Political Possibility in the Age of Managed Populations: 6 The Last Function of Meaning

If protest can be absorbed, and political temporality hollowed, the question arises: is there any space where semiotic participation remains structurally indispensable? Where does meaning still perform a function that value-based coordination alone cannot replicate?

From a relational perspective, the answer is partial, fragile, and conditional. Semiotic participation is never required to maintain governance in its functional sense. Yet there remain interfaces between the field of potential and the field of actualisation in which meaning exerts a formative influence: spaces where the system cannot fully prefigure behaviour or outcomes, and where unconstrained possibilities may still emerge.

These spaces are rare. They are characterised by:

1. Underdetermined interactions: Situations where rules and optimisation cannot fully specify outcomes. Construal matters; participants’ interpretations can redirect trajectories.

2. Unstable constraints: Conditions where minor deviations can cascade, producing outcomes unanticipated by system feedback. Here, semiotic agency can expand the field.

3. Emergent coordination gaps: Interstices where optimisation fails to fully stabilise behaviour, leaving room for novel actualisations.

Even here, the influence of meaning is local, contingent, and easily absorbed. The field of political possibility is no longer generically open; it is a lattice of highly constrained potentials. Semiotic participation persists, but its scope is limited, and its effect is often transient. Meaning survives as a structural perturbation, not as the default generative medium of political futures.

The faint chill is present: the very structures that once enabled citizens to shape collective futures now restrict and filter them. Semiotic participation is the exception, not the rule. Actualisations of unconstrained potential may still occur, but they are anomalies—fragile, fleeting, and frequently subsumed by optimisation.

This observation frames the next critical question: if the last traces of meaning are rare and precarious, what becomes of the political field over time? Can it maintain the generative diversity necessary for unconstrained possibility, or will it converge toward a fully predictable configuration? The system may persist indefinitely, yet the texture of political possibility has already been irrevocably altered.

From this vantage, we can see the relational logic of the field itself: governance without meaning continues, protest may appear, local possibilities persist—but these are marginal, delicate, and increasingly constrained. The field remains, but it is a shadow of what once unfolded under representation.

In the next post, Collapse or Mutation, we will explore the possible trajectories of this hollowed and constrained field: whether political possibility disappears, is transformed into a new structural form, or persists in a way that defies traditional understanding.