Stop Sign, or, Don't Read Semiotics When You're Stoned

These days I'm very much enjoying my friend Viviane K. Namaste's book, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. It's jogging my brain, inspiring me, and helping me more deeply understand the philosophical underpinnings of the reflexive poststructuralist methodology of the sociological study she has designed to investigate what barriers exist to certain local populations (bisexual-identified women, swingers, and men who have sex with men and women without identifying as bi) accessing health care services. I'm on the advisory committee for this project. More about that later.

I'd had a lovely joint and a snack this afternoon when I sat down at a sunny table for a read. I stayed there until I got to this passage in V's larger exploration of metaphor as a socially-constitutive rhetorical device quite distinct in its operations and effects from mere comparisons or substitutions. She quotes philosopher Max Black (p.97):

"We are supposed to be puzzled as to how some expression (M) , used metaphorically, can function in place of some literal expression (L) that is held to be an approximate synonym; and the answer is that what M stands for (in its literal use) is similar to what L stands for. But how informative is this? There is some temptation to think of similarities as "objectively given," so that a question of the form "Is A like B in respect of P?" has a definite and predetermined answer. If this were so, similes might be governed by rules as strict as those controlling the statements of physics. But likeness always admits of degrees, so that a truly "objective" question would need to take some such form as "Is A more like B than C on such and such a scale of degrees of P?" Yet, in proportion as we approach such forms, metaphorical statements lose their effectiveness and their point."

Two clear-headed readings later, I can follow up on the implications of this quote, but in trying to do so yesterday while high, I got living proof of (temporarily, I hope) having lost my effectiveness and point. I put V's book back in my bag and went out to buy a Star magazine and a jumbo Snickers.