In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.

— Goethe, Works (ed. 1882)

Rifling through a box of things I kept because I thought they might be useful someday, I found a rusted NJS chain off my old track bike. When I was eighteen I worked at a cafe, and because I was always running late at that point in my life, arriving at 5am in the winter meant pedaling forty minutes across town at breakneck speed, avoiding puddles from the slow winter rain, kitted out in gloves and a neck gaiter against the biting wind. I would sometimes arrive with an earache that lasted the first two hours of my shift. Unearthing the chain immediately conjured the earaches, the steam rising from the espresso machine as I dialed it, the route I would plan to avoid the roads where I knew the water would puddle and soak my pants, and the calm of a slow morning when I arrived early.

None of this is contained in the chain itself. The chain, seemingly, has no relation to earaches as an object. However, it is an object from which, equipped with certain knowledge, I can derive associations with other objects.

Most obviously, I can look at it and imagine the drive train of a bicycle.

It is an organized pile of minerals, but it is also part of a system I understand intimately, and I can conjure the rest of that system through association. The chain is attached to the chainring, the rear derailleur, the pedals, my feet, and the path I was traveling along, even when none of those elements are in front of me. Some of that association arrives through a meaning I was taught. When I was building my first bike on work-trade at the bicycle co-op, I learned those meanings from someone else, who showed me through diagrams and hands-on training what a drive train is, what a chainring is, what a bicycle chain is, and how they interact.

Less obviously, it can evoke a puddle or an earache.

These are meanings I arrived at through experience rather than instruction. To someone for whom rain or cold means leaving the bike and taking the family SUV instead, a chain might not evoke an earache at all. Both kinds of association run on the same underlying operation, since in each case the chain and the thing it evokes were genuinely adjacent, whether through a mechanical assemblage or through a series of experiences. Meaning is the key that allows me to traverse between them so quickly that I can hardly perceive the traversal, and the cold wind of that ride may be present the instant I see the chain, without my having stepped through any sequence to get there.

Meaning is what makes the relation of things possible in the mind. Meaning can be viewed as a kind of interstitial layer, like myofascial tissue, which wraps throughout our world casing our experiences in itself. To understand it deeply would require a thorough study in philosophy, which isn't my objective here, but suffice to say that it is an immaterial material that exists in varying thicknesses between one's consciousness and the world.

Sometimes, an experience, object or an Other presents itself in my life and it has very little meaning, and the layer is thin. Other objects are hugely drenched in meaning, so much so that I almost can't see the object at all through the meaning.

The sign (an object upon which we confer meaning) has no resident meaning. Meaning is imported by people through differentiation between signs, through their position relative to one another, which means that all the time, whether at the subconscious or conscious level, we're creating a soup of meaning from the raw ingredients of the world.

If a thing means something only by its difference from other things, then what it is not is doing as much work as what it is, thus opposition turns out to be an immensely important kind of relation rather than the absence of one. This also means that no object available to me stands outside the field, since to be available at all is to have already been placed in relation to everything it is not.^[1]

Nothing is isolated because isolation cannot be occupied, it's not a location. Something can only seem to be isolated because of its relation to other things, which thus makes it not isolated. This means, for me, the question is never whether two things are related but whether I have found the relation yet. Whether the relation is negative or positive is inconsequential, either way it's produced through meaning. I believe the human capacity to create meaning is fundamentally one of our most powerful skills as a species, and while I can't assert that we are the only species who do it, I can say with certainty that the creation of meaning is what has sustained humans since time immemorial.

But then, if meaning is a possible connective tissue between every object, whether discovered or manufactured, what differentiates meaning produced through objects which have some discoverable relation, and those which have no apparent relation? What about when the feeling of stepping on a rock evokes, instantaneously, a memory of eating a certain food? Or when my partner said to me "this tastes like a hockey game" after taking a bite of a chopped cheese. Freud's Little Hans is the far end of the same phenomenon, since the horse that produced the boy's phobia was, on Freud's reading, carrying the meaning of the father, and Hans himself had no access whatsoever to the connection his own mind had already made.^[2]

Is this a mistake? Is it schizophrenic thought? Is it erroneous? I'd argue not. I think that the interrelation of unrelated objects through meaning is precisely what brought the bicycle into the world, what allowed me to imagine a route I might take to get to work on one cold and rainy morning at 5am. The chain and the chainring are not the same case as the rock and the food. In the first, the two things were genuinely next to each other, in a mechanism or in an experience, and the meaning I traverse to connect them was laid down in advance by that adjacency. In the second there is no path of that kind, and the connection has to be made rather than followed. Roman Jakobson described something like the two operations I'm describing, as poles of a spectrum of meaning. What he calls the metonymic pole runs on contiguity and the metaphoric pole runs on substitution.^[3]

If there exists something like actual relation, the metonymic pole, which is arrived at through learning or rational progression, and there exists some unrelated relation, the metaphoric pole, which often arrives without our understanding and acts on us, we can also consider other kinds of arrival at meaning/relation. Is there something other than rational progression or irrational movement which we can do to create meaning? Accepting the two poles, and their usual methods of arrival, I’m suggesting something other than a position between them, since the kind of relation isn't what changes. What would happen if we crossed wires, utilizing the arrival method of one pole to try to arrive at the other? The only arrival method we can voluntarily evoke is that of the metonymic pole(learning and rational progression) since metaphoric meaning typically arrives from outside us, without our knowledge or consent. What if we attempted to produce a metaphoric relation deliberately through learning and rational progression, rather than waiting for it to happen?

I may experience a sandwich as tasting like a hockey game, but I’d have to reconstruct or imagine a meaning to explain that relation in order to convey it to someone in whom it does not spontaneously arise. In an intentional, rather than unprovoked, evocation of the sandwich to hockey lies the potential third method I am suggesting, which I call superimposition.

I don't believe anything is unrelated. Meaning is a smooth space^[4] and everything in the world is connected through it, which ought to make the distinction collapse entirely, except that a relation being available is not the same as a relation being traveled. The chain and the chainring are joined by a path so short and so worn that I cross it without noticing I have crossed anything, even the memory of the earache is crossed without a second thought, it feels continuous. The sandwich and the hockey game are joined somewhere as well, and the experience is instantaneous, but no path exists yet, and one has to be laid before anyone else can use it. I may experience a sandwich as tasting like a hockey game, but I’d have to reconstruct or imagine a meaning to explain that relation in order to convey it to someone in whom it does not spontaneously arise. In an intentional, rather than unprovoked, evocation of the sandwich to hockey lies the potential third method I am suggesting, which I call superimposition. Superimposition is the deliberate laying of that path between objects where the path is not apparent. It is not the manufacture of a relation out of nothing, since I don't believe there is any nothing, any true non-relation, for it to come out of, but the import of material from far enough away that the relation has to be built rather than walked.

The mind performs this operation constantly and without permission, as the rock and Hans' horse both demonstrate. Superimposition is essentially just the intentional invocation of that otherwise spontaneous act, the deliberate induction of an involuntary faculty. What remains is to say why the induction produces something rather than nothing, and what keeps the result from being arbitrary.

An approach that helped me articulate this method is found in the writing of film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, whose chapter "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form"^[5] opens with the Goethe epigraph I use above. Eisenstein makes a convincing argument that art is fundamentally conflictual, that it exists for the purpose of manifesting contradiction into form and can only exist through contradiction, and that its natural form is an expression of the specific conflict between entropy and creativity. In music and poetry, he suggests that meaning comes from a conflict between the metric measure employed in a piece and the distribution of accents overriding that measure, disparate elements which come together to form a new, third, and more valuable meaning only found in their interaction.

He suggests that the dialectic of Nature and Industry is the focal point at which art is born. This, I believe, is also true of design. What we do, as artists and designers, is fundamentally a conflict between the received arrangement of objects we encounter and the transformation of them into meaning. I'd extend Eisenstein by arguing that the third thing I'm describing (superimposition) is born from an attempt at relation of conflictual elements rather than from the collision itself. Taking two isolated elements, combining them, and then, crucially, applying the creative act of producing meaning to the conflict between them yields something completely outside either object. This is not to say that a practice like automatic drawing, wherein the artist knowingly declines to produce a meaning layer, isn't producing the third thing. It's not necessary that the meaning be declared by the artist, it's there either way, ready to be interpreted by the audience. Aby Warburg spent the last years of his life arranging and rearranging photographic reproductions across panels of black cloth. He juxtaposed Renaissance paintings beside an antique relief beside a newspaper clipping and he never had the chance to write down the argument those adjacencies produced.^[6]

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Picture Atlas, Final Series, panel 8, October/November 1929. © The Warburg Institute

Whether the interstitial meaning layer is produced by the artist or the audience is really relatively inconsequential in terms of its impact.^[7] In both scenarios, two disparate elements are combined to produce more and more and more of the meaning soup which is the source of the power a given work has. To be moved, to be impacted, one must experience the interposition of meaning, whether from within themselves or from the artist's mouth.

A friend with whom I was developing a website once told me he had a fondness for the aesthetics of the Russian avant garde and El Lissitzky in particular, and loaned me a book on him. The reference was offered primarily for its aesthetic quality, which is to say red and black, tilted geometry, asymmetry, challenging and tense composition, beautiful fields of empty canvas. Lissitzky's paintings and prints moved my friend, and he wanted to share them with me. The project is a website hosting texts, though at the time we were developing the idea that the texts could constitute a collective relational database rather than a shelf or a blog, so I had been mulling ways to interrelate the texts using the vast and diverse technologies of the web, but I hadn't quite landed on what we would really do.

The printed surface transcends space and time. The printed surface, the infinity of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.

— El Lissitzky, Merz, no. 4 (Hannover, 1923)

Merz, no. 4 (Hannover, 1923)

Reading the text of the book between the reproductions of his prints and paintings, I found Lissitzky in 1923 declaring the printed page exhausted and describing what he called the electro-library, a book-space you enter rather than a sequence you read through.^[8] This seemingly unrelated material, which wasn't even the intention of sharing the book, struck me with clarity like a lightning bolt. A typographic manifesto published in Hannover in 1923 and a content schema have no path between them, and yet, the two objects unlocked a third.

I became momentarily obsessed with extrapolating what else Lissitzky's vision might suggest about what we were building, with his revolutionary avant garde imagination of computing, before the machine existed, and what it might mean for us. I built the new backend of the site, subsequently, as a database in which a word, phrase or paragraph can be selected and wrapped in a concept-tag that links it to that concept's own document, so that the texts together form an interrelated field of concepts, periods, locations and vocabulary.

When I feel stuck on a project, when I experience a block in my process, or when I am searching for a je ne sais quoi which is missing from a work, I often reach for superimposition. Grabbing a book off my shelf which is totally unrelated to the project at hand, opening to a page at random, and finding something I can relate to the project can produce a totally fluid sense of depth and meaning. This is not a new method, but it's one I was unaware of when I began conceptualizing it. I later discovered that Eno and Schmidt built a deck of cards to do this fifty years ago.^[9]

Oblique Strategies is a deck of instruction cards drawn at random when work stalls, each carrying a directive that has no bearing on the problem at hand, forcing creative thinking about how to implement or resolve it. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, image via Boo-Hooray

To be clear, superimposition is not moodboarding. Moodboarding harvests surfaces without depth and stops at resemblance, so that the unrelated object remains unrelated except through appearance, and the material it contains never has to be understood, only looked at. This is simple juxtaposition not superimposition--it's a layering of disparate elements without depth. What I am calling superimposition, as a method, requires reading the imported thing on its own terms, a product manual or a veladora taken seriously as an object with rich semiotic life, rather than skimmed for an interesting surface, and then elevating whatever connection appears into a structural, conceptual position, rather than a surface decoration. Crucially, however, it must be undertaken in a rigorous way. I'm not simply implying that two random things can be slammed together and it solves all aporias in a work or project. I've earlier established that the interstitial meaning layer may be produced within the viewer, as well as by the creator, so the resolution may not be mine to perform, but wanton combinations alongside a hope that viewers deduce meaning is its own act somewhat distinct from what I'm calling superimposition. The seed of connectivity which I produce between the two objects must be a hook, which resolves either in my mind or the mind of the viewer, but the hook should be evident nonetheless.

My late friend Isaac Kirkman was a street astrologer, poet, and tarotist. When I asked him once about his beliefs about the tarot, he declined, in good mystic fashion, to clearly answer whether he thought it could in fact tell the future, and offered instead that the interpretation of the cards by both the tarotist and the sitter are telling. This is why, he explained, the images on the cards are so important. He would point to a card and ask me to explain what I thought it meant, before he'd do the same.

The meaning imbued by the card's illustrator and the meaning interpreted by the sitter are disparate objects, just like the bicycle chain and the earache. The illustrator knew nothing of the sitter's present condition, and the sitter doesn't know exactly what semiotics are intentionally encoded by the illustrator versus accidentally linked by their own mind. Is the young man in the Rider-Waite Ten of Wands weeping, his head buried in a bundle of sticks, or is he carrying the bundle home to the village in the distance, having had a bountiful harvest? Did Pamela Colman Smith illustrate him to represent remorse? Difficult passage? The torment of work?

When someone struggles for meaning, Isaac told me, the struggle and the meaning they find expose to them dimensions of their thought or experience which they may have not yet realized. This is the essential meaning of superimposition to me; it's not that things are truly unrelated and we purely fabricate the meaning, it's that viewing an unrelated thing through a particular lens (a project, a work, a query, a problem) can allow us to see new facets of meaning that we didn't previously have the vantage to see. Whether the cards are selected through omnipotent divine power, or by entropic accident, has little effect on whether their meaning changes the future.

When I read El Lissitzky through the lens of the web project, it illuminated something new about both; El Lissitzky was describing the kind of computing I was imagining, before computing existed, and I was trying to make El Lissitzky's electro-library in the website, before I knew he had written it. Viewed in isolation, neither object can produce the weight of the two read through each other, the fluid connection of meaning is produced through the superimposition of the two objects.

Ten of Wands Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (1909)

1. The claim that a sign has no meaning of its own and acquires it only through differential position is found in Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916); the term Saussure uses is valeur, usually rendered as value.
2. "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" (1909). Jakobson maps Freud's condensation and displacement onto the metonymic and metaphoric poles in the essay cited below.
3. Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (1956). Jakobson derives the poles from Saussure's syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, contributing his own dimensions of meaning to Saussure's argument.
4. Deleuze and Guattari demarcate smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Where striated space is rational, structured, hierarchical and divided, smooth space is nomadic and continuous, it wanders.
5. Sergei Eisenstein's "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" is collected in and cited from Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1977 ed)
6. Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, worked on from 1924 until his death in 1929 and left unfinished.
7. This idea is really Umberto Eco's, developed in The Limits of Interpretation (1990), which also implicates his earlier account of unlimited semiosis
8. Lissitzky's "Topography of Typography" appeared in Merz no. 4, Hannover, July 1923.
9. Oblique Strategies was published by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975.