Atlas

Metaphor, today as in the ancient Greek metapherein, refers to reversible passages that connect two realms and preserve similitude between them; on the other hand, metabolism, from metaballein, refers to abrupt and radical changes that fundamentally efface, digest, or absorb all traces of an earlier state.

-Shane Denson, Crazy Cameras

Metabolism is affect without feeling or emotion—affect as the transformative power of “passion” that, as Brian Massumi reminds us, Spinoza identifies as that unknown power of embodiment that is neither wholly active nor wholly passive.43 Metabolic processes are the zero degree of transformative agency, at once intimately familiar and terrifyingly