73: A Verb & Her Metaphor

a short defense against the latter & the search for the best former

I remember, a few years ago, sitting on my porch and thinking about how fucked up the world is. Inasmuch as I’ve waged a tiresome battle against metaphor— or worked hard to either avoid its uncritical deployment or at least consistently offer a self-critique in those instances where I do use it— I suppose then, as now, some preconscious script simply runs automatically in the search for a good metaphor to ascribe to whatever it is that I’m thinking about.

My thoughts fell upon the verbal adjective unhinged. The world, it seemed, is something like unhinged. I immediately set upon attacking my own word choice, feeling that the metaphor deployed wasn’t nuanced enough: to me what I wanted my metaphor to describe was a world with an overwhelming amount of elements forming an impossibly vast network of relations that all seemed to be “falling apart,” and I it didn’t strike me that unhinged— which, btw, I evoked in a literal sense, as denoting two things that were connected by a hinge, and not a colloquial version of something like “crazy,” all though, in its way, that also worked toward describing the world I was trying to articulate— really worked.

There are further problems with the word: besides its ableist connotations, the metaphor presented is of something like a door that has been removed from its hinges. The connotation here being that it, at one point, functioned “properly,” and that something happened to cause its lack of functioning— someone came across the door and removed it from its hinges. Things were good at one time, before everything started “falling apart.”

This notion is important because what would the effort to de-unhinge or rehinge or simply hinge the world (again) look like? What logics and therefore strategies and tactics would or should be deployed in the service of (re)hinging the world? And what exactly is that end goal, what does that de-unhinged world look like? If the idea is that things used to be good and we can make them good again, then the idea is merely reformist: conservative, reactionary and ultimately fascist. Cough cough.

Recently and relatedly, while on (something like a) date, I was sharing with my visitor my interest in physics. I could tell that she was immediately repulsed by the idea that anyone would have that (no judge, honestly), but she said something then that struck me in a way that was probably as difficult to hide from her as her distaste for the idea that I might like physics was impossible to hide from me. As I was explaining why I was interested in physics, she mentioned that this sort of knowledge was good “as a metaphor.” It was a fraught vibe check, to say the least.

Later that night, as she drove away, I wondered why anyone would actively choose to make something that is empirically verifiable (e.g. real) a metaphor. Why would someone choose to transform the reality of something observed— something breathtaking and fantastic, I might add— into a phantasy of an entirely different meaning, and do so on purpose? Is it that we do not have the humility to sit before something we don’t understand, or that we are scared of the complexity of the thing, or are so anxious for a felt sense of political or ethical meaning that might animate us that we tend to imbue everything with a sort of religious or quasi-religious hermeneutic symbolism to make it makes sense, give us instructions, or feel like our lives are worth living? Forgive me, I know that often this sort of rhetorical structure usually suggests that the answer, for the author, is in the question, and in this case it partly is. The answer is all of those things and more, probably, but my point isn’t to find and answer, but to sit in the question, and to be okay sitting in the question, the same way I am okay sitting with something I don’t quite understand, like black holes, quantum physics, relativity both general and specific. And I’m ok with this because I think it’s a good thing.

It is good because it is the foundation for the sort of work that is a defense against the way ideology can take up our thinking, both on the personal and discursive levels, and have us working against ourselves. In his essay “(More) Regular-Ass, Everyday (Historical) Materialism (,Please),” forthcoming from The Parallax Conspiracy for the Articulation of Thaumaturgical Research/ Ideas, what Eugene Love describes in relation to colloquial speech that ascribes agency to something other than humans (eg “god”) is also at play here, in that they are both

symptomatic of something like an overall cultural attitude that itself has something like roots in mostly unscrutinized assumptions about how the world, or reality even, works. And I think that this is important because they are expressions of things like values, and things like values (or our very conception of ‘value’) underpin and animate action in the world, from your individual decisions to the policies and very structure of our government and economy. Values can be overdetermined, in the sense that they mean many things— but not in the sense that they mean everything or even so many things that it’s not worth examining them. In this case, the value I see propounded by the above mentioned colloquialisms is not ‘a general cultural belief in god,’ but something more along the lines of ‘a general tendency to ascribe value to something other than anything that exists in the world, especially people.’ And it is this value that I believe is both actively harmful, on an individual as well as cultural or social level, and able to be exploited, taken up and hijacked by those entities, classes and institutions that wield power and mete out oppression and domination.

In sitting with this thing I’m seeking to understand and articulate (and by rereading what I’ve written), it becomes apparent that what I failed to do, both in my initial consideration of the word “unhinged” as well as my remembrance of that consideration, was to make the distinction— or identify the non-distinction I was (not) making— between the search for a verb and the search for a metaphor. It is a very good practice to search for a good verb when looking to articulate the world, and it is very easy to accidentally choose (or not realize you’re looking for) a metaphor— or to let that verb become, or function as, a metaphor for something else. The search for the right verb is asking the question “what is this thing doing?” so that we can then find ways to answer the question “what can we do about it?”