We have reached an important point in our argument.
A difference can matter.
A difference that matters between systems can function as a signal.
A signal can become a sign when it participates in a semiotic system.
But once signs exist, something extraordinary becomes possible.
A meaning can itself become a resource for making another meaning.
We can use one way of construing experience to construe something else.
A journey can become a way of understanding a life.
A container can become a way of understanding an emotion.
A network can become a way of understanding a society.
A musical figure can become a way of understanding a character.
This is metaphor.
And metaphor matters to our argument because it shows that meaning does not merely accumulate. It can generate new meaning from existing meaning.
Meaning was already relational
It is important to be precise about what is new here.
Meaning was relational from the beginning.
A sign means through its relations to other signs, to contexts, to participants and to the larger semiotic system in which it operates.
So metaphor does not mark the moment when meaning becomes relational.
Something more specific happens.
A semiotic system acquires the capacity to make one configuration of meaning a resource for construing another.
Meaning can be reorganised through meaning.
This is a new degree of reflexivity.
Metaphor is not just comparison
We often explain metaphor as comparison.
Someone is described as a lion because they are courageous.
Life is described as a journey because it has beginnings, directions and destinations.
But this makes metaphor sound like a decorative comparison between things.
Something more powerful is happening.
The source domain provides an organisation of relations that can be recruited in the construal of another domain.
A journey contains possibilities such as departure, direction, progress, obstacles, detours and arrival.
When life is construed as a journey, these relations become available for thinking about life.
We can speak of a person's path, turning point, direction or crossroads.
The metaphor has therefore not merely added an image.
It has expanded the possibilities for construing the target domain.
Halliday's junction
This is where Halliday's account of metaphor gives us an especially useful formulation.
He describes metaphoric elements as junctional because they embody a junction of two semantic categories: the meaning of the congruent wording and the meaning of the metaphorical wording.
The important point is that the metaphorical expression does not simply discard one meaning and replace it with another.
The two semantic relations are brought together.
The wording therefore carries a junction of meanings.
That gives us a more precise account of the reflexivity we have been exploring.
A semantic category can be recruited into another semantic relation without disappearing from its original domain.
Meaning is now capable of folding back upon itself.
Grammatical metaphor
Halliday's grammatical metaphor shows this particularly clearly.
Consider the difference between:
The population increased rapidly.
and:
There was a rapid increase in the population.
The event has not changed.
But the construal has.
In the first wording, increased construes the change congruently as a process.
In the second, increase construes that process as a thing-like entity.
This new construal matters because the entity can now participate in further meanings.
We can speak about the increase.
Compare it with another increase.
Measure it.
Explain it.
Attribute causes to it.
The metaphorical wording creates new possibilities for subsequent meaning-making.
A meaning has become a resource for further meaning.
Why this matters
This is more than a linguistic curiosity.
A system that can reinterpret its own meanings gains a new kind of productivity.
It can create distinctions that were not previously available in the same form.
It can reorganise experience.
It can construct new concepts.
It can develop new explanations.
It can make one domain illuminate another.
The semiotic system becomes capable of working upon its own resources.
This is one reason conceptual evolution can be so much faster than biological evolution.
A new biological form requires changes in organisms and populations.
A new semiotic construal can arise in a conversation, a metaphor, an image, a scientific model or a piece of art and spread rapidly through a culture.
The meaning potential can change within a generation.
Metaphor expands potential
We can now return to our distinction between potential and instance.
A novel metaphor is a particular instance of meaning-making.
But if other people adopt it, the relation it establishes can become part of the collective potential.
What was previously an unusual construal becomes a familiar resource.
The process can therefore be represented as:
new construal → repeated use → recognition → conventionalisation → expanded potential
The metaphor changes the system that made it possible.
This is another example of potential and instance entering a recursive relationship.
The potential provides resources for innovation.
Innovations can enlarge the potential.
The power of convention
Once a metaphor becomes familiar, it may no longer feel metaphorical.
We speak of the mouth of a river, the leg of a table, the head of an organisation.
The original cross-domain relation has become ordinary vocabulary.
What was once a novel construal has been absorbed into the semiotic system.
This process is sometimes described as the "dead" metaphor.
But the metaphor is not dead in the interesting sense.
Its history has become sedimented into the potential of the language.
A relation that once had to be actively constructed has become an available possibility for everyone.
Conceptual evolution often works this way.
Innovation becomes convention.
Convention becomes infrastructure.
Infrastructure becomes the starting point for further innovation.
Metaphor is selective
A metaphor does not transfer an entire domain.
When we construe life as a journey, we do not import every property of physical travel.
We select particular relations: direction, obstacles, movement, departure, arrival.
This selectivity is essential.
The source domain contains a large potential of meanings.
The metaphor actualises only some of them in relation to the target.
Metaphor therefore involves selection within a potential.
It does not simply compare two objects wholesale.
This is one reason different metaphors can construe the same phenomenon differently.
Life can be a journey.
It can be a game.
It can be a battle.
It can be a story.
Each metaphor makes some relations available and leaves others in the background.
Metaphor changes what can be asked
Once a domain is construed through another, new questions become possible.
If life is a journey, we can ask:
Where are we going?
Have we lost our way?
What was the turning point?
If an argument is construed as a battle:
Who attacked?
What position was defended?
Which argument defeated the other?
These questions were not simply waiting inside the original concepts.
The metaphor made them available.
This is why metaphor is a mechanism of conceptual affordance.
It changes what can be thought, not merely how something is described.
Metaphor and scientific thought
Science provides many examples.
We speak of genetic codes, neural networks, ecological webs, information flows and molecular machines.
Such expressions are not always merely poetic.
They recruit structured relations from one domain to organise another.
A network brings nodes and connections.
A machine brings parts, functions and operations.
A code brings formal patterns and systematic correspondences.
A flow brings movement and continuity.
Each metaphor makes some distinctions easier to formulate.
It may also make others harder to see.
Metaphor therefore participates in explanation.
It helps determine what kinds of questions a theory can ask.
Metaphor can become a model
Sometimes a metaphor becomes so productive that it develops into a more explicit model.
The original comparison provides a conceptual foothold.
Researchers begin reasoning within it.
New distinctions are added.
The model is tested.
Some aspects survive.
Others are discarded.
Eventually the metaphor may become almost invisible.
The conceptual system it generated remains.
This is an important form of cultural evolution.
A metaphor can be the beginning of a conceptual potential that later becomes highly specialised.
Metaphor and image
Now we can turn toward the visual question that will occupy us in the next post.
If metaphor allows one domain of meaning to become a resource for construing another, might something analogous happen across modes?
An image is not automatically a metaphor.
A painted tree need not be a metaphor for anything.
A photograph need not be metaphorical.
A shape can be repeated for practical or decorative reasons without symbolising.
But an image can participate in a semiotic system where a visual relation is recruited to construe something beyond its immediate appearance.
A tree can become an image of ancestry.
A circle can become associated with cyclical time.
A particular animal can become associated with power, fertility or danger.
The crucial operation is not resemblance alone.
It is the recruitment of one organised relation into the construal of another.
From metaphor to representation
This gives us a new way to think about representation.
Perhaps representation is not simply the ability to copy an object.
Perhaps it involves the ability to make a relation available in another form.
A picture can preserve an appearance.
But it can also organise experience.
It can make a relation spatially available.
It can bring the absent into presence.
It can condense a network of associations into one visible form.
The image becomes a resource for further construal.
That is the direction in which our argument is now moving.
Metaphor and myth
The power of metaphor becomes even greater when several metaphors are connected.
A culture may construe the earth as a mother.
If this relation becomes established, it can generate others.
The earth can give birth.
The earth can be wounded.
The earth can be nourished.
Humans can become children.
A metaphor has become a network of possible meanings.
When such networks are organised into stories, they can become myth.
Myth can therefore be understood partly as the expansion of metaphorical relations into a larger symbolic world.
This does not mean that all myth is reducible to metaphor.
It means that metaphor provides one powerful mechanism by which meanings can become generative.
The metaphorical junction is productive
Halliday's term junction is especially apt here.
The metaphor does not simply choose one semantic category and abandon another.
The expression creates a junction.
The congruent and metaphorical meanings remain available together.
That means the metaphor has a kind of semantic surplus.
We can move between the two construals.
We can exploit their relation.
We can extend it.
We can challenge it.
This is one reason metaphor is so powerful artistically.
A metaphor can be precise without being reducible to a single paraphrase.
Its richness comes from the relation between semantic possibilities.
Meaning can become self-expanding
We can now see the broader consequence.
Once meanings can function as resources for further meanings, the semiotic system can expand without needing a completely new physical environment each time.
It can reuse itself.
A metaphor generates a new construal.
The new construal becomes conventional.
The convention becomes material for another metaphor.
A story combines earlier stories.
A genre transforms previous genres.
An image quotes another image.
A scientific model borrows from another model.
Meaning becomes cumulative.
The system acquires a history of its own transformations.
This is where conceptual evolution begins to accelerate
Biological evolution works through variation, inheritance and selection across generations.
Cultural semiosis can operate similar processes much more rapidly.
A new expression is tried.
Others adopt it.
The relation becomes familiar.
It enters the collective reservoir.
Future speakers now inherit the new possibility.
The same happens in music, art, science and myth.
An innovation becomes part of the environment in which subsequent innovations occur.
The history of meaning therefore changes the possibilities from which meaning can subsequently be made.
This is why the past can constrain and enable the future.
Metaphor and mattering
We can now reconnect metaphor with our starting point.
A metaphor can alter what distinctions become salient.
A new way of construing a phenomenon can change what seems important about it.
A society that construes an ecosystem as a machine may attend to some relations.
A society that construes it as a web may attend to others.
A person who construes a life event as a turning point may give it a significance it previously lacked.
Metaphor can therefore alter what matters.
The feedback from meaning to value has already begun.
But it is still operating through the expansion of possible construals.
The visual threshold
We are now ready to approach the image.
If meaning can become a resource for meaning, and if semantic relations can be realised through different modes, then a further possibility emerges:
a relation of meaning can itself become materially available in another mode.
A visual form can participate in a symbolic system.
A pattern can become recognisable as significant.
An image can become a resource for construal.
A representation can preserve a relation across time.
The history of visual meaning therefore becomes part of the same story.
But we should approach it carefully.
A mark is not necessarily an image.
An image is not necessarily a representation.
A representation is not necessarily a symbol.
And a symbol is not necessarily detachable from the world it signifies.
Those distinctions will matter.
One meaning can open another world
This is perhaps the deepest thing metaphor teaches us.
Meaning does not merely give us labels for a pre-existing reality.
It gives us new ways of making possibilities available.
A metaphor can reveal a relation.
The relation can become a concept.
The concept can become a convention.
The convention can become a model.
The model can generate new questions.
The questions can generate new meanings.
The semiotic system becomes capable of producing worlds of its own.
And once those worlds can be externalised in images, stories, music and other modes, they can become part of the environment within which future meaning is made.
The next step
We have therefore moved from:
difference → mattering → signal → sign
to:
sign → meaning → metaphor → new meaning potential
The next question is what happens when these new possibilities of construal can be given material form.
What happens when a relation of meaning becomes visible?
When a form can not only matter or signify, but represent?
That is where we meet the image.
And our next question is:
When does an image become a sign?
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