‘Semantics, semantics…’ I hear the learned voice in my head rant.
I can’t help but wonder. Is it all semantics? Is it only semantics? Perhaps it is far more. I like taking liberties with language; it makes writing fun. But what happens to language, to the people who use it, when we leave long-assumed sense behind? When we do it too quickly, too carelessly?
Language is a process. Not an ideology; although it is used to promote those.
The ground beneath us is being, or has been, upended. The world is in flux (but then apparently it always was). Words and meaning and substance are doing a Nietzschean dance. Accept the current scientific theories, drive them to their very ends, and metaphor is all there is. Or there is no such thing as metaphor at all.
Either we, and all we know and some stuff we don’t know but suspect, are like icons on a desktop, coming into view or partial view based on information retrieval and a ‘Fitness-Beats-Truth’ (FBT)* theorem (Hoffman, 2019: xv) before vanishing again – outside of human time of course – or, metaphor is entirely non-sensical in the post-representational paradigm that contemporary science points towards. In that post-representational paradigm, words and matter do not ‘essentially differ from one another’ (Rovelli, 2026: vii), so a rose can be an object or a quality. And even when it is an object, it isn’t really because objects are only the contingent outcome of relations, of which we and our understanding are a part. All of reality, us, the black holes, the McDonald’s patties and lunch deals, climate change, server farms and daisies, are anti-foundationalist becomings. None of these random listed items, objects, processes – call them what you will – were named from the outside by some higher order (be that us humans or the Gods we invented in our image).
Karen River Barad (2007: 150) writes;
Just as there are no words with determinate meanings lying in wait as so many candidates for an appropriate representational moment, neither are there things with determinate boundaries and properties whirring aimlessly in the void, bereft of agency, historicity, or meaning, which are only to be bestowed from the outside, as when the agency of Man pronounces the name that attaches to specific beings in the making of word-thing pairs.
I am not remotely qualified to argue for or against either of the theories above with any rigour. I merely find myself puzzled by the implications; there is only metaphor, or metaphor doesn’t exist at all. I can barely count, never mind understand the complex equations and physics philosophies that lead Hoffman or Barad and Rovelli to these models of reality and current summations. I have little choice, given my lack of mathematics, but to almost ‘believe in’ this one or that. I’m inclined to lean towards Barad and Rovelli’s arguments, not least of all because Hoffman – some of whose theory does seem right to my post-Enlightenment, post-scientific revolution sensibilities – talks of giant triangles on the edge of reality where Gods may reside. Is he speaking metaphorically? Is metaphor the only way to conceive of such an outlandish idea? Is it any more outlandish than the blood of Christ absolving my sins? And yet, Barad and Rovelli, which at first lead me to no such thing as metaphor, equally could also amount to ‘all there is is metaphor’. If words and the things they describe are only ever ‘becomings’, then all words are metaphor. Including ‘it’, ‘if’ and ‘and’… each an agential cut and therefore a metaphor for a caught moment, a snapshot, a trace of ever-changing relations. But I am also a little with Hoffman when he does not seem to do away with representation but rather leans into it, as a super-positional entanglement of representation/with process, since I am somewhat sceptical of the desire to throw anything out entirely. Are we not inescapably representational/process critters, after all? Do we not rely on the representation of reality to move around, find a mate, feed ourselves, emerge continuously into the seen reality, then retreat, leaving behind memories and photographs and Facebook accounts?
There are objects. I see, touch, feel them.
No; objects are in decline. There is only relationship, out of which the meaning of things in the world arises. We are inside and part of that relating. How can we ‘say what is up and what is down’ under such circumstances (Bohr, in Petersen, 1985: 302, cited in Barad, 2007: 125)?
‘Phenomena cannot be understood in terms of objects’ (Rovelli, 2026: 5). I would love to no longer be an object and wish so much to believe. Perhaps you feel just like an object. Perhaps I an unable to escape it; even though I’d rather not interpret myself in that way.
Do objects not exist outside the peculiar and idiosyncratic linguistic perspective we humans inhabit? Or is the question a sign I simply cannot escape my anthropomorphic view of reality? One that constructs the view through human eyes and skills alone.
Our human lens, born of evolutionary time, has informed our intuitions, out of which our Time has also emerged; intuitions that told us what the words ‘time’, ‘I’, ‘heaven ’, and ‘earth’ mean (use of the word intuition, Rovelli, 2026).
Or emptiness. Today, here in the 21st century, we are learning that the word empty may have been a metaphor all along; for nothing, nowhere, has been empty for as long as existence existed. Maybe there was a bang into emptiness. Maybe there was a bounce out of it. Now – by which I mean the parochial human now – a bag of air is not a bag of nothing. A hole in the ground is not a hole without something. An emptiness in my heart is neither empty nor nothing. The bag may feel light, but it is teeming. We might be able to see all the way down to the bottom of the hole, but it is thriving with quarks and energy and fluctuations and potential. My heart is always brimming with life, sometimes agonising life, until it is no longer, no matter how I feel. The void may be whirring, but not with words waiting to be matched to fully-formed things waiting to be named.
Should we then dispense with the word empty? Now that science has convinced us that nowhere is empty and emptiness never was. But words, in fact, move, just as we do. Text is related to weave: ‘texture’. Today, however, you have to listen carefully to hear text speaking to its origins. Text implies a stream of letters sent on a phone or a piece of writing in a play. In semiotics, it is a little broader; an image, a film, a book or a painting. Yet, if I spoke about the weft and weave of the text, I would be accused of drifting towards metaphor. A computer was a person who made calculations. Today it is a device. If I referred to myself as a computer, you’d think I was being metaphorical. In fact, given my disability where counting is concerned, I might merely be guilty of delusional fantasy.
Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Sarah-Jane, said the lecturer with whom I tried to have this conversation. Of course there are metaphors. Really, I ask? In that case, perhaps I am one. Perhaps you are too. Perhaps we all are neither and both all at once.
*The FBT Theorem tells us that the language of our perceptions—including space, time, shape, hue, saturation, brightness, texture, taste, sound, smell, and motion—cannot describe reality as it is when no one looks. It’s not simply that this or that perception is wrong. It’s that none of our perceptions, being couched in this language, could possibly be right (Hoffman, 2019: xv)
Refs:
Barad, K.M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hoffman, D.D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes, London: Allen Lane.
Rovelli, C. (2026) On the equality of all things: physics and philosophy. Translated by S. Carnell. London: Allen Lane.
Further reading:
Smith, D. (2019) ‘Sense and Literality: Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy’, pp. 44–67. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429022562-4.
Smith-Ruiu, J. (2022) ‘Why do metaphors matter’, The internet is not what you think it is: a history, a philosophy, a warning. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 140–145.
This entry arose from thoughts I had in 2019 while researching and writing a BA final essay for my Open College of Arts Photography degree.