If the cut names the ontological condition under which meaning becomes determinate, then instantiation names the form that determination takes. It is here that many accounts falter, because instantiation is almost reflexively treated as a process: something that unfolds in time, produces novelty, or brings an abstract structure into concrete existence.
That picture will not do.
Instantiation, as it is being used here, is not a temporal transition from potential to actuality. Nothing moves, nothing develops, nothing is realised in the sense of coming into being. To treat instantiation this way is to import a causal narrative that misdescribes what is at stake.
Instantiation is a perspectival cut.
To say that a system is instantiated is not to say that it has produced an outcome. It is to say that the system is being encountered as an instance. The system does not change; the perspective does. What appears under that perspective is a phenomenon: a first-order meaning, determinate and intelligible.
This requires a shift in how systems themselves are understood. A system, in this framework, is not a thing that exists alongside its instances. It is a structured potential: a theory of its possible instantiations. The system does not sit behind its instances as a hidden mechanism, nor does it hover above them as an abstract schema. It exists precisely as the space of distinctions that could be cut.
Under a particular cut, the system is seen as this instance rather than another. That instance does not exhaust the system. On the contrary, the system remains fully intact as unrealised possibility. Instantiation does not consume potential; it presupposes it.
This is why instantiation cannot be a process. Processes have stages, trajectories, and outcomes. But an instance is not the end-point of a sequence. It is a perspectival articulation of a system that remains what it was. To speak of instantiation is therefore not to narrate a history, but to mark a relation.
Seen this way, the familiar opposition between abstract and concrete begins to dissolve. The system is not “abstract” in contrast to the “concreteness” of its instances. Nor is the instance merely a degraded or partial version of the system. The difference is not one of substance, but of mode of intelligibility. The system is intelligible as potential; the instance is intelligible as phenomenon.
This has an important consequence: instances are not less real than systems, nor more real. They are real in different ways. The system is real as structured possibility; the instance is real as actualised perspective. Neither has ontological priority in the sense of being more fundamental. What matters is the relation between them.
It also follows that instantiation is not creative in the sense often attributed to it. No new structure is introduced at the moment of instantiation. What appears was already available as possibility. What changes is that one articulation becomes foregrounded while others recede into background. The novelty of experience is not the creation of form, but the selection of form under a cut.
This selection, however, must not be mistaken for choice. There is no agent standing outside the system selecting among options. The cut is constrained by the system’s own structure. Only distinctions that are available within the system can be instantiated. Instantiation is therefore neither free invention nor mechanical determination. It is the system seen under conditions that make one articulation salient.
From this perspective, the familiar question “how does the abstract become concrete?” is revealed as ill-posed. Nothing becomes anything else. There is no transformation to explain. What needs explanation is only how a single articulation can appear as determinate against a field of alternatives. The answer is: by a cut.
Instantiation, then, is not an operation performed on a system. It is the system under a perspective. To encounter an instance is to encounter the system in a way that makes one configuration intelligible while leaving others implicit. The instance is not a product of the system; it is the system, constrained by a cut.
This reframing also clarifies why no instance can ever be final. Because the system persists as possibility, further instantiations remain available. Each instance is complete as a phenomenon, but incomplete as an account of the system. There is no privileged instantiation that captures the system “as it really is”, because the system is not the sort of thing that could be captured that way.
In the next post, this relation between instantiation and exclusion will be examined more closely. If every instance foregrounds one articulation, it necessarily backgrounds others. The question, then, is whether this exclusion should be understood as loss, negation, or violence—or whether it is the very condition under which meaning can be sustained at all.
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