| This study is an investigation into the implications inhering in the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to metaphor and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) for understanding the production and reception of meaning in writing about artistic production. Cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to metaphor differ in the grounding frameworks, philosophic positions and methodological assumptions that shape how metaphor is understood; this study is interested in developing ways to read difference between and within what seem to be incompatible theories in order to complicate understandings, conceptions and reception of writing about artistic production as it promotes meaning through metaphoric structures and processes.;This is a qualitative, philosophic study utilizing analyses of metaphoric structures within a piece of art critical writing by Daniel Birnbaum about artist Mark Dion and his 1999 work Tate Thames Dig. Dion's work interrogates the character of meaning and history, and Birnbaum's writing about Dion's work affords readers particular routes of access to meaning about the work. This study analyzes Birnbaum's writing utilizing both Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with attention to ways that meaning is produced, pointed to and supported through the use of metaphor. The study then seeks to develop an understanding of ways attention to differing approaches to metaphor can complicate the reading and provide insight into writing about artistic practice.;Utilizing a Bakhtinian dialogic framework a dialogic encounter is enacted to explore the possibilities for a complicated approach to metaphor as uncovered through the readings of Birnbaum's writing. Finally, the study, taking both Lacanian theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory into account, discusses a complicated approach to metaphor with attention to insight, communication, thinking and knowing, and the body as a source of meaning. Within this discussion a consideration of the necessity of interrogating metaphor's relationship to knowledge, considering constraints and affordances of theoretical frameworks, and foregrounding the value of theoretical difference reflexively explores the contextual values enabling such a complication of metaphor to take place. |
