Language is not static; it is alive. It circulates, transforms, and regenerates potential across social, symbolic, and material ecologies. In this five-part series, we explore language as metabolic process, tracing the circulation of meaning from individual acts of construal to the reflexive alignment of the planet itself.
1. Metabolism as Relational Lens: From Life to Language
We introduce metabolism as a conceptual lens, showing how Halliday’s system–instance–instantiation triad already prefigures semiotic circulation. Meaning is not a mirror of the world but a living, reflexive flow of potential.
2. Construal Metabolism: How Meaning Sustains Itself
Individual acts of language are metabolic pulses. Each construal consumes potential, transforms it, and feeds it back into the system, sustaining coherence, diversity, and reflexive alignment at the micro-scale.
3. Metabolic Networks: Communities and Institutions
Meso-level networks of meaning emerge as communities and institutions regulate, amplify, and constrain semiotic flows. Feedback loops and circulatory patterns stabilise collective potential while allowing adaptation and innovation.
4. Semiotic Evolution: Metabolism and the Emergence of Novelty
Language evolves reflexively. Novelty arises not by chance but through recombination and alignment of potential, allowing the ecosocial system to learn, adapt, and expand the space of possibility.
5. Cosmogenic Metabolism: Language as Planetary Reflexivity
At the macro scale, language functions as the planet’s reflexive nervous system, coordinating symbolic, social, and material processes. Semiotic metabolism enables the ecosocial field to observe, adapt, and co-actualise possibility across planetary networks.
Together, the series reveals language as a living, self-transforming ecosystem of meaning, a metabolism that sustains potential, enables evolution, and orchestrates reflexive alignment from the micro-scale of individual construals to the cosmogenic horizon of the symbolic Gaia.
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