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1. Renaissance Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change: An Introductory Road Map This book studies the functioning of metaphor in Tudor and early Stuart culture. Accordingly, its chapters treat a range of disciplines, including language , religion, rhetoric, politics, literature, and economics. Also and inevitably , it touches the present, raising questions about the position of language and rhetoric within post-structuralism and neo-cognitivism and doing so in a way that highlights the connection between intellectual problems active in our own culture and those manifested in the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury texts, controversies, and crises that I discuss. Translating Investments is thus conceived as simultaneously a critical and a historical study. In it, I am recurrently concerned with the issues of conceptualization, abstraction, and transcendence that can be encapsulated in the Hegelian concept of sublation—Aufhebung, or, ‘‘raising,’’ as both Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur have understood this concept. More expansively, sublation can be rendered as ‘‘translation to a higher level incident on partial cancellation of the physical’’ and thus at once a plus or surplus beyond it, a partial continuity with it, and a partial loss of it.1 The problem of sublation traditionally has occurred in relation to the physical roots of philosophical abstractions , such as Idea (from Greek eido, ‘‘to see’’) or concept itself (from Latin com Ⳮ capio, ‘‘to seize together’’). These roots threaten the transcendence of thought built on abstractions derived from them. By extension, the problem of sublation informs broader issues of symbolism and conception, for example, those surrounding the Eucharist in the sixteenth century, those realized in poetic vision, or even those evident in attitudes to currency exchange under the early Stuarts. As I have indicated, sublation, as raising, involves translation, or a transfer from one dimension (one place) to another. Fundamentally tropic and more specifically metaphoric, the process of translation itself, whether from lower to higher or otherwise, is known in traditional rhetoric by the Latin term translatio, literally a ‘‘carrying across,’’ and this traditional term is also a synonym for the arch-trope metaphor. In sum, the raising that is sublation is 1 2 Translating Investments fundamentally implicated in the problematic of metaphor: its structure, workings, and effects in theory and cultural history. More specifically, sublation is inseparable from the viability of metaphor, its productive life as distinct from its death in code or cliché, and from the related linguistic issues of diachrony and synchrony and in particular of etymology and polysemy. Underlying, generating, shaping such issues and relationships, metaphorical language will emerge in my argument as a constructive force in the historical development of cultural meaning. When transferred to the more humanistic forms of cognitive science, to which I refer in this study as neo-cognitivism, sublation reappears as surplus, continuity, and loss in such a concept as Andy Clark’s ‘‘scaffolding.’’ Clark conceives ‘‘language and culture’’ as advanced forms of ‘‘external scaffolding ‘designed’ to squeeze maximum coherence and utility’’ from otherwise limited , embodied, physical ‘‘minds.’’2 Scaffolding is the means by which physical ‘‘minds,’’ or more precisely, brains, go higher. Neo-cognitivism posits that thought is ‘‘materially possible,’’ but without a metaphorical concept like scaffolding, its impulse is insistently downward and backward to a physical or purely material base; that is, its impulse is to level cultural development and flatten cultural nuance.3 When the neo-cognitivists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example, assert that even an amoeba ‘‘categorizes’’ by distinguishing food from non-food and cite this ‘‘fact’’ as evidence that abstract concepts are primarily ‘‘body-based’’ and therefore metaphorical, one might question, partly in jest, whether the amoeba also ‘‘classifies’’ according to a conceptual scheme, makes a predication, or speaks in the assembly (Greek katagoreuein), all more complex meanings that attach over time to the human concept categorization.4 With such historical development and nuance, the question of ‘‘raising’’ (Aufhebung) returns and brings with it the problematic of metaphor. Even cursorily examined, the metaphor of scaffolding, or laddering, itself also has obvious physical, conceptual, and explanatory limits. In this respect, it resembles the Tower of Babel, whose material limits vie with its height and with the purely human aspiration (sinful to traditional religion) that it embodies. Problems like these play in and out of discussion in the chapters that follow . My intention is to explore the relation of these problems to the cultural texts in which they inhere and thus both to ground abstractive issues and to render textual ones more significant. The ensuing...

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