introduction |
cognitive linguistics |
technopoesis |
reusable images |
conclusions
Rhetoric, Poesis and Technopoetics
Cognitive linguists have addressed what they view as the
nonexistent split between rhetoric and poetic in a way that can be helpful
in understanding the connection between techne and poesis.
Mark Turner in Reading
Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science
makes two main claims that address the rhetoric/poesis or techne/poesis
integration:
- "A human person is patterns of activity in a human brain" (30)
- "There is no distinction between common versus special language" (14).
"A human person is patterns of activity
in a human brain."
Whatever else humans may be, they are perceivable on at least
two levels: mechanism and meaning (another way of phrasing the body/mind
facets of human existence).
If sense experience and self perception are mediated through the brain,
translated from electrical and chemical impulses into the realm of human
thought, feeling and action, then ultimately everything human beings
create is already part of a coded system. What we normally refer to
as language (itself a code system) exists inside of and as a part of
whatever bio-symbolic processes link the brain to what we interpret
as the body and as the world around us.
"There is no distinction between common versus
special language."
Turner describes the connections between literature and rhetoric – in
other words, the between "ordinary language" and the "special"
language of poetry. By describing the metaphorical nature of normal
language, he seeks to show that it uses the same elements as poetic
language.
Turner also argues that "Common knowledge expressing common thought
is anything but simple, and its workings are not obvious. Special language
expressing special thought is an exploitation of the common and to analyzed
only with respect to it" (14). In other words, "originality"
depends upon the very unoriginal, that originality is not the creation
of the wholly new, but rather consists of rearranging the old in new
ways.
An example of how poetics/aesthetics is a matter of interpretation
is the concept of "Found Art," which can be related
to the phenomenon of "found" or "reusable"
images on the Web.
Metaphors and Image-Schemas
In a chapter called the "Poetics of Connection," Turner describes
a metaphor as not just one thing standing in the place of another, but
a mapping of a whole set of relationships and entailments from one thing
to another. He refers to these metaphoric sets as "Image-Schemas":
Image-schemas are extremely skeletal images that we use in cognitive
operations. Many of our most important and pervasive image schemas
are those underlying our bodily sense of spatiality. They include
our image-schema of verticality, of a path leading from a source
to its goal, of a forward motion, of a container (or more accurately
of a bounded space with an interior and exterior, of contact, and
of such orientations as up-down, front-back, and center periphery.
We have many image-schemas of a part-whole relational structure[. ...] When
we understand a scene, we naturally structure it in terms of such
elementary image-schemas. (58)Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English
in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.
For a list of addition work by Turner, check his Web site. You might also be interested in George Lakoff's work on the "Contemporary Metaphor."
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