Alignment Without Meaning: Interpersonal Semiosis and the Logic of Value — 0 The Dangerous Proximity

There are distinctions that clarify, and there are distinctions that destabilise.

The distinction between meaning and value has so far done both. It has clarified by separating what is too often conflated: the semiotic construal of experience from the non-semiotic dynamics of coordination, affect, and regulation. At the same time, it has destabilised a range of theoretical habits that rely—quietly but persistently—on treating these as a single domain.

Up to this point, the distinction has held.

Working within the ideational domain, the separation is relatively straightforward. Meaning construes the world: it organises experience, stabilises categories, and renders phenomena intelligible. Value does not construe. It does not represent or signify. It operates instead as a field of orientation: shaping tendencies, distributing pressures, and coordinating behaviour without recourse to symbolic form.

Even where tightly coupled, the two remain distinct. Meaning makes distinctions available; value makes some of those distinctions matter.

So far, so stable.

But there is a region where this stability becomes difficult to maintain—not because the distinction is weak, but because it is being asked to operate at a much finer resolution. That region is encountered when we turn from ideational meaning to interpersonal meaning as a metafunctional mode within semantics.

Here, the terrain shifts.

Interpersonal meaning is not concerned with construing the world, but with enacting social relations. It operates through stance, alignment, obligation, and evaluation. It positions speakers and listeners relative to one another. It negotiates roles, calibrates attitudes, and manages expectations.

And in doing so, it begins to look uncomfortably like value.

Consider even the simplest case:

“You should apologise.”

This is not merely a representation of a state of affairs. It is an act of positioning. It encodes obligation, evaluates behaviour, and projects an expected course of action. It brings into play relations of authority, normativity, and alignment.

But these are precisely the domains in which value has been located:

• obligation

• evaluation

• normative pressure

• social coordination

So the question arises almost immediately:

Are we here still dealing with meaning—or have we simply redescribed value in semiotic terms?

The difficulty is not superficial. It is structural.

Interpersonal meaning and value do not merely coexist; they appear to occupy the same conceptual space. Both are concerned with alignment. Both engage evaluation. Both are implicated in the regulation of behaviour and the maintenance of social order.

The result is a dangerous proximity.

So close, in fact, that much of the theoretical tradition has treated them as indistinguishable. Evaluation becomes “meaning.” Normativity becomes “discourse.” Social pressure becomes “representation.” What is enacted is redescribed as what is signified.

From this perspective, the distinction between meaning and value begins to look less like an analytical resource and more like an unnecessary complication.

Why not simply collapse the two?

This series begins from the refusal of that collapse.

Not because the distinction must be preserved at all costs, but because the cost of collapsing it has not been adequately reckoned with. If interpersonal meaning and value are indeed distinct, then their apparent overlap must be explained, not assumed. If they are not distinct, then the distinction should be abandoned—but only after it has been properly tested.

At present, neither condition has been met.

What we have instead is a persistent ambiguity: a tendency to move, often without noticing, between semiotic description and social force, treating them as interchangeable.

This ambiguity is not benign. It obscures the mechanisms by which alignment is achieved, maintained, and transformed. It makes it difficult to distinguish between what is construed and what is enacted, between what is said and what is done.

And it leaves us poorly equipped to analyse phenomena where the distinction matters most.

So the task ahead is a precise one.

Not to defend the distinction in the abstract, but to determine whether it can survive in the very region where it appears most vulnerable. To do so, we will need to isolate what interpersonal meaning actually does, and what value actually does, without allowing either to quietly absorb the other.

Only then will we be in a position to understand how they relate.

And whether they can, in fact, be kept apart.

For now, it is enough to recognise the proximity—and the danger it presents.

We proceed, then, not with a solution, but with a problem sharpened to the point where it can no longer be ignored.