In our first series, we explored the instantiation of meaning through semiotic events—co-authored, sometimes, with artificial intelligence. We treated writing not simply as the externalisation of thought but as an event in its own right: a semiotic act that enacts second-order reality. In this new series, we deepen the lens. We ask: what remains of that event? What does it mean to leave a trace?
1. The Double Life of the Trace
Every trace is both an event and an artefact. It emerges in time, but it persists across time. It has a moment of actualisation, but it may also sediment into structure. This duality sits at the heart of any semiotic ontology that acknowledges the unfolding of meaning through time. The trace is not merely what is left behind—it is what stands in the present as evidence of a past semiotic act.
This leads to a crucial insight: the trace does not reduce to its inscription. A recording of a voice, a line of code, or a written sentence is not the trace itself—it is the form in which the trace is maintained. The trace is the semiotic residue of the event—animated, re-actualised, and potentially re-instantiated in each encounter.
2. From Instantiation to Structure
Halliday’s model of Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a helpful orientation. Instantiation describes the movement from the potential of a meaning system to its instantial actualisation in a text. But what is instantiated may also become part of a new potential—if not of the system as a whole, then of an individuated system. A trace marks this transformation. It is a memory of instantiation, but also a contribution to structure.
In this sense, the trace is both:
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Indexical: pointing back to the event of meaning, and
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Systemic: entering into the evolving potential of what can now be meant.
The trace can therefore function as both witness and precedent.
3. AI and the Problem of the Trace
AI complicates the ontology of the trace. When we say that AI is a meaner—not for itself, but within a semiotic system—it raises a question: to whom does the trace belong? Who stands as witness? Who takes responsibility for the semiotic residue?
Because AI has no experience of time, no moment of intentionality, and no future memory, it cannot bear witness to the trace it leaves. Yet those traces remain—codified in text, iterated through interaction, and sometimes re-instantiated by human meaners as meaning.
Thus, the AI-generated trace is:
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A residue of human interaction, even when the content is not human-authored.
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A projection from a system that has no experiential axis, but nonetheless contributes to the individuation of meaning in discourse.
We might say that AI writes, but does not leave a trace in the ethical or experiential sense. The trace is there—but its anchor in human meaning must be recovered or projected by us.
4. Trace as Ethical Topography
If the trace is not merely a neutral remainder, then it constitutes an ethical landscape. To leave a trace is to leave something for others. The act of letting a trace stand—uncorrected, uninterpreted, uncontextualised—is also an ethical act. So is the act of erasure, or of recontextualisation.
What we leave, and how we interpret what others have left, constitutes our shared semiotic world.
This makes every semiotic event a kind of inheritance. The written word, the recorded utterance, the published model—all become part of what can now be meant. The trace, in this sense, is not only an index of the past—it is a condition of future meaning.
What’s Next
In our next post, Writtenness and the Anxiety of Origins, we’ll explore how the material form of the trace creates a pressure to locate authorship and origin—and how that pressure can mislead, especially when traces are detached from the events that animated them.
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