I’ve been planing to do some reading on metaphor soon, but I figured that in the meantime, I might jot down some notes to track what changes, if any, there might be at the end of my study. Anyway, one interesting way to approach metaphor is with respect to both speed and novelty. Traditionally, metaphor is distinguished from the literal insofar as it is what might be called ‘figural’. The literal is ‘the thing itself’, while the metaphor is rhetorical figure that doubles and extends the literal. It’s clear however, that the metaphor is not merely a double of the literal, but in fact ‘adds' something new, something novel, to the sense of the literal. With respect to learning, metaphors are used precisely for their ability to shed new light on a concept that might otherwise be hard to grasp (not to mention their inherence at the heart of using words themselves - note, in the previous sentence the notions of ‘shedding light’ and ‘grasping’).

This notion of 'extending sense’ in fact puts metaphor on a continuum, a line (another metaphor!) with the literal at one end, and the unintelligible on the other, with metaphor perched precariously in the middle of both. Unintelligible because if the metaphor ‘strays’ too far from the literal, if I speak in figures and nothing but figures - images, things - it becomes almost impossible to make sense of what I am saying. Indeed, most prose, if not language, deploys itself as a sort of sew-sawing between the literal and the metaphorical, sometimes extending into the unintelligible in the case of some poetry. From the point of view of metaphor however, the literal - which here differs from the figural simply by degree - is in fact something like a ‘sedimented figure’, figures whose power to invoke what is novel or new is greatly diminished due to ubiquity and common use.

One way to think about this is in terms of speed: to use metaphor is to be able to rapidly deploy language so that - to utilise another distinction - the ‘spirit’, rather than just the ‘letter’ of a point is grasped at stroke. To remain at the level of the literal - strictly speaking, something impossible to do - is to use language in a ‘slow’ way, to move at a reduced pace in comparison to the speed at which metaphor works. The danger however, is the attempt to move too rapidly, to eschew the literal altogether in order to bound right over language and hit 'the point’ directly, as it were, a move which would result in sheer nonsense or the play of unbounded word-association.

An upshot of the above is that all language - whether metaphorical or literal - in fact brings something new to the table of making-sense. While the words we speak always harken back to a relatively stable set of pre-understood meanings, the ways in which we use words in concrete situations always inflects our words with a sheen of novelty that cannot be reduced to those pre-established meanings. We construct anew, in our manner of speaking, 'the world’, the horizon according to which our words makes sense and become co-coordinated to each other at the time of their utterance.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ways in which books, while they ‘begin’ with a stock of ‘well-worn and ready made significations’, end up ‘imperceptibly varying the ordinary meaning of signs, and like a whirlwind they sweep me along toward the other meaning with which I am to connect’. All language involves this kind of sweeping (a metaphor no one would get had I not established the parameters of it’s use by writing the words above). Just some thoughts to throw out.