3 Constraining Possibility: Culture, Language, and Meaning: 3 Cultural Patterns as Value-Driven Coordination

Language, as we saw in the previous post, acts as a relational scaffold, stabilising semiotic thresholds and enabling shared meaning. But humans do not live in isolation: our semiotic potentials unfold within communities. Culture, then, is the emergent orchestration of relational dynamics across social fields, a system of coordinated potentials that maintains viability, channels meaning, and structures shared life.

Culture as coordination, not symbolism

Traditional accounts treat culture as a collection of symbols, rules, or transmitted information. Relational ontology reframes it:

• Cultural patterns emerge from value-driven coordination: practices, rituals, and norms actualise possibilities that maintain social viability.

• Symbolic content is secondary, a surface-level outcome of deeper relational dynamics.

• Stability arises not from representation, but from recurring, contingent actualisations that preserve shared relational fields.

Examples of value-driven coordination

• Rituals and norms: Repeated social practices align the potentials of individuals, creating predictable patterns without requiring conscious symbolic intent.

• Collective problem-solving: Communities dynamically adjust behaviors to navigate environmental or social challenges, actualising viable solutions emergently.

• Knowledge transmission: Teaching, apprenticeship, and storytelling scaffold potentials across generations, without necessitating literal encoding of meaning; semiotic structures emerge as cumulative actualisations.

The semiotic interplay

Culture does not abolish relational dynamics; it amplifies them. Semiotic thresholds operate within cultural fields:

• Shared meanings are stabilised patterns of relational actualisation, distributed across participants.

• Individuals navigate these patterns, constraining and enabling each other’s possibilities.

• Symbolic innovation occurs when relational fields are reconfigured, allowing new semiotic regimes to emerge.

Implications for understanding human life

Understanding culture as value-driven coordination helps us avoid the dual errors of:

1. Over-symbolisation: Attributing intentionality, design, or fixed meaning to emergent patterns.

2. Reductionism: Ignoring the underlying relational and viability-driven dynamics that produce those patterns.

Culture is thus a dynamic lattice of coordinated potentials, a semiotic field where meaning emerges as a byproduct of relational orchestration rather than as its primary driver.

In the next post, we will examine Social Norms and Semiotic Modulation, exploring how expectation, constraint, and collective interpretation maintain the integrity of these emergent cultural patterns while enabling the co-creation of meaning.