Series: Construal and the Collective: A deeper exploration of how construal scales, aligns, and phases within and across social formations
From Experience to Alignment: The Social Scale of Construal
In the Reflexive Matter series, we explored how meaning is not imposed on the world from outside, but emerges as the world’s own reflexive construal — its capacity to take a perspective on itself, and to symbolise that perspective in ways that transform what is possible. Construal was shown to be not merely a cognitive or linguistic process, but a phase-shift in reality itself.
Now we ask: how does construal scale?
What happens when meaning is no longer a matter of a single organism’s symbolic reflexivity, but becomes collective — formed, maintained, and shifted across multiple participants in a shared system of construal?
This question draws us into the domain of the social, but not as an external layer or context. In a relational ontology, there is no 'social world' distinct from the world of meaning. Rather, social formations are themselves symbolic architectures — metastable formations of construal — that both emerge from and constrain the symbolic dynamics of their participants.
To put it differently: collectives are not merely the sum of individuals; they are the symbolic conditions for the kinds of individuals that can emerge.
Beyond Shared Experience
It is tempting to treat social life as simply 'shared experience' — the idea that we perceive similar things, talk about them, and thus align. But this picture is too thin. Sharing presupposes construal; and construal is not reducible to perception. It is an act of meaning-making that involves selection, abstraction, and alignment within a symbolic system.
Two people can occupy the same physical setting and yet inhabit radically different construals of it. Conversely, two people separated in space and time can participate in a single symbolic formation — a religious tradition, a political discourse, a scientific paradigm — whose symbolic architecture constrains what can be meant, by whom, and with what effects.
So the collective is not simply the co-presence of multiple construals. It is a phase space within which construal becomes interdependent. That interdependence is not always harmonious; it includes tension, misalignment, rupture. But the point is that construal itself becomes structured by the collective — and in turn structures the collective.
The Social as Symbolic Architecture
We propose to treat social formations not as aggregates of behaviour, but as symbolic architectures that:
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scale construal across bodies, voices, texts, practices, and institutions
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align construal via shared semiotic resources, normative expectations, and distributed repertoires
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phase construal through temporal layering, patterned variation, and diachronic transformation
Such architectures are not static structures. They are metastable: they hold together by holding open — by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium of continuity and variation. They are not just containers of meaning, but systems of symbolic potential that make meaning possible in particular ways.
Toward a Collective Ontogenesis
What emerges is a new line of inquiry: not simply the sociology of meaning, but a collective ontogenesis — an exploration of how symbolic realities evolve within, across, and as collectives.
We will explore the dynamics of phasing: how collective construals can crystallise, fracture, resonate, and realign. We will trace how shared construal produces shared realities — and how those realities can in turn reflexively constrain what it is possible to mean.
In short, we are no longer asking how I construe the world. We are asking how we come to inhabit symbolic architectures that make meaning possible at all.
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