As the superorganism emerges, not all individuals occupy the same semiotic or functional role. Division of labour arises as a natural consequence of relational alignment: different potentials are actualised in specialised roles, producing differentiated contributions to the collective field.
Castes, task groups, and behavioural subtypes are not imposed hierarchically; they are semiotic expressions of the colony’s morphogenetic logic. Workers forage, guards patrol, and reproductives reproduce — each role is a construal of potential shaped by interactions, feedback, and environmental contingencies. The colony is intelligible not in the sum of individuals, but in the patterned alignment of these differentiated functions.
Differentiation stabilises the superorganism. By distributing tasks according to potential and context, the colony maintains reflexive coherence across scales. Local perturbations — a lost forager, an injured guard — do not collapse the system; neighbouring individuals recalibrate their behaviour, maintaining systemic alignment. Flexibility emerges through structured differentiation, where roles are semiotic slots rather than rigid assignments.
From a relational perspective, individuality is folded into collective identity. Each organism construes its contribution with awareness of the field it inhabits, and the field itself construes the organism’s actions as part of a larger morphogenetic narrative. Differentiation, then, is not just efficiency, but the mechanism by which the colony sustains reflexive semiotic coherence.
In this sense, division of labour mirrors multicellularity: just as tissues and organs actualise differentiated potentials within a body, castes and roles actualise differentiated potentials within a superorganism. Differentiation is the grammar of collective functionality, a necessary step for complex, persistent organisation.
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