Metaphors, semiotics, and future studies

1 Metaphors as isotopies

It is well known that metaphors are essential to any kind of communication and speech, which is not only a direct representation of empirical reality; in fact, the use of metaphors is as common as the so-called ‘natural narratology’ (Fludernik, 1996), i.e. our temptation to tell little stories and narratives on diverse occasions. We most often talk about what others have said about us. Yet, metaphors as expressions which are not direct ‘Firstness’ statements (Peirce, 1931–1935: 2 CP 1. 356) are used so abundantly in everyday communication that we are no longer aware of them.

In their famous study Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) have clearly shown this function in everyday communication. For instance, metaphors of ‘up’ or ‘down’ that are linked to something ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, respectively, are typical examples: HAPPY IS UP and SAD IS DOWN. In fact, it was the French anthropologist Gilbert Durand (1960, 1999), who in his Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, already proposed a theory of the origin of our metaphors in the body, its functions such as standing, walking, swallowing, and breathing. He distinguished three dominant reflexes: postural, digestive, and copulative. This system he called ‘protosemantism’.

Durand was severely criticized by A.J. Greimas, the founder of the Paris school of semiotics (Greimas, 1967:55–58). Greimas simply did not believe that the origin of metaphors resides in their iconic relationship with the body. For Greimas the essential thing behind any metaphor was the change of the meaning level he called ‘isotopy’, when reading a metaphor. His example is Cet homme estun lion (‘This man is a lion’) (Greimas, 1967:96). Well, in our society where there are no lions, we read the sentence as meaning ‘This man is courageous’. But if we are in Africa, in a tribal society, in an archaic state where lions exist, it refers to a totemic distinction between animals and humans. Thus, the essential conditions for the functioning of any metaphors are the isotopies underlying them and the sudden change from one isotopic level to another. If Oscar Wilde had written the Importance of being Ernest, a metaphor arises when Ernest = Earnest.

Winfried Nöth (2000: 342) cites as an example of metaphor the German translation of Shakespeare’s The world is a stage, i.e. Die Welt ist eine Bühne, a typical metaphor. Calderon wrote the famous play La vida es sueño (‘Life is a Dream’). In Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the expert for predicting the future is Erda, the goddess of the earth. She knows what will happen; she appears twice on the stage to deliver her prophecy to the fighting gods; they should give up the ring, the metaphor of power. But at the end of the opera she refuses to share her wisdom, and she sings: Mein Schlafen ist Träumen, Mein Träumenist Sinnen, mein Sinnen ist Walten des Wissens (‘My sleep is dreaming, my dreaming is sensing and my sensing is power of knowledge’). Thus he conveys a whole series of metaphors. Of course, the entire Der Ring des Nibelungen is one major metaphor of the future of mankind until Götterdämmerung. However, let us state here what the conductor Christian Thieleman said: none of Wagner’s operas ends with a minor chord, they all end in major. Major is a metaphoric sign of a positive future.

Consequently, metaphors are not merely ordinary signs with their signifiers and signifieds, or denotations and connotations, but they are signs plus something else. As Lévi-Strauss (1971) put it, we reach the level of ‘semiology’ when dealing with the myths of South American Indians and understanding that e.g. honey and ashes are not only concrete things but signs that function as metaphors of the lost paradise and the decline of mankind.

2 Metaphor as genre

An interesting issue is the problem how we learn to distinguish metaphors from ‘normal’ statements. As a class of signs they belong to what the philosopher Vaihinger (1922) called als ob Zeichen (‘as if signs’). They are signs that must not be taken seriously and literally but only as kinds of quasi-signs. One very common theory in the semiotics of metaphor is the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. In fact, some scholars classify metaphors either as paradigmatic entities picked from a store of similar signs; whereas in the case of metonymy a figurative meaning emerges from its contiguous relationship with its object. Hence, metaphor and metonymy are kinds of indexes. Roland Barthes (1968) presents his classification in his classical Elements of semiology: Ina menu, metaphors are different dishes belonging to one category, say, hors d’oeuvre (‘starters’), which include salade, carotte, pâté, quiche, etc., and the corresponding metonymy is the menu in its sequential or temporal order. Or, consider an ancient Greek temple: the varying ornamental styles of the columns, e.g. Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric, are metaphors, whereas the internal relationships among columns, the roof, and the steps represents cases of metonymy. As a final example, consider the metaphor the head of state, which is a metonymic metaphor: the head is the highest part of the body and it can thus stand for e.g. ‘chief’, ‘king’ or ‘president’.

We could also think of metaphors as a particular ‘genre’. Normally every genre and an utterance belonging to some genre carries displays some sign that allows us to interpret it correctly. Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (1996), the Belgian semiotician, for instance, says: when we see the imperative Put the tiger in the tank, we know immediately that this a metaphor because it cannot be true literally, and we also grasp immediately that it belongs to the genre of advertising. If I say quoting Verlaine Il pleure dans mon coeur /Comme il pleut sur la ville (literally ‘It is weeping in my heart/ Like it is raining on the town’) we again understand it is as a metaphor and as belonging to the genre of poetry. As Kuusi, Lauhakangas, Ruttas-Küttim (2015) put it in a recent study: the most powerful metaphors are emotionally laden. They are ‘core’ metaphors.

3 Music

Metaphors enable us to express difficult, challenging, complicated, and sophisticated issues of life. It is for instance about music that Roland Barthes once said: Seule la métaphore est exacte (‘Only the metaphor is exact’). We can talk about music, the non-verbal language, only via metaphors.

Some scholars have developed theories about the future of a society using music as its metaphor. A long time ago, Jacques Attali published his innovative and witty essay Les bruits (‘noises’) (Attali, 1977) in which he claimed: “Music is a prophecy”. In its styles and economic organization it is ahead of the rest of society because, in a given code, it is able to explore the whole field of the possible – faster than any other socio-cultural phenomenon.

Studying music we can prognosticate the future of a society. Music is considered by many to be the most profound metaphor of human life. Of particular interest is its temporality: music unfolds in time and hence it represents what we call Erscheinen (‘appearance’). In fact, if the future is something totally uncertain and indefinite, we can anticipate it and deal with it most efficiently by metaphors. The French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch (1957) spoke about categories of predictability/unpredictability and reversibility/irreversibility, i.e., we can feel time either as predictable, anticipate it or not, and then imagine that it possibly returns or not. All this has much to do with how we envision the future.

4 Existentiality and appearance

In this section, I introduce an approach to semiotics that I call existential semiotics, which might lead to an integrative view of semiotics and future studies, in particular of metaphor (see Tarasti 2000, 2012a, 2012b, 2015). Futurists and existential semiotics have one thing in common: the realm of possible worlds, i.e. those alternatives that might have happened but did. Our anticipation of the future is largely based on history and memory of this ‘counterfactual ‘world. Some even think that nothing new can happen unless it has already been ‘tested’ and occurred earlier in the flow of time. Others believe in the creativity of the human mind and think that new things can happen.

For the philosophy of existential semiotics the concepts of Dasein (‘being-there’, a term borrowed from Jaspers and Heidegger) and transcendence are essential. Avoiding philosophical nuances of these key concepts, the easiest way to define ‘transcendence’ is that it is anything that is absent from the Dasein – but present in our mind. In that way it comes close to the concept of future. Future is also transcendental, i.e. something we do not know yet. It is like Ernst Bloch said, something ‘not yet’, noch nicht. The concept of the transcendence shared by existential semiotics and futures research has many forerunners from antiquity to Middle Ages to Arabic and Persian philosophy (Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, the Sufi scholars, etc.; see e.g. Kaukua, 2015).

The transcendental becomes empirical reality, or it is so to say ‘naturalized’ (Pihlström, 2003), by appearance. Reality emerges from one step, one moment to another. Existential semiotics shares the basic point of departure of many futurists: we can never know what happens next. As David Hume already showed in his criticism of causality, there are no ‘necessary connections’. There is no logical reason why world1 should lead to world2. This makes a situation truly existential in the old sense of Sartre or de Beauvoir. We are responsible for what happens, we can choose, and we can perform acts. Like Hannah Arendt spoke about a society in which everything seems to be totally determined. There seems to be no hope for change; yet, that ‘infinitely improbable’ can happen. Mankind has experienced the fall of big empires, as e.g. in recent history, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While most semiotic theories content themselves with demonstrating the universal and timeless structures of signification and communication, in existential semiotics the subject has a more active role. The theory takes into account those values that guide our activities. Ultimately, this approach takes us to a theory of resistance, i.e. it models how we live in the present world, take a critical stand towards it and form a theory whereby we could resist what is negative and not acceptable (see e.g. Bankov, 2004). Thus the theory becomes a tool for participative observation. It can change our future.

Existential semiotics and the related concept of transcendence also suggest a conceptual framework for anticipation purposes. The Finnish philosopher Sami Pihlström (2003: 144) has described the concept of transcendental argumentation as follows: “Generally speaking, a transcendental argument is an argument which proceeds from the actuality of some problematic phenomenon (e.g. knowledge, experience, language or thought) to its conditions of possibility”.

5 Varieties of transcendence and their contextuality

From the point of view of the study of metaphors, the distinction among three kinds of transcendences is useful:

Empirical transcendence that occurs in our everyday reality like metaphors. We could say that the Internet is the main source of empirical transcendence of our time. Our Facebook friends are often more or less ‘transcendental’ entities, i.e., we see of them only the appearance they want to show us. The renowned semiotician Umberto Eco was asked (Kull & Velmezova, 2014: 539), What is the main challenge for contemporary semiotics? He answered: “Today semiotics should take into account new phenomena such as the Web as a maximal encyclopedia [...] and new kinds of communicative intercourse such as social networks […] communication with virtual partners […]”.

Existential transcendence means that we can transcend any event or aspect of our body, person, institution and norms, all this by our existential judgment, affirmation or negation. We step, as it were, into our Geist (‘spirit’) (in the sense of Hegel), our transcendental ego (Sartre) or le moi profound (‘the deep ego’) (Bergson).

Finally, there is the notion of radical transcendence, of which we cannot say anything directly. We can only conceptualize in terms of metaphors. In theological thought, this type of core metaphor is ‘grace’. With the concept of the radical transcendence, we might reach what Goethe meant when he said at the end of the second part of his Faust: Alles Vergängliche ist nurein Gleichnis (‘Everything perishable is merely a parable/allegory’).

The process of metaphorization thus goes in two directions: from empirical reality towards the transcendences and from the utmost transcendence towards the ‘earth’. In the domain of empirical transcendence we virtualize real things, e.g. in the Internet. Existential transcendence or radical transcendence open up possibilities to us to realize our metaphoric plans.

If we take the close connection between metaphors and ‘transcendental categories’ into consideration, it is reasonable to assume that ‘transcendental categories’ depend on the culture in which they are enunciated. This is what Kuusi, Lauhakangas and Ruttas-Küttim (2015) claim in their unpublished essay: If people learn to understand the metaphors of culturally distant people, they gain a deeper understanding of them.

The Polish linguist and semiotician Zdisław Wąsik has emphasized the principle of construction in approaches to meaning (Wąsik, 2014: 145): “Cognitive models may be, in the span of human life, be replaced by others based on inferential, slightly altered or entirely innovative constructs when the experiential domain of a cognizing subject expands as a result of his or her subsequent searching explorations”. I would continue by saying that we need a transcultural existential semiotics, in order to avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings (Raffler-Engel, 2002). I am convinced that existential semiotics covers essentially the whole paradigm of future issues; it is, as it were, a future oriented theory.