Illuminated Potential: From Meaning to Non-Meaning in the Relational Cosmos: 1 The Ontology of Non-Meaning

In our earlier work, meaning was understood as reflexive alignment — the event of construal that cuts through the potential of the system, bringing a patterned portion of possibility into luminous form. Each construal, in that sense, is an act of differentiation within the relational field: a momentary alignment that gives rise to what we experience as phenomenon.

But if every act of meaning is a cut, then meaning cannot be everything. There must be something it cuts from — something not yet drawn into construal, not yet actualised. That something is what we now call non-meaning.

1. Non-meaning as potential, not absence

To speak of non-meaning is not to invoke a void. The non-meaningful is not the meaningless. Rather, it is structured potential — the relational field as it stands before construal, the theory of possible meanings awaiting instantiation.

In this sense, non-meaning is meaning’s generative horizon: it is the undifferentiated, relationally complete system of affordances from which construal draws.

When the lantern of construal illuminates a segment of this field, we name it meaning. But what remains in shadow is not destroyed or negated — it sustains the very conditions for meaning’s emergence.

2. Affordance as relational tension

This reframing aligns, in a limited sense, with Gibson’s notion of affordance, yet it extends beyond the ecological interface between organism and environment.

For Gibson, affordance names what the environment offers a perceiver. In our ontology, affordance is relational tension within the potential field — the structured readiness of the world to be meant.

Non-meaning, therefore, is not a static background but an active potential for construal: a dynamic, relational affordance awaiting alignment.

3. From potential to construal

Meaning does not arise from non-meaning as if out of substance; it cuts through it as perspective.

The field of non-meaning is the theory of possible meanings — a system of virtual alignments.

To construe is to take perspective within that system: to actualise a possible relation as event.

In this light, the non-meaningful is the unactualised dimension of meaning itself — what meaning presupposes but cannot exhaust. Each construal illuminates a pattern within the darkness, and in so doing, deepens the structure of that darkness by defining its contours anew.

4. The paradox of illumination

Meaning’s boundary is not where light ends but where light begins. Every illumination remakes its own horizon of non-meaning, redefining what remains possible.

In this way, non-meaning is not external to the semiotic process — it is the condition of its reflexivity. Without the unlit field, no lantern could cast its glow.

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In summary:

• Non-meaning is structured potential, not negation.

• It is the relational affordance of construal, not the absence of meaning.

• Each act of meaning redraws the horizon of non-meaning, altering what can next be meant.

Meaning and non-meaning thus co-constitute one another across the field of potential: the luminous and the latent, the actual and the affordant, the lantern and its night.