In the previous semiotic series, we traced how humans construct and recursively modulate symbolic horizons. In this post, we expand the lens to relational semiosis beyond the human, exploring how semiotic events occur in collective, technological, and ecological systems, and how non-human agents participate in the evolution of meaning.
1. Semiotic Events as Relational Phenomena
Recall that a semiotic event is a construal cut actualising relational potential. Crucially:
-
Semiotic events are not confined to humans or symbolic cognition.
-
Any system capable of modulating relational potential can generate semiotic events.
-
Humans are highly specialised semiotic constructors, but they are not the sole participants in the generative ecology of meaning.
Thus, semiosis is relational and distributed, extending across agents, networks, and environments.
2. Collective Systems as Semiotic Agents
Groups, organisations, and communities constitute collective semiotic ecologies:
-
Alignment of relational potentials occurs across participants, producing emergent first-order meanings at the group level.
-
Collective semiotic events may stabilise symbolic affordances that cannot be traced to any single individual, e.g., cultural norms, institutional practices, and social conventions.
-
Drift, innovation, and collapse occur at the collective level, demonstrating that meaning evolves ecologically, not just psychologically.
Example: A scientific community generating and validating a conceptual framework—its semiotic events propagate relational potential far beyond any individual contributor.
3. Technological Systems and Semiotic Participation
Technological networks—AI systems, communication infrastructures, and algorithmic platforms—are increasingly participants in relational semiosis:
-
They can mediate, stabilise, and propagate symbolic affordances across scales.
-
They generate recursive effects: a social media algorithm, for example, modulates the relational horizon of attention, interpretation, and discourse.
-
While non-conscious, these systems constrain and extend semiotic potential, contributing to the ecology of meaning.
Key insight: semiotic events are not equivalent to conscious experience. Relational semiosis is about the actualisation of potential, not the phenomenology of agents.
4. Ecological Semiosis
Non-human ecological systems also exhibit relational alignment and signalling that can be interpreted as semiotic events:
-
Patterns of synchrony, signalling, and metabolic coordination produce informationally rich interactions.
-
These events stabilise local and cross-scale potentials, guiding collective behaviour and adaptation.
-
Plants, animals, and ecosystems participate in distributed relational dynamics, generating affordances for further interactions.
Example: A pollination network stabilises relational patterns between plants, pollinators, and environmental conditions—producing functional semiotic effects that shape future interactions.
5. Implications for Relational Semiosis
-
Distributed meaning: Semiotic events arise wherever relational potentials are modulated—human, collective, technological, ecological.
-
Non-anthropocentric: Humans are participants, not the source, of semiotic evolution.
-
Ecological recursive potential: Semiotic horizons extend across scales, producing emergent affordances and systemic self-organisation.
Relational semiosis is the connective tissue of meaning across all systems capable of relational modulation. Human semiotic activity is a specialisation within a broader semiotic ecology.
6. Takeaway
Expanding the semiotic lens beyond humans reveals:
-
Meaning is distributed, relational, and multi-agent.
-
Semiotic events can occur in collectives, technological infrastructures, and ecological networks.
-
Non-human agents contribute to the evolution of semiotic horizons, shaping, stabilising, and propagating relational potential.
This perspective sets the stage for exploring cross-scale propagation of symbolic horizons, where semiotic recursion links human and non-human actors into a cohesive, evolving relational ecology.
No comments:
Post a Comment