Restoring Possibility: 8 Agency under the Ladder

Once assessment and authority have been aligned to the ladder, agency itself is reframed. What had been distributed, relational, and semiotic is now abstracted, constrained, and delegated. The ladder logic transforms actors into instruments of system validation.

1. Halliday’s relational agency

In Halliday’s model:

• Agency is situated and relational: meaning emerges through interaction between system potential and instance enactment.

• Persons, institutions, and texts co-construct meaning in context.

• Variation, improvisation, and multimodal enactment are evidence of semiotic vitality, not error.

2. The ladder effect on agency

Under the ladder:

• Agency is subordinated to stages and endpoints.

• Students, analysts, and semiotic actors are expected to perform within the boundaries of system expectations.

• Autonomy is interpreted as deviation; initiative is filtered through compliance.

The result is a flattened semiotic ecology: actors exist primarily to demonstrate adherence.

3. Embodied and multimodal agency is compressed

Embodied action — gesture, prosody, movement, visual-spatial meaning — is now:

• Treated as secondary or irrelevant unless it serves measurable stages.

• Reduced to tokens of expected behaviour rather than constitutive meaning-making.

• Abstracted from relational context; the richness of enactment is subordinated to systemic validation.

The ladder does not eliminate agency entirely; it redirects it toward conformity.

4. Ethical and semiotic consequences

This reordering carries subtle but serious effects:

• Ethically, actors are responsible for compliance, not for relational meaning-making.

• Semiotically, richness, ambiguity, and improvisation are discouraged.

• Epistemically, knowledge emerges less from interaction and more from verification against pre-established structures.

The ladder produces predictable, measurable, but constrained forms of action.

5. The illusion of empowerment

Interestingly, the ladder can create a false sense of agency:

• Actors feel empowered by completing stages, fulfilling genre requirements, or aligning with systemic expectations.

• In reality, their freedom is bounded: the range of meaningful options has been pre-determined.

• The relational, interpretive, and emergent possibilities Halliday valued are invisible.

6. Looking ahead

The next post will trace the coda of possibility: how Halliday’s distinctions between realisation, instantiation, and context can be restored to reclaim agency, flexibility, and semiotic richness.