We have spent the first half of this series below the level of explicit meaning.
Organisms have value systems.
Signals engage one another's value-sensitive organisation.
Recurrent signalling produces coordination.
Coordination can become collective form.
Persistent patterns of coupling become social structure.
Individuals inhabit that structure through differentiated repertoires.
Overlapping repertoires can support affiliation.
Affiliations can become recognisable social formations.
All of this can happen before the relations involved are explicitly construed as meanings.
But humans possess another extraordinary capacity.
We can construe what matters.
We can name a relation.
Describe it.
Compare it.
Narrate it.
Evaluate it.
Argue about it.
Represent it.
We can turn patterns of social mattering into symbolic resources.
This is the transition we need to understand:
How does mattering become meaning?
Halliday's formulation
Halliday gives us an unusually concise answer.
A semiotic system, he writes, is:
“a social system where value has been further transformed into meaning.”
The word further matters.
Meaning does not replace value.
It is a transformation of something already present at the social level.
We therefore have:
biological value → social mattering → symbolic meaning
The levels are related without being identical.
An organism's value system is not the same thing as social mattering.
Social mattering is not the same thing as meaning.
But meaning becomes possible because a social world already exists in which things matter.
The signal is not yet a sign
This is where our distinction between signal and sign becomes decisive.
A signal can engage another organism's value-sensitive organisation.
An ant's pheromone can alter the behaviour of another ant.
A peacock's display can engage a peahen's reproductive value system.
A warning movement can cause another animal to withdraw.
These relations can be extraordinarily complex.
But they do not require symbolic meaning.
A signal matters because of what it does within an interaction.
A sign does something different.
A sign participates in a system in which a form can be construed as something else.
The transition is therefore not:
signal → more complicated signal.
It is:
signal → symbolic construal
What changes with symbolism?
Suppose a social relation is already well established.
Participants depend upon one another.
They occupy differentiated positions.
There are boundaries.
There are expectations.
There are recurring patterns of affiliation.
Now imagine that some aspect of this relational structure acquires a conventional form.
A word.
A gesture.
An emblem.
A ritual.
A story.
The social relation can now become available for explicit construal.
It can be talked about.
Remembered.
Taught.
Argued over.
Compared with alternatives.
The relation has entered a semiotic system.
A role becomes a name
Consider a social role.
Before it is named, there may already be a recurrent pattern of mattering.
One participant depends upon another for certain activities.
Responsibilities recur.
Expectations develop.
A distinction becomes socially significant.
Then the role acquires a name.
The name does not create the entire relation.
It gives the relation a symbolic form.
Participants can now say what the role is.
Teach it.
Challenge it.
Transfer the term to another context.
Compare one role with another.
Meaning has made the social relation portable and reflexively available.
A boundary becomes a category
The same thing happens with boundaries.
A social group may already distinguish insiders from outsiders through patterns of participation.
Then a name appears.
Citizen.
Member.
Stranger.
Foreigner.
The boundary becomes symbolically articulated.
Once named, it can be regulated.
Negotiated.
Expanded.
Restricted.
Institutionalised.
The symbolic category therefore feeds back into the topology.
What once existed primarily as a pattern of mattering becomes part of the means through which that pattern is reproduced or changed.
Meaning makes social structure visible to itself
This may be one of the greatest transformations introduced by semiosis.
A social system can now, to some extent, construe its own relations.
Participants can recognise patterns in which they are involved.
They can ask:
Why is this relation organised this way?
Who benefits?
Who is responsible?
What should change?
What should remain?
The system can begin to represent its own organisation.
It has acquired a degree of reflexivity.
Meaning makes social structure available for reflection and redesign.
From participation to representation
This does not mean that representation is detached from participation.
A symbol can only matter within a social system.
A word such as "leader" matters because leadership is already a social relation.
A legal category matters because institutions act upon it.
A political identity matters because people coordinate around it.
A myth matters because it participates in a community's organisation of value.
Meaning therefore does not float above mattering.
It gives mattering another mode of existence.
The collective reservoir
This is where our distinction between collective reservoir and individual repertoire becomes especially important.
Once social mattering has been symbolically construed, the resulting forms enter a collective semiotic reservoir.
The culture now contains words, categories, stories, images, symbols and practices through which participants can construe the social world.
The reservoir is larger than any one individual repertoire.
No participant masters the whole system.
But each can draw upon parts of it.
Repertoire becomes symbolic
The individual repertoire now acquires another dimension.
A participant's repertoire includes not only ways of acting and responding within social relations, but ways of construing those relations symbolically.
Someone may know how to perform a role.
They may also know its name.
Its history.
Its obligations.
Its symbolic significance.
Another participant may inhabit a similar structural position but lack those symbolic resources.
The same topology can therefore be experienced through different repertoires of meaning.
Meaning is intrinsically relational
Halliday's reference to Saussure is important here.
Meaning is not simply attached to forms.
It is intrinsically paradigmatic.
A sign means partly through the alternatives from which it is distinguished.
This brings us back to the potential/instance distinction in a useful but limited way.
A particular expression becomes meaningful because other expressions were possible.
A category becomes intelligible because it excludes or contrasts with other categories.
A social identity becomes meaningful because other identities are available.
Meaning therefore depends upon a structured field of alternatives.
The semiotic reservoir is not just a collection of labels.
It is a system of contrasts and choices.
Symbolic construal adds possibilities
Once social mattering has symbolic form, participants can do things that were previously difficult or impossible.
They can compare distant situations.
Imagine alternatives.
Tell stories about the past.
Describe possible futures.
Teach relations to people who have never experienced them directly.
Coordinate people across physical distance.
Preserve knowledge across generations.
A pattern of social mattering can therefore become detachable from its immediate occurrence.
Meaning makes social relations portable.
From the present to the absent
This is one of the transformations we already encountered in our work on film music.
A sign can make something absent present.
The same principle applies socially.
A story can invoke ancestors who are no longer alive.
A constitution can organise relationships among people who have never met.
A national symbol can connect strangers across enormous distances.
A historical event can continue to matter through representations long after its participants have disappeared.
Meaning extends the temporal and spatial reach of social mattering.
From experience to concept
A recurring social pattern can become conceptual.
Suppose a community repeatedly encounters an asymmetrical relation.
It experiences dependence.
Conflict.
Benefit.
Resentment.
Protection.
These experiences can eventually be symbolically construed as concepts such as:
authority,
exploitation,
responsibility,
justice,
obligation.
The words do not merely label the existing relations.
Once established, they provide resources for construing new situations.
A concept can therefore become a resource for further meaning-making.
This is precisely the recursive potential we explored in From Mattering to Meaning.
From concept to institution
Meaning can then feed back into structure.
A concept becomes a rule.
A rule becomes a procedure.
A procedure becomes an institution.
The symbolic articulation changes behaviour.
Behaviour changes relations.
Relations change the topology.
So:
mattering → meaning → altered mattering
The loop has returned.
This is why semiotic systems can transform social systems.
They do not merely describe what already exists.
They can help reorganise it.
Value becomes discussable
Perhaps the most significant change is that social value can now become an object of argument.
Participants can disagree about what ought to matter.
They can ask whether one relation is fair.
Whether one role is legitimate.
Whether one boundary is justified.
Whether one institution should survive.
This is impossible in the same way before symbolic construal exists.
A mattering-relation can exist without a theory of itself.
Meaning enables the system to reflect upon its own values.
Ideology enters here
This is where ideology properly belongs.
Ideology is not the origin of social value.
It is one way in which social value becomes systematically construed and organised symbolically.
An ideology connects concepts.
Provides categories.
Narrates causes.
Identifies threats.
Defines legitimate relations.
Proposes futures.
It therefore offers participants a symbolic map of the social topology.
But the map is not neutral.
It selects.
Frames.
Emphasises.
Excludes.
Different ideological traditions may therefore construe the same underlying mattering-relations very differently.
The symbolic map can change the territory
Once an ideological map becomes socially effective, it changes the topology it describes.
People act on its categories.
Institutions are reorganised.
Affiliations strengthen or weaken.
New boundaries emerge.
Old ones dissolve.
A previously neglected relation becomes salient.
A new group forms around it.
The map has become part of the terrain.
Meaning has fed back into mattering.
Why repertoire matters here
This is where differentiated repertoires become politically and socially significant.
Participants do not encounter the same collective reservoir in identical ways.
One repertoire may make hierarchy immediately intelligible as a legitimate form of organisation.
Another may make the same pattern salient as domination.
One may readily construe obligation as mutual responsibility.
Another may construe it as coercion.
The social topology is not different in itself.
But the available symbolic pathways through it are different.
The same mattering-relations can therefore become different meanings.
Affiliation can become ideology
This also gives us a way to understand how affiliation develops further.
Participants first become recurrently aligned around patterns of mattering.
Their repertoires overlap.
A "we" emerges.
Then the "we" acquires symbolic form.
It gets a name.
A history.
A set of values.
A narrative of itself.
At that point, affiliation becomes ideologically articulated.
The symbolic identity can then recruit new participants.
Teach them the group's repertoire.
Strengthen its boundaries.
Alter its social position.
Meaning is now participating directly in the reproduction of affiliation.
Meaning transforms the repertoire
The individual repertoire is not merely a collection of inherited meanings.
A participant can learn a new concept and suddenly recognise a pattern that was previously difficult to construe.
They may encounter a metaphor that reveals a new relation.
A political category may make a previously private experience socially intelligible.
A story may connect separate experiences.
The repertoire expands.
This can alter what the individual notices and therefore what matters.
Symbolic learning is therefore another pathway by which:
meaning feeds back into mattering.
The semiotic system becomes reflexive
We can now see why Halliday's transition from social to semiotic systems is so significant.
A social system is already organised through value-relations.
A semiotic system adds the capacity to construe those relations symbolically.
The system can therefore, at least in principle, represent its own organisation.
It can create concepts of itself.
Tell stories about itself.
Argue about itself.
Transform itself deliberately.
That is a very different kind of evolutionary possibility.
Meaning does not replace mattering
But we should keep one final distinction firmly in place.
Meaning does not supersede social mattering.
A symbol remains socially effective because it participates in relations.
An institution remains significant because it changes behaviour.
A political identity matters because it coordinates people.
A legal category matters because consequences follow from it.
Meaning remains grounded in what matters.
The semiotic transformation adds another layer of organisation.
It does not abolish the previous one.
The full transition
We can now describe the central transformation of this series more precisely.
At first:
organisms have value systems.
Then:
their signals engage one another's value systems.
Then:
responses become recurrently coupled.
Then:
collective patterns become social structure.
Then:
individuals develop repertoires for participating in that structure.
Then:
overlapping repertoires support affiliation.
And now:
patterns of affiliation and mattering become symbolically construed.
The movement is:
value → mattering → meaning
But each transition preserves what came before.
Meaning is mattering further transformed.
Meaning can also transform the topology
This is the point at which the topology ceases to be merely a background structure.
Once meaning enters the system, the topology itself can evolve more rapidly.
A new category can expose a previously unrecognised boundary.
A new symbol can coordinate people across a previous boundary.
A new concept can make a new affiliation possible.
A new narrative can transform an old relationship.
The social system acquires new pathways because it has acquired symbolic resources for imagining and coordinating them.
What the semiotic transformation makes possible
Meaning therefore adds a distinctive set of possibilities to social life.
The system can:
remember beyond individual memory;
coordinate across distance;
compare alternative arrangements;
imagine futures;
preserve histories;
generalise experiences;
formulate norms;
criticise institutions;
invent identities;
construct ideologies.
These capacities are not simply "more information".
They are new ways of reorganising social mattering.
The next problem: the political map
We have now reached the threshold at which our topology can acquire a symbolic map.
But a map is never simply a neutral representation.
Different repertoires will construe the same social relations differently.
Different affiliations will emphasise different regions of mattering.
Different ideologies will offer different accounts of what needs preserving, transforming or defending.
So we are now in a position to ask a question we deliberately postponed:
Does the familiar political spectrum correspond to anything in the topology of mattering?
Perhaps it does.
Perhaps it only partially does.
Perhaps the conventional left/right line compresses several different dimensions into one.
Whatever the answer, we now have a framework in which the question can be asked without beginning from political labels themselves.
The next task is therefore to see whether political affiliation can be understood as a symbolic pattern within the topology of mattering.
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