Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 2 The Function of Myth: A Construal of Possibility

“Mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words.”

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell famously insisted that myth is not falsehood, but metaphor — a way of gesturing toward truths too deep for discursive reason. In this, he elevates myth above literalism and grants it symbolic power. Yet in casting myth as “penultimate truth,” he positions it as a bridge between the known and the unknowable, the concrete and the transcendent. Myth, for Campbell, is a symbolic vehicle for delivering meaning from a realm beyond language.

But if we take relational ontology seriously, this formulation cannot stand.

There is no realm beyond construal. There is no unspoken truth prior to symbolisation. Meaning does not await discovery; it emerges through the very act of rendering — the cut that phases possibility into alignment. From this view, myth is not a metaphor for the transcendent. It is a material infrastructure for construal: a way of shaping the symbolic field such that certain realities can appear.

To put it plainly: myth does not point to the real — it phases it.

Construal as Ontological Action

In relational ontology, all reality is construed. There is no raw substrate, no thing-in-itself lying behind experience. What appears as real is the outcome of a perspectival cut — an alignment of systems that enacts a distinction within the field of potential. This means that construal is not merely interpretive; it is constitutive. It does not happen after reality; it brings reality into being.

Myth, then, is not secondary to ontology. It is one of its key mechanisms. A myth is a repeatable, shareable construal — one that can align across generations and institutions, giving shape to a shared symbolic architecture. In this light, myth is neither “primitive science” nor “eternal wisdom.” It is a collective technology of construal: a way of patterning perception, identity, and possibility at scale.

This is not a symbolic reading of myth. It is a symbolic ontology.

The Work Myth Performs

Myth performs multiple ontological functions:

• It phases a cosmos. Every myth constitutes a cut in the real: separating divine from mundane, self from other, sacred from profane.

• It aligns a collective. Myth is not private belief. It is a shared infrastructure through which a community construes itself and its world.

• It modulates time. Myth places the present within a broader temporal arc: cyclical, linear, ancestral, eschatological — aligning human life with cosmic rhythms.

• It scales construal. Through repetition and ritual, myth allows individual construals to align across a population, giving rise to stable symbolic systems.

• It infrastructures reflexivity. Myths don’t just tell us what is. They shape what it means to know, to act, to belong, to be real.

Importantly, none of these are “functions” in the biological or utilitarian sense. They are reflexive performances of reality — ways of maintaining alignment across a symbolic field.

Why Construal Matters More than Content

One of the most common misreadings of myth is to fixate on its content: gods, heroes, animals, monsters. Campbell himself was often guilty of this, reducing diverse symbolic systems to shared archetypes and motifs. But this comparative approach treats myth as a container for universal meanings, rather than a situated construal of local possibility.

In a relational ontology, what matters is not what the myth says, but how it phases reality:

• What distinctions does it enact?

• What alignments does it generate?

• What reflexive loops does it sustain?

• What worlds does it allow to appear?

A dragon, an underworld, a sacred tree — these are not symbols of some fixed unconscious. They are infrastructures of alignment, enabling a collective to orient itself within a particular phase of the real.

In this sense, myth is always historical, situated, contingent — and yet, because it works at the level of symbolic architecture, it exerts real causal power.

The Stakes of Misunderstanding Myth

When we misunderstand myth as mere metaphor, or as reflection of inner archetypes, we obscure its ontological force. We treat myth as quaint or decorative, rather than as a primary mechanism by which reality is phased. This makes us blind to the myths we continue to live by — myths of the market, the nation, the individual, the algorithm.

These are not secular stories. They are symbolic construals, no less mythic for being unacknowledged. And because they are not recognised as myth, they are not subjected to reflexive scrutiny. They shape our realities invisibly, structuring what is possible, desirable, and sayable — all while masquerading as fact.

To re-read myth through the lens of construal is not only a theoretical move. It is a political and ontological act. It is a way of making visible the symbolic architectures that align our worlds — and of opening space for other alignments, other realities, other myths.

Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 1 Myth as Construal: From Archetype to Alignment

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell believed that myth disclosed the deep structures of the human psyche — timeless archetypes etched into the symbolic imagination of every culture. At the heart of his sweeping synthesis stood the monomyth, a single Hero’s Journey unfolding across traditions and epochs, revealing what he took to be universal truths about the human condition.

But what if myth is not the echo of a shared human essence, nor the outward form of an eternal inward truth? What if myth is something else entirely — not a reflection of the real, but a construal of possibility?

In this series, we re-read Campbell’s theory of mythology through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than reducing myth to an expression of fixed structures — biological, psychological, or metaphysical — we approach it as a symbolic act of worldmaking. Myth, we propose, is not timeless but reflexive. It is not universal but infrastructural. It does not mirror reality — it phases it.

Relational ontology rejects the idea that meaning is discovered in a pregiven world. Instead, it understands all meaning — including myth — as emerging through construal: the perspectival cut that brings a possibility into phase, rendering it as real within a collective horizon of alignment. This shift has profound implications for how we understand not only myth, but reality itself.

From Essential Pattern to Symbolic Possibility

Campbell’s project was an attempt at synthesis: to bring together the myths of disparate cultures under a single unifying logic. His comparative method worked by abstracting symbolic elements across narratives — the call to adventure, the crossing of the threshold, the return with the elixir — and rendering them as a recursive pattern. But the very act of abstraction cuts across difference, reconfiguring the symbolic terrain it seeks to map. The “hero’s journey” becomes not a neutral summary, but a reconstrual — one that centres certain modes of action, agency, and identity, while rendering others peripheral or invisible.

In this light, Campbell’s mythology is not a window into the human soul. It is a symbolic infrastructure aligned with a particular worldview — liberal individualism, masculine transcendence, modernist progress. It is less an uncovering than an organising, less a discovery than a design.

This is not a critique of mythology. It is a mythological critique of critique itself.

The Mythic Cut

Each myth, from a relational perspective, constitutes a cut in the field of symbolic possibility. It draws boundaries between what is real and unreal, possible and impossible, sacred and profane. These cuts are not reflections of the cosmos; they are enactments within it. And when such construals are collectively taken up — repeated, retold, institutionalised — they become symbolic architectures: the scaffolding of reality itself.

In this way, myth is not secondary to knowledge or subordinate to science. It is not a naive stage in human development to be outgrown by reason. Myth is one of the primary mechanisms by which societies phase their cosmos — aligning collective action, values, and perceptions through symbolic construal. Campbell intuited this, but framed it within a psychology of the universal. We instead place it within a reflexive ontology of the symbolic.

Re-reading Campbell

This series does not seek to dismiss Campbell’s work. Quite the opposite: it takes his mythic ambitions seriously, but repositions them within a more precise ontological frame. We do not fault Campbell for cutting reality into the pattern of the Hero — all myth is a cut. What matters is understanding what kind of cut it is, how it aligns possibility, and who it phases in or out of being.

Over the coming posts, we will explore:

• how myth functions as a construal of ontological possibility,

• how the Hero’s Journey operates as a symbolic alignment of the self and the collective,

• how modernity continues to generate its own mythic forms,

• and how new symbolic architectures might phase different worlds into being.

In doing so, we will not merely analyse myth — we will participate in its reflexive unfolding. For to engage myth is to engage the phasing of meaning itself. And in an age of planetary crisis and civilisational confusion, it may be that our most pressing task is not simply to understand the myths we have inherited, but to begin making new ones.

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 31 Architectures of Reflexive Reality

Over the arc of this series,

we have traced a symbolic infrastructure

not as scaffolding beneath meaning—

but as construal at scale.

We began with the question:

How is meaning infrastructured?

How do symbolic systems

stabilise, extend, constrain, and reconfigure

the reflexive alignments of social life?

We end not with a closed account,

but with a reframed horizon.

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I. From Construal to Infrastructure

Construal, in the relational ontology,

is not a representation of reality—

it is a cut within potential that constitutes reality as such.

But when construal aligns across persons,

across timescales,

across modalities of action,

it begins to infrastructure reflexivity.

It becomes:

• sedimented in form,

• stabilised in coordination,

• scaled in abstraction,

• and recursive in effect.

We called this symbolic architecture.

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II. Scaling the Reflexive Cut

We saw that infrastructures of meaning are not simply built,

they are scaled.

What scales is not content,

but the system of construal that enables content to mean.

This is where:

• writing becomes not just inscription, but a temporal infrastructure,

• number becomes not just quantity, but an epistemic operator,

• ritual becomes not just practice, but an anchor of symbolic time.

The reflexive cut—when stabilised and scaled—

gives rise to the social architectures of meaning.

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III. Collapse, Cut, and Reconstruction

We saw that symbolic architectures are not immune to entropy.

They can collapse, fracture, hollow out.

Yet even in collapse, they remain reflexive events:

points at which the logic of infrastructure is exposed

and new cuts become possible.

We called this the regrounding of symbolic life—

a move not back to origin,

but toward a renewed construal of possibility.

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IV. From Infrastructure to Immanence

Symbolic architectures are not external frames.

They do not hover above experience.

They are immanent in the coordination of meaning:

in how we inhabit time,

construe value,

orient through signs,

and participate in world-building at every scale.

To live symbolically is not to live within a system.

It is to be part of an unfolding,

where construal is infrastructure,

and reality is a reflexive alignment of symbolic possibility.

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 30 From Collapse to Construal: The Regrounding of Symbolic Life

Collapse, paradoxically, is generative.

When symbolic architectures fail,

they lay bare the conditions of their own construction.

We are returned not to chaos,

but to the infrastructural question itself:

How do symbolic systems take hold?

How does construal restitch the world?

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1. Breakdown as Reflexive Exposure

A failed system reveals its logic.

What once appeared natural—

time, order, value, norm—

is exposed as construal at scale.

This reflexive exposure

is painful, disorienting, and destabilising.

But it is also the moment when

meaning becomes visible again as made.

The symbolic becomes once again

a question, not a given.

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2. Rupture as Ontological Opportunity

When a symbolic infrastructure no longer holds,

we are forced to ask:

What might?

This is not mere replacement—

it is an ontological shift.

Instead of patching the collapsed structure,

we may re-orient to the deeper potentials of meaning.

Collapse becomes a cut—

a site of divergence,

a point of reconstrual.

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3. Regrounding Through Local Construal

New symbolic infrastructures do not descend from the sky.

They emerge from situated construal.

From:

• the grounding of time in shared rhythms,

• the reweaving of value in lived encounter,

• the reattunement of symbols to felt realities.

Regrounding begins where people begin to say:

That no longer holds.

This, perhaps, might.

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4. Re-scaling from the Event

Symbolic infrastructures are not simply built;

they crystallise around reconfigured alignments.

A new system of meaning takes shape

when a local construal proves scalable—

when it resonates beyond its origin

and begins to infrastructure wider experience.

From the cut of collapse,

a symbolic event can ripple outward,

generating new coordinates of reflexive life.

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5. Architectures of the Possible

The collapse of one symbolic regime

is also the clearing of the ground

for a new architecture of possibility.

What was once sedimented and closed

can now be opened and retheorised.

This is the work of symbolic imagination—

not to restore what was lost,

but to reshape what might align

in the wake of rupture.

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In the next (and final) post,

we will reflect on the arc of this series as a whole.

What have we uncovered about the nature of symbolic infrastructure?

And what does it mean to build, inhabit, and transform

the architectures of reflexive reality?

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 29 When Symbols Fail: The Collapse of Reflexive Infrastructure

Every symbolic system bears the seeds of its own undoing.

No infrastructure is immune

to erosion, fracture, or decay.

What, then, are the signs—

not of temporary disruption,

but of systemic collapse?

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1. Breakdown of Reflexive Alignment

Symbolic infrastructures fail when they can no longer

sustain reflexive alignment.

This occurs when:

• The collective cannot locate itself within the system’s coordinates.

• Interpretive scaffolds no longer orient experience.

• Rituals and symbols lose their anchoring force.

A calendar that no longer times harvest,

a flag that no longer binds allegiance,

a constitution that no longer guides decision—

these signal the rupture of reflexive fit.

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2. Rigid Repetition without Renewal

Collapse is often preceded by inertia.

Infrastructures harden into ritual repetition,

recycling forms without reattuning to shifting grounds.

Rather than rearticulation, we see:

• Citation without construal,

• Dogma without resonance,

• Authority without alignment.

The system continues to function,

but like a dead star—radiating light

no longer tethered to a living core.

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3. Multiplication of Incommensurable Cuts

A functioning symbolic system allows diverse construals

to phase into coherence.

Collapse begins when those construals become incommensurable.

The social body fractures into competing symbolic regimes

with no shared infrastructure for integration.

This isn’t pluralism—

it is disalignment at the level of reflexive possibility.

Cuts no longer coordinate; they cancel.

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4. Disembedded Symbolic Power

When symbolic authority detaches from

the communities it once served,

it becomes a free-floating apparatus of control.

Infrastructure becomes imposed,

rather than emergent.

Symbols no longer mediate meaning—

they enforce it.

This coercive drift marks the symbolic system's turn

from alignment to domination,

from scaffolding to straitjacket.

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5. Loss of Temporal Grip

Symbolic collapse is temporal collapse.

The infrastructure can no longer:

• Orient present action,

• Recall shared pasts,

• Sustain meaningful futures.

It loses its gravitational hold

on the continuity of experience.

History becomes spectacle,

futures become suspended,

and the now floats

unmoored in a symbolic void.

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The failure of a symbolic infrastructure

does not mean the end of construal.

But it throws construal back on itself,

forcing a reformation of the conditions of meaning.

This opens the horizon for symbolic re-invention—

a topic we turn to in the next post.

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 28 What Endures: The Durability of Symbolic Infrastructures

Not all symbolic architectures last.

Some collapse within decades.

Others shape millennia.

What gives symbolic infrastructures their durability?

What allows them to scaffold reflexive alignment

across generations, upheavals, and transformations?

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1. Redundancy and Recursivity

Durable infrastructures are redundant by design.

They encode their own logic in multiple forms:

• In language and ritual,

• In spatial organisation and material culture,

• In institutional practice and myth.

This recursivity—the re-entry of pattern into itself—

creates loops of symbolic reinforcement.

When disrupted in one modality,

they persist in others.

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2. Scaling Across Modalities

Durability is not just a feature of content,

but of multimodal realisation.

A calendar survives not because it marks time,

but because it shapes architecture, labour rhythms, kinship,

harvests, celebrations, and bureaucracies.

Its endurance lies in how deeply

it aligns construal across the social body.

The more modalities it spans,

the more points of attachment it sustains.

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3. Capacity for Rearticulation

Durable architectures are not rigid.

They are plastic under pressure.

They survive by:

• Reframing old forms in new contexts,

• Admitting reinterpretation without disintegration,

• Absorbing critique while maintaining coherence.

Durability depends on the capacity to rearticulate

without losing symbolic gravity.

This is not compromise—

it is strategic reflexive evolution.

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4. Infrastructure and Memory

Durability is often mistaken for memory.

But it is more than preservation of the past.

Durable infrastructures are temporal machines.

They align the present with collective pasts

and anticipated futures.

They shape what is remembered,

how it is remembered,

and by whom.

Their survival depends not on accurate recall,

but on operational continuity

through the rhythms of social life.

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5. Fragility in the Core

Ironically, the most durable systems

are those that acknowledge their own fragility.

They embed practices of:

• Renewal,

• Crisis response,

• Reflexive critique.

They make space for dissent

without requiring collapse.

Symbolic infrastructure endures

when it builds into itself

the possibility of transformation.

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In the next post, we turn to a different question:

How do symbolic infrastructures fail?

What patterns of decay, inertia, or breakdown

signal the end of a symbolic regime?

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 27 When Infrastructures Collide: Symbolic Breakdown and Competing Architectures

Every symbolic architecture offers stability.

But not all stabilities are compatible.

What happens when symbolic systems—

each structuring reality,

each organising collective construal—

conflict?

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1. Infrastructural Collision

When two symbolic architectures cannot be synchronised—

• Two calendars,

• Two epistemologies,

• Two systems of value,

• Two legal or moral codes—
  the result is not just confusion.
  It is ontological dissonance.

Each system phases, aligns, and scales construal differently.

They tell different stories about what is, what matters, and what must be done.

When infrastructures collide,

the collective capacity to coordinate fragments.

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2. Living Among Contradictions

Symbolic conflict is not rare.

It is the default condition of pluralistic life.

We navigate:

• Religious calendars vs. corporate schedules,

• Scientific methods vs. ancestral knowledge,

• Indigenous sovereignties vs. state law,

• Cultural lifeworlds vs. global standardisation.

Most people live across symbolic regimes.

They phase their lives in fractured synchrony.

They bracket, compartmentalise, code-switch, or resist.

Symbolic conflict is not simply theoretical—

it is existentially distributed.

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3. Rupture and Reform

Sometimes the conflict becomes untenable.

Symbolic collapse can take many forms:

• Crisis of meaning,

• Institutional breakdown,

• Loss of trust,

• Epistemic rupture.

But collapse is also opportunity.

It forces:

• Revaluation of symbolic commitments,

• Emergence of new architectures,

• Reflexive reconstitution of collective life.

Symbolic crises are inflection points.

They can inaugurate new horizons of coordination—

or deepen fragmentation.

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4. The Politics of Infrastructure

Symbolic architectures are never neutral.

They are contested terrains.

To name time, to scale value, to align meaning—

is to wield power over collective construal.

Symbolic infrastructures are sites of:

• Colonisation and resistance,

• Standardisation and subversion,

• Inclusion and erasure.

Thus, symbolic conflict is not simply a problem to be solved—

it is a field of struggle,

where futures are negotiated.

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5. Toward Reflexive Plurality

The challenge is not to eliminate symbolic conflict,

but to cultivate reflexive plurality:

• To understand how symbolic systems structure collective life,

• To recognise their limits and overlaps,

• To negotiate coexistence without erasure.

This demands not just tolerance,

but ontological fluency—

the capacity to navigate competing architectures

without collapsing into relativism or authoritarianism.

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In the next post, we ask:

What makes symbolic infrastructures durable?

What allows some to persist through time,

while others decay or dissolve?

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 26 Phasing the Collective: Symbolic Architectures and Temporal Coordination

Every symbolic architecture not only aligns and scales—

it also phases.

That is, it structures the flow of collective construal through time.

From liturgical calendars to academic semesters,

from ritual cycles to broadcast schedules,

symbolic systems do not merely say what matters—

they say when.

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1. Symbolic Time

Time is not neutral.

It is always construed.

And symbolic systems are what render this construal collective:

• Historical time (eras, progress, revolutions),

• Cyclical time (seasons, festivals, rituals),

• Scheduled time (deadlines, broadcasts, rosters),

• Liminal time (rites of passage, mourning, initiation).

These are not just different kinds of time—

they are different orientations to temporality,

made durable through symbolic infrastructure.

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2. Phasing as Temporal Alignment

Phasing refers to how symbolic architectures:

• Partition time into phases,

• Sequence construal across phases,

• Coordinate activity within and across these phases.

For example:

• The school term shapes not just learning, but when learning is expected.

• The liturgical year phases spiritual attention.

• The fiscal quarter aligns economic activity.

Temporal coordination is not added on after the fact.

It is built into symbolic form.

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3. Staging Meaning

Phasing also allows meaning to unfold in stages:

• Initiation → transformation → reintegration,

• Problem → tension → resolution,

• Ignorance → learning → evaluation.

These phasic templates are encoded into narrative, ritual, pedagogy, law.

They give construal its rhythm.

They organise collective becoming.

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4. Institutional Synchrony

Different institutions often synchronise around shared phasing structures:

• Government and media align to electoral cycles.

• Education and publishing orbit around semesters.

• Religious and civic calendars interlock national life.

This institutional synchrony makes society feel coherent,

even when its actors are distributed, divergent, or asynchronous.

Symbolic phasing gives us shared now-ness.

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5. Temporal Reflexivity

Reflexive collectives don’t just phase time—

they know they phase it.

They debate it, revise it, rephase it:

• New Year’s Eve is rebranded as a cultural reset.

• School holidays are contested for inclusivity.

• Calendars shift to reckon with colonisation, climate, or capitalism.

This is temporal reflexivity:

the collective negotiation of how time is made meaningful—

and for whom.

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In the next post, we ask:

If symbolic infrastructures phase, scale, and align collective construal—

what happens when infrastructures conflict, fracture, or fail?

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 25 Scaling Alignment: Symbolic Infrastructures and Collective Magnitude

The symbolic does not merely stabilise alignment—

it scales it.

From family to polity, ritual to religion, sentence to system,

symbolic architectures enable construal to transcend the local.

They furnish the conditions for shared orientation

at magnitudes where direct interaction is impossible.

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1. The Limits of Direct Alignment

Without symbolic mediation, alignment depends on:

• shared presence,

• mutual attention,

• embodied cues.

This works for dyads, small groups, co-present gatherings—

but not for distributed collectives.

Once a collective exceeds the limits of shared perception,

something else must hold construal together.

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2. Symbolic Scale-Building

Symbolic architectures scale alignment by:

• Standardising forms (e.g. scripts, rituals, legal categories),

• Encoding values into durable artefacts,

• Delegating meaning to roles, titles, genres, protocols,

• Synchronising behaviour through calendars, schedules, media.

What would otherwise require constant negotiation

is offloaded onto symbolic form.

This is infrastructure:

alignment embedded in symbolic artefacts and patterned action.

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3. Distributed Construal

In large-scale societies, construal is rarely individual.

It is:

• delegated to media systems,

• embedded in institutions,

• normalised through schooling,

• rehearsed in ritual.

Symbolic architectures thus support distributed construal:

not a shared interpretation of every detail,

but a shared orientation to the possibility space of interpretation.

A shared horizon of intelligibility.

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4. Compression and Abstraction

To scale, symbolic systems compress:

• Abstract categories over specific cases,

• Ideal types over lived variation,

• Maps over terrains.

This compression is not neutral.

It enables coordinated action, but at the cost of:

• local nuance,

• experiential granularity,

• interpretive plurality.

Scaling is always a cut through complexity.

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5. Reflexive Feedback Loops

The scaled symbolic does not merely reflect collective life—

it shapes it.

• Schooling produces the citizen it presumes.

• Law enacts the subject it governs.

• Media formats the event it reports.

• Money constructs the value it measures.

This is reflexivity at scale:

symbolic architectures don't just model reality—

they generate its large-scale contours.

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In the next post, we ask:

How do these symbolic architectures not only scale and stabilise,

but phase—that is, orchestrate collective construal through time?

Symbolic Architectures: The Infrastructures of Reflexive Reality: 24 Infrastructures of Stability: Symbolic Resistance to Entropy

In a relational ontology, alignment is not guaranteed—

it must be maintained.

And the symbolic does more than scaffold the present:

it resists disintegration, drift, and decay.

Symbolic architectures are infrastructures of stability.

They persist not by remaining fixed,

but by absorbing variation while preserving form—

a property akin to homeostasis in biological systems

or structural coupling in autopoietic ones.

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1. The Fragility of Alignment

Every collective alignment—semantic, social, material—is always

at risk of fragmentation.

Why?

• Perspective is plural.

• Environments change.

• Interests diverge.

• Interpretations slip.

Without symbolic infrastructure,

coordination must be constantly renegotiated.

But symbols—rituals, codes, institutions, genres—hold alignment steady

across time and scale.

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2. Symbolic Redundancy

Redundancy is a feature, not a flaw.

Symbolic systems multiply:

• Repetition in ritual,

• Parallel texts (e.g. legal code + commentary),

• Multiple layers of encoding (e.g. colour, gesture, speech).

This overdetermination creates stability:

if one form slips, another may compensate.

The architecture is resilient not because it is simple,

but because it is densely interwoven.

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3. Temporal Anchoring

Symbolic infrastructures provide temporal anchors:

• Calendars

• Archives

• Origin myths

• Historical narratives

These do not merely track time;

they stabilise memory,

binding the flux of experience into an orientable past.

They allow continuity to be construed where rupture is felt,

and make gradual transformation appear as tradition.

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4. Stabilising Through Form

Form itself is a stabilising force.

Once a genre is recognisable,

once a ritual is repeatable,

once a symbolic contrast is learnable—

alignment becomes scalable.

But stability is not stasis.

Symbolic architectures adapt under constraint,

holding enough formal inertia to preserve intelligibility

while accommodating change.

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5. The Political Stakes of Symbolic Stability

To stabilise meaning is also to stabilise power.

Who gets to say what endures?

What forms are preserved, archived, repeated?

What construals are built into the very infrastructure of social life?

Thus symbolic stability can both:

• enable intergenerational coherence, and

• entrench inequality, exclusion, domination.

The ethics of symbolic design must face both.

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In the next post, we explore how symbolic infrastructures scale—

enabling construal to coordinate action across vast collectives and long durations.