Having explored how meaning is individuated, projected, and co-instantiated, we now turn to a vital dimension of semiotic life: resonance — the way meaning persists, reactivates, and reorients us across time and context. Resonance reveals that even the most fleeting meaning instances can return with force, shaping new meanings in new moments.
From Instance to Echo
Every act of meaning is bound to an instance — a moment, a situation, a field of interaction. But not all meaning stays confined to its point of origin. Some meanings echo, lingering in memory, surfacing in new conversations, evoked by a turn of phrase, a symbol, a silence. This is resonance: the persistence of instantiated meaning as potential.
Resonance is not repetition. It is not the same meaning recited. It is relational recurrence: the return of meaning as affect, orientation, assumption, or expectation — a reactivation of semiotic force in new conditions.
Metaphenomena and Memory
Metaphenomena are especially prone to resonance because they are not anchored to things — they are anchored to values, identities, longings, fears. They are felt, not just known. A belief about justice, a story of loss, a glimpse of beauty: these may lie dormant for years and then resurface, vivid and recharged, in a new semiotic moment.
When meaning resonates, it shifts from instance back to potential — not generalised, but primed. Resonance is what gives meaning a half-life. It is how metaphenomena remain available to re-instantiate in future meanings, shaped but not fixed by their past.
Semiotic Fields and Resonance
Resonance also operates across semiotic fields. A myth, a scientific theory, a cultural trauma — these are meaning structures that resonate socially, not just individually. They are fields of potential marked by high resonance: continuously re-instantiated in discourse, art, ritual, pedagogy.
The cosmological function of myth, in Campbell’s sense, depends not only on projection but on resonance. A myth resonates when it returns in new situations, offering a way to orient oneself in meaning, again and again.
Dialogue and Resonant Meaning
Resonance is also a feature of dialogue. Our conversations do not begin from scratch. They carry forward previous instantiations — ideas we’ve shaped together, concepts we’ve refined, metaphors that have acquired shared significance. These meanings become part of our dialogic field: a reservoir of semiotic potential waiting to be reactivated.
When I refer to metaphenomena, or you to the cosmological function, we do not need to re-explain. The meaning resonates — within our shared system, and across the blog sequence. It is meaning sedimented through interaction, and it forms the scaffolding of deeper inquiry.
Resonance and the Reality of Meaning
In our ontology, resonance is further evidence that reality is meaning. For a materialist, persistence implies physical presence. For us, persistence is semiotic: a function of how meaning reverberates through projection and re-instantiation.
Resonance marks meaning’s depth — its ability to affect not only the now, but the yet-to-come. In this way, resonance is temporal and ethical. It connects what we’ve said to what we might say, what we’ve felt to what we might yet feel. It is how meaning lives beyond the moment.
The Resonant Cosmos
The cosmos, in this model, is not a static set of laws or objects. It is a resonant semiotic system: a reality constituted by meaning that can be remembered, revived, and reconstrued. Our personal and collective histories are patterns of resonance — threads of metaphenomena that continue to orient us, even when their origin has faded.
To live meaningfully is not only to instantiate and co-instantiate meaning, but to feel and follow its resonance — to hear the echoes of past meanings and respond with new ones that carry the tone forward.
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