Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (review)

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Barbara Maria Stafford. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 219. $29.50.

Visual Analogy is an important book, as much for the problems it raises as for the arguments it elaborates. Stafford persuasively argues that our culture's success in analytically and imaginatively articulating differences leaves us severely impoverished in our ability to wield a "representational taxonomy recognizing the existence of degrees of likeness" (32). She offers a suggestive analysis of the two basic structures of analogy--one proportional, the other participatory. But I find her less persuasive on the corollary claim that if we are to negotiate degrees of likeness in experience we have to restore the centrality of analogical thinking, which entails also foregrounding the powers involved in vision. Her effort to produce a theory of analogy makes clear what analogy cannot do and demonstrates to me the need to turn elsewhere for theoretical frameworks that can modulate between the tasks of establishing differences and of negotiating them.

Stafford's first chapter points out that analytic thought and poststructuralism have entered into a strange alliance because both stress the establishing of differences--with costs that are most obvious in the political sphere. For without substantial trust in analogical thinking we cannot establish terms for a social contract responsive to inequalities and capable of producing sympathy. Reason, after all, relies on categories that cannot adequately handle the motives leading us to employ them. Then Stafford offers two very learned chapters that define the powers of analogy by elaborating contrasts with the abstracting and binarizing work of allegory. In art the case for allegory is most fully elaborated in German Romanticism, and in cosmology it is Gnosticism's sharp opposition between flesh and spirit that deprives culture of a possible "erotic-religious force" (104). Read against such allegorizing, Leibniz's work with analogy stands out for its offering "an ontology" that is "at the same time an aesthetics" responsive to "the fluidities of compossibility" (129, 14). Finally, Stafford's last chapter uses these oppositions in order to show how analogical energies within visual art help us identify what remains problematic and limited in computational models of consciousness:

In sum: it seems that the crux of the problem of consciousness lies in the flagrant contrast or clash between organ and awareness. How does one satisfactorily reconcile the paradox of a disembodied brain as a scientific conglomerate of dissected processes with the gut feelings, flickers of emotion, moral struggles, and secret attractions we intuitively feel? [179]

This book has many virtues, especially the timeliness of its critique of differential thinking, its marvelous range of examples from visual art, and Stafford's supple intricacy with abstract language. Here, though, I want to dwell on what I take to be the two most significant problems raised by her arguments. One concerns her historical analysis of German Romanticism, the other the issue of what analogical thinking offers theory.

Stafford's historical chapters are necessary for explaining why analogical thinking lost out to allegory yet still has something to offer to contemporary culture. German Romanticism is central to this story because its historical moment had to take account of both the Enlightenment cult of differences and the reactive tendencies to make allegory do the work of mysticism. During this period "the inductive art of finding and making connections became aligned . . . with its hermeneutical excesses" and hence relegated to the domain of the occult (19). Analogy became illusion, and critical self-consciousness had to turn to allegory as its means of scrutinizing its own relation to those temptations. "Analogy, as the creative and tentative weaving together of individuated phenomena, was thus supplanted by the elevation of atomistic difference: the obsession with unbridgeable imparity and the heiratic insistence on insurmountable distance between the material and the spiritual realms" (61). Linked to illusion, images had to be carefully monitored by intellect, and intellect so privileged found itself torn "between private consciousness...