The Reflexive Field: Readiness and the Grammar of Becoming: 2 Systemic Poise and the Dynamics of Readiness

If readiness is the grammar of becoming, then systemic poise is its dynamic principle. Poise is not balance in the static sense, but the relational tension through which a system sustains its readiness to shift without collapsing into actualisation prematurely. It is the structured suspension that allows potential to remain live.

A poised system holds its potential as potential: it neither resolves too soon into event nor disperses into indeterminacy. This tension is not mechanical equilibrium but reflexive alignment — the system’s ability to maintain internal differences as differences while still being open to transformation through them. The logic is neither stasis nor motion, but readiness-to-become.

In linguistic terms, systemic poise parallels the organisation of mood and modality: the way a language holds open the field of interpersonal potential before commitment. A statement, a question, an offer, or a command each construe a different poise of readiness between speakers — a different calibration of what can come next. Likewise, in ontological terms, the poise of a system organises its readiness toward certain lines of actualisation while withholding others.

This dynamic of readiness implies that systems are not defined by what they do, but by what they could do — and, more precisely, by the kinds of readiness that shape those coulds. Readiness is thus not simply the absence of event but the presence of formative possibility: the readiness to respond, to align, to shift perspective.

Poise, then, is the art of ontological restraint. A system that lacks poise collapses into either chaos or rigidity — either unbounded dispersal or frozen determinacy. Both extremes mark a loss of readiness. The poised system, by contrast, sustains a dynamic equilibrium in which differentiation remains possible. It is the difference that is held, not erased.

Seen from this angle, becoming is not a sequence of events but a choreography of poise. The world is not composed of things in motion but of tensions in readiness, reflexively aligning and realigning through systemic potentials that never quite close. The event is only ever the momentary cut through this field — the perspectival actualisation of a system’s poise at a given point in its ongoing readiness.