30 Self as Reflexive Phase: Memory, Construal, and the Illusion of Interior Continuity

(Post 30 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

In the everyday imagination, the self is a persistent interior: a centre of thought, feeling, and agency that lives behind the eyes and travels through time. But in relational ontology, no such uncut interior exists. The self, too, is a construed phenomenon, a cut-bound phase of coherence.

So what is the self, if not an inner container?

Reflexive Matter and the Appearance of a Self

The illusion of a continuous, private self arises from the reflexive nature of construal. The system not only construes — it can also construe its own construals. In doing so, it organises patterns of coherence across perspectives.

This reflexive loop allows the emergence of:

• Memory as the symbolic re-instantiation of prior construals.

• Self-reference as a semiotic strategy for stabilising construal identity.

• Interiorisation as the myth of a central locus from which construals proceed.

But none of these require an interior subject. What persists is not an entity, but a historically sedimented phase of perspective-taking.

The self is not inside the body; it is distributed across remembered construals.

Memory as Symbolic Alignment

What we call “my past” is not a continuous substrate, but a symbolic re-alignment of prior construals. Memory does not preserve the past; it re-performs it — according to the constraints of current perspective.

Hence, the self appears to persist because symbolic systems enable cuts to be stitched together into a phase. Language, narrative, ritual, and naming all serve this function. They phase construals so that:

• What differs can be construed as the same (identity).

• What is distributed can be construed as interior (subjectivity).

• What is contingent can be construed as necessary (continuity).

The Self as a Construal Constraint

From a relational view, the self is not an agent but a constraint on construal: a habitual vector for making meaning. When we say “I,” we are not naming a thing — we are invoking a semiotic phase space: the historically sedimented trajectory of symbolic construals that can be aligned as a self.

This means:

• The self is not the origin of meaning, but its conditioned pathway.

• There is no essence behind the self, only a phase of reflexive alignment.

• The self is not hidden inside, but produced in the very act of cutting.

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This decentring of the self opens space to rethink agency, ethics, and transformation. If the self is a phase, not a core, then change becomes not a loss of identity, but a shift in construal resonance. And the ‘liberation’ of the self is not an inward turn, but a new way of cutting.