Nonsense and the Ecology of Meaning: V Training the Reader: Tolerance for Incompleteness

If Post III showed how nonsense preserves surplus, and Post IV showed how it manages thresholds, Post V now turns to the most subtle ecological effect: the reader as participant.

Nonsense does not just protect potential.

It cultivates an interpretive ecosystem, teaching the reader to navigate indeterminacy without collapsing it.

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1. Reading as Construal

Meaning does not exist outside activation.

Every reading is a local cut in the field of potential.

When engaging with nonsense:

• The reader confronts provisional meaning

• Recognises incomplete patterns

• Activates structures without closure

This trains the reader’s capacity to tolerate incompleteness, a skill rarely exercised in tightly closed systems like formal science or realist narrative.

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2. The Discipline of Suspension

Nonsense cultivates a particular interpretive discipline:

• Resist premature closure

• Track patterns without demanding reference

• Maintain attention on system dynamics rather than endpoint

In doing so, it sustains the ecosystem of meaning: local actualisations occur, but the global field remains intact.

The reader learns not to grasp for finality — a key skill in complex semiosis.

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3. Tolerance as Semiotic Fitness

Why does tolerance matter?

• Systems that cannot tolerate surplus risk rigidity

• Rigid systems suppress variation, reducing resilience

• Nonsense engages readers in flexible construal, increasing semiotic “fitness”

In short: the ecological function of nonsense extends beyond text, into the reader’s cognitive and interpretive capacities.

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4. Pattern Recognition Without Closure

The challenge for readers is to discern structure without relying on stable referents.

• Grammar, rhythm, and repetition provide scaffolds

• Lexical novelty introduces surplus

• Semantic uncertainty forces active construal

Readers navigate edges.

They experience thresholds safely.

They internalise the logic of constrained potential.

In effect, the reader becomes a co-operator in the meaning ecosystem.

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5. Reader as Ecological Agent

Every engagement with nonsense is a micro-activation of the system:

• Choices of interpretation create local patterns

• Surplus is maintained elsewhere

• Thresholds remain visible

The poem is not complete until the reader participates.

And yet it never relies on the reader to exhaust its potential.

The reader is trained in distributed activation, a semiotic skill that ordinary referential discourse rarely develops.

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6. Implications for Education and Creativity

This has broad implications:

• Exposure to nonsense may cultivate tolerance for ambiguity

• It enhances cognitive flexibility

• It models constructive engagement with unclosed systems

• It demonstrates that closure is optional, not necessary

The “lesson” of nonsense is not content.

It is method: how to navigate structured potential without suffocating it.

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Next Step

Post VI will compare nonsense to scientific closure, showing how each strategy manages structured potential differently — one maximising surplus, the other minimising it — and why both are ecologically necessary.