Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 18:41:36 +0000
Subject: metamorphosen 3
From: "Michael Pennamacoor" <pennamacoor-AT-enterprise.net>


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"... I'm a substitute for another guy/ I look pretty tall but my heels are high/ the simple things you see are all complicated/ I look pretty young but I'm just backdated, yeah/ substitute, need for him/ substitute, my coke for gin [forging?]/ substitute you for my mum/ at least I'll get my washing done..." [The Who 'Substitute']

Jud: 

Etymologically the word figure comes from the Latin figura, figurare, related to fingere 'fashion'] in the sense of making or creating something I suppose?

and "literal" as in "speaking literally" comes from the French for "letter", so when one is speaking literally one is speaking '(true) to the letter': another metaphor! In other words [sic], being literal requires the resources of metaphor (that which it appears to be opposed to) for it to be what it is, for it to be understood as what it is, for it to function; it needs to be put in other words; it stems (!) from the slippage of signifiers in the production of meaning.

Jud: 
The meaning of 'literal' can be explained with the words: "Reflecting the essential or genuine character of something" and you are correct when you say that it is almost impossible to escape using such metaphors: like "reflecting" and (even worse) "essential" in one's description. 

Perhaps again the 'metaphoricity' of language is unavoidable, inescapable and should be viewed as nothing negative; we need not try "to escape using such metaphors"... no one gets out of here alive :-)

Perhaps it is the case that when language is appearing as metaphorical it is showing itself as itself; I mean [sic] that in its metaphorical guise, language is showing itself qua language and not just a humanly communicative tool for accurately (what is that?) transmitting a message from sender to receiver with the minimum of noise in the signal (the sequence of signs). The slippage and substitutability of signifiers is the play of language with itself; when we hear this playing we hear the saying of language (and this is why poetry and the poetic (and thus, the musical) have such a high value in most civilisations). In this play the signifieds are deferred; the point is the pointing (and painting) that language confers and defers.

If meta-phor is a bearing/carrying across and about, what is trans-ferred? to where/what? from where/what? What is passed and borne across? And, by what 'agency'? In what way could philosophical language, the language of thinking, be literal? Questioning the language of thinking requires us to begin thinking language qua language. Immediately we run up against the problem of the distinction: literal/metaphorical. If philosophical discourse is more concerned with, e.g., the thingness of things, the objectivity of objects, the being of beings (as compared, say, with commonsense or science which rather concerns itself with things, objects and beings respectively, etc), then what might literalness mean here? 'To Being itself!' might be the cry here... Language, here, would be compelled to display being in its very speech about (necessarily) beings, as 'plainly' as possible, no comparisons being made. How? Perhaps the display of being could eventualise via the very structure of t!
he philosophemes, the statements of the language and their relations to one another; not actually spoken but said nonetheless (in the way some music says something non-musical without words or in spite of the words {say, of a song}). Or, perhaps, the language of thinking could 'simply' 'evoke' being through speaking about its limits, its not-being what it is not (beings, nothing); or, by 'allowing' being to speak for itself... How else could a non-metaphorical language be literal concerning being? Perhaps by showing itself to be subject to being rather than subjecting being (attempting to predicate it, which won't do since being cannot be predicated), in the sway of being, swaying...

Michael: 
I'd like to say again that language is inescapably metaphoric (in the extended sense, as above), even in the white virginality of mathematical proof writing (say, 
in the use of "let" in such as: "let x=1", or "therefore" in "therefore n is prime"; and is not proof by 'reductio ad absurdum ' not some form of mathematical irony?). I am basically disputing the notion that metaphor (etc) is a pleasant (and informative) 'colouration', 'ornamentation', 'prettification' [themselves painterly, musical and design metaphors], etc, of language (although it can be in any instance).

Let us suppose that we could so strip, so denude, so divest a philosophical language of its metaphorical furnishings, that it becomes what we might call a purely literal language, or at least aspires to such, whatever its actual failings, what would such a stripped (and virginal... ?) language be like (asking here, already for a simile, if not a smiley)? Its pronouncements might be a-tomic (respecting the unbroken, uncut integrity of its signifieds), might be epi-tomic (cutting into the stronger lines of its subject-matter, a drawing...), etc. And although no florid comparisons could be made within its pronouncements, it itself, its very entirety, would be a comparison unstated, a drawing, a picture, a model, a map of the entirety of that which it speaks, that which it thinks. Such a language would present a very strange image of an image of nothing image-able; but an image nonetheless: the whole system would display itself as a metaphor (this display 'says' silently, invisi!
bly, "the world of which I speak is like this..."); the relation of bearing-across (that is the metaphorical energetics, its eurythmics) would be how the language is like the world it speaks of.

[I wonder if a beautiful although failed attempt at such a denuded language might be displayed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus... in this text he has his crystalline structure in its entirety map or reflect the world (of facts not things) as a picture does to the pictured, and within it he says this (amongst much else) about the language of thinking:

"4.116  Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.
4.12  Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it--logical form.
In order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to be able to station ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world.
4.121  propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
Propositions show the logical form of reality.
They display it." [Wittgenstein's italics in black]

This, to me, gives an almost mystical significance to a certain notion of Logos, the laying out and pointing to that underlies the very intelligibility of the world. Wittgenstein's brilliant metallic hard language, in some sense it cannot speak about, reflects a brilliant hard world, the only world we can think (clearly and unambiguously, in a sense, certainly). The relationship between the chain of signifiers in its entire and the signified(s) to which it points is not a synagogue; the system, the language game is silent, muted on this, cannot, will not contain this one relation; this relation is not of the world, otherwise it could be represented in the language; this relation must exceed the world; a transcendent Logos, something unspeakable, unutterable, withdrawn.

In the attempt to purify philosophical language of some of its resonances with its world (the realm of the signified, whether things, objects or concepts) the language of thinking is prevented, barred from thinking its relation to the world it thinks. This language floats in the sky between sky (the perfect silent word of god) and earth (the metaphorically tainted imperfect word of man, the speaking animal) and cannot say where it is or how it floats [and how's that for a bunch of mixed metaphors :-)]

Running out of steam of the useful sort, so

regards

michaelP





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