From Metaphor to Metalepsis

From transfer to transformation: on personal growth

I have thoughts I would like to share on personal growth. Thoughts on “learning from experience.” Wilfred Bion, who titled his first book “Learning from Experience”, spent his writing life elaborating on that phrase and its potential meaning. Much of my thinking and writing on growth is informed by Bion. His work is a study of what I want to call the practice of encounter. How to help others and himself learn from experience?

I appreciate how simply I can ask myself that question. How can I learn from experience? I can ask it without mentioning Bion or having to know who he was, or even what his work was about. It’s a relief to not have to know. I can write or speak that question and others will immediately have a sense of its meaning. Common, ordinary language affords me that effective simplicity. Ordinary language also affords a richness. That richness, nonetheless, depends upon experience. 

The ease and flexibility of ordinary language is matched by its dependence on use, on experience. One example: “Love is what you've been through with someone” is a simple quote that often and easily comes to mind. I found it in Glen Gabbard, who coined it by paraphrasing James Thurber, the humorist. It’s easy for me to remember, and it’s easy for me to say that statement. It’s also understandable to nearly every person of almost any age. I would feel free to say it to anyone. It also points directly to experience. Love, an exemplary word of common language which can mean so many things, is here defined through shared experience. To a child it might mean what they have been through with parents or siblings. For an adult it might mean something more, depending on what they have been through with others, and depending on how much they have come to appreciate their intimate relations. I can then listen to how someone responds to the statement and ask them to express something of what they think it means. The ability to gauge another’s understanding then depends upon my own experience and learning from experience as well as my sensitivity to another’s experience. My sense of another person’s sense in a given moment, and their sense of mine.

Familiar words such as love are various in sense, polysemous. And they are constantly used in many senses with ease. Speaker and listener, writer and reader arrive at shared understanding through shared use, shared context, and shared experience. Sense is mobile as well, ever extending, and ephemeral. A sense may appear in one moment, in one context, only to recede in another.

Extended uses of common language are an everyday fact. It’s not something that users have to think about. That is how language is used. Some highly developed theories of common language are based on use or history of use. Meaning is use. I won’t defend or argue that definition of meaning in common language, but I will act on it and use it. (It’s more fun for me to make use of meaning than to rehash too many arguments.) 

It appears to me that common words have many meanings and are ever ready for new use and new meaning. But grounding meaning in use is notoriously slippery and odd in exposition or exercise. Ordinary language philosophers who ground meaning in the use of ordinary language are notoriously difficult to understand.

(An aside that can be skipped: Adam Phillips has a nascent project called “Ordinary Language Psychoanalysis” which appears to be inspired by Winnicott and by Stanley Cavell, an ordinary language philosopher. Winnicott took a turn to ordinary language in his writing, to enigmatic result, as did many others, Wilfred Bion among them. Adam Phillips can frustrate readers who want to pin down his meaning, which is ever mobile. A similar experience of frustration can be evoked by Winnicott or by Bion. I’m happy to not discuss the vagaries of an ordinary language approach too much. It can get difficult to read in its developed form and can also be laborious to read. I’m happy to simply point to the common. Ordinary language in use depends on shared sense, on agreement or on the illusion of agreement.  Stanley Cavell, in fact, grounds his understanding of natural language in “our ability and willingness to agree” with no guarantee. No school will form around such an ordinary language approach as it claims no special language. There is no school of Winnicott, no school of Adam Phillips, no school of Bion, no school of Cavell, or even later Wittgenstein. They are each too odd and too idiosyncratic, their mobile sense too dependent on context and experience. They tantalize, evoke, and frustrate their readers, and an experience of understanding them can be ephemeral. An “extraordinarily ambitious metaphilosophical project” as Chiara Alfano calls ordinary language philosophy is pursued without specialized jargon and with polysemy and mobile sense always in play.  Therapists and others who work with people directly know and live with this “no guarantee” more intimately than professional philosophers, and much of their conversation with others will go over areas of shared agreement or seeming agreement and find differences or new senses in which they may disagree or agree. In a generous atmosphere, much agreement can be assumed as difference is explored. How much good will and good faith, how much generosity do we depend on? Shakespeare, in one of his late romance plays, The Tempest, in the last words of the epilogue has Prospero directly ask the audience for their indulgence. We all do that when we speak and write. Just as I ask your indulgence in reading this, Prospero says,  “As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.” Thank you for your indulgence if you made it this far.)

One reason that grounding meaning in use may be so challenging as an exercise is that the exercise and its meaning are not transferable as an artifact. You have to be there. You have to have the experience or the capacity to understand a particular use of a common word in a given context. And experience can’t be given to you. Experience must be suffered. I can’t expect a child to know what love means to an adult.

Technical or professional communities are often prone to jargon in part because common language is such an unruly and rough realm, a wilderness. Meaning cannot be easily pinned down nor easily transferred. Scholars and professionals may then police language, preferring one definition of a term over another, hoping to control and to transmit a particular understanding or meaning.  And professionals often decry the debasement of a term by popular use. But a communicator or a language worker benefits from being more generous and more capacious, more humble in relation to the great drift of common speech. It’s an advance and a development to prefer common language to jargon. And it is challenging. Embrace polysemy. Embrace ambiguity. And speak or write without guarantee, if you dare.

I would have loved to name my newsletter “learning from experience” or “transformations” or “attention” or any of the more common words that Bion used to name his books, but they are so common that they are all taken. I chose metalepsis because it is not being used on this platform.  Though metalepsis is uncommon and specialized in use, I have a meaning for it that fits my purpose. I have a novel use for it that I want to build up to in my writing. 

But, a novel use of a common word, or a novel use of an uncommon word is a risk that depends on generosity if not outright indulgence. And a novel use of a word such as metalepsis needs a context, based on a previous history of use. Novelty arises out of experience, tradition, and creative need. If I share an experience or an orientation based on experience with someone, as I use a word, then perhaps another can get my drift.

Metalepsis is an old term from rhetoric that has been given novel use by literary critics, and I want to give it novel use in the domain of mental growth. My thinking about growth as an experience could be summed up by metalepsis as much as it could by Bion’s “learning from experience” or one of his other pregnant titles, “transformations”. But, I don’t assume that my readers will know what I or Bion mean by “learning from experience” or by metalepsis. I will, therefore, start from common use and make forays, assays, and sketches into novel use.

I don’t want to prematurely define metalepsis, to give it the meaning I intend. Especially since the focus of my writing is on experience and on practice, any meaning or sense that I give to a novel use of this odd word will depend on the context in my own writing combined with the work of others. Out of tradition and out of need, out of experience and use a new meaning emerges. A definition can give a preview of a new sense or a summary of old sense, a definition can be repeated and memorized, but the mobile and living sense of a word, a phrase, a concept can only be experienced in its use.

My patron saint in matters of novel use here is Marcel Duchamp who preferred examples to definitions. Prefer the example to the definition. Start small. Travel as lightly as possible. A toothbrush and a change of clothes. Though I mean “travel lightly” in a metaphorical sense, in fact, Duchamp notoriously did travel lightly, only with a toothbrush and one change of clothes.  He lived it. He needed to travel that lightly to be himself and do his work.

Duchamp went as far as to create new words which he did not define or explain, but only used. He provided examples, so that others might experiment themselves and discover their own uses for his novelty. But he did not define and he did not teach. He took himself so lightly and his projects so playfully that his neologisms were not jargon but something else. There is no school or discipline of Duchamp. Any relationship to him is purely elective. One feels an affinity or an inspiration from Duchamp and one goes one’s own way. (There is an affinity here with Bion, with Winnicott, with Adam Phillips, and with Cavell or Wittgenstein. One draws inspiration and one goes one’s own way. One Bion inspired writer calls Bion’s work a “model kit”, where one is called to make one’s own version of understanding. “Model Kit” comes from the title of a Cortazar novel. He gives you parts. You build something of it, if you will.)

Taking Duchamp’s attitude to heart, can I traipse over the subject of figuration, from metaphor to metalepsis with some ease? Can I do it lightly enough? I need to. When I encounter others and when I communicate with them, I try to use a shared and common language in a light and simple form. I need to travel lightly, to speak lightly.

Starting with common areas of language and experience, initially sharing a common language (we may be using a common language differently), and through the sharing of experience and the sharing of communication about that experience, shared words may begin to be experienced with a richness of meaning. Words and phrases may then take on new meanings or new degrees of richness and meaning.

Without assuming too much, starting from a shared and common place, perhaps I can communicate something novel. For now, I feel most comfortable rehearsing a common basis for myself and for you, my reader, both. 

Without belaboring or defining too much, what can I say of metalepsis that none of us will have to remember too much of? Simply, metalepsis is a trope, figure of speech, a variation on metaphor. Aristotle, who knew a thing or two about figurative language, rolled all the figures up into one easy to remember term. One which we can all know and can pass over quickly enough. Metaphor. A word that we don’t have to define to use. 

Metaphor in its most basic senses, is something we all use, whether consciously or not.  Saint Augustine famously said of time, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”  Of metaphor, I might say, “What is metaphor? Without asking myself what it is, I will nonetheless use it, both consciously and unconsciously. I cannot escape it. But if I try to explain it, I do not know.”

Metaphor may be in essence ungraspable, but it does have a basic everyday definition. It is a common word. Thankfully. As a figure of speech it is a transfer of sense, a use of a word or phrase in a strange or novel sense. A sense is brought from one domain to another in order to lend life, color, or illumination. 

Metaphor is much needed and appreciated. A gift for metaphor is highly prized. Aristotle praised that gift; he said “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances”. 

Metaphor is sometimes summed up as a “comparison by transference of a descriptive word or phrase”. (transference is a rich and overloaded term in different domains) Metaphora, the Greek word, is itself a metaphor that literally means a transfer or a carrying over. 

The subject of metaphor quickly gets out of hand, however, if I look deeply into it. But metaphor also remains somewhat clear when I most simply think of it. If I just assume that I understand what it is in its most basic senses, I can start to use it.

One of the simplest definitions of metaphor, one that is easy to observe, is metaphor's contrasting difference from literal sense (metaphor is figurative, not literal). But if I look too closely or ask too deeply of what is figurative and what is literal? 

The literal under analysis will take on odd guises. When observed closely, it may appear as uncanny. The common ground will prove itself rough and strange. But, it seems that to arrive at reflective distance from the literal, and to inquire into the nature of the literal enough to see its strangeness is a development. Thought disturbed individuals most noted for their literalness cannot reflect on “literalness”. (Wittgenstein made the roughness and strangeness of the common ground a focus of his reflections, and Stanley Cavell titled his Tanner Lectures, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary”.Their focus on the roughness and strangeness of the ordinary is highly sophisticated, though it may not appear so on its common surface.) 

(A short history of metaphor: Metaphor as a figure of speech is an object of poetic language and rhetorical use. It also has cognitive or mental aspects, aspects which were first mentioned by Aristotle and others. Metaphor as structural and implicit, historical, cultural and developmental. The mental or developmental aspect of symbolic thought or capacity for metaphor was a particular focus of  Bion and others. Implicit or structural metaphor later became a focus in Cognitive Science. The mental and developmental aspects of symbolic thought, its development or lack of development in a particular individual is of particular interest to me and of many who work with other people or themselves to develop or grow. And I want to explore this developmental aspect of symbolic thought at length.)

So, assuming that we have a sense for metaphor, the figure of figures, heart of rhetoric, and prized of Aristotle, what is metalepsis and why did I choose it as a title for a newsletter about learning and growth? I beg your indulgence. 

I’m taking a risk. I was warned to never use metalepsis by Quintillian and shamed out of using it by Puttenham, those old teachers. Puttenham declared the trope itself an indulgence, and he named it the far-fetched, an exoticism. Quintillian found it absurd and saw it as at best the stuff of the ridiculous and the exaggerated. At its simplest and in its most common form, it is a slip, a mixed metaphor, a catachresis. Not the stuff of good poetry or prose. In trying to take a big leap, in trying to say something creative, I may fall flat. And when I fall flat, comedy or embarrassment follow.

Falling flat may be just the place to start. It’s humble enough, and we have all been there. It’s how we learned to walk if we did, and how we learned to ride bicycles.  Bion’s Learning from Experience was born from his struggle and failure. He failed to communicate with “thought disturbed” psychotic patients. And he struggled to communicate in the face of his failure.

The rough ground of failure can be a place to start, provided I can allow myself the experience of failure, and learn something from it. Falling flat, falling short are common and comedic. The stuff of the pun and of mixed metaphor are stuff of slips. And allowing for and listening to slips is a method. Metalepsis is my attempt to learn from experience.  ‘

I start here with simple or rudimentary meaning. It fits my purpose to start with a rudiment, with something simple, because I write for experience and about experience. I like to write and learn as an experience. I like to enjoy reading and writing like I enjoy art or music. As I enjoy music for the experience of it, I’d like to invite others to read me for the experience of it. I don’t take notes when I’m listening to music. I don’t want take notes when I’m learning. Nor do I want to take notes when I am reading. I want to read with the same attitude that I listen to music with, with receptivity and feeling, for experience.

I’m not here to teach or to burden another or myself with too much of learning. I’m after another kind of learning, a kind that comes from experience, not from facts or definitions or arguments alone. Another kind of learning that permits of another kind of attention and another kind of memory. It’s easier to start with what we all share.

(This is not a mental health newsletter, and it is not geared for a professional audience. Although I may be informed by training and learning in any number of disciplines, I’m not a gatekeeper and I have no allegiance to any school of therapy or learning. I do have appreciation, passion, and enthusiasm, and that is what I would like to share. Nothing here should be construed as advice, professional or personal. I am here for the enjoyment and to share a passion for learning.)

---