Vakhshtain, V. S. City Metaphors and Metaphorics of Urban Researches: Self-Description VS. Meta-Description

Abstract: Modern cities are endlessly heterogeneous and always changing. Culture experts, psychologists and sociologists dispute with each other trying to win the right to talk about this changeability in terms of their science. This is probably the reason why discussions touching upon ‘urban culture’, ‘structure of urban society’ and ‘urban everyday life’ usually have an interdisciplinary nature. The object of research lies at the crossing point of the aforesaid sciences, too. The author of the article raises a question whether taking into account such ‘interdisciplinary autism’ it is possible to make a theoretical statement using sociology terms and this statement can be relevant to terminology of interdisciplinary sciences. What acts as a ‘cross disciplinary bridge’ that can convey the theoretical content overcoming the disciplinary borders between sociology, psychology and cultural studies? According to the author, metaphor can serve as such a bridge. Therefore, the present article is devoted to the analysis of the two types of metaphors, self-descriptive and meta-descriptive metaphors in urban ideologies and urban studies. The research is based on the IPA methodology (Interpretative Policy Analysis), frame-analysis and analysis of metaphoric grounds of sociological conceptualization. Metaphors can be coherent or consistent. For example, metaphors of our country as a ‘rust-bucket in the ocean of world policy’ or a ‘train on a side route of history’ are coherent metaphors, i.e. they agree with the general concept of ‘transport’, but these metaphors are not consistent, i.e. they do not create a single image. On the contrary, metaphors ‘Our country is a ship’ and ‘Party is our steersman’ are consistent but not coherent. Applying to the scope of the present article, this means that epistemic metaphors (researher’s self-description) and theoretical metaphors (meta-description of an object) are more consistent than meta-description of an object and selfdescription of an object. The relationship between metaphors in the triangle ‘Self-description of cognition – Meta-description of an object – Self-description of an object’ reflects the nature of contingency and these metaphors are not precisely correlated. This conclusion allows to solve Ankersmit’s case. If Frank Ankersmit is right, then the two key operations of a researcher’s mind, problematization and conceptualization, are opposed to each other. Conceptualization is based on metaphoric mechanisms of reasoning and is the process of presenting the unfamiliar as something familiar, i.e. describing an unfamiliar object in terms of the existing system of categories and concepts. On the contrary, problematization is a process of ‘defamiliarization’ or transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar. Ankersmit establishes that logically a metaphor cannot serve as a tool of problematization. If we follow his logic, we can tell that problematization – i.e. defamiliarization of an object – creates some kind of ‘beyond transcendence’ grounds for cognition. However, the author of the article rejects such a thesis. According to the author, ‘comprehensibility’ or ‘incomprehensibility’ are not ontological properties of an object but an attribute of the relation of an object to the above mentioned cognitive scheme. As the results of the research show, inconsistency of metaphors of different orders, first of all, metaphors of self– and meta-description of an object, is a source of such problematization.

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