So far, we have treated music as a privileged case.
It is privileged not because it is exceptional, but because it is unusually transparent. Music allows us to see a form of social coordination operating at scale without the mediation of meaning. Through the modulation of readiness, biological value is lifted into social value directly.
In this post, we want to remove that privilege.
If readiness is a genuine ontological category — not a metaphor smuggled in from music — then we should expect to find it elsewhere. And indeed we do. Once named, readiness turns out to be one of the primary mechanisms by which societies coordinate action, stabilise order, and exercise power.
Ritual as the Management of Readiness
Rituals are often analysed as symbolic performances: carriers of belief, representations of cosmology, enactments of shared meaning.
But strip away the commentary, and what rituals reliably do is something simpler.
Repetition establishes expectation. Formal constraint limits deviation. Escalation and release are carefully staged. Participants are not asked to interpret; they are asked to arrive on time, move together, wait, kneel, rise, chant, or fall silent.
The efficacy of ritual does not depend on what participants believe the ritual means. It depends on the successful alignment of readiness across a group.
This is why rituals retain power even when belief wanes, doctrine fragments, or interpretation becomes contested. Meaning can drift; readiness must not.
Labour, Discipline, and Temporal Control
The same dynamics appear starkly in organised labour.
Workplaces do not function primarily through shared understanding of purpose or values. They function through the coordination of readiness: shifts, schedules, deadlines, breaks, rhythms of effort and rest.
Factory whistles, timecards, stand-up meetings, productivity metrics — these are not semiotic systems designed to persuade. They are technologies for tuning biological regulation to institutional tempo.
Even when workers resist the meanings attached to work, their bodies are still entrained. Readiness is shaped regardless of belief.
Power here is exercised temporally, not symbolically.
Politics Without Persuasion
Political theory tends to overestimate the role of persuasion and understate the role of coordination.
Mass politics is often explained in terms of ideology, narrative, and rhetoric. Yet large-scale political events — rallies, marches, strikes, curfews, states of emergency — operate first by modulating readiness.
Crowds assemble. Attention is focused. Thresholds for action are lowered or raised. Windows of possibility are opened or closed.
Slogans and speeches matter, but they ride on a more basic substrate: bodies being prepared to move, to wait, to endure, or to act together.
A population that is perpetually exhausted, overstimulated, or kept in suspense is not being persuaded. It is being managed.
Readiness and the Exercise of Power
Seen through this lens, power is not only the capacity to shape belief or meaning.
It is the capacity to regulate readiness.
Who controls tempo? Who sets the schedule? Who decides when escalation is permitted and when release is allowed? These questions cut closer to the mechanics of power than debates about ideology alone.
Importantly, readiness-based power is often invisible precisely because it does not speak in symbols. It operates through infrastructure, procedure, repetition, and delay.
Music made this visible because it was honest about what it was doing. Other institutions are not.
The Danger of Meaning-Centrism
A culture that treats meaning as the primary vector of social influence will systematically miss these dynamics.
By focusing on discourse, belief, and interpretation, it will overlook the ways bodies are synchronised, fatigued, accelerated, or held in suspense. Resistance will be framed as counter-argument, when what is often required is counter-coordination.
This is not an argument against meaning. Semiotic systems matter. They do real work.
But they do not do all the work.
From Music Back to Possibility
Music was never the destination of this inquiry. It was the opening.
By attending to how music modulates readiness without meaning, we gain a lens for understanding how possibility itself is shaped in social systems. Possibility does not evolve only through new ideas or interpretations, but through changes in timing, threshold, and coordination.
In the final post of this series, we will return to this larger frame, asking what it would mean to take readiness seriously as a driver of social change — and how this reframes the relation between meaning, value, and the becoming of possibility.
For now, the conclusion is unsettling but clear:
Societies are held together less by what they believethan by how they are prepared to act — together.
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