The sign itself is a shifter, a switching yard where values are exchanged (where values exchange values for other values like clothes; or exchange values, where "values" is a verb); "ex-changed," as in previously owned, or changed back to what they were before this process even started; where values are variables, and metaphors too are shifters. Although metaphors need the pole of the literal to complete their transfer, the "appearance" of meaning cannot be attached discretely to either the literal or the figurative pole, but must be detached precisely in order to enter the shifting ground of "appearance" where the real exchange occurs. Thus, the place of "appearance" exists as the medium of the exchange and of the transference, the means of transit, the medium of the messages qua "the message" (language, as medium, is a virus, an "infection"); the animating force of the in-betweenness that forges (binds and fits into forms) the signifiers and fires (kindles and lets go) the signifieds. The point is not to isolate the particulars previous to their consummation in the universal (fire), but to reparticularize the universal -- substantiate, make into substances, and then de-reify and dismantle them -- returning to them in order to get back at them with equal force, insinuate into their very foundation a subroutine of forgetfulness that attacks their approximation of total memory. The idea is to introduce an "infection" [Ansteckung] through redundancy (reiteration and repetition in language as written script) at the level of the signified. Thinking is what it does -- it means. Knowledge is not a thing but a force.[NOTE 51] To enter into that movement is to rub out (exterminate) material objects, erase their material inscriptions, so that the stubbly pink remainders of their erasure mark the place by presenting the traces of their disappearance. Then and only then (if and only if) can Geist commingle with "pure appearance" and get the mix in motion after the initial, almighty negation has vaporized the schematic categories of the Understanding. The pieces come back together as if in the slow motion reversal of time-lapse photography because all of this has already happened. And if the world is haunting its ghost, so too is the word haunting its reference.