Where I differ with McHulan though is important. I think the
metaphor is literal and creates a change in perception. Tzara speaks of a
literalism of the imagination - M.M sees all media as the carrier of
another media (Understanding Media), where as I see the media as shaped by
a multitude of things, a multiplicity (as in Deleuze and Guattari), "the"
multiple. It is the niveau which underides all media, media are the molar
level of perception. This woman's metaphor was not only wearing me, but it
created affect at the deepest level of my being - I wept as I mentioned.
For myself MM is only the outermost level of the figure, the figure is the
first level of the metaphor, and there are hundreds of levels. After all
metaphor is metamorphosis, it is from biology in one sense that metaphor
emerges from. The deepest metaphor is a perceptual device, a probe
allowing one to "go in" and "farther" and also to "go out." NO, metaphor
is not only a "figure of speech" rather is it the speech of Figure. The
human body is the model - thus as in Dylan Thomas' line - Man be my
metaphor - Man here being the body, and the body of memory and the
future. The casting forth of new biolgies, and the rhizomatic nature of
its escapes, its perpetual ways of escape and flight. So if I wore this
woman's inner life, it was more than a mere media framing, it was the
grinding out of another body, the body of empathy and identity, the
creation in fact of anther body, the body without organs. As lovers do.
CDuffy
"All bodies are miracles, awaiting their word."
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