Worlds Within Meaning

30 September 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Value to Cosmos

1 Myth as Adaptive Semiotic Technology

Myth has too often been burdened with essentialist weight — universal archetypes, eternal patterns, psychic blueprints. What if we took another approach? Rather than searching for mythical constants across cultures, we might ask: what work does myth do?

Seen through a relational ontology, myth emerges as a technology of construal: a cultural means of bringing value-orientations into the domain of meaning. Following Gerald Edelman, we can distinguish value systems — biological regulators of adaptive behaviour — from semiotic systems, which create meanings and meanings-of-meanings. Myth stands precisely at this junction.

In ritual, trance, and altered states, perception is loosened, bypassed, suspended. These are not errors of the senses but different cuts into potential, where deep value-orientations surface unfiltered. Left unshaped, they remain fleeting intensities. But when narrated, dramatised, chanted, storied, they are semioticised — given symbolic form that can be shared, remembered, and transformed.

This is the adaptive work of myth: to take the orienting pull of value, and weave it into systems of meaning that align a collective. Myths are not eternal; they are provisional symbolic architectures, adaptive semiotic technologies that let communities survive, flourish, and re-align in shifting worlds.

Dreams offer a hint of this work. In Campbell’s famous aphorism, “dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.” Stripped of its archetypal undertones, we might hear this differently: dreams are private experiments in symbolic construal, while myths are collective architectures of the same process. Both cut into value-laden orientations beyond perception; both shape them into symbolic meaning.

In this way, myth can be seen not as universal story but as reflexive cultural adaptation — an ongoing negotiation between the values that orient life and the meanings that organise worlds.

2 Bypassing Perception: Altered States and Symbolic Access

In everyday life, perception construes the world for us. It is tuned to survival: selecting what is relevant, filtering what is not, delivering a stable horizon of meaning. Yet perception is also a narrowing. It keeps us oriented in the familiar, but it occludes other possibilities.

Mythic practice begins precisely where perception loosens. Across cultures, ritual, trance, dream, and vision have long been cultivated as technologies of altered state. These are not accidents or failures of cognition, but deliberate suspensions of the perceptual cut. They open onto potentials otherwise inaccessible.

In these states, value-orientations rise to the surface. The emotional intensities, the urgencies of desire, fear, and awe — the deep regulators of adaptive life — appear unmediated. Not yet tied to everyday construals, they pulse as raw orientations. But left alone, they vanish as soon as waking perception reasserts itself.

The genius of myth is to catch these intensities in symbolic nets. Through chant, dance, story, and image, altered-state experience is shaped into semiotic form. What was fleeting becomes narratable; what was ineffable becomes shareable; what was private becomes collective.

This is why myths so often bear the marks of altered states: their dreamlike illogic, their kaleidoscopic transformations, their refusal of ordinary causality. They are not faulty stories, but symbolic echoes of perception’s suspension. By bypassing perception, myth accesses orientations otherwise hidden; by symbolising them, it aligns a community around new meanings.

In this sense, altered states are not departures from reality but different relational cuts into it. They access potentials beyond ordinary construal. Myth is the cultural practice of bringing those potentials back into the semiotic weave of collective life.

3 From Value to Meaning-of-Meaning

To understand the unique work of myth, we need to distinguish between two very different systems: value systems and semiotic systems.

Value systems, as Gerald Edelman describes them, are biological regulators. They orient behaviour by amplifying what is adaptive and suppressing what is not. Hunger, fear, desire, attachment — these are not meanings, but biases in action, ensuring that life turns toward viability. They are adaptive, not interpretive.

Semiotic systems, by contrast, do not orient behaviour directly. They generate meanings, and even more crucially, meanings-of-meanings — symbolic architectures that reflect on, refract, and reorganise what construal can be. Semiotic systems make worlds, not just moves within them.

What myth does is to bridge these two strata. In altered states, value-orientations surface: intensities without symbolic form. Through story, chant, and ritual, they are semioticised — drawn up into symbolic patterns that can be shared and remembered. In this way, myth turns adaptive orientations into symbolic horizons.

This is why myths are not just stories about the world but stories about the meaning of the world. They do not merely map terrain; they map how terrain itself comes to matter. They are reflexive, second-order constructs: meanings-of-meanings that give value-laden orientations a symbolic architecture.

Consider how myths encode fear: not simply as a reaction, but as a cosmic order of danger and protection. Or how they encode desire: not as raw appetite, but as narratives of quest, union, or transformation. Myth transposes value into meaning, and then folds meaning back into the collective as an organising horizon.

This reflexive turn is the heart of myth. It does not universalise archetypes, nor reveal timeless essences. Instead, it functions as a cultural semiotic technology, transforming value into symbolic meaning-of-meaning, aligning collectives to new adaptive horizons.

4 Myth as Collective Alignment

If myth transforms value into meaning-of-meaning, then its real power lies in collective alignment.

A biological value is individual — hunger, fear, desire, attachment. Myth amplifies and transposes these orientations into shared symbolic patterns that organise not just personal behaviour but the very horizon of collective being.

Ritualised myth brings this into effect. Through chant, dance, story, or spectacle, individuals are not only exposed to symbolic construals — they are synchronised by them. Myth functions as a phase mechanism: it binds many bodies, many perspectives, into a shared symbolic rhythm. The telling is never private. Even when recounted alone, the myth orients the teller within a larger symbolic horizon that already belongs to the collective.

This is why myth is central to early social formations. It does not just explain the world, nor simply entertain. It aligns collectives by:

Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
Staging possibilities: myths articulate what can and cannot be done, who one may become, and how the world itself might unfold.

Seen this way, myth is not a “public dream” in Campbell’s sense — an archetypal structure projected into communal life. Rather, it is a symbolic architecture of alignment, continuously remade in performance, synchronising individual orientations into a shared horizon of possibility.

Myth thus phases the collective: it turns value into meaning-of-meaning, and then uses those meanings to hold together, orient, and project the social whole.

5 Myth as Reflexive Cosmos

When myth aligns a collective, it does more than coordinate social life. It projects an entire cosmos — a world reflexively structured through meaning-of-meaning.

A cosmos is not simply “the universe” as physical environment. It is the symbolically construed horizon within which beings, relations, and possibilities take shape. Myth generates such horizons. It binds together natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations into a single symbolic weave.

In this sense, myth is cosmogenetic. It does not merely describe the world but actively brings a world into being for a collective. Mountains and rivers become ancestors, stars become guides, animals become totems. Social orders are not grounded in brute force but in symbolic alignment with cosmic patterns. The cosmos is not external backdrop; it is a reflexive projection of collective construal.

What makes myth distinctive here is the reflexive turn:

Value-orientations surface in altered states.
These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
That alignment is then mirrored back as a cosmos — a world that seems always already there, but is in fact the projection of collective construal.

The cosmos of myth is thus a reflexive reality: it appears to precede the collective, but is continually constituted through its symbolic practices. The divine order, the ancestral lineage, the cycle of life and death — these are not discovered truths but symbolic architectures that organise existence.

This is why myth can endure across generations. It is not just a narrative but a cosmological infrastructure, sustaining reflexive reality itself. The cosmos of myth is the collective seeing itself, its values, and its possibilities, refracted and stabilised in symbolic form.

Coda: Myth without Archetype

What, then, remains of myth once we set aside archetypes, universal essences, and timeless psychic structures?

Not absence, but clarity.

Myth appears not as a coded expression of eternal forms but as a symbolic technology of life itself — a way of transposing value into meaning, synchronising collectives, and projecting worlds. Its power lies not in universal sameness but in situated resonance, each myth staging horizons of possibility unique to its collective.

We have traced three moves:

From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
From alignment to reflexive cosmos: myth projects those horizons outward, making a world appear as given — a cosmos reflexively constituted through symbolic practice.

In this light, Campbell’s claim that “myths are public dreams” can be reframed. Dreams are not private myths, and myths are not collective dreams. Dreams are idiosyncratic symbolic events of the sleeping body; myths are collective semiotic architectures that turn value into world. Their relation is not one of equivalence but of scale: both are reflexive construals, but only myth stabilises them into the symbolic infrastructure of a cosmos.

This is myth without archetype: not eternal, not universal, not psychic essence — but semiotic reflexivity. A cultural technology for making values into meanings, meanings into alignments, and alignments into worlds.

To study myth in this key is to study how collectives construe themselves into being, again and again, by telling the world into form.

Postscript: Beyond Campbell, Beyond Consciousness

One striking implication of this relational reading of myth is that consciousness — as introspective experience or psychic interiority — is not required to understand myth’s power. Myth operates through value-oriented intensities, semiotic transformation, and collective alignment, not through private reflection or archetypal recognition.

This moves myth studies into a new terrain:

Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
Toward an understanding of myth as a distributed, relational, adaptive practice: enacted, shared, and phasing across collective horizons.

In this light, myths are best seen as symbolic infrastructures, coordinating life and projecting worlds, regardless of whether any individual consciously apprehends their full import. Consciousness is neither a cause nor a necessary substrate; it is just one node among many in the network of relational construal that myth enacts.

This perspective opens a path for a more ecological, socially embedded, and adaptive study of myth, one attentive to how symbolic practices shape life itself, rather than how inner psychic patterns are mirrored in stories.

29 September 2025

Myth as Construal: Rereading Campbell through Relational Ontology

Preface: From Monomyth to Relational Worlds

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has long been celebrated for unveiling the “monomyth,” a universal narrative arc underlying global mythologies. Across cultures and eras, Campbell traced a single heroic itinerary: departure, initiation, and return. His work promised a unifying vision of myth as the manifestation of timeless psychic patterns.

Yet this universalising lens obscures a fundamental ontological distinction: the stories themselves are not instances of a preordained archetype, but situated, collective, and contingent acts of symbolic construal. Each myth phases its community into alignment, projects the collective into relational landscapes, and opens possibilities for action and imagination. The patterns Campbell detects are echoes — recurrent solutions to relational tensions — not proof of a singular, eternal monomyth.

This series, Myth as Construal, undertakes a relational rereading of Campbell. Its six posts trace a careful progression:

The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data – distinguishing Campbell’s universalising model from the plural, situated ontology of the myths themselves.
From Archetype to Reflexivity – reframing archetypes not as psychic essences but as effects of collective reflexive alignment.
From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures – dissolving the singular hero’s journey into heterogeneous construals of collective being.
Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process – exploring how each telling stages collective alignment through time.
Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes – showing how myths scaffold understanding across social, ecological, and symbolic horizons.
From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis – synthesising the series to foreground myth as the architecture of possibility, and Campbell’s monomyth as artefact.

The guiding move of this series is a relational cut: to treat myth not as a reflection of a timeless inner truth, but as an active, plural, and phasing construal of collective possibility. In doing so, it reframes Campbell’s project, highlighting the richness, heterogeneity, and creative dynamism of myth as it is actually enacted, rather than as it is universalised into theory.

By the end, the series invites readers to inhabit myth not as a static template of the psyche, but as a symbolic instrument, a field in which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their worlds. Campbell’s monomyth is a mirror; relational ontology invites us to step off the mirror and into the plurality of mythic life itself.

1 The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often celebrated for uncovering a universal pattern at the heart of mythology: the so-called “monomyth,” or hero’s journey. His comparative lens spans continents and centuries, stitching together myths from Greece to India, Polynesia to Sumer. What results is a grand synthesis, a single archetypal itinerary of separation, initiation, and return.

But this ambition conceals a crucial slippage: the ontology of Campbell’s model is not the ontology of his data.

The myths Campbell draws upon are symbolic construals, each situated within its own collective horizon. They are not “instances” of a timeless archetype; they are ways of aligning a community through shared symbolic potential. A Navajo emergence story, a Polynesian voyage tale, and a Greek heroic cycle each construe different relations of collective, individual, cosmos, and possibility. Their meanings are grounded in their social-symbolic contexts, not in an abstract, transcendent psyche.

Campbell’s model, by contrast, is not relational but archetypal. Anchored in Jungian psychology, it treats myth as an expression of timeless psychic structures. Similarities across myths are gathered into a universal narrative sequence, which is then taken as the truth of myth itself. In doing so, Campbell conflates the patterned potential of symbolic construal with the absolutised structure of a monomyth.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is the decisive cut: the data are plural, situated, and collective; the model is singular, universalising, and psychic. Campbell mistakes the resonances of symbolic construal across cultures for proof of an underlying universal form. The relational move is to resist this collapse, and to treat myth instead as a field of heterogeneous construals — each staging possibilities for being-together, none reducible to a single archetypal template.

In this series, we will reread Campbell through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than a monomyth of timeless individuation, myth will be approached as symbolic construal: the staging of ontological possibility, the phasing of collective alignment, the architecture of what a world can mean.

2 From Archetype to Reflexivity

At the core of Campbell’s model lies the concept of the archetype. Myths, in his account, are symbolic expressions of deep psychic patterns: timeless forms residing in the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not a cultural invention but a universal structure of the psyche, surfacing again and again in different guises.

This is where Campbell’s ontology reveals its essentialist foundations. Archetypes are conceived as givens — eternal forms that precede and determine symbolic expression. Myth, in this view, is not a situated act of meaning-making but a coded manifestation of an inner truth.

A relational ontology cuts this differently. It denies the existence of timeless, pre-given forms. Instead, it understands meaning as construal: the perspectival shaping of potential into symbolic actuality. From this vantage, what Campbell calls an “archetype” is not a psychic essence but an effect of reflexive alignment.

When a collective tells a myth, it symbolically projects itself into form. This projection aligns individual and collective experience within a shared horizon. The figure of the hero, for example, does not derive from an eternal archetype of individuation; it arises as a symbolic construal of how individuation can be oriented within a particular collective. The hero is not an archetype of the psyche but a reflexive articulation of possibility.

This shift matters. Archetype freezes myth into essence; reflexivity restores myth as event. Archetype says: the hero’s journey is eternal. Reflexivity says: this telling stages individuation against the collective whole here, now, within this symbolic horizon.

From a relational perspective, then, Campbell’s archetypes are not the source of myth but its retrospective abstraction. They are second-order readings of recurrent symbolic construals, elevated into timeless universals. Myths themselves do not reveal archetypes; they enact reflexivity.

In other words: myth does not express the unconscious. It constitutes the horizon of the possible.

3 From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures

Campbell’s “hero’s journey” presents a sweeping narrative: separation, initiation, return. Across cultures, he finds the same beats, the same archetypal itinerary. The monomyth promises universality: one path, one sequence, one story of individuation.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is precisely the move that flattens myth into abstraction. The monomyth treats similarity as essence, pattern as law, and recurrence as evidence of universality. It neglects the situated, collective, and contingent work that myths perform within their own horizons.

Relational ontology reframes this: there is no single journey, only plural mythic architectures. Each myth constructs a horizon of possibility for its collective, shaping alignment, scaling individuation, and orienting action. The apparent “recurrences” that Campbell notes are not proofs of a universal plot; they are resonances — structural echoes that arise whenever certain relational tensions are negotiated in symbolic form (life and death, self and collective, known and unknown).

In this view:

The hero’s journey is not a template but one construal among many. A Polynesian navigation epic, a Greek tragedy, and a Navajo emergence myth do not share a hidden “monomyth” but instead instantiate different solutions to recurring relational challenges.
Myth is an architecture, not a map. It scaffolds collective experience, guiding what a community can imagine, enact, and align toward, rather than reporting an eternal psychic itinerary.
Plurality is fundamental. Each telling opens a new trajectory of being-together; the multiplicity of myths is not noise against a universal signal but the terrain of possibility itself.

From the relational vantage, Campbell’s monomyth is a model imposed upon the richness of plural construals. By universalising, it abstracts away the reflexive, contingent, and collective dimension of mythic action. The monomyth dissolves; what remains are heterogeneous mythic architectures — patterned potentials, staged alignments, and symbolic spaces in which collectives orient themselves toward what they can become.

The move from monomyth to plural architectures is thus more than critique: it is a reorientation. Myth is no longer a map of the psyche; it is the scaffolding of collective possibility.

4 Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process

Campbell’s monomyth presents myth as a sequence — the hero departs, faces trials, and returns transformed. Time, in his model, is linear and universal: myths follow a preordained itinerary, regardless of context or culture. In this framing, the narrative is a template, and the story’s phasing is derivative, secondary to the archetype.

Relational ontology cuts differently. Myth is not a static pattern traced over time; it is a process of phasing — an enactment of collective alignment, unfolding within the temporality of the telling. Each telling of a myth does more than recount events: it coordinates the present, anticipates potential futures, and aligns participants to shared symbolic horizons.

Key insights from this perspective include:

Temporal Relativity of Myth: Myths do not exist outside the moment of their telling. The same narrative can be enacted differently across occasions, emphasising different relational tensions, guiding different alignments, and opening distinct trajectories of collective possibility. The “sequence” of events is not fixed but flexible, contingent upon the horizon it phases.
Phasing Social Formation: Each telling structures a collective’s experience, scaling individual action against the whole, synchronising symbolic projection, and orienting what the group perceives as possible. Myth thus functions as a temporal scaffold: a way to order experience, not to illustrate an eternal pattern.
Iterative Reflexivity: Mythical phasing is reflexive. As the collective engages with a story, it adapts and realigns its symbolic horizon, which in turn reshapes subsequent tellings. Myths evolve through practice, not by appealing to a timeless monomyth.
Staging Possibility: Every act of storytelling is a construal of what could be. Myth does not describe what must occur; it maps potential, showing how the collective might navigate uncertainty, tension, and relational challenge.

From this vantage, Campbell’s linear monomyth becomes a shadow of myth’s real function. It abstracts sequence into universality, freezing temporal phasing into archetypal necessity. Relational ontology restores myth as a dynamic, iterative, and contingent process — a temporal choreography of symbolic alignment that unfolds differently each time it is enacted.

In short: myths are not maps of the psyche or the universe. They are temporal instruments, phasing collectives into alignment with their symbolic and relational possibilities.

5 Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes

Beyond sequence and timing, myths operate across relational landscapes. They are not only temporal phasings but also symbolic architectures that structure how collectives inhabit, navigate, and understand their worlds. From a relational ontology perspective, every myth functions as a lens through which a community construes its environment, its relations, and its possibilities.

Myths as Spatial and Social Scaffolds:
Myths map symbolic relationships across social and natural landscapes. A hero’s journey through a forest, across seas, or into the underworld is not merely narrative decoration; it stages relations between the collective and its environment, between individual roles and collective expectations. Myth constructs an experiential geography where actions, values, and relational tensions are meaningfully aligned.
Reflexive Projection:
Each myth projects the collective into symbolic form, allowing it to see itself from multiple vantage points simultaneously: the individual’s perspective, the collective’s stance, and the horizon of potential futures. This reflexivity is not introspection of a universal psyche but the enactment of collective self-construal.
Alignment Across Horizons:
Through repeated tellings, myths synchronise understanding across dispersed or heterogeneous participants. They create shared symbolic coordinates, so that disparate members of a collective can navigate tensions consistently, orient their actions coherently, and inhabit the same symbolic horizon. Myth, in this sense, is an instrument of social coordination, not a mere recounting of archetypal patterns.
Dynamic, Heterogeneous Landscapes:
The landscapes of myth are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, ecological, and historical contingencies. A myth adapts to new circumstances, producing multiple, overlapping trajectories of meaning. Campbell’s universal model erases this heterogeneity; relational ontology foregrounds it, revealing myth as plural, adaptive, and contextually grounded.

In sum, myths are simultaneously temporal and spatial instruments. They phase collective alignment through time, scaffold understanding across relational space, and reflexively project the collective into the symbolic horizon it inhabits. They do not mirror a timeless archetype; they constitute the terrain of possibility, showing communities how to live, act, and align within the worlds they inhabit.

6 From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has captivated generations by offering a singular, universal path through the landscape of human imagination: the hero departs, undergoes trials, and returns transformed. Its appeal lies in simplicity, coherence, and the promise of timeless truth. Yet, from a relational ontology perspective, this very appeal masks a critical ontological distortion.

The Monomyth as Artefact
Campbell’s synthesis abstracts, universalises, and essentialises. It treats recurrence as law, similarity as essence, and pattern as proof of an underlying psychic reality. In doing so, it collapses the plural, situated, and contingent nature of mythic practice into a single, flattened narrative. The “hero’s journey” becomes less a reflection of lived symbolic activity than a projection of theoretical desire — a map imposed upon terrain that is, in reality, richly diverse and dynamic.

Relational Ontology Restores Plurality
In contrast, myth itself is heterogeneous, iterative, and phasing. Each telling:

Aligns collective and individual experience within a symbolic horizon.
Projects the collective into temporal, social, and ecological landscapes.
Scaffolds possibilities for being-together, coordinating action, meaning, and expectation.
Evolves reflexively with each retelling, producing layered, context-sensitive architectures of understanding.

From this vantage, myths are not templates for inner transformation but instruments of symbolic construction — shaping what a collective can imagine, orient toward, and enact. The “archetypes” and “monomyths” of Campbell are therefore second-order abstractions: reflective readings of recurring construals, elevated into universalist theory. They are artefacts of comparison, not inherent features of the data.

The Decisive Cut
Relational ontology draws the critical distinction: the ontology of Campbell’s model ≠ the ontology of the myths themselves. The former is singular, universalising, and psychic; the latter is plural, situated, and collective. By preserving this cut, we reclaim myth as an active, temporal, reflexive, and spatially rich phenomenon.

Concluding Insight
Myth is not a path laid out by the unconscious; it is the architecture of possibility. It stages collective alignment, phases experience across horizons, and opens trajectories for becoming. In short, myths are not timeless patterns to be discovered; they are the relational instruments by which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Campbell’s monomyth, while elegant, is a mirror of our desire for universals. Relational ontology invites us instead to inhabit the plural, contingent, and creative reality of myth as it actually functions — as construal, alignment, and possibility in action.

Coda: Dwelling in the Relational Horizon of Myth

As we conclude this series, it is worth pausing not to summarise, but to reflect on the implications of a relational reading of myth. If Campbell’s monomyth invites us to see a singular path — the hero’s journey of individuation — relational ontology invites us to inhabit plural horizons of possibility. Myths are not mirrors of a timeless psyche; they are instruments through which collectives enact, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Each telling is a temporary cut into the vast field of potential: it phases alignment, projects relational possibilities, and shapes the collective’s horizon. Across cultures and epochs, the diversity of mythic form is not deviation from a universal pattern, but the very texture of symbolic life. The hero departs, yes — but the paths, landscapes, tensions, and resolutions are as varied as the communities who tell them.

In dwelling with myths relationally, we recognise the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of symbolic activity. We see that alignment and reflexivity are not metaphors, but operative processes that structure possibility. Myths are not discoveries of hidden truth; they are enactments of what a collective can become.

This perspective does not diminish the power or beauty of myth; rather, it deepens it. By attending to plurality, contingency, and process, we honour the creative and collective work that myths perform. We are invited to read myth as an architecture, to inhabit it as a landscape, and to participate in it as a living field of relational possibility.

Campbell’s vision, compelling though it is, reflects our desire for universals. The relational lens reframes that desire, allowing us to dwell instead in the rich, contingent, and evolving horizon of myth itself — a horizon in which every telling is both a projection and a possibility, and in which the collective imagines, aligns, and becomes.

In the end, myth is not a path to truth; it is the space in which truth is construed, rehearsed, and renewed. To engage with myth relationally is to dwell in that space, attentive to the plurality, phasing, and reflexivity that make collective life meaningful.

"Step lightly into the tales.
Notice the paths, but do not follow them as lines of destiny.
Attend instead to the spaces they open,
the alignments they perform,
the possibilities they call into being.
Here, myth is not a map, but a horizon —
and you are invited to dwell within it."

28 September 2025

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.

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?”

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.

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?”

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.

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.

27 September 2025

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.

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:

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.