13 Symbol Without Substance: Rethinking Abstraction in a Reflexive Ontology

(Post 13 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

In the long arc of Western thought, the symbol has often stood for transcendence: a sign that floats free of its material substrate, pointing to something beyond the here and now. From Plato’s eternal Forms to modern-day digital codes, symbols have been cast as abstractions that leave embodiment behind.

But in a reflexive ontology — where all actuality is a cut through potential, and where meaning is inseparable from construal — abstraction cannot be severed from materiality. The symbol is not a substance that escapes the world, but a phase of construal that reorganises how the world becomes meaningful.

The Symbol as Reflexive Cut

In systemic functional linguistics, Halliday and Matthiessen offer a powerful reconstrual: symbolisation is a higher-order construal of experience, a semiotic cut layered over a previous construal. It is not a detachment from matter, but a reflexive turn within meaning-making itself.

This fits perfectly with a relational view. Symbolisation is a re-entry of construal into itself — a second-order cut that patterns how first-order meanings (phenomena) are themselves organised and interpreted. The symbol does not “stand for” something else at a distance; it reconfigures the field of potential in which meaning arises.

Abstraction as Semiotic Phase Shift

Rather than picturing abstraction as a ladder that rises away from the real, we might picture it as a phase shift in reflexivity. Just as steam is not more “real” than ice, the symbolic is not more “abstract” in some metaphysical sense. It is a different mode of patterning — one that introduces symbolic potential: the capacity to construe construals, to mean about meaning.

Importantly, this potential is always anchored in the semiotic system itself. No symbol floats freely. Each is embedded in a field of patterned relations, and its capacity to signify emerges from the structure of the system as a whole — not from some intrinsic or ideal essence.

No Substance, No Problem

To call a symbol “without substance” is not to deny its power — but to relocate that power. It does not arise from a transcendent signified, but from a systemic alignment of construal. The symbol is a cut that draws meaning not from what it is, but from how it functions within a reflexive whole.

In this light, abstraction is not a departure from the world. It is a new coherence in the system of cuts — a new way of aligning perspectives, possibilities, and potential meanings.

We do not move from matter to mind, or from world to word. We move within a system that can repattern itself — that can symbolise, and in doing so, transform the very space of what is possible.

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In the next post, we’ll explore how this symbolic reflexivity sets the stage for collective meaning — for systems that coordinate not just individual construals, but shared horizons of sense.