metastability

Not stability, not instability. A metastable system sits in an attractor and can endure a great deal while appearing to be at equilibrium, but it is far from equilibrium and retains the potential to shift. At actual equilibrium every potential has been actualised and nothing can transform. The case that makes it concrete is a supersaturated solution: charged with gradients that are only implicit forms, out of which crystals precipitate along particular routes — many coexisting, some actualised, all real, which is what basin and attractor describes computationally. The capacity to change is not a weakness in a structure; it is the sign the structure is still alive, and its absence is what individuation without a wound points at.