Life as Coordination: 7 When Meaning Eats the Field: Pathologies of Semiotic Dominance

Meaning is not the enemy of coordination.

But when meaning ceases to regulate coordination and instead begins to replace it, the field becomes unstable in a very specific way.

This post names that failure mode.

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1. Meaning as a Regulatory Layer, Not a Substrate

Throughout this series, we have treated fields of coordination as primary.

They consist of:

• distributed readiness (inclination and ability),

• flows of value,

• constraints that shape viable action.

Meaning enters these fields late. It is not foundational.

It arises as a semiotic layer that enables:

• intelligibility,

• anticipatory alignment,

• revisability without collapse.

Crucially, meaning does not do the coordination.

It makes coordination legible to itself.

This distinction matters, because when it is lost, pathology follows.

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2. What Semiotic Dominance Is

Semiotic dominance occurs when meaning systems cease to be responsive to the field and begin to override it.

This inversion has a recognisable structure:

• symbols become self-authorising,

• narratives substitute for feedback,

• coherence is valued over viability,

• interpretation replaces adjustment.

At this point, the semiotic system no longer tracks the field’s dynamics.

It begins enforcing its own internal consistency instead.

The result is not “false meaning”, but meaning untethered from coordination.

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3. The Mechanism: Replacement, Not Representation

The common mistake is to describe this as a problem of misrepresentation — as though the issue were simply that meanings get things “wrong”.

But the deeper issue is not representational error.

It is functional replacement.

Meaning systems begin to perform roles they are not equipped to perform:

• moral language replaces negotiation,

• identity replaces readiness,

• symbolic compliance replaces adaptive response,

• declarative consensus replaces distributed repair.

When this happens, the field does not correct the system — because the system has insulated itself from the field.

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4. Why This Is a Pathology, Not an Ideology

It is tempting to treat semiotic dominance as an ideological problem: too much belief, too much abstraction, too much discourse.

That framing is inadequate.

Semiotic dominance is a coordination pathology, not a cognitive one.

It emerges when:

• coordination scales exceed feedback capacity,

• symbolic alignment becomes cheaper than material adjustment,

• stability is mistaken for robustness.

In such conditions, meaning does not become “false” — it becomes over-functionalised.

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5. Moralisation as an Accelerator of Dominance

One of the most reliable accelerants of semiotic dominance is moral language.

Not because morality is bad, but because moral language:

• collapses revisability,

• substitutes judgement for recalibration,

• freezes positions into identities,

• converts coordination failures into character failures.

Once moralisation takes hold, disagreement becomes deviance,

and repair becomes betrayal.

At that point, the field is no longer negotiable — only enforceable.

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6. Institutions as Semiotic Echo Chambers

Institutions are especially vulnerable to this pathology.

As institutions stabilise, they tend to:

• codify meaning faster than they update practice,

• protect narrative legitimacy over field responsiveness,

• reward symbolic conformity rather than adaptive competence.

Eventually, institutional meaning systems begin coordinating themselves, while the underlying field degrades.

This is not corruption.

It is semantic drift under stability pressure.

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7. When Meaning Eats the Field

The phrase “meaning eats the field” names the endpoint of this process.

At that point:

• symbols no longer regulate coordination — they consume it,

• interpretability replaces viability as the success criterion,

• the system becomes exquisitely meaningful and catastrophically brittle.

Collapse, when it comes, appears sudden — but it is actually the delayed consequence of long-term semiotic insulation.

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8. Why This Matters Now

Contemporary global systems are increasingly governed through:

• narratives,

• metrics,

• moral framings,

• symbolic alignment at scale.

These are powerful tools — but they are not coordination itself.

When meaning systems dominate faster than fields can revise,

collapse becomes not a failure of ethics, but a failure of coupling.

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9. A Preview of What Comes Next

The task, then, is not to abandon meaning — but to re-subordinate it.

To ask:

• How can meaning remain revisable?

• How can symbols stay porous to the field?

• How can ethics operate without moralising?

• How can coordination scale without semiotic enclosure?

Those questions belong to the next phase of the work.

For now, it is enough to see the pathology clearly:

Meaning fails not when it is wrong,

but when it forgets what it is for.