Showing posts with label projection. Show all posts

02 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Myth

1 Creation as Cut

When myth turns to creation, it rarely describes a smooth, linear unfolding. Instead, creation is staged as a cut.

In Genesis, “Let there be light” is not a chronological step in a physical process — it is a division: light from darkness, order from chaos, world from void. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk slays Tiamat and cuts her body into heavens and earth. In Māori cosmogony, Rangi and Papa — Sky and Earth — are separated by their children, and the world becomes possible through their parting. Again and again, the world is not “made” but divided, named, separated.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate a crucial insight: creation is not an absolute beginning in time, but a perspectival cut in potential. Systems, as we understand them, are structured possibilities. Instantiation is not the gradual accumulation of substance, but the sudden construal of relation — the drawing of a line that makes inside and outside, self and other, earth and sky.

This is why creation myths often begin with chaos, undifferentiated night, or primal waters. These are not failed attempts at proto-science. They are symbolic construals of uncut potential. What follows is always the cut: the division of one into two, the naming that distinguishes, the separation that instantiates.

Creation myths thus encode, in symbolic form, the insight that being arises from differentiation. Reality is not first substance, then relation; it is relation from the start. Without the cut, there is no cosmos, no world, no possibility of meaning.

Seen this way, myth anticipates relational ontology’s own insistence: there is no unconstrued phenomenon, no reality independent of cut. To be is to be distinguished within a horizon of possibility.

Creation, in myth, is not the origin of matter but the staging of meaningful cosmos. It is the symbolic alignment of a collective to a world that has become cut, named, and oriented.

2 Cosmos as Reflexive Projection

Once creation is cut, myth turns to cosmos: the world not as brute matter but as an ordered horizon.

In many traditions, the cosmos is not an external reality to be observed; it is a mirror, a projection, a symbolic alignment between collective life and the wider whole. Among the Navajo, the stars are placed in the sky through a tale of order and disorder, their pattern reflecting principles of balance that also govern human life. In ancient Egypt, the cosmic order of Ma’at was simultaneously the structure of the heavens and the basis of justice. In Polynesian voyaging traditions, the sea is not just geography but a patterned cosmos, oriented through stars, swells, and ancestral guidance.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that cosmos is reflexively construed. The stars are not merely “out there”: they are aligned with the collective, staging a horizon of meaning and possibility. Cosmos is not discovered but constituted. It functions as a symbolic mirror through which collectives experience themselves as part of a larger whole.

In this way, myth resists the division between inner and outer. What Campbell framed as archetype, we can instead read as reflexive projection: the alignment of collective construal with the patterns of the world. Cosmos is the collective turned inside-out, a world whose shape is the shape of symbolic life itself.

To call the cosmos reflexive is not to deny its materiality, but to foreground how it becomes meaningful. Every constellation, every seasonal cycle, every sacred mountain or river is not simply “there”: it is construed as part of a symbolic horizon, binding the collective into alignment with the world.

Thus myth anticipates another of relational ontology’s core moves: reality is not independent of construal. The cosmos is not simply a background against which life unfolds; it is the symbolic horizon through which life takes shape.

3 Individuation as Relational Phasing

Myth does not only align cosmos and collective. It also stages the place of the individual. But here again, individuation is not construed as autonomy in the modern sense. It is always relational.

Initiation rituals, heroic cycles, shamanic journeys: these myths place the individual in trial or transition. The novice undergoes ordeals, the hero departs, suffers, and returns, the shaman descends into other worlds. Yet in every case, individuation is only complete when it is reintegrated into the collective. The initiate becomes an adult for the community. The hero returns with gifts of knowledge, power, or renewal for the people. The shaman’s journey heals not themselves, but the social whole.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate individuation as phasing. The individual is not a unit that precedes relation; they are a cut within collective potential. Individuation is a perspectival articulation along a cline between the shared horizon and the particular node.

The mythic hero is not an archetype of inner psyche, but a symbolic construal of this phasing. Their journey dramatises how individual potential is actualised only through relation to collective possibility. To individuate is to take up a place in the web, not to stand outside it.

This explains why myth so often insists on ordeal, trial, or death before transformation. Individuation is not a simple flowering of inner essence, but a restructuring of relational alignment. The ordeal symbolises the re-cutting of possibility, the shift of perspective that allows a new constellation of self and collective to emerge.

In this way, myth again anticipates relational ontology’s move: there is no individual outside relation, no self without collective alignment. Individuation is the reflexive phasing of the whole through the part.

4 Trickster and the Contingency of Cuts

If creation myths stage the cut, and heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing, then trickster tales reveal another truth: the cut is never final.

Tricksters appear across traditions: Loki in Norse tales, Coyote and Raven in Native American stories, Eshu in Yoruba cosmology. They deceive, disrupt, invert, and play. They mock the gods, steal fire, blur boundaries, turn order into chaos and chaos into unexpected renewal.

From a relational ontology perspective, trickster figures anticipate the insight that symbolic orders are contingent. No cosmos, no law, no meaning-system is absolute. Every cut that instantiates an horizon of order is open to inversion, disruption, or re-cutting.

Trickster shows that systems are perspectival. Where the gods impose structure, the trickster reveals fissures. Where norms stabilise, the trickster exposes arbitrariness. Where horizons seem fixed, the trickster reminds us they are only ever symbolic alignments — provisional, not eternal.

This is why trickster stories oscillate between comedy and danger. They carry both the joy of freedom and the risk of collapse. The trickster destabilises order, but also makes renewal possible. By revealing contingency, trickster opens the space for re-alignment.

In this sense, trickster is myth’s anticipation of ontology’s critical move: that reality is not a closed system of absolutes, but an ongoing construal, always susceptible to being cut again.

What Campbell might call archetype, we instead read as a symbolic dramatisation of the ontological fact of contingency. Trickster is not an eternal form, but a reflexive reminder: no cosmos is final, no meaning immune to play.

5 Reflexive Cycles of Renewal

If trickster reminds us that no cut is final, many myths go further: they portray the cosmos itself as cyclically dissolving and reforming.

Seasonal myths stage this rhythm through the death and rebirth of deities — Persephone descending into the underworld, Osiris dismembered and restored, Inanna passing through death’s gates and returning renewed. Cosmic myths stage even larger cycles: Hindu traditions speak of kalpas, vast spans of creation and dissolution; Norse myth anticipates Ragnarök, the world’s destruction and its rebirth from the sea.

These cycles are not mistakes of “primitive science.” They are symbolic construals of a deeper ontological truth: reality is not static, but reflexive. Horizons of meaning are constituted, dissolve, and must be constituted again. Cosmos is not once-and-for-all but ongoing, a patterned renewal of collective alignment.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that construal is never finished. To live in a symbolic cosmos is to live within cycles of renewal, where meanings and worlds must be re-cut, re-aligned, and re-staged. Death and rebirth are not only biological or seasonal facts; they symbolise the reflexivity of being itself.

This is why myth so often insists on ritual repetition. Festivals, sacrifices, and commemorations are not simply commemorative. They are re-instantiations of cosmos, symbolic acts of keeping the horizon alive. Renewal is not automatic; it requires reflexive participation.

In this way, myths of cyclic renewal stage one of relational ontology’s deepest insights: reality is constituted through ongoing reflexive alignment. What is cut must be cut again. What is aligned must be re-aligned. The cosmos is never finished; it is always in the making.

6 The Net of Indra

Among the most striking anticipations of relational ontology comes from the Buddhist and Hindu image of the Net of Indra.

The image is simple but profound: an infinite net stretches across the cosmos, and at each intersection rests a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel, and in each reflection the whole net is mirrored again. Nothing exists in isolation; everything is constituted in relation to everything else.

From a relational ontology perspective, this mythic image is astonishingly prescient. Reality here is not composed of independent substances but of relations. Each node exists only through its reflexive entanglement with all others. To perceive one jewel is to perceive the entire net, since each reflection contains the whole.

The Net of Indra thus dissolves the idea of an unconstrued phenomenon. There is no jewel that exists outside of relation, no being that is self-sufficient. Everything is cut, aligned, and constituted within the relational whole.

In mythic terms, the net stages the insight that cosmos is not a hierarchy of absolutes but a reflexive web. In ontological terms, it anticipates our insistence that meaning and reality are co-constitutive, that construal always scales through relational alignment, and that the part and the whole are perspectival, not separate.

What modern metaphysics strains to articulate in abstractions, the Net of Indra gives us in a single shimmering image: reality as infinite reflexivity, relation all the way down.

Coda: Myth as Ontological Experiment

What, then, do these myths reveal?

Creation myths show that being emerges through cut. Cosmological myths show the reflexive projection of collective horizons. Heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing. Trickster tales reveal the contingency of symbolic orders. Renewal cycles dramatise the reflexivity of worlds dissolving and reforming. And the Net of Indra offers a dazzling image of infinite relationality.

Taken together, these are not primitive attempts at science. They are experimental ontologies. Myths are not naïve explanations of nature; they are symbolic construals of possibility. They test, stage, and explore what it means to live in a world constituted by relation.

Seen through the lens of relational ontology, myth is not a failed epistemology but an archive of insight. It anticipates, in symbolic form, many of the moves we now make philosophically: that there is no unconstrued phenomenon, that instantiation is a cut in potential, that cosmos is reflexive, that individuation is perspectival, that every order is contingent, and that reality itself is relational all the way down.

This is why myths endure. They do not only tell stories; they hold open ontological horizons. They invite us to construe again, to re-align, to imagine new worlds.

Myth, then, is not the dream of an unconscious psyche, nor the failed hypothesis of an early science. It is an experiment in being. And in its shimmering cuts, cycles, and nets, it continues to anticipate the relational insight: reality is always already construed, and meaning is the way the world comes to be.

01 October 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Function to Horizon

The Functions of Myth Reframed: A Relational Ontology

Joseph Campbell suggested that mythology has four core functions: mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, and sociological. Each, in his telling, expresses a timeless role of myth in the psychic and cultural life of humanity.

But Campbell’s functions rely on an archetypal ontology: they presuppose a universal psyche, whose needs for awe, order, guidance, and structure are timeless and given. In this frame, myths become symbolic tools for eternal psychic functions.

Relational ontology makes a different cut. It resists the idea of universal psychic functions and treats myths instead as semiotic operations: symbolic construals that transform value into meaning-of-meaning and phase collective life. What Campbell names as four functions can be reframed as four relational operations:

Symbolising Alterity (reframing the mystical) — constraining the inassimilable through symbolic projection.
Projecting a Reflexive World (reframing the cosmological) — weaving value and meaning into a cosmos reflexively sustained by the collective.
Phasing Individuation (reframing the pedagogical) — aligning life-course transitions within symbolic horizons of the collective.
Synchronising the Collective (reframing the sociological) — binding orientations, practices, and institutions into symbolic unity.

In what follows, we will reread Campbell’s four functions through this relational lens. Myth is not the servant of universal psychic needs; it is the symbolic technology of collective life, staging horizons of possibility, binding individuals to worlds, and weaving worlds into collectives.

1 Symbolising Alterity (Reframing the Mystical)

Campbell’s first function of mythology is the mystical: to awaken awe before the mystery of being. In his telling, myths serve as reminders of a transcendent order beyond comprehension, stirring reverence for life’s unfathomable ground.

From a relational ontology perspective, however, this mystical function is not about awakening a pre-given psychic response. It is about symbolising alterity — giving semiotic form to what cannot otherwise be assimilated.

Every collective confronts what exceeds its grasp: death, catastrophe, the infinite, the unknown. These are not simply external “mysteries,” but relational limits where construal breaks down. Myth does not reveal these mysteries; it contains them by projecting them into symbolic horizons — gods, spirits, primordial forces.

In this sense, myth’s so-called mystical function is really a semiotic operation of constraint. It takes intensities that bypass perception — terror, awe, ecstasy — and anchors them in symbolic form. The storm becomes the anger of the sky-god; death becomes the journey to an underworld. These projections do not explain alterity but make it inhabitable.

The point is not reverence before mystery but the symbolic domestication of alterity. Myth gives a community the means to live with what it cannot master, to align around the inassimilable without collapsing into disorientation.

Thus the mystical reframed: not universal awe, but the symbolic construal of limits. Myth does not open the psyche to eternal mystery; it stabilises a collective against what it cannot otherwise endure.

2 Projecting a Reflexive World (Reframing the Cosmological)

Campbell’s second function of mythology is the cosmological: to explain the structure and order of the universe. For him, myths provide a symbolic map of the cosmos, situating human life within a grand design.

Relational ontology reframes this. Myths are not proto-scientific explanations of an objective universe. They are acts of world-making: symbolic projections that generate a cosmos reflexively structured by the collective.

A cosmos, in this sense, is not the physical universe but a horizon of meaning. Mountains become ancestors, rivers become life-givers, stars become guides. Myths weave these elements together into a symbolic whole where natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations are inseparable.

This is not explanation but projection: the cosmos appears to precede the collective, yet is constituted through its symbolic practices. The order of the world is reflexive — it reflects and sustains the order of the collective itself.

Thus, when a people tells of creation, they are not accounting for physical origins; they are articulating the relational architecture within which they live. The world is narrated into being, and that narration aligns collective existence.

Reframed this way, the cosmological function is not about explaining the universe, but about projecting a reflexive world. Myth generates a cosmos that feels given and necessary, but is in fact the symbolic articulation of collective construal.

3 Phasing Individuation (Reframing the Pedagogical)

Campbell’s third function of mythology is the pedagogical: to guide individuals through the stages of life, from birth to death. Myths, he suggests, provide symbolic models for navigating universal thresholds of existence.

From a relational ontology standpoint, individuation is not a solitary psychic process. It is always phased within the horizon of the collective. Myth provides not universal life-stages, but symbolic patterns through which a community aligns individual becoming with collective being.

Birth is not just a biological event; it is ritually phased into kinship, lineage, and belonging. Puberty is not merely biological change; it is semioticised through initiation, binding a young person into new roles and responsibilities. Death is not raw cessation; it is framed as passage, transformation, or ancestral return, situating the loss within a symbolic cosmos.

These are not timeless, archetypal stages. They are collective construals of individuation, ensuring that each life course is tethered to the symbolic fabric of the whole. The pedagogical is thus really a semiotic phasing: myths provide architectures of becoming that keep the individual and collective aligned.

Reframed this way, the pedagogical function is not about instructing a universal human journey. It is about phasing individuation into symbolic synchrony with the collective horizon. Myth does not teach individuals what they must universally do; it symbolically situates their becoming in relation to their world.

4 Synchronising the Collective (Reframing the Sociological)

Campbell’s fourth function of mythology is the sociological: to support and validate a given social order, prescribing norms and legitimating institutions. In this view, myth operates as a kind of ideological charter, stabilising the status quo.

From a relational ontology perspective, this framing is too static. Myth does not simply endorse or enforce order; it provides the symbolic infrastructure through which collective life is synchronised.

Myths are the semiotic architectures that align values, roles, and institutions within a reflexive cosmos. They bind different spheres of life — kinship, economy, ritual, governance — into a coherent symbolic pattern. What might appear as mere justification is in fact a process of symbolic synchronisation, ensuring that individual action, social role, and cosmic order resonate together.

Importantly, myth also allows for transformation. By shifting symbolic patterns, myths can recalibrate collective synchrony, enabling new orders of life to emerge. This is why myths often appear both conservative and revolutionary: they stabilise alignment, but they also provide the symbolic means to shift it.

Reframed this way, the sociological function is not about legitimating a fixed order. It is about synchronising the collective — sustaining alignment across scales of existence and providing a symbolic horizon through which change can be navigated.

Coda: From Functions to Reflexive Horizons

Campbell’s schema of four mythological functions — mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, sociological — remains influential because it gestures toward the breadth of myth’s role. But reframed through relational ontology, we can see that what appears as four separate functions are in fact four horizons of reflexive construal.

The mystical is not about private awe before transcendence, but about attuning collective construal to the openness of possibility itself.
The cosmological is not an attempt to explain the universe, but a means of projecting a reflexive world that holds together the collective’s symbolic life.
The pedagogical is not the charting of universal life-stages, but the phasing of individuation so that becoming remains aligned with the collective horizon.
The sociological is not static justification of order, but the synchronisation of collective life across roles, institutions, and symbolic structures.

Seen this way, myth is not a collection of stories that decorate human life, nor is it a proto-scientific attempt at explanation. It is the symbolic scaffolding through which life is oriented, synchronised, and projected into cosmos. Myth is not about gods above or instincts below; it is about the reflexive infrastructures of meaning that bind value, being, and world into coherence.

Thus, instead of “functions of mythology,” we might better speak of horizons of symbolic reflexivity. Myth does not explain, command, or instruct; it enables collective life to construe itself, to phase its becoming, and to project its cosmos.

02 July 2025

Music in Relational Ontology: Sound, Value, and the Unfolding of Consciousness

1 Music as Social Phenomena: A Relational Model

Music moves us. It brings tears, delight, energy, or calm. But what exactly is it that moves us? This series offers a model of music grounded in relational ontology — one that begins not with what music means, but with what music does.

Music as Material and Social

Music is not a message. It is not a symbolic system that encodes and transmits meaning between minds. Rather, it is a material phenomenon — a pattern of sound — that functions socially by activating values in others. A music maker generates sound, and that sound has the potential to resonate within a listener’s consciousness, selecting from that listener’s system of perceptual categorisations and affective dispositions.

In these terms, music is not semiotic, because it does not rely on the symbolic abstraction of meaning. But it is social, because it acts upon systems of value within social bodies — like laughter, birdsong, or the colours of a peacock’s tail.

Relational Ontology: Sound in Context

In the model developed here, we take seriously the implications of a relational ontology: nothing exists in isolation, and no phenomenon is defined independently of the relations in which it participates. Sounds are not just events in physical space. They are phenomena — not in the sense of universal percepts, but as instances of potential actualised in and through relations. These relations include the listener’s body, memory, attention, and social and cultural context.

Time, too, is understood relationally: not as a container or a measure, but as the unfolding of processes. Sound unfolds in time, and so does consciousness. Music arises when these unfoldings come into resonance — when the movement of sound selects a movement of value in the listener.

Music Maker and Music Listener

A key distinction in this model is between the music maker and the music listener.

The music maker instantiates material potential: sound patterns in time.
The music listener actualises value: a response of feeling, attention, and perhaps memory.

This is not a communication between minds, but an encounter between phenomena and consciousness. The social function of music lies in its power to recruit shared systems of value — just as the scent of ripened fruit might draw animals, or a ritual chant might synchronise a group.

From Sound to Social Force

This approach allows us to understand music not as a symbolic message to be interpreted, but as a social force that acts through its capacity to resonate. A piece of music can stir a crowd, offer solace, coordinate movement, or bind people together. But it does this not by conveying meanings, but by selecting and activating values in those who listen.

This distinction is crucial. The value awakened in the listener is not put there by the music. Rather, the music selects it from a system already formed through embodied experience and social life.

In Part 2, we will turn more closely to the materiality of sound itself — how physical patterns of vibration participate in the unfolding of processes, and how these are taken up within the body of the listener.

2 The Sound of Process: Materiality, Time, and Resonance

If music is not a symbolic message but a material phenomenon that functions socially, then what kind of material phenomenon is it? What kind of matter is sound? And how does this matter come to matter — how does it exert social force?

To answer these questions, we turn to sound as processual materiality: something that unfolds through time and in relation.

Sound as Unfolding

In a relational ontology, time is not a container in which things happen. Time is the unfolding of processes. A sound does not occur in time; it is time — the time of its unfolding. This makes sound a particularly vivid example of what it means for a phenomenon to exist as relation.

A single tone is not an object but a movement of air. A rhythm is not a set of points in time but a patterned trajectory. Harmony, timbre, phrasing — all are forms of unfolding, inseparable from the processes that actualise them in material and perceptual space.

When we say that music “unfolds in time,” we are describing a relational process: sound and consciousness co-arising, each affecting the other.

From Vibration to Value

Sound begins as vibration — compressions and rarefactions of air. But its social function begins only when those vibrations are taken up in a body — when a listening body hears not only frequencies, but qualities. A sound is not merely detected; it is felt. This feeling is shaped by the body’s histories, habits, and perceptual structures — many of which are shared across individuals, cultures, or species.

This makes music a phenomenon that acts through resonance: the matching of movement in one domain (sound) with movement in another (consciousness). Resonance is not mere mimicry. It is relational selection: a process in which the unfolding of sound brings forth — activates — a corresponding unfolding of affect, attention, or action in the listener.

This is how music begins to function socially. Not through meaning, but through value: by selecting what matters from a body’s system of dispositions.

No Symbols, No Codes

There are no messages in music. There are no codes to be deciphered. What there is, instead, is a shared field of attunement. The listener is not interpreting the music; they are responding to it — through the actualisation of patterned affect.

This patterning does not require shared symbols, but it often recruits shared histories. A genre, a style, a groove — these are not semiotic systems, but sedimented forms of valueful relation. They shape what kinds of resonance are possible. They make social coordination and collective affect possible.

In Part 3, we explore how these shared resonances give rise to musical ecologies — distributed systems of sound, value, and social relation that link music makers and listeners in a common unfolding.

3 Shared Soundworlds: Musical Ecologies and Social Bodies

If music is a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners, then its social power lies not in communication, but in co-ordination. Not in saying something, but in sounding with others.

In this post, we explore how music gives rise to musical ecologies — distributed networks of relations among bodies, sounds, values, and histories. These ecologies link music makers and music listeners in overlapping fields of attunement.

From Individual Bodies to Social Bodies

When a listener hears music, they are not merely decoding structure; they are enacting a bodily response to patterned sound. This response is shaped by evolutionary dispositions, cultural practices, and individual history — all of which reside not only in the brain, but in the whole body as a social, biological, and physical system.

Music resonates with this bodily system. But because bodies are never simply individual — they are born, shaped, and sustained through social relation — the affective resonance of music draws listeners into shared experience. When this happens, the body of the listener becomes part of a social body, even if no words are exchanged.

A crowd dancing, a choir singing, a mother humming to her child: these are not symbolic transactions. They are mutual enactments of patterned resonance — what we might call valueful synchrony.

Ecologies of Sound and Value

These resonant synchronies do not emerge from nowhere. They depend on shared conditions: cultural practices, acoustic environments, habits of attention, and historical repertoires of feeling. Together, these form musical ecologies — patterned arrangements of material and social potential that support the emergence of resonance.

Such ecologies are not reducible to music makers or music listeners. They are relational fields in which music happens — not as an object, but as an event of unfolding relation.

And they are never static. As music makers generate sound — instantiating particular material forms — and as listeners respond — actualising particular affective patterns — the ecology shifts. New resonances are formed, new values are selected. The ecology evolves.

Music as Social Force

Because music unfolds in relation, it can bring into being new social possibilities. It can recruit attention, shape collective movement, generate belonging, and mobilise affect. It does this not by representing a shared world, but by co-producing one — through the coordinated resonance of bodies in time.

In this sense, music does not describe a world. It instantiates one. It draws together music maker and music listener into a shared soundworld — a momentary, material, social constellation.

In Part 4, we explore how this resonance is not only social, but emotional — how music moves us by actualising affective potential in patterned and powerful ways.

4 Feeling With: Affective Resonance and Emotional Force

In previous posts, we described music as a material phenomenon that functions socially by activating values in listeners. This post turns to the affective dimension of that activation: how music feels.

We propose that music’s force lies not in what it means, but in what it moves — in how it resonates with affective patterns of value. Music does not represent emotion; it actualises emotional potential in patterned and relational ways.

The Feeling of Form

When a listener hears music, they encounter changes in pitch, rhythm, loudness, texture, and timbre. These are not just acoustic features; they are perceptual forces that the body registers as tensions, releases, intensities, and reliefs.

These patterned forces map onto — or better, activate — bodily capacities for feeling. Rising pitch may activate anticipatory tension. A sudden silence may evoke surprise. Repetition may comfort; dissonance may disturb. These effects are not symbolic. They are affective responses to material form.

But these responses are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, developmental, and situational factors. The same sound may elicit different feelings in different contexts. Still, in all cases, the emotional response is actualised from the listener’s own affective potential, triggered by the form of the music, in relation.

Emotional Patterning Without Emotional Content

Music often feels expressive — joyful, mournful, agitated, serene. Yet music does not express these states in the way a person might verbally articulate emotion. It does not refer to emotion. Instead, it produces affective resonances that align with emotional experience.

This is an important distinction. Music does not contain emotion, nor does it communicate it from music maker to music listener. Rather, it brings about patterns of feeling that can be co-experienced across listeners. This shared resonance allows listeners to feel with others — even when listening alone.

In this sense, music’s emotional power lies in its capacity to coordinate affect across time and bodies — not to label or describe emotion, but to synchronise it.

Force Without Message

Music thus exerts emotional force without message. It does not need to “say” anything to move us. Its power lies in the dynamics of unfolding — of tension and release, repetition and variation, continuation and rupture — which our bodies experience as emotional events.

These affective dynamics unfold in time, not as a ticking clock, but as processual time: the lived time of shifting states and relational change. Music resonates with this temporality, drawing listeners into patterns of affective unfolding that are as much embodied as they are auditory.

In Part 5, we turn directly to the question of meaning. If music is so powerful, why does it not count as a semiotic system? What kind of significance does it carry, and how should we understand that significance in relation to meaning?

5 Significance Without Symbol: Why Music Isn’t a Language

Music is often said to be a “language,” or to “communicate,” or to “express meaning.” These metaphors are widespread and intuitively appealing — and yet, they can obscure more than they reveal. If we’re to understand how music functions in our relational model, we need to be precise: music is not a semiotic system. It does not create or convey meaning by symbolic means. Its power lies elsewhere.

In a semiotic system like language, meaning is structured paradigmatically. Speakers make choices from meaning systems — for instance, choosing the word cat instead of dog, or jump instead of crawl — and those choices are what make the expression meaningful. The paradigmatic axis is central to how meaning is organised and interpreted: the value of any given word depends on the range of alternatives that could have been chosen instead.

In music, there are certainly choices — choices of pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, texture, and more. These are often richly structured, both culturally and historically. But they are not choices in meaning. They are not symbolic selections that stand in opposition to other meanings. Rather, they are material selections: choices of sound, not choices of signification. A composer might choose to resolve a phrase with a major triad rather than a suspended fourth, but that choice does not produce a different meaning in the linguistic sense — it produces a different sonic effect that will resonate differently with listeners.

This is an important distinction. While music has paradigmatic choices in its material resources — selections from a repertoire of available sounds — it does not have paradigmatic choices in systems of symbolic meaning. These choices affect how the sounds are experienced, but not what they mean, because they don’t mean anything symbolically. Music is not an underdetermined form of language; it is a different kind of system altogether.

The effects of music — its sense of significance, its emotional resonance, its social force — arise not from symbolic content but from the relational interplay between the material phenomena produced by the music maker and the perceptual value systems activated in the music listener. The process is dynamic, embodied, and affective, but not semiotic. The listener doesn’t interpret a message; they participate in an unfolding of sound that resonates with the unfolding of their own consciousness.

In that sense, music is not meaningful, but it is significant. It brings things to matter. It shapes how bodies feel, how time flows, how values take form — not through messages, but through presence, rhythm, energy, and movement. And that, in our relational model, is more than enough.

In our final post, we explore the implications of this model for identity and memory. If music doesn’t mean, how does it come to matter so deeply to the self?

6 Echoes of the Self: Music, Memory, and Individuation

Music stays with us. A childhood lullaby, a song from a first dance, an anthem of protest — such sounds are etched into experience with uncanny vividness. If music does not mean, how does it come to matter so much to the self?

This final post considers how music contributes to individuation: the development of a unique, situated consciousness within a social field. Without being semiotic, music still participates in shaping identity, memory, and the unfolding of the self.

Music as an Attractor in the Flow of Time

In our relational ontology, time is not a container, but the unfolding of processes. Consciousness is one such process. It does not sit behind experience but is shaped through it.

Music, too, unfolds in time. But more than that, it provides attractors for consciousness — recurring structures of sound that invite us to attend, entrain, and return. The listener’s own unfolding becomes rhythmically and emotionally co-organised with the unfolding of the music.

Over time, such co-unfoldings become part of the history of the self. They anchor moments of intensity, episodes of relational meaning, or shifts in our sense of what matters.

Memory Without Meaning

Because music is not semiotic, it does not carry memories as messages. It carries them as resonance.

A few bars of melody may trigger embodied responses, emotional surges, or sudden recollection. These are not acts of interpretation, but of activation: the re-emergence of prior value-laden experience prompted by similar sonic contours.

This is memory without representation. Music does not remind us by saying “remember,” but by feeling us back into an earlier configuration of self-in-world.

Music and the Social Shaping of the Self

Individuation is not isolation. We become ourselves through our position within social systems of value. Music plays a central role in this, not because it expresses who we are, but because it selects what we respond to.

Tastes, scenes, and subcultures — all structured by musical value — contribute to the formation of identity. We hear ourselves through others' sounds, and we find affinity with others who resonate to the same patterns. Music draws boundaries not by expressing meanings but by activating shared valuations.

In this way, music contributes not to the symbolic construction of the self, but to the social activation of the self as a value-sensitive, relational body.

Conclusion

We have argued throughout this series that music is not a semiotic system. It does not construe the world symbolically, but instead unfolds as phenomena that activate patterns of social value in listeners.

This is not a lesser role. On the contrary, music’s capacity to shape attention, affect, memory, and identity — all without message or meaning — reveals a powerful domain of social functionality beyond semiosis.

Music does not speak. It does not say. It resonates. And in doing so, it helps shape the rhythms of living, the pulse of community, and the echoing self.

Coda — Listening Again: A Reflection on Music, Consciousness, and Social Value

This series has offered a view of music grounded not in message but in resonance — not in meaning, but in value. We’ve proposed a model in which the music maker instantiates material phenomena — patterns of sound — and the music listener, through embodied perception and shared social experience, values them. These phenomena do not express the inner life of the maker in symbolic terms, but they resonate with the listener’s own unfolding of consciousness, selecting from perceptual systems shaped by biology, culture, and history. It is through this resonance that music functions socially.

Throughout, we’ve avoided the temptation to classify music as a semiotic system, resisting the pressure to read music as if it were language. Instead, we’ve treated it as a material phenomenon within a social ecology, whose functioning is better understood in terms of value rather than meaning. The distinction is subtle but crucial. To call music meaningful risks importing assumptions of symbolic reference. To call it valuable foregrounds its role in selecting and reinforcing perceptual preferences, emotional dispositions, and social attunements.

In this way, we have been careful to preserve the full dimensionality of a relational ontology. Time, in this view, is not a backdrop for musical events, but the very dimension in which they unfold — and in which listening unfolds, too. Music and consciousness meet in time, process to process. Their resonance is not metaphorical. It is structural.

There are, of course, limits to any model. Music exceeds classification; it surprises us, shapes us, and follows us into memory. But the value of a model lies not in its closure, but in its capacity to guide new attention. If this one helps us listen more deeply — not only to music, but to how we relate, how we feel, how we attune to one another — then it has done enough.

And if, in the background, you hear the echo of a soundworld not yet named — a value still unfolding — then the model has done more than enough. It has begun to listen back.

01 July 2025

The Projected Self: Consciousness Rewritten in Relation

1 Consciousness Is Not What You Think

What is consciousness? Western traditions have often pictured it as a light inside the mind, an inner eye surveying the world from a private theatre. From Descartes' cogito to the computational mind of cognitive science, consciousness has been cast as a thing — something that resides in us, that we possess, that acts as the origin of meaning.

But what if this picture is backwards?

This series proposes a reorientation: that consciousness is not the origin of meaning, but an instance of it — not an inner substance, but a semiotic unfolding. Rather than something we have, consciousness is something that happens: a relational phase in the movement of meaning potential across strata, speakers, and systems.

Consciousness is not what you think — and not where you think it is.

This is not a metaphor. It is a shift in ontology. Instead of treating the self as a bounded subject who produces thoughts, we treat the self as a semiotic position that emerges from the interplay of signs. The "I" is not the source of meaning but its temporary centre of gravity — a node in a relational network of meaning-making.

We draw on a relational ontology informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which understands language not as a conduit for thoughts, but as the very architecture that makes thought possible. In this model, consciousness is:

Relational: It arises through semiotic relations, not in isolation.
Stratified: It unfolds across different levels of language (semantics, grammar, phonology).
Instantiated: It is not a fixed entity but an event — a moment of actualisation from potential.

To say that the self is "semiotic all the way down" is not to deny its reality, but to reconstrue it. We are not peeling away layers to find an inner core; we are following threads in a relational fabric. And what we find is not an essence, but a pattern — one that is always in the making.

In the parts to come, we will explore:

How projection, stratification, and instantiation shape the architecture of consciousness.
How meaning unfolds not in the mind alone, but in the relation between potential and instance, self and other.
How rewriting consciousness requires rewriting the ontological assumptions that have shaped our thinking for centuries.

We are not theorising about consciousness from the outside. We are inhabiting it differently — from within a system that is always already relational.

2 Projection, Stratification, and the Architecture of Experience

If consciousness is not a substance within us, but a phase in the unfolding of meaning, how does it come to feel so immediate — so real? The answer lies in how language organises experience through projection, stratification, and instantiation.

Projection: Consciousness in Transit

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), projection refers to the linguistic mechanism by which one clause is made to represent another — as in she thought he was late. This is not just grammar reporting thoughts; it is grammar enacting them.

To think is to project: to represent meaning as meaning.

Projection models consciousness as a relation between semiotic instances — one clause standing in for another, one layer of experience doubling as another. Far from being a mirror of inner life, projection constructs that innerness as a semiotic effect. Consciousness, then, is not the origin of projected meaning but the outcome of projection itself.

Stratification: The Semiotic Planes of Experience

Stratification refers to the layered architecture of language: meanings (semantics) are realised by wordings (lexicogrammar), which are realised by soundings or scriptings (phonology/graphology). These are not just technical distinctions — they define how meaning is formed.

Consciousness emerges not at a single level, but across strata.

To become aware of something is to move across these planes: from potential to meaning, from meaning to wording, from wording to form. Thought is not confined to a single level but arises in the relation between them — in the semiotic tension that makes meaning perceivable.

When we speak of "inner speech" or "the voice in the head," we are invoking these strata at work: grammar silently enacting a semantic episode, internally projected and potentially actualised. The so-called "inner world" is just language folding back on itself.

Instantiation: From Potential to Presence

Every act of meaning is an instance — a momentary actualisation of a broader system. Instantiation is the process by which meaning potential becomes meaning instance. Consciousness, in this light, is not the totality of a self but the immediate instance of its semiotic system in action.

This is why consciousness feels temporal, fleeting, and ungraspable — because it is. It is the instantial tip of a semiotic iceberg, a phase in a system whose full potential always exceeds what is actualised.

Consciousness is not the full field of being, but a vector within it — the trajectory of meaning becoming actual in time.

In sum, the architecture of experience is not built from the inside out, but from the relational operations of language. Projection gives us a structure for representing thought. Stratification gives us the layers through which it is realised. Instantiation gives us the pulse of presence — the moment when meaning takes form.

This is not a deflation of consciousness. It is a reconfiguration: to see consciousness not as a container of thought, but as the flow of meaning between planes, systems, and selves.

3 No Mind Without Meaning — No Meaning Without Relation

We have now seen that consciousness does not emerge from a hidden interior, but from semiotic processes — from projection, stratification, and instantiation. In this part, we take the claim further: not only is there no mind without meaning, but no meaning without relation.

The Self as Semiotic Effect

In traditional metaphysics, the self is often imagined as the stable centre of experience — a thinker behind the thought. But in our relational ontology, there is no "self" prior to the systems that make it possible. What we call self is the emergent effect of relations: between meaning potentials, between speakers, and between semiotic strata.

The self is not the source of meaning, but a position within meaning systems — a semiotic locus where relations converge.

In SFL terms, this self emerges through instantiation and individuation. Instantiation is the relation between the system of meaning potential and the actual meaning instance. Individuation is the relation between the collective meaning potential of a culture and the specialised meaning potential of a particular person.

Consciousness emerges as the ongoing interplay of these two: the individual's unique trajectory through meaning systems, shaped by what they have meant before, and constrained by what the culture makes possible to mean now.

Meaning as Always Already Relational

There is no isolated meaning. Meaning only becomes actual through relation — to a context, to a co-text, to a system, and to an interlocutor.

A word only means something because it enters into relation: with other words in the clause, with other clauses in the discourse, with the situation in which it is spoken. And these relations do not merely surround meaning — they constitute it.

Meaning is not an object in the mind but a structure of difference — a pattern of choices in a system that becomes real in context.

This is why meaning must be relationally semiotic. It cannot be located in a mind or encoded in a brain. It is the product of selections within systems — systems that are themselves relational configurations of possibility.

From Relation to Realisation

It is tempting to imagine that meanings exist somewhere, floating in the mind, waiting to be expressed. But meanings do not pre-exist their realisation. They come into being through the act of meaning — through the process of selecting features from systems and actualising them in context.

And because those systems are themselves formed through social interaction, meaning is always a shared phenomenon. Even our most private thoughts take shape in systems we did not create, using categories we inherited.

There is no isolated mind observing the world; there is only semiotic unfolding in relation — between strata, between speakers, and between potential and instance.

In this light, we no longer ask where the mind is. We ask how meaning is made — and we find consciousness not in a place, but in a pattern: the unfolding of systems in time, the movement of meanings across strata, the pulse of instantiation in context.

4 Consciousness Without a Self, Thought Without a Thinker

We are used to imagining thought as an action performed by a self — a thinker who observes, reflects, and decides. But if consciousness is a semiotic unfolding, as we’ve seen, then this "thinker" may be no more than a useful fiction. In this final part, we step fully into the implications of a relational semiotic ontology: there is no self behind thought, and no mind behind consciousness. There is only relation — enacted in language, instantiated in context, and stratified across semiotic planes.

The Illusion of the Interior

Western traditions have long placed the self at the centre of consciousness — a private, interior subject with privileged access to thought. But the relational ontology unravels this image. If every act of meaning is systemic, and every system is social, then what we call “interior” is already a product of shared semiotic history.

The inside is made from the outside: what feels like personal thought is the actualisation of cultural potential, through the individuated system of the speaker.

The self, then, is not the agent of thought but its outcome. It is what appears when systemic selections cohere in a recognisable pattern — a pattern that we narrate as identity, stabilised only through repetition.

Thought as a Phase in the Semiotic Flow

What, then, becomes of thought? If there is no thinker, does thought disappear? On the contrary, it becomes more visible — not as a hidden process within a mind, but as a visible unfolding across meaning systems.

Thought is not a possession. It is a phase in the unfolding of meaning: the projection of meaning from one stratum to another, or from one speaker to another.

It is this movement — from semantic potential to lexicogrammatical selection, from clause to clause, from instance to system — that constitutes the rhythm of thought. The “mind” is not thinking — meaning is happening, and the illusion of thought arises when we experience our place within that flow.

The Architecture of Unfolding

In SFL terms, we can think of consciousness as the dynamic organisation of system and instance, stratification and individuation. Each moment of experience is shaped not by an inner will, but by the semiotic engines of language and culture, which condition what can be meant — and by whom, and how.

To be conscious is to stand at the intersection of these engines: to find oneself actualising potential meaning, shaped by a history of prior instantiations, constrained by a system, animated by relation.

And thus:

There is no self who has thoughts. There is only thought as semiotic patterning.
There is no mind that observes the world. There is only the unfolding of meaning across systems of potential.
There is no consciousness as essence. There is only consciousness as process — as meaning made momentary and relational.

Epilogue: What Happens When We Mean

What happens when we mean?

We are not expressing a hidden self. We are not revealing inner truth. We are not transporting thoughts from one head to another.

We are entering a field — a field of potential meanings structured by culture, history, and the systems of language. And in that field, we are making selections: actualising potentials, configuring strata, and participating in patterns that stretch far beyond the instant.

To mean is to move. Not in physical space, but in semiotic space — across the cline from potential to instance, from system to realisation, from what could be said to what is said now.

And in that movement, there is no need for a central self. No interior agent. No metaphysical essence doing the meaning. Meaning happens relationally, in the encounter between speakers, systems, and situations.

The “self” is what appears when this process stabilises — when recurring configurations of meaning take on a patterned shape. The “mind” is the name we give to the unfolding of this process as it becomes conscious — but only because it folds back on itself, projects itself, and sees its own patterns reflected in the mirror of language.

We are not beings who mean.
We are becomings of meaning.

To rewrite consciousness, then, is not to redefine what a mind is, but to let go of the need for minds entirely — and to see instead the semiotic engines, the unfolding systems, the relational grounds from which meaning emerges.

And this is not a loss. It is a liberation: from the myth of the isolated self, from the illusion of mental privacy, from the Cartesian prison. It is an invitation to reimagine who we are — not as containers of meaning, but as moments in its ongoing flow.