After Representation: 7 What a Non-Representational Linguistics Would Require

If representation is to be genuinely displaced, it cannot be done piecemeal.

Adding interaction, embodiment, or social constraint to an otherwise representational framework alters how meaning is explained, but not what meaning is taken to be. A non-representational linguistics would therefore require not a new mechanism, but a change in ontological footing.

This final move is not a proposal for a new theory of language. It is an account of the conditions under which representation ceases to be explanatory at all.

Meaning as Event, Not Content

The first requirement is that meaning no longer be treated as a thing.

Meaning cannot be a content that exists prior to its expression, nor a unit that practices transmit or negotiate. It must be understood as something that occurs — an event constituted in the enactment of distinctions within a situation.

On this view, there is no meaning that is merely waiting to be realised. Meaning exists only as actualised.

This does not deny stability. It relocates it.

Stability Without Shared Representations

A non-representational account cannot appeal to shared mental contents or common meanings as the basis of coordination.

Stability must instead be explained as persistence across enactments: the recurrence of admissible distinctions, the durability of forms of action, the continued viability of certain cuts rather than others.

Agreement is no longer foundational. Coordination is.

Understanding is visible in what participants can do together, not in what they are presumed to share.

Systems as Possibility Spaces

Language, on this account, is not a repository of meanings but a structured space of possibility.

A linguistic system constrains what distinctions can be enacted, what relations can be established, and what continuations are admissible. It does not cause meanings, nor does it aim at outcomes.

Actualisation is therefore not a process driven by intention or mechanism. It is a perspectival selection among admissible cuts.

Teleology and causation have no explanatory role here.

Explanation Without Origins or Ends

Once meaning is treated as event rather than content, familiar explanatory questions lose their grip.

There is no need to ask what caused a meaning to occur, because meaning is not an effect. There is no need to ask what a meaning was for, because meaning is not a means.

Explanation remains immanent:

• Which distinctions were enacted?

• Under what constraints were they admissible?

• How did these enactments stabilise or transform the system?

These questions do not reach backward to origins or forward to goals.

Error, Misalignment, and Difference

Without representation, error cannot be misrepresentation.

Misalignment is not failure to reach a shared meaning, but divergence in enacted distinctions across perspectives or scales. Such divergence is not inherently pathological. It is often constitutive of system dynamics.

Correction, therefore, is not the restoration of accuracy, but the reconfiguration of admissibility.

What Changes — and What Does Not

A non-representational linguistics does not deny reference, communication, or social coordination. It denies that these are grounded in the transmission of content.

Reference becomes a secondary description of how distinctions function within activity. Communication becomes coordination across enacted cuts. Social meaning becomes the patterned persistence of admissible relations.

What changes is the level at which explanation is allowed to stop.

From Theories to Ontology

The repeated return of representation across linguistic and semiotic traditions is not a failure of theory-building. It is a sign that the ontological ground has remained fixed.

To move beyond representation requires shifting that ground.

This series has traced how representational explanation becomes installed, reinforced, softened, and extended. Its aim has not been to replace one theory with another, but to show that another kind of explanation is possible — one that does not require meaning to point beyond itself in order to be intelligible.

A non-representational linguistics would not begin by asking what meanings are. It would begin by asking what distinctions are possible, and what it takes for them to occur.