Rhetorical Construction of Visual Thinking: Aesthetic Study on the Generation Mechanism of Visual Metaphor

摘要

As a kind of spiritual product formed in the process of rhetorical construction of visual thinking, the premise of generation of visual metaphor is not only the inherent similarity or creating similarity of the various relationships between human and nature, i.e. formal attributes of visible things, but also "the invisible form that can make things visible in the depths of the world" (Foucault). Visual perception firstly transforms the information in the perceptual system into the "perceptual image" of vision. After imagination plays the function of similarity fusion, the comprehensive cognitive perception highlights and enhances the similarity between the information, and a visual metaphor is thus created. Because it only stays in the subject's brain at the level of visual thinking, without connection with certain time and space conditions, specific social and cultural factors, and image symbols, strictly speaking, it is only a possible process of the formation of visual metaphor. In the process of transformation from similarity fusion to similarity highlighting, if certain visual image is constructed with the language symbol, the "verbal image" of a literary text, or the graphical or visualized language - poetic metaphor can be generated; if the visual image is constructed with image symbol, the image rhetoric that is purely composed of visual elements - visual metaphor can be generated.