The Interdisciplinarity of Paradox: Part 2

An Analytical Exploration of Academia by Henry Condon

The Paradoxes of Meaning and Language

After conversing with Professor Shieber about the paradoxes of Philosophy, I wanted to learn more about language and its possible paradoxes. I was quite happy with the first conversation overall; it was engaging and Professor Shieber had exceptionally strong answers and helpful, clarifying thoughts for all of the questions I was able to ask. Yet, the definition of paradox he upheld still felt too narrow in its scope and its applicable contexts. To address this, I thought that discussing the specific subjects of meaning and language with someone knowledgeable about our everyday uses of them and their historic forms in literature might help to reveal or further some kind of generalized or socially acceptable framework for identifying paradoxes when they appear in other areas. What resulted was a wonderful conversation about the nature of meaning, its broader study within semiotics, and various paradoxical applications of meaning and language; though I will admit that I am the least proud of my ‘performance’ in this interview because some of the questions I asked were rather clunky, obtuse, or not well set up.

In preparation for the second conversation I reviewed several sources that broadly outlined the paradoxicality of meaning and language and helped me begin to understand the profundity and universality of symbolism. In keeping with my findings and thoughts from the previous conversation, I was interested in searching for sources that were connected to my understanding of truthful, correspondent meaning as relativity, but this proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. One of my first thoughts was to explore our contemporary uses of emoji, as it seems to me that our use of them is that of language and writing with a similar paradox being as I described in Part 1: the emojis are interchangeable representatives of that which they symbolize but they are not those things — they are emoji. This led me to read the first chapter of The Semiotics of Emoji by Marcel Danesi, and while it served as a grand introduction on the history of language and writing systems as a whole the presented information did little to aid in my search for paradoxes or further my ideas on meaning and relativity. However, it did generally inspire me to look deeper into the realm of semiotics.

From there I found a spectacular article, which — while being pretty aggressive in its positions — greatly advanced my understanding of semiotics and introduced me to the disciplines’ various paradoxes and applications. This article is Everyday Semiotics: The Paradox of a Universal Discipline by Elliot Gaines. It begins, “One of the many paradoxes of semiotics is its marginal status in society and the academic world…Although semiotics is relevant to every academic field, the study of signs and sign functions is mostly taken for-granted while scholars primarily focus on established practices in each discipline” (Gaines, 2015, p. 295). I was quickly taken by surprise. The first sentence of this article asserts the being of semiotics itself within society and academia is a paradox. What luck! This source is the second significant external confirmation of the conceptual existence within a discipline. Taken with the paradoxes of Philosophy, there appears to be a growing interdisciplinary pattern, but it could still be too early to tell…

In addition to my argument proving the simultaneity of ontological nihilism and physicalism make the entire field of Philosophy paradoxical, here was an exclamation that the whole of semiotics is paradoxical due to its broad applicability and its lack of recognition as such. The article continues, “Paradoxically, semiotics is not only relevant to every field of inquiry, but is a universal aspect of everyday experiences…Considering the advancements in the field, another paradox is that more people have been introduced to semiology rather than the more complete concepts of semiotics” (Gaines, 2015, p. 295–296). I have apparently struck gold. Although, I would like to point that Gaines has not offered any definition of paradox, and he seems to be using the term in either a general or colloquial sense or in a way that is not aligned with the classically understood definition of paradox articulated by Professor Shieber in Part 1. Instead, Gaines appears to be using ‘paradox’ as defined by vague contradiction, counterintuition, or the missed expectation of broad acceptance and recognition; Gaines’ definition is directly aligned with my definition of paradox in the Introduction.

A bit later in the article Gaines proclaims, “All communication strategies are cultural representations of semiotic structures that can describe what a receiver experiences…Neither the sender nor receiver needs to know about semiotics for a message to succeed, but an understanding of semiotics can inform both” (Gaines, 2015, p. 296–297). Both of these statements imply the presence of a ‘receiver’, and I interpret this as comparable to my articulation of external relativity as it pertains to an observer or some source of awareness that acknowledges a sentence, or — more generally in the semiotic sense — a sign. This reinforces the importance of a sign having some kind of external relativity such that its content or that which is being signified can be revealed or confirmed, and without which that content is left unrecognized making that sign externally nonrelative or externally meaningless. Further on, Gains says, “semiotics does not provide a method, but a point of view that recognizes the process of semiosis…and the nature of signs to refer to other signs in the process of signification” (Gaines, 2015, p. 303)(Emphasis mine). Again we see Gaines posit the import of reference for meaning, this time with an emphasis on internal relativity, specifically the creation of internal relativity through the processes of ‘semiosis’ or ‘signification’. My interpretation of these processes is that they are the activity of purposefully constructing a relation or arrangement that involves the reference, envesselation, encapsulation, or ‘enframment’ of meaning (internally relative to other meaningful signs) into what become particular signs or mediums of symbolism. The origin of ‘enframement’ and its connection to relativity, context, and technology is presented in Part 5. The article continues to make the claim that semiotics needs to be more broadly accepted, understood, taught, and generally applied, and this will or should happen once a universal semiotic has been formalized. I agree with this notion, and think that a more universal and generally understandable semiotic might be achieved through the continued integration of the concepts of relativity and paradox in a fundamental way.

The next article I read was Critical Theory and the Paradox of Modernist Discourse by Richard Allen. This article had quite a large scope to its references: from Wittgenstein, to Derrida, to Foucault, to Marx, to Baudrillard. The article felt like a homology of many of their ideas and attempted to formulate a perspective through which modern social relations and communications could be understood. For me, the article mainly functioned as a source of sources from which I should pull and study to continue this present study in the near future. It’s already inspired me to purchase a copy of Philosophical Investigations and Simulacra and Simulation. Following this next conversation I took some time to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (TLP) which was, simply put, an awakening for me. Yet, my research luck of source happenstance had seemingly run out with Everyday Semiotics, as it would have made much more sense to use TLP as a source for the Philosophy conversation or this coming language conversation than any other one following it. Additionally, my thoughts on TLP and how they pertain to my ideas of meaning as relativity and broader conceptions of possibility significantly exceed the scope of this course. I will briefly say of my thoughts on possibility that if I do find paradoxes as a result of this study — as I already have with the landscape of Philosophy and the largely unacknowledged importance of semiotics — then the being of those paradoxes must mean those paradoxical happenings were able to come into being or were possible to become. This, in turn, must mean that the essence and nature of that which gave rise to those paradoxes, i.e. possibility itself, must have some paradoxical quality to it or be a paradox itself. Thus, in my opinion, possibility is paradoxical. This is expanded further on in this Part, connected to existence at large in Part 3, reiterated in Part 7, and extrapolated upon in the Conclusion.

Returning to Allen’s Critical Theory and the Paradox of Modernist Discourse, though it did not really contribute to the central question of this study, it nonetheless presented interesting information relevant to previously mentioned topics. The article starts by noting that Wittgenstein began his Philosophical Investigations with a quote from St. Augustine, and Allen decided to do the same. That quote reads, “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out…Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” Allen goes on to describe St. Augustine’s work influenced Wittgenstein towards an understanding of this relationship between the mind, language, and reality, which St. Augustine articulated. Allen then provides three core contentions upon which this relationship is based: “The first claim is that ‘Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.’ The second is that understanding, in the sense of grasping the meaning of a word, consists of the mental association of a word with an object, its sense. Finally, a sentence is held to be a combination of these word-names, and its meaning, determined by the meaning of its constituents, is conceived as a possible description of the world” (Allan, 1987, p. 69). This passage seems to closely resemble Frege’s link between language and ontology described by Parsons. The first contention, particularly the use of correlation, seems identical to my notion of meaning as internal relativity, while the second contention seems equally comparable to my notion of meaning as external relativity where understanding, as it is described, is placing that internally relative meaning in a known context.

Even though this study is primarily searching for paradoxes, an important component to that search is understanding the concept of ‘meaning’ enough to know when signs have meanings that are paradoxical. Łukowski’s definition of paradox hinged upon the unexpected, and this might correspond to some happening or symbol having an unexpected meaning. Professor Shieber’s definition of paradox was more focused on pure contradiction or incoherency from an otherwise coherent and well-supported base, and still that resultant incoherency or contradiction is the contradiction of meaning. In both of these cases the paradox arises from some incongruous pairing with a minimum of two irreconcilable components, whether it be irreconcilable expectations or premises. In other words, to understand paradoxes in their definitions’ contexts there need to be at least two parts that are internally relative in such a simultaneous way as to be seemingly impossible or otherwise mutually exclusive.

I attempted to be more general with my definition of paradox, and I would like to elaborate upon some of that generality now, specifically the mention of individuals and groups as it pertains to meaning. There can be individuals of meaning such as a word or a bit of information, or there can be groups of meaning like a sentence. Given a group, set, or collection of meanings, they will have an internal relativity that may constitute a new meaning that then becomes relative to that which is already internally relative within the group. This new relationship — the relativity between the parts of collection and the collection as a whole — is of a higher order or level than the internal relativity of the set of parts, and this higher order internal relativity between the whole and the parts can only come about through recognition from an external, aware observer. This is because pieces of meaning on their own cannot come to form a collective meaning without some purposeful arrangement or recognition, and that arrangement or recognition is only possible by the means and methods employed by a source of awareness. A group of meanings may be a paradox if two or more of its pieces are inherently contradictory, conflicting, opposed to each other. Once the collection is externally relative to an aware observer and that observer recognizes that the collection constitutes a new meaning, the internal relativity now encompasses every possible connection between every part of the group as well as every possible connection between the new meaning of the whole and the connections between every part. So, a group may also become a paradox — once there is external relativity leading to newly recognized collective meaning — if that newly recognized meaning of the collective is contradictory, conflicting, or opposed to one or more of the collection’s parts, or if the observer needs to employ counterintuition when manifesting the collective’s meaning or when grappling with the higher relativity between the whole and its parts.

But what of an isolated individual’s meaning? As I argued in Part 1: everything that exists — even isolated words or random, singular symbols — carries the content of its own existence. I call this simple form of content ‘existential validity’. But is existential validity a form of meaning? It is not meaning in the internally relative sense, however it is a simple form of meaning in the externally relative sense. Imagine you’re on a path in the woods and you come across a tree with a spiral carved into it. What does the spiral mean? Now imagine you’re very young, so young you have never seen a spiral before and you’re just captivated by it. You are also not old enough to understand knives, carving, reasons why people might carve things into trees, the concept of vandalism in general, the word ‘spiral’, or other occurrences of spirals in nature as you’ve never seen one. Perhaps you’re being walked on one of those weird toddler leashes or riding in a stroller in a park somewhere and you see this tree. You’re so enraptured by this new image you forget all the times you’ve seen a flushed toilet or maybe witnessed a comparable spiral happening. In fact, maybe you’re so young that you don’t yet understand what toilets or trees are. Imagine you are so young that you simply cannot think of any possible reason why there would be a spiral on a tree, or what it could possibly represent. All you know is this big tall thing has an interesting swirl pattern on it and you are looking at it. This is the simplest form of meaningful external relativity between an aware observer and an existentially valid, isolated, individual symbol; you are relative to the symbol, but you don’t know what it signifies or if it even signifies anything.

One might argue that there is internal relativity between the medium of symbol and the symbol itself, and while this is a fair argument it should be clarified that if you are unaware of what the medium is — like being so young you don’t yet understand what trees are — then the medium merely has the same content as the unknown symbol: existential validity. The existential validities of the medium and the symbol can indeed establish a form of internal relativity, but if the observer is unaware of both what the medium is and what the symbol is then the medium and the symbol might as well be one unknown, meaningless thing that lacks internal relativity. If this is the case, and the internal relativity melds together as a single, nonrelative happening — a happening that is equally nonrelative to any referential sources of meaning (such as the different, known categories of trees or different instances of spirals that an extremely young person would not know about, for example) — then that internal relativity between medium and symbol doesn’t exist, and the lack of connection is meaningless. Therefore, the only relativity — and thus the only meaning — is the external relativity between the observer and simultaneous, nonrelative symbol-medium happening. This is further described in different ways in Part 4, in connection to the evolution of styles and materials of Art and a historical tendency or affinity to present paradoxical illusions.

Where does paradox fit with regard to the internal relativity or meaning of an isolated individual? In the previous example, there was an external relativity present through the beings — the existential validities — of an observer and a sign connected through the activity of the observer’s witnessing. What if there was no observer? If a symbol is existentially valid, yet there are no observers around to witness it (even though one’s imagining of such a witnessless scenario is a form of observing the symbol), then it is solely internally relative to any purposeful connections and the medium or material in which it is inscribed. For example, if the symbol inscribed in a tree was an ‘H’ instead of a spiral, it might have a purposeful connection to the English alphabet, a name, or the simplicity of crafting the sign from three knife-strokes; it might have a connection which establishes some internal relation within the symbol and thus manifesting meaning once witnessed (Note: I would never damage a tree this way.). What if the isolated individual wasn’t a symbol but was instead some existentially valid object or even a person? It is this scenario — when taken to its extreme — would be, in my opinion, a form of physical paradox. If such a happening could even occur, then in order to be truly and completely isolated an individual (symbol, object, concept, person, or any other individual thing) would need to be existentially valid while being nonrelative internally and externally: for an individual to exist in isolation they would need to be utterly alone in the void — surrounded by Nothing, relative to only Nothing, seemingly created from that Nothing — and while such a situation would certainly be paradoxical, it can only exist in the mind, but even then that imaginary, isolated individual would still be externally relative to you: the imaginer, the visualizer, the creator. This is further considered in Part 3.

The final article I read in preparation for my second conversation that significantly contributed towards the pursuit of this course was Robert Q. Young’s On Propaganda: Pseudocommunication as Paradox. Young begins the article by referencing the definition of ‘pseudocommunication’ as defined in a 1979 article by Terence Moran, also published in the journal of Et cetera. Young articulates the essence of Moran’s definition of pseudocommunication as occurring, “a) when there is an imbalance of power such that one party controls the message system rather than its being shared, and b) when the party in control imposes a message system on others in such a way that the controlled party has little or no opportunity to contribute to the communication process” (Young, 1979, p. 325). Young then goes on to describe how Moran’s definition “parallels almost exactly” the “communication pathology” outlined in a 1956 behavioral study by Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and others — titled Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia — and then connects both through their mirrored “interpersonal difficulties, confusions, and frustrations” to the notion of a “double-bind” and a classical understanding of paradox (Young, 1979, p. 325). Young upholds a definition of paradox articulated by a 1967 study called The Pragmatics of Human Communication, which reads, “paradox is defined as ‘…a contradiction that follows correct deduction from consistent premises’ ” and is, in essence, the same definition articulated by Professor Shieber in Part 1. Young then describes how this classical understanding of paradox and its study has traditionally applied to the works of philosophers, logicians, and theologians, but the schizophrenia study by Jackson and others has proved that, “paradoxes do occur in real situations involving real people and with very real — and usually damaging — effects.” Young sets up the purpose of his work, “These pragmatic paradoxes are the focus of this brief article, especially as they occur through propaganda” (Young, 1979, p. 326).

This paradoxical link Young establishes between the afflictions of schizophrenia and the nature of propaganda is profound, and his description of these paradoxical happenings as “real” and “pragmatic” is a point I want to linger on momentarily. Though Young’s chosen definition of paradox is strongly tied to the traditional understanding of them, his application of it is through the lens of “paradoxical injunction” which is distilled from pages 194–219 of the 1967 The Pragmatics of Human Communication study. This notion of Philosophical injunction is equivalent to Young’s notion of the ‘double-bind’ and is described or quoted from the 1967 study as, “1) A relationship exists in which there is an imbalance of power; 2) A command is given that must be disobeyed to be obeyed; and 3) The person in the subordinate position is prevented in some way from stepping out of the frame and commenting on the contradiction, or from leaving the field altogether” (Young, 1979, p. 326). Young’s work seeks to connect this forced contradictory activity and behavioral environment to the notion of pseudocommunication and its potential to lead to psychological breaks as well as provide several examples of the environments in which that form of activity arises. In contrast, the present study seeks to identify examples of paradox in the attempt to establish some sort of interdisciplinary pattern. There has already been exceptionally strong evidence presented and confirmed supporting the existence of paradoxes in and of Philosophy and that of semiotics. Young’s article asserts that in addition to paradoxes in the realms of Philosophy, logic, and theology, there are also real, pragmatic, and ‘physicalized’ paradoxes in the realms of language and psychology, where those double-bind paradoxes are propaganda and affectations of schizophrenia respectively. While I did not have a chance to explore the paradoxes of theology, the physical forms of paradox presented in Young’s article cannot be overlooked.

This is the first source I have come across in my research, so far, that has proposed a physical being and nature of paradoxes beyond mental or ‘ideal’ thought constructions and signs or the strange results of arguments while still based within the traditional understanding of paradoxes as such. Their physical being of these paradoxes is that of us; the pseudocommunication environments we create allow for us to experience double-bind paradoxes and possibly lead to physical, neurological affectations like schizophrenia. If these pragmatic or ‘physical’ paradoxes are to be understood more precisely or contextualized more accurately then a new definition of paradox is necessary, and it must be executed in such a way as to incorporate these physical embodiments of paradox. My definition of paradox in the Introduction is one such definition. Other forms of physical and pragmatic paradoxes are discussed in every subsequent Part of this study, and Part 7 discusses other psychological paradoxes unrelated to formal pathological descriptions and pseudocommunication environments.

Young’s article continues by further explaining his notion of the double-bind paradoxical injunction on page 326, followed by articulations of and connections to ‘be spontaneous’ paradoxes of creativity and examples of Orwellian Newspeak. On page 328 he gives a straightforward explanation on the definition of pseudocommunication: “pseudocommunication is not the content of messages so much as a communication environment,” and as such, “we may see examples from the most ordinary of places” (Young, 1979, p. 328). These “ordinary” places in which paradoxically double-binding pseudocommunication occurs include areas of education like textbooks and course registrations, as well as prisons. These examples of pragmatic paradoxes — even in their being as amorphous communication environments — continue to cement the physicality of paradox. Later he reiterates this sentiment, “Again I must stress that pseudocommunication, and the double-bind that it creates are environments, not words and sentences alone” (Young, 1979, p. 330). Everything I just explained and quoted is well summarized in this passage: “The double-binding nature of the message creates a situation in which the receiver has literally no options; whatever he/she does merely compounds the problem. In the familiar phrase: they are ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t.’ Over time this can lead to bizarre behavior, psychopathology, and even complete schizophrenic breaks. It is no secret that ‘brainwashing’ relies heavily on the creation of paradoxical environments in which the prisoner must eventually relinquish all meaning to the interrogator in order to achieve a stable, noncontradictory world” (Young, 1979, p. 326–327)(Emphasis mine). Applied to modern propaganda, and with the monumental being of our globally entrenched sociotechnical media apparatus in mind, I wonder if the “stable, noncontradictory world” we’re currently living in is a result of the constancy, consistency, or coherency of perpetual contradictions.

My research for this conversation encompassed a variety of subjects: from the development of language until our semiotic use of emoji today, to the universal applicability of semiotics and its importance for understanding communication in the modern day, to the nature of pseudocommunication environments and their possible psychological connections. All of these topics were interconnected through the commonality of meaning and its various applications, studies, and manipulations. These sources all made me ponder and reflect upon the nature of meaning and its essence of relativity, and it is this essence that I was primarily concerned with addressing and verbalizing going into this interview.

A Conversation with Professor Steven Belletto

For this conversation on the paradoxicality of meaning and language, I talked with Professor Steven Belletto of Lafayette College. Professor Belletto is a Professor of English who works on post-World War II literature, the Beats, and the literature of the Cold War. I consider my participation in this conversation to be the worst of the seven, due to the blunt wording and stumbled reading of some of my questions. Nevertheless, I found Professor Belletto to be an immense source of literary knowledge that was able to take my awkwardly phrased and muddled questions in stride, and I am very appreciative of his thoughts and contributions that greatly enriched my understanding of this subject.

As an opener, I asked one of the most direct and poorly contextualized questions ever. To paraphrase, and incorporate the Professor’s rightfully expressed need for context, I asked Professor Belletto how he conceptualizes meaning, potentially as it might apply to semiotics. He responded, “When we’re talking about semiotics from a literary or cultural studies point of view, we’re talking about the study of signs. So the idea is that our world is — our sense of reality, or how we make meaning — is always mediated by something: by language or by signs or by images. So when we’re trying to think about meaning — again from a literary studies point of view — we’ll often say, ‘alright, there’s a split or a difference between the signifier and then the signified.’ So the signifier is the word or the image or the utterance, or whatever you want to think about, that’s representing something else. So if you use the word ‘dog’ everybody knows that that means because we all know what dogs are, or if you draw a stick picture of a house we all know what that is even if it doesn’t correspond to an actual house. But people say, ‘well if you imagine you’re from Venus or something and you’ve never seen a dog or a house, that stick drawing, the cartoon drawing of a house isn’t going to mean anything. Same thing with the dog, there’s no sort of inherent relationship between that ‘d’ ‘o’ ‘g’ and the little four-legged creature’…So if that’s the case, people say, ‘alright…the relationship between the signifier and the signified is like ‘slippery’, and if that’s the case then that means language itself is slippery and subject to, obviously, interpretation, to multiple kinds of meaning.’ And so, if you’re trying to figure out ‘how does language relate to meaning’, you have to say, ‘well there’s a sort of tenuous or slippery relationship’ because there’s always this deferral of meaning” (Condon & Belletto, 2020).

I found this to be an excellent and generous response to my horrible prompt, and I brought up my understanding of the paradoxicality of language as I described it in Part 1 (how the word ‘dog’ is not a dog nor the word ‘stick’ an actual, physical stick despite their ‘perfect’ correlation) and connected that to the slipperiness of language and its deferral of meaning as Professor Belletto described it. Then I suggested the frame of paradox might be more accurate to describe this linguistic mechanism of representation than slipperiness or deferment. He replied, “I was thinking a little about paradox just because I knew you were working on it, from a literary studies point of view…one of the ways people think about it in, again, literary studies, is that we know basically what a paradox is, right? But in literary studies, people will sometimes use the term or the idea of paradox to describe something that’s actually articulating a type of truth. So if you have a poem: ‘words cannot express how much I love you.’ So, that’s a paradox, because you’re saying the words, you’re using the words…but the sense of those words is that words are inadequate to articulate what I mean. However, in that case, the suggestion is that it’s more true than saying whatever: roses are red, violets are blue, I love you. And so, by saying I can’t use words to articulate how much I love you, that seems more true than if you were to actually use words and describe it. So that’s one example of how a paradox in literary studies would represent…a kind of truth” (Condon & Belletto, 2020).

This is a fantastic example of a paradox and it is representative of a counterintuitive paradox by my definition, or one of Łukowski’s type of paradox that subverts the expectations of language. Additionally, this notion that paradoxes can articulate “a kind of truth” is interesting because such contradictory happenings may be known of and belong quite well in literary studies, yet it would be out of place in contemporary Philosophy and logical systems, especially those systems that reject dialetheism such as the ones Professor Shieber maintained. In fact, though language may be a kind of universal logic, or a publicly understood logical system, I find it generally strange that language allows for these natural, literary paradoxes while Philosophy and logic have yet to come to some consensus on why they’re allowed to be at all, let alone create some unified, coherent logic that can adequately explain them. Perhaps language is that logic? It would certainly fit Gaines’ view of a needed universal semiotic.

The Professor continues, “It has to do also with irreducibility…there’s a school of criticism called ‘new criticism’ where you pay attention to the form of a poem, or any text, and in theory you’re not supposed to look for any other cultural, historical, biographical context, but in practice people often do. But the new critics have particular formal features that they’re particularly interested in, so like irony is one of them and paradox is another…one of the basic ideas of new criticism is that language or meaning is always discovered in tensions…if we’ve decided that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is slippery, ok, in the case of one word ‘dog’, if you have a complex John Donne sonnet or something, it’s likely to be the case that the meaning of that sonnet is irreducible…this is why people say you can’t paraphrase the poem. So I can tell you the plot of this poem is ‘guy A loves woman B’, alright that’s the plot but that’s not what it means. So a new critic might say, ‘alright so the meaning is irreducible, and it’s actually found in these tensions, or it’s found in, say, paradoxes, where you have a symbol that could symbolize A or B or neither or both.’ And so that’s a kind of paradox of meaning. And so you might just say, ‘well, I can’t shut down or foreclose any particular meanings; the meaning is actually in that tension.’ Or the meaning is in the paradox, if you want to use that language” (Condon & Belletto, 2020).

This description of irreducibility and tension is extraordinarily apt within the contexts of meaning and paradoxes, and it directly parallels the way of thinking I employ that considers meaning through internal and external relativity. The very notion of relativity — its essence — is a connection, a relationship in the most literal sense. Relativities, as they pertain to meaning, are relationships or connections between different forms of information, of value, of purposeful and embodied content, of that which is meaningful. I propose that these relativities can exist as equilibriums, equations, or equivalencies between meanings, and they can exist as multiplicities in which one meaning is internally relative to multiple other meanings. For example, the single word ‘defenestration’ means or is internally relative to ‘the action of throwing out a window’, and that word’s relativity to that phrase — that set of multiple words — is immediately manifested or evoked upon its utterance. However, conveying the specific meaning of ‘defenestration’ to someone would be incomplete without mentioning the action of throwing or clarifying that a thing or person must be thrown out of, specifically, a window. This is because ‘defenestration’ has its etymological origins in Latin; the Latin word ‘fenestra’ that comprises defenestration in part is directly related to (means) the word ‘window’. This example shows that a word can have multiple simultaneous conceptual relativities internally that are known and relative to each other upon that word’s evocation. These internal relativities that exist as equilibriums — whether they be singular or part of a larger collection — allow for the representational interchangeability I described in Part 1, and can be described as ‘balanced’. That is to say: regardless of whether you are using the word ‘window’ or ‘fenestra’ you are saying the same thing. This might be a point of controversy, but I believe that even these balanced equilibriums of interchangeable meaning are also paradoxical for a similar reason as the ontological difference between the word ‘dog’ and an actual, physical dog as I asserted in Part 1. Though the word ‘ending’ might mean ‘final’ and exists in a perfect correlation such that they could be replaced and signify the exact same meaning (obviously depending on the context and grammar of where the words are used, but generally speaking) they are still different words comprised of different letters making them ontologically different symbols that symbolize the same content. While the same can be said for ‘fenestra’ and ‘window’, it is not counterintuitive that two different languages with different grammatical and historical origins would generate two different words that signify the same physical object. To clarify, I find the fact that we can use ‘end’ and ‘final’ in the same way — because they mean the same thing — despite them being entirely different words to be counterintuitive and thus paradoxical by my definition. This is to say that despite their equilibrium or equation of meaning — of an essence I would describe as ‘balanced’ — there is still a paradox present, and so a definition of paradox must incorporate the notion of balance, just as mine does. Physical paradoxes of balance, other than physicalized symbols and words that exist in balance, are discussed more in Part 3.

Furthermore, as Professor Belletto describes, the relativities of meaning can exist in tensions as well as balanced equilibriums. These tensions are conflicts or contradictory connections between meanings that are nonetheless established, and such a tension is itself meaningful as Professor Belletto says, “the meaning is in that tension” (Condon & Belletto, 2020). Although it is equally counterintuitive that any contradictory meaning could exist, words like ‘counterintuitive’, ‘contradictory’, and even ‘conflict’ all have meanings that imply or signify tension. This kind of happening, this notion of tension is equivalent in essence to my definition of paradox as balance; even Professor Belletto used ‘tension’ and ‘paradox’ interchangeably.

Our conversation moves forward and considers the notion of understanding as contextualization within a relativistic sense of meaning. To clarify my position on this let’s consider meaning is relativity, or, in other words, all facts are relative to one another. Also considering 2.013–2.0141 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus (TLP), which I interpret as establishing the concept of possibility as it pertains to facts, such a notion of possibility must be infinite in its scope, and that scope is reinforced in 2.0131 (Wittgenstein, 1921, p. 26). I think that the total relativity of all facts comprises an infinity of unspoken possibility — alluded to in Part 1, of which Wittgenstein calls “the world” — and this infinity must be collapsed or specified when one seeks to convey a particular meaning or a particular relativity (Wittgenstein, 1921, p. 25). Similarly, when one seeks to understand something new, they must fit that new meaning within their personal, infinite network of established relativities making the activity of understanding comparable or equivalent in essence to ‘contextualization’. This is what I mean by ‘understanding as contextualization’. Contextualization is further defined and discussed in relation to the notion and origin of ‘enframent’ in Part 5 and possibility in Part 7.

I then awkwardly jump in our conversation to the three core contentions of language outlined in Allan’s Critical Theory And The Paradox of Modernist Discourse, but in my defense I make many strange transitions from topic to topic in each of these conversations which are only loosely connected through paradox — especially considering how purposefully general my definition of paradox is. Professor Belletto then goes on to brilliantly describe Thomas Pynchon’s V and a character’s quest to find what ‘V’ means even though, “V is of course…like a floating signifier, meaning that it’s a signifier that’s not necessarily to any signified” (Condon & Belletto, 2020). He then connects this back to concepts of irreducibility, tension, and relativity of meaning and goes on to describe how V uses quotes of Wittgenstein’s TLP to incorporate and play with these concepts. I continue with a question of whether prepositions might be comparable to the notion of a ‘floating signifier’. He confirm its comparability but clarifies the formality of the term ‘floating signifier’ defining it as, “a term that has become unanchored from its signified” and extrapolates upon the example of ‘fascism’ as it’s used in the modern day. His literary knowledge and passion is as gripping as it is vast and the conversation progresses to topics of literature and modernity surrounding the World Wars, specifically the poem The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot, a passage from which he quotes from memory. I briefly return to the notion of floating signifiers in Part 4.

Then I make a stumbled attempt to ask a question about a passage from Gaines’ Everyday Semiotics: The Paradox of a Universal Discipline. The question considered the comparability of the concepts of ‘interpretation’ and ‘habit’ to the activities of ascribing meaning and reaffirming understanding, respectively. From there, we talk about questions, prompted by a question I asked Professor Shieber in the first episode of The Paradoxicast and an enduring idea or belief that questions are fundamentally paradoxes. Specifically ‘why’ questions seem to essentially be the presentation of a paradox, and it’s that paradoxicality that allows for its open-endedness. This idea is briefly returned to later in Part 7. Again, my wording of these questions was painfully blunt. I have learned from these conversational mistakes and that I have is hopefully apparent in future conversations, but I want to apologize to Professor Belletto for subjecting him to them here.

Lastly, but definitely not least considering my earlier slips, I ask two questions about propaganda prompted by my reading of Young’s article On Propaganda. Professor Belletto offers a wonderful articulation of his personal interpretation of propaganda and its interconnection, obfuscation, confusion, or foreclosure of the “complex, replete, profuse, deeper, maybe irreducible” being of our lives into what ultimately may be an overly repeated lie (Condon & Belletto, 2020).

Overall, Professor Belletto was an excellent conversationalist and presented masterful and well-articulated responses to questions that I’m not sure warranted such breadth and excellence. In our conversation we discussed meaning as relativity and connected that idea to a notion of understanding as contextualization, followed by a consideration of questions, and finished with invocations of grand interpretations of life and propaganda. While our discussion of meaning led to a fruitful expansion of the notion of meaning as relativity in connection with irreducibility, tension, and — most importantly for this study — paradox, the other sections were not as fruitful for the establishment or confirmation of paradox. Nonetheless, it was a pleasure to hear Professor Belletto’s thoughts on those matters and I am grateful that he took the time to speak with me.

Part 2 Sources:

Allan, R. (1987, March 1). Critical Theory and the Paradox of Modernist Discourse. Screen, 28(2), p. 69–84.

Condon, H. R. (Producer; Host). Belletto, S. (Guest). (2020). The Paradoxicast Episode 2 — Professor Steven Belletto [Audio podcast].

Danesi, M. (2016). The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ProQuest Ebook Central. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lafayettecol-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4659857

Gaines, E. (2015). Everyday Semiotics: The Paradox of a Universal Discipline. The American Journal of Semiotics, 31.3(4), p. 295–310. ProQuest.

Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (C. K. Ogden, Trans.).

Young, R. Q. (1979). ON PROPAGANDA: Pseudocommunication as Paradox. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 36(4), p. 325–332. JSTOR. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/42575433