3. Fact and Fiction

Omnia Mutantor, Nihil Interit

– Ovidius

Introduction: Narratives and Metaphors

We open worlds by telling each other stories. However, in telling these stories, we need to take our own worlds and experiences into account. We cannot expect our audiences to enter into a world that is so completely different from our own, that they don't understand anything about it. Our experiences, our biological and pyschological make-up, our own being-in-the-world dictates the understanding we can have of other worlds.

In this vain, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously once said that 'if a lion could speak, we would not understand it' ('Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen', philosophische Untersuchungen, p.223).

In this session, we will look into different ways in which we can describe the world and objects within it. We will see that an objective description of an object is not really conveying what the object actually is. We will see that most of our talk is done using metaphors.

Interestingly, Hartmut Rosa himself that his term 'Resonance' is used fundamentally in a metaphorical sense as well:

DEEN

Es kann kein Zweifel daran bestehen, dass sich der Resonanzbegriff als Metapher zur Beschreibung von Beziehungsqualitäten in hohem Maße eignet und dass er ein enormes Anregungspotential für die Untersuchung von Weltverhältnissen auf nahezu allen Feldern des menschlichen Lebens entfaltet. Allein, eine solche metaphorische Verwendung des Begriffs genügt nicht den konzeptuellen und systematischen Anforderungen, um Resonanz als einen socialphilosophischen Grundbegriff und eine sozialwissenschaftliche Analysekategorie zu etablieren, auf die sich eine umfassende Soziologie der Weltbeziehung aufbauen ließe. (Rosa, 2022, p.281)

There can be no doubt that the concept of resonance is a highly suitable metaphor for describing the qualities of relatinships, and that it moreover offers enormous potential for analyzing how human beings relate to the world in nearly every area of life. Merely employing it metaphorically, however, is not sufficient if we wish to conceptually and systematically establish resonance as a fundemental concept of social philosophy and a social-scientific analytical category on which to build a comprehensive sociology of human relationships to the world. (Rosa, 2019, p.164)

Examples

Who	What	Where
Meret Oppenheimer	A Woman's Work	MoMa
Robert Rauschenberg	Bed	MoMa
Marcel Duchamp	Fountain	Wikipedia
Salvator Dalí	Lobster Telephone	Wikipedia
Huma Bhabha	Bleekmen	MoMa
Irma Hünerfauth	Instead of Air	irma-huenerfauth.de
Svetlana Kopystiansky	Achitecton	Centre Pompidou

Lectures

• Studio Binder: What is a Visual Metaphor
• ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’ at The Ian Potter Centre
• The art of the metaphor - Jane Hirshfield
• Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• George Lakoff on Framing

Literature

• Donald Davidson, 1978, "What Metaphors Mean". Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. (1984). Oxford UP.
• George Lakoff, 1980, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago UP.