The series From Mattering to Meaning began with a deceptively simple question:
How can something matter before it means?
The question arose from an apparent paradox.
Music can matter enormously without, by itself, functioning as a symbolic system. A rhythm can coordinate bodies. A melody can become bound up with memory. A sound can alter behaviour. A place can become significant through a history of relations. None of this requires a symbolic meaning in the strict sense.
Yet human beings also inhabit a world saturated with meanings.
Words mean.
Images mean.
Gestures mean.
Stories mean.
Symbols mean.
Music can participate in meaning when it enters larger semiotic configurations.
So how did we get from one condition to the other?
The answer developed across the series as a sequence of increasingly differentiated relations:
potential → instance → mattering → signal → sign → metaphor → representation → multimodal meaning → feedback into mattering
But this is not a ladder of stages through which reality climbs.
It is better understood as an evolving ecology of relations.
Each new possibility emerges within relations that already exist, transforms them, and then becomes part of the environment from which further possibilities arise.
Before meaning, there is mattering
We began with difference.
The world contains innumerable differences, but most of them matter to no particular system.
A difference matters when its consequences affect an organised system's possibilities.
A change in temperature can matter to an organism.
A movement can matter to another organism.
A rhythm can matter to an ensemble.
A place can matter to a community.
Mattering is therefore relational.
Something matters to something.
This was why biological value was so important to the argument. Life is already organised around differential consequences. Some conditions support an organism's continued organisation; others disrupt it. The organism does not first encounter a completely neutral world and then add value to it.
Life already inhabits a world in which differences count differently.
So our first conclusion was:
Mattering is older than meaning.
Possibility and actuality
But a particular difference does not become significant merely because it exists.
It occurs within a field of possibilities.
A particular utterance is one possibility among the many available in a language.
A particular performance is one actualisation among many possibilities in a musical system.
A particular social action is one possibility within a practice.
This gave us the relation between potential and instance.
A potential is a structured field of possibilities.
An instance is one particular actualisation within that field.
potential ↔ instance
The potential is not a hidden object behind the instance. It is a range of organised possibilities.
The instance is not simply an isolated event. It is intelligible as an instance because alternatives exist.
This distinction becomes important because value depends upon difference.
A musical phrase can be surprising because other continuations were possible.
A word can matter because other wordings were possible.
An action can be consequential because other actions could have occurred.
Potential therefore provides the background against which actuality can become significant.
And the relation is dynamic.
Instances can alter what becomes possible in the future.
A new musical practice can become part of a tradition.
A new expression can enter a language.
A new social practice can become conventional.
Thus:
potential → instance → altered potential
The actual can transform the possible.
When a difference matters
Potential gives us possibility, but not value.
An actualisation matters when its particularity has consequences for the organisation of a system.
This is the point at which difference becomes value.
A tiny rhythmic deviation can change an entire performance.
A small change in temperature can alter an organism's state.
A gesture can reorganise an interaction.
The magnitude of the difference is not what matters.
Its consequences do.
We can therefore formulate the principle:
A difference matters when its difference makes a consequential difference to an organised system.
This is why mattering is neither simply perception nor conscious evaluation.
Something can matter before anyone interprets it.
An organism can respond before it knows what is happening.
An ensemble can coordinate without explaining its coordination.
A social practice can persist without an explicit theory of its value.
Mattering is therefore a natural feature of organised systems.
From organism to organism
Once one organism can affect another, value becomes interorganism.
A sound can attract or repel.
A movement can recruit a response.
A gesture can invite or inhibit.
A rhythmic cue can coordinate.
One organism's difference changes another organism's possibilities.
This is the beginning of signalling.
The significance of the event is now distributed across a relation.
The crucial point is that signalling does not yet require symbolic meaning.
A signal can simply matter to another system.
Its basic relation is:
instance → changed disposition
This is already communication in a broad sense.
But it is not yet semiosis.
From signal to sign
A sign adds something new.
It participates in a system in which a form can be construed as something.
A warning call can trigger a response.
A warning word can make a situation available for symbolic construal.
A rhythmic cue can coordinate an ensemble.
A musical motif can later signify a character.
A visual trace can point to an event.
A symbol can invoke something absent.
The difference is not that the sign is merely a more powerful signal.
It is a different organisation of the relation.
A signal matters because of what it does.
A sign can matter through what it means.
Meaning belongs not to the isolated form but to the semiotic system in which the form participates.
The particular sign is an instance within a meaning potential.
And once a semiotic system exists, it possesses something extraordinary: it can use its own resources to make further meanings.
When meanings become resources
This is where metaphor enters.
Meaning was already relational. The new development is that one configuration of meaning can become a resource for construing another.
A journey can construe a life.
A network can construe a social system.
A container can construe an emotion.
A musical theme can construe a character.
Halliday's account of metaphor gives us a particularly precise formulation: metaphoric elements are junctional, embodying a junction of congruent and metaphorical semantic categories.
The expression therefore does not simply replace one meaning with another.
It brings the two semantic possibilities together.
A process can be construed as a thing.
An event can become an entity that can itself participate in further relations of meaning.
This expands semantic potential.
A metaphor can introduce a new way of construing something.
The new construal can become conventional.
The convention can become a resource for further meanings.
So we get another recursive relation:
existing potential → novel construal → expanded potential
Meaning has become capable of modifying its own possibilities.
Meaning takes form
Once meanings can be reorganised through other meanings, another possibility opens.
A relation of meaning can be given material form in another mode.
This is where images become important.
A mark is not necessarily an image.
An image is not necessarily a representation.
A representation is not necessarily a symbol.
A footprint may be a trace.
A painted figure may resemble something.
A repeated pattern may organise space.
A visual form can participate in ritual.
These relations can coexist.
An image can become a sign without ceasing to be material, perceptual or socially significant.
Representation therefore should not be understood simply as copying.
An image selects, frames, organises and makes relations available in a particular mode.
A temporal or conceptual relation can acquire spatial form.
The absent can become present through an image.
A relation can become durable.
Meaning has become materially portable.
The prehistoric image
This is where the history of art becomes especially difficult and interesting.
A prehistoric image survives materially, but the semiotic environment in which it once operated has largely disappeared.
A cave painting may have been connected with ritual, hunting, social practice, story, place, ancestry or something we can no longer reconstruct.
We therefore should not begin by asking:
What did this image mean?
We should first ask:
What kinds of relations might this image have participated in?
This distinction matters because the earliest visual forms may not have separated our modern categories cleanly.
Iconicity, indexicality, participation, ritual value and symbolic function may have overlapped.
The history of visual semiosis may therefore be less a story of one function replacing another than a story of progressive differentiation and recombination.
Symbol and referent
At a later stage, a further possibility becomes increasingly important:
the symbol can be distinguished from its referent.
A word can refer to something absent.
An image can survive after the disappearance of its subject.
A story can preserve an event.
A symbol can travel beyond the context in which it originated.
This makes meaning portable.
But it also creates distance.
The sign can become an object of reflection.
We can compare a representation with what it represents.
We can alter the sign without altering the referent.
We can question, translate, parody and reinterpret.
The distinction between symbol and referent therefore should not be treated as the origin of semiosis.
It is better understood as a differentiation within semiosis.
The sign becomes increasingly autonomous while remaining embedded in material and social systems.
When modes make meaning together
Once signs can be combined, meaning can become distributed across modes.
Language has its affordances.
Images have theirs.
Music has its own.
Gesture, space, editing and other semiotic resources contribute differently again.
They need not agree.
Indeed, contradiction can be highly productive.
A face can appear cheerful while the music is ominous.
A natural disaster can be accompanied by triumphant music.
The result may be irony, absurdity, satire or something else.
The meaning does not reside entirely in either mode.
It emerges from their relation.
This is why film is such a revealing modern example.
A musical motif can become associated with a character.
An image can change how the music is heard.
An edit can establish a relation between two otherwise unrelated shots.
A recurring sound can invoke an absent event.
The film creates a semiotic configuration in which different modes constrain and transform one another.
Meaning becomes a relation among relations.
Why music was so important
Music gave us the clue with which the whole investigation began.
Music can matter before it means.
Its rhythm, harmony, timbre and temporal organisation can affect bodies, expectations and emotions.
It can become personally significant through memory.
It can coordinate groups.
Then a larger semiotic system can recruit those capacities.
A melody can become a leitmotif.
A rhythm can become an emblem.
A song can become a cultural identity marker.
A film can give music a symbolic role it did not possess in isolation.
The music has not stopped being music.
Meaning has been added through participation in a larger system.
This suggests a broader principle:
Semiosis can recruit existing forms of mattering rather than creating significance from nothing.
Meaning feeds back into mattering
And now the direction of the argument reverses.
Once something means, it can begin to matter because of what it means.
A place can become sacred.
A song can become an anthem.
A piece of cloth can become a flag.
A ring can become a commitment.
A story can make an event worthy of remembrance.
A metaphor can make a relation newly salient.
A category can determine what deserves attention.
Meaning therefore does not remain on the side of representation.
It feeds into value.
It changes practice.
It reorganises attention.
It can alter institutions.
It can transform what people protect, celebrate, fear, remember or pursue.
So:
mattering → meaning → new mattering
The relationship has become recursive.
Meaning changes potential
The feedback goes deeper than value.
A new meaning can change what becomes possible.
A metaphor can become conventional.
A musical innovation can become a genre.
A visual technique can become part of an artistic tradition.
A scientific concept can open a new field of inquiry.
A new symbolic distinction can enter culture's inherited resources.
The semiotic potential evolves through its own actualisations.
Future participants inherit not only what previous generations did, but what those actions made possible.
This is how meaning becomes part of cultural evolution.
The larger picture
We can now see the entire argument without mistaking it for a rigid developmental sequence.
A system has a potential.
A particular possibility is actualised as an instance.
Some actualisations matter because of their consequences.
When consequential differences operate between systems, signalling becomes possible.
Some signals become signs.
Signs participate in meaning potential.
Meanings become resources for further meanings through metaphor.
Meanings can take material form.
Different modes can combine them.
And the resulting meanings feed back into value, practice and future possibility.
The process is recursive at every level.
Potential shapes instances.
Instances can reshape potential.
Mattering can become meaning.
Meaning can reshape mattering.
The system evolves through these interactions.
What, then, is meaning?
After all of this, meaning can be defined quite modestly.
Meaning is not simply information.
It is not simply a response.
It is not merely importance.
It is not a word-object correspondence.
Meaning arises when differences participate in a semiotic system so that they can become available for symbolic construal.
What makes human meaning-making extraordinary is not simply that we possess signs.
It is that meanings can themselves become resources.
A metaphor can generate a new concept.
An image can embody a relation.
A story can reorganise a history.
A film can make different modes interpret one another.
A symbolic system can therefore modify its own potential.
Meaning becomes reflexive, productive and evolutionary.
The deeper conclusion
The series began by asking how something can matter before it means.
We can now answer:
Because mattering does not depend upon semiosis.
Organisms can value differences.
Organisms can affect one another.
Social systems can stabilise patterns.
Signals can coordinate.
All of this can exist before symbolic meaning.
What meaning adds is a new organisation of these relations.
A difference can become available as something to be construed.
A meaning can become a resource for another meaning.
A representation can preserve a relation across time and space.
Different modes can make meanings together.
And those meanings can alter the world of value from which they emerged.
Meaning is therefore not a miraculous substance added to nature.
It is an emergent organisation of relations within a world already capable of mattering.
The circle that is not really a circle
We might represent the whole argument as:
potential → instance → consequence → mattering → signal → sign → metaphor → representation → multimodal meaning → new mattering
But the arrow should not be read as a one-way ladder.
Every part of the cycle can feed back into the others.
A new meaning alters potential.
A new potential enables new instances.
New instances can matter differently.
New values invite new meanings.
A new mode can transform an established sign.
An old metaphor can be remade.
A familiar symbol can acquire a new value.
The system never reaches a final state.
It evolves.
A world that can make meaning
Perhaps the deepest transformation we have been describing is therefore not from matter to meaning.
It is from a world in which differences matter to a world in which some of those differences can become available for further construal.
A world with organisms already possesses value.
A social world possesses shared significance.
A semiotic world can represent, remember, compare and imagine.
A reflexive semiotic world can question its own meanings and create new ones.
It can alter what matters by altering what things mean.
In this sense, meaning makes a world expressive.
Not because the world has acquired a voice from outside itself.
But because relations that already exist within it have acquired forms through which they can enter into further relations.
That is the central insight of From Mattering to Meaning.
Meaning is significance becoming available for symbolic construal.
And once significance becomes symbolically available, it does not merely become something we can talk about.
It becomes something through which the world can acquire new possibilities for mattering.
The story therefore does not end with meaning.
It begins again there.
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