Thursday, June 12, 2014

Can you see without a metaphor

Prompted by watching our two feral cats playing on our terrace I observed that, unlike ourselves, they break through the back of the house-like shelter created out of pillows by my wife Christina. They do not see the house, shelter but only the opportunity to enter and pop through but not the house. Yet they will sit in the shelter and wrestle each other to win the turf of the place. The place is on the divan above the floor. We see the soft pillows and associate all of this with comfort, house, and shelter.
This experience and its analysis dramatize the difference between seeing and perceiving. I believe the cats see but they do not perceive. They don’t know that they know.

“Can you see without a metaphor?” 2,678 words on 7 pages
Prof. Barie Fez-Barringten
www.barie-fez-barringten.com
Prompted by watching our two feral cats playing on our terrace I observed that, unlike ourselves, they break through the back of the house-like shelter created out of pillows by my wife Christina. They do not see the house, shelter but only the opportunity to enter and pop through but not the house. Yet they will sit in the shelter and wrestle each other to win the turf of the place. The place is on the divan above the floor. We see the soft pillows and associate all of this with comfort, house, and shelter. This experience and its analysis dramatize the difference between seeing and perceiving. I believe the cats see but they do not perceive. They don’t know that they know.
This I believe is at the heart of the metaphor and what scientist calls cognition; where cognition is the mental act by which knowledge is acquired, including perception, intuition and reasoning. Yet I know the cats learn and remember so many things yet the overall connections may not be associated; nor need be associated. As an academic only behavioral psychologist whose world is entrenched with experiments, results and evidence of the response to stimuli. Ordinary stimulus response evidence is really not studied with people’s perception of their built environment.
When I speak about seeing I mean not only recognizing images through the eye but also felt through the other four senses. As metaphors make the strange familiar we are constantly bombarded with unfamiliar and grope to match with a familiar to assimilate but it only the metaphor which describes the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar and then we see. It builds up from childhood as we learn the stimuli in a variety of settings. As a walk through a forest, or over an alms the metaphor is simple and undistracted.
The forest is understood when we metaphorically seek this particular forests, distinctive from the many others we in our vocabulary. In the alms we can see the grass, blossoms and insect creatures. Most of us cannot identify the name of the elements yet we can accept and digest the images. In this was metaphor is a mental image. [4] Metaphor maps the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”. [4] For example, the “superimposition of the image of an hour glass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of their common shape”. As before the metaphor is conceptual; it is not the works themselves, but the mental images. In this case metaphor is a mental image.
“Each metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” In acting it is called a” handle” where your whole character’s peculiarity is remember by one acting device (accent, slang, twang, wiggle, walk, snort, etc) ;in architecture the building’s roof top, cladding, silhouette, interior finishes, lighting, gargoyles, entrance, rounded corners, etc. Most of our seeing in this silent metaphoric world is our own mystery and secret inner life. Yet it is what we have in common with all others. All of it hinges on human’s ability to make metaphors in a continuous stream of seeing; seeing without perception until it is our will to perceive.
The aesthetic experience requires both seeing and words to describe what we are seeing; the functional experience of carrying so many of life’s ordinary, repetitive mundane acts. These acts are embedded and instantaneously recalled. If they do talk about one thing in terms of another they do so in cryptic shorthand that defies “knowing”. That is synapse links the strange to the familiar and allows us to secure a path to operate, understand, and enjoy.
More often than not we can accept without understanding because the connection is faster than we can read. In any case with that metaphor operating we would be blind and not see to understand, appreciate, know or function. In fact we may be stymied. For example some drive for long periods of time in a stupor from which they are jolted to realize they do realize what they were doing all the past while. Yet they were functioning as a driver; steering, accelerating, maneuvering and staying safely on the road. Mindless yes mindful; a metaphor so embedded that functionality is maintained. As architecture is a metaphor and itself is the making of metaphors and its makers the makers of metaphors so too are our creations and perceptions of such works. We can ignore great expanses of spaces, planes and repetitions elements awaiting the discernment of the unique, sign, symbol and element that will communicate, synapse the place and help us to see once again.
Metaphors are both overt, subtle, often unperceived, undervalued, and in a world stuffed with information, huge bureaucracies we are trained to be vicarious, inane, insensitive, callous, and blind. Nevertheless; the metaphor is in each and all our surrounds where we act and react, see and perceive with unified and predictable precision. Conditioned throughout our lives to adjust, adapt and utilize. Metaphorical language (products) (1) is a surface manifestation of conceptual (program, design and contact documents) metaphor.
artwork by Christina Fez-Barringten available in her book on Amazon.com called "Legend"


The product metaphor is the residue, excrement, and periphery of the deep and complex reality of the product’s creative process and extent reality. As we don’t know the inner workings of our car and yet are able to drive so we can use other design products. What we design and what we read, not the metaphor, but a surface manifestation of the concept metaphor. A concept which we can only know as well as we is able to discern metaphorical language. The construction and the metaphor beneath are mapped by the building being the manifestation of the hidden conceptual metaphor. To know the conceptual metaphor we must read the product.
The metaphor-building clarifies our place, status and value. As metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning so products inform our social, psychological and political condition. Designers and other arts as well as users and connoisseurs can find sufficient satisfaction with only the aesthetics of the technical before ever considering the conceptual metaphor. The product, song, ballet, painting, poem has an intrinsic beauty satisfying the five senses leaving thought and concepts for a later time. For example today we can relish in the great royal residences of France leaving aside the sociopolitical concepts they expressed. Voices in harmony to soft music are a background as may be a cityscape of buildings designed in harmony with one another; both being perceived as technical and not conceptually. Conceptual metaphors are exemplified by a game where you name a string of common characteristics and the challenger then may answer: “things that are on animals, in buildings”, etc. In other words people can identify the metaphor once given a set of common characteristics. What has windows, doors, is in Manhattan, symbol of New York and houses office workers: “the Empire State building”.
The challenger makes a metaphor between the words and association best suited to those words. When naming the thing and its referents the challenger is correct. Neither the referent image nor the correct answer is the metaphor. The metaphor is the process of making the association between the words and something stored in the mind. Whether automated, instinctive, educated, licensed, indigenous or cultural the fact remains that a bridge that transfers one from another permeates all forms of thought. In fact the artifact that we see is a remnant of the technical and conceptual metaphoric processes.
To say that art is a metaphor and then that design too must be a metaphor assumes that the art is the manifest work and not what it represents. Early classic music in the age of Mozart known as the Rocco period was a music of technique; it wasn't until Tchaikovsky, symphonies and the romantics that conceptual metaphor in music was born, yet there was technical metaphors in Mozart’s music. Works of art are intentionally created perceived. They can initially be viscerally observed but ultimately onlookers must switch gears and sides of brain to know the work. At that moment a different kind of metaphor is utilized.
A conduit (2) is a minor framework which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads. Regardless of the details the overall concept is “transferred “from one to the other, irrespective of sub-dominant and tertiary design elements. The conduit framework explains why we can see without overt metaphors and realizing the value of what we experience. [3] “In principle, three steps, recognition, reconstruction, and interpretation, must be taken in understating metaphors, although the simplest instance the processing may occur so rapidly that all three blend into a single mental act.”
When we face a new metaphor (product) a new context with its own vocabulary is presented, one which the creator must find and connect and the other which the reader must read and transfer from previous experience. Interactive Chain where the technical begets the conceptual begets the technical and so forth. A conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system. Over the year’s society, cultures, families and individuals experience and store a plethora of mapping routines which are part of society’s mapping vocabulary. As a potential user, when encountering a new building-type, such as a hi-tech manufacturing center, we call upon our highly structured subsystem to find conceptual systems which will work to navigate this particular event.
{5} Design as a surrogate is accepted at face value. As a surrogate
(a design) is "a replacement that is used as a means for transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may not be a part”, design’s metaphor bridge from the program, designs and fabricators to a product and trusted tool. It works. [A] “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of: a. Two sides to a surrogate, the user side and the context side (from which the user is absent or unable to function). “Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit for ourselves. “We have that ability”.
b. “None of us is just a person, a lived body, or just an organism; we are all three and more. We are singulars who own and express ourselves in and through them. As Weiss proclaims
c. That we cannot separate these three from each other so that it follows that we may find it impossible to separate us from the external metaphors. Inferences that are not yet warranted can be real even before we have the evidence.
d. Metaphors are accepted at face value and design is accepted at face value. Accustomed to surrogates design is made by assuming these connections are real and have benefit. Until they are fabricated and used we trust that they will benefit the end user. Assembling the product we assume the occupancy, frequency and destinations. We each are surrogates to one another yet fitted into one message. When this passage had been used as read as had been other passages, corridors and links.
e. Like a linguistic, the building stands, like a great, stone dagger, [A] emphatic against the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis and is strongly expressive. Whether we know it or not we cannot see without a metaphor.
References:
(1) Metametaphors and Mondrian: Neo-plasticism and its' influences in architecture" 1993 Available on Academia since 2008
2) The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy.
[3] Images and models, similes and metaphors by George A. Miller
{4}The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff
{5} "Surrogates," published by Indiana University Press. By Paul Weiss
Footnote
[A] Art is the intentional and skillful act and/or product applying a technique and differs from natural but pleasing behaviors and useful or decorative products in their intent and application of a developed technique and skill with that technique. Art is not limited to fields, persons or institutions as science, government, security, architecture, engineering, administration, construction, design, decorating, sports, etc. On the other hand in each there are both natural and artistic where metaphors (conceptual and/technical) make the difference, art is something perfected and well done in that field. For example, the difference between an artistic copy and the original is the art of originality and authorship in that it documents a creative process lacking in the copy.
Researched Publications: Refereed and Peer-reviewed Journals: "monographs": Barie Fez-Barringten; Associate professor Global University
1. "Architecture the making of metaphors" Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education; Sept.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.
2."Schools and metaphors" Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.
3."User's metametaphoric phenomena of architecture and Music": “METU” (Middle East Technical University: Ankara, Turkey): May 1995" Journal of the Faculty of Architecture
4."Metametaphors and Mondrian: Neo-plasticism and its' influences in architecture" 1993 Available on Academia.edu since 2008
5. "The Metametaphor of architectural education", North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 1997
6."Mosques and metaphors" Unpublished, 1993
7."The basis of the metaphor of Arabia" Unpublished, 1994
8."The conditions of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 1994
9. "The metametaphor theorem" Architectural Scientific Journal, Vol. No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University.
10. "Arabia’s metaphoric images" Unpublished, 1995
11."The context of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 1995
12. "A partial metaphoric vocabulary of Arabia" “Architecture: University of Technology in Datutop; February 1995 Finland
13."The Aesthetics of the Arab architectural metaphor" “International Journal for Housing Science and its applications” Coral Gables, Florida.1993
14."Multi-dimensional metaphoric thinking" Open House, September 1997: Vol. 22; No. 3, United Kingdom: Newcastle upon Tyne
15."Teaching the techniques of making architectural metaphors in the twenty-first century.” Journal of King Abdul Aziz University Eng...Sciences; Jeddah: Code: BAR/223/0615:OCT.2.1421 H. 12TH EDITION; VOL. I and “Transactions” of Cardiff University, UK. April 2010
16. “Word Gram #9” Permafrost: Vol.31 Summer 2009 University of Alaska Fairbanks; ISSN: 0740-7890; page 197
17. "Metaphors and Architecture." ArchNet.org. October, 2009.at MIT
18. “Metaphor as an inference from sign”; University of Syracuse Journal of Enterprise Architecture; November 2009: and nominated architect of the year in special issue of Journal of Enterprise Architecture explaining the unique relationship between enterprise and classic building architecture.
19. “Framing the art vs. architecture argument”; Brunel University (West London); BST: Vol. 9 no. 1: Body, Space & Technology Journal: Perspectives Section
20. “Urban Passion”: October 2010; Reconstruction & “Creation”; June 2010; by C. Fez-Barringten; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/;
21. “An architectural history of metaphors”: AI & Society: (Journal of human-centered and machine intelligence) Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication: Pub: Springer; London; AI & Society located in University of Brighton, UK; AI & Society. ISSN (Print) 1435-5655 - ISSN (Online) 0951-5666 : Published by Springer-Verlag;; 6 May 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2632623064r5ljk/ Paper copy: AIS Vol. 26.1. Feb. 2011; Online ISSN 1435-5655; Print ISSN 0951-5666; DOI 10.1007/s00146-010-0280-8; : Volume 26, Issue 1 (2011), Page 103.
22. “Does Architecture Create Metaphors?; G.Malek; Cambridge; August 8,2009 Pgs 3-12 (4/24/2010)
23. “Imagery or Imagination”:the role of metaphor in architecture: Ami Ran (based on Architecture: the making of metaphors); :and Illustration:”A Metaphor of Passion”:Architecture of Israel 82.AI;August2010pgs.83-87.
24. “The soverign built metaphor”: monograph converted to Power Point for presentation to Southwest Florida Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. 2011
25.“Architecture:the making of metaphors”:The Book; Contract to publish: 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 2XX United Kingdom Edited by Edward Richard Hart, 0/2 249 Bearsden Road Glasgow G13 1DH UK
Barie Fez-Barringten is the originator (founder) of “Architecture: the making of metaphors (architecture as the making of metaphors)"
First lecture at Yale University in 1967 First published in 1971 in the peer reviewed learned journal:"Main Currents in Modern Thought"; In 1970,
founded New York City not-for-profit called Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments (LME) and has been widely published in many international learned journals including Springer publications, MIT, and Syracuse University. The book “Architecture: the making of metaphors" has been published in February 2012 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in New Castle on Tyne, UK..
I welcome hearing from you. bariefezbarringten.gmail.com 
artwork by Christina Fez-Barringten available in her book on Amazon.com called "Legend"

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