The paradox of meaning
on the structural condition of meaning: tensions, contradictions, simultaneity
Meaning comes into being through a paradox, drawing us in by undoing the very boundaries it appears to establish. It expands exactly where it collapses.
For example, literary descriptions are inherently contradictory.
They pull back what they put forth. What does it mean?
A description’s ability to draw the reader into a text is what makes reading so fascinating: while I read, I create a multitude of worlds, an unleashed imagination that brings me to Carl Jung’s unconsciousness and childhood dreams, Salman Rushdie’s midnight partition time, Ken Kesey’s psychiatric ward, all while sitting in my room.
My boundaries become boundless through imagination;
I find myself in my room and Virginia Woolf’s room too.
I am here, but I am also there. That’s why reading, through the help of vivid descriptions, transforms the human sense of self into something limitless,
present and absent at the same time.
Yet, while describing something, the writer reveals and obscures the object.
Simply because it cannot be real if I am reading the text sitting in my room. What’s real then?
In a way, the notion of reality, or the truth, is distorted despite multiple attempts to vividly portray it as closely as possible. You can read a sentence three times and the meaning you get will change every time.
This contradictory pull that blends meaning and matter together, makes and unmakes, and even remakes, has extended itself into the global world in such a normalized way that reality and the virtual have become hyperreality.
Who hasn’t posted something on social media that is actually not happening in the now, just for the sake of reproducing a real-life experience?
The paradox of description has extended into our lives, human and non-human, crawling under our skin through technology.
An unsettling invasion, a deep integration of non-life has blurred the confines of who we are: technology is no longer external; it has become a part of us through implants, behavioral changes, integrating human and non-human systems perpetually blurring distinctions.
The paradox, now, operates within and across realms, unimaginable dimensions of clouds “safekeeping” our data (or DNA for the daring/innocent ones), altering our perception of reality
traveling way beyond traditional human boundaries.
Meaning, then, does not settle; it survives by continuously undoing itself.
Meaning exists in this very tension: I am here and I am also there.
Cited
Houser, Heather. “Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism.” New Literary History, vol. 51 no. 1, 2020, p. 1-22. Project MUSE.
Looking Ahead
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