We began this series with a simple distinction.
Something can matter without meaning.
A sound can affect an organism without representing anything.
A rhythm can coordinate people without standing for a proposition.
A place can become significant through the relations that occur there before anyone formulates what that significance means.
Then, gradually, something new becomes possible.
Differences that matter can enter semiotic systems.
Signals can become signs.
Meanings can become resources for further meanings.
Relations of meaning can take material form.
Different modes can make meaning together.
But this is not the end of the process.
Once meaning exists, it does something remarkable.
It begins to change what matters.
The direction of our argument reverses.
Mattering can become meaning.
But then:
Meaning can become mattering.
This is where the circle closes.
Or, more accurately, where a new cycle begins.
Meaning is not merely descriptive
It is easy to think of meaning as though its role were simply to describe a world that already exists.
A word names something.
An image depicts something.
A story tells us what happened.
A symbol stands for something.
But meaning can do much more than describe.
A category can make a distinction salient.
A metaphor can make a relation visible.
A story can connect an event to a history.
A symbol can make an identity important.
A name can make something repeatedly referable.
A map can change how a landscape is understood.
Meaning can therefore alter the field of significance within which people act.
It can change not only what we think about, but what we attend to, value and do.
A place becomes sacred
Consider a place.
Before it acquires symbolic significance, it may already matter materially or socially. People may live there, travel through it, obtain resources there or gather there.
Then a story becomes associated with the place.
An ancestor is said to have emerged there.
An important event is remembered there.
A ritual is performed there.
The place acquires a new meaning.
And because it means something, it begins to matter differently.
People may protect it.
Avoid entering it casually.
Return to it at particular times.
Teach others about it.
Organise their activities around it.
The physical place has not necessarily changed.
Its position within the social field of value has changed.
Meaning has fed back into mattering.
A symbol can create value
The same thing happens with objects.
A piece of cloth can become a flag.
A piece of metal can become a wedding ring.
A printed document can become a legal instrument.
A building can become a monument.
A melody can become an anthem.
The material form does not explain its social significance by itself.
A symbolic relation has reorganised its place within a network of social practices.
The object now matters partly because of what it means.
This is one reason symbolic systems are causally important.
They do not merely represent value.
They can help produce and organise value.
Music comes full circle
Music provides perhaps our clearest example.
A piece of music can matter through rhythm, melody, timbre, memory and social participation.
It may then acquire symbolic significance.
A melody becomes associated with an event.
The association becomes conventional.
The melody becomes a national anthem, a protest song, a song of remembrance, a marker of identity.
Once that happens, the music matters differently.
People may stand when it is played.
Sing it together.
Use it to mark belonging.
Feel pride, grief or anger.
Refuse to perform it because of what it represents.
The music has not ceased to matter musically.
Its symbolic meaning has become another source of value.
Meaning can create new distinctions
Meaning can also alter what counts as a distinguishable thing.
Before a concept becomes available, a range of experiences may be encountered without a stable boundary between them.
A new word or category can make a distinction easier to recognise.
Once recognised, the distinction can become important.
People can discuss it.
Teach it.
Measure it.
Argue about it.
Act upon it.
Meaning has therefore changed the field of possible attention.
A symbolic distinction can become a practical distinction.
This is one reason language is such a powerful component of human environments.
It gives us resources for making differences that matter more finely articulated.
Metaphor can change what matters
Metaphor is especially powerful here.
Suppose an ecosystem is construed as a web.
The metaphor makes relations, interdependence and vulnerability particularly salient.
Those relations may then become objects of attention.
The ecosystem can begin to matter in ways that were previously difficult to articulate.
Or consider the metaphor of life as a journey.
It makes direction, obstacles, turning points and destinations salient.
A person may begin to understand an event in their own life differently because the metaphor changes what relations stand out.
The metaphor has therefore altered not just description but significance.
A new construal has changed the value landscape.
Meaning can reorganise attention
This feedback often begins with attention.
What we have a way of construing becomes easier to notice.
A musician hears a rhythmic relation because their repertoire makes it available.
A scientist notices a pattern because a conceptual framework tells them what to look for.
A viewer recognises an allusion in a film because they know its cultural history.
A person notices a symbol because they have learned what it signifies.
Meaning therefore helps organise salience.
And salience affects what can become important.
The relation is not deterministic.
But it is powerful.
What we can construe influences what we are likely to notice.
What we notice influences what can matter.
Meaning can change practice
The feedback becomes even clearer when meaning changes what people do.
A community may begin performing a ritual differently because its meaning has been reinterpreted.
A work of art may become politically important because of the meanings attached to it.
A historical event may become a commemorative occasion because a community has constructed a new narrative around it.
A scientific classification may change how researchers conduct experiments.
A legal category may change how institutions organise behaviour.
Meaning is therefore not merely something that happens inside interpretation.
It can reorganise practice.
A sign becomes an actor
This is why we should avoid treating signs as passive carriers.
A sign participates in a system of action.
A law changes what institutions do.
A warning changes behaviour.
A slogan can coordinate a movement.
A diagnosis can reorganise treatment.
A map can alter a journey.
A story can justify an institution.
A symbol can define belonging.
The sign does not act independently.
Its consequences depend upon the organisms, practices and institutions that participate in its interpretation.
But the symbolic relation has become part of the causal organisation of the system.
Meaning has acquired social efficacy.
Meaning can create institutions
Institutions make the feedback loop especially visible.
People engage in recurring practices.
Rules emerge.
The rules are recorded or symbolically formulated.
Those rules then organise later behaviour.
The altered behaviour generates new circumstances.
The rules are revised.
The process continues.
An institution is therefore partly a system in which meanings have become embodied in stable patterns of action.
Law is an obvious example.
A legal category is not merely a description.
It changes what actions count as permissible, prohibited or obligatory.
The symbolic distinction becomes part of the social machinery.
Meaning changes future potential
There is another level of feedback.
A new meaning can change the potential from which future meanings are made.
A novel metaphor becomes conventional.
A new musical style becomes a genre.
A new artistic technique becomes part of a tradition.
A scientific concept opens a new field of questions.
A political symbol becomes part of a culture's inherited repertoire.
The new possibility enters the environment for future participants.
So the relation becomes:
instance → meaning → altered potential → new instances
The potential itself evolves through what its instances make available.
This is cultural evolution in one of its most important forms.
The collective reservoir changes
Because meanings become part of shared culture, the collective reservoir changes too.
A new expression may initially belong to a few people.
A new metaphor may circulate among specialists.
A musical innovation may begin in a small community.
An unusual visual form may be adopted by a few artists.
If it spreads, it becomes culturally available to others.
The reservoir has changed.
Future repertoires can now draw upon something that was previously absent from their possibilities.
The individual can therefore become a source of collective transformation.
The past changes what the future can mean
This is why cultural inheritance is different from simple repetition.
We inherit not only forms.
We inherit possibilities for construal.
A later generation does not start with the same meaning potential as an earlier one.
It inherits their metaphors.
Their categories.
Their stories.
Their images.
Their musical conventions.
Their symbolic distinctions.
It can use them, reject them, recombine them or transform them.
The potential of the future is therefore partly made from the meanings of the past.
Meaning can also erase mattering
The feedback is not always additive.
A new meaning can cause something to matter less.
A place once considered sacred can lose its significance.
A musical convention can become a cliché.
A political symbol can become discredited.
An old ritual can lose its social force.
A category can cease to be useful.
Meaning can therefore reorganise value in both directions.
It can amplify.
Diminish.
Redirect.
Reverse.
What matters is historically unstable because the meanings through which value is organised are themselves evolving.
Meaning can change the meaning of the same thing
This is particularly clear in art and music.
A musical passage can acquire one meaning early in a film and another later.
An image can initially seem harmless and later become disturbing after we learn its history.
A recurring symbol can acquire new significance when placed in a new context.
The material form remains the same.
Its relations have changed.
Meaning is therefore not simply accumulated like a fixed layer of paint.
It is continually reconstrued.
And when the construal changes, mattering can change with it.
Film makes the feedback visible
Film provides a beautiful example of this recursive process.
A musical motif is introduced.
At first it may seem unimportant.
It returns.
The audience notices the association.
It becomes the character's theme.
Later, the character is absent but the theme appears.
The music now matters because of what it means.
Then the director subverts the association.
The theme appears in an unexpected context.
The audience recognises the convention and notices its violation.
The same musical form now carries a new significance.
The film has taught the audience a symbolic relation and then used that relation to create another one.
Meaning has changed the significance of the music.
Meaning can become part of perception
The feedback can go deeper still.
Once we acquire a semiotic distinction, it can become part of how we perceive.
A trained musician hears structure in sound.
A fluent reader sees words rather than individual marks.
Someone familiar with an icon recognises it instantly.
A person familiar with a visual tradition may see patterns that another person overlooks.
The physical stimulus need not change.
The participant's repertoire has changed.
Meaning has become part of the conditions of perception.
And because perception helps determine what becomes salient, meaning has fed back into mattering at a very basic level.
This is not arbitrary construction
There is an important qualification.
If meaning changes what matters, it does not follow that humans can simply invent any reality they wish.
Semiotic systems remain constrained.
By the material world.
By biological capacities.
By social organisation.
By inherited meanings.
By the consequences of action.
A map can be wrong.
A metaphor can mislead.
A theory can fail.
A symbol can lose its force.
The world constrains what meanings can successfully persist.
Meaning is therefore not an escape from reality.
It is a new mode of participation in reality.
The full loop
We can now see the whole process.
A system has a potential.
An instance actualises one possibility.
Its difference has consequences.
It matters.
When the difference matters between systems, it can become a signal.
A signal can become a sign.
Signs create semiotic possibilities.
Meanings can become resources for further meanings.
Those meanings can take material form.
Different modes can combine them.
And then:
meaning changes what matters.
The changed field of value alters future practice.
Practice generates new instances.
New instances transform the potential.
The cycle begins again.
We have not discovered a ladder.
We have discovered a loop.
From mattering to meaning and back again
Our original question was:
How can something matter before it means?
We can now give a richer answer.
Because mattering does not depend upon symbolic meaning.
A difference can have value because of its consequences within an organised system.
Some such differences can become signals.
Some signals can become signs.
Semiotic systems can make those differences available for symbolic construal.
Metaphor can generate new meanings from existing meanings.
Images and other modes can give those meanings material forms.
Multimodal systems can combine them into larger symbolic configurations.
And then meaning can return to the world of value from which it emerged.
Mattering becomes meaning.
Meaning becomes mattering.
The two are no longer separate stages.
They become mutually transformative processes.
A world changed by what it means
This is perhaps the deepest discovery of the series.
A world capable of meaning is not merely a world with an additional representational layer.
It is a world in which meanings themselves become causally significant within social life.
A story can change a place.
A symbol can change an identity.
A metaphor can change a concept.
A song can change what a community remembers.
An image can change what people notice.
A category can change how institutions act.
Meaning changes the organisation of future possibility.
The world has acquired a new kind of feedback.
And the circle continues
We should therefore resist the temptation to end by saying that mattering has finally become meaning.
Nothing has finally become anything.
The potential changes.
Instances change.
Practices change.
Repertoires change.
Meanings change.
Values change.
New possibilities emerge.
Old ones disappear.
The semiotic environment is constantly remade.
The most interesting consequence of meaning may therefore be that it allows a system to participate in the evolution of its own possibilities.
A community can change its meanings.
Those meanings change what matters.
What matters changes what the community does.
What it does creates new meanings.
The system has become recursively evolutionary.
The world becomes expressive
We can now return to the question underlying the whole series.
What is the difference between a world in which things matter and a world in which things can mean?
The first is already alive.
An organism inhabits a world of value.
Organisms coordinate around differences that matter.
Social systems stabilise those differences.
But a semiotic world can make some of its own relations available for further construal.
It can remember.
Represent.
Imagine.
Compare.
Question.
Reinterpret.
It can make its own meanings into resources.
And because those meanings matter, they become part of the world that future meaning-makers inherit.
The world has become expressive.
Not because reality has acquired a voice from outside itself.
But because a world already organised by relations has acquired systems through which some of those relations can become available for further relations.
That is what meaning adds.
And that is why the story of meaning is also a story of evolution.
Potential creates possibility.
Instances make possibilities actual.
Some differences matter.
Some mattering becomes signalling.
Some signals become signs.
Meanings become resources for further meanings.
Meaning takes form across modes.
And meaning feeds back into what matters.
The circle is complete.
But, in an evolving world, a completed circle is also a new beginning.
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