The Shadow of an Ideal
Everything we record is a metaphor. And a metaphor is the shadow, not the thing.
I had the thought on a drive: that art — meaning everything humans bother to record — is the expression of a metaphor in a new way, so as to carry a concept across to someone else.
The painter paints from somewhere underneath thinking. The subconscious is not itself legible; you cannot read it directly, not even as the person who has it. What the painter does is transduce that illegible thing into an object that can be read. The canvas is not the feeling. It is a structure built so that a feeling adjacent to the original can be reconstructed in someone standing in front of it.
So the work needs interpreting precisely because the original is sealed off. If the inner state could be handed over whole, there would be no need for art — you would just hand it over. The metaphor exists to stand in for what cannot be transmitted.
By my definition, a metaphor is a Platonic ideal — or rather, it points at one. And here the picture sharpens into something I find a little vertiginous: the metaphor is the shadow the ideal casts. A simulacrum of the ideal, but never the ideal itself.
The contradiction worth keeping
There is a tension in saying both things at once — that the metaphor is the ideal, and that it is the ideal's shadow. In Plato those are opposite rungs. The Form lives in the higher world; the shadow on the cave wall is the lowest copy, the mere appearance. A thing cannot be both the Form and the Form's shadow.
But the shadow reading is the truer one, and it makes the idea stronger, because it forces in a missing layer. Watch the descent:
- The ideal — the concept, inaccessible.
- The subconscious impression of it — inaccessible even to the artist.
- The artwork — the metaphor, a shadow of (2), which is already a shadow of (1).
- The viewer's interpretation — a shadow of (3).
So art is not a simulacrum. It is a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Each act of recording loses the original and substitutes a readable stand-in, and then interpretation repeats the loss one more time. This is the very thing Plato distrusted painting for: he called it third from the truth — an imitation of an imitation.
More shadow does not sum to the object. You cannot stack copies high enough to reach the thing they are copies of.
Where the rule strains
I want to claim that everything we record is metaphor. But not all of it is. Some recording is index rather than metaphor — it points at its referent by direct causal contact instead of standing in for an ideal. A photograph, a tax ledger, a seismograph's trace: these are caused by the thing, the way a footprint is caused by a foot. The metaphor model fits expressive art beautifully and strains on the bookkeeping end of "everything."
Maybe two different acts hide under one word: expression, which is metaphor, and registration, which is index. Worth keeping them apart.
The question underneath
When I say a metaphor "is to be interpreted," I have to decide what interpretation is for. Is there a correct reading to recover — the artist's hidden ideal, waiting at the bottom of the well? Or does the metaphor merely generate readings, with no fact of the matter about which is right?
Plato wants the first. The simulacrum framing drifts toward the second. Pick one and you have decided something large: whether interpretation is recovery or creation. I did not expect a thought about painting to become a fork that big. It does. And, as the next two pieces argue, it is the same fork that decides what a machine can ever understand.