Hunting the Snark: Ontology at the Edge of Meaning: 2 Naming Without Object

“The Snark!” they shouted. And yet, no one knew what it was.

The name existed. The thing did not.

Meaning was not in a referent, but in the collective vector of expectation, attention, and differentiation.

Each utterance of “Snark” was a construal, not a citation; a small cut into potential, not a description of reality.

And with each cut, the system hummed — alive, unstable, generative.

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1. The Name as Semiotic Attractor

The word “Snark” does not point.

It functions purely relationally:

• It attracts the crew into coordinated attention.

• It differentiates possible from impossible, huntable from catastrophic.

• It sustains a field of potential instantiation without stabilising into an object.

Calling it is not naming. It is system maintenance.

• Clinical: A name is a formalised vector in a field of potential, a hook for construal, not a pointer to an independent entity.

• Satirical: The crew exclaims, the reader nods, and no one can show the Snark. Yet we all act as if we know it — the classic absurdity of human “knowledge.”

• Mischievous: The text implicates the reader: even understanding the term draws you into the hunting system. You are now part of the relational vector; you are already hunting.

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2. Differentiation Without Representation

The Snark is not “something.”

It is an axis along which distinctions are drawn.

• Snark vs. Boojum: an emergent difference in construal mode.

• Known vs. unknown: a vector of expectation, not an object.

• Huntable vs. catastrophic: a threshold of structural stability.

Each differentiation does not instantiate an object, but shapes the system’s potential for instantiation.

The Baker may vanish; the Bellman may survive. None are predictable, yet all are conditioned by relational structure.

The Snark is not in the forest. It is in the rules of the hunt themselves.

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3. Satirical Undercurrent: Knowledge Without Object

Victorian logic demands objects to justify names.

Carroll exposes the absurdity:

• The crew shouts and scribbles and strategises.

• The Snark remains a vector of potential, never stabilised.

• Meaning resides not in the Snark, but in their attempts to apprehend it.

It is a gentle mockery of empirical confidence: the more we attempt to pin down the object, the more we expose its ontological slipperiness.

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4. Mischievous Layer: Reader Entanglement

The reader, too, is caught in the semiotic web.

• You may imagine the Snark.

• You may believe the image corresponds to something “real.”

• Yet you are already part of the relational system that produces meaning by attempted, doomed actualisation.

Every reading, every inference, every speculative description of the Snark contributes to the system — even as the Snark itself remains uninstantiated.

The Snark, like the blank map, is density made performative.

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5. Towards Catastrophic Potential

Naming without object sets the stage for future posts:

• Distributed construal of the crew (Post 3) — how the system absorbs and manages relational cuts.

• Boojum logic (Post 4) — when construal fails and the potential actualises catastrophically.

Here, we see the first relational stress test: a name alone generates expectation, attention, and constraint, yet the system has no physical substrate.

In short, the hunt is already underway. And you — reader, hunter, conspirator — are not merely watching. You are implicated.