Blog Eight: Metaphors

When thinking of a metaphor, I instantly relate it to poetry and using analogies for comparative purposes.  After reading Fiske's chapter on signification, it is clear that metaphors are not simply creative ways of describing things, but the idea of understanding one thing in terms of another.  The use of a metaphor "to express the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar" (Fiske, 92) ties into communication's need to create a common understanding.  A metaphor is a component of constructing a shared interpretation through what we know and how it can be described to convey what we don't know.  Fiske says that a metaphor "exploits simultaneous similarity and difference" (92), meaning that we use a referent that we already have to find a connection, or reference, through noted similarities or differences of something that we are familiar with.  Context and culture play a large role in this as our personal and cultural experiences impact how we interpret meaning.  I never realized how metaphors don't just stand for themselves but create understanding.  By applying more physical qualities to complex things, we use metaphors to "make sense of abstractions...by embodying them in concrete experience" (94).  This shows that society uses language as a vehicle to come to an understanding and that we use words to better our grasp on signs and symbols.  Metaphors connote a meaning through their shift of qualities from one thing to another.  I disagree with Jakobson  in arguing that "metaphor is the normal mode for poetry" (Fiske, 97) because, while metaphors may require more creativity and imagination to transfer qualities and to construct an idea of the unknown, it allows us to form some reality involving the unknown and can be useful outside the realm of poetry.