Mirroring Metaphors of Liveness

June 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The metaphor of liveness has been used extensively to allow for an embodied understanding of a range of phenomena which would otherwise be conceptually incomprehensible. A sample of such metaphorical uses might include; live ammunition, live electrical cable, live political issues, liveness of a line of code in computer programming, etc. All of these phenomena have no sensory extension and do not figure in kinaesthetic image schema. They can therefore only figure in cognition by a process of metaphorical mapping. In all cases, some entailment of the liveness of a living being is mapped onto these abstract concepts, giving these concepts a structure and an embodied availability.

The widespread use of liveness as a metaphor has a strange effect on the original source of that metaphor, the live event or living being itself. It is almost impossible to experience a live event or being without the conceptualising of that event including some of the aspects of the target concept onto which that liveness is metaphorically mapped. When viewing the live event our understanding of that event is partly constructed in terms of live ammunition, live electrical cable, live issues etc. It is not only that electrical wires are understood in terms of living systems, but because of this mirroring back of the target concept, living systems are also understood partially in terms of electrical wires. Or rather, our understanding of live events and living beings now contains the physical signs and contexts of those other metaphorical applications. Performances are ‘explosive’, or ‘high voltage’.

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Liveness and Simultaneity

December 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the key features of ‘liveness’ is best partially understood not as a property of an individual entity or event, but as a relationship between two or more entities. In this formulation, liveness signifies a simultaneity in time such that to experience an entity ‘live’ is to be in a relationship to that entity that includes this simultaneity. This correlation of liveness and simultaneity also allows for the apparent paradox of the ‘live recording’ in which an event exists simultaneous to its inscription on a recording media of some kind. This would be in contradistinction to the non simultaneous ‘recording’ carried out in recording studios for example, in which the inscription onto media takes place progressively, with different tracks being recorded and assembled at different times.

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Fechner’s ‘Day View’

November 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Gustav Fechner, the 19th century philosopher and pioneer psychologist, is most known for developing the science of psychophysics, the investigation of the relationships between physical events and stimuli and the appearance of these stimuli in consciousness. In addition to this work, (which he apparently regarded as something of a diversion to his major interests), Fechner is primarily associated with a metaphysics which attempts to unite concepts of body and mind. Echoing some of the monist ideas of Spinoza, and latterly Muller and others, Fechner regarded all phenomona as having both a physical and a psychological dimension. In the language of his day Fechner referred to this psychic dimension as ’soul’, although there is no absolute necessity to embrace the full theological implications of this terms to appreciate the distinction he is making. In looking out into the world, Fechner would claim, our experience is not only of the material substances that make up that world but also a kind of ‘liveness’ which animates that experience. This does not apply only to those aspects of experience which we usually associate with liveness, plants and animals predominantly, but that this liveness is a component of being itself. Fechner goes on to critique what he saw as an overly materialistic and empiricist way of looking at the world which he felt denied this liveness, and referred to this way of looking as the ‘night view’, a sterile and ultimately bleak way of looking which evacuated the world of meaningfulness, in contrast to what he called the ‘day view’ in which the world is witnessed in its full liveness. It is important to note that this quasi-panpsychist viewpoint that Fechner argued for does not attribute the world, or the materials of the world, with specific agency; he is not arguing for a crudely animist way of looking in which spirits haunt every rock and tree, but of a more abstract and distributed notion of what we would now refer to as consciousness. This has some resonance with the work of David Chalmers, for example, in contemporary consciousness studies, who similarly argues against theories of consciousness as an emergent phenomena and in favour of a conception of it as a omnipresent aspect of being.

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Desert, Dazzling Light (kitchen)

November 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie

When I relax and look at the world I have the strange feeling that it is not inert, passively accepting my gaze and allowing itself to be simply captured by my eyes, but rather that it is alive and active. Between typing these sentences I am looking around a kitchen and the whole room, including the appliances, the furniture, the windows, the cups on the draining board, even the space itself, seems vibrant and strangely alert. I have no sense that the room has ‘consciousness’ or ‘agency’ and there is none of the feeling of a predictive psychology that accompanies the presence of another human being (or animal), I do not feel that the room is ‘thinking’. The feeling is more like the experience one has in the presence of a corpse, or a dead animal, but without the morbidity of that encounter. Here is the palpable presence of undirected, sourceless, intentionality. I feel it all around me right up to the surface of my skin and touching my eyes, balancing and continuing the personal sense of the presence of my own mind at this side of those eyes.

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