Why should I need anagrams?

I don't need anagrams, they are just fun. I have a certain order in a certain situation: if I reverse the situation and invert the roles, I get something comical. The reversal often reconciles antinomies, and the disequilibrium between any two realities which exist beside one another is transformed into an initial equilibrium characteristic of any game. The anagram and the secret language have the statuses of a code. The anagrams operate according to a general principle of rearrangement: a constellation of messages can be deciphered, for deciphering the anagram moves to a plurality of hidden meanings, moves from the overt to the covert, it is like "finding faces in the trees," with their surplus of signification. The anagram gives primacy to the uncovering of hidden meanings and truths as they involve juggling where meaning is shifted from one axis to another.

What is the philosophy of anagrams?

The reversal is a particular threat to hierarchy and direction. If everyday life is viewed as "getting somewhere" as an expression of progress, the reversal reminds us that what goes one way in one order could come to be about in another way and another order, and what happens in the domain of communication could often be turned back on itself. Language is nonmaterial, it has no "concrete" effect upon the physical world and is the place of all excercises in reversibility. Events are both reversible and infinitely rearrangeable. Anagrams show the infinite connectibility of all things and the arbitrariness of all connections: the essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. Each inversion and reversal undercuts the status of the original order - the linguistic sign and what it signifies in the case of the anagrams. This calls statuses and role relationships into question, emphasizing the reversible and flexible nature of communication. With the anagrams reversibility becomes available to the entire text as an object - the text can be rearranged in mechanical space in accordance with a variety of orders. Reversals may seem to be inherently ironic because they produce both a doubling and a contradiction, expessing the movement of thought caught against itself. The reversibility of discourse is made possible by the reversibility of knowledge itself, of "reality" and its dimensions.

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