There is a small complication in our recent discussion that turns out to clarify something important.
In The Nucleus of Becoming, we deliberately restricted our attention to saying and sensing. This gave us a particularly clean configuration because the Sayer and Senser are both Mediums. We could therefore follow the same participant through successive symbolic processes while keeping the Nucleus clearly in view.
But an instantial participant is not restricted to one kind of participation.
Once we look beyond saying and sensing, the same participant may occur as Medium in one figure, Agent in another, Beneficiary in another, and Range in another.
At first sight, this might seem to create a problem.
If the participant persists, shouldn't its role persist too?
The answer is no.
And the reason is rather important.
Participant persistence is not persistence of participant role.
The participant and its role
Consider a very simple sequence:
I heard the explanation.
I considered the argument.
You gave me another example.
I changed my interpretation.
My question clarified the issue.
The participant associated with I, me and my remains identifiable across the sequence.
But its participation does not remain constant.
In one figure, it is Medium.
In another, it is Medium again.
In another, it is Beneficiary.
In another, it may be Medium in a different processual configuration.
And in other kinds of discourse, the same instantial participant could occur in still other roles.
The participant persists.
Its way of participating changes.
There is no contradiction here.
Indeed, this is precisely what we should expect of a participant that persists across an unfolding instance.
The Nucleus is local
The distinction becomes clearer if we separate two levels of analysis.
Within an individual figure, the ergative Nucleus gives us the relation between:
Process + Medium
The Process unfolds.
The Medium is the participant through which it is actualised.
The complementarity is therefore:
unfolding + persistence.
But this is a relation within the figure.
The instantial participant belongs to a different question:
What participant persists across the succession of figures that constitutes the unfolding instance?
Once we ask that question, there is no reason for the participant to remain Medium.
The participant can enter successive figures in different ways.
The Nucleus therefore gives us the local relation between Process and Medium, while logogenesis allows us to trace a participant across successive figures.
These are complementary perspectives, not competing ones.
Persistence does not mean stasis
This also helps us avoid a possible misunderstanding of persistence.
To persist is not to remain unchanged.
A participant that could never change would not be a particularly interesting participant.
What makes continuity intelligible is precisely that something can be different while remaining identifiable as the same participant.
We can therefore distinguish:
persistence of the participant
from:
variation in its participation.
The first provides continuity.
The second provides change.
Together they make history possible.
This is the same complementarity we encountered in the Nucleus itself.
The Process unfolds.
The Medium persists.
But now, across successive figures:
the participant persists,
while:
its roles can change.
That is what allows an instantial participant to have a history rather than merely a repeated occurrence.
Why this matters for the “I”
The distinction is particularly important for the self-like participant we have been tracing in LLM discourse.
The I does not persist because it is always a Senser.
Nor does it persist because it is always a Medium.
It persists because the same instantial participant can be traced across different processes and different modes of participation.
It can:
say,
sense,
receive,
act,
be affected,
participate in relations,
and so forth, depending on the figures through which the instance unfolds.
The continuity of the I therefore cannot be reduced to continuity of any particular participant role.
What persists is the participant.
What changes is how that participant participates.
This actually strengthens the notion of the instantial participant
There is an important consequence here.
If an instantial participant had to retain the same role throughout an instance, the concept would be rather limited.
We could follow:
the same Medium through successive processes,
but we would have difficulty explaining how one participant could remain continuous while participating in qualitatively different configurations.
Yet that is exactly what ordinary discourse does.
A person can:
say something,
hear something,
receive something,
give something,
experience something,
change something,
and become the object or beneficiary of something else.
We nevertheless understand these processes as involving one continuing participant.
The instantial participant is therefore not the participant that always plays the same role.
It is the participant that persists through changing roles.
That is a much more powerful notion.
A small correction to our earlier focus
This also lets us see why our restriction to Sayer and Senser in The Nucleus of Becoming was useful without being general.
It gave us a controlled environment in which the relation between the Nucleus and participant persistence could be seen particularly clearly.
But it was a special case.
Both Sayer and Senser are Mediums, so the distinction between:
persistence of the participant
and:
persistence of its role
remained largely invisible.
Once we widen the field, the distinction appears.
And it is worth making explicit because otherwise we might accidentally attribute to the instantial participant a property that belongs only to the particular figures we happened to be examining.
From role to continuity
We can now refine our earlier trajectory.
We began with the participant as part of a figure:
participant in relation to Process
The Nucleus then gave us:
Process + Medium
with its complementarity of:
unfolding + persistence.
Following participants across an unfolding instance gave us:
persistence across figures.
But that persistence does not require:
persistence of role.
Instead:
one participant → changing roles → continuing identity
is precisely what makes the instantial participant visible.
And this matters because the participant's history is constituted not simply by the processes that occur, but by the different ways in which the participant participates in those processes.
The participant persists; its participation changes
Perhaps, then, the cleanest formulation is also the simplest:
The participant persists; its participation changes.
This is not a problem for our account.
It is what makes the account work.
The participant could not have a history if it could not change.
It could not have continuity if it did not persist.
The instantial participant is therefore the point at which these two possibilities meet:
continuity through variation.
And that gives us a final refinement of the lesson of The Nucleus of Becoming.
The important thing about persistence is not that nothing changes.
It is that change can be construed as belonging to something that persists through it.
The participant does not have to remain the same role in order to remain the same participant.
Indeed, it is precisely because its roles can change that its persistence becomes theoretically interesting.
Persistence is not the absence of change.
It is what makes change belong to a participant that persists through it.
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