Coordination Without Meaning / Meaning Without Coordination: 4 Meaning as Destabilisation

When Interpretation Breaks Coordination

Coordination without meaning is efficient. Meaning enters, and efficiency becomes a secondary concern. Interpretation disrupts predictable behaviour. Patterns shift. Actions diverge. The system, once stable, wavers.

Destabilisation is not incidental. It is the effect of semiotic excess. Meaning does not merely arrive; it intervenes.

Creativity and Dissent

Where meaning destabilises, possibility emerges. New solutions appear. Novel connections form. Individual or collective agency begins to exert influence that is not prescribed by system rules.

Dissent is a symptom of meaning. It is a natural outcome of surplus interpretation. Systems designed for predictability cannot incorporate dissent without adaptation or failure.

Misunderstanding as Mechanism

Misunderstanding is not error in the semiotic sense. It is a mechanism by which meaning asserts itself. Interpretive drift, misalignment, and surprise are not anomalies; they are the channels through which relational and ethical capacities are exercised.

Meaning destabilises because it cannot be fully formalised. Its integrity depends on its surplus nature. Any attempt to fully integrate meaning into a coordinating system diminishes what it is.

The Productive Danger of Semiotic Overflow

Destabilisation is dangerous. Coordination falters. Predictability is lost. Resource costs rise. Yet the danger is productive. Without destabilisation, systems remain blind to the ethical, relational, and creative capacities that meaning enables.

Destabilisation is the point where care, attention, and responsibility become necessary. It is where life becomes ethical rather than merely functional.

The Ethical Imperative

To tolerate meaning is to tolerate risk. It is to accept that systems will be slower, less efficient, and more fragile. Yet this tolerance is precisely what allows attention, relationality, and semiotic richness to exist.

Meaning destabilises coordination. But without this destabilisation, there is no room for care, for creativity, or for ethical engagement.

Implication

The tension between coordination and meaning is not a flaw. It is the space in which significance can arise. Systems will resist. Semiotic excess will disrupt. Yet this disruption is the condition of all relational and ethical possibility.

The next episode will revisit value without conflating it with meaning, preparing the ground for understanding how systems and semiotic surplus coexist, and why some practices deliberately prioritise meaning over coordination.