cliché at the global level.

Scale thus shapes the modality of resonance. At small scales, resonance may be deeply embodied and specific; at large scales, it often becomes more symbolic or representative. Yet both scales are necessary to the ecology of music’s social life.

Nested and Interacting Fields

Audience fields are not bounded by scale; they are nested and permeable. A local listening culture may be shaped by global flows; a global trend may be reinterpreted through local resonance. Likewise, micro-audiences may selectively affiliate with larger publics — adopting, rejecting, or reframing collective values.

This interplay is crucial to understanding the ontology of the audience. It is not that audiences “exist” at one level or another, but that they are constantly constituted across levels — through interactions, contradictions, and recursive resonances. Scale is not a static property but a dynamic effect of social-material processes.

Toward a Relational Cartography

If we are to theorise audiences in a way that respects their complexity, we need a relational cartography: one that maps not size or reach, but configurations of resonance and attention across nested fields. Such a map would show how musical value emerges and shifts as it moves between intimate and public domains, between the personal and the political, between the isolated and the collective.

In the next and final post of this series, we will reflect on what it means to theorise the audience ontologically — not as a demographic, a market, or a group of subjects, but as a field of potential and instance shaped by listening, resonance, and coalescence.

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5 Listening as Ontological Process: Rethinking the Audience

What does it mean to theorise the audience not as a collection of listeners but as an ontological field — a space in which values coalesce through processes of listening? Throughout this series, we have developed a relational model of the audience grounded in attention, resonance, technology, and scale. In this final post, we draw these threads together to propose a shift: from the audience as object to audience as processual field — emergent, distributed, and dynamic.

This shift is not merely conceptual. It has implications for how we understand music, meaning, and collective experience — especially in contexts of cultural flux, technological change, and identity formation.

From Group to Field

The conventional view treats the audience as a group of subjects — assembled physically or imagined demographically, often unified by shared preferences or modes of consumption. This framing presumes an already-constituted subject who listens, evaluates, and responds.

But in a relational ontology, subjectivity itself is formed within processes of listening. The listener is not pre-given, but actualised through attention and resonance. The audience, accordingly, is not a group of pre-existing listeners, but a field of potential value — structured by who or what is attended to, and how resonance unfolds.

This means that audience formation is ontological: it is the emergence of material configurations of attention, synchrony, and valuation across bodies, devices, and social space.

The Temporality of Audience

Audiences are often treated as temporally stable: a fanbase, an era, a market segment. But from a processual perspective, they are transient configurations — coming into being with each event of listening, and dissolving or transforming thereafter.

Even mass publics — those gathered by broadcasts, platforms, or global rituals — are held together not by permanence, but by the temporality of shared resonance. The moment of collective attention is not epiphenomenal; it is the audience.

This view foregrounds listening as a temporal unfolding, not just an act of perception. Audience fields emerge in time, as bodies, devices, and orientations align — however briefly — around sonic attractors of value.

Resonance as Value Actualisation

Resonance, in this model, is more than affective reaction. It is the material actualisation of value. A track resonates because it activates particular potentialities — emotional, cultural, embodied — that are co-present in the listening field. These resonances are not merely reactions to the music; they are how the audience field realises its structure in that moment.

This process is cumulative. As particular motifs or modes of listening are repeatedly instantiated, they begin to function as attractors — shaping the probabilities of future resonances. In this way, audience fields develop histories, textures, and gradients of familiarity — not as stored memory, but as dispositional fields of potential.

Mediation Without Transparency

Throughout the series, we have stressed the role of technological mediation. Technologies of listening — from spatial acoustics to platform algorithms — do not merely deliver sound; they configure the very possibilities of attention and resonance. They shape what kind of audience can be actualised, and how value can be distributed across scales.

Crucially, technologies are not neutral enablers. They impose material constraints and affordances that structure the ontology of the audience field. This calls for a reflexive approach to audience research — one that considers not only who listens, but how the listening is organised materially.

Listening as Social Process

Finally, this model positions listening as a social process, not a private experience. Even in its most intimate form, listening is shaped by shared cultural values, learned dispositions, and embodied histories. When value coalesces around a piece of music, it does so not in isolation, but within a field of collective resonance — however diffuse or uneven.

This is why the audience cannot be reduced to metrics or markets. It is not an aggregate of preferences, but a semi-stable attractor in a dynamic system of social-material relations. To understand audiences, we must therefore attend to how listening constitutes subjectivities, affiliations, and values — not after the fact, but in the moment of resonance.

Concluding Reflection

The ontology of the audience, as we have sketched it here, is not a fixed map but a shifting topology — a dynamic landscape in which processes of listening give rise to fields of value. These fields are mediated by technology, modulated by scale, and instantiated in time.

By thinking of audiences as emergent configurations rather than pre-existing groups, we open new possibilities for analysing music as a social and material phenomenon — one that is not simply consumed, but actualised in and through collective processes of listening.

This shift, we propose, is not only philosophically coherent with a relational ontology — it is necessary for any adequate account of how music matters, and to whom.