29 Phase and Identity: Patterns That Hold Across the Cut

(Post 29 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

If the world appears continuous, it is because patterns of construal cohere across cuts. And if identities appear stable — persons, objects, species, fields — it is because certain of these patterns phase across time.

Let us now understand identity not as what something is, but as what holds through ongoing perspectival instantiations.

Identity as a Phase, Not a Substance

Under relational ontology, identity is not a pre-given property. It is a temporally extended relation: a coherence maintained across instances of construal. Each cut produces a new instantiation; identity emerges when successive cuts echo, reinforce, or align with each other.

So we can say:

Identity is not what recurs, but what recurs coherently.

It is not sameness that constitutes identity, but the possibility of aligning cuts in such a way that a pattern appears to hold — a pattern that can be construed as the same across a phase of difference.

Phasing as Reflexive Stability

Think of phasing in the sense used in physics or music: not a perfect repetition, but a structure of reciprocal resonance across time. In this light:

• An individual is a phase through which certain semiotic, social, and biological patterns cohere.

• A species is a phase through which genetic, ecological, and construal tendencies stabilise across evolutionary cuts.

• A concept is a phase that emerges when construals become recurrent across contexts, structuring how we can continue to mean.

This interpretation removes the need to posit hidden substances or enduring cores. What persists is not a thing, but a reflexive coherence — a holding pattern that appears as identity.

The Ontology of What Holds

From this perspective, ontology must shift from what exists to what holds together. The question is no longer “what is X?” but “what patterns constrain how X can be construed?” Identity becomes a function of construal inertia — the resistance to disruption in patterns of alignment.

And crucially, identity is always:

• Perspectival: dependent on which construals are aligned.

• Phase-dependent: defined across cuts, not within them.

• Fragile: maintained only insofar as coherence can be sustained.

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This shift reframes our understanding of persistence, individuation, and being. It opens the way to rethink phenomena like selfhood, memory, and symbolic reference — not as mappings to static entities, but as performances of continuity across the cut.