Is my shell-and-pearl metaphor improved by mapping nacre to language and the enveloping and pervading irritants to language-defiant realities?
Or is it better to map nacre to objectivity and the the nacre-necessitating irritants to whatever rejects objective comprehension?
Does this difference make a difference?
*
“And our condition is linguistic: we say non-metaphorically first.” — Jan Zwicky
I’d map the nacre, not just to linguistic metaphors, but to all forms of “seeing-as”. For example, there are many examples of visual seeing-as’s. And of course, affordances are a paradigm of seeing as.
I think where the analogy with nacre runs out for me is that the process of nacre-ing (sp?) changes that which becomes covered in nacre, but it doesn’t change the organism doing the nacre-ing. I see our see-ing as as a form of dependent co-arising/reciprocal constitution: we shape our world and our world shapes us.
I’ll need to think about this. You’ve caused me to move back toward conception as nacre.
For “visual nacre” I was thinking of the examples in this article I emailed you the other day: http://www.bobolinkbooks.com/Gestalt/EmbeddedFigures.html . When a visual figure, “pops out” at us, we have nacred it.