Art Lies, Volume 64, Winter 2009 Page: 48

                                
Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy
Art and the Suppression of Thought
text by Charles Gaines

In a panel held in New York and moderated by Beatrix Ruf, the director of
the Kunsthalle Zurich, John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner and Liam Gillick
discussed the metaphor.' Because of their suspicion about its use in works
of art, they believed it needed attention. Gillick commented that metaphor
is often used in society to repress critical thinking. He said that the Bush
administration's metaphor of "desert storm" was an instrument to form an
identifying figure that would locate the war as an act of patriotism.
The reason that this comment is noteworthy is because since the six-
teenth century, metaphor has been considered the sine qua non of art.
Gillick's observation raised the unsettling possibility that a trope that has
been considered central to our very idea of what it means to be human
and which has its noblest expression in works of art can be used as an
instrument of repression.
For many years I have shared Gillick's suspicion about the metaphor.
In my case it grew out of an understanding of the limits of its basic semi-
otic structure: that metaphor is a trope or figure where two unrelated
signs are mapped together based on some similarity or analogy between
them. This means to me that the metaphor forms itself based on struc-
tural similarities between signs and does not consider the meanings of
the signs in this operation. Meaning, therefore, plays no role in how met-
aphors are formed. Instead the cognitive process the metaphor triggers
produces a pleasure in the individual as she comprehends an order or rela-
tionship between two unrelated things; this is a consciousness-changing
experience where difference is unified resulting in a new thought or idea.
Because of the way metaphors are formed, this new thought is not con-
strained by the cultural, ethical or political forces that shape society at any
particular time. And the affect or pleasure it produces suppresses these
critical constraints. Gillick's observation recognizes this and warns that
this pleasure has often been used to seduce us to embrace analogies that
are intended only to serve the political interest of its producer, such as
"desert storm" and the Bush foreign policy.

In this paper, I intend to show that this "suppression of thought" is a
faculty in forms of art whose raison d'etre is based on aesthetics. Further,
that there is a historical evolution of ideas that reveals the relationship
between metaphor and the philosophy of aesthetics, and later metaphor's
role in developing an affect-based theory of art that we find in Croce's
theory of Expressionism. Moreover, how metaphor helped advance the
Western idea of universal knowledge, the idea that there are totalizing
concepts that preclude dissent or difference.
To begin with, let us define metaphor. Take the example: "John is a
wolf." The signs "John" and "wolf," two completely unrelated ideas, are
being compared. If in metaphor two unrelated ideas are mapped together,
what drives the conflation? As the cognitive linguist Barcelona says, the
two signs share a similar structure, and so the metaphoric analogy is made
on the basis of this structural similarity. But we should note that meta-
phors require that there not be in the analogy a similarity of meaning.
What this means is that metaphors are not formed through a con-
sideration of meaning. In fact, difference in meaning is essential to the
metaphoric conflation. On this basis, the metaphor is not a critical illumi-
nation of its meaning. We see this in our example: even though "John" and
"wolf" are unrelated concepts, mapping the aggressiveness of the wolf
onto John forms the metaphoric analogy. And as a result, one sign is sub-
stituted for the other: "John" is then converted to "wolf." Since the meta-
phor is a semantic function, we recognize it because it conflates unrelated
sememes (semantic units). So where is the analogy or similarity found? It
is found at the predications of each sign.
John is + (predicate).
Wolf is + (predicate).
Hence, according to Barcelona, the transfer from one sign to another
is facilitated by a redundancy on the level of each predication. This is
described by Barcelona as a structural analogy, which allows two unre-
lated signs to come together. To repeat, this "coming together" is not

48 ART LIES NO. 64