The Encounter with the Cybersemiotic Real in Alice Books

The main objective of this paper is to incorporate the three Lacanian orders in Søren Brier’s cybersemiotic theory in the context Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts. As an interdisciplinary framework that emphasizes the role of the observer and its symbolically-generated hieroglyph-like universe of “signification sphere” in which any attempt at accessing the objective world of information seems nonsensical, cybersemiotic is an invaluable tool for re-visiting the three orders by which, according to Lacan, we develop our sense of self and the world. Certain elements such as dream-like states, impossible word plays, paradoxes, and nonsense in the Alice books, which follow the titular character into the fantastic realms of Wonderland and the Looking Glass World, can allow for registering the Real by disclosing the self-referential nature of language and debunking the seemingly integrated façade of an imaginary and metaphoric reality founded upon the Symbolic and the Imaginary. For an in-depth analysis of how a creatively self-reflexive handling of language can evoke a space where the three Lacanian orders emerge simultaneously as one collapses onto the other, a cybersemiotic formulation of nonsense in the Alice books is introduced as the linguistic moment in which signifier-in-isolation (the Real) and signifier-in-relation paradoxically appear on the same cognitive horizon, revealing the underlying dynamics of the signification process which involves an arbitrary development of differentiated signs rendered meaningful due to a tacit consensus agreed upon over the temporal axis.

Keywords:

cybersemiotics , nonsense , the Real , Lacan