[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Douglas Williams]

Hi, Huw--
Coincidentally, I spent a term at UCB to study with Lakoff, and he took about twenty or so exceptions to my exceptions, though I was thinking they were questions. It would be interesting to see you debate, as I was not up to the challenge (my main radicalism was to note parallels between things in the Cognitive Linguistics model and thinking in complexes (LSV), and Whorf/Sapir, GH Mead, Dewey, and so on, and wondering if there could be some cross-disciplinary unity that would improve on all of them. Not interesting questions for him, at the time, at least. 
Barring the debate, I'd be interested in seeing your take on the flaws of the cognitive metaphor approach, or do Schon or Beer happen to address themselves to Lakoff in particular? 
I find Cognitive Linguistics quite interesting. Even if some of the explanations are wrong (as is certainly true with Freud's hydraulic cathexes and repression of the id relating to jokes--seeking, like water, the way of least resistance to the sea), the observations are interesting, and well worth pursuing deeper. I also looked a bit into Ronald Langacker, which is the more austere form of embodied language, relating to an embodied basis for grammar, which is also quite interesting, though more calculus to Lakoff's algebra, at least to me. But this is an area of study that is expanding its adherents, 
Mark Turner's More Than Cool Reason and Death is the Mother of Beauty are the better places to begin from a literary appreciation standpoint. 
And for Alfredo and Annalisa--I think one needn't go terribly far into anthropology to find that embodied imagery clothed and complicated with words is the foundation of all kinds of complex interactive imagery and behaviors, from Balinese cockfights to "Christian" leopards in Ethiopia, to the mono no aware--the awareness of the infinite sadness and beauty of the cycle of life--which is evoked by the sakura, the cherry blossom. 
The Meaning of Cherry Blossoms in Japan: Life, Death and Renewal


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The Meaning of Cherry Blossoms in Japan: Life, Death and Renewal

Japanese sakura are not only sublime to look at, they're deeply revered for their symbolism. Find out the true m...
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Cherry blossoms as the image of human life, or autumn leaves, or winter snows, or the return of the salmon--very commonly, mixtures of renewal or restoral, mixed with death and decay, and other emblems of seasonal cycles--is a constant imagistic theme across many cultures, related specifically to humans--so that these things are humans, unconsciously, at least, as we have put off . The rituals in Japan around the sakura are in concert with the theme of ancestor worship, another kind of day of the dead, and consistent  with much more wordy expressions of something embodied in the imagery--this from Stevens' "Sunday Morning:"
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, 
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams 
And our desires.
a common theme...

Qui beauté eut trop plus qu'humaine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! (Villon) 
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.(Khayyam)

But one step deeper: What really strikes me as the core of metaphor and analogy--see, here was my idea of a multidisciplinary research project that was always beyond my abilities or means--is the fixation of memory and associations and emotional associations in dreams. They are metaphoric and metonymic through blending of imagery--for we remake past and present memory in dreams--and in dreams, which was a radical idea 25 years ago, but emerging as the dominant paradigm now--we form and reshape the past and present in sequences that develop through recalling and associating past fixed memories with newer ones. All mammals (except the echidna, a very primitive group of mammals) dream, emphasizing the essential adaptive nature of dreams, which we have known heuristically, and increasingly scientifically, are associated with memory. And what do animals dream? According to Temple Grandin, mammals think (and dream) predominantly in images. They think in pictures. We think in pictures too, but words and internalized schemas and phrases overwhelm the imagery. But it is in dreams that we come relatively closer to the more common mammalian world of imagistic cognition--though even there, we bring in sociocultural schemas. Images are less mediated in words, more direct to our own perceptions. Part of the appeal to poetry, surely, is in the way that a good poem can reach into imagery, and evoke sensations and sounds of the sort that are closer to a pre-verbal sensory and narrative world. It is precisely the power of imagery that struck people about the early cinema. We have learned to take cinematic narratives for granted now, but they continue to have social effects that are probably underexamined. 
For narratives to seem most numinous to us, most self-evident or profound, it would make sense that they probably typically evoke the imagistic thinking our words and socially internalized narratives often convey implicitly, concealed behind words, and that we perceive in our own embodied world of imagery. 
Which leads us back to the unconscious. One part of it, which I draw from Grandin, is that perception of raw sensory data is still what we do, all the time. Though it is mediated by words and social narratives, and to some extent shaped by them, the extreme perception that enables dogs or cats to perceive narratives of the sensory world we don't notice, are still there. They tug at us, and we react unconsciously (preconsciously) to them. Emotive associations with imagery (the evolutionary benefit of fear, anger, pleasure and pain), evoked in the background of our mind through words, and schemas that touch on these strings of preconscious perception and memory would give a sense of how a cinematic narrative is constructed literally to play on common sensory experience, mediated through shared sociocultural themes--and how some of these themes that are universal to human experience, would be so similar in their imagery in human culture. 
But that's a lot (obviously some bottled-up thought--and probably less interesting to you than to me), and it's time for me to sleep, perchance to dream... 
Regards,Doug

   On ‎Tuesday‎, ‎August‎ ‎28‎, ‎2018‎ ‎01‎:‎57‎:‎45‎ ‎AM‎ ‎PDT, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 After taking twenty or so exceptions to "The now-classic, Metaphors We Live By" in the first fifty pages, my copy now resides in a pile of books the only use of which is to refer to errors. One of the basic errors seems to be Lackoff's assumption that we only have one conceptual system. Rather, I would commend Donald Schon's "Displacement of Concepts". The use of homology (by Bateson) is also systematically (and simply) presented by Stafford Beer in his text on "Decision and Control".
Best,Huw
On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 at 07:31, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no> wrote:


oh yes, the chapter! Here it is :) 

Alfredo





From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
Sent: 28 August 2018 07:05
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day 
Hi Alfredo and venerable others who continue to peruse the thread,




Thanks for your verdant post! I must say that in regard to your syllogism:





Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.





I would reply:





Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass cut down by the grim reaper;but grass grows back if watered by mother nature;
A mother who lives forever. 



Just to give a feminist twist, though I hope not too essentialist.




However, I was taken by surprise on your take on Lakoff and Johnson, and I had to think a little before I replied, so that I respond more thoughtfully (I hope). 





For me, the "flesh" part of the book's content references embodied thinking, which I may have already said, and I hope I'm not repeating myself. The assertion being, we can't think without a body and also that we are not robots with brains for our CPUs. I wish I had the book at my fingertips right now to say more on that.





It took me a little bit to consider what embodied thinking actually meant while reading the book, because looking back I see how many Cartesian assumptions I had to unlearn when thinking about mind. Also reading David Kirsh's work on dancers and how they mark with their bodies when learning new sequences of steps helped me to understand. Using a bookmark is a form of embodied thinking (real books not digital browsers!)





The problem with thinking about thinking is that we forget that we have a body already in place sitting in a soup of evolution, culture, history, etc, and how there is an illusion that we are bubbles of consciousness thinking like Rodin's thinker on a stool. That pose has become the shorthand for mainstream conceptions of a thinker.




I'm even remembering how the documentary of Hannah Arendt shows her laying on a couch smoking a cigarette while contemplating evil (which might just a postmodern cinematic redo of David's Madame Recamier perhaps?).





Anyway, there was also something Kirsh wrote in another paper about metacognition about libraries that I found illuminating, and I'm not referencing green-shaded lamps. Recalling from memory... it was something like: how if not for size and height of the tables (horizontal) we could not read the books stored on the shelves(vertically) because sometimes we want to lay many books open at once and compare them, and how we might use a finger to keep our place while checking and comparing texts. So environment has a lot of power in how we digest our tools for thinking as well. 





How could we conceive of vertical and horizontal without bodies (and without gravity and a horizon).




Also, that the way we see, which the eyes only have a small part in, also has to do with our bodies, because sometimes we have to walk around things to know about them, something the eyes can't do alone. Or how the organs of perception work in unison, such as smoke and fire may mean danger when we see flames, smell burning wood and our skin feels heat. But when we have one of those faux fireplaces with digital flickering flames, we just feel coziness (or an aversion to the kitsch)!





Anyway, Bateson was an inspiration to Hutchins, and his work assisted in Hutchins's development of his approach to distributed cognition (Bateson is someone on my reading list). I also feel that there is a connection to what you offer about Bateson's observation of metaphor as a "primary" language to Levi-Straus's Science of the Concrete, as described in the first chapter of Le Pensée Sauvage whose connotation, I might add, is lost when translated to English's "The Savage Mind" because in the French (as I understand) is a double enténdre of savage mind and wild pansy at the same time. I take that to be a wonderful reference to the wisdom of the natural world inherent in what we used to call "primitive" or "uncivilized" cultures. It is a beautiful, embodied metaphor which is far more meaningful than the English, which ironically seems more idealized, or Cartesian (who was French!)





I would enjoy to look at that chapter you almost attached if not for want of a plane to board.




With regard to the metaphor and how it fails, is that metaphor is aspectual. Just like a tool might have a proper and improper application, so does a metaphor.





In Vedanta, for example, there is a drshtanta (sanskrit for "teaching-illustration") for the dehatma-buddhi, which translates roughly to the "mind-body-sense complex," (and also references that the dehatma-buddhi is the self and the self is the dehatma-buddhi as 1:1 equivalence and how this equivalence is an illusion), anyway, the drshtanta of the red-hot iron ball is a very old metaphor used to explain something very hard to explain rationally.





It is used to show how one might perceive that the attributes of iron might associate to the fire and vice versa, because they are indeed at that moment in time inseparably presenting in the same loci. It would take for one to have prior knowledge of the attributes of fire to know that the roundness and heaviness of the ball does not belong to fire but to iron, and likewise the knowledge of iron to know that the heat and the redness belong actually to fire not to iron. It is impossible to physically differentiate the red-hot from the iron ball, say by pulling them apart into smaller pieces (which Descartes tries to do: to see a thing in parts adding into a whole). It is a beautiful metaphor for explaining how the self takes on attributes of the body and the body takes attributes of the self. And yet the drshtanta fails if someone from the peanut gallery says, "Just dunk it in a pool of water like any old blacksmith and you'll figure that one out," and the peanut thrower would be right, but the metaphor, if used in a surgical way, is very apt to show the illusion of the location of consciousness (self). So the metaphor, when used with precision, is a useful tool.




One doesn't get far with a screwdriver if everything seems a screw, especially if the screw is a nail.





I think with a metaphor (as a cognitive tool) it's the same. Of course there is danger if we mix our metaphors inappropriately, which is another way they can fail.





I feel compelled to find an example in which metaphors help problem-solving in life situation...perhaps it is a job for Superman or some other superhero.




Kind regards,




Annalisa



  
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