Introducing A Relational Anthropology: The Human Animal Reconstructed

We like to think of humans as things: creatures with properties, minds with essences, or souls with fixed contents. This is an illusion.

Humans are not objects. Humans are emergent relational nodes: vortices of potentials circulating across biological, semiotic, social, and cosmological domains. What we call “the human” is a pattern of alignment, a dynamic interplay of potentials, and a constant negotiation of constraints.

A Relational Anthropology is a five-part exploration of this vision. Across the series, we will dismantle essentialist and representational habits of thought, replacing them with a view of humanity as process, relationality, and co-individuation.

Here’s what to expect:

1. The Human as Vortex of Potentials: No Essence, Only Circulating Relational Cuts
   Humans are not defined by properties or traits. We emerge in the circulation of semiotic, biological, and social potentials. Every action, thought, or relation is a cut in this dynamic lattice.

2. Agency as Relational Leverage: How Action Emerges from Alignment of Potentials
   Agency is not inner volition. It is leverage — the ability to actualise potential by aligning relational currents. Action is relational, emergent, and co-individuating.

3. Culture as Semiotic Ecology: Meaning as Environmental
   Culture is not stored in minds. It is an environment: a semiotic ecology of potentials that humans inhabit, circulate through, and co-structure. Meaning is everywhere, distributed across interactions.

4. Emotion as Constraint Negotiation: Against Inner Mentalism
   Emotions are not hidden states. They are emergent responses to relational constraints, negotiating alignment across body, sociality, and semiotic fields.

5. The Future Human: Co-Individuating with New Technological and Ecological Cuts
   Humanity is not fixed. We co-individuate with ecological, technological, and cognitive potentials. The human of tomorrow is not a property-enhanced creature, but a node in an ever-shifting lattice of potential.

This series is not abstract philosophy. It is a guide to seeing humans relationally, without resorting to essences, mentalism, or representation. It reframes what it means to act, feel, co-exist, and become in a world of circulating potentials.

If you have ever felt constrained by traditional notions of what it means to be human, this series will offer a new lens: one in which the human is not defined, but emerges.