Representation has become the default explanatory posture for meaning. We ask how words represent things, how thoughts represent states of affairs, how symbols stand for objects in the world. These questions feel natural, even inevitable. And yet they already assume what they claim to explain.
To begin with representation is to begin too late.
Representation presupposes a world of determinate entities: objects with identities, properties, and boundaries already in place. It presupposes that meaning is a relation between two independently constituted domains — symbols on one side, things on the other — and that the philosophical task is to explain how the bridge is crossed. But this framing quietly imports a fully articulated ontology before meaning has even entered the scene.
The result is a circularity so familiar that it often goes unnoticed. Representation is invoked to explain meaning, but meaning is already doing the work of making representation possible. Before anything can represent anything else, there must already be intelligibility: a structured field in which distinctions can appear, persist, and matter. Representation does not generate intelligibility; it presupposes it.
This becomes clearer if we pause over the question that representation takes for granted. The representational tradition asks: How do symbols refer to objects? But this is not the fundamental question. A more basic question precedes it, one that representation cannot answer:
How does anything become intelligible at all?
If we take this question seriously, the representational frame begins to wobble. Intelligibility does not arrive after objects are given; it is the condition under which anything can appear as an object in the first place. Distinctions, identities, and stabilities are not self-present features of a pre-given world waiting to be mirrored. They are the outcome of articulation within a structured field of possibility.
To start with representation is therefore to mistake a derivative achievement for a foundation.
This is not to deny that representation exists or that it functions effectively. Maps guide travellers, words coordinate action, diagrams organise thought. But none of these activities explain the emergence of meaning. They operate within an already meaningful field. Representation works because intelligibility is already there to be exploited.
The deeper mistake lies in assuming that meaning is fundamentally a matter of aboutness. Once this assumption is in place, everything else follows: reference, correspondence, truth as mirroring, error as misalignment. But aboutness is not primitive. It is a phenomenological effect that arises under specific conditions — conditions that representation itself cannot account for.
When meaning is treated as representation, intelligibility is pushed outside the system and relocated in a presumed external reality. Meaning becomes a problem of alignment rather than emergence. The philosophical task becomes one of calibration rather than ontology. And yet the very possibility of calibration depends on prior distinctions that representation cannot generate.
What is required, then, is not a better theory of representation, but a shift in starting point.
Instead of beginning with symbols and objects, we begin with relation. Instead of asking how meanings point outward, we ask how intelligibility is articulated inwardly within a system. Instead of assuming determinate entities, we examine how stability itself arises through constraint, sedimentation, and successful articulation.
From this perspective, representation no longer disappears — but it moves. It becomes a secondary practice, a stabilised pattern within relational systems, not their ground. It is something to be explained, not something that does the explaining.
This series will develop that shift systematically. We will see that relation is ontologically prior to reference; that meaning is not fundamentally about anything; that objects emerge as stabilised relational effects; and that the persistence of representational thinking is itself a phenomenon in need of explanation.
Once that is seen, the representational problem quietly dissolves — not because it is solved, but because it is no longer the right problem to pose.
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