Visualizing the Invisible. Or, how to beat the pandemic.

An English friend who lives in London recently sent me a picture of an orange pomander she made over Christmas, and I immediately realized she had fabricated a Coronavirus. I told her so. But this  possibility apparently hadn’t occurred to her!

See what you think:

This illustration of the virus was created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and shows its ultrastructural morphology. When viewed using electron microscopically, one sees spikes covering the outer surface, which is why it is called a ‘corona’ virus.

Now here is my friend’s orange pomander:

I rest my case.

My friend’s wholly unconscious fabrication of the virus got me thinking about the role played by the activity of visualizing the invisible in our lives in general.  We can’t see – or smell, taste, touch – so much of what is important to us, but at some point in our evolution we came up with the idea of using metaphors and analogies, which  give form and substance to abstractions, or what is sensed but remains invisible.

In such books as ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’ (1999) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have developed what they call Conceptual Metaphor Theory.  They discuss how we use ‘primitive image schemas’, as they call them, to make ‘imagistic cross-domain mappings.’ A ‘target domain’, such as something invisible like  an emotion, or time, or the nature of human relationships, is mapped onto a ‘source domain’ - an image drawn from our memory, our experience of interacting with the environment, and from a shared cultural stock of already existing metaphors. The ‘target’ concept is inherently abstract, and so lacks clear demarcation, making it difficult to grasp or ‘see’, and  it is in order to render it comprehensible and communicable that we have recourse to the concrete things   accessible to the senses. Because the physiological conditions of human corporeality have remained more or less constant for millennia, such metaphorical or analogical schema function within a context that manifests a limited range of variables,  and they have remarkable durability through time and space. As Lakoff and Johnson show, in the world’s languages a relatively small number of ‘primitive image schemas’ exist which are based on  familiar spatial relations arising from the experience of being a body  occupying and moving in space. These schemas serve as the ‘source-domains’ for abstractions such as ideas, concepts, qualities, and feelings and emotions.  They refer to core experiences, such as those of  “part-whole, center–periphery, link, cycle, iteration, contact, adjacency, force motion (eg., pushing, pulling, propelling), support balance, straight-curved, and near-far.”. Orientational metaphors are especially pervasive ‘source-domains,’ and have do with space-occupancy - with the fact that we inhabit spaces. For example, we imagine being happy as being spatially ‘up.’ “The fact that the concept HAPPY is oriented UP leads to English expressions like “I’m feeling up today.”,

A universally pervasive conceptual metaphor  makes a correlation between knowing something and the act of seeing, so that we believe that  ‘Knowing is Seeing’. If we can’t ‘see’ an idea, a concept, or a feeling clearly in the ‘mind’s yes’, then we don’t believe we ‘know’ it. So, as  Mark Johnson writes in ‘The Meaning of the Body’ (2007):

 ‘If there is insufficient light, I will not be able to see the object clearly. If I cannot discern the object clearly, I won’t perceive the details of its shape and structure [……..] if an idea is obscure or an explanation is not clear, it follows that one cannot understand the idea. Murky arguments are hard to understand. Shedding more light on a subject makes it easier to understand, and so we value any account that is illuminating. ‘

This correlation between seeing and knowing become especially problematic when something is invisible. We are at a loss, and are likely to feel threatened and fearful. That is, unless we can give it a visible form. Before scientific instruments, it was visionary images that mostly performed this task, often unconsciously finding visual correlatives for the invisible forces that dominate our lives, or transforming them into the visible, so that they can thereby be grasped and, tamed. Carl Jung terms them ‘archetypes.’ This, in a sense, is what the shaman’s role was for traditional societies: he or she made visible what was invisible. Before science provided us with a vastly extended capacity to know through seeing, thanks to the invention of the microscope and telescope, we came up with other ways to grasp the invisible, which were mostly through various forms of anthropomorphism. In this regard, images are much more effective than the word based metaphors that are Lakoff and Johnson’s main focus. Images can produce much closer - isomorphic- correspondences in actual or illusionistic three-dimensions between things visible and invisible.

We freeze things, holding them still in order to better control them. But this can also have profoundly negative implication, as William Wordsworth lamented in his poem ‘The tables Turned’:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; 

Our meddling intellect 

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— 

We murder to dissect. 

Enough of Science and of Art; 

Close up those barren leaves; 

Come forth, and bring with you a heart 

That watches and receives. 

‘We may indeed ‘murder to dissect’, and it is certain that a ‘heart / That watches and receives’ is to be nurtured. But in the case of a deadly virus, the capacity to ‘dissect’ is useful, and will save millions of lives. The microscope, aided by digital imaging, has made the virus visible to us, and thereby made it more controllable.   

But there is also an important place for more ‘primitive’ forms of visualization, motivated by deep anxieties, which, as in this case, led to the making of an image that is parasitic on microscopic scientific imagery in order to visualize the invisible. This activity is very therapeutic. I think my friend, who is naturally very anxious about the dangers of the virus, found a way to unconsciously control and work through  her fear through making a tasty, edible, image of the ‘enemy’. If she does indeed eat her orange pomander, she will also add an important performative dimension to the therapeutic process, literally dismembering and consuming what she fears. Perhaps the fact that she went about making her fetish unconsciously is also important. I hope I haven’t destroyed the good voodoo it offers by bringing it to attention.

Come to think of it, this process is also what the face mask enacts to some extent. It functions as a metonym or synecdoche for the virus. In other words, the mask makes visible the virus through being a visible attribute representing the invisible whole. Quite apart from the practical medical benefits, this is, as I noted in a previous post, a very valuable symbolic role of the face mask, one that we should credit with more than just mere ‘symbolic’ value, because it also has a directly practical benefit that accrues on the level of affect and emotion - the psychological rather than the somatic, which is what the doctors talk about. 

SUBLIME CORONAVIRUS

With the arrival of Covid-19  human history has finally collided with nature.

As I’m interested in the concept of the sublime,  I can but see the current crisis through the lens of  the ‘negative sublime’.  The concept of the sublime   describes the experience of standing on a borderline, threshold,  or  boundary and therefore finding oneself in an unfamiliar and vulnerable position.

Etymologically, the term   derives from the Latin sublimis (‘elevated,’ ‘lofty’), from the preposition sub, meaning ‘up to,’ and limen (the threshold, surround, or lintel of a doorway), and it also relates to  limes - a boundary or limit.  The concept of the sublime is therefore  an attempt to  map  experiences characterized by bodily displacement and confusion onto phenomena that are obscure, complex, immense, and awe-inspiring, onto  cognitive and emotional states associated with   fear and terror.  The sublime has two valences –   positive and negative. In its positive mode, the sublime describes a destabilizing but invigorating experience of transcendence. In its negative mode, by contrast, the experience is one in which we are humbled and diminished by an encounter with something overwhelming.  Both valences explore the role of pain rather than pleasure within the economy of the self.

The concept of the sublime  is therefore an attempt to address  humanity’s troubled relationship  with nature from a secular point of view.  Through drawing attention to existential limits va analogies to   expansive horizons, stormy oceans, immense geological formations, and diffuse and indistinct atmospheres, the sublime is about the  transformation of ontological situations caused by extreme situations.  

The Covid-19 pandemic can be usefully described in terms of  the  ‘negative sublime’.  Seeing it in this context  is   significant not least because we thought we had successfully divested nature of its troubling sublimities.  We thought the sublime in nature  was a  hackneyed cliché associated with the vacation snap-shot and  advertising copy. We thought it had been completely assimilated to mass culture, and become an ersatz sublimity designed to stimulate a jaded consumer. The now all too familiar images of ‘sublimity’ were  routinely exploited to sell everything from new cars to male perfumes, and  it features harmlessly in countless ‘end-of-the-world’ and sci-fi movie entertainments. The domestication  and commodification of the   sublime as a feature of our relationship to nature seemed total.

But we were wrong, and it’s  very sobering.