Metaphor
to magnify
This
may be a bit rambling, it may chime, but this is a semi-riff-with-structured-argument
on a number of books (provided at the end) I have read in the past month
(except Being & Time, which I am
currently reading, but which has featured in good measure in Morton’s &
Harman’s books). I hope it provokes some discussion.
Metaphor has extensive reach in how we perceive reality. That’s quite a bold, counter-intuitive assumption, isn’t it? Well yes, or not. Stopping, considering, it seems remote that a device, which uses another thing to point at a thing, indirectly, can’t possibly extend downward in such a perforating manner, to the core of perceiving a [the?] reality of things (maybe that’ll prove to be taking things a little far). But maybe metaphor is one (of potentially numerous) mad method for doing so.
Metaphor
has taken a bit of a haymaker since Pound’s Imagiste Manifesto, especially the
4th criteria: To present an image. We are not a school
of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and
not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for
this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real
difficulties of his art. I have always taken this to be a contributing
factor in the shrugging off of figurative language, as if simile, metonym,
personification or the like were a taint on the gracile sheen of a thing chosen
for its already rendered, veneered perfection. But that seems to me
problematic. It sort of embodies the assumption of a surface-reality
exclusivity & moreover that things are in & of themselves without any capacity
to affect each other. I have no quarrel with direct perception & the
artistic validity direct focus on stuff for stuff-sake, is one I find admirable
& can & often do subscribe to in my own poetry & gandering at the
world.
Graham Harman is a contemporary philosopher in the “New Theory of Everything” OOO, which stands for Object Oriented Ontology. His friend & fellow OOO enthusiast, Timothy Morton expresses ontology as “the how of what” which is pretty succinct, but accurate.
The justification of OOO’s necessity is complicated, but the actual action needed to live by its tenets is pretty easy: respect inanimate things as you would animate things. Why? Well, when you do, you come to more rendered considerations of the reason-for, & what-will-happen-if of creating something. As Morton likes to highlight in his book Hyperobjects (:enormous entities stretched across time & space, non-local, viscous, affecting; global warming, being an often used example) if we’d thought in such a way earlier in our civilizing capacity (hindsight not really helpful here), we’d have been more cautious in our plastic usage, more ready to outline the potential negative feedback loop it would initialize; realize sooner it takes the potential rise & fall of cultures to degrade. Same with nuclear fission, yes, it powers our homes, provides comfort, concludes our ancient fear of night, but it has also affected the ecological imbalance of the world, penetrating the ecosystem, leaving lasting damage 24,000 from now in the form of plutonium-239 “Gamma rays shoot out of” (Morton) through its lifetime & iodine-129 which will still appear in the sediments for future archaeologists to discover 15 million years from now.
These examples show
how our rash progressive nature is acted upon without proper interrogation of
the lasting effects.
This is becoming increasingly incontestable in the context we find ourselves in: we are actually, seriously debating altering the geological period as we exist through the tipping point of our effect on the ecological system. There is no going back on what we have done—we are in the Anthropocene; (elegantly treated in Simon L. Lewis & Mark A. Maslin’s recent book The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, a text worthy of everybody’s attention.)
In his book Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything Harman lays out some of the “principles of OOO”, number 1 being: “All objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional.” How so? Well, easy. Look at the effects of pollution, the examples of which are numerous. As Morton explains, we live in “a world in which there is no away” because when you begin to treat even a typical process as a thing (object), then something always has an effect, we get “context explosions” which Morton articulates better than I can in an article titled Subscendence:
The
thing about ecological contexts is that you can’t draw a line around them in
advance, because ecology is profoundly about interdependence. The biosphere
depends on earth’s magnetic shield to protect lifeforms from solar rays, and
this depends on the way earth’s iron core is spinning, and that depends on how
the earth formed in the early stages of the solar system, and so on. We are
dealing with a potential infinity of entities on a potential infinity of
scales—there is no way to ascertain whether the pleroma of beings has an end
point, at least not in advance. Ecological awareness just is this context
explosion.
This all ties in with metaphor & how it gets at the substance of stuffs. Kenneth Burke highlights that “etymologically ‘substance’ is a scenic word. A person’s or a thing’s sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing.”(Burke: The Paradox of Substance) Because of the “context explosion” affecting things with things, in the context of an [the] environment we can see that sub-stance of reality is the propping of things by things. “The leg bone’s connected to the toxic waste dump” (Morton).
Harman breaks down an essay by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, in one of his chapters. Harman thinks the essay a “neglected masterpiece in the realist tradition of philosophy.” Harman’s extolling the virtue of Ortega’s essay is due to how Ortega pinches shut the gap jacked by Kant, who saw phenomena (everything we are “able to encounter, perceive, use, think about”) as irreconcilable with noumena, which we are unable to access directly. A thing [being] is ultimately ungraspable (something, which Heidegger when to great lengths to remedy). The repercussion for OOO is that objects become (potentially & demonstrably: people are clearly not making adequate alterations to veer away from planetary catastrophe despite the evidence) insignificant, they are unworthy of attention unless they attract us through a conditioned pleasantness: a flower’s scent, a beautiful object, fashion, cute animals; while ugly animals, weeds, algae, lichen, fungi are not as clearly represented as beautiful in & of themselves & thus of a lower degree of importance. This perpetuated bias is of little use to OOO.
Ortega’s great insight is that “there is nothing we can make an object of cognition, nothing that can exist for us unless it becomes an image, a concept, an idea—unless, that is, it stops being what it is in order to become a shadow or an outline of itself.” This happens often when a scientist tries to explain (turn into metaphor) to a layman what would otherwise be an equation, or complex technical process only an expert would normally understand. This may be considered a belittling of the thing, but actually, in the context of a scientist informing a layman, the reach of the idea is expanded, the context explodes into language rather than confined to a specialized jargon. Carlo Rovelli, is a fine example of a physicist who captures the poetry of his profession & articulates its merits, through metaphor to a wider audience; I wish I had his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics to hand for examples, but I left it in Korea.
Music is another example. The musician writes the music & then reads it. To the average person the written music is unintelligible, it could say anything. The musician transforms the jargon of written music into something accessible to anyone, on top of which value can be obtained. Imagine if music was a mystery in the Eleusian register?
What the metaphor provides is a similar access. This is because
art does something spectacular, something data & empiricism struggles with:
it aestheticizes the thing, making it accessible. Ortega qualifies this:
“Notice I am not saying that a work of art reveals the secret of life and being
to us; what I do say is that a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we
call esthetic by making it seem that
the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us.”
This is my qualification for beginning this essay as I did. It helps give perceptual context to the quality of objects.
Metaphor I consider to be a magnification of sorts. Magnifying is to make the small larger, what metaphoring does is remove the insignificance of a thing & make it more significant, this has repercussions across all things, because of the proximity-making effect taking note enough to transform has. Metaphoring provides adjectival comparatives & superlatives a whole new reason to be. Think of looking into a petri-dish & then looking at a Hubble photograph of the observable universe. Two scales that resemble each other. The result: a conversation on scale, which in turn provides a context that oscillates between the macro & micro.
The performance of likening something to another thing[s] introduces us into the equation because it is only through the agency of a being (something like Heidegger’s Dasein) that the transubstantiation of stuffs into stuffs can become a force for understanding a closer knit relation we have with things. We come closer to objects in the act of likening them, because OOO brings us into an akin proximity with anything whatsoever: you are not so much indistinguishable from things, nor are you as or less important, only that by seeing them as accessible they become important tools, with a reduced likelihood they’ll be taken for granted. The bacteria, nor the cells or DNA in your body is not human, but they are the constitutive factors that allows you to be human; love your bacteria.
Ortega goes on to clarify that “the esthetic object and the metaphorical object are the same, or rather that metaphor is the elementary esthetic object, the beautiful cell.” [my italics] A cockroach is no replacement for a doctor, but that doesn’t mean the cockroach should be afforded less right to exist, otherwise what sort of repercussions on being-responsibility can that have? Where is the demarcation & why make it, how even? Who gets to say? Look around you. Essentially the swatting of a cockroach can produce the deleterious fixation of consumerism: both actions are thinking one effect has no effect on anything else.
To metaphor well, the properties of things can be listed & parallels founded on the evidence of their likeness, which intensifies both, bringing us into contact with the textures, uses, degrees of scale, shape & form of the thing being likened. (Degrees of scale is something I really want to talk about now, but will leave for a treatment all of its own.)
Take Alice Oswald’s metaphor in her poem Sisyphus from Woods etc. where she has the “thundercloud shaking its blue wolf’s head” & immediately both objects, though dissimilar in their structure & motive enhance each other through their puissance, texture & shape. We recognize immediately both objects as powerful, so they complement each other regardless of their dissimilitude. The properties of each are irreconcilable except through the aesthetic binding in the magnifying metaphor.
Metaphor allows us to interrogate the thing & in our
interrogation we integrate ourselves, enabling dissimilarities to coalesce
through aestheticism. This is why Morton analyzing Plato, arrives at the
conclusion that “art is demonic: it emanates from some unseen (or even
unseeable) beyond in the sense that I am not in charge of it and can’t quite
perceive it directly, in front of me, constantly present.” (Morton, Being Ecological)
Metaphor is a telling phenomenon, it not only enhances aesthetic effect, it enables the restructuring of jargon accessible to a minority, to be opened to a majority. This is akin to the move away from the sacerdotal securing of knowledge for itself to control others, to the information age where we carry the whole history of human thought in a small, easily accessible, easily manipulated device. Whatever the problems the contemporary world spumes up from its well of complexity, I think we are more provided for & prepared to formulate solutions under the current paradigm than at any other period in history. Go forth & metaphor.
Bibliography:
Burke, K. (1989). On Symbols and Society, ed by Joseph R. Gusfield. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Harman, G. (2018). Object
Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Great Britain: Pelican
Books.
Heidegger, M. (2010). Being
& Time. trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York
Press, Albany.
Lewis, S. L & Maslin, M. A. (2018). The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. Great Britain:
Pelican Books
Morton, T. (2018). Being
Ecological. Great Britain: Pelican Books.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects:
Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, London: The
University of Minnesota Press.
Morton, T. (October 2017). Subscendence.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156375/subscendence/
e-flux journal #85.
Oswald, A. (2007). Woods
etc. London: Faber & Faber.
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