In the previous posts, we argued that music neither construes meaning nor communicates content. Instead, it activates biological value and coordinates that activation socially. We then introduced readiness as the missing concept that makes sense of this capacity.
In this post, we want to do something deliberately unfashionable.
Rather than offering further examples or metaphors, we will formalise readiness almost axiomatically — not as a mathematical system, but as a set of ontological commitments. The aim is not precision for its own sake, but constraint: to say clearly what readiness must be if it is to do the work we have already seen it doing.
Axiom 1: Readiness Is Not Itself Meaning
Readiness does not construe phenomena. It does not differentiate experience into recognisable kinds, nor does it make anything available for interpretation or reference as meaning.
Readiness may include orientation toward meaning — toward sense, significance, or symbolic articulation — but it is not itself a semiotic act. It prepares potential for action before any phenomenon is stabilised as something that can be paraphrased, argued about, or denied.
If a state can be paraphrased, argued about, or denied, it is not readiness.
Readiness precedes any question of sense or truth. It is a condition for action and coordination, not a content of understanding.
Axiom 2: Readiness Is Relational, Not Internal
Readiness does not reside inside a subject.
It is a relational configuration between systems: bodies, artefacts, environments, temporal patterns. A listener is not “ready” in isolation; readiness is distributed across rhythmic cues, spatial arrangements, expectations, and collective timing.
To speak of readiness is therefore to speak of between-ness, not interior state.
Axiom 3: Readiness Is Temporal Through and Through
Readiness is not a snapshot condition.
It consists in the shaping of when something can occur: thresholds of anticipation, tolerances of delay, capacities for acceleration or suspension. A system is ready for what comes next, not for what already is.
Any account of music — or coordination more generally — that ignores temporality cannot account for readiness.
Axiom 4: Readiness Is Graded, Not Categorical
Readiness does not switch on or off.
It accumulates, saturates, dissipates, and resets. It can be heightened, strained, deferred, or collapsed. These gradations are precisely what musical systems manipulate so effectively.
Binary descriptions (“tense/relaxed”, “prepared/unprepared”) are retrospective simplifications, not the operative reality.
Axiom 5: Readiness Is Action-Biased
Readiness always leans toward action.
This does not mean that action must occur — only that readiness shapes the space of possible actions. It biases systems toward certain transitions rather than others.
Importantly, readiness does not specify which action will take place. It prepares a field; it does not script behaviour.
Axiom 6: Readiness Can Be Shared Without Agreement
Readiness does not require consensus, interpretation, or belief.
Multiple systems can be aligned in readiness even while disagreeing about meaning, intention, or value. What is shared is timing and threshold, not understanding.
This is why music can coordinate strangers, enemies, or machines as effectively as communities with rich shared cultures.
Axiom 7: Readiness Is the Bridge Between Biological and Social Value
Readiness is where biological regulation becomes socially consequential.
Through shared modulation of readiness, individual regulatory systems become temporarily coupled. Biological value — arousal, anticipation, release — is lifted into social value without being transformed into meaning.
No symbols are required for this transition.
What This Buys Us
Taken together, these axioms describe readiness as a non-semiotic, temporal, relational condition of structured possibility.
This explains why music can:
coordinate action without instruction,
sustain collective practices without doctrine,
and generate powerful social effects without semantic content.
Music is not unique in this respect — but it is unusually transparent.
In the next post, we will turn to a decisive stress test for this account: machine-generated music. When expression, intention, and biological affect are stripped away, what remains is readiness itself — bare, operational, and unmistakable.
For now, the claim can be stated plainly:
Meaning tells us what something is.Readiness prepares us for what can happen.
Confusing the two has obscured the nature of music for a very long time.
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