CONSTRUCTING AUTOPOIESIS: THE ARCHITECTURAL BODY IN LIGHT OF CONTEMPORARY COGNITIVE SCIENCE “Constructing life”/constructing metaphors

When crossing disciplinary domains, one always crashes head-first into the problem of metaphor: how can you connect ideas from distinct intellectual fields by means of a device analogous to what mathematicians recognize as an equal sign or a congruency sign? The problem intensifies when both domains have to buy into the term employed. Since theorizers about metaphor now understand that a metaphor has no absolute stability, even with respect to its home discourse, one can question why bother: as Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues in this collection, Gilles Deleuze famously denies their existence. Given: 1) Their tacit or “conventional” status; 2) their drifting, gaseous irreducibility: Why bother to employ metaphors (or tropes generally), or even attempt to cross disciplines, if all that happens is to turn distinct orderly domains into a maze? Perhaps that is the point. When questions become unanswerable within a single domain, innovators seek analogous questions in foreign realms in order to resituate their lines of inquiry, and even to pursue several lines simultaneously, hoping, through juxtaposition, to find answers or more powerful questions in between, or beyond. Perhaps what we need are periplum meanderings from questions formerly situated on standard grids. Arakawa’s early visual works often involve a mazy juxtaposition of different cognitive and conceptual schema, as well as an immanent “blankness,” all competing for the aesthetic attention of the conventional art consumer. Metaphor and planes of interdisciplinary schema; foreground and background—navigation can become treacherous quickly.