When language stratified its content plane into semantics and lexicogrammar, a new kind of relation became possible: meanings could now stand for other meanings. Halliday described this as a junctional phenomenon, where a wording realises both its congruent and metaphorical meanings — a token–value relation within the semantics itself. This reflexive fold in meaning-making not only expanded the potential of language; it restructured perception.
The same reflexive capacity that enabled metaphor in language also made representation in art possible. Once the human mind could construe meaning as objectifiable, capable of standing for another meaning, the image could begin to operate symbolically — while still remaining embedded in the participatory field of being. The painted animal did not cease to participate in life; it also could stand for bison. Representation is not a replacement of participation, but a rephasing: the image is both enactment and token, both field and marker.
This was not merely a cognitive achievement; it was an ontological reorganisation. Through the lens of relational ontology, the emergence of representation marks a new phase of worlding — from the immediacy of direct relational participation to the simultaneous presence of symbolic mediation. The world is not simply separated from the human observer; it can now be construed both as it is lived and as it can be represented.
In this representational turn, art becomes an interface between modes of experience: the experiential world of perception and action, and the symbolic world of meaning. The artist assumes a dual role — interpreter and participant — moving between these domains. The mark becomes intentional, the composition deliberate, the viewpoint articulated, yet participation remains present in subtle relational currents.
Perspective, when it appears, is the logical articulation of this dual mode. Once meaning can be represented, it can also be framed — organised according to viewpoint — while coexisting with participatory immediacy. The image becomes not only a reflection of what is seen but a structured articulation of relational construal.
This shift reverberates through the semiotic ecology. In language, metaphor reconstrues processes as entities, qualities as participants, doing as being. In art, representation externalises experience as image, while maintaining traces of participation. Both are metaphorical in Halliday’s sense: they allow the living fluidity of meaning to be structured, observable, and transferrable.
Even as symbolic representation emerges, tension arises. What was once fully immersive now also carries mediation. Representation can stand over the world even as it participates within it. Meaning may be articulated apart from immediate being, opening the power to name, depict, and define. Yet this detachment coexists with the participatory ground: the image continues to enact relationality, even as it communicates across time, space, and minds.
In prehistoric art, this duality is visible in the movement from indexical and gestural traces — handprints, pigmented lines — to iconic and figurative forms: the animal in motion, the hunt in replay. The cave remains a site of ritual and relational presence even as it becomes a surface of inscription. Representation and participation coexist, layering experience in new ways.
This is the birth of the world as image, alongside the human as observer. A profound asymmetry enters experience: the image can stand before the viewer while still participating in a shared field. Separation and co-presence move together. Once meaning can be displaced from experience, it can travel — through time, space, and minds. Representation fractures immediacy but extends continuity; it severs, yet also connects.
In this dual movement — co-existence of participation and symbolic representation — we see the first stirrings of history, memory, and myth as layered architectures of meaning. Worlds endure not only through ritual repetition but through representational permanence, while still echoing relational vitality.
In the next post, we will follow this evolution further, tracing how the symbolic image gave rise to mythic composition: when representation became narrative, and image and word began to fold into one another.
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