In the previous post, we reframed obligation as stabilised readiness — a semiotic achievement that resists withdrawal and makes non-actualisation accountable. Obligation, on this view, is not a moral substance or an internal pressure, but a durable configuration of meaning.
This immediately raises a difficult question:
If commitment is relational and semiotic, who is responsible?
The habitual answer — the subject — turns out to be the least helpful one.
The Problem with Subject-Centred Responsibility
Most accounts of responsibility assume a familiar architecture:
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an individual subject
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with intentions
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who chooses
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and is therefore responsible
But this architecture struggles to explain phenomena that are routine rather than exceptional:
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commitments that persist after personnel change
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obligations attached to roles rather than persons
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responsibility distributed across teams, procedures, or institutions
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accountability without identifiable intent
If responsibility were fundamentally a property of subjects, these cases would be anomalies. In practice, they are the norm.
The problem is not that subjects do not matter, but that they are not where commitment lives.
Responsibility Follows Commitment, Not Intention
Once obligation is understood as stabilised meaning, responsibility can be reconceived accordingly.
Where a future has been semiotically stabilised — through uptake, alignment, expectation, and modulation — responsibility attaches to the configuration that sustains that stabilisation.
Commitment as a Property of Configurations
A configuration may include:
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participants in interaction
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roles and role relations
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procedures and routines
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documents and records
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institutional expectations
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temporal sequencing
Responsibility belongs to the configuration as a whole, not to any one element within it.
This explains why:
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an organisation can be responsible even when no one “meant” the outcome
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a role can carry obligations regardless of who occupies it
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responsibility can be transferred, delegated, or inherited
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accountability persists even when desire disappears
Distributed Responsibility in Practice
Consider a familiar case: a scheduled meeting.
Once the meeting has been:
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proposed
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taken up
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aligned around
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expected
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and modulated as obligatory
Responsibility for that future does not reside in any single participant’s intention. It resides in the network of expectations that now makes absence accountable.
This is why:
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forgetting is an explanation, not an excuse
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personal reluctance does not dissolve obligation
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responsibility survives changes in motivation
The binding force comes from shared semiotic history, not from current mental state.
Why This Is Not a Denial of Agency
Reframing responsibility as distributed does not erase agency. It relocates it.
Agency appears not as sovereign choice, but as participation in configurations that carry futures forward.
An agent acts responsibly by:
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recognising which commitments are in play
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understanding how they are sustained
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negotiating, revising, or discharging them semiotically
Responsibility, on this account, is not about guilt or virtue. It is about recognition of binding meaning.
Blame, Praise, and Second-Order Proposals
They do not discover responsibility; they attempt to:
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reassign it
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intensify it
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redistribute it
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or repair it after breakdown
This explains why blame and praise are themselves contestable, negotiable, and often unstable. They are moves within the semiotic field, not verdicts issued from outside it.
Letting Go of the Subject — Carefully
This account does not deny persons. It denies that persons are the origin of commitment.
Subjects matter because they:
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take up proposals
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sustain alignments
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enact modulations
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maintain or dissolve expectations
But responsibility emerges between them, not inside them.
Where This Leaves Us
At this point in the series, we can see that:
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obligation is stabilised meaning
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responsibility is distributed meaning
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commitment is maintained by configurations
This prepares the ground for the next step.
If commitment is not carried by subjects, how does it survive time, turnover, and scale?
To answer that, we must turn to the most powerful commitment-preserving devices we have: institutions.
In the next post, we will examine institutions not as value systems or authorities, but as semiotic machines for sustaining binding futures.
That is where meaning becomes durable enough to outlive us.
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