Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The Metaphor Project
In the English composition class I teach, I recently unleashed an assignment which maybe can be expanded beyond the confines of the class . . . .
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Goal(s): To become more aware of the ways we use conceptual frames and metaphors to give meaning and structure to our experience; perhaps to begin to reconceptualize how we experience the world; to create new, better metaphors to give meaning to our lives and communicate better with others.
Methodology: Be aware of and keep track of the ways "conceptual metaphors" get used in many different contexts: school, work, families, friends, the news, popular culture, churches, etc. Near the end of the quarter (3/15) construct a list of different metaphors you have collected and write a brief report on what you have learned as a result of this research. What kinds of metaphors are the most persistent? Which metaphors perhaps have pernicious effects, as a result of the dimensions of the concept the metaphor hides? Can you think of other ways of metaphorisizing a concept to capture other qualities preexisting metaphors miss? One of the examples Lakoff and Johnson discuss is “argument is war.” Has this class helped you create other metaphors by which to understand “argument” in other ways?
Further Background Discussion and Rationale: In their book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all kinds of metaphors are pervasive in our everyday lives, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. For example, we’re all familiar with the idea that “time is money.” This is an idea that is reflected in countless familiar phrases: You’re wasting my time; how do you spend your time these days; I’ve invested a lot of time in her; you need to budget your time; is that worth your while; he’s living on borrowed time; you don’t use your time profitably; thank you for your time. In fact, this idea is so widespread that it is considered common sense. And, after all, time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity—a limited resource, even money—we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.
But the metaphor only provides us with a partial understanding of what time is. In doing this, it hides other aspects of the concept. The metaphorical structuring involved here is partial, not total. For example time isn’t really money. If you spend your time trying to do something and it doesn’t work, you can’t get your time back. There are no time banks. I can give you a lot of time, but you can’t give me back the same time, though you can give me back the same amount of time. And so on. Thus, part of a metaphorical concept does not and cannot fit.
If our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people, then it is incumbent upon us to make sure the metaphors we use capture beneficial aspects of the concepts we want to emphasize. This metaphorical construction of our concepts is a process of negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. Hopefully you can communicate unshared experiences with others in a way to achieve mutual understanding. Hence, new metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.
I should mention that by “metaphor” I mean all kinds of figures of speech. So, for example, similes and metonymies could also work in this regard. Ultimately, all figures of speech, whether a metaphor strictly speaking or not, communicate indirectly rather than in a literal, direct, dictionary-definition type way. So, for example, if one hears in the news, “The White House denied allegations of corruption,” one shouldn’t think that the literal building the president lives in spoke. Rather, we’re using “White House” as a metonymy to refer to the entire presidential administration. There are many different figures of speech that pepper our everyday use of language you might pay some attention to.
A War of Words?
On the first page of the excerpt from their book I gave you, Lakoff and Johnson describe the ARGUMENT IS WAR concept. Ironically, it seems to me that the war in Iraq, or especially the public relations war about the war, is itself constructed through a series of various figures of speech or phrases so often repeated as if to mean something: a troop “surge”; “doubling down” on troop strength; “stay the course”; “cut-and-run”; “Freedom’s on the march”; “weapons of mass destruction”; “war on terror(ism)”; etc. Considering that there’s actually people dying and being scarred for life, do these various constructions serve merely to cover over what’s actually going on?
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Goal(s): To become more aware of the ways we use conceptual frames and metaphors to give meaning and structure to our experience; perhaps to begin to reconceptualize how we experience the world; to create new, better metaphors to give meaning to our lives and communicate better with others.
Methodology: Be aware of and keep track of the ways "conceptual metaphors" get used in many different contexts: school, work, families, friends, the news, popular culture, churches, etc. Near the end of the quarter (3/15) construct a list of different metaphors you have collected and write a brief report on what you have learned as a result of this research. What kinds of metaphors are the most persistent? Which metaphors perhaps have pernicious effects, as a result of the dimensions of the concept the metaphor hides? Can you think of other ways of metaphorisizing a concept to capture other qualities preexisting metaphors miss? One of the examples Lakoff and Johnson discuss is “argument is war.” Has this class helped you create other metaphors by which to understand “argument” in other ways?
Further Background Discussion and Rationale: In their book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all kinds of metaphors are pervasive in our everyday lives, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. For example, we’re all familiar with the idea that “time is money.” This is an idea that is reflected in countless familiar phrases: You’re wasting my time; how do you spend your time these days; I’ve invested a lot of time in her; you need to budget your time; is that worth your while; he’s living on borrowed time; you don’t use your time profitably; thank you for your time. In fact, this idea is so widespread that it is considered common sense. And, after all, time in our culture is a valuable commodity. It is a limited resource that we use to accomplish our goals. Because of the way that the concept of work has developed in modern Western culture, where work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified, it has become customary to pay people by the hour, week, or year. These practices are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialized societies and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity—a limited resource, even money—we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.
But the metaphor only provides us with a partial understanding of what time is. In doing this, it hides other aspects of the concept. The metaphorical structuring involved here is partial, not total. For example time isn’t really money. If you spend your time trying to do something and it doesn’t work, you can’t get your time back. There are no time banks. I can give you a lot of time, but you can’t give me back the same time, though you can give me back the same amount of time. And so on. Thus, part of a metaphorical concept does not and cannot fit.
If our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people, then it is incumbent upon us to make sure the metaphors we use capture beneficial aspects of the concepts we want to emphasize. This metaphorical construction of our concepts is a process of negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. Hopefully you can communicate unshared experiences with others in a way to achieve mutual understanding. Hence, new metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.
I should mention that by “metaphor” I mean all kinds of figures of speech. So, for example, similes and metonymies could also work in this regard. Ultimately, all figures of speech, whether a metaphor strictly speaking or not, communicate indirectly rather than in a literal, direct, dictionary-definition type way. So, for example, if one hears in the news, “The White House denied allegations of corruption,” one shouldn’t think that the literal building the president lives in spoke. Rather, we’re using “White House” as a metonymy to refer to the entire presidential administration. There are many different figures of speech that pepper our everyday use of language you might pay some attention to.
A War of Words?
On the first page of the excerpt from their book I gave you, Lakoff and Johnson describe the ARGUMENT IS WAR concept. Ironically, it seems to me that the war in Iraq, or especially the public relations war about the war, is itself constructed through a series of various figures of speech or phrases so often repeated as if to mean something: a troop “surge”; “doubling down” on troop strength; “stay the course”; “cut-and-run”; “Freedom’s on the march”; “weapons of mass destruction”; “war on terror(ism)”; etc. Considering that there’s actually people dying and being scarred for life, do these various constructions serve merely to cover over what’s actually going on?
