Individuation in Structured Potential: 1 — System as Ontology

1. System and the Question of Being

In systemic functional linguistics, a system is not a collection of things. It is a structured set of options — a theory of possible instances. An instance is not a fragment of a substance; it is a selection within that structured potential.

This relation is typically treated as methodological: a way of modelling language. But taken seriously, it carries ontological weight.

If a system is a structured potential for instances, then what we call “actual” is always already understood as a narrowing within a field of possibility.

The instance does not stand apart from the system. It is the system viewed from the pole of actualisation.

From the opposite pole, the system is the instance viewed as potential.

This is not a temporal sequence. The system does not first exist and then produce instances. Nor do instances accumulate to form a system. The relation is perspectival.

The system is a theory of its possible instances.

An instance is that theory narrowed.

If this holds, then ontology cannot begin from substance. It must begin from structured potential.

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2. Potential Without Substrate

“Potential” here does not mean an underlying material waiting to be shaped. It does not imply a hidden reservoir of pre-existing stuff. It refers to organisation — to patterned openness.

To say that reality is structured potential is to say that what exists is not a collection of self-subsistent entities, but a dynamic organisation of possible actualisations.

An instance, then, is not a thing added to the world.

It is a construal — a perspectival narrowing within structured possibility.

There is no unconstrued phenomenon waiting behind this process. Phenomenon is first-order meaning: experience as construed.

The cut from potential to instance is not a change in substance. It is a shift in perspective.

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3. The Clines of Actualisation

Once we abandon substance as the starting point, the familiar dichotomy between the individual and the collective becomes unstable.

If what exists is structured potential, then any “entity” must be understood as a relative stabilisation within that potential.

Stability becomes a matter of density — of repeated narrowing along particular paths of selection.

But at this stage we must proceed carefully.

Density is not mass.

Stability is not isolation.

Organisation is not container.

We are not describing objects in space.

We are describing patterned actualisations within a theory of possibility.

Individuation, if it is to be coherent in such a framework, cannot mean separation from the field. It must mean a particular configuration of narrowing within it.

This will require further development.

For now, it is enough to observe:

If system and instance are understood ontologically, then being is not substance but structured potential — and what we call the actual is that potential viewed from the pole of selection.

The implications of this shift are considerable.