For Hegel the senses (& bodies) are holes, porous orifices that let in as much as they let out. Whether regarded as theoretical or practical, they assimilate and excrete not only the excess but what the self is in-itself, as if the body could rid itself of its own corporeality (body) and become idealized (in the movement and moments of becoming-idealized), throwing off the mortal coils of its digestive apparatus through which it feeds on itself as a living organism, to enter the realm of "appearances" where transactions with the world can be completed, taking the outside in and giving the inside out, exchanging the body's corporeality for the mind's (the spirit's) incorporeality (shedding its skin and its own signifier is ((was)) that skin) -- thus the body becomes a sign in-self and a shifter for-itself. Just as the sensuous particulars in works of art shed their materiality (their signifiers) and exchange them for the immateriality of the spiritual element (signifieds) through the fluctuating exchange rate of appearance; the exchange relates to the transfer of funds (from fundament to firmament, from excretory remnant to incremental permanence) in which medium metaphors also "appear" and go through a similar process of shifting between identities; between the literal (proper) bite and the figurative (invented) bark of their meaning, becoming 'ensouled' in the bargain (not bought and sold). One cannot ever prove that this transaction has occurred by referring to receipts and written records of it, because the very fact that the transaction (and one must believe this to be a real action which occurs "across, beyond, and through itself --trans--) has occurred inevitably changes the natures of the particulars involved, which will have been transformed 'beyond' recognition. The meeting that took place was not clandestine; it was the struggle for recognition, but that event is also forgotten and can only be re-collected in memory, just as the process of the slave/artist has worked upon its materials and transformed them into art, and just as the body's digestive system has assimilated and disfigured these materials beyond recognition according to the constructive instinct which produces excrement -- Art, thou art translated. The mediums, the in-betweens = (1) Appearance (2) Language (3) Meaning. These are the milieu where particular elements can exchange identities, this is the element[NOTE 53] (milieu) in which the elements (particulars) can shift between general and specific, universal and particular -- it is art and/or aesthetic philosophy, when the holes of the senses (sensory) can be made whole and thus make sense (intelligibility). When we come back to the process which takes place at each stage of the dialectic in the Phenomenology, the passage through each shape of consciousness, we will have forgotten the previous struggle, the particulars will have changed, but the universals hold by definition. The only thing that hasn't changed is that everything has changed; or, the only thing that has changed is the nothing that has. "This" is it.