Visual Analogy

Abstract

A groundbreaking book exploring the discovery of sameness in otherness. Recuperating a topic once central to philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics, this groundbreaking book explores the discovery of sameness in otherness. Analogy poses an intriguingly ancient and modern conundrum. How, in the face of cultural diversity, can a unique someone or something be perceived as like what it is not? This book is for anyone puzzled by why today, as Barbara Maria Stafford claims, "we possess no language for talking about resemblance, only an exaggerated awareness of difference." Well-designed images, Stafford argues, reveal the mind's intuitive leaps to connect known with unknown experience. The first of four wide-ranging chapters paints a challenging overview of several pressing contemporary issues. Cloning, legal controversies about social inequity, identity politics, electronic copying, and the mimicry of virtual reality expose the need for a nuanced theory of similitude. The second examines the historical tug-of-war between analogy and allegory, or disanalogy. Stafford provocatively suggests that, since the Romantic Era, we have been living in polarizingly allegorical times. The third roots this divisiveness within the momentous shift from a magical universe, modeled on sexual bonds, to an engineered world built of discrete automated units. Finally, recent developments in computational brain research notwithstanding, major phenomenological questions about memory, emotion, intelligence, and awareness beckon. In the fourth chapter, Stafford intervenes in the consciousness debates to propose a humanistic cognitive science with bridging/analogy at its artful core.

Scandalous Artifacts: Practice between Archaeology and Architecture

“…[45] Stafford, amongst others, [46] maintains that in the period spanning the years of the Enlightenment, a particular and inclusive interdisciplinary mode of reasoning was abandoned, and that this inclusivity was replaced with "an exaggerated awareness of difference." [47] According to Stafford, it was a tragedy for Enlightenment thinking that analogical reasoning became identified with occultism and mysticism and, in general, a kind of sloppy, or even deliberately malicious, thinkingor perhaps no thinking or reasoning at all. Instead, the practical magic of medieval modes of cognition, Stafford explains, was replaced with the textuality of allegorical reasoning.…”

“…Instead, the practical magic of medieval modes of cognition, Stafford explains, was replaced with the textuality of allegorical reasoning. "Putting the visible into relationship with the invisible and manifesting the effect of that momentary unison" [48] as a way of understanding the world became unfashionable, even heretical.…”

“…Stafford implies that analogous reasoning is a natural form of thinking, that it represents an Eden of lost interdisciplinary innocence to which we must return and that Visual Analogy [49] and her later work Devices of Wonder [50] together provide, above all, a practical attempt at proposing and implementing a "humanistic cognitive science with bridging/analogy at its artful core" [51] a return, therefore, to pre-Enlightenment epistemes. It was part of the project of Enlightenment thinking, according to Stafford, to lessen, even eliminate, resemblance; she maintains that "all physical phenomena … can be cross-referenced, linked in reconciling explanation by the informed imagination."…”

“…It was part of the project of Enlightenment thinking, according to Stafford, to lessen, even eliminate, resemblance; she maintains that "all physical phenomena … can be cross-referenced, linked in reconciling explanation by the informed imagination." [52] This is a radical project but is crucial to her conception of an analogical universean interconnectedness of everything. However, for scandalous space an all-inclusive interdisciplinarity is not necessary or even possible.…”

Corporeal Theory with/in Practice: Christine Borland's Winter Garden

“…Moreover, this in-between is a mobile process, bringing historically and materially distinct ideas into connection and demonstrating Stafford's claim that the pre-eminent activity of art resides in visual analogy: 'a metamorphic and metaphoric practice for weaving discordant particulars into a partial concordance'. 26 I want to argue that exploring art in this way can transform critical practice as well, engendering a similar shift from object to process, asking not what a work of art is, but what it does -how art works. 27 Here, the full repercussions of a move to corporeal theory might begin to be felt as feminist art history and criticism become active, creative forces in the articulation of embodied subject positions in and through differential aesthetics.…”