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view, is none other than 'information' in the most proper sense of the term: an excess of disorder in respect to existing codes. When faced with metaphor, we sense that it is turning into a vehicle of knowledge, and intuitively (in surveying the subjacent metonymic chains) we grasp its legitimacy; but until analysis has brought these subjacent metonymic chains to light, we must recognize that metaphors imply additional knowledge without knowing how to demonstrate the legitimacy of the argument. |
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The coupling between the new vehicle and the new (or old, or unsuspected) tenor is still not a part of our culture. The sense of this still unrecognized codification, nevertheless felt in a confused way to be necessary, confers to metaphor its memorability and exemplariness. When united to other contextual or supersegmental artifices involving operations on the substance of expression and thus aesthetic metaphors, this confused sense becomes exactly that which naive aestheticians choose to call 'poetry', 'lyricism', or 'the miracle of art'. It is the sense of availability, of a valence not yet saturated by culture. It is the moment that new codes could (should) be born and that the old codes cannot resist the impact. When, finally, metaphors are transformed into knowledge, they will at least have completed their cycle: they become catachreses. The field has been restructured, semiosis rearranged, and metaphor (from the invention which it was) turned into culture. |
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In any case, in order to arrive at these results, metaphor has had to rely upon possible contradictions of the code. It has obtained subversive value, thanks to the existence of two conditions in the code, one linked to the level of expression and the other to the level of content: |
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(i) It was necessary for the code's fundamental arbitrariness that there be correspondences between signifying systems and signified systems (not strictly univocal correspondences, not in a single sense, not predetermined once and for all; but, on the contrary, open to slippages of different sorts), by virtue of which we could conceive of the possibility of using a signifier to indicate a signified which, in the current game of couplings, is not its own. |
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(ii) In the second place, it was necessaryin passing from one semantic field to another and in putting them in relationship to each otherto discover in the interior of the Global Semantic System that it is possible to attribute contradictory semes to a single sememe. |
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Given once again the schema |
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