We are accustomed to asking what things mean.
What does a word mean? What does an image mean? What does a gesture mean? What does a piece of music mean?
The questions are so familiar that we can easily forget that they presuppose something more basic.
Before something can mean, it may first have to matter.
A sound can matter to an organism without representing anything. A movement can matter because another organism responds to it. A rhythm can matter because it brings a group into coordination. A place can matter because of the relations that have accumulated there.
None of these requires symbolic meaning.
Something can make a difference without standing for anything.
That gives us the starting point for this series:
Something can matter without meaning.
And once we take that possibility seriously, the emergence of meaning begins to look rather different.
A difference that makes a difference
The world contains innumerable differences.
A stone differs from the ground around it. One patch of light differs from another. The temperature changes. A sound occurs. A chemical concentration rises or falls.
Most of these differences mean nothing to us.
Some make no difference to an organism at all.
Others do.
A sudden sound may redirect attention. A change in temperature may alter bodily regulation. A chemical trace may alter behaviour. One organism's movement may change the behaviour of another.
The important thing is therefore not simply that something differs.
It is that the difference has consequences.
A useful way of putting this is:
A difference matters when its difference makes a difference to an organised system.
Mattering is therefore relational.
The sound does not matter in isolation. It matters to an organism.
The gesture does not matter in isolation. It matters within an interaction.
The rhythm does not matter in isolation. It matters within the organisation of a performance.
Value is not a mysterious substance attached to certain things. It emerges from the relations between organised systems and the differences that affect them.
Life is already selective
This becomes particularly clear with living organisms.
An organism cannot respond equally to every difference in its environment. Its continued organisation depends upon discriminating among possibilities.
Some conditions support its persistence.
Some threaten it.
Some changes recruit responses.
Others can be ignored.
This is close to what Gerald Edelman meant by biological value: the fact that living systems are organised around differential consequences. An organism need not consciously decide that something is valuable. Its organisation can already distinguish among states according to what they enable or threaten.
Life therefore inhabits a world that is not indifferent.
There is already a difference between what matters and what does not.
That distinction is older than language.
Older than symbols.
Perhaps older than anything we would call communication in the human sense.
Mattering is not meaning
We should therefore distinguish two questions:
Does this make a difference?
and
Does this signify something?
The first is a question about value.
The second is a question about semiosis.
The two can coincide, but they should not be confused.
A warning sound can matter because it causes an organism to change its behaviour.
A word can mean "danger".
The word can matter because of what it means, but the symbolic relation is something additional.
Likewise, a piece of music can matter enormously without having a determinate semantic content.
It can organise expectation.
Alter mood.
Coordinate movement.
Evoke memory.
Become bound up with a person's life.
It need not therefore represent a proposition.
This distinction is particularly important because our ordinary language encourages us to call all of these things "meaningful".
But if everything that matters is called meaningful, we lose the distinction we need in order to explain how symbolic meaning could have emerged in the first place.
Music shows us the difference
Music offers a remarkably clear example.
A beat can make a body move.
A rhythm can bring several people into synchrony.
A melody can become associated with a particular person or period of life.
A musical phrase can create tension by delaying an expected resolution.
All of this can happen without the music saying anything in the semantic sense.
And yet music clearly matters.
Indeed, it can matter profoundly.
A song can become an index of a period of one's life: a few notes are enough to bring an entire world of memory back into presence.
The music has acquired significance.
But significance is not necessarily symbolic meaning.
This is why music is such a useful starting point for a larger investigation.
It shows us a world already rich in value before we ask how that value can become organised as meaning.
From organism to organism
Mattering also changes when organisms encounter one another.
One organism becomes part of another's environment.
A movement by one can alter the possibilities available to another.
A sound can attract.
A posture can inhibit.
A gesture can invite.
A rhythm can coordinate.
Now we have a new possibility:
something can matter between organisms.
The significance is no longer confined to the internal organisation of one organism. It has become part of a relation.
This is the beginning of social coordination.
And still, meaning is not required.
Two people can walk together without making propositions about walking.
Musicians can coordinate without discussing timing.
A crowd can clap together without agreeing about what the applause means.
Social organisation therefore does not begin with shared meanings.
It can begin with shared differences that matter.
Mattering can become collective
Once a pattern matters repeatedly to several participants, it can become socially stabilised.
A rhythm can become customary.
A gesture can become familiar.
A place can become significant.
A song can become associated with a community.
A ritual can acquire importance.
The significance of the pattern is now no longer simply private.
It has become part of a shared history.
This matters because repetition creates possibilities that a single event does not possess.
Something that happens once can matter.
Something that happens repeatedly can become expected.
What becomes expected can organise behaviour.
What organises behaviour can become a practice.
And practices can eventually become conventions.
We should not yet call this meaning.
But we are moving toward the conditions in which meaning becomes possible.
Meaning does not appear from nowhere
This gives us the first major proposition of the series:
Meaning emerges within a world that is already capable of mattering.
We should therefore resist the picture of an initially meaningless universe onto which humans later project meanings.
The natural world contains organised systems.
Living organisms distinguish among consequential states.
Organisms respond to one another.
Social groups develop patterns of coordination.
Histories accumulate.
Some differences become more salient than others.
Some relations become stable.
There is already a rich ecology of significance.
The emergence of meaning would therefore not be the creation of significance from nothing.
It would be the emergence of a new way of organising significance.
From difference to value
We can now sketch the first step of the journey:
difference → consequence → value
A difference occurs.
It changes something within an organised system.
The difference acquires significance because of its consequences.
That is mattering.
But the journey toward meaning will require further transformations.
An instance may become important within a field of possibilities.
Its effect may become socially distributed.
A difference that matters may begin to function as a signal.
A signal may become part of a semiotic system.
And then something extraordinary becomes possible:
the difference can become available for symbolic construal.
That is where meaning begins.
But we are not there yet.
Before meaning
Perhaps, then, the most important thing to say at the beginning of this investigation is also the simplest.
Meaning is not the first form of significance.
The world does not have to speak before it can matter.
An organism does not have to represent a difference before responding to it.
A group does not have to agree about what something means before coordinating around it.
A musical ensemble does not need a vocabulary for rhythm before it can move together.
Mattering comes first.
And because mattering comes first, the emergence of meaning becomes a much more interesting question.
We no longer have to imagine meaning as something mysteriously added to an otherwise indifferent world.
We can ask instead:
How does a difference that already matters become a difference that can mean?
That is the question that will guide the rest of our journey.
Before we can answer it, however, we need to understand something even more basic.
A difference does not occur in an empty space of possibilities.
Things happen within systems that make some possibilities available and others unavailable.
A particular event is possible because of a larger field of possibility within which it can occur.
So our next question is:
What is the relation between a potential and one of its instances?
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