There is a recurring gesture in contemporary semiotic theory that rarely announces itself as a problem, because it does not present as a claim. It presents as a necessity.
Again and again, when theory is put to work — especially in analysis with political or ethical urgency — we find the same move: system is privileged over instance. Not merely analytically foregrounded, but treated as the proper perspective from which meaning ought to be understood.
The instance becomes illustrative. The system becomes explanatory. And this ordering feels, to many theorists, not just reasonable but responsible.
This series begins by asking why.
1. The pressure that precedes the theory
The impulse to privilege system does not originate in abstraction. It originates in unease.
When confronted with phenomena such as war discourse, racism, bureaucratic violence, or institutional harm, the singular instance can feel dangerously insufficient. Individual texts appear contingent, deniable, too easily dismissed as exceptions or accidents. To stay with the instance alone can feel politically naïve, even complicit.
To appeal to system is to insist that what we are seeing is not a one-off, not a misfire, not a misunderstanding — but a patterned way of meaning that precedes and exceeds any particular text.
This is not a theoretical error. It is an ethical motivation.
The difficulty begins when this motivation is smuggled into the ontology.
2. From analytic emphasis to ontological asymmetry
Within a Hallidayan architecture, system and instance are not competitors. They are perspectives on the same semiotic potential. Neither is prior in being. Neither is closer to truth.
Instantiation, on this view, is not a process that moves meaning from system into text. It is a perspectival cut that allows meaning to appear as text and as system simultaneously.
Yet once the need for explanation hardens into the need for guarantee, this balance begins to slip.
System is no longer just the perspective from which patterns can be described. It becomes the place where meaning really resides. The instance is recoded as partial, local, or even misleading — something that must be explained by the system rather than understood with it.
What began as an analytic emphasis quietly becomes an ontological asymmetry.
3. The intuition that drives the asymmetry
The intuition is simple and powerful:
If we want to explain patterned harm, we must privilege the pattern over the event.
But this intuition already assumes what it seeks to establish.
It assumes that pattern exists independently of the events that instantiate it, and that explanation flows from the general to the particular. In other words, it assumes that instantiation is directional.
Once this assumption is in place, the theoretical consequences follow with remarkable consistency:
At this point, the system–instance relation is no longer a cline of perspective. It has become a ladder.
4. Why the ladder feels so compelling
The ladder feels compelling because it offers reassurance.
If system is ontologically privileged, then the analyst is not trapped in contingency. They can speak about war discourse, or violence, or ideology, without having to defend every claim against the objection: but this text could have been otherwise.
System stabilises critique. It allows one to say: this is how meaning works here, even when the textual surface wavers.
The cost of this reassurance is rarely acknowledged, because it is paid in a different currency.
5. What is lost when system becomes prior
The moment system is treated as ontologically prior, the instance changes status.
No longer a full semiotic event, it becomes evidence. Its role is to exemplify a structure that is already assumed to exist. Meaning no longer emerges in the act of construal; it is traced back to a source.
At the same time, variation must be explained away. If the system is stable and prior, then differences between instances cannot be differences in meaning potential. They must be attributed to:
Difference is relocated — often implicitly — from the semiotic system to the individual.
This is not a political gain. It is a theoretical concession.
6. A false choice
Much of what follows in this series will show how this concession generates further compensations: layered context, directional instantiation, teleological genre, evaluative staging.
But the mistake occurs earlier.
The choice is falsely framed as one between:
Halliday’s model never required this choice.
System does not need to be ontologically privileged in order to be analytically powerful. Instance does not need to be downgraded in order for pattern to be real.
Pattern exists only in and through instantiation — not as a hidden structure behind it, but as a way of seeing semiotic potential from a different angle.
7. What this series will do
This series begins, then, not with a person or a school, but with a pressure: the felt need to secure explanation by privileging system.
We will trace how that pressure reshapes the system–instance relation, how ladders replace clines, and how ontological asymmetries are mistaken for theoretical rigour.
Only later will we name where these moves become codified.
The task is not to defend instances against systems, nor systems against instances. It is to recover the relation between them — before explanation hardens into hierarchy, and before critique mistakes ontological imbalance for political seriousness.
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