3 Constraining Possibility: Culture, Language, and Meaning: 5 Memory, Narrative, and the Construction of Self

We have seen culture as value-driven coordination and social norms as relational regulators that modulate semiotic thresholds. The next layer of human meaning emerges in the interplay of memory, narrative, and self-construal — the processes by which individuals integrate relational potentials into coherent semiotic experience.

Memory as relational scaffolding

Memory is not merely storage of information. It is a dynamic reconstruction of past relational fields, enabling the individual to:

• Maintain continuity across experiences.

• Anticipate potentialities and modulate present actions.

• Participate in shared semiotic fields with others.

Memory thus translates value-driven actualisations into interpretable semiotic patterns, allowing relational dynamics to persist and accumulate over time.

Narrative as the structuring of possibility

Narrative extends memory into temporal and relational coherence:

• It organises events, interactions, and experiences into patterns that can be shared, interpreted, and modified.

• Narratives do not merely recount; they mediate relational fields, constraining which possibilities are salient and which are peripheral.

• Through narrative, individuals situate themselves within larger cultural and semiotic landscapes, navigating thresholds of meaning collaboratively.

Self as emergent semiotic construct

The self is not a fixed entity; it is an ongoing semiotic actualisation, arising where relational fields intersect with semiotic thresholds:

• The self integrates memory, narrative, and cultural scaffolds to coordinate action and construal.

• Identity is distributed, simultaneously personal, social, and historical, emerging from the interplay of relational potentials and semiotic capacities.

• Meaning is co-constructed, grounded in value-driven interactions but actualised within the semiotic thresholds of human consciousness.

Implications

Understanding memory, narrative, and the self in relational and semiotic terms clarifies:

• Why human meaning is contextual and contingent, not pre-given.

• How personal and collective experience co-evolve, shaping cultural and linguistic landscapes.

• Why innovation, creativity, and symbolic construction are emergent phenomena, dependent on relational fields crossing semiotic thresholds rather than deterministic rules.

In the next post, we will explore Creativity and Innovation, examining how semiotic thresholds and relational dynamics enable novelty, new patterns of meaning, and the continuous expansion of cultural possibility.