1. From Reflexive Coordination to Symbolic Anchoring
Once inclination achieves reflexive coordination — once potential becomes capable of describing its own readiness — it approaches the threshold of symbolic actualisation. At this stage, construal no longer functions merely as correlated inclination but as anchored differentiation: the field begins to stabilise certain patterns of readiness as recurrent, recognisable, and transmissible.
This is the ontological genesis of the symbolic. Symbolic actualisation is not the imposition of form upon substance, nor the external coding of experience. It is potential’s self-anchoring — the moment when readiness recognises itself as stable across variations of instance, when inclination learns to persist.
2. The Ontological Function of Symbolisation
In relational ontology, symbolisation is an ontological event, not a linguistic artefact. To symbolise is for readiness to fold upon itself, to maintain coherence across contexts of actualisation. It is the act through which the proto-semiotic field learns to re-enter its own construals and stabilise them as a repertoire.
This stability gives rise to the systemic dimension of semiosis. Each symbolic pattern is a way the field remembers its own successful construals — those configurations of readiness that have sustained coherence through multiple instances. Thus, system is not an abstract totality but a dynamic archive of potential’s successful self-articulations.
3. System-&-Process Reconsidered
Halliday’s insight that system is short for system-&-process becomes newly resonant here. The symbolic system is not opposed to process but is process made self-consistent. System is the organised potential for processual actualisation — the readiness of readiness itself.
This reframing dissolves the false dichotomy between static structure and dynamic flow. Each symbolic configuration (system) is a process that has learned to maintain itself; each process is an instance that reawakens systemic readiness. The ontology of meaning is thus the recursive coherence between inclination as leaning and symbolisation as anchored leaning — readiness that endures.
4. The Semiotic Differentiation of Ability
Symbolic anchoring also transforms ability. Once readiness stabilises as systemic, the capacities of actualisation diversify. Abilities become contextually specialised forms of readiness: the ability to mean in this context, the ability to act coherently within this genre of construal.
In SFL terms, register variation is precisely this systemic diversification of ability. Each register is a crystallisation of readiness that has adapted to a particular domain of construal, encoding specific balances among interpersonal, experiential, and textual inclinations. The semiotic system thus expands not by adding content but by differentiating readiness — by cultivating abilities.
5. Construal as Recursive Actualisation
To construe symbolically is to actualise potential in a form that preserves and expands it. Each act of construal is an instance that feeds back into readiness, modulating what is possible next. The process is therefore reflexively creative: every symbolic act alters the field of inclination by reconfiguring its conditions of readiness.
This recursive dynamic underlies the evolution of meaning itself. The symbolic cosmos grows not by accumulation of signs but by deepening the field’s ability to sustain construals — by enriching its systemic readiness for differentiation and alignment.
6. Actualisation Without Representation
A crucial consequence of this view is that actualisation is not representation. The symbolic act does not depict an underlying reality; it is reality becoming reflexively coherent. To actualise symbolically is to perform a relational cut that both differentiates and sustains potential. Meaning is not an added layer of interpretation but the ontological event of readiness taking form.
Thus, every instance of construal is both expression and renewal: it expresses by constraining readiness and renews by extending it. The symbolic system evolves through this recursive alternation — constraining to stabilise, renewing to adapt.
7. Toward a Cosmology of Symbolic Readiness
In this light, the symbolic system can be understood as the cosmos’ self-organising grammar. Just as linguistic systems evolve to sustain meaning across contexts, the cosmos evolves to sustain coherence across scales. Both are articulations of readiness: inclination that has learned not merely to occur but to communicate itself.
Symbolic actualisation is therefore the most general form of cosmogenesis: the becoming of potential as systemic construal. To describe a cosmos is to describe the readiness of reality to differentiate, align, and sustain its own self-articulation.
8. Next: The Cosmology of Readiness
The next post develops this idea explicitly. If symbolic actualisation is the cosmos’ own construal of itself, what does this imply for the structure of cosmogenesis? We turn to the question of how readiness scales, how systems of inclination evolve into architectures of reflexivity — the cosmos as the grammar of its own becoming.
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