Attention Shoppers: Everybody Please Rise

April 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

A spectator has the unique power to wield attention. The ability to capture and hold the attention of spectators is a desirable skill for any performer to have, and is part of a raft of skills and tools utilised by performers which collectively result in ’stage presence’.

In discussing attention, it is inevitable that a number of metaphors are revealed. On the one hand attention is something that is caught, that can be attracted, that can be riveted, that can be held or grabbed. If we are not careful attention can wander, it can drift off, it can be all over the place, in which case you may have to call attention to yourself. On the other hand attention is like currency, it has the economy of a limited resource, you can give it, lose it, steal it. You can divide it or give it fully, compete for it, you can pay attention to somebody, maybe in return for something.

From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, when we use these metaphors we are not simply making poetic allusions in place of more symbolically structured knowledge or transcendent reason. Rather in using these and related metaphors to describe the performance event we are relating the formal structure of thinking itself. From this perspective, almost all thinking is metaphorical and these metaphors (which ultimately are sourced from bodily experience) overlap and inter-relate to form what we think of as bodies of knowledge. This paper will use the cognitive linguistic approach developed by Lakoff and Johnson and others to excavate the metaphors and image schemas associated with attention in relation to performance. Particular attention (sic) will be given to the use of metaphors used in performer training as a possible means of empowering the performer and developing stage presence.

Posted in Attention, Cognitive Linguistics, Conference Abstract, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Performance, Presence, Schema | No Comments »

How Science got it Body Back

July 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

As has been described by Kline (1980), Davies (2005), and others, the history of scientifically verified truth took a particular turn around the 16th century. The mathematization of science in which validation processes from experimental hypotheses and procedures moved from being ’self-evident’ (i.e. evidenced by the sense of the embodied self), to being validated axiomatically using the language of mathematics. The authority of this mathematical truth is owing to its being underwritten by a transcendent logic, untainted by human frailty. Maths is/was considered a purely abstract structure of thought, separate from the messy subjectivity of the body, and therefore not only exact, but also disembodied. The 20th century, however, through the work of Godel and others, saw this transcendent logic and coherence of mathematics exposed as fundamentally untrue, which discovery resulted in a ‘loss of certainty’ (Kline: 1980) in maths and a corresponding loss of certainty in the sciences which rest rest on this mythic transcendent coherent logic. This could be interpreted as a crisis for maths and science, as these activities are revealed as ultimately groundless; not based on eternal transcendental, possibly God-given laws, but at best on heuristics which are merely ‘useful’ and ‘effective’. However, recent developments in cognitive linguistics and the development of theories of ‘embodied cognition’ offer a different interpretation. These emerging disciplines suggest that our ability to conceptualise and work with even the most abstract ideas of mathematics or science is throught the use of embodied metaphors, and that even the equations of pure maths, when analysed using the tools of cognitive linguistics, reveal the use of concepts and ideas which are mapped metaphorically from simple actions and responses of the somatosensory body, (Lakoff and Nunez 2000). This implies that ultimately, what logic and coherence maths may possess which allows it to be used to validate science, is due to the logic and coherence of the metaphors used to conceptualise that maths. These metaphors, while they may inevitably be partial, contradictory, and incompatible one with another, are themselves built from the experiential realism of embodiment. The ground of thought is not in the sky, but in ourselves, and the loss of certainty in maths is the regaining of the body in science

Davies, B. (2005). “Whither Mathematics?” Notices of the AMS 52(11): 1350 - 1356.

Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Decline of Certainty. New York, Oxford University Press.

Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, History, Kline, Morris, Mathematics, Science | No Comments »

A Dream about Mixed Metaphors

September 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I had a dream last night about a world without any objects. Everything was unstable, in flux, but not chaotic or confusing. What would happen is that I would look at something, and that looking would be accompanied by a thought, and then as my stream of consciousness proceeded then as my thoughts changed this would physically change the thing I was looking at. It was as if I was watching the motion of my own thinking. I can only assume the dream was a reflection of the material on metaphor I have been hearing about; that as the metaphors which comprise my conceptualisation of experience shift, then the experience itself shifts. This kind of shifting presumably happens all the time in non-conscious cognition; I am thinking about something, love for example, and (usually unconsciously) understanding it as a PATH, and then my metaphorical understanding of that shifts so that I (again usually unconsciously) start to understand it as a CONTAINER. This suggests that however stable and consistent the external world may be, the internal, symbolically (metaphorically) structured, world must be much more motile. Many of the elements of the external world which we regard as object-like, particularly abstract concepts like love, justice, truth, etc. must exist in our minds as variable, transformable entities; PATHS can turn into CONTAINERS and then into BATTLES, and then into a DANCE. The symbolic universe of the unconscious must undergo these kind of transformations all the time, and these transformations should be surreal but not arbitrary; they should follow the logic of cognitive linguistics. I think it must be a vision of that universe that I dreamed about.

Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Dream, Metaphor, Sleep, Story, Transformation | No Comments »

Metaphor and Copenhagen Interpretation

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The mathematician JBS Haldane famously observed that ‘the universe may not only be queerer than we think but queerer than we can think’. He intended this observation to apply specifically to the more esoteric aspects of the universe encountered mainly by astronomers and particle physicists, whose equations do indeed describe a world which is inconceivable in any literal sense, and which makes no intuitive appeal to the senses of even the most highly trained. As Richard Feynman put it, ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’

Haldane’s comment finds theoretical support and application within the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum theory introduced by Bohr and Heisenberg. Part of the application of this principle requires an attitude towards that application which recognises the distinctly partial ontological status of such theories. As Robert Anton Wilson colloquially put it, ‘the equations of quantum mechanics do not describe what is happening in the quantum world, but what structures of thought we need to create in order to think about that world’. Recent work done in the field of cognitive linguistics and cognate fields suggests that these ’structures of thought’ are largely built out of embodied metaphors, and it is these metaphors, grounded in concrete sensibilities of the body and the sensorimotor system, which give accessible form and order to the queerest aspect of the universe.

The attitude one must bring to the Copenhagen Interpretation has occasionally been referred to as ‘model agnosticism’: an approach to abstract theoretical constructs such as equations, models, structures etc, which recognises their usefulness whilst simultaneously also recognising their status as ‘man-made’ artifacts, rather than as material facts

Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Copenhagen Interpretation, Embodiment, Haldane, J.B.S., Metaphor, Science, Wilson, Robert Anton | No Comments »

Free Floating Metaphors

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

It has been conclusively demonstrated that much of the language that we speak is metaphorical, these metaphors not only being linguistic turns of phrase but echoing the widespread use of such metaphors as a cognitive strategy allowing us to think the otherwise unthinkable. A tenet within the various disciplines of conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, cognitive linguistics and experiential philosophy is that the mind can only think in terms of the affordances of a (evolutionarily constructed) body and sensorimotor system. Cognition uses the totally familiar and concrete experiences of pulling, pushing, containment, direction, substances, entities, directions etc as the basic vocabulary from which all thoughts, however apparently abstract, are contructed. The use of conceptual metaphor within cognition allows us to conceive of entities and phenomena which would otherwise be inconceivable, these entities being outside the range of the senses.

Most of the work in this area has been concerned with the excavation of such metaphors and the mapping of key metaphor groups across specific areas of experience. What has not been systematically identified and analysed is the wide range of metaphors in common daily use which refer to entities which are not only abstract but which are, in all likelihood, non-existent. We may be familiar with (and perhaps condescending toward) the use of such fictions in the past, totally unaware that we are maintaining similar fictions in the present through the repeated positing of such ideas in language and thought.

Some entities which figure extensively in our language and cognition seem to exist purely in metaphorical form; they have well-articulated sources for the metaphorical mapping but no evidence exists at all for the target of such mapping. These are concepts without referents: free-floating figures of speech and thought that occupy our minds and feature extensively in social discourse. Their only life is in language and mentation and perhaps the most two prevalent of these are the concept of mind and the concept of God.

Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, God, Imagination, Language, Metaphor | No Comments »