Illuminated Potential: From Meaning to Non-Meaning in the Relational Cosmos: Series Preface

The Lantern series traced how meaning emerges as a reflexive alignment within the luminous field of construal — how each act of differentiation lights up a portion of potential, rendering the world meaningful through patterned attention. But if every illumination is a construal, every shadow is also real — not as negation, but as potential itself: the unlit reservoir of meaning that makes construal possible.

This new series asks:

• What is non-meaning in a relational ontology?

• How does the unactualised — the not-yet-construed — participate in the dynamics of meaning?

• Can we think of potential as the relational affordance of meaning, rather than its absence?

If the lantern illuminated meaning as reflexive event, this series turns to the dark field that gives it depth. Meaning is not a substance; it is a cut through the indeterminate. But the indeterminate is not mere lack — it is the structured potential from which meaning differentiates.

Here we follow three threads:

1. Potential as non-meaning — the relational affordance of construal.

2. Affordance as perspectival tension — neither matter nor mind, but the field of mutual possibility.

3. Illumination as ontogenesis — the actualisation of potential meaning through construal, not as representation but as phase-shift in the field of relation.

Non-meaning, in this sense, is not absence but plenitude: the horizon of what could yet be meant. It is the dark energy of the semiotic cosmos — invisible but formative, the condition of every possible act of meaning.