Temporal Horizons of Worlding: 3 Anticipation and the Horizon of Emergence

If memory anchors worlds in their past, anticipation situates them in relation to futures yet to be actualised. Within a relational ontology, the future is not an external, pre-existing dimension awaiting realisation; it is a construal field, co-formed by present patterns of potential and by the temporal resonances of past worlds. Anticipation is the active engagement with these potentials—a mode of worlding in which horizons of emergence are dynamically sensed, oriented toward, and negotiated.

Anticipatory structures operate through what might be called temporal affordances. A world perceives certain futures as possible, probable, or desirable, not in isolation but in relation to its own internal patterns and the surrounding network of co-individuated worlds. These anticipatory cues influence present actualisations: what is enacted now is always conditioned by the projection of potentialities into the immediate horizon. The world, in effect, is already partially inhabited by its own possible futures, which shape its trajectory even before they are fully realised.

The horizon of emergence is not uniform or singular. Multiple co-existing futures may intersect, overlap, or conflict, creating zones of temporal tension and resonance. Consider a technological ecosystem: the development of a novel platform is guided not only by current capacities and constraints but by anticipatory visions of user behaviour, market dynamics, and societal impact. The unfolding of the platform is thus a negotiation among competing temporal potentials, each shaping the present as it projects itself forward.

Anticipation also mediates relational alignment. Worlds attune to one another, synchronising or diverging in expectation of mutual possibilities. This co-temporality implies that the future is not merely “mine” or “yours” but emerges across the interweaving of multiple world-horizons. Conflicts of anticipation—misaligned projections or competing valuations of potential—can destabilise worlds, while resonance among anticipatory structures can amplify coherence and accelerate emergence.

Crucially, anticipation is not deterministic. Potential futures are enacted relationally: the act of projecting a horizon is itself a construal that may reinforce, redirect, or collapse certain possibilities. In this sense, anticipation is both enabling and constraining: it opens paths by making them perceivable and actionable, yet it also closes others by structuring attention, energy, and resources toward selected trajectories. The relational temporality of anticipation thus actively co-shapes the topology of worlding.

Engaging with anticipation relationally demands sensitivity to the subtle interplay of projection and responsiveness. Worlds do not merely wait for the future to arrive; they prefigure it through distributed patterns of expectation, negotiation, and enactment. By cultivating this awareness, we can observe how temporal horizons are continuously reframed, expanded, and contracted, generating the ongoing dynamism of worlding.

Next in the series: Historical Entanglements — Interweaving Past Worlds, where we will examine how multiple pasts intersect, overlap, and constrain present and emergent worlds, highlighting the relational texture of temporal entanglement.

Temporal Horizons of Worlding: 2 Memory and the Persistence of Worlds

Memory is often conceived as a repository of the past—a collection of traces, images, or records. Within a relational ontology of worlding, memory must be reconceived as an active component of temporal fields: a mechanism through which past worlds persist, resonate, and condition the emergence of present and future worlds. Memory is not merely retention; it is relational actualisation, an ongoing interplay of sedimented potentialities and current construals.

Each world carries with it traces of prior worlds, not as static imprints but as dynamically engaged affordances. These traces inform the present by modulating possibilities: certain paths become more likely, others less so, and new potentials are continuously co-constituted in the interplay of remembering and actualising. Memory, then, functions as both a stabiliser and a transformer. It sustains coherence by maintaining continuity across temporal layers, yet it simultaneously enables novelty by refracting past patterns into new configurations.

Persistence of worlds through memory is not uniform. Some temporal traces endure through repeated resonance, becoming “thick” features of a world’s construal, while others fade, attenuated by lack of alignment or incompatibility with emergent configurations. The selective endurance of memory is itself relational: it depends upon the interactions of multiple co-individuated worlds, each influencing which traces are amplified, muted, or recombined.

Consider, for example, the temporal field of a linguistic community. The forms, structures, and conventions of speech persist across generations not as fixed objects but as relational patterns, continuously actualised in dialogue and practice. Here, memory is enacted: it exists in the patterns that speakers perpetuate, adapt, or abandon, linking past uses to present acts and future potentials. Similarly, ecological worlds retain memory in the sediment of geological strata, the genetic legacies of organisms, or the cyclical rhythms of climate systems, each layer interacting with emergent conditions to shape the unfolding of the present.

Memory thus mediates between stability and emergence. It is neither a mere archive nor a deterministic template; it is a relational conduit through which temporal potentials circulate. By attending to the persistence of worlds via memory, we recognise that every present moment is temporally plural: it is threaded with echoes of prior worlds even as it gestures toward the actualisation of novel configurations. Memory, in this sense, is a temporal infrastructure—a dynamic network of influence, resonance, and constraint.

Engaging with memory relationally also requires acknowledging its selective and perspectival nature. Not all traces endure equally, and not all worlds are equally attentive to the same memories. The persistence of a world is thus an ongoing negotiation among overlapping temporalities, each drawing upon, transforming, or suppressing aspects of the past. Memory, far from being an inert backdrop, is an active participant in worlding: it shapes what can emerge, constrains what is possible, and enables worlds to persist across the shifting horizon of time.

Next in the series: Anticipation and the Horizon of Emergence, where we will explore how the future—like the past—is a relational construal, shaping the trajectories of worlds even before they come into being.

Temporal Horizons of Worlding: 1 Temporal Plurality — Time as Relational Field

In conventional discourse, time is often treated as a linear, measurable continuum—an external stage upon which events unfold. Within a relational ontology, this view becomes insufficient. Time is not a neutral backdrop; it is a relational field through which worlds co-individuate, interact, and transform. Each world is temporally structured, its past, present, and future inseparably entangled with the potentials that constitute it.

Temporality, in this sense, is a construal field. It is an active medium through which patterns of possibility emerge, stabilise, and dissipate. Just as a musical phrase acquires its identity through the interplay of notes, silences, and expectations, a world acquires its contours through temporal resonance: past instantiations inform present alignments, while anticipatory structures shape the horizon of emergence. Worlds are thus never fully present—they are always co-temporally extended, their being stretched across what has been, what is, and what might be.

This temporal plurality challenges singular narratives of causality and sequence. Worlds do not merely succeed one another; they overlap, interlace, and sometimes interfere. A present moment is always a locus of multiple temporalities: the residue of past worlds, the pulse of contemporaneous worlds, and the prefiguration of emergent worlds yet to be actualised. In this way, temporal fields are not passive containers but active participants in worlding.

Relational temporality reframes our understanding of emergence. Where a conventional ontology might ask “when did this world begin?” a relational perspective asks, “how do temporal patterns align to actualise this world here and now?” This shift foregrounds the constitutive role of temporal entanglement: the continuity of a world is not a given, but a negotiated alignment among multiple co-existing temporalities.

Moreover, temporal plurality is not merely an abstract phenomenon; it manifests in the rhythms, resonances, and dissonances among co-individuated worlds. Consider the persistence of a cultural formation: its temporal field is marked by sedimented practices, recurrent motifs, and anticipatory imaginaries that collectively sustain and destabilise it. Similarly, ecological worlds emerge through complex temporal interdependencies, where species interactions, climatic rhythms, and evolutionary trajectories intersect. In every case, time is both medium and agent, structuring the very possibilities that worlds may realise.

To engage with temporal plurality is to cultivate sensitivity to the relational choreography of worlds. It demands an attentiveness to how past, present, and future do not merely follow one another but co-compose, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in tension. Time, in this view, is less a linear measure and more a resonant field—a horizon within which worlds come into, and out of, being.

Next in the series: Memory and the Persistence of Worlds, where we will explore how past temporalities persist within and across co-individuated worlds, shaping the ongoing interplay of potential and actualisation.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: Series Synthesis — Worlding: Relation, Plurality, and Possibility

The Worlding Series traces a trajectory from the emergence of worlds to their interaction, interdependence, and ethical stewardship, culminating in a vision of relation as the ontological and ethical ground of possibility. Across ten posts, the series develops several interlocking insights:

1. Worlds as relational configurations: Worlds are not isolated entities or ontological monads; they are stabilised patterns of potential actualised within relational fields. From the first post, “Worlds in Play,” the series foregrounds worlding as an ongoing, improvisational activity rather than a completed product.

2. Emergence and individuation: Through posts like “The Genesis of a World” and “Incommensurability and Resonance,” the series emphasises that worlds emerge through thresholds of coherence, maintaining internal logic while overlapping with others in partial alignment. Individuation is both a local and relational process, producing worlds that are distinct yet interconnected.

3. Translation and improvisation: Translation between worlds is not equivalence but a creative negotiation. “Translation as Ontological Interface” and “Metaphysical Improvisation” explore how worlds meet, adapt, and co-evolve, generating novel patterns of sense, action, and existence without enforcing homogenisation.

4. Power and exclusion: The series does not shy away from the politics of worlding. “Power, Exclusion, and the Policing of Worlds” highlights how dominant worlds can suppress plural possibilities, while ethical attention to interdependence can reclaim relational fields from universalising pressures.

5. Ecology and interdependence: Worlds co-exist in dynamic ecologies, sustaining and constraining one another. The relational metabolism of possibility depends on feedback, resonance, and adaptive tension, emphasised in “Ecology of Worlds.” Stability arises from iterative negotiation, not from fixed hierarchy or domination.

6. Ethical responsibility: Plurality is inseparable from ethical obligation. “The Ethics of Plurality” situates ethical practice in care, attention, and facilitation, emphasising the co-individuation of worlds and the relational consequences of every act.

7. Relation without totality: The series concludes by proposing that the cosmos itself is reflexive and relational, not a singular container of worlds. “The Reflexive Cosmos” and “Afterword — Playing Beyond Worlds” invite recognition of relation as the primary medium of existence, with worlds emerging, interacting, and flourishing within it.

Taken together, the Worlding Series offers a relational, plural, and ethically attuned ontology. It shifts focus from static entities to the processes through which possibility manifests, emphasising that worlds are not merely environments to inhabit but fields to co-individuate, negotiate, and sustain. Relation is the rhythm through which worlds become possible, and through which they continue to flourish — together.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 10 Afterword — Playing Beyond Worlds

If the previous posts have traced the emergence, interaction, and ethical responsibilities of plural worlds, the afterword turns our attention to the ultimate horizon of relational possibility. To play beyond worlds is not to abandon them, but to recognise that the primary substance of existence is relation itself. Worlds are not ontological atoms; they are configurations of potential actualised through interaction, attention, and improvisation.

The play of worlds is thus processual rather than static. Each encounter, translation, and act of improvisation reconfigures relational fields, opening avenues for new forms of sense, action, and coexistence. The cosmos, in this view, is less a container of worlds than a dynamic medium in which worlds emerge, overlap, and resonate. The rhythm of relation — oscillating between alignment and tension — is the pulse through which possibility itself unfolds.

To play beyond worlds is also to embrace the limits of comprehension and control. No singular perspective can encompass the totality of relational fields; no act can fully determine the evolution of the ecology of sense. Improvisation, experimentation, and responsiveness become essential practices, allowing actors within the cosmos to navigate emergent, indeterminate, and incommensurable potentials.

Ethically, this vision demands a commitment to careful facilitation rather than domination. To sustain the plurality of worlds is to cultivate conditions in which each relational configuration can express its potential without being subsumed or erased. The responsibility extends from individual encounters to the structuring of social, technological, and ecological systems: all must be attuned to the metabolism of possibility.

Finally, playing beyond worlds is a call to recognise relation as the only real. Worlds are provisional, improvisational, and situated; relation is persistent, reflexive, and co-constitutive. By attending to relation itself — to the movements, tensions, and resonances that generate worlds — we engage in the most profound act of creation: the ongoing co-individuation of possibility itself.

The series closes, then, not with answers but with an invitation: to inhabit, care for, and play within the field of relational potential, allowing worlds to emerge, interact, and flourish — together.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 9 The Ethics of Plurality — Responsibility in the Play of Worlds

If the cosmos is a reflexive field of interdependent worlds, then plurality is not merely descriptive; it is inherently ethical. To inhabit such a field is to recognise that every act of worlding carries consequences beyond the immediate relational field in which it occurs. Decisions, interventions, and expressions are never contained within a single world: they ripple outward, enabling or constraining potentials elsewhere.

Ethics in a plural ontology begins with responsibility to difference. Coexistence is not accidental; it requires attentiveness, negotiation, and care. Translation between worlds, engagement with other perspectives, and acts of improvisation all become ethical acts precisely because they mediate relational possibilities. The harm lies not in the difference itself, but in the suppression, distortion, or erasure of worlds that would otherwise contribute to the ecology of possibility.

This ethics also emphasises mutual becoming. Worlds are co-individuated: the emergence of one depends upon the existence and responsiveness of others. Ethical action is therefore not only about restraint but also about facilitation — actively sustaining conditions in which plural potentialities can flourish. Attention, listening, and responsiveness are as morally significant as prohibition or correction.

Power and inequality remain central concerns. Dominant worlds often impose norms that constrain or homogenise the field, creating structural inequities in the ecology of sense. Ethical plurality demands intervention at systemic levels, not only at the level of individual encounters. Policies, institutions, cultural practices, and technological infrastructures must be oriented toward sustaining relational diversity rather than enforcing monolithic order.

Finally, the ethics of plurality is pragmatically relational. There are no universal principles to apply across all worlds, only context-sensitive judgments: calibrations of action in relation to the patterns, rhythms, and affordances of the relational field. Ethical discernment is itself an improvisational practice — continuously negotiating alignment, tension, and resonance across overlapping and incommensurable worlds.

In embracing this ethic, worlding becomes an act of careful play. To live ethically is to attend to difference, to cultivate resonance without domination, and to recognise that every relational gesture shapes the possibilities of existence itself. Plurality is thus both a condition and a responsibility — the medium through which worlds can continue to become, together.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 8 The Reflexive Cosmos — Relation without Totality

If worlds are relational constellations and improvisation the medium through which they interact, then the cosmos itself is best understood not as a totalising container but as the reflexive play of relations. There is no overarching unity, no singular framework into which all worlds must be folded. Instead, the cosmos manifests as a dynamic field in which plural worlds co-constitute the possibilities of each other.

Reflexivity here is crucial. Each world, in encountering others, modifies its own structures and potentials. The cosmos is not an external backdrop but a living matrix of interaction: the horizon against which worlds are individuated and co-individuated. Its coherence is emergent, sustained by the continual tuning, resonance, and adjustment of its constituent worlds. Unity is not imposed; it arises as a side-effect of relational attunement, always partial, always provisional.

In this view, relation is ontologically prior to totality. The reflexive cosmos does not demand that differences be reconciled; it celebrates and relies upon them. Stability emerges not from equivalence or assimilation but from adaptive tension — the capacity of worlds to align, diverge, and resonate without erasing their distinctiveness. Plurality is the norm, not a deviation from a singular world.

This perspective reframes questions of scale and hierarchy. Power, influence, and dominance are not cosmic absolutes but modulations within the field of relational possibility. Worlds rise and fall, expand and contract, yet the cosmos remains — not as a pre-given arena but as the ongoing reflexive dance of interaction. Its “laws” are not immutable but patterned regularities that emerge from repeated relational engagements.

The reflexive cosmos also reframes epistemology and ethics. Knowledge is not about mapping a pre-existing totality but about navigating and modulating relations; ethical responsibility is not about enforcing unity but about sustaining plurality. Coexistence, resonance, improvisation, and care are the principles through which the cosmos manifests as intelligible and habitable.

In sum, the reflexive cosmos offers a vision of existence without closure: a field of endless relational play, in which the coherence of each world depends upon and contributes to the vitality of all others. It is a cosmos of process, not substance; of interdependence, not domination; of possibility, not finality.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 7 Metaphysical Improvisation — When Worlds Meet

The meeting of worlds is always a site of improvisation. When distinct relational fields intersect — scientific with mythical, aesthetic with ecological, digital with embodied — the encounter generates ontological tension. These points of contact are not predictable; they do not yield uniform translation or stable synthesis. Instead, they create zones of improvisation where patterns flex, rhythms adjust, and potentialities are renegotiated.

Improvisation at the metaphysical level is not mere novelty. It is a testing of coherence across worlds: a probe of limits, resonances, and dissonances. Artistic innovation, scientific theorising, ritual enactment, and technological experimentation all instantiate this improvisational logic. Each act of world-crossing is a moment of relational experimentation, revealing both what can be integrated and what must remain distinct.

Such encounters also expose the reflexive nature of worlds. A world is never fixed; it adapts, deforms, and evolves in response to the intrusion of difference. Metaphysical improvisation amplifies this reflexivity: worlds learn their own constraints only by engaging with what lies outside them. The act of improvisation, then, is simultaneously creative and diagnostic — expanding potential while clarifying boundaries.

Crucially, improvisation is ethical as well as ontological. Encountering another world requires attention, care, and negotiation. The improvisational move is never neutral; it carries consequences for the relational ecology. A reckless alignment may dominate or suppress, while a responsive engagement cultivates resonance and emergent possibility. Here, play and responsibility converge: the freedom to innovate is inseparable from the obligation to sustain plural coherence.

In this light, metaphysical improvisation is the engine of relational emergence. It is where worlds are tested, recalibrated, and reimagined — where the rhythm of relation generates new horizons of possibility. Through these encounters, worlds are not simply juxtaposed; they co-evolve, each modulating the potentialities of the other, producing unforeseen forms of sense, action, and existence.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 6 Ecology of Worlds — Coexistence and Interdependence

Plurality is not simply a matter of counting worlds; it is a dynamic ecology in which relational fields sustain, constrain, and shape one another. Each world — scientific, mythical, aesthetic, ecological, digital — emerges through the actualisation of potential within particular relational configurations. Yet no world exists in isolation: the possibilities it can instantiate are co-constituted by the presence of others. The relational ecology of worlds, therefore, is a networked field of co-dependence.

This interdependence is not symmetrical. Some worlds are more dominant, more expansive, more institutionally or technologically supported. Others are marginal, emergent, or fragile. Yet each contributes to the structural integrity of the whole. An ecological perspective recognises that the suppression or extinction of even a minor world impoverishes the entire field of potential. The dynamics of coexistence — feedback, resonance, inhibition — determine which possibilities can manifest and which remain latent.

Worlds communicate through resonance and interference rather than direct translation. The shifts in one world create ripples across others, opening or closing pathways for action, imagination, and knowledge. For example, ecological understanding may reshape technological development; aesthetic sensibilities can influence scientific framing; digital infrastructures redefine social and cognitive practices. Each world’s patterning is thus both a constraint and an enabler for others, forming a metabolism of potential where action, perception, and imagination circulate.

Relational ecology also highlights the temporal interweaving of worlds. Stability is achieved through iterative adjustment: traditions, routines, and institutions maintain coherence, while ongoing interaction and adaptation introduce variation. Coexistence is not static harmony but a processual negotiation: a balance of alignment and tension, repetition and innovation.

Practising world-care in this context involves cultivating attention to interdependence. It requires sensitivity to the ways one world’s expansion might constrain another, and an ethical commitment to sustain plural fields of potential. Knowledge, art, ritual, and practice all become interventions in this ecology: modulations of energy, attention, and relational possibility.

In this sense, an ecology of worlds is both descriptive and normative. It maps how worlds actually interrelate, while also guiding action toward coexistence that preserves the richness of potential. By thinking ecologically, we shift from questions of domination or assimilation to questions of sustainability, resonance, and mutual flourishing.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 5 Power, Exclusion, and the Policing of Worlds — The Violence of the Universal

If translation is the art of sustaining difference, then power is the machinery that seeks to erase it. The Enlightenment dream of universality — one reason, one nature, one humanity — became the template for a project of ontological consolidation. Under its influence, plurality was not only ignored but actively suppressed: worlding was recoded as deviation, superstition, or error. What had been a polyphony of construals was refashioned into a single, regulated discourse of the real.

To universalise is to police the play of worlds. The modern concept of “the world” emerged through this very exclusion: a totalising imaginary in which one mode of construal — empirical, objectifying, secular — declared itself the measure of all others. Within that framework, alternate ontologies were rendered immature or primitive, to be educated or erased. Colonial epistemologies extended this logic globally, converting relational ecologies of sense into extractive grids of value, territory, and resource. The violence of the universal thus lies not in its intent to unify, but in its refusal to listen.

In relational terms, this policing operates through constriction of potential. When the conditions for multiple ontological grammars are narrowed to a single authorised syntax, the ecology of sense begins to starve. Worlds that cannot be translated into the dominant register are silenced or absorbed — their rhythms overwritten by the tempo of power. The resulting homogeneity produces a profound ontological impoverishment: the loss not only of cultural diversity but of the very capacity to imagine differently.

Resistance to such policing does not lie in multiplying “alternative worlds” as if they were options within a shared market of perspectives. It lies in reclaiming the relational ground from which worlds emerge — the field of possibility itself. A decolonial or feminist epistemology, for instance, does not merely add voices to the chorus; it detunes the very system of harmonic order that decided which notes could be heard. Power, in this sense, is not merely an imposition from above, but a modulation of relational resonance — it shapes which relations can form, and which cannot.

To counter such modulation is to practise world-care: the maintenance of plural construals as living, coexisting possibilities. This involves not only critique but creativity — reanimating forms of knowing, sensing, and being that the universal had exiled. Art, storytelling, and ritual often lead this reclamation: they keep the wounds of exclusion open enough for new sense to grow through them.

The policing of worlds is thus never total. Every attempt at closure reveals its own fractures — the leaks where suppressed meanings return, refracted through irony, rebellion, or myth. Power can constrain the field, but relation will always exceed it. The task, then, is not to abolish universals but to universalise differently: to recognise universality itself as an emergent property of relation, not its negation.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 4 Translation as Ontological Interface — The Movement of Sense

If incommensurability marks the divergence of worlds, then translation is the gesture that reaches across it — not to bridge the gap, but to inhabit it. In the relational cosmos, translation is not a transfer of meaning from one code to another but an act of ontological interface: a play between distinct ways of constraining and actualising potential. It is not about correspondence but about coordination — how one world’s rhythm can, for a moment, touch another’s without collapsing their difference.

Traditional metaphors of translation presume stability — fixed meanings, discrete languages, equivalences to be found. But worlds do not communicate through equivalence; they meet through resonance. The translator, in this deeper sense, does not carry messages between domains but tunes into the interstitial field where meanings deform, recombine, and reorient. Translation is a relational improvisation: it sustains communication by accepting that perfect understanding is neither possible nor desirable.

Every act of translation, then, is also an act of creation. When Enlightenment rationality encounters Indigenous cosmology, when poetic imagination refracts scientific theory, or when digital code rearticulates bodily gesture, something new emerges — a third sense that belongs fully to neither world. Translation generates hybrid spaces of potential, partial articulations where worlds learn to breathe together. These are not zones of synthesis but of semiotic elasticity: the capacity of relation itself to stretch without tearing.

Such elasticity, however, demands care. To translate without reflexivity risks domination — the subsumption of one world’s logic by another’s. The colonial project, for instance, functioned as an apparatus of translation without reciprocity: a machinery for converting plural worldings into a single universal frame. A relational ethics of translation begins instead from asymmetry — from the acknowledgement that each world’s coherence depends on limits that cannot be fully traversed. The translator’s task is not to erase these limits, but to make them audible.

In this sense, translation is an ecological act. It participates in the metabolism of worlds, enabling energy and information to circulate across ontological membranes without total assimilation. It keeps the cosmos open — sustaining difference through communication, and communication through difference.

Translation as ontological interface thus reveals the deeper condition of all meaning: that it is always in motion, always negotiated, always transforming as it moves between relational fields. To translate is to play with the edges of the possible — to engage the living tension where sense itself becomes the medium of becoming.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 3 Incommensurability and Resonance — The Music of Worlds

If worlds are relational constellations of possibility — patterned coherences in the flow of becoming — then the problem of incommensurability arises wherever these patterns diverge. Scientific, mythical, aesthetic, ecological, digital: each constitutes a world not by enclosing reality but by orienting relation differently, by tuning attention to distinct gradients of potential. Their incommensurability, then, is not a failure of reason but a sign of multiplicity itself — an indication that relation can never be reduced to a single schema of coordination.

Yet incommensurability does not mean isolation. Worlds resonate. Their divergences create the intervals through which resonance becomes possible. Between scientific precision and poetic ambiguity, between economic calculation and moral imagination, there exists a space of vibrational overlap — not translation in the conventional sense, but sympathetic tension. Each world, when confronted with another, trembles slightly, reconfiguring its own sense of coherence in response.

This resonance is not additive. It is improvisational and asymmetrical. When myth encounters science, or ecology meets technology, what emerges is not synthesis but modulation — a partial alignment that rearticulates the potentials of both. Incommensurability ensures that no alignment is ever total; resonance ensures that none is ever sterile. The worlding process is thus neither harmony nor dissonance but the dynamic interplay between the two — the continual adjustment of perspectives across ontological thresholds.

From a relational standpoint, this means that incommensurability is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a medium to be lived. It is the space where sense multiplies, where the reflexive tension of coexistence makes new meaning possible. To inhabit resonance is to dwell in the uncertainty of relation — to allow the foreign vibration of another world to transform the rhythm of one’s own.

In this way, worlds are not fixed ontologies but ongoing performances of mutual attunement. Their coherence is rhythmic, not structural; sustained through continual adjustment rather than enforced unity. The music of worlds, then, is the music of relation itself: the sound of possibility reverberating across difference, never resolving into a final chord, yet endlessly reconstituting the conditions for listening.

The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 2 The Genesis of a World — From Potential to Pattern

Every world begins as a modulation within a shared medium of potential. Before there is coherence, there is field — a relational expanse in which possibilities interpenetrate, not yet distinguishable as entities or systems. The genesis of a world is thus a movement from undifferentiated potential to patterned stability, from relational flux to sustained articulation.

Yet this transition is not creation ex nihilo. It is selection through resonance. Certain relations begin to stabilise because they reinforce one another, generating feedback loops that consolidate coherence. These stabilisations — perceptual, symbolic, ecological — form the scaffolds from which a world can emerge. What we call “origin” is therefore not a singular event, but a threshold of recurrence: the moment when repetition becomes rhythm, when pattern begins to hold.

From the perspective of relational ontology, genesis is always immanent. Worlds are not imposed upon matter by external design; they self-organise through constraint, interaction, and amplification. Material processes, cognitive schemas, and symbolic grammars co-evolve, producing strata of coherence. A world takes form when these strata align sufficiently to sustain mutual intelligibility — when meaning, materiality, and agency interlock.

Crucially, each world’s genesis presupposes others. The scientific world is born out of the mythical, the economic from the ethical, the digital from the social. New ontologies are never isolated inventions; they differentiate themselves from prior relational patterns, inheriting both affordances and constraints. Genesis is therefore genealogical: each world reconfigures its ancestors’ potentials while introducing new modes of organisation.

Temporality enters here as the memory of prior coherence. A world inherits traces of what it transforms, embedding them in new configurations. The Renaissance world retained medieval cosmology even as it inverted its centre; the Enlightenment preserved theological order while secularising its logic. Every genesis is thus palimpsestic — the inscription of new relations upon old alignments, the continuation of potential under altered constraints.

To speak of genesis in this way is to replace the question “What caused the world?” with “How does coherence emerge and sustain itself?” It is to treat reality as an ecology of alignments, each poised between stability and transformation. A world is a temporary resolution in the ongoing play of potential — a pattern that endures by modulating what exceeds it.

In this light, creation is continuous. The world is always being born, not as repetition of the same, but as reiteration of possibility under evolving conditions. To perceive genesis is therefore to perceive relation itself — the field in motion, selecting, constraining, and sustaining the dance of worlds.