1 The Self as Relation, Not Substance
Western thought has long imagined the self as a kind of substance — an essence that lies behind experience, that acquires language, that thinks. But the view we offer here begins elsewhere: not in essence, but in relation.
The child is not a bearer of meaning who gradually learns to express what was always inside. Nor is the child a blank slate waiting to be written upon by the world. Instead, the child is a site where meaning unfolds — a meaning potential that becomes actual through relation. The self is not a substance that uses language, but a semiotic emergence that is language in the making.
We do not start as selves who then relate; we relate, and in doing so, instantiate a self. Meaning does not clothe an interior mind — it constitutes the self from the start, through the patterned interaction of voices, gestures, responses, and roles. The baby’s cry, the caregiver’s reply, the shared gaze, the naming of things — each is not just communication, but ontogenesis: the coming-into-being of a self that is never private, always relational.
This is the lens of relational ontology. The self is not a hidden presence within; it is the trace of meaning-making across time, the shape that relation takes when actualised as instance. It is not given once and for all, but unfolded again and again, a semiotic becoming through others.
There is no 'I' without 'you'. And neither is a thing. Each is an instance of the other’s potential — actualised in time, through meaning, by relation.
2 Instantiation and the Birth of Meaning
To understand how the self comes into being, we must turn to the semiotic engine that makes it possible: instantiation. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), instantiation refers to the relation between a system of meaning potential and its actualisation in context — the meaning instance. And in our relational ontology, this is not just a technical process of language; it is the very mode by which being unfolds.
At birth, the child enters a world already rich with meaning: a social semiotic system shaped by generations of patterned action and response. But this system is not inherited as a set of fixed categories. It is realised only in the moment of meaning — when a potential is actualised in a specific context, with a specific other. Each cry, each glance, each co-produced routine is not a repetition of the same, but a new instantiation — a bringing-forth of self in relation.
The self does not precede this process. It is not the speaker of a cry, but the cry-in-relation. The infant’s sound becomes meaningful only because it is taken up, interpreted, folded into a semiotic exchange. It is this exchange that actualises a point of view — a perspective, a self — from within the potential. In other words, the child is not a pre-existing source of meaning, but a site of emergence, where relational meaning becomes actual.
This reframes learning: not as the accumulation of knowledge by an individual, but as the increasing delicacy of instantiation — the refining of patterns, the growing capacity to actualise finer distinctions from the system. The child becomes more and more able to occupy specific roles, adopt stances, construe experience — not by acquiring things, but by becoming patterns of relation.
Importantly, this process is always bidirectional. The self is actualised through others, but each instance also updates the system. With every new exchange, the child’s meaning potential is subtly reshaped. Certain patterns become more probable, others less so. This is not learning as input–output, but ontogenesis through relation: a dynamic interplay between the system and the instance, between what could be and what has just become.
In this way, instantiation is not just how meaning happens — it is how selves happen. Not as fixed substances behind words, but as histories of actualised relation: the delicate tracery of what has been made real through others, again and again.
3 Individuation as Ontological Development
If instantiation is the process by which selves emerge in context, then individuation is the longer arc: the unfolding of a unique meaning potential from shared semiotic ground. In traditional views, individuation is often mistaken for the carving out of autonomy — the formation of an individual as a bounded unit distinct from others. But in our relational ontology, individuation is not separation — it is differentiation through relation.
Each person begins life immersed in the collective meaning potential of a culture: the semantic system that makes being-with-others possible. But no individual can actualise all of this system. Instead, through repeated patterns of instantiation — shaped by caregivers, peers, contexts, and contingencies — certain selections become more probable than others. The child’s meaning potential begins to diverge.
This divergence is not a withdrawal from the collective, but a reconfiguration within it. A person’s individuation is a partial trace: not the system itself, but a lived contour of co-selection, a history of what has been actualised and can be again. In this sense, the self is not a container of meaning, but a probabilistic modulation of the social semiotic field — a localised tuning of what can be meant.
This reframes identity as ontological, not categorical. We are not born with fixed traits, nor do we simply acquire them. Rather, we come to be who we are through patterns of relation that instantiate certain potentials over others. These patterns sediment, not as fixed essences, but as biases in becoming — tendencies toward certain selections, postures, values, alignments.
Individuation is thus a trajectory of potential, shaped by the relational architecture of meaning. It does not oppose sociality, but deepens it: my individuation is recognisable only within a system that allows for such divergence, and it is meaningful only because others orient to it. Even resistance, even rupture, is semiotically shaped.
This is not to deny material conditions, power, or constraint. On the contrary, individuation always unfolds within specific material-semiotic environments. But it is precisely in this materiality of relation — not in the illusion of an isolated soul — that the human self comes to be.
We are never outside the system. We are only ever particular unfoldings of it.
4 Becoming Real Through Others
If instantiation makes meaning real in context, and individuation shapes a trajectory of potential across time, then their interdependence finds its fullest expression in relation — the semiotic fabric through which selves become actual. In this final move, we name what has always been implicit: to be real is to be related.
We do not instantiate meaning alone. Even the most private thought — a whispered clause to the self — is made possible by systems learned from others, and is shaped in expectation of intelligibility. Projection, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, is always a relation: one clause enacts another, one voice presupposes a hearer. In this way, even our solitude is dialogic. We speak ourselves into being through the horizon of otherness.
This is why the child must be hailed to become a self. The infant cries, but it is only when that cry is interpreted — when it enters into a relation of meaning — that it begins to function as a sign. And the signs the child is offered do not merely name the world — they name them, position them, fold them into social space. 'You’re hungry.' 'You’re a good girl.' 'You’re always so difficult.' These are not descriptions. They are semiotic acts of individuation.
Across the life course, this pattern continues. We are always being brought into reality by others — through recognition, misrecognition, affiliation, resistance. But recognition is not simply a mirror. It is the actualisation of latent meaning — the difference between potential and presence. To be seen is to be made semiotically real.
In relational ontology, then, the self is not a precondition of relation; it is its outcome. There is no substance behind the pattern, no essential agent orchestrating the process. What exists is the ongoing unfolding of semiotic relations, some of which sediment into recognisable tendencies, orientations, habits of meaning: what we call persons.
This reframes autonomy not as detachment, but as semiotic differentiation within a shared system. The more deeply a person’s meaning potential is instantiated and recognised across contexts, the more individuated they become. And the more individuated, the more they contribute back to the potential of the system — expanding it for others.
The self, then, is not the origin of meaning. It is the threshold where meaning passes into being — again and again, in the gaze, the clause, the act of address.
To become real is always to become real with.
Epilogue: The Relational Pulse of Being
We began with a question: what kind of ontology is implied by the theory of meaning we practice?
Through four steps, we have followed meaning from potential to instance, from instance to person, from person to world — and back again. Along the way, we have reframed concepts often taken as givens: identity, thought, autonomy, even being itself. What emerged is not a world of entities, but of semiotic unfoldings — not a theatre of substances, but a web of relations in motion.
To live, in this view, is not to possess meaning, but to participate in its actualisation. We do not stand apart from language, using it to represent a world. We are folded into it, made real through each clause, each recognition, each response. Meaning is not a property. It is a relation — stratified, instantiating, always emerging.
This is not a metaphor. It is a reframing of ontology itself.
We do not propose a new set of substances to replace the old. We propose that substance itself is an artefact of forgetting — a trace left behind when semiotic movement is reified into static form. Our aim is not to deny the felt reality of the self or the world, but to re-understand them as modes of becoming real — through others, through history, through the relational architectures we call meaning systems.