If the topology of Indra’s net gave us the field of relations, and reciprocal individuation gave us its symmetry, then metabolism is its rhythm — the pulse of transformation through which meaning sustains itself. Metabolism is not a metaphor imported from biology; it is a formal principle of any living system: a pattern that maintains itself by exchanging and transforming its own components.
Meaning, too, lives only through this process. Every construal draws on the collective potential of the system, differentiates it through perspective, and returns the outcome as a reconfiguration of that same potential. This is the metabolic circulation of meaning — the dynamic by which relational potential stays alive.
1. The Semiotic Metabolism
In Halliday’s architecture, the system defines the potential for meaning — what can be meant — while instantiation is the actualisation of that potential in text. But this is not a one-way flow. Every instance feeds back into the system: it extends, refines, and sometimes even redefines the field of possibilities. Over time, the system evolves through its own instantiations.
Lemke’s ecosocial theory makes this explicit. Meaning circulates through the entire social-material ecology: through talk, writing, gesture, architecture, technology, energy flows, and institutional routines. Each instance metabolises material and symbolic resources — a process of drawing in relational potential, transforming it through construal, and returning it to the collective as altered possibility.
In this sense, meaning is metabolic by definition. It has no substance of its own; it is the continual exchange between system and instance, potential and actualisation, the field and its individuations.
2. The Flow of Potentials
To metabolise is to exchange across difference. Within an ecosocial system, this exchange takes place across multiple scales:
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within the moment of logogenesis (the unfolding of a text),
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within the lifeworld of individuals and institutions,
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and across historical time as languages and cultures evolve.
Each scale participates in the same rhythmic alternation: construal differentiates potential; the differentiated instance feeds back to enrich or modify the field. Thus, linguistic systems are not static grammars but living metabolic structures — continuously renewed by the flux of meaning-making.
The “grammar” of a language, seen metabolically, is a stabilised rhythm of circulation: a semiotic infrastructure evolved to manage the flow of relational individuation.
3. The Economy of Construal
In every act of meaning, the system invests potential — it commits to a particular constellation of relations. The instance, in turn, yields surplus: new distinctions, new resonances, new relational patterns. The economy of construal therefore mirrors the logic of ecological metabolism: nothing is lost, but everything is transformed.
Every utterance leaves a residue — not as a physical trace, but as a shift in the probability landscape of potential meanings. The collective learns through construal; each act subtly reconfigures what the system can henceforth mean.
This is why meaning is cumulative without being additive. It grows by differentiation, not accumulation — by recursively altering the topology of potential through the metabolic pulse of construal.
4. Metabolism and Morphogenesis
If individuation gives us the form of differentiation, metabolism gives us its temporal dynamics. The two are inseparable: every individuation is an act of metabolism, and every metabolic exchange individuates new potential.
From a morphogenetic standpoint, metabolism is the form-generating process through which the field continually reshapes itself. Construal is morphogenetic metabolism: the transformation of potential form into individuated pattern, and the reabsorption of that pattern into potential.
In this way, language and semiosis are not merely communicative systems but morphogenetic metabolisms of meaning — the processes through which the world sustains and evolves its own relational intelligibility.
5. Ecosocial Continuity: The Life of Meaning
The ecosocial system endures through the rhythmic renewal of its potentials. A culture, a language, a collective consciousness: all survive by metabolising their own instances.
Each act of construal is both consumption and regeneration — it expends potential and returns transformed potential to the field. The energy of meaning is thus endlessly recycled, its vitality depending on the diversity and resonance of its individuations.
Ecosocial sustainability, in this sense, is not merely an ethical issue but an ontological one. To sustain life — symbolic, social, or biological — is to sustain the conditions for reciprocal individuation, the capacity for ongoing metabolic exchange.
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