The Meaning of ‘Meaning’

We resist new forms of meaning. We're even resistant to the idea of them. It simply is difficult to conceptualise ways of understanding that we haven't thought through before, or that differ from our usual ways of thinking. This is something we have to work at: as all school pupils can attest. To ‘get your head round’ something: even the cliche conveys a sense of effortful rearrangement. From such practical difficulty flow the many religious, philosophical or ‘commonsensical’ beliefs – some of them notorious – which in turn reinforce these resistances. Our own resistances are hardest of all to spot. So what about ‘us’, the ‘you’ and ‘I’ this text posits – and posits as cultural and conceptually located in ways roughly similar to each other? Our thinking seems to start with language; and language seems irrevocably embroiled in denotation. We even have terms of pure denotation, like the English ‘thingummy’, ‘whodyamaflick’ and ‘doovalacky’, that are entirely about the gesture of indicating an object, and not at all concerned with the qualities of the object in itself. But language also has a semiotic element: a ‘musical’, rhythmic ebb and flow, as independent of logic as a ‘hum’ by A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, and related to a stream of consciousness like the one that James Joyce gives Molly Bloom in Ulysses . ‘Stream of consciousness’ is a literary trope, of course; and semiotic ways of going on do receive special attention in literary contexts – not least poetry. At first glance they seem to be of less use when something needs to be imparted: although recent educational research shows the semiotic supporting the semantic, for example when music helps children learn to read. Still, in the main, when we catch ourselves thinking like Molly Bloom we say we're being ‘absent minded’. Even in fiction, the semiotic is frequently used to represent a character daydreaming or ruminating. Novelist Niall Griffiths often uses first-person stream of consciousness narration. In Stump (2004), he disrupts grammar, and omits both conjunctions and the rhythmic order imposed by conventional sentence structures, to orchestrate a semiotic blur.