Branding provides another sign of the way that word and image suffuse one another (wish the Tutor weren’t taking a break so he could chime in). The principles of vexillology and heraldry provide, as it were, the grammar of their images’ signification.
“A picture held us captive.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 115
Now, grant (if you will) that pictures and words are not as diametrically opposite as they are sometimes supposed to be. Isn’t it odd that schools of hermeneutical reflection so often begin with apposite, vivid metaphors, which critics then deploy as terms of art within the hermeneutical discourse, and which at the end function as though they were simply descriptions of what actually takes place?
I refer here to such hermeneutical staples as “the world behind the text,” “the world in front of the text,” and “the world of the text” or “text as window” versus “text as mirror.” Am I being perversely literalistic if I ask, “If the world is behind the text, why can’t I reach around and touch it?” I’d like to think that I’m not, that instead I’m (in effect) asking how to recognize the metaphor’s fit to the situation it presumably describes, and how to discern when the metaphor has so captivated its user that the user now takes the metaphorical description as an account of what is.
Posted by AKMA at September 26, 2003 07:12 AM | TrackBackI think brand is best understood as an emblem or, since you mention the Tutor, an emblem.
Posted by: Phil at September 26, 2003 10:24 AMI suspect (with merely hermeneutic suspicion) that you are troubled by the fact that we embrace visual metaphors for things like texts, and fall into taking them literally, for reasons that have long bothered me. But I have not focused the problem as well as you do. What this syndrome, or symptom, suggests (to me anyway) is that this is one mode we resist (through oversimplification) the "knowledge" that texts are something other than easily totalized receptacles that can be captured by figural representation. I don't know if this is the same captivity as Luddie was talking about. If texts were so easily reduced to image and metaphor, we could just exchange them as objects, like Swift's Lagadan academics, no?
Hope y're feeling better...
If I remember correctly, and I may not since it's been quite some time since I've dealt with it, but isn't this one aspect of J. Derrida's critique of E. Levinas in 'Violence and Metaphysics'? Moving past, or avoiding, the ontological verbage thrown around there, I think it is safe to say to that the former comes to very similar hermeneutical questions as you.
Posted by: Brad at September 28, 2003 11:17 AM