Abstract: In recent years, Chilean public life has manifest acute politicalpolarization, widespread discontent, and disaffection with the state of thenation. The legitimacy of the institutional order has been vigorouslychallenged, from the electoral system and political parties to the economicstructure and englobing political economic system. This institutionallegitimacy crisis has coincided with the emergence of multitudinous new ‘socialmovements’, of which I examine here two cases, the so-called “Student Movement”and the “Mapuche Autonomy Movement”. Frequently mobilized in this institutionalcrisis, in order to describe it, is the term “Chilean Model” [el modelo(Chileno)], or more often simply, “the model”. In this paper, I begin byexamining talk about the model and alternatives to it—model talk—as aprism for understanding the new social movements. Many opponents of the modelexpress widespread belief that its victims share natural affinities, since thesurface forms of their victimization are symptoms of an underlying virus. AsSociologist Alberto Mayol suggests, “the model structures relations and definestheir traits, it is the DNA that explains the configuration [of Chileansociety]”. My aim is tochallenge these contentions. To reason about the problems of modeling societyrequires more than coarse ontological assumptions about political alignment andpotentiality. And yet, salient metasemiotic discourses routinely support suchreductions of lived complexity. By examining the ontology of the StudentMovement through the shifting composition of CONFECH, the Chilean StudentFederation, I hope to address some of the problems that attend the constructionof a collective subject organized as an alternative to, and legitimated througha critique of, a particular model of society. My interest is in how thedeconstructive project shapes the constructive project, and how problems ofmodeling society, part and parcel of projects to remake it, can be semioticallytracked to illuminate sociologically interesting segmentations obscured bysalient metadiscourses, including metadiscourses of critique and resistance. Isuggest that critique of the model sets constraints on the alternative modelsof society that activists propose, but does not determine how their alternativesocial projects will avoid reproducing the very model they seek todiscredit.