Master’s of Arts thesis
European Graduate School
Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought
Abstract
Pivot: Tropes, Tropisms, and Non-Metaphor
Using a non-philosophical methodology, I propose to track the theological origins of the concept of trope through hermeneutics and into deconstruction, turning to biology for a recuperation of the root tropos as movement-towards. This movement-towards will be argued as a metaphor-in-the-last-instance of its unilateral relation with the real, extended into language and abstraction through the indication of movement and valuation in relation to environmental gradients. I argue that the focus on movement is a key non-philosophical strategy, as it necessitates a description that “requires its constant recasting [and is] not determined but indefinitely rectified.” Movement’s perceptible necessity is change, a phenomenon that is describable, but never as a stable scene or calcified order.
Also inherent in this instance of movement is an allowance for the abstraction of that description of change in order to construct adaptive value environments through which to navigate and understand change. The evolutionary development of the organism requires this abstraction, which is determined by its environmentally devised tropisms, the most basic being geo-, photo-, and hydrotropism. The initiation of the trope through movement is a base form of conflationary description of the real with abstraction. This form will be used to reassess analogous gestures, in value and language. Its interrogation is necessary to think the dyadic philosophical relation of “the object and the thought of the object….the real and language in the mixture of the logos.” Its continued use and morphology throughout textual philosophical practices is further evidence of the trope’s “prohibition of knowledge in the name of interpretation.” Using dynamical systems theory to describe multiple field gradients, and the movements within them, I will attempt to apply this methodology to abstract metaphor environments.
From a turn-towards, to a turn-towards-God, to a turn-of-phrase, the trope exemplifies the exploitation of the real through philosophy. This exploitation substitutes a constructed ideological value environment for that of the initial external biological stimulus, in a coercive attempt to manipulate various movements-towards. I argue that by reducing the trope to its biological constitutive element, that of the pivot, a perceivable reaction to the external stimulus of the real, we can both trace the monumental inflation of its extracted value from the real, and begin to attempt a methodology based on its determination in the last instance.
Full text PDF available on Academia.edu
Cover image pulled from the software: https://github.com/anvaka/fieldplay
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