To bind and yet not to be bound to carry out what is stated either intentionally or in actuality; to implement a recursive strategy as an incursion into the master program in order to invent a subroutine that doubles back on the system and changes it; so, not to circumvent, nor really to invent but to use a product already manufactured by the system, to examine the function of metaphor as an integral part of the system, as another motor and motive for difference (mode of differentiation) which works against its own assimilation back into the same (identity), because what is re-absorbed will re-program that system, and thus that system will no longer be the same, or in control of the procedures which have been imprinted on it (written into it), imported into it and will effect changes in it by infecting it with a new language (metaphor) which shifts the balance of power between literal and figurative modes, reversing by troping (turning away) the linear program of the Understanding which functions by processing (getting rid of) the means toward producing ends. And, more importantly, the reversal of these modes does not then imply that the figurative is installed as "first" in a hierarchical order, rather the emphasis should be placed on the moment of transition, or "shift," which does imply that this balance of power is precarious and eminently subject to reversibility. If the referential function is the "carrying-back" function, then it must work in tandem with the tropological function of language (its turning away). Thus, if it is in the deictic nature of language to point to itself, its own immanent tropological movement makes language also "turn away" from itself. I am thinking here of de Man's description of the word as vector: "the word does not function as a sign or name, as was the case in the nominal definition, but as a vector, a directional motion that is manifest only as a turn, since the target toward which it turns remains unknown. In other words, the sign has become a trope, a substitutive relationship that has to posit a meaning whose existence cannot be verified, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function" (Aesthetic Ideology 56).[NOTE 49] So, in lieu of taking aim on an unknown target, to seed dead ends directly into the system in order, by these means, to redirect its program toward other ends, not strictly toward indeterminacy as a systemless system, but as a modus operandi, a way of thinking through the cracks, between the tines of each bifurcated opposition. Could metaphor be the means, the carrier, that produces fresh images, insights and linkages that transform the mode along the lines of different vectors or trajectories? Could one cut one's teeth on metaphors in order to undercut the overbite arching o'er the dialectical maw of Hegel's Aufhebung? Is metaphor the wild card in this game of theory, the aleatory mechanism, the x, the invariant structure that codes for difference, that allows for the repeated recurrence of the same as difference itself, the eternal variable of infinite variation? Are metaphors the means of meaning that enable us to think the "meaning of meaning," or are they the literal glut of the polyglot, the white noise of white mythology? Metaphors allow us to question the meaning of ends because as "figures" they shift between literal and figurative, denotative and connotative, proper and secondary meanings, and don't settle into simple causal relations; they allow us to question the meaning of the means, the meaning of themselves as means, and the meaning of what means as how it means.