Social-Semiotic Potential: Actualisation and Individuation — Series Introduction

How do individuals and collectives co-actualise possibilities in social life? Social-Semiotic Potential: Actualisation and Individuation explores this question through the lens of relational ontology. Social systems are fields of potential, structured semiotically and relationally, and the processes of actualisation (instantiation of actions, roles, and practices) and individuation reveal how this potential is expressed, stabilised, and recursively transformed.

This series examines:

• The preconditions that enable social-semiotic instances to emerge — structured norms, relational frames, symbolic resources, and stability scaffolds;

• The consequences of actualisation and individuation — novelty, constraint propagation, recursive shaping of collective potential, and semiotic-functional embedding;

• The synthesis, showing how social-semiotic potential unfolds as a continuous relational process, producing meaning, coordination, and evolving capacities for collective action.

Readers are invited to trace the dynamics of social-semiotic potential across scales — from individuals to subgroups to entire collectives — revealing how actors and collectives co-actualise, differentiate, and recursively reshape the landscape of social possibility.