Semiosis is often introduced as if it were a process of linking things: a sign linked to a meaning, a form linked to a content, a linguistic choice linked to a contextual variable. Even systemic functional linguistics, with its rich stratifications, can drift into this representational habit when we start treating meaning as something language “expresses” rather than something language is.
In this series, we take a different approach. We start from the axiom that has been animating our work for some time:
Meaning = Reality.
This is not a slogan; it is a relational commitment. It denies the existence of any realm of “unconstrued” reality to which meanings might correspond or from which they might derive their authority. It denies any semiotic transaction between a sign and a world. What we call “reality” just is the ongoing actualisation of meaning in a field of relational potential.
If this sounds metaphysical, that’s because the representational tradition has naturalised its metaphysics so thoroughly that any alternative now sounds strange. But the relational move is simple:
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There is no world behind the meaning.
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There is only the world as construed.
And construal is not a distortion or a filter. It is what brings reality forth.
This means that semiosis cannot be understood as a process of encoding, decoding, or referencing. Semiosis is not a process of moving meaning between minds or systems. Nor is it a mapping between strata. Semiosis is a cut within a structured potential: a perspectival shift that actualises one possibility within a field of many.
To put it differently:
Semiosis is the ongoing differentiation of possibility into event.
This gives us a point of departure for a metasemiotics grounded in relational ontology rather than representation.
System as the Theory of the Instance
In a relational ontology, a system is not an inventory of forms or a catalogue of units. A system is a theory of the possible ways an event may take shape. It is structured potential. The system does not precede the instance in time; it precedes only in logical non-specificity. It is the horizon of what an instance can be.
In this sense:
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The system is a metasemiotic abstraction: a structured way of thinking the possible.
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The instance is a perspectival actualisation: a cut that selects and enacts one trajectory through that space.
Semiosis happens in the shift — not in the system, not in the instance, but in the relation between them.
This is already a metasemiotic insight, even if we don’t label it as such. The moment we treat system as the theory of the instance, we understand that semiosis is not a process inside the system but a relational event between theory and actualisation.
No Meaning Beneath Meaning
A persistent temptation in linguistic theory is to posit a deeper layer beneath the construed meaning: some pre-semiotic “stuff” or contextual substrate that meaning is said to represent. This can appear as:
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“context” understood as situational substance,
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“experience” understood as pre-symbolic content,
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“reality” understood as extra-semiotic givenness.
In each case, meaning is relegated to a secondary status — a layer that refers to something more primary.
But in a relational ontology:
There is nothing more primary.
Meaning does not represent reality; meaning is reality in its event-form.
This automatically changes the metasemiotic landscape. We no longer ask:
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What is meaning “based on”?
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What does meaning “express”?
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What does meaning “refer to”?
Instead, we ask:
Semiosis is not grounded in a world. It grounds the world.
Semiosis as a Perspectival Event
Once we let go of representation, semiosis becomes simpler and more radical:
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There is a structured potential.
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There is a cut.
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The cut is a construal.
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The construal is a phenomenon.
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The phenomenon is a reality.
Nothing else is required.
There is only the perspectival event in which a possibility becomes actual from this vantage and not another.
This is what makes semiosis inherently metasemiotic: every construed event presupposes the space of potential it distinguishes itself from. And because the system is a theory of possible instances, every instance implicitly points back to the metasemiotic horizon that makes it possible.
Where This Series Goes Next
In the next posts, we will build an explicit metasemiotic architecture out of this. Each post will unfold a layer of the metasemiotic without assuming representation, without importing context-as-substance, and without collapsing meaning into value systems or ecosocial processes.
Instead, the metasemiotic emerges from relation, from cut, and from the becoming of possibility.
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