The Topology of Mattering: VII. The Political Topology

We have spent most of this series deliberately avoiding politics.

That was necessary.

If we begin with political categories such as left and right, conservative and progressive, liberal and authoritarian, we risk assuming that those categories already tell us what matters and why.

Our aim has been to work in the opposite direction.

We began with organisms whose own value systems differentiate what matters.

Signals can engage the value systems of other organisms.

Recurrent value-sensitive responses become coupled.

Collective patterns emerge.

Persistent patterns become social structure.

Individuals inhabit that structure through differentiated repertoires.

Overlapping repertoires can produce affiliation.

And social relations can then become symbolically construed as values, identities and ideologies.

We have now reached the point at which politics can enter the picture.

But it should enter as a test of the topology, not as its starting point.

The question is therefore:

Does the familiar political spectrum correspond to anything in the topology of mattering?

The answer may be yes.

It may be only partly yes.

Or it may turn out that the familiar spectrum is a convenient symbolic simplification of a much more complicated relational space.

Why a line may be too simple

The political spectrum is usually represented as a line.

Left.

Right.

Perhaps centre in between.

The image is attractive because it is simple.

But our topology has already suggested that social relations have several dimensions.

There can be:

dependence;

reciprocity;

hierarchy;

autonomy;

protection;

redistribution;

competition;

solidarity;

openness;

boundary maintenance;

stability;

transformation.

There is no obvious reason why these relations should all fall neatly along a single axis.

A political position might therefore be close to another in one respect and distant in another.

The line may be compressing a multidimensional topology into one coordinate.

Freedom is not one place

Consider a familiar political value such as freedom.

It can matter through very different social relations.

For one participant, freedom may mean protection from interference.

For another, it may mean freedom from domination.

For another, it may require collective provision that makes action possible.

For another, it may mean freedom of a community to govern itself.

The word is the same.

The surrounding mattering-relations are different.

So two groups can both say that they value freedom while inhabiting very different regions of the topology.

The disagreement may therefore not concern the word itself.

It may concern what relations make freedom possible.

Security is similarly ambiguous

The same problem arises with security.

Security may be construed through:

strong boundaries;

social provision;

trusted institutions;

military capacity;

economic independence;

local community;

personal autonomy.

Again, the surface value is shared.

The relational configuration differs.

This suggests that we should not plot political groups by asking simply:

"How much do they value security?"

We should ask:

What configuration of mattering does their conception of security organise?

Equality is not one relation either

Equality can likewise occupy different regions of the topology.

It might concern equality of status.

Equality of opportunity.

Equality of resources.

Equality of political voice.

Equality before the law.

Equality of social recognition.

Each involves different relations.

Some may be mutually reinforcing.

Others may trade off against one another under particular conditions.

The term "equality" therefore tells us less than the topology around it.

A political argument may be about the same symbolic term while presupposing very different relational structures.

Political affiliation as patterned mattering

This gives us a possible definition.

Rather than treating a political affiliation as a bundle of opinions, we might treat it as:

a relatively stable symbolic articulation of a configuration of social mattering.

The phrase "relatively stable" matters.

Political affiliations change.

Parties evolve.

Movements split.

Ideas are borrowed.

Historical circumstances alter priorities.

But a recognizable configuration can persist through those changes.

The symbolic vocabulary changes while certain relational commitments remain.

From mattering to ideology

An ideology can therefore be thought of as a symbolic map of social mattering.

It tells participants:

which relations matter;

which threats are salient;

which dependencies are legitimate;

which boundaries should be preserved;

which inequalities are tolerable or intolerable;

which forms of coordination should be encouraged;

which kinds of transformation are desirable.

An ideology does not create all these concerns from nothing.

It selects, organises and symbolically construes them.

The map then feeds back into the terrain.

Political language can conceal topology

This may explain why political disagreement can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to resolve.

People use the same words.

"Freedom."

"Justice."

"Security."

"Democracy."

"Equality."

But those words may occupy different neighbourhoods in their repertoires.

The same sign can connect to different configurations of mattering.

Arguments at the level of vocabulary can therefore conceal disagreements at the level of social structure.

Two people may appear to disagree about the meaning of "freedom" when they actually disagree about:

who should depend upon whom, who should constrain whom, and what kinds of dependence are legitimate.

That is a topological disagreement.

The conventional left/right spectrum

What, then, might left and right represent?

We should not answer too quickly.

Historically, the terms have meant different things in different contexts.

Their meanings have shifted.

Movements have changed sides on particular issues.

So any claim that there is a universal biological or social essence of left and right would be unjustified.

But perhaps the topology gives us a more modest hypothesis.

The left/right distinction may repeatedly encode contrasting tendencies in the organisation of social mattering.

For example, some political traditions may place greater emphasis on reducing certain forms of hierarchy or asymmetrical dependence.

Others may place greater emphasis on preserving established structures, boundaries or inherited relations.

But these are tendencies, not definitions.

And each can coexist with many other relational commitments.

Stability and transformation

This brings us back to a distinction that emerged earlier:

reproduction versus transformation.

A social system needs continuity.

It also needs adaptation.

One political orientation may emphasise preserving established relations because they are seen as sustaining what matters.

Another may emphasise transforming them because those same relations are seen as preventing the system from adapting.

The opposition is therefore not necessarily:

old values vs new values

but:

different theories of how a social system should preserve what matters.

This is a subtler distinction.

The conservative paradox

A conservative orientation may sometimes favour radical institutional change.

Why?

Because a familiar structure may no longer sustain the valued relation it once supported.

Transformation can therefore be undertaken in order to preserve.

Conversely, a progressive movement can eventually become strongly concerned with preserving institutions or norms that it helped create.

So the topology cannot simply be divided into:

preservation = right;

change = left.

The dynamics are more interesting.

The real question is:

What is being preserved, what is being transformed, and why?

The progressive paradox

The same reasoning applies in reverse.

A movement may seek to transform an institution because the existing structure prevents a valued relation.

But once the transformation succeeds, the new arrangement can become something that participants wish to defend.

The topology changes.

The political affiliation changes with it.

What was once transformation becomes reproduction.

A political identity can therefore move through the topology over time.

This is another reason the spectrum should not be treated as a fixed coordinate system.

Multiple dimensions

Perhaps the political topology is better imagined as multidimensional.

One dimension might concern:

asymmetry of dependence.

Another:

distribution of resources or capacities.

Another:

boundary openness.

Another:

centralisation versus dispersal of authority.

Another:

stability versus willingness to reorganise established relations.

Another:

local versus extensive scales of solidarity.

We should not assume that these are the final dimensions.

Indeed, discovering which dimensions are empirically useful would be part of the research programme.

The important point is simply that one line is unlikely to capture all the relevant structure.

Political positions can be neighbours in one dimension and strangers in another

This gives us a way of understanding some otherwise puzzling political alignments.

Two groups can disagree about economic distribution while sharing similar attitudes to authority.

Two groups can disagree about culture while sharing similar concerns about local autonomy.

Two groups can be far apart on one dimension but close on another.

Coalitions can therefore form between groups that appear ideologically distant.

Why?

Because the topology allows partial overlap.

Political affiliation need not imply global similarity.

It may arise from alignment around a particular region or trajectory.

Coalitions as temporary neighbourhoods

A coalition is especially revealing.

Two groups may unite around one concern without sharing a complete political worldview.

Their repertoires overlap sufficiently around a particular mattering-configuration.

The coalition forms.

It may persist.

Or it may dissolve once the common mattering is no longer salient.

The topology therefore allows affiliations to be:

temporary;

layered;

overlapping;

nested;

strategic;

deeply integrated.

The political world may be less a collection of fixed tribes than a system of shifting relational neighbourhoods.

Polarisation

The same framework offers another way to think about polarisation.

Polarisation may not simply mean that two groups move toward opposite ends of a line.

It may involve:

increasing separation between their repertoires;

increasingly rigid boundaries;

reduced pathways of interaction;

reinterpretation of previously shared signs;

stronger internal coupling;

increasing salience of external threat.

The topology becomes more sharply divided.

Bridges disappear.

The regions become internally denser and externally more distant.

Political polarisation is therefore a topological transformation.

The role of symbolic boundaries

Symbolic meaning can intensify this process.

A group gives itself a name.

It names its opponents.

It develops stories about the distinction.

The boundary that began as a pattern of social mattering becomes symbolically explicit.

Once the boundary is named, participants can reproduce it even in situations where the original relational conditions have changed.

Symbols can therefore make topology more stable.

But they can also make boundaries more rigid than the underlying mattering relations require.

Identity compresses complexity

This is one reason political identity can be powerful.

The individual social topology is extraordinarily complicated.

Identity compresses it.

"I am one of them."

"I am not one of them."

The category simplifies many relationships at once.

That can aid coordination.

It can make affiliation legible.

It can also obscure variation within the group.

Two members may occupy very different positions in the underlying topology while sharing the same identity.

The symbolic map is therefore useful but never identical to the relational terrain.

Repertoire determines how the map is read

This brings repertoire back into the picture.

Two participants may encounter the same political symbol but construe it differently because their repertoires connect it to different mattering-relations.

A flag may signify security to one person and exclusion to another.

A word like "reform" may signal opportunity to one repertoire and threat to another.

The sign is the same.

The surrounding topology within the repertoire is different.

This is another reason we should not treat political meaning as contained in vocabulary.

Political affiliation as repertoire overlap

We can now refine our earlier definition.

A political affiliation may emerge when participants have:

sufficient overlap in their repertoires to coordinate around a shared configuration of social mattering.

That overlap may initially be practical.

Later, it becomes conceptual.

Then symbolic.

Eventually ideological.

The political movement thereby acquires a shared reservoir of concepts and symbols.

New participants can acquire the repertoire through participation.

The affiliation reproduces itself.

But political affiliation can transform the topology

A political movement does not merely occupy a region of the existing social topology.

It may alter that topology.

It can build institutions.

Redistribute resources.

Create new roles.

Redefine boundaries.

Change laws.

Create new identities.

The movement changes the relations through which people matter to one another.

Its symbolic map has become a material intervention.

This is the feedback from meaning to mattering at political scale.

The political spectrum may therefore be a projection

Perhaps the most provocative possibility is this:

the familiar left/right spectrum may be a projection of a much higher-dimensional topology onto a single line.

A projection can be useful.

It can also conceal structure.

Two points far apart on the line may be close in the underlying topology.

Two points close on the line may be very distant when other dimensions are considered.

The apparent continuity of the spectrum may therefore be misleading.

This would explain why political categories sometimes produce unexpected alliances and unexpected internal conflicts.

But we must be empirical

We should not make the topology explain everything simply because it is an attractive metaphor.

The framework needs to produce distinctions that can actually be investigated.

If political affiliations form recognisable clusters along certain relational dimensions, that would support the model.

If the dimensions vary historically, that would be informative.

If the conventional left/right line captures little of the actual structure, that would also be informative.

If the topology adds nothing beyond existing political classifications, then the project has failed to earn its conceptual machinery.

The hypothesis is interesting precisely because it can be wrong.

A possible relation to Edelman

We can now return cautiously to the biological substrate.

Political affiliations may ultimately be shaped by patterns of mattering that have some continuity with biological value systems.

Security.

Threat avoidance.

Attachment.

Competition.

Exploration.

Reciprocity.

Care.

Recognition.

But we should not map these directly onto political positions.

The social topology is a transformation and recombination of organismic value.

Culture can organise the same basic adaptive concerns in radically different ways.

The topology therefore mediates between biology and politics.

The biological substrate is not the political map

This distinction is important enough to state explicitly.

We should not expect:

biological value system A → political affiliation A.

Nor:

"left" and "right" to correspond neatly to biological value systems.

What we should investigate is whether biological value systems constrain the kinds of social mattering-relations that can become stable, and whether those relations are subsequently symbolically elaborated into political forms.

That is a much more defensible hypothesis.

What we have established

We can now describe political affiliation as something that emerges within the topology rather than defining the topology itself.

The process is:

organismic value

↓

social mattering

↓

structured relations

↓

individual repertoires

↓

affiliation

↓

symbolic articulation

↓

political identity and ideology

And then the arrow comes back:

political meaning → altered social mattering

The political world is therefore recursive.

It is made from relations that political meanings then help reorganise.

One final complication

If political affiliations are regions or trajectories within a topology, then something similar may be true of cultures more generally.

Political ideas are not the only maps of mattering.

Myths are maps.

Rituals are maps.

Religious traditions are maps.

Stories are maps.

They can all symbolically construe recurrent patterns in which things matter.

The political spectrum is therefore only one possible symbolic projection of the underlying topology.

This brings us to the next question.

Long before modern political categories existed, human cultures were already creating symbolic distinctions between ways of living, forms of order, kinds of belonging and paths through the social world.

Some of those distinctions recur remarkably widely.

And one particularly intriguing example is the ancient contrast between the path of the established social order and the path of departure into the unknown.

That brings us to myth.

Can myth provide a symbolic map of the topology of mattering?

The Topology of Mattering: VI. From Mattering to Meaning

We have spent the first half of this series below the level of explicit meaning.

Organisms have value systems.

Signals engage one another's value-sensitive organisation.

Recurrent signalling produces coordination.

Coordination can become collective form.

Persistent patterns of coupling become social structure.

Individuals inhabit that structure through differentiated repertoires.

Overlapping repertoires can support affiliation.

Affiliations can become recognisable social formations.

All of this can happen before the relations involved are explicitly construed as meanings.

But humans possess another extraordinary capacity.

We can construe what matters.

We can name a relation.

Describe it.

Compare it.

Narrate it.

Evaluate it.

Argue about it.

Represent it.

We can turn patterns of social mattering into symbolic resources.

This is the transition we need to understand:

How does mattering become meaning?

Halliday's formulation

Halliday gives us an unusually concise answer.

A semiotic system, he writes, is:

“a social system where value has been further transformed into meaning.”

The word further matters.

Meaning does not replace value.

It is a transformation of something already present at the social level.

We therefore have:

biological value → social mattering → symbolic meaning

The levels are related without being identical.

An organism's value system is not the same thing as social mattering.

Social mattering is not the same thing as meaning.

But meaning becomes possible because a social world already exists in which things matter.

The signal is not yet a sign

This is where our distinction between signal and sign becomes decisive.

A signal can engage another organism's value-sensitive organisation.

An ant's pheromone can alter the behaviour of another ant.

A peacock's display can engage a peahen's reproductive value system.

A warning movement can cause another animal to withdraw.

These relations can be extraordinarily complex.

But they do not require symbolic meaning.

A signal matters because of what it does within an interaction.

A sign does something different.

A sign participates in a system in which a form can be construed as something else.

The transition is therefore not:

signal → more complicated signal.

It is:

signal → symbolic construal

What changes with symbolism?

Suppose a social relation is already well established.

Participants depend upon one another.

They occupy differentiated positions.

There are boundaries.

There are expectations.

There are recurring patterns of affiliation.

Now imagine that some aspect of this relational structure acquires a conventional form.

A word.

A gesture.

An emblem.

A ritual.

A story.

The social relation can now become available for explicit construal.

It can be talked about.

Remembered.

Taught.

Argued over.

Compared with alternatives.

The relation has entered a semiotic system.

A role becomes a name

Consider a social role.

Before it is named, there may already be a recurrent pattern of mattering.

One participant depends upon another for certain activities.

Responsibilities recur.

Expectations develop.

A distinction becomes socially significant.

Then the role acquires a name.

The name does not create the entire relation.

It gives the relation a symbolic form.

Participants can now say what the role is.

Teach it.

Challenge it.

Transfer the term to another context.

Compare one role with another.

Meaning has made the social relation portable and reflexively available.

A boundary becomes a category

The same thing happens with boundaries.

A social group may already distinguish insiders from outsiders through patterns of participation.

Then a name appears.

Citizen.

Member.

Stranger.

Foreigner.

The boundary becomes symbolically articulated.

Once named, it can be regulated.

Negotiated.

Expanded.

Restricted.

Institutionalised.

The symbolic category therefore feeds back into the topology.

What once existed primarily as a pattern of mattering becomes part of the means through which that pattern is reproduced or changed.

Meaning makes social structure visible to itself

This may be one of the greatest transformations introduced by semiosis.

A social system can now, to some extent, construe its own relations.

Participants can recognise patterns in which they are involved.

They can ask:

Why is this relation organised this way?

Who benefits?

Who is responsible?

What should change?

What should remain?

The system can begin to represent its own organisation.

It has acquired a degree of reflexivity.

Meaning makes social structure available for reflection and redesign.

From participation to representation

This does not mean that representation is detached from participation.

A symbol can only matter within a social system.

A word such as "leader" matters because leadership is already a social relation.

A legal category matters because institutions act upon it.

A political identity matters because people coordinate around it.

A myth matters because it participates in a community's organisation of value.

Meaning therefore does not float above mattering.

It gives mattering another mode of existence.

The collective reservoir

This is where our distinction between collective reservoir and individual repertoire becomes especially important.

Once social mattering has been symbolically construed, the resulting forms enter a collective semiotic reservoir.

The culture now contains words, categories, stories, images, symbols and practices through which participants can construe the social world.

The reservoir is larger than any one individual repertoire.

No participant masters the whole system.

But each can draw upon parts of it.

Repertoire becomes symbolic

The individual repertoire now acquires another dimension.

A participant's repertoire includes not only ways of acting and responding within social relations, but ways of construing those relations symbolically.

Someone may know how to perform a role.

They may also know its name.

Its history.

Its obligations.

Its symbolic significance.

Another participant may inhabit a similar structural position but lack those symbolic resources.

The same topology can therefore be experienced through different repertoires of meaning.

Meaning is intrinsically relational

Halliday's reference to Saussure is important here.

Meaning is not simply attached to forms.

It is intrinsically paradigmatic.

A sign means partly through the alternatives from which it is distinguished.

This brings us back to the potential/instance distinction in a useful but limited way.

A particular expression becomes meaningful because other expressions were possible.

A category becomes intelligible because it excludes or contrasts with other categories.

A social identity becomes meaningful because other identities are available.

Meaning therefore depends upon a structured field of alternatives.

The semiotic reservoir is not just a collection of labels.

It is a system of contrasts and choices.

Symbolic construal adds possibilities

Once social mattering has symbolic form, participants can do things that were previously difficult or impossible.

They can compare distant situations.

Imagine alternatives.

Tell stories about the past.

Describe possible futures.

Teach relations to people who have never experienced them directly.

Coordinate people across physical distance.

Preserve knowledge across generations.

A pattern of social mattering can therefore become detachable from its immediate occurrence.

Meaning makes social relations portable.

From the present to the absent

This is one of the transformations we already encountered in our work on film music.

A sign can make something absent present.

The same principle applies socially.

A story can invoke ancestors who are no longer alive.

A constitution can organise relationships among people who have never met.

A national symbol can connect strangers across enormous distances.

A historical event can continue to matter through representations long after its participants have disappeared.

Meaning extends the temporal and spatial reach of social mattering.

From experience to concept

A recurring social pattern can become conceptual.

Suppose a community repeatedly encounters an asymmetrical relation.

It experiences dependence.

Conflict.

Benefit.

Resentment.

Protection.

These experiences can eventually be symbolically construed as concepts such as:

authority,

exploitation,

responsibility,

justice,

obligation.

The words do not merely label the existing relations.

Once established, they provide resources for construing new situations.

A concept can therefore become a resource for further meaning-making.

This is precisely the recursive potential we explored in From Mattering to Meaning.

From concept to institution

Meaning can then feed back into structure.

A concept becomes a rule.

A rule becomes a procedure.

A procedure becomes an institution.

The symbolic articulation changes behaviour.

Behaviour changes relations.

Relations change the topology.

So:

mattering → meaning → altered mattering

The loop has returned.

This is why semiotic systems can transform social systems.

They do not merely describe what already exists.

They can help reorganise it.

Value becomes discussable

Perhaps the most significant change is that social value can now become an object of argument.

Participants can disagree about what ought to matter.

They can ask whether one relation is fair.

Whether one role is legitimate.

Whether one boundary is justified.

Whether one institution should survive.

This is impossible in the same way before symbolic construal exists.

A mattering-relation can exist without a theory of itself.

Meaning enables the system to reflect upon its own values.

Ideology enters here

This is where ideology properly belongs.

Ideology is not the origin of social value.

It is one way in which social value becomes systematically construed and organised symbolically.

An ideology connects concepts.

Provides categories.

Narrates causes.

Identifies threats.

Defines legitimate relations.

Proposes futures.

It therefore offers participants a symbolic map of the social topology.

But the map is not neutral.

It selects.

Frames.

Emphasises.

Excludes.

Different ideological traditions may therefore construe the same underlying mattering-relations very differently.

The symbolic map can change the territory

Once an ideological map becomes socially effective, it changes the topology it describes.

People act on its categories.

Institutions are reorganised.

Affiliations strengthen or weaken.

New boundaries emerge.

Old ones dissolve.

A previously neglected relation becomes salient.

A new group forms around it.

The map has become part of the terrain.

Meaning has fed back into mattering.

Why repertoire matters here

This is where differentiated repertoires become politically and socially significant.

Participants do not encounter the same collective reservoir in identical ways.

One repertoire may make hierarchy immediately intelligible as a legitimate form of organisation.

Another may make the same pattern salient as domination.

One may readily construe obligation as mutual responsibility.

Another may construe it as coercion.

The social topology is not different in itself.

But the available symbolic pathways through it are different.

The same mattering-relations can therefore become different meanings.

Affiliation can become ideology

This also gives us a way to understand how affiliation develops further.

Participants first become recurrently aligned around patterns of mattering.

Their repertoires overlap.

A "we" emerges.

Then the "we" acquires symbolic form.

It gets a name.

A history.

A set of values.

A narrative of itself.

At that point, affiliation becomes ideologically articulated.

The symbolic identity can then recruit new participants.

Teach them the group's repertoire.

Strengthen its boundaries.

Alter its social position.

Meaning is now participating directly in the reproduction of affiliation.

Meaning transforms the repertoire

The individual repertoire is not merely a collection of inherited meanings.

A participant can learn a new concept and suddenly recognise a pattern that was previously difficult to construe.

They may encounter a metaphor that reveals a new relation.

A political category may make a previously private experience socially intelligible.

A story may connect separate experiences.

The repertoire expands.

This can alter what the individual notices and therefore what matters.

Symbolic learning is therefore another pathway by which:

meaning feeds back into mattering.

The semiotic system becomes reflexive

We can now see why Halliday's transition from social to semiotic systems is so significant.

A social system is already organised through value-relations.

A semiotic system adds the capacity to construe those relations symbolically.

The system can therefore, at least in principle, represent its own organisation.

It can create concepts of itself.

Tell stories about itself.

Argue about itself.

Transform itself deliberately.

That is a very different kind of evolutionary possibility.

Meaning does not replace mattering

But we should keep one final distinction firmly in place.

Meaning does not supersede social mattering.

A symbol remains socially effective because it participates in relations.

An institution remains significant because it changes behaviour.

A political identity matters because it coordinates people.

A legal category matters because consequences follow from it.

Meaning remains grounded in what matters.

The semiotic transformation adds another layer of organisation.

It does not abolish the previous one.

The full transition

We can now describe the central transformation of this series more precisely.

At first:

organisms have value systems.

Then:

their signals engage one another's value systems.

Then:

responses become recurrently coupled.

Then:

collective patterns become social structure.

Then:

individuals develop repertoires for participating in that structure.

Then:

overlapping repertoires support affiliation.

And now:

patterns of affiliation and mattering become symbolically construed.

The movement is:

value → mattering → meaning

But each transition preserves what came before.

Meaning is mattering further transformed.

Meaning can also transform the topology

This is the point at which the topology ceases to be merely a background structure.

Once meaning enters the system, the topology itself can evolve more rapidly.

A new category can expose a previously unrecognised boundary.

A new symbol can coordinate people across a previous boundary.

A new concept can make a new affiliation possible.

A new narrative can transform an old relationship.

The social system acquires new pathways because it has acquired symbolic resources for imagining and coordinating them.

What the semiotic transformation makes possible

Meaning therefore adds a distinctive set of possibilities to social life.

The system can:

remember beyond individual memory;

coordinate across distance;

compare alternative arrangements;

imagine futures;

preserve histories;

generalise experiences;

formulate norms;

criticise institutions;

invent identities;

construct ideologies.

These capacities are not simply "more information".

They are new ways of reorganising social mattering.

The next problem: the political map

We have now reached the threshold at which our topology can acquire a symbolic map.

But a map is never simply a neutral representation.

Different repertoires will construe the same social relations differently.

Different affiliations will emphasise different regions of mattering.

Different ideologies will offer different accounts of what needs preserving, transforming or defending.

So we are now in a position to ask a question we deliberately postponed:

Does the familiar political spectrum correspond to anything in the topology of mattering?

Perhaps it does.

Perhaps it only partially does.

Perhaps the conventional left/right line compresses several different dimensions into one.

Whatever the answer, we now have a framework in which the question can be asked without beginning from political labels themselves.

The next task is therefore to see whether political affiliation can be understood as a symbolic pattern within the topology of mattering.

The Topology of Mattering: V. Affiliation — Finding Our Neighbours

We have now reached the point at which individuals begin to matter to one another in a rather different way.

A social topology consists of relations among value-organised participants.

An individual inhabits that topology through a particular history of participation.

That history develops a repertoire.

The repertoire makes some relations, distinctions and pathways more readily available than others.

But a topology is not simply a collection of isolated trajectories.

Participants can discover that they repeatedly respond to the same situations in compatible ways.

They can rely upon one another.

Coordinate their activity.

Share practices.

Recognise similar possibilities.

Gradually, a pattern of alignment can emerge.

This gives us our next question:

How does affiliation arise within a topology of mattering?

Affiliation is not the same as similarity

It would be tempting to say that people affiliate because they are similar.

But similarity is not enough.

Two people can have very similar repertoires and never interact.

Two people can have very different repertoires and nevertheless cooperate closely.

Affiliation is therefore better understood relationally.

Perhaps:

affiliation begins when participants become recurrently consequential to one another around sufficiently overlapping patterns of mattering.

The overlap need not be complete.

Nor need it be consciously recognised.

What matters first is that their participation fits together.

Finding our neighbours

The title of this post is deliberately spatial.

In a topology, a neighbour is not necessarily someone physically close.

A neighbour is someone whose position is relationally near.

In a social topology, this might mean that two participants:

• depend upon similar relations;

• participate in overlapping practices;

• respond to similar situations;

• share important pathways through the system;

• or repeatedly affect one another's possibilities.

They may live on opposite sides of a city.

They may never meet.

Yet they can occupy neighbouring regions of social mattering.

Conversely, two people can work side by side while being topologically distant.

Physical proximity and social proximity are not the same thing.

Affiliation begins in coordination

Consider a very simple case.

Two people repeatedly find themselves needing to coordinate.

They discover that each can rely upon the other's response.

Their actions become mutually predictable.

A pattern develops.

The pattern makes further coordination easier.

Eventually, they may seek one another out because their repertoires fit the relation.

Nothing symbolic has necessarily happened yet.

The affiliation begins as a pattern of successful coupling.

Only later may someone call it friendship, partnership, alliance or membership.

Shared mattering

A stronger form of affiliation arises when participants repeatedly encounter situations in which similar things matter to them.

Again, we should be cautious.

This does not mean they possess identical values.

Two people may both care about a child's welfare for quite different reasons.

Two workers may both care about the success of an organisation while construing their own responsibilities differently.

Two citizens may both care about social stability while disagreeing profoundly about how stability should be achieved.

What they share may therefore be less a value itself than a region of mattering.

Their repertoires overlap around a particular configuration of consequences.

Overlapping repertoires

This gives repertoire a particularly important role.

Two repertoires need not be identical.

They only need sufficient overlap for participants to recognise one another's actions as intelligible and consequential within a shared field.

We might therefore think of affiliation as something like:

recurrent coupling supported by overlapping repertoires.

The overlap provides a basis for coordination.

The coordination strengthens the relationship.

The relationship creates further shared experience.

That experience can enlarge the overlap.

Affiliation can therefore become self-reinforcing.

A repertoire can expand through affiliation

Affiliation does not merely depend upon prior repertoire.

It can transform repertoire.

A person joins a musical ensemble and learns new ways of listening.

Someone enters a profession and acquires new practices.

A newcomer to a community learns its expectations.

A member of a political movement acquires its concepts and narratives.

The individual's repertoire expands through participation.

So the relation is recursive:

overlap enables affiliation → affiliation expands repertoire → expanded repertoire enables deeper affiliation

A group can therefore become more internally coherent over time without its members ever becoming identical.

The emergence of a "we"

At some point, recurrent affiliation can become collectively recognisable.

Participants begin to distinguish:

we

from:

they.

This is an important transition.

The relational pattern has acquired a boundary.

The boundary need not initially be symbolic.

It may simply consist in differences of participation:

who helps whom;

who shares whose practices;

who can rely upon whom;

who responds to whose signals.

But once the pattern becomes salient, it can become available for explicit construal.

The social "we" can acquire a name.

From relation to membership

This is where the distinction between affiliation and membership becomes useful.

Affiliation can exist before formal membership.

A person can participate in the relations of a group without possessing an official category.

Conversely, someone can have formal membership without strong affiliation.

A member may rarely participate.

A participant may not be formally recognised.

The topology therefore gives us a more fundamental concept:

membership is a symbolic or institutional recognition of an already existing pattern of affiliation.

That is a hypothesis worth testing rather than a universal law.

But it allows us to keep the order of emergence clear.

Boundaries become meaningful

Once a stable "we" develops, a boundary becomes more salient.

Some participants are routinely included.

Others are excluded.

Some can enter easily.

Others require initiation.

Some are permanently outside.

The boundary may be based upon practice, trust, kinship, competence, geography, law or symbolic identity.

The topology gives us the relational substrate.

Meaning can later turn the boundary into a category:

insider / outsider,

citizen / foreigner,

member / non-member,

colleague / stranger.

The boundary has become symbolically legible.

Affiliation can occur without a name

This is important because it keeps the argument below the level of explicit ideology.

A group of people can repeatedly cooperate around a common task without naming themselves as a group.

A neighbourhood can develop shared practices without a formal organisation.

Friends can form an enduring social unit without a declaration.

A movement can exist before it chooses a name.

The pattern of mattering can precede its symbolic articulation.

This is another instance of:

mattering → meaning

rather than the reverse.

But affiliation is not always harmonious

Nor does affiliation require agreement.

Participants can disagree strongly and still occupy a shared region of mattering.

Indeed, some groups depend upon disagreement.

A scientific community contains competing hypotheses.

A political movement contains factions.

A family contains conflict.

An organisation contains disputes.

What holds the affiliation together is not identity of opinion.

It is a sufficiently stable relational configuration.

People continue to matter to one another in ways that sustain participation.

Conflict can strengthen a boundary

Sometimes disagreement sharpens affiliation.

A dispute makes differences visible.

Participants discover what they will defend.

The boundary between groups becomes more salient.

The groups may become more internally coordinated as a result.

This can create a paradox:

conflict between affiliations can strengthen affiliation within each.

The topology is therefore not necessarily smoother when relations are harmonious.

Competition and opposition can produce highly stable regions.

Affiliation can be layered

A person can belong to several overlapping affiliations.

Family.

Profession.

Friendship.

Local community.

Cultural tradition.

Political movement.

Each affiliation is a different region or pattern within the broader topology.

The overlaps can be extensive.

Sometimes they reinforce one another.

Sometimes they conflict.

A person can therefore experience social life as participation in several intersecting topologies of mattering.

This is one reason simple group categories can be misleading.

The same individual can occupy quite different relational positions in different systems.

Nested and overlapping affiliations

Some affiliations are nested.

A person belongs to a department within a university, which belongs to a university, which belongs to a national system.

Others overlap without nesting.

A person can belong simultaneously to a profession and a political movement.

The boundaries cross.

The topology is therefore unlikely to resemble a collection of isolated clusters.

It may be better imagined as a set of overlapping regions and pathways.

Why shared values can mislead us

This gives us a reason to be cautious about statements such as:

"These people share the value of freedom."

Perhaps they do.

But that tells us little about the structure of their affiliation.

What matters is what relations surround that value.

Freedom may be connected to:

autonomy,

non-interference,

property,

self-government,

collective liberation,

protection from domination,

opportunity,

or something else.

The word alone does not locate someone in the topology.

Their surrounding configuration does.

The same value, different neighbourhoods

This may become especially important when we eventually approach political affiliation.

Two groups can use the same vocabulary while inhabiting different topological regions.

Both may speak of:

freedom,

equality,

security,

justice.

But the relations through which these matter may differ radically.

One group's freedom may depend upon reducing external constraint.

Another's may depend upon increasing collective capacity.

One group's security may depend upon stable hierarchy.

Another's upon social provision.

The surface vocabulary can be shared.

The topology around it can be different.

Affiliation as a trajectory

Affiliation may also be dynamic.

People can move between groups.

They can become more deeply involved.

They can drift away.

They can occupy several affiliations at once.

A group can itself move through the social topology as circumstances change.

So affiliation should not be represented simply as a fixed point.

It may be better understood as a trajectory of recurrent participation.

What matters is not merely where someone is, but where their relations are taking them.

The role of transitions

This raises an important question.

What allows someone to move from one region to another?

Sometimes a new relationship.

Sometimes a change in circumstance.

Sometimes a new repertoire.

Sometimes a crisis.

Sometimes an institution deliberately recruits new participants.

Sometimes an affiliation itself creates the repertoire needed for entry.

The transition is therefore not merely spatial.

It is a transformation of the individual's capacity to participate.

Affiliation and learning

This means that affiliation is partly educational.

To join a group is often to learn its ways of acting.

Its expectations.

Its practices.

Its distinctions.

Its history.

Its language.

Its symbols.

The repertoire expands.

The boundary becomes more intelligible.

The participant becomes more deeply coupled to the group.

This helps explain why mature affiliations can become remarkably resilient.

Leaving them is not simply a matter of changing an opinion.

It may require reorganising a large portion of one's repertoire.

Affiliation can become identity

At some point, affiliation can become symbolically construed as an identity.

A participant is no longer simply someone who repeatedly occupies a relational pattern.

They can say:

I am one of them.

The affiliation now has a symbolic form.

The collective can acquire a name.

A flag.

A story.

A ritual.

A set of explicit norms.

The topology has received a symbolic map.

This is one of the major transitions we will explore next.

But identity can also reshape affiliation

Once affiliation has become symbolic, the relation feeds back.

A name can recruit new participants.

A symbol can strengthen coordination.

A narrative can reinterpret the group's history.

A boundary can become more rigid.

An institution can formalise membership.

The symbolic articulation can therefore change the social topology that produced it.

This is the beginning of the feedback from meaning to mattering.

Towards politics

We are now close to a question that has been waiting in the background.

Political affiliations are among the most symbolically elaborate forms of social alignment.

People join parties, movements and causes.

They inherit narratives.

They learn concepts.

They adopt symbols.

They recognise allies.

They identify opponents.

But beneath these explicit forms, there are patterns of mattering.

Some things matter enough to coordinate action.

Some relationships are regarded as just.

Others as threatening.

Some forms of dependence are accepted.

Others rejected.

Political affiliation may therefore be a symbolically elaborated configuration of social mattering.

We are not yet ready to test this.

But the topology gives us a place to begin.

The emergence of a social "neighbourhood"

We can now return to our title.

Finding our neighbours does not mean discovering people who think exactly as we do.

It means discovering participants whose patterns of mattering overlap sufficiently with ours to support recurrent affiliation.

A neighbour may disagree with us.

They may occupy a different role.

They may have a different repertoire.

What brings us together is that our trajectories through the social topology repeatedly intersect.

That is a much richer conception of social belonging than shared opinion.

What we have established

We began with a social topology constituted by relations among value-organised participants.

Individuals inhabit it through repertoires.

Some repertoires overlap.

Overlapping capacities make recurrent coordination easier.

Coordination produces shared experience.

Shared experience can stabilise affiliation.

Affiliation can become a socially recognised "we".

The "we" can acquire boundaries.

The boundaries can become symbolically articulated as membership and identity.

And once they do, the symbolic forms can feed back into the topology.

The movement is therefore:

topology → repertoire → overlap → recurrent affiliation → symbolic articulation → transformed topology

The next question

We have deliberately stopped just before the threshold of explicit meaning.

But now that threshold is unavoidable.

What happens when the patterns through which people matter to one another become named, narrated, classified and symbolised?

When an affiliation acquires a concept of itself?

When a social relation becomes a value in words?

When a "we" becomes an identity?

When a pattern of mattering becomes an ideology?

That is the transition Halliday leaves us with when he says that a semiotic system is a social system in which value has been further transformed into meaning.

The next question is therefore:

How does mattering become meaning?

The Topology of Mattering: IV. Living in the Topology

A social system can have a structure.

It can contain dependencies, boundaries, centres and peripheries. Some relations may be dense, others sparse. Some pathways may be familiar, others difficult to traverse.

But the structure exists only because particular organisms participate in it.

So we need to ask a more personal question:

How does an individual organism inhabit a topology of mattering?

The answer cannot simply be that the individual occupies a position on a social map.

No organism encounters the entire social system at once.

Each has a history.

Each has a particular set of relationships.

Each has developed particular capacities for responding to, recognising and participating in the relations that surround it.

This is where the concept of repertoire becomes important.

The social world is larger than any participant

A social system contains more possibilities than any one participant can realise.

There are roles they do not occupy.

Practices they do not know.

Relationships they do not enter.

Distinctions they do not readily make.

Institutions whose workings they barely understand.

Meanings that have never become part of their experience.

The social system therefore contains a much larger potential than any individual's participation in it.

This is where the distinction between collective reservoir and individual repertoire becomes useful.

The collective system provides a reservoir of available possibilities.

An individual develops a repertoire through their particular history of participation.

The two are related, but they are not identical.

A repertoire is not a possession

We should be careful about what we mean by repertoire.

It is tempting to think of it as a collection of things stored inside an individual.

But that would make it sound like an inventory.

A repertoire is better understood as a historically developed capacity for participation.

It includes distinctions someone can readily make.

Patterns they can recognise.

Practices they can perform.

Relations they can anticipate.

Ways of construing what happens around them.

It is therefore less like a library and more like a set of possibilities made available through previous participation.

The collective reservoir

The social system provides the wider reservoir.

A language has possibilities that no individual speaker exhausts.

A culture contains practices that no individual knows.

A profession contains procedures that some practitioners never encounter.

A political system contains forms of participation that many citizens never use.

The collective reservoir is therefore larger than any repertoire.

This is not a defect.

It is what allows social differentiation.

Participants can specialise.

They can occupy different roles.

They can develop different capacities.

They can learn from one another.

The social system depends partly upon the fact that its participants do not all know or do the same things.

Repertoire as differentiated access

This gives us a first approximation:

A repertoire provides differentiated access to the possibilities available within a social system.

But "access" should not be understood too literally.

A person may be aware that a practice exists without knowing how to participate in it.

They may occupy a social position that formally gives them access to something without possessing the repertoire required to use it.

Conversely, someone may develop a repertoire that allows them to move between regions of the topology that are difficult for others to navigate.

Repertoire therefore mediates the relation between what the social system makes possible and what an individual can actually construe and do.

Learning to move

This suggests a useful image.

A social topology contains pathways.

An individual's repertoire affects which pathways they can recognise and traverse.

A child entering a community does not initially know the whole structure.

They learn.

How to approach others.

When to speak.

What counts as appropriate.

What kinds of help can be requested.

Which relationships are close.

Which boundaries should not be crossed.

Which actions have consequences.

Much of this learning does not begin with explicit rules.

It begins with participation.

The individual learns the topology by living through its mattering-relations.

Mattering before explicit meaning

This is an important continuation of our earlier argument.

A child may learn that a certain action upsets another person long before being able to formulate a theory of that person's emotional state.

They may learn that some adults can be approached directly while others cannot.

They may learn that certain behaviours attract approval or disapproval.

The relations first become significant through consequences.

Only later are they necessarily named and symbolically articulated.

The individual repertoire therefore develops partly through experience of mattering before it becomes a repertoire of explicit meanings.

Repertoire is not the same as preference

Another distinction is important.

If someone repeatedly participates in a particular region of the social topology, that does not necessarily mean they prefer it in some simple psychological sense.

Their participation may arise from dependence.

Necessity.

Habit.

Opportunity.

Role.

Constraint.

Affection.

Obligation.

Or many things at once.

A repertoire describes what forms of participation have become available and practised.

It does not by itself tell us what the individual consciously prefers.

The topology constrains the repertoire

The relation is therefore reciprocal.

An individual develops a repertoire through participation in a social system.

But the structure of that system also constrains what repertoire can readily develop.

Some practices are accessible.

Others are difficult.

Some forms of knowledge circulate freely.

Others are restricted.

Some positions expose people to many social relations.

Others isolate them.

The topology therefore shapes the conditions under which repertoires develop.

The repertoire transforms the topology

But the reverse also occurs.

An individual can introduce a new practice.

Make a new connection.

Carry a practice from one region into another.

Teach someone else.

Refuse an established role.

Invent a new way of coordinating.

The repertoire can therefore become a source of structural change.

The relation is recursive:

topology → participation → repertoire → altered participation → transformed topology

The individual is not merely located within the social system.

They can help reorganise it.

Bridges and repertoire

This gives us a particularly interesting interpretation of the bridges we discussed in the previous post.

A bridge connects regions of a topology.

But what enables an individual to become a bridge?

Often, a repertoire spanning more than one region.

Someone who participates in two communities may understand practices that are unfamiliar to each.

They can translate expectations.

Recognise correspondences.

Carry information.

Coordinate action.

Their significance does not arise simply from being physically present in two places.

It arises from possessing a repertoire that allows them to participate meaningfully in both.

Boundary crossing

The same principle applies at social boundaries.

A boundary separates regions of mattering.

Crossing it may require learning another way of acting.

A person entering a profession acquires new practices.

Someone entering another culture learns new expectations.

Someone moving between social classes may encounter different repertoires of language, conduct and interaction.

The topology may remain continuous across the boundary.

But the participant's repertoire has to change for the new region to become navigable.

This suggests that social transformation can sometimes begin with repertoire expansion.

Repertoire can be narrow or broad

Participants can have very different repertoire breadth.

A highly specialised role may involve deep competence in one region of the topology and relatively little access to others.

A mediator may have a broader repertoire spanning several domains.

A marginal participant may have partial access to several regions without being fully integrated into any.

Again, breadth should not be equated with superiority.

A narrow repertoire can be highly effective in a stable environment.

A broad repertoire can become valuable when environments change.

The adaptive significance depends upon the topology and its dynamics.

Repertoire and uncertainty

A changing topology creates a particularly interesting problem.

A participant whose repertoire is well suited to the current configuration may become less effective when the structure shifts.

A new technology can make old practices less useful.

A new institution can create unfamiliar roles.

A political crisis can alter social boundaries.

A migration can bring previously separate repertoires into contact.

The individual then faces a mismatch between established repertoire and changed topology.

Adaptation may require repertoire transformation.

Innovation begins here

This gives us a possible mechanism for social innovation.

A participant encounters a problem that cannot be handled easily with their existing repertoire.

They experiment.

A new practice works.

Others adopt it.

The practice becomes part of the collective reservoir.

The topology changes.

Future participants now inherit a different field of possibilities.

So:

mismatch → innovation → uptake → expanded reservoir → transformed topology

This is not guaranteed.

Many innovations disappear.

But when one persists, the social system changes.

The repertoire is historical

An individual's repertoire therefore has a history.

It is shaped by what they have encountered.

Whom they have interacted with.

Which practices they have learned.

Which regions of the social system they have occupied.

Which transitions they have survived.

This history matters because it changes future possibilities.

Two people entering the same social situation can construe it differently because their repertoires differ.

They do not encounter exactly the same social topology.

They encounter the topology through different histories of participation.

The same topology, different worlds

This gives us a useful formulation:

There may be one social topology, but many experienced pathways through it.

The topology is relational and collective.

The repertoire is individual and historical.

The two should not be collapsed.

A person does not carry a private topology inside their head.

Nor does the collective topology determine exactly what the individual experiences.

The repertoire mediates between them.

Where affiliation begins

We are now approaching the question of affiliation.

People do not necessarily affiliate simply because they occupy the same location in a formal social structure.

Nor do they need identical repertoires.

Affiliation may become possible when participants have sufficient overlap in the ways they can participate in and construe particular regions of mattering.

Two people may have very different lives but share enough repertoire to recognise one another as participants in the same social world.

Conversely, people may share a formal institution while possessing such different repertoires that their experiences of it are quite different.

Affiliation therefore may involve overlap rather than identity.

Repertoire overlap

Imagine two participants whose repertoires overlap strongly around cooperation, mutual assistance and collective responsibility.

They may readily recognise one another's actions as compatible.

Another participant may occupy the same institution but have a repertoire organised around competition, autonomy and individual achievement.

The institutional topology is shared.

The repertoires are different.

The same interaction can therefore matter differently to the participants.

This is where social differentiation becomes increasingly interesting.

But we must not turn repertoire into ideology

At this stage, we should resist interpreting repertoires as explicit belief systems.

A repertoire can include practices long before anyone formulates a doctrine.

A person may know how to cooperate without possessing a theory of cooperation.

They may know how to behave in a hierarchy without believing hierarchy is desirable.

They may navigate a social boundary without being able to explain it.

Explicit ideology comes later.

Repertoire is about capacity for participation and construal.

From repertoire to symbolic articulation

Eventually, however, some of these distinctions can become available for explicit symbolic construal.

People name relations.

Describe roles.

Tell stories about their position.

Develop concepts of justice, authority, freedom, belonging or obligation.

A practice becomes a norm.

A relationship becomes an identity.

A pattern of mattering becomes a value.

The repertoire becomes increasingly semiotic.

This is where the social and semiotic levels begin to approach one another.

The collective reservoir changes

When an individual innovation is taken up by others, something important happens.

The new possibility no longer belongs only to one repertoire.

It enters the collective reservoir.

Others can now learn it.

Teach it.

Modify it.

Combine it with existing practices.

What was once an individual possibility becomes a collective resource.

This is one way social systems evolve their potentials.

The collective reservoir changes through the experiences and innovations of participants.

The social system learns

We can therefore describe social learning as a transformation of the collective reservoir.

Participants experiment.

Some practices succeed.

Others disappear.

Some distinctions become important.

Others lose relevance.

The reservoir changes.

The topology may change as a result.

And new repertoires develop within the transformed environment.

The process is recursive:

individual participation → innovation → collective uptake → transformed reservoir → new individual repertoires

The topology is therefore inhabited, not merely occupied

This may be the most important conclusion of the post.

A social topology is not a map on which people sit like counters.

It is a dynamic field of relations that participants learn to navigate.

They discover pathways.

Encounter boundaries.

Develop competencies.

Form dependencies.

Build bridges.

Become attached to regions.

Sometimes become trapped within them.

Sometimes discover routes between them.

Their repertoires make some trajectories more probable than others.

And their activity can alter the topology itself.

Before political affiliation

This is why we still should not begin with political categories.

Before someone can identify with a political movement, they have already acquired a repertoire of ways of construing social relations.

They have learned what kinds of dependence feel normal.

What kinds of hierarchy are intelligible.

What kinds of cooperation are expected.

Which boundaries matter.

Which forms of change are familiar or alarming.

Only later do these patterns become articulated as explicit political positions.

Political affiliation is therefore unlikely to be the beginning of the process.

It is a symbolically elaborated form of prior participation in social mattering.

A possible dynamic

We can now see a possible pathway:

social topology → participation → repertoire → repertoire overlap → affiliation

But the reverse must also remain visible:

affiliation → coordinated participation → altered social relations → transformed topology

This is why affiliation will need to be treated as dynamic rather than merely categorical.

An affiliation can change the relations that made it possible.

And now the biological substrate returns

There is another reason to keep the Edelman connection in view.

An individual repertoire does not float free of biology.

Participants remain organisms with value systems.

Their needs, sensitivities and adaptive histories shape the conditions under which social relations become consequential.

But social participation transforms the contexts in which those value systems operate.

The relation is therefore not:

biology or culture.

It is:

biological organisation participating within socially organised environments.

The social topology becomes part of the organism's world of significance.

What we have established

We began with a collective topology of mattering.

We have now added the individual participant.

Each participant has a value system.

Through history, they develop a repertoire.

The repertoire provides differentiated capacities for recognising, construal and participation within the social topology.

The topology constrains repertoire development.

Repertoire enables particular pathways through the topology.

Participation can alter the collective reservoir.

The reservoir can then alter future repertoires.

The resulting loop is:

topology ↔ repertoire ↔ participation

And from the overlaps among repertoires, new forms of affiliation may emerge.

The next question

But affiliation is not simply a matter of having similar repertoires.

People may share only part of their repertoire.

They may participate in the same region of mattering for different reasons.

They may move into new regions together.

They may discover that their repertoires overlap in some respects while diverging in others.

So what exactly makes an affiliation stable?

What makes a collection of participants begin to recognise themselves as a we?

And how does an alignment of mattering become a named social formation?

That is the next question:

How do we find our neighbours in a topology of mattering?