Process Semiotics: The Fluid Nature of The Meaning in Language
THE PARADOX OF INFINITE REGRESS OF SENSE
In chapter 5 of The Logic of Sense (“Fifth Series of Sense”), Gilles Deleuze showcases one of the paradoxes of how meaning works within language, the paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation.
Deleuze explains how whenever we are dealing with a statement (a word, a sentence, an act, or anything else), we are justified in asking ourselves the meaning behind it. The meaning behind a statement is not something already given, which is why we often do not clearly understand what someone means by what they said. When you read an obscure passage from a philosopher for example, or when you read a confusing passage in a mathematics textbook, or when a love-interest is giving you a perplexing hint, you will ask yourself “what the heck does this mean?”. In other words, an act of communication has a dual nature: it can be treated as both an answer or a question. An answer implies finality, ‘staticness’, it does not point to anything else, it is the end, a destination. A question on the other hand implies movement, it points somewhere else. A perplexing or confusing act of communication, whose meaning we do not immediately grasp, is a question for us, or at least raises a question, the question behind the meaning of the statement.
We will be tempted to get the answer to that question, either by directly or indirectly asking the other person for clarification (“can you explain what you meant by this?”), or by asking a third party for clarification (“can you explain what Hegel meant by this paragraph?”) or asking ourselves for clarification (“let me answer my own question by thinking more deeply about what they meant by this”). But what if you do not understand the explanation itself? What if the question raises even more questions? You will ask that person who gave you the explanation to give you an explanation of the explanation. But what if you don’t understand the second explanation either? You will require a third explanation, and we can keep this going to infinity.
This is what Deleuze refers to as the contrast between denotation and sense. For Deleuze, meaning is composed of four parts: denotation, manifestation, signification and sense. The first three are static, they are something that exist within a proposition, while the fourth one (sense) is not something that exists, but an event that happens (or that “insists and inheres” in a proposition, as Deleuze puts it). For Deleuze, “Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak, (…) In other words, I never state the sense of what I am saying”¹. What Deleuze means is that sense is never self-explanatory, the sense of a proposition can be denoted by a second proposition. The sense of the second proposition can be denoted by a third proposition, and so on to infinity.
PROCESS SEMIOTICS
What all of this implies is that the meaning of an act of communication is never something given or static, it does not simply exist. Meaning is fluid and ever changing, it is not something that is but something that happens. One can never fully know what something means because the answer to the meaning of a proposition itself has a meaning that needs explained, it always refers to something else (“defers” as Derrida would put it in his explanation of the iterativity of language). The answer to the meaning of a statement itself has a meaning, and that meaning itself has a meaning and so on to infinity. Therefore, the meaning of a statement is never a final destination but more like a journey that one can explore through the passing of time.
We can imagine the meaning of a proposition like a movie or a GIF: the meaning of a statement is never a single frame in that movie, instead it is the unfolding of the movie through time, with denotation, manifestation and signification representing proprieties of each frame while sense being, in this analogy, the movement or relationships between the frames.
The idea that reality is made up not of things that exist, but of events and processes that happen, and that reality in general is fluid and dynamic, constantly subject to change, is called “process philosophy” or “process metaphysics”. But we are completely justified in applying the same principle to language, in order to create (like Deleuze) a process semiotics, where meaning is something changing and dynamic.
SARCASM
To illustrate the paradox of infinite regress, Deleuze gives an example from Lewis Caroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”, but I think his example is too confusing to explain here. I would rather give my own personal example to illustrate this concept: sarcasm. Sarcasm for me is one of the most fascinating case studies in the philosophy of language since it pushes the limits of meaning itself: when we are sarcastic, we say the opposite of what we mean. But let’s think of an absurd scenario: after I say something sarcastic, I explain to you the fact that I was sarcastic. In many cases (especially if it was obvious enough that I was sarcastic, without the need for an explanation), this can be a subtle way of calling you an idiot. If I explain to you that I was just being sarcastic, it’s almost like I’m telling you that you’re dumb enough that you’re not able to get sarcasm without an explanation. In other words, decoding the ‘hidden meaning’ behind a statement itself hides a hidden meaning, like in the paradox of infinite regress of sense.
This example is more relevant than ever today since online, after we are sarcastic we have the habit of adding “/s” at the end of our sarcastic statement. But the interesting part is that “/s” is never just “/s”. When you add “/s” at the end of the statement, you do not merely explain that you are sarcastic, instead you add an extra layer of sarcasm and irony and you retroactively change the meaning of the previous statement. Analogous to Lacan’s notion of surplus-enjoyment, we can call this an example of ‘surplus-meaning’ perhaps: adding “/s” to a message adds something more than a mere explanation of the fact that you were sarcastic, it adds an extra layer of irony and spiciness.
ALL COMMUNICATION IS INDIRECT COMMUNICATION
Why does all of this matter? It matters whenever we try to understand the phenomena of indirect communication: hints, allusions, euphemisms, speaking in code, dog-whistles, etc. The existence of indirect communication implies the existence of direct communication, the idea that we can know what something means without interpretation, that the meaning of a statement is obvious and not hidden behind layers of encryption. But we already showed that this is impossible: there’s no such thing as direct communication, the meaning of a statement is not something given and static but something dynamic and moving, and sense is the driving factor, like the fuel that fuels the engine of meaning in order to keep it running, constantly changing its position.
The existence of such a thing as indirect communication implies a pre-existing form of direct communication that was repressed by a censoring force, like the censor in Freud’s dream analysis. But Deleuze and Guattari explain in Anti-Oedipus that the repression retroactively creates the thing which was repressed (in the same way that for Slavoj Zizek, the ‘fall’ retroactively creates the thing from which it fell). Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the incest taboo: “If desire is repressed, this is not because it is desire for the mother and for the death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed”². D&G explain that it is not that we first unconsciously desired to have sex with our mother and to kill our father, and only later did society prohibit those acts in order to preserve the social order. Instead, they explain, the prohibition preceded the desire: we first had the prohibition of incest with our parents, and only later we thought “If this is prohibited, it means there was a reason it was prohibited, we must have wanted it”.
We can apply an analogous logic to the act of communication. When the meaning of a statement is “hidden”, when we treated it as a hint, we imply that the meaning was hidden from us by an act of censorship or repression, that there was some original transparent meaning of the statement that was encrypted only later. But there is no such thing — we must dissolve the distinction between direct communication and indirect communication, meaning can never be pointed down and settled, it is constantly moving, changing and evolving into something else, something which it is not. Full transparency is neither desirable nor undesirable, transparency is impossible.
When men often complain that women expect them to read their minds, and that women do not tell them directly what they want, they assume that there is a static and fixed answer to the question “what does she want?”, isolated from context. But desire is found in the connections between events. Lacan often pointed out how communicating one’s desire to an analyst in therapy itself has an effect on that communicating desire, retroactively. Consider, for example, my desire for other people to compliment my looks. Wouldn’t communicating this desire to my partner be self-defeating in some situations? If I tell my partner “I like when people compliment my looks” and a few seconds after that, my partner compliments my looks, I will be completely justified in thinking to myself “They only did that because I told them to, not because they truly mean it”. But if I do not tell my partner that I like receiving compliments, and my partner nonetheless decides to compliment me, this will mean much more to me, I will believe that they truly mean it, that they’re not doing it just because I told them I like it.
In the above example, desire is not simply the desire for others to compliment me, but rather the desire for others to want to compliment me of their own volition. In Lacanian terms, my desire is not for the act itself (the compliment) but for the recognition of my desirability through the Other. This recognition is an event that unfolds in a dynamic relationship between what is communicated, what is withheld, and what is interpreted. The act of communicating my desire alters its trajectory — it transforms from being an implicit demand into something explicit, but this explicitness undermines the very structure of the desire itself.
This interplay highlights how all communication is, in essence, indirect. The meaning of a statement, like desire, cannot be isolated from the context in which it arises or from the relational dynamics that shape its unfolding. When I seek to understand what another person means by their words, I am not simply looking for a fixed truth; I am engaging in a process that involves my own interpretive framework, my assumptions, and my expectations.
Thus, communication in a relationship is a very tricky topic, full of paradoxes, twists and turns; one can never simply advice others that “communication is the most important thing in a relationship” — communication of what exactly? Communication of desire, of one’s wants and needs, itself is shaped and is intertwined within the structures of language, as Lacan often shows. Let us consider another simple example: a wife tells her husband in passing that white roses are her favorite flowers. A week later her husband buys her a white rose, she becomes happy. A second example now — the wife ‘directly’ communicates her desire to her husband “I want you to buy me a white rose tomorrow, that would make me very happy”. The husband buys her a white rose tomorrow.
The act of buying a white rose can be thought of as a signifier because it means something (in fact, everything can be a signifier if you’re brave enough), but what it means, what it refers to or what we can infer from it, is shaped by the underlying context we find it in. Every signifier has a history. The same act of buying a white rose means two different things depending on its history: in the first example, the wife can think that the husband demonstrated that he is attentive to her needs, that he remembers things about her. In the second example, the wife may think that the husband is obedient, that he does what he is told, or that he cares enough about her to spend money on her, perhaps. The very same signifier: two different meanings.
A naïve analysis would tempt us to think of the first example as an act of indirect communication, as a hint (“the wife hinted to her husband that she wants him to buy a white rose to her”) and the second act as an act of direct communication, a transparent revealing of desire. But this is not entirely correct. Thinking of the first act as a hint implies that there was a prior meaning to the statement that was repressed or censored, thus coming out on the other side in an ‘encrypted’ form. But what exactly was her desire? Did she want her husband to buy her a white rose, or did she want her husband to buy her a white rose without her telling him to (in other words, did she want her husband to simply buy her a white rose, or did she want her husband to want to buy her a white rose)? If it’s the latter case, then how can she communicate that? Would she have to say “I want you to buy me a white rose without me telling you to buy me a white rose”? But wouldn’t this desire itself defer to a third state, where she wants her husband to buy her a white rose without her telling him to buy a white rose and without her telling him that she wants him to buy her a white rose without her telling him to buy a white rose? We can keep this going to infinity, as we showed in the beginning of the article with the paradox of the infinite regress of sense. If sense is constituted through an infinite regress, perhaps desire itself is an infinite regress: the desire for desire, the desire for the desire of desire and the desire for the desire of the desire for desire… Desire, by its definition, can not be communicated. You can never express what you want. What you want is intertwined within the structures of language, within the structures of the symbolic order that is presupposed in order to communicate that desire in the first place. Desire is not something fixed: Deleuze and Guattari talk about “fluxes” of desire, where a flux (incorrectly translated from French as “flow” of desire) represents the instantaneous rate of change, like the derivative in mathematics.
LANGUAGE AND DESIRING-MACHINES
If we keep up this train of thought, we can see that language itself operates within a desiring-machine. Deleuze and Guattari say that a machine is nothing but its connections. Each statement, each signifier, points beyond itself to something else — another statement, another context, another layer of meaning. This infinite deferral of meaning is not a failure of communication but its very condition. Just as desire is never satisfied but continually reconstituted in its pursuit, so too is the sense of a statement never final but always in motion, driven by the interplay of what is said and what is unsaid.
This process becomes even more complex when we consider the role of power, ideology, and social structures in shaping the fluxes of meaning. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “machinic assemblages” provides a useful framework here: language is not a neutral tool but an active participant in the production of reality. It organizes and reorganizes fluxes of desire, creating territories of meaning that are always provisional and subject to deterritorialization. For example, the use of sarcasm or euphemism in political discourse can simultaneously reveal and obscure meaning, depending on the context and the audience. A sarcastic remark can undermine an official narrative while also reinforcing the cynicism that prevents meaningful action.
A clear example of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in political discourse can be seen in the use of euphemisms to frame austerity measures. Consider the phrase “fiscal responsibility” often used to justify budget cuts to social programs. At first glance, this euphemism deterritorializes the harsh reality of austerity by stripping it of its negative connotations, replacing it with a term that implies prudence and care. However, in doing so, it reterritorializes the concept within an ideological framework that valorizes economic discipline over social welfare, recoding austerity as a moral imperative rather than a political choice.
This process becomes even more evident when sarcasm is used to challenge such euphemisms. A politician or commentator might sarcastically say, “I’m sure the elderly will appreciate the government’s ‘fiscal responsibility’ when their heating bills triple this winter.” This sarcastic remark deterritorializes the euphemism by exposing the gap between its benign appearance and its harmful consequences. Yet, at the same time, the sarcasm risks reterritorializing the critique within a framework of cynicism, potentially discouraging active resistance by framing the issue as inevitable or absurdly hypocritical.
Decoding and overcoding are also at play in this dynamic. Sarcasm functions as a form of decoding, breaking down the official language of power to reveal its hidden implications. By highlighting the dissonance between the euphemism and its material effects, sarcasm opens up a space for reinterpretation. However, overcoding occurs when this reinterpretation is subsumed by another dominant narrative — such as the idea that all political language is inherently deceptive — thus reinforcing a sense of disengagement or apathy.
HOW DO I KNOW THE MEANING OF MY OWN THOUGHTS?
We can further extend this analysis by observing the nature of thought. Each thought we have is a signifier, pointing to something else, generating other thoughts. You are not your mind, the mind is a thought-generating machine, connecting itself to other machines in your system. A thought generates thought, it reproduces itself. Just as we might be tempted to ask “What the heck did they mean by this?” when we deal with a confusing paragraph from a philosopher or a confusing hint from a person we are attracted to, we are just as justified in asking ourselves “What the heck did I mean by this?” when we have a confusing thought. In fact, this is the very essence of the act of thinking, constantly questioning ourselves. Each thought we have is a question whose answer will lead to even more questions. A question implies movement, change, evolution. Questioning is the fuel that drives thought. The meaning of my own thoughts is not something that is static and fixed, but instead contains a sense that does not exist but rather insists or inheres in my thought, a sense that fuels my thought to move and change.
But if we take the psychoanalytic route, assuming that people have an unconscious, then what stops us from pushing this point even further and say that the mind itself is not fully transparent to itself, that our own spirit is indirect towards itself? The subject is fundamentally split. In his (in)famous essay “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”, Jacques Lacan inverts Rene Decartes’ famous formula “I think therefore I am” into “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”. Lacan writes: “It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. (…) What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”³
In the introduction to the third volume of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (also known as the “Philosophy of Mind”), Hegel says of mind/spirit (‘Geist’) that it “is not an inert entity but is rather what is absolutely restless, pure activity, the negating or the ideality of every fixed determination of the intellect,- not abstractly simple but, in its simplicity, at the same time a distinguishing-of-itself-from-itself”⁴. Hence, we are dealing here in many ways with the opposite of Ficthe’s tautological self-positing “I = I”, if there is a point that Hegel is making is that one is truly oneself by virtue of not fully being oneself, the subjectivity is found in the very failure to completely actualize one’s identity, hence “I =/= I”. That is to say, mind is “the negating of every fixed determination of the intellect”, since it is not a fixed, stable state of affairs, but a constantly changing and evolving state of affairs, hence not determined as one particular thing out of many, but the constant “distinguishing of itself from itself”. Mind is whatever is not fully itself, yet also the very source of this distinguishing, the perpetually self-negating second-order cybernetic system.
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NOTES:
1: Gilles Deleuze, “The Logic of Sense”, pg. 28
2: Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, pg. 118
3: Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p.126
4: G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Introduction
