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Shadows and Other Non-Metaphorical Analogies by Charles Gaines

There appear to be two phases in the history of my practice.  The early work involved numbers and systems and the later work (since 1990) involved language.  I had always believed that my interest in structures connected these two periods: numbers as the language of structures in the early work and linguistic structure in the later work.  Recently, I have begun to think that there is a more fundamental connection, perhaps illustrated in my Shadows series.  In these drawings, using numbers, I plotted the shape of plants and the shadows they cast.  Initially the relationship of the two is indexical.  To this extent we are reminded of Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” where prisoners trapped in a cave see in front of them shadows of puppets that are cast by a flame behind them.  The prisoners are unaware of this entire mechanism and regard the shadows as real things.  Plato believed that the prisoners were like people untutored in the life of forms.  As with these prisoners, the reality we think we see is a mere shadow of forms of which we are unaware.

What happens when we see both the shadow and the object?  For one, the indexical relationship is destroyed.  The cause and effect of the temporal space of the indexical sign is disrupted as they occupy a shared space making them coterminous.  What we have is a highlighting of a spatial structure that gives rise to concepts rather than the focus being on the concepts themselves.  Plato’s cave is an allegory, a narrative of metaphoric conflations where the shadow is an index of its object.  So, the question is, what happens if the prisoners see both the object (puppet) and its shadow?  They then occupy the same outside or interpretive space as the reader of the allegory or, from inside the narrative, a space of a yet newer reality.  Is there a third space that both positions occupy that allows a critical investigation of both? 

Contemplating the Shadows series now, I realize this is what I was trying to address.  Instead of trying to highlight the indexical relationship between plants and shadows, I was attempting to create a space where both the plant and the shadow were coterminous.  In the video collaboration I made with Hoyun Son, Black Ghost Blues Redux (2008), it is interesting to think about this context and how Lightnin’ Hopkins’s lyrics to “Black Ghost Blues” (featured in the work) seem to relate to this as well.  Hopkins sings:

Black ghost is a picture, and the black ghost is a shadow tooi

These lyrics suggest that the ghost is both a picture and a shadow.  Although expressed as a metaphor, this image is not a metaphoric mapping because the figures of the metaphor are not what they appear to be at first: ghost and picture and ghost and shadow.  The figures are instead picture and shadow.  Ghost locates the third space where shadow and picture become coterminous, meaning they both equally occupy the same space.  This describes a unique analogy.  Because of this they produce an affecting interpretation of haunting and of race by employing the emotional power of metaphors with the critical capacity of metonyms. This particular form of analogy produces black ghost as an imagined space where both affect and criticality can form multiple relationships.  This new space is outside the usual space or structure of a normal metaphoric conflation.  In my recent work, I continue to critically investigate the relationship of feeling and affect through non-metaphorical mappings.

The basic structure of the metaphor is analogical.  However, I am proposing that the metaphor is not the only site where we find the analogy.  There are non-metaphorical analogies, which I describe as an indirect analogical conflation, where an autonomous space is created within which the autonomous figures of the analogy can co-exist.  This is different from metaphor where one sign is read in terms of another.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that we form concepts by comparing different things (mental images) in order to find their similarities, reflect on these similarities (an act of a unified consciousness), and finally form an abstraction (a separation from the mental image) by segregating out all differences.  Kant says, “Concepts depend on functions.  By this function I therefore mean the unity of the act of arranging different representations under one common representation.”ii

This description of concepts permits a way to consider the formation of non-metaphoric analogies in terms of what Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner define as Conceptual Blending.  This is a cognitive process where the structure from two input spaces is projected on to a third space.  The blend is the merging of the two structures.iii  Fauconnier and Turner give an example of a contemporary philosopher who is leading a seminar.  In it he has a fictional debate with Immanuel Kant over Kant’s idea that reason is a priori.  The philosopher counters, speaking to Kant, that reason is a self-developing capacity.  This is a fictional debate that operates in a blended space, an imagined space where it is possible for a contemporary philosopher to have a conversation with Kant.iv

In fact, Fauconnier and Turner describe this as a metaphoric mapping.  In a metaphoric mapping a primary sign is conceptualized according to the structure of an autonomous secondary sign.  For example, in the metaphor “more brains,” the word brains is conceptualized in terms of quantity, a completely autonomous concept.  (Smart people are not measured by the quantity of brains).  This is not a blended space because the structure of the secondary sign is determinative in the reading of the metaphor.  The blended space is different; it is a projection of a third space, the result of a blending of two structures.  The description of this as a metaphor may be more accurate, but I am drawn to the fact that in any example of a blended space it is difficult to determine which sign is primary and which is secondary.

Recently I gave a presentation of my works Manifestos (2008), and Skybox I (2011) in which I argued that in each case I made an analogy between two autonomous systems.  In Manifestos, it was written language and musical notation.  In Skybox I, it was written language and the night sky.  I claimed however that this analogy was not a metaphor.  In Manifestos, I was not drawing an analogy so that the qualities of musical phrasing could be mapped on to words.  Instead I created, as Fauconnier and Turner describe, a blended space from the autonomous structures of text and music.  In this space a music/language correspondence was realized.  The effect of Skybox I was similar, where the structure of pages of text formed an analogy with the spatiality of stars of the night sky, hence forming a blended space where both the sky and the text were coterminous. 

As I indicated earlier, I now believe I was using a similar strategy as early as 1974 (Regressions series) when I began my systems work.  In the series Walnut Tree Orchard (1975-2012), Shadows (1978-80), and Faces (1977-79), I plotted the shapes and contours of various objects and things, such as trees, plants, and facial contours.  In the Walnut Tree Orchard works, for example, I sequentially plotted the shapes of walnut trees in numbers on a grid, starting with a single tree and ending with twenty-six trees.  In this blended space the structure of an orchard (or it could be any grouping of the same type or different objects) and a numbering system produced a blended space where numerically derived silhouettes of overlapping trees were realized.  I now recognize I am investigating a particular type of representational space where both the concept and its object can be considered without assuming that one was imminent in the other.  Not from inside the concept, but from the standpoint of a space, an imagined space, where both the concept and the object are coterminous.  This highlights a spatial structure that gives rise to concepts rather than focusing on the concepts themselves.  Under these terms, analogies can be critically considered, a situation that is not possible with metaphoric analogies.  We can debate whether this is an example of a different type of metaphorical analogy or, as I argue, a non-metaphorical analogy.  But it is a space where I can, within a discursive space, engage both the structure of something and what it means to us.v  

i From “Black Ghost Blues,” Lightnin’ Hopkins, Soul Blues, 1966.
ii Immanuel Kant, in Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allan Wood, (New York: Modern Library), 2001. p. 55 (A68-9/B93-4).
iii Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Blending as a Central Process of Grammar,” in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, ed., Adele Goldberg, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1996, pp. 2-6.
iv Ibid. p. 1.
v For more on metaphor/metonymy and their relation to art, see my essay, .