FoolsCap

Is it too bold a claim that mediation and metaphor overlap?

I’ve been thinking about Kant, despite my earlier avowals to never again do so.  In particular, I’m thinking about a phrase I wrote for one of the Flatley papers, "the apparatus of subjectivity," to describe Kantian subjectivity.  To whit, a vastly reductive diagram:

sensory impressions  —> subjectivity (imagination/reason/understanding) —> cognition

As Flatley points out (in lecture, although if I bothered I’m sure I’d find some official reference to it somewhere), the Kantian subject’s experience of the world is always mediated by the processes necessary for the cognition of experience (what I called the "apparatus" for shorthand reference).  So a little extrapolation  generates this model of mediation:

information/data —> media (however you choose to understand that) —> subject

And after some thought, metaphor is starting to seem like it works like mediation too; yes, it’s comparative, but can we also say it works like this,

object one —> object two —> reader

such that the first object is understood through a mediated relationship to the second?  Let’s tak every third grader’s favorite metaphor, "cotton-candy clouds," and apply it to this model:

clouds  —> cotton-candy —> reader

If this model works and holds true, then metaphor is mediation, or at least analogous to it: we can understand the first object through the way it is mediated through the second. 

Okay, so something to think about.  But what do I do with this?  First, read more.  Then, think more.  And after that, write more.

And think rhetorically too, dagnabbit.

Later. . .thoughts on deconstruction and metaphor.