In this context we can note Ehrensvard's (1960) concept of a 'living pond' as a first stage in the origin of life, together with Depew and Weber's (1995) view of the organism as a 'superecosystem', along with Sidney Fox's (1988) demonstrations that artificial proteinoid microspheres can carry out most of the coarser behaviors of cells (like cell division), making these processes generic at a certain scale--these coupled to Cairns-Smith's (1982) idea of the 'genetic takeover' of an abiotic system of microscopic informational template inheritance.
The microscopic components--metabolic micelles or proteinoid microspheres, with perhaps the information bearing days of Cairns-Smith--would occupy the original locus of meaning.