The Poetics of Performance Knowledge

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Notes

1 Discussion of the sense of smell is outside the terms of this writing, although it is extensively covered within the literature on conceptual metaphor and related fields. (Brennan, 2004; Chu and Downes, 2000; Drobnick, 2006; Eno, 1992; Howes, 2005; Rouby, 2002).

2 Simon R. Leather, Department of Biology, Silwood Park Campus, Imperial College London, Ascot, Berkshire (Leather 1996).

3 It is a convention within the fields of practice I am citing here to capitalize these metaphorical relationships. I will be following this convention where appropriate.

4 A variant on this claim for a universal viewing position as legitimizing authority over knowledge is presented by Foucault in Discipline & Punish: The birth of the prison. In his analysis, authoritative power asserts itself directly not by simulating omniscience but through the elevation of a singular ‘viewpoint’ to a position of panoptical disciplinary control (Foucault and Sheridan 1977. 195 - 228).

5 George Lakoff refers to this process as ‘accepting the frame’, by which he means that any attempt to argue a point that is framed metaphorically (as most are) usually requires that parties to that debate use the same set of metaphors. This means that those who determine the metaphorical ‘frame’ of the argument are at a distinct advantage (Lakoff 2004: 4).

6 This use of the term ‘confusion’ is ideally read in its original etymological sense from confundere, signifying the act of being ‘poured together’.

7 Arendt works up this distinction into a critique of certain aspects of modernity, claiming that the focus on individual prosperity, production and consumption has diminished the intersubjective world of homo faber in favour of the alienating, simply social being of animal laborans.