There are two ways of rendering our choices for the inquiry into existence, a state of bifurcation: one is the real but meaningless matter named nature – or the material; the other is the meaningful but unreal symbol named culture – or the mind. However, these two are in a relationship of shaping and being shaped by each other. To overcome the oppositional yet inseparable relationship of this bifurcation, we must recognise that the world is composed of hybrids of both the natural and the cultural. The world acts in multiplicity. To engage with the world, we must sharpen our sensibility through drifting, acting, and metamorphosing along with all other agents. Words are one of these agents, with semantic capacities that contribute to mediating our relationship to the world.
From the Nature of singularity to the World of multiplicity, we must learn to inhabit the metamorphic zone. Metamorphism is a fundamental attribute of the world itself; it can be understood as any entity, agency, or phenomenon undergoing transformation, whether human or non-human, material, or immaterial. Metamorphic Zone is where different actors exchange features, leading to new distributions of agency.
From metaphor to metamorphism, words are actors, agents, and institutional processes that navigate us within the world where existence and signification are synonyms, embedded as properties of all agents.