Condense, Authorize, Destabilize: Multiperspectivism and Stratigraphy

Abstract

The paper is both an exercise in multiperspectivist analysis of metaphors and an attempt to find a theoretical foundation for the possibility of such a procedure. The concept of speculative realist “decentered thought,” which is most clearly encapsultated in Morton’s dark ecology project, implicitly presupposes a thematization and problematization of the “center” of the conceptual system - a mesh that makes the order reproduced by it a solid and stable picture of a possible world. Appealing to the theory of metaphor allows one to fix on this tension, which arises not between philosophical theory and some “external world” but between the conceptual system and the possible existence of way of ordering its instances. This also solves two problems: first, via reconfiguration of the concept of the “center” of the conceptual system by inscribing a metaphor into it; and second, by invoking and reinterpreting the Ankersmit problem to endow metaphor with the ability to act while highlighting the basic modes of its agency. This interpretation diverges from the classical - perspectivist - conceptualization of metaphor as an operator of unambiguous order in a theory and turns the systems of concepts themselves into clots of multiple and ambiguous interpretations of metaphors that always reserve the right to be something else and not the same as before. The article tests and illustrates this multiperspectivism with the conflict of metaphors involved in the transfer of the concept of Ian Bogost’s alien phenomenology to Levi Bryant’s onto-cartography system. The final part of the article elaborates a multiperspectivist stratigraphy project (an as yet non-existent branch of theory that would turn a metaphor into both an object and instrument of description and explanation) and also maps out points of uncertainty that, once overcome and clarified, would make such a stratigraphy possible. Why does the Other defeat Technology? Where has perspectivism failed? How is a history of metaphors possible if temporal regimes themselves turn out to be an effect of metaphorical operations? How can metaphors act? The article clarifies and details some answers to these and other questions.