Minima Semantica

Modernity is sometimes characterised as a dialectic between inherited dualisms – macro-microcosm, cosmos-mind, schema-trope, maximalism-minimalism, etc. – reinscribed, in the computer-age, within the emerging discourses of complexity-simplicity & given a broadly “cybernetic” inflection, corresponding to the operations of dynamic systems. The autopoetic character of such systems is the subject of a large body of literature. That semantics in general can be understood in these terms is a fundamental prerequisite for the recent advent of language-based AI, which in a very short period has become ubiquitous. While a statistical model of communication, refined into a calculus of “intelligence,” may seem to resolve the old antagonism of the sensible-intelligible, in crucial respects it remains at the level of a mimēsis – a descriptive-approximative system – so long as it retains a dualistic (& not recursive-differential) structure. Signification's capacity to arise in the first place is no more mysterious than the existence of the Higgs field. The question remains: what – under arbitrarily assumed conditions – constitutes a semantic minimum? i.e., a difference that “means”? This minimum can be conceived as a Planck limit (or some other universal bound), necessitating a convergence of the semantic field. Yet while the opacity of AI is unsuited to a general theory of semantic emergence, re-examination of certain paradigmatic modernist texts – whose linguistic economies are often held to be diametrically opposed, but which reveal “intrapsychic identifications” (Kristeva) – may be more fruitful.

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