In my previous post I introduced Joseph Grady’s account of how basic events—the innumerable, life-long experiences of phenomena such as resistance, weight, effort, etc., etc.—give rise to an indeterminately large range of basic scenes, concepts, and metaphors that can plausibly be thought to be shared by human beings by virtue of their embodiment, their self-motion and activities, and their common perceptual and cognitive capacities. As part of the common resources of human life, these scenes, concepts, and metaphors can further function as part of the content of the projections that we are seeking as part of the basis of artistic meaningfulness. In this post I’ll introduce a more determinate and detailed sense of these common resources as presented in the writings of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the pragmatist philosopher Mark Johnson, first in their path-breaking book of 1980 Metaphors We Live By, and then extensively developed in many books and papers since. I’ll focus on the account given in their most recent collaborative book, Philosophy in the Flesh of 1999, a book that treats Grady’s work as foundational to their own.
First, an anecdote: Once in a long philosophical conversation with the great Russian poet Aleksei Parshchikov, he suddenly said, “John, I must ask you: which is more important, space . . . or time?” I was of course flummoxed. Some philosophical titles leapt to mind--Being and Time, Time and the Other, Time and Free Will—so I thought ‘What the hell’ and said “Time”. Aleksei sadly looked at me and said, “Yes, many people think that, but the right answer is Space.” Parshchikov’s claim seems to tally with the results of cognitive linguistics, where time is conceptualized in (the more fundamental) terms or concepts of space; as Lakoff and Johnson put it, “All of our understandings of time are relative to other concepts such as motion, space, and events”, and “Most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space.” (Lakoff and Johnson (1999), pp. 137 and 139). The authors identify a basic level of spatial relations, which can then be combined to create more complex spatial conceptions, as well as metaphorically projected to conceptualize other basic concepts, such as time or the self, as well as projected as part of complex conceptualizations generally. Our concern ultimately will be with how these projections give rise to and enrich artistic meaning.
Lakoff and Johnson’s writings, individually and together, contain many hundreds of pages of explication and analysis of the fundamental conceptualizations of spatiality and their employment. I limit myself here to a brief sketch of their basic claims and conceptualizations. With regard to basic spatial relations and their conceptual elaboration, they argue as follows: There are for human beings a range of elementary spatial relations, including those articulated with terms like ‘in’, ‘to’, ‘above’, and ‘in contact with’. These elementary relations are pre-linguistic, in the sense that they are partially acquired by infants and young children prior to the onset of language, and developed along the routes laid out by Grady. These elementary relations admit of combination with each other and further conceptualizations to produce more complex spatial relations; so ‘into’ combines the elementary relations of ‘in’ and ‘to’, and ‘on’ synthesizes ‘above’ and ‘in contact with’ with the tactile conceptualization ‘is supported by’. (1999, p. 31) Elementary spatial relations also themselves “have a further internal structure consisting of an image schema, a profile, and a trajector-landmark structure.” (a) ‘Image schemas’ are “relatively simple structures that constantly recur in our everyday bodily experience”, such as containers and paths, and may include orientations (such as up-down and front-back) and relations (such as part-whole and center-periphery) (Lakoff (1987), p. 267). (b) ‘Profile’ is synonymous with ‘highlighting’ and refers to the way in which different terms and conceptualizations pick out one aspect of the relevant image-schema as relatively important (Lakoff and Johnson (1999), p. 33). This is most readily explicated together with the next feature.
(c) ‘Trajector-landmark structure’ is given most clearly in the basic image schema of source-path-goal, visualized as a line with a dot on one end (the source or point of origin) and an arrow at the other (the goal or pointing to the goal). The conceptualization ‘to’ profiles (i.e. highlights) the goal, while ‘from’ profiles the source. (ibid)
There are three further features of image schemas that pervade their employment in human life, and so unsurprisingly will play a great range of roles in the production of artistic meaning. Image schemas are topological in the sense that they can be expanded, shrunk, or deformed to a degree and still retain their identity as a particular schema (ibid, p. 33).
Second, image schemas have “built-in spatial “logics”” that permit automatic inferences. So if one container is nested within a larger container, then we can automatically infer that something within the smaller container is also within the larger. A third feature, and one that will prove to be of the greatest importance in the mechanisms of artistic meaning in visual art, is that image schemas are cross-modal with regard to the senses, that is, they do not solely arise from, nor are they limited in application to, any one sense (vision, hearing, touch, etc.) (ibid, p. 32)
Following Grady’s, Lakoff’s, and Johnson’s accounts, one sees that Image schemas in every way presuppose human embodiment. The employment of image schemas straightforwardly involves the projection of the human body in the particularly prominent instance of front-back relations. We automatically project such relations onto objects in light of our characteristic interactions with them; the front of a television set is where we characteristically look, the front of a house is where we characteristically enter and where the visual presentation is characteristically maximized, etc. (ibid, p. 34). And we have already seen in Michael Podro’s account of Rembrandt how front-back orientation is invoked, multiplied, and played with in an instance of maximal artistic meaningfulness.
This completes the initial presentation of how the body figures as a durable and species-wide source of artistic meaningfulness. In the next post I begin to present a second great resource, a specific part of the body: the human hand as something capable of distinctive kinds of grasping, gesturing, and pointing.
References:
Joseph Grady, Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes (1997), Dissertation in Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)
--Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)