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Here it seems we are left in an ambivalent state with regard to the possibility of (consistent, stable) "meaning"; we are left suspended between two views, one that takes meaning as possible ("words have something to say") and one that sees it as (strictly speaking) impossible ("what they say is not fixed"). Chad Hansen, in "A Tao of Tao in Chuang-tzu," takes Dao as a "discourse" that guides human actions; he sees Zhuangzi as having many discourse daos rather than the Confucian authoritative ("one and correct") discourse Dao:
Zhuangzi does not claim that all shi-ing [asserting] is wrong because the absolute is without any distinctions. He claims instead that all shi-ing is right-from some perspective or other. He does not claim that all language is pei-perverse but that all is admissible-in some conventional practice or another.
"There is no limit to what you can shi and ... what you can fei. So I say nothing is better than clarity" [Zhuangzi]. Ming/clarity is apparently to be understood here as the awareness that there is a possible dao which would generate any desired pattern of shiing and fei-ing. Whatever pattern of response we adopt becomes a way. The conventionality and artificiality of daos and language are underlined again. (Tao of Tao, p. 46)
This view of dao(s) is, of course, also not that of the primitive Daoism of Shen Dao, which refuses to adopt any system of discrimination and thus sees "all things as one." Rather, the "mature Daoist" view attributed by Hansen to Zhuangzi seems in effect to "mime" or "play off of" Confucianism: "Zhuangzi goes on to pragmatic endorsement of 'residing in the usual'-using names and shi-ing in the conventional, shared, therefore useful and understandable ways." Such a reading would seem to fit the various aspects of Zhuangzi's playfulness. Yet Hansen (Tao of Tao, p. 48) also acknowledges Zhuangzi's claim-a seemingly "serious" if not also "mystical" one-that "[Conformist shi-ing2] comes to an end; and when it is at an end, that of which we do not know what is so of it we call [the] dao."
Hansen's reading of the Qi Wu Lun is persuasive, especially given the very Daoist proviso that (as he says) this reading implies that the "opposite" (Confucianist or mystical monist)...