Reweaving the Body with Cognitive Metaphors
摘要
What the Bayesian Ratio ratified, this chapter argues, was the eighteenth-century “woven body.” Weaving, a ubiquitous economic activity in Blake’s day, was widely deemed an image of the nervous interconnections that generate the association of ideas (as it is today). Bayesianism, however, tended to formalize the ongoing, practical activity of doing weaving into wovenness considered as a preexisting property of objects. Blake’s linguistic decompositions in Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Milton counteract this tendency by treating weaving as a cognitive metaphor in terms George Lakoff has made familiar. These poems also explore the power and extent of “ambient” metaphor based in the body’s immersive relation to its environment—a relation Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “the flesh” helps to explain. The semantics of Blake’s ambient and cognitive metaphors provide a basis for his unweavings and reweavings of the solid-seeming three-dimensional representations that make up the assumed “fabric” of reality.