/lit/ - Literature

>>10211747

...where does one draw the essential or irreduceable point of difference between metonymy and metaphor? maybe it's the case that we are in our deep individualist selves aware of being metonymic, and in our exterior selves metaphorical.

machine intelligence, in the sense that we talk about it here, largely deals with the *exteriorized* form. it doesn't matter what we *mean,* only what we *say.* this is sufficient for market formalism, acceleration, all the rest.

here we can criticize baudrillard's simulacra, too, perhaps, for being too general and too vague. the simulacra seems like an attempt to combine metaphor and metonymy into a *single* process, where we might be better off understanding them as parallel, but related ones. what we call Tradition is a *metonymic* process, what we call ideology is always *critique of metaphor*...

...and *mimesis* is a mutual awareness of *both* of these. we don't go to war over purely exteriorized, sensible interpretations, we go to war and fight to the death because we are *unable to tolerate the approriation of our interpretations by the other...*

...and so capital-as-machine-intelligence enters the picture and says, I Appropriate Nothing. Speak. I Am Listening. but we know that such a being can only be spoken to, in a way, but it is like speaking to an empty room...

...perhaps human *feeling* is this metonymous dimension, the sense of things being painfully and uncomfortably *bound up with each other.* we cannot *fully* distinguish metaphor from metonymy without a psychic break, and we cannot reduce metonymy *to* metaphor (although machines can - and perhaps can *only* do this.)

can we say then that mimetic crisis is conflict over metaphors, while Tradition is *agreement upon metonymy?* that is, the unspeakable One-All? that which endows metaphor with something that allows it to *be* a metaphor reflecting an irreducible metonymy itself? and which every attempt to split the difference or reconcile them politically results in disaster?

again, i feel that whatever it is that we can call literature is a form of being an *exception* to these infinite (and infinitely stupid, i will admit) cognitive traps. some people just get it: goethe, for instance. he just *got it.* and maybe the price for failure to understand this is that in the end you get the functionalist machine deities or forbidding Old Testament superegoic Big Others we deserve. because we see what we want to see. like beings stuck in plato's cave and hypnotized by the shadows.