Support
General Definition
In technical or artistic language, support designates the physical medium that sustains an inscription — such as canvas, paper, or the body. In the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, support is everything that, being materially active, allows the symbolic inscription to stabilize, persist, and become relational. A support is not a neutral background, but an operator: the inscription only becomes gesture, memory, or event if there is a material plane capable of conserving organized difference. Every symbolic system requires ...
Ontological Variations in the Ontology of Emergent Complexity
Support As a Condition of Inscription
Without support, the gesture dissolves. Symbolic existence only occurs where matter can stabilize difference: body, technique, medium, or relational structure that sustains the inscription.
Support As Differentiated Matter
Not just any matter can function as support. It must be sensitive, resistant, and capable of conserving variation with local coherence.
Support As a Technical-Symbolic Operator
Support is also a technique: it organizes what can or cannot be inscribed. The type of support defines the limits and possibilities of inscription.
Support As an Ethical Place
Every support implies responsibility. Inscribing something onto a body, system, or language is reorganizing the way that support presents itself to the world.
Support As a Condition for Repetition and Memory
Symbolic memory only exists because there is support. Repetition with variation is only possible where the previous trace is conserved — even if partially.
Support As a Relational Instance
A support connects: it makes the inscription transmissible, shareable, reinscribable. Support is a means of relation, not merely a material background.