Disgusting Girls (and Ron Athey)

June 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the presentations today included some footage of a Ron Athey piece, which some people in the audience were clearly having problems with. It is interesting to note what people do when they are disgusted by something. There was a lot of squirming. According to the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson and others, a possible reason why they/we were doing this is because of a process of cognitive metaphor creation. The mind effectively maps the structure of the physical and emotional response from the concrete concept of something pathogenically disgusting like a toxic substance onto the abstact concept of ‘deviant’ sexuality, such that we get ‘DEVIANT’ SEXUALITY IS A TOXIC SUBSTANCE. The details of the behavior which follows, lip curling (as if at a bitter taste), nose wrinkling (as if at a bad smell), and mouth gape (in preparation for vomiting) are metaphorical projections from the concrete concept onto the abstract concept enacted as a physical schema or performance.

Another revealing feature of the disgust reflex is that, once learnt through embodied experience with real TOXIC SUBSTANCES, the behaviour is then available not only for unconscious metaphorical mapping onto abstract concepts (as in the case of the Ron Athey video) but as an intentional gestalt performance which can be consciously activated to indicate moral or ethical disgust. An interesting example of this from my own experience is observing my children, both boys, metaphorically mapping GIRLS ARE A TOXIC SUBSTANCE. Before the age of around 6 this mapping did not exist, but from 6 onward the presence of a girl stimulated all aspects of the disgust reflex indicated above. From the age of around 12 however, this physical schema has become more of a conscious performance which is activated only in certain contexts (when they are with their friends), and which is clearly in competition with other physical schema presumably appropriate to metaphors such as GIRLS ARE RARE AND UNUSUAL OBJECTS, and even GIRLS ARE PEOPLE.

Posted in Art, Gesture, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Performance, Schema, Story | No Comments »

Levels of Metaphor

August 8th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Although all abstract concepts are rendered comprehensible through the use of embodied metaphor, there is no clear division between the concrete and the abstract. It is more useful to consider metaphor operating at various levels of remove.

• Functional and operational actions performed by the body are clearly not metaphorical and are the most ‘concrete’
• Gestures and words which ’stand in’ for these concrete actions are similarly concrete, although there may be an element of metonymy in their isolation of a particular element of a concrete action.
• Words for concepts or entities which have no physically experienced properties can only be rendered linguistically by using reference to concrete actions/objects, i.e. metaphor.
• Non-natural languages can be developed to discuss certain abstract concepts based on the systematisation of concrete embodied metaphors, e.g. Mathematics, poetry.

Posted in Abstract, Embodiment, Gesture, Mathematics, Metaphor, Poetics | No Comments »

Acting the Subtext - Chekhov and Gist

December 30th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The rehearsal technique known as ‘acting the subtext’ is a method for developing, in an embodied fashion, the physical schema articulating the competing or complementing psychological sense present in a performance. In this technique, the subtextual ‘gist’ of a scene is made physically available such that gestures, actions, etc might be constructed appropriate to this gist. This gist is then available as a non-conscious schema or trace which might then inflect the overt schema representing the surface text. One example of a technique which utilises this combination of schema is the ‘psychological gesture’ of Michael Chekhov.

Posted in Acting, Chekhov, Michael, Gesture, Gist, Schema | No Comments »