Metaphoricity

1999, Preface to Gender Trouble by Judith Butler Just as metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into concepts, so subversive performances always run the risk of becoming deadening cliches through their repetition and, most importantly, through their repetition within commodity culture where subversion carries market value.

Programmers create software by developing abstractions to describe the behaviour of their programs. These abstractions begin life as metaphors. The classic theory of abstraction in programming holds that abstraction is a form of “information hiding”. This theory has had noticeable impact on early research in CCS. I argue that the “information hiding” theory is one-sided and ignores the metaphoricity of abstractions. I propose a theory, abstraction as the virtualisation of metaphor, and use this theory to elucidate the “extrafunctional significance” of the Wikilambda code.