Cognitive Mapping

Frederic Jameson adapted his notion of “cognitive mapping” from the work of the urban geographer Kevin Lynch. After interviewing hundreds of people and asking them to draw their own maps of the cities they lived in, Lynch discovered that people felt more alienated in cities without identifiable markers such as monuments, rivers, or identifiable buildings. Citizens of cities like Boston, who drew maps delineated by parks, monuments, and the Charles River, had a more developed sense of place and attachment to their city. Jameson considers these cognitive maps “pre-cartographic” in that they are subject-centred, rather than objective attempts to map an area. They are more “itineraries” than maps. He used this sense of cognitive mapping as a metaphor for the process that contemporary citizens of multinational capitalism must undergo in order to create meaning in our disorienting, postmodern world. In effect, he is arguing that we must figure out a way to represent the global, the national, the local, and the individual in an integrative way that makes sense of both the things we recognize as directly affecting us, and the unseen things that affect us even if we are unaware of their presence. He saw cognitive mapping as a way to bring meaning into the lives of peoples and communities who face the challenge of integrating the personal moments of their everyday lives with the impersonal forces of global capitalism. Essentially, this difficult task amounts to “representing the unrepresentable” – understanding a totality that is not fixed, concrete, or stable (Hardt and Weeks p. 22-23).

According to Jameson, the problem of representation began in the “monopoly” stage of capitalism. Although he uses Ernst Mandel’s periodization of capitalism, Jameson’s analysis is essentially spatial, since he argues that each stage of capitalism produces a space unique to it. The space associated with the classical or market stage of capitalism was the Cartesian grid, shaped by the influences of the Enlightenment that “disenchanted” the newly capitalist world: secularization, the transfer of use value into exchange value, the separation of subject and object, and the “scientific” separation of work into discrete phases (Taylorism). During this phase of capitalism, the figurative representation of the world was less challenging. This is the period of “realism” in both art and literature: a sense that it is possible to represent “reality” and to reflect the situation of a particular social class or individual in relation to history.

This sense of reality changes during the development of capitalism from the market to the monopoly stage of capitalism, or what Lenin described as the imperialist stage. To quote Jameson:

At this point the phenomenological experience of the individual subject…
becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view
of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the
truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it
takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience in London lies,
rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole
colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of
individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer
accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even
conceptualizable for most people (“Cognitive” p. 278)

The result is a situation in which the individual experience, therefore, is not strictly a “true” representation, yet any scientific or cognitive ways of representing the situation effectively eliminate individual experience.

Jameson argued that elaborate new strategies had to be developed to address this problem of representation, evident in new forms of expression. The allegory becomes an important form of playing with the figurative. Just as pre-modern societies used allegorical figures to represent the unknowable nature of god, so must artists of this stage of capitalism use allegory to show the unseen and the absent nature of the global colonial. Another common approach of this time is evident in the writing of Gide, Proust, James, Conrad or Pirandello, where these authors represent individual consciousness as a sealed world that relates to other subjective worlds as “passing ships” that never intersect.

This problem of representation is magnified in our contemporary stage of “late” capitalism. Jameson uses words like schizophrenic, disorienting, decentred, and fragmented to describe contemporary global capitalism: a place where the distance of Benjamin’s “aura” is obliterated; where all voids and empty spaces are filled; where we are constantly exposed to a “barrage of immediacy” with no intervening barriers. The only way to counteract the inevitable alienation of global capitalism is to engage in an exercise of cognitive mapping that allows us to imagine our unimaginable reality. Jameson uses the analogy of Althusser’s definition of ideology: “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” In this sense, ideology is an imaginary representation that coordinates or maps an individual’s relationship or positioning to class relations, to the global, and to the local.

This brings us back to Lynch’s notion of cognitive mapping, since Jameson argues that we must effectively apply Lynch’s spatial notion of mapping to the mapping of our social and global totality. Failure to do so, he maintains, will be as crippling and alienating politically as the inability to cognitively map the city was for Lynch’s subjects. Jameson thus sees cognitive mapping as a critical part of the socialist political project and essential to any sense of agency or meaning in contemporary life, although he never provides any concrete suggestions of how this might be done.

Jameson’s ideas are relevant to our project in a variety of ways. On the one hand, we can conceive of the biometric equipment we are using as attempts to represent our physical reality to ourselves in a way that we grasp onto as “real” because it is scientific. There are examples in our using testing dialogues where participants effectively admit that the data seems meaningless to them, although they’re sure a “scientist” would be able to read it. On the other hand, we have also discussed using the data from the biometric equipment to reveal to participants how clearly inadequate it is as a form of representation, and invite them to create their own forms of cognitive mapping. In this sense it would be interesting to explore with participants the very notion that we do form cognitive maps, and allow them to develop mapping exercises themselves that are not just repudiations of the biometric equipment, but re-adaptations of it. Jameson argues that the use of technology in contemporary art is “a degraded figure of the great multinational space that remains to be cognitively mapped,” in other words it stands in for global capitalism and replicates our alienation from it. Is there a way to address this alienation, or move the technology into a cognitively mapped space that transforms it? Note that it is not necessary to move through a space to make a cognitive map, although moving through a space and mapping it could be used as a metaphor for the process he is talking about.

Jameson’s idea takes us a step beyond the scientific discourses inherent in biometric equipment, to their role in the space of global capitalism surrounding us. In his discussions of this “totality”, he provides an alternative perspective on our relationship to space and to the technology we use to navigate that space.

Bibilography

Hardt, Michael and Kathi Weeks. “Introduction,” In Hardt and Weeks eds. The Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, pp. 1-30.

Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping,“ in Hardt and Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Poetry and the Archaeology of Space

“Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.” Pierre-Jean Jouvé

I’d like to continue Paula’s discussion of metaphor by examining the poetic image as an expression of the essence, or origin, of human experience in space. I’ll draw from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and especially Bachelard, to query the spatial notions of inside/outside and to examine the poetic possibilities of the Biomapping project.

Merleau-Ponty uses Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ to describe the primordial openness of the human subject to the world through the intermediary of the body. Cartesian philosophy (or what Merleau-Ponty calls realism or empiricism) speaks of the world as objective and determinate, existing independently outside of human consciousness. This notion of the world as “fixed and determinate”, M-P argued, distorts the fundamental structure of being-in-the world. The true nature of our being-in-the-world can only be determined through the “phenomenological reduction” – a sort of archaeological methodology that descends from this fixed, objective picture of the relation between body and the world, down to the primordial origins of experience. This archaeology, one might say, is premised on a series of descending metaphors, in which each layer of consciousness is preceded by another until we reach the most primordial level, expressing the primitive hold of the world on our body as a pre-personal subject. As Liu argues, for M-P “the unity of experience of human space can only find its basis in a “natural” and non-human space, a primordial spatiality which originates from the pre-conscious hold of our body as a natural subject on a natural world and which merges with the primitive structure of being-in-the-world” (Liu 138).

The primordial structure provides us with our sense of spatiality in the so-called objective world. When we move through a space, for example, we don’t use purely exterior or geometric notions of space, but our bodily experience is “orientated”. We intrinsically understand a series of inter-related concepts such as up/down, or left/right, and these intrinsic understandings bring expression to the space. In other words, our understanding of space involves a communication or interaction, mediated by the body, between this primordial sense of space and the space itself. As M-P noted, we shouldn’t think of our bodies as “in” space, but rather “inhabiting” space. (M-P 139). Elsewhere he says, “Experience discloses beneath objective space, in which the body eventually finds its place, a primitive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer covering and which merges with the body’s very being” (M-P 149). Put another way, the “outside” space can be understood only by merging with the “inside” orientation of the body. Outside goes in, inside comes out.

Understanding this “primordial structure”, therefore, is key to understanding our experience of space. How is this archaeological dig into consciousness to be accomplished? At this point I leave the more physiological explanations of M-P behind and move to the phenomenological poetry of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space is not preoccupied with understanding the primordial nature of our bodily orientation in space; instead it attempts to undertake the archaeological dig into origins via the poetic image. I should note that Bachelard’s musings relate specifically to the intimate space of the house, but I believe his ideas can also be usefully applied to our project.

For Bachelard, as for Merleau-Ponty, the study of space is fundamental to the phenomenological reduction, or descent into origin. Although we often think we understand ourselves in time, he argued, all we really know is a sequence of fixations in space, or localizations of our memories. By exploring those spaces, thereby engaging in a kind of “topoanalysis” of the sites of our intimate lives, we begin to understand our origin. In Bachelard’s words, “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for” (Bachelard 8). Understanding space, therefore, involves digging up these localized memories, a task Bachelard maintained was best undertaken through the poetic image, especially in the form of daydreaming.

Although he acknowledged that the unconscious primordial world may also be accessed through night dreams, Bachelard saw daydreams as a superior mode of communication with our localized past. He saw the poetic image and daydreaming as analogous in many ways, arguing that “To read poetry is essentially to daydream” (Bachelard 17). He also believed that poems and daydreams communicated in a similar manner — the reader of a poem is asked to consider an image not as an object, but is expected to seize its “specific reality – a fleeting product of consciousness” (Bachelard xix). Similarly, daydreams (unlike night dreams) also provide a “fleeting glimpse” into the soul: “Poetry comes naturally from a daydream, which is less insistent than a night dream; it is only a matter of an “instant’s freezing.” But the poetic document is none the less indicative. A terrestrial sign is set upon a celestial being. The archaeology of images is thus illumined by the poet’s swift instantaneous image” (Bachelard 36). And, he notes, we should not forget that dream values, especially when re-constituted in the form of a poem, communicate poetically from soul to soul. The poetic image, he argued, could be seen as the concentration of an entire psyche, which could also, against all reason, communicate with other hearts and souls.

So powerful is the poetic daydream image that it captures the essence of childhood indescribably and unforgettably: “To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream it” (Bachelard 16). One would think, he notes, that a geometrical object such as a house, with its straight lines of plumbing and walls, would resist “metaphors that welcome the human body and soul” (Bachelard 48). But, defying all rationality, the house translates into the human plane once it is recognized as a place to defend and contain intimacy.

I wonder if Bachelard’s phenomenology of the imagination manifest in the daydream’s poetic image could be applied to spaces other than the house. I am thinking of that indescribable sense one gets when moving through certain spaces, a poetic flash of déjà vu, or the intuitive sense of remembering that unconsciously guides us on our daily journeys. I love Bachelard’s insight into how poetically we dwell, and recall Paula noting that the scripts from the user testing often sounded like poetry as people interacted with the technology – devices designed to read bodily signals and make visible those things we might feel, but not see or hear. Can we give participants the opportunity to express their daydreams by interacting with their biological data, perhaps showing them concretely how they are interacting with the space from the inside out? Can we play with the amorphous boundary between inside/outside? Generally, in addition to deconstructing the metaphors joining “source” to “target”, I wonder if it’s possible to explore the metaphor backwards from the “source” to the origin. These are musings rather than suggestions, but it would be fun to explore the poetry of space.

Metaphor

From Wordsmith Words:

(MET-uh-for)

noun
1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase which is not literally applicable is used in place of another to suggest an analogy.
2. Something used to represent another; a symbol.

Etymology
From Latin metaphora, from Greek metaphora, from metapherein (to transfer), from pherein (to carry).

From Brittanica Concise Encyclopedia

Metaphor: Figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or action is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in “the ship plows the seas” or “a volley of oaths”).

A metaphor is an implied comparison (as in “a marble brow”), in contrast to the explicit comparison of the simile (”a brow white as marble”).

Metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways, are similar in another important way. Metaphor thus achieves effect by pointing to association, comparison, or resemblance (e.g., antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy, and simile, which are types of metaphors.

Types of metaphors:

There are a myriad of types of metaphor. Some favourites, pulled from Wikipedia:

Metaphors of language

• An absolute or paralogical metaphor (sometimes called an anti-metaphor) is one in which there is no discernible point of resemblance between the idea and the image. e.g. “light” as a metaphor for virtue.
• A complex metaphor is one which mounts one identification on another. Example: “That throws some light on the question.” Throwing light is a metaphor: there is no actual light, and a question is not the sort of thing that can be lit up.
• A compound or loose metaphor is one that catches the mind with several points of similarity. Example: “He has the wild stag’s foot.” This phrase suggests grace and speed as well as daring.
• An implicit metaphor is one in which the tenor is not specified but implied. Example: “Shut your trap!” Here, the mouth of the listener is the unspecified tenor.
• An implied or unstated metaphor is a metaphor not explicitly stated or obvious that compares two things by using adjectives that commonly describe one thing, but are used to describe another comparing the two.
  An example: “Golden baked skin”, comparing bakery goods to skin or “green blades of nausea”, comparing green grass to the pallor of a nauseated person or “leafy golden sunset” comparing the sunset to a tree in the fall.
• A submerged metaphor is one in which the vehicle is implied, or indicated by one aspect. Example: “my winged thought”. Here, the audience must supply the image of the bird.
• A synecdochic metaphor is a trope that is both a metaphor and a synecdoche in which a small part of something is chosen to represent the whole so as to highlight certain elements of the whole.

Metaphor as Everyday Life

For cognitive linguistic theorists, metaphors found our conceptual system. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their classic work, Metaphors We Live By think of the conceptual system as not only language but also practice (thought and action). Metaphor, for them, is a common conceptual frame in our everyday life. Metaphor is more than language, it is articulated in practice. Since language articulates our conceptual systems, we can see it as a symptom or representation – a gateway into how metaphor functions in particular conceptual systems. (Ref: http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html)

The pair write: “The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we thinks what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.”

Communication is deeply linked to metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson use Michael Reddy’s term, “conduit metaphor,” to argue that we understand and experience one kind of thing, in terms of another. We put an idea into a container or conduit, send it, and it is unpacked by another.

The Cognitive Science of Lexicality

Lexical: of or relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction.

Contemporary theorist of conceptual metaphor, Alice Deignan clarifies: metaphor operates at the level of thinking. Metaphors link two conceptual domains, the ‘source’ and the ‘target’ domains. The source consists of a set of literal entities, attributes, processes and relationships, linked semantically and (apparently) stored together in the mind. These are expressed in language (the target) through related words and expressions, and organized as lexical sets –word groups that share features. (Diegan source: http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/metaphor-analysis/theories.cfm?paper=cmt)

The conceptual metaphor links the ‘target’ and ‘source’ domain—the target domain, which is abstract, and takes its structure from the source domain. Target domains (metaphorical expressions) are thus believed to have relationships between entities, attributes and processes that mirror those found in the source.

Thought over language

For proponents of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, thought has primacy over language. The theory was not intended to account for language in use, which is merely the surface manifestation of more important phenomena. (Deignan)

Conceptual Metaphor Theorists argue that few abstract notions can be talked about without metaphor: there is no direct way of perceiving them and we can only understand them through the filter of directly experienced, concrete notions. For example, a purposeful life is routinely linked to a journey (in literature); for example: He got a head start in life. He’s without direction in life. I’m where I want to be in life…” (Lakoff 1993: 223)

Linguistic evidence suggests that abstract subjects are generally talked about using metaphor. Hence, a close examination of the metaphors we use are a key to the way people have mentally constructed abstract domains. (Deignan)

Constraint, lack, hiding

Conceptual metaphor theorists claim that all metaphors both hide and highlight aspects of the target domain. (Alice Deignan, Ref: http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/metaphor-analysis/theories.cfm?paper=cmt) For instance, the conceptual metaphor ‘understanding is seizing’, discussed by Lakoff and Turner (1989) suggests that an idea is a concrete object which can be metaphorically grasped and then held. This highlights a familiar aspect of understanding new ideas but hides the important point that sometimes understanding comes slowly, with some effort, and that ideas are reinterpreted by each individual. (Deignan)

If conceptual metaphors help people to understand abstract subjects of such central importance as life and communication, then the metaphorical expressions that should form the focus of study are the conventional, frequent ones.

In many cases, linguistic metaphors represent subconscious choices on the part of the speaker or writer, whose choice of language is partly constrained by the conceptual structures shared by members of his or her community.

An array of common term use (in English) demonstrate the conceptual metaphor:

Lakoff and Johnson:

It’s hard to get that idea across to him.

I gave you that idea.

Your reasons came through to us.

It’s difficult to put my ideas into words.

When you have a good idea, try to capture it immediately in words.

Try to pack more thought into fewer words.

You can’t simply stuff ideas into a sentence any old way.

The meaning is right there in the words.

Broadly put, communication, then, is a practice of metaphor—one where ideas are processed.

Orientational metaphors are culturally distinct and spatially oriented. This concept reminds us to culturally situate our assumptions about spatiality.

Lakoff and Johnson:

HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN.

I’m feeling up. That boosted my spirits. My spirits rose. you’re in high spirits. Thinking about her always gives me a lift. I’m feeling down. I’m depressed. He’s really low these days. I fell into a depression. My spirits sank.

physical basis: Drooping Posture typically goes along with sadness and depression, erect posture with a positive emotional state.

CONSCIOUS IS UP; UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN

Wake up Wake up. I’m up already. He rises early in the morning. He fell asleep. He dropped off to sleep. He’s under hypnosis. He’s under hypnosis. He sank into a coma.

Physical basis: Humans and most other mammals sleep lying down and stand up when they awaken.

HEALTH AND LIFE ARE UP

SICKNESS AND DEATH ARE DOWN

He’s at the peak of health. Lazarus rose from the dead. He’s in top shape.As to his health, he’s way up there. He fell ill. He’s sinking fast. He came down with the flu. His health is declining. He dropped dead.

Physical basis: Serious illness forces us to lie down physically. When you’re dead, you are physically down.

HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP

BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL OR FORCE IS DOWN

I have control over her. I am on top of the situation. He’s in a superior position. He’s at the height of his power. He’s in the high command. He’s in the upper echelon. His power rose. He ranks above me in strength. He is under my control. He fell from power. His Power is on the decline. He is my social interior. He is low man on the totem pole.

Physical basis- Physical size typically correlates with physical strength, and the victor in a fight is typically on top.

RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTIONAL IS DOWN

The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane. We put our feelings aside and had a high-level intellectual discussion of the matter. He couldn’t rise above his emotions.

Physical and cultural basis: In our culture people view themselves as being in control over animals, plants, and their physical environment, and it is their unique ability to reason that places human beings above other animals and gives them this control. CONTROL IS UP thus provides a basis for MAN IS UP and therefore RATIONAL IS UP.

Biomapping

In what way can the practice of metaphors serve as a metaphor to Biomapping practice?

Biomapping queries cognitive theories of comprehension, knowing, and in turn, how these processes create Knowledges we rely on and live by.

Biomapping is concerned with cultural practice and queries the transition of expert languages and its structures, for example, of neuroscience, as we put them into pratice in our everyday lives.

Biomapping is deeply concerned with translative practices—the personal, spatially and temporally distinct cultural practices by which we take up a conceptual system to practice expert knowledges. Our team is particularly concerned with brain waves as well as everyday body data (pulse, heartrate), and how we understand the tools that gather, interpret and present this data.

Biomapping is invested in providing material, discursive and conceptual tools to participants to query their everyday life with their data—to get participants into the tool structures, knowledges and practices, so that they might enter critically into spaces of translation. Metaphor then, provides a range of vehicles to get participants into translative practices.

Biomapping queries the relationship between spatial environments, self-understanding and technologies (including language/conceptual systems and augmenting and representational technologies.) How do our minute and individual spatial and temporal associations, our subcultural assumptions, impact how we read and represent our selves?

Biomapping is interested in the varied conscious and unconscious levels at which we comprehend and take up discourse in everyday life, particularly discourses of the computed human. Identifying common abstract manners in which we articulate expert discourses provides an opening to critical and reflexive response to these ideas.

Metaphors that hide aspects of the so-called target (or cognitive organizing domain) are a ripe source for Biomapping. Cracking open these metaphors, or re-representing them aesthetically provide a rich opportunity for getting at the particular struggles of subjects to comprehend and personally process discourses. Through aesthetic practice we have the opportunity to represent this abstract process of metaphorical trial and tribulation.

Biomapping is interested in the aesthetics of communication practices. W seek to enhance subject’s ability to craft metaphor in conduits and the circuits that carry them, in order to communication or represent with clarity, relevance, freshness, inspiration, challenge—whatever end validly speaks to the data/idea/experience, for the subject. Biomapping seeks to explore the aesthetics of metaphor.

References
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lakoff, George. 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.) Metaphor and Thought. (pp. 202-251) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [second edition]

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago press.

Welcome to the Metaphor Blog for the OCAD Biomapping project.

Art can take the temperature of a culture and allow us to gauge our selves through our sensual and perceptual experiences. “Biomapping: Mobile Experiments in Self-computation and Spatial Aesthetics” develops process-based and map and sculptural art creations that question our sense of self through mobile and biometric technologies.

Participants will create artworks based on their own biometric and perception data, collected in both laboratory and urban environments. Working with artists, participants will develop software that will process their personal data to reflect their own image of “self.” The data will then be translated into physical form via a computer-controlled printer or rapid-prototyping facility, creating a “biomap of self.”

“Biomapping” employs user-focused art, to develop novel manners for individuals to document themselves and their spaces. Research outcomes will be distributed via mobile networks, gallery exhibitions, process documentation, and an on-line, interactive Biomapping website.