In The Hunting of the Snark, the most quietly radical object is not the Snark.
It is the map.
“A perfect and absolute blank.”
This line is typically treated as parody — a joke at the expense of navigators who require charts. But read structurally, the blank map is not incompetence. It is ontology.
The blank map is not nothing.
It is structured openness.
It is the condition under which differentiation becomes possible.
1. Against the Myth of Emptiness
Emptiness is usually imagined as absence — lack of content, lack of structure, lack of meaning.
But the blank map in Snark does not function as chaos. The crew do not despair. They do not collapse into confusion. They proceed.
Why?
Because the blank is not void. It is a field awaiting cuts.
The map is a mythic image of semiotic potential before local construal. It represents:
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a system capable of supporting differentiation,
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a field in which relations can be established,
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structured possibility not yet actualised.
The absence of markings is not the absence of structure.
It is the refusal to pre-determine instance.
2. Potential Precedes Instance
Meaning begins with structured potential capable of being actualised.
The blank map therefore stands for:
the system as theory of its possible instances.
Before any specific route is drawn, the system is already capable of generating routes. Before any Snark is identified, the field is already capable of supporting its pursuit.
The crew do not invent meaning from nothing.
They activate potential.
3. The First Cut
The moment the Bellman speaks, a cut occurs.
A cut:
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differentiates figure from ground,
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stabilises expectation,
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actualises a local phenomenon.
But that cut does not exhaust the map.
Each instruction, each chant, each role assignment marks the blank — yet the blank remains generative.
This is crucial.
If the map were already filled, the hunt would be trivial. If it were truly empty, the hunt would be impossible.
The blank map occupies the only viable ontological position:
structured, inexhaustible potential.
4. Why This Is Myth, Not Satire
Carroll could have written a clever joke about incompetence.
Instead, he wrote a myth of beginning.
The blank map is the condition of semiosis before overdetermination.
It is the space where:
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no object is fixed,
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no hierarchy is settled,
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no final meaning has been imposed.
The hunt emerges from this openness.
Meaning begins here — not in certainty, but in structured possibility.
5. The Implication for Us
We tend to imagine meaning as something discovered.
The poem suggests something more radical:
Meaning is actualised through constrained relational activity within a field of prior potential.
The blank map is not ignorance of meaning.
It is the condition that makes meaning possible.
In the next post, we turn from potential to activation.
If the map is the field, then the hunt is the dynamic.
And we will see that the Snark itself is not the centre.
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