We have now reached the point at which individuals begin to matter to one another in a rather different way.
A social topology consists of relations among value-organised participants.
An individual inhabits that topology through a particular history of participation.
That history develops a repertoire.
The repertoire makes some relations, distinctions and pathways more readily available than others.
But a topology is not simply a collection of isolated trajectories.
Participants can discover that they repeatedly respond to the same situations in compatible ways.
They can rely upon one another.
Coordinate their activity.
Share practices.
Recognise similar possibilities.
Gradually, a pattern of alignment can emerge.
This gives us our next question:
How does affiliation arise within a topology of mattering?
Affiliation is not the same as similarity
It would be tempting to say that people affiliate because they are similar.
But similarity is not enough.
Two people can have very similar repertoires and never interact.
Two people can have very different repertoires and nevertheless cooperate closely.
Affiliation is therefore better understood relationally.
Perhaps:
affiliation begins when participants become recurrently consequential to one another around sufficiently overlapping patterns of mattering.
The overlap need not be complete.
Nor need it be consciously recognised.
What matters first is that their participation fits together.
Finding our neighbours
The title of this post is deliberately spatial.
In a topology, a neighbour is not necessarily someone physically close.
A neighbour is someone whose position is relationally near.
In a social topology, this might mean that two participants:
depend upon similar relations;
participate in overlapping practices;
respond to similar situations;
share important pathways through the system;
or repeatedly affect one another's possibilities.
They may live on opposite sides of a city.
They may never meet.
Yet they can occupy neighbouring regions of social mattering.
Conversely, two people can work side by side while being topologically distant.
Physical proximity and social proximity are not the same thing.
Affiliation begins in coordination
Consider a very simple case.
Two people repeatedly find themselves needing to coordinate.
They discover that each can rely upon the other's response.
Their actions become mutually predictable.
A pattern develops.
The pattern makes further coordination easier.
Eventually, they may seek one another out because their repertoires fit the relation.
Nothing symbolic has necessarily happened yet.
The affiliation begins as a pattern of successful coupling.
Only later may someone call it friendship, partnership, alliance or membership.
Shared mattering
A stronger form of affiliation arises when participants repeatedly encounter situations in which similar things matter to them.
Again, we should be cautious.
This does not mean they possess identical values.
Two people may both care about a child's welfare for quite different reasons.
Two workers may both care about the success of an organisation while construing their own responsibilities differently.
Two citizens may both care about social stability while disagreeing profoundly about how stability should be achieved.
What they share may therefore be less a value itself than a region of mattering.
Their repertoires overlap around a particular configuration of consequences.
Overlapping repertoires
This gives repertoire a particularly important role.
Two repertoires need not be identical.
They only need sufficient overlap for participants to recognise one another's actions as intelligible and consequential within a shared field.
We might therefore think of affiliation as something like:
recurrent coupling supported by overlapping repertoires.
The overlap provides a basis for coordination.
The coordination strengthens the relationship.
The relationship creates further shared experience.
That experience can enlarge the overlap.
Affiliation can therefore become self-reinforcing.
A repertoire can expand through affiliation
Affiliation does not merely depend upon prior repertoire.
It can transform repertoire.
A person joins a musical ensemble and learns new ways of listening.
Someone enters a profession and acquires new practices.
A newcomer to a community learns its expectations.
A member of a political movement acquires its concepts and narratives.
The individual's repertoire expands through participation.
So the relation is recursive:
overlap enables affiliation → affiliation expands repertoire → expanded repertoire enables deeper affiliation
A group can therefore become more internally coherent over time without its members ever becoming identical.
The emergence of a "we"
At some point, recurrent affiliation can become collectively recognisable.
Participants begin to distinguish:
we
from:
they.
This is an important transition.
The relational pattern has acquired a boundary.
The boundary need not initially be symbolic.
It may simply consist in differences of participation:
who helps whom;
who shares whose practices;
who can rely upon whom;
who responds to whose signals.
But once the pattern becomes salient, it can become available for explicit construal.
The social "we" can acquire a name.
From relation to membership
This is where the distinction between affiliation and membership becomes useful.
Affiliation can exist before formal membership.
A person can participate in the relations of a group without possessing an official category.
Conversely, someone can have formal membership without strong affiliation.
A member may rarely participate.
A participant may not be formally recognised.
The topology therefore gives us a more fundamental concept:
membership is a symbolic or institutional recognition of an already existing pattern of affiliation.
That is a hypothesis worth testing rather than a universal law.
But it allows us to keep the order of emergence clear.
Boundaries become meaningful
Once a stable "we" develops, a boundary becomes more salient.
Some participants are routinely included.
Others are excluded.
Some can enter easily.
Others require initiation.
Some are permanently outside.
The boundary may be based upon practice, trust, kinship, competence, geography, law or symbolic identity.
The topology gives us the relational substrate.
Meaning can later turn the boundary into a category:
insider / outsider,
citizen / foreigner,
member / non-member,
colleague / stranger.
The boundary has become symbolically legible.
Affiliation can occur without a name
This is important because it keeps the argument below the level of explicit ideology.
A group of people can repeatedly cooperate around a common task without naming themselves as a group.
A neighbourhood can develop shared practices without a formal organisation.
Friends can form an enduring social unit without a declaration.
A movement can exist before it chooses a name.
The pattern of mattering can precede its symbolic articulation.
This is another instance of:
mattering → meaning
rather than the reverse.
But affiliation is not always harmonious
Nor does affiliation require agreement.
Participants can disagree strongly and still occupy a shared region of mattering.
Indeed, some groups depend upon disagreement.
A scientific community contains competing hypotheses.
A political movement contains factions.
A family contains conflict.
An organisation contains disputes.
What holds the affiliation together is not identity of opinion.
It is a sufficiently stable relational configuration.
People continue to matter to one another in ways that sustain participation.
Conflict can strengthen a boundary
Sometimes disagreement sharpens affiliation.
A dispute makes differences visible.
Participants discover what they will defend.
The boundary between groups becomes more salient.
The groups may become more internally coordinated as a result.
This can create a paradox:
conflict between affiliations can strengthen affiliation within each.
The topology is therefore not necessarily smoother when relations are harmonious.
Competition and opposition can produce highly stable regions.
Affiliation can be layered
A person can belong to several overlapping affiliations.
Family.
Profession.
Friendship.
Local community.
Cultural tradition.
Political movement.
Each affiliation is a different region or pattern within the broader topology.
The overlaps can be extensive.
Sometimes they reinforce one another.
Sometimes they conflict.
A person can therefore experience social life as participation in several intersecting topologies of mattering.
This is one reason simple group categories can be misleading.
The same individual can occupy quite different relational positions in different systems.
Nested and overlapping affiliations
Some affiliations are nested.
A person belongs to a department within a university, which belongs to a university, which belongs to a national system.
Others overlap without nesting.
A person can belong simultaneously to a profession and a political movement.
The boundaries cross.
The topology is therefore unlikely to resemble a collection of isolated clusters.
It may be better imagined as a set of overlapping regions and pathways.
Why shared values can mislead us
This gives us a reason to be cautious about statements such as:
"These people share the value of freedom."
Perhaps they do.
But that tells us little about the structure of their affiliation.
What matters is what relations surround that value.
Freedom may be connected to:
autonomy,
non-interference,
property,
self-government,
collective liberation,
protection from domination,
opportunity,
or something else.
The word alone does not locate someone in the topology.
Their surrounding configuration does.
The same value, different neighbourhoods
This may become especially important when we eventually approach political affiliation.
Two groups can use the same vocabulary while inhabiting different topological regions.
Both may speak of:
freedom,
equality,
security,
justice.
But the relations through which these matter may differ radically.
One group's freedom may depend upon reducing external constraint.
Another's may depend upon increasing collective capacity.
One group's security may depend upon stable hierarchy.
Another's upon social provision.
The surface vocabulary can be shared.
The topology around it can be different.
Affiliation as a trajectory
Affiliation may also be dynamic.
People can move between groups.
They can become more deeply involved.
They can drift away.
They can occupy several affiliations at once.
A group can itself move through the social topology as circumstances change.
So affiliation should not be represented simply as a fixed point.
It may be better understood as a trajectory of recurrent participation.
What matters is not merely where someone is, but where their relations are taking them.
The role of transitions
This raises an important question.
What allows someone to move from one region to another?
Sometimes a new relationship.
Sometimes a change in circumstance.
Sometimes a new repertoire.
Sometimes a crisis.
Sometimes an institution deliberately recruits new participants.
Sometimes an affiliation itself creates the repertoire needed for entry.
The transition is therefore not merely spatial.
It is a transformation of the individual's capacity to participate.
Affiliation and learning
This means that affiliation is partly educational.
To join a group is often to learn its ways of acting.
Its expectations.
Its practices.
Its distinctions.
Its history.
Its language.
Its symbols.
The repertoire expands.
The boundary becomes more intelligible.
The participant becomes more deeply coupled to the group.
This helps explain why mature affiliations can become remarkably resilient.
Leaving them is not simply a matter of changing an opinion.
It may require reorganising a large portion of one's repertoire.
Affiliation can become identity
At some point, affiliation can become symbolically construed as an identity.
A participant is no longer simply someone who repeatedly occupies a relational pattern.
They can say:
I am one of them.
The affiliation now has a symbolic form.
The collective can acquire a name.
A flag.
A story.
A ritual.
A set of explicit norms.
The topology has received a symbolic map.
This is one of the major transitions we will explore next.
But identity can also reshape affiliation
Once affiliation has become symbolic, the relation feeds back.
A name can recruit new participants.
A symbol can strengthen coordination.
A narrative can reinterpret the group's history.
A boundary can become more rigid.
An institution can formalise membership.
The symbolic articulation can therefore change the social topology that produced it.
This is the beginning of the feedback from meaning to mattering.
Towards politics
We are now close to a question that has been waiting in the background.
Political affiliations are among the most symbolically elaborate forms of social alignment.
People join parties, movements and causes.
They inherit narratives.
They learn concepts.
They adopt symbols.
They recognise allies.
They identify opponents.
But beneath these explicit forms, there are patterns of mattering.
Some things matter enough to coordinate action.
Some relationships are regarded as just.
Others as threatening.
Some forms of dependence are accepted.
Others rejected.
Political affiliation may therefore be a symbolically elaborated configuration of social mattering.
We are not yet ready to test this.
But the topology gives us a place to begin.
The emergence of a social "neighbourhood"
We can now return to our title.
Finding our neighbours does not mean discovering people who think exactly as we do.
It means discovering participants whose patterns of mattering overlap sufficiently with ours to support recurrent affiliation.
A neighbour may disagree with us.
They may occupy a different role.
They may have a different repertoire.
What brings us together is that our trajectories through the social topology repeatedly intersect.
That is a much richer conception of social belonging than shared opinion.
What we have established
We began with a social topology constituted by relations among value-organised participants.
Individuals inhabit it through repertoires.
Some repertoires overlap.
Overlapping capacities make recurrent coordination easier.
Coordination produces shared experience.
Shared experience can stabilise affiliation.
Affiliation can become a socially recognised "we".
The "we" can acquire boundaries.
The boundaries can become symbolically articulated as membership and identity.
And once they do, the symbolic forms can feed back into the topology.
The movement is therefore:
topology → repertoire → overlap → recurrent affiliation → symbolic articulation → transformed topology
The next question
We have deliberately stopped just before the threshold of explicit meaning.
But now that threshold is unavoidable.
What happens when the patterns through which people matter to one another become named, narrated, classified and symbolised?
When an affiliation acquires a concept of itself?
When a social relation becomes a value in words?
When a "we" becomes an identity?
When a pattern of mattering becomes an ideology?
That is the transition Halliday leaves us with when he says that a semiotic system is a social system in which value has been further transformed into meaning.
The next question is therefore:
How does mattering become meaning?
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