Martin E. Rosenberg| The Role of Metaphor (or Tropes more generally) in Trans-disciplinary Inquiry_1

Programmer and Organizer: Sepideh Majidi
Moderator: Sepideh Majidi
Video edit: Shaum Mehra

The Role of Metaphor (or Tropes more generally) in Trans-disciplinary Inquiry
Session 1
The purpose of this talk is to investigate how a paradox in Gilles Deleuze's attitude towards metaphor (or tropes generally speaking) might play a significant role in resolving a problem understanding the productive, perhaps even subversive role of tropes in the “forging” of trans-disciplinary “alliances” across science, philosophy and the arts. This paradox has yet to be unpacked properly. In the English “Preface” to Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues vigorously for such “forgings.” Yet, Deleuze is famous for denying the efficacy of metaphor, and for condemning analogy specifically for its taint by identity and transcendence (or Being), a condemnation which implicates as well the genus/species formations which lie at the heart of disciplinarity itself.

What I propose to do here is to re-view the problematic “operational closure” of disciplinary formations through the lense of Gilles Deleuze's critique of analogy, representation, and the trap of genus/species formations in his masterwork Différence et repetition (1968). I will then read that same text to rehabilitate a paradigm of tropical performance which will answer Deleuze's call to forge “mobile relations” or what the cognitive scientists Maturana and Varela would call emerging “consensual domains” across rigid disciplinary boundaries, while at the same time avoiding the error of analogy that Deleuze links to an ontology of Being which undergirds genus/species formations, and which, in turn, re-inscribes that Being.

This talk builds on earlier work which emerged from 1. my critique of the role of science metaphors from thermodynamics in Freud and Deleuze and Guattari; 2, my examination of the naïve or ironic cultural work of the metaphor “chess” across disciplinary boundaries in my hypermedia project Chess RHIZOME; 3. my deployment of Bruno Latour and Peter Galison's notion of the "agency" of tools, in enabling trans-disciplinary “Trading Zones” as an approach to understanding the cultural work of tropes; and 4. my examination of Arakawa and Gins’ concept “terminological junctions” in their manifestos, in terms of Deleuze’s “shocks to thought.”

I first examine how Deleuze critiques the motive to deploy the tropical dimension of language to establish identity-relationships among concepts in disparate fields of inquiry. Then, I wish to replace this motive with one which deploys tropes and their extensions in models and diagrams transversally, to subvert the arboreal formation of disciplines, and to establish contingent, emergent alliances, for the specific purpose of generating events that are understood in terms of what Deleuze calls "shocks to thought." These events reveal intensive processes, indicating qualitative changes in the nature of knowledge-formation that reverberate cosmo-politically (from Isabelle Stengers) across all disciplines--processes of morphogenetic knowledge-formation that (as Francicso Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch demonstrate) can account for the emergence of historically significant innovations such as the hybrid discipline of cognitive science. I will discuss tropes derived from reversible and irreversible time, chess, entropy, bifurcation/individuation, and singularity, to unveil errors, and then model their recuperation.

[EdT.-xtyv]

56:00 prelude:embodied mind, ,
31:00 demystify, avant garde complicit,