A former professor told a
student how her arguments are sound, all sound. An old quip, nothing original
about it. People probably quote old witticisms to revive their sense by the
harvest of new laughter. From another perspective, you could say there was
nothing deprecatory anymore about the pun. The replacement of the
logico-semantic content of an utterance by its material embodiment as
representing the totality of the "significance" of the discursive
string is already the axiomatic base of many contemporary literary practices,
from futurism and lettrism, to language poetry and post-literate art.
Building up sound to
replicate sense has always been the feature of traditional poetic style, the
mythic ambition of onomatopoeia, wedding matter with meaning, or vice versa, or
whatever along this binary dialectic, still felt by many in their linguistic
fantasies. But my anecdote can be seen to be saying something more, if we move
away now from the technical asides we managed to spew. Let's not be blind to
its paradoxical bind, where its humor consumes the very logic it tries to deny,
where sense and non-sense meet in the paradoxical materiality of the sign.
