The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.
"All the World’s a Stage"
"Communication is not what one does with the machine, but is the machine itself." (Johnson, Lakoff, 1980).
“We may not always know it, but we think in metaphor.' A large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts, that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought that are used to comprehend another, completely different domain. Such concepts are often reflected in everyday language, but their most dramatic effect comes in ordinary reasoning. Because so much of our social and political reasoning makes use of this system of metaphorical concepts, any adequate appreciation of even the most mundane social and political thought requires an understanding of this system. But unless one knows that the system exists, one may miss it altogether and be mystified by its effects (Lakoff, 1995).”
I like critical philosophy.
It was the class in grad school I was certain I would dislike most. The one I sought to avoid.
As with so many educational experiences I dreaded beforehand, it became one of my favorites afterward.
I was particularly enamored of metaphor theory, which I believe has strong, pragmatic, real world applicability.
Metaphor system:
Metaphor Systems are essentially vocabularies conceptualized and driven by a primary metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson (1970) utilize the primary metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR as an example of ways that a concept that is metaphorical in nature; that is, using a vocabulary associated with the domain of war to structure the everyday activity of arguing, by creating a list of phrases commonly used when describing the activity we call arguing:
ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
Conventional Metaphor: A conventional metaphor is a metaphor that is commonly used in everyday language in a culture to give structure to some portion of that culture’s conceptual system.
Ontological Metaphor: An ontological metaphor is a metaphor in which an abstraction, such as an activity, emotion, or idea, is represented as something concrete, such as an object, substance, container, or person.
IDEAS ARE ENTITIES AND WORDS ARE CONTAINERS
It’s hard to get that idea across to him.
Your reasons came through to me.
It’s difficult to put my ideas into words.
When you have a good idea, try to capture it immediately in words.
Try to pack more thought into fewer words.
His words carry little meaning.
Orientational Metaphor: An orientational metaphor is a metaphor in which concepts are spatially related to each other, as in the following ways:
MORE IS UP
The number of books printed each year keeps going up.
You made a high number of mistakes.
My income rose last year.
The amount of artistic activity in this state has gone down in the past year.
His number of errors is incredibly low.
His income fell last year.
Structural Metaphor: These involve the structuring of one kind of experience or activity in terms of another kind of experience or activity.
UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING
I see what you’re saying.
It looks different from my point of view.
What is your outlook on that?
The way we form ideas, how we perceive the world in relation to our everyday experience, and how we acquire our seemingly innate spatial knowledge is largely a matter of metaphor. Metaphor is not just a powerful means of communication or a decorative rhetorical device; metaphor dictates the way we move, react, respond, and survive. Our most basic concepts are understood in terms of metaphor and are developed as a result of our physical interaction with the world (Lakoff & Johnson).
For example we use spatial-relations concepts such as over, under, through and on to make sense of space, although these concepts do not exist as objects in the physical world.
Let us assume we are watching children playing baseball in an open field and one player hits a ‘home-run.’ In order for us to conceive of a home run we must first project onto this scene a bounded three-dimensional imagistic structure, a baseball park, with dimensions extending into the air. We must then locate the ball, or trajector, somewhere relative to the conceptual container of the baseball park, moving through space.
As we track the movement of the ball, which can sometimes be metaphorically described as a ‘looping fly ball’ or a ‘bullet shot’ depending on speed and trajectory, we know that it is considered a home-run when it breeches the imaginary back wall of the three dimensional conceptual structure we have, with amazing speed, subconsciously created. In order to make this happen we utilize metaphor.
According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson “We perform such complex, though mundane, acts of imaginative perception during every moment of our waking lives (1980).”
In 1980 Lakoff and Johnson offered a detailed exploration of the processes involved with conceptual metaphor creation in their work Metaphors We Live By.
Their contentions are:
1. That our ability to produce and communicate meaning is mostly due to mappings or correspondences between source and target domains (That is, a comparison between a structure in the source domain with a structure in the target domain.
2. That meaning is often constructed as blends of mental spaces.
3. That information is projected from two or more input spaces or domains to a blended space so that the blended space contains information and structure from more than one domain.
4. That this blended space contains emergent structure not available from the inputs.
5. And, that use of conceptual metaphor is the primary engine that drives the creation of new emergent structure.
The art of directing involves carrying on several conversations with artists across myriad aspects of production.
Keeping track of these conversations and uniting all the collaborative artists in moving the process forward begins with the director’s imaginative development of broad metaphor systems, usually prompted by the play text.
An obvious example is the storm event that takes place immediately prior to the beginning of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.
The storm has split an apple tree in the front yard of protagonist, Joe Keller. The storm is the first significant dramatic event identified in the text. Miller keeps a tight reign on the flow of information, but we get a sense early on that, for the Keller family, a strong wind is coming, perhaps with the power to blow their house down. A cross domain mapping with certain aspects from the domain, wind, as a storm or an uncontrollable, unpredictable force of nature, combine with certain aspects from the domain, house, as dwelling for families. These aspects from both domains offer a new emergent structure, a mental picture of a family unit, broken, resultant from past, not yet revealed, transgressions of Joe Keller.
August Staub (former head of University of Georgia’s Theater and Film Studies Department) provides an excellent metaphor system or vocabulary for directing theater based on the elements of kinetic art, which Staub identifies as; “body in space, direction, rate, energy, control and movement itself.”5
For the director of All My Sons, the storm metaphor is full of potential possibilities for kinetic visual exploitation. For actors in All My Sons, keeping physically alive to the possibilities of a pending storm can help to maintain an uncomfortable tension onstage. Slight physical acknowledgements of rising winds, sounds in the distance or an occasional scanning of the sky all provide possibilities for enriching the production’s visual metaphor system. As various visual physical elements of the production become available for rehearsal use, e.g., the set, costumes, props, lights, media, etc., these metaphor systems become more tightly fixed and the director can concentrate on limited aspects of the visual metaphor system he or she imagines.
1 I am including here Mark Johnson’s simple concrete definition of image schemas from The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) for the purpose of keeping the theoretical piece of the thesis limited and concise: “An image schema is a recurring dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience.” xiv.
2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 31.
3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Here is the link to website that comprises the first four chapters of the book. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search?q=metaphors+we+live+by&submit=Search&sort=rlv&t=doc. It is offers a short, strong introduction and should prove very useful.
4 The notion of conceptual blending can be found in,
Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
5 August W. Staub. Creating Theatre; the Art of Theatrical Directing. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. 163.