Metaphorical use of language vs. descriptive use of language in Wittgenstein’s work: Evidencing the production of [architectural] conceptual metaphors in Palais Stonborough

Abstract

This paper proposes a common ground for discussion between linguistic and architectural production in the framework of some late Cognitive Theories of meaning construction like Conceptual Metaphor Theory (from Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and Conceptual Integration Theory (from Fauconnier and Turner 2002). This common ground will be analyzed from formal plan making reference to Wittgenstein's linguistic thesis. For instance, understanding his architectural production in Palais Stonborough requires a realistic knowledge of the author's specific conception of a work of art as an object seen sub specie aeternitatis. In the author's view, this construal demands the nullification of the subjective component, since the work of art must aim to become an objective description of the totality of existing states of affair, which is the world. Thus, following Wittgenstein's conception of art, beauty emerges from the objectivity of the work in a process that must run on the side-lines of subject's mediation. We are confronted with an inclusive representational problem: Is this objectivity of the work possible as conceptually constructed and linguistically expressed by Wittgenstein in his written essays? To answer this question, we will conceptually analyze the two subcategories of linguistic plan and formal plan focusing on the way they project partial structure from the domains of object and of subject; our aim is to prove, applying feasible cognitive poetic and linguistic principles, methods, and models, that artful ideas that are linguistically valid in Tractatus cannot be directly applied to architectural production. We conclude that both plans are not really interchangeable.