Meaning without Agency: The Establishment of Meaningful Time Relations as Prerequisite for the Emergence of Biosemiosis

Abstract

AbstractThis article reexamines meaning, agency, and interpretation by challenging the view that they require primary or secondary agency. Using Paul Ricœur’s narrative temporality, it explores Terrence Deacon’s autogenic theory, reinterpreting it as a narrative process with non-agentic meaning by distinguishing between distended and displaced temporal relations. Distended relations pertain to agency and biosemiosis, while displaced relations involve the meaning found not in the entity but the processes which gave it a functionally historicized existence. Applying Ricœur’s analysis of temporal aporia and Deacon’s concept of zero, the article suggests that meaning in Deacon’s model mirrors the normative process of narrative interpretation. It emphasizes that primary agency requires meaningful organization for agentic action to have a self for which decisions matter, concluding that meaning, life, and primary agency are grounded in already existing displaced temporal relations resultant from proto-interpretative relations not bounded within an organism.