The artefacts and instances as microcosms or individuated and particular salience are indeed not the essence of a linguistic system, but notice how that from within the grammatical and ordered sub-set of logic that language (inadvertently) embodies – the projective and asserted totality of intelligible meaning or self-consistent systems is some kind of statistical average and functional approximation of asymptosis to which we find ourselves quite naturally drawn.
In a sense, yes, there is no ghost in this machine, only the machine itself but to state this without taking into account the foundational limitations of machines (and the logic that forms their substrate) is to miss a key point of eminently useful and conspicuous absence here. The indefinite extensibility of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. “complex”) information and energy-processing systems incurs both the structural utility from which selves (or meanings and grammatical order in language) might emerge and the unique inconsistency and undecidability that haunts the core of those systems.
The metaphysical unknown “beyond” is endemic “within” and this founds the basis of a logical self-containment by which meanings invoked in a language become as (usefully) fallible as the language itself. Grammatical structure (and its emergent semantic webs) invokes an abstraction that in its implicit limitations mirrors the fallibilities of its linguistic container but the true illusion of the fantasy and projection of even the possibility of certainty and closure. Language lies.
Daedelus Kite 