Meaning Does Not Fail Gracefully
When meaning breaks, we tend to reach for familiar explanations: error, ignorance, bias, incompetence, pathology. These explanations share a hidden assumption — that meaning is fundamentally representational, and that breakdowns occur when representations misfire.
From a relational perspective, this diagnosis is backwards.
Breakdowns of meaning are not primarily cognitive deficits. They are structural failures of symbolic capacity.
Readiness Failure, Not Representational Error
Recall the distinction:
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Inclination: the internal organisation of a system — its rules, regularities, grammars, or tendencies.
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Ability: the system’s capacity to actualise symbolic value in relation — its remaining potential space.
In cases of meaning breakdown, inclination often remains intact. Grammar still functions. Rules are still followed. Structures persist.
What fails is ability.
There is no longer sufficient relational room for reinterpretation, negotiation, or renewal of symbolic value.
Meaning collapses not because the system cannot produce symbols, but because those symbols can no longer do anything.
Case 1: Nonsense and Incoherence
Nonsense is frequently treated as a failure of syntax or reference. Yet many forms of nonsense are syntactically impeccable.
What is missing is not form, but symbolic traction.
The symbols no longer open relational space. They do not invite differentiation, response, or elaboration. Interpretation spins without purchase.
This is what nonsense feels like from the inside: not confusion, but exhaustion. Every possible construal has already been foreclosed.
Case 2: Ideological Rigidity
Ideological language is often grammatically fluent, rhetorically polished, and internally consistent. Its failure is not formal.
Its failure is relational.
Such systems exhibit:
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maximal inclination — rules, slogans, doctrines, positions;
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minimal ability — no room for reinterpretation, challenge, or contextual shift.
Every utterance closes further potential rather than opening it. Meaning becomes repetitive, brittle, and immune to learning.
Case 3: Aphasia and Pragmatic Collapse
In aphasia and related pragmatic disorders, symbols may still be produced, but their use no longer reliably tracks relational context.
This is often framed as a neurological deficit affecting representation or retrieval.
A relational diagnosis reframes it: the coordination between symbolic form and situational readiness has fractured.
The issue is not missing meanings, but the inability to place meaning in relation to others, contexts, or purposes.
Meaning requires not only form, but room to land.
Case 4: Semantic Inflation and Empty Abstraction
In academic, bureaucratic, and managerial discourse, we often encounter language that is impeccably formed yet strangely empty.
Terms proliferate. Abstractions multiply. Precision increases. Meaning thins.
This is semantic inflation: symbols expand while relational capacity contracts.
The system continues to generate inclination — definitions, frameworks, taxonomies — but ability erodes. New distinctions no longer create new relations.
What remains is form without force.
A Single Relational Pattern
Across these cases, the pattern is consistent:
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Inclination persists: rules, grammars, ideologies, structures remain intact.
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Ability collapses: relational capacity for symbolic actualisation is exhausted.
Meaning fails not because symbols are incorrect, but because symbolic potential has been spent.
This is why attempts to repair meaning by adding more rules, more precision, or more formal structure so often make things worse.
They increase inclination while further draining ability.
Payoff: Miscommunication Reframed
Miscommunication and meaninglessness are not primarily problems of:
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faulty encoding,
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insufficient information,
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cognitive error.
They are problems of structural readiness.
This reframing shifts responsibility:
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from individuals to systems,
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from competence to capacity,
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from correction to stewardship.
In the next post, we will turn from breakdown to misuse: how modern systems systematically drain readiness by treating meaning as inexhaustible — and how this produces the characteristic pathologies of contemporary communication.
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