Worlds Within Meaning

26 September 2025

The Evolution of Possibility

1 Possibility Before Being

We have become accustomed to thinking of possibility as derivative — as something that arises once the real has already taken shape. A tree stands, and we imagine the other forms it could have taken. A person acts, and we imagine what else they might have done. In this framing, possibility is posterior: it trails behind actuality like an echo, like the shadow of what was.

But what if we invert the frame?

What if possibility comes first — not just logically, but ontologically? What if the real is not a given but a cut — an actualisation within a wider field of structured potential? In this view, to exist is not to be in the absolute sense, but to unfold from a system of possible construals.

This is the vision we pursue here. Not a metaphysics of substance, but a relational ontology of unfolding potential — in which meaning, far from being a by-product of biological evolution or cultural contingency, is the very condition for the differentiation of what-is. The symbolic animal — that peculiar creature who lives through language, ritual, system, and self-reflection — is not the climax of evolution but a phase in the evolution of possibility itself.

From the Real to the Possible

In classical metaphysics, Being is primary. The world exists, and our task is to understand it. Possibility appears only as a secondary operation: hypothetical, imaginative, subjunctive. But from the standpoint of relational ontology, this order is reversed. There is no 'thing' apart from the construal that brings it into view — no ‘given’ that precedes its relational actualisation.

This means possibility is not subordinate to the real. Rather, the real is a particular construal within the space of the possible.

The shift is subtle but radical. Where classical thought speaks of emergence — of mind from matter, language from brain, culture from organism — we speak instead of instantiation: a cut from system to instance, from possibility to perspective. In this model, evolution is not a ladder or a tree. It is not progress or contingency. It is the repatterning of potential — the evolving shape of what could be meant.

Not a Story of Origins

This is not a return to myth as the story of beginnings. We are not looking for the first gesture, the first word, the first meaning. Those are illusions, products of a linear imagination. What we seek instead is a way of understanding how meaning itself evolves — not as the product of external forces, but as the system through which unfolding becomes thinkable at all.

To think in terms of possibility before being is to think before time, before form, before separation. It is to imagine not a primal chaos, but a structured openness — a space not empty, but pregnant with relational tension. Not a void, but a system. Not a big bang, but a relational field waiting to be cut.

And from this cut, this construal — not imposed, but immanent — comes experience, perspective, history, world.

The Road Ahead

In this series, we will trace the evolution of possibility across multiple phases of construal. From pre-semiotic fields to the emergence of ritual and symbolic system. From gesture to grammar. From biologically-oriented coupling to the symbolic reflexivity of myth, ethics, and theory.

At each phase, we will ask: What kind of possibility becomes available here? And what is required for such possibility to be enacted, inhabited, constrained, or opened?

Ultimately, we will suggest that evolution is not about life adapting to a pre-given world — but about meaning systems evolving to construe a world that could not otherwise exist.

This is not a philosophy of life. It is a mythos of possibility.

And we begin not with what is, but with what might become.

2 The Pre-Semiotic Cut

Before meaning, before symbols, before even the semblance of communicative coordination — there is difference. Not the difference between things, for there are no things yet. But the differentiation of potential within a relational field: a tension that allows something to be distinguished from what it is not, even before it has any name.

We call this the pre-semiotic cut — the most primitive gesture of construal, where the possibility of meaning begins to take shape. It is not symbolic, not cognitive, not even sentient in any familiar sense. But it marks the first alignment of potential, the earliest tension between system and instance.

This is where the evolution of possibility begins.

Before Representation: Construal Without Symbol

Much of our intellectual heritage assumes that meaning begins with representation: a mark stands for a thing, a sound names an object, a gesture signifies an intent. But this view already presupposes a symbolic order. It assumes the existence of separable entities — sign and referent, form and content, self and world.

Relational ontology offers a different path. It does not begin with the symbol, but with construal: the perspectival cut that allows experience to be organised.

In the pre-semiotic field, there is no subject to experience and no object to be experienced. There is only the system of potential tensions, through which certain alignments become more likely than others. These are not yet meanings, but they are proto-meaningful: configurations of potential that, when constrained in particular ways, will become meaning.

In other words, possibility is already structured before the symbolic emerges.

Attunement Without Intentionality

To speak of this phase is necessarily paradoxical. We are describing what cannot yet be observed or expressed — a phase prior to expression itself. But we can gesture toward it.

We can imagine, for example, an organism whose coupling with its environment is not yet mediated by signs, but is nonetheless shaped by patterned responsiveness. A molecule “prefers” one bond over another. A cell “follows” a gradient. A nervous system “settles” into rhythms. These are not metaphors. They are actualisations of pre-semiotic potential.

What we see here is attunement without intentionality: coordination without symbolisation. No meaning is yet made, but the conditions for construal are evolving. The world is not yet known, but it is coming into knowability.

The Cut That Prepares the Cut

Why call this a "cut" at all, if nothing is being named, pointed to, or distinguished as such? Because even here, we find the incipient separation of a perspective. Not the perspective of a subject, but the differentiation of a system into zones of relative stability and flux. A proto-instance. A tension in the field. A directionality within potential.

This is the precondition for meaning. And it is already a form of evolution.

Not the evolution of life adapting to fixed conditions, but the evolution of possibility itself: a shifting in what can be enacted, aligned, inhabited. The symbolic animal will emerge much later, but its ground is already being laid in these pre-semiotic alignments — these cuts that do not yet know themselves as cuts.

Beyond Mechanism, Before Mind

This model asks us to think beyond both mechanism and mind. Not a mechanical system blindly following laws, nor a conscious subject navigating a world. But a field of potentialities gradually stratifying into systems and constraints, from which both mind and world will eventually emerge.

Before symbol, before syntax, before subject — there is a world in the making. Not a chaos waiting to be ordered, but a structured openness evolving toward reflexivity.

And that is where we turn next: to the first stirrings of systemic coordination — the phase in which difference becomes patterned, and possibility begins to take on semiotic form.

3 From Alignment to System

Meaning does not erupt fully formed into the world. It unfolds through phases — slow, recursive differentiations of what is possible. In the previous post, we explored the pre-semiotic cut, where construal begins not as representation but as attunement within a field of potential. Now we move to the next shift: from alignment to system.

Here, the world is not merely reacted to — it is patterned. Alignment becomes regularity. Tension becomes constraint. And through this stabilisation of coordination, a new kind of potential emerges: systemic possibility.

Patterning as a Precondition of Meaning

To say that meaning depends on pattern is not to reduce it to regularity, but to acknowledge the precondition for construal: without some degree of recurrence, no semiotic system can evolve. But this recurrence need not be rigid or mechanical. It is better seen as a tendency — a drift toward attractors in a field of interaction.

When these patterns constrain what can happen next, the field begins to articulate itself. A difference now makes a difference, not only because it happens, but because it conditions what may follow. This is the beginning of system — not as a fixed totality, but as a theory of its own instances.

And with it comes the first glimpse of meaning potential.

The Emergence of Systemic Constraints

Let us imagine a population of organisms — primitive, without symbolic communication, but embedded in patterned interaction with their environment and each other. Over time, certain couplings are reinforced, not by intention but by consequence. Certain sequences stabilise. Certain reactions feed back into their conditions of possibility.

This is not yet semiosis, but it is already systemic: the field is no longer a loose collection of alignments, but a dynamic ecology of constraints.

Such constraints do not suppress possibility; they generate it. They transform an undifferentiated field into a structured one — a topology of what can be enacted. System, in this view, is not a mechanism of control but a medium of meaning.

System as Evolving Theory

This brings us to a key insight of relational ontology: a system is a theory of the instance. It is not a collection of parts or rules, but a structured potential — an orientation toward what might be actualised.

The evolution of possibility thus entails the emergence of systems that constrain and enable what counts as a meaningful act. These systems are not static. They are themselves evolving theories, adapting as their instances feed back into the potential they instantiate.

In short: possibility evolves not by increasing variety alone, but by differentiating systems of potential — systems that make new construals possible.

The Semiotic Threshold Approaches

At this point in our story, we have not yet crossed the threshold into meaning. But we are approaching it. With the emergence of systemic constraints, the field is no longer merely reacting — it is beginning to construe itself.

Whereas pre-semiotic alignments were shaped by implicit tension, systemic patterns now shape the space of potential actions. This opens the door to symbolic abstraction: the power to construe construal itself.

That is where we turn next — to the emergence of the semiotic animal, and with it, the birth of symbolic meaning.

4 The Semiotic Threshold

We now arrive at a crucial inflection in our unfolding arc. If the earlier phases traced the emergence of possibility through pre-semiotic alignment and systemic constraint, this post turns to the next great transformation: the semiotic threshold.

Here, for the first time, a field of patterned interactions crosses a relational cut. The system begins to construe itself as system — not by reflex, but by symbolic abstraction. A new order of reality begins to unfold: the order of meaning.

What Is the Semiotic Threshold?

The semiotic threshold is not a boundary between life and language, nor a sharp division between instinct and culture. It is a perspectival shift within the evolution of potential: from acting within a system, to acting on the system as such.

This does not mean organisms become aware in a reflective sense. It means that acts become symbolic — not merely coordinated or conditioned, but interpretable within a system of construal.

What marks this threshold is not the appearance of a particular form (gesture, sound, mark), but the emergence of a relational function: the ability to mean — to construe experience as experience.

Symbolic Abstraction as Systemic Recursion

At the semiotic threshold, the system does something it has never done before: it begins to re-enter itself. Its patterns become interpretable within the system. Its instances are not only shaped by the system, but reshape the system through interpretation.

This is the core recursive move of symbolic abstraction:

To construe the construal.

This recursion is not infinite. It is layered, stratified, constrained. But it opens a new space: a metasystemic space in which meaning can evolve. This is not just the coordination of acts — it is the coordination of construals, the social evolution of symbolic systems.

The Symbolic Animal

What evolves at this threshold is not simply a new species — but a new order of being. The symbolic animal is not defined by biology, cognition, or culture in isolation. It is defined by its mode of possibility.

To live as a symbolic animal is to live within — and through — a system of construal. It is to experience reality not only as what is, but as what is meant. The environment becomes interpretable. Action becomes negotiable. Existence itself becomes semiotic.

This is not a higher rung on some evolutionary ladder. It is a cut across modes of potential — a shift from enacting the possible, to inhabiting possibility as such.

The Mythos of Meaning Begins

The semiotic threshold is the true beginning of what we might call a mythos of meaning — not in the sense of an ancient tale, but in the deep sense of a shared construal of what meaning is.

From here, evolution proceeds not only biologically, nor even culturally, but symbolically — through the expansion and differentiation of meaning potential. That is the path we now trace: from symbolic construal to semiotic system, from lived tension to reflexive mythos.

We are now fully within the domain of meaning.

And so in the next post, we turn to the dynamics of symbolic evolution — where construal becomes social, systems differentiate, and possibility itself becomes a medium of collective transformation.

5 The Symbolic Drift

Having crossed the semiotic threshold, the symbolic animal embarks on a remarkable journey: the continuous unfolding and differentiation of symbolic systems. This process is not random; it is guided by an emergent logic we call the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility.

The Drift as Systemic Differentiation

The symbolic drift is not a linear progression or steady climb but a complex differentiation within a semiotic ecology. Symbolic systems multiply, diverge, and recombine, opening new fields of possibility while constraining others.

This differentiation is systemic. It is not just the growth of vocabulary or grammar but the reconfiguration of the entire symbolic space — new genres, new norms, new modes of orientation. Each symbolic innovation alters the landscape of meaning, shifting what can be said, thought, and enacted.

Symbolic Evolution as Repatterning

The drift is also a repatterning. Patterns that were once stable may become unstable or obsolete, while novel configurations emerge. This process is driven by internal tensions, external pressures, and reflexive reorganisation.

Unlike biological evolution, symbolic evolution is not limited by physical inheritance. Instead, it evolves through social transmission, collective memory, and ritualised repetition — processes that enable symbolic systems to carry forward, transform, and reimagine possibility.

Symbolic Systems as Medium and Constraint

Symbolic systems simultaneously enable and constrain. They are the medium through which meaning is made and shared, but they also set the limits of what can be meaningfully said.

Understanding this dual role is essential. It accounts for why symbolic systems can foster both creativity and conservatism; both innovation and tradition; both freedom and constraint.

The Mythos Grows

As symbolic systems drift and differentiate, they generate what we call a mythos of meaning — a shared orientation toward the future, grounded in historical sedimentation but always open to reimagination.

This mythos is not a fixed story but a living constellation of symbolic commitments — a systemic ecology of possibility that grounds identity, community, and action.

Toward a New Symbolic Ethics

The symbolic drift invites an ethical stance. If symbolic life is always becoming, always transforming, then our participation in meaning is a form of responsibility.

We do not merely inherit symbolic systems; we inhabit and reshape them. To live symbolically is to orient oneself within an evolving field of possibility — and to act in ways that acknowledge the consequences of that orientation.

In our next and final post of this series, we explore the mythos of meaning itself — how it sustains, challenges, and invites us to live otherwise.

6 The Mythos of Meaning

We have journeyed from the pre-semiotic cut, through systemic emergence and the semiotic threshold, to the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility. Now we arrive at the heart of our inquiry: the mythos of meaning.

Mythos Beyond Storytelling

“Mythos” here is not mere story or legend. It is the systemic symbolic commitment that grounds and orients a collective. It is the living architecture through which meaning takes shape, sustains identity, and generates futures.

A mythos is the dynamic horizon of possibility within which symbolic animals live. It is the shared web of construals that both enables and constrains what can be said, done, and imagined.

The Mythos as System of Possibility

The mythos is a patterned field of symbolic relations — a network of narratives, values, rituals, and semiotic resources that together shape a community’s orientation to the world and its own becoming.

It is not fixed or given, but always in motion: evolving, contested, renegotiated.

The mythos is the living ecology of meaning within which symbolic life unfolds.

Living Otherwise: Ethics and Transformation

To inhabit a mythos is to participate in a symbolic order. But because the mythos is always partial and provisional, it also invites transformation — the possibility of living otherwise.

This is the ethical horizon of symbolic life: not to be trapped by inherited construals, but to respond reflexively — to reshape the mythos through praxis, imagination, and critique.

The Evolution of Possibility Continues

The mythos is not an endpoint but a phase in the ongoing evolution of possibility. It opens space for new construals, new forms of life, new symbolic worlds.

In this sense, evolution is never finished. It is always a becoming.

Final Reflections

This series has sought to reframe evolution as the unfolding of possibility itself — not as the survival of the fittest or the march of progress, but as the evolving architecture of meaning.

We are symbolic animals living in symbolic worlds — worlds that we both inherit and invent.

Our task is not only to understand this condition but to inhabit it responsibly: to engage with the mythos of meaning not as passive recipients but as active participants and co-creators.

25 September 2025

The Symbolic Animal: Phasing the Human in Meaning

1 The Animal That Means

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Context as Commitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Living the Metafunctions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 The Double Inheritance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 The Reflexive Cut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Semiotic Life as Praxis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: The Ethical Horizon of the Cut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 September 2025

Unfolding Myths: Living With Time After Its End

1 The End of Time, The Return of Myth

"When time dissolves into unfolding, only story remains. And it is in story that the world is cut again — not into clocks, but into meanings."

We are now living beyond time.

This is not a claim about physics, calendars, or cultural decay. It is a semiotic claim — a recognition that time as we have inherited it was never a neutral backdrop, but a symbolic infrastructure: a grammar of unfolding that served a particular worldview. That grammar is crumbling. And in its place, something older — and perhaps more enduring — is beginning to stir.

We ended the Phasecraft series by dissolving time into perspectival unfolding: not a line, but a field of processes, each undergoing its own mode of becoming. In that move, we displaced time as a container and recast it as an effect of how we phase the world — how we cut it into perceptible, nameable, shareable processes.

But when those cuts become unstable — when phasing fails to deliver the world as coherent or navigable — what then? What orients us, when the temporal scaffolding collapses?

This is where mythos returns.

Not as fantasy. Not as superstition. But as symbolic orientation to the open.

As the story through which a world becomes phaseable again.

As the deeper grammar beneath all our surface grammars.

Time as Myth

The modern notion of time — linear, uniform, divisible, external — is a myth. Not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of being a total symbolic cut: a story that orders experience, anchors causality, and locates the self within a broader unfolding. It is a myth that came to dominate others, installing itself as the background condition for science, economy, and governance. And like all myths, it shaped what could be said, thought, and felt.

But its authority is waning. Climate crisis, planetary computation, cultural unmooring — these have ruptured the coherence of linear time. We no longer move confidently toward “the future.” We no longer believe in progress as unfolding inevitability. We no longer trust that time’s arrow points anywhere in particular.

We are left, instead, with unfolding: plural, perspectival, processual.

Mythos as the Grammar of Meaningful Unfolding

If phasecraft is our method for cutting the world into unfolding processes, then mythos is what gives those cuts weight. Mythos provides the symbolic conditions under which a cut matters — under which it becomes not just a perceptual distinction, but an orientation within a shared world.

Where phasecraft works at the level of semiotic technique, mythos works at the level of symbolic ecology. It shapes what is seen as sacred, tragic, inevitable, redemptive, or possible. It tells us what kind of world we are phasing.

And crucially, it is not optional. Every act of phasing already presupposes a mythos. Even modernity, with all its anti-mythical pretensions, was mythic through and through — its faith in rationality, in mastery, in temporal progress, was nothing less than cosmogonic.

To phase without mythos is to navigate without a horizon. To live-with unfolding without symbolic grounding is to drift in a sea of processes, unable to name what matters.

So myth returns — not as regression, but as the symbolic consequence of time’s collapse.

Living With the Open

What we are seeking now is not a return to traditional mythologies. Those were anchored in cosmoi and ecologies that no longer hold. Nor are we seeking to fabricate new grand narratives, scripted from above.

What we are seeking is something else entirely:

a grammar for symbolic orientation to the open;
a practice of worlding that lives-with indeterminacy rather than denying it;
a poetics of unfolding that cuts meaning without claiming closure.

This is the work of mythos after time.

In the posts that follow, we will explore how different cultures have phased the world through cosmological narrative — and how these symbolic grammars might inform, challenge, or inspire our own. We will examine the colonial wound of imposed temporalities, the more-than-human grammars of mythic ecology, and the emerging symbolic potentials of this transitional moment.

We are not looking for stories to believe.

We are looking for ways to live.

And that, now more than ever, is the work of myth.

2 Cosmoi of the Cut

“Each cut is already a cosmos. Each unfolding bears the weight of a world.”

If time was never a neutral container, then neither were the worlds that grew within it. Across cultures and histories, people have lived-with unfolding in ways that far exceed the grammar of clocks. They did not name time, but cut the world — into seasons and stories, initiations and returns, births and deaths and rebirths. These cuts were never mere temporal markers. They were cosmoi: entire symbolic orders sustained through ritual, genre, and shared construal.

In this post, we move from the critique of modern time to the plurality of world-cuts: how different cultures have phased becoming through symbolic practice. We’re not here to survey traditions for their quaintness, nor to appropriate cosmologies out of context. We’re here to learn how people have lived-with unfolding, and how they’ve sustained symbolic orientation without collapsing into linearity or chaos.

This is not anthropology. It is an archaeology of possibility.

From Time to Cosmos

To say that mythos returns after time is to say that cosmos returns — not as the universe, but as an ordered whole: a world that holds its unfolding through symbolic structure. Every cosmos is sustained by a grammar of cuts: distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the before and the after, the permissible and the forbidden. These are not abstract metaphysics; they are lived semiotics.

Consider a few examples of such symbolic orderings:

Spiral temporalities (e.g. in West African or Andean cosmologies), where events do not repeat, but echo — returning with difference, intensifying through layered cycles.
Kinship calendars, in which unfolding is synchronised with social roles — becoming a parent, elder, ancestor — and the very structure of time is indexed to relational change.
Agricultural rituals, where sowing and harvesting are not just economic acts, but cosmogonic events — re-enactments of creation, death, and renewal.
Initiatory thresholds, where unfolding is cut not by age or date, but by symbolic trial — the world becomes different after the ordeal, and so does the self.

Each of these is a cosmos: not a map of space-time, but a grammar for living meaningfully with change.

The Cut as Symbolic, Not Temporal

What these practices reveal is that unfolding has always been lived through symbolic cut, not measured time.

A cut is not just a moment; it is a transvaluation — a shift in the order of meaning. A festival doesn’t merely mark the passage of days; it alters the world, re-activates cosmological grounding. A ritual doesn’t occur in time; it cuts time, orienting the unfolding around a phase shift that cannot be located on a clock.

This is why modern “time management” feels so hollow. It offers division without cosmos, segmentation without symbolism. It phases the world into units, but never into meaning.

In contrast, cosmoi hold the unfolding through cuts that matter — cuts that orient, bind, and renew.

Phasing as Cosmopoiesis

If phasecraft names the act of semiotic cutting — of distinguishing processes in order to live with them — then cosmopoiesis is the symbolic maintenance of those cuts at the level of world. It is not merely phasing; it is worlding.

In this sense, phasing is never just technical. Every cut is already embedded in a mythos. To phase is to participate in a cosmos — to locate oneself, not merely in a process, but in a meaningful whole.

This has profound implications:

There is no such thing as pure process. All unfolding is construed through a symbolic ecology.
There is no such thing as universal time. All temporalities are local, perspectival, and cosmopoietic.
The loss of symbolic grammar is not neutral. It disables the world’s phaseability.

Toward Pluriversal Phasing

What we are now confronting is a collapse of the dominant cosmos — not just its institutions, but its symbolic coherence. In its place is not chaos, but multiplicity — a pluriverse of potential grammars for phasing the world.

We do not need to adopt ancient cosmoi. We do not need to fabricate new meta-narratives. We need to become conscious phasecrafters of the symbolic — not just how we cut, but how we world.

This will require re-learning what it means to live-with the cut — not as loss, but as cosmogony.

The next post will turn to the colonial imposition of clock time and the systematic destruction of other cosmoi.

Because before we can recraft mythos, we must reckon with the violence that unmade it.

3 Clock Time and the Colonial Cut

“To conquer a people, it is not enough to take their land. You must also take their time.”

So far, we’ve spoken of mythos, cosmos, and the unfolding of lived processes. But the end of time — and the return of myth — cannot be understood apart from the colonial cut that severed peoples from their symbolic ecologies. Clock time did not merely displace cosmoi; it imposed a new symbolic order altogether: abstract, universal, measurable, empty. It was not just a technical convenience. It was an epistemic conquest.

To deconstruct time is not just to philosophise. It is to decolonise the symbolic order that made clock time appear natural, inevitable, and neutral. And it is to understand that reclaiming unfolding means also reclaiming the right to live-with the world in one's own way — to phase it, symbolise it, and belong to it.

The Universalisation of One Cut

Clock time is not universal. It is the outcome of a particular historical trajectory — one that emerged in Western Europe alongside industrialisation, colonial expansion, and the commodification of labour.

But what matters most is how it universalised its cut. Clock time did not merely offer an alternative way of organising the world; it redefined what organisation meant. It replaced local phasing with standardisation. It replaced symbolic significance with synchronicity. It replaced cosmopoiesis with compliance.

And it travelled not through persuasion, but through power.

Missionaries imposed liturgical schedules that displaced local festivals and ritual cycles.
Administrators enforced calendars and census regimes that rewrote indigenous genealogies and events.
Educators retrained children to think in hours and years, not in monsoons or harvests or kinship roles.
Capitalists converted labour into timed units, destroying the link between work, land, and sacred rhythm.

These were not side effects. They were strategies of domination — severing people from their world, their unfolding, their symbolic infrastructure.

The Violence of Temporal Displacement

To be torn from one’s symbolic unfolding is not just to lose tradition. It is to lose the very grammar of meaning. The colonial cut was a severing of orientation — a disembedding so profound that it left communities not just dispossessed, but disoriented.

This is why so much postcolonial struggle is not just about land or language, but about time. The call to “slow down,” to “reconnect with cycles,” to “honour ancestors” — these are not lifestyle choices. They are attempts to reworld the cut, to regenerate phaseability within a damaged symbolic ecology.

In this light, even modern calls to “manage time better” or “be more productive” carry colonial echoes. They preserve the grammar of compliance, not of orientation. They assume the legitimacy of the clock, even as they lament its effects.

Resisting Temporal Monoculture

Just as biodiversity protects ecosystems, symbolic diversity protects worldability. When only one mode of phasing is authorised — when only one temporal grammar is legitimate — then all other cosmoi become unintelligible. Or worse: romanticised, commodified, or erased.

To resist temporal monoculture is not to reject coordination or technology. It is to reclaim the right to live-with unfolding in ways that honour one’s own symbolic grounding. It is to refuse the idea that meaningful life must submit to abstract universals. And it is to recognise that no symbolic ecology can flourish under conditions of extraction and erasure.

This resistance is already alive — in indigenous language revival, in land-based ritual, in Afro-diasporic futurisms, in queer temporalities, in more-than-human cosmologies. These are not just cultural expressions. They are cosmopoietic acts — cuts against the clock, in defence of unfolding.

Beyond the Reparative Frame

Yet even resistance can be captured by the grammar it opposes. The dream of “restoring” cosmoi, of “undoing” the colonial cut, risks reinscribing the logic of time — as if symbolic healing were a project with a deadline, a future to arrive at, a past to retrieve.

But unfolding does not move backwards or forwards. It moves with. And so the task is not reparation as reversal, but as reconstrual: a living-with the cut as a site of worldmaking, not world-loss.

In the next post, we will turn to how the more-than-human — forests, rivers, winds, fungi — already phase the world in ways that exceed clock time, and how relational ontologies offer an alternative ground for cosmopoiesis in the aftermath of time.

4 More-than-Human Phasecraft

“The wind does not wait for permission to change. The mushroom does not ask if it is time. The forest phases itself.”

Clock time tells us that the world is inert, waiting to be moved. But in truth, the world is always already unfolding — not as background, but as participant. In this post, we turn to the more-than-human: the forests, rivers, fungi, weather-systems, microbial colonies — not as objects in time, but as phasers of world. They are not resources, not scenery, not passive terrain. They are agents of the cut.

And if mythos is to return — if symbolic life is to be reconstituted — it cannot do so within a human-only cosmology. The more-than-human is already phasing the world. We are the ones catching up.

From Environment to Ecophase

Modernity called it “the environment” — a container for human activity, to be studied or saved. But the world does not surround us. It co-constitutes us.

In relational ontology, the world is not a set of things in space-time. It is an ongoing differentiation of process — and that process includes us only as one strand in a vast, dynamic weave. More-than-human life does not simply exist; it orients, cuts, intensifies. It produces symbolic pressure. It phases becoming.

A fungal bloom reframes the forest’s metabolism.
A drought realigns the village’s rituals.
A migration reshapes the semiotic horizon of the land.

These are not effects of “natural forces.” They are symbolic acts, cutting the unfolding into new orientations. The cosmos is not just human; it is composed across scales and species.

More-than-Human Phasecraft

Just as humans ritualise the cut, the more-than-human world actualises it — through shifts that are not only physical, but relationally meaningful.

Let us consider:

Coral bleaching, not just as an ecological event, but as a cosmological cry — a cut that says: you have breached the relational contract.
Mushroom networks, not merely as underground highways, but as distributed phasecraft — synchronising decay, renewal, and growth across ecologies.
Tides and winds, not as background conditions, but as tempo-shaping forces — cutting movement into phases, producing ritual synchrony without a clock.
Animal migration, not as instinctual behaviour, but as a living semiotic, phasing regions into seasonal orientations and sacred thresholds.

These are not metaphors. They are symbolic operations within ecologies whose semiotic logics do not depend on humans to be meaningful.

Cosmopoiesis Beyond the Human

When the colonial clock cut through symbolic ecologies, it not only severed human cultures — it desevered the more-than-human world. It rendered the world inanimate, unspeaking, passive. But in relational ontology, the more-than-human is symbolically active — co-participant in the phasing of cosmos.

This has consequences:

There can be no reconstitution of mythos that is not ecosemiotic — involving plants, animals, weather, topologies.
Cosmopoiesis must be distributed — held across species, not centralised in human institutions.
Phasecraft must be listened for, not just designed — because the world is already cutting itself, even when we are deaf to it.

This is not to romanticise nature. It is to relocate cosmological power: to understand that the grammar of unfolding is not anthropocentric — and never was.

Learning to Listen With

The task is not to give voice to the more-than-human, but to relearn how to hear it — not as data, but as phasic symbolisation. This means cultivating new forms of attentiveness, new grammars of encounter:

Ethnobotany as semiotic apprenticeship.
Ecological restoration as ritual reconstrual.
Animism not as belief, but as relational literacy.
Seasonality not as weather report, but as phaseable grammar.

Living-with the more-than-human requires more than science or policy. It requires worlding otherwise — composing cosmoi in which humans are not the sole symbolic agents.

In the next post, we will ask what it means to craft mythos from here — in the aftermath of the clock, in the pluriverse of cosmoi, amid the phasing of more-than-human life.

What might symbolic life become — when it is no longer confined to time?

5 Mythos After Time

“Myth is not what we believe. It is what believes us.”

What remains, after time ends? After the colonial cut is revealed as a violent abstraction, after the more-than-human is restored to symbolic agency, after unfolding is reclaimed as the very texture of life — what remains?

What remains is mythos.

Not a return to old stories, nor a retreat into nostalgia — but the emergence of new symbolic grammars, forged in the aftermath of temporal conquest.

This final post invites us to linger here: not in time, but in unfolding. Not in recovery, but in reconstrual. And to ask: what does it mean to live symbolically — now — without the scaffolding of time?

The Mythic is Not the Primitive

Modernity taught us to associate myth with the past: primitive, pre-rational, obsolete. But this framing is itself a product of the temporal cut — of a worldview that treats abstract progression as the only form of development.

Myth, however, is not bound to chronology.

It is not a stage of history. It is a mode of worldmaking — one that never ended, even when it was repressed.

The mythic is not primitive. It is phasic. It phases the real through symbolic intensities: narrative, ritual, sacrifice, rebirth, encounter. It creates thresholds and thresholds create cosmos. Where time seeks continuity, myth cuts.

And where time is indifferent to meaning, mythos is saturated with it.

Mythos as Construal

In relational ontology, meaning is not found, but construed. It is not located in objects or in minds, but in the cut — the distinction that makes orientation possible.

Mythos is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is a symbolic construal of unfolding — one that enables a people, a place, a process to phase itself meaningfully.

A creation story is not a history; it is a symbolic grammar for becoming.
A taboo is not a rule; it is a cut that holds the cosmos in tension.
A ritual is not an act; it is a phase-transition in a semiotic ecology.

In this light, to craft mythos is not to imagine fanciful tales — it is to take up the responsibility of world-construal.

And in a pluriverse, there can be no single mythos — only co-emergent cosmoi.

Symbolic Life Without the Clock

If the clock is no longer our master, then what orients us?

Not a replacement universal. Not a new timekeeper. But shared phasecraft — relational grammars for living-with, living-as, living-through. Symbolic life becomes not a matter of deadlines and durations, but of attentions and thresholds.

It becomes possible to ask:

What are the rhythms of this forest, and how might I phase with them?
What are the sacred tensions in this community, and how are they held?
What cut must we now make, to symbolise our changed relation to the world?

These are not technical questions. They are mythic ones. They call not for solutions, but for orientations — not for certainty, but for meaningful unfolding.

After Time, We Make Cuts

To live without time does not mean to live in chaos. It means to live by the cut: to recognise that every act of meaning is a differentiation — and that we are always already phasing the world through our participation in it.

We do not need to return to old mythologies. But we do need to craft new ones — slowly, carefully, relationally. Mythos is not a relic. It is a method.

For sensing what matters.
For orienting in the pluriverse.
For cutting meaning into the flux of unfolding.

After time ends, mythos begins again — not as belief, but as responsibility: the responsibility to cut meaningfully, to phase with care, and to world otherwise.

Coda: On the Far Side of Time

“To end time is not to end the world. It is to let the world unfold otherwise.”

This series began with a question:

What becomes of meaning when time ends?

We have not answered it once and for all — because the question is not one of fact, but of orientation. It is a phasic question, not a temporal one. And every answer cuts the world differently.

We have seen how the idea of time — linear, abstract, colonial — severed unfolding from meaning. How it froze becoming into units, stripped processes of their symbolic force, and claimed the right to organise all life by its grid.

We have also seen how time was never a neutral measure — but a worldmaking force: one that enabled some lives to count, and others to be discounted.

But the clock is not eternal. Its authority is not absolute.

And it is failing.

The end of time is not a catastrophe.

It is a threshold. A portal. A moment of phasic reorientation.

When we no longer believe in time as a container, we begin to see the world again as unfolding — as process, phase, cut, and construal. We rediscover the symbolic life of the more-than-human. We remember that cosmology was always a shared act.

To step through this threshold is not to abandon all structure. It is to accept a different kind of responsibility:

To listen for phases rather than impose plans.
To construe rather than control.
To make meaning not once and for all, but again and again — in relation.

So what becomes of meaning when time ends?

It becomes ours to make again —

with each cut, each gesture, each unfolding.

And in this, we are not alone.

The world is already phasing.

We are simply learning to hear it once more.