It almost goes without saying, that language feels itself to be very very special in its relationship to meaning. It is language after all that is the house of being - the lord of meaning. What would meaning be without the frameworks, the wefts and warps of words. Language then creates the gauzy verbosity in which meaning occurs. I forms the structures and the flows, the aural surface of meaning.
likewise language insists that it has special powers over meaning - the powers of sense and nonsense.
Sense is the claim that it is in words meanings are found. to make real meaning - to have the key then to describing the world and actually saying stuff that is worth saying one needs words and what they say. errors then becomes merely all about words, all about saying the right thing at the right time: all about just getting it right. Purify language and meaning will flow.
Nonsense is the opposite power of language. language will clim it is more than meaning for it has the key to nonsense - it can say things that make no sense at all. more than that it a can create sense from this nonsense. It provides rules rules of repetition and rhythm, rules of grammar that allow near sense, and semi-tomes of meaning to evolve. Language is then clearly greater than its meaning. It is its parent - the rules that allow it meaning to be as a small subdomain within this wider kingdom.
language then pulls itself free of army utilariarrian point of view - and starts to punch for itself: it is the master and meaning i to be contained - and ultimately resolved into dictionaries.
and yet at almost every point in this powergrab meaning is seen struggle to say other things as well: Asserting then a silent freedom for itself. Meaning would then claim that actually words only work it meaning is assumed. it is language then that is the symptom of meaning or at least the idea of sharing ideas which makes meaning. the sharing of sounds and structures which is language and the sharing of minds are then caught up with each other: to treat language as autonomous is then to cut it off from what supports it. Of course one creates then an autonomous structure, but so what? The actual domain of meaning is considerably upstream of any such ragbag structure. Likewise meaning strains against the excessive claims of words to say everything: what about diagrams or sound patterns, or patterns n the starts. There are so many other forms of saying stuff. One might of course talk here about writting - but that is quite another debate. Language in the form of spoken clearly is not half the story of meaning. Writting might then be a name of an element of what is in both our minds allowing language to be - but language - No. Even with writting there is a suspicion that an allegory between is being mistake for reality. That is there is certainly something in the shared fate of writing is relations to language (where it can be mistaken merely as its handmaiden) and the structures of thought that allow language to be possible. Both elements are silent- productive and yet irresovelable into what words say. That much is true. but are they the same in anything more than allegory? that us quite a different matter.
Likewise claims about the powers and rights of nonsense are based ion assumptions about meaning that it might not share. since when meaning wonders has it been simple or fixed? Yes it emerges from nonesense - and once can forge new meanings between individuals as a light fluffy gauge or deep current. Of course one can - so what? The point was not the forging of meaning so much as the way it is forged. that is what extra it is adding, and how that extra allows itself to register across time. meaning is not to be confused then with the truth which is the true target of nonsense....
Meaning quietly resist this powergrab. it say no -actually I am not quite where you think I am. i am lighter than that - in the gap between words and visuals, and part of the very sharing of words in though alone. Meaning insists then it is what is shared in minds and the process of the sharing bound up and bound in allow us in operates to create minds that inhabit worlds. it has nothing to same to the noisy attempt to use formal structure to create a seperate domain. Or at least it will of course inhabit this domain as it has its own meaning- but that does not mean that the domain is special or different. It might create a world - but then so what such creation is cheap. And that is the point - the mystery of meaning - and its independents from truth or words or even formal structure: for it is what lurks inside all of these - allowing them to shared, and so creating the sense they are said at all.
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