SIMULZDAT

Permanent Funeral

0.0 Foreword

It was said that in the late days of the age of consensus, when systems of meaning had become elaborate enough to obscure their own foundations, a certain silence took hold. The early theorists of this period, having long observed the recursive movements of institutions and their symbolic scaffolding, noted that what passed for stability had less to do with agreement than with an exhaustion of alternatives. There were, by then, great towers of thought assembled from the fragmentary remains of older orders, their materials—laws, doctrines, models of cognition—laid atop one another in so many careful layers that it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began. The architects of these structures, believing themselves to be building toward an ever more rational and efficient world, had not foreseen the peculiar weight of their own efforts.

It was in this climate that certain scholars—less often gathered in formal schools than dispersed across the ruins of the previous era’s ambitions—began to unearth an older division in the way humans oriented themselves to meaning. The distinction, only intermittently recognized in earlier epochs, lay between those who sought to consolidate what could be known and those who saw, in every structure, the necessary prelude to its collapse. Faith and consensus, they called it, though the terms themselves had long since lost their force.

Some centuries before, Niklas Luhmann had remarked upon the self-referential nature of social systems, observing that they did not so much perceive the world as compose themselves through the constraints of their own internal logic. Bruno Latour, writing in a similar period, had gone further, suggesting that no institution, no belief, no articulation of power existed independently of the networks of actors—human and non-human—that sustained them. These were, in retrospect, the first articulations of what would later be called the paradox of stability: the realization that systems, left unchecked, would not remain inert but would grow more intricate, layering themselves against the very reality they sought to describe.

By the time this paradox became explicit, the structures of meaning that had defined civilization for centuries were not only unwieldy but impenetrable, their complexity rendering them both inescapable and illegible. It was then that a new mode of thought emerged—not as revolution, but as something quieter, the slow reorientation of minds no longer convinced that coherence was the highest good. If consensus had been the art of making sense of a world too vast to comprehend, then faith—defined not as adherence to doctrine but as an opening to the infinite—was the refusal to mistake consensus for truth.

This, then, is the story of how meaning is formed and how it fails. It is an account of systems that, in their attempts to stabilize, became too rigid to survive, and of the forces—sometimes catastrophic, sometimes imperceptible—that unmade them. It is an examination of faith not as belief in the impossible, but as an encounter with the limits of what can be made finite. And it is, above all, a history of the present as seen from the distant shore of its eventual dissolution.

1.0 The Construction of Meaning

There was, in the late period of the knowledge systems, an attempt to formalize the mechanisms by which meaning cohered, though even the most sophisticated theorists of the time understood that the very act of articulation risked reifying what was, at its core, a fragile and contingent operation. It had long been assumed that the structures through which human beings derived meaning—laws, scriptures, symbols, institutions—were not themselves active participants in the formation of thought but rather inert vessels, containers of ideas that were, in some fundamental sense, prior to their expression. This assumption, once so deeply ingrained that it appeared self-evident, had by then been thoroughly undone.

The first sustained inquiries into the problem of meaning’s persistence had already taken place some centuries before. In those early formulations, it was argued that meaning could not be understood as something given but only as something that must be produced, maintained, and stabilized. Theories emerged that sought to describe these processes—not merely how meaning arose but how it endured, how it withstood the ceaseless erosion of time and interpretation. In one account, offered by the German theorist Niklas Luhmann, meaning was said to exist within autopoietic systems of communication, structures that, like biological organisms, reproduced themselves by continuously distinguishing what lay within from what remained without. A legal system, a religious order, even the logic of a particular economy—each of these, according to Luhmann, did not operate by directly engaging with reality but by sustaining its own internal coherence, drawing its boundaries in such a way that it might persist without the need for external validation.

In another account, developed through the work of Bruno Latour, meaning did not emerge through systems alone but through the intricate assemblage of actors, the heterogeneous elements—humans, texts, machines, traditions—that, by forming networks, rendered meaning operational. Here, a doctrine was not merely a set of propositions but an effect of relations, held together by institutions, rituals, physical artifacts, and even the mundane gestures of those who enacted it. Unlike Luhmann, who had insisted upon the self-referential closure of systems, Latour revealed the extent to which meaning remained open, dependent on the constant work of maintenance, vulnerable to shifts in the network’s composition.

In both cases, there was no room for the notion that meaning was an inherent quality, existing independently of its articulation. What was called stability was in truth a state of ceaseless upkeep, a choreography in which coherence was never assumed but endlessly renewed. The long histories of belief, law, and scientific knowledge could, in this sense, be understood less as evolutions of truth than as records of what had, in various moments, been made to hold.

It was in this intellectual terrain that a new distinction began to emerge—one that did not merely describe the mechanisms of meaning’s stabilization but sought to articulate the forces that moved against it. Faith, long understood in opposition to reason, came to be seen in a new light: not as belief in the improbable but as an orientation toward the infinite, a force that continually exposed meaning to its own contingency. Where consensus had always been the means by which systems endured—by filtering out dissonance, establishing categories, forging coherence—faith was now recognized as its counterpoint, the destabilization of the finite in the face of that which could not be enclosed.

To those who examined the structures of their own time, it became evident that faith and consensus were not merely conceptual opposites but interwoven necessities. If consensus was the temporary resolution of meaning, the force that allowed societies to function by making their truths feel solid, then faith was the force that ensured those truths could never harden beyond repair. It was this dynamic, rather than the false dichotomy of faith versus reason, that determined how meaning endured. Faith did not oppose reason; it opposed ossification. It disrupted systems not in order to destroy them but to keep them from mistaking their own coherence for completion.

What followed, then, was not a question of which force should dominate—whether consensus should dictate reality or faith should shatter its fragile constructions—but rather how these two could exist in perpetual relation. It was understood that meaning, as it had been for millennia, would always exceed its own articulation, that consensus could never fully enclose reality, that faith would never entirely undo what had been built. The problem was not whether meaning should be stabilized or destabilized, but how the tension between the two could be sustained without tipping toward either stagnation or dissolution.

This, then, was the paradox at the heart of civilization’s long experiment with knowledge: that meaning was always provisional, yet always necessary. If Luhmann had provided the model for how structures preserved coherence, and Latour had revealed how those structures were assembled and maintained, then faith itself had provided the necessary disruption, ensuring that what was built would never stand forever. And so the work continued—not toward resolution, but toward the endless reconfiguration of the possible.

2.1 The Assembly of Meaning

It was known, even in the earliest periods of recorded thought, that meaning did not descend from some immutable order but had to be worked into existence, its scaffolding assembled from the raw materials of the world. This was no less true in the great theological traditions, where doctrine emerged not from revelation alone but from the ceaseless effort to render what was infinite into terms that could be sustained across generations. The councils, the scriptures, the painstaking translation of concept into law, of vision into institution—each was an act of construction, provisional yet binding, a structure built not once but over and over, as if the very nature of meaning required that it be continuously reassembled from its own remains.

By the time the knowledge systems of the late period reached their most elaborate expressions, the mechanisms of this assembly had become explicit. No longer could it be assumed that meaning simply was—that it existed apart from the vast networks of actors that sustained it. The institutions of faith, the principles of governance, the great edifices of scientific knowledge—all of them were understood not as singular, stable forms but as assemblages, tenuous and dynamic, composed of people, objects, texts, rituals, and instruments, each dependent on the other to maintain coherence.

It was Latour who first named this in its totality, observing that what passed for stability in human affairs was, in truth, an ongoing negotiation, an arrangement always in danger of unbinding itself. Every doctrine, every paradigm, every system of governance existed only because of the labor of its maintenance—priests tending to the integrity of their creeds, judges reinforcing the precedence of law, scientists calibrating the instruments that made their claims intelligible. The world, far from being governed by abstract principles, was held together by work, by the ceaseless efforts of those who arranged and reassembled the fragments of meaning into structures that could endure.

But what was often overlooked in these descriptions was the force that made such maintenance necessary—the persistent, unrelenting pressure exerted by the uncontained, the unaccounted for. There was always, within any system, that which did not fit, an excess that refused to be absorbed into the given categories of understanding. Faith, when it was recognized as more than adherence to a doctrine, could be seen as precisely this: the force that disrupts what has been assembled, exposing its limits, ensuring that what has been built does not mistake itself for something final.

Faith, in this sense, was never the antithesis of knowledge, nor the negation of reason, but the force that made both necessary. It was the confrontation with that which could not yet be named, the pressure exerted on systems by reality itself, which was always larger than its articulations. The great theologians had long recognized this, though their formulations were later forgotten: that what is called God must always remain ungraspable, that the attempt to name the divine could only ever produce partial truths. Yet what was true of faith was true of all meaning-making, for even the most secular of institutions found itself subject to the same instability. No system, however intricate, could hold itself together indefinitely. No paradigm could persist without encountering something that exceeded its explanatory reach.

Thus, in every structure, there existed both the impulse to consolidate and the inevitability of disruption. The assembly of meaning was never a singular event but a process of continuous repair, a response to the forces that worked against it. If Latour’s actor-networks revealed the means by which systems were held together, they also illuminated their fragility. No belief, no principle, no articulation of the world was secured in perpetuity—it had to be reaffirmed, reconstructed, its legitimacy reasserted against the weight of its own disintegration.

And yet, it was precisely in this fragility that meaning remained alive. What endured was not the permanence of structures but the persistence of their reconstruction, the ceaseless negotiation between what had been made and what resisted incorporation. Faith, as an orientation to the infinite, ensured that no system ever closed itself completely, that no arrangement of meaning became so rigid that it could no longer be remade. And so the work continued, not toward the fixing of final truths, but toward the endless task of assembling the world anew.

2.2 The Self-Sustaining System of Meaning

It was observed, in the long history of knowledge systems, that what had once been precarious could, if tended to carefully enough, become self-sustaining. This was not merely a tendency of human institutions but a principle embedded in the nature of meaning itself: that which is stabilized over time begins to function as if it had always been so, its origins obscured by the very success of its endurance. What had been, in one era, an unstable network of actors—texts, rituals, traditions, objects—could, in another, appear as an immutable order, its contingency forgotten in the wake of its consolidation.

Luhmann described this process in terms of autopoiesis, a term borrowed from biology, denoting the self-reproduction of living systems. A system of meaning, once sufficiently complex, no longer required input from the outside to sustain itself; it operated on the basis of its own internal distinctions, perpetuating its logic without reference to the broader reality from which it had first emerged. What had once required effort to assemble now required only effort to maintain. The doctrines of a religion, the jurisprudence of a legal system, the epistemic frameworks of science—each, over time, refined its internal grammar, closing itself off from that which might disturb its coherence.

There were advantages to this closure. A belief, once stabilized, did not have to be constantly renegotiated. A tradition, once established, provided continuity where there might otherwise have been disorder. Consensus, once reached, became a mechanism for reinforcing meaning, filtering out contradictions, excising anomalies, and preserving the intelligibility of the world. In this way, what had begun as a fragile negotiation among actors became, in time, a self-referential order, one whose authority lay not in its engagement with the infinite but in its capacity to persist.

It was through this process that institutions became resistant to disruption, their boundaries increasingly impermeable to that which lay beyond them. In the great religious traditions, for example, what had once been a volatile interaction with revelation—the encounter with a force beyond comprehension—was gradually transformed into an ordered system of doctrine, liturgy, and interpretative authority. The infinite, which had once ruptured the world, was now managed within the finite: confined to texts, regulated by councils, spoken of only in terms that did not threaten the coherence of what had been established. Faith, once a site of exposure to the unknown, had been made to serve the function of reinforcing what was already known.

The same pattern could be found in all forms of meaning-making. What had begun as discovery became tradition; what had once been an open-ended engagement with the world became a system unto itself, filtering and structuring reality rather than confronting it. The sciences, too, which had once been a series of radical disruptions—Copernican revolutions, quantum uncertainties—became, in their own way, self-referential systems, constructing paradigms that determined what could and could not be recognized as knowledge. The movement was always the same: the provisional became permanent, the contingent became necessary, the infinite became enclosed within the finite.

Yet it was in this very movement that the seeds of dissolution were always planted. A system, once closed, ceased to perceive that which lay beyond its boundaries. What had once been an adaptation to reality became a defense against it. The process by which meaning was sustained was also the process by which it began to ossify, no longer able to recognize that it had been, from the beginning, nothing more than a fragile assemblage. And so, at certain intervals, systems would find themselves confronted with a force they could not absorb—something beyond their categories, something that did not fit. It was at these moments that the work of faith began again, not as an adherence to what had been, but as an encounter with that which could not yet be named.

The cycle repeated itself across centuries, across civilizations. Consensus built structures; faith undid them. Systems of meaning, having closed themselves off, were forced open again, not from within, but from the pressure of that which had been excluded. And so it was that meaning was never settled, never complete, but only ever provisionally arranged—until it was not.

2.3 The Interplay of Stability and Disruption

Throughout the history of knowledge systems, there existed an unspoken assumption that meaning, once found, ought to endure. That which was true, it was thought, should remain so, unshaken by the instability of the world. And yet, even in the most ancient traditions, it was recognized that stability alone was not sufficient. There had always been forces at work that ensured meaning was never simply preserved but always, in some way, remade—not through the slow erosion of time, but through the pressures exerted upon it by something larger, something uncontained by the structures that sought to house it.

It was in this sense that the great theorists of the late period came to describe meaning not as a singular event but as a double movement, a process in which it was first assembled, then stabilized, then undone, only to be reassembled again. Latour’s networks formed meaning; Luhmann’s systems preserved it. Faith destabilized meaning; consensus restored it. These were not discrete moments in time but overlapping, interwoven tendencies, always at work within any structure that sought to make sense of the world.

At the outset, meaning was a process of assembly, a fragile negotiation among actors—humans, institutions, symbols, machines—none of which, in isolation, could sustain themselves. A faith community, for instance, did not begin as a self-sufficient system but as an unstable coalition of beliefs, practices, and material supports, each contributing to what, in time, might come to be recognized as a doctrine. The same was true of political institutions, of legal frameworks, of scientific paradigms. Meaning, in its early stages, was always an effort, a making-do with what was at hand.

Yet, as these networks gained coherence, they became systems unto themselves, no longer requiring external validation. What had once been a fragile arrangement was now a self-replicating structure, something that could sustain itself by reinforcing its own internal logic. What had begun as an experiment in meaning-making had become a doctrine, a law, a paradigm—something that no longer recognized itself as contingent.

But it was precisely at the moment of stabilization that another force asserted itself. Faith, understood now not as adherence to a system but as an opening to that which could not yet be systematized, pressed against the boundaries of the closed form. It introduced new elements, disrupted existing categories, forced reconsiderations. At times, this force was slow, almost imperceptible, a gradual shifting of thought that called into question what had seemed unquestionable. At other times, it arrived all at once, as rupture, as schism, as revelation. It was faith, not as certainty, but as the encounter with uncertainty, the refusal to allow consensus to be mistaken for finality.

And yet, as much as faith was necessary to break meaning open, consensus was just as necessary to reassemble what had been broken. If faith ensured that meaning did not harden into something inert, consensus ensured that meaning did not dissolve altogether. That which had been unsettled needed, at some point, to be negotiated into a new form, a structure that, while temporary, could sustain itself long enough to be lived. In this way, the very disruptions introduced by faith were, in time, absorbed, their radical force transformed into something that could function, that could be taught, that could be shared.

It was through this interplay—of stabilization and disruption, of system and network, of faith and consensus—that meaning remained alive. Too much closure, and meaning became ossified, resistant to reality. Too much disruption, and meaning collapsed, unable to orient itself. It was not a question of choosing one over the other, but of maintaining the tension between them, ensuring that neither was allowed to overtake the other completely.

And so, across centuries, across civilizations, the pattern repeated itself. Meaning was assembled, preserved, broken apart, and reassembled again—not in a linear progression toward some final truth, but in a recursive movement, an endless negotiation between what had been built and what could not yet be contained.

3.1 Faith as the Destabilization of Closed Systems

It was observed, in the long cycles of human thought, that those who sought to preserve meaning often mistook its endurance for its permanence. What had begun as a fragile attempt to order the world—the careful arrangement of words and symbols into coherence—soon took on the character of necessity, its origins obscured by the weight of its own survival. Theologies, laws, and philosophies, once the subjects of urgent negotiation, came to be seen as self-evident, as if they had always been so, as if they had not, in the beginning, been precarious, vulnerable to the forces that would now be called faith.

For faith, properly understood, was not the acceptance of doctrine but the recognition of its limits. It was not the recitation of what had already been said but the force that made repetition insufficient. It was, in every age, that which arrived from beyond the system, disturbing the categories that had been set in place. It did not abolish meaning, but it refused to allow meaning to harden into something absolute. And so it was that faith, despite being regarded by some as the foundation of certainty, was in fact the thing that kept certainty from becoming idolatry.

The institutions that had once drawn their strength from faith were the first to resist it. In time, every religious tradition came to establish the terms by which it might survive, setting into doctrine what had once been fluid, inscribing into permanence what had once been contested. The wildness of the prophetic voice was subdued by the needs of governance; the radicalism of revelation was tamed by the work of preservation. It was not an error, nor was it avoidable—meaning, in order to be carried forward, required structure. But it was also in this process that the danger lay: that what had been stabilized might cease to recognize that it had once been unknown, that it had once been made, that it was not the thing itself but a response to it.

Faith, then, was the intrusion of that knowledge. It was the reminder that no system was final, that no doctrine had exhausted the infinite, that no articulation of truth could claim sovereignty over reality. It was, in this sense, the force that broke through dogmatic ossification, ensuring that what had once been a living tradition did not become mere repetition. It arrived in various forms—in theological schisms, in new interpretations, in the unsettling recognition that what had been assumed to be universal had, in fact, been contingent. It was always met with resistance, for no system willingly exposes itself to its own incompleteness. And yet, without faith’s disruption, meaning would not remain alive.

Beyond religion, the same dynamic governed all systems that sought to enclose the world within a single order. In the political sphere, faith took the form not of belief in an ideology but of trust in reality itself, against the forces that would seek to render it subordinate to their own logic. It was, in its essence, the refusal to allow a system to close itself entirely—to mistake its coherence for truth, to claim for itself the authority to dictate what could and could not be recognized. It was for this reason that totalitarian structures, in all their forms, sought not only to control thought but to eliminate the very conditions under which thought might be disturbed. In such regimes, faith—understood not as adherence to a doctrine but as an openness to what lay beyond it—was the first thing to be suppressed.

Yet faith could not be eradicated, for it was not a thing but a force, one that arose wherever meaning became too rigid, wherever systems mistook their survival for their justification. It was the pressure exerted by the infinite against the finite, the quiet insistence that no order was ever complete. And so, in every era, faith would reappear—not in the form of certainty, but in the unsettling recognition that certainty was not enough. It did not destroy meaning, but it ensured that meaning did not become its own prison. It did not oppose order, but it refused to allow order to mistake itself for reality. It was, as it had always been, the force that ensured that what had been built could still be broken, and built again.

3.2 Consensus as the Finite Stabilization of Meaning

If faith was the force that exposed the limits of meaning, then consensus was the means by which meaning was made livable. It had long been understood that a world in constant disruption could not sustain itself, that the very conditions of existence required some stabilization of what had been unsettled. It was not enough to encounter the infinite; one had to make a place for it within the finite, to shape its overwhelming presence into something that could be spoken, enacted, and carried forward.

Across civilizations, this was the function of consensus—not to provide ultimate truth, but to render meaning functional, to ensure that what had been glimpsed in moments of rupture could be integrated into the continuity of the world. In religious terms, it took the form of doctrine, of scripture, of rituals that did not merely preserve faith but made it operative, transforming the raw experience of the unknown into something that could be practiced, understood, and shared. The prophets and mystics might encounter the divine in its unmediated form, but the traditions that followed did not survive on revelation alone. They required structure, a framework within which what had been known in uncertainty could be sustained.

But what was true of faith was no less true of all human attempts to make sense of reality. The same movement that shaped religious traditions governed the formation of political institutions, scientific paradigms, and ethical frameworks. What had begun as a disruption—a new way of seeing, a sudden fracture in the established order—would, over time, require consolidation. The great political systems of the world, though often traced to moments of revolution or reform, did not exist in their original instability; they hardened into law, into bureaucracy, into governance. The ethical principles that had once arrived as radical challenges to injustice became codified, institutionalized, woven into the very systems they had once opposed. Science, which had once been a continuous breaking apart of old assumptions, became a structure within which certain forms of inquiry were legitimized while others were cast aside.

Consensus, in each of these domains, was the process by which the radical became ordinary, the disruptive became settled, the impossible became fact. It did not deny faith, nor did it erase the original force of revelation, but it absorbed it, transforming it into something that could endure. In this sense, consensus was not merely a necessity—it was an inevitability. No society, no tradition, no body of knowledge could persist without it, for to exist without stabilization was to exist in perpetual upheaval.

Yet it was precisely in this movement toward order that consensus carried within it the seeds of its own undoing. What had once been a necessary consolidation could, in time, become an impediment to the very forces that had given rise to it. The doctrine that had once allowed faith to be preserved could become the very thing that resisted faith’s return. The political system that had once been founded on new possibilities could become incapable of imagining others. The scientific paradigm that had once overturned previous assumptions could become rigid, unwilling to recognize what lay beyond its limits. And so, at certain moments, faith would press against consensus, breaking through its enclosure, forcing it into renewal.

Consensus, then, was not the opposite of faith, but its complement. It was the necessary stabilization of meaning, the process by which what had been glimpsed in uncertainty was made durable, so that it could be lived. It was only when consensus mistook itself for completion, when it refused to recognize the conditions of its own contingency, that faith would be required to break it open once more.

In this way, meaning was never settled, never secured in its final form. It moved between rupture and restoration, between the infinite and the finite, between what had been disrupted and what had been made stable. It was neither faith alone nor consensus alone that shaped the course of human thought, but the interplay between them—the force that exposed meaning to its own limits, and the structures that ensured meaning could still be sustained.

4.1 Bridging Faith and Consensus with Meaning-Making

There had always been a tendency, in the study of human thought, to regard faith and consensus as opposing forces, to see in them a fundamental contradiction—one tearing apart what the other sought to preserve. The historical record was replete with such oppositions: the heretic and the institution, the reformer and the law, the visionary and the framework that could not contain the vision. But this opposition, though compelling in its clarity, was never entirely sufficient. It failed to recognize that faith and consensus were not separate entities but different phases of the same process, neither of which could exist without the other.

In the late period of knowledge systems, this was made explicit. The theorists of that time, working in traditions that traced their origins to Latour and Luhmann, described meaning as a recursive movement between two states: one of assembly and disruption, the other of stabilization and endurance. The work of meaning-making, they argued, was never complete—it did not move toward a final articulation but instead cycled between the formation of new relationships, the solidification of those relationships into structures, and the eventual breakdown of those structures when their limits were reached.

Faith as the Disruption of the Finite

Faith, in this model, was not simply a disposition or a belief but an event within the process of meaning itself—a moment in which the given categories of understanding became insufficient. Latour had shown that meaning was assembled, that it emerged through the tenuous connections between actors, that it was not inherent but made. Luhmann, in turn, demonstrated that once these connections stabilized, they no longer required reference to anything outside themselves. What had once been a fragile negotiation became a system that reproduced its own meaning, sustaining itself without the need for justification beyond its own operations.

But no system, however self-sustaining, could avoid encountering its own limits. There was always something it could not account for, something that had been excluded in the process of stabilization. And so faith arrived—not as belief in the established order, but as the force that exposed the inadequacy of that order, the pressure exerted by reality itself against the closure of systems. In its most radical form, faith was an opening to the infinite (R), an encounter with that which could not yet be enclosed within the structures of the known.

This was not a phenomenon confined to religion. It was visible in every domain where meaning had been stabilized for too long: in political systems that had ceased to recognize new possibilities, in scientific paradigms that could no longer accommodate anomalies, in ethical frameworks that mistook their contingencies for universal truths. In each case, faith did not arrive as a gentle revision but as rupture, as crisis, as a moment in which what had been taken for granted could no longer hold.

Consensus as the Stabilization of Meaning

But if faith was necessary to ensure that meaning did not harden into something dead, consensus was necessary to ensure that meaning could still be lived. For disruption alone was not enough—one could not remain in a state of perpetual fracture. At some point, what had been unsettled had to be reassembled, reconfigured into a form that, while provisional, could sustain itself long enough to be shared, taught, enacted.

Consensus, in this model, was the process of negotiating new alignments (K), the effort to take what had been broken open by faith and give it coherence once more. It was the means by which an ethical insight became law, by which a scientific breakthrough became the foundation for future knowledge, by which a moment of revelation became doctrine. It did not erase the disruptions that had preceded it, but it absorbed them, turning them into structures that could endure—until, in time, they too reached their limits.

Crisis as the Threshold of Renewal

It was at this threshold that meaning was most vulnerable. When consensus became too rigid, when it mistook its temporary stability for permanence, it would collapse under its own weight. The very structures that had once been necessary would become barriers to further meaning, incapable of perceiving what lay beyond them. It was in these moments that faith, once again, became essential—not to destroy what had been built, but to open it to reassembly.

Thus, faith and consensus were not opposing forces but interwoven phases, neither of which could survive without the other. Faith prevented consensus from becoming idolatrous. Consensus prevented faith from dissolving into chaos. The movement between them was not a linear progression but a recursive cycle, an ongoing negotiation between the infinite and the finite, between what could be known and what could never be fully contained.

And so meaning, across time, did not resolve itself but remained in motion, shifting between stabilization and disruption, between enclosure and exposure, between what had been structured and what, inevitably, would break beyond structure’s limits. It was not a failure that meaning could not be fixed. It was the very condition of its endurance.

4.2 The Necessity of Both Layers

It was well understood, by those who studied the long cycles of human thought, that neither faith nor consensus could exist in isolation. Faith, untethered from structure, led only to dissolution, a ceaseless fracturing in which meaning could never be sustained. Consensus, unchallenged by disruption, hardened into rigidity, mistaking its own constructions for finality, its own mechanisms for truth. The history of ideas was littered with the ruins of both extremes—societies that had collapsed into formless uncertainty, others that had calcified into oppressive systems incapable of perceiving their own demise.

There were those who, in certain epochs, had imagined that faith alone would be sufficient. They believed that truth could be found only in its most immediate form, that all articulations of it were corruptions, distortions of something that could not be spoken. They rejected systems, institutions, doctrines, arguing that all such structures were barriers between the self and reality, between the human mind and what lay beyond its comprehension. But what they failed to see was that meaning, once shattered, does not automatically reform itself—that to live in pure disruption was to live in exile from coherence, in a world where every recognition was immediately dissolved, where every attempt at understanding was undone before it could take hold. It was not an accident that those who pursued this path so often found themselves lost, caught in an endless negation in which nothing could be affirmed, nothing could endure.

There were others, too, who believed that consensus alone was enough, that meaning, once stabilized, should never be allowed to shift. They imagined that truth, once articulated, should be fixed in place, protected from the uncertainties that had given birth to it. These were the builders of systems, the architects of doctrines, the custodians of institutions who sought, above all else, to ensure that what had been established would not be disturbed. But what they failed to recognize was that a system that does not permit disruption does not preserve meaning—it entombs it. Every structure that sought to enclose the world within its own categories, to eliminate the possibility of contradiction, only ensured its own eventual collapse. For nothing could be made so complete that it required no revision, no articulation so final that it could not be broken open again.

It was the interplay between these forces—between faith and consensus, between the disruption of meaning and its reassembly—that ensured meaning did not vanish into incoherence or suffocate under its own weight. It was not the case that one force was superior to the other, nor that they could be neatly separated. Rather, each depended on the other, not as opposites, but as necessary conditions of meaning itself. Faith was not the destruction of consensus, but the pressure that ensured consensus did not become an enclosure. Consensus was not the rejection of faith, but the structure that allowed faith’s disruptions to be carried forward rather than lost.

If history had shown anything, it was that meaning was never stable for long. What had once been an open field of possibility always, in time, became an enclosed system, and what had once been rigid always, in time, was broken apart. The balance was never perfect, never complete, for to complete it would be to arrest the movement itself. Meaning was always on the threshold between what had been stabilized and what could not yet be contained, between what had been articulated and what would, in time, be forced to shift again.

It was not failure that meaning could not remain fixed. It was, instead, the condition of its survival.

5.0 The Infinite Process of Meaning

It was a pattern observed across the long histories of civilization, appearing first as anomaly, then as recurrence, until finally it could no longer be dismissed as incidental. Meaning, wherever it had been made, wherever it had been secured in doctrine, in law, in custom, had never remained in place indefinitely. It moved, always, between states—from assembly to stability, from stability to fracture, from fracture to reassembly. It was not a linear progression, not the accumulation of knowledge toward some final state, but an oscillation, a recursive movement between two forces: the drive to establish coherence, and the force that exposed coherence to its own limits.

Faith and consensus, then, were not opposites but phases of the same process, neither capable of existing without the other. It was faith that broke apart what had become rigid, that refused the closure of systems, that pressed against the boundaries of meaning where it had become too fixed. And it was consensus that made meaning livable, that stabilized what had been unsettled, that took the fragments left in the wake of faith’s disruption and wove them into a structure that could endure—until, in time, it too required dismantling.

In some places, this movement had been misinterpreted. It had been assumed that faith was an adversary to knowledge, a refusal to engage with reality, or else that consensus was an obstacle to revelation, a force that stifled truth beneath layers of bureaucracy and tradition. But these were misunderstandings, born from the tendency to see stability and disruption as incommensurable. In reality, each was the necessary condition of the other. Faith, without consensus, dissolved into chaos, an endless fracturing in which nothing could be carried forward. Consensus, without faith, became idolatry, mistaking its own structures for truth, building walls so thick that nothing new could enter.

It was this balance that had eluded so many systems of thought. The great theological traditions, at their inception, had often recognized the necessity of both—faith as the opening to the infinite, consensus as the means by which the infinite could be given form. But in time, the structures meant to hold faith had grown resistant to it, had become so fixed in their articulations that they could no longer recognize what had once given rise to them. The same had been true of the political orders that, founded in moments of rupture, sought to preserve the conditions of their own emergence by suppressing any force that might unsettle them. The same had been true of science, which had once been a method of exposing the limits of knowledge but had, in certain eras, mistaken its own paradigms for conclusions rather than provisional arrangements.

It was not that any of these systems had erred in seeking coherence. Meaning, after all, could not exist in a state of pure disruption. The world itself could not be lived in without some stabilizing framework, without language, without structures that determined what was intelligible and what was not. But whenever these frameworks ceased to recognize that they had been built, whenever they mistook their coherence for completion, they became closed against reality itself. And it was in these moments that faith became necessary—not as adherence to a doctrine, not as belief in an institution, but as an opening to that which lay beyond articulation, to that which had not yet been contained in the available structures of meaning.

Yet even faith, left unchecked, could not sustain itself. The same force that pressed against consensus, that refused to allow meaning to settle, could, if it had no limit, render meaning impossible altogether. There had been figures in history who sought to live entirely in the space of faith, refusing every system, every name, every articulation. Some had called themselves mystics, some revolutionaries, some simply wanderers in search of what could not be captured by language. But though they were necessary to the process, though they reminded systems of what they could not enclose, they could not themselves build what would come after. That task fell always to consensus, to those who took what had been broken and arranged it again into something that could be lived.

The oscillation between these forces was not confined to religion. It extended outward, into politics, into ethics, into the structures by which civilizations oriented themselves. The failure of political orders, when it came, was rarely due to the absence of consensus; rather, it was the failure to recognize when consensus had hardened into dogma, when it had ceased to adapt, when it had closed itself off to the world that continued to move beyond it. The collapse of intellectual paradigms was rarely due to the lack of knowledge but to the inability to perceive when knowledge had become too self-enclosed, when it had ceased to engage with the reality it sought to describe.

The task, then, was never to choose between faith and consensus but to recognize their interplay—to understand that meaning was never secured in any permanent form but only ever stabilized long enough to be reconfigured. The formalization of this dynamic, drawn from the work of Luhmann and Latour, provided a framework for thinking through the process, for understanding how actor-networks assembled meaning, how systems sustained it, and how, in time, both reached their limits. It was a model that did not resolve meaning into a single articulation but held open the space between what had been structured and what could not yet be contained.

To live within meaning was, then, to move between these states—to engage with the structures that had been built, to recognize when they no longer sufficed, to endure the uncertainty of disruption, and to take part in the slow work of assembling what would come next. It was not a failure that meaning did not remain fixed. It was the very condition of its endurance.