What is Language? On Sense and Nonsense

This short essay touches on the misadventures of language, a theme we’ll explore further in our upcoming course, Language and Semiotics: Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and Literature.

We live in a world made of words, and yet we rarely stop to ask what it means for something to “make sense.” We assume meaning is simply there, tucked inside our sentences like objects in a box, ready to be passed from one mind to another. Gilles Deleuze’s 1969 book The Logic of Sense asks us to look again. Sense, he argues, is not a thing we possess but something that happens. It is an event that occurs at the surface where language and the world meet, fragile and fleeting, yet powerful enough to shape how we live and think.

Ordinarily, we picture language as a tool that points to things, expresses feelings, or links ideas together, essentially a vehicle for communication and intention. Philosophers describe this usage through three relations: denotation, where language represents the world (“it is raining”); manifestation, where language expresses the speaker (“I am angry”); and signification, where language draws logical connections (“if it rains, the streets will be wet”). These relations of language, to the world, to the self and to itself, explain how language behaves once meaning is in place, but not how meaning itself arises. They presuppose sense or meaning, rather than illuminate it.

For Deleuze, something else is needed - a “fourth dimension” of language: sense itself, which is not a mental content or a deep essence that belongs to language, but an event taking place whenever words touch the world. When I say “the glass shattered,” one event unfolds as a proposition in language, another as a real occurrence. Sense is the shimmer that appears between them, the happening that is expressed in both without being identical to either. It exists only at this surface, never hidden in depths or lodged in interior consciousness.

We can feel this most clearly in those strange, almost empty phrases like “you know what I mean.” On the surface, it looks like a meaningful statement, yet it refers to nothing in particular and carries no stable content of its own. It works more as a placeholder than a description, less a claim than a hinge that keeps the conversation moving. The phrase doesn’t deliver a meaning so much as gesture toward one, as if meaning were about to arrive but never quite does. And yet it works: people nod, laugh, or simply move on. Part of whatever meaning it has lies in the words themselves, but just as much depends on tone, context, shared history. The phrase opens a small gap in which sense branches outward in several possible directions. Everyone “gets it” differently, but there is just enough shared orientation to continue. That gap is not a breakdown of communication but its very condition. Meaning here is not a fixed object transferred from one mind to another but a shifting field where possibilities overlap and drift. Sense doesn’t eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty, it is born from it.

This is why nonsense plays such an important role. We often imagine nonsense as the opposite of meaning, a kind of linguistic failure, but Deleuze thinks otherwise. Nonsense is built into sense; it is not the negation of meaning but its motor. A pun, a paradox, a children’s rhyme that violates grammar - all of these push language to its edges, forcing it to invent new routes. Nonsense interrupts the orderly circuits of representation and logic, compelling sense to bifurcate, to split and produce new directions. Without this internal pressure, language would stagnate, repeating familiar patterns rather than generating new ones. Everything meaningful in language is generated out of nonsense.

Gilles Deleuze

This brings us to Deleuze’s key idea of “bifurcation”. Sense never moves along a single line. It is always reaching moments at which it can branch. Think of a story that could end in several ways. Each ending is possible, but they cannot all occur in the same world. They are what Deleuze calls “incompossible”: they cannot coexist within one order of sense even though each could form a coherent world on its own. Meaning works similarly. At certain moments - in thought, conversation, politics, culture – multiple directions are open. When one is taken, others recede, but they remain part of the wider field of what could have been. These bifurcations mark thresholds where the system of sense shifts. Old meanings no longer hold, new ones begin to crystallise.

Deleuze often compares this to scientific models of tipping points. A climate system may seem stable, until gradually accumulated pressures push it past a threshold and a new equilibrium emerges. For him, sense behaves in this way. Our shared vocabularies, habits of thought, and forms of life can appear settled, until contradictions and tensions accumulate and the system begins to split. What counted as common sense yesterday becomes questionable today. Words shift meanings. New styles of speaking and thinking take shape. Bifurcation is not catastrophe but creation – the opening of another possible world.

To describe this dynamic, Deleuze borrows the notion of metastability from philosopher Gilbers Simondon: a state that is not simply stable or unstable, but full of unresolved potentials. A metastable system holds differences that have not yet been resolved and can become actual in various ways. For Deleuze, language is always metastable. Every word contains more possible sense than it can actualise in any one moment, because it carries with it its past uses, future possibilities, and the contexts in which it might be taken up. Nonsense is the moment when this surplus becomes visible, signalling that the current regime of meaning is reaching a limit and that another direction is about to emerge. A joke, a mistaken word, an unexpected metaphor, each can crack open the system and let sense spill into new forms.

The Logic of Sense offers a surprisingly accessible insight once this framework becomes clear. Sense is not something hidden behind words that we can never reach, nor something stored inside individual minds. It is not subjective or relative. It is a surface phenomenon that arises in the interval between speakers, between words, between situations. It is produced, not possessed. It is mobile, not static. It is born not from perfect clarity but from the friction between clarity and indeterminacy.

This gives us a way of thinking about language that is also a way of thinking about our present. When our usual terms begin to falter, when conversations feel strained, when paradoxes multiply, it may not mean that meaning has collapsed. It may mean that the system of sense is approaching a threshold at which another configuration is possible. Rather than clinging to old certainties, we can learn to listen for those moments when nonsense appears inside language, when meaning hesitates, when something unresolved presses forward. These are not signs of decay but signals of potential. Sense is a continuous act of creation. It forks, diverges, branches, and renews itself through us.

We’ll explore more of these aspects of language in our upcoming course,Language and Semiotics: Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and Literature.