Excess As Creative Matrix

Since Antiquity, the problem of the motor of change has traversed the history of thought as a persistent interrogation. For Heraclitus, change is the inseparable flow of reality; for Parmenides, it is merely appearance to be overcome by the stability of being. Aristotle formalizes the passage from potentiality to act, subordinating it to an intrinsic teleology. In Stoicism and Neoplatonism, variation is governed by a cosmic logos, an ordering principle that prevents contingency from escaping reason. Mechanical modernity, with Descartes and Newton, reduces change to measurable transformation according to invariant laws. Kant shifts the problem to the internal conditions of the subject; Hegel converts transformation into dialectical negativity, whose outcome is always synthesis. In the 20th century, structuralism, cybernetics, and functionalism identify it with the adaptation of systems to disturbances. Postmodernity, by deconstructing grand narratives, often dissolved the very concept of the motor, replacing it with the fragment and unarticulated contingency.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity rejects both the linearity of these narratives and their dependence on negativity, finality, or exteriority. What is asserted here is that change does not arise from crisis, failure, or telos, but from an excess immanent to the material organization itself. This excess is not useless residue, noise, or waste, but a superposition of local compatibilities whose density surpasses what is necessary to sustain the current configuration. It is an operative overflow that does not break the form due to defect, but displaces its stabilized regime through superabundance, establishing new conditions of organization. “Creative matrix” here does not designate a producing substance, but a relational effect: a mode of operation that, through its own intensity, opens space for configurations not foreseen in the present regime.

Unlike interpretations that imagine a prior reservoir of potentialities, excess is not anterior to form — it is the intensification of its own operation, the point where the network of relations multiplies to such a degree that the form can no longer maintain them without reorganizing. There is no preserved background, no virtuality waiting: there is only the immanent action of compatibilities that reconfigure themselves.

Thus, excess distinguishes itself both from entropy and from the Aristotelian “just measure”: it is neither degradation nor deviation, but a creative matrix as an emergent effect of interactions. In prebiotic chemistry, the local accumulation of reactive interactions generates unprecedented chains; in ecosystems, biodiversity that exceeds the minimum stability not only maintains a transitory order but opens space for new combinations. In these cases, excess does not preserve what exists — it engenders what has not yet been inscribed.

This formulation shifts the question of the motor of change — understood here not as an agent, but as an operative condition — outside the paradigm of reaction. It is not about solving pre-existing problems, but about reorganizing the present under the intensity of a material “more-than-enough.” When a system operates only in its stabilized operative mode, there is no margin for novelty; the capacity for invention resides in what overflows the current regime of compatibilities.

Excess, here, is not a reserve for an uncertain future: it is a present act, a motor — as an effect of reorganization — already underway. It does not save itself — it acts. The plasticity that results from it is not a luxury, but an expression of the very ontological condition of matter as a field of variation. Change, understood in this way, is neither ascent, recovery, nor escape: it is internal inflection, generated by an operativity that surpasses itself.

To affirm excess as a creative matrix is, finally, to reject the image of a world that moves only by lack or destiny. It is to recognize that, at the point where a configuration finds itself traversed by more relations than it can contain, reality reorganizes itself — without plan, without origin, and without promise — because it persists in exceeding itself.

"Nothing moves reality — it merely reorganizes itself where it no longer fits within itself."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——