The Metaphor: Sincere Expression of Perception or Pathetic Utterance Amidst Self-Delusion?

The poor metaphor in this week’s readings of Buck, Nietzsche and Balliff goes from mediocre, to worse to non-existent.

Buck discusses her three classifications of metaphor as radical, poetic and plain statement. For the most part, she is critical of the metaphor, noting that it often is made “cheap and tawdry” (35) in its artificial use by authors creating bad art or dishonest rhetors trying create a certain effect on listeners. However, she does allow for some genuine poetic metaphor when it truly is a statement about two elements perceived by the rhetor’s mind as one, which she believes is “psychological defensible” (43).

However, Nietzsche would say this is hopeless and the distinctions between good and bad metaphor moot. He sees all language as metaphor, or “arbitrary assignments” (1173) of words and therefore, man is incapable of ever obtaining truth. “We believe that we know something about the things themselves…and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (1174). Nietzsche views our reality as so anthropomorphic-centered that it is impossible for us to reach beyond our own perceptions.

I think the effort to do so is what Michelle Balliff is attempting with her model of a Third Sophistic, posthumanist transrhetorical Cyborg. She wants us to take control of reality, to “stretch the borders of language” (184) and “be a perpetual engagement with difference” (191). She encourages the rhetor to shake off this present metaphorical existence by stepping out of his/her historical context, power structure and epistemological framework or to produce “writing whose speed surpasses the consumptive appetite of abstractions, concepts and reasons” (193). Whether such a creature/action is possible is another argument, but if so, I think it might even cheer up Nietzsche.