Symbolic construals are not confined to local interactions or bounded communities. They scale—across networks, institutions, and ecologies—extending the reach and resonance of collective meaning-making. In this post, we explore how symbolic systems propagate, phase, and entangle across multiple scales.
1. Symbolic Transmission and Resonance
Symbolic forms scale not by replication, but by resonance:
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A construal spreads when its pattern aligns with existing potentials across contexts.
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This is not diffusion, but a field effect—a symbolic rhythm catching on, refracted and reconfigured at each uptake.
2. Local Meaning-Making as Cosmogenic
Even the most intimate construal can be cosmogenic:
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Local symbolic acts shift the conditions of possibility for larger systems.
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Every scaled symbolic order—whether nation, religion, or ideology—emerged from localised acts of construal.
3. Infrastructure, Media, and the Global Symbolic
Technological infrastructures extend the reach of symbolic construal:
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Writing, print, broadcast, digital networks—all reconfigure the temporality and scope of symbolic alignment.
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Yet this expansion comes with a cost: the flattening of nuance, the standardisation of rhythms, the erasure of non-dominant construals.
4. The Planetary as a Symbolic Horizon
As ecological collapse and global crises press into consciousness, a new symbolic scale emerges:
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The planetary is not just spatially global—it is temporally deep and systemically entangled.
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It calls for a symbolic reorientation: not mastery, but mutual reflexivity with the Earth and its many modes of construal.
In scaling the symbolic, we see how meaning circulates through and remakes the collective—at every level from the whisper of kinship to the cosmic arc of planetary fate. The next post explores how these scaled symbolic architectures orient time itself.
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