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Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility.

Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of a(ny) language or information encoding mechanism necessarily grounded in difference and aspirational Manichaean certainties, perhaps, but when observed as an intractable, yet persistent and somewhat paradoxical epistemological skeleton key for engaging or shaping facts, the conspicuous absence of referential identity in the parts of a whole deeply problematise the human experience of an individuation that then finds itself gravitationally anchored upon (and self-validated by) nothing much at all. Emergent non-linearity renders determinism impotent.

If the self-propagating essence and functional grounding of meaning is in an elementary absence, then meaning is dissimulated in the parts but distributed and embodied across the whole (of a) communication system as a generative instance of global self-reference and bootstrapped system recursion. The cybernetics of language (and communication, or of technology) is as much a matter of philosophy as it is of engineering or systems theory but rolling such a significant inertial mass up this asymptote of a general systems concept requires something of a nuanced strategy and adaptive orientation within, through and as language.