Resonant Systems: The Dynamics of Relational Coherence: 2 Feedback and Attunement

If resonance is the grammar of coherence, feedback is its syntax — the continual process by which relations sense themselves and adapt. Yet the language of feedback has been colonised by cybernetics, where it serves as a metaphor for control. Systems “correct” their deviations; homeostasis replaces vitality.

But relational systems do not survive through control. They persist through attunement — through a responsiveness that neither fixes nor freezes the field. Where control presumes an external regulator, attunement unfolds within the relation itself. The field listens to its own vibration and modulates accordingly.

We might distinguish two kinds of feedback:

• Corrective feedback seeks to restore equilibrium by negating difference. It treats deviation as error, variation as threat.

• Generative feedback amplifies sensitivity; it treats deviation as information, as a site of potential transformation.

In living, relational fields, coherence depends on this second kind. It is less about returning to balance than about deepening the capacity to balance — expanding the range of viable responses. Attunement is feedback as feeling: not a command loop but a relational sensing of rhythm, tone, and resonance.

In this sense, attunement is epistemic. It requires listening to what is not yet signal — to the faint tremors of emergence before they stabilise into form. It asks for a posture of attention that can perceive coherence in flux, pattern in noise. To be attuned is to move with the world’s becoming rather than to stand apart and measure it.

Resonant systems, then, are not self-correcting but self-listening. Their intelligence is distributed, their coherence emergent. They do not seek equilibrium; they cultivate sensitivity.

The task of attunement is to remain receptive to what shifts the field — to maintain coherence through difference, not against it. In such systems, knowing and being are continuous: to sense is already to participate.

Key move: from regulation to relational sensing; from homeostasis to co-adaptation.