In the previous post, we established that instantiation is a perspectival cut: the system is seen as a particular instance, intelligible against a field of unrealised possibilities. This inevitably raises a question: if one articulation is foregrounded, what becomes of the rest? Are the excluded possibilities lost, negated, or somehow diminished?
The natural temptation is to treat exclusion as a form of erasure or violence. Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and theorists of interpretation alike often frame exclusion in moral or causal terms: what is not actualised is assumed to be destroyed, or at least suppressed. This is a conceptual error that must be corrected.
Exclusion, in the framework of perspectival instantiation, is not loss.
To see why, recall what a system is: a structured field of potential, a theory of possible instances. The system is not consumed by its instantiations. One instance does not exhaust what can appear; it only foregrounds one articulation. The system remains intact as the source of further possibilities. What is excluded is therefore not annihilated—it is unrealised potential. Its presence persists, but in a latent mode.
This distinction matters. To treat exclusion as loss is to conflate foregrounding with destruction. Actualisation of one instance does not subtract from the system; it merely shifts the mode in which certain potentials are experienced. Exclusion is a structural necessity, not a deficiency. Without exclusion, nothing could appear at all. If all possibilities were present simultaneously, nothing would be intelligible; the field would collapse into undifferentiated openness.
Put differently: what is excluded is what makes foregrounding meaningful. If we remove the unrealised possibilities from consideration, the instance itself loses its character. The determinate, the perceptible, and the experienced are intelligible only against what remains in the background. Exclusion is not a diminishment, but the condition of meaning itself.
Consider an analogy in language. When a speaker chooses a word, they articulate one possibility from a nearly infinite set of options. The other options are not destroyed—they remain potential for future speech acts, for other contexts, for other meanings. The choice is not violent; it is what allows the chosen word to mean anything at all. Exclusion without loss is the engine of intelligibility.
This principle extends beyond language. In perception, a figure emerges against a background. In music, a note is heard against silence or other tones. In thought, a distinction highlights one aspect of a problem while leaving others implicit. At every level, the same logic holds: foregrounding presupposes backgrounding, and the backgrounded is not lost; it sustains the foregrounded.
It is important to note that exclusion is not optional. Any instance necessarily excludes alternatives; there is no instance without exclusion. The appearance of phenomena depends on it. And yet, the excluded possibilities remain fully real, fully present as potential, fully available for future instantiation. The cut does not destroy; it articulates.
Exclusion without loss also clarifies a common misunderstanding about determinacy. When a phenomenon appears as intelligible, it may seem that something has been “fixed” or “resolved” in reality. But determinacy is always perspectival. What appears determined under one cut remains only one articulation of the system. The system itself retains all other potentials, untouched and unconstrained except by the internal structure that makes them intelligible.
This principle prepares us for the next step. If exclusion is productive rather than destructive, we can examine phenomena as they appear: not as static objects, but as first-order meanings that emerge within the interplay of foreground and background. Only then can we fully articulate why phenomena are not things, and why the cut is both unavoidable and generative.
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