Series Preface: This post begins a series exploring how meaning structures reality, perception, and potential, using a relational ontology approach. We will trace how phenomena emerge, how perception unfolds, and how non-meaning—the spaces of potential—co-constitutes our experience.
Meaning Creates Its Own Shadow
Imagine a dark ocean at night. Into this ocean, you lower a lantern. The lantern illuminates the water around it, revealing shapes, ripples, and eddies. Yet the light does more than reveal—it defines the darkness around it. The illuminated patches stand against shadow, and the shadow itself becomes intelligible only because there is light.
In this simple metaphor lies a profound insight: meaning creates the domain of non-meaning. Each act of meaning—each word, symbol, or construal—does not float freely; it shapes the horizon against which other potential meanings may emerge. Non-meaning is not an empty void, but a structured field of possibilities, sculpted relationally by existing meaning.
Lanterns, Shadows, and the Relational Field
In Hallidayan terms, each lantern is like an instance of a system actualised in a particular context. Meaning is local, contingent, and relational, but it also has directional force: it structures what is possible, what can appear next, and what remains in shadow. The dark ocean—the field of non-meaning—is the complementary space, the potential that makes new meaning possible.
Perception works the same way. What we see, hear, or sense does not exist independently “out there” as pre-given phenomena. Instead, phenomena emerge relationally, as first-order patterns phased from the interplay of meaning and non-meaning. A tree, a face, a landscape—they stabilise in perception only because they contrast with what is not-tree, not-face, not-landscape.
The Co-Constitution of Meaning and Non-Meaning
This leads to a radical but simple principle: meaning and non-meaning are co-constitutive.
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Meaning cannot exist without a horizon of potential, otherwise there is nothing to differentiate it from.
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Non-meaning cannot exist independently, because it is intelligible only as the structured field shaped by actualised meaning.
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Phenomena, perception, and experience are temporary stabilisations in this ongoing dance between light and dark, actualisation and potential.
In other words, when we speak, perceive, or act, we are not merely revealing a pre-existing world; we are phasing it into existence, creating patterns of intelligibility while simultaneously defining spaces for future novelty.
Why This Matters
Thinking of meaning this way reshapes how we understand perception, cognition, and communication:
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It rejects the idea of a “neutral” world separate from human construal.
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It highlights the dynamic, temporal, and relational character of experience.
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It prepares the ground for exploring collective phenomena: shared patterns of meaning, social formations, and symbolic alignment.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we will explore how phenomena themselves emerge from this relational field, and how perception is an active process of phasing patterns from potential into actuality. We will see that seeing, hearing, and knowing are not passive acts—they are dances of lanterns across the ocean of experience.
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