by Mark Turner
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case or evolution or computer activity or any of a vast range of other targets. We can project itjust as we project the generic spaces that arise out of “VVhen the cat’s away, the mice will play” or “Look before you leap” or any other proverb that mentions only a specific source story. We can project it notjust to purpose- ful behavior directed at a goal but indeed to any action performed by an inten- tional agent. “Watch your step” can be said of any action that an agent is about to perform, purposeful or not, intentional or not, consciously or not. The generic space underlying “Watch your step” consists only of an agent, an action that the agent is on the verge of performing, and a warning to pay attention.
A telling difference between a basic metaphor like LIFE Is A JOURNEY and our generic interpretation of “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t play” is this: The generic space involved in LIFE IS A JOURNEY has a deeply entrenched default projection onto a particular specific target space, the course of a lffiefrom birth to death, while the generic space arising from “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t play” is not conventionally tied to a specific target space. It is therefore easier to see the generic space in the second case, and to be aware of our application of that generic space to this or that specific target space.
When we take our data exclusively from deeply entrenched projections like LIFE IS A JOURNEY that have deeply entrenched vocabulary, the generic and blended spaces are less easily noticed, and the projection looks as if it carries positive meaning from one input space (the source) to another (the target). This has lead to the customary model of the projection of meaning as direct, one-way, and positive. This is a useful and parsimonious model, but it is adequate only in limiting cases.
Generic spaces differ linguistically from specific input spaces and blended spaces in one fundamental regard: They lack their own rich vocabulary. The vocabulary of a generic space is largely shifted to it from an input space. This vocabulary applies whenever we project the generic space onto a new space. For example, we have no generic word that means “an instrument somebody uses so constantly in his chosen work as to be regarded as definin g the work.” One such instrument for one such worker is anaxe. The relation of the worker to the axe— manipulating it, trying to get it to do what he wants done--has an abstract struc- ture, and this structure can be projected to a generic space. That generic space can then be projected to a target, such as playing a jazz instrument. In jazz, someone’s instrument is called his axe. A saxophone is an axe, but so is a flute, a guitar, a drum set, a piano. The vocabulary of one space is shifted to the generic space, and projected from there to whatever target the generic applies to—in this case, jazz instruments. A new projection of the generic space onto a new kind of instrument (a synthesizer, for example) will not look unusual even if it is entirely novel: the vocabulary that has been shifted to the generic space is expected to
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apply to any target to which the generic space is projected. Such projection underlies category extension: “Axe” can now refer to the blended space that con- sists of all axes, including real axes.
WAKING UP THE GENERIC SPACE
We can at will focus on the generic space and wake it up fully. Even when, as in a basic metaphor, the generic space is fully superimposed upon a conventional target, we can nonetheless easily turn that generic space into a blended space by supplementing it with specifics from the source and the target. Underlying a phrase like “She’s making considerable progress as a young adult” is a conven- tional projection so deeply entrenched that it may be hard to see blending at work. The generic space, fully superimposed on the target, is nearly invisible. But this generic space can be turned into a blended space, as in a television commercial for an insurance company in which a person is actually on a road, encountering and going through doors labeled sclyool, college admissions, undergraduate educa- tion, professional sclyool, marriage. As she goes along, passing through each door on the road, she ages and her clothing changes to suit her present “stage of life.” She acquires fellow travelers in the form of playmates, friends, husband, and children. Her parents, standing at the side of the road, hand her fistfuls of money as she trots past. She in turn hands the money to the “bursar” who stands out- side the door of professional school, and so on. This is a fantastic blended space, constructed by waking up the generic space and adding to it.
Waking up the generic space is a standard tool of literature. Contrast the very skeletal generic space underlying the phrase “drug trip” with Proust’ s elaboration:
When one absorbs a new drug, entirely different in composition, it is always with a delicious expectancy of the unknown. . . . To what un- known forms of sleep, of dreams, is the newcomer going to lead one? It is inside one now, it is in control of our thoughts. In what way is one going to fall asleep? And, once asleep, by what strange paths, up to what peaks, into what unfathomed gulfs will this all-powerful master lead one? VVhat new group of sensations will one meet with on this jour- ney? Will it lead to illness? To blissful happiness? To death?
On n’absorbe le produit nouveau, d’une composition toute différente, qu’avec la délicieuse attente de l’inconnu. . . . Vers quel genres ignorés de sommeil, de réves, le nouveau venu va-t-il nous conduire? Il est maintenant dans nous, il a la direction de notre pensée. De quelle facon allons-nous nous endormir? Et une fois que nous le serons, par quel
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chemins étrangers, sur quelle cimes, dans quels gouffres inexplorés le maitre tout-puissant nous conduira-t-il? Qlel groupement nouveau de sensations allons-nous connaitre dans ce voyage? Nous ménera-t-il au malaise? la béatitude? la mort?
Similarly, contrast the very skeletal generic space underlying an expression like “Death finally won” with Proust’s elaborations:
For we talk of “Death” for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people. We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. Often there are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later. They come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operation, it is necessary to plan1: the tumour there afresh.
Car nous disons la mort pour simplifier, mais il y en a presque autant que de personnes. Nous ne possédons pas de sens qui nous permette de voir, courant '21 toute vitesse, dans toutes les directions, les morts, les morts actives dirigées par le destin ver tel ou tel. Souvent ce sont des morts qui ne seront entiérement libérées de leur tache que deux, trois ans aprés. Elles courent vite poser un cancer au flanc d’un Swann, puis repartent pour d’autres besognes, ne revenant que quand l’opération des chirurgiens ayant eu lieu il fault poser le cancer '21 nouveau.
In such cases of rich blending, the generic space is awakened and elaborated in a blended space where new work is done that requires revision of the input stories.
THE GRADIENT OF MIDDLE SPACES
A generic space stands at one end of a gradient; a richly blended space stands at the other end; the blend connects to the generic space and includes its structure. As information is blended from the input spaces into the blended space, it moves along the gradient from generic to blend. The degree of blending varies along this gradient. A “pedagogical gun” or a “walking steam—engine” may suggest a thin blend, while a lengthy allegorical poem may suggest a very rich blend. The degree of blending is often up to the reader. Bernadine Healy resigned as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shortly after the inauguration
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of President Bill Clinton, implicitly acknowledging that she had been asked to leave because she had been associated with the federal ban on the use of fetal tissue in scientific research paid for with federal
funds. She expressed regret that the agency had been drawn into the political debate by saying, “NIH has become a bit of the Beirut of abortion and fetal tissue.”
A reader who uses the popular notion of Beirut as suffering terribly and innocently because conflicting factions war over it might interpret this blend so thinly as to make it seem like no blend at all: Healy is simply saying that the NIH has suffered innocently by being caught in the “political crossfire,” where again the noun comes from the source and the adjective from the target but in a phrase so conventional as to seem as normal as “intellectual progress.”
But it is equally easy to imagine Healy in a bullet-scarred NIH building (the one in Bethesda, Maryland,just outside the District of Columbia) taking politi- cal rounds of ammunition, lobbed at her alternately by Republican and Demo- cratic presidents and their political factions, from the VVhite House and Con- gress, located on the Mall a few miles away. A political cartoon supporting her point of view might picture her in a helmet, ducking the incoming fire. There is a gradient of specificity between the generic space and the blended space, and we have latitude in moving along that gradient as we interpret expressions.
CATEGORIES AND ANALOGIES
Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the everyday mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific. Let us consider some examples of social and scientific blending originally treated by Fauconnier and me.
Analogy places pressure upon conventional category structures. A success- ful analogy can, through entrenchment, earn a place among our category struc- tures. The assault of an analogy on conventional categories is often expressed in the early stages by a blend-construction that draws its noun from the source and its modifier from the target. “Same-sex marriage,” for example, asks us to project the scenario of marriage onto an alternative domestic scenario. People of vio- lently opposed ideological belief will freely agree that the generic space of this projection carries information applicable to both scenarios. It might include people living in a household, dividing labor, protecting each other in various ways, and planning together.
What is at issue is not the existence of this information but rather its status. Those whose conception of conventional marriage has as a requisite component “heterosexual union” and has as its prototype “for the sake of children” will regard this abstract generic information as merely incidental or derivative in the story
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of traditional marriage. In their view, “same-sex marriage” will remain an ana- logical projection whose blended space is as fantastic and conflicted as any we have seen in Dante or Shakespeare, but which nonetheless draws legitimate abstract connections—however inessential—between one kind of story and an entirely different kind of story.
But others may regard this abstract information in the generic space as the central information in the story of traditional marriage. They may regard “het- erosexual union for the sake of children” as merely incidental information in the traditional story. For these people, “same-sex marriage” is not an aggressive ana- logical construction; it simply refers to a subcategory of marriage in the way that “light wave” refers to a kind of wave.
We must be careful not to mistake the research question of how parable works in the mind for a different issue of professed ideological belief. Agreeing to treat two scenarios as belonging to the same category for purposes of protection under the law or taxation or health coverage or whatever is different from actually having a conceptual structure in which these two scenarios belong to the same conceptual category. Liberal goodwill toward diverse scenarios, on a philosophy of live and let live, is irrelevant to the phenomenon of recognizing something to be an obvious instance of a category, as when we recognize light to be obviously a wave or a heron to be obviously a bird. When we have a category that is entrenched in our concep- tual structure, we do not merely agree to treat two of its central members in some of the ways we treat the other; instead, they share the same default generic structure.
Suppose the information in the generic space of “same-sex marriage”— people living in a household, dividing labor, protecting each other in various ways, and planning together—came over time to be the central information in our stan- dard concept of marriage. This would mean that the generic space of “same-sex marriage” had displaced the generic space of “traditional marriage” as the essen- tial structure of the category marriage. The blended space would become not a fantastic combination but rather a new and wider category. It would ultimately subsume the original input spaces.
In a situation of ideological tension over category connections, there is always the opportunity to reject the projection and invert the relative status of the two input spaces. This has happened in debates over racial, gender, social, and eco- nomic categories, and occurs in two steps. First, an attempt is made to claim that the generic space that is projected from a powerful group (white, male, aris- tocratic, rich, colonialist, capitalist, master) applies to less powerful groups if we project the “right” and “just” information, thereby extending the category: There becomes no “legitimate” distinction between aristocrat and commoner, for example. Such projections are often resisted by those who see themselves as belonging to the source category, but embraced by people who see themselves as belonging to the target.
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However, a second possible response in the social debate occurs when those in the target reject the projection, on the claim that the two groups do not belong to a category at all. It might be claimed, for example, that violence is central to men but not to women and that any generic space that lumps them together does a disservice to women and is to be rejected; that the rich are inherently dishonest while the poor are inherently honest and that any generic space that lumps them together does a disservice to the poor and is to be rejected; that white culture is essentially a culture of ice and therefore cold while black culture is essentially a culture of the sun and therefore warm and that any generic space that is pro- posed as a category that applies to both of them is to be rejected; that conven- tional marriage involves asymmetry between the man and the woman while same- sex marriage has no such asymmetry and so any generic space proposed to lump them together is to be rejected. VVhat is at issue here is of course not in the slightest degree any particular ideological view but rather the fact that all ideological views use parable to judge and reason. Parable is an instrument of thought and belief and consequently of argument.
The cultural tussle over the analogical pressure of “same-sex marriage” upon conventional category structures provides daily journalistic copy and stirs pas- sions. It is an example of the role played by blended spaces in our understanding of cultural and social reality, and of our place in that reality. Blended spaces play the identical role in the world of basic science. Consider the case of “artificial life.” If a mental space that includes biological life has as central information “embodied, developed through biological evolution, carbon-based,” and so on, then “artificial life”-which comes from a computer lab and is not based on car- bon#will always be an analogical concept, and “artificial life” will not belong to the category “life.” It will be a provisional category extension, like “He’s a real fish.” But computer viruses, for example, share abstract structure with biological organisms. As the generic space that can be projected from biological life and imposed on computer events grows more useful, some people may be tempted to change their conception of the status of this information as carried in the source. The generic space involved in the concept “artificial life” could in principle come to constitute the central structure of the source. In that case, “artificial life” would become a subcategory of life. At present, “artificial life” is an analogical projec- tion of evident utility that seems unlikely to displace conventional category con- nections. But that situation could in principle change.
Blended spaces play a ro
utine role in the development of even the most fun- damental scientific concepts. Mass and energy, once conceived as belonging to two different categories, have been reconceived. The blended space of mass that is simultaneously energy has become the new category: Mass is energy and energy is mass. Similarly, the projection of spatial structure onto the conception of time has always been profound; in our own century, the scientific role of this projec-
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tion has grown considerably larger, resulting in a blend that seemed at first an impossible clash—space-time. But this blend too has come to subsume the origi- nal inputs.
THE UBlO$JlTY OF BLENDED SPACES
There is a certain way of thinking about thought that has kept blended spaces from being detected. It begins with the ostensibly reasonable assumption that inference and truth go together. On this assumption, central meanings and crucial inferences that guide our action come from what we believe to be true, not from fantasy con- structions like Bertran de Born in Dante’s Inferno. To get over this blindness to blended spaces requires separating belief from the construction of meaning. It is often the case that central inferences for a “real-world” space are in fact constructed in a blended space that we do not believe to be true or real. The truth of an input space can come from a hlena'ea’spaee that we do not believe to he true or real. This sounds paradoxical, but there is no reason it should, once we draw a distinction between the construction of meaning and the adoption of belief.