20 The System of Meaning: Not a Code, but a Theory of Possibility

(Post 20 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

It is tempting — especially in cognitive and computational paradigms — to treat meaning as something encoded and decoded, as if messages are containers and minds are the recipients. But from a relational perspective, meaning is not a code. It is not transmitted; it is construed.

This misunderstanding is not trivial. It mislocates the semiotic act in the movement of a message, rather than in the systemic potential that makes meaning possible in the first place.

Meaning as a Structured Potential

In relational ontology, a system is not a set of rules or pre-existing forms. It is a structured potential — a theory of the possible, not a template for the actual. Meaning systems are thus fields of construal: they define what can be meant, not what must be meant.

To speak, to act symbolically, is to make a cut through that potential — to instantiate a configuration from within the system’s affordances.

A semantic system, then, is not a codebook. It is more like a phase space of meaning: a topological field in which trajectories of construal unfold. It sets the conditions of coherence, relevance, contrast, and resonance — but it does not predetermine the path.

System and Instance: Meaning’s Complementarity

Just as quantum theory compels us to think in terms of wave–particle complementarity, relational ontology insists on the complementarity of system and instance. Meaning does not reside in either pole, but emerges in the cut between them.

The system is virtual; the instance is actual. The system is semantic potential; the instance is a phenomenally realised construal. And meaning — as an event — arises when the two are brought into relation.

To understand a meaning is not to decode a message. It is to resonate with the construal — to orient oneself within the same field of possibility and to participate, however briefly, in the same phase space of sense.

From Semiotic Code to Semiotic Physics

If we abandon the metaphor of meaning as a code and embrace the model of system-as-potential, a new kind of semiotic emerges — not semiotics as structural description, but semiotics as field theory.

This is not simply a shift in terminology. It is a shift in ontology. Meaning becomes a physical process, not in the materialist sense, but in the relational sense: it is how systems structure their own possible becomings.

This perspective does not erase symbolic abstraction — it deepens it. To symbolise, in this view, is to cut the field in a way that inflects the system and reshapes the possibilities for future construal.