University of Winchester

Education Studies, Education Studies (Early Childhood)

ES2407: Art of Learning, Semester 2, 2011

Week 1: Representation and an Introduction to Metaphor

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last updated 12.01.11.

Representation

The Frame

• Making a representation of something, and presenting it to others, is equivalent to insisting upon a single way of 'looking' at a state of affairs.  So you will already have come across representations of Socrates, Dickens, and others during your First Year programme.  These representations - or presentations - typically made only slight use of visual material, but here it is being used as a starting point.  This example is intended to remind you that there is a case for saying that the frame - the way of looking - 'constitutes' the nature of the contents that are seen within.

• In this example the frame is very obvious, but we 'frame' ideas in language and through gesture and expression, and of course we can do the same through dance and music.  This particular frame is doing all of the following - including something, excluding a lot, presenting the something so that it takes up most of the visual space, showing it 'intact', rather than just showing a part, such as the entrance steps, and conferring on the 'contents' of the frame a particular set of associations through the ornate and 'dated' decorative surround.  So much seems obvious, and because it is part of a photograph one doesn't expect much more - one, in fact, 'gets the joke'.  But if it was a drawing or painting instead it's worth adding that there is nothing in principle to prevent the artist allowing the viewer to see inside the structure, to show it schematically as if it were an architect's plan, or simply to add together many images of the house taken from different perspectives so as to offer a collage - and then, of course, the house might simply be a work of imagination.

• But of all of these ways of influencing what is being presented, probably the most important is the frame's negative effect: a representation is as significant for what it avoids and excludes as it is for what it emphasises and includes.

• One of the major arguments that is often put forward by critics of particular forms of representations is that they are not as 'truthful' as we might suppose or desire.  While we may feel comfortable with familiar representations, such critics will point to their artificial nature - how they select their contents, what they exclude from 'viewing, how they 'enframe' some part of reality, how, in fact, they distort reality.  This is as true for text as for visual material - a history of some set of events may be told from the perspective of an individual who has simply been imagined by the writer in order to offer the reader a fixed perspective on an existential complexity that extends even down to the identification of the events as events.  These critics work, then, to make us question the 'framing' of the ideas we are being presented with - or have accepted in the past - making us aware that they are just that - ideas - not the way the world necessarily is.

• This amounts to saying that as subjects we hold both an attitude towards those objects which we take to be 'true', 'useful', 'relevant', etc. and along with this 'perspective' there is often a form of life - a way in which we typically interact with the rest of our social world - co-ordinating socially what follows from this recognition and confirmation with the rest of our lives and our beliefs.  (You may find some recent texts describing this state of affairs as being 'situated', i.e., we are always situated with respect to some state of affairs, we are never totally neutral in the sense of being disembodied - even when we attempt to be explicitly objective.)

• A frame as magnificent as the one above may not, therefore, be needed in our normal dealings with one another.  Typically the realities we deal with do not come packaged up like this.  Instead they seem to come as though they are articulated in just such a way as to allow them to fit into everything else we know and believe.  It's the exceptions that intrigue and sometimes puzzle us.  And so, perhaps, rather than talking about frames in the rather literal way we have so far, we ought to think of a new representation as always potentially becoming part of our lives - joining in the way we live and work together.  This doesn't mean that enframing in these cases has no part to play.  So long as the new representations 'fit' with everything else we have already accepted, we assume that the rules of its viewing will be the same, i.e., are existing set of beliefs are extended to incorporate (to enframe) the new material.  It's as though we infer the rules of composition, exclusion and inclusion, etc. for the new representation because we can 'see' that it is 'natural', 'truthful', 'helpful', or simply 'consistent', etc.  And yet despite this, and no matter how 'helpful' some representation may be, they can still be 'wrong.'

An Illustration - What is Theory?

Thinking about theory, rather than pictures, may help!  There are various ways in which we can work towards an understanding of theory itself - the principal focus of the whole of your second year.  For the moment let's assume that a theory is a special kind or way of making representations.  Just how special can be seen from the range of descriptions that you are likely to find in any dictionary:

• a supposition explaining something,
• a generalisation explaining phenomena as the result of assumed natural causes,
• a speculative idea of something,
• a mere hypothesis, speculation, or abstract knowledge,
• an exposition of the general principles of a science etc.,
• a body of theorems illustrating a particular subject.

(Source: Cassell's Concise Dictionary, 1997.)

All of these descriptions suggest that we are being provided with both a framing of some part of the world and a way of looking at it, i.e., a representation, or a series of representations.  However, each bullet point introduces a slightly different account of the way in which we should understand these representations and the practices associated with them.  The fourth, for instance, explicitly refers to our status as protagonists within a particular field of representation - we are to view the theory in question as being in some sense impractical.

With both representation in general, and theory in particular, we need to to say something positive about the capacity which allows us - to some degree - to stand apart from the representations that not only surround us, but which we also use continually and may even make ourselves.  In fact, emphasising the production of representations as part and parcel of the process which helps us maintain a sense of self within a community suggests a suitable target for analysis.

Subjective experience becomes the product of a dynamic interaction between the individual's production and consumption of representations.  Directing attention to this interaction suggests that an education could/should involve more than just the presentation of the established representations which already exist within a community.  Perhaps there should be a part for the subject and the subject's life, i.e., possibly a narrative - possibly more than one?  (It is in this sense that recent writers have talked about 'situated lives' - and situation theory itself (Jon Barwise, 1978) offers one way of detailing the complex information flows between individuals, events, and scenes.  This form of study was/is close to information theory and as such has allowed for mathematical modelling.)

At the very least, this line of thinking suggests that the experience of subjectivity has the potential to be both fractured and contradictory, fluid and disparate, depending on the consistency of the representations and associated life practices that we partake in.  The nature of subjectivity itself is seen, therefore, to be tied to specific contexts, and linked to differing or conflicting positions for the individual within communities and cultures.  This leads onto a more exact prescription for the role of students within the setting of an Education Studies course, for instance.  Rather than acting like puppets within a tutor's educational Punch-and-Judy show, you can engage in a study of your own hermeneutics (the art or science of interpretation).  In other words, the focus of your work becomes a study of personal decisions in relation to your interpretation of educational representations.  And as learners of a higher education you might want to do more than simply apply the representations of others. You may feel the need to engage directly with the problems that generated the representations in the first place and develop your own - even identifying/re-identifying the problems themselves.

Summary Statement:

A freer sense of (meaning for) self; re-defines the self as a capacity for generating a plurality of meanings; and establishes this as a 'directable' and voluntary operation through which the self ceases to be merely a passive receptacle for representations and their associated forms of life, becoming instead a productive agent within a dynamic web of meanings.  The self is prised free of habitual roles, and becomes an active producer of its own meanings.  But how feasible is this type of analysis - beyond such generalities, and how do we do it if we can? 

The overall task within Education Studies is to start the process which will lead you towards some balanced attainment of this goal, and in this module the principal form of educational and life 'framing' we consider is metaphorical imagery - but just what is a metaphor.  To end this week's session we close with a simple account that may help to get you started.

I. A. Richards on metaphor - an 'interaction' theory

(Richards, I. A. (1965) The Philosophy of Rhetoric Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

Overview:

I. A. Richards’ theory of interaction provides a way to start thinking about metaphors.  The theory suggests that in every metaphor there are two components: its ‘tenor’, and its ‘vehicle’.  The tenor is the general term Richards uses to refer to whatever topic is being discussed, while his second term - the vehicle - is the object/figure introduced by the metaphor as a means to suggest a particular quality of the topic.  For example, the phrase ‘applying theory’ is typical of the covert way metaphor slips into language.  Applying a theory to some area of study would probably be a very different experience from applying a mud pack!  In this case, the verb-metaphor inserts the suggestion that using a theory in a particular instance is just like sticking one thing onto the surface of another.

However, as Richards’ makes clear, the context of metaphorical use must be central in any study of metaphor – perhaps in the above example a researcher really did think that applying a new theory to a problem would ‘rejuvenate’ its appearance.  The context of discourse not only provides a sense of what the tenor is, it also provides boundaries.  Quite what these are will shift as the conversation moves from topic to topic, or reviews aspects of the topic, but at any one moment some vehicles will strike the reader/listener as relevant, intriguing, amusing, etc. while others will simply be puzzling, silly, or reveal a lack of understanding of the topic itself.

This alone should suggest that Richards' use of the word ‘interaction’ has to carry a great deal of weight – perhaps too much to be helpful.

Selected Details from Richards

Three assumptions about metaphor, deriving from Aristotle, are rejected by Richards:

• an 'eye for resemblances' is not common.

• this 'eye' cannot be taught.

• and metaphorical language is 'something special and exceptional in the use of language'.

In opposition to these points, Richards asserts that metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language: 'In philosophy, above all, we can take no step safely without an un-relaxing awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing ...'

First definition:

'In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.'

Richards takes the view that there are many ways in which interaction can work between 'co-present' thoughts.

'... fundamentally [metaphor] is a borrowing between and intercourse between contexts.  Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.'

Richards also entertains what he calls a context theorem - that words gain meaning only in discourse contexts - so that metaphorical meaning can also be understood as being generated by an awareness that a word used as a metaphor gains its meaning through us also being aware that there are missing parts or aspects of the word's normal context(s).  This is clearly the bit of his theory that connects with our previous discussion of frames, but Richards himself does not have much to say about it, other than that one should be sensitive to such contexts, however these are understood.

Once again, the two technical terms are:-

the tenor of a metaphor,

the vehicle of a metaphor.

the tenor is the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means.

Later on, Richards offers this important clarification significant for the whole of this module:

'We cannot too firmly recognise that how a figure of speech works has nothing necessarily to do with how any images, as copies or duplicates of sense perceptions, may, for reader or writer, be backing up his words.'

So, to summarise:

A. Richards

Analogies offered:

metaphor is not just a trick with words

metaphor is not just an ornament

two thoughts active together supported by a single word or phrase

the meaning of a metaphor as the 'resultant' of the interaction of two thoughts

a borrowing between, and intercourse of, thoughts

a transaction between contexts