Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Using a deconstructionist cultural-studies lens, we will interrogate how meaning is constructed when we can recognize only the form, and not the content, of an illustrated text. Such is the reader’s experience when perusing Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. The text of Codex Seraphinianus is all but indecipherable; yet we can tell that it does imply meaning, due to its organization into lists, labels, and other textual organizational features. Its indecipherability combined with the visual impression that it must mean something creates a lacuna in comprehension, which holds the potential to inspire childlike wonder in the reader. The book’s combination of fantastic images and unreadable text destabilizes familiar concepts, opens new perspectives on reading, and, by extension, on the instability of meaning. We can recognize familiar aspects of our world (people, food, tools, cultural practices), but our associations with them are no longer useful in interpreting the images’ meanings and reading the words. Serafini forces us to step away from preexisting knowledge and build new interpretations based purely on observation. Serafini’s world deconstructs binary distinctions between alive and dead, born and manufactured, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, and nature and culture. As a result of this, Serafini’s work produces a posthuman, deconstructionist narrative in which the hybridity of machines, humans, and other natural forms destabilizes an anthropocentric world order.