metaphorical

Theory

in , ,

"It is the theory that decides what we can observe." (Einstein)

"It is more important that a theory be beautiful than it be true." (Paul Dirac)

In Greek, theoria originally meant a looking at or viewing and theoreo, a spectator. In this sense, theory and Visuality are metaphors of each other.

Is the theoretical attitude is that of the disengaged observer? Does theory require a distinction between the illusionless observer and the gullible participant, or to put it more mildly, between theory and observation? Does theory always entail what John Dewey derided as the "spectator theory of knowledge"? Perhaps to theorize is to create the impression of something that existed already (or, even better, always already) (see metaphor) In the Pragmatic tradition, theory is the critical reflection on "belief." William James calls it "an appetite of the mind," what Frank Lentricchia calls "the need to generalize" and "to obliterate differences." (quoted in Cary Wolfe, Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" )

But according to the Greek conception, theory is not a knowledge but touching (thigein ).

Read More

art/science

in , ,

The French zoosystéician Louis Bec argues that "With the advent of the sciences of the "artificial" and of communication, as well as the explosion of the technosciences and the sciences of the living a "lieu" (site or place) has emerged in which the total integration of arts, sciences, and technology can be achieved. There are now two different "epistemological poles" that encompass this integration. The first strives to link "poetic", "symbolic" descriptions of nature's mechanisms to scientific ones, producing " metaphorical expressions". (cf Gaia) The second involves activities ( cybernetics, artificial intelligence,...) which, among other ends, ultimately aim to simulate and act on the world, to better understand it by transforming it. (See Artificial Life II) 

Read More

clothing / garment

in

In traditional rhetoric and neo-classic theory, language is the "dress" of thought, and figures are the " ornaments" of language, for the sake of the pleasurable emotion which distinguishes a poetic from a merely didactic discourse. (Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p.290)

Read More

immersion

in

There are a number of ways to approach the metaphors of immersion and navigation that suffuse descriptions of technology. The psychological theme of the "oceanic" is explored by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents among other places, and provides an interpretation of the sense immensity that the term conveys. 

Read More

metaphor / model

in ,

According to Giambattista Vico, the ancient language, before the formation of society, must have been full of the boldest metaphor, since this is the natural character of "words taken wholly from rough Nature, and invented under some Passion, as Terror, Rage, or Want." A distant echo of Vico's theories can be heard in Steven Pinker's Darwinian accounts of language. For Pinker, metaphors of space and force are quite possibly part of our evolutionary inheritance and are so basic to language that they are hardly metaphors at all, at lease not in the literary sense.


Metaphors depend on drawing attention to the similar in the apparently dissimilar, and they trade on secondary comparisons between the two terms.

Read More

mirror

in ,
mirror

In the tenth book of the Republic, Socrates differentiates the maker of an object, such as a bed, made in accordance with the Idea of the thing (this is its eidos or form) , from the artist, proceeding in a quick and easy fashion, as if using a mirror. But "What should a painting be called," asked Alberti, "except the holding of a mirror up to the original as in art?"

Read More

phase beauty

in ,

"A flowering spray of lily-of-the-valley exemplifies a growth gradient, after a simple fashion of its own. Along the stalk the growth-rate falls away; the florets are of descending age, from flower to bud; their graded differences of age lead to an exquisite gradation of size and form; the time-interval between one and another, or the "space-time relation" between them all, gives a peculiar beauty -- we may call it phase beauty - to the whole." 

(D'Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form, page unknown, quoted in Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz, "Developmental Models of Multicellular Organisms", Artificial Life 2, p.230) 

Read More

resonance

in , , ,

Resonance: when waves resonate, their amplitudes pile up on top of each other, as opposed to interference, which reduces their amplitudes.

A feedback loop creates a resonance that grows without bound.

The Desana Indians of Columbia describe the sky as a brain, its two hemispheres divided by the Milky Way. Their brains, they say, are in resonance with the sky. This integrates them into the world and gives them a sense of their role in the cosmos.

The qualitative aspects of pleasure have been difficult to formulate for psychoanalysis, which uses the "hydraulic" model of tension and release. Hans Loewald suggests that "resonance" between systems of psychic organization, (love, for example) forms of "hypercathexis," might help understand the pleasure in higher organization and unpleasure in less or lower organization -- of the exitation inherent in living substance. (this is similar to Kant's philosophical pleasures -- see critique of judgement )

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers talk about the resonance between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity in the success of the clock metaphor of the universe. Gilles Deleuze proposes that "philosophy, art, and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons." For Deleuze and Guattari, the interaction of actual and virtual is a resonance.

For Deleuze, "the central state is constituted ..by the organization of resonance among centers." (Thousand Plateaus, p.211) "a central computing eye scanning all of the radii."

Rupert Sheldrake believes that morphogenetic events resonate with each other, that it becomes progressively easier for a particular form to occur as its occurrences accumulate. He cites the formation of crystals as an example, in which occurrences of a new cristalline form seem to occur shortly after a first one is observed, in places with no direct relation to the first occurrence. For Sheldrake the probability of the new form occurring increases rapidly with each occurrence, starting with the first.

One wonders, however, why Chinese isn't easier to learn if so many people speak it.

symbiosis

in ,

The term symbiosis was defined by the German mycologist Anton De Bary (1879) as meaning the "living together" of "dissimilar" or "differently named" organisms. 

Today, in most current biological literature, it is taken to mean "mutualistic biotrophic associations" (biotrophy: one partner requires a nutrient that is a metabolic product of the other partner.) For example, lichens consist of algal and fungal components in nearly equal mass in symbiosis. 

Read More

tech metaphor

in ,

For Proust railway travel was like a metaphor in that "it united two distant individualities of the world, took us from one name to another name" (quoted in Kern Culture of Time and Space. p.217) " Gertrude Stein speculated that the Cubists' breakup of the old way of seeing things was suggested by aerial vision, even though none of them had been up in a plane.

While Proust used technological analogies to illustrate his method of metaphor, the Futurists used technological metaphors to illustrate their method of analogy, which they called "Imagination without wires"

cinema: close up and quick cut

tree

in ,
tree

The image of the tree, of branching phylogenies, has come to underly all our thinking about organisms and evolution. It is a "canonical icon" whose influence can be described as an " unconscious hegemony."The hierarchical structure expresses the pattern of branching speciation, of successive, unending, natural wedging through natural selection which forms the "tree of life." The tree combines the "ladder" of evolution, from lower to higher lifeform -- and with man at the top -- with the "cone" of increasing diversity. (Steven Jay Gould in Hidden Histories of Science) As Gould points out, the latter is factually incorrect. The Cambrian explosion was the moment of greatest diversity. The former is, of course, an anthropocentric bias. 

Read More