When Meaning Becomes Absurd
(Saturation, Breakdown, and the Loss of Gravity)
There is a point at which meaning stops tightening.
It doesn’t release.
It doesn’t correct.
It simply collapses under its own weight.
In Chapter Eleven of Fought Disorder (“Gone Gaga”), the moral and narrative pressure built across the previous chapters reaches saturation.
What follows is not relief.
It is absurdity.
Absurdity Is Not Comedy
It’s important to be precise here.
This chapter may read as chaotic, strange, even darkly funny in places — but that is not humour functioning as distance or coping.
This is meaning losing gravity.
When every symbol matters, eventually none of them can carry the load.
A Short Passage
Rather than a single quote, this chapter operates through tonal whiplash:
Cultural references pile up
Associations jump registers
Significance and triviality collide
The result is not randomness.
It is semantic exhaustion.
What’s Happening Linguistically
This chapter introduces an eleventh distortion:
Meaning saturation.
In ordinary cognition:
Meaning is selective
Not everything is relevant
Attention is economised
Here:
Everything is relevant
Nothing can be ignored
Attention cannot rest
The system consumes itself.
Why Absurdity Emerges
When:
Metaphor hardens
Narrative closes
Guilt becomes total
Procedure interrupts without explaining
Something has to give.
Absurdity is not escape.
It is overflow.
Language can no longer maintain coherence, but it cannot stop producing meaning either.
So it produces too much — too fast — in incompatible registers.
The Reader’s Disorientation
Readers often experience this chapter as destabilising in a new way.
Not frightening.
Not accusatory.
But unmoored.
That sensation is accurate.
This is what it feels like when:
Meaning has nowhere left to go
Seriousness can’t be sustained
Nothing can be trusted to stay in one register
Why This Is Dangerous
Absurdity can look harmless from the outside.
It can even look like improvement.
But here, it signals:
Cognitive overload
Attentional collapse
Loss of prioritisation
The mind is no longer organising experience.
It’s reacting to it.
Why This Chapter Matters Structurally
This is not comic relief.
It is a pressure release without resolution.
The system has not healed.
It has not corrected.
It has not regained balance.
It has simply run out of tensile strength.
That makes it fragile.
The First Hint of Breakdown
For the first time, the narrative does not feel inevitable.
It feels slippery.
Associations no longer reinforce each other reliably.
Meaning no longer stabilises.
This instability is terrifying — but also necessary.
Rigid systems don’t loosen.
They crack.
Why the Book Doesn’t Soften This
Many accounts romanticise this phase.
Fought Disorder does not.
Because absurdity here is not liberation.
It’s the nervous system failing to maintain a structure that has become impossible.
What Comes Next
After saturation comes confrontation.
With others.
With consequence.
With social reality.
The world doesn’t adapt to absurdity.
It responds to it.
