Nonsense and the Ecology of Meaning: I Why Nonsense Is Not the Opposite of Meaning

Most people assume a simple opposition:

• Meaning ↔ sense

• Nonsense ↔ absence of meaning

Under this model, nonsense is failure.

Noise. Breakdown. Collapse of intelligibility.

But this assumption depends on a prior confusion:

It treats meaning as stable reference.

If meaning equals successful correspondence between word and world, then nonsense appears as its negation.

But that is already the wrong ontology.

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1. Meaning Is Not Reference

Reference is one way meaning can stabilise.

It is not the condition of meaning.

Meaning is relational construal within structured potential.

It arises when:

• distinctions are made,

• patterns are sustained,

• expectations are coordinated,

• phenomena are locally actualised.

Reference is a special case of this process.

It is not the foundation.

If we begin here, the opposition collapses.

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2. What Nonsense Actually Does

Consider The Hunting of the Snark.

The poem contains:

• syntax,

• rhythm,

• narrative progression,

• distributed roles,

• patterned repetition,

• escalating expectation.

Nothing about its structure is chaotic.

What it withholds is stable referent.

The Snark cannot be definitively identified.

The Boojum cannot be taxonomised.

But the relational field is dense.

The system is active.

Meaning is being actualised continuously — just not referentially anchored.

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3. Nonsense Intensifies Potential

In many genres, potential is quickly narrowed:

• Scientific discourse seeks determinate description.

• Legal discourse seeks binding classification.

• Realist narrative seeks resolved closure.

Nonsense suspends premature narrowing.

It keeps surplus visible.

It sustains activation without collapsing into fixation.

This does not destroy meaning.

It foregrounds its generativity.

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4. Structural Coherence Without Object Capture

The crucial point is this:

Nonsense preserves constraint.

Without constraint, there would be chaos.

But nonsense poetry maintains:

• metrical discipline,

• syntactic organisation,

• patterned recurrence,

• thematic cohesion.

Structure remains intact.

Object certainty does not.

This reveals something profound:

Meaning does not require stable objects.

It requires structured differentiation.

Nonsense strips away the illusion that reference is the foundation.

What remains is the underlying machinery of semiosis.

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5. Why the Confusion Persists

We are trained to equate understanding with identification.

“What is it?”

“What does it refer to?”

“What does it stand for?”

When these questions fail, we assume meaning has failed.

But often what has failed is only the demand for closure.

Nonsense does not negate meaning.

It frustrates premature capture.

And in doing so, it exposes how meaning actually works.

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6. The Ontological Inversion

The real opposition is not:

Meaning vs. nonsense.

It is:

Closure vs. generativity.

Many “serious” forms of discourse move rapidly toward closure.

Nonsense delays it.

It keeps the field open long enough for us to notice the dynamics of activation, constraint, and surplus.

In this sense, nonsense may be more ontologically honest than highly referential discourse.

It does not pretend that potential has been exhausted.

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7. A More Accurate Statement

Nonsense is not the absence of meaning.

It is meaning without premature object fixation.

It is structured potential in motion.

It is semiosis with the training wheels of stable reference temporarily removed.

And once seen this way, nonsense becomes philosophically dangerous.

Because it reveals that what we often call “sense” is simply stabilised nonsense that has been socially ratified.