Does language, like information (as the saying goes), want to be
free?
I think we can (at least provisionally) say YES to this question
because it is clearly the case that every time we want to believe
that we are able, with language, to ground meaning in a directly
referential sense, we are thrown back upon an awareness that
noise in the channel is ubiquitous.
When we recognize that language is a
machine that functions (in
the sense in which any machine is said to function) only when it
is producing sense in a decidable context, we are acknowledging
that language is -- in its very constitution -- multi-
functional.
This multi-functionality, borne of language's iterability, is
what allows us to use it (and use it only) metaphorically.