I’m still in the process of deepening the analysis of the death of Damocles episode. I’ve just introduced new bits of terminology, distinguishing figurations from configurations, and clarified some of the more technical metaphysical details; it’s time to explore how they work together.
10. A central feature of figurations is the metaphorical connection which holds between some of the events in them, and which is what is taken up in the psychological uptake that makes a figuration into a configuration.
Thus when discussing the Damocles case, I have characterized the stopping of the clock as metaphorically expressing another event: the literal death. The latter is Damocles dying, but it’s now additionally expressed as “Damocles’ clock running out.” That sentence, of course, is a rendering in language which makes it immediately plain what the metaphorical meaning of the event is. But we have to be aware that this is not simply meaning in the sense of the linguistic meaning of that sentence; nor is it linguistic meaning in any other sense. The communication, if we were to call it that, happens in a different way.
To see this, consider what happens when someone grasps the metaphorical meaning. In our example, Cassandra sees the clock has stopped (or sees the clock at the precise time when it stops), and she understands this directly. This means that Cassandra doesn’t have to formulate, out loud or even silently to herself, the very sentence “Damocles’ time has run out”, in order to take up the metaphorical significance. She doesn’t need any linguistic construct (a rendering in express language) to understand this relationship between the events. When Cassandra notices the clock stopping, she grasps it: she knows, in that moment, that Damocles has just died. (Another way of putting this is by saying, as I have done earlier, that both events express the same fact: one as the literal happening, the other as a metaphorically related happening. Cassandra becomes aware of that fact, not by receiving a linguistic report about the death, but by witnessing the event that expresses it metaphorically.)
Now we can make that relationship explicit, by bringing it under a description, where it will show up as a “metaphorical” one (which is what I’ve called it up to now, too). But the metaphorical character here is not exactly one as traditionally understood: it is not one of, that is, one language construct metaphorically standing in (being substitutable) for another. The metaphorical relationship does not only come out when being brought into language, it can appear directly in what happens, in what is going on as Cassandra experiences it.
True, this direct character is somewhat obscured if we look at it in the novel variation of our analogy: there, a reader understands the significance of the event, very similarly to how Cassandra understands it, but the experience is necessarily one of reading, of taking up meaning as it has been brought into linguistic form. Cassandra lives through the event, the reader reads about it, and in this way is once removed from it, or, as we could equally say, once mediated through language.
But the relationship is not a relationship between the sentences that express it: it’s a relationship between the events. (Just in the same way as a causal relationship is one between events, not between the physical descriptions that describe them.) This is what I meant by saying that the relationships between the events in a figuration belong on the “objective” side of things (though not physical objectivity here, but that of the cultural context within which metaphorical relationships hold). Of course, to analyze the relationships and figure out whether they hold or not, we have to start putting things into sentences, and only there we can see them. But what emerges in those descriptions (if they fit what they describe) are relationships between what happens, not between what we use to describe what happens.
And needless to say: there are types of description where this metaphorical character of the relationship between these particular events doesn’t come out. (A purely physical description, for example, knows only relations such as causal ones or physical constraints, neither of which we have seen don’t hold between the events in this example set.) Metaphorical relations between events (and thus: figurations), even though they can be intersubjectively verified to hold, and perhaps even hold objectively, still only appear under a suitable description.
Given these considerations, “metaphorical” is perhaps not the best term for this layer. (But for lack of a better alternative, I’m going to stick with it for now.)
