A horizon is not simply a line separating two regions. It is the boundary of what can be seen from somewhere, under particular conditions. Move, and the horizon changes. What lay beyond it may come into view; what was once visible may disappear. The horizon belongs neither to the landscape alone nor to the observer alone, but to their relation.
Perhaps this offers a way to think about the relation between the semiotic and the non-semiotic.
Meaning arises within a world that is not wholly organised by meaning. Semiotic systems depend on physical processes, living bodies, social practices and material circumstances. Yet these conditions do not become semiotic merely because they participate in meaning-making. The challenge is to understand how the semiotic and the non-semiotic meet without treating them either as separate worlds or as different names for the same thing.
The idea of a horizon helps us approach this problem. It directs our attention away from a fixed boundary between two independently existing domains and towards the relations through which the distinction becomes consequential.
Consider a spoken word. Its production involves bodily processes, acoustic events and a physical environment. Its meaning, however, belongs to its relations within a semiotic system and to the circumstances in which it is used. These dimensions are inseparable in the event of speaking, but they are not interchangeable. The acoustic event is not itself the meaning, and the meaning is not an additional physical object hidden within the sound.
Nor does meaning simply begin where the physical ends. The material event participates in the making of meaning, while the semiotic organisation shapes what the event can do within a social situation. The relation crosses the distinction without abolishing it.
A written sign offers a similar example. Its marks depend on a material surface and on the physical processes through which they are produced and encountered. But their meaning depends on an organisation that cannot be explained by the marks alone. The same marks may mean different things within different systems; marks that are materially similar may participate in different meanings. The material and the semiotic meet, but neither provides a complete account of the other.
The horizon, then, should not be imagined as a barrier that meaning must cross to reach an external world. It is the shifting interface through which semiotic activity participates in relations extending beyond the semiotic domain. What happens at that interface depends on the particular systems, participants and circumstances involved.
This also guards against a tempting mistake: supposing that whatever contributes to meaning must already contain meaning in some latent form. The physical conditions of speech need not be potential meanings waiting to be expressed. The social conditions of an exchange need not be disguised semiotic structures. They may enable, constrain or transform meaning-making without themselves being meanings.
The reverse mistake is to imagine that the non-semiotic can be understood without reference to the semiotic wherever the two participate in the same activity. A warning sign, for example, is simultaneously a material object, a resource within a semiotic system and a participant in a social situation. Its consequences may extend beyond what it means, while what it means cannot be reduced to those consequences. The relations are multiple, and their differences matter.
A relational horizon is therefore not a fixed dividing line, but neither is it an invitation to dissolve every distinction. It is a way of asking how distinct forms of organisation participate in the same unfolding processes, and how their relations may change what each makes possible.
The question becomes especially interesting when the participants themselves are not all alike. A human being, a written text and an artificial language model may contribute to a shared activity in different ways. Their material conditions, capacities and forms of participation differ. Yet these differences need not prevent relations from arising among them.
If meaning is immanent in the world, it does not follow that the world is entirely semiotic. It means that meaning arises within the world's ongoing relations, without requiring a separate realm in which meanings exist before their participation in those relations.
A horizon changes with the relations from which it emerges. So, too, the interface between the semiotic and the non-semiotic may be reorganised as new participants, practices and resources enter into relation.
The important question is not where meaning ends and the world begins. Meaning has never been outside the world. The question is how meaning participates in a world whose organisation exceeds it.
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