UC San Diego

This dissertation explores the misreading of figurative language (mainly metaphors), especially when literalized, in “sites” where reality is challenged by these misreadings. The “proper” mode of reading metaphors tends towards abstraction (metaphorical “meaning”), while “improper” readings veer towards materiality (literal interpretations) forming a familiar two-poled continuum that goes from the material to the abstract. Science fiction becomes the means of transportation between these different sites, as literalizing metaphorical language is one of the basic mechanisms of speculative fiction, which disagrees with reality while explaining it through its prophetic mode.There is a double danger of reading metaphors. The first is reading them properly, abstracting features and transporting them. This abstraction reduces the world to data, and enforces, by different methods, the realization of the ways the information is organized. This danger is studied as the mechanism of speculative finances, the border wall and extractivism, a process I call mise-en-force by which abstract value is enforced and material wealth is extracted. This procedure forces itself on a world that is materially collapsing (ecological disaster; species extinction; rogue-weather). Abstraction is co-related to the ecological/health/political crisis the world is going through, intimately related to colonialism. The second danger, literalizing metaphors, is characterized by certainty, and rounds up fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, indigenous cosmogonies, lack of intelligence and madness (especially delusions). Misreading metaphors is pathologized, almost criminalized. The procedure for understanding figurative language becomes a major, even decisive factor, in the production of subjectivity (according to psycho- and schizoanalysis). Abstraction is the mandatory way in which the algorithmic unconscious works. It is political: its effects bypass the difference between abstraction and materiality. Literalizing metaphors is also a strategy to make sense of the world. Science fiction’s literalizations make the complex world we are living in “available for representation” in the same way a delusion, or any conspiracy theory, is always an attempt to understand the world. The difference between facts and ficts is hard to tell apart when the authority of the Other —language, the law— is failing. In order to break away from the dichotomy between abstraction and materiality, this dissertation understands metaphors as a coupling between different species: a device that creates a productive becoming between categories that are seemingly disparate. Metaphor is, by definition, as much an ontological device as a transdisciplinary one, which is why I use the opportunities this device allows me as a methodology, preferring trajects to arguments, and throughs to logical sentences. A proposal to understand metaphors through double negations that shortcircuit the difference between the abstract and the material is attempted, through the use of both anthropology and, not surprisingly, theories and practices of magic and madness.