Ecosystems as Polyphonic Readiness Fields: 1 The Ecosystem as a Relational Medium: From Coexistence to Co-Articulation

The first mistake is to imagine an ecosystem as a thing.

This is the conceptual reflex inherited from organismal biology: if an organism is an entity, then surely a forest, a reef, or a savannah is an entity as well—just a larger one. But ecosystems do not behave like individuals, nor like super-individuals. They have no interior, no boundary, no cohesive metabolism. They do not “do” anything in the way organisms act; yet they undeniably exhibit coherence, persistence, and patterned transformation.

The problem is not ecological; it is ontological.

To understand ecosystems on their own terms, we must let go of the idea that they are containers of species and instead construe them as distributed relational media in which species actualise different cuts through a shared potential. The ecosystem does not contain organisms. Rather, organisms co-articulate an ecosystem by mutually constraining the readiness of the field they jointly inhabit.

This is the first relational turn.

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1. The Ecosystem Is Not a Collective of Organisms

The classical ecological image is representational: lists of species, trophic pyramids, energy flows, maps with arrows showing “interactions.” These models imply that the ecosystem is the structure and the organisms are the content—like beads strung along a predefined network.

But meaning does not lie in the arrows.

Every species encounters the ecosystem only as its own perspectival environment. The forest of the deer is not the forest of the fungus, nor the forest of the owl. They are not inhabiting the same world; they are intersecting cuts through a shared relational potential.

The ecosystem exists only insofar as these cuts fit.

Where they misalign, potential dissipates.

Where they resonate, something like coherence appears.

Ecosystems are not the sum of these construals, nor the intersection, nor the average. They are the medium within which these construals are possible: a readiness field that is simultaneously over-full (too rich for any one organism) and under specified (requiring co-articulation).

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2. The Ecosystem as a Medium of Distributed Readiness

Every organism encounters not “the environment” but a patterned set of affordances:

light reachable at its height, food destructible by its physiology, threats legible to its sensory capacities.

These affordances are not properties of the species or properties of the world. They are relational potentials—mutual absences where one organism’s limitation meets another’s pattern of presence.

In this sense, the ecosystem is a multi-layered abstract potential, analogous to your treatment of colonies and embryogenesis:

• The colony provides the constraints within which cells actualise fates.

• The proto-ecosystem provides the constraints within which species actualise niches.

But unlike a colony, no single organism governs the field.

No centralised metabolism enforces coherence.

Ecosystem coherence emerges when many different construals of the world do not annihilate one another.

When the cuts interleave without collapsing the field.

Thus, ecosystem persistence is a property of compatibility, not unity.

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3. Coexistence Is Not Enough: Ecosystems Require Co-Articulation

Many species may coexist, but coexistence alone does not amount to an ecosystem.

Coexistence:

Two species use the same space without interfering with each other.

Co-articulation:

Each species helps stabilise readiness conditions that the others require.

A pollinator increases reproductive opportunity for flowering plants.

Flowering plants provide the pollinator’s feeding field.

The predator regulates the herbivore, allowing the vegetation to recover.

The decomposer recycles matter, sustaining the soil’s readiness for all.

These relations are not causal in the mechanistic sense.

They are stabilising alignments of perspectival cuts.

Co-articulation means: my construal of the world enables yours without needing to know anything about you.

This is the first sign of ecological agency—but it is a fugitive, migrating agency, actualised nowhere in particular.

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4. Ecosystem Coherence Without a Centre

If organisms do not share a single environment, if each species construes only its own cut, why do ecosystems show such striking coherence?

Because coherence lives in the field, not in any perspective upon it.

Ecosystems persist because multiple species generate gradients, rhythms, and material distributions that make each other’s construals possible. These patterns exist between organisms, not within them.

The ecosystem as a relational medium is thus:

• Not a collective individual

• Not a self-regulating organism

• Not a symbolic system

• Not a super-agency

But a polyphonic readiness field—the relational potential that arises when many organisms enact intersecting but asymmetrical consistencies.

An ecosystem cannot perceive, plan, or intend.

But it can hold form across time, resisting collapse through distributed constraint.

That is what makes it a medium.

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5. From Organisms to Fields: The Ontological Shift

To move into an ecosystem ontology, one must shift from:

organisms acting within an environment

→

organisms co-articulating a relational potential that none of them construe directly

This reframing prepares all subsequent posts:

• niches as perspectival cuts, not locations

• predator–prey as reciprocal individuation pressures

• ecosystem agency as field-level coherence, not superorganismic intention

• ecological evolution as expansion of relational possibility

• human ecological participation as doubly mediated (ecological + symbolic)

With this first cut, the series begins:

ecosystems not as containers of life, but as the conditions under which life can distribute its perspectival orientations.