From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos: 26 Coordinating the Valuable

Every symbolic cosmos organises not only what is thinkable, sayable, and doable—but also what is worth thinking, saying, and doing. Symbolic construal coordinates the valuable, not as an external ranking, but as an intrinsic structuring of reality.

1. Value as Construal, Not Currency

Value in this context is not transactional or economic. It is semiotic:

• What is foregrounded or backgrounded.

• What is treated as sacred, profane, central, marginal, urgent, trivial.

• What is salient to the collective’s sense of itself and its world.

Such salience is not pre-given. It is enacted through symbolic construal—through how meaning is patterned and aligned.

2. Symbolic Systems as Economies of Attention

Every symbolic formation constitutes an economy of attention:

• It regulates what counts.

• It structures who can attend to what, and how.

• It phases significance across domains—ritual, labour, intimacy, politics.

These are not secondary effects. They are the symbolic cosmos in operation.

3. The Collective Distribution of Worth

Symbolic coordination enables shared sensibilities of worth:

• What can be mourned.

• What must be protected.

• What can be sacrificed.

• What cannot be named.

Through these alignments, collectives distribute value not as a measure, but as a way of being.

4. Reflexivity and the Revaluation of Value

Reflexive construal opens symbolic value systems to transformation:

• The sacred may become obsolete.

• The marginal may become central.

• Entire systems of worth may be re-phased, re-construed, re-symbolised.

This revaluation is not merely cultural or political—it is cosmological. It alters what the world is allowed to mean.

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Symbolic construal does not simply mirror values—it makes them actionable, shareable, and transformable. The symbolic cosmos is a cosmos of worth: an evolving pattern of salience that construes reality as meaningful. In the next post, we turn to how symbolic construal gives rise to cosmic topology: not just a structure of meaning, but a structure as meaning.