This working paper attempts to give meaninglessness a face. Or at most, to bring about some questions in relation to the notion of meaninglessness, as it is posed by Jean Baudrillard. To accept the world’s meaninglessness, Baudrillard states, is to enable for a significant shift in the ongoing “desertization” of the real to happen. Consequently this would lessen the hyperreal expansion and expenditure. The question I am considering in this paper is if it is possible to address such an undertaking of a meaninglessness end by means of playing with forms. In the light of meaninglessness and forms in general, it seems as though ‘we’ cannot stop (re)making images. Behind the ongoing proliferation of images questions secretly lurks. About who asserts the qualities needed in and for meaninglessness to take place. About whether creating a meaninglessness in a context of digital visual production is possible. And about neutralizing and counteracting the purpose of meaninglessness through its advocation, as it then tends to configure into “strategic meaninglessness”.
The concept of ‘meaning’ is difficult. As a materialist, I view objective meaning as an almost supernatural word, belonging either in religion or in the center Jacques Derrida called logos. I am not sure it is possible to sustain the concept of objective meaning in a secular world. And I don’t think we need it.
On the other side, ‘meaning’ is a very important concept in the construction of the ‘person’. A person without meaning is a mere individual, an algorithmic entity in the hands of administrative rationalism.
If Baudrillard only refers to semiotic meaning, I am not sure there can be ‘meaninglessness’, since semiotic meaning is basically pragmatic. Ontological meaning in semiotics is difficult to sustain after Saussure - at least. After Saussure, ‘meaninglessness’, is arbitrary, as all words are.
Or, is it possible that B objects to all kinds of meaning, even pragmatic, constructed meaning?
I am not sure I understand the location of Baudrillard’s ‘meaninglessness’.