Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a flaw. It is a phase delay built into symbolic systems. Because signals never coincide exactly with what they refer to, they remain reusable, recombinable, and mobile across contexts. Locally, this produces coherence: temporary alignments that function as coordinate systems for thought, action, and decision. Globally, the system never closes. What remains invariant under transformation is not stable meaning, but the tension between local coherence and global indeterminacy, between stabilisation and deferral. Meaning behaves analogically to entropy, not as decay but as redistribution. Order appears briefly as constraint, then diffuses back into circulation.
From these mechanics follow consequences that are neither abstract nor optional. Meaning is necessarily insubstantial, and that insubstantiality is not a weakness but a load-bearing feature. Certainty exists, but only locally and provisionally, because it depends on an underlying field of uncertainty that absorbs error, allows revision, and enables adaptation. When systems attempt to collapse meaning into a single, crystalline coherence, they do not strengthen it. They destroy its shock absorption. Difference is eliminated, ambiguity is treated as failure, and the relational field loses its capacity to bend without breaking. What follows is not clarity but brittleness. Language hardens into slogans, policies into dogma, identities into absolutes. Meaning thins out precisely as closure intensifies.
At that point the dynamic becomes overtly political, and eventually planetary. Socio-political and geopolitical systems that cannot tolerate uncertainty begin to manufacture it instead. They induce instability, amplify fear, and keep ambiguity unresolved, then centralise authority, enforce simplifications, and present themselves as the only available stabilisers. This is the orbit: uncertainty produces closure; closure reproduces the conditions of uncertainty that make it appear necessary. Absurdity rises to the surface not as an accident but as a signal that the system has lost its ability to manage indeterminacy quietly. Extreme positions, theatrical confidence, and pathological certainty are rewarded because they simulate coherence in a field that has been stripped of adaptive slack. The cost is externalised across populations, ecosystems, and time horizons that cannot respond within the narrowed frame.
The practical implication is neither moral nor cosmetic. Communication cannot be purified without collapse. Attempts to eliminate ambiguity undermine the very conditions that allow collective sense-making, coordination, and long-term survival. Ambiguity must be acknowledged, routed, and bounded rather than denied. Certainty must be treated as a local instrument, not a global claim, and revision as a sign of systemic health rather than weakness. Systems capable of surfacing uncertainty early and distributing it intelligently reduce the need for coercive closure and performative control. Systems that deny this structure invite its return in more damaging and destabilising forms. Meaning remains viable only where deferral is respected, limits are legible, and coherence is allowed to expire on schedule.
Daedelus Kite 