Semiosis as a Time-Generator
A **Feynman diagram** is often described as a *short story in time*. Two particles approach, interact, and separate again. Yet the diagram itself is not temporal. Nothing moves. Nothing flows. The entire “story” is laid out at once, as a fixed configuration of lines and vertices. What the diagram does is not to represent time passing, but to **spatialize relations** in such a way that an ordered account can be reconstructed. This apparent paradox—telling a story about time by suspending temporal flow—is not accidental. It reveals a more general mechanism: diagrams do not depict processes, they **constrain inference**. Their power lies in the fact that relations are made visible and operable. When we read a Feynman diagram, we do not replay a process in time; we follow a **necessary order of interpretation** imposed by the diagram’s structure. This is precisely the sense in which **Charles Sanders Peirce** understood diagrams: as **icons of rational relations**. A diagram preserves relations rather than appearances, and reasoning proceeds by *manipulating* those relations. Building on this, **Luca M. Possati** argues that computation itself should be understood as a form of **diagrammatic semiosis**. Computation is not primarily the processing of symbols over time, but the rule-governed transformation of relational structures that generate new consequences—new interpretants. Seen from this perspective, the diagram embodies what **Zettel 1622** calls the *spatial aspect of time*: moments are placed “next to” one another, and flow is replaced by ordering. The *Now* of each interaction (Zettel 4053) is frozen into a vertex; what remains is a structure of constraints. When temporal flow is suspended (Zettel 3609), what becomes visible is not timelessness in the sense of stasis, but **ordering without duration**. The crucial point is that this ordering is not added from outside. In Possati’s Peircean framework, each interpretant generated by diagrammatic manipulation becomes a new sign, opening a further step of inference. In this way, semiosis itself **produces futureness**: an intrinsic before/after that does not rely on clocks or timelines. Time, in this sense, is not a background dimension but the **effect of semiotic ordering**. This aligns with the “timeless” reconstructions found in **Julian Barbour**: time emerges from structure, not from flow.
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