This appendix clarifies three terms that often circulate together in discussions of meaning, individuation, and social semiotics: reservoir, repertoire, and persona.
The series does not introduce new terminology for its own sake. Instead, it makes visible why these terms have carried so much conceptual weight — and why one of them can now be let go.
1. Reservoir Re-specified
In much theoretical and pedagogic usage, reservoir has functioned as a convenient metaphor for “what meanings are available.”
What has often remained unclear is where this reservoir is located.
Is it:
in individuals?
in communities?
in minds?
in texts?
The work of this series resolves that ambiguity.
A reservoir is best understood as collective meaning potential:
ambient rather than local
structured rather than random
shared rather than owned
A reservoir is not something anyone has. It is something that exists as availability within a semiotic ecology.
This clarification matters because it prevents reservoir from quietly becoming a mental storehouse — a psychological substitute for meaning.
2. Repertoire Re-specified
Repertoire has often been treated as the individual-facing counterpart to reservoir: the subset of meanings a person can deploy.
That formulation, however, reintroduces subject-ownership at precisely the point where explanation is needed.
Within the framework developed in the series, repertoire is better understood as:
differentiated readiness within collective meaning potential.
Repertoires:
are perspectival, not personal
differ across positions, not across selves
are shaped by histories of uptake and commitment
A repertoire is not a possession. It is a pattern of availability relative to a perspective.
This places repertoire squarely on the individuation cline:
reservoir → collective potential
repertoire → differentiated readiness
No appeal to interior competence is required.
3. Persona as a Conceptual Patch
The term persona has played an important historical role — but one that is now clearer in hindsight.
Persona has functioned as a conceptual patch.
It emerged to address a real problem: how to talk about socially recognisable patterns of meaning-making without collapsing everything into either:
abstract systems, or
psychological subjects
Persona appeared to offer a middle ground.
4. The Strategic Ambiguity of Persona
Persona is powerful because it is ambiguous.
Depending on context, it can refer to:
a role
a discursive stance
a social identity
a moral position
a psychological self
This ambiguity has allowed persona to do useful work — but also to smuggle in assumptions that remain unexamined.
In practice, persona often behaves as:
a host of meaning
an owner of repertoire
a bearer of responsibility
a site of agency
In other words, persona frequently operates as a subject-proxy, even when framed as semiotic.
5. Why Persona Is No Longer Needed
The series has shown that once individuation is properly accounted for, the explanatory pressure that produced persona disappears.
The work persona was doing is now handled explicitly by:
collective meaning potential (reservoir)
differentiated readiness (repertoire)
perspectival commitment
distributed responsibility
None of these require a mediating subject-like construct.
Persona was solving a problem that had not yet been adequately specified.
That problem is now specified.
6. Letting the Patch Go
To say that persona is no longer needed is not to say it was mistaken.
It was a historically intelligible response to a genuine theoretical gap.
What has changed is the framework around it.
Once individuation is understood as:
relational rather than intrinsic
perspectival rather than personal
temporal rather than static
persona ceases to add explanatory value.
It becomes optional rhetoric rather than necessary theory.
7. What This Clarification Achieves
With these clarifications in place:
reservoir names collective semiotic potential without psychological drift
repertoire names differentiated readiness without subject ownership
persona is revealed as a workaround whose function has been superseded
This does not close down future theorising.
It clears conceptual space.
Closing Note
The broader project of The Becoming of Possibility has consistently aimed to relocate meaning-making away from interior subjects and toward relational, semiotic processes.
This appendix shows how that relocation sharpens familiar terms — and allows others to be retired with confidence.
What remains is not a theory of persons, but a clearer account of how persons become thinkable at all.
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