31 Agency Without Subject: Emergent Causality in a Reflexive Field

(Post 31 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

Agency is typically imagined as a power that originates within the subject and flows outward into the world. The subject acts; the world reacts. But in relational ontology, this model cannot hold. There is no uncut interior source of action. So how can we reconceive agency without a subject?

Agency as Cut and Constraint

In a world of reflexive matter, action is not the emanation of a will. It is the actualisation of a construal. That is: the making of a cut within a phase of structured potential. And this cut is always:

• Constrained by prior symbolic alignment (what can be meant);

• Situated within a phase of perspective (what is being meant);

• Open-ended in its reverberations (what else could be meant).

Agency, then, is not a force that flows outward, but a function of how systems are cut — and how construals propagate within and across phases.

The system acts not by willing, but by construing in alignment with what has been possible — and thereby shifting what is possible.

Emergence Across Fields

What appears as individual action is in fact the emergent patterning of fielded constraints. These include:

• Biological constraints: value systems modulating viability.

• Semiotic constraints: systems of meaning co-articulating phenomena.

• Social constraints: patterns of alignment within symbolic collectives.

• Historical constraints: sedimented pathways of construal.

Each cut is therefore not caused by an agent, but emerges at the intersection of multiple constraining systems — none of which is sovereign.

The phase of construal called ‘I’ may appear to act, but its agency is distributed across these fields, emerging in and as the cut.

Causality Without Centrality

Causality, then, is no longer linear or subject-centred. It is:

• Phase-dependent (emerging within construal, not prior to it);

• Perspective-relative (what counts as a cause depends on the cut);

• Non-hierarchical (no level is privileged as the source of action).

From this view, agency is relational causality: not an imposition upon the world, but a resonant modulation within it.

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To say “I act” is thus to phase a cut through reflexive matter — to align systems of meaning, memory, social relation, and bodily constraint in a way that actualises possibility. But there is no “I” outside this phasing. The subject is not the source of agency; the subject is the trace that agency leaves behind.