I've been reading some essays by Jerome Bruner, a scholar of perception, memory, consciousness, and the role of language and metaphor therein. I’ve also been reading a tiny bit of Walker Percy, but I’ll get to that later (I think). Bruner articulates concepts that have fascinated me for some time now. His continual thrust is this: At their best (and at their not-so-good), art, language and metaphor are a means of exposing unity.
In an essay titled "Art as a Mode of Knowing," he writes, “the reward for grasping a work of art” is the “connecting of experience.” This is the movement beyond juxtaposition--a tired device--to exposure. Art drains the precooked waters dividing the conscious and subconscious to reveal that "two islands of experience have beneath them a single continent." And, as I witnessed last night, it sometimes drains the waters dividing us, one from another.
What I find most striking is that the unity he speaks of is not a merging or fusing of what is separate (as we commonly think of it) but a pulling back or a drawing near. It is laying one thing on top of another or measuring the distance between objects. It is everything finding connection to anything, creating “a syntax of concepts” in our minds, ad infinitum.
Juxtaposition is about contrasts; opposites are displayed in a way that reinforces our presuppositions about how they may relate. This sometimes leads us to unity via irony, but to me it usually feels too contrived. There’s nothing wrong with contrivances (where would many of my favorite novelists be without it?), but the great movement of contemporary art (and everything else) has been away from the merely clever and toward the sincere.
The unity Bruner speaks of is an uncovering, a discovering--the idea being that the unity is already there. This is obviously not a new idea. His take on how unity is disclosed, however, deserves greater currency. This is because, in my opinion, it’s not just “his take”--it’s true.
The Old Part
Everything we do, all of art, begins and ends in metaphor, and we all know this, right? We are, as Walker Percy puts it, “symbol mongers,” spending literally all of our time in symbolic interaction. Think about it, this is ALL WE DO. But we are so unaware of how those symbols work, and this is what makes me feel like stooping (that near-universal symbolic enactment of humility) in worship.
The Not-So-New Part
Symbol and metaphor, our very “mode of knowing” and being, are also how unity is disclosed. Unity is inherent to every word we use. This is because every word simultaneously activates multiple pieces of experience and assumes they have relationship. A word is a web of relationships between sound, image, memory, idea, feeling, and so on that really exists. It’s not just in your mind; other people take it for granted, too.
The Part I’m Not Sure Very Many People Have Truly Considered
When the relationships are invoked and the unity brought casually to light, nothing has actually moved. Words (and remember I’m talking about all types of symbols) don’t cram what’s separate into some sort of smaller space, or melt them into some fondue. They just give us selective focus. Sometimes the combinations are unusual for us, giving us that sense of revelation or coming upon a new idea. It’s counterintuitive, but unity is disclosed by economy, the reducing and selecting. The very words unity and economy are redundant. Bruner believes that this economy keeps metaphors fertile and unpredictable.
I think of it as a map with billions of tiny light bulbs at every imaginable point. I say “pigeon” and red lights blink on over the sound of me saying it, over an image of a pigeon, the string of letters p-i-g-e-o-n, a sensation of a neck bobbing, a memory of some movie where a woman fed pigeons in the park, a bit of knowledge I have about passenger pigeons, and another imagined memory of thousands of pigeons flying over a farm (something gleaned from a story on the radio). The word is blurred by lots of dim lights at points of information about birds in general. Play connect the dots and a diagram of Pigeon, whatever that may look like, stands out over the map.
Once again, I’m talking about the fact that nothing has actually moved. When we simply notice the distance between things, however near or far they may be, we unify them. We don’t have to rearrange. That was the brilliance of Laura’s show: we just reached across and touched the person in front of us. I don’t know how else to explain it. I am afraid I haven’t made any sense. My thoughts are beginning to splinter.
Wait for it:.Wait for it:Here it is: At the beginning of insight, while we grope for a picture of the universe, we start with a metaphor. This is a ball. The metaphor lights up the map, establishing an interface. Charles Pierce, a philosopher who might be the most important contributor to semiotics, came up with the distinction between the dyadic and the triadic. Dyadic events are causal, the collision or response that moves us from A to B. The events can be continually strung along (A-->B-->C-->D-->) but we can always isolate two parts.
Triadic events, however, cannot be explained by “stimulus and response.” Here, Percy explains, “three elements are involved in a relationship which is absolutely irreducible.” They are “man’s interactions with symbols” and can be illustrated thus:
Furthermore, when one person speaks and another person hears, we get this, the interface:
You are looking at a depiction of the building blocks of consciousness. As Percy says, “there’s the rub of it and also the joy of it: what happens across the interface.” Bruner and Percy are talking about the same thing. We use metaphor to uncover unity. Language and art are essentially, inescapably, unifying acts. We unifying by noticing, measuring, speaking. It’s all so simple, it just keeps happening. We don't know how these triads happen, exactly. It's incredible to me.
I’m sorry this is rambling and ill-structured. I would really like to hear your responses. Do you know what I mean about juxtaposition? Are these things very old and obvious to you? Have I just made myself look like an idiot because you thought about all of this (and refuted it) in Philosophy 101? I just need to something to revere, can you at least relate to that?
Fill me in, chicken skin.
