The modern imagination often reduces meaning to representation: words as mirrors, symbols as stand-ins, signs as tokens of an independent reality. In this frame, meaning is secondary, derivative — a convenient shorthand for what “really exists.”
But representation is only one construal of meaning, and a narrow one at that. To reduce meaning to representation is to mistake a particular symbolic practice for the ground of meaning itself.
Meaning does not simply point outward; it configures inward. It does not mirror a cosmos; it brings a cosmos forth. Every symbolic act cuts across possibility, aligning relations, staging distinctions, opening some paths and closing others. To mean is not to copy what is already there, but to actualise what can come to be.
Representation is one tool among many, but it is never the whole. Meaning is not exhausted by the referential relation between sign and thing. It lives in orientation, in coordination, in construal. It is the very process by which the fabric of relation comes into view as a world.
To move beyond representation is to see meaning not as supplement to being, but as one of its modes of unfolding.
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