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"I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning." -- Michael Jacobson, asemic artist


This tension between meaningfulness and meaninglessness probably defines what language is all about. It is like being caught in the middle of two opposing traffic. This is not so different from the concept of reason. If you insist too much on the rationality of an idea, you will end up being irrational. Voltaire's Candide is a very good illustration. Humor, too, can easily degenerate into other things without a certain balancing act.

It is not, however, a simple binarism. If you move beyond a certain point towards one end, you will find yourself at the other end, and so on. Thus, what we actually have is an endless swing toward both ends, never really defining for us the pure state of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.

These two terms are not axiomatic givens, as if we knew what they were ahead of time. In any process that involves scripts, images, symbols, or signs, that is, any language game, everything seems to be moving by positing positive and negative values, or units and gaps, along the way. It is as if the very act of walking was creating the road itself, instead of walking over a prior constructed path. Each action creates its own space, or weaves its own path, instantaneously assigning poles of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as constitutive horizons that do not have absolute positions, nor absolute values.

The uncertainty of the real value of these poles even renders them mysterious. It is for a system or a game to decide which is which to set itself up. When that happens, a certain threshold is reached. Everything solidifies into a dogma, and becomes too signifying, too obvious. What was previously dismissed as meaningless starts making more sense.

What is interesting, from the point of view of literature, is to see many texts that play on these tensions through the use of different techniques (Ray di Palma's super-efficient syntax, for example, or Peter Ganick's voiceless, subjectless, objectless flux).