5 minutes ago I had a distinct idea of what I was going to write in this post. Now, I only remember what’s in the title. That is to say, bear with me.
Big “M” Meaning is a hard thing to nail down. A few weeks after I moved in with my current roommates (shoutout Mikey, Nate and Sam), I came home to the beginnings of a conversation – what species is the most advanced? The heavy favorite among Earth’s niche-fillers was the human species, homo sapiens, that species to which I, and I assume everyone reading this, belong. But forgoing a quick conclusion, a question quickly arose: how do you define ‘advanced’?.
In my Sophomore year of college I took a class on the French thinker and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Lacan was what I would call a scientific thinker, and sought to categorize human behaviors and tendencies according to certain definitions and quasi-mathematical relationships. One relationship he described was between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. In basic terms, a ‘signifier’ is a symbol (word, image, gesture) that is used to represent a signified (meaning). For example, the word apple tends to bring to mind a certain red fruit for most English speakers. However, the manifestation of this signified can differ greatly from person to person. While my dominant thought upon hearing ‘apple’ might be of a crisp first bite, rended from a cool core on a Summer’s day, the first thought for another might be the sight of an apple swinging heavily from a bowed branch in brisk Autumn.
The same confusion is exacerbated in defining abstract ideas like advanced. What is an advanced species? Is it the happiest? The most resilient? The longest lasting? The most technologically robust? What is robust? And so it goes.
Lacan’s description of signifier and signified goes further, arguing that meaning (signified) cannot even exist without a signifier attached to it. Basically, if something does not have a signifier, it is not meaningful in the sense that it means nothing to anyone – without a tool to invoke a meaning, that meaning cannot exist. He continues to say that signifiers create significance through their relative position to other signifiers. ‘Apple’ draws significance as a signifier through its proximity to the signifiers ‘Red’, ‘Crispy’, and ‘Fruit’. These draw significance from their neighbors, and so on and so forth, creating a personal language that is described in thousands and millions of dimensions (This is interestingly prescient of how modern Large Language Models are structured).
Perhaps an easier way to visualize this is thinking about learning a new language. When we begin learning new vocab in a new language, each new word is attached to a single word in our native language, and its signified meaning is dependent on the position of the native language signifier’s position. For a novice Spanish speaker, ‘Hola’ only has significance based on its proximity to ‘Hello’ as a signifier.
But I believe meaning can exist without effective signifiers. To me, the biggest of big M Meaning resides in the unsignified.
The ‘unsignified’?, you ask, curious. Yes, the unsignified. That thing which we cannot deny has meaning, and yet has no effective signifier. Ineffable emotions, indescribable sensations, crying in the rain, floating in a sea of stars.
I have made many attempts to describe these feelings. I imagined it was the task of the writer, and the sign of a poor one to fail in doing so. Yet, my attempts made me feel dirty where those emotions made me feel pure. In trying to attach signifiers (words, descriptions) to these emotions, I was defining them relative to other signifiers, and thus bringing them low. Experiencing these sensations is something exalted, more so for their ineffability, and to put them in common terms is to taint the sensations with a color of commonness themselves.
Still, it is possible to communicate the idea of these sensations, even if exacting the sensation in words is a fool’s errand. Thus, I imagine another method in making meaning – the prompt to recall. In saying – imagine the first time you knew you were in love, or the moment you felt loss most profoundly – I am doing a poor job in reflecting an experience through words, but, I still likely have a profound emotional effect on my listener. How is this effect created? It relies on the recall of my audience. The more universal the situation, the broader effect my call to recall will have. If I bring to mind love, sex, grief, or joy, most people will have distinct experiences ready to bubble to the surface in response to my words – I am not creating these emotions, I am merely opening the door for them.
I believe great art does this, and good art fails greatness for a lack of this. Between good art and great there may not be a discrepancy in technique or messaging, but there is certainly a discrepancy in emotion. Great art is beautiful, intentional, subtle and transmits a prompt to recall – purposeful or no – between artist and audience. In art, the prompt to recall is not obvious. It is an emotional frequency that exists in the artist, persists through the art, and relies on resonance in the audience for effect.
When a filmmaker presents grief, he may deploy tools, techniques and an intimate understanding of his craft to weave grief through his production, but if he is excellent, there will be an element of shared understanding reminding of grief that permeates the work and is unattributable to any matters of form. I will not venture to argue this point today – for now it must be enough that after much thought I believe it to be true.
An example for me is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, the most technical writer I have ever read. In it, Joyce writes deftly of the youthful joy then adolescent disillusionment of Stephen Dedalus. His prose is beautiful, his allegory pervasive and his skill clear, however, his effect is not implicit in any of these. The effect comes from a remembrance of youth that is evoked by his writing, and brings the reader smoothly into the shoes of a young, insecure boy. Without that experience, or a like one, the writing would fail emotionally.
To be honest, I am not sure where I’m going with this, so I am going to pause and return later. I want to write more about a hundred things included in this post, especially the goal of art being to impart a resonance from artist to consumer, but none of it is resolved well enough in my mind to continue right now.
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