Formalising the Cut: 2 Potential and Actualisation: Why Meaning Requires a Cut That Cannot Be Undone

Meaning does not begin with expression, interpretation, or representation.

It begins earlier — at the point where not everything that could happen is allowed to happen.

This post names the most primitive distinction in the calculus: potential and actualisation. Without it, meaning cannot arise. With it, meaning is already constrained.

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Potential Is Not Possibility

Potential is often mistaken for a set of options waiting to be chosen.

That picture is misleading.

Potential is not a menu.

It is a structured space of constraints and affordances — a field in which some actualisations are available, others are excluded, and many are unthinkable.

Potential is already shaped:

• by prior commitments

• by sedimented coordination

• by material and semiotic histories

• by what has already been bound

Nothing is “merely possible”.

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Actualisation Is Not a Process in Time

Actualisation is not the gradual unfolding of what was already there.

It is a cut.

A perspectival differentiation that:

• selects

• constrains

• commits

• excludes alternatives

Once actualised, a configuration cannot be returned to the undifferentiated potential from which it emerged.

This is not because of time.

It is because of binding.

Actualisation creates obligations — even when no subject intends them.

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Why the Cut Is Irreversible

After actualisation:

• coordination must adapt

• responses must account for what has occurred

• alternatives are no longer symmetrical

Even failed actualisations bind.

A misstatement, a broken promise, a missed signal — all are actualisations that reshape the field of potential going forward.

Irreversibility is not moral.

It is structural.

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Meaning Begins with Exclusion

Every act of meaning excludes:

• other interpretations

• other futures

• other alignments

This is not a defect.

It is the condition of intelligibility.

A system that refused to exclude would never stabilise anything long enough to mean.

Meaning is not generous.

It is selective.

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Degradation of the Distinction

The potential / actualisation distinction degrades under overload.

In such cases:

• everything feels urgent

• alternatives proliferate without resolution

• commitments stack without uptake

• nothing feels settled

This is not freedom.

It is collapse of the cut.

When actualisation fails to bind, potential floods the system.

Burnout is one name for this condition.

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Why This Distinction Is Minimal

Remove potential, and nothing can change.

Remove actualisation, and nothing can bind.

You cannot trade one for the other.

You cannot reduce one to the other.

You cannot collapse them without destroying meaning.

Even in breakdown, the system continues to struggle to actualise — to cut, to bind, to stabilise something.

That struggle is evidence of irreducibility.

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Not Choice, Not Will

This distinction does not rely on:

• intention

• deliberation

• subjects choosing between options

Actualisation happens in:

• institutions

• habits

• infrastructures

• semiotic environments

Often without awareness.

Often against preference.

Meaning does not wait for permission.

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What the Calculus Gains Here

By naming potential and actualisation explicitly, the calculus gains:

• a way to talk about constraint without determinism

• a way to talk about change without voluntarism

• a way to explain irreversibility without moralisation

This distinction does the first and heaviest work.

Everything else builds on it.

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Next

The next post introduces the second primitive distinction:

Readiness and Commitment

How actualisation becomes binding — and why not all bindings hold.

That is where obligation enters the calculus.