https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/746/post_images/Slide196.JPG">

Carroll brings us, says Deleuze, an elaborate “play of sense and nonsense.” “Humpty Dumpty (whose waist and neck, tie and belt, are indiscernible) lacks common sense as much as he lacks differentiated organs.” He “opposes … the impenetrability of incorporeal entities without thickness to the mixtures and reciprocal penetrations of substances, … the ‘pride’ of verbs to the complacency of substantives and adjectives. Impenetrability also means the frontier between the two – and that the person situated at the frontier, precisely as Humpty Dumpty is seated on his narrow wall, has both at his disposal.” Concludes Deleuze: “Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense.”⁶²

Or to hear Humpty Dumpty through our notion of design,^§MS0.4.1 nouns and verbs can, if we so wish, be left to their regular tempers, their commonsense meanings. Nouns, by transposition, can be made verbs. Their tempers are changeable. Penetrating can become penetration, or in its absence, impenetrability. We can also make a noun – “impenetrability” – mean what we will, from meaning, to non-meaning, to meaning, to ending the discussion. We can manage meaning. Design is a matter of meanings-for as much as it is meanings-in.

Back to Deleuze (this time writing with Félix Guattari): “The concept is incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies.” And, “the plane of immanence is … the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”⁶³ This, Deleuze calls “transcendental empiricism,”⁶⁴ as if to create an oxymoron as clear in its paradoxical meaning as Humpty Dumpty’s “impenetrability,” where the grounded and specific is at the same time universal, a place where the actual and the virtual⁶⁵ are at one.

Deleuze traces this part of his thinking back to another materialist philosopher who also allowed that thinking could exceed the material, Alexius Meinong.⁶⁶ “The totality of what exists,” said Meinong in 1904, “including what has existed and will exist, is infinitely small in comparison with the totality of the objects of knowledge.”⁶⁷ This excess of meaning, things that could be meant but which do not materially exist – fictions, conjectures, imaginary possibilities and the like – later came to be called “Meinong’s jungle.”

Speaking less elliptically than either Deleuze or Humpty Dumpty, Elizabeth Grosz^§MS3.1.1a calls for an ontology not only of what is, but what might be. We know there are things that we do not know. Ideality is our “ability to direct, orient, and internally inhabit materiality … Ideality provides the cohesion of form, the orientation or direction toward which material things tend, the capacity for the self-expansion of material things and relations into new orders.” For “without ideality, a plan, a map, a model, an ideal, a direction, or a theme, materiality would not realize itself.” In this ideality, moreover, there is “no definitive break between animals and humans and between animals, plants, and inanimate objects.” Our focus then should be the “material constitution of an ordered world in which the connections between things, between entities and events, come to or always already have meaning.”⁶⁸

Or, to rephrase in terms of our grammar of multimodality, our ontology of structure, there are no meanings that are not at once material and ideal, meanings-in that are also meanings-for. Yet material structures can exceed the ideal, the actually but as-yet unmeant. And ideal structures can exceed the material, the meanable but as-yet materialized. To which we add a caveat: the meanable is not just by humans, but any sentient creature, and for that matter any insentient entity that may act.

Alice is the perfectly well tempered inhabitant of the world. She encounters nonsense, and makes of it what she can, always testing it against her common sense, as if the imaginable could be true. She is ever-ready to contemplate the possibility that meaning might exceed experience. She encounters the smile of the Cheshire Cat that can linger after its body has vanished. She heeds the advice of the Queen to think of six impossible things before breakfast. She is subject to arbitrary but mercifully ineffectual calls to injustice. “Off with her head,” orders the Queen, but for all the times she has barked this order, there has never been an execution.

Alice is cautious but never conquered by fear of the unknown. She is careful and at the same time courageous. She remains curious, tolerant of difference, and self-reflective about the comparative conditions of her knowing. She is always willing to move between sense and nonsense, where nonsense is a test of possibility and imagination is a journey into knowability.

Leaving Humpty Dumpty, Alice says,

“Good-bye!” … and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn’t help saying to herself as she went, “Of all the unsatisfactory – ” (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) “of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met – ” She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.⁶⁹

---

⁶⁰ Charles Dodgson (nom de plume, Lewis Carroll), 1896 [1977], Symbolic Logic, New York, NY: Clarkson Potter.

⁶¹ Lewis Carroll, 1872 [2000], The Annotated Alice: Through the Looking Glass, edited by M. Gardner, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p. 213–14.

⁶² Gilles Deleuze, 1969 [1990], The Logic of Sense, translated by M. Lester, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. xiii, 80, 25, 24.

⁶³ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1991 [1994], What Is Philosophy?, translated by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 21, 37.

⁶⁴ Gilles Deleuze, 1995 [2001], Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, translated by A. Boyman, New York, NY: Zone Books, p. 25.

⁶⁵ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, 1977 [2007], Dialogues II, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 148–52.

⁶⁶ Gilles Deleuze, 1969 [1990], The Logic of Sense, translated by M. Lester, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 35.

⁶⁷ Alexius Meinong, 1904 [1981], “The Theory of Objects,” pp. 76–117 in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, edited by Roderick M. Chisholm, Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, p. 79.

⁶⁸ Elizabeth Grosz, 2017, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 2–3, 12–13.

⁶⁹ Lewis Carroll, 1872 [2000], The Annotated Alice: Through the Looking Glass, edited by M. Gardner, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, pp. 219–20.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–280. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense” §MS3.1.1b