24 Relativity Revisited: Spacetime as a Meaningful Cut

(Post 24 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

Special relativity revolutionised our understanding of space and time — not as separate entities, but as dimensions of a unified spacetime. In relational ontology, this unification takes on new significance: it is not merely a mathematical formalism but a construal — a cut through the potential of experience that reshapes the terms of possibility.

No View from Nowhere

Einstein’s core insight was perspectival: simultaneity is not absolute. Time depends on motion. Space depends on time. And observation depends on relation. There is no privileged frame of reference. This is not just a physical finding — it is a metaphysical provocation.

In relational ontology, this decentralisation of perspective is taken further. There is not even a “God’s eye” from which the spacetime continuum is laid out like a static block. Instead, each cut through spacetime is a meaningful enactment: a way of organising potentiality into actuality.

We do not observe spacetime; we construct it — through the cuts we make to distinguish position, motion, sequence, and causality.

The Lorentz Cut: Construal of Relativistic Coherence

From this angle, the Lorentz transformations — those mathematical operations that allow us to move between observers in relative motion — are not simply computational tools. They are relational bridges. They maintain coherence across perspectival cuts, allowing a shared world to persist despite local differences in construal.

This isn’t to say that physics becomes subjectivist. Rather, construal is systematic. The relational orderings defined by special relativity reflect the constraints under which such construals can be coordinated. They are not optional. They are invariant under transformation, not because they are absolute, but because they express a deep relational invariance.

In Hallidayan terms, we might say that relativistic transformations conserve the metafunctions: ideational content, interpersonal relation, textual coherence — each must still hold across the cut.

Spacetime Is Not a Container — It Is a Phase of Meaning

Perhaps the most radical implication is this: spacetime is not a pre-existing substrate into which events are placed. It is a meaningful organisation of experience — a phase of meaning, realised through the relational constraints imposed by coordination.

Different systems may phase meaning in different ways — but the structure of spacetime as construed in relativity emerges from the need to coordinate interaction across perspectival diversity. It is a functional construal, not a metaphysical given.