TEXT
This is a text which I have written and am now publishing on social media. There is no apparent reason, no deeper meaning behind it. The text reaches for nothing, seeks to achieve nothing, is devoid of other meaning than pointing towards its own vulgar meaninglessness and absurdity.
I challenge readers to view the text without irony, humor, or that twinkle in the eye. There is none. The text flows out of pure emptiness, as subatomic particles flicker past the threshold of existence in complete vacuum. Absurdities are often equated with jokes — in fact, in this very moment, I catch myself struggling against the impulse to smirk, to giggle, or at least subvocalize with a ironic melody. But this is not a joke. I am serious. This is a meaningless post.
This way of spamming you with complete nonsense would appear, on the surface level, to be an immoral thing to do: wasting your time. However, if we are to be consequential about this, at least I should be allowed an amoral standing for this agency.
And — I mean no insult to my fellow social media posters — the following should also be considered: If I write a post that is entirely meaningless, and yet somehow more meaningful than the majority of other content posted, what does that say about how much meaningless crap we are subjecting ourselves and one another to?
And — I suppose this is the coup-de-grace for my own-goal post: Is that not indeed a meaning of the meaningless post, which somehow snuck in through the backdoor? I am seriously trying my best to write absolute nonsense, but somehow nonsense, that insolent bastard, resists. It won’t yield. It somehow throws meaning back at me.
The whole thing sounds like God, in fact — who also resists when we try to throw Him/Her/Them/Etc. out. It’s quite annoying, actually. On the surface level, it appears as there is just so much meaningless crap on social media. But when I explicitly try to go as meaningless as it gets, the whole thing ricochets and lands in issues of the divine, of “what is of ultimate significance”, i.e. the very source of all meaning.
So, like pure emptiness somehow resists itself — there’s a nice little essay by Karen Barad on it, “the measure of nothingness” — so does meaninglessness.
I seriously did not plan that conclusion. It was not a ruse. I did not write this text, it wrote itself.
I do however challenge my fellow social media denizens to try to write something entirely meaningless in the comments. Perhaps you will be more successful than I have.
In complete absurdity and entirely devoid of meaning,
Hanzi
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