A Portrait of the Artist in an Auto

Lyotard, in an occasional piece, somewhere evokes pleasure one might experience in starting up an automobile by activating a rhetoric.' This is, to be sure, only a manner of speaking, a metaphor, a particularly opportune example, but only an example, of those figures of rhetoric of which it may be said that they move crowds, but concerning which it is known that none, in reality, has ever started up a single car. And yet who would be able to say, precisely, concerning a metaphor, where and when it starts-or stops. Who, for instance, could determine the precise moment in which an automobile becomes a metaphor? Each is, in its way, a means of transport, a certain kind of instrument used in order to effect a displacement. And if it be objected that metaphor (since it does not transport a real object from one point to another in real space) is such, in so far as it is concerned, only metaphorically, the economy of that restriction immediately imposes its conversion into a generalization: all the more reason. I continue: what happens when a metaphorical vehicle is borrowed in order to take a spin in reality? What kind of transference is called into play by that acting out? What, moreover, might one make of a band of nomads who, in order to transport themselves, would make use only of metaphorical translators? And how, then, prevent those nomads (Deleuze's nomades sur place?) from being immediately tapped in order to restore currency to the deplorable expression: literary movement? Sur place [in place] does not necessarily mean without surprise. It will perhaps not be out of place to recall at this juncture that Lyotard inserts his metaphor of the rhetorical starter in the dis

Art · Art history · Portrait · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Postmodernism in Literature and Education