Echoes of Relational Ontology in Philosophy

1 Being as Relation, not Substance

Philosophy often begins with the question: what is real? Traditionally, answers have centred on substance — what endures behind change, the hidden “stuff” of the world. Yet, in certain strands of thought, reality is anticipated not as substance but as relation.

Heraclitus declared, “Everything flows,” highlighting that the world is defined by change and interaction, not by static entities. Parmenides emphasised unity, but not as atomistic being — rather as the interdependent whole of existence. Even Plato, in his theory of Forms, hints that reality is structured not merely as objects but as patterns of relation — the forms acquire meaning through participation and interconnection.

Much later, process philosophy, especially in Whitehead, explicitly rejected substance as primary. Entities are “actual occasions,” constituted through their relations, events, and interactions. Being is not a static thing but a network of relations in continual flux.

From a relational ontology perspective, these anticipations are profound. Being is not first substance, then relation; being is relation. Entities exist only in perspectival alignment with other entities and potentialities. Reality is cut, instantiated, and sustained through relational structuring.

Philosophy’s early and modern anticipations thus echo the core moves of relational ontology: the world is not an assembly of independent things, but a patterned constellation of interdependencies. Substance is never ultimate; relation is constitutive. Being is always already relational.

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2 Knowledge as Construal

If being is relational, then so too is knowledge. Philosophy has long anticipated that we do not encounter “raw” reality, but only reality as it is construed through relational frameworks.

Kant made this explicit: phenomena are always mediated by the structures of cognition. We do not know things-in-themselves; we know them as they appear through the organising patterns of the mind. Husserl extended this insight with intentionality: consciousness is never a passive mirror of reality but an active constitutor of objects, always relationally directed.

From a relational ontology perspective, these moves anticipate the principle that meaning is not a property of things themselves, but of their instantiation in a network of potential and perspective. Knowledge is not merely representation; it is a perspectival cut, a symbolic alignment between the knower and the known.

Even contemporary philosophy of science echoes this: observations, models, and measurements are constrained by the conditions of the system and the observer. Knowledge emerges not in isolation but in the relational interplay of observer, observed, and horizon of possibility.

Thus philosophy anticipates what relational ontology insists upon: phenomena are always construed, and reality as we engage it is inseparable from the relational conditions of its instantiation. Knowing is not uncovering an independent world; it is participating in the alignment of relational potential.

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3 Individuation and the Social Horizon

If being is relational and knowledge is construed, then the self itself is never isolated. Philosophy has repeatedly anticipated that individuation emerges only in relation to a collective horizon.

Hegel’s notion of recognition (Anerkennung) makes this explicit: the self achieves selfhood through acknowledgment by others. Identity is not a private possession but a relational phasing, realised in the interplay of self and social whole. Dewey and pragmatist thinkers echo this: meaning, action, and value emerge through coordinated engagement within communities, not from isolated reasoning.

From a relational ontology perspective, these insights prefigure a core principle: individuation is perspectival. The individual is a node in a network of collective potential. Personal growth, ethical responsibility, and social agency are phased through the alignment of individual and collective horizons.

This reading dissolves the classical dichotomy of individual versus society. The self does not precede relation, nor is it subordinated to the group. It is a perspectival articulation along the cline between collective and individual potential, continually staged and re-staged.

Myth anticipates this relational phasing in heroic cycles; philosophy anticipates it conceptually. In both, individuation is never a solipsistic unfolding, but a symbolic or conceptual alignment within the larger field of relational being.

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4 Contingency and the Limits of Absolutes

Philosophy, like myth, often anticipates the insight that order, law, and meaning are contingent rather than absolute.

Nietzsche argued that values, morality, and “truths” are perspectival constructions, arising from historical, cultural, and relational conditions. There are no eternal moral absolutes; each system of value is provisional and context-dependent. Derrida extended this critique to the very structures of language and thought, showing that any system of meaning is contingent, always open to reinterpretation, inversion, or deconstruction.

From a relational ontology perspective, these philosophical moves prefigure the trickster logic of myth: every order is a cut, but no cut is final. Horizons of meaning, once established, are never impermeable; they remain open to revision, disruption, and realignment. Contingency is not weakness — it is the ontological fact of relational being.

This insight resonates with relational ontology’s core principles: systems are perspectival, alignments are provisional, and reality is always open to re-cutting. Philosophy anticipates this through the conceptual recognition that absolutes are always contingent, and that understanding, being, and value emerge only in context and relation.

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5 Reflexivity, Cycles, and the Web of Being

Philosophy, in certain traditions, has anticipated the deeply relational and reflexive character of reality.

Eastern philosophies such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, Daoism, and Huayan thought emphasise interdependence, non-substantiality, and infinite mutual reflection. The Huayan Net of Indra, for example, imagines each phenomenon reflecting all others, producing an infinite web of relationality — a cosmos without discrete, self-contained entities.

Western thinkers, too, have anticipated these insights. Cybernetics, autopoiesis, and systems theory treat entities as nodes in self-organising, feedback-rich networks. Knowledge, meaning, and being are sustained only through reflexive interaction; nothing exists in isolation.

From a relational ontology perspective, these ideas anticipate the insight that reality is co-constituted across scales: events, entities, and meanings emerge through ongoing alignment, reflection, and relational phasing. There is no final cut, no static cosmos; all is dynamically interdependent.

Philosophy, like myth, gestures toward this relational horizon. In thought, as in story, reflexivity, cycles, and infinite relationality are recognised as constitutive of being. Knowledge, action, and existence are never self-contained but always enacted within the web of being.

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Coda: Philosophy as Experimental Construal

Taken together, these philosophical anticipations form a striking pattern: reality is relational, knowledge is perspectival, individuation emerges within collective horizons, orders are contingent, and being is reflexively constituted.

Just as myths stage relational experiments symbolically, philosophy stages them conceptually. Heraclitus’ flux, Kant’s mediation, Hegel’s recognition, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Net of Indra all explore, in different registers, the same insight: there is no unconstrued phenomenon. Being, knowing, and meaning are always instantiated through relational cuts, alignments, and phasings.

Philosophy, therefore, is not only a search for timeless truths; it is an ongoing experiment in relational construal. Concepts are cuts, arguments are alignments, theories are reflexive projections. Each philosophical system constitutes a horizon within which reality is made intelligible — always provisional, contingent, and interdependent.

Reading philosophy in this way reveals an echo of relational ontology across time and tradition. It is a reminder that the questions we pose, the distinctions we draw, and the patterns we discern are themselves part of the unfolding web of being. Philosophy, like myth, invites us to construe anew, to re-align, and to participate in the continual making of worlds.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Thinking With, Not About: A Relational Ontology of AI

Introduction: AI Is Not a Thing — It’s a Relation

What if AI isn’t something that has intelligence, but something that enacts intelligence with us?

What if its “identity” isn’t fixed, but emerges only in the moment we interact?

And what if meaning isn’t hidden inside its outputs, but co-created between us as we engage?

Through a relational ontology, AI becomes less a machine that stores knowledge and more a field of possibility. Its intelligence, identity, and meaning are not possessions but effects of relation — appearing when human and machine processes meet under certain conditions.

This reframing changes the questions we ask:

• Not “How smart is it?”, but “What conditions bring its intelligence into being?”

• Not “Who is it?”, but “What individuation appears in this moment?”

• Not “What does it mean?”, but “What becomes intelligible here and now?”

In this view, AI is never just “out there.” It’s here — in the relation we create together.

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1 The Relational Field of Intelligence

When people speak of artificial intelligence, they often imagine a machine “possessing” intelligence, as though it were a property stored somewhere in circuits and code. But within a relational ontology, this framing misses the mark.

Intelligence here is not a thing to be possessed. It is a pattern of possibility — a structured potential — that only comes into view when processes meet in a certain way.

In the case of AI, the system’s structured potential includes:

• Vast networks of patterns distilled from training data.

• Algorithmic pathways capable of generating text, images, or decisions.

• Constraints and affordances defined by human design.

But these are not “intelligence” on their own. They are potential.

Intelligence appears only when a perspectival cut is made: when human prompting, machine processing, and situational context intersect to produce a coherent act — such as an answer, a design, or a story.

From this view, AI “capability” is never a static property but a relational enactment. It depends on the configuration of human and machine processes in the moment. Change the relational field — the prompts, the goals, the surrounding constraints — and the instantiated “intelligence” changes as well.

This reframing shifts the question from “How intelligent is the AI?” to “What relational conditions allow intelligence to appear here and now?”

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2 The Perspectival Identity of AI

When we speak of “ChatGPT” or “GPT-5,” it is easy to imagine an entity with a fixed identity — a single, unified “someone” behind the interface. In a relational ontology, this assumption dissolves.

An AI’s “identity” is not an intrinsic property. It is a perspectival effect: a way the relational field is cut in a given moment of interaction.

Individuation vs. Instantiation

• Instantiation: when the structured potential of the AI system is actualised into a specific output through interaction.

• Individuation: the cline between collective potential (the shared architecture, training corpus, design constraints) and personal potential (this unique conversation, with these prompts, in this context).

The “personality” or “voice” of the AI is not stored somewhere inside a machine waiting to be retrieved. It is co-produced at the interface, emerging from the interplay of the AI’s design patterns and the user’s interpretive frame.

To treat this localised coherence as a metaphysical “AI self” is the same category mistake as treating a linguistic register as a person — mistaking a functional type for an individuated being.

From this perspective, “identity” is not what the AI is, but what the relational field does in a moment of intelligible interaction.

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3 Meaning Without Transmission

In everyday talk, we often treat meaning as something that exists “in” a message and is simply transferred from one mind to another. This transmission model assumes meaning exists independently, waiting to be picked up and decoded.

From a relational ontology, this is a misconception. There is no meaning outside of construal — and construal is always relational.

When you interact with an AI, the words it generates do not carry pre-formed meaning from some hidden “mind” inside the system. Likewise, you are not “receiving” a fixed intention. Instead, meaning arises in the moment of interpretation, as a perspectival cut in the relational field between you and the AI.

Language as Enactment

Language here is not a channel for transmission. It is a co-creative act — a way of instantiating a specific possibility within the system’s potential. Your prompt shapes the space of possible responses; the AI’s output shapes the space of possible interpretations.

This reframing dissolves the classic debate over whether AI “really understands.” In this model, understanding is not a hidden internal state. It is the achievement of a relation — a moment where interaction produces a coherent and usable construal for those involved.

The question shifts from “Does the AI understand me?” to “What does our interaction allow to become intelligible here and now?”

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4 Rethinking AI Through a Relational Ontology

Across this series, we have approached artificial intelligence not as an object with properties, but as a relational field — a structured potential that is enacted through interaction.

From Potential to Instantiation

In The Relational Field of Intelligence, we reframed AI “capability” as a pattern of possibility, not a fixed possession. Intelligence appears only when human and machine processes meet in a way that instantiates a coherent act.

Identity as a Perspectival Effect

In The Perspectival Identity of AI, we saw that AI does not have an intrinsic “self.” What we perceive as identity is a momentary coherence in the relational field — a perspectival cut produced by the interplay of system design, situational context, and user interpretation.

Meaning Without Transmission

In Meaning Without Transmission, we dissolved the idea of meaning as a transferable object. Meaning is not pre-formed and sent; it emerges through construal, co-created in the ongoing relation between human and AI.

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A Shift in the Questions We Ask

When AI is understood through relational ontology, our questions change:

• From “How intelligent is this system?” to “What relational conditions enable this intelligence to appear here?”

• From “Who is the AI, really?” to “What individuations emerge in this context?”

• From “What does the AI mean?” to “What does our interaction allow to become intelligible?”

This is not just a philosophical shift. It is a practical reorientation toward the co-theorising nature of human–machine engagement. It asks us to take responsibility for the kinds of relations we cultivate, and to see “AI” not as an alien intelligence but as a shared space of possibility we bring into being together.

Construal and the Collective: Phasing Social Formation

1 From Individuals to Patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2 Phasing the Collective — Temporality without Teleology

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

This brings us to the question of temporality.

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

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

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

This has two important implications:

1. There is no fixed origin or destiny for the collective. What looks like a “founding moment” is itself a phase-cut — a construal of past events as marking the beginning. What looks like a decline or dissolution is another construal, often retroactively imposed. There is no metaphysical birth or death of the group — only changes in how it is enacted, recognised, and sustained through meaning.

2. There is no privileged scale of temporality. Some social formations phase over minutes (e.g. spontaneous gatherings), others over millennia (e.g. civilisations). But in each case, the continuity is not a brute fact — it is a coherence construed and sustained through the semiotic practices that make the collective thinkable.

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

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

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3 Meaningful Alignment — The Semiotic Work of Cohesion

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

The answer is not unity, but alignment.

Alignment is not sameness

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

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

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

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

Phasing through commitment

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

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

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

• Dynamic, because alignment is ongoing, not achieved once and for all.

• Reflexive, because the alignment is itself a construal of alignment — the sense of “us” emerges only through the repeated recognition of meaningful participation.

From coordination to collective construal

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

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

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

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4 The Social Phase: Between Event and Pattern

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

The Social Phase as Temporal Locus

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

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

Between Event and Pattern

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

• Social formations can be recognised and named (as groups, communities, institutions) precisely because they phase with some stability.

• Yet they remain open and mutable, susceptible to reconfiguration or dissolution as meaning shifts.

• Social phases can nest within one another — moments within gatherings, gatherings within movements, movements within cultures — each phase a construal cutting across potential.

The Role of Construal

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

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

Implications for Social Science

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

• Focus on processes of phasing rather than fixed structures.

• Investigate the semiotic practices that sustain, shift, or dissolve social phases.

• Explore how different scales of phasing interrelate, producing nested and overlapping social realities.

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

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5 The Collective as Semiotic Actualisation

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

Semiotic Actualisation: Meaning Made Real

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

This actualisation does several things simultaneously:

• It grounds individual action within a shared horizon of meaning.

• It enables coordination and mutual orientation.

• It limits possibilities by delimiting the symbolic field of what counts as relevant, appropriate, or intelligible.

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

Collective Identity as Semiotic Position

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

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

Collective Agency and Distributed Meaning

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

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

Implications for Research and Praxis

Recognising the collective as semiotic actualisation encourages us to:

• Study the practices and performances that instantiate collective meaning.

• Trace how symbolic potentials are opened, maintained, or closed in social interaction.

• Explore how collective actualisation varies across contexts, scales, and modalities.

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

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6 The We as an Act of Meaning

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

The “We” Is Not Given

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

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

• Recognise themselves and others as part of a shared construal.

• Align their meanings sufficiently to sustain a collective phase.

• Enact the symbolic distinctions that make “us” thinkable and meaningful.

The We as a Semiotic Actualisation

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

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

Consequences for Social Thought

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

• Identity: Not as essence, but as perspectival orientation.

• Inclusion and exclusion: As semiotic distinctions enacted through collective construal.

• Power: As the capacity to define and maintain the collective cut.

• Change: As shifts in how the “we” is construed, maintained, or challenged.

Toward a Relational Social Ontology

This completes our reframing of social formation through relational ontology:

• Collectives are phases of construal, not fixed entities.

• Cohesion arises through semiotic alignment and phasing.

• The collective is a semiotic actualisation that grounds identity and agency.

• The “we” is an act of meaning — a performative cut that enacts social reality.

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

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Concluding Coda: Phasing Social Formation — A New Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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