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Events turn into objects, things with a meaning … Events when once they are named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation: their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner experimentation – which is thought – may issue forth in interaction with crude or raw events.³¹

The meanings in the material may spread in their scope indefinitely across context, known to unknown. The meanings in the ideal may spread their scope indefinitely across context, real to imagined.^§MS3.1 Then the ideal may return to the material; it can be materialized.

Meaning travels between the material and the ideal in several ways. Peirce classified these in one of his triads as icon/index-indication/symbol-token. Icons are “likenesses … which serve to convey the ideas of things they represent by simply imitating them.”³² “An index … asserts nothing, it only says ‘There!’ It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object … a pointing finger being the type of the class.”³³ A symbol or token is a convention that “cannot indicate any particular thing; it denotes a kind of thing.”³⁴

We rename and slightly redefine these ways of traveling between the ideal and the material as likeness, directedness, and abstraction. With materialization, the ideal is manifest as likeness, direction, or abstraction. Materialization is a process of situating meaning in context.

Here is a rough map of some processes of materialization:

Fig. 1.1: Materialization

Each of likeness, directedness, and abstraction in its own characteristic way directs the traffic of meaning between the ideal and the material, a traffic that attributes meaning by connecting meaning in contexts, and recontextualizing it in the act of meaning.

These processes of the materialization of meaning can occur at the same time in the combination of likeness, and/or directedness, and/or symbolization. Or one kind of materialization can become one or more of the others. Such are the slippery dynamics of functional transposition, where meanings are ever ready to move, and move all the time they do.

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³⁰ John Dewey, 1925, Experience and Nature, Chicago, IL: Open Court, p. 166.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Charles Sanders Peirce, 1998, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2: 1893–1913, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 5.

³³ Charles Sanders Peirce, 1992, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1: 1867–1893, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 225.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 9.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 31–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Materialization §AS1.1