Breaking Apart: As Metaphor for Metonymy

Chan's technological breaking and remaking of linguistic symbols in the Flash program is mirrored by another strategy at work on the surface of the Website. In several segments, Chan uses Greek alphabetic characters to write in English. Essentially what Chan has done is to break the characters out of their linguistic context and reuse them for her own purposes. She has also created a ruse of sorts, leading us to believe that she has written to us in Greek. It's a ruse that works because the home page of eneri.net through which we gain access to the eneriwomaninterface features a different Flash text where Chinese and English are used to present the poem that appears there. However, to read this Greek one need not know the language. We need only to figure out the code: alpha = a, beta = b, etc. Thus. in the screen shot pictured at right:

= "me I Fear."

In Autobiographics, Gilmore writes:

"When autobiography studies focus on metaphor as the defining trope, they participate in the production of identity as identity; that is, as a one-to-one mirroring of an essential sameness (the self) in different forms (real life and autobiography). When autobiography studies focus on metonymy, they recognize the continual production of identity as a kind of patterning sustained through time by the modes of production that create it.” (69, my emphasis)

Chan's appropriation of the Greek alphabet would seem to be exactly the kind of metaphorical move that Gilmore describes, "a one-to-one mirroring of an essential sameness [. . .] in different forms." Yet, Chan uses that correspondence not to reveal identity, but rather to obscure it, much like the pixellated face of the photographer above (as in her use of the alias eneri and its further obfuscation as an interface). Moreover, while the individual symbols themselves may function on a metaphorical level, as language, the words themselves do not. Rather, we must reconstruct language by retracing its production, by recognizing patterns, relationships, process. The breaking apart and reconstruction accomplished through the interface is replicated by this particular manipulation of language, here in this text that wonders "Do I have to give up myself[?]" and speculates about the "me I fear in you." "Breaking apart" carries through the levels of production, form, and content, shifting the identity of the artist from the metaphoric to the metonymic. >>>