Time is not a container for events, nor a sequence in which worlds unfold, but a relational field through which worlds come to be. Every world is a temporal weave — a pattern of potential modulated by construal. In a plural ontology, temporality is not a universal dimension but a situated inflection of relation: each world temporalises itself through the rhythms, tensions, and anticipations that sustain its coherence. To explore time, then, is to explore the conditions under which worlds persist, diverge, and reconfigure their own horizons of becoming.
Temporal Plurality
In the modern imaginary, time is often treated as linear, external, and uniform — a universal measure within which phenomena occur. Yet within a relational ontology, time is not an independent substrate but a construal of relation itself. Temporal differentiation is a way of orienting potential: to speak of before and after is already to have enacted a cut in the relational field, distinguishing what has been construed as persisting from what is construed as emergent. Temporal plurality follows from ontological plurality: every world sustains its own temporal coherence, its own mode of unfolding, synchronising, and renewing. Time, in this sense, is the grammar of worlding — the way potential is modulated into persistence and change.
Memory and the Persistence of Worlds
Persistence is not endurance in time, but re-actualisation within relation. A world persists not by remaining the same, but by continuously reconstituting its own coherence. Memory is the recursive process through which a world re-enacts its own construals, holding open the alignment that allows it to remain recognisable. Rather than a repository of fixed pasts, memory is the resonance of relational patterning — the echo that allows a world to find itself again. What persists, then, is not a substance or identity, but the rhythmic renewal of potential. The past is not left behind; it is continually woven into the ongoing construal of the present.
Anticipation and the Horizon of Emergence
If memory sustains coherence, anticipation opens the horizon of transformation. Anticipation is not projection but readiness — the world’s sensitivity to its own possible modulations. The future, in this sense, is not elsewhere; it is folded into the present as potential difference. Anticipation is a relational tension: the orientation toward what could yet be actualised. Worlds emerge through the play between inherited coherence and anticipatory openness — the poised instability that makes change possible. In each construal, the future is both constraint and invitation, shaping the way potential is drawn into relation.
Historical Entanglements
Worlds do not succeed one another in linear sequence; they interweave through resonance and interference. The historical, in this view, is not a temporal series but an entangled field in which multiple worlds sustain partial continuities with one another. Past construals persist as living traces, still active in the relational ecology of the present. History is not the record of what has been, but the dynamic interrelation of worlds that once were and still are — ghosting, guiding, or contesting the construals that follow. To inhabit history is to inhabit an interworld field of resonant potentials.
Futurity as Constraint and Enabler
The openness of the future is never absolute. Each world sustains its futurity through commitments — the continuities it seeks to preserve, the boundaries it draws around what counts as transformation. These commitments both constrain and enable: they delimit possible trajectories even as they make action intelligible. Futurity thus becomes the reflexive horizon of a world’s own coherence. To open a future is to reconfigure the conditions of persistence; to constrain a future is to hold a form steady long enough for it to endure. Every world navigates this tension, balancing the need for continuation against the lure of emergence.
Synchrony and Dissonance
When multiple worlds coexist, their temporalities do not align automatically. Worlds meet through resonance, interference, or discord — through patterns of partial synchrony and local dissonance. Synchrony is the relational moment when rhythms coincide, when different temporal logics find temporary alignment. Dissonance, by contrast, is the friction that sustains plurality: the refusal of a single rhythm to dominate. Coexistence in a plural ontology depends not on temporal unity but on the capacity to sustain dissonance without collapse — to let worlds resonate, collide, and reconstitute their alignments without erasing difference.
Improvisation Across Time
Improvisation is the lived practice of temporal negotiation. It is the capacity of a world — or of those who dwell within it — to modulate inherited patterns in response to emergent conditions. To improvise is to intervene in temporal alignment itself: to bend rhythms, to syncopate expectations, to re-time relation. Creativity, in this sense, is not the production of novelty ex nihilo but the responsive reconfiguration of potential. Every improvisation is a temporal cut that both affirms and transforms what has been. It is through such improvisations that worlds remain alive, adaptive, and capable of renewal.
Co-temporality and Collective Worlding
Temporal negotiation intensifies when worlds converge in collective processes. Co-temporality is not shared time but the relational modulation of multiple temporal horizons in resonance. A collective world is sustained not by simultaneity but by coordination — by the capacity of its participants to attune their differing rhythms without erasing them. The social, viewed through this lens, is a field of temporal alignment: the mutual adjustment of horizons that allows plural persistence. Collective worlding, then, is a rhythmic practice — the ongoing negotiation of co-temporality across difference.
Reflexive Temporalities
There are moments when a world turns back upon its own temporal patterning — when it becomes aware, within itself, of its own rhythms and resonances. Such reflexive moments mark a shift in the world’s capacity to reconfigure itself. Reflexivity is a temporal fold: the point at which the construal of time becomes part of time’s own modulation. When a world perceives its own temporality, it gains the potential to alter the conditions of its becoming — to change not merely what happens, but how happening itself is temporally structured. This reflexive capacity marks the threshold of temporal transformation.
Temporal Horizons of Possibility
To think of time as relational field is to recognise that the persistence of worlds depends on their capacity to differentiate, synchronise, and renew their temporalities. Every act of construal opens a temporal horizon — a space of potential coherence and divergence. Worlds sustain themselves not by transcending time but by inhabiting its plurality: by folding memory and anticipation into the living present, by resonating across dissonant rhythms, by improvising new alignments from inherited traces.
Temporality, in this view, is the ecology of worlding itself — the medium through which relation endures and transforms. The horizon of possibility is never static: it widens and contracts with every act of construal, every reflexive re-timing of relation. To live within temporal plurality is to inhabit the ongoing creation of worlds — each a distinct modulation of time’s relational field, each sustaining its own rhythm of becoming within the vast polyphony of the real.
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