If meaning is an act, a familiar worry immediately arises: how can acts scale?
Institutions endure. Disciplines stabilise. Legal systems, scientific practices, bureaucracies, and genres outlive their participants. If meaning were only ever local, perspectival, and enacted, how could such large-scale regularities exist at all?
This post answers that question without retreating from the cuts already made. Meaning scales, but it does not migrate. It coordinates, but it is not transferred. Institutions stabilise meaning without becoming its source.
1. Why Coordination Is Necessary
Acts of meaning do not occur in isolation. They succeed—or fail—only insofar as they are taken up, responded to, and recognised by others. Without coordination, meaning would dissipate as quickly as it arises.
Coordination allows meanings to:
persist beyond the moment of enactment
travel across participants and situations
accumulate into traditions, practices, and genres
Without such coordination, there would be no science, no law, no education, no culture.
Meaning, therefore, must scale.
2. Why Coordination Is Not Enough
But coordination alone does not explain meaning.
If institutions produced meaning, individual acts would be epiphenomenal—mere surface ripples on deeper systemic currents. Responsibility would drain away. Meaning would once again become an outcome rather than an act.
This does not match our practices.
Institutions do not mean. They are meant within. They do not speak; they are spoken through. They do not take responsibility; responsibility is distributed among participants acting within institutional constraints.
Coordination stabilises meaning; it does not originate it.
3. Institutions as Organised Semiotic Potential
The key move is to reconceptualise institutions not as agents or causal engines, but as organised semiotic potential.
An institution is a historically sedimented configuration of:
roles and relations
authorised genres and registers
normative expectations and sanctions
material and symbolic infrastructures
Together, these structure what can plausibly be meant, by whom, and with what consequences.
Institutions, in this sense, are systems: theories of possible acts.
They do not act. They make action intelligible.
4. Scaling Without Migration
Meaning scales not by migrating from individuals to systems, but by being repeatedly re-enacted within coordinated spaces of potential.
A legal judgment does not contain legal meaning. It is a site where legal meaning is enacted under institutional conditions. The next judgment re-enacts that meaning, with variation, interpretation, and possible contestation.
What persists is not meaning itself, but the conditions under which meaning can be made recognisably legal, scientific, or bureaucratic.
Scale is achieved through repetition without identity.
5. Coordination and the Illusion of Systemic Agency
Because institutions stabilise expectations so effectively, they acquire the appearance of agency. We say that “the law requires”, “science shows”, or “the system decided”.
These are useful shorthand. They are also metaphors.
Taken literally, they obscure the asymmetry established earlier. Systems do not decide. People decide within systems. Acts occur within constraints, not as expressions of an institutional will.
The illusion of systemic agency is a by-product of successful coordination.
6. Technology as Accelerator, Not Agent
Technologies—including large-scale probabilistic systems—intensify coordination. They accelerate circulation, compress response times, and increase the reach of semiotic acts.
But acceleration is not agency.
Technological systems participate in meaning-making only insofar as agents use them within acts for which responsibility remains human and institutional.
Treating technologies as meaning-makers repeats the same error as treating institutions as agents: mistaking scaffolding for source.
7. The Asymmetry at Scale
We can now restate the asymmetry at its highest level:
Meaning is enacted in acts of construal.
Acts are conditioned by context and institution.
Institutions organise potential; they do not enact meaning.
Coordination stabilises meaning without replacing agency.
Scaling does not dissolve the act. It multiplies it.
8. What This Enables
Seen this way, institutions are neither oppressive monoliths nor meaning-generating machines. They are fragile achievements—patterns of coordination that must be continually re-enacted to persist.
This perspective makes room for:
institutional critique without reductionism
responsibility without individualism
social meaning without systemic determinism
Meaning scales because acts coordinate.
But the cut still holds.
Meaning does not happen by itself—no matter how large the system.
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