Art is: medium, mediation, in-betweenness, passage, transit, transition, transformation. It is not simply presupposed or posited, but appears, as it were, to preposition itself. It moves in and through and between metaphor, language, meaning, appearance. The crucial notion in the Aesthetics of "appearance" is that its sense partakes of both the sensuous and the intelligible, of the particular and the universal. And it logically follows that the various figures which are grouped under the conceptual category of "mediation" should also be related among themselves. One example of this type of relation is Sussman's dovetailing of the notions of "appearance" and "metaphor":
The shifter of valence that will facilitate the conversion of [. . .] the data of sense-experience into the immobility of law is the variable Appearance (Erscheinung). The capabilities of Appearance overlap with those of metaphor itself: imputation and transference. Appearance is able to impute actuality or semblance (Schein) to phenomena and to transfer the status of actuality to semblance, and vice versa. In this manner, Appearance is able to convert the almost physical movement of reversal in models of reciprocal action into conceptual terms (semblance and actuality) that harbor metaphysical valences within them." (Sussman 34)
I am suggesting that it is possible to take this notion of "the shifter of valence" out of its specific context and use it in a more global fashion. I am using "valence" in the sense of a "relative capacity to unite, react, or interact" on a conceptual level. The argument is that all the "metaphors" of in-betweenness are capable of shifting themselves and creating the very medium in which these reversals (inversions, conversions) can take place.