[I’ve been a bad blogger and am now catching up on the blogreading that events kept me from for about a week.]

AKMA is once again doing the hard work for us, worrying about how our ways of talking about literalism are themselves infused with non-literal metaphors:

Am I being perversely literalistic if I ask, “If the world is behind the text, why can?t I reach around and touch it?”

And in a follow-up entry he writes:

…metaphors such as “the text is a mirror” should help us understand something that would otherwise be obscure, or they risk further obscuring the topic by introducing problems with the metaphorical representation of the topic that aren’t already implied by the topic itself. And that phenomenon matters all the more urgently since “clarity” and “obscurity” are themselves metaphors…

Hofstadter’s book should have been titled Gödel, Escher, Bach and AKMA (where “AKMA” is in fact a metaphor for the best of post-modernism). You want to understand our relationship to the texts and meanings of the world, asks PoMo with it’s sharp-edged and often superior air? (Not AKMA!) Then you’d better recognize that there’s a metaphysics concealed within the concept of understanding: foundations, things “standing for” or “representing” other things, understanding as an “inner” state, etc. That metaphysics is self-contradictory: it says it’s only real when it stands on a firm foundation, but such foundations are neither firm nor foundational. So, what then is understanding to do?

Welcome to the 21st century where we can no longer say “A metaphor is a bridge for understanding” without falling off the bridge. Laughing.

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AKMA‘s doctor is pleased with his patient’s recovery. AKMA wonders what the stitches look like from the inside.

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I don’t usually get sentimental about money. Here’s an exception…

Frankly, I thought they were nuts when the Dean campaign gave itself the very public goal of raising $5M in ten days, mainly over the Internet. And it looked like I was right as the thermometers on the Dean site slowly edged up.

But last night, they made it and came damn close to the absurd goal of raising $15M in a quarter, breaking the previous record of $10.4M set by Bill Clinton when he was president and not competing for funds with 9 other candidates.

Ah, but you point out that W has raised multiples of that. True. But here’s the point that truly matters: The average donation to the Dean campaign was something like $77. That’s the sound of the grassroots rooting.

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