In The Hunting of the Snark, the crew do not stumble aimlessly across the blank map.
They organise.
The hunt is not chaos.
It is activation.
1. Meaning Does Not Sit in Objects
If the Snark were a creature waiting passively to be found, meaning would reside in the object.
But nothing in the poem supports this.
The Snark is undefined, unstable, taxonomically fluid. It may be this. It may be that. It may be neither.
What remains constant is not the Snark.
It is the structured activity of hunting.
This is the crucial inversion:
Meaning does not precede relational coordination.It emerges through it.
2. Distributed Roles as Semiotic Differentiation
Consider the crew:
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Bellman
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Banker
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Butcher
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Baker
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Beaver
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Barrister
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Broker
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Bonnet-maker
These are not psychological portraits. They are functional differentiations.
Each role introduces:
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a perspective,
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a constraint,
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a mode of participation.
Semiosis requires distribution.
No single node sustains the system. Meaning thickens when differentiation allows patterned interaction.
The hunt activates the field established by the blank map by introducing structured relational asymmetry.
Without differentiation, there is no activation.
3. Repetition and Constraint
The Bellman’s injunction —
“What I tell you three times is true.”
— is not epistemology. It is ritual constraint.
Repetition stabilises expectation. Constraint narrows potential. Pattern generates coherence.
The hunt proceeds through:
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reiterated procedure,
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shared anticipation,
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disciplined orientation toward a not-yet-actualised figure.
Meaning does not appear because something is seen.
Meaning appears because a system sustains coordinated expectation long enough for local phenomena to stabilise.
4. The Snark as Attractor, Not Object
The Snark functions as an attractor.
It orients activity without requiring definitive presence.
The crew’s actions are structured by the anticipation of the Snark. The anticipation itself thickens the relational field.
In this sense:
The Snark is less a creature than a horizon.
It holds the system in motion.
Its indeterminacy sustains activation.
5. Activation as the Core of Meaning
Meaning is:
the patterned activation of structured potential through distributed relational participation.
The hunt is semiosis in motion.
We now see why the poem cannot be reduced to parody.
It is staging something far more fundamental:
The conditions under which meaning becomes active.
In the next post, we tighten the incision.
If the hunt is activation, then each act within it is a cut.
And cuts are where local phenomena appear — and where limits begin to surface.
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