Politics, Language and Metaphor (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Political Language and Metaphor

Until a century ago, a metaphor was just a mere figure of speech, but since the development of discourse analysis, a metaphor has become more than merely incidental to the content of the arguments or findings. Students and scholars in political studies know the importance of metaphors in electoral and policy-related politics, coming across metaphors that are, knowingly or unknowingly, influencing our perception of politics. This book is the first to develop new methodological approaches to understand and analyse the use of metaphor in political science and international relations. It does this by: • • •

combining theory with case studies in order to advance substantive work in politics and international relations that focuses on metaphor; expands the range of empirical case studies that employ this category descriptively and also in explanatory logic; advances research that investigates the role of metaphor in empirical and discourse-based methodologies, thus building on results from other disciplines, notably linguistics and hermeneutic philosophy.

This innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, international relations and communication studies. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Jernej Pikalo is Lecturer in Political Theory at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Routledge innovations in political theory

1 A Radical Green Political Theory Alan Carter 2 Rational Woman A feminist critique of dualism Raia Prokhovnik 3 Rethinking State Theory Mark J. Smith 4 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics Beyond pessimism of the intellect Anne Showstack Sassoon 5 Post-Ecologist Politics Social theory and the abdication of the ecologist paradigm Ingolfur Blühdorn 6 Ecological Relations Susan Board 7 The Political Theory of Global Citizenship April Carter 8 Democracy and National Pluralism Edited by Ferran Requejo 9 Civil Society and Democratic Theory Alternative voices Gideon Baker

10 Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory Between critical theory and post-Marxism Mark Devenney 11 Citizenship and Identity Towards a new republic John Schwarzmantel 12 Multiculturalism, Identity and Rights Edited by Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch 13 Political Theory of Global Justice A cosmopolitan case for the World State Luis Cabrera 14 Democracy, Nationalism and Multiculturalism Edited by Ramón Maiz and Ferrán Requejo 15 Political Reconciliation Andrew Schaap 16 National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics Edited by Ephraim Nimni

17 Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New theories of the political Saul Newman

25 In Defense of Human Rights A non-religious grounding in a pluralistic world Ari Kohen

18 Capabilities Equality Basic issues and problems Edited by Alexander Kaufman

26 Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory Jason Glynos and David Howarth

19 Morality and Nationalism Catherine Frost

27 Political Constructivism Peri Roberts

20 Principles and Political Order The challenge of diversity Edited by Bruce Haddock, Peri Roberts and Peter Sutch

28 The New Politics of Masculinity Men, power and resistance Fidelma Ashe

21 European Integration and the Nationalities Question Edited by John McGarry and Michael Keating

29 Citizens and the State Attitudes in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia Takashi Inoguchi and Jean Blondel

22 Deliberation, Social Choice and Absolutist Democracy David van Mill

30 Political Language and Metaphor Interpreting and changing the world Edited by Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo

23 Sexual Justice/Cultural Justice Critical perspectives in political theory and practice Edited by Barbara Arneil, Monique Deveaux, Rita Dhamoon and Avigail Eisenberg 24 The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt Terror, liberal war and the crisis of global order Edited by Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito

Political Language and Metaphor Interpreting and changing the world

Edited by Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Selection and editorial matter, Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-93123-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-41735-x (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93123-8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-41735-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93123-3 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Editors’ introduction

x xii xvi 1

TERRELL CARVER AND JERNEJ PIKALO

PART I

Science 1 The ways of stargazing: Newtonian metaphoricity in American foreign policy

13 15

DIMITRIOS E. AKRIVOULIS

2 Slippery slopes in political discourse

28

DAG STENVOLL

3 Mechanical metaphors in politics

41

JERNEJ PIKALO

PART II

Structures 4 Metaphors of social order

55 57

ERIK RINGMAR

5 Metaphors of solidarity ISEULT HONOHAN

69

viii Contents

6 Exploring the metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy: a comparison of legitimation discourses in American and British newspapers

83

STEFFEN G. SCHNEIDER

PART III

Europe 7 Identifying and assessing metaphors: discourse on EU reform

103 105

PETR DRULÁK

8 Discursive metaphor analysis: (de)construction(s) of Europe

119

JOCHEN WALTER AND JAN HELMIG

9 Political protest and metaphor

132

CHARLOTTE FRIDOLFSSON

PART IV

Sexuality

149

10 Real construction through metaphorical language: how animals and machines (amongst other metaphors) maketh (hu)man (what ‘he’ is)

151

TERRELL CARVER

11 Data, anecdote and metaphor in gender equality policy-making: merging ‘intellectual and real world mainstreaming’

165

GEMMA M. CARNEY

12 Metaphors, mini-narratives and Foucauldian discourse theory VÉRONIQUE MOTTIER

182

Contents ix PART V

Policy

195

13 Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence: the rhetoric of Freedom to Fly in the struggle over aviation policy in the United Kingdom

197

DAVID HOWARTH AND STEVEN GRIGGS

14 Love and life in Heart-less Town: or, the use of metaphor in local planning

212

MERLIJN J. VAN HULST

15 Cognition meets action: metaphors as models of and models for

225

DVORA YANOW

PART VI

Language

239

16 The application of conceptual metaphor theory to political discourse: methodological questions and some possible solutions

241

ALAN CIENKI

17 Metaphorical moves: ‘scientific expertise’ in research policy studies

257

PHILIPPE SORMANI AND MARTIN BENNINGHOFF

18 A metaphorical election style: use of metaphor at election time

271

DIETER VERTESSEN AND CHRIST’L DE LANDTSHEER

Reflections

286

TERRELL CARVER AND JERNEJ PIKALO

Further reading Index

289 291

Illustrations

Figures 9.1 A person 9.2 A book cover 13.1 The rhetoric of Freedom to Fly, ‘Flying Responsibly into the Future’ 13.2 The rhetoric of sustainable aviation 13.3 The appeal to collective imaginaries 16.1 One view of the MDS configuration for the results of the pile sort of phrases in the category of education 17.1 A sample abstract, Politics of Science 32 (1974) 412–436 18.1 Metaphor power in different 2003 Belgian media types at election time and between elections

138 141 204 205 209 252 263 281

Tables 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 18.1

The ‘grammar’ of legitimation statements Objects and patterns of (de-)legitimation, by country (Groups of) metaphorical fields, by country Elective affinities between objects and patterns of legitimation, and metaphorical fields, by country The EU finality debate EU members EU candidates Gender mainstreaming vocabulary Vocabulary of women’s rights Dichotomous metaphors of gender mainstreaming Metaphor frequency, intensity, content and metaphor power on 2003 Belgian public (VRT) and commercial (VTM) broadcasting television news at election time and between elections

87 89 93 98–9 113 114 114 174 175–6 177

279

Illustrations xi 18.2 Metaphor frequency, intensity, content and metaphor power in 2003 Belgian quality papers and in tabloids at election time and between elections 18.3 Metaphor power, empathetic use of modals, integrative complexity and the crisis communication combination on 2003 Belgian public (VRT) and commercial (VTM) broadcasting television news at election time and between elections 18.4 Metaphor power, empathetic use of modals, integrative complexity and the crisis communication combination in 2003 Belgian quality newspapers and tabloids at election time and between elections

280

282

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Contributors

Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis is Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Balkan Studies at the University of Western Macedonia, Greece. His research focuses on Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutics and quantum conceptions of politics. His work includes Beyond Constructivism and Rationalism: A Hermeneutics of International Politics (in progress) and Introduction to European Post-Socratic Political Philosophy (Kritiki, 2006). Martin Benninghoff is Researcher at the Observatory Science, Policy and Society of the University of Lausanne. His work stands at the intersection of research policy studies and social studies of science by focusing on different issues such as boundary work, cycles of credit and social organisation of research activities. He is author of the book La recherche, affaire d’Etat (PPUR, 2003) and co-editor of La fabrique des sciences (PPUR, 2006). Gemma M. Carney is a Researcher and Policy Analyst with a particular interest in gender equality issues. She undertook a case study of gender mainstreaming in the Republic of Ireland, 2000–2004, for which she was awarded a PhD by Trinity College Dublin in 2004. She has lectured in political science and women’s studies at Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University and is currently teaching international studies at the Open University. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and co-chair of the ECPR Theory Standing Group. He has published widely on gender, masculinities and non-reductionist methodologies and has co-edited two ECPR-based collections of papers that feature a theory/case-study approach: Interpreting the Political: New Methodologies (Routledge, 1997) and Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (Routledge, 1998) in the ECPR Series ‘European Political Science’. Alan Cienki is Lecturer in English Linguistics in the Department of Language and Communication at the Faculty of Arts of the Vrije Univer-

Contributors xiii siteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on semantics, language and cognition and metaphor in thought and its expression in spoken interaction. He is a co-editor of the volumes Conceptual and Discourse Factors in Linguistic Structure (CSLI, 2001) and Metaphor and Gesture (Benjamins, forthcoming) and is on the editorial board of the journal Cognitive Linguistics. Petr Drulák is Director of the Institute of International Relations in Prague and Associate Professor of International Relations at the Charles University; he has published on theory of international relations, European integration and EU enlargement in a number of Czech and international publications. He is author of the first Czech textbook on theory of International relations (2003); he was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence in 2003/2004. Charlotte Fridolfsson is a Lecturer and the Director of Studies in Law and Legal Science at Örebro University, Sweden. She teaches courses in gender studies and political science where the focus is on qualitative and quantitative method, political theory, feminist theory, Swedish politics and EU politics. Her main research interests are contemporary continental philosophy, social movements, political parties and identity politics. She is the author of Deconstructing Political Protest (Örebro University, 2006). She defended her thesis Deconstructing Political Protest in 2006. She is currently working as the Director of Studies in Law/Legal studies and is also teaching political science and gender studies at Örebro University in Sweden. Steven Griggs is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He has published articles on developments in French health policy and politics and is currently studying the dynamics of community governance, in particular the mobilisation and decisionmaking processes of community protest campaigns. He is co-author of French Politics: Debates and Controversies (2000) and is editor of the journal Critical Policy Analysis. Jan Helmig is a PhD candidate at the research training group ‘World Society – Making and Representing the Global’ at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His main research interests include metaphors, geopolitics and military affairs on which he has published several articles. Iseult Honohan is Senior Lecturer in political theory in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin. Her publications include ‘Friends, strangers or countrymen? The ties between citizens as colleagues’, Political Studies (2001); Civic Republicanism (Routledge, 2002), and, as co-editor (with Jeremy Jennings), Republicanism in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2005). Her current research

xiv Contributors interests lie in the foundations of republican theory and in its application in areas including citizenship and immigration. David Howarth is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. His books include Discourse (Open University Press, 2000) and Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (Routledge, 2007), which was co-written with Jason Glynos. He has published numerous articles and chapters on theories on discourse, post-Marxist political theory and its application to empirical cases, most notably South African politics and new environmental movements. Merlijn J. van Hulst is Lecturer in Public Administration at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His background is in Cultural Anthropology. He recently finished his PhD project on the culture of municipalities. His research interests include culture, narrative, local government, interpretive methods and methodology. Christ’l De Landtsheer is Professor of Communication Science and Director of the Research Unit Political Communication at the University of Antwerp. Her research is on psychological, linguistic and technological aspects of political communication. Among her publications are Metaphorical World Politics, Politically Speaking, Beyond Public Speech and Symbols, Democratization, Europeanization and Globalization Trends and Political Culture, Socialization and Education. Véronique Mottier is Professor in Sociology at the University of Lausanne and Fellow in Social and Political Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is co-chair of the ECPR Theory Standing Group and has published widely in the areas of social and political theory, gender, sexuality and the state, and discourse analysis, including Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (co-edited, Routledge, 1998), Genre et politique: débats et perspectives (co-edited, Gallimard, 2000) and Sexuality (OUP, forthcoming). Jernej Pikalo is Lecturer in Political Theory at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is author of Neoliberal Globalisation and the State (ZPS, 2003) and assistant editor of Journal of International Relations and Development (Palgrave). His main research interests include political concepts, theory of the state, interpretative methodology and theories of globalisation. Erik Ringmar is Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies and the Center for General Education at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He has written widely on political economy, economic history, international relations and cultural sociology. His book on freedom of speech on the internet, Watch It Buddy, I’m Blogging This, was published by Anthem Press in 2007.

Contributors xv Steffen G. Schneider is Research Associate at the TranState Research Centre, University of Bremen, Germany. He is co-editor of Legitimacy in an Age of Politics (Palgrave, 2007) and co-author of several book chapters on the legitimation of western democracies. His other research interests include party system developments and the political economy of social and labour market policy reforms in advanced industrial democracies. Philippe Sormani is Research Fellow at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and member of the Interaction and Social Practices Research Group at Fribourg University, Switzerland. Trained as a sociologist, he has specialised in higher education and research policy studies as well as ethnomethodological approaches to research practice. Video analysis of instructional activities in various settings, ‘scientific’ or ‘ordinary’, provides his current focus. Dag Stenvoll is a Political Scientist and Senior Researcher at the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include language and politics, discourse analysis, transnational sex work and trafficking, sexuality and reproductive issues, and Russia. He currently leads the multidisciplinary research project Prostitution, Gender and Migration (2006–2010). Dieter Vertessen holds an MA in Communication Sciences. As a PhD student, he is currently working in the Research Unit Political Communication at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on style and form in mediated political discourse, on political metaphors and on the political implications of a soundbite culture. Jochen Walter is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, and is a research associate at the extra collaborative research centre ‘The Political as Communicative Space in History’. His main research interests include processes of European identity formation, discourse analysis, poststructuralist theories, systems theory and constructivist hermeneutics. He has published in the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen. Dvora Yanow holds the Strategic Chair in Meaning and Method at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Her research has been shaped by an overall interest in the communication of meaning in organisational and policy settings. She is the author of How does a policy mean? Interpreting policy and organizational actions (Georgetown University Press, 1996); Conducting interpretive policy analysis (Sage, 2000); Constructing American “race” and “ethnicity”: Category-making in public policy and administration (M. E. Sharpe, 2003).

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and all participants in the 2004 ‘Metaphor in Political Science’ workshop held in Granada, Spain. Although contributions to this volume are not limited to Granada papers, the workshop that brought together scholars from various disciplines proved to be a catalyst for many fresh insights into political metaphors, political theory and methodology. The editors are especially grateful to Heidi Bagtazo of Routledge for her pioneering vision and guidance on this volume. They would also like to thank each other, and all contributors to this volume, for exemplary helpfulness, patience and forbearance.

Editors’ introduction Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo

This volume presents new methodological and theoretical approaches to the use of metaphor in political science. It is not, therefore, about political metaphors. Rather it explores the different ways that metaphor itself can be understood, in order to demonstrate the utility (and indeed necessity) of these different conceptions of metaphor to political science. The scholars who have contributed to this work are thus doing two things: providing diverse interpretations of metaphor (and therefore of language) and offering illustrative exemplars of elucidation and explanation that will appeal to political scientists. The foundations of this work are in philosophy of language, linguistic philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, discourse theory, deconstruction, post-structuralism, cognitive psychology and ethnography, though different contributors will draw more from some areas than from others. The results will thus appear in an interdisciplinary frame, though always accessible to political scientists, students of politics and social scientists in general. Political scientists are already aware of the importance of metaphors in politics, particularly electoral and policy-related politics (Charteris-Black, 2005; Yanow, 2000). In their studies and research, they come across metaphors that, whether anyone notices it or not, are influencing our perceptions of politics. ‘Body politic’, ‘branches of government’, ‘head of state’, ‘ship of state’, etc. are all metaphors commonly in use for describing political situations and processes. There are of course more colourful ones used by politicians and political advisors. These include contemporary usage such as ‘spin’, ‘surgical strike’, ‘sex up’ and ‘blowback’. However, studies on political metaphors as such have thus far mainly focused on their use in political discourses that have been subject to some form of discourse analysis, or perhaps just comment. The theoretical and methodological issues relating to metaphor in political science are the subjects of this volume, which has the aim of advancing methodological work. Contributors are thus investigating the role of metaphor in empirical and discourse-based methodologies, building on the work done in other disciplines, notably linguistics and hermeneutics. While discourse analysis in political science has recently focused attention on language, communication

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and meaning, this work does not as yet reach the technical level of linguistic analysis already pioneered in other disciplines. This volume thus builds on the substantive work already done in political science on political metaphor and advances discourse methodology in realms relevant to political science. Moreover, it expands the range of studies in political science that can employ this category – political metaphor – in both substantive and methodological ways. Each chapter, while developing its own theoretical perspective, draws theory into practice by undertaking a detailed and informative case-study. Etymologically, metaphor is a ‘carrying over’ or, more colloquially, a kind of ‘standing-for’ relationship, between one concept and another. Seen in this way, metaphor is just a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a tool in language, a device of poetic imagination, a deviant linguistic expression or ‘catachresis’, a matter of words rather than of thought or action, the primary role of which is to describe a social reality by using a ‘stand-in’ word or phrase different from the one usually taken to be literal. The ‘metaphorical’ is thus usually taken to be opposite to, or at least other than, ‘the literal’, as a way of categorising language-in-use. In this conventional account, language appears as a tool for viewing the world, or a kind of window onto it, used in an instrumental fashion. This presumes a radical separation between the world of things and the linguistic structures of apprehension through which knowledge of the world ‘appears’. On this view, truth, as the criterion for knowledge, marks a perfect correspondence between word and thing and thus an alignment in principle between language and ‘things as they really are’. In this conventional view, literal language is a tool through which the world is apprehended and validated, so therefore metaphor becomes a corruption at worst or a superfluity at best (Shapiro, 1985–86: 200). Metaphor as a corruption of language, however, is at odds with the Greek roots of the word ‘metaphor’ as meta + phorein, meaning ‘to carry over’. The defining characteristic of metaphor in the Aristotelian tradition is that it is defined in terms of movement, change with respect to location, mainly movement ‘from . . . to’ (Ricoeur, 1981: 17). Although Aristotle applies the word metaphor to every transposition in terms, this does not mean that metaphor corrupts an already established logical order of language. For him, metaphor operates within an already existing logical order, the semantic core of which is ontologically established prior to any use of metaphor. His process of epiphora (movement ‘from . . . to’) thus presumes that all language is transparent to reality. Max Black’s seminal study Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (1962) mounted an attack on the classical perception that metaphor has merely a substitutive function. According to this view, when a speaker chooses to replace a literal term with another one different from the ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ form of words, the metaphor thus deployed is a mere substitute for a literal expression (cf. Maasen, 1995: 14–15; Ricoeur, 1981: 83–90; Zashin and Chapman, 1974: 296–7). Such a substitution introduces

Editors’ introduction 3 no new information and therefore has no cognitive function. Its only function, according to Black, is that it may come to fill a gap in the dictionary and thereby act in future as a literal expression but then necessarily disappear as a metaphor. Black proposes a different view of a metaphor, one that has subsequently become known as the ‘interaction view’ or cognitive dimension. In this view, metaphor is rarely only something substitutive (and probably decorative), rather it renders a certain nuanced meaning by emphasising some details and de-emphasising others. According to Black’s interaction view, a metaphor functions almost like a pair of glasses through which the metaphoric object is observed, i.e. reorganised. Those metaphors which turn out to be successful establish a privileged perspective on an object or constitute ‘the’ object and, by doing so, disappear as metaphors (Maasen, 1995: 14–15). Metaphor ceases to be a mere substitute for a literal term or form of words, since it is a result of the interaction in thought between two different things. According to this prominent, but controversial view, metaphors add meanings, although they do not have an ontologically creative function within the world. Writing on political metaphors is often uncritical and unreflective about the ontologically creative function of metaphor. This analysis is thus confined to an interpretation of metaphor vis-à-vis literal sense or, at best, to its relevance in various contexts. This situates metaphor within the referential theory of meaning, stipulating that meaning arises from the relationship between statements and the ‘things’ that they are about, and not within the human practices of meaning-giving actions, including the production of subjects and objects within forms of knowledge (Shapiro, 1985–86). Contributors to this volume add to the analysis of metaphor in political science this ontologically creative aspect. It arises from a view that the analysis of political metaphors should not just be about the interpretation of political metaphors, but also and above all else about the creative-productive function that they have in politics and in political science itself. In other words, politics and political science are themselves linguistic phenomena and are thus created and constructed through actions and activities as forms of life and knowledge. For cognitive linguists, utterance is the usual unit of metaphorical analysis. This is also the approach taken by most analysts of political metaphors. This is problematic for political scientists, because it fails to take into account the wider contexts of statements and discourses and the circumstances through which they are produced. Social and political contexts play major roles in how metaphors of political science are defined, how they function and what their meanings are. Analysing the embeddedness of a metaphor in a historical context is a necessary, though not fully satisfactory way to analyse metaphors in political science. The contingency of historical contexts must also be taken into account in order to situate metaphors

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within political, social and scientific relations of power. Since contexts are texts as well, they should not be objectified, as if they had an ontological foundation prior to and independent of texts. Metaphors in this respect act as discursive hubs, developing meaning in the interplay of texts and contexts. Metaphors therefore also inform and structure thinking on discourses and contexts. As Mottier notes in this volume, they are boundary-drawing, boundary-maintaining, ordering and othering ‘mini-narratives’ that act against a backdrop of tacit knowledge. In this way, they contribute to the working of discursive mechanisms as political and social phenomena in their own right, enabling or constraining the capabilities of actors. The relations of power within discourses are typically condensed and expressed in authorised metaphors, and they are thus central to an understanding of the political process itself. Metaphors also act as discursive nodal points (Diez, 1999; Torfing, 1999) between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of any bounded discourse, acting as nodes, and thus freeing political science from any necessary adherence to linear models of causality. They thus represent a potential for creativity in politics and political science. This ‘poetical’ function is closely connected to the transference of knowledge from one domain to the other. These transfers challenge and transform meanings across domains and are mediating knowledges between and within discourses. To political discourses, which tend to be conservative because they draw boundaries and create ‘others’, metaphors offer a potential for creativity, for new, fresh insights and critique, including self-critique. How and in what ways can metaphors from other disciplines be productively incorporated into political science? Can progress on the issue of metaphors in political science be productively exported to other social science disciplines? To other sciences? Has this already been the case, and what are the underlying mechanisms of transfer? What are the effects? Contributions in the sections ‘Science’, ‘Policy’ and ‘Language’ in this volume address these questions in detail. Different sections of this book address other important research questions. Especially useful for the self-awareness of political science as a discipline is the question of how politics has been perceived through metaphors and how the use of metaphors has influenced the perception of politics. The sections on ‘Europe’, ‘Structures’ and ‘Sexuality’ painstakingly analyse these issues in detail and case by case from a variety of methodological positions. The question of the descriptive and constitutive functions of metaphors in politics and political science features prominently in this volume. This volume not only takes a significant step towards engaging with the constitutive function of metaphors, but also offers comparative analysis. Different cultural and historical contexts inform the descriptive and constitutive functions of metaphors differently. There is thus something here of interest for specialists in linguistics, discourse analysis and other social scientists. Con-

Editors’ introduction 5 tributors to this book draw on the political scientist’s presumption that the world is political in the first instance and that human phenomena exist only within power relations. While borrowing from the work, sometimes technical of other disciplines, the hope all along has been that political science would have something distinctive to give back, and we very much hope that this volume will fulfil this expectation. The first section of this book explores the relation between science, metaphor and society, within a political frame. In the opening chapter, ‘The ways of stargazing: Newtonian metaphoricity in American foreign policy’, Dimitrios Akrivoulis investigates the employment of Newtonian metaphoricity in two distinct phases of American politics: its founding era and the early Cold War years. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of imagination, he suggests that the Newtonian imaginary had special resonance in the founding act of American society. Thus, it had a significant impact on the way that the newly created American state conceived of itself historically and its relations to other states. Relating this conceptualisation of Newtonian balance forward to the Cold War era’s ‘balance of power’, Akrivoulis’s chapter then shows how this ideological schematisation affects three levels of US foreign policy: projects of action, level of motivation and power to act. Dag Stenvoll, in ‘Slippery slopes in political discourse’, shows how this family of metaphors works constitutively in political discourse, in at least two ways. First, it moves the argumentative focus from the matter at hand to the hypothetical, from present to future. An instant case is linked to a danger case, which will, putatively, result from accepting the instant case. The metaphor links the two in such a way that connotations of the danger case attach to the instant case. Second, the slippery slope metaphor constitutes politics as a world of physical objects, where laws of nature rule (as argued in the preceding chapter by Akrivoulis) instead of unpredictable human and social factors. It simplifies complex social issues, establishes easily understandable, determining causes and effects, and naturalises politics. In the closing chapter to this section, ‘Mechanical metaphors in politics’, Jernej Pikalo argues that metaphors have been used throughout history to imagine situations and outcomes in discourses that are political. Each historical period has generated different central conceptions of politics, often based on imageries of nature. As conceptions of nature have changed, very dramatically in the case of early modern natural science, so have metaphors. Metaphors of ‘body’, ‘machine’, ‘mechanism’, ‘cell’, ‘gene’ etc. have all been used in political contexts in various historical eras. His chapter explores the relationship between the natural sciences and political discourses via selected metaphors and trajectories of change. What is the link between nature, natural sciences, political discourses and metaphors? How has this link altered with changing theories in science? What has been the role of metaphors of nature in political discourses? How do political metaphors function? Pikalo raises and considers all these questions.

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The next section, on ‘Structures’, begins detailed analysis of specific metaphors that have significant effects in contemporary politics. Erik Ringmar, in ‘Metaphors of social order’, shows how all societies face the problem of social order. Usually, this is understood as a question of how to assure compliance with norms and laws as a matter of explicit control and policing. Ringmar argues instead that much social control is assured rather more imperceptibly through the power of metaphor. He undertakes a comparison of various metaphorical strategies and spells out their political implications. Metaphor, he concludes, is a crucial tool for social scientists interested in inter-cultural comparisons. Iseult Honohan’s ‘Metaphors of solidarity’ then explores a dual metaphor in the context of the state or political community itself. While political community has often been understood in terms of a body, it has also been understood in terms of different kinds of human relationships. Metaphors of solidarity are particularly relevant in the contemporary context, precisely because there is increased questioning of the nation-state as the dominant frame for political community and of patriotism as the bond of solidarity among citizens. Her chapter focuses on examining the ways in which metaphors constitute the political community as unitary (whether as an organic or a mechanical entity) or as more articulated relationships (e.g. social networks, bonding, bridging and linking ties). She also considers how metaphors portray citizens as vertically mediated by the state or as horizontally connected, as a firmly bounded or exclusive group, or one with more diffuse limits. This chapter thus examines the ways in which different kinds of metaphor may facilitate and constrain the development of new discourses and practices of solidarity. Steffen G. Schneider’s ‘Exploring the metaphorical (de)-construction of legitimacy: a comparison of legitimation discourses in American and British newspapers’ concludes this section. In it, he explores the use of metaphorical concepts in media discourses on the legitimacy of political orders and institutions, arguing that these discourses play an important role. Metaphors serve as key resources in the (re-)production of legitimacy, and variations in the nature and scope of national legitimation discourses may be considerable. Each of these discourses is likely to betray characteristic ‘elective affinities’ between particular metaphorical fields and specific objects or patterns of legitimation. Schneider examines a corpus of newspaper articles from Great Britain and the United States in order to probe these hypotheses, concluding in his comparative study that the American system of government appears to be more robust – that is, less vulnerable to charges of illegitimacy – than the British system. Overall, he suggests that this finding is linked with the divergent supply and use of metaphorical imagery in two different discourses of legitimation. The next chapters take ‘Europe’ as their object of study, beginning with Petr Drulák’s ‘Identifying and assessing metaphors: discourse on EU reform’. He explains that the study of international politics through

Editors’ introduction 7 metaphor is underdeveloped methodologically and suggests a method by which metaphors of international political discourse can be researched. This is based on qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis and on the cognitivist conceptualisation of metaphor. On the basis of the interaction between theory and data, his method identifies and assesses the significance of all relevant conceptual metaphors within this chosen area of international interactions. He presents his method as a sequence of steps, outlining each one in abstract terms and then applying it empirically, in order to examine the metaphors through which the recent debate on the reform of the European Union reform was conducted. Jochen Walter and Jan Helmig, in ‘Discursive metaphor analysis: (de)construction(s) of Europe’, note that language is increasingly conceptualised as important in the social construction of reality, but note that the linguistic turn in social and cultural sciences has neglected a fundamental understanding of how reality is imposed. This is because it only refers to the primary level of linguistic construction. Not only what we say is decisive but also how we say it. Metaphors thus play a particularly crucial role in constructing reality. Walter and Helmig engage with discourse theory and with theories of metaphors, in order to develop a new methodology, sketching both the macro-level of discourse and the micro-level of metaphor. To illustrate these arguments, they consider the (de)construction(s) of Europe as a continuous example, concluding with comments on what to expect when applying the discursive analysis of metaphors to the study of the politics of European enlargement. The concluding chapter on European politics, Charlotte Fridolfsson’s ‘Political protest and metaphor’, explores the use of metaphors, particularly the gender divide, in narratives that structure the understanding of political protest in Sweden. Two events that have engaged there with European politics serve as her case-studies. One is the alternative globalisation movement’s demonstrations at the EU summit in Gothenburg 2001, where the protesters were characterised through metaphor as some type of living organism, an animal/natural phenomenon and also as war, which subjected activists to ‘otherness’. The metonymic relation between violence, masculinity and protest was apparent in elite discourses and media reports about these events, and women were notably absent as subjects. Women were more visible in the second case-study, in which a majority of the Swedish electorate voted against introducing the Euro as currency in 2003. Novoters were condensed into and explained through metaphors such as their ‘being’ women, rural, nationalist or lacking knowledge. Both hegemonic interventions studied here maintained a social imaginary, a myth, which organises political protest, whether on the streets or in the ballot box. This happens in accordance with a liberal democratic idealisation, such as fair laws and a few foul demonstrators, or an inevitable EMU-project and a predestined economic future in an ever-more integrated European Union. Three chapters deal with ‘Sexuality’ as an area of political contention. The

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first is Terrell Carver’s ‘Real construction through metaphorical language: how animals and machines (amongst other metaphors) maketh (hu)man (what “he” is)’. Carver argues that international ethics, law and politics arise within a conceptual framework of civilisation/barbarism and peacetime/ wartime. This framework incorporates a myth of unitary, unproblematic masculinity – ‘warrior man’/’economic man’ – whose world is not in fact bifurcated by a war/peace distinction, but is rather one world of competitive, aggressive, self-interested and somewhat paranoid strategic interaction. While this masculinised figure has an obvious relation to sex, gender and sexuality, it is curiously prior to the gender binary, indeed a projection from ‘within’ this masculinised being (of woman as an ‘other’) is the foundation of the gender binary as such. As the foundational ‘man’ in the human, the humane and the humanitarian, this figure is also the source of the animal and machine projections through which ‘man’s’ characteristics are given metaphorical reality. Carver concludes that ‘man’ is the locus through which power-flows negate the moral categories (in declarations and conventions of rights and protections) that – far from being genuinely respected – are themselves subverted by the destructive peace/war and civilisation/barbarism dichotomisation of human experience. Gemma M. Carney’s ‘Data, anecdote and metaphor in gender equality policy-making: merging “intellectual and real world mainstreaming” ’ explores this global policy for gender equality that has been adopted by more governments, supranational and international institutions than any predecessor. Her chapter defines the use of metaphor in relation to gender mainstreaming policy and investigates the scope of metaphor as an explanatory category for policy-makers and political scientists. She employs metaphor as a means for explaining the relative failure of gender mainstreaming as a practical initiative for producing gender equality and concludes that metaphor could play an important role in helping policy-makers to imagine a more gender equal policy-making programme and to articulate that vision to the (often patriarchal) establishment. Lastly in this section, Véronique Mottier’s chapter ‘Metaphors, mininarratives and Foucauldian discourse theory’ examines the ways in which the analysis of metaphor fits in with social and political analysis. She argues that the social and political analysis of metaphor requires a theory of interpretation as well as an account of institutions and power. While hermeneutics and relevance theory can provide a theory of interpretation, both perspectives neglect the role of institutions and power. Foucauldian discourse theory shares with relevance theory a useful move away from the earlier hermeneutic emphasis on a speaker’s intentions, but it lacks a sophisticated theory of interpretation. However, Foucauldian discourse theory offers an account of power which allows us to link the analysis of metaphor to issues of meaning, identity and institutions. Mottier thus pursues a strategy of incorporating the concept of metaphor within the discourse-analytical framework, while also drawing on insights from hermeneutics and relevance

Editors’ introduction 9 theory. Her analyses explore the closely articulated networks of metaphor through which race/ethnicity, sexuality and identity emerge as power-driven political constructs. The ‘Policy’ section of this book opens with a chapter by David Howarth and Steven Griggs, ‘Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence: the rhetoric of freedom to fly in the struggle over aviation policy in the United Kingdom’. Howarth and Griggs investigate the dynamics of current aviation policy in Britain by examining the consultation process surrounding the ‘New Labour’ government’s 2003 strategic plan to expand airport capacity in the United Kingdom. They draw upon recent developments in post-Marxist discourse theory to examine the rhetorical strategies and mechanisms by which organic intellectuals welded together a diverse range of pro-expansion interests, thus securing agreement that a policy proposal – in this case for growth in air travel – ought to be the government’s overriding demand in the policy and public domains. In so doing, this chapter examines three rhetorical logics – those of rhetorical redescription, catachresis and equivalence – showing how these informed the new and successful discourse of aviation expansion. In ‘Love and life in Heart-less town: or, the use of metaphor in local planning’, Merlijn van Hulst recounts field research conducted on a decisionmaking process in a Dutch municipality. Political actors in the town want to build a community centre, but the most important criterion in the political setting is that it should be ‘like a heart’. There are two aspects to this metaphor, however, and they do not point to the same choice of location. Moreover, the very use of the metaphor legitimised a process that might have lost support among the public had the metaphor not been used. Although metaphors play an important role in the case, van Hulst’s analysis demonstrates that Schön’s (1979/1994) theory of metaphors, which emphasises transparency, does not allow for the degree of ambiguity he observed. In the final chapter in this penultimate section, Dvora Yanow asks, ‘What work do metaphors do in policy and other political contexts?’ Metaphoric language enables a ‘seeing-as’, which may in turn lead to action. How does this seeing-as process work? What is seen, and what is concomitantly notseen? Where does the vision come from, and what action(s) does it enable? Her chapter ‘Cognition meets action: metaphors as models of and models for’ offers illustrative answers to these questions. Such questions direct attention towards the analysis of public policies and debates, which can elucidate communicative blockages and, at times, lead to mutual understanding and perhaps even to a resolution of the differences between contenders. In the final section of this volume, ‘Language’, three chapters pursue the interdisciplinary links between linguistic theory and analysis and the study of political phenomena. Alan Cienki’s ‘The application of conceptual metaphor theory to political discourse: methodological questions and some possible solutions’ undertakes a critical examination of research methods. He examines five: the intuiting of conceptual metaphor based on expert

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knowledge; testing for metaphors proposed in this way against a small database (or ‘corpus’) of topically appropriate political rhetoric; the use of small corpora of speeches by politicians to propose conceptual metaphors in them for critical discourse analysis; the use of a small corpus of journalistic texts on a political topic to research selections of large corpora strategically; and a recent experiment by Cienki himself to find out what patterns of relations non-specialists in linguistics or political science may find in sets of metaphoric expressions from political rhetoric. In conclusion, Cienki presents his own composite methodology. In the next chapter, ‘Metaphorical moves: “scientific expertise in research policy studies” ’, Philippe Sormani and Martin Benninghoff examine the use of metaphor in specific studies of research policy. Formal studies of research policy seem to be bound up in a hermeneutic circle: the expertise they call upon takes part in the domain of science it defines. Research policy studies are thus a critical case for studying the reflexive implication of scientific expertise, all the more so as ‘axiological neutrality’ is the declared ‘scientific’ objective. Their chapter is written from a descriptive stance that considers the question, How are these phenomena textually organised? What particular reading do they yield? The procedural description offered in this chapter specifies what kinds of metaphorical moves are involved in the discursive articulation of scientific expertise. Before turning the ‘reflexive implication’ of research policy studies into a critical issue, however, this chapter addresses it as an empirical phenomenon. In the concluding chapter to this section, and to this volume, Dieter Vertessen and Christ’l de Landtsheer examine the dynamic application of style in politics, depending upon the rhetorical situation, by looking at its relationship to metaphor. In ‘A metaphorical election style: use of metaphor at election time’, they use public television, commercial television, quality papers and tabloids and analyse how approaching elections change the rhetorical situation. Employing two theories – the ‘metaphor power’ or ‘C-index’ and the ‘crisis communication combination’ or ‘CCC-index’ – Vertessen and de Landtsheer conclude that metaphors become more important at election time because they simplify language and prepare the public for persuasion and action. The chapters in this volume have thus covered philosophical and theoretical issues, research methodologies and procedures and a considerable number of political phenomena and events of contemporary relevance. In a final brief chapter, the co-editors Carver and Pikalo share their ‘Reflections’ on what was promised, what has been achieved and where further research and inquiry might be directed.

References Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Editors’ introduction 11 Charteris-Black, J. (2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: the persuasive power of metaphor, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Diez, T. (1999) Die EU lesen: Diskursive Knotenpunkte in der britischen Europadebatte, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Maasen, S. (1995) ‘Who Is Afraid of Metaphors?’ in S. Maasen, E. Mendelsohn and P. Weingart (eds) Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors, Dodrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ricoeur, P. (1981) The Rule of Metaphor, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schön, D.A. (1979/1994) ‘Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-setting in Social Policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torfing, J. (1999) New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zˇizˇek, Oxford: Blackwell. Yanow, D. (2000) Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Zashin, E. and Chapman, P. C. (1974) ‘The Uses of Metaphor and Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political Language’, The Journal of Politics, 36: 290–326.

Part I

Science

1

The ways of stargazing Newtonian metaphoricity in American foreign policy Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis

One night, while quietly nestled down under a fig tree, I looked at a star with that curious passion which captures children and to which my precocious melancholy added a kind of sentimental understanding . . .. She [the governess] pretended to look for me and called me. I answered. She came to the fig tree where she knew I was. ‘What are you doing there?’ she said. ‘I am looking at a star.’ ‘You are not looking at a star,’ said my mother, who heard us from her balcony. ‘Can one know astronomy at your age?’ (Balzac Le Lys dans la vallée)

This excerpt from Honoré de Balzac’s novel opens Eugène Minkowski’s discussion of man’s poetic encounter with nature in his Vers une cosmologie (1936: 163–72). What the quoted dialogue reveals are two contrasting ways of stargazing: on the one hand, there is the scientific way, that is, seeing the heavenly bodies in their objective materiality. On the other hand, there is the poetic way, that is, looking at the stars in a manner that frees the gaze from the confines of the heavenly bodies’ tangible existence. These are the ways of the astronomer and the poet, representing the two ideas that delimit our dealings with the metaphorical relevance of nature and science to politics. Nature is probably the most profound source of metaphoricity, representing the widest realm to which political thought has resorted for metaphorical inspiration and reference. Particularly in the last four centuries, an alteration in the definition of science has confined this area to the domain of natural science and scientific ‘discoveries’ that have offered the most widely used and authorised models of structure and process. For example, how differently would the Cold War balance of power have been conceptualised if Isaac Newton had not ‘discovered’ the laws of planetary gravitation? No matter how engaging such a question might be, it equally could be misleading, insofar as it leaves science intact, uninfluenced by the sociopolitical contexts of its practices, untouched by the respective specificities and necessities of its epoch. This privileging of science over politics in their

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metaphorical relation brings forth two cardinal and problematic biases. The first relates to a concrete, pre-scientific conceptualisation of nature left to be ‘discovered’ through scientific endeavour and then providing the natural and hence legitimate patterns for sociopolitical organisation and interaction. The second relates to the treatment of metaphors as the means for such modelling in terms of what science has already represented as natural. In what sense could scientific metaphors then (re-)inform our political methodologies? Astronomers are supposed to look at the objective materiality of the stars in a way that offers us an accurate representation of the order and interaction of the heavenly bodies found in nature. Should we then model our political structures and interactions as systems in a similar way? Or, should we, like the boy’s mother, dismiss any possibility of imaginatively representing international politics through the employment of scientific metaphors as necessarily full of inconsistencies and imprecisions? (see, for example, Sokal and Bricmont 1998). Answering this question presupposes an engagement with the role of metaphorical language in the sociopolitical imagination, as well as with how nature and science are treated in the process of metapherein. To put it another way, looking at the patterns and legalities ‘discovered’ in nature through science as metaphor, and thus as the linguistic modes for sociopolitical modelling, also involves questioning the claim that science is able to decipher and mimetically represent natural regularities, and thus the claim that a scientific outlook is radically distinct from a non-scientific one. The way of the poet advocated here treats scientific metaphors as deeply ingrained in political methodology, without necessarily implying the scientific modelling of politics. The relevance of this process for international politics is rendered momentous, once the employment of scientific metaphors transcends individual use and becomes embodied in political discourse. This gives rise to powerful social imaginaries and thus becomes a social form of poetic stargazing.

Newtonian metaphors in the American founding era The history of ideas has often addressed the culture of Newtonianism as an exclusively American phenomenon, due to its deep resonance in eighteenthcentury American political thought. Some authors have even suggested that Newtonian politics continues to be the prevailing mode of political thought and action in the United States (see, for example, Barber 1984). Nevertheless, more often than not, Newtonianism has been treated as an accurate reflection of Newton’s own theories (Roche 1988: 43; Striner 1995), while its ideological content and function remain rather obscure. When identified with and reduced to the use of the machine metaphor, the impact of Newtonianism on the writers of the American founding documents is even questioned by some authors on grounds of the scarce use of mechanistic metaphors (Boorstin 1953: 79; Robinson 1957: 256). More recent accounts

The ways of stargazing 17 of the machine metaphor (Foley 1990; Kammen 1994; Cohen 1995) offer a more synthetic and systematic view of the impact of Newtonian metaphor, without fully departing from the assertions made in traditional historiography. Nevertheless, a more thorough approach indicates that Newtonianism itself resists ‘any hard-and-fast definition or even a convenient narrative troping; it cannot be identified simply with a specific political program or a handpicked group of Newton’s disciples’ (Markley 1993: 178). Indeed, the distance separating Newton’s own theories from the culture of Newtonianism in terms of both content and aims is notable. Newton’s thought was recontextualised and its internal tensions repressed; this produced the discursive underpinnings of the so-called culture of Newtonianism. Newtonianism is the intellectual locus for diverse recontextualisations and crucial metaphors that sought to contain Newton’s original legitimating representation of the natural order. Because Newton’s science was metaphorically deployed as Newtonianism in the sociopolitical rhetoric of the times, its meaning was constantly generated and regenerated through what could be called, following Ricoeur (1997: 95–6), the ‘living powers’ of metaphoricity. After being imported into America, Newtonianism was in a stage of constant metamorphosis, being filtered through diverse sociopolitical, theological and philosophical developments (May 1976: 25). The dissemination and popularisation of Newton’s theories intensified with parallel evolutions in science and technology, which played an increasingly important role in the lives of the first Americans, often equating Newtonian metaphoricity with the machine metaphor. This development was also facilitated by the parallel impact of European mechanistic concepts, mostly of French origin, as well as the materialism implicit in the writings of some English republicans and French philosophes. The result was the metaphorical blending of the Newtonian planetary system regulated by gravitational forces with the functions of a machine (Brooke 1956: 170). This Newtonian imaginary depicted ‘man’ as a physical object in a society obeying the same laws of attraction and repulsion as the celestial system or functioning like the highly ordered parts of a machine. After all, the recipients of this dissemination ‘were repeatedly told that what they were learning sanctioned the existing social and constitutional order’ (Jacob 1987: 137). Although scepticism was occasionally expressed by most of the founding fathers (Washington 1939: 311; Jefferson 1950: 395–6; Hamilton 1961a, 1961b; Madison 1962: 163–4) with respect to the possibility of a perpetual or perfect form of government, Adams (1971b: 376, 1977: 135) referred to the Newtonian system, reduced to a harmonious and balanced machine, as the authoritative depiction of a balanced government. Thus, government could erect itself as its own representation, its replica, also establishing the same causal relations between human actions and physical motions. Yet in this process of re-creation, Newtonian metaphors were not always used for

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the same purposes and with the same meanings, nor were the images of sociopolitical balance they evoked always taken unproblematically for granted (e.g. Farrand 1937: 82, 135, 153, 421). This diversity in content, aims and normative claims reveals a contestation less about the complexities of a balanced American government than about the internal tensions within the images of Newtonian metaphoricity. The states were often likened to the ‘planets’ of the ‘solar’ federal system of national government, with their orbits of ‘movement’ immovable, fixed and legitimated by nature itself, though there was of course disputation about what exactly the properties of these orbits really were. Similar tensions were also evident in the discussion of the checks-and-balances system of the new constitution. They were imagined interchangeably as a giant clock, a machine or the planetary system, and this was reinvoked later in times of crisis (Washington 1935; Adams 1971a: 391; Jefferson 1979: 161). During this pristine phase of the newly formed American state, political discourse focused almost exclusively on the organisation of the governmental system. The accounts addressing the external affairs of the state were limited and mostly related to America’s relations with England. In his ‘Common Sense’ (1776), Thomas Paine metaphorically evokes a Newtonian image, likening England to the ‘primary planet’ and America to its ‘satellite’, only to reject this by referring to the ‘common order of nature’ and thus replacing this with a new yet still Newtonian image. ‘[I]n no instance’, he writes, ‘hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems’ (Paine 1945 [1776]: 24). Here the ‘common order of nature’ was used to destabilise the prevailing order between the two states and thus to legitimate America’s independence as belonging to a different gravitational system. The same anxiety of the newly born state to be acknowledged and recognised as an autonomous, independent entity is also evident in Thomas Pownall’s Memorial . . . to the Sovereigns of Europe (1780: 4–5), where independence appears ‘fixed as fate’, and America as ‘a mistress of her own fortune’. To further legitimate his assertion, Pownall employs a Newtonian metaphor portraying an even more dynamic, almost cosmic image of the American state, depicting independence as its ‘proper orbit’. ‘This new system of power united in a moving round its own proper centre’, he writes, ‘is growing, by accelerated notions, and accumulated accretion of parts, into an independent organised being, a great and powerful empire. It has taken its equal station with the nations upon earth’ (1780: 5). Nevertheless, later in the same text, Pownall notes that America has become ‘a new primary planet in the system of the world’ (1780: 5). While this planet naturally follows its own orbit, it ‘must have effect on the orbit of every other planet’ and eventually ‘shift the common centre of gravity of the whole system of the European world’ (Pownall 1780: 5). As the newly formed American state tried to accommodate itself to the

The ways of stargazing 19 interstate system already operating in balance-of-power terms, it had first to render this system intelligible and to discover the laws that regulate it. In Europe, the counterpoise imaginary was already frequently evoked to describe the dynamics of the balance-of-power system (de Vattel 1982). Given the impact of Newtonianism in American political discourses relevant to the organisation and functions of the new state, it comes as no surprise that this counterpoise imaginary was accommodated in the early American discourses of international relations imbued with Newtonian metaphors. The order found in the interplanetary system was thought to provide the legitimate pattern for understanding the laws that regulate the behaviour, the interests and the relations of states (Gilbert 1961: 92, 98). Once incorporated in the American founding textuality, Newtonian metaphors contributed to the repeatability of the nation’s inaugural event in social memory as a perpetuation of the initial energy of the founding act (Ellul 1973: 335–54). This process offered a basis of identification for future generations, who came to understand themselves and their origins in terms of the ideas embodied in this founding textuality. This grounding rendered the nation’s understanding of itself possible without being delimited by the here and now of the present. It is in this temporal distance from the founding act to its future perpetuation that Newtonian metaphoricity comes into play (Mandelblaum 1977: 5–11; Ricoeur 1981: 25, 1984: 194–203, 1988: 216–19). In this process of metaphorical representation, and as the temporal gap increased, justification and rationalisation took the place of former conviction and consensus. The Newtonian imaginary became an argumentative device that justified and legitimated what the American nation came to be. Its goal was less the mobilisation of the nation than the justification of what it had become. In that sense, the metaphorical representation of the American government, nation or individuals, mobilised in terms of a machine, a clock or a planetary system, was less an object of thought per se, than something that generated thought, the Standort from which this thought was possible (Ricoeur 1978: 47). In other words, the Newtonian imaginary animated society through a justificatory belief in the founding act, so that the righteousness, justness and necessity of the society’s existence and organisation would be affirmed. This animation was possible through the schematising and codifying function of the modes of Newtonian metaphoricity employed, thus facilitating the idealisation of the American nation’s image of itself and of its relations with others in these early formative years of its existence, as well as the perpetuation of this new idealised image in the future (Ricoeur 1988: 218–19). With this mutation of thought into doxa, the Newtonian imaginary functioned at the level of rationalisation, as its metaphors were gradually added in the political rhetorics of the times. It hence came to provide a non-reflective image of sociopolitical reality, and by virtue of this, it made its implicit ideas about society and politics efficacious, and helped to integrate American society.

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In the Newtonian imaginary, with everything reflecting harmony and order, and also being sanctioned by it, whatever existed in society and politics was considered legitimate, as long as it could correspond to the mechanised, harmonious and balanced view of political reality. This is how the discourses of Newtonian metaphoricity served as expressions of political ontology. Whatever was assimilable to this metaphoricity was legitimate, and whatever was legitimate, in turn, then existed. If the initial function of ideology is to ‘perpetuate a founding act in the mode of representation’ (Ricoeur 1981: 227), then the ideological function of the Newtonian imaginary implicit in American founding textuality was to interpret what counts as real in politics, thus resulting in a kind of ideological ‘blindness’ and ‘closure’ (Ricoeur 1986: 199). We could say that this highly uncritical moment is but an instance of the ideological function of a Newtonian imaginary, which is full of checks-andbalances, and law-governed and predictable political interactions, in a fixed, preordained spatio-temporality. At least in the case of what has been addressed as American Newtonianism, this ideological function of the Newtonian imaginary is presented here as one deeply rooted in the founding act of American society itself.

The Newtonian constellations of ‘NSC-68’ During the founding years of its existence, the United States was imagined, as we have seen, as a new, primary planet that would grow into a powerful empire affecting and finally shifting the common centre of gravity in the whole balance-of-power system. This moment was not reached until the emergence of Cold War bipolarity, when the United States was clearly imagined for the first time as the gravitational centre of power of the ‘free world’. The imaginative depiction of the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of the Newtonian metaphoricity of its founding years was so pervasive that the United States came to understand its expectations as ‘acts not of conscious obedience to something external but of self-realisation, of survival as what [it] ha[d] become’ (Ashley 1984: 276). By relating the imaginative conceptualisation of balance during America’s founding years to the Cold War balance-of-power system, the focus here will be on the ideological functions of the imaginary that idealised, rationalised and repeated the initial energy of its founding act. Following David Campbell’s (1998: 91) assertions that ‘America is the imagined community par excellence’ and that ‘more than any other state, the imprecise process of imagination is what constitutes American identity’, the United States is treated here as heavily dependent ontologically upon its representational practices. In order to illustrate the ideological functions of this imaginary depicting the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of Newtonian constellations, special reference will be made here to the employment of Newtonian metaphors in NSC-68, the docu-

The ways of stargazing 21 ment that set the basic lines of US Cold War policies (US Department of State 1950). I can think of no better account relating the Cold War balance-of-power system to the American conceptualisation of balance evident in its founding textuality than the one offered by Hans Morgenthau in his Politics among Nations (1973), written amid the early Cold War years. There Morgenthau relates the idealised balance in the domestic organisation of the American state as expressed in its own Constitution with the one regulating international politics as a system of power relations that metaphorically correspond to the relations of forces in classical mechanics. For Morgenthau, this balanced constitution is but the kind of ‘mechanism’ described by The Federalist that, once transferred into the domain of international politics, could render it more intelligible. As he remarks (1973: 178), ‘one needs only to substitute the terminology of international politics for the concepts used by The Federalist’. As the old system of European power politics has given way to Cold War bipolarity, the old metaphor of a fragile, uncertain equilibrium produced by the wavering balance of scales has been replaced by the Newtonian metaphor of a bipolar and gravitational international system that has inherent powers safeguarding its stability, by virtue of the natural, rational and secular laws formulating the calculable interests that govern the systemic behaviour of states. In this system, state-policies are fixed like planetary movements and regulated by measurable state-interests, as if they followed calculable orbits in a cosmos (international system) that itself provides these legitimate and infallible patterns of behaviour (Morgenthau 1973: 343–5, 351; see also Chilton 1996: 96–7). The same imaginary was often evoked in American Cold War textuality, and the case of NSC-68 is typical in this respect. This figurative representation is particularly striking, since NSC-68 was not written for public consumption: That such a restricted audience, one normally thought to be removed from the more colourful aspects of political life and endowed with the ability to see the world as it really ‘is’, should be actively concerned with the figurative representation of its mission necessarily requires us to rethink the meaning of foreign policy making. We should no longer regard those who occupy the secretive domains of the national security state as being outside of the cultural parameters of the national security in whose name they operate. (Campbell 1998: 28; emphasis added) Perhaps then, it would be more meaningful to understand how these cultural parameters were reflected in the modes chosen for such a figurative representation and, in turn, in America’s sense-making of Cold War political reality. This involves an exploration of the sociopolitical imaginary through which the Cold War experience was inscribed, interpretatively

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posited and enacted. Thus, the ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ of NSC-68 could be studied not as an individual act, but instead as an imaginative codification and concretisation of political action, part of an ideological world-making discursive enterprise. The metaphors correspond to and build up an imaginative conceptualisation of the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of Newtonian constellations. In that sense, NSC-68 should be read less as an individual, unique attempt to set up an imaginative schematisation of the Cold War system, than as a political expression reflecting a much wider social process conceptualising the place and role of the United States in post–Second World War international politics. Presenting the ‘Background of the Present Crisis’, NSC-68 first focused on the change from the multipolar ‘historic distribution of power’ to Cold War bipolarity (US Department of State 1950: 2). The complex set of factors responsible for this change was twofold: first, the defeat of the Axis Powers and the eventual decline of the old European powers ‘have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centres’ (US Department of State 1950: 2). Second, it was by then evident that the USSR was ‘animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own’ (US Department of State 1950: 2). The result was the development of gravitational forces exercised by the two centres of power, the two antithetical poles. The new balance of power demanded a re-evaluation of the strategic plans and goals of the United States to make them appropriate for the new dynamic system. Moreover, the United States was presented as bound to respond to Soviet aspirations because of its position in the system ‘as the principal centre of power in the non-Soviet world’ (US Department of State 1950: 3). Under these circumstances, the United States had no choice but to restore the balance of power. Yet, NSC-68 did not stop there: ‘This fact imposes on us, in our interests, the responsibility of world leadership’ (US Department of State 1950: 6). The document also discussed the relations of the Kremlin with its ‘satellites’. The respective wording referred to fixed policies, which look more like orbits around the gravitational centre of the Soviet Union. In this context, no alternative courses of action were available to the Soviet satellites (US Department of State 1950: 8–14). The American response should be proportional, that is, to preserve the balance of power through similar satellitebuilding. In this case, though, the wording was much different from the one used to refer to the Soviet allies: Our position as the centre of power in the free world places a heavy responsibility upon the United States for leadership. We must organise and enlist the energies and resources of the free world in a positive program for peace which will frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination by creating a situation in the free world to which the Kremlin will be compelled to adjust. (US Department of State 1950: 45)

The ways of stargazing 23 The United States, as the principal centre of power in the non-Soviet world, thus had to react to the ‘fundamental design’ of the antithetical pole. Nevertheless, this reaction had to be proportional and balanced to the Soviet action. Quoting The Federalist (No. 28), the authors of NSC-68 insisted that ‘[t]he means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief’ (US Department of State 1950: 8). The Cold War American objectives were thus imposed and legitimated by the very ‘counterbalancing’ nature of the international system itself. As in any text of its kind, NSC-68 had a mediated relationship with international reality such that it represented what ‘international reality’ was thought to be as it emerged in the writing of the text (Ricoeur 1991: 177). Consequently, the formation of United States’ Cold War foreign policy, the very schematisation of the various projects and motivations of political action, as well as America’s own capacity to act internationally, were inseparable from this imaginative process. The imaginary depiction of the Cold War balance-of-power system in the cosmological terms of Newtonian constellations contributed substantially to the configuration of the noematic content of the foreign policy projects of the United States. As we have seen, by metaphorically imagining its own position as the centre of power in the free world, the project of attaining world leadership appeared almost fixed as an article of faith, a heavy responsibility imposed upon the United States by its very place in the balance-of-power system. This project involved moreover a similar satellite-building project around its own gravitational centre. In Ricoeur’s language, the project of America’s leadership became America’s own pragma, the thing to be done, the foreign policy project to be aspired to. By having been configured through a Newtonian imaginary, the noematic content of this pragma already contained a certain schematisation of possibilities and limitations imposed by the balance-of-power system itself. This imaginative conceptualisation of the balance of power by the United States served as the imaginary schema through which it could ‘try out’ different courses of foreign policy action. However, these possibilities were also delimited by the necessities imposed by the conceptualisation of the ideological system itself. Moreover, this imaginary depiction also functioned at the level of motivation by providing the milieu in which the United States could compare and evaluate its diverse motives for foreign policy action. At this level, the imaginary functioned as the terrain of comparison and mediation between the will, the desire and the legitimacy of setting out a specific project of action. Yet, as the noematic content of the US foreign policy projects was configured and fixed by the ideological function of the Newtonian imaginary, foreign policy motivations became identified with and entertained by the pre-existing necessity to act in a manner imposed by the system’s specificities. The choice then became almost compelling, as opting for any other alternative project would ultimately lead to ‘gradual withdrawals’ and ‘vital sacrifices’ (US Department of State 1950: 47). In other words, the determination and desire

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to follow the foreign policy project appropriate for the leader of the ‘free world’ was always already preconditioned by America’s imaginative schematisation of its role as its gravitational centre. Finally, it was upon such a Newtonian imaginary that the United States could try out its power to act, as well as measure the scope of its possibility to act. To put it in Ricoeur’s (1991: 178) own terms, the United States could ‘take possession of the immediate certainty of its power only through the imaginative variations that mediate this certainty’. Indeed, this imaginary imputed the power to act of the United States itself as the agent of its own action. Yet, whereas this would have been possible through a depiction of this power ‘in the form of imaginative variations on’ the possible projects of its foreign policy action, these imaginative variations reflected less the possibilities than the necessities of a specific project by virtue of the ideological function of the imaginary in question. The Newtonian imaginary depicted in NSC-68 was but an historical expression of this process, an instance of the ‘stylized repetition’ of America’s founding act (Campbell 1998: 10).

Conclusions In this cosmological context, the inscription of international relations by the American textuality examined here offered a new ‘world map’, an authoritative reading of the nature of international politics. It delineated a space of action and identification, and through the creative capacity of the metaphors employed, it came to constitute an order that was thought of as given. Its core seems to represent the essential construction of the ‘nature’ of international politics, seeing world politics, to borrow Roland Barthes’s (1974: 174) term, as lisible, an aesthetic totality, a cosmos, reigned by an intelligible logos, the balance-of-power system. This system, in turn, with all its poles, orbits or satellites, was imagined as an accurate description or formulation of international politics. Yet, it also and most crucially came to be a propositional interpretation of Cold War international politics. In the imaginary discussed here, the possibilities for political action were sanctioned by the cosmological matrices generated by Newtonian metaphoricity, ideologically determining a given political order. This ideological determination of political reality involved the parallel transformation of a series of questions. Hence, while metaphors were employed to make the reality of Cold War politics more intelligible, questions like ‘what is’ were transformed into ones like ‘what ought to be’, energising specific constraints of political action and expediency. Hence, this Cold War Newtonian cosmology legitimated and normalised what could be desired, articulated or attained in international politics, thus ordering and prefiguring prescribed courses of international interaction. In this ontological commitment, the nature and order of the reality of international politics was not described but prescribed through the valorisation of the politically desirable and possible.

The ways of stargazing 25 Newtonian metaphors offered the conditions of possibility for this cosmological configuration, first by rendering it into a form of symbolic power and then by legitimating its truths in a universal meta-discourse. Yet, how could any relating of the American imaginary schematisation of the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of Newtonian constellations, with its conceptualisation of balance formulated during the founding years of the republic, be of importance to the American conceptualisation of itself and its relations with others in the post–Cold War era? To proclaim the end of the Cold War and to call for an alternative mode of political imagination already presupposes that we know what the Cold War was and how its politics was imagined. In Campbell’s (1998: 15) words, we cannot consider the issue of ‘where we go from here’ without first problematising ‘how we got to here’. As I have tried to suggest in this chapter, problematising this final ‘how’ is a process that, in the American case, involves an investigation of the representational practices upon which American society has been so exceptionally dependent. These practices involve, inter alia, an imaginative schematisation of balance-of-power politics in terms of Newtonian constellations.

References Adams, J. (1971a) ‘A Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America (1786–1787)’, in C.F. Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, 1735–1826, vol. 4. New York: AMS Press. Adams, J. (1971b) ‘Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776’, in C.F. Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams, 1735–1826, vol. 9. New York: AMS Press. Adams, J. (1977) ‘Adams to James Waren, April 22, 1776’, in R.J. Taylor, G.J. Lint and C. Walker (eds), Papers of John Adams, vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ashley, R.K. (1984) ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organization 38 (2): 225–86. Barber, B. (1984) Strong Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z, trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Boorstin, D.J. (1953) The Genius of American Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brooke, H. (1956) The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press. Campbell, D. (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chilton, P.A. (1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House. New York: Peter Lang. Cohen, I.B. (1995) Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Ellul, J. (1973) ‘Le rôle médiateur de l’idéologie’, in E. Castelli (ed.), Démythization et idéologie. Paris: Aubier. Farrand, M. (ed.) (1937) The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 1. London: Oxford University Press.

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Foley, M. (1990) Laws, Men and Machines: Modern American Government and the Appeal of Newtonian Mechanics. London and New York: Routledge. Gilbert, F. (1961) To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hamilton, A. (1961a) ‘The Federalist, No. 65’, in C. Rossiter (ed.), The Federalist Papers. New York: New American Library. Hamilton, A. (1961b) ‘The Federalist, No. 85’, in C. Rossiter (ed.), The Federalist Papers. New York: New American Library. Jacob, M.C. (1987) ‘Scientific Culture in the Early English Enlightenment: Mechanism, Industry, and Gentlemanly Facts’, in A.C. Kors and P.J. Korshin (eds), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jefferson, T. (1950) ‘Jefferson to Madison, September 6, 1789’, in J.P. Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jefferson, T. (1979) Thomas Jefferson on Democracy. New York: New American Library, Mentor. Kammen, M. (1994) A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture. New York: St Martin’s Press. Madison, J. (1962) ‘Madison to Jefferson, September 6, 1787’, in W.T. Hutchinson and W.M.E. Rachel (eds), The Papers of James Madison, vol. 10. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mandelblaum, M. (1977) The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Markley, R. (1993) Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. May, E.R. (1976) The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Minkowski, E. (1936) Vers une cosmologie. Paris: Aubier. Morgenthau, H.J. (1973) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. Paine, T. (1945 [1776]) ‘Common Sense’, in P.S. Foner (ed.), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 1. New York: Citadel Press. Pownall, T. (1780) A Memorial Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe, on the Present State of Affairs Between the Old and New World. London: Printed for J. Almon. Ricoeur, P. (1978) ‘Can There Be a Scientific Concept of Ideology?’ in J. Bien (ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences: A Dialogue. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Ricoeur, P. (1981) ‘Science and Ideology’, in J.B. Thompson (ed.), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, vol. I. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1986) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1988) Time and Narrative, vol. III. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991) ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action’, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, vol. II. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1997) The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robinson, J.A. (1957) ‘Newtonianism and the Constitution’, Midwest Journal of Political Science 1 (3/4): 252–66.

The ways of stargazing 27 Roche, J. (1988) ‘Newton’s Principia’, in J. Fauvel, R. Flood, M. Shortland and R. Wilson (eds), Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Works. New York: Oxford University Press. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1998) Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science. London: Profile. Striner, R. (1995) ‘Political Newtonianism: The Cosmic Model of Politics in Europe and America’, William and Mary Quarterly 52: 583–608. US Department of State (1950) ‘NSC-68’, in Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. I. Washington, DC: US Department of State. de Vattel, E. (1982) The Law of Nations (1758). New York: AMS Press. Washington, G. (1935) ‘Washington’s First Draft for an Address, enclosed in his letter of May 15, 1796 to Hamilton’, in V.H. Palsits (ed.), Washington’s Farewell Address. New York: New York Public Library. Washington, G. (1939) ‘Washington to Bushrod Washington, November 10, 1787’, in J.C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, vol. 29. Washington, DC: USGPO.

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Slippery slopes in political discourse Dag Stenvoll

If we allow gay marriage today, then it is only a matter of time before we will have gay adoption. This reasoning, heard in slightly different versions in two early 1990s Norwegian parliamentary debates on same-sex partnership, is an example of slippery slope logic: if we now accept X, in itself harmless or at least not so bad, then what will inevitably follow in the future is Y, something that we all (or most of us) think is bad. This chapter is about slippery slope arguments in political discourse. Through dysphemistic reasoning, an immediate instant case is linked to a hypothetical, future danger case, so that the more negative evaluations and connotations of the latter attach to the former. This thematic and temporal displacement of focus, from the matter at hand to the hypothetical and from the present to the future, and thus from something specific to something more uncertain, is the clearest argumentative effect of the slippery slope metaphor. More subtly, the imagery of a slippery slope constitutes politics as a world of physical objects, where predictable laws of physics rule instead of complex and unpredictable social factors, human inconsistencies and political contingencies.

Threshold and slippery slope metaphors In an article about British media debate on the first so-called designer baby in 2000, the slippery slope metaphor is discussed as an example of the more generic category threshold metaphors, also including expressions such as crossing a line, taking one step too far, and opening Pandora’s Box (Nerlich et al. 2003). The essence of the slippery slope ‘argumentative cliché’, as the authors call it, is that the endpoint of the slippery slope (in their example, the prospect of ‘designer babies’) semantically contaminates the top of it (the concept and practice of ‘donor babies’). It works as a kind of dysphemism, speaking about something in terms of something else, the latter constructed as more problematic than the former. The structure of the slippery slope metaphor type of argument, which also includes expressions such as the ‘camel’s nose is in the tent’, the ‘thin edge of the wedge’, and a ‘foot in the door’, has been formally mapped out

Slippery slopes in political discourse 29 by Schauer (1985). He sets up a conceptual distinction between the state of rest (the current state of affairs), the instant case (the problem now before us and its proposed resolution), and the danger case (the future problem that would, or would likely, result from the instant case). The slippery slope argument says that by moving from the state of rest to the instant case, we will eventually end up at the danger case: A slippery slope argument claims that permitting the instant case – a case that it concedes to be facially innocuous and that it linguistically distinguishes from the danger case – will nevertheless lead to, or increase the likelihood of, the danger case. (Schauer 1985: 369) Stepping from the state of rest to the seemingly harmless instant case is in other words like stepping from safe to unsafe ground, like stepping onto a slippery slope where there is danger at the bottom of the slope. The figurative argument requires that the imagined scenario, at end of the slope, is conceived of as more negative than the instant scenario, at the top of the slope. Arguments against the danger case will then have a greater potential to legitimise policy than arguments against the instant case. The slippery slope image works metaphorically in at least two ways. First, it sets up the physical world of solid objects as an analogy to political matters, implying that politics is like the physical world: if you ‘move’ something in the world of politics, like making or changing a particular law or policy, other things will inevitably follow – just as if you put a physical object on a sliding plate. This naturalising image of politics simplifies the complexity of cause and effect in the social world, compared to the natural world and its more mechanic, more predictable patterns of causality. Second, the slippery slope does in itself entail a particular image of movement: from a good or relatively good place to a relatively worse or bad place and from a political world of voluntarism and human action to a natural world of determinism and laws of physics. It imposes a kind of unidirectional, unstoppable movement which, when used metaphorically about politics, binds phenomena together in a specific way. The instant case is thus subject to a metaphorical transfer of meaning in two ways; by the analogy of physical laws of cause and effect (the instant case will inevitably lead to the danger case) and by the idea of one-way movement, downwards (where ‘down’ equals ‘bad’), arising from the image of the slippery slope itself. The metaphorical expression of a slippery slope also involves a dual displacement of focus: regarding time perspective, from the present to the future, and regarding problematisation, from the instant to the danger case.

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The slippery slope metaphor in Norwegian sexual politics The examples given in this section are from Norwegian parliamentary debates on sexuality, abortion, and new reproductive technologies from the 1950s through the 1990s (Stenvoll 2003). Slippery slope metaphors, and equivalent images of a non-stoppable movement from an instant case towards a danger case, were articulated on a number of occasions. In abortion debates, for instance, it was argued that to allow abortion for other than ‘self-defence’ (when continued pregnancy could threaten a woman’s life) would lead to a slide towards infanticide or euthanasia (one MP, during a mid-1970s debate, also mentioned ‘sexual irresponsibility’ as the possible end point). According to another argument, to allow abortion for anything but self-defence would, eventually, lead to abortion used ‘as contraception’ – that is, instead of means for birth control such as the pill or condoms. This last argument was also used against the introduction of the abortifacient drug Mifepristone as a method to end pregnancies, saying this would lead to the drug being used privately, outside of hospitals, as contraception. New reproductive technologies and prenatal screening were two other issue areas where it was argued that instant cases (e.g. freezing of eggs, egg donation, and allowing screening for serious disabilities) would lead to danger cases (e.g. cloning, surrogate motherhood, and screening for normal traits, like sex). As in Nerlich et al. (2003), an article on designer babies, the end of the slippery slope was commonly associated with some version of eugenics, using technology to improve the human species or using humans as means rather than treating them as ends in themselves. This warning of a eugenic society, with connotations to Nazi Germany, has been present in bio-political debates in many other countries (Walton 1992; McGleenan 1995; Mulkay 1997). When the Norwegian pornography law was discussed in the mid-1980s, the consumption of pornographic material was compared to the consumption of drugs: seeing ‘half porn’ (e.g. pictures of naked women) would lead to a demand for hardcore (e.g. pictures of violent sex) or worse (sexual assault). In the Norwegian context of the 1980s, the drug analogy fit well with slippery slope logic. Dominant public discourse at the time assumed a determined, downward movement once you tried any of it. If you smoked cannabis and there was not much to stop you from ending up as a heroin addict. When those in favour of stricter porn laws were confronted with liberal arguments for freedom of speech, these arguments were disregarded as irrelevant. Demands for the criminalisation of indecent images and porn were to a great extent based on an expected slide towards ‘harder stuff’, involving imagery of violence, animals, children, dead bodies, or sexual harassment/assault, phenomena generally considered to be beyond freedom of speech issues. A more historically curious example of slippery slope reasoning: in sexuality debates from the mid-1950s and early 1960s, it was warned that to

Slippery slopes in political discourse 31 decriminalise male homosexuality, living as concubines, and refusal to marry a woman one had made pregnant under promise of marriage (there was indeed a clause on this in the Criminal Code), could lead to a ‘moral backslide’. These were old paragraphs which were rarely or never used in practice, and the resistance to nullify them (the instant case) was justified in terms of alleged increased risk for an accelerated moral decay (the danger case), rather than in terms of their soundness and applicability in themselves. For my own discussion of slippery slope metaphors, I do not require Schauer’s defining characteristic of the instant case as necessarily being harmless or uncontroversial. This might fit sometimes, but often there will be someone among those arguing in terms of the slippery slope who also oppose to the instant case in itself. For instance, when parliament debated the same-sex partnership law in the early 1990s, many MPs said they were against it (the instant case) for representing a threat to the institution of marriage. This was a self-contained argument, explicitly grounded in a normative defence of heterosexual marriage, against the proposed legislation. During the debates, however, the additional argument ‘if gay marriage now, then same-sex adoption next’ was put forth. It was argued that if gay people were allowed to marry (the instant case), something that might not in itself be so bad (after all, many MPs and voters were already in favour of it), then something all but a very few were against, gay couples adopting children (the danger case), would come next. In this example, same-sex partnership was seen as bad in itself, but also as the top of a slippery slope towards something even worse: gay adoption. Co-existing arguments in terms of the slippery slope and against the instant case as such should come as no surprise and can hardly be classified as inconsistent. The camel’s nose might be in the tent, but one can still bet on several horses in the same race. Arguments using the slippery slope metaphor will, however, if formulated in line with majority values and opinions, have a greater potential for support than arguments against the instant case. In many contexts, the slippery slope argument will not be the only objection to a suggested policy or legislation, but an argument parallel to other arguments. In addition to the given examples, the following expressions for slippery slope logic were put forward in the studied debates: be on slippery ground, stand at the edge of the precipice, the domino effect, a quagmire, a sliding scale, downhill, backslide, pitfall, and the last bulwark. Except from the last bulwark, all these metaphorical expressions imply the high possibility or necessity of (further) downwards movement – into a bad or disastrous situation. The last bulwark metaphor carries a somewhat different imagery than the others: there is an external enemy whose invasion will be prevented by remaining at the state of rest. The other expressions rather imply that the enemy is already among us and that the instant case will release those destructive energies and pull us down towards the danger case.

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Arguing against the slippery slope metaphor In the early 1990s, only one of the MPs in favour of same-sex partnership met the ‘from gay marriage to gay adoption’ argument by explicitly speaking in favour of ‘not excluding same-sex couples from the right to be assessed as adoptive parents’ (although this problematisation sounds less like a danger case than ‘giving gays the right to adopt’). In 2001, new legislation was passed, allowing for adoption of stepchildren within same-sex partnerships, and the discussions since then point towards a general right to be assessed as adoptive parents, regardless of civil status, in the near future. What were previously danger cases have turned into instant cases. In the same-sex partnership debates of the early 1990s, however, it was suggested that the overarching principle guiding children’s rights, the socalled best of the child principle, would be the solid threshold against adoption by gay couples. In a more generic term, this can be referred to as a foothold metaphor argument: there is a foothold, a line, a hedge, or a bulwark that will prevent the slide. On the abortion issue, the medical committee regime and women’s own sound judgements about their pregnancies have been represented as two footholds against abortion turning into a conventional method of birth control. On the issue of freezing fertilised eggs, a maximum time limit has been held as a guarantee against danger scenarios such as cloning or fights over ‘custody rights’. McGleenan (1995) has similarly pointed out how, in many countries’ policies of human gene therapy, a line has been drawn between changing somatic cells (only affecting the treated individual) and changing germ cells (possibly affecting all future offspring). Restricting gene therapy to somatic cells would, allegedly, be the ‘bright line’ preventing a slide down the slippery slope. Mulkay, in analysing the British embryo research parliamentary debates of the 1980s and early 1990s, makes a similar point. The slippery slope metaphor was used explicitly in about every fifth speech in these debates and was also accompanied by a number of similar images, such as ‘downward path’, ‘wedge, foot in the door’, and ‘crossing the Rubicon’ (Mulkay 1997: 205, n. 52). Pro-researchers tried to keep the matter of embryonic research off the slippery slope, by constructing the category of a pre-embryo, by distinguishing between research and treatment and between medical and social motives, and by advocating informed consent (Mulkay 1997). All these can be seen as forms of categorical work, defining the slippery slope as irrelevant to the instant case. The British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, established in 1990, was furthermore set up as a control agency that was meant to prevent research and treatment from descending down the slope. As Lady Warnock put it in a 1994 debate: We can stop our descent down the slippery slope at any point when we wish to do so and the way of stopping ourselves descending into

Slippery slopes in political discourse 33 unknown horrors is by legislation. [. . .] My belief is that if we have a statutory body licensing research and if the statutory body is backed up by a clear moral view of the pre-embryo, then we need not fear that we shall descend the slope (quoted in Mulkay 1997: 149) Creating a new category such as the pre-embryo and introducing distinctions such as research versus treatment are examples of the slippery slope argument being countered without challenging its normative content (that the danger case is indeed dangerous), but by making it irrelevant in the particular instant case. The danger case does not follow from the instant case, because they are not of the same kind (or, to stick to the imagery, not on the same slope). Similarly, foothold metaphors do not challenge the normative content of the slippery slope metaphor but rather its deterministic causal logic: that there is nothing to prevent the danger case from happening if we accept the instant case. The slide can be stopped through the foothold. This does not mean that those advocating the foothold argument necessarily accept the danger case as dangerous. It is perfectly possible to argue in terms of the slippery slope and at the same time be openly against the instant case, and it is equally perfectly possible to argue in terms of a foothold and also be in favour of the danger case (and thus disagreeing that it represents any danger). An example of the normative content of the slippery slope argument being directly challenged would be someone arguing that the alleged danger case is actually an improvement rather than a degradation: the imagery would be more like walking up some stairs of progress, where each step would be a step ‘forward’, than like a slide downwards to some evil. For example, the decriminalisation of male homosexuality was constructed in this way. When some MPs argued that decriminalisation would lead to homosexuality being normalised (to them a danger case), other MPs countered that such a normalisation was exactly the point and should be seen as something positive. This is an example of a badly structured slippery slope argument, in the given context, because of considerable normative disagreement. To sum up, of the several ways to counter slippery slope logic, some reject its normative content, others its presumed determinism, and others again its relevance for the instant case. In the next two sections, I will discuss the treatment of metaphor in two traditions of analysis: conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA).

Conceptual metaphor theory In the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are seen as ‘pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3). Metaphorical reasoning is central to

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our conceptual systems, that is, to how categories are understood, defined, and linked to other categories. Such reasoning involves understanding one domain of experience in terms of another domain of experience, a process which highlights and hides at the same time: by focusing on one aspect of something, other aspects are downplayed or ignored. For instance, describing a debate in terms of a battle, thus drawing on the conceptual metaphor that ARGUMENT IS WAR (where there are winners and losers), hides the cooperative functions of debates (e.g. through a strengthening of the social fabric or through a consensual result that everyone will benefit from). The process of metaphorical categorisation gives things meaning through such highlighting, downplaying, and hiding. A central idea in conceptual metaphor theory is that metaphorical structuring of meaning has a certain direction: relatively, more abstract and experience-distant concepts and domains of experience are understood in terms of more concrete and experience-near concepts and domains of experience. The fact that humans are physical beings, moving in a physical and social world where we interact with objects and other beings, shapes and constrains our thinking and understanding of reality – including other domains than the ‘sensory-motor’ ones. For instance, gravity’s effect on our bodies is a basic experience that structures the way we think of abstract phenomena as ordered vertically, e.g. that good is up and bad is down. Language and meaning are thus embodied, in the sense that concepts and cognitive processes are related to bodily experiences in interacting with the environment. Lakoff and Johnson call this view of language experientialism, which is contrasted to and presented as a synthesis of objectivism, ‘that there is absolute and unconditional truth’, and the subjectivist alternative of ‘truth as obtainable only through the imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances’ (1980: 192). Metaphorical reasoning, grounded in bodily experience, is something that unites reason and imagination: Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing – what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality (1980: 193, emphasis in original) In their re-edition of Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson write that conceptual metaphor ‘allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences in other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgement, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on)’ (2003: 244). Metaphorical thought has a ‘neural basis’, in the sense that primary categories, or ‘sensory-motor concepts’, arise from sensory-motor experiences like moving in space and dealing with physical objects. Abstract reasoning ‘is governed by sensory-motor enactments

Slippery slopes in political discourse 35 unfolding in real time and in real contexts’ (2003: 258). When such experientialism is applied to politics, metaphors become essential to constituting politics itself. Metaphorical reasoning plays a major role in how we understand political concepts and actors, social phenomena, chains of causality, etc. Lakoff and Johnson make a distinction between new metaphors, which bind together domains of experience in an original way, and conventional metaphors, which are entrenched in everyday language use to such an extent that most people do not see them as metaphors at all. The last sentence contains one example of such a conventional metaphor; that THINKING IS SEEING. Conventional metaphors are furthermore classified into three types: structural metaphors (one concept is structured in terms of another, e.g. ‘linguistic expressions are containers for meaning’), orientational metaphors (two systems of concepts are organised with respect to one another, e.g. ‘health and life are up’; ‘sickness and death are down’), and ontological metaphors (abstract phenomena are treated as physical objects, e.g. ‘the mind is a machine’; ‘the mind is a brittle object’). Lakoff and Johnson have recently revised their earlier work and stated that all metaphors are structural and ontological and many also orientational (2003: 264). This is true for the slippery slope metaphor and its equivalents (‘threshold’, ‘crossing a line’, ‘taking one step too far’, ‘domino effect’, etc.). First, when used in political discourse, these images serve to structure the political in terms of the physical: the issues under discussion are, through this metaphorical transfer of meaning, made analogous to physical objects in nature. This is an expression of a structural, conventional metaphor that can be phrased as POLITICS IS PHYSICS. Second, slippery slope imagery organises time/space of the social world into a normative hierarchical structure, where the present state of rest is ‘up’ and thus good, whereas the instant case and the following slope brings us ‘down’ to a bad place we should stay away from. The metaphorical expression thus corresponds to an orientational, conventional metaphor that can be phrased as GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN. Third, abstract and complex social phenomena, like a policy or a legal practice, are represented as clearly distinguishable physical objects. Social causes and effects are named in the language of physical causes and effects, which are easier to grasp intuitively than the former. The implicit ontological, conventional metaphor can, as above, be phrased as POLITICS IS PHYSICS. Thus, viewed from conceptual metaphor theory, the slippery slope metaphor is an expression of several conceptual metaphors that structure the way people understand, experience, and practise politics. The politics equals physics analogy is of both a structural and an ontological kind: things that are relatively abstract (politics and social objects) are seen in terms of things that are relatively concrete (nature and physical objects). The unpredictable and hard-to-observe effects of political actions, such as a new law or a changed policy, are understood in terms of the more predictable effects of

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stepping onto a slippery slope: you will, inevitably, slide down to the bottom of the slope. The downward movement dimension of the metaphor is primarily of an orientational kind, providing a normative frame where up is good and down is bad.

Metaphor in CDA In an early issue of the journal Discourse & Society, the editor T.A. van Dijk accounts for two central ideas behind the journal and CDA: first, to bring more focus to socio-political structures in linguistic and socio-psychological studies of language, because, according to van Dijk, these disciplines have been too concerned with technical aspects of language and tend to analyse individual language use out of context. And second, to encourage more empirical text analysis within social scientific discourse analysis, which is assessed to be too abstract and detached from concrete text. Van Dijk argues that social scientists have to take detailed text analysis more seriously and that it is not sufficient to just ‘juggle’ with concepts such as text and discourse. Rather, he writes, one must systematically examine ‘their detailed phonological, graphical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, lexical, rhetorical, interactional or cognitive structures and strategies’ (1994: 164). Van Dijk furthermore asserts that ‘vague and metaphorical terminology is no substitute for such explicit analyses’ and that post-structuralist writing ‘too often indulges in pre-structuralist impressionism’ (1994: 164). Within CDA, as in classical Marxist social analysis, language is not accredited independent explanatory force. Language use, including the use of metaphor, is analysed as an instrument of power, as something that political actors ‘stand outside’ (to use a conventional metaphor) and may use to communicate, legitimate, and/or mask political interests. In the first issue of Discourse & Society, van Dijk (1990) discusses how power abuse and social inequalities are legitimised through rhetoric and persuasive argumentation and through controlling semantic content. ‘Manufacture of consent’ and ‘mind management’ take place through language, and in this perspective, metaphor is a rhetorical figure that functions to represent and naturalise things and events in ways that favour some and disfavour others. The critical aim of CDA resides in unmasking such ideological representations, ‘to show the contingency of existing social arrangements: to expose to scrutiny claims of inevitability’ (Fairclough et al. 2004: 1). Such increased awareness of the ideological functions of particular linguistic practices may, consequently, stimulate politics that can reduce injustices connected to social inequalities. Fairclough, who has been particularly concerned with working out a practical methodology for CDA, suggests a threefold analytical division of discourse (1992: 75–7): as text, as discursive practice (the production, distribution, and consumption of text), and as social practice (more general structural and ideological aspects of text and discursive practices). He furthermore suggests that text analysis can be organised under the following

Slippery slopes in political discourse 37 four headings: vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, and text structure. Metaphor is to be analysed as part of the vocabulary, that is, how individual words have specific political and ideological significance. Van Dijk (1993) makes a similar distinction between analysis of context (such as access patterns, setting, and participant positions and roles) and analysis of the text itself (such as its topics, style, and rhetoric – including metaphor). Thus, in CDA theory and methodology, consideration of metaphor is part of an attempt to expose the ideological dimensions of language use by examining rhetorical figures. Metaphor is something to be considered at the most text-near end of the analysis, subject to further interpretation and contextualisation as part of discursive and social practices. As Schauer (1985) has pointed out, arguments built on the slippery slope metaphor tend to favour the status quo (the state of rest) rather than change (moving on to the instant case). In this sense, the slippery slope metaphor has a conservative bias, favouring an embrace of existing policies and social arrangements and a reluctant attitude to trying something new – which, in this logic of thinking, could turn out to have irrevocably disastrous effects despite its apparent innocence. A critical discourse analyst could thus be expected to treat the use of slippery slope arguments as a form of conservative ideological discursive practice and to show how the preservation of the state of rest is in someone’s interest.

Political theatre or political circus? Metaphors are significant in politics, because they have constitutive functions: they contribute to setting the scene (to use a drama metaphor). What is the play about, and, just as important, what is it not about? How does it correspond to other dramas, and why must we therefore deal with it in a certain way? The metaphor of the slippery slope sets up a plot in which the actors slide helplessly across the tilting stage floor. In this tragedy, a seemingly innocent turn of events, on the face of it pointing towards a happy ending, instead leads to a sequence of scenes and a tragic grand finale. Both language-oriented research traditions considered in this chapter have as an ambition to overcome analytical dichotomies such as meaning and structure, subjectivism and objectivism, and text and context. Conceptual metaphor theory and CDA treat metaphor very differently, however. In the political theatre of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are given lead roles and are crucial in making the performance meaningful and enjoyable to the audience. In the political circus of CDA, however, metaphors are linguistic requisites used by the discursive acrobats and the circus director to entertain and spellbind the audience. Elsewhere, in a more exclusive showing, a powerful few enjoy the tragedy of the oppressed. In my view, both the traditions discussed above have their problems and weaknesses. Conceptual metaphor theory presumes a coherence and naturalness in our conceptual system, because it links conventional metaphors to

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the allegedly universal experiences of human beings moving in a physical world. Language use, including the use of metaphor, is seen as a function of human cognition, as it has been shaped by our natural experiences as physical beings. The theory fails to take into account the social construction of all human experience, including physical interaction with the environment. As a consequence of the naturalising model, it becomes difficult to account for ideological aspects of language use, which is influenced and shaped by socio-economic actors and structures. Proponents of CDA, on the other hand, tend to let the focus on powerful, and oppressed social groups guide the analysis to such an extent that language is reduced to a set of power tools in a Manichaean social reality. The main purpose of the analysis is to show how the powerful abuse language, including metaphor, to keep the rest in place. Through such an ‘unmasking’ of power as ideology, the analyst will make room for alternative, more socially just linguistic descriptions of the world. This classic plot, with clearly identified villains and heroes, downplays the complex relationship between language, reality, and power. The highlighting and hiding function of metaphor, accounted for both by Lakoff and Johnson and in CDA, can be analysed as part of the broader phenomenon of selective problematisation in political debate. Different ways of telling the drama, through metaphors, narratives, analogies, myths, or choice of words, highlight some dimensions of the issue and downplay others – thus constituting ‘the issue’ itself. Sometimes this is done consciously and strategically, thus serving instrumental functions. At other times, it happens because political actors portray the world ‘as they see it’ – in other words, a given problematisation can be part of their unquestioned beliefs. As for the slippery slope metaphor, it seems like an impossible task to decide when it is used as an internalised description of the world (as one might expect on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory’s understanding of metaphor as constitutive) or used rhetorically to obscure or convince, due to the greater argumentative catch-all potential in arguing dysphemistically against the danger case rather than the instant case. Probably there will, in most discussions, be some mix of these two, although not necessarily split along the clear-cut line implied in CDA (with those in power using metaphors rhetorically and the rest – except from the critical analyst – being duped by them).

Metaphors, political discourse, and naturalisation Rather than to speculate about speakers’ intentions, analyses of metaphor (or language use in general) should in my view point to the ways in which a given political vocabulary and set of arguments structure the matter at hand. Which alternative problematisations are hidden or downplayed by a dominant conceptualisation, and what effects would a different way of articulating the issue at hand have on the political process? How would different sets of

Slippery slopes in political discourse 39 metaphors, narratives, and vocabulary change the pool of acceptable arguments, what kind of subject positions are given weight, and which political solutions to the problem seem intelligent, effective, and legitimate? The analysis of metaphor is thus part of the larger question of how language use structures politics, by promoting certain ways and downplaying other possible ways of understanding phenomena, and of acting upon these understandings. Metaphor has constitutive functions, be it as a foundation of human thought, as in conceptual metaphor theory, or as rhetorical tool, as in CDA.

Conclusions The slippery slope metaphor and its equivalents are expressions that connect political issues to the physical domain, and draw on an underlying conceptual metaphor, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s term, which I have called POLITICS IS PHYSICS. Through its implicit reference to laws of gravity and physical movement, the slippery slope metaphor reifies politics, making abstract social entities with fuzzy borders into clearly demarcated physical objects. It also reduces complex relations of causes, effects, and contingencies in the political world to deterministic and mechanical causal models of the physical world. More generally than the example of the slippery slope metaphor, all reifying and reductionist modelling of the political world based on the physical world is analytically interesting, from a political science point of view. To describe political processes in terms of physical processes creates a sense of predictability and determinism – that if we do X, then Y will inevitably follow. In practical politics, such causal straightforwardness usually lacks, the course of events being much more complex, with possible advert effects and side effects of most actions. In addition to these descriptive shortcomings, it is problematic from a prescriptive point of view to present the social as determined by strict physical rules of cause and effect, because people could easily end up in fatalism – there is nothing one can do (besides non-X): no real policy choice and thus no potential for political action. There is a parallel between applying metaphors of the physical world on politics and the use of the language of biology on the social, e.g. by describing society in organic terms or by explaining social phenomena as resulting from processes analogous to natural selection. There have been more critical academic discussions about the so-called biologisation of the social sciences than about their leaning on models from physics. However, be it in the language of biology or physics, metaphorical reasoning from nature to society works to naturalise social phenomena. By representing the socially constructed and amendable as naturally given and non-amendable, such metaphors may contribute to the conservation of the status quo – for better or for worse.

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References Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N., Graham, P., Lemke, J. and Wodak, R. (2004) ‘Introduction’, Critical Discourse Studies, 1: 1–7. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) ‘Afterword 2003’, in Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 243–76. McGleenan, T. (1995) ‘Human Gene Therapy and Slippery Slope Arguments’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 21: 350–5. Mulkay, M. (1997) The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of Reproduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nerlich, B., Johnson, S. and Clarke, D.D. (2003) ‘The First “Designer Baby”: The Role of Narratives, Clichés and Metaphors in the Year 2000 Media Debate’, Science as Culture, 12: 471–98. Schauer, F. (1985) ‘Slippery Slopes’, Harvard Law Review, 99: 361–83. Stenvoll, D. (2003) ‘Political Argumentation: An Analysis of Norwegian Parliamentary Debates on Sexuality and Reproduction 1945–2001’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bergen. Van Dijk, T.A. (1990) ‘Discourse & Society: A New Journal for a New Research Focus’, Discourse & Society, 1: 5–16. Van Dijk, T.A. (1993) ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, Discourse & Society, 4: 249–83. Van Dijk, T.A. (1994) ‘Discourse Analysis as Social Analysis’, Discourse & Society, 5: 163–4. Walton, D. (1992) Slippery Slope Arguments, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Mechanical metaphors in politics Jernej Pikalo

Throughout history mechanical metaphors have played an important role in the political imagination. They have been used in various contexts to generate perceptions of politics that have necessarily changed as conceptions of nature and mechanics have altered. Politics has usually been viewed as on the receiving end of the relationship, borrowing imagery and vocabulary from mechanics and the natural sciences in general. However, recent studies (e.g. Keller 1995) have shown that there is a relationship of mutual construction and that concepts in the natural sciences are themselves affected by political, technological and informational discourses. This chapter looks into the relationship between the natural sciences and political discourses by examining selected metaphors and trajectories of change, exploring the changes in one or the other domain and carefully examining the linkages. I begin by outlining major theoretical considerations relevant to a study of metaphor in political science and then move on to focus interpretatively on discovering and recovering the relationship between mechanical visions of nature and political metaphors.

Political metaphor: a methodological primer Political metaphors have a long history. One of the most persistent questions about the nature and role of political metaphors has been the distinction between the metaphorical and literal meanings of political concepts. Encyclopaedia Britannica in its 1771 edition states: Metaphor, in rhetoric, a trope, by which we put a strange word for a proper word, by reason of its resemblance to it; a simile or comparison intended to enforce or illustrate the thing we speak of, without the signs or forms of comparison. (quoted in Miller 2003: 3) A metaphor can be seen in a number of ways. It can be just a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a tool in language, a device of poetic imagination, a deviant linguistic expression, a matter of words rather than thought or

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action, the primary role of which is the depiction of social reality with a word different from the one usually understood to be literal. Or, as we have come to know it since the linguistic turn in social sciences and its accompanying linguistic-based methodologies, as something ‘more’ than just ornament of language. When seen as a strange word that stands in for a proper word, several questions appear instantaneously: what is literal and what is metaphorical? Is the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical transcultural and transhistorical? Is the literal supposed to have privileged and direct access to the ‘right’ meaning of a concept and the metaphorical only indirect access via the literal? Who defines what is the ‘right’ meaning of the concept? And, last but not least, what is the ‘reality’ that language-users so eagerly want their words to describe? What Weltanschauung is presupposed by this particular vision of ‘the metaphorical’? There are several views and methodologies (together with the ontological and epistemological positions they presuppose) that view metaphors as deviant from literal expression. Let it suffice to mention just two: objectivism and positivism. Objectivism, according to Johnson (1987: x), takes the following ontological and epistemological form: The world consists of objects that have properties and stand in various relationships independent of human understanding. The world is as it is, no matter what any person happens to believe about it, and there is one correct ‘God’s-Eye-View’ of what the world really is like. In other words, there is a rational structure to reality, independent of the beliefs of any people, and correct reason mirrors this rational structure. To express reality, on this view, we need language that can connect objects, properties and relations in literal, univocal, context-independent fashion (see Shapiro 1985–86: 199–200). Reasoning thus functions in a linear way by joining such concepts into propositions that describe reality, by connecting up concepts according to the rules of logic. Words correspond directly to the things in the world; there is thus no place for human agency in making meaning and rationality, because meaning is a direct relation between symbols and ‘real’ things in the world (Johnson 1987: x; cf. Ortony 1993: 1). From this methodological position, a metaphor functions merely as an ornament in language, barred from the fundamental, descriptive level of objective reality, because only literal terms and propositions can describe at this level, according to objectivist assumptions. Metaphor is unsuitable for description because it crosses ‘categorical boundaries and therefore cannot properly map onto the world that has discrete and categorical boundaries’ (Johnson 1987: 66–7). Since metaphors are not fundamental and cannot describe the world organised into discrete units, they also have no role in constituting that reality, unless they are reducible to literal concepts and propositions (Johnson 1987: 66–7).

Mechanical metaphors in politics 43 Positivism shares many ontological and epistemological positions with objectivism, especially logical positivism as defined by thinkers of the Vienna Circle. For logical positivism to achieve objectivity, every sentence and every statement must be a direct expression of observable things, and therefore, all ‘speculative’ ideas, including metaphors, must be removed. It places emphasis on sensory perception and on observation as the foundation of knowledge (Smith 1998: 98; see Benton and Craib 2001: 13ff). Since scientific statements must be perfect, mirror-like reflections of things, metaphors are viewed as literary devices that corrupt knowledge of ‘reality’. Seeing metaphors as literary devices gives rise to the meta-metaphorical function of language. Language is taken in this way to be a tool for viewing the world, chiefly in instrumental fashion, presuming a linear correspondence between words and the world and also presuming a radical separation between the world of things and the structures of apprehension that bring that world to knowledge (cf. Shapiro 1985–86: 200). The meta-metaphor of language as a tool therefore acts to perform a perfect translation between one world and another, therefore making metaphor as such a corrupting device in this process. The Greek roots of the word ‘metaphor’ have, however, nothing to do with metaphor as a corrupting device in language. Metaphor, literally meaning ‘to carry over’, is in the Aristotelian tradition characteristically defined in terms of movement, change with respect to location, mainly movement ‘from . . . to’ (Ricoeur 1981: 17; see also the chapters by Fridolfsson, Honohan, Mottier and Howarth and Griggs in this volume). Aristotle applies the word ‘metaphor’ to every transposition in terms. We could suppose, therefore, that metaphor is a kind of borrowing, that borrowed meaning is opposed to ‘proper’ meaning, that one resorts to metaphors to fill a semantic void and that a borrowed word takes the place of an absent proper word where such a place exists (Ricoeur 1981: 17–18). But no such thing happens. Metaphors may disturb an already established logical order of language where transposition operates, but this does not mean that in the Aristotelian tradition metaphors have an ontologically creative function, bringing upon an already established order a new one, since the transposition operates within this established order. Aristotle’s process of epiphora (movement ‘from . . . to’) rests on a perception of resemblance, established ontologically prior to metaphor itself. Metaphors just add meanings, fill semantic voids, substitute where necessary, but they do not have a creative function. Aristotle’s ontological assumption is that language is transparent to reality and that metaphors are operating within this already established order. The classical perception of metaphor as having merely a substitutive function was challenged by Max Black in seminal study Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (1962). According to Black, metaphor does more than just substitute for a literal term (see Zashin and Chapman 1974: 296–7; Ricoeur 1981: 83–90; Maasen 1995: 14–15), when

44 J. Pikalo a speaker chooses to replace it with another expression different from a supposed ‘normal’, ‘proper’ meaning. Mere substitution introduces no new information and has therefore no cognitive function. Black’s ‘interaction view’ of metaphor, on the other hand, goes beyond a merely decorative function for metaphor. It emphasises cognitive function by stressing reorganisation and transformation of the original term. Metaphor operates by describing one phenomenon in terms of the other. By this, it evokes reorganisation of meanings in both domains and reciprocity of impact. Metaphor also renders certain view as prominent – by emphasising some details and de-emphasising others. In this, it functions almost like a pair of tinted glasses, through which a re-organisation of the view of the observed object is viewed. Successful metaphor establishes a privileged perspective on the object and thus becomes normalised – in this, it disappears as metaphor (Maasen 1995: 14–15). In both the classical and the interaction view of metaphor, reality is seen ontologically as objective. It is considered to be something lying outside a narrative that relates descriptively to the world, which is itself beyond the reach of discursive structures and is ontologically foundational. Although the interaction view of metaphor does allow for some details to be emphasised and others omitted, this does not mean that thought is considered to be ontologically prior to reality, but rather that thought rather takes a posterior position and so is dependent upon reality, reflecting it. Reality is thus an objective entity not susceptible to the creative power of thought. Putnam (1994: 452) has criticised this position at length as a common philosophical error, because it presumes that reality is one, single super-thing, whereas looking at the ways in which we endlessly renegotiate reality as our language and life develop leads to quite another philosophically significant conclusion. Putnam’s argument (and similar arguments by other ‘constructivists’) can be developed even further, since the question of the nature of reality is also a question about the privileged position of those who define reality through speaking and acting, a question of who is authorised to speak and act and in what way, a question about ‘regimes of truth’, knowledgeable practices, etc. In short, it is a question about power, the creative and constitutive power that creates the world in an ontological sense. Shapiro, for example, echoes the tradition of social theory after the linguistic turn by arguing: that there are no ‘things’ that have meaning apart from the human practices that are implicit in what we regard as things and that our discursive practices are vehicles for the production of subjects and objects that participate in what are generally regarded as forms of knowledge (Shapiro 1985–86: 193–4). Metaphors can therefore perform functions other than just corrupting language. They may also be creative of the world and therefore reality. This

Mechanical metaphors in politics 45 does not, however, mean that there must be an unequivocal and linear relation between the language and the world. Social theory and twentiethcentury social science methodologies have offered numerous insights and solutions for this question; most post-positivist theories reject the notion that writing and thinking are transparent activities1 performed by historically and socially ‘cleansed’ or ‘disembedded’ subjects. Non-empirical and non-positivist political studies rely heavily on the narrative form of explanation, thereby rejecting the view of language as literal, static and intersubjectively and transhistorically uniform. They argue instead for a multifaceted view of language that includes paradoxes and antitheses as constructive elements of the world-creating process (see Zashin and Chapman 1974: 294). Incoherence in language may thus lead to coherence in reality, if coherence in the form of an ‘objective’ explanation can be established, as post-positivist methodologies would predict. The way we organise our perceptions of the world is very much dependent upon the ways through which we form knowledge about the world. These may be called traditions, cultures, discourses or epistemic realities, the bottom line being that knowledge is dependent upon structures governing its production. Metaphors are therefore dependent upon the same structures, functioning in this respect as myths, rendering the unintelligible intelligible, and the non-empirical empirical. It is through metaphor that the abstract field of ‘the political’ becomes empirical as a matter of reality, and thus, a world that political science can purport to explain. If we look upon metaphors in the classical sense of ‘carrying over’ together with these new, post-positivist methodological insights, then is not metaphor the very bridge, the concept that connects the unconnected, the concept whose mission is bridging the unbridgeable gap between words and reality? Does not metaphor have a liberating potential to free ‘the political’ (and not just political science) from conceiving of the relationship between words and reality in positivist, linear terms? In meta-metaphorical terms, does not metaphor defy the logical relation of self-identity (which anyway implies the possibility of literal, i.e. non-metaphorical thought)? Thought processes that create the world are irreducibly metaphorical in their structure; the world is rendered intelligible through metaphor. Political metaphors are manifestations of these thought processes, through which the political world and its processes become intelligible. In this way, metaphors inscribe meanings and produce political realities that stretch the limits of our imaginations. This poetic function of metaphor presents a potential for construction and creativity in politics and political science. It is closely connected with the transference of meanings from one domain to the other. As such, it is a challenge and a potential for the transformation of meanings across any number of domains. One result of these processes may be that grids of intelligibility themselves become unstable, requiring a re-articulation of knowledge and identity not just epistemically but also ontologically.

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Isolated statements or utterances are the usual units of metaphorical analysis for cognitive linguists. This is also the path that most analysts of political metaphors have taken. That approach is problematic for political scientists, because it fails to take into account the wider contexts of statements and discourses and the circumstances of their production (see the chapter by Mottier in this volume). Social and political contexts play a major role in how the metaphors of political science are defined, how they function and what their meanings are. Analysing the contextual embeddedness of a text is a necessary, though not completely satisfactory, way to analyse its metaphors. The contingency of historical contexts should be taken into account in order to situate metaphors within political, social and scientific relations of power. Since contexts are texts as well, they should not be objectified, as if they had an ontological foundation prior to and independent of texts themselves. Metaphors develop their meanings in this interplay of texts and contexts, albeit not in a linear causality between the two.

Individuals as social atoms, states as mass particles: Newtonian mechanics meets Descartes in political science Political metaphors are products of their time. The knowledge about ‘the political’ that they produce and the production of knowledge about them are both embedded in the epistemic frame of an epoch. Thinking about ‘the political’ is informed and structured by metaphors figuring in various discourses. The transfer of meanings and imagery from these discourses enables the poetic function of metaphor to work, and thus, creativity and innovation can take place. This part of my chapter has a three-fold purpose: to identify some of the mechanical metaphors in modern political usage, to discuss their sources and to show the embeddedness of such political metaphors in these contexts. I argue that metaphors are not just rhetorical devices, but rather serve as imagery for thought processes. They are ontologically creative and constitutive for political realities. Narratives, images, symbolism and thinking in day-to-day politics are informed by the metaphor of the individual as an atom. In some of the theories of international relations, states are thought to be mass particles in metaphorical terms, acting and reacting on each other, according to Newtonian laws of physics. Politics is thus largely still created and imagined within this epistemic frame, which is that of a mechanism. This limits and obstructs the multidimensionality of ‘the political’. Although reflexivity has been introduced into theoretical physics, and social and political theory have also introduced a number of self-reflexive theories, the prevailing mode through which politics is conceived is still based on the classical Newtonian mechanics of mass bodies, developed in the seventeenth century (see the chapter by Akrivoulis in this volume).

Mechanical metaphors in politics 47 Nicholas Copernicus published his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (The Revolution of Celestial Spheres) in 1543, and in it, he presented a heliocentric model of the world and its context. That work challenged the age-old view that the universe worked quite differently, a geo-centric model that exaggerated the importance of the Earth and, by extension, the importance of human beings. The realisation that we, our planet, and indeed, our solar system (and even our galaxy) are quite ordinary in heavenly terms, since there are very likely myriads of planetary systems, provided a sobering and unsettling revision. All the reassurances of the cosmology of the Middle Ages were gone and a new view of the world, less secure and comfortable, came into being. Despite these ‘problems’, and the many critics of the heliocentric view, this model of the solar system was soon accepted by the best minds of the time, such as Galileo. For late seventeenth-century writers of social and political thought, the Copernican revolution brought many challenges and opportunities. Suddenly, categories of social and political thought that were previously central seemed peripheral and useless, or even empty of meaning, and the concepts of authority and subjection had to be worked out anew. No longer was the Earth the centre of the universe, planets did not move in perfect circles, and a world less secure and central to humankind was born. All this impacted on the political and social thinking at the time. Disharmonies in the body politic became easier to explore, and a new individualism was coming of age. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and their fellow thinkers were presented with the challenge of forging new political theories and doctrines based on these new scientific discoveries. Walzer (1967: 192) argues that the new cosmology and theology were a great influence on political writers, but that there was not a straightforward translation of cosmological and theological ideas into political and social ones. ‘[Robert] Hooke might write that it was “expedient” to understand the angelic hierarchy for the “more perfect direction” of mankind, but he did not mean that the best social order could be deduced from the structure of evangelic squadrons’ (Walzer 1967: 192). In other words, the Copernican revolution provided a new worldview, a new epistemic reality according to which knowledge about the world was being re-created. It provided new principles, new metaphors to orient and create political knowledge; it would later evolve into individualism and eventually liberalism (cf. Wolin 1960: 282; Walzer 1967: 203). Sir Isaac Newton was an heir of the Copernican revolution. In what has been designated many times as the most important book in the history of science, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 1687), he spelled out his theory containing the laws of motion and gravitation and he explained these motions in the sky and on Earth all with the same laws. Newton realised that the moon’s path around the Earth could be caused by the same gravitational force that holds a cannonball in low orbit, the same force that causes bodies to fall, i.e. the

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gravitational attraction between two bodies. With this theory, Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets, the tides and their variations, the precession of the Earth’s axes and the motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Earth and Sun. Gravitation is the force that prevents the various components of the world (persons, planets, etc.) from flying apart or from being sucked into space. Newtonian physics is about fixed systems. Although it includes some kind of change, particularly changes due to a well-defined notion of cause and effect, Newton’s laws are highly deterministic and predictable (Becker and Slaton 2000: 29) and are therefore of very limited use in explaining political phenomena. Narrating and imagining ‘the political’ through the metaphor of atoms or other bodies acting according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics reduces any explanation for political phenomena to onedimensionality, based on cause-and-effect relationship. It also renders the objects and processes of ‘the political’ ontologically foundational, as having the nature of a thing-in-itself or Ding an sich, thus omitting any ontologically creative function for discourse and thought. Newton experimented with a cannonball in order to generate metaphors describing the paths of the planets, stars, comets, moons, etc., and this vision was only later adopted as the general worldview.2 Newtonianism has gone through many mutations, affected by diverse socio-political, theological and philosophical developments. The result was that ‘man’ is portrayed as a physical object, as an atom or a planet, obeying the same laws of attraction and repulsion as the celestial system. While it is highly probable that planets do travel in their orbits in a highly determined and predictable fashion, this is not entirely applicable for political behaviour (and human behaviour in general). Imagine if a planet suddenly jumped out of its orbit around the sun and settled somewhere else. This sort of behaviour happens all the time to us. Planets do not act like this, but people, including ones I know, do it all too often. So how did this Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe come to influence politics and political science? Capra (1982: 68) claims that: Descartes himself had sketched the outlines of the mechanistic approach to physics,3 astronomy, biology, psychology, and medicine. The thinkers of the eighteenth century carried the program further by applying the principles of Newtonian mechanics to the sciences of human nature and human society. The newly created social sciences generated great enthusiasm, and some of their proponents even claimed to have discovered a ‘social physics’.4 The Newtonian theory of the universe and the belief in the rational approach to human problems spread so rapidly among the middle classes of the eighteenth century that the whole era became the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. The dominant figure in this development was the philosopher John Locke, whose most important writings were pub-

Mechanical metaphors in politics 49 lished late in the seventeenth century. Strongly influenced by Descartes and his personal friend Newton, Locke’s work had a decisive impact on the eighteenth century thought. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England experienced political transformations that were directly linked to the new worlds of the Copernican revolution. No longer was the harmony of various parts of the universe the most powerful metaphor; instead, the decay of the old cosmology and theology opened up a space for a new experience of man: The body-in-motion upon which he [Hobbes] builds his system is a symbolic figure. It represents the individual human being, but in a very special way: no longer is he a member of the body politic; no longer does he have a place in a hierarchical system of deference and authority; no longer do his movements conduce to universal harmony. Instead, the individual is alone, separated from his fellows, without a master or a secure social place; his movements, determined by no one but himself, clash with the movements of the other, identical individuals; he acts out chaos. (Walzer 1967: 201) The Newtonian world of mechanical motion became the reference-world for new political thought, a new source of metaphors, analogies and images. Metaphors of mechanical motion, particularly clockwork mechanisms, became appropriate for a time when people were literally set in motion due to political and social transformations. Metaphors of clockwork mechanisms did not only describe, but also prescribed, models not just of man but also of the state. Hobbes took the metaphor very seriously and applied it to various political concepts. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the opening chapter of Leviathan: ‘For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?’ (Hobbes 1651/1996: 9). There are numerous examples in the history of politics and political science where metaphors that follow Newton’s logic of the cosmos were also being applied. Becker and Slaton (2000: 25–6) report that the American Founding Fathers were entrenched in the Newtonian worldview of their time by thinking in mechanistic terms, seeing individuals as independent units, accepting the supremacy of reason over emotion and being guided by cause-and-effect determinism (see also the chapter by Akrivoulis in this volume). Thomas Paine (1966: 161) declared in his essay Common Sense that: ‘All great laws of society are laws of nature.’ As one of many political scientists under influence of Newtonian physics, his acceptance of the Newtonian vision of the universe played an important role in shaping his political theories, and it served, through metaphor and analogy, to support his ideas

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about society and government. Together with many other political philosophers and scientists, he stated that politics can be rendered intelligible through metaphors of mechanics, ‘The Revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics’ (Paine 1966: 154; emphasis added). William Bennett Munro, professor of government at Harvard University and president of the American Political Science Association in 1920s, was one of the first to realise that American political science in the early twentieth century was deeply entrenched in Newtonian thinking. In his ‘Presidential Address’ to the Association on 28 December 1927, he claimed that: Both the science and art of government still rest on what may be called the atomic theory of politics – upon the postulate that all able-bodied citizens are of equal weight, volume and value, endowed with various absolute and unalienable rights; vested with equally absolute duties; and clothed with the attribute of an individual sovereignty. (quoted in Becker and Slaton 2000: 39; cf. Barber 1984) Metaphors inspired by the Newtonian worldview also offered imagery for theorising international relations and the role of the United States in the Cold War era. One of the best expressions of this is NSC-68 document produced by the State Department in 1950 which sets the basic lines of US Cold War policies (see the chapter by Akrivoulis in this volume). The document describes the balance-of-power situation in terms of the ‘planets’ (states) and the ‘cosmos’ (international system). The international system of the time and the role of the states in it are imagined as a planet-like system of movements in orbits. What states can achieve and do is determined by their role in this fixed system. The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) are imagined as planets having gravitational forces that pull their satellites (allied states) towards them. Akrivoulis sees this document less as an individual attempt to provide a schematisation for the international system, but more as a wider political expression of the role of the United States in international politics post–Second World War. It offered a new ‘world map’, an authoritative reading of the nature of international politics. It delineated a space of action and identification, and through the creative capacity of the metaphors employed, it came to constitute an order that was thought of as given. Its core seems to represent the essential construction of the ‘nature’ of international politics. (Akrivoulis in this volume) The metaphor of atoms and mass bodies acting according to mechanistic laws has influenced knowledge of the relations among states. The metaphor of the atom is nowhere better to be seen than in neorealists’ claim that states are autonomous and equal (see Waltz 1979: 93, 95) and the consequent

Mechanical metaphors in politics 51 vision of states as units. Many have argued against this view. Sorensen (1998: 79–80), inter alia, stresses that states are highly unlike units, not just in terms of their relative power capabilities, but also in terms of their qualitative differences. Sovereign equality and the sovereign individualism of states are concepts that set an ontological mode of being based on the metaphorical image of atoms. The compartamentalisation of the world into an outside and an inside – into unit and system – is based on atomistic and mechanical imagery. This thinking about relations among states and the international system is based on the mechanical relations of mass particles. A similar logic applies to the stratification of the world, though in this case in terms of different ‘weight’ or mass of particles (i.e. states). This metaphor-informed imagery often serves ideological purposes. Its goal is to set and strengthen a particular political agenda. For example, if we look at cases of developing states in East Asia, we learn that the path towards development is contingent and not transhistorically and transsocially path-dependent. Even within East Asia, there are substantive differences, different paths towards development, regardless of the fact that all of these states, in the specialist literature, are labelled as cases of the so-called ‘late development’. The underlying presupposition of this unit-like view is that there is a single world-capitalist mode of production and that differences among various units are insignificant or reducible to a temporary uneven development. What is more, the first wave literature (see Hay and Marsh 2000: 4–7) on the relationship between globalisation and the state is permeated by the metaphor of laws that govern the behaviour of mass particles. The state is narrated as a natural fact, with attributes of weight and volume.5 The processes of globalisation are imagined as coming from outside the state, therefore influencing that particle’s place and existence. The claim in this first wave literature that the state is withering away due to the pressures of globalisation is metaphorically based on Newton’s second law of motion, which states that if the momentum of an object changes, i.e. if it accelerates, then there must be a force acting on it to produce this result. Moreover, because atoms do not have an internal animating force for self-reinvention, so states are often bereft of a capacity to reinvent themselves, to reinvent their institutional forms, to be polyvalent and polycontextual phenomena. This example of first wave globalisation literature and the metaphors it uses also points up the creative potential of metaphors, since many states have begun to act according to patterns that can be logically derived from this mechanical metaphor. The epistemic reality that we have tried to outline cannot be designated as merely Newtonian. From the epistemological point of view, it is also Cartesian. In this epistemological frame, there is a central idea that politics and political theory should not be understood and portrayed in political terms, but should rather be understood and portrayed on non-political foundations. The subject matter of politics should be defined and

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understood with reference to the world outside the political realm; the study of politics should not itself be infected with political terms. In order to explain political phenomena, metaphors from other disciplines would have to be used. Descartes wrote: I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all opinions which I have formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish firm and permanent structure in the sciences (quoted in Barber 1984: 48) Hobbes and his successors took this idea very seriously and tried to erect theories of political life solely on non-political foundations, using inter alia metaphors from other disciplines. But metaphors, as we have already seen, are rarely merely descriptive or purely decorative.

Metaphor: a prose of the world In this chapter, I have briefly sketched the relationship between nature and political metaphors. I have limited my research to the discipline of physics and to the seventeenth century, when changes occurred that are still having a decisive impact on the way we perceive ‘the political’. Although the natural sciences have seen the introduction of self-reflexive theories, especially in the form of quantum physics and the theory of relativity, and the social sciences have introduced various post-positivist and post-empiricist methodologies, ‘the political’ is predominantly still thought and imagined in relation to this tradition of mechanical metaphor. Technological advances may have introduced new metaphors that differ from classical ones like the machine or the body (today, we think, imagine and create using metaphors such as networks or flows), but the prevailing metaphor in political thought is still predominantly the Newtonian world experience (e.g. the state–globalisation relationship). Metaphors allow language to free itself from the function of direct description and to set up a contingent relationship between words and reality. With this, imagination is freed from the constraints of objectivism, and new creations of the world can occur. The relationship between metaphors and objects is then a reciprocal construction in the disciplinary division of labour of the modern social sciences. Or to say it with metaphor, metaphors are actually the prose of the world we create in their image.

Notes 1 Thinking as a transparent activity is itself based on a metaphor of language as a tool, something that directly translates inputs coming to the senses from the ‘outside’ world into linguistic outputs ‘about’ that world.

Mechanical metaphors in politics 53 2 When Newton died in 1727, Alexander Pope (1688–1744), one of the greatest poets of English Enlightenment wrote: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light’ (Tenn 2003). Newton’s thought was so highly regarded that it was seen as bringing light (wisdom) to the human understanding of all natural phenomena. 3 Descartes’ approach to physics differs from Newton’s over the idea of action at the distance. While Newton argued for the workings and consequences of gravitational force, Descartes argued for forces that work only through contact. 4 August Comte labelled his approach to social sciences ‘social physics’. He accepted the assumptions of naturalism and saw the natural sciences as an example of how to set up a new foundation for objective reasoning. He believed that it is possible to discover natural laws of social life that would have the same validity as scientific laws of nature. On this view, life in society is governed by the same laws as Newtonian mechanics (Smith 1998: 79). 5 There are two types of metaphors present here, the main point of both being that non-physical things can become entities in the ontological sense (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/2003: 25–7, 30).

References Barber, B. (1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press. Becker, T. and Slaton, C.D. (2000) The Future of Teledemocracy, Westport, CT: Praeger. Benton, T. and Craib, I. (2001) Philosophy of Social Sciences: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Capra, F. (1982) The Turning Point, New York: Simon and Schuster. Hay, C. and Marsh, D. (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Demystifying Globalization, Basingstroke: Palgrave. Hobbes, T. (1651/1996) Leviathan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Keller, E.F. (1995) Refiguring Life: Metaphors of the Twentieth-Century Biology, New York: Columbia University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980/2003) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maasen, S. (1995) ‘Who Is Afraid of Metaphors?’ in S. Maasen, E. Mendelsohn and P. Weingart (eds) Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors, Dodrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Miller, C.A. (2003) Ship of State: The Nautical Metaphors of Thomas Jefferson, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Ortony, A. (1993) ‘Metaphor, Language and Thought’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, T. (1966) Common Sense and other Writings, New York: Pyramid. Putnam, H. (1994) ‘Sense, Nonsense and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind’, The Journal of Philosophy, 91: 445–517. Ricoeur, P. (1981) The Rule of Metaphor, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Shapiro, M.J. (1985–86) ‘Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences’, Culture and Critique, 2: 191–214.

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Smith, M.J. (1998) Social Science in Question, London: Sage in association with The Open University. Sorensen, G. (1998) ‘States Are Not “Like Units”: Types of State and Forms of Anarchy in the Present International System’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 6: 79–98. Tenn, J.S. (2003) The Copernican Revolution. Online. (accessed 10 April 2005). Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of International Relations, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Walzer, M. (1967) ‘On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly, 82: 191–204. Wolin, S. (1960) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Boston, MA: Little Brown. Zashin, E. and Chapman, P.C. (1974) ‘The Uses of Metaphor and Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political Language’, The Journal of Politics, 36: 290–326.

Part II

Structures

4

Metaphors of social order Erik Ringmar

All political systems need some way of assuring social order. Order guarantees peace and physical security but also hermeneutic stability. Only if some measure of social order is assured will it be possible to interpret the world coherently, to plan and to act rationally. For order to be established, a way must be found of dealing with diversity, with the coexistence of potentially conflicting ideas, projects and goals. In the process of working out such conflicts, power will come to be distributed in a certain fashion. The problem of social order will thus presuppose the existence of ways of setting a public agenda, ways of determining rules and reaching decisions and a distribution of legitimate authority. Metaphors are often considered as mere matters of stylistic decoration. This is not, however, all they are. Metaphors are also cognitive tools (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1981). As such, they help us organise the world in a particular manner. They help us make sense of the confusing multitude of things which surrounds us by telling us not what things are, but rather what things are like. In this way, the metaphors invoked or implied by a person or a society will necessarily come to reveal a certain world-view. This is not to deny that metaphors have rhetorical uses. Indeed in politics metaphors are often tools employed by elites to stifle critique and to keep people in their places. Yet, to admit that metaphors have rhetorical uses is not to say that we can do without them. There is no true description of society hiding beyond or behind the metaphorical language we invoke. We all need a conception or another of what social life is like and some way of understanding how things fit together. In order to arrive at such understandings, metaphors are inevitable. Shared social meanings will always come to presuppose a prior metaphorical commitment. What for example is a ‘state’? (cf. Skinner 1989: 90–113). Much discussed as this question has been among historians and political scientists, it is quite impossible to say that it has a definitive answer – that the state must be one thing and that it cannot be something else. The state has no basic essence in terms of which it conclusively can be defined (Ringmar 1996; cf. Review of International Studies 2004). In order to deal with this unsatisfactory state of affairs what we end up doing is to compare the state to other things.

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Instead of talking about what the state is, we talk about it metaphorically. Somewhat cryptically put: although we know nothing about ‘being’, we know surprisingly much about ‘being as’ (Ricœur 1975: 323–99). Metaphors have a way of simultaneously both highlighting and obscuring aspects of reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10–13). By seeing something as a certain kind of thing, some arguments and some actions become available to us whereas other arguments and actions become unavailable. In this way our use of metaphor will have profound implications for the way politics is organised and carried out. Hence, critics of an existing social order often advocate alternative metaphors which allow new things to be seen and new courses of action to appear feasible. For their intelligibility, metaphors must be grounded in a certain culture and a certain way of life (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 22–4). As a result, they tend to vary from one society to the next and vary also over the course of time. This is why a study of metaphors provides an excellent research tool for inter-societal comparisons, a fact already well understood by cultural anthropologists and some historians (de Baecque 1993/1997; Fernandez 1991). For political scientists, the comparative study of metaphors provides a new and hitherto largely unexplored way of understanding the similarities and differences in the way political systems are conceptualised (pace Lakoff 1996). The aim of this paper is to briefly compare the metaphors used to discuss the problem of social order. The ultimate goal is to understand the roles which various political systems have accorded to key concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘power’, ‘equality’, ‘rights’, ‘dissent’ and ‘virtue’. To this end, a comparison will be made between medieval, early modern and contemporary uses, as well as a brief look at metaphors employed in an entirely different part of the world – China and Japan. The comparative study of metaphors provides the best way of understanding why it is that a certain political concept takes on one meaning rather than another. To illustrate what is at stake, consider the following short list of metaphorical uses.

The state as a ‘body’ In the early modern era, the body was the predominant metaphor through which the European state was understood (Kantorowitz 1951/1957: 194–232; Gierke 1881/1996: 9–30; Ringmar 2007: 169–72). Originally, the body metaphor had been applied to the Church. Or to be more precise, the Church had had two bodies – one temporal and one transcendental; one which human beings belonged to while still on earth and another which they belonged to eternally in heaven. It was Jesus Christ who was in charge of the eternal church and the pope who took care of the temporal. With the rise of the state as a sovereign entity in the course of the Renaissance, this corporal language was gradually secularised and given a political application. As a result, also the state came to be given two bodies – one temporal

Metaphors of social order 59 and one transcendental – and its subjects were simultaneously members of both (Kantorowitz 1951/1957: 207–32). In its temporal capacity, the state was made up of various kinds of institutions staffed by officials, but the state clearly also had an existence apart from these institutional manifestations; this was the Staat guided by the Weltgeist of history, la France éternelle or the eternal principles enshrined in the constitution of the United States (Cassirer 1946: 248–76; Ringmar 1996). The body metaphor provides an easy and convincing solution to the problem of social order. As the metaphor makes clear, social life and the political system are, just like the various parts of the body, intimately related and organically unified. Each social class corresponds to a bodily organ: the aristocracy is the ‘arm’, the clergy is the ‘heart’ and the peasants or merchants are the ‘stomach’. And naturally, the king ruling over this ‘body politic’ is the ‘head of state’. The body metaphor is obviously hierarchical. The organs which make up the state have entirely different functions, ranks and importance, yet hierarchy is a requirement for social order to be preserved. It is precisely because groups and classes have different functions that they depend on each other; the clergy needs the peasants just as the heart needs the stomach or the arm. Diversity is thus not a problem but instead a precondition for social solidarity and peace. After all, if we all were the same, there would be no reason for us to stay together; equality of status leads to isolation and eventually to indifference and to a break-up of social life (cf. de Tocqueville 1840/1945: 104–5). In a state understood as a body, conflicts are quite inconceivable. Social groups and classes cannot be at war with each other for the same reason that one hand cannot fight the other or the heart rebel against the stomach. Instead, all groups and classes depend on one another for the proper functioning of the whole. Thus, the body metaphor provides no place for politics; there is nothing much for the various members to discuss; there is only one will and all decisions are taken by the head. Yet, this does not quite imply unlimited kingship since the king in practice often will have to investigate the condition of the various body parts before reaching any decision. If an arm or the stomach was in a poor state of health, the king would naturally have to take this into account, if not for the sake of the ailing member as much as for the sake of the body as a whole. Although diversity is a requirement for social stability, divisions are an ever-present threat. Consequently, the existence of political parties has always been condemned in the strongest possible terms by those who embrace an embodied view of society. In eighteenth-century England, for example, Jonathan Swift defined a party as ‘the madness of many, for the gain of the few’, and George Washington devoted a large part of his farewell address of 1796 to solemn warnings against ‘the baneful effects of the spirit of party’ (quoted in Hofstadter 1969: 2). In fact, ‘bipartisanship’ is still considered a great virtue in an American politician. Yet, anti-establishment

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groups were often equally critical of parties. Even the most utopian of political tracts, such as those written by Diggers, Levellers and other seventeenth-century radicals, defined the good society as one entirely without factionalism (Ball 1989: 163). The aim of their particular party was simply to, once and for all, end all parties. The long-term viability of the body metaphor depends on the degree to which it recognises the demands of various social groups while at the same time limiting those demands so as to keep the bodily functions evenly balanced. This is a particular challenge whenever new social cleavages arise together with new political demands. In the Middle Ages, new social movements were relatively easily assimilated – ‘incorporated’ as it were – into existing bodies, and eventually all of them constituted integral parts of the universal body – the body of bodies – which was the Church (Cohn 1970: 158–9). In the twentieth century, similar forms of corporatism were tried in both national-socialist and socialist-nationalist states, but these attempts have now largely been abandoned (Schmitter 1989: 54–73). Few groups are prepared to accept the hierarchical subordination which the metaphor imposes, and few are prepared to define their interests in terms of the interests of society as a whole.

The state as a ‘family’ The family is another popular metaphor through which the problem of social order has been addressed. This image is widely shared across societies, although the interpretations vary depending on exactly what is meant by a ‘family’. Most commonly, the metaphor combines biological and hierarchical principles. Rulers have often found it expedient to define themselves as ‘fathers’ of the countries they rule and their subjects as ‘children’ of varying ages and states of maturity. The father in the state, as in traditional families, is the one who makes the decisions; fathers know best and other family members are not supposed to question their judgement. Order in the state is assured in an analogous fashion. Yet, relations within a state understood as a family are quite different from relations within a state understood as a body (Lakoff 1996: 44–161). Family bonds are not primarily biological after all but rather social. A father is supposed to take a personal interest in the members of his family, their well-being and future, and he is supposed to include them in the decisions he makes. He is a pater and the state which has children as its subjects is therefore necessarily paternalistic (Schapiro 1999: 715–38). The paternalistic state thinks, plans and acts on behalf of the people subject to it; it disciplines and regulates them in order to protect them from the unexpected, the disastrous and, often enough, also to protect them from themselves. Understood as a family, the state comes to exist in a location which can be compared to a ‘home’. Hence, the Japanese kokka, the ‘national home’, or the Swedish Folkhem, the ‘home of the people’ (Trägårdh 2002: 80–5).

Metaphors of social order 61 Understood as a home, the state becomes an institution which can make demands on our loyalty. Not surprisingly, the family metaphor has been a popular way of describing hierarchical forms of nationalism. The Japanese emperor, for example, was never understood as ‘father’ until the 1890s, when military competition suddenly was seen to require a principle according to which soldiers could be asked to make sacrifices on behalf of the nation (Jansen 1975/1995: 70–1; Hirakawa 1989: 496). Yet, the family metaphor is typically less stifling than the body metaphor, and it is likely to provide more space for politics. Family members are separate individuals after all, with individual wants and aspirations. In order to accommodate such inevitable diversity, families usually discuss things together and reach decisions through reasonably consensual methods. Although such consensualism may be more common today than previously, pure patriarchalism is quite rare. A society modelled on a family is for that reason likely to allow a measure of debate and dissent. We may not like it, but we are nevertheless not unprepared for the fact that family members sometimes fight and fall out. Once the two institutions are rhetorically connected, changes in the definition of the family can bring about changes in the definition of the state. This presents a hermeneutic opportunity which can be creatively explored by oppositional groups. It is possible for example to see marriage as a contract freely entered into by two equal parties rather than as a union sanctioned by god. If so, the contract can be broken if one of the parties violates the terms of the agreement. The political implications of this reconceptualisation are obvious, and they were quickly identified by seventeenth-century Puritans, among others, who set themselves up against what they identified as the excesses of the paternalistic English state (Walzer 1965: 183–93). The malleability of the family metaphor means that it can survive even dramatic changes of political fortune. Take a case where the siblings decide to rebel against the tyranny imposed on them by the father. Killing him off may be labelled as ‘patricide’, but it is also the foundation of a new kind of ‘fraternity’ which guarantees both equality and freedom while at the same time making sure that the political unit continues to be closely united (David 1987). The idea of fraternity is a powerful way of expressing an egalitarian form of nationalism. The father may have been beheaded, but the metaphor lives on.

The state as a ‘musical director’ Turning to China and Japan, we find quite different conceptualisations of society. Traditionally, people were typically seen as connected to each other through long chains of hierarchical relationships stretching from the bottom of society to its very top (Fei 1947/1992: 60–86). These relationships were governed by particularistic rather than by universalistic ties. In China, the emperor ruled by virtue of a ‘mandate of heaven’, but this mandate did not

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give him a general right to interfere in people’s lives. Instead, it was incumbent on all Chinese, the emperors included, first to fulfil their obligations toward their families and friends. If everyone only maintained their respective parts of the great network which was society, the country would be at peace and everyone would prosper. Much the same was true in the case of Japan where the social structure was held together by ties connecting vassals to their lords. Instead of relying on legal abstractions, the Japanese state was governed by mutual obligations and feudal codes of honour. The political question is: what role the state possibly can play in such a networked society? Clearly, European-style lawmaking is not going to be sufficient since there officially is no universal and homogeneous realm over which politics can exercise a jurisdiction (cf. Ringmar 2007: 288–9). Instead the personal qualities – the virtue – of political leaders and bureaucrats become crucial. Rule takes place by example rather than by decree. Or differently put, politics becomes profoundly ritualistic. In China, the most important rituals were those concerned with the cult of the ancestors, above all the funeral rites, but there were also rituals for marriage, baptism and the celebration of New Year and a long series of festive annual events. Rituals expressed the meaning of social obligations, they provided people with concrete ways of fulfilling their obligations and assured the piety of sons, the faithfulness of wives and the loyalty of subjects. Rituals also helped to define social classes and maintain the hierarchical order of social life. The emperor was the person ultimately responsible for the maintenance of this ceremonial system. It was the rituals the emperor performed that kept Earth in correspondence with Heaven and yin and yang in balance. The metaphor which best expresses this ritualistic logic is a musical one. The emperor was like a conductor directing a state bureaucracy made up of musicians, and the people were like dancers moving in unison to the beat of their tune (Pocock 1989: 46). The social ideal was harmony – wa in Japanese, hé in Chinese (Itô 1998). Harmony required people to co-ordinate their actions; no discordant voices should be heard, and no awkward movements be displayed; instead, everyone should simply lose themselves in the music: How do we know the meaning of dancing? The dancer’s eyes do not look at himself; his ears do not listen to himself; yet he controls the lowering and raising of his head, the bending and straightening of his body, his advancing and retreating, his slow and rapid movements; everything is discriminated and regulated. He exerts to the utmost all the strength of his body to keep time to the measures of the sounds of the drum and bell, and has no rebellious heart. All his purposes are summed up and earnest. (Xun Zi quoted in Pocock 1989: 46) In a state organised as a musical performance, adjustments will happen smoothly and by themselves, and for that reason, overt repression is usually

Metaphors of social order 63 not required. Instead, the maintenance of social order is perfectly decentralised. It is above all other participants who notice when people close to them sing out of tune or behave gracelessly, and they are also the ones best placed to apply sanctions. Usually some mild form of social disapproval is sufficient to set the clumsy performer straight. In a state organised in this manner, politics is not something that you talk about, but instead, something that you do. Politics is not about discussions, and no confrontations between opposing views are possible (Jullien 2000: 117–40). Although the emperor nominally may have the power to decide which music that should be performed, the repertoire is usually determined by tradition, and it does not really matter which tune that is chosen as long as everyone knows which parts to play. People can object to the music to be sure, but this is always going to be an aesthetic rather than a political judgement. Music, strikingly, has no contraries – there is no way of contradicting a tune or a dance movement – and for that reason alone a state organised as a musical performance allows little criticism. In a society where harmony is the highest social goal, and where carefully integrated rituals are used to achieve it, there can be no dissent, only correct or incorrect actions. At the same time, the musical metaphor is very tolerant of diverging opinions. Even if they mean entirely different things by the same notes or movements, people can still get along perfectly well with each other. As long as everyone only moves as they are supposed to, it does not really matter what they are thinking or if they are thinking anything at all. There is consequently no need to monitor or control people’s minds as the authorities always did in Europe (Fei 1947/1992: 94–100; Watson 1993: 81). Instead of orthodoxy, it was orthopraxy that held imperial China together; what mattered was the right movements rather than the right beliefs.

The state as a ‘machine’ Returning to Europe, another important metaphor – popular from the latter part of the seventeenth century onwards – is the state understood as a ‘machine’ (Mayr 1986). The reasons behind its popularity were the advances in technology made at the time and the subsequent fascination with mechanical gadgetry of all kinds, above all clockworks. The enlightened autocrats of eighteenth-century Europe were particularly fond of this metaphor, but we still invoke it in our contemporary references to, say, ‘bureaucratic machineries’, the ‘wheels of administration’ or ‘social engineering’. If the state is a machine, then the various parts of society become the levers, springs and cogwheels which make up the machine. As such, this metaphor comes to resemble the body metaphor since it connects the functional differentiation of parts with the need for social cooperation. Since the components of society are radically different from each other, it is only by cooperating with each other that they can attain their ends. As the machine

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metaphor makes clear, a refusal to put the collective interest above the individual is necessarily self-defeating. A cogwheel is after all quite useless alone. At the same time, there is no mistaking the hierarchical implications of the metaphor. While some of the machine’s components are inessential and easy to replace, others are unique and utterly crucial. Just as the body metaphor, the machine metaphor has no place for dissent. All components should fit neatly with each other, and wheels that squeak must quickly be oiled or replaced. The implications are repressive, and not surprisingly, the metaphor is a long-time favourite with absolutist rulers. It is for example closely associated with attempts to restore peace after the civil wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Mayr 1986: 104–5). Jean Bodin’s understanding of the state was mechanical, and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is a kind of humanoid robot. As both authors made clear, the state-machine would pacify society above all by suppressing the diversity it contained (see the chapter by Carver in this volume) (Ringmar 2007: 177–82). Intermediary groups of all kinds – feudal estates, corporations, brotherhoods and religious sects – were to be broken up and society to be divided into its smallest constituent parts. These atomised individuals were then reunited in and through the machinery of the state. Still, there are clear limits to the power of any machine-based absolutism. In a political system understood through this metaphor, the ruler becomes an engineer who oversees the machine’s operations. As such, the machine may often come to operate quite independently of the ruler’s personal wishes. As early modern political theorists insisted, there are laws of statecraft – similar to the laws of mechanics – which also the king has to follow if he is to maintain the state in a good working order and himself in power. The state and the king are both governed by reason, and this raison d’état can at least in principle be objectively defined and calculated (Hirschman 1977: 43–4). In this way, the machine metaphor served as a check on absolutist power, and the regimes where the metaphor was most popular – Prussia and Austria in particular – were also the states where people first were granted rights. Constitutional documents, pioneered in these Rechtstaaten, were taken as the blueprints for the construction of the machineries of state. Frederick the Great of Prussia could even be sued by his own subjects.

The state as a ‘cybernetic device’ A shortcoming of the state understood as a mechanical device is that it is prohibitively costly to operate. Repressing diversity – oiling squeaking wheels and replacing uncooperative parts – takes a lot of time and effort. It would be far more efficient if people somehow could be convinced to oil and replace themselves. A solution of this kind was chanced upon in England in the course of the eighteenth century as society increasingly came to be regarded as a ‘self-balancing mechanism’ or a ‘cybernetic device’ (Mayr 1986: 195).

Metaphors of social order 65 Again, the origin of this metaphor is best explained by the historical context. In England, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, a number of seminal discoveries and inventions were made which were taken to demonstrate the viability of the principle of self-regulation (Mayr 1986: 190–3). One example was Newton’s description of the mathematics of the planetary system wherein every planet was held in place by the sun and by the actions of all other planets. Another example was the governor which automatically controlled the pressure in a steam engine through automatic feedback mechanisms. But there were also less seminal, if not less useful, inventions which taught the same lesson – such as the thermostat which regulated the temperature in chicken incubators. What these systems have in common is the interaction of contradictory forces. In all of them, a push in one direction automatically triggers a pull in the opposite direction, and as a result, the overall balance is restored. This is the model famously adopted by Adam Smith in his description of the economic system as governed by an ‘invisible hand’, a metaphor he initially applied to Newtonian cosmology – ‘the invisible hand of Jupiter’ – in an early essay (Smith 1758/1982: 49; cf. Smith 1776/1981: IV, 2, 456). The economic system, Smith explained, maintains itself in balance as the selfserving actions of one group or individual are counteracted by the selfserving actions of another group or individual (Hirschman 1977: 100–12). The outcome is taken to be beneficial to society as a whole since it mobilises and allocates resources and thereby maximises efficiency. In the course of the nineteenth century, the same metaphor came to be extended to politics (Hofstadter 1969; Ringmar 2007: 202–15). As political theorists now argued, parties can serve the public interest if they only first serve their own interests. Competition in the ‘market-place of ideas’ is beneficial for all, and dissent is not a problem as long as it is counteracted by contradictory opinions and as long as people are given a chance to freely make up their own minds (Mill 1859/1985: 75–128). Instead of overthrowing the government in a bloody coup, the dissenters should take their seats in parliament where they should form an orderly opposition and bide their time. The job of the opposition is indeed to oppose, but only loyally so, that is, within the generally accepted rules of the political game. As the cybernetic metaphor makes clear, people are able to settle their differences by themselves as long as only the forces of the economic and the political system are allowed to operate freely. Diversity is not a threat to the stability of the social order but instead as a precondition for it; the mutual antagonism of opposing interests and groups is what maintains the social order. Outside intervention by a ‘balancer’ such as the state jeopardises this self-organisation. In a society which regulates itself, the king can be abolished and the state drastically scaled back. This is the liberal idea of ‘freedom’, the freedom to pursue one’s own interests constrained only by other actors who pursue theirs. The beauty and simplicity of this metaphor obscures its demanding

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requirements. Self-organisation is not spontaneous after all but is only likely to work in an environment which already is thoroughly organised (Polanyi 1944). Order is created only thanks to the coercive means through which the boundaries of the system are policed and its operations regulated. The egalitarian ethos of the metaphor is also violated by the very different capabilities of the actors involved. One’s freedom depends on which resources one has at one’s disposal, but resource endowments are likely to vary considerably from one person to the next. And as it turns out, cybernetic systems can quite easily be manipulated by actors with access to disproportionate resources. Groups who control media outlets can for example distort the interaction between political parties, and groups with a monopoly position in a market can distort the interaction between economic parties. Social order, cybernetically maintained, is always more apparent than real.

Conclusions This discussion has a large number of far-reaching implications. One obvious point is that the metaphors invoked to describe the political system have varied considerably over time and between societies. Another conclusion, possibly less obvious, is that this variation presents a challenge to our ability to compare political phenomena. Without understanding the metaphorical differences between societies, the different ways in which these metaphors have been interpreted, and the ways in which both metaphors and meanings have been transformed, no proper inter-cultural or intertemporal comparisons are possible (cf. MacIntyre 1984: 260–79). After all, what is similar and what is different depends not on what things are as much as on what they mean, and meanings are always organised through and around metaphors. Thus, basic political notions such as ‘freedom’, ‘power’, ‘equality’, ‘rights’, ‘dissent’ or ‘virtue’ will come to mean quite different things depending on the metaphorical context in which we find them. And in some contexts, the notions cannot even be identified. In Europe, there is historically speaking a transition from organic and hierarchical metaphors to cybernetic and egalitarian ones. This is the metaphorical groundwork required by the spread of laissez-faire capitalism and liberal political thought. Inter-culturally speaking, the same transition takes place as metaphors of self-governance gradually come to replace other ways of understanding social order. And yet, the cybernetic metaphor is neither entirely dominant nor unchallenged. Compare the European welfare state which still relies heavily on family metaphors or nationalist discourses which often insist on seeing the state as a body. There are also plenty of ‘social scientists’ around whose work presupposes a mechanical understanding of society. This is not surprising when we consider that the cybernetic metaphor is unable to capture many aspects of social life which we see as important, including a notion of community, the value of togetherness and a sense of a

Metaphors of social order 67 common purpose. The kind of balancing which the metaphor requires can only work well in an atomised society. In the end, most of us are actually quite content to mix our metaphors. We see some aspects of society with the help of one metaphor and other aspects with the help of another metaphor (Oakeshott 1933/2002: 9–85). Those who refuse to do this – those who stick to only one metaphor and who make it their life’s work to impose its interpretative grid on all spheres of life and on all the rest of us – come across as simple-minded and as fanatical. In recent years, it is cybernetic fanaticism which has been predominant. That this metaphor can be relevantly applied is beyond doubt, but it is an urgent political task to investigate what its limits are. We need to know where the metaphor is ‘stretched’ and where it eventually ‘breaks down’ and ‘dies’. At a time when social order more than anything is conceptualised through metaphors of selforganisation, such an investigation is a precondition for political criticism and for transformative social change.

References Ball, T. (1989) ‘Party’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R.L. Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, E. (1946) The Myth of the State, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cohn, N. (1970) The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, London: Pimlico. David, M. (1987) Fraternité et Révolution française, 1789–1799, Paris: Aubier. de Baecque, A. (1993/1997) The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. de Tocqueville, A. (1840/1945) Democracy in America, vol. II, New York: Vintage. Fei, X. (1947/1992) From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, trans. G.G. Hamilton and W. Zheng, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fernandez, J.W. (1991) Beyond Metaphor: Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gierke, O. (1881/1996) Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Hirakawa, S. (1989) ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, in M.B. Jansen (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan: vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschman, A.O. (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hofstadter, R. (1969) The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840, Berkeley: University of California Press. Itô, K. (1998) ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shotoku in Modern Japan’, in S. Vlastos (ed.) Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Jansen, M.B. (1975/1995) Japan and its World: Two Centuries of Change, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, M. (ed.) (1981) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Jullien, F. (2000) Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, New York: Zone Books. Kantorowitz, E. (1951/1957) The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lakoff, G. (1996) Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know what Liberals Don’t, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984) ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’ in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mayr, O. (1986) Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mill, J.S. (1859/1985) On Liberty, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Oakeshott, M. (1933/2002) Experience and its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, J.G.A. (1989) ‘Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay on the Apparent Meanings of Ancient Chinese Philosophy’, in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon. Review of International Studies (2004) ‘Forum: Is the State a Person? Why Should We Care?’ 30: 255–316. Ricœur, P. (1975) ‘Métaphore et Discours Philosophique’, in La métaphore vive, Paris: Seuil. Ringmar, E. (1996) ‘On the Ontological Status of the State’, European Journal of International Relations, 2: 439–66. Ringmar, E. (2007) Why Europe Was First: Social Change and Economic Growth in Europe and East Asia, 1500–2050, London: Anthem. Schapiro, T. (1999) ‘What Is a Child?’ Ethics, 109: 715–38. Schmitter, P.C. (1989) ‘Corporatism Is Dead! Long Live Corporatism!’, Government and Opposition, 24: 54–73. Skinner, Q. (1989) ‘The State’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R.L. Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (1758/1982) ‘The History of Astronomy’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Smith, A. (1776/1981) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Trägårdh, L. (2002) ‘Crises and the Politics of National Community: Germany and Sweden, 1944/1994’, in N. Witoszek and L. Trägårdh (eds) Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden, New York: Berghahn. Walzer, M. (1965) The Revolution and the Saints: A Study of the Origins of Radical Politics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Watson, J.L. (1993) ‘Rites or Beliefs: The Construction of a Unified Culture in Late Imperial China’, in L. Dittmer and S.S. Kim (eds) China’s Quest for National Identity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

5

Metaphors of solidarity Iseult Honohan

Those are the greatest slaves to metaphorical language, who have but one set of metaphors (Mill 1963: VII, 795)1

Solidarity, understood as an inclination to collective concern and action, is the direct heir of fraternity and has been a central political value in modern times (Stjerno 2004). But it has become particularly difficult to theorise in the context of more diverse societies and across greater distances. What does it mean and with whom is it possible for people to share solidarity in contemporary society? There is a widely held assumption in contemporary political science that solidarity is inherently limited in its extent. On one interpretation, it requires a basis in ethnic or cultural commonality; on another, it depends not on any particular cultural content, but on a sense of ‘belonging’, which may be defined primarily by the drawing of a boundary defining the group. What is crucial is maintaining boundaries between an in-group and an outgroup; group solidarity then can survive changes and diversity of cultural content. Neither approach offers much prospect, however, for the sort of solidarity that many see as desirable, and hope may be possible, in diverse societies and across national boundaries in a globalising world. Is the logic of solidarity necessarily limited in extent or essentially oppositional or to what extent are current understandings constrained by other factors, in particular by metaphors of solidarity that express or reinforce particular conceptions at the expense of others? Metaphors do not merely embellish political language but rather play a part in structuring the field of politics itself; those that achieve widespread use highlight certain aspects of social life and occlude others. They entrench distinctions between things we might otherwise tend to think of as united in a single whole and posit relationships between things we might otherwise tend to think of as separate. They provide a shorthand that makes it possible, or easier, to handle complex realities. They may make it possible to conceive of certain ways of living and acting and thus play a significant part

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in constituting social reality. As Lakoff and Johnson put it, ‘We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/2003: 158). Political community and civic solidarity have long been understood in terms of metaphors drawn from the body and close relationships of family and friends. These lend themselves to consolidating (if not determining) limited solidarities, or, more broadly, the social imaginary within which it makes sense to act in certain ways to, or even to conceive of commitments to, others not identified in these terms. Indeed the tendency to represent relationships and activities in substantive metaphors per se, rather than any particular metaphors, may itself restrict the extensibility of solidarity. The assumption here is that metaphors set the agenda for our thinking about solidarity, rather than wholly determining it. They constrain our actions by appearing to define the range of real possibilities and sidelining other ways of conceiving of solidarity in political terms. If they are predominantly derived from relationships of family or friendship, for example, they support the impression that solidarity is based on close, face-to-face, emotionally charged relationships and that these dimensions of relationship are mutually entailed. Studying such metaphors may show ways in which thinking about solidarity is more or less systematically constrained. At the same time, many successful metaphors are ambiguous in their entailment, thus allowing a plurality and evolution of interpretations. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the patterns of constraint currently at work by examining prevailing metaphors of solidarity. I suggest that solidarity is nowadays configured distinctively in two discursive contexts: in analyses of nationality, culture and ethnicity, on the one hand, and of social capital, on the other. Prevailing metaphors fall into two broad categories: those representing solidarity as a matter of belonging to a bounded social whole (without necessarily involving direct relationships among its members) and those representing it as a by-product of voluntary relationships or ‘ties’ between individuals and groups. Much contemporary normative political theory is committed to an analytical approach to the issues it addresses. But we will see that metaphors play a remarkable framing role in contemporary accounts of solidarity in political theory. The task of political theory is not only to deconstruct such metaphors, or to identify the particular biases implicit in the current fields of metaphor, but also to explore alternative metaphors and the more nuanced possibilities they may open up.

Traditional metaphors of solidarity At critical points in the development of political practice, normative theorists have supplied or established metaphors articulating conceptual and

Metaphors of solidarity 71 practical understandings of political community, notably the ‘body politic’ and the ‘ship of state’. The notion of the ‘body politic’ has a long history. This metaphor initially represented society not only as a unity but also as a naturally hierarchical order in which solidarity among its elements can be taken for granted (see the chapters by Ringmar and Pikalo in this volume). Thus, Plato saw society, like the individual, as a body to be ruled by reason (Plato 1974). Aristotle expressed the relationship between citizen and society as that of hand and body – an analogy explicitly criticised by later theorists (Aristotle 1981a: i, 2). As anatomical and biological knowledge developed, the analogies became more specific (Sennett 1994). Monarchy gained legitimacy when represented as the apparently natural head of the body politic. But the metaphor could also be interpreted in very different ways. When the supernatural grounds for a hierarchical political order were no longer universally agreed, Hobbes provided an alternative version of the body politic. The frontispiece of his Leviathan can be seen as summing up the argument that the sovereign authority of the monarch is justified because he is constituted by the people, and represents them, when they are united in an artificial or conventional body. Later, the notion of the absolute and indivisible power of the monarch was reversed and encapsulated in the metaphor of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ elaborated by Rousseau. Thus, a long process of struggle led to the replacement of the notion that the ruler was the natural ‘head’ of the body politic to the idea of ‘the people’ as a self-governing body. Liberal political theory developed from the notion that political authority is conventional rather than natural. Rousseau contributed to this denaturalisation of political community by supplying the term, the ‘social contract’, long the preferred metaphor among liberals for the origin of political society, representing political community as a voluntary association of separate individuals. But, even if understood conventionally, this image remains a unitary one, implying a clear distinction between those who are ‘members’ and those who are not, and it is difficult to combine with diversity or with more richly articulated relationships among its members. Thus, although liberals have resisted the idea of political community as a natural entity, emphasising as they do the independence of individuals, they have tended to be constrained by unitary images of the political community. As Kukathas usefully summarises it: The good society liberal political theory describes is not a unified entity. Yet in the history of political theory the metaphors which have been used to describe political society have been entirely unsympathetic to this outlook. Powerful though it has been, the metaphor of the ‘body politic’ has not been a helpful one for liberal thinking insofar as it as encouraged the thought that the existence of social life is dependent on the functioning of a single political order within which human conduct is organised. (Kukathas 2003: 8)

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Kukathas goes on to condemn also the metaphor of the ‘ship of state’ as ‘one which has social unity and hierarchy at the very core of its understanding of society’ (Kukathas 2003: 8). He argues further that this ‘confines political reflection in troubling ways, for it forces us to think about political society as a discrete entity, with firm, impermeable borders, inhabited by selfsufficient beings, existing in a form of social unity given by common purposes’ (Kukathas 2003: 21–2). The ship of state has indeed been one of the most powerful metaphors guiding notions of solidarity. It is true that the ship provides an essentially unitary and unidirectional image, but it has been capable of many alternative interpretations, starting with Aristotle’s suggestion that citizens may be more like crew-members who take turns at different posts than the unruly passengers criticised by Plato for presuming to interfere in steering the ship (Aristotle 1981a: ii). Later, Hume adopts the metaphor to criticise Locke’s notion of tacit consent to government, comparing that with the ‘agreement’ of a press-ganged sailor not to jump overboard when far out at sea (Hume 1748/1987). In the twentieth century, Oakeshott (1962) advocated a conservative view of political life as a matter of keeping afloat and on an even keel, without any implication of either a definite starting point or any destination. More recently, the image of a Haida canoe, ‘peopled’ by a variety of totemic animals, has been invoked to represent the way that multicultural states should accommodate diversity even in their constitutional structures (Tully 1995). Likewise, the idea of the earth as a lifeboat has been used to argue both for and against assistance for the global poor (Hardin 1974; O’Neill 1975). While these variations demonstrate the possibility of alternative interpretations of a single metaphor, they also show how the image of political communities as discrete, unitary and firmly bounded is reinforced by the dominant metaphors.

Contemporary metaphors of solidarity Despite an increasing emphasis on diversity within modern societies, political discourse has not transcended unitary metaphors. In this section, I outline two of the currently most influential logics of solidarity, namely membership of bounded groups and the by-product of voluntary relationships among individuals and groups. While not the only ways in which solidarity is represented, the discourses in which these are embedded carry particular weight in both academic analysis and popular political discourse. If the body politic is still implicitly operative in various ways – possessed of a constitution, incorporating other elements, liable to corruption and so on – it is in conjunction with other metaphors of belonging to groups such as families and cultures, which are interpreted as more or less natural and which have largely supplanted, for example, the idea of class as the unit of solidarity.

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Family metaphors Thus the nation has been identified as the basis of political community, portrayed through a variety of family metaphors, most obviously those of the mother country or fatherland. This combines the sovereignty of the people with an explicitly renaturalised community. The nation is represented, not only as a natural community, but also, like family, as one that is specific and exclusive, that provides a home for its members and gives them common purposes. Nationalist discourse involves an attempt to constitute identities in sharp, categorical terms, to render boundaries clear and identities integral, even while the processes of capitalist expansion, slave trade, colonization, war and the globalization of culture all have ensured the production of ever more multiplicities and overlaps of identities. (Calhoun 1999: 218) The representation of the family bond evolved from the patriarchal one contested by Hobbes and Locke as the model of political authority to the fraternal one upheld by the French revolutionaries. However, even if not patriarchal, families are, at least to some degree, hierarchical. Fraternity, the republican ideal of egalitarian brotherhood, assumes a shared substantive good, which, historically at least, depended on excluding women. Family metaphors have also been applied to other political movements, notably the sisterhood of feminists. Sisterhood has equally been shown to mask differences among women. Motherly care, also proposed as the basis of community, is not always separable from control or self-abnegation. Whether seen as genetic or institutional in nature, these presuppose small groups in face-toface relations, characterised by intimate knowledge and deep emotional bonds. Even if more equal relations of fraternity, sisterhood or motherly care can be envisaged, the intimate knowledge and emotional commitment of the family can still not be directly reproduced at the level of a whole society. Thus, the interesting strategy of redefining the family metaphor (Lakoff 1996), by replacing conservative and authoritarian family metaphors with liberal metaphors of a nurturing and enabling relationship, seems in this respect to have limited potential. Such ‘family’ metaphors, implying close or ‘thick’ relationships with a basis in descent, are seen as the strongest basis for solidarity. This conveys the idea that only such close relations can ‘generate’ the support of citizens. This may be a genetic or an electro-magnetic metaphor; indeed, at least one author has seen nationalism as a ‘battery’ that allows states to run (Canovan 1996: 80). Other kinds of membership are considered colder and more distant and lacking this motivating power. The prevalence of such metaphors can be illustrated from a recently controversial example. David Goodhart’s 2004 Prospect article (widely discussed in Britain) argued for the

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need to limit immigration, not from any intrinsic hostility to foreigners, but on the grounds that only citizens who can identify with one another will support significant redistributive social policies. What is of interest here is the fact that the author relies on the contrast of strangers to kin-groups and identifies solidarity as a response to the question, Who is my brother? (Goodhart 2004). It has proved difficult to identify a form of attachment to the political community that does not draw on some element of the composite family metaphor. Even those who want to articulate a distinct kind of commitment among citizens often fall back on metaphors of ‘patriotism’, or ‘love’ of country, even if this is qualified as civic, constitutional and so forth (e.g. Viroli 1995).

Ethnic groups Thus, it seems that political solidarity tends to fall back on groups that appear to be clearly bounded and capable of evoking emotional ties modelled on family relationships. Ethnic groups seem to be particularly favoured in this respect. But the existence of social groups that constitute natural foci for solidarity has been subject to considerable analysis and critique. Many political and social theorists have insisted that subjects have multiple, overlapping or hyphenated identities, that boundaries are porous, requiring the recognition of ‘transversal politics’, ‘interculturality’, and many kinds of cross-cutting relationships. As Brubaker puts it: The treatment of groups as real . . . has been challenged by several traditions of social analysis. Many constructivist stances treat groups as constructed, contingent, and fluctuating, while a diffuse postmodernist sensibility emphasises the fragmentary, the ephemeral and the erosion of fixed forms and clear boundaries. (Brubaker 2003: 554) Thus, the extent to which we can speak of ethnic ‘groups’ as real has been radically challenged. The idea that solidarity can rest on membership of an essentialised group with clear boundaries is rendered problematic by the fact that many social groups do not have such hard edges. But they come to be represented as such in politics by political actors as part of the process of creating solidarity: By invoking groups they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being; their categories are for doing – designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle and energize. By reifying groups, by treating them as substantial things-in-the-world, ethno-political entrepreneurs may as, Bourdieu notes, ‘contribute to producing what they apparently describe or designate’. (Brubaker 2003: 166)

Metaphors of solidarity 75 But this does not undermine the importance of such groups. Even though people may live with multiple identities, political rhetoric tends to promote a unitary perspective. As Calhoun argues: We can emphasise the variable and shifting nature of group membership, the distinction between groups and organisations that facilitate actions in their names, and the extent to which groups are projects rather than fixed realities. [. . .] But none of this makes solidarities or groupness less important, only more complex and problematic (Calhoun 2003: 547) Even those who operate according to a sense of family, it may be argued, often observe in practice a distinction between genetic descent and a sense of close familial relationships. Thus, it has been argued that the idea of a community of kinship, involving the application of a family metaphor in politics, is, in fact, made up of many elements. And these do not always involve a sense of broader ethnicity: The deep feeling, sense of common provenance, kinship bonding, the sense of shared blood, thick affiliation, and community-ness so often associated with the practical category of ethnicity are in fact distinct, found separately, cross-cutting and typically unrelated. When sometimes they come together in some cases of intense ethnic conflict this is the exception which requires explanation. (Ruane and Todd 2004: 219) Thus, it is argued, a sense of solidarity understood as ‘kinship’ is present among those who live in Alsace, despite differences of language and culture, as well as in France more generally, despite the variety of ethnic and racial descent it incorporates; it is absent between different groups of Northern Ireland Protestants, despite the fact that they hold a belief in their common descent. So Ruane and Todd argue that ‘One might hypothesise that ideas of (extended) kinship are most powerful emotionally when they are used symbolically and metaphorically rather than to express an actual belief in common descent’ (Ruane and Todd 2004: 221). The metaphorical sense of family is more powerful in creating solidarity than the belief in descent or literal family membership.

Friendship Civic ‘friendship’, apparently more extensible and capable of accommodating diversity than the family membership model, is a metaphor often proposed as an alternative. Aristotle represented citizens as specific kind of friends, those concerned for the welfare of the other, and not simply with mutual benefit or the enjoyment of the other’s company (Aristotle 1981b: iii).

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His notion of friendship required a considerable degree of similarity, more than may be possible to envisage among contemporary citizens. And though friends may be unlike family insofar as they can to a considerable extent be chosen, the degree to which friendship, like family, can be extended beyond a small group of specified individuals is open to question. Thus, in the modern world, friendship and political relationships often seem remote and even radically opposed categories – as, famously, in E.M. Forster’s expressed hope that he would choose to betray his country rather than his friend (Forster 1962). But perhaps the most influential way in which the metaphor of friendship has recently been discussed, originating with Carl Schmitt, not merely questions the extensibility of friendship, but defines it in oppositional terms: friend and enemy deemed the central concepts of politics. It should be noted, though, that Schmitt resists the implication that this usage involves extending personal to political relationships or that it is thus essentially a metaphorical use of the term: The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors and symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses. [. . .] The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis not inimicus in the broader sense; polemos not ekthros. (Schmitt 1996: 27–8) Friends in this sense are those who share an enemy. Such an understanding explicitly makes the extension of solidarity dependent not only on a clear distinction between in-group and out-group, but on a radical opposition between them. Whether or not the distinction between personal and political friendship can be made as clearly as Schmitt suggests, and whether or not the metaphorical status of his term can be so easily dismissed, there is empirical evidence that in political practice group solidarity can often be strengthened through the emergence of a common enemy. However, it must be said that most of the contemporary discussions on the possibility of representing civic solidarity in terms of friendship revolve more around the appropriateness of extending personal friendship to political community than of identifying common enemies (e.g. Schwarzenbach 1996; Derrida 1997; Wellman 2001; Scorza 2004).

Metaphors of solidarity 77 By contrast, the Schmittian friend–enemy axis is more reminiscent of the ‘team’ metaphors widely employed in contemporary, especially electoral politics. Teams are more clearly unitary and purposive entities than either family or friends. Even when political community is portrayed not as a natural entity but as a team, it remains a group with unified perspectives and common purposes. In contemporary Irish politics, for example, where ethnic metaphors, though not entirely absent, are highly sensitive in the light of the peace process in Northern Ireland, metaphors that represent political agents as a unified national team are still acceptable. Thus, before the second referendum on the Nice Treaty, Mary Harney, the Táiniste (deputy prime minister) was reported as expressing the hope that everyone would ‘wear the green jersey’ in supporting the Treaty. This metaphor is significantly ambiguous, since a green shirt is worn both by a culturally and religiously mixed rugby team representing the whole island and by a soccer team representing only the Republic, and it is not clear who represents the opposing team.

Alternatives So, given the power and problematic implications of these unitary metaphors, providing alternative metaphors for consideration is one obvious route that political theorists can take. We have already seen Kukathas’s critique of the unitary image of society entailed in the dominant metaphors. He goes on to propose replacing these with the image of society as an archipelago. For him, this represents: [a]n area of sea containing many small islands. The islands in question, here, are different communities or, better still, jurisdictions, operating in a sea of mutual toleration. Political society – and in particular the good political society – is best understood not as a single body or an ideal realm of the just, or a ship piloted by a skilful seaman, or even as a single island rightly ordered. It should be understood instead as something altogether less clearly bounded, marked by movement within those bounds, and movement across fuzzy boundaries. (Kukathas 2003: 22) Attempting to provide an alternative to the idea of a unitary society is a helpful approach, but it is not clear that the alternative offered avoids the assumption of clearly bounded groups. While it represents society as unbounded – the sea across which the archipelago is strung out – it implies that groups (islands) within society are bounded, if not entirely out of contact with one another. This accords with Kukathas’s emphasis on freedom of association as a key principle of liberalism. In place of an excessively unitary image of political community, he gives us an image of one that is fragmented among distinct groups. The degree to which these groups

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are seen as insulated from external pressures is reflected in the substantive criticisms his theory has received, as allowing too much potential for such groups to oppress individuals, when exit is the principal guarantee of freedom. What is more telling for the concerns addressed here, it does not offer us any purchase on what might be a wider solidarity. We can agree with Kukathas that the image of society as a single bounded entity is misleading and yet believe that social relationships need to be represented as more articulated and groups as more porous, more overlapping and more internally diverse than the archipelago metaphor suggests.

Social capital: voluntary relationships in civil society There is a contemporary alternative to membership of clearly defined, unitary social formations as a way of representing solidarity. In the discursive context of social capital theory, solidarity is extrapolated from voluntary relationships among individuals in different activities in civil society. This is conveyed in the definition of social capital as ‘a societal resource that links citizens to each other and enables them to pursue their common objectives more effectively’ (Stolle 2003: 19). ‘Social capital’ offers the remarkable success story of a metaphor plucked from academic political science and absorbed into practical politics, where it has come to wield considerable influence. There are many dimensions to its success. But there are two ways in particular in which the associated metaphors ground a perspective on social solidarity. The first, widely recognised, is the way in which social ‘capital’ entails a whole field of economic terms and concepts and highlights the significance of social relationships by recasting issues of solidarity in these quasi-economic terms. As Farr puts it, ‘[u]sed figuratively, it relies for its metaphoric power on the dominant discourse of economics in a capitalist society’ (Farr 2004: 26). The second (and related) dimension is that, in this paradigm, social solidarity is understood to be produced, as it were, behind the backs of the actors. On the model of the hidden hand, particular private or social relationships are translated into wider social solidarity. At least within Putnam’s approach to social capital (the account with the widest political penetration), it is identified with the density of social networks (Putnam 2000). Socially beneficial social capital is created when people join voluntary associations (archetypally, bowling leagues, choral societies and neighbourhood picnics). Indeed, part of the success of ‘social capital’ may lie in the implicit ambiguity as to whether it is a kind of capital that belongs to society or an individual social resource. This gives rise to feelings of reciprocity in these relationships. Thus, solidarity is identified as realised through the existence of multiple associations in society, as the density of such associations is held to translate into ‘generalised trust’ among strangers. But it should be noted that this tends to reinterpret solidarity in terms of what we might think of as its obverse, trust, without

Metaphors of solidarity 79 identifying the wider and more active or political commitment that solidarity might otherwise be thought to require. Social capital is identified as connecting separate individuals through ‘bonds’ (within communities), ‘bridges’ (between communities) and ‘links’ (between those in higher and lower social positions). The use made of these metaphors reflects the origins of current social capital discourse in concerns about political apathy and social isolation. The emphasis on metaphors of connection, shared with some communitarian authors, features a recurrent use of images of stretching, fraying and generally of fragility. Though the process of creating social capital is often described in terms of building, the materials employed seem to be assumed to be uniform in every case. Thus ties with those near us are ‘thick’; those with people who are more distant are ‘thin’, as if the material has to stretch; entailing an issue of how far a tie can stretch before it breaks or becomes too thin to be effective. This could be thought to preclude the question whether there might be different kinds of bonds (or materials) between those who are more distant and those who are nearer. Here too, different strategies have been adopted in response to this approach. One is to analyse the metaphors associated with social capital, demonstrating the ways in which they constrain the possibilities of solidarity and of action. Solidarity becomes a side effect of individual relationships, not a concern for or collective action in a wider society. Others have pointed to the ways in which social capital depends not on voluntary association alone, but is facilitated by certain kinds of political institutions or policies (e.g. Rothstein and Stolle 2003). Another strategy is to reclaim the metaphors by drawing attention to alternative ways in which the discourse can be articulated. Thus, for example, Farr aims to reclaim the ‘social’ dimension of social capital. Moreover, he points out how its original theorist, the educator Hanifan, was ‘using the concept to help create the thing itself; or rather using the term to name that which his and others’ efforts were designed to bring about’ (Farr 2004: 11). Now again, he maintains: [d]espite or because of its figurative status and positive connotations, ‘social capital’ may be – because it has been – put to critical use to spotlight those agencies or forces that deny or deprive identifiable groups or communities of the freedom or equality of shared work, civic education or sympathy and solidarity. The point of the speech act is to imagine and undertake constructive negations of these agencies or forces. (Farr 2004: 26) From the point of view of solidarity, the problem with social capital discourse is its narrow framing of the patterns of relationships it identifies. It represents a ‘segmented’ solidarity that reflects neither necessity nor interdependence but individual choice (Komter 2005).

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Conclusions I have suggested that the currently dominant metaphors of solidarity represent it either as membership of and identification with bounded wholes or as a by-product of voluntarily assumed relationships between individuals. In these metaphors, boundaries between groups are characteristically clear and relationships between individuals or groups characteristically fragile and threatened by extension. In recent years, these two patterns have largely dominated the field of discourse about social solidarity. In this way, it may be argued, certain metaphors have played a significant role in sustaining a particular shape of political solidarity. It may be that these accurately represent the only kinds of social solidarity possible in contemporary society, but it may also be the case that this discourse itself reinforces unnecessarily narrow conceptions of solidarity. The possibility of forms of solidarity defined in terms other than those of bounded groups or private and social relationships needs to be further examined through empirical work about the basis of social solidarity and its motivation, in critical engagement with further research on areas such as identity formation, social capital and trust. Arguments about the relationship between cultural identity and social solidarity need further critical analysis (e.g. Abizadeh 2002). Thus, Calhoun identifies additional kinds of solidarity that can be identified in practice, including solidarity based on economic interdependence in social and economic activities, and through public communication or interaction in ‘discursive publics’ (Calhoun 2003: 547–8). Other approaches examine ways in which people may enlarge the groups with which they identify (Wilde 2004) and the role of political institutions in providing the conditions for solidarity. The dominant metaphors do not make it easy to represent these kinds of solidarity. Without presupposing a definitive answer to the question whether they primarily reflect or reinforce bounded political solidarity, it is also important to explore other metaphorical resources that may resonate with a different notion of solidarity in political experience. These would include alternative metaphors of relationships that include people who are more distant and diverse (e.g. colleagues, workmates, city-dwellers); that represent interdependence rather than primary identification; that emerge in interaction and engagement; that are fluid or have strength in extension (as flows, streams, strands, networks, webs); that are based on collective attention in a common space (orchestra, audience, public) and that convey unity in diversity. These may allow us to understand political community in a more complex and articulated way, including relationships established in political action in public, rather than membership of bounded wholes or the density of relationships in civil society. If we use simpler and more concrete expressions to describe more complex phenomena, these will always misrepresent them to some extent. But to the extent that our experience outruns our language, metaphors are

Metaphors of solidarity 81 necessary and useful to expand our thinking. Rather than seeking to conduct normative political theory strictly through analytic language, or simply to deconstruct misleading metaphors, our understanding may progress through the elaboration or introduction of new metaphors. What determines whether these metaphors gain wider currency no doubt involves political power as well as normative appropriateness. But new metaphors may make it possible to imagine and draw attention to alternative possibilities. It may be as important in politics that there should be many sets of metaphors (as suggested by Mill in the opening aphorism) as that there are many arguments.

Note 1 Thanks to Graham Finlay for drawing this quotation to my attention. Acknowledgements are also due to the participants in the ECPR workshop on ‘Metaphor in Political Science’, Granada 2005, for helpful comments and suggestions on the presentation on which this chapter is based.

References Abizadeh, A. (2002) ‘Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four Arguments’, American Political Science Review, 96: 495–509. Aristotle (1981a) Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Aristotle (1981b) Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brubaker, R. (2003) ‘Neither Individualism nor Groupism: A Reply to Craig Calhoun’, Ethnicities, 3: 553–7. Calhoun, C. (1999) ‘Nationalism, Political Community and the Representation of Society; or Why Feeling at Home Is Not a Substitute for Public Space’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2: 217–31. Calhoun, C. (2003) ‘Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary’, Ethnicities, 3: 531–3. Canovan, M. (1996) Nationhood and Political Theory, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Derrida, J. (1997) The Politics of Friendship, London: Verso. Farr, J. (2004) ‘Social Capital: A Conceptual History’, Political Theory, 32: 6–33. Forster, E.M. (1962) ‘What I Believe’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Goodhart, D. (2004) ‘Solidarity Versus Diversity’, Prospect, 95: 30–7. Online. <www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/start.asp?P_Article=12394> (accessed 24 September 2004). Hardin, G. (1974) ‘Living on a Lifeboat’, Bioscience, 24: 561–8. Hume, D. (1748/1987) ‘Of the Original Contract’, in E.F. Miller (ed.) Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Komter, A. (2005) Social Solidarity and the Gift, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kukathas, C. (2003) The Liberal Archipelago, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. (1996) Moral Politics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980/2003) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Mill, J.S. (1963) ‘A System of Logic’, in J.M. Robson (ed.) Collected Works of J.S. Mill, VII, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oakeshott, M. (1962) ‘Political Education’, in Rationalism in Politics, London: Methuen. O’Neill, O. (1975) ‘Lifeboat Earth’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 4: 273–92. Plato (1974) Republic, New York: Penguin Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Touchstone Books. Rothstein, B. and Stolle, D. (2003) ‘Social Capital, Impartiality and the Welfare State: An Institutional Approach’, in M. Hooghe and D. Stolle (eds) Generating Social Capital, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ruane, J. and Todd, J. (2004) ‘The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflicts May Not in Fact be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence’, European Journal of Sociology, 45: 209–32. Schmitt, C. (1996) The Concept of the Political, Translated by George Schwab, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schwarzenbach, S. (1996) ‘On Civic Friendship’, Ethics, 107: 97–128. Scorza, J. (2004) ‘Liberal Citizenship and Civic Friendship’, Political Theory, 32: 85–108. Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization, London: Penguin. Stjerno, S. (2004) Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stolle, D. (2003) ‘The Sources of Social Capital’, in M. Hooghe and D. Stolle (eds) Generating Social Capital, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tully, J. (1995) Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viroli, M. (1995) For Love of Country, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wellman, C. (2001) ‘Friends, Compatriots, and Special Political Obligations’, Political Theory, 29: 217–36. Wilde, L. (2004) ‘A Radical Humanist Approach to the Concept of Solidarity’, Political Studies, 52: 162–79.

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Exploring the metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy A comparison of legitimation discourses in American and British newspapers Steffen G. Schneider

This chapter explores the use of metaphorical language in a particularly important segment of political communication, discourses on the legitimacy of political orders. It argues that such discourses play a crucial and so far largely neglected role – with metaphors serving as key resources – in the (re-) production of legitimacy. Debates on legitimacy have been characterised by the cyclical return of crisis diagnoses. A glance at the literature suggests that we are in the midst of the latest cyclical peak: despite the conspicuous lack of normatively plausible alternatives to democratic government, and despite the presumptive global triumph of liberal democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, scepticism prevails today when the legitimacy of political orders in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is assessed (Nye et al. 1998; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Dalton 2004). Whereas older variations on the crisis theme focused on the internal flaws and contradictions of representative democracy and capitalism, globalisation now tends to be identified as the main culprit for the alleged erosion of democratic quality and legitimacy (Zürn 2004). A more sanguine view rejects the dominant erosion-of-legitimacy hypothesis, positing instead that the globalisation-induced transformation or emergence of national and international governance arrangements has coincided with the rise of new foundations of legitimacy, a shift from democratic and input-oriented to output-based criteria of legitimation (Scharpf 1999). Yet such a development may itself be interpreted as a crisis signal. This chapter proceeds as follows. I outline the contours of a text analytical research perspective that highlights the communicative dimension and metaphorical nature of legitimation processes. The remainder of this chapter uses this analytical framework for a brief comparison of legitimation discourses and metaphor use in American and British newspapers. This empirical sketch, while no more than a preliminary snapshot, illustrates that the communicative and metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy remains, to a large extent, characterised by nationally specific features in the age of globalisation. In the conclusion, I discuss these findings and indicate where more

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elaborate research on the incidence and functions of metaphors in legitimation discourses might take us.

Metaphors and the communicative dimension of legitimacy Recent scholarly writing on the legitimacy of the democratic nation state and its presumptive crisis or transformation tends to fall into one of two groups (Barker 2001: 7–12; Peters 2005: 97–8): a ‘diagnostic’ strand that evaluates the normative acceptability – read: democratic quality – of realworld political orders (Lauth 2004) and an empirical literature that aims to measure their factual acceptance among citizens. In the empirical tradition, legitimacy is usually conceptualised as a specific form of regime support (Easton 1965: 278–88). Rather than the authorities of the day or individual policies, entire political communities and regimes with their core institutions and principles are treated as the primary objects of legitimation. And because support may be grounded in a variety of motivations, including habitual obedience and self-interested compliance based on the fear of sanctions or individual cost-benefit calculations, the mere acceptance of a regime does not yet count as legitimacy (Barker 1990: 11). A political order is legitimate if it is ‘rightful’ (Beetham 1991: 3; Gilley 2006: 501) in the eyes of its citizens – that is, in line with widely shared moral and legal principles or any other normative standards that presuppose a notion of the public good. In contrast with the diagnostic perspective, however, the empirical one treats such normative benchmarks or patterns of legitimation – the individual or collective beliefs, assessments, and justifications that underpin a system’s legitimacy – as social facts (Barker 1990: 21–6; Steffek 2003: 254). Measuring levels of support is the first and most basic task of empirical legitimacy research. How legitimate is a particular system, institution, or form of government? Is it more legitimate than others? Is support for representative democracy stable, eroding, or growing? Examining the foundations of legitimacy comes next. Why is a regime considered legitimate by its citizens? What are the sources of their legitimacy beliefs? Which criteria and arguments do they use to assess their regime and to justify these evaluations? Do the dominant patterns of legitimation vary between individuals, social groups, and political communities and have they shifted over time? The empirical literature usually draws on public opinion surveys or, less frequently, on the study of various forms of (non-)conventional political action to gauge these variables, thus concentrating on the attitudinal and behavioural dimensions of legitimacy (Almond and Verba 1963; Kaase and Newton 1995; Norris 2002). A third set of questions, which has received much less attention, shifts the perspective away from legitimacy as a state or attribute of political orders. Processes and mechanisms of legitimation are the focus of interest here. Which actors, practices, and strategies play a role in the (re-)production,

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 85 transformation, or erosion of a system’s legitimacy? How have challenges to the legitimacy of the democratic nation state been dealt with and to what effect? If there are indeed signs of a crisis, how has the erstwhile support for the institutions and principles of democratic government been undermined? If not, how has the crisis been prevented? Metaphorical concepts figure prominently in the different strands of legitimacy research. The very term ‘crisis’ may serve as example, and although the metaphor is arguably a dead one for most language users, its origin in the language of medicine – explicitly discussed by Habermas (1976) – is quite suggestive: more often than not, crisis diagnoses are based on the discovery of symptoms by academic observers – legitimacy doctors, as it were – without consideration of the patient’s subjective health – the extent to which citizens support their own political community and regime. This perspective is unproblematic as long as its diagnostic character is acknowledged. Yet, Habermas is only one of the many authors who have been criticised for confounding a diagnostic with an empirical perspective – a danger that is ever present where the source and chain metaphors of legitimacy are in heavy use, for they imply that like a river, the legitimacy of any given political order, institution, or form of government has exactly one, or at least one privileged, source; a chain of legitimation, then, ensures that all of a regime’s core institutions are connected with that source. Perhaps the equally popular erosion, deficit, and foundation metaphors are less problematic. Yet the underlying conceptualisation of legitimacy as an easily quantifiable substance or resource, a good for which there is a supply and demand (and that can be produced or consumed), or a house that may be built on more or less solid ground (and collapse), may also be linked with characteristic biases of empirical research. The two dominant empirical approaches are indeed fraught with such biases. The limitations of public opinion research are primarily related to the fact that it is a reactive and, by definition, context-insensitive method. Thus, it cannot tell us which institutions and principles respondents highlight, and which evaluative criteria they privilege, when they assess their regime as citizens, in their real-world environment, and without being prompted by the stimuli of closed question items. By the same token, the method is unlikely to shed much light on the provenance, meaning, or effects of the legitimacy beliefs that it purports to uncover (Dryzek 1988; Barker 2001). And while it has been discussed if survey indicators of trust, (dis-)affection, confidence, etc. may be interpreted as measures of legitimacy in the first place (Sniderman 1981), the ambivalence of behavioural indicators – derived from the observation of repertoires of political action that presumably indicate regime support or dissent – is even greater (Norris et al. 2006). The comparative advantage of the observational method – its reliance on natural data – is limited by the fact that one cannot assign an unequivocally legitimising or delegitimising character to most forms of political action and contention: there may be different motivations for, and hence different

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plausible interpretations of, (non-)voting, paying taxes, or joining a protest group, some indicating a system’s (il-)legitimacy and others not. Finally, which legitimation objects are targeted by these acts of support and dissent, and on the basis of which normative foundations, is not easily discerned either. Moreover, like survey research, which concentrates on ‘rightfulness “as believed” by citizens’ (Gilley 2006: 502), the observational approach is limited to a mere segment of relevant actors and forms of behaviour. The self-representations and legitimation rituals of political elites (Barker 2001) – ‘rightfulness “as claimed” by rulers’ (Gilley 2006: 502) – are neglected. Both perspectives also seem ill-suited to capture the dynamics of legitimation processes or the actors, practices, and strategies involved in them. Most importantly, and not coincidentally, the role of communication in the (re-) production of legitimacy is downplayed. In the public opinion field, the concern with language is no more than a methodological one. Where political action is observed, its non-verbal elements tend to be the focus of interest, although some of the recent literature on protest events and political claims making has paid more attention to the link between behavioural and discursive practices (Koopmans and Statham 1999). This is not only inconsistent with the normative and empirical weight that is usually given to the quality of political communication and the existence of national public spheres in the context of liberal democracy (Sarcinelli 2002; Peters 2005). It is also out of step with the constructivist turn in political science with its premise that reality is socially constructed, that the construction of reality is essentially a linguistic phenomenon, and that language, thought, and action are therefore inextricably linked. The (de-)construction of legitimacy may thus be characterised as an essentially communicative phenomenon as well (Luckmann 2001; Nullmeier 2001; Raufer 2005). Although no causal primacy of this additional dimension of legitimacy is suggested, a focus on legitimation discourses – understood as structured and rules-based products of social and communicative interaction (Keller 2004) – not only provides an important missing link between the attitudinal and behavioural dimensions of legitimacy but also between the political institutions and elites whose legitimacy is at stake and the citizens who lend or withdraw their support. Like policies and the authorities of the day, political communities and regimes are constantly assessed in the public sphere. Citizens express and develop their legitimacy beliefs, and political elites advance their self-representations, through participation in, or exposure to, this specific, legitimacy-related type of political communication. These evaluations may or may not be linked with affirmative rituals or acts of dissent. But in any case, the evaluations and self-representations of citizens and political elites have to be justified and may be contested in the media and other arenas of the public sphere. The dominant frames of reference, speaker positions, and rules of participation in this language game are built into legitimation discourses which, in

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 87 turn, may be operationalised as those segments of national political communication in which the (il-)legitimacy of regimes and their core elements is evaluated and where these assessments are justified or rejected. These discourses are, in other words, characterised by a particular discursive practice that will be called legitimation statement here. The basic elements of these statements can be translated into a stylised legitimation ‘grammar’ (Franzosi 2004): the evaluated object of legitimation, the pattern of legitimation (argument) that underpins the assessment, and finally, its supportive or critical – legitimising or delegitimising – character (see examples in Table 6.1). A focus on the communicative dimension of legitimacy, then, suggests the use of text (i.e. content or discourse) analytical methods. And it is readily apparent why the examination of figurative language in political communication should be an integral part of the outlined perspective. Metaphors are no mere rhetorical device, as the instrumental view would have it, but play a key role in the construction of social and political reality (Black 1962; Miller 1979; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Charteris-Black 2005). They have cognitive functions and thus may, for instance, simplify or condense reality, hide some aspects of it and highlight others or give a particular meaning to them. But their potential role in diagnostic framing and consensus mobilisation (Snow and Benford 1989) is even more germane here. Couching legitimation statements in figurative language might strengthen their underlying interpretations, causal attributions, and normative orientations and hence create or preclude opportunities of (discursive) action. The evaluations and arguments of legitimisers and delegitimisers are likely to have ‘elective affinities’ with specific conceptual metaphors, and these might serve as key resources in the communicative (de-)construction of legitimacy. As long as a system’s legitimacy is stable, the frames and Table 6.1 The ‘grammar’ of legitimation statements Example 1: ‘The people and their representatives have been sent to the sidelines by the courts, and that’s not right’ (Washington Post 2004: 6 February, Michael Powell, ‘Battle Over Gay-Marriage Ruling Begins to Take Shape’). Translation: ‘The judicial branch [object of legitimation] is illegitimate [evaluation] because it undermines popular sovereignty [pattern of legitimation].’ Metaphor: Sports/game. Example 2: ‘One of the strengths of our democracy is that [. . .] breaches are open to scrutiny, that we can learn quickly from them, and nothing is swept under the carpet’ (The Times 2004: 11 May, Stewart Tendler, ‘Trespass on Royal Turf May Become a Crime’). Translation: ‘Democracy [object of legitimation] is legitimate [evaluation] because it ensures open/transparent government [pattern of legitimation].’ Metaphor: Cleaning/dirt.

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(conventional) metaphors of the legitimising discourse coalition are likely to resonate more strongly with its political culture than the metaphors of delegitimisers. The challengers of a system’s legitimacy and its foundations may, in turn, reinterpret ‘authorised’ metaphors or use innovative metaphors to contest the dominant master frames of legitimation discourses.

Some empirical illustrations A text corpus originally established for a project comparing legitimation discourses in four western democracies – Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States – provides the basis for the following exploration of metaphorical language in this type of political communication (Hurrelmann et al. 2005; Schneider et al. 2006; Wiesner et al. 2006). Here I restrict myself to the two Anglo-Saxon nations. The corpus is made up of articles published in British (Guardian and The Times) and American newspapers (Washington Post and New York Times), in 2004, that contained at least one legitimation statement. Six hundred and ninety-seven statements were identified in the British papers. A sample of equal size was drawn from more than 1,200 American statements. In the next step, the core elements of our legitimation ‘grammar’ were coded. Table 6.2 summarises the frequency distributions of these variables. Despite the considerable discursive exchange between the two Englishspeaking nations, and despite a set of issues (the occupation of Iraq, the ‘war on terror’) that dominated the media agenda in both countries, marked differences in the structures of national legitimation discourses are readily apparent. Delegitimising statements greatly outweigh legitimising ones in Britain while the picture is balanced, even with a slight preponderance of supportive communication, in the United States. It seems implausible to attribute this finding to a more pronounced negative bias of the British papers alone. Instead, one may suspect that the British system of government was indeed more strongly challenged, in 2004, than its American counterpart. Turning to four broad categories of legitimation objects first, we see that the majority of legitimation statements in both countries, and especially in the United States, tend to be formulated at a high level of ‘generalisation’. They evaluate the whole regime or political community (‘the United States’ and ‘the British people’), without further specification, or the elements of the democratic nation state – including the rule of law, constitutionalism, and welfare provision – in its American and British variant. Assessments of single political institutions (for instance, the three branches of government, federalism, or the electoral system) and key groups of actors (the political class/elites and the party system) are much less frequent. Yet while this last category – whose evaluation should be most strongly influenced by evaluations of the authorities of the day (President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and so on) – bears the brunt of criticism in each of the two nations, all object

27.8 37.3 24.7 10.2 100.0 Regime Political community Political class Democracy Constitution Welfare state 43.6 8.6 15.6 21.5 100.0a Human rights Credibility Popular sovereignty Accountability Effectiveness Tradition N = 697

61.3 65.0 67.4 88.7 67.0 70.1 50.0 89.8 67.2 67.2 61.5 75.3 71.7 43.1 66.0 67.0 46.2 97.4 57.7 80.3 67.4 76.7

% delegitimation 14.8 64.7 13.5 7.0 100.0 Regime Political community Democracy Electoral system Constitution Political class 28.0 9.3 17.8 28.3 100.0a Human rights Morality Effectiveness International standing Moderation Distributive justice N = 697

■ % of total

United States

Note a The percentage shares of ‘general’ legitimation statements (that are not linked with a specific pattern) are omitted.

. . . most frequently used patterns, in rank order

Democratic input Non-democratic input Democratic output Non-democratic output

. . . most frequently evaluated objects, in rank order

Democratic nation state Regime/political community Core institutions Actor groups

% of total

Britain

Table 6.2 Objects and patterns of (de-)legitimation, by country

45.6 37.7 68.1 87.8 46.5 36.3 46.0 45.5 80.0 42.1 95.8 52.8 66.2 19.4 51.8 46.5 17.7 57.4 57.1 86.2 93.1 40.0

% delegitimation

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categories are more often delegitimised than legitimised in Britain. In the United States, by contrast, this is only true for individual actor groups and political institutions but not for the (democratic) system or political community as a whole. A similar picture emerges when the most frequently assessed individual legitimation objects are considered. Five out of six are the same in Britain and the United States, and three even have the same rank. Only the political community escapes the pronounced criticism that meets the core institutions and actor groups of the British system of government. In the United States, on the other hand, only the electoral system – under increased scrutiny since the Bush v. Gore fiasco of 2000 – and the political class suffer from a preponderance of negative evaluations. The bottom half of the table presents the corresponding figures for patterns of legitimation, again beginning with four aggregate categories of evaluation standards. In Britain, democratic input criteria (like popular sovereignty, accountability, and responsiveness) dominate, followed at a distance by non-democratic output criteria (effectiveness, etc.). In the United States, a bit more than one quarter of the statements use democratic input and non-democratic output criteria, respectively. And while non-democratic input criteria (religious authority, charismatic leadership, and so on) play a marginal role in both nations, a considerable number of democratic legitimation patterns are output-based. The list of the most frequently used individual patterns underlines this point: the protection of human and civil rights – a democratic output criterion – plays an important role in legitimising communication. In Britain, it is the only criterion that is used more often in affirmative than in critical statements. Dissatisfaction with various features of the country’s Westminster system, compounded by the political scandals of the year 2004, was arguably responsible for the prominence of delegitimising communication drawing on evaluative standards like credibility, accountability, and popular sovereignty. In a system of government that concentrates power as much as the British one, their frequent use in delegitimising statements hardly comes as a surprise. But even effectiveness – a presumptive strength of the Westminster system – and tradition are more often than not linked with critical assessments. In the United States, on the other hand, the link between regime support and the human rights criterion is even more pronounced than in Britain, and the criterion of distributive justice (somewhat counter-intuitively) tilts in the affirmative direction, too. The negative orientation of the other patterns may, to a large extent, be linked with events in 2004: the electoral campaign brought about a fair amount of legitimation statements criticising all-out party competition – that is, a lack of moderation in the political sphere. The questioning of American moral authority and concern about the international standing of the United States was often triggered by the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and related foreign policy issues.

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 91 These data, then, are suggestive of nationally specific legitimation styles. Two questions arise that cannot be pursued here. First, do the identified national variations stem from differences in institutional arrangements, political cultures, and traditions of democratic thought? Are parliamentary and presidential democracy, or unitary and federal systems, tied to characteristic normative standards and value orientations and are these reflected in the hegemonic interpretive and diagnostic frames of national legitimation discourses? If so, the identified variations should be relatively stable. Or can the differences be explained by pointing to mere short-term fluctuations in issue and legitimation attention cycles (Downs 1972), the different political agendas, issues, and events that caught the American and British media’s attention in 2004? And finally, do the presented figures reflect some longterm trend, such as a globalisation-induced crisis or transformation of legitimacy? Instead of pursuing these questions further, I now turn to an exploratory analysis of metaphor use in the two national legitimation discourses. The tentative nature of the analysis must be underlined: the fuzziness of metaphors – what exactly constitutes a (live or dead and conventional or innovative) metaphor and how can different metaphorical concepts and fields be properly distinguished from each other? – raises methodological issues that this chapter solves in a ‘quick and dirty’ fashion, and no extensive discussion of these issues can be provided here (Schmitt 2003; Charteris-Black 2004). For each text in the corpus (that is, each paragraph containing one or more legitimation statements), the (non-)occurrence of a range of metaphorical concepts was examined and coded (see examples in Table 6.1 above). The list of concepts was established on the basis of extant literature on political metaphors (Rigotti 1994; Beer and De Landtsheer 2004: 19–21) and a first browsing of my own material. While an ‘other’ category was initially provided for, it turned out that the vast majority of metaphors could be assigned to one of the fields suggested by the literature. Only metaphors of a clearly lexicalised nature were ignored, and a given metaphorical expression could be assigned to more than one category. Both coding rules of course lead to a somewhat inflated picture of metaphor use in our corpus, and data presented below should be read with this in mind. First, the frequency of metaphor use in the two national legitimation discourses was compared. The average number of metaphorical expressions per text (paragraph) can serve as a rough index of ‘metaphoricity’, although the analytical mileage of this index is somewhat limited: That metaphorical language is indeed used rather frequently – about 2.5 metaphorical expressions per case were identified – is unsurprising, especially given the low threshold used in the coding of the material. Many of the legitimation statements are linked with remarkably elaborate combinations of metaphors, though, often creatively extending conventional metaphors or advancing innovative ones. The American ‘metaphoricity’ index is slightly above and the one for Britain slightly below average. But we lack comparable data for other segments of

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political communication, and as some of the examples cited below suggest, figurative language in the United States may not so much characterised by a particularly high number of metaphors per textual unit than by the ‘exceptional’ quality of some of the metaphors used (all quotations below are from the electronic versions of articles, and hence no page numbers are given). Table 6.3 shows the relative importance of metaphorical fields. Once again, four broad categories were distinguished. The first reunites metaphors with the ‘animate world’ as source, notably including human body metaphors (linking a political target domain with body parts and functions) and biology/medicine metaphors (linking it with evolution, the stages of the life cycle, health and diseases, mental disorders, etc.). These are, for instance, used in claims that ‘a spreading cancer of dishonesty [. . .] has corrupted large parts of the British state’ (Guardian 2004: 3 May, ‘Editorial’) or that ‘we are fortunate to have a living, breathing legal system’ (The Times 2004: 21 February, ‘Law and Lore’). Similarly, we find the United States referred to – by Noam Chomsky in the Washington Post (2004: 9 May, Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘Pox Americana’) – as ‘odious, immoral, drunk on its own wild ambitions’, while others – like President Bush in the New York Times (2004: 2 July, Richard W. Stevenson, ‘Bush Marks Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act’) – see ‘the laws [. . .] and the good heart of this nation [. . .] on the side of equality’. This group also contains animal and plant metaphors which, however, turn out to be very infrequent, despite their important role in ‘classics’ of political writing (Rigotti 1994). In one of the few examples, we learn that ‘even a well-managed welfare state is a competitive albatross in an age of globalization’ (New York Times 2004: 12 August, Christopher Caldwell, ‘While the Politicians Fiddle, America Goes Broke’). And extraterrestrial life forms, too, may become the source domain of metaphorical legitimation statements: To the extent that the courts do have a leading role, it is perfectly natural. Gay marriage opponents like to portray judges as alien beings, [. . .]. Courts are supposed to give life to phrases like ‘equal protection’ and ‘due process’ (New York Times 2004: 7 March, ‘The Road to Gay Marriage’) The second category merges Lakoff and Johnson’s orientational and spatial metaphors with more elaborate travel and (im-)mobility metaphors. Here we find the statement that the American Constitution gives the people ‘room to decide and leeway to make mistakes’ (Washington Post 2004: 23 November, E.J. Dionne, ‘Talking Sense on Court Choices’) almost next to a poetic complaint about ‘destabilized/democratic spaces/closed foreclosed/ nation’ (New York Times 2004: 21 November, Stephen Burt, ‘Happy as Two Blue-Plate Specials’). In Britain, one of the few identified nautical metaphors – pointing to the ‘casting adrift of democratic politics from its anchor in

Animate world Orientational/spatial Inanimate world Social interaction . . . most frequent metaphorical fields, in rank order

39.7 42.6 38.7 39.3 Natural forces Human body Biology/medicine Travel/mobility Business/market War/military Architecture/building Technology/machine Arts/entertainment Religion Family/household Day/night N = 697

% of total

Britain

Table 6.3 (Groups of) metaphorical fields, by country

71.8 64.6 64.4 62.4 64.1 66.7 74.2 64.3 66.7 57.3 55.1 63.2 67.4 62.2 62.2 71.4 67.0

% delegitimation 43.8 49.6 43.9 39.6 Natural forces Biology/medicine Human body Travel/mobility War/military Architecture/building Religion Business/market Technology/machine Cleaning/dirt Sports/game Crime N = 697

■% of total

United States

50.0 49.9 44.8 50.0 43.3 65.7 42.3 44.2 50.0 39.5 35.0 53.0 59.3 60.0 54.5 68.8 46.5

% delegitimation

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rational argument’ (The Times 2004: 4 September, Roger Scruton, ‘Dumb and Dumber’) – or the praise of ‘[m]onarchy [as] the route to mysticism, the backbone of history’ (The Times 2004: 22 May, Roger Boyes, ‘Europe’s Royals Learn to Apply Common Touch’) may serve as examples. The third group reunites metaphors with the ‘inanimate world’ as source domain. It notably comprises metaphors with natural forces and phenomena, technology and machines, architecture and buildings as source domains. A complaint about ‘the glacial pace of our legal system’ (The Times 2004: 26 October, Martin Waller, ‘Judge Dread’) or criticism of ‘Washington’s fog of secrecy’ (New York Times 2004: 26 August, Trent Lott and Ron Wyden, ‘Hiding the Truth in a Cloud of Black Ink’) may, for instance, be cited here. For technology/machine metaphors, consider the suggestion that ‘[o]ur stagnant first-past-the-post electoral system has no escape valves for pent-up frustration’ (Guardian 2004: 9 June, ‘Would-Be Voters Need to Get a Grip on Reality’) or the depiction of ‘America as the New World’s Engine of Ideas’ (New York Times 2004: 6 June, Roger Cohen, ‘France Says, Love the U.S., Hate Its Chief’), for architecture/building metaphor references to British democracy as ‘the castle of our values and our freedoms’ (The Times 2004: 20 March, A.C. Grayling, ‘The Reason of Things’) and the Christian Right’s pious hope that ‘the American government [is] founded on divine authority rather than human reason’ (New York Times 2004: 8 January, Susan Jacoby, ‘One Nation, Under Securalism’). Finally, social relationships and phenomena (in a narrower or wider sense) as source domains are joined together in our fourth category: family/household (and cleaning/dirt), sports/games, arts/entertainment, business/market, crime, and war/military metaphors. Thus, one finds references to the state as ‘an extended family’ (The Times 2004: 26 November, Nicole Woolcock, ‘It’s No Nanny State More an Extended Family, Minister Says’) or a ‘nanny’ (The Times 2004: 2 January, Tessa Jowell, ‘In Our Interest, Learn to Love the Nanny State’) and to ‘the culture of secrecy [that] has lingered under Whitehall’s floorboards like a bad case of dry rot in a venerable stately home’ (Guardian 2004: 22 March, ‘Your Right to Know: The Guardian’s Victory in the High Court Last Week’). Interestingly, the notion that democratic government is messy is frequently tied to legitimising statements like this: Yesterday’s scenes were a small but salutary reminder that law-making in a democracy will always be messy. It would suit the professionals if it was a cerebral business conducted by experts for experts. But democracy means that worldly interests must be balanced too. In the end, sawdust and greasepaint have their place. This is the unignorable role of politics. With all its faults, it is what guarantees that the most carefully refined law-making process nevertheless remains rooted in the fibre of life, argument and conflict. (Guardian 2004: 15 December, ‘Parliament: Constructive Chaos’)

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 95 Business/market metaphors refer to the ‘exercise of reasoned judgment that is the currency of our judicial system’ (New York Times 2004: 18 April, Linda Greenhouse, ‘The Imperial Presidency and the Constraint of the Law’) or attack – in Ralph Nader’s words – ‘the “duopoly” that makes Washington’s corporate-occupied territory’ (New York Times 2004: 7 March, Michael Janofsky, ‘Nader Presses on’). Sports/games metaphors frame democracy as ‘a kind of consumer good and spectator sport’ (New York Times 2004: 26 October, Todd S. Purdum, ‘The Year of Passion’), and ‘the dangerous thinning of the NFL talent pool’ is qualified as ‘a problem not totally unknown to the world of presidential politics’ (Washington Post 2004: 19 August, Jonathan Yardley, ‘Halftime for Gonzo’). The following two statements draw on arts/entertainment (theatre and music) metaphors: We have a system, a kind of ritual, for electing our representatives in Britain; we have done it this way for a long time; it contains an element of theatre – curtain up, roll of the kettledrums, cast vote, count votes, cue returning officer, cheer, boo, curtain down. It is straightforward; people understand it; and millions do take part. Let those who opt out enjoy that luxury: they will opt back in soon enough when it matters. In our anxiety to pursue the truants, we are in danger of losing the stage, losing the curtain and losing the plot. (The Times 2004: 29 May, Matthew Parris, ‘The Ritual of the Polling Booth is Vital to Healthy Democracy’) British politics [. . .] has lost its soul is out of sync with the popular vibe; disharmony is the inevitable result. Fewer people are voting while more are marching than ever before, and the political class are as welcome on the public stage as Engelbert’s elevator muzak at a Sam and Dave revival convention (Guardian 2004: 27 January, ‘Respect – I’ve Gotta Have It: Matters of Dispute’). Turning to crime and war/military metaphors, rapper Ice Cube evaluates the United States as a ‘Gangsta nation’ (New York Times 2004: 1 February, Robert Levine, ‘The Thawing of Ice Cube’), and the The Times (2004: 21 January, Alice Miles, ‘When the Cold Hand of the State Rocks the Cradle’) complains about ‘strangulation by the state’. Finally, while the American practice of democratic government is decried as ‘a take-no-prisoners culture war’ (Washington Post 2004: 28 August, Edwin M. Yoder, ‘Southern Leaders, Texan Presidents and the Rapid Voice of Dissent’), a commentator in the The Times (2004: 22 December, Simon Jenkins, ‘I Never Thought I’d Say This, But Thank You to the Lords, the Libs and the Law’) remarks that ‘[t]he three strongest bulwarks against the abuse of state power in Britain are three institutions I most often deride: the law, the Liberal Democrats and the House of Lords’. The impression to be gleaned from the data in Table 6.3 is, again rather unsurprisingly, that these broad metaphorical fields are all but ubiquitous in

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legitimation discourses (and undoubtedly in other segments of political communication and everyday language, too). Remarkably, similar percentages of the material contain metaphors from each of these groups in the two countries and the shares of delegitimising communication linked with the four metaphorical fields are similar as well. Some variations become apparent when subcategories are considered, although they are, again, quite marginal. Each of the first four subcategories, and the same in both countries, may be found in roughly 15–25 per cent of our cases. Each of the next four was identified in about 10 per cent of the cases, and the last four in roughly 5 per cent. Few of these metaphorical concepts have a markedly different rank order in Britain and the United States – religious metaphors, for instance – or show up among the most frequent concepts in only one of the two countries. This last group is perhaps the best example for the use of particular metaphors as legitimising discursive resources, especially in the United States, where religious metaphors are often linked with a metaphorical imagery of day and night or light and dark – America as a shining ‘city on a hill’. Even the backdrop of the Abu Ghraib scandal may, then, be used for a powerful affirmation of legitimacy – in the words of Donald Rumsfeld: Ask them if the willingness of Americans to acknowledge their own failures before humanity doesn’t light the world as surely as the great ideas and beliefs that made this nation a beacon of hope and liberty for all who strive to be free (New York Times 2004: 8 May, ‘ “My Deepest Apology” From Rumsfeld’) There is hardly an equivalent in the British material for (explicitly or implicitly) religious and powerfully legitimising claims like the one that ‘America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope’, one expressed in Bob Dylan’s words as ‘freedom just around the corner’ (New York Times 2004: 28 March, Gordon S. Wood, ‘Free to Be You’), or in Kris Kristofferson’s words: ‘The source of the American River [. . .] is the pure, clean dream of Freedom, and Justice and Mercy’ (Washington Post 2004: 19 September, ‘Elias’s “River”: A Simple But Satisfying Flow’). Are some metaphorical concepts more strongly associated with delegitimising legitimation statements? In Britain, such effects are weak. Architecture/building metaphors are most likely to appear in the context of legitimising communication; biology/medicine metaphors are usually employed in the context of negative evaluations. In the United States, on the other hand, these ‘elective affinities’ are more pronounced, with religious and architecture/building metaphors on the affirmative and cleaning/dirt, biology/medicine, and crime metaphors on the critical end of the spectrum. Finally, I explored the scope and nature of ‘elective affinities’ between

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 97 objects and patterns of legitimation on the one hand and metaphorical concepts on the other. Such ‘affinities’ might, for instance, be expected between ‘conservative’ patterns of legitimation (tradition, religious authority, and morality) and the ‘organic’ metaphors that have been shown to be typical for conservative political speech or between the efficiency and effectiveness patterns and business/market or technology/machine metaphors. A simple check of such ‘affinities’ is offered in Table 6.4. For each of our four object and pattern categories, the ratio of its share in a particular metaphor category and its overall share in the corpus is calculated. A value greater than 1, then, indicates that the specific object or pattern of legitimation is overrepresented in the metaphor category and one below 1 indicates the opposite. The values 0.5 and 1.5 were used as thresholds for ‘significant’ over- and under-representation. Turning to objects first, we see that in Britain, there are only a few such ‘affinities’. The democratic nation state is particularly often evaluated in the context of family/household and sports/games metaphors. The predominantly negative evaluations of actor groups, on the other hand, are frequently couched in the language of biology/medicine and crime metaphors. In the United States, characteristic pairings between object categories and metaphorical fields are mostly found with regard to core institutions and actor groups. Here, too, the metaphorical imagery of biology/medicine, crime, and dirt serves a largely delegitimising purpose while business/market and sports/games metaphors help shed a more favourable light on institutions and actor groups. Finally, the most remarkable finding about patterns is the association of cleaning/dirt, sports/games, and arts/entertainment metaphors with non-democratic input criteria in Britain and with democratic input criteria in the United States. While an explanation of this finding must await another day, it appears safe to conclude that most metaphorical concepts may be combined quite ‘flexibly’ with objects and patterns of legitimation.

Conclusion This chapter made the case for a perspective on empirical legitimacy that pays more attention than extant approaches to the role of communication in the (de-)legitimation of political orders. The study of national legitimation discourses promises to shed additional light on the contours, foundations, and meaning of legitimacy beliefs (as examined by public opinion research) or acts of support and dissent (as observed by research on [non-]conventional political behaviour). Moreover, the study of discursive mechanisms, practices, and strategies is arguably a crucial element of research into legitimation processes. A full exploration of the research agenda sketched here was beyond the scope of this chapter. One might, for instance, want to analyse discourses in other arenas (the academic or political sphere) and types of media (the

1.19 1.29 0.57 1.65 1.80

1.34 1.00 0.84 1.03 1.27 1.35 0.64 1.23 1.95 0.66

Britain Biology/medicine Cleaning/dirt Crime Family/household Sports/game

United States Architecture/building Arts/entertainment Biology/medicine Business/market Crime Cleaning/dirt Day/night Sports/game Technology/machine Travel/mobility

Democratic nation state

1.03 0.69 0.91 0.91 0.68 0.68 0.92 0.42 0.73 0.96

0.69 1.29 1.13 0.80 0.96

Regime/political community

0.82 2.47 1.19 0.33 1.85 1.70 1.62 2.92 1.13 1.57

0.91 0.65 1.06 0.66 0.59

Core institutions

Table 6.4 Elective affinities between objects and patterns of legitimation, and metaphorical fields, by country

0.36 1.06 1.77 3.03 1.79 1.63 1.34 2.17 1.21 1.01

1.81 0 1.55 0.79 0

Actor groups

1.20 0.91 1.28 1.64 1.05 0.33 0.98

1.72 1.63 1.45 1.79 1.63

Britain Arts/entertainment Business/market Cleaning/dirt Day/night Family/household Sports/game War/military

United States Arts/entertainment Cleaning/dirt Crime Family/household Sports/game

Democratic input

0.40 0.61 1.34 0 0.98

1.51 0.44 2.33 0.34 0.63 2.49 0.78

Non-democratic input

0.62 0.48 0.53 1.06 0.34

0.42 1.15 0 0.73 1.56 0.92 1.20

Democratic output

0.65 1.01 0.44 0.88 0.54

0.81 1.61 0.74 0.53 0.50 1.66 0.87

Non-democratic output

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tabloid press and television) than the ones examined here. And a thorough study of discursive mechanisms would require us to combine the quantitative, content analytical approach used in this chapter with interpretive, discourse analytical methods. The few descriptive inferences presented in this chapter merely served to make the point that legitimation discourses are indeed characterised, to some extent, by nationally specific and historically contingent features. Differences in institutional arrangements, political cultures, and democratic thought as well as short-term influences are likely to play a role in their explanation. Thus, we saw that discourses in Britain and the United States highlight distinct sets of legitimation objects. Some are the focus of critical assessments while others appear in a more positive light. And in both countries, legitimation statements draw on a wide range of democratic and nondemocratic patterns of input and output legitimation. Even the legitimacy of the democratic nation state does, in other words, not only rely on the normative benchmarks privileged by democratic theory, although these continue to figure prominently in legitimation discourses. Overall, the American system of government appears to be more robust – that is, less vulnerable to charges of illegitimacy – than its British counterpart. The hypothesis of a pervasive, globalisation-induced crisis or transformation of democratic legitimacy may, then, have to be qualified. The cursory examination of metaphor use in the analysed text corpus showed that legitimation statements are frequently underpinned by, or expressed in, figurative language. Both national legitimation discourses – and the statements of legitimisers and delegitimisers alike – heavily use a set of metaphors. Yet the data presented above suggest that there are at least some of the hypothesised peculiarities of metaphor use in Britain and the United States, as well as nationally specific ‘elective affinities’ with objects and patterns of legitimation. More research – and a closer look at the contexts of national legitimation discourses – is needed to elucidate the workings and functions of discursive mechanisms or (legitimising and delegitimising) strategies that involve (conventional or innovative) metaphors, or to substantiate their role as discursive resources. But we may already speculate that the apparent legitimacy gap between the American and British political orders is linked with the divergent supply and use of metaphorical imagery.

References Almond, G.A. and Verba, S. (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barker, R. (1990) Political Legitimacy and the State, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barker, R. (2001) Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentation of Rulers and Subjects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beer, F.A. and De Landtsheer, C. (eds) (2004) Metaphorical World Politics, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Metaphorical (de-)construction of legitimacy 101 Beetham, D. (1991) The Legitimation of Power, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, Houndmills, NY: Palgrave. Charteris-Black, J. (2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Pervasive Power of Metaphor, Houndmills, NY: Palgrave. Dalton, R.J. (2004) Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Downs, A. (1972) ‘Up and Down with Ecology: The Issue Attention Cycle’, Public Interest, 28: 38–50. Dryzek, J.S. (1988) ‘The Mismeasure of Political Man’, Journal of Politics, 50: 705–25. Easton, D. (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life, New York: John Wiley. Franzosi, R. (2004) From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilley, B. (2006) ‘The Determinants of State Legitimacy: Results for 72 Countries’, International Political Science Review, 27: 47–71. Guardian (2004) Corpus of legitimacy-relevant articles (electronic versions, as provided by Factiva), on file with author. Habermas, J. (1976) Legitimation Crisis, London: Heinemann. Hurrelmann, A., Krell-Laluhová, Z., Lhotta, R., Nullmeier, F. and Wiesner, A. (2005) ‘Is There a Legitimation Crisis of the Nation State?’ in S. Leibfried and M. Zürn (eds) Transformations of the State? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaase, M. and Newton, K. (eds) (1995) Beliefs in Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keller, R. (2004) Diskursanalyse: Eine Einführung für SozialwissenschaftlerInnen, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Koopmans, R. and Statham, P. (1999) ‘Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches’, Mobilization, 4: 203–22. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Lauth, H.-J. (2004) Demokratie und Demokratiemessung: Eine konzeptionelle Grundlegung für den interkulturellen Vergleich, Wiesbaden: VS. Luckmann, T. (2001) ‘Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem der Legitimation’, in C. Bohn and H. Willems (eds) Sinngeneratoren: Fremd- und Selbstthematisierung in soziologisch-historischer Perspektive, Konstanz: UVK. Miller, E.F. (1979) ‘Metaphor and Political Knowledge’, American Political Science Review, 73: 155–70. New York Times (2004) Corpus of legitimacy-relevant articles (electronic versions, as provided by Factiva), on file with author. Norris, P. (2002) Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, P., Walgrave, S. and van Aelst, P. (2006) ‘Does Protest Signify Disaffection? Demonstrators in a Postindustrial Democracy’, in M. Torcal and J.R. Montero (eds) Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies: Social Capital, Institutions, and Politics, London: Routledge. Nullmeier, F. (2001) ‘Politikwissenschaft auf dem Weg zur Diskursanalyse?’ in R. Keller (ed.) Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse, vol. 1: Theorien und Methoden, Opladen: Leske and Budrich.

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Nye, J.S., Zelikow, P.D. and King, D.C. (eds) (1998) Why People Don’t Trust Government, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peters, B. (2005) ‘Public Discourse, Identity and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy’, in E.O. Eriksen (ed.) Making the European Polity: Reflexive Integration in the EU, London: Routledge. Pharr, S.J. and Putnam, R.D. (eds) (2000) Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raufer, T. (2005) Die legitime Demokratie: Zur Begründung politischer Ordnung in der Bundesrepublik, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Rigotti, F. (1994) Die Macht und ihre Metaphern: Über die sprachlichen Bilder der Politik, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Sarcinelli, U. (2002) ‘Legitimität’, in O. Jarren, U. Sarcinelli and U. Saxer (eds) Politische Kommunikation in der demokratischen Gesellschaft, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Scharpf, F.W. (1999) Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmitt, R. (2003) ‘Methode und Subjektivität in der Systematischen Metaphernanalyse’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 4: 3. Schneider, S., Nullmeier, F., Lhotta, R., Krell-Laluhová, Z. and Hurrelmann, A. (2006) ‘Legitimationskrise nationalstaatlicher Demokratien?’ in S. Leibfried and M. Zürn (eds) Transformationen des Staates? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sniderman, P.M. (1981) A Question of Loyalty, Berkeley: University of California Press. Snow, D.A. and Benford, R.D. (1989) ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization’, in B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi and S. Tarrow (eds) From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures, Greenwich, CT: JAI. Steffek, J. (2003) ‘The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse Approach’, European Journal of International Relations, 9: 249–75. The Times (2004) Corpus of legitimacy-relevant articles (electronic versions, as provided by Factiva), on file with author. Washington Post (2004) Corpus of legitimacy-relevant articles (electronic versions, as provided by Factiva), on file with author. Wiesner, A., Schneider, S., Nullmeier, F., Krell-Laluhová, Z. and Hurrelmann, A. (2006) ‘Legalität und Legitimität – erneut betrachtet’, in M. Becker and R. Zimmerling (eds) Politik und Recht, Wiesbaden: VS. Zürn, M. (2004) ‘Global Governance and Legitimacy Problems’, in M. KoenigArchibugi, D. Held and M. Zuran (eds) Global Governance and Public Accountability, Oxford: Blackwell.

Part III

Europe

7

Identifying and assessing metaphors Discourse on EU reform Petr Drulák

The analysis of metaphors has been providing an increasingly popular tool of international political analysis since the early 1990s (e.g. Chilton and Ilyin 1993; Lakoff 1993; Chilton and Lakoff 1995; Musolff 1995; Schäffner 1995; Chilton 1996; Milliken 1996; Hülsse 2003; Beer and De Landtsheer 2004; Luoma-aho 2004; Drulák 2006a). However, as Hülsse (2003: 43–8) convincingly argues, the metaphorical study of international politics remains underdeveloped methodologically. This is connected with the fact that analysis of metaphors, as a part of discourse oriented approaches, has been mainly practised by interpretivist students of international politics who tend to be sceptical about the positivist emphasis on the use of well-defined methodology as a guarantee for gaining objective knowledge. This scepticism was beneficial to the extent that it undermined the positivist obsession with quantitative methods; however, it was detrimental to the extent that it discouraged a deeper methodological debate among interpretivists. This weakness has recently been acknowledged and a more rigorous methodological underpinning of political discourse analysis has been called for (Milliken 2001). This chapter addresses this lacuna by suggesting a method by which metaphors of international political discourse can be researched. The method draws on the methodological reflection on metaphor in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993; Jäkel 1997; Verboven 2003) and applied linguistics (Cameron and Low 1999) as well as on methodological insights provided by the study of metaphors of international politics and European integration (Chilton 1996; Hülsse 2003) and on my previous work in this area (Drulák 2004, 2006a, 2006b). The method is presented as a sequence of steps whereby each step is first outlined in the abstract and then applied empirically, examining the metaphors in the recent debate on the European Union (EU) reform. This method tries to identify and to assess the significance of all relevant conceptual metaphors within the chosen area of international interactions. Its goals differ from the ones of alternative methods which focus on a single conceptual metaphor examining its impact on a particular area of international relations (IRs) (Schäffner 1995). The method uses conceptual

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metaphors as tools of analysis of both political structures and agents. First, it tries to figure out which conceptual metaphors are widely shared among the discourse participants. These metaphors represent the discursive structures which facilitate those political actions being embedded within them while constraining the actions which lack this embeddedness. Second, the record of the metaphor usage by particular agents provides insights into their political agendas. On this basis, a variety of descriptive inferences (King et al. 1994) can be made concerning the qualitative states of structure or particular agents. These inferences may be research goals in themselves or they can represent an intermediate step towards the causal inference based on other methods. Before presenting the method, the concept of metaphor needs to be briefly introduced. The method is based on qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis (Deignan 1999; Charteris-Black 2004) largely relying on the cognitivist conceptualisation of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). The cognitivist approach develops on a common sense definition of metaphors as devices for ‘seeing something in terms of something else’ (Burke 1945: 503, quoted in Cameron 1999a: 13) to present metaphor as a necessary condition of our thinking and speaking (see the chapters by Fridolfsson, Honohan, Mottier and Ringmar in this volume). Whenever we try to understand unfamiliar things by linking them with familiar things, we rely on metaphors. In this respect, metaphors guide our thinking without us often being aware of them. Their examination may therefore reveal hidden structural conditions which shape the imagination of social actors. This examination is facilitated by the methodological distinction between conceptual metaphors and metaphorical expressions. The conceptual metaphor is an abstract connection between two conceptual domains (e.g. STATES ARE PERSONS) which makes us apply what we know about source domain (PERSONS) to target domain (STATES) (Lakoff 1993: 208–9). In contrast, metaphorical expressions are concrete statements which can be found in actual discourse and which exemplify conceptual metaphors. Thus, there is a variety of metaphorical expressions relying on the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE PERSONS such as ‘United States of America acted decisively’ or ‘Iraq threatened its neighbors’ (as only persons can act or threaten someone). This key methodological distinction provides a valuable link between general (conceptual metaphor) and particular (metaphorical expression), facilitating both the operationalisation of abstract models to the level of concrete statements and the generalisation of empirical findings.

Methodological framework As argued, explicit methodological considerations are quite rare in the metaphorical study of international politics. On the other hand, a lot of useful guidelines can be found in the literature on cognitive and applied linguistics. The twelve-step methodological blueprint which was suggested by

Identifying and assessing metaphors 107 the German cognitive linguist Jäkel is a good starting point in this respect (Jäkel 1997: 153–70; Verboven 2003: 23–5). After introducing and revising this approach, I suggest a series of seven methodological steps which can guide the research. Jäkel suggests to start with the choice of a discursive target domain which should be studied (1). Having made this choice researcher is advised to collect the corpus concerning the target domain (2) and to search for all relevant metaphorical expressions (3). After this, conventional metaphors need to be distinguished from idiosyncratic ones as the analysis should address only conventional metaphorical expressions (4). These expressions should then be classified according to the source domains to which they refer (5). On this basis, conceptual metaphors can be identified (6). Following this, a corpus search for metaphorical expressions should be repeated, but this time, the search is informed by the conceptual metaphors which provide a guide for what to look for (7). This new search may bring about a modification of the conceptual metaphors (8). These conceptual metaphors need to be analysed and systemised with respect to metaphorical expressions (9), and internal coherence and connections within single conceptual metaphors need to be checked (10). Finally, the researcher is advised to identify competing conceptual metaphors for the chosen target domain (11) and to analyse the features which are emphasised by each of the conceptual metaphors (12). These twelve steps provide us with a sound methodological advice which can be followed by a variety of research programmes. However, it is still underdeveloped in four respects at least. First, the choice of the target domain is connected with the choice of the speech community whose discourse is to be analysed. Therefore, the concept of the speech community needs to be addressed. Second, conceptual metaphors can also be identified deductively on the basis of the theoretical reflection of the target domain. Both the inductive way (drawing on metaphorical expressions) and the deductive way should interact. Third, conceptual metaphors alternative to the ones which prevail in the discourse need to be addressed as they present a possibility of a radical discursive change. Therefore, idiosyncratic metaphors should not be dismissed (third step), and the search for competing metaphors should come at an earlier stage (currently the last but one step). Fourth, even though the qualitative evaluation of metaphors is fundamental, quantitative evaluation, based on their frequency, is also in order. In particular, as the size of the corpus grows, so does the analytical contribution of quantitative analysis. On this basis, I suggest following methodological steps which include the above twelve steps while also reflecting on the suggestions for revision: choice of the target domain and of the speech community, corpus collection and deduction of conceptual metaphors, search for metaphorical expressions, revision of conceptual metaphors, establishment of frequencies, comparison of distinct discursive segments and elaboration of practical implications. Below, each of these steps is developed and explained. The scope of this

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chapter does not allow for a detailed empirical application of the outlined method. However, referring to my previous work on the discourse about the EU reform (Drulák 2006a), I present some results of the application of the respective methodological steps.

Target domain and speech community The identification of the target domain is an obvious start of the research. It consists in the delimitation of the phenomenon in which we are interested and the metaphors which we are about to examine. The target domain tells us what we should look for in the discourse. The area of IR offers an unlimited variety of possible targets such as specific international actors [e.g. United States of America, United Nations (UN), EU, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)], policies of these actors (e.g. EU enlargement, US–Russian relations) or international events (e.g. wars, conferences, crises, disasters). Less obvious is the identification of the speech community even though it is equally important. Cameron (1999b: 112) notices that the research always takes place ‘relative to particular groups and types of discourse context, which may not always be acknowledged’. Any metaphor research has to take into account norms of the researched speech community as well as individual background knowledge of speakers. The speech community refers to a group of people who through regular interaction develop a shared language usage (Gumperz 1968/1972: 219). It usually has a clear social dimension and tends to coincide with specific social units such as countries, professional groups or religious groupings. Usually, the chosen target domain can be studied from the perspective of several speech communities. Do we want to research German discourse on Europe or French one? Are we interested in the discourse of political leaders, officials, media, researchers or other social groups? These clarifications are essential as communication in each speech community is likely to follow quite different rules including rules of the use of metaphors. Even though most studies focus on speech communities which do not transcend language borders (e.g. British media on Europe), speech communities can also be transnational. They may even include several languages as long as speakers share some communication rules on the basis of which they can understand one another (Gumperz 1972: 16). However, transnational speech communities often develop their own languages which speakers use inside the community while using another language outside. Administrative codes, such as Medieval Latin, and trade languages are examples of these shared languages (Gumperz 1968: 469; Gumperz 1968/1972: 227; Dittmar 1976: 110). While the former are used by small administrative or priestly elites and their use is heavily ritualised, the latter are inclusive facilitating the broadest possible contacts. The distinction between administrative codes and trade languages is rele-

Identifying and assessing metaphors 109 vant for the current study of IR. While the ritualised language of international diplomacy is an administrative code, a technocratic language of European integration, Euro-speak, resembles a trade language. Even though either language draws on English or French, many of their statements will be unintelligible for many English or French while being well understood by diplomats or civil servants for whom English or French are second languages. The language of international diplomacy was described as ‘a paper currency of conventionalised phrases in place of the hard coins of ordinary human converse’ (Nicholson 1969: 122–3). This currency has a well-known value inside the diplomatic community which ‘transcends all differences of nationality or language’ while also ‘evolving a form of solidarity and establishing certain tacit standards’ (Nicholson 1969: 40). Similarly, the EU institutions have produced their own ‘purpose-built vocabulary of terms to describe (and shape) the reality of the EU’ which contributes to ‘the construction of a European political class’ (Christiansen et al. 1999: 541).

Application I focused my research on the target area of EU institutional identity, raising the question about ‘the nature of the beast’ (Risse-Kappen 1996). I researched the speech community of political leaders of EU members and EU candidate countries who participated in the pan-European debate on the EU future which had preceded the drafting of the EU constitutional treaty (Drulák 2006a). It is an example of transnational speech community communicating in a shared language of European integration. They share specific vocabulary and their discursive interventions often reacted to one another. Hence, I asked the question, how do European leaders imagine the EU?

Corpus collection and deduction of conceptual metaphors The corpus is likely to consist of articles, speeches, interviews or books which characterise the discourse of the selected speech community about the chosen target domain during the defined period of time. The key practical question during the corpus building concerns the selection criterion by which the documents are incorporated lest the corpus exceed a manageable size. Sometimes the target domain is narrow enough and the speech community is not too prolific for corpus to include all the relevant documents. However, it is frequently the case that the number of documents is too high and the corpus can include only a small part of them. With a large N, a random selection is a possibility, but it is often more meaningful to constrain the selection by focusing on the discourse of key institutions or individuals or by addressing specific debates which took place.

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Concurrently, conceptual metaphors can be deduced. Now, conceptual metaphors are usually found inductively on the basis of metaphorical expressions pertaining to the given target domain which are found in the corpus. These conceptual metaphors can be seen as empirical generalisations from ‘collected examples of coventionalised metaphors found in the language’ (Cameron 1999a: 18). However, I suggest to start with a deductive approach which theoretically constructs possible source domains on the basis of a conceptual reflection of the given target domain without engaging the discourse (Cameron 1999a: 18). The deductive approach has several virtues. To start with, the conceptual metaphors come up with source domains which helps us better define what we should look for in the corpus. Moreover, the approach offers coherence and completeness: it deduces the conceptual metaphors from a set of abstract principles anchored in the theoretical reflection of the given target domain. Therefore, the resulting metaphors are unlikely to overlap while logically covering all the possibilities. Also, deduction can generate radically new conceptual metaphors, which are a logical possibility but which have not found their way into the political discourse. Finally, it makes it possible to identify sedimented metaphors whose metaphoricity is invisible in the discourse. How many conceptual metaphors should be deduced? Even though their number is necessarily related to the nature of the target domain, it is also arbitrary to some extent. On the one hand, the more contested the target domain is, the higher the number of competing metaphors is likely to be. On the other hand, this number also depends on the level of abstraction at which the conceptual metaphors are identified – the more abstract the conceptual metaphors the lower their number. For example, bilateral relation between two countries can be seen in terms of a WOUND by some and in terms of RECOVERY by others. However, both source domains can be subsumed under a more abstract domain of BODY. The choice of the level of abstraction depends on the specific question the researcher asks. Given this, all the source domains should be at the same level of abstraction so that overlaps could be prevented. However, conceptual metaphors need to be identified by means of the ‘interaction between theory and data’ (Cameron 1999b: 105). The deduction only represents the theory, hence, suffering from major weaknesses. Namely, it does not tell us which of the identified metaphors is actually relevant for the examined discourse nor does it provide any sufficient basis for associating conceptual metaphors with concrete metaphorical expressions. These shortcomings are remedied in the next step.

Application The corpus consisted of seventy-four speeches contributing to the debate on the EU future whereby each country was represented by two or three speeches which were selected on the basis of the attention which they raised

Identifying and assessing metaphors 111 (measured by the number of references in the internet search) (Drulák 2006a). Even though from quantitative perspective this sample is quite small in a huge stream of speeches and proposals, it is highly relevant from political perspective as it represents the views of all the governments concerned. The conceptual metaphors were deduced from major theories of European integration: realism, liberal intergovernmentalism, federalism, neofunctionalism, institutionalism, multi-level governance perspective and postmodern approaches. On this basis, four possible source areas were identified: MOTION, CONTAINER, EQUILIBRIUM OF CONTAINERS and the NEW MIDDLE AGES. The metaphor of MOTION is at the heart of the neofunctionalist understanding of the EU as an open-ended process. In this perspective, the EU is seen as a constantly changing entity which defies any firm boundaries and descriptions. It is at odds with the ideas of Europe as a goal-oriented project, of European borders or of European agency. The CONTAINER metaphor is close to the federalist understanding of the EU as an enclosed entity similar to the sovereign state. The EU is then conceptualised as a state in the making. This conceptual metaphor is also the basis for all possible analogies between the EU and its institutions, on the one hand, and the national state and its institutions, on the other hand. The EQUILIBRIUM metaphor is embraced by realists for whom European integration is a continuation of the traditional European power politics. This metaphor therefore puts emphasis on the balance of power, on the balance of contending interests of sovereign states and on the role of nation states as true agents of the European integration while being at odds with European agency and continuing integration. Finally, the NEW MIDDLE AGES metaphor has been promoted by postmodernists who argue that the fuzzy borders and overlaps of authority in the current EU make it structurally similar with the pre-Westphalian Europe.

Search for metaphorical expressions and revision of conceptual metaphors As argued, the conceptual metaphors deduced help us guide the corpusbased search for metaphorical expressions. However, this search needs to be as inclusive as possible. It should identify not only metaphorical expressions which are in line with the conceptual metaphors but also those metaphorical expressions which do not fit in. It is on the basis of the latter expressions that the original, deductive set of conceptual metaphors is revised. New source domains are formulated as generalisations of metaphorical expressions which are not covered by the original conceptual metaphors. Also, on the same basis, the original source domains may be modified, narrowed down or broadened up. This revision brings conceptual metaphors which are backed by both theory and data. Eventually, each of these needs to be associated with

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metaphorical expressions found in the discourse in an unambiguous way so that each metaphorical expression is related to only one conceptual metaphor.

Application No metaphorical expression was found which could be related to the conceptual metaphor, the EU IS THE NEW MIDDLE AGES (Drulák 2006a). In contrast, several metaphorical expressions did not fit to any of the theoretically constructed metaphors while being consistent with the new conceptual metaphor, the EU IS JOINT-STOCK COMPANY. This metaphor focuses on efficiency of the integration considering the EU as a provider of all sorts of services. The resulting overview of the conceptual metaphors together with their metaphorical expressions was as follows: EU IS MOTION (e.g. ‘new steps’, ‘leaps forward’, ‘slowing-down the train’, ‘the flame of Europe’, ‘future direction of integration’), EU IS CONTAINER (e.g. ‘European edifice’, ‘forging Europe’, ‘abolition of dividing lines’, ‘being at the heart of Europe’), EU IS EQUILIBRIUM OF CONTAINERS (e.g. ‘balance of power’, ‘alliancebuilding’, ‘contending national interests’, ‘equality between member states’, ‘directoire’) and EU IS JOINT-STOCK COMPANY (e.g. ‘Europe able to deliver’, ‘ownership of Europe by citizens’, ‘mission statement of Europe’, ‘added value of Europe’).

Establishment of frequencies and comparison of distinct discursive segments Frequency with which a conceptual metaphor occurs in the corpus provides an important criterion of its significance (Cortazzi and Jin 1999; CharterisBlack 2004). The higher its frequency, the more influential the metaphor is within the given speech community. The distribution of frequencies across all the conceptual metaphors describes the configuration of the discursive structure within which participants to the discourse are embedded. Moreover, the frequency distributions of different actors can be established and the comparison of these distributions can reveal distinctions and overlaps among their perspectives. Basically, the frequency of the conceptual metaphor can be defined as a number of metaphorical expressions in the corpus which are associated with this conceptual metaphor. However, I modify this definition establishing the frequency at two levels at least – at the level of unit and at the level of corpus. At the unit level, each speech, interview or article in the corpus is considered as a basic unit with respect to which the frequency of conceptual metaphors is assessed. This makes it possible to take into account the contextual information concerning the speaker and the text in which the metaphorical expressions appear.

Identifying and assessing metaphors 113 At this level, frequency is assessed on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative analysis replacing the numbers with the descriptions of the qualitative states. In this respect, each conceptual metaphor is assessed with respect to the given text as dominant or important or used or absent or rejected or ambiguous (if conceptual metaphor is both embraced and rejected with a comparable frequency). These qualitative states elaborate on previous classification (Cortazzi and Jin 1999: 168) but they also reflect on the questions which are usually asked when figuring out what was said or written. What is the main message of the speech? What other important issues were mentioned? What is criticised or rejected? Where is the speech ambiguous? At the corpus level, the frequency is calculated by summarising the qualitative states of each conceptual metaphor across the corpus. Doing this, we find out in how many units of the corpus (speeches, interviews or articles) each conceptual metaphor is represented as dominant, important, used, absent, rejected or ambiguous. This frequency distribution characterises the comparative significance of conceptual metaphors. The conceptual metaphors which most frequently occur as dominant or important and which are not challenged (rejected or ambiguous) or the other way round (being frequently challenged but never dominant or important) represent the taken-for-granted wisdom on which the participation in the discourse is based. In contrast, metaphors which are frequently challenged while also being important point to the contested issues in the discourse. Finally, metaphors which tend to be merely used or even absent hint at the margins which do not shape the thinking of the speech community. Moreover, the summarisation need not be done at the corpus level only. The frequency distribution can also be calculated for specific segments of the corpus which represent specific members of the speech community or their groupings. The comparison between the frequency distributions of different segments can reveal important differences in the thinking of different actors.

Application Table 7.1 shows the frequency distribution for the whole corpus (Drulák 2006a). The numbers are percentages reflecting the shares of speeches in Table 7.1 The EU finality debate (relative frequency table in %, N = 74)

Dominant Important Also used Absent Rejected Ambiguous

Motion

Container

Equilibrium

Company

16 5 2 0 0 2

5 9 5 1 1 4

6 6 3 3 4 3

0 0 3 22 0 0

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which the given conceptual metaphor appears in the given quality (dominant, important, etc.) The source domain of MOTION turns out to be taken for granted as a model of European integration by European leaders (in most speeches, it tends to be dominant and it is only rarely challenged). In contrast, the source area of CONTAINER and EQUILIBRIUM are contested representing two opposite and influential views of the EU (both positive usage and challenges are numerous). Finally, the innovative metaphor of the EU as a COMPANY did not influence the thinking of the leaders in any significant way. Tables 7.2 and 7.3 present the data of the most important segments of the speech community, namely the leaders of the then EU members and the leaders of the then EU candidates. As the comparison shows, the overlap between the two groups is huge. All the same, they differ in one important respect. While EQUILIBRIUM is more contested than CONTAINER in the EU members discourse, it is the other way round in the EU candidates discourse.

Elaboration of practical implications The cognitivist perspective on metaphor is powerful in its claim that the conceptual metaphors which are sufficiently internalised by the speech community shape the way people think about the world. Therefore, embrace Table 7.2 EU members (relative frequency table, N = 43)

Dominant Important Also used Absent Rejected Ambiguous

Motion

Container

Equilibrium

Company

17 4 1 0 0 3

6 9 6 0 2 2

5 6 1 2 7 4

0 0 6 19 0 0

Table 7.3 EU candidates (relative frequency table, N = 31)

Dominant Important Also used Absent Rejected Ambiguous

Motion

Container

Equilibrium

Company

14 6 4 1 0 0

4 8 3 2 0 8

8 6 5 4 0 2

0 0 0 25 0 0

Identifying and assessing metaphors 115 of particular conceptual metaphor makes it easy to grasp all the observations consistent with the metaphor while making it difficult to accept facts which contradict the metaphor. Thus, it is essential to clarify what the logical implications of each conceptual metaphor are, defining which actions are compatible with it and which ones are not. On this basis, one identifies discursive boundaries to political actions which are implied in the metaphors.

Application What are the implications of the identified conceptual metaphors (Drulák 2006a)? Usually, it is argued that the mainstream of the EU debate is divided into two comparable streams, the former claiming that Europe is like a nation state writ large and the latter considering it as a more sophisticated kind of traditional inter-state co-operation. However, my findings corroborate an alternative claim that these streams, important as they are, are overshadowed by a genuine mainstream which sees the EU as a sui generis beast which is in a constant flux. It is the metaphor of MOTION which dominates presenting the EU as an ongoing process without any final goal. In contrast, the metaphors of CONTAINER and EQUILIBRIUM, which correspond to the above ideas of Europe as a nation writ large and Europe as an inter-state co-operation respectively, lag behind the metaphor of MOTION. Even though the original purpose of the debate on the EU future was to provide the EU with a clear goal and to come up with new, unconventional ideas about Europe, the debate itself was dominated by a metaphor which contradicts the very idea of goal-orientation, while hardly any unconventional metaphors appeared. Hence, my analysis suggests that the debate might have been business as usual rather than a great leap forward. Moreover, there were no fundamental differences between the EU members and the EU candidates as far as the perceptions of the EU are concerned. All the same, EU candidates were relatively reluctant to see the EU as an imperfect state (CONTAINER); they instead preferred the model of the EU as a group of states (EQUILIBRIUM), which tended to be rejected by the EU members. This means that the projects which aim at turning the EU into a state-like organisation are likely to be met with a greater hostility in new EU members than among the old ones.

Conclusions The method which has been outlined in this chapter can contribute to a clearer methodological reflection of metaphor in the empirical study of IRs. The outlined data analysis is a bit less direct than alternative approaches. First, it does not start with the examination of the actual corpus data. Instead, it embraces the theoretical reflection of the target domain, thus gaining a preliminary set of conceptual metaphors which then guide the

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empirical examination. Second, it does not simply count metaphorical expressions in the corpus which would make it possible to associate each conceptual metaphor with one single number reflecting its frequency. Instead, it distinguishes between qualitative frequency at the level of speech, article or interview, on the one hand, and the quantitative frequency at the level of the corpus or at the level of its segments, on the other hand. There are several reasons for preferring this method over more direct approaches. To start with, it strives for a genuine interaction between theory and data. Hence, the empirical results can be better related to the findings of studies which employed different methodologies, thus making the results relevant beyond the metaphor research. Also, the distinction between the two kinds of frequency lays grounds for a richer analysis than simple counting. It results in a two-dimensional picture of the frequency distribution which allows for the assessment of the significance of metaphors with respect to corpus units. Finally, different corpus segments can be analysed by grouping the qualitative frequencies of the perspective units on the basis of external criteria. However, this less direct method can give rise to two kinds of problems: the focus on theory may bring about conceptual metaphors which do not fit the data and the incorporation of the qualitative considerations into the frequency assessment may weaken the rigour of the findings. The method tries to address both problems, at least to some extent. The fit with data should be guaranteed by the fact that not all metaphorical expressions are expected to be covered by the theory-based conceptual metaphors. In this connection, an inductive identification of new conceptual metaphors on the basis of data is essential. All in all, the method enables us to identify discursive construction of an area of international interactions. However, the political action also includes non-discursive elements which cannot be addressed by this approach. Moreover, the identification of discursive conditions relies on the assumption that conceptual metaphors indeed structure their target domains in coherent ways which may not be the case everywhere. Despite these limitations, a link between metaphors, discourse and political action has been established by previous studies in the field and the outlined method can contribute to the further study of this link.

References Beer, F.A. and De Landtsheer, C. (eds) (2004) Metaphorical World Politics, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Cameron, L. (1999a) ‘Operationalising “Metaphor” for Applied Linguistic Research’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, L. (1999b) ‘Identifying and Describing Metaphor in Spoken Discourse

Identifying and assessing metaphors 117 Data’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, L. and Low, G. (eds) (1999) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chilton, P. (1996) ‘The Meaning of Security’, in F.A. Beer and R. Harriman (eds) Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Chilton, P. and Ilyin, M. (1993) ‘Metaphor in Political Discourse: The Case of the “Common European House” ’, Discourse & Society, 4: 7–31. Chilton, P. and Lakoff, G. (1995) ‘Foreign Policy by Metaphor’, in C. Schäffner and A.L. Wenden (eds) Language and Peace, Aldershot: Dartmouth. Christiansen, T., Joergenssen, K.E. and Wiener, A. (1999) ‘The Social Construction of Europe’, Journal of European Public Policy, 6(4) (special issue): 528–44. Cortazzi, M. and Jin, L. (1999) ‘Bridges to Learning: Metaphors of Teaching, Learning and Language’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deignan, A. (1999) ‘Corpus-Based Research into Metaphor’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dittmar, N. (1976) Sociolinguistics. A Critical Survey of Theory and Application, London: Edward Arnold. Drulák, P. (2004) ‘Metaphors Europe Lives By: Language and Institutional Change of the European Union’, EUI Working Papers, SPS No. 2004/15, Florence: European University Institute. Drulák, P. (2006a) ‘Motion, Container and Equilibrium: Metaphors in the Discourse about European Integration’, European Journal of International Relations, 12: 499–531. Drulák, P. (2006b) ‘Jak na metafory? Neˇkolik poznámek k analy´ze politického diskurzu mezinárodních vztahu˚’, in B. Plechanovová (ed.), Evropská unie na pocˇátku 21. století: Reformní procesy a institucionální zmeˇny, Praha: Karolinum. Gumperz, J.J. (1968/1972) ‘The Speech Community’, in P.P. Giglioli (ed.) Language and Social Context, London: Penguin Books. Gumperz, J.J. (1972) ‘Introduction’, in J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hülsse, R. (2003) Metaphern der EU-Erweiterung als Konstruktion europäischer Identität, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Jäkel, O. (1997) Metaphern in abstrakten Diskurs-Domänen, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. King, G., Keohane, R.O. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lakoff, G. (1993) ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Luoma-aho, M. (2004) ‘ “Arm” versus “Pillar”: The Politics of Metaphors of the Western European Union at the 1990–91 Intergovernmental Conference on Political Union’, Journal of European Public Policy, 11: 106–27.

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Milliken, J. (1996) ‘Metaphors of Prestige and Reputation in American Foreign Policy and American Realism’, in F.A. Beer and R. Harriman (eds) Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Milliken, J. (2001) ‘Discourse Study: Bringing Rigor to Critical Theory’, in K. Fierke and K.E. Joergensen (eds) Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, London: M.E. Sharp. Musolff, A. (1995) ‘Promising to End a War = Language of Peace? The Rhetoric of Allied News Management in the Gulf War 1991’, in C. Schäffner and A.L. Wenden (eds) Language and Peace, Aldershot: Dartmouth. Nicholson, H. (1969) Diplomacy, 3rd edn, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Risse-Kappen, T. (1996) ‘Exploring the Nature of the Beast: International Relations Theory and Comparative Policy Analysis Meet the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34: 53–80. Schäffner, C. (1995) ‘The “Balance” Metaphor in Relation to Peace’, in C. Schäffner and A.L. Wenden (eds) Language and Peace, Aldershot: Dartmouth. Verboven, H. (2003) Die Metapher als Ideologie: Eine kognitiv-semantische Analyse der Kriegsmetaphorik im Frühwerk Ernst Jüngers, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.

8

Discursive metaphor analysis (De)construction(s) of Europe Jochen Walter and Jan Helmig

Whether language is able to describe our environment objectively or whether, by contrast, it actually produces this reality is generally contested. In particular, the ‘third debate’ in International Relations (IR) is characterised by an intense dispute over the significance of language. Depending on the specific positions of any author – either on the side of the ‘moderates’ or on the side of ‘post-positivist constructivists’ – the relevance of language is conceived differently. Radical (or post-positivist) constructivism bases its research programme on language as the key to understanding the social construction of reality (cf. Shapiro 1981; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Adler 1997). Our aim here is to elaborate in greater detail the insights generated by such approaches and to offer, at the same time, a new contribution to discursive analytical strategies in IR. While until now discourse analyses has mainly asked what is constructed through the use of language, we will also ask how reality is constructed. Metaphors have a massive influence on the construction of reality. Speech acts, of which metaphors constitute an intrinsic component, are in turn embedded in discourses which can be analysed and deconstructed accordingly. But only the combined analysis of discourses and metaphors can lead to a comprehensive understanding of the social construction of reality. Hence, the notion of ‘metaphor’ as well as of ‘discourse’ must be clearly defined, and the analysis of these two dimensions – including their methodological implementation – must be clarified. We argue that combining the analysis of metaphors and discourses promises to be a worthwhile venture so as to obtain in-depth knowledge of a socially constructed reality. To make our argumentation more plausible, we will use different (de)constructions of Europe as examples. Our contribution proceeds as follows: first, we determine the scope and role of ‘discourses’ in constructing reality. This section highlights the central assumptions underlying this analytical conception. This clarification is necessary in order to understand the integration of metaphors into discourse analytical studies. Following this, in the second part of this chapter, we give a brief introduction to metaphors. This is followed by detailed analysis and exemplified with reference to Europe and the case of European

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Union (EU) enlargement. This case study, briefly sketched, applies discursive metaphor analysis in a concrete example. A short conclusion then sums up our contribution.

Determining discourse It is widely accepted that language can neither be seen as a neutral instrument nor be related simply and straightforwardly to objective facts or the real world ‘out there’. Indeed, if this were the case, one word would then relate to one material object and signify it and that fixed connection would last throughout time. But merely thinking of a contested concept like ‘democracy’ (Gallie 1956: 183–7) or even of the changing meaning of the term ‘house’ (Chilton 1996) already suggests that a fixed connection between a certain word and a corresponding material thing in the world is impossible. Instead, language must be conceived as a set of differential signs, wherein words get their meaning through their specific relation to other words. Following the Derridean notion of différance, these relations can never be ultimately fixed, but rather change over time. They need to be observed as open and fluid speech chains or language games which are evolving through history (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Derrida 1988, 1997; Torfing 1999: 86). The words we use and the speech acts we make are contingent choices which construct a contingent communicative reality with its own logic. Even a (scientific) observer can only observe reality via the given language and linguistic/communicative concepts she/he possesses. Observations and reconstructions of reality are thus always contingent constructions. And as no observer can ever transcend this constructedness, the interesting question to pose here is: how (and, of course, which) reality is constructed through the use of language (cf. Goodman 1978; Luhmann 1995: 92ff )? If there is no chance to reach a reality beyond language or words (if there exists any such reality at all), there is perforce a need to observe the inner logic(s) of speech acts and discourses. To illustrate this, one need to only think of Europe. What could Europe be beyond language and discourse? Is there any material Europe with clearcut frontiers (e.g. as a definable landmass), and if there is any such Europe, where does it begin or end, and why does it do so? Who could legitimately draw a line with regard to the question of which geographical borders prevail? In the light of the impossibility of describing such a material reality, Europe must be understood as a socio-communicative construction that includes conflicting communicative ideas and discourses which evolve and dissolve through history. Hence, the meaning of Europe shifts over time, depending on the dominant discursive fields, and with this the boundaries, geographical delineations, and settings, as well as ascriptions of Europe. Without observing discourses, and this includes their embedded metaphors, Europe cannot be properly observed at all (cf. Delanty 1995; Chilton 1996: 263/4; Diez 2001a).

Discursive metaphor analysis 121 Thus understood, language is not only an instrument for political talk or conversation but is itself political. Language thereby constructs social and political realities. Such an understanding of the role of language is picked up by, for example, discourse theoretical studies. The concept of discourse, which was initially developed by Michel Foucault but has now flourished well beyond his initial ideas, is thus able to analyse processes of communicative reality-construction. In general, discourses can be understood as all those linguisticcommunicative practices (e.g. oral speech or written texts) that aim to produce and stabilise – even if just temporarily – specific semantic meanings and concepts which then become institutionalised in socially binding knowledge orders (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112; Keller 2004: 7). Discourses do not simply depict or reproduce the world, but instead constitute and construct reality in a selective and contingent manner. They have a productive character which means that discourses are practices which are systematically producing the very objects that they apparently describe (cf. Foucault 1972: 74). Returning to our example, Europe only comes into existence through talking about Europe. Its meaning shifts depending on how it is talked about. Europe, just like any other ‘essentially contested concept’, thus changes its meaning through the course of time, depending on the different interpretations of different actors at different times. Discourses always include an interplay between communicative strategies of inclusion and exclusion. In the course of the construction of a European self, there is at the same time always an excluded other side, said or suggested to be non-European, whether Russia, the United States, the ‘Orient’ or Europe’s own past (cf. Neumann 1998a; Diez 2001b). The construction of reality through discourse is thus always contingent and selective, which means that the communicative choices that have been made could also have been made in a totally different manner (cf. Luhmann 1995; Waldenfels 1996: Chapter B). Due to the constant repetition and reactualisation of these contingent choices, the boundaries which are drawn tend to become ‘naturalised’ as if they refer to a pre-existent being. Thus, ongoing repetitions of dominant discursive figures result in power effects comprising inevitable political impact (cf. Foucault 1972: 39). The characteristics of discourse mentioned above automatically lead to the question as to why a specific speech act appears just as it does and what is made discursively (im)possible through its expression. The rules of discursive production need to be observed, together with their justifications (cf. Der Derian 1989: 4–7; Shapiro 1989: 15). For example, within more conservative circles, Europe is denoted as a community of people sharing Christian values. While all the western European and most eastern European countries are included in such a conceptualisation of Europe, Turkey, but also Muslims living in ‘European’ countries, is excluded as a result of this definition. Strategies of inclusion thus always coincide with strategies of exclusion (Neumann 1998a, 1998b). In the absence of a fixed centre, any

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definite closure of discourses becomes impossible. Rather, Europe can be constructed in many different and often competing ways. As the definitions of Europe are never-ending, the inbuilt differences are ever-shifting and provoke many other conceptions, resulting in long historical processes of sometimes conflicting and diverging ideas about Europe (cf. Derrida 1992; Wilson and van der Dussen 1993; Delanty 1995). Discourses can thus be understood as differential ensembles of signifying sequences ‘in which meaning is constantly renegotiated’ (Torfing 1999: 85). Following Foucault, we see discourses as discontinuous practices. They need to be observed in their historical sequence of events, disruption, and interconnectedness. A feature of discourses is hence their urgent and open character. The preceding analysis cannot be dissociated from the ‘contradictory content’ of discourses. The interpretation and understanding of events or behaviour is always a starting point for conflicting discourses that compete against each other in order to monopolise collectively binding definitions. Within discourses, the right gets separated from the wrong, the good from the evil, and the normal from the abnormal (cf. Foucault 1965; SchwabTrapp 2002: 35). There is always dissent about the boundaries that are drawn, while these boundaries themselves shift as a result of ongoing debates. The (temporarily) successful dominant interpretations – Foucault calls them ‘discursive formations’ (cf. Foucault 1972: 48) – shape and legitimate political actions and decisions. They help to implement collectively binding decisions while, for the moment, excluding other possible options. This then shapes the specific political character of discourses (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112). Looking at Europe, we see that defining it as a community of Christian values results in contradictory depictions, such as a community of democratic values or a multicultural society. The leading discursive formation may in fact have a massive influence on the decision whether Turkey should get a full membership of the EU or not (Huelsse 2003a, 2003b). Discourses are furthermore to be understood as a ‘public good’. Only interpretations that appear in public can become socially institutionalised. Today, discourses are mostly disseminated via public communicative processes and practices such as books, newspapers, magazines, (political) speeches, television, the internet, and treaties (Fairclough 1995: 35). Europe, as a discursive construction, emerges as a result of political speeches and treaties, the front pages of newspapers, or regular summit conferences. Although discourses must be regarded as a public good, participation is nevertheless restricted. Hence, the ‘limited accessibility’ to discourse results in a more or less exclusive elitism. While, for example, at least in principle everyone has access to the media, in fact only those able to realise this can become visible. Not everyone can speak within discourses; the access to discourse is limited via historical contingent conditions. This can be called the ‘institutional dimension’ of the restricted accessibility to discourse (cf. Fairclough 1995: 49).

Discursive metaphor analysis 123 Furthermore, discourse stipulates what can be said and thought at a given time and also how we can talk about specific topics. Discourses select contributors and contributions (Schmidt 2003: 52). Foucault notices that what individuals say or write is stipulated through anonymous discursive rules which change over time, but which cannot be changed by individual authors (Foucault 1977: 21, 26). Shapiro argues that if an individual wants to participate in a discourse, she/he needs to adopt the discursive schemes and concepts that are built in (Shapiro 1981: 130). To participate in specific discourses, an individual has to subordinate his or her preconceptions under the restrictive accessibility guidelines given in the ‘intertextual dimension’. Taking these characteristics into account, however, an observer may only be able to analyse the surface – or macro-level – of discourses. She/he can observe what topics get pushed through and what is constructed through them. What is not observed is how a specific topic gets constructed and how certain aims are reached through the use of language. The construction of reality, in a nutshell, is not only a result of what we say but also how we say something. In order to analyse this micro-level of discourses, it is necessary to go beneath the surface of discourse. Metaphors, we argue here, play an immanent and important role in the discursive production of a social reality at the micro-level of language. Two concepts of metaphor seem to be especially germane to this discursive conception. First, interaction theory, as, for example, promoted by Max Black (1977/1983), and second, cognitive linguistics, probably most widely known through the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003). In the next part of this chapter, we briefly discuss these concepts and highlight potential points of contact with discourse theory.

Determining metaphors Although metaphor is an intrinsic component of language, its precise role is contested. In the most general understanding of language or in common parlance, metaphors are generally conceived as ‘ornate’ figures that simply fulfil rhetorical or poetic functions. Metaphors thereafter act as surrogates for other words – an exception to normal speech as proposed by substitution theory. But contrary to conceiving them as mere rhetorical applications without any further significance, post-modern approaches not only regard metaphors as pure simplifications but also as constitutive figures which create, like discourses, effects of their own (cf. Shapiro 1984). The production and reception of metaphors plays a central role in generating and establishing identity and community. The classical or rhetorical notion of metaphor assigns a high degree of human intentionality to their use, and is thus distinguished from other conceptualisations (cf. Haverkamp 1983). In contrast to classical substitution theory, interaction theory assumes that there is no corresponding literal content for any given metaphor; metaphorical concepts are thus not substitutable without an

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unavoidable loss of meaning. According to interaction theory, metaphors are not simple surrogates for other words but must be analysed in their unique context and with reference to other concepts as well. Metaphors are not only vehicles simply transporting images from one domain to another but are also agents of signification on their own, in the sense that they allow us to see things as something. Metaphors are thus not merely ornate components of speech but are constitutive as well, a view held by Max Black, who argues that metaphors can only be properly understood when the interaction between ‘dispenser’ and ‘receiver’ is analysed (see the chapters by Honohan, Mottier, and Howarth and Griggs in this volume) (Black 1977/1983). According to Black, the metaphor acts as a ‘filter’ through which a specific meaning is projected onto a target domain. The metaphor is the ‘focus’, and the surrounding lexical environment is the ‘frame’. The special feature of metaphors now consists in the fact that they do not necessarily highlight the primary aspects of the area from which they were projected, but rather that metaphors particularly emphasise the periphery surrounding the focal point. For example, depicting Turkey as ‘bridge’ does not move its material characteristics to the fore – the metaphorical focus – but rather points to its periphery, e.g. ascriptions like accessibility, the overcoming of barriers, or a connection between different areas. This connection between different discursive domains does not generate new data per se. Rather, it produces meaning through the (re)combination of information already in existence. This knowledge is not ‘new’, in the sense that it is based on existing knowledge merely placed into new surroundings. From this, one can see how a receiver must have at least a certain kind of understanding of metaphorical concepts, their discursive characteristics, and of course the function of metaphor. Without appropriate linguistic capabilities, the process of transfer does not succeed. That is why children up to a certain age fail to recognise metaphors but rather take them as ordinary, truthful speech – with sometimes embarrassing effects for parents. Similar instances can be observed between different cultures where metaphors are not necessarily apprehended as figurative language; this leads to misunderstanding and confusion. For example, Chilton makes this point nicely by highlighting how German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev had different meanings in mind when talking about the ‘European House’. While for Kohl ‘House’ meant a ‘single occupancy house’, Gorbachev conceptualised it as a kind of ‘multifamily residence’ (cf. Chilton 1996). Understanding the periphery surrounding the focal point is essential for understanding the role of metaphors. Without any knowledge of peripheral and discursive connotations, the cognitive process of transfer is disrupted. However, although interaction theory is better suited to analysing political speech as compared to substitution theory, it is not immune from criticism. For example, Black’s notion of ‘associated commonplaces’ seems to delineate a linguistic sphere and a world outside of language. But as language is pro-

Discursive metaphor analysis 125 ducing this reality in the first place, it seems unconvincing to talk of metaphors being outside the construction process. While interaction theory emphasises the interaction between the metaphorical source- and target-domains, Lakoff and Johnson argue that in politics, as in other fields of practice, metaphors structure how people define (or constitute) phenomena and, therefore, how they act (cf. Milliken 1999; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Lakoff and Johnson articulate their concept of metaphor, pointing out how talking about war as a disease, for example, highlights ‘some aspects of a phenomenon, downplays and hides other features that could give a different stance’ (cf. Fitzgerald 1995; Milliken 1999: 221). Metaphors are thus not simply plain talk, but rather represent one aspect of experience in terms of another. The use of metaphor already makes selective distinctions. Cognitive linguistics conceptualises metaphors as crucial elements which structure thinking. Cerebration and cognitive processes in general are organised metaphorically and are, in turn, reflected in the use of speech (cf. Wagner 1997: 216). Language is the mirror image for the operational and organisational modes of mind (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 454). Creativity is only possible within these basic metaphorical concepts, which always include a source and target-domain. But the intentionality of the application of metaphors is contentious. While, on the one hand, the cognitive understanding of metaphors concedes freedom of decision to the human subject, due to an individualistic perspective, it limits this by emphasising the inevitable metaphorical structuring of thought, on the other. Even in the brief context of the present discussion, this contradiction already highlights the contrast with classical-rhetorical notions of metaphors. Whereas the classical-rhetorical notion points to the selective usage of metaphors as linguistic tools, the cognitive conception analyses metaphors as a means to an end, namely a better understanding of cognitive processes. However, this circularity of assumptions – from the action of speech and metaphors on cognitive processes or on thinking in general and vice versa – provokes some criticism (cf. Murphy 1996: 183; Zinken 2002: 17). Moreover, cognitive processes are usually assigned priority over language, albeit, as Chilton states, they are ‘reciprocally connected’ (Chilton 1996: 31). The individualistic premise of cognitive approaches in general and cognitive metaphorical appendages in particular are also subject to criticism. Social processes are unavoidably reduced to the position of the subject, masking trans-subjective social and cultural experiences. But explaining social change only from the perspective of individual actors neglects societal aspects. This is especially true when focusing on the analysis of language, which is by definition a social product and which shapes its users as much as they can in turn influence language. Nonetheless, the underlying ontological constructivism of interaction theory and cognitive linguistics represents a considerable step towards a better understanding of the linguistic presentation and apprehension of our environment.

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The two conceptualisations of metaphor briefly sketched above – despite their shortcomings – are germane to discourse analytical approaches. Both approaches apprehend metaphors as important agents in the social construction of reality. As shown above, they do not conceive of metaphors in a deterministic fashion such that they resemble a fixed relation to other words, but rather also take their discursive surroundings into account. Nevertheless, they do have some disadvantages which must be overcome if they are to be coupled with discourse analysis. These will be addressed in greater detail in the following section.

Towards a discursive analysis of metaphors The concepts of interaction theory and cognitive linguistics discussed above are inevitably insufficient because they only concentrate on individualistic cognitive processes or on distinguishing between a real world ‘out there’ and the descriptive linguistic sphere. Instead, Huelsse, for example, introduces the concept of a ‘discursive notion of metaphors’ (Huelsse 2003b: 32–43). With this concept, metaphors are conceptualised as purely social phenomena embedded in discourses rather than as reflexes to cognitive processes. In line with discourse theory as outlined above, the capabilities and possibilities of actors are reduced under such theoretical perspectives, and only discourse itself allows for the usage of metaphors. Specific discourses only authorise specific metaphors, thereby explaining why certain metaphors are used intersubjectively. The society-wide usage of specific metaphors cannot be explained, for example, by cognitive approaches, which additionally are not able to monitor ‘cognition’ itself. The problem of not being able to gaze into the ‘black box’ of human cognition is elegantly circumvented by the discursive notion of metaphors, too. Discourses construct the terms of their own (even subtle) metaphors as one of their key elements, so this is a vital part of the way that discourses are shaped and constructed. By doing so, metaphors help to legitimise certain ‘inclusive’ but also ‘exclusive’ strategies and filtering, which allow different ways of thinking (cf. Black 1977/1983). Where, for example, cognitive linguistics adheres to a discourse analytical understanding, metaphors provide the framework for example, for conceptualising political strategies. Talking about the much debated (south-)eastern enlargement of the EU in terms of neighbourhood, brotherhood, or kinship influences the overall discourse of EU enlargement at the macro-level. Metaphors affect how EU enlargement discourse is directed. Of course, such a diversion into different and clearly separable levels is for analytical purposes only. Identifying metaphors as intrinsic and important to discourses does not say much about the variety of frequently mentioned forms, for example, sedimented, conventional, or innovative. In fact, such clear-cut differentiation is not required for analysing the role of metaphors in discourse. From the perspective of discourse analysis, for example, sedimented and conventional

Discursive metaphor analysis 127 metaphors are at least equally critical in understanding the construction of reality. Because all forms of metaphor are important in mediating the social construction of reality, the discursive notion of metaphor takes these linguistic processes into account. It understands individual influence as intrinsic to discourse while noting that cognitive as well as rhetorical approaches neglect trans-subjective social and cultural experiences. Discourse and metaphor are embedded in ‘texts’. A scientific observer has to interpret those texts while taking into consideration both discourse and metaphor. Texts serve as the most basic material for and level of analysis, not the putative intentions of authors (cf. Van Dijk 1980; Titscher et al. 2000). Metaphors – themselves embedded in discourses – inform concepts at the micro-level. Discourses pass through various texts and encompass them, transforming certain speech acts into discursive formations. They structure entire topic areas at the macro-level and thus create orders of social knowledge that is collectively binding. Discourse are therefore the ‘superstructure’ of texts (cf. Van Dijk 1980: Chapter 5). However, acknowledging that two distinct levels of textual reality production exist is not sufficient for an analytical programme. What needs to be observed is the interconnectedness of these two levels, or for example, how metaphors – understood as ‘discursive nodal points’ (cf. Diez 1999; Torfing 1999: 98) – provoke certain processes in the production of meaning at the macro-level, and furthermore, whether effects of inclusion or exclusion at the micro-level of metaphor coincide with or differ from those on the macrolevel of discourse. Central to these assumptions are these questions: which metaphors are used, how are they used, what purposes are they used for, in which discourses and how this shifts over time. Only when viewed as embedded in discourse, can metaphors develop their specific effects. For this reason, both levels need to be analysed while taking into account their respective characteristics. A comprehensive approach combining the analysis of discourses as well as metaphors promises a better understanding relevant to political processes of delineation and integration, especially prevalent in, for example, the (geo)political arrangements of EU enlargement. It provides a richer understanding of how social orders are constituted, legitimised, and put into place. Such a combined effort helps us to better understand the processes of social ordering.

Europe and the case of EU enlargement Constructions and self-descriptions of Europe feed on a number of constantly evolving discourses in a number of different subject areas such as politics, strategy, economics, or culture. And in all of these discursive areas, specific descriptions of a European self or attribute as a semantics of inclusion (e.g. market economy, Western democracy, or a Judeo-Christian value community) also require specific semantics of exclusion which allows for

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the identification of what does not belong to this self/attribute. Despite the complexity of such semantic formations, successful constructions of stable European identity formations require ongoing reductions of that complexity. One way that such reductions take place is through the use of metaphors. There is only a relatively small and limited set of metaphors which denote a European self, like the European ‘house’, ‘club’, ‘family’, or ‘fortress’. Discourses revolving around a proposed European enlargement frequently entail metaphors of ‘movement’, such as rather abstract terms like ‘closing’ and/or ‘departing’ but also material forms like ‘train’, ‘car’, ‘vehicle’, ‘path’, ‘road’, ‘one-way street’, or ‘bridge’. These metaphors are consistently repeated in different discourses that revolve around an idea of Europe and are rarely altered in fundamental ways (cf. Musolff 2000; Huelsse 2003a). Thus, what needs to be analysed is the specific usage and reading of these metaphors in different discourses but also within any single discourse. To this end, we must observe who uses which metaphors for what purposes and in which media. For example, when regarding the possible and heavily discussed Turkish accession to the EU, the ‘bridge’ metaphor is often used to depict a suggested Turkish benefit or threat for an enlarged EU. These contradictory evaluations depend on the different readings of the metaphor. During a certain period of time, many speech-acts within cultural–religious discourse, for example, suggest that Turkey could serve as a connecting bridge between two ‘cultures’, namely ‘the West’ and the ‘world of Islam’. Its possible accession is therefore seen as a ‘chance’ for Europe. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, this ‘bridge’ is interpreted in a rather more menacing fashion. It is suggested that Turkey could also become a ‘bridge’ that could be easily crossed by radical Islamists or serve as a ‘focus’ for ‘terrorist infection’ (cf. Sarasin 2004: 160–92). The ‘bridge’ metaphor can also be found in the economic discourse, wherein Turkey at one time is depicted as a ‘bridgehead’ towards promising new markets in the Middle East, at another, as a threat to the common European market. Metaphors therefore function as ‘discursive nodal points’ (cf. Diez 2001b), linking and knotting together different discourses, thereby reducing their enormous complexity. Representing Turkey as extrinsic to the EU is frequently done by using metaphors of difference. Specific metaphors couple discourses of European integration to discourses of cultural classification. These semantic forms of inclusion as well as exclusion on either one of these levels directly affect the other. Using metaphors about Turkey as either inclusive or exclusive entails similar representations at the macro-level of discourse. The use of specific metaphors brings up related meanings in discourses. As both can be altered, a definite circularity (from metaphors to discourses and vice versa within a closed system), however, is barred. Based on these findings, we argue that our proposed combination of metaphor and discourse analysis is more than adding up two related but still different approaches. We have tried to show in this chapter how ontological

Discursive metaphor analysis 129 adaptations must be made. The fact that in both discourse analysis and the analysis of metaphors, a variety of books have recently been published once again highlights the growing interest within political science in these approaches (cf. Barker 2003; Charteris-Black 2004; Fairclough 2004).

Conclusions In the above discussion, we have defined the content of discourse and metaphor. It is our understanding that comprehension of the construction of reality must take into account both concepts, combining and integrating the macro-level of discourse with the micro-level of metaphor. For us, metaphor constitutes an intrinsic part of discourse. As opposed to seeing metaphor as a mere figure or embellishment of language, we argue that metaphors construct reality since they reify objects and circumstances as natural phenomena within speech. Contrary to conceiving metaphors as intentionally used and as rhetorical applications for describing an objective environment, metaphors are understood in this chapter as inherent linguistic functions which structure their environment. Like discourse, metaphor has an inevitable political function in the exercise of power. Their political function highlights the necessity to analyse them in conjunction with discourse rather than as separate phenomena. With our contribution, we aimed for a mutual engagement of discourse theory with theories of metaphor. There is still room for development within both concepts. Their combination will both strengthen the discipline of IR and lead to fresh insights.

References Adler, E. (1997) ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3: 319–63. Black, M. (1977/1983) ‘More about Metaphor’, in A. Haverkamp (ed.) Theorie der Metapher, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Barker, C. (2003) Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis: A dialogue on Language and Identity, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chilton, P. (1996) Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House, New York: Peter Lang. Delanty, G. (1995) Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Der Derian, J. (1989) ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations’, in J. Der Derian and M.J. Shapiro (eds) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, New York: Lexington. Der Derian, J. and Shapiro, M.J. (1989) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, New York: Lexington. Derrida, J. (1988) Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1992) The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Derrida, J. (1997) Writing and Difference, London: Routledge. Diez, T. (1999) Die EU lesen: Diskursive Knotenpunkte in der britischen Europadebatte, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Diez, T. (2001a) ‘Speaking “Europe”: the Politics of Integration Discourse’, in T. Christiansen, K.-E. Jørgensen and A. Wiener (eds) The Social Construction of Europe, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Diez, T. (2001b) ‘Europe as a Discursive Battleground: Discourse Analysis and European Integration Studies’, Cooperation and Conflict, 36: 5–38. Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse, London: Arnold. Fairclough, N. (2004) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, London: Routledge. Fitzgerald, T.K. (1995) ‘Uses and Abuses of Metaphor in Social and Cultural Analyses’, New Zealand Sociology, 10: 1–16. Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1977) ‘What is an Author?’ in D.F. Boucard (ed.) Language, CounterMemory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gallie, W.B. (1956) ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: New Series, LVI: 167–98. Goodman, N. (1978) Ways of Worldmaking, Cambridge: Hackett. Haverkamp, A. (1983) Theorie der Metapher, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Huelsse, R. (2003a) ‘Sprache ist mehr als Argumentation: Zur wirklichkeitskonstituierenden Rolle von Metaphern’, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 10: 211–46. Huelsse, R. (2003b) Metaphern der EU-Erweiterung als Konstruktionen europäischer Identität, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Keller, R. (2004) Diskursforschung: Eine Einführung für SozialwissenschaftlerInnen, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) ‘Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language’, The Journal of Philosophy, 77: 453–86. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Milliken, J. (1999) ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5: 225–54. Murphy, G.L. (1996) ‘On Metaphoric Representation’, Cognition, 60: 173–204. Musolff, A. (2000) ‘Political Imagery of Europe: A House Without Exit Doors?’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 21: 216–29. Neumann, I.B. (1998a) Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Neumann, I.B. (1998b) ‘European Identity, EU Expansion, and the Integration/Exclusion Nexus’, Alternatives, 23: 397–416. Sarasin, P. (2004) ‘Anthrax’: Bioterror als Phantasma, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schmidt, S.J. (2003) Geschichte und Diskurse: Abschied vom Konstruktivismus, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.

Discursive metaphor analysis 131 Schwab-Trapp, M. (2002) Kriegsdiskurse: Die politische Kultur des Krieges im Wandel 1991–1999, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Shapiro, M.J. (1981) Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practices, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Shapiro, M.J. (ed.) (1984) Language and Politics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shapiro, M.J. (1989) ‘Textualizing Global Politics’, in J. Der Derian and M.J. Shapiro (eds) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, New York: Lexington. Titscher, S., Meyer, M., Wodak, R. and Vetter, E. (2000) Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, London: Sage. Torfing, J. (1999) New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zˇizˇek, Oxford: Blackwell. Van Dijk, T.A. (1980) Textwissenschaft: Eine interdisziplinäre Einführung, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wagner, F. (1997) ‘Metaphern und soziale Repräsentation’, in B.U. Biere and W.A. Liebert (eds) Metaphern, Medien, Wissenschaft: Zur Vermittlung der AIDSForschung in Presse und Rundfunk, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Waldenfels, B. (1996) Order in the Twilight, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Wilson, K., and van der Dussen, J. (1993) The History of the Idea of Europe, London: Routledge. Zinken, J. (2002) ‘Imagination im Diskurs: Zur Modellierung metaphorischer Kommunikation und Kognition’, unpublished dissertation, Bielefeld.

9

Political protest and metaphor Charlotte Fridolfsson

This chapter explores the use of metaphors, particularly the gender divide, in discourses organising political protest. Two separate events from Swedish politics will serve as examples of how metaphors produce political meaning. I will investigate the hegemonic interventions that bring order to a political event, which does not itself have an inherent meaning but is arranged by metonymic chains of equivalence and difference (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Zˇizˇek 1990).

Metaphor and discourse Metaphors, simply put, are the application of alien names by transference (Aristotle 1996). Metaphors are also said to be the language of poetry (Quintilian 1933), where words are used in ambiguous ways, or abused, not found in their ‘proper’ place. The following analysis is made possible through what can be called a rhetorical tropological ontology, where society is regarded as organised through unstable symbolic relations that are never completely settled. The relational functioning of language can be traced from Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on structural linguistics (1960). Freud’s writings on the interpretation of dreams, where the condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) never ceases, are relevant here as an analogy to meaning and language in general. The interpretation of the manifested dream into dream-thoughts cannot ever be fully exhausted, just as each sign in language is certain to find ever new applications (Freud 1999). Nietzsche argued that there is no natural link between the thing in itself, ideas and whatever signifies those ideas. The relationship between language and thought can never be pure according to this view, and is always constituted by blatant metaphors, from the nerve-stimuli we call perception to the sound-image and, then, to what we call cognition (Nietzsche 1979). Nevertheless, communication would not be possible without metaphors. Even if they are sweeping simplifications, we must use these arbitrary representations to interpret an ever-changing world. I refrain from conceptualising language ontologically as ordinary versus strange, because that presumes an already constituted language. As articulated by Ricoeur:

Political protest and metaphor 133 Certainly, the only functioning of language we are aware of operates within an already constituted order; metaphor does not produce a new order except by creating rifts in an old order. Nevertheless, could we not imagine that the order itself is born in the same way that it changes? Is there not in Gadamer’s terms, a ‘metaphoric’ at work at the origin of logical thought, at the root of all classification? (Ricoeur 1977: 23) Similarly, Jacques Derrida argues that ‘there is a supplement at the source’ (Derrida 1998: 304), meaning that the ‘original’ is also a replica. In this way, metaphor in the Aristotelian sense is always already a metaphor. Some metaphors reign for a moment, enlighten a conversation, but are suddenly gone the next. Others are forgotten as such and thus stay and are taken as our given world, eternal truths, pure language, direct thoughts or simply common sense. In spite of the undetermined nature of language and meaning, or rather, precisely because of that, metaphor as the object of research becomes of critical importance for studies in politics. For the purpose of analysing politics, we must believe in our illusory use of metaphor, but nevertheless must also remember not to forget what they are. In this endeavour, I make use of discourse theory inspired by the work of Slavoj Zˇizˇek (1989, 1990) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), but also draw on an interpretation of the ‘metaphors we live by’ through a reading of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). When using the structuring metaphors stipulated by Lakoff and Johnsson, one needs to be aware of the essentialist cognitivism suggested by the two, as it does not routinely harmonise with discourse theory (Winther Jørgensen and Phillips 2000). However, without succumbing to their ontology, metaphors can be treated as structuring the entire social (the meaning of our ideological world), even if they are contingent and bound by locality, in terms of both time and space. Discourse is viewed here as the result of every articulation maintaining it, not only through language but also through institutional arrangements, pictures or humour. A discourse is thus a signifying system with signs that are related to one another through the logics of difference and equivalence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), and they function metaphorically and metonymically. Any text material, whether feature stories, government reports, scientific work or broadcast debates, will, in this analysis, be handled as articulations of discourse inscribed in a general text. Genre is hence not a privileged category, but may be yet another articulation bringing meaning to a text. Meaning is, however, never bound by, nor merely an effect of, a certain genre or medium. The concept of pure genre may even be questioned (Derrida 1980, 1986) as there is always an outside that is already a part, at least by defining it, of the inside (Derrida 1998). All language is saturated with metaphor, and while researching the ideological organisation of signs, I naturally entangle myself in ideological

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production. The way that the political community is constituted as an unproblematic whole, where events of protest within are granted a certain meaning, is ideological (Laclau 1996a: 206). However, I see no way to engage outside the order of metaphor, because ‘[t]here is no opposite to metaphor – other than death, mental and/or social’ (Miller 1992: 88).

The study of political metaphor and protest The present study of political metaphors centres attention on the ideological organisation of political protest. Political subjects are not ready-made entities, but instead the result of a temporary fixation. I examine metaphors, in the form of social practices and representations, that mould events of protest. Political activists are embodied the moment they are represented, either by themselves or by others, spoken to or on behalf of (Laclau 1993). Hence, the political subject is a metaphor condensed with meaning. Simultaneous with the representation of a differential group identity, here the protestors’ identity, an entire account of the social emerges, and groups acquire meaning in relation to their context (Laclau 1996b). The purpose here is to deconstruct the inherently political character of the social, the hegemony that identifies and recognises political protests. In a western liberal democracy, the most institutionalised and accepted form of political protest is casting a vote in a sanctioned election. Illegal direct action would be located at the opposite end on an imagined, simplified and formalised scale. Street-demonstrations or labour-strikes are found somewhere in between and are considered healthy expressions of public opinion but can occasionally turn ‘extreme’. These are the ‘laws’ of protest, but the meaning of the protests is negotiable, and certain subjects and gestures become more legitimate, or even plausible and true, than others. The ‘laws’ of protest are further constantly broken, as any incidence of political protest, due to iterability (Derrida 1988), is split into one unique example of protest and into the universal law regulating the same. Both events analysed here have in common how the laws regulating the modes of protest are broken. Yet, it is exactly when they are broken that they come into being. Laws are hence determined by their transgressions, by what they are not. I also argue in this chapter that metaphors, such as age, gender or class, determine the success of any protest (Laclau 1990), something which further questions the liberal idea about the primacy of the good argument. Two events from contemporary Swedish politics are the focus of my study on how political protest gains meaning from metaphor. They are not treated as comparative case studies, but instead as unique proceedings that are analysed precisely because of their specific conditions. The first event is the global justice movement’s demonstrations at the European Union (EU) summit in Gothenburg in 2001, ending the Swedish presidency. The second event is a consultative referendum about the introduction of the euro as currency instead of the Swedish krona in September 2003.

Political protest and metaphor 135 The two events are ‘dislocations’ in Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology (1985) and as such require hegemonic interventions bringing order to uncertainties. Hegemonic discourses explaining the events are symbolic condensations taking place in an undecidable terrain. Hegemony is the new fixation of meaning and the exclusion of all other possible ones. My intention is not only to reactivate the contingency of these hegemonic discourses, but also to pinpoint possible effects triggered by the metaphors brought into play within the hegemonic account of the social.

Event one – a demonstration in Gothenburg Sweden held the presidency of the EU in 2001, which culminated in a summit in the city of Gothenburg in June, where leaders from Europe and the President of the United States, George W. Bush, came to meet. Similar to other current summits, this provoked massive social movement demonstrations, joined here under the common platform Towards a Different Europe. Social movement activism is related as a binary opposition to official politics which is the representation and negotiation of interests in liberal democracy. The almost obligatory presence of the non-official politics of social movement activism at contemporary summits is part of the social myth of a transparent liberal democracy. The moments organising the global justice movement, as an occurrence of ‘civil society’, are relational to and different from the institutional EU-project. The social movements can thus be recognised within the same system of differences, although as complementary to institutional politics. The recurring attempts to establish beforehand deliberative situations between the movements and the institutional political arena are articulations of such a totalising order and belief in the transparency of the community. During the summit, three activists were shot by the police, hundreds were imprisoned, police and civilians were injured and property valued in millions of euros was destroyed. This dislocation resulted in a hegemonic intervention, where the social movement protest regained its proper place in the EU-project and the associated idea of liberal democracy. A supplement, a radical outside to the established order of EU-politics, which cannot be symbolised but is nevertheless labelled in all sorts of ways, was introduced as an explanation for the violence, thus filling the empty place of the universal. This radical outside is a condensed (metaphoric) fantasy-figure overdetermined with symbolic investment. This supplement, a deviant demonstrator, was granted contradicting subjectivities such as unfortunate adolescents going astray, upper middle-class spoiled kids revolting, criminals missing a social context, idiots, communists, Nazis and terrorists (this last name opened up a whole new dimension after 11 September the same year). A constitutive outside takes many forms while heterogeneously compensating for the failed social. The diverse subjectivities representing the deviant social movement activist broaden the number of possible positive answers to the

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question of the possibility of the (intrinsically impossible) social. The deviating activist becomes a social symptom, filling the void, explaining to many why society does not work (Zˇizˇek 1989). An ideological fantasy about a transparent EU-project already knows about its incompleteness and produces the anticipated threatening subject long before any dislocation. The deviating violent activist is thus ‘a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance’ (Zˇizˇek 1989: 126). Unruly demonstrations were already present as subjectivities well ahead of the Gothenburg summit. For example the National Security Service warned about a group of violent demonstrators attending the EU-meeting (SÄPO 2001). Many journalists also constructed worst-case scenarios in advance involving deviant violent demonstrators and, thereby anticipation, a tense expectation, jouissance. A not very subtle exclusion mechanism divided demonstrators into categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. One journalist reported from the confrontations at the summit: ‘When the police closed off the Victoria Bridge in order to prevent hundreds of people sitting there to leave, no cloaked demonstrators could be detected and the police could no longer separate the good from the evil’ (Grahn 2001: 37; emphasis added). Here, the evil-doers are a phantasmic crowd gathering among the respected demonstrators, subjectivities now paradoxically masked by showing their faces. The metaphoric supplement of the deviating demonstrator is thus continuously present, despite deficient substantiation; it is an already given identification.

Conceptual metaphors and demonstrations The hegemonic intervention attaches guilt to a collective of deviant activists marked by a number of conceptual metaphors. A recurring structuring metaphor characterises the social movement demonstrations as some type of living organism, ‘protest as an animal/a natural phenomenon’ (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In this discourse, a group of deviant activists is referred to as a ‘tail’, which is metonymically and unambiguously attached to a nonpronounced animal’s body – the normal demonstrators. Two illustrative quotes commenting on the events are that ‘[t]here is a tail, for which politics becomes a means to go berserk’ (SVT 2001) and ‘[i]t is time to question the right to demonstrate when there is this tail [of violent demonstrators] that wants to crush anything that comes in its way’ (GT/Expressen 2001). A variation on this theme is describing collective protests as a cyclical recurring force of nature, a historic or natural certainty: ‘There are always waves like this. There will always be youth that need to protest and become violent [. . .] this is nothing new in the history of mankind’ (SR 2001). Also ‘insects’, ‘rats’ and ‘pigs’ were biological names marking the constitutive outside responsible for the political failure at Gothenburg. Rejection and redirection of these interpellations among all demonstrators reproduces an imaginary collective of deviant activists. Normal and abnormal forms of protests become relevant categories through acts of identification such as the

Political protest and metaphor 137 repetitive dissociation of the activists themselves from a pronounced ‘violent tail’. Few want to belong to the ‘small group of violent deviants’, but they nevertheless become a part of the very same large animal-like body, which embraces everyone, despite the almost unison condemnation and detachment. Even utterances of dissociation pronouncing oneself as a ‘peaceful demonstrator’ simultaneously reproduce this same order, while marking the supplement as ‘the other’ but also inevitably remaining attached to this violent outside. The official Swedish Presidency web page reported on the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson’s experiences from the summit: It is hard for the President-in-Office of the European Council not to mention the riots in Göteborg when he summarises the decisions of the European Council meeting. At the same time, he is pleased with the real political results. ‘This is a historic moment’, says Persson, referring to the agreements made in the sphere of enlargement. (The Swedish Presidency 2001; emphasis added) Here, again no distinction is made between the riots and the non-official politics of the summit; political protest outside the ‘real politics’ is condensed to the metaphoric riot. The failed idea of ‘civil society’, and social movement activism as a phenomenon supporting the hegemonic political project, is concealed through the return of a haunting supplement. The body cannot escape its tail, and the inconsistent field organising an imaginary EU-project of fully sutured transparent politics, or an ever-accommodating and transparent liberal democracy, cannot escape its own impossibility. ‘Demonstration is war’ is another widespread structuring metaphor subjecting the global justice movement in Gothenburg to otherness. These metaphors are so obvious and established that protest becomes very similar to war in the discourse. During the summit, there was a regular mention of ‘a feeling of war’, ‘the battle of Gothenburg’, ‘besieged city’, ‘guerrilla warfare’ or ‘street combat’ and so on. Persistent reference to and identification with ‘peaceful demonstrators’ also implies others dealing with the binary opposition term – war. Furthermore, the news photography was charged with visual references to war aesthetics like people hunching down in the streets or frightened faces taking protection in a smoky environment. In a sense, a photo is the ultimate metaphor with immense condensation of meaning. Figure 9.1 below, taken at the Gothenburg demonstrations and frequently exposed in the media, moreover curiously approximates the iconic front cover of the book Deeds of War (1989) by the renowned photo journalist James Nachtwey. References to Gaza, the West Bank, Nazi Germany and other infamous trouble spots are also articulations of this structuring metaphor. Considering my introductory characterisation of metaphor, this is not simply rhetorical assistance; we can never escape the workings of its

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Figure 9.1 A person.

imagery. Hence, the use of war metaphors establishes the plausibility for military intervention when dealing with political protest. Disruptive natural phenomena are also something that reasonably only can be controlled by forceful intervention. The metonymic relation between violence, masculinity and protest becomes apparent in elite discourses and media reports on street demonstrations. Women are notably absent as subjects in the discourse organising collective protest taking to the streets. Studies show, however, that more women than men engage in new social movements and non-formalised

Political protest and metaphor 139 political activity (Foweraker 1995; Oskarson 1999). Nevertheless, it is mainly men in these organisations who become public figures representing the movements. Women are not granted the same space to act publicly and to appear as political subjects. Elena Semino and Michaela Masci argue that Silvio Berlusconi’s usage of football metaphors in a campaign has sexist implications, not merely due to the fact that more men than women are interested in football, but also because the archetypical representation of the football player remains a man (Semino and Masci 1996). Translated into a discourse organising political protest, the structuring war and combat metaphors also connote that the participants are men. According to Cynthia Enloe (2000), the militarisation of civil areas marginalises women. As a result, women are discarded as political subjects in the discourse about social movement protest. Demonstrators, even when disguised with a mask as in Figure 9.1, are nevertheless regularly presumed to be male. In spite of hesitant gender marks, boys become a signifying metaphor embodying the activist in the discourse on street demonstrations. The demonstrators are mainly made out to be aggressive males, preferably boys, in texts from the event. ‘In front of the library, when the windows at the bus-stop were already shattered, seven masked boys were grabbing paving-stones’, a journalist reported from the demonstration (GP 2001). Evidently, the reporter could not possibly know for sure whether or not these activists were boys since they were hooded, but they were still articulated as boys in the discourse. Activists are more often made into ‘rascals’ or ‘boys’ than into ‘men’, possibly because ‘real men’ represent another type of masculinity. In a similar way, the policemen working at the summit were men. Women are not policemen, they are ‘women policemen’. Under a newspaper headline ‘Raped Gothenburg’, the text reads: The assertion that we [the journalists] are hoping for riots and violence is nonsense. Of course we do not want that. But we have to depict what is happening. When hooligans rape Gothenburg, when the Avenue is battered, and there is shooting in the Vasa Park, we most certainly write about it and we write a lot. Otherwise it would not be journalism, but distortion of reality (Hjörne 2001: 1; emphasis added) ‘The raped city’ became a meaningful metaphoric conception that was repeated in many texts after this one. Here, the gendered male activist is reproduced, as the concept of rape needs a rapist, who by metonymic attachment is a man, at present a hooligan. The raped city is also an example of what Carol Adams (1990) would call an absent referent. In this case, there is a raped city, although the concept of rape is usually reserved for women exposed to sexual violence. Through the use of metaphor, one area gets illuminated while something else is hidden. In the texts on the ‘raped city’,

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the more common usage of the words ‘rape’ and ‘battered’ is weakened, and this thereby obscures suffering among women exposed to violent acts carried out by men.

Event two – a Swedish referendum Sweden joined the EU in 1995 after a consultative referendum in September 1994 in which 52.3 per cent of the participating electorate voted ‘Yes’ to join the European political project. Since 1999, the EU has also been a monetary union (EMU) with the purpose of coordinating the economic policies of the member states. On 14 September 2003, yet another consultative referendum took place in which the constituency was to answer the question, ‘Do you think that Sweden should introduce the euro as currency?’ This time 55.9 per cent of the participants voted ‘No’, which was a dislocatory event that immediately demanded organisation and structure to become comprehensible. The result from the referendum did not agree with representations of a consensual EU-project. The meaning of the election outcome hence had to be organised, and a hegemonic intervention had to establish a discourse explaining the disturbing outcome. Political subjects are embodied as metaphoric condensations, but explanatory responsibility rests heavier on some than on others. The winning No-voters, despite a successful campaign, were still subjected to marginalisation, since the meaning of political protests is negotiable. Naming the No-voters in certain ways became more plausible than others after the referendum, and a majority of the votes accordingly does not guarantee a privileged interpretation of what follows.

Scientific and expert explanation A team of political scientists published a book one year after the referendum, investigating and ‘explaining’ the outcome (Oscarsson and Holmberg 2004). Already the preface to that book stages the event as out of the ordinary, something that this giant book-project is itself an articulation of: The Struggle over the euro [the name of the anthology] is the largest joint book-project carried out so far by the Department of Political Science in Gothenburg. With 27 chapters and 24 participating authors we are proud to present a broad analysis on why the referendum about the euro in 2003 ended the way it did. In this anthology the main actors in the drama are studied – first of all the voters, but also the parties, the media, campaigners and the members of parliament. (Oscarsson and Holmberg 2004: 7; emphasis added) The dislocation even gained biblical proportions as one of the authors, referring to the election, writes that ‘[b]ig usually defeats little. Even if this time

Political protest and metaphor 141 Goliath, just like in the Bible, got beaten by David’ (Holmberg 2004: 21). Chapters in the academic anthology like ‘Lacking Anchorage’ (Brothén 2004), ‘The Impossible Loss’ (Strömbäck 2004) and ‘The Terminological Mistake’ (Rothstein 2004) implicitly suggest that there was a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ outcome in the election or the least that this outcome was bewildering. ‘Lacking anchorage’ reasonably necessitates an agent troubled with this lack, here an absent referent, with an interpretative privilege, is presented with a problem – which again is the (here non-anchored) No-voters. An ‘impossible loss’ also presumes that the normal state is not being achieved, i.e. the more probable victory is by the protagonist agent who is losing here, even though it ought not to be possible. Finally, a ‘terminological mistake’ presupposes that the election outcome was not wished for. This presupposes and reproduces a hegemonic narrative, where a figure with interpretative privilege is not happy with the result. The anthology front cover, Figure 9.2, illustrates the No-voter as a woman riding on an orange-painted Dalecarlian horse. These are popular wooden handcrafted souvenirs sold in the rural landscape of Dalarna, something that further evokes the backwardness of voting No to the euro. This, like any picture, is again the ultimate articulation of metaphor. In this humorous depiction, the No-voter is condensed into a somewhat ridiculous political subject on a wooden horse trying to fight an armed soldier on a sturdy European stallion. The message is that there is little or no prospect for this obstinate looking girl-woman, using the krona as a

Figure 9.2 A book cover.

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shield, to win the battle against the force of rationality. While using the coin as a protective devise, this metaphor also connotes a sense of regional protectionism, but even further, it conveys the message that it is the currency in itself that is of importance to the No-voter. While bringing forward one metaphor, others are marginalised. Among other things, this hides the fact that No-voters may be against socio-political implications of the capitalist order that possibly come with the EMU-project. Two chapters in the report are entitled ‘Homefeeling’ (Berg 2004) and ‘Swedes, the Euro and Nationalism’, respectively, and metonymically they attach emotion and intolerance to the metaphoric No-voter. The wooden Dalecarlian horse is also an articulation with nationalist connotations due to dissemination (Derrida 1981). City people versus the countryside residents became a popular division frequently referred to throughout the election. This occasioned a debate mounted by Swedish state television inviting two discussants to a morning news show announced under the rubric ‘Big cities say Yes, countryside says No’. Pernilla Ström, active in the Yes-campaign, was asked to explain this tendency and commented on it as follows: I think it depends on what type of contacts one has. If you look at the big cities, there are lots of exterior connections. I think it has to do with the industrial structure. While in the countryside you don’t have that type of flow, those types of contacts that you have in the cities. It’s natural then to be a little more wary, and think twice before letting in these new things that are a bit unfamiliar and that can be felt to be a little different. (SVT 2003a; emphasis added) Again, this statement reveals the inevitability of the development to come. Changed currency is something that needs to be ‘let in’, and those opposing are emotional and worried about European intrusion due to rural isolation. The Social Democratic Prime Minister Göran Persson adopted this same discourse when commenting on the election outcome more than a month after the referendum: We have regional tensions here in Sweden that continue to grow. It is a tremendous failure. A Sweden where the future in some parts of the country is perceived as a threat and in others as a possibility. [. . .] Accordingly, this cleavage that grows there, that is frankly our great great [sic!] hell. (SVT 2003b; emphasis original) There are unquestionably a better and a worse attitude that one can adopt towards the future according to the prime minister. Making the rift in the electorate, a great hell puts considerable responsibility on those who answered No – those in parts of the country where the future is said to be

Political protest and metaphor 143 regarded as a threat. The hegemonic discourse makes No-voters bear the responsibility for a great hell. ‘Women most negative to the euro’ (DagensIndustri 2003) and ‘Women most hesitant to the euro’ (Brors 2003) were two major newspaper headlines referring to an opinion poll prior to the referendum. These articulations are illustrative of the hegemonic intervention and make apparent the norm. It is not considered newsworthy to report on men being positive to the euro; the metaphoric women are the deviating subjectivity. However, this is significant in indicating women’s position in politics in general, where they are characterised by deviation from an invisible, though male, political subject (Eduards 2002). No-voters were also metaphorically marked as women during the Election Night broadcast. One focus during the television studio analysis was on explaining women’s reasons for voting against the euro, not the men voting Yes. This reinforces the impression of there being a proper answer in the referendum. The men were not out of order voting Yes, even though metaphorically representing the minority. This again makes apparent the norm, while enforcing men’s and weakening women’s status. The metaphoric women are thus much more visible in the common currency discourse than in the street demonstrations. Even so, they turn out to be subordinated when being embodied as those dividing the country. The political scientists’ scientific account of the election results, truthseekingly mapping out the ‘being’ of the No-voter, grapples with age, gender, whereabouts, EU-knowledge, voter-behaviour, etc. of the condensed metaphor. Their efforts to allocate ‘human beings into types and categories, all necessarily divided from each other for distinct handling, treatment and consideration’ are what Donald F. Miller would call literalist (Miller 1992: 91). These condensations, like any metaphor, illuminate similarities despite dissimilarities, regardless of the number of categories used as explanatory variables. Authenticity cannot be reached, no matter how many chapters are written on the topic; the gist still remains and is also reproduced through articulation – the problematic outcome of the election. This meticulous search for the reasons for the No-voters’ victory contributes to an idea of the EMU-project as the norm and an almost ‘natural’ step for a joint European project destined to come. This air of inevitability was also hinted at in an interview with Prime Minister Persson in the Financial Times: ‘It’s impossible for us to say no. We have only two options. “Yes, we want to enter now” or “Yes, we want to enter later” ’ (Dawkins 1999). While focusing on facts about the No-voters, these characterisations simultaneously function as a reduction of possibilities and other potential interpretations are concealed. This figurative drive to establish identity between dissimilar subjects is what Nietzsche would call ‘the will to power’ (Sarup 1988: 46). Metaphors promote the opportunity to act in certain ways and make others unintelligible. Not only do these interpretations obscure other possible comprehensions of No-voters, in terms of class-related or anti-capitalist reasons for voting No to the common currency, but this

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hegemonic intervention also names the No-voter with metonymic attachment; it also creates a chain of equivalence that hides the inherent ‘lack’ in the social, i.e. a gap haunting the social myth that here announces itself as in essence an unproblematic EU-project.

Chains of equivalence and a social symptom There are other ways than physical repression to disband a political protest, as even a majority of the electorate can be subjected to subordination. The relentless determination of the nature of the No-voter also evokes the character of the Yes-voter as its opposite. All dichotomies have one privileged position where the privileged moment belongs to the masculine subject on a symbolic level (Sarup 1988: 109). The metaphoric No-voter subject can thus be illustrated with the following metonymic moments constituting a symbolic chain of equivalence: woman, naïve (lack of knowledge), rural and emotional. Its binary opposition is hence a metonymic chain that is male, wise, urban and pragmatic. The EMU-referendum resulted in a dislocation, a trauma that needs to heal. Although the rift is heterogeneously rationalised, this discourse is not unchallenged. There are antagonistic explanations for this social rupture, some even less flattering, when suggesting nationalist inclinations for voting No. Such a chain of equivalence would metonymically attach fear, intolerance, nationalism, regional protectionism and reactionary qualities to the condensed No-voter and simultaneously attach to the Yes-voter tolerance and foresight. The metaphoric No-voter, even while in majority, becomes a social symptom, a residue disturbing the myth of an inevitable merger of ‘European economic and political interests’. Attempts to articulate this event as the result of a capitalist or imperialist critique cannot escape the fact that explanatory responsibility is still put on the No-voters’ behaviour.

Metaphor and the study of politics The deconstructing of conceptual metaphors problematises the world and the meanings we take for granted. This study of political protest has traced political and ideological construction of the social and also pinpointed possible effects due to metaphor. In a western liberal democracy, the most institutionalised form of political protest is going to the ballot box. Nonetheless, as mentioned, political subjects do not exist in themselves as ready-made entities, but are the result of a temporary fixation of meaning. Demonstrators at the Gothenburg summit need a constitutive outside in order to become legitimate activists. Peaceful demonstrators’ efforts at distancing themselves from the violent outside in order to gain legitimacy, however, remain difficult, because a variety of metaphors organise all activists as part of the same organic body. Similarly, a majority of the electorate voted

Political protest and metaphor 145 against the introduction of the common currency. Still, this referendum was not unanimously respected, even with its being the most institutionalised protest mode available, with each citizen having one vote to cast. The rationality of using the referendum as a means in politics is questioned directly and indirectly. Different themes explain the problematic No-victory as No-voters are condensed into and explained through metaphors such as their ‘being’ women, rural, nationalist or lacking knowledge. Political protest does not have a meaning before its representation. Hence, also a familiar and legitimate political issue can become marginalised in a discourse, for instance through naming the protest reactionary, regional or embodied by women. Both hegemonic interventions studied here maintain a social imaginary, a myth, which organises political protest in accordance with a liberal democratic ideal. In Gothenburg, the hegemonic project inscribed the demonstrations in a myth reproducing an accommodating and transparent democracy with fair laws and a few foul demonstrators. In the euro-election, the myth suggests an inevitable EMU-project and a pre-destined European economic future. However, these attempts to formulate a unified social also reveal always-present conflicts and antagonisms. This study of political protest traces the political and ideological organisation of the social and also pinpoints possible effects of metaphors. Since the use of metaphor is intrinsic to all meaning, I also find it useful to draw attention to metaphors used by political scientists, as these are also dense with the politics of condensation and displacement.

References Adams, C.J. (1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, London: Polity Press. Aristotle (1996) Poetics, London: Penguin. Berg, L. (2004) Hemkänsla’, in H.O.S. Holmberg (ed.), Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen. Brors, H. (2003) ‘Kvinnor mest tveksamma till euron’, Dagens Nyheter. Brothén, M. (2004) ‘Bristande förankring’, in H. Oscarsson and S. Holmberg (eds), Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen. DagensIndustri (2003) ‘Kvinnor mest negativa till euron Dagens Industri’, 18 August. Dawkins, C.B. (1999) ‘We will join euro, says PM’, Financial Times, 15 November. De Saussure, F. (1960) Course in General Linguistics, London: Owen. Derrida, J. (1980) ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry, 7: 55–81. Derrida, J. (1981) Dissemination, London: Athlone. Derrida, J. (1986) ‘But, beyond . . .’ (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon), Critical Response, 13: 155–70. Derrida, J. (1988) Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1998) Of grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eduards, M. (2002) Förbjuden handling: om kvinnors organisering och feministisk teori, Malmö: Liber ekonomi.

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Enloe, C.H. (2000) Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foweraker, J. (1995) Theorizing Social Movements, London: Pluto Press. Freud, S. (1999) The Interpretation of Dreams, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grahn, H.B.M. (2001) ‘Den svarta fredagen Kaos och skräck när polis och ligister drabbade samman’, Göteborgs-Posten, 16 June. GT/Expressen (2001) [tabloid], 16 June. GP (2001) [newspaper], 16 June. Hjörne, P. (2001) ‘Våldtaget Göteborg’, Göteborgs-posten, 16 June. Holmberg, S. (2004) ‘Valspurten avgjorde inte’, in H. Oscarsson and S. Holmberg (eds) Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen. The Swedish Presidency (2001) Official web-page. Online. http://www.eu2001.se (accessed 14 April 2006). Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1993) ‘Power and Representation’, in M. Poster (ed.) Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Laclau, E. (1996a) ‘The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3: 201–20. Laclau, E. (1996b) Emancipation(s), London: Verso. Laclau, E., and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D.F. (1992) The Reason of Metaphor: A Study in Politics, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage. Nachtwey, J. (1989) Deeds of War: Photographs, London: Thames and Hudson. Nietzsche, F. (1979) Philosophy and Truth, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Oscarsson, H., and Holmberg, S. (eds) (2004) Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen Göteborgs universitet. Oskarson, M. (1999) ‘Kvinnors politiska medborgarskap i tre välfärdsstater: politiskt deltagande och engagemang’, in P. Aronson (ed.) Demokrati och medborgarskap, SOU. Quintilian, M.F. (1933) The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, London: Loeb Classical Library. Ricoeur, P. (1977) The Rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rothstein, B. (2004) ‘Det terminologiska misstaget’, in H.O.S. Holmberg (ed.) Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen. Sarup, M. (1988) An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Semino, E., and Masci, M. (1996) ‘Politics is Football: Metaphor in the Discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’, Discourse and Society, 2: 243–69. SR (2001) ‘Interview with Ulf Adelsohn’, Lördagsintervjun, P1, 1 September. Strömbäck, J. (2004) ‘Den omöjliga förlusten’, in H.O.S. Holmberg (ed.) Kampen om euron, Göteborg: Statsvetenskapliga institutionen. SVT (2001) Morgonnyheterna, 19 June. SVT (2003a) ‘Storstaden säger ja och landsbygden säger nej’. Online broadcast. http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=4678&a=118579 (accessed 14 April, 2006).

Political protest and metaphor 147 SVT (2003b) Aktuellt, 22 October. SÄPO (2001) ‘Säkerhetspolisens verksamhetsberättelse 2000’, Stockholm: SÄPO [Report by the Swedish Security Service]. Winther Jørgensen, M., and Phillips, L. (2000) Diskursanalys som teori och metod, Lund: Studentlitteratur. Zˇizˇek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, S. (1990) ‘Beyond Discourse-Analysis’, in E. Laclau (ed.) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times, London: Verso.

Part IV

Sexuality

10 Real construction through metaphorical language How animals and machines (amongst other metaphors) maketh (hu)man (what ‘he’ is)1 Terrell Carver My purpose in this chapter is not to write a history of the human, the humane or the humanitarian or to find its genealogy in the struggles of the past in any comprehensive or even persuasively contextual way. Rather I intend to meditate at first on the role of animal and machine metaphors in our current conceptions and to see what this tells us about the overtly judgemental side of the concept ‘the humane’. To do that, I refer to texts, commentaries and current usage that accompany discussion of the international conventions on the laws of war and the various declarations of human rights. As I pursue that project, I also touch on some of the ways that sex, gender and sexuality figure in producing the concepts and distinctions through which these conventions and declarations are operative and from which ethical judgements and practices are produced (Kinsella 2008). Methodologically this chapter argues that discourse analysis generally and the cognitive semantic approach to metaphor in particular require a clear location with respect to a philosophy of human consciousness and practice. My appeals to Derridean post-structuralism and to Wittgensteinian/Butlerian ‘performativity’ make commonplace assumptions concerning the body – consciousness relationship, and the literal – metaphorical linguistic distinction, highly problematic (Derrida 1974; Shapiro 1985–86; Wittgenstein 1997; Butler 1999). I see humanity as operating in a linguistic mode ‘all the way down’ through the body itself, and I see human practice as a Foucauldian realm of power-play through which the action-oriented ‘regimes’ of evaluation and judgement are themselves constructed (Foucault 1970, 1980, 2003). While a defence of this view would have to be extensive, and would certainly be controversial, my aim here is to link metaphor to power via two devices: the overall framing distinctions through which a mythical human figure is evoked and sustained and the projections through which concepts are defined and deployed by invoking a metaphorical ‘other’. Having adopted a workable methodology of metaphorical ‘othering’, outward projection and recursive re-projection back onto the (supposed) unitary human figure, I discuss in the final section the prior issue of the already masculinised character of the ‘man’ in the human, the humane and

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the humanitarian. It is from this figure that the dichotomies of civilisation/ barbarism, and peacetime/wartime, arise, and these dichotomies frame current human experience very profoundly in globalised terms.

De animalia My approach here will be somewhat different from Aristotle’s in that my observations will be on and of metaphor, rather than animate objects (other than plants) and their being. Because the human is both at one with the animal (i.e. we are both decisively an animal and decisively different, so we like to think), the conceptual inside/outside is already problematic because we are a living contradiction (both animal and not-animal) and also unsure exactly where the supposed boundary (between the not-animal human and the ‘mere’ animals) is supposed to be. Moreover, we have complex ways of ranking or grading animals from various perspectives (higher/lower, food-if at all/non-food, domesticated/wild, specially protected species/objects of sport or hunting, etc.). We thus already have an animal ‘within’ (the human one) and so an important ‘inner’ source of metaphor about the human. Animal metaphors are thus particularly telling, because they are already both ‘within’ and ‘without’, and so the ‘outside’ is also ‘inside’ in a productively ambiguous way. ‘She’s a real star’, on the other hand, transfers meaning (both ways, as metaphors do: stars are beautiful and special and so is she; she is special and beautiful and so are stars). But the star is safely outside the human (on usual conceptions), despite their discursive overlap. ‘The prince must be both a lion and a fox’ is quite different (Machiavelli 1988). The bestiary is rather more internal to the human subject and the two-way overlap rather more dangerously productive. We already imagine that lions and foxes are aggressive predators (which they may be, but then that is just what they do). And we already know that humans may be aggressive predators (but amongst many other behaviour patterns from within a realm of presumed choices in aid of which we deploy ethical systems and moral codes). The animal metaphors are not really ‘from nature’ and therefore outside the human subject; rather they are projections from our concepts of the human subject ‘onto nature’ (Davis 1999). The metaphorical transfer of meaning is therefore not really from the ‘outside’ (as much as is the case in the ‘star’ example above). Foxes are not really foxy in Machiavelli’s sense at all; we are. Animal metaphors are themselves a repository of our concepts of character and morals, from our animal ‘within’, or to put it the other way round, it would be rather difficult to express all the judgements and distinctions that we want to express about ourselves strictly from within the ‘human’, ignoring a comparative ‘outside’. Indeed, if we thought wholly within the human, there would be no constitutive ‘outside’, and so no human at all, because it would not be other than, or distinguished from, anything else. We seem to need recourse to our highly varied ‘inside’, and our pseudo-‘outside’, to do what we want to do discursively and in

Real construction through metaphorical language 153 power-terms. The human/animal non-boundary line and the inside/outside non-boundary line are two sides of the same highly productive contradiction that is not going to go away, because it is about language and politics (and not about some biological realm of fact to which we must adhere to make our political language truthful) (Connolly 1991; Chambers 2003). Unsurprisingly, everything we do to animals we do to humans, though there are differences in scale and legality but hardly consistent ones. And we struggle to humanise them with nicknames, protective legislation, licensing and pet-services, schools and vocations, even passports (with micro-chip insertions, already in use in humans for some informational purposes). As with human children, where these two realms merge most directly, animals are objects of rights and duties of care, rather than subjects in their own (full) right, though the boundary line is wavering in both cases (animals and children). This makes the metaphorical mix all that much more complex and the anthropomorphism all that much more encompassing. But what is the ‘morph’ in the ‘anthro’? We adults admit to an inner animal rather more readily than to an internal child, precisely because the ‘human’ must be an adult (in various defined senses) rather than a child (in defined senses that are rarely obverse and opposite to adulthood in logical ways). Of course, this age demarcator has an operative power in terms of birth certificates and legal rights (and obligations and liabilities), but the concept itself is ultimately metaphorical and ascriptive (‘oh, do grow up’), rather than biological and factual. But what is the (adult) human supposed to be like? The use of age as a universal and objective demarcator of the human (as adult) is quite recent historically and quite specific culturally. It has very distinct political effects in terms of international relations (e.g. child soldiers, refugees/deserters) as well as local and ultimately personal identity (whether established or faked). It is undeniably Eurocentric, and despite a supposed veneer of (so-called) secularisation, it is a development of an individualism (and a view of childhood) that derives ultimately from Christian thought, though with possible commonalities with other traditions. While it is difficult to show that modern conceptions of equality were completely unknown elsewhere in thought and practice (whether historically or culturally), our enlightenment doctrines of the (adult) human are a current point of global (though hardly universal) reference. The main metaphorical trope here is bound to be reason, conceptualised as logical and mathematical rationality, and also (more or less) covertly as male and masculine (Lloyd 1993; Prokhovnik 2002; Carver 2004). Notoriously, this individualistic and ‘adult’ conception of the human is also instrumental, unemotional, acquisitive and economic. This leads us to the other metaphorical realm through which the human is defined and into which humans project their ‘inner’ discursive possibilities onto an ‘other’ – machines.

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‘Modern times’ the movie The inner machine is rather less well known than the inner child. It is also not such a colourful and pseudo-ethical world as the ‘animal kingdom’ (conceived metaphorically). After all, animals have bodies, and we make metaphorical connections with some very unlikely ones at times. Also they have independent motion, to which we ascribe varying degrees of consciousness and volition; this explains why we are not very involved with plant metaphors in defining ourselves. Nonetheless, we often feel ‘part of a machine’ when we comment on human institutions, and the metaphor seems to stand for processes that are mechanical in essence (rather than conscious and volitional), emotionless and without feeling (because these are aspects of consciousness) and immune to morality in their own terms (morality being an exclusively human realm, though we like to see some good and caring behaviour in animals to mirror and confirm our superior position in a pan-animal order of things). Charteris-Black (2005: 205–6) mentions the political use of the machine metaphor, but only in passing contrast to metaphors of personhood, i.e. the human. Hobbes’s metaphors strike particularly close to this particular bone. In the little-remarked Preface to Leviathan (1996), he explicitly says that ‘life is but a motion of limbs’ and then likens the human body to the parts of a spring-loaded watch, noting that death for the two is the same – the cessation of vital motion as the mechanism runs down. While this is normally regarded as a pleasantly odd (or perhaps only slightly sinister) seventeenthcentury conceit, the point is a serious one (for Hobbes and for us). On this view, we are machines and that is all that life is – motion from within, in the manner of automata. This, of course, is the premise today of materialist psychologies and physiologies and of artificial intelligence (and robotics in some modes) – we are simply the sum of various chemical and electrical reactions and ‘events’, albeit quite complicated ones. This view is actually the result of the character and logical structure of the concepts that we have, particularly the highly abstract ones of logic and mathematics that we use (and continually invent) to characterise the world (see the chapters by Akrivoulis and Pikalo in this volume). Or rather, we project these concepts on to the world in which we find phenomena (or not) that we say (according to our rules and protocols) are corresponding. Machines are what they are, because we want them to be that way, and we are not that unhappy treating our bodies (and our brains) in the same terms for purposes of research and medical therapies (but not completely happy, either). While it is easier to think of an ‘inner animal’ from which we project behavioural and moral qualities into the world (i.e. back onto the animals from which we then ‘derive’ the metaphors), the same process works with the ‘inner machine’, derived as it is from concepts and abstractions that are ours, and no one else’s, and which are as ‘internal’ to us as anything else. I am rather tempted to say that we project ourselves morally into the world

Real construction through metaphorical language 155 through animal metaphors (they give such vivid characterisations to our examples) and scientifically into the world through systematic or machinelike metaphors (since they are but reflections of our concepts of logic and mathematics), but this is doubtless rather too simple. The human adult thus has an ‘inner’ relationship with machine-logic, and therefore with machines as objects and as metaphors, but as we will see, this inner/outer nonboundary line between the human adult and the machine is much more terrifyingly problematic than all our terrors about animals. Machines kill without the warmth that we (think we) get from a more obvious anthropomorphism with animals. Possibly the implications of the ‘purely mechanical’ side of humanity, where the complexities of ‘real consciousness’ have been reduced to repetition and programming, feel so alien to us because we perceive our world of consciousness, memory and morality, and the squidgy world of the body, as warm and friendly because it is ‘biological’ and living, rather than ‘mechanical’ and dead (though mechanical prosthesis is quite welcome at times and famously, now, we humans are cyborgs, i.e. acculturated fusions of ‘biology’ and machinery) (Haraway 1991). Nonetheless, we have few hesitations in imposing this view not just on nature (as a realm of objects and lower forms of consciousness, and sometimes even higher ones) but on ourselves through the technologies of social science, which reduce, simplify, educate, discipline, train and change us ‘from within’ so that we fit within the economic and social realm of ‘order’ (Foucault 1970). That ‘order’ is increasingly reduced and simplified to logical instructions and programmes, and we find that we must ‘fit in’ with ‘the system’ (or get fired), that we must achieve in terms of performance indicators (or lose out) and that we work ourselves up (from the bottom line) in a world where emotion and morality are redefined for us and within us to suit the system (which is created by us). Social sciences have been just as effective as physical sciences in changing the world; it is just that their object is us, and it is disturbing for us to highlight this apparently unstoppable process. While animals are not inherently moral (because we are, so we usually think), they are sufficiently like us in the squidginess of their bodies and the apparent complexity of their behaviour (the ones we are really interested in, anyway) that they seem less alien to us than the ‘non-living’ world of mechanisms, both physical and virtual ones. Machines and ‘systems’ (which are both mechanical and social constructs at the same time) seem to represent a world alien to ‘real’ consciousness, emotion and morals. Though we may oppose this machine-world to a world of morals and emotion, we also like to impose a world of logic and abstraction, simplification and repetition, certainty and instruction onto the world, and ever-increasingly so. Darwinian biology did not merely contradict the scriptures and eliminate God; it also conceptualised life itself in the simplest possible terms as a non-moral struggle for existence, with reproductive advantage going to those individuals which (and for Social Darwinists, who) avoid early death. Because of

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the presumption of individual behaviour and diametrically opposed interests, these are the premises of strategic interaction, as any game theorist will tell you, and they are of course precisely a projection of that particular logical and abstract view onto the biological world (sometimes including ourselves) via mechanistic metaphors of competitive individualism. Darwin had absorbed these from Malthus and Malthus from the categories of political economy (and Marx made a mordant comment exactly on this point in Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 14) (Marx 1990). Feminists have usefully exposed this realm of biological/mechanistic metaphor as masculinised, that is, not imbued with masculinity as one ‘pole’ of the gender binary, but rather collected up from the very same metaphors through which modern ‘bourgeois’ masculinity and ‘rational man’ have been constructed in commercial societies as regulating and animating social norms (Di Stefano 1991; Brown 1995; Hooper 2001).

Man’s inhumanity to man Both the (international) laws of war and the (universal) declarations of human rights (with their concepts of the human, the humane and the humanitarian) are produced from within a set of framing distinctions, which are not necessarily acknowledged. These are posed as dichotomies that are founded on (supposedly) self-evident facts and (therefore?) ethically defensible principles. However, deconstruction reveals that these facts are far from self-evident ‘realities’ apparent to observation and empirical validation (or even refutation) and that the principles which supposedly follow would require substantial ethical defence and are by no means self-evident to many of the worlds’ individuals and communities. Given the political setting of the conferences where these protocols and agreements were written and ratified, this explicit attention to ethical argument was understandably not forthcoming in a defining way, nor are the framing dichotomies more than alluded to, except very distantly. My aim in this concluding section is to lay out the basic framing dichotomies and to explore the metaphorical projections and recursive reprojections through which they are articulated and therefore produced as dichotomies in the (supposed) first place. Once produced, considerable institutional and structural power flows from these dichotomies via the declarations and protocols mentioned above, and the agencies of all kinds which invoke them in practice, from humanitarian NGOs and UN peacekeepers to hegemonic interventions into ‘conflict’ and global warfare on ‘rogue states’ and ‘terror’. But it also takes a lot of discursive work to produce these framing distinctions, and doing this involves the use of metaphor, working in the way described above. The major dichotomy framing these discourses of national and individual rights, and ethical injunctions and prohibitions, begins with a supposed unity in ‘humanity’ or ‘common humanity’. This almost immediately frac-

Real construction through metaphorical language 157 tures (as a matter of defining conceptual necessity) into a dichotomy between civilisation and its ‘other’, barbarism. The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to ‘all members of the human family’ and to ‘barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’. As it is no longer defensible to align barbarism anymore with ‘race’/ethnicity or e.g. language use (paradigmatically, those who did not speak [ancient] Greek), this process of ‘othering’ now relies on values and behaviours which supposedly result from observing the actions (rather than the ‘being’) of those who are going to sit either side of the (presumed) distinction. Historically, this practical line of theorising arises in early seventeenth-century discourses against the ‘frenzy’ of war, which was said to defile civilisation and to be characteristic of barbarians. Thus, certain prohibitions on the conduct of war are still said to mark the division between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbarous’ (Kinsella 2004). But the civilisation/barbarism distinction also arises domestically, for example in rights-discourse. Those who break natural laws (brigands, robbers and murders) that enjoin respect for the personal security and rightful property of all persons are uncivilised because they depart from reason and wilfully cause damage and disturbance (Locke 1988). Notably, a unity is posited in the human, in order to draw a dichotomy out of it: a (supposed unitary) being and its ‘other’. This is derived, of course, in apparent contradiction, from within itself already, precisely because it is language that is always and already ‘within’ (and because language is available for projection to create a ‘without’, since that is what language does). Barbarism is defined by its propensity to murder – rather than to defend and protect – various categories of humans, which as the ‘vulnerable’ proliferate in a variety of subject positions. These are women, the old, the young, the sick, the unarmed and defenceless, and even various occupational categories, e.g. religious vocations, farmers and medical personnel. Barbarians by contrast are an intriguingly undifferentiated category (this fact of discourse will become important later), whereas the civilised subject positions are stabilised and produced by ‘woman’ as a (supposedly) natural referent (i.e. a supposed repository of weakness, vulnerability and inability to fight or otherwise unable to exercise full economic and political agency) (Snyder 1999; Kinsella 2004). Yet, these categories of protected and defended persons are not a synecdoche for civilisation itself, but rather for civilised values. These are (supposedly) those of domestic and international order. This order has an overall unity and a gendered character in patriarchy (with the international arising out of the domestic, at least in most patriarchal theories) (Walby 1986; Odysseos and Seckinelgin 2002). What has not quite been said is that this order is also not just masculinised but also imbued with ambiguities about men and masculinities that need drawing out. What is the civilised human? How is he humane? In wartime, he (supposedly) protects and defends these ‘weak’ categories of persons. In peacetime, he shows respect for the rights of ‘others’ (presumably

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like himself) in ‘orderly’ commercial transactions, and he also (supposedly) shows respect for his duties of ‘care’ in personal relationships, most notably with women and children (and domesticated animals). What else is he like? How is this figure of ‘civilised man’ constructed against (yet in common with) animal and machine ‘others’ through metaphorical projections? How are these metaphors then projected as ‘others’ onto other humans and with what consequences? Which other metaphors are recursively re-projected onto the original subject, the civilised man and with what consequences? Barbarian ‘frenzy’ in war is clearly a realm of metaphorical beasts and vicious predators, animal-like (supposedly) in unreasoning and furious destruction, lacking ethical qualities of judgement (say, of suiting punishment to offence), any framework of justice (in going to war) and evincing pleasure in cruelty and suffering. Grotius says that they are ‘more animals than human beings’ (quoted in Kinsella 2008). Obviously, it would be hard to find any real animal that does these things, other than the human one, and so our inner animal is in this way projected outwards and is always an outward projection. This is clearly reflected in a text such as Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, where ‘polecats and foxes’ stand for viciousness in humanity, compounded in absolute arbitrary rulership (which is akin to ‘lyons and tigers’) (Locke 1988). While these metaphorical creatures are projected outwards from an inner animal to establish a conceptual contrast, they do this then in reality by being further projected onto barbarian or uncivilised lawbreakers and ‘aggressors’, who are of course real humans, and this then has a direct function as evaluative description (even in so far as the literal description may be false). By contrast, the measured rationality and impartiality of Locke’s civilised magistracy is of course a projection of an inner machine, systematic and object-like in its automation, controlled rather than contingent. ‘The magistrate’ is an abstract figure, and these qualities are then recursively reprojected onto real humans ‘in role’ in order to make the distinction real. Much the same process of double projection establishes ‘civilised’ behaviour in war and barbarous ‘frenzy’. Locke, of course, makes no real distinction between international war and domestic crime anyway; they are both violations of the same natural law: that all humans are to be preserved, the innocent being preferred over wrongdoers. Wrongdoers are subject to penalties up to and including death, and the imposition of this penalty can be the result of self-defence by an individual, domestic justice via a magistracy, or wartime defensive action against an aggressor. Concepts of masculinity have functioned in a patriarchal context and have deeply structured human experience, not as just one-half of a gender binary, but as the dominating ‘half’ in a steeply hierarchical ordering. Feminists have identified ‘woman as other’ to this in terms of codes of inferiority, ‘otherness’ and any number of ‘deviations’ from the male norm. As well as some feminists, sociologists and others working on masculinities have identified masculinity historically with a sharp pyramid of domination and exclusion

Real construction through metaphorical language 159 amongst men (an intriguing element in Lynndie England’s fantasy life), usually based in war or warrior-like activity, sexual ‘conquests’ and in more recent times a commercial transposition of these ‘battles’ and values into the economic sphere (Stiehm 1983; Di Stefano 1991; Elshtain 1993; Connell 1995; Hooper 2001; Kaufman-Osborn 2008). Thus, this masculinised outlook on ‘civilisation’ presumes that human experience divides into peace and war, that the appropriate behaviour in each of the two is not very different, e.g. aggressive pursuit of self-interest, considerable effort in defending what has been obtained, a concomitant measure of paranoia about others, and the exercise of fully ‘human’ agency in terms of intelligence and physicality. The line between civilisation and barbarism (or between lawful peace and criminal acts) thus lies in the creation of ‘others’, namely lawbreakers/barbarians, and the graded array of lesser (because more vulnerable) human beings, who need protection and are owed duties of care. A variety of animal metaphors are available to characterise the latter group of ‘innocents’, as they were termed in Grotius, chiefly semidomesticated herbivores, such as lambs. It should be no surprise, then, that lambs go to slaughter (albeit ‘humanely’ in a regulated process). This mirrors the ambiguities that Kinsella has traced towards the weak and vulnerable in the practice of total war, namely that the legal and moral prohibitions on killing (the whole point of their being ‘protected persons’) are all too easily vanquished by Realpolitik, because the doctrines and declarations themselves admit of ‘exceptions’ on these grounds of state necessity, as judged by states themselves (Krasner 1999; Acharya 2007). Since the boundary between combatants and noncombatants is so difficult and dangerous to operationalise, so the argument runs, then it is also not surprising that those who appear to be civilians/noncombatants/innocents are regularly killed in the course of ‘action’. Oftentimes, they are defined after the fact as potential threats or as victims of a kind of militarised accident. In the (supposedly) more modern context of total war, where mass weaponry is deployed with mass casualties, indiscriminately killing those in militarised roles and those in civilian ones (this distinction is the trickiest of all, given irregulars, guerrillas, partisans and the ‘supporting community’), the animating metaphor is still the machine, but no longer one which is capable of making and enforcing the fine distinctions that Grotius had in mind (Kinsella 2008). The ‘banality of evil’ from within the bureaucratic/ technological ‘machine’, the distancing effects of technology (pushing a button from high up in the sky) and the de-realisation effects of virtual warfare (with computer-driven targeting and weapons systems) are all instances of this (Arendt 1963; Der Derian 2001). They are projections outward of our ‘inner machine’ which works by a ruthless logic, matching effects (mass destruction rather than limited self-defence) to causes (mere possession of the weaponry and systems). Mere possession is a cause, because the ruthless logic of total war connects the ‘need’ to develop mass weaponry

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of ever greater destructive power with its use. Or to put it the other way round, the successes in regulating weaponry have very largely come with technologies that are actually of little or limited utility, except in provoking emotional reactions and ‘terror’ in the ‘other side’ (e.g. ‘biological’ warfare). My point here is that logic, will and (what is left of) emotion now merge into behaviour and decisions that are genuinely machine-like, in that they are reductionist, simplified, relentless, unstoppable, ‘unconscious’, repetitious, etc., albeit provided ex post facto with moral justifications and political rationalisations (such as ‘collateral damage’ or ‘correct targeting’). Modern civilised ‘warrior man’ is thus a curious throwback to the frenzied barbarian who represented the antithesis of civilisation. The machine metaphor now licences this behaviour, formerly attributed to (supposedly) wild animals, and the distinction between civilised warfare and barbarian frenzy has largely collapsed. Or at least it has with respect to the USA, which is the major power for making war at present, given its disregard for the apparatus of international law and the ‘public’ opinion of the international community. Curiously, the operative metaphor for US interventions is now ‘surgery’, as in ‘surgical strike’, although there is a huge gap between what happens (in so far as it is reported or, perhaps more importantly, pictured) and anything that could count as surgery. What emerges from this discussion is that ‘othering’ as projection (whether as wild animals or killing machines) is exactly that; ‘we’ in our human ‘essential’ identity did not do those things. This apparently contradictory outcome (why do we have prohibitions that admit to self-defined and self-judged exceptions?) is explicable because the (supposedly) unitary masculinised human individual is himself conflicted in two ways, conceptually and empirically. Empirically, it is not the case that warrior males are made by nature; they are socially produced and produced in infinite gradations and variety. Militarisation is notable for its ‘uniform’ attempts to make warriors uniform, but this is of course a masquerade (literally!). No military is a ‘well-oiled machine’, and military personnel are not identical cogs in a mechanism. These are productive metaphors, but as with all human production, the results are mixed. In this case, there are empirical excesses over and beyond the concept. Conceptually, the apparently unitary masculinised individual is even in theory inherently weak and vulnerable, namely it does not take much to wound a warrior or to damage his technology (which is just as vulnerable and error-prone as he is, metaphorical hype to the contrary). Even without being wounded, the masculinised human soldier (who could, of course, and in some senses, be a woman) is a complex consciousness with all the concepts of his weak and vulnerable ‘others’ well within the realm of his imagination, feeling and reality. Much the same applies in the commercial world, where legitimate and fraudulent practices share a realm of negotiation with agencies and institutions whose approach is anything but hard and fast, provided you exemplify the higher reaches of bureaucratic/commercial masculinities and do not occupy the lower ones. In

Real construction through metaphorical language 161 those, poverty, ascriptions of crime and other negative markers create gradations of esteem/disdain, rather than consolidations into unitary subjects whose activities fit self-evidently on one side of the line or the other. In this way, masculinity is a myth that defies examination, since it posits and maintains itself as unitary and powerful, whether this is the humane power of civilisation or the inhumane power of the barbarian. Needless to say, these are mutually opposed projections, not objective categories, i.e. it depends which side you are on whom you put into which camp. While there is every need to focus on disadvantaged ‘others’, who are the victims of outrages every moment (more the result, these days, of behaviour that is metaphorically machine-like, than metaphorically animal-like, though the latter can happen), it does not follow that the ‘human’ of civilisation or barbarism is really unitary and for that reason self-evident and immune to deconstruction. Because so many processes make this apparent unity visible in performance, and make the inner ‘others’ so impossible to conceptualise, the concept of projection is required to make this deconstruction work. It is very difficult and indeed almost oxymoronic to conceptualise the vulnerable warrior, the male (rape) victim, the female killer, the mother murderer, etc. While the overall framing distinctions through which this discourse operates – civilisation/barbarism, peacetime/wartime – can be read through gendered discourse to a certain extent (with the feminine on the side of civilisation and peace and the masculine on the side of barbarism and war), gendered discourse itself arises in much the same way that the (second) creation story in Genesis posits ‘man’ and then derives ‘woman’ from him as a ‘helpmeet’ and (obvious) inferior and ‘other’. This happens even before the Garden/Temptation/Fall parable of female weakness of will (allied to a curiously unexamined male weakness, only visible once female intrusion has disrupted the original projection of the creator’s image onto his male creation). Or to put the matter somewhat differently, and somewhat the other way round, a concept of unitary masculinity, unsullied with a significant gendered other, animates the civilisation/barbarism distinction, through which various gradations of ‘otherness’ and (supposed) inferiority become visible. The ‘internal’ projections from which these ‘others’ arise are in that way banished metaphorically from the being that contains the unitary masculine myth, which then does not invite examination. Rather the ‘others’ do, because they have been made problematic. This leads to a certain selfsubverting emphasis on the weak and vulnerable in both the discourses of international politics and those of liberal democracy because centring the weak (and feminised) leaves the strong (and masculinised) at the margins, where they lack visibility, look unproblematic and gain power. These (supposed) distinctions of civilisation/barbarism, vulnerable/invulnerable are not themselves produced by a gender distinction, and the gender distinction maps rather uneasily onto them, rather more because men are less consistently warriors than women are less consistently peaceful. Instead, they are the foundation stones of a process of ‘othering’ via metaphorical

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projections, with which the metaphors that produce gender importantly intersect. The gender distinction, and in particular, the ‘natural’ sex of woman (which marks her off from the unitarily ‘human’ as a masculinised mythical figure), works to stabilise both the domestic and the international orders, because they are interlinked via political doctrines of order in the heterosexual household projected outwards onto nation-states (Pateman 1988). However, that discursive strategy only operates within prior distinctions that determine the ‘human’, and these are derived from a myth of a unitary masculinised being, the ‘man’ in the human, the humane and the humanitarian. Once all this is traced out, the double-edged character of the institutional processes involved in ‘protecting the innocent’ becomes visible: power gets you an exception to the rules that prohibit and enjoin. While this is somewhat clearer in the world of international Realpolitik and the law of war (and there are, of course, exceptions) than in the world of domestic justice and supposed equality before the law, it is true there as well (e.g. President Richard M. Nixon was pardoned of any offence before he was ever charged). This does not mean that there is no point in the prohibitions and injunctions; there is. Rather than give up, we should be more awake to the powerpolitics involved in institutionalising those lines as vectors of enforcement and be less mystified by ritual repetitions of ‘equality before the law’ and invocations of supposed conventions on ‘civilised’ war and declarations of human rights. Note the ease with which the USA made a mockery of all these during the recent Asian and Middle Eastern wars and Guantánamo Bay and other incarcerations. The supposed line between civilisation and barbarism is but one of the mobile army of metaphors, through which ‘civilised’ humans do what they love best – fighting each other, whether with weapons or money, and then excusing the misery that results from this with moralised rationalisations that favour the rich and powerful (Nietzsche 1971).

Conclusions Sex, gender and sexuality do not themselves produce international ethics, law and politics. Rather these phenomena arise within a prior framework of civilisation/barbarism and peacetime/wartime. This framework incorporates a myth of a unitary, unproblematic masculinised being – ‘warrior man’/’economic man’ – whose world is not in fact bifurcated by a war/peace distinction, but is rather one world of competitive, aggressive, self-interested and somewhat paranoid strategic interaction. While this masculinised being has an obvious relation to sex, gender and sexuality, it is curiously prior to the gender binary, and indeed a projection from ‘within’ itself (of woman as an ‘other’) is the foundation of the gender binary as such and of the heterosexualised understanding of sex and sexuality. As the foundational ‘man’ in the human, the humane and the humanitarian, this figure is the source of the

Real construction through metaphorical language 163 animal and machine projections through which human characteristics are given metaphorical reality in language, both as ‘outward’ projections through which ‘othering’ takes place (from which real ‘others’ are identified in graded categories) and as recursive re-projections through which the myth of the unified masculine being is itself animated. There will be very little real protection for the vulnerable in society, they are defined and represented, unless and until this quintessential human subject is no longer mythologised as unitary and unproblematic. It is in fact constructed in the very ways that give the lie – through the peacetime/wartime and civilisation/barbarism dichotomies – to the values of care and protection to which (some) humans aspire. The ‘man’ in the human, the humane and the humanitarian is the locus through which power-flows negate the moral categories (in declarations and conventions of rights and protections) that – far from being genuinely respected – are subverted by the destructive peace/war and civilisation/barbarism dichotomisation of human experience.

Note 1 I am grateful to Samuel Chambers and Helen Kinsella for inspiration, ideas and support in developing this line of thinking, but no one should dream of associating them with this without their explicit permission. This chapter draws on material in the chapter ‘The Machine in the Man: Metaphor, Masculinity and Militarization’, in M. Zalewski and J. Parpart (eds) The ‘Man Question’ in International Relations, 2nd edn, London: Zed, forthcoming.

References Acharya, A. (2007) ‘State Sovereignty after 9/11: Disorganised Hypocrisy’, Political Studies, 55: 274–96. Arendt, H. (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Faber & Faber. Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Carver, T. (2004) Men in Political Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chambers, S.A. (2003) Untimely Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities, Oxford: Polity. Connolly, W. (1991) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations f Political Paradox, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davis, M. (1999) The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, London: Picador. Der Derian, J. (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network, Boulder, CO: Westview. Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Di Stefano, C. (1991) Configurations of Masculinity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Elshtain, J.B. (1993) Public Man/Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. V. Marchetti and A. Salomoni, trans. G. Burchell, London: Verso. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association. Hobbes, T. (1996) Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper, C. (2001) Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics, New York: Columbia University Press. Kaufman-Osborn, T. (2008) ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?’ in T. Carver and S. Chambers (eds) Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge. Kinsella, H. (2004) ‘Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender In the Laws of War’, in M. Barnett and B. Duvall (eds) Power and Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinsella, H. (2008) ‘Gendering Grotius’, Political Theory, 34: 161–91. Krasner, S.D. (1999) Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lloyd, G. (1993) Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, 2nd edn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Locke, J. (1988) Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machiavelli, N. (1988) The Prince, ed. Q. Skinner and R. Price, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1990) Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1971) The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, London: Chatto & Windus. Odysseos, L. and Seckinelgin, H. (eds) (2002) Gendering the International, Houndmills: Palgrave. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Prokhovnik, R. (2002) Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shapiro, M. (1985–86) ‘Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences’, Culture & Critique, 2: 191–214. Snyder, R.C. (1999) Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Stiehm, J. (1983) Women and War, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational. Walby, S. (1986) Patriarchy at Work: Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment, Oxford: Polity. Wittgenstein, L. (1997) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell.

11 Data, anecdote and metaphor in gender equality policy-making Merging ‘intellectual and real world mainstreaming’ Gemma M. Carney This chapter stems from several years in an intellectual tussle with the elusive and over-used concept ‘gender mainstreaming’.1 The rise of neoliberal policy paradigms and the focus on quantitative measurement of policy outcomes have been identified as key challenges in developing gender equality policy (True 2003; Carney 2004). Based on previous research investigating gender mainstreaming in the Republic of Ireland as one case of a proliferating global gender policy, this chapter aims to define the use of metaphor in relation to gender mainstreaming policy. It will also investigate the scope of metaphor as an explanatory category for policy-makers and analysts developing the mainstreaming phenomenon in theory and practice (cf. Mazey 2000: 333). The development of awkward jargon (e.g. gender impact assessment, gender mainstreaming, mainstreaming equality) and (mis)communication have already been identified as problems for those working with gender mainstreaming (Mossink 2001; Carney 2002). More recent studies have concluded that gender disaggregated data, gathered while implementing gender mainstreaming, have been used to justify the introduction of the policy; rather than to build a new, gender-equal policy base. New methodological approaches are needed to move the mainstreaming agenda beyond the circular ‘data as a justification for the policy’ loop2 in which it is currently trapped. The main conclusion drawn from this research is that gender disaggregated data are not useful in understanding or eradicating gender inequality. Hence, this chapter begins to explore other means of understanding gender mainstreaming – namely metaphor.

The political significance of gender mainstreaming Political and institutional support for gender mainstreaming is unprecedented for any equality policy. Gender mainstreaming is being implemented across and within national government, supranational organisations and international institutions (Mazey 2001: 2) and has proliferated almost worldwide as the default gender equality policy at state level (True 2001: 3). Why have governments decided to promote and develop strategies such as gender mainstreaming, and how do they interpret and develop such

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strategies? I argue here that a number of factors combine to operationalise international gender norms such as international influence, domestic political pressures and political cultural status of equality objectives (Eisenstein 1995; Beveridge et al. 2000: 20; Woodward 2003). However, there are also arguments that governments only adopt gender mainstreaming as part of an image-making exercise, with little or no resources assigned for the implementation of the policy (Beveridge et al. 2000: 20). The mainstreaming phenomenon is global, but its application reflects local cultural norms. What is the capacity of gender mainstreaming to be a transformative policy tool? In answering this question, I consider Mazey’s view that ‘ “intellectual” and “real world” mainstreaming of gender are interrelated rather than parallel developments’ (Mazey 2000: 334). Mazey (2000) implies that research on mainstreaming informs its manifestation in practice and vice versa. In addressing this observation, I aim to access the radical potential of gender mainstreaming by highlighting the implications of the concept for knowledge production in policy-making and in feminism. The issue as to whether gender mainstreaming is a policy, a concept, a tool or a method is hotly debated. Concept refers to the idea that policies should be conceived and developed without gender prejudice. Policy refers to the process of achieving this via gender impact assessment, gender disaggregated data and the use of feminist expertise. Feminists refer to the ‘transformative potential’ of gender mainstreaming (Woodward 2003: 88). This potential to achieve radical re-structuring of the policy agenda is, perhaps, the main reason for such widespread interest in the phenomenon amongst feminists. Its potential to be transformatory is contested and generally refers to ‘the capacity . . . for questioning, undermining or transforming gender relations and the structures of subordination’ (Young quoted in Jackson and Pearson 1998: 75). Central to accessing the ‘transformative potential’ (Mossink 2001) of gender mainstreaming is the argument that ‘control over knowledge and information is an important dimension of power’ (Haas 1992: 2). Specifically, the potential of mainstreaming lies in how information about gender issues is gathered in the process of ‘mainstreaming gender’ and the role of feminism in educating mainstream policy-makers.

Mainstreaming language in the Republic of Ireland Language plays an important role in communicating gender mainstreaming, though the argument that gender mainstreaming is incoherent, and that policy-makers therefore cannot understand it, seems too simplistic to merit development.3 Rather, the failure of gender mainstreaming is identified as symptomatic of the incompatibility of economic and equality priorities, based on profound ideological divisions between mainstream bureaucracy and feminist proponents of gender mainstreaming. Current dilemmas surrounding the collation of gender disaggregated

Data, anecdote and metaphor 167 data, and how it is used to produce gender mainstreaming, are central to debates on knowledge and power between feminists and mainstream policy-makers. A level of technical expertise, available within feminist communities, is necessary to translate data about women into mechanisms that effectively mainstream gender concerns into everyday policy. It is at this juncture that intellectual and real world mainstreaming must interact through feminists, employed by mainstream government (femocrats4), to produce gender sensitive policies. I use Haas’s (1992: 2) concept of ‘epistemic communities’5 or ‘networks of knowledge-based experts’ to investigate the implications of this new feminist practice for feminist theory. These arguments are investigated through an in-depth analysis of the adoption and implementation of gender mainstreaming in the Republic of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, the advent of gender mainstreaming policy established gender equality as a legitimate principle of government, regardless of whether or not political cultural values fully reflect equal status for women (Galligan 1998). The fact that policy-makers and government must systematically consider gender in order to conform to international norms is the beginning of an important normative shift regarding gender relations in the Republic of Ireland. However, the means by which gender mainstreaming is being operationalised presents problems for the policy. These problems, manifest in confused meanings, language barriers and obscure vocabularies,6 are rooted in the liberal democratic framework of Irish policy-making, combined with the depoliticisation of gender mainstreaming through its quantification as ‘gender proofing’ by mainstream institutions (Sutton 1999: 8). Conceptualising femocrats as ‘epistemic communities’ is significant because it demonstrates how ‘networks of knowledge based experts’ (Haas 1992: 2) can influence policy when their knowledge is deemed useful by government. The question is whether by establishing a link between knowledge and power in the feminist pursuit of liberation through mainstream institutions, gender mainstreaming has the potential to produce a radical politics in the future.

Gender and metaphor Metaphor is a key concept, whether it is defined as peripheral to social science (and so implicated in the definition of scientific terminology as ‘nonmetaphorical’) or as central to a ‘constructivist’ social science [as has been argued, particularly in methodological debates in International Relations (IR), but not as yet established] (Carver and Pikalo 2004). The definition of metaphor, particularly in relation to the central purpose of this chapter (to explore new methodologies for uncovering the implications of gender mainstreaming for policy-making and feminism), is most clearly related to metaphor as a ‘constructivist’ social science (Carver and

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Pikalo 2004). The relevant constructivist social science is feminist theory and scholarship which aims to make sense of gender mainstreaming as a recent means of feminist engagement with mainstream political institutions. In applying this conceptualisation, gender mainstreaming can be viewed as a metaphor in two different ways. First, gender mainstreaming implies the metaphorical movement of women and feminist ideas from the margin of policy-making to the mainstream. ‘Mainstreaming’ suggests that policies for the eradication of gender inequity should be moved from ‘women’s ghettoes’ to central bureaucracy.7 Second, gender is identified as a means of constructing metaphorical hierarchies from biological characteristics. Nelson (1996: xi) identifies how gender is not only socially but also metaphorically constructed. Her definition of gender relies on the identification of metaphor as a central conceptual tool in establishing gender hierarchies: Gender is primarily analysed in terms of how it structures our cognition: that is, how the distinction masculine/feminine is metaphorically related to long lists of other characteristics and qualities. The culturally dominant conception of gender distinctions as hierarchical, with ‘masculine’ on top, leads to high value being attributed to subjects and methods perceived as masculine, and a parallel devaluing of subjects and methods metaphorically associated with femininity. Science, for example, is associated with qualities like ‘hard’ and ‘tough’ (and masculine), in contrast to (inferior) feminine-associated qualities like ‘soft’ or ‘emotional.’ It is arguable that Nelson means ‘metaphorically related’ in the sense that these differences are not real but constructed. The hierarchy between male and female is the elaboration of a metaphor where male and female biology are used as means to dichotomise roles and ascribe identities with differential status in order to associate one gender with strength, the other with weakness, one with leadership, the other with deference, one with fruitful labour (productive work), the other with natural obligations (motherhood/ reproductive life). The effect over time is to create a hierarchy of gender identities where a newborn’s life path is effectively predestined according to the abilities/identities metaphorically associated with his/her biological characteristics. The power of such metaphors to naturalise and deproblematise difference and inequality is recognised: ‘Those metaphors which turn out to be successful establish a privileged perspective on an object or constitute ‘the’ object and by doing so, disappear as metaphors’ (Maasen 1995: 14–15). It is precisely this facility of metaphors to construct, legitimate and eventually naturalise inequalities that this research seeks to question. Can metaphors operate, ultimately, to de-politicise and weaken the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming? Nelson, quoted above, is an economist, but her sentiments resonate with

Data, anecdote and metaphor 169 the work of anthropologist Martin (1991: 489), who critiques biologists’ descriptions of human fertilisation. Martin notes how structures of cultural belief concerning the supremacy of potent maleness over passive and subordinate femaleness are transposed onto biologists’ ‘objective’ accounts of human fertilisation: The more common picture – egg as damsel in distress, shielded only by her sacred garments; sperm as heroic warrior to the rescue – cannot be proved to be dictated by the biology of these events. While the ‘facts’ of biology may not always be constructed in cultural terms, I would argue that in this case they are. The degree of metaphorical content in these descriptions, the extent to which difference between egg and sperm are emphasised, and the parallels between cultural stereotypes of male and female behaviour and the character of egg and sperm all point to that conclusion. (Martin 1991: 492; emphasis original) Martin’s account of the implicit sexism of metaphors used to explain workings of the human body suggests that the gender metaphor, as outlined by Nelson, may be mapped onto many social scientific and scientific explanations or descriptions of our world. Are similar metaphorical constructions of gender and masculinity/femininity observable in the discourse of gender mainstreaming? Specifically, I aim to uncover these metaphors because ‘becoming aware of their implications will rob them of their power to naturalise our social conventions about gender’ (Martin 1991: 501).

Defining metaphor How do these dichotomous metaphors relate to ‘mainstreaming’ as a metaphor? If we imaging social organisations are plants (e.g. branches of government/the family tree) and arguments are war (we won the debate/feminazis), then gender mainstreaming is a mix of conflicting metaphors – fighting plants? Planting fights? The latter would seem to have more potential as a metaphor for the elaboration of gender mainstreaming, as the ‘radical potential’ of gender mainstreaming may rest in its ability to plant a cell structure of fighters within mainstream bureaucracy. This would certainly resonate with what some early commentators hoped it would be: Woodward saw gender mainstreaming as holding promise as ‘a Trojan horse’ within mainstream bureaucracy (Woodward 2001: 133). This articulation of the use of metaphor resonates with the commonly used metaphor of the ‘gender lens’: ‘[. . .] a metaphor functions almost like a pair of glasses through which the metaphoric object is observed, i.e. reorganised’ (Massen 1995: 14–15). Feminists have long been using metaphors in this way. For instance, the commonly used metaphor of the ‘gender lens’ is used to describe gendered

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power relations: ‘the power of gender: how gender is a category of our mental ordering (a filter or lens) that has consequences for practices, processes and institutions that we think of as world politics’ (Peterson and Runyan 1999: 10). Sight or light metaphors are often used by feminists. The metaphor of the gender lens is well established in the feminist literature as an interpretation of the social and political world which reveals gender hierarchies and disadvantages in a way that ‘gender neutral’ or ‘gender blind’ (often a pseudonym for male/mainstream) interpretations do not. Viewed in this way, the idea of a gender metaphor seems to have broader implications – we have been using gender as a very expansive metaphor, with multiple applications, without explicitly recognising it as such. Neither have we considered the limitations of such a conceptualisation of gender and gender relations. The case of gender mainstreaming would seem to suggest that the gender metaphor then has to be translated into an environment where it is competing with other established metaphors. The metaphorical construction of gender and gender identities is no longer recognisable as a metaphor and so becomes less and less prominent, relevant or meaningful as its domains, signifiers and even contexts for its use are continuously questioned, boundaries re-drawn and core concepts re-defined. Fox Keller (1995: 79) quotes Kalmus on the gene, offering a good idea of how a metaphor is constructed, at least in biology where the image of a gene as an inter-generational message gives substance and meaning to the abstract concept: ‘A gene, we may say, is a message, which can survive the death of the individual and can thus be received repeatedly by several organisms of different generations’ (Kalmus quoted in Fox Keller 1995: 79). In this sense, metaphors can be constructive as well as constructed as they can be used to attribute meaning and substance to invisible or nonexistent entities like ‘gene’ or ‘gender mainstreaming’. The argument that metaphors have a constructive capacity can be developed to demonstrate that many of the ideas we take as ‘hard’ scientifically proven facts are in fact built on a house of cards, as the ideas which form their foundation are themselves metaphors or social constructions.8 Such multiple constructions can lead to meaningless concepts, particularly if the metaphor on which it is constructed is spurious, inappropriate or too closely related to its predecessor. The fact that gender is revealed as a metaphor in this chapter sheds some light on the charge that gender mainstreaming is often deemed meaningless as it establishes that gender mainstreaming comprises two metaphors – the gender metaphor and the mainstreaming metaphor – one meaning the metaphorical association of value as attributed to biological characteristics and the other meaning the movement of this category towards a central position. But these two metaphors become muddled, because the centre is actually male, not really the centre (which does not actually exist), so really mainstreaming just means moving men and women into one ‘male’ metaphorical location or category. The purpose of such metaphors is to give substance and meaning to the

Data, anecdote and metaphor 171 abstract or unobservable. The question arising for gender mainstreaming is that it only exists when we observe it, but by the time we get to observe it in policy-making, is it still gender mainstreaming? It then becomes a more theoretically challenging question, not what is gender mainstreaming, but what should gender mainstreaming be?

The ‘battle of the sexes’ versus ‘gender mainstreaming’ The introduction of gender mainstreaming represents a movement away from the discourse of women’s rights towards a discourse based on gender equality. This move removes the explicit focus on women from previous feminist discourse (i.e. the ‘battle of the sexes’ discourse). Re-naming ‘the movement to end sexist oppression’ (Hooks 2000: 18) as ‘gender equality’ rather than ‘women’s rights’ has a number of effects. It would seem that one possible benefit is that gender mainstreaming becomes endowed with some of the legitimacy ascribed to masculine traits and metaphors as outlined by Nelson (1996) above. The conflict between feminists and the mainstream, the war on inequality, has always challenged convention. As such, the principles of feminist politics within a women’s rights framework are anathema to a conciliatory, indeterminate approach like gender mainstreaming which mentions nothing of conflict/rights/movements/social unrest/protest/strike, etc. This point was noted by some of those working with gender mainstreaming, particularly those with many years experience in the Irish women’s movement: I think women’s rights are stronger than gender equality. I would prefer to be standing on the streets fighting for women’s rights. I don’t know why that is exactly. I suppose it (gender equality) is very watery. I mean what on earth is it? Women’s rights sounds like something that is needed, that you have a moral right to them. That in some way society is oppressing what belongs to you. Whereas gender equality sounds like an aspiration you should hold on to. It is vaguer. You feel like you could put women’s rights down on a page and onto it, it is clear. I suppose the thing about gender equality though is that it does imply equality between men and women and recognises that; whereas women’s rights only come from a female perspective. Gender equality is more balanced because it includes men. (Author interview, R16, August 2002)9 The sense that gender equality is more balanced, as it includes men, raises questions for feminist discourse. Many of the metaphors that we use to describe sexist oppression are based on a ‘battle of the sexes’ metaphor where women are seeking to gain access to male privilege and status. As feminists, we have tended to employ dichotomous metaphors in this discourse, as is clearly evidenced in Ann Tickner’s (2005) review of the

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contribution of feminism to IR. Tickner quotes Reinharz on the primary aims of feminist IR: Making the invisible visible, bringing the margin to the center, rendering the trivial important, putting the spotlight on women as competent actors, understanding women as subjects in their own right rather than objects for men – all continue to be elements of feminist research. (Reinharz quoted in Tickner 2005: 7) Tickner’s (2005) synopsis of the work of feminist scholars of IR demonstrates the use of metaphors to describe relations between the sexes. A number of the metaphors relate to sight/light: ‘making the invisible visible’ and ‘putting the spotlight on women as competent actors’ (Reinharz quoted in Tickner 2005: 7). Location metaphors are also often used, one of the most common being that identified by Tickner (2005: 7) ‘bringing the margin to the center’. It is also interesting to note how feminist metaphors tend to be defined relationally, particularly the status of women in relation to men/male categories. Feminists, therefore, are involved in ‘rendering the trivial important’ (Reinharz quoted in Tickner 2005: 7) and ‘understanding women as subjects in their own right rather than objects for men’ (Reinharz quoted in Tickner 2005: 7). All of these metaphors are in some way sensual, relating to sight, light, visibility, feeling included or being constructed as a sex object. Each one implies a desire for admission under the umbrella of male-associated status – to the centre or the mainstream. Gender mainstreaming can be seen as a progression on this idea as it makes this ambition an action word, a verb: to become part of the mainstream. How does Nelson’s (1996) comment on the metaphorical association of separate gender with opposing characteristics apply to gender mainstreaming? Given the focus on quantifiable evidence and data in the implementation of gender mainstreaming (Carney 2004), it would seem that the policy gains some of the ‘hard’ data-driven credence of male stereotyping through its association with performance management techniques. The question, though, is whether in this quest for credibility and admission to the formal seats of power, the feminist ideals which provided the political purpose for gender mainstreaming become lost. Certainly, research has revealed that bureaucracies seem resistant to accepting gender mainstreaming. What is it about bureaucratic discourse that makes it so resistant to accepting or constructing a new concept like gender mainstreaming? Kramerae (in McConnell-Ginet et al. 1985: 58) identifies how other feminist ideas have faced a similar fate in trying to gain a foothold within established lexicography: Men have largely determined what is labeled, have defined the ordering and classifying system, and have in most instances created the words which are catalogued in our dictionaries and which are the medium of

Data, anecdote and metaphor 173 everyday speech. Thomas Hardy’s heroine in Far from the Madding Crowd observes that ‘it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. Kramerae (in McConnell-Ginet et al. 1985: 61; emphasis original) also argues that: Many people have argued that our perception of social reality is shaped by our particular language; we will not see, hear, or think concepts except as our language allows. Whether or not language determines thought in any significant way, it seems plausible that language can at least constrain concept formation, and that gender-biased language may constrain the perception and expression of women, as well as men who do not conform to heterosexual male norms or are in other ways outside the ‘mainstream’. By considering some of the vocabulary associated with gender mainstreaming, we can perhaps gauge its capacity to liberate the language of gender equality policy-making. Table 11.1 lists the vocabulary of gender mainstreaming as published by femocrats in the Republic of Ireland, for use by ordinary policy-makers involved in the implementation of gender mainstreaming. The meaning of most of the words in this table is not immediately obvious. Rather, ideas are cloaked in the apolitical and dry language of bureaucracy. The only political term is ‘positive action’, which is possibly included merely to demonstrate what gender mainstreaming is not! Compare the bureaucratic language of Table 11.1 with that of Table 11.2,10 which lists the vocabulary of the women’s rights movement – the discourse of gender equality which preceded gender mainstreaming. Do these contrasting vocabularies demonstrate how the shift to gender mainstreaming has removed the fight from the feminist agenda and replaced it with the more acceptable discourse of performance management gender neutralism? While more detailed comparison of these two policy-making lexicons is merited, for the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to introduce them as a means of demonstrating the more technocratic, apolitical tone of the ‘vocabulary’ of gender mainstreaming versus the more old-fashioned but obviously political tone of feminist discourse. It is easy to see how the metaphor ‘battle of the sexes’ emerged from the confrontational conceptualisation of male/ female relations typified by images of wife-battering, sexual harassment, glass ceilings and empowerment discourse of the women’s rights era. The metaphorical association of gender mainstreaming is less clear. Terms like gender disaggregated data, gender impact assessment and gender proofing are more clearly associated with the proofing and accountability requirements of performance management policy-making than feminist politics. How feminism and performance management discourses combine to

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Table 11.1 Gender mainstreaming vocabulary Gender

A concept that refers to the social differences, as opposed to the biological ones, between women and men that have been learned, are changeable over time and have wide variations both within and between cultures.

Gender mainstreaming

The systematic integration of the respective situations, priorities and needs of women and men in all mainstream policies with a view to promoting equality between women and men.

Gender neutral

In policy terms, a policy which has no differential impact, either positive or negative, for equality between women and men.

Gender blind

Ignoring or failing to address the gender equality dimension.

Gender disaggregated data

The collection and separation of data by gender to allow comparative gender analysis.

Gender equality

The concept that all human beings are free to develop their personal abilities and make choices without the limitations set by strict gender roles and that the different behaviour, aspirations and needs of women and men are considered, valued and favoured equally.

Gender proofing

A check carried out on a policy proposal to ensure that any potential gender discriminatory effects arising from that policy have been avoided and that gender equality is promoted.

Gender impact assessment

Examining policy proposals to see whether they will affect women and men differently, with a view to adapting these proposals to make sure that any discriminatory effects are neutralised and that gender equality is promoted.

Positive action

Measures targeted at a particular group and intended to eliminate and prevent discrimination or to offset disadvantages arising from existing attitudes, behaviours and structures.

Source: NDP Gender equality unit. http://www.ndpgenderequality.ie/about_genmain/ about_genmain_8.html (accessed 4 May 2007).

Data, anecdote and metaphor 175 Table 11.2 Vocabulary of women’s rights Empowerment

The process of gaining access and developing one’s capacities with a view to participating actively in shaping one’s own life and that of one’s community in economic, social and political terms

Feminisation of poverty

The increasing incidence and prevalence of poverty among women as compared to men

Gender-based violence/ sexual violence

Any form of violence by the use or threat of physical or emotional force, including rape, wife battering, sexual harassment, incest and pedophilia

Glass ceiling

The invisible barrier arising from a complex set of structures in male-dominated organisations which prevents women from accessing senior positions

Human rights of women

The rights of women and the girl child as an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights and including the concept of reproductive rights

Invisible barriers

Attitudes and their traditional assumptions, norms and values which prevent (women’s) empowerment/full participation in society

Quota

A defined proportion or share of places, seats or resources to be filled by proportional representation allocated to a specific group, generally under certain rules or criteria, and aimed at correcting a previous imbalance, usually in decision-making positions or in access to training opportunities or jobs

Recognition and valuation of unpaid work

Measurement, in quantitative terms, including by assessing and reflecting its value in satellite accounts, of remunerated work that is outside the scope of national accounts such as domestic work, caring for children and other dependants, preparing food for the family, community and other voluntary work

Refuge

A safe place for women and children who are victims of violence in the home (shelter and crisis center)

Reproductive rights

The right of an individual or couple to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health

Satellite account

An official account that is separate from but consistent with core national accounts continued

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Table 11.2 Continued Sex

The biological characteristics which distinguish human beings as female or male

Sex discrimination – direct

Where a person is treated less favourably because of his or her sex

Sex discrimination – indirect

Where a law, regulation, policy or practice, apparently neutral, has a disproportionate adverse impact on the members of one sex, unless the difference of treatment can be justified by objective factors

Sex/gender system

A system of economic, social and political structures which sustain and reproduce distinctive gender roles and attributes of men and women (see gendercontract)

Sex trade

The trade in human beings, largely in women and children, for the purpose of sexual exploitation

Sexual harassment

Unwanted conduct of a sexual nature or other conduct based on sex affecting the dignity of women and men at work including conduct of superiors and colleagues

Sexual violence

See gender and sexual violence

Time use survey

A measurement of the use of time by women and men, particularly in relation to paid and unpaid work, market and non market activities, leisure and personal time

Trafficking/trading in human beings/in women and children

The trade in people, primarily in women and children, for the purposes of modern slavery or cheap labour or for sexual exploitation (see sex trade)

Wife battering/beating

Violence against women by their partner (see also domestic violence)

Women’s studies/ gender studies

An academic, usually interdisciplinary approach to the study of women’s situation and gender relations as well as the gender dimension of all other disciplines

produce a new development of Nelson’s dichotomous gender metaphor is illustrated in Table 11.3 below. Tracing from the bottom of this table back up to the top one can see how Nelson’s gender metaphors come to overlap. Gender mainstreaming may be seen as a legitimate form of policy-making by governments because it subscribes to the superior qualities of good policy-making, i.e. it is evidencebased, it relies on data and results; it is quantifiable, tangible and precise. Feminism, on the other hand, relates to the soft side of the metaphorical equation. It represents political rhetoric, not fact; there is no evidence to

Data, anecdote and metaphor 177 Table 11.3 Dichotomous metaphors of gender mainstreaming Male ↓ Masculine ↓ Hard ↓ Legitimate ↓ Gender mainstreaming (centre) ↓ Data (proof) ↓ Performance Management (gender proofing)

Female ↓ Feminine ↓ Soft ↓ Irrelevant ↓ Feminism (margin) ↓ Political Rhetoric (speculation) ↓ Anecdote/metaphor (experiential politics)

support feminist ‘claims’ which tend to rely on ‘women’s lived experience’ and anecdote as sources of evidence. In terms of metaphors, it would seem that gender mainstreaming represents a cross-over from ‘soft’ feminism to ‘hard’ science in that it applies masculine logic to make feminist ideals into public policies. The problems that this mixing of metaphors brings for gender mainstreaming are outlined elsewhere (Beveridge et al. 2000). For the purposes of this chapter, suffice it to say that the application of Nelson’s gender metaphor is a useful means of illustrating the fate of gender mainstreaming.

What is the significance of the gender metaphor? One significant characteristic of the gender metaphor is that it implies that gender is always conceived of as relational.11 The gender categories we have socially constructed, politically endorsed and institutionalised (male/female, hard/soft, etc.) have rendered it impossible to be female without reference to what it means to be male. Throughout history, women have always been referred to as a male’s relative – daughter, wife, mother, sister – rarely as individuals with their own name and distinct identities. It is not surprising, then, that feminist critiques have constructed metaphorical oppositions between men and women as resistance to the patriarchal heritage where femininity is associated with weakness and/or ineffectiveness in comparison with the (male) ideal. The old metaphor of the ‘battle of the sexes’, constructed as a means to replace the perceived wisdom of ‘female = inferior’ with one of ‘female = equal but different’ has since been diluted with the replacement of women by an inclusive concept of ‘gender’, where male and female differences are recognised, but the implicit assumption that women are always the underdogs, has been removed. Does this suggest a re-construction of the gender metaphor outlined by Nelson, where new reasons are given for

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accepting the inferior status of the feminine? In the case of gender mainstreaming, the lack of availability of substantive evidence (gender disaggregated data) is identified as a barrier to producing gender equality.12 Rather like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, new feminist ideas are continually met with equally powerful critiques and revisionist sexist strategies. Attempts to remove sexual stereotyping from metaphors used to discuss human biology have revealed a similar tendency to resist non-sexist conceptualisation. Martin (1991: 498) identifies how revisionist accounts of human fertilisation ‘cannot seem to escape the hierarchical imagery of older accounts’. In more recent (1980s as opposed to 1940s) accounts of conception, images of female gametes are based on new, but equally derogatory female stereotypes. The damsel in distress image of the female gamete is now replaced with an aggressive, man-eating cultural stereotype: the egg ends up as the female aggressor who ‘captures and tethers’ the sperm with her sticky zona, rather like a spider lying in wait in her web (Martin 1991: 498). Similarly, for some commentators, gender mainstreaming represents an opportunity for wholesale revisionist stereotyping, where policies like gender mainstreaming are identified as the new enemy of men in the battle of the sexes. Well-known columnist, Kevin Myers, writing in Ireland’s most respected broadsheet, the Irish Times, mocks gender mainstreaming as ‘yet more mumbo-jumbo from the feminist language factory’ (Myers 2004), dismissing gender mainstreaming as anti-democratic, despotic ‘ideological brain-washing’: This year-zero ideological nonsense isn’t happening after a revolutionary take-over by a gender Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as the Sex Pots, but within a democratic society which apparently slumbers while the Sex Pots investigate, interrogate and politicise the entire civil service. (Myers 2004) As such, gender mainstreaming represents the battle of the sexes by another name. In many ways, it is easier for people like Myers to engage in conflict with an idea (that just happens to benefit women) than to engage with women directly. On this note, the metaphor of gender mainstreaming would seem to be an abject failure in terms of instituting feminist aims. Its interpretation suggests that it does not remove the male–female conflict from feminist politics, but merely repackages the conflict as something more palatable to twenty-first century gender politics as it moves women out of the position of victim and men out of the role as perpetrators. It achieves this by adding a confusing, but ultimately useless data requirement to the feminist agenda, where issues must be weighed, women counted and a quantitative basis for gender equality policy established.

Data, anecdote and metaphor 179

Notes 1 The most widely quoted definition of gender mainstreaming was used to launch the policy at the Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing in 1995: ‘governments and other actors should promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective in all policies and programmes so that, before decisions are taken, an analysis is made of the effects on women and men, respectively’ (United Nations 1996: 11). Essentially, gender mainstreaming means that rather than having women-only policies for the eradication of gender inequalities, all policies should be developed with the consideration of possible gender inequities and devise plans to avoid them from the outset. 2 One of the main conclusions of my previous research was that gender mainstreaming policy-makers had to meet demands to prove the worth of the policy continually. The result was that they spent most of their time gathering gender disaggregated data to demonstrate that women are at a disadvantage, and justifying their own positions, rather than devising innovative policies that would produce gender-equal outcomes. See Carney (2004). 3 For a fuller discussion of the issue of language and communication with regard to gender mainstreaming. See Carney (2003). 4 Femocrat is an increasingly popular term to describe women in bureaucracies and political institutions. Eisenstein (1996: xii) identifies the authentic meaning as ‘more restricted, it refers to a woman, feminist by personal conviction, who works within a government bureaucracy at a senior level to advance the status of women in society’. 5 ‘An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policyrelevant knowledge within that domain or issue area. Epistemic communities need not be made up of natural scientists or of professionals applying the same methodology that natural scientists do. Our notion of “epistemic community” somewhat resembles Fleck’s notion of a “thought collective” – a sociological group with a common style of thinking’ (Haas 1992: 3). 6 ‘One cannot speak “outside the structure”, either of language or society. Feminists can, however, struggle, from the inside, to speak against the structure, by contesting/critiquing the representation of women in language and discourse’ (Cameron 1992: 9; emphasis added). In this way, those implementing gender mainstreaming try to articulate a coherent critique of mainstream bureaucracy. 7 For instance, in the Republic of Ireland, the Ministry for Women’s Affairs (1980s) has evolved into the Gender Equality Unit (2000 onwards). 8 For instance, genes rely on the concept of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) which itself is a constructed image of a combination of proteins which are so tiny that no one can ever actually see them. Likewise, gender mainstreaming is built on two metaphors – gender derived from socially ascribed identities based on different sex organs and mainstreaming, a facility for becoming central. 9 The interviews referred to in the text formed part of a larger project; see Carney (2004). 10 Definitions adapted from ‘One hundred words for equality: A glossary of terms on equality between women and men’, Brussels: European Commission, DG for Employment, Industrial Relations & Social Affairs. Online. (accessed 4 May 2007). 11 In general, identifying gender as a relational category is deemed useful (Peterson 1992), particularly if it is seen as related to other categories such as race, class and age in terms of identifying how disadvantage privilege can be compounded. 12 See footnote 3.

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Data, anecdote and metaphor 181 Nelson, J. (1996) Feminism, Objectivity and Economics, London: Routledge. Peterson, V.S. (ed.) (1992) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Peterson, V.S. and Runyan, A.S. (1999) Global Gender Issues, 2nd edn, Oxford: Westview. Sutton, R. (1999) The Policy Process: An Overview, WP 118. London: Overseas Development Institute. Online, available at: www.gdnet.org/middle.php?oid=237& zone=docs&action=doc&doc=2204 (accessed 4 May 2007). Tickner, J.A. (2005) ‘What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions’, International Studies Quarterly, 49(1): 1–22. True, J. (2001) ‘Transnational Feminist Networks and Gender Mainstreaming: A Comparative Analysis’, paper presented at the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, September 2001. True, J. (2003) ‘Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5: 368–96. United Nations (1996) The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action, New York: United Nations. Woodward, A.E. (2001) ‘Gender Mainstreaming in European Policy: Innovation or Deception?’ discussion paper, Berlin: WZB. Woodward, A.E. (2003) ‘European Gender Mainstreaming: Promises and Pitfalls of a Transformative Policy’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 9: 65–88.

12 Metaphors, mini-narratives and Foucauldian discourse theory Véronique Mottier

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations which, poetically and rhetorically intensified, become transposed and embellished, and which after long usage by people seem fixed, canonical, and binding on them. Truths are illusions which one has forgotten are illusions. (Nietzsche 1873/1980: 880-881) Much contemporary work on metaphor focuses on its semantic dimension, analysing the type of metaphors used and the meanings that they produce.1 While not wishing to deny the usefulness of such studies, my aim in this chapter is to ask whether the analysis of metaphors can go further. More precisely, I wish to locate the notion of metaphor more firmly within an analytical framework that centres on the relations between meaning, identity and power, thereby making it a particularly suitable subject for social and political analysis. Drawing on discourse and narrative theory, I consequently propose a number of theoretical moves which link semantics with pragmatics and meaning with action. The present text thus attempts to formulate an analytic strategy which links the analysis of metaphors with that of power. In doing so, I shall pursue a strategy of incorporation of the notion of metaphor in discourse theory rather than a strategy of substitution of the concept of discourse with that of metaphor.

From semantics to pragmatics The earliest systematic analyses of metaphors are provided by the Ancients, most prominently by Aristotle and the later Rhetorical Schools which included orators such as Cicero, Plutarch and Quintilian. The Ancients defined metaphors as explicit descriptions of something in terms of something else. Derived from the Greek verb meta-pherein, which means to transfer or to translate (the Latin word for metaphor being ‘translatio’), the term metaphor thus referred primarily to aesthetic and stylistic aspects of meaning production. Metaphors were seen to have an ornamen-

Metaphors, mini-narratives and discourse theory 183 tal function, serving as ‘verbal cosmetics’, as Boys-Stones (2003: 4) puts it. Aristotle considered metaphor as a special version of poetic language, pointing out that it constitutes a non-standard or ‘deviant’ usage of language (since metaphors work by describing something using a word that is not commonly used in this case). As he famously put it in ‘Poetics’ (1932a: 1457b): ‘Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy.’ In his later text ‘Rhetoric’, he elaborated on this, stating that ‘it is metaphor above all that gives perspicuity, pleasure, and a foreign air’ (1932b: 1405a), thereby elevating and embellishing language, ‘for men admire what is remote, and that which excites admiration is pleasant’ (1932b: 1404b). It is important to remember that Aristotle’s notion of metaphor in ‘Poetics’ and ‘Rhetoric’ was wider than its modern understanding, since he subsumed tropes in general (including metonymy) under the category of metaphor (Silk 2003: 117). Tropes are ‘embellishments’ of language and are usually taken to include metaphor (using an unusual term to describe a usual term, for example, ‘axis of evil’), metonymy (describing the whole in terms of a part or of something connected to it, for example, ‘the White House’ for the US government), synecdoche (a version of metonymy, involving semantic sliding from a class to a member or vice versa, in other words, whole for part or part for whole; for example ‘I have a new set of wheels’) and irony. Aristotle’s surviving texts were highly influential in establishing a canonical understanding of metaphor which focused on its substitutive role. Its usefulness for social and political analysis appears limited, however, due to Aristotle’s primary concern with aesthetic aspects, especially in ‘Poetics’ (see also the chapters by Fridolfsson and Honohan in this volume). Two theoretical developments were particularly instrumental in moving forward from the Aristotelian understanding of metaphor in modern times. First, the structural linguist Roman Jakobson (1960) shifted the focus from a concern with the properties of poetry to those of discourse in general, arguing that poetic features permeate language as a whole. Introducing a distinction between metaphor, centred on analogy/similarity, and metonymy, centred on association/contiguity, Jakobson points out that these polarities do not just structure poetry or literature, but constitute two fundamental modes of discourse in general. Admittedly, Aristotle himself had already, in ‘Rhetoric’, moved away from the ‘Poetics’-specific focus on poetic language to point out the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday conversation (Mahon 1999: 73). His writings on metaphor have in fact been criticised by prominent commentators such as Silk (2003: 144) for their ‘inconsistency’ in not systematically focusing on poetic language alone. Though perhaps less applicable to ‘Poetics’, this characterisation is certainly valid for ‘Rhetoric’; that being said, it might be judged that such criticism is to some extent unfair since Silk fails to acknowledge that Aristotle’s main interest

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was not poetic language as such. Rather, Aristotle’s interest in poetics was located within his wider project of a philosophy of the nature of cultural, scientific and political objects, including prose, science and political institutions. Silk thus criticises Aristotle for not fully achieving an aim which he had not set out to pursue in the first place. Silk (2003: 144) expresses similar reservations about Jakobson’s failure to theorise metaphors with consistent reference to poetry; however, I would like to argue in contrast that it is precisely Jakobson’s (and less systematically, Aristotle’s) widening of the theorisation of metaphor to discourse in general which opens up avenues for thinking about how the analysis of metaphor fits in with wider social and political analysis. Second, in contrast to the classical substitutional theory of metaphor, Max Black proposed, in his influential book Models and Metaphors (1962), a more complex theory involving a cognitive dimension. According to Black’s interactional model, metaphor is not just an aesthetic embellishment of language, but organises and transforms our perception of the original term. Decoupling the Aristotelian association of metaphor and substitution, this introduction of a cognitive dimension was picked up and further fleshed out by numerous other authors, in particular by linguists and philosophers of language. For example, in their oft-quoted book, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson argue that ‘our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3). Metaphor is thus seen as not just central to language, but also to thought and action. The shift from metaphor as meaning-production to a concern with the ways in which meaning-producing metaphors structure the ways in which people make sense of the world necessitates a concurrent concern not just with the semantic content of metaphors, but also with their effects, and therefore ultimately with issues of cognition and subjectivity. In short, it requires a theory of interpretation. Formulating a theory of interpretation that would take into account the audience’s cognitive processes was a project undertaken by cognitive linguists such as Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Sweetser (1990). Building on Grice’s pragmatics, their goal was to provide an account of interpretation that was based on the effects of language. Thus, relevance theory suggests that metaphors are effective because they can be interpreted in a number of ways; there are numerous possible interpretations and associations (termed ‘weak implicatures’). For example, when eugenic campaigners in pre-War Switzerland, Sweden or Germany argued for limiting reproduction by ‘inferior’, ‘degenerate’ categories of the population, they would speak of the necessity to eradicate the bad ‘weeds’ from the national ‘garden’. In this context, ‘weeds’ would be interpreted as diverse, obnoxious, weak, you want to pull them out of your garden, etc. The impact of description on the reader is stronger if it is made in an indirect way – an argument which the Ancients also made: metaphors work through making the listener see a

Metaphors, mini-narratives and discourse theory 185 familiar object in an unusual way, through what modern authors would call ‘defamiliarisation’. Whereas Gricean pragmatics was originally a philosophy of language, these linguists gave it a cognitive twist by attempting to flesh out the ways in which audiences perceive meanings by making inferences about the context of the communicative interaction. As Grice had argued, speakers and hearers rely on shared background knowledge in their communicative interactions. For example, the exchange ‘what time is it?’ followed by the reply ‘the news has just started’ relies on the tacit assumption on the part of the person responding that the person who asked the question knows that the news always starts at 6 PM. Thus, interpretations rely upon inferences made from careful consideration of context. As Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory argues, hearers try to interpret meanings through maximising those elements that are relevant to the context. The implication for the interpretation of metaphor is that the choice of a particular metaphor will be assumed to be based upon whatever is ‘relevant to the wider text’. In other words, there will be an underlying cognitive assumption at work on the part of the interpreters that the text as a whole is coherent, that it makes sense. Although it needs to be acknowledged that some metaphors or texts may ‘work’ despite, or even because of internal contradictions (a point which is not explicitly treated by Sperber and Wilson), coherence is in this case supplied by the reader, who will try to make a coherent narrative out of a possibly incoherent text, reflecting a more general social–psychological need for coherence on the part of human beings. This cognitive dynamic is based on what Grice has termed the ‘cooperational principle’; this is the assumption that the participants in any given communicative interaction will ‘cooperate’, in the sense that they will follow the same implicit rules in the interaction. This is a similar concept, I would argue, to that behind the ‘fundamental reciprocity of perspectives’ (i.e. the implicit assumption in our everyday lives that other people will follow the same tacit rules governing routine interactions as we do) which ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel (1984) claim structures everyday life. Grice’s cooperational principle similarly reflects an inherently moral understanding of everyday life as being, fundamentally, based on implicit trust. Relevance theory was, initially, received with great excitement and high hopes. Its theory of interpretation was seen as a way out of the dead end of literary criticism’s understanding of interpretation as the reconstruction of original authorial intention. Relevance theory, it was thought, would also allow readers to avoid some of the perceived excesses of deconstruction and post-structuralism, especially the claim that one can find any meaning in the text, by trying to establish some boundaries to interpretation. The 1990s thus saw a lot of handwaving in programmatic articles about the radiant future that cognitive linguistics would bring. In truth, not much progress has been made in terms of practical applications of the theory. It is not my purpose here to exhaustively address the reasons for this failure. Rather, I

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will concentrate more specifically on those aspects of cognitive linguistics that make the application of these perspectives particularly problematic for the analysis of social and political issues. From this angle, I believe that three aspects of cognitive theories of meaning and interpretation are particularly problematic: first, their theorisation of subjectivity; second, their understanding of context; and third, their unit of analysis. Concerning the first point, cognitive linguists tend to argue that cognitive processes are linked to bodily experience. For example, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical preconceptual structures arising from everyday bodily experiences, which explain, for example, that ‘up’ tends to be perceived as ‘good’ while being ‘down’ is generally a bad thing. This is a seductive view, not least because, although we have diligently learned from Saussure that signs are arbitrary, many metaphors do not actually appear to be so. The problem is, however, with how the body is theorised. Cognitive linguists tend to treat the body as a physical ‘given’, thereby failing to take into account the cultural situatedness of bodily experience. Subjectivity operates from the materiality of a body, which is located in time and space, following MerleauPonty’s influential notion of the corps propre developed in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). However, it is important to recognise that the way in which the body moves in time and space and the ways in which perception operates from the body is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘given’. Embodied experience is the outcome of a learning process, of ‘work’, and therefore ultimately a product of culture as authors such as Mauss (1936), Foucault (1975), Douglas (1966) or Butler (1993) would also point out. Whereas the takenfor-grantedness of the body is central to, but largely left implicit in Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘experiential’ theory of metaphorical understanding, current cognitive linguistics tends to move in an even more problematic direction. Indeed, explicitly Chomskian genetic and naturalising arguments which relate cognitive processes to brain make-up have become highly fashionable, downplaying both the historical contingency of meaning processes and the ways in which these are structured by relations of power. The second and third weaknesses of cognitive linguistics for the wider social and political analysis of metaphors, its understanding of context and its restricted unit of analysis, are related. Relevance theory offers useful ways of thinking about how subjects interpret metaphors from their background knowledge to make the relevant inferences based on interactional context. Given this understanding of context in terms of background knowledge and the contextual features which characterise a specific communicative interaction, cognitive linguists share with hermeneutic theories of meaning and interpretation an emphasis on the embeddedness of meaning production and interpretive processes in their wider historical and cultural ‘horizon of meaning’, to borrow Gadamer’s terminology. However, they also share with hermeneutics a neglect of the role of institutions and power in that wider

Metaphors, mini-narratives and discourse theory 187 context. By defining the notion of context primarily in relation to interactional context, cognitive linguistic analysis, as represented in the work of Sperber and Wilson, thus leaves aside issues that are particularly relevant to social and political contexts understood in a broader sense, including the wider power relations or political events that set the stage for and structure a particular communicative local interaction. Moreover, as is the case for linguists in general, the unit of analysis of cognitive linguists is utterances, which is problematic for social and political scientists who will be interested in the role of metaphors in wider discourses and not just in isolated statements. As the hermeneutic ‘principle of global understanding’, developed primarily by Schleiermacher, points out, the insertion of a text in its particular historical horizon of meaning indicates the necessity of having a global, contextual understanding of a discourse (though hermeneutic thinkers would use the term ‘text’ here). Following this principle, the interpretation of a component of a discourse, such as a specific metaphor, needs to take into account the whole to which this element refers. At the same time, the meaning of the whole can only be understood from its details. The parts only acquire meaning in relation to the whole and vice versa. Metaphoric meaning is thus always relative both to the discourse as a whole (as Saussure’s notion of linguistic value as relative would also argue, albeit in a different way) and to its wider historical horizon of meaning as Gadamerian hermeneutics would emphasise. However, though we can usefully draw upon both hermeneutics and relevance theory to emphasise the importance of context for metaphorical meaning production and interpretation, they fail to address the power relations and institutions that structure that context. Furthermore, both perspectives leave aside the analysis of the actual effects of the use of metaphors, including the ways in which metaphors strengthen, reproduce or subvert relations of power. To take an example, let us consider the recent emergence in social and political discourse in post-genocide Rwanda of the use of the metaphor ‘sopeka’ to describe female survivors of the 1994 genocide. Literally, the term ‘sopeka’ is the name of locally popular gasoline service stations – the equivalent of Western ‘Shell’ or ‘Esso’ service stations. In the post-genocide Rwandan context, when used as an identity label for female genocide survivors, the metaphor ‘sopeka’ has come to suggest that these women were able to survive the genocide because they had been providing sexual services to the Hutu Power death squads. In doing so, this metaphor echoes anecdotal evidence from survivors that a number of women were kept alive by the death squads to be raped and subsequently murdered but effects a semantic shift from labelling such women as rape victims to designating them as sexual collaborators. At level one of the sopeka metaphor, the image of the victim builds on the sexual metaphor of filling up the car tank and inserting petrol pumps into a number of different car petrol tanks. The second level, or in relevance theory terms ‘weaker implicature’ is that the petrol pumps

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benefit from the transaction, flourish and thrive, etc. Note that the metaphor also involves an interesting gender switch, since the pump should be ‘male’ and the petrol tank ‘female’, but the female has taken on the association of the petrol station, not the car being filled up. When looking at a specific communicative exchange in which the metaphor ‘sopeka’ is used, a cognitive linguist would lift these metaphors out of the wider social and political context, and be primarily interested in analysing the meaning construction in the statements included in this specific interaction, and the way in which this metaphor structures the participants’ perception of the women thus described. The implicit assumptions about events and participants’ identities would be examples of contextual elements taken into account. In contrast, social and political analysts would, depending on their research interests, more likely want to take their analysis a step further by adding to that the exploration of the ways in which the use of the term ‘sopeka’ reproduces or transforms the relations of power around ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the Rwandan context, for example. This is not to say that the second analysis is inherently ‘better’, but rather, that the reduction of context to that of a specific communicative interaction and the focus on the analysis of isolated statements as central to cognitive linguistics is problematic. Whereas cognitive linguistics usefully recognises context as crucial to the analysis of metaphorical meaning-construction, its narrow understanding of context as referring to the basic features of the context of utterance, such as participants’ identity and assumptions about taken-for-granted knowledge of other participants makes it of limited use for social and political analysis. In other words and to summarise my argument so far, for the purpose of studying metaphors within social and political analysis, we need a theory of interpretation based on a more satisfying account of situated, incorporated subjectivity. We need a more systematic account of context which defines it more broadly as the wider cultural horizon of meaning and the institutions and power relations that structure it, thereby allowing us to locate the analysis of metaphor in relation to wider issues of social and political action and transformation. By extension, we need to broaden our analytical scope to locate metaphors within their wider discursive and narrative context, shifting the unit of analysis from statements to discourse. Whereas we can usefully draw upon relevance theory and hermeneutics to provide us with a more sophisticated theory of interpretation and meaning-production, their failure to link meaning to power and to reflect upon the political ‘work’ that metaphors perform is problematic, especially for our purposes of locating the analysis of metaphors within a wider framework of social and political analysis. Therefore, I will turn in the next section to Foucauldian discourse theory to fuse hermeneutic and discourse analytical insights into metaphorical meaning production. Though Foucauldian discourse theory notoriously lacks a theory of interpretation, I argue that it has the benefit of offering an account of power which allows us to link the analysis of metaphors to issues of meaning, identity and power.

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Meaning, identity, power Turning from cognitive approaches to a discourse-analytical framework involves a move from an emphasis on the cognitive to the productive aspects of metaphors. Indeed, Foucauldian perspectives would argue that metaphors (as discourse in general) are constitutive of the social and political world (instead of considering them as ways of cognitively grasping a ‘given’ world). Differences between the two approaches are perhaps at times ritualistically overstated in the sense that discourse analysts would certainly acknowledge the importance of discourse in structuring perceptions of reality and therefore see the cognitive and productive aspects of language as inextricably intertwined. This is the case for instance when a discourse analyst like Howarth defines this approach as the analysis of ‘the way systems of meaning or “discourses” shape the way people understand their roles in society and influence their political activity’ (Howarth 1995: 115). However, relevance theory is primarily a theory of interpretation of metaphors, whereas, with discourse theory, we shift the main analytical focus away from interpretive processes to the political work that metaphors perform (see the chapter by Howarth and Griggs in this volume). As such, we return to preoccupations that were already present in Aristotle’s writings on metaphors. Indeed, whereas the ‘Poetics’ centred mostly on meanings and therefore on semantic issues, Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ started to explore questions such as the conditions of efficiency of metaphors, although the conditions that he identified were mostly to do with aesthetic features, such as stylistic ‘appropriateness’ and ‘sound’ of metaphorical expressions. Foucauldian strands of discourse theory which I draw upon here use the term ‘discourses’ to refer to the ‘macro-level’ of structural orders of discourse (Foucault 1971). This involves broad historical systems of meaning including meaningful political practices (referred to as discursive practices), which are relatively stable over considerable periods of time. However, following the genealogical method developed in Michel Foucault’s later writings, it is important to emphasise that identity is not only constructed in the context of relations of meaning, but also within institutionalised relations of power. Discourses around national identity, sexuality, gender or race, for example, are not autonomous systems but operate in the context of the institutional supports and practices that they rely upon (see also Mottier 2000). Consequently, the main aim of Foucauldian discourse analysis is not to reveal how specific discursive constructions result from the mere play of freefloating signifiers (in contrast to post-modern approaches, especially Derridian deconstruction) or from unconscious desires (in contrast to psychoanalytic approaches). Instead, it seeks to explore how specific discourses reproduce or transform relations of power as well as relations of meaning. Foucauldian understandings of discourse refer to two interrelated aspects of discursive practices: first, what I have termed elsewhere a set of language

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games: statements or constructions of meaning; second, to a set of strategic games, exploring the ways in which these constructions of meaning produce, reproduce, sustain or subvert relations of social and political power (Mottier 2005). Whereas the concept of language games when applied to metaphors refers to their semantic aspects such as the constructions of meanings and identities that they produce, the concept of strategic games explores the pragmatic aspects of metaphors such as the action that they perform. As Austinian speech act theorists are well aware, these two aspects are usually intertwined. For example, when metaphors engage in political labelling and naming, such as when immigrants are described in terms of ‘flood’ or ‘epidemic’ metaphors, these metaphors both produce stigmatised identities and have an effect on the public who may feel indignant or scared by the metaphor, thereby performing an action. More generally, not all metaphors are speech acts (i.e. utterances which in themselves constitute an action). For instance, the statement ‘I am pregnant with ideas’ contains a metaphor but is not a speech act. Metaphors in political discourse, however, are generally likely to be speech acts. In focusing on speech rather than on the system of language, but also in considering discourse in terms of strategies, Foucauldian discourse analysis demonstrates affinities to theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, P.F. Strawson, J.L. Austin and John Searle, with whose work Foucault was familiar. There is an important difference though in the way in which speech act theory as developed by Searle and Austin relates the ‘success’ of speech acts to speaker intentions, something which Foucauldian discourse theory emphatically rejects. Indeed, for Austin (1962), for a speech act to be ‘felicitous’ (successful), a person has to have a ‘serious’ intention (in other words, the statement cannot be meant as a joke). However, we may well incorporate speech act theory’s focus on the effects of speech within discourse theory while decoupling it from the link to intentions, via the notion of unintended consequences. For example, when a person tells a racist joke which was meant ironically but is not perceived by an audience as a joke (as happens, when the audience accepts a racist epithet at face value, not realising its ironic intention), there may still be a performative effect to the speech act, which in this case runs counter to that which the speaker intended. A perfect illustration of this is offered by the recent movie ‘Borat’, in which the actor Sacha Baron-Cohen makes anti-Semitic comments in the character of Borat, which are taken at one level by the immediate audience, but in a different way by the viewing public who know that Sacha BaronCohen is in fact Jewish himself. In other words, I would argue that there is no intrinsic incompatibility between discourse theory and speech act theory on condition of de-linking speech act theory from speaker intention and expanding its unit of analysis beyond isolated statements. In fact, this was recognised by Foucault, who drew upon speech act theory to show (as Austin did) that language has force and power, in addition to its semantic aspects. Foucault took issue with

Metaphors, mini-narratives and discourse theory 191 speech act theory, however, for concentrating on a restricted range of isolated language games around ‘a cup of tea in an Oxford drawing room’, disconnected from real historic context and from practices whose social and political relevancy are less restricted. The analysis of language and strategic games is linked to what Foucault terms an analytics of power. In contrast to Marxist accounts of power, Foucauldian discourse theory develops a relational understanding of power as a more diffuse network which cannot be reduced to the state alone, but pervades all areas of social life, and sees politics as involving struggles over meanings and identities. Second, in contrast to the Marxian concept of ideology which focuses on the study of ideological ‘distortions’ of reality and truth, the Foucauldian notion of discourse centres on the study of discursive strategies without assuming an essential pre-existing truth. Instead, each society is thought to have its own ‘truth regime’, its own contingent rules defining what is considered ‘true’ or ‘false’ at a certain moment in history. The implication for our current purposes is that truth is considered as ‘a mobile army of metaphors’ to use Nietzsche’s apt description and that, analytically, the aim is not to demask the ‘untruth’ of political metaphors, but rather to ask what political truths specific metaphors construct and what social and political consequences result from these.

Identity and narration As regards identity construction, Foucauldian discourse theory would similarly treat identity as the outcome of metaphorical constructions of meaning, which might include processes of naming and labelling. However, I believe that there is also something more specific about metaphors from the point of view of identity construction. Indeed, metaphors construct identities by telling a story in a very concentrated or condensed format. In that sense, metaphors function as what I propose to term mini-narratives which are not fully explicated – the spelling out of the full story is done by the audience which draws upon their tacit knowledge of the historical, social or political context to do so; as the example of the metaphor ‘sopeka’ demonstrates (which only ‘works’ with an audience that is aware of the pre-existing cultural meanings attached to this term). Within narrative theory, narratives are variously defined as ‘a story with a beginning, middle and end that reveals someone’s experiences’ (Manning and Cullum-Swan 1994); as ‘an original state of affairs, an action, or an event, and the consequent state of events’ (Czarniawska 1998); or much more broadly as ‘any form of communication’ (Barthes 1974) or ‘the main mode of human knowledge’ (Bruner 1990). Whereas some uses of the term narrative, such as Barthes’ or Bruner’s, make no distinction between narrative and discourse, I use the term narrative here in a more specific sense as referring to stories and storytelling. As such, narratives are possible forms of discourse, while discourses include, but are not reduced to, narratives (Mottier 2000). Narratives are

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(possible) building-blocks of discourse, while metaphors are (possible) building-blocks of both narratives and discourse. Specific tools of storytelling, such as metaphors, are important narrative forms that contribute to broader discursive constructions of identity. Identity formation involves the formulation of specific forms of narrative which constitute commonalities and differences between self and others (Yuval-Davis 1997: 43). As Ken Plummer (1995: 19) puts it: ‘stories mark out identities; identities mark out differences; differences define “the other”; and “the other” helps structure the moral life of culture, group, and individual’. Consequently, of central importance to processes of identity formation through metaphors is what I have elsewhere proposed to term discursive mechanisms of boundary-drawing, boundary-maintenance, ordering and othering (Mottier 2005). Metaphorical mini-narratives contribute to the discursive mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion from the political community.

Conclusions To draw the different strands of my argument so far together, I would argue that locating the analysis of metaphors within a discourse-analytical framework which takes into account their narrative features and links semantic issues of construction of meanings and identities with pragmatic concerns about context and power would involve an analytical framework focusing on the following three aspects of metaphor. First, its poetic function: how metaphors construct meanings and thereby contribute to what Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvärinen (1997: 6), in a pioneering work on interpretive methodologies in political science, described as the ‘potential for creativity in politics’. Second, the constitution of identity: how metaphors work as mini-narratives which construct identities and identity boundaries, involving naming and labelling processes. Third, the effects of metaphors, in particular, the ways in which metaphors reproduce, challenge or transform relations of power. On this last point, it is important to recognise that the claim that metaphorical identity constructions connect to relations of power does not imply that metaphor is power. For example, when individuals are described as ‘weeds’ to be eliminated from the national community, the effects of the categorisations are based upon the metaphors, but not reduced to the categorisation. Also, different agents may subvert the pejorative way in which the metaphor usage was originally intended, as happens for example when current gay rights campaigners describe themselves as ‘queer’. While metaphors classify and order reality, social and political classifications and orderings are not power itself, but rather the vehicle through which power operates.

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Note 1 This chapter owes much to help and advice from James Clackson. Thanks are also due to Edouard Bizumuremyi, Terrell Carver, Alan Cienki, Natalia Gerodetti, Jernej Pikalo, Dvora Yanow and participants in the ECPR workshop on ‘Metaphor in Political Science’ (Granada 2005) for critical feedback; to William Ossipow for initially triggering some of the questions that I have tried to pursue; to the Swiss National Science Foundation for generously funding this research (Research Professor Grant 61–66003.01); to the Institut d’Études Politiques et Internationales, University of Lausanne and Jesus College, Cambridge for institutional support; and to Olaf Henricson-Bell for stylistic improvements of the text.

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Mottier, V. (2000) ‘Narratives of National Identity: Sexuality, Race, and the Swiss “Dream of Order” ’, Swiss Journal of Sociology, 26: 533–58. Mottier, V. (2005) ‘From Welfare to Social Exclusion: Eugenic Social Policies and the Swiss National Order’, in D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds) Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, London: Macmillan. Nietzsche, F. (1873/1980) ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge in aussermoralischen Sinne’, in G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds) Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, vol. 1, Berlin: De Gruyter. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London: Routledge. Silk, M. (2003) ‘Metaphor and Metonymy: Aristotle, Jakobson, Ricoeur and Others’, in G.R. Boys-Stones (ed.) Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell. Sweetser, E.E. (1990) From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage.

Part V

Policy

13 Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence The rhetoric of Freedom to Fly in the struggle over aviation policy in the United Kingdom David Howarth and Steven Griggs

The fear of a media backlash, the threat of a sustained campaign of political protest or just generalised cautiousness may sometimes conspire to impede the adoption of programmes that from an external perspective may seem inevitable. Even governments with large parliamentary majorities enjoying considerable popular support can be reluctant to pursue public policies they think are desirable and justifiable. In such circumstances, one possible way to achieve a desired set of policy goals, and thus to circumvent the paradox, is to have a third party or agency that is ostensibly independent of government provide ‘ideological cover’ so that governments can pursue their desired goals. How do actors not directly at the behest of government provide such ideological cover? And what are the logics of argumentation and persuasion pursued by such actors in their efforts to enable governments to carry out their desired policies? This chapter addresses these questions by examining the politics of aviation policy in the United Kingdom and the consultation process that led to the publication in December 2003 of the British government’s thirty-year strategic plan for the development of airport capacity. This White Paper, The Future of Air Transport (Department of Transport 2003), came down firmly on the side of promoting expansion to meet projected demand for air travel, with environmental concerns relegated to a relatively subsidiary role (Dudley 2004). However, pro-growth campaigners had previously charged the New Labour government with ‘dithering’ and ‘piecemeal development’, expressing a real fear that, though intent on giving a strong ideological and policy lead on aviation expansion, government would ultimately prevaricate and defer decisions to expand (Caves and Gosling 1997: 320; Dean 2002). The liberalisation, deregulation and global commercialisation of aviation in the 1980s and 1990s had thrown up a series of contradictions, tensions and outright antagonisms about the extent, the location and the very rationale for accelerated expansion (Caves and Gosling 1997; Humphreys 2003; Whitelegg 2003). New alliances of local protest groups, conservationists

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and radical environmentalists had articulated particular demands to limit expansion in their areas with wider and more universal demands for environment protection and social justice – demands which contested the dominant ‘predict and provide’ policy paradigm in aviation (Griggs and Howarth 2002, 2004, 2006). In a climate of increasing suspicion of government from both advocates and opponents of growth, and committed, at least ideologically, to environmental targets aiming to reduce harmful emissions, the government had thought it wise to tread carefully. Against such concerns, we argue that the passing of the ‘go-for-growth’ White Paper was in important respects made possible by the political and ideological practices of a coalition of actors named Freedom to Fly, who successfully structured the terrain of public reasoning and debate so as to negate or contain those voices that challenged government’s desire to expand airport capacity. Freedom to Fly constructed a broad political coalition of all those forces in favour of expansion, drawing together airport companies, airlines and trade unions, air users, organised business and sections of the tourist industry around the rhetoric of ‘responsible’ and ‘sustainable growth’. In constructing such an alliance, intellectuals and activists associated with the aviation industry sought to make equivalent a series of diverse particular demands by elaborating a common discourse that could provide a plausible and credible project for growth. Such a discourse provided a defensible ‘storyline’ about the need for, and the advantages of, the growth of the aviation industry, which was built around the ideas of ‘sustainable aviation’ and the ‘freedom to fly’, and elaborated a persuasive set of counter-arguments designed to negate and disarticulate the political alliance opposed to growth. In order to account for the way in which this campaign was able to displace the existing terrain of argument so as to favour the case for growth, we draw upon recent developments in post-Marxist discourse theory (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Howarth 2000; Howarth and Torfing 2005). Critically for us, each of the components of Freedom to Fly’s strategy was mediated by a rhetorical dimension. We focus on the rhetorical strategies and mechanisms – what we call the logics of rhetorical (and more specifically, metaphorical) redescription, catachresis and equivalence – through which a pro-growth discourse coalition was constituted and operated. In advancing our arguments and claims, we focus principally on the ‘official public discourse’ of Freedom to Fly – its media statements, the interviews given by elite actors, the articles written in national newspapers – as well as a series of in-depth interviews with key actors and draw upon an analysis of the consultation process surrounding airport expansion which took place between December 2000 and December 2003. As our analysis discusses primarily the rhetorical logics of construction, we preface it with a brief excursus on rhetoric and its specific role within our conception of discourse theory.

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A brief excursus on rhetoric Against more mainstream social science approaches, discourse theorists regard the existence of rhetoric as a constitutive aspect of social reality and its theoretical and empirical analysis as an essential part of understanding and explaining social phenomena. However, it is important to distinguish between discourse theory and discourse analysis, where the latter consists of a range of techniques to analyse ‘talk and text in context’, while the former provides the underlying assumptions for their appropriate employment (see Howarth 2005). In Heideggerian terms, discourse theory corresponds to the ontological level, where the concept of discourse specifies the necessary presuppositions of any inquiry into the nature of objects and social relations, while discourse analysis operates at the ontical level and is concerned to analyse the particular objects specified by one’s ontological presuppositions (see Mulhall 1996: 4). A consideration of the specific role of metonyms and metaphors in a rhetorical analysis of politicians’ speeches thus functions at the ontical level and presumes the basic categories of discourse theory. At this level of inquiry, and as long as they are commensurate with its ontological assumptions, discourse theorists can freely draw upon a range of tropes and devices to analyse texts and practices. Our focus in this article is not so much on the ontological dimension per se, but on the employment of rhetorical figures in the ‘ontical’ analysis of the pro-growth coalition. We are concerned with the role of tropes such as metaphor and catachresis in constituting Freedom to Fly’s discourse. More precisely, we are interested in the technique of ‘rhetorical redescription’ – focusing mainly on the substitution of new metaphors – as a means of understanding the logic by which those organising the Freedom to Fly coalition struggled to secure the requisite ideological cover for New Labour’s aviation policy and the process of naming that helped bind the coalition together. Quentin Skinner reactivates Quintilian’s technique of rhetorical redescription (paradiastole), in which he draws upon the latter’s advice of presenting factual narratives (say to persuade a court of law). The technique involves the restating of facts ‘but not all in the same way; you must assign different causes, a different state of mind and a different motive for what was done’ (Quintilian cited in Skinner 2002: 183). Of particular interest is the substitution of a rival (yet neighbouring) evaluative term ‘that serves to picture an action no less plausibly, but serves at the same time to place it in a contrasting light’ (Skinner 2002: 183). Thus, ‘prodigality must be more leniently redescribed as liberality, avarice as carefulness, negligence as simplicity of mind’ (Quintilian cited in Skinner 2002: 183). Against this background, we need to make one further, important theoretical detour, which centres on the precise relationship between the figures of catachresis and metaphor in our account. In the history of rhetoric, it is commonplace to relegate the figure of catachresis to a secondary position visà-vis metaphor. Whereas metaphor is generally understood as ‘a transfer or

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substitution employed when a proper term does already exist and is displaced by a term transferred from another place to a place not its own’ – or, more simply, when one thing is described as being another thing – catachresis ‘is a transfer of terms from one place to another employed when no proper word exists’ (Parker 1990: 60). Catachresis is in this sense to misapply a word. For example, to say or write that the Labour government’s consultation strategy flew into turbulence is to substitute a particular experience or event of flying in an aeroplane for a specific political practice, thus describing the former in different terms and conveying a new meaning, whereas to speak of ‘the leg of a table’ or to refer to someone’s ‘walkman’ is to apply a term to a thing to which the term does not literally refer, either because our language lacks such a term or because we come across or invent new objects in need of a name. For many, the identification of catachresis with an abuse of metaphorical transfers – a misapplication of words – makes the former an ‘unexpected’, ‘violent’ or ‘mixed’ metaphor. In short, the figure of catachresis is subject to a double relegation from the proper: not only is it stained by its figurative dimension, as are all tropes, but even within the figurative domain, it represents an abhorrent form – an abusio rather than a translatio. However, following in the wake of theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau, the figure of catachresis can be conceded a more fundamental role in our understanding of rhetoric. For instance, Derrida in his essay ‘White Mythology’ prioritises the figure of catachresis to problematise the metaphysical distinction between the literal and the figurative – between the traditional conceptions of the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical – which continues to haunt current discussions in the human and social sciences (Derrida 1982). While Derrida contests the valorisation of the concept vis-à-vis metaphor in philosophical discourse, he does not simply invert this tendency by privileging the classical and traditional notion of metaphor. To ground philosophy and its search for pure concepts on the (equally metaphysical) concept of metaphor would be both to exclude and to privilege metaphor from the very field of study it seeks to explain. Instead, just as he constructs a generalised ‘arche-writing’ within which to account for signification and the sign, he stresses a ‘generalised metaphoricity’ that is predicated on the figure of catachresis – ‘a not very proper proper meaning’ to use Bennington’s phrase – which weakens any privileging of metaphor or non-metaphoricity (Bennington 1993: 13). One significant implication of Derrida’s reading is a mutual interweaving of the literal and the figurative and thus of the real and its representation. However, while Derrida correctly stresses ‘the radical contingency of naming’ (Zˇizˇek 1989: 92), and though he implicitly presupposes a performing subjectivity that names, his general philosophical scepticism about the subject means that he does not thematise this aspect in any great theoretical detail (Derrida 1976: 107–18). It is here that Laclau’s stress on the constitutive function of naming adds an important twist to the tale. Laclau argues that in certain specific circumstances – the failure of an institutional order to

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 201 contain demands, for example, and the emergence of antagonisms and demands that cannot be represented within it – ‘the name becomes the ground of the thing’ (Laclau 2005: 100). In other words, in a situation where heterogeneous elements are only held together by a chain of equivalences, whose unity itself depends on the exclusion of a designated other, the name partly constitutes the meanings of the objects to which it applies. Laclau’s account draws upon Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s Lacanian-inspired account of naming. Zˇizˇek intervenes in the dispute between descriptivists (e.g. John Searle) and anti-descriptivists (e.g. Saul Kripke) about naming and reference. Very briefly, while for descriptivists the content of every name is given by a cluster of positive properties – a chair, for instance, is an object upon which one sits, and thus the word ‘chair’ applies to things of this sort – for antidescriptivists such as Kripke words do not refer to objects because of the latter’s properties but through a process of naming – a ‘primal baptism’ as he puts it – which gives rise to a trajectory of historical and causal mechanisms that connect the employment of a particular name and the thing to which it refers (Kripke 1980: 83–5). In this conception, each user of words and names is part of a relational system of language, and it is because the structure of language is causally hooked up to a world of objects that reference is made possible at all. Now, in seeking to go beyond these approaches, Zˇizˇek criticises descriptivists like Searle, on the one hand, because they circumvent what might be called the social fact of language: the fact that if language qua symbolic order – Lacan’s ‘big Other’ – is ‘a social network in which meaning exists only in so far as it is intersubjectively recognised’: then it must be part of the meaning of each name that it refers to a certain object because this is its name, because others use this name to designate the object in question: every name, in so far as it is part of common language, implies this self-referential, circular moment (Zˇizˇek 1989: 93) However, on the other hand, if descriptivists miss the role of the Lacanian ‘big Other’ – language as a system of signifiers – then the anti-descriptivists miss the Lacanian ‘small other’ (the object petit a). For Lacan and his followers, the object petit a is a fantasy object – an excess – which stands in for and seeks to cover over the fact that language is an incomplete structure, and it is the latter which problematises the myth that it is possible to trace out an external causal chain back to the ‘primal baptism’ in which an object acquires its name, thus ensuring that the name designates the same object in all possible worlds. Instead, for Zˇizˇek, contra anti-descriptivists like Kripke, what guarantees the identity of an object in all possible counterfactual situations [i]s the retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object. The ‘surplus’ in the object

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In short, then, Zˇizˇek’s argument about the radical contingency of a naming practice which retroactively constitutes its reference – what we shall call the moment of catachresis par excellence – foregrounds the lack in any symbolic order, as well as the importance of the political subject, which is compelled to act in the voids opened up in the gaps and fissures of the ‘Big Other’. With this brief detour into the world of rhetoric completed, we return to an analysis of the rhetoric of Freedom to Fly.

Analysing the rhetoric of Freedom to Fly As the consultation process unfolded from December 2000, large corporations such as British Airports Authority (BAA), British Airways (BA) and Virgin, along with air users, business associations, trades unions and elements of the tourist industry, deployed their considerable influence and economic power to put the wider case for airport expansion. In doing so, leaders of Freedom to Fly, such as their Director Joe Irvin (who went on to become a senior trade union figure in the Transport and General Workers Union), Brenda Dean (a current Labour peer), Stephen Hardwick (the public affairs director of BAA) and Dan Hodges, who replaced Irvin as a Director and whose career includes work for his mother, the former Transport Minister Glenda Jackson MP, the Road Haulage Association and for the GMB Trade Union opposing privatisation), successfully managed to persuade a large number of power corporations, collective actors and stakeholders to forego their immediate and short-term interests – what Gramsci would have called their ‘economic-corporate’ interests – to maximise their individual preferences in order to construct a united front in favour of airport expansion per se. As the major public vehicle of their campaign, they launched the Freedom to Fly Campaign on 14 January 2002 in order to win over the wider public to the idea of airport expansion. Articulating arguments in favour of airport expansion, members of the coalition organised their rhetoric around the benefits of aviation for a range of subjects (passengers, business and workers), thus seeking to confer a particular meaning to the notion of ‘sustainable growth’, which was the object of much ideological contestation. Now the first task of those wishing to provide ideological space for the government to reach and act upon the ‘correct’ decision was to forge a coalition of supporters who could speak with a united voice. The organic intellectuals who took up this challenge were confronted with the fact that they sought to represent a series of competing and potentially conflicting interests. There were

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 203 significant conflicts of interest between competing airlines, who did not necessarily agree on sites for expansion, and amongst different airports, each backed by competing regional growth coalitions. There were also potential and actual conflicts of interest between the producers and consumers of airline and airport services, as well as between their owners and managers and the workers in these corporations. There was also the issue of constructing a case for expansion that would find favour and be legitimate in the eyes of the public at large. In seeking to unify these different interests into a collective will, organic intellectuals were able to make the demand for growth and expansion the single overriding demand. They thus sought to make the lowest common denominator of immediate and decisive support for aviation expansion by the government the point of compromise between the different forces at play. In reaching this agreement, they were able to locate a point of universality between the competing demands and interests to which all could agree to give their support, and they managed to construct an equivalence between interests that both supported growth and strongly opposed all those against expansion. Hence, its proponents implored the government to increase runway capacity to meet rising demand, and in their rhetoric, they adduced and enumerated several reasons to support their case. In this next section, we examine how Freedom to Fly constructed air travel as an economic success story, articulated the failure to expand airport capacity as a threat to employment and investment and sought to elaborate a public discourse which redescribed the aviation industry not as a threat to the environment, but as proponents of ‘sustainable aviation’.

Rhetorical redescription: the demand for responsible and sustainable aviation First, as we said above, Freedom to Fly constructed air travel as an economic success story not only in itself, but also in its capacity to unlock new opportunities both for business and pleasure. As Brenda Dean (2002) put it: ‘Air travel has opened up new horizons, for both business and holidaymakers. In 1977 we took 7 million holidays abroad. Now we take 38 million holidays abroad each year.’ In Flying Responsibly into the Future, its pamphlet promoting airport expansion, the coalition further associated aviation with ‘growth, prosperity and jobs’, stressing its role as a catalyst for growth across all business sectors: ‘Aviation is vital for our country. It supports jobs, investment and tourism’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 1). Or as Dean argued: Time is money. Modern businesses rely on fast, reliable transport both of people and high value, time sensitive goods. The UK’s highest growth industries especially, such as pharmaceuticals, communication services, finance, insurance and consultancy, depend heavily on good international transport links. (Dean 2002)

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Such claims of employment and business opportunities were more importantly presented as ‘FACT’ (see Figure 13.1). Indeed, seeking to embed the uncontested nature of its claims, Freedom to Fly invoked the Oxford Economic Forecasting study on the positive contribution of aviation to the British economy and even the Government’s own consultation papers which ‘are unequivocal that the UK’s aviation industry is good for the economy and employment’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 2). Thus, reiterating General Motors’ famous advertising slogan, pro-growth supporters asserted that ‘what is good for aviation is good for the United Kingdom’ (cf. Miliband 1969: 69). Second, Freedom to Fly posed the failure to build new airport capacity as a threat both to the host of employment and investment opportunities unlocked by air travel and to the global competitive position of the UK aviation industry. As Freedom to Fly was keen to point out: ‘the cost to the economy of no growth could be in excess of £15 billion (net present value) and the economy would lose billions of pounds’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 2). Without expansion, the coalition warned that the price of air travel would increase, up to 260,000 jobs would be put at risk, 73 million passenger movements in the UK prevented, and incoming tourism hit, threatening 4700 jobs (Freedom to Fly 2002: 12). And, as if to amplify the threat, the failure to build new capacity would also mean losing out to Britain’s competitors in Europe: Meanwhile Charles de Gaulle in Paris now serves more destinations than Heathrow. In fact while we were labouring through the cumbersome inquiry about a fifth terminal for passengers at two-runway Heathrow airport, the French, Germans and Dutch were busy building the fourth or fifth runways at Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Schipol. (Dean 2002) In short, this inculcation of an external threat invoked the priority of the collective good over the particular interests of individuals: ‘Air travel gives us tremendous opportunities and is vital to the UK economy. If everyone says “not in my backyard”, it’ll be disastrous for consumers and the British economy’ (Irwin cited in Clark 2002). In other words, ‘community interests have to be balanced with national priorities’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 11).

FACT: Aviation adds over £10 billion a year to the UK economy and generates half a million jobs. FACT: The Government estimates that throughout the UK some 260,000 extra jobs could be created through the proposals for expanding airport capacity by 2030.

Figure 13.1 The rhetoric of Freedom to Fly, ‘Flying Responsibly into the Future’ (source: Freedom to Fly (2002: 2–3), emphasis in original).

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 205 Nevertheless, proponents of the expansion campaign were weary of presenting their case in terms of ‘growth at any cost’. On the contrary, they were of the firm view that the environmental and social costs of expansion had to be fully acknowledged and addressed to allay fears about the negative consequences of growth. It was here that a first usage of the technique of rhetorical redescription came to the fore. In this regard, and as we intimated above, those articulating the Freedom to Fly discourse sought to redescribe the aviation industry not as a threat to the environment, but as proponents of ‘sustainable aviation’ committed to ‘sustainable growth’. Drawing on radical environmental and development discourses – demands for ‘sustainable development’ in the face of the ‘limits to growth’ – organic intellectuals thus substituted a rival evaluative term based on the qualifier ‘sustainable’ to counter efforts by environmentalists and Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) groups intent on presenting the expansion of the aviation industry as ‘unsustainable’, ‘unnecessary’ and ‘subsidised’, thus requiring the demand for air travel to be ‘managed’ and ‘limited’. In short, therefore, the metaphor of sustainable development, widely understood as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, was reiterated in the context of aviation to stave off potential criticism and adverse publicity (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 43). As such, the proponents of expansion sought to transform the zero-sum game of expansion or environmental protection into a positive-sum game where it was possible to achieve both growth and environmental protection (see Figure 13.2). Thus, for example, the Director of Freedom to Fly, Dan Hodges, rejected proposals that emerged during the consultation process for the building of a new airport at Cliffe in North Kent on the grounds ‘that Cliffe is simply unsustainable on environmental grounds’. And he continued to argue that ‘The aviation industry has a long standing commitment to sustainable expansion’: ‘We are prepared to demonstrate our commitment to sensible aviation growth, and we call on Airport Watch and Friends of the Earth to

Setting a clear direction for aviation policy will inevitably involve a number of hard choices. The principal issue to address will be how to meet demand for aviation in the most sustainable manner. In our view, policies which limit consumer choice or seek to artificially constrain demand would lead to job losses, damage to the UK economy and undermine the freedom of consumers to travel at a reasonable cost to a broad range of destinations. Our own vision is of an aviation policy promoting a dynamic industry to support the British economy, provide consumer choice and deliver effective measures to protect the environment.

Figure 13.2 The rhetoric of sustainable aviation (source: Ed Anderson, Chairman of Airport Operators Association (citied in Airport Operators Association 2002: 1)).

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do the same’ (‘No Airport at Cliffe Campaign Liaison Group’, Conservation and Communities United 2004). In a similar vein, Brenda Dean asserted that ‘The challenge for the Government is to maximise the economic and social benefits of air travel while mitigating harmful effects and environmental costs’ (Dean 2002). In other words: [g]rowth must be responsible and sustainable. All human activity affects the environment. There is general agreement that aviation like all industries should meet the environmental costs it imposes, on a fair and equitable basis. Unfortunately there is a wide and sometimes wild range of estimates of what these costs amount to. The costs can be dealt with through cutting out problems at source, mitigation (e.g. noise insulation) and compensation. That is why we must encourage the aviation industry to be greener by design. And many believe that a system of tradable permits would be the best way to reduce global emissions for aircraft while permitting people to enjoy the benefits of air travel. (Dean 2002) This rhetorical redescription of ‘sustainable aviation’ was driven by attempts to dispute the alleged environmental costs of air travel. Freedom to Fly (2002: 9–11) thus hastened to establish the progress made by the aviation industry in terms of noise pollution, lauding its commitment to meet new standards of the European Union (EU) for NO2 and advocating a system of emissions trading. Equally, it threw doubts for example on the significance of the contribution of air transport to existing global CO2 emissions in the UK and levels of air pollution surrounding local airports (attributed primarily in this instance to cars not necessarily travelling to airports). As such, any decision to impose further taxation on air travel to offset environmental costs was challenged by the reasoning that: ‘If aviation covers its environmental costs (both by cutting pollution and paying for the remaining external costs) what justification is there for pricing people out of flying?’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 9). Finally, it questioned the description of expansion as ‘some simplistic form of “predict and provide” policy – an accusation previously levelled at roads policy’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 7). Existing levels of demand, it argued, already justified new infrastructure, and airport expansion, unlike roads, would incur no costs to the taxpayers and would have a marginal charge for using them as ‘runways are built by airports who depend on customers paying to fly’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 7).

Bringing back the subject? The practice of naming qua catachresis Up until now, our analysis draws inspiration from, and in its basic structure conforms to, Laclau’s logic of hegemony (Laclau 1990, 1995, 2000). In brief, the construction of a hegemonic project (or discourse coalition to use

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 207 another term) involves the construction of an equivalential chain that links together different demands against a ‘common enemy’. In this model, each demand is split between a universal (e.g. the demand for growth) and particular dimension. For instance, an airline might demand an expansion of the aviation industry (the universal dimension) in a particular location such as London Heathrow (the particular dimension). In this theory, then, one of the demands – the desire for growth – comes to play a universal function, thus representing and giving sense to the entire chain of demands. As more and more demands are added to the chain of equivalences, so the universal signifier (e.g. ‘expand the aviation industry in the UK’) is emptied of content, thus becoming a ‘tendentially empty signifier’ to use Laclau’s terms. In the case we are considering, our claim is that the name Freedom to Fly came to signify the universal need for growth, thus functioning to unify the coalition around something that was perceived to be lacking or at least under threat from those protesting against expansion. In fact, our account of the pro-growth coalition suggests that the collocation ‘sustainable growth’, which was made to serve as the universal demand of the coalition, was the product of a metaphorical redescription, which was then universalised by organic intellectuals intent on developing what they thought was the most plausible and credible case for expansion. Similarly, the act of naming the coalition – the catachrestic moment par excellence – was an inspired creation that successfully tapped into a number of important beliefs, desires and discourses held by people in UK society at large. In this view, naming the coalition Freedom to Fly was a radical and inspired act that brought into being a new object – the coalition demanding sustainable growth – and provided the ideological means of representing a perceived threat or lack (being prevented from flying) that could be overcome by a particular policy (a pro-growth expansion strategy). In short, Freedom to Fly framed the demand for ‘sustainable aviation’, and the discourse was structured around the fantasy that these two elements do not contradict or cancel each other out, but can be equally desired and achieved. That Freedom to Fly was an inspired choice for naming, and thus constituting the coalition as well as for framing its demands in ideological terms, is evident in the connotations and meanings of the signifiers it employed. Let us begin by breaking the metaphor ‘freedom to fly’ into its two basic parts. First, the importance of the signifier ‘freedom’ in any political discourse is difficult to underplay. Historically, and in numerous contexts, ‘freedom’ has connoted an exemption or release from bondage, liberation from the bondage of sin, the emancipation from slavery, the breaking free from shackles, the removal of obstacles or impediments to actions and so forth. Just as it is difficult to be against measures that are protective of our natural environment, so it is politically difficult to be ‘against freedom’. The burden of proof seems inevitably stacked on the side of those who wish to interfere with our freedoms or take away our liberties. In the discourse of political philosophy, and in the analysis of political ideologies, the basic

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concept of freedom is generally taken to mean an ‘ability to choose without interference by others’, and it has been commonplace, if somewhat misleading, to distinguish between at least two conceptions of freedom: a negative conception – ‘freedom from’ external constraint – and a positive conception – ‘freedom to’ (Berlin 1969). The beauty of the name Freedom to Fly is that it seamlessly captures both dimensions: the ‘freedom from’ those who would prevent us from flying by ‘managing demand’, for example, or by blocking the expansion of airports, and the ‘freedom to’ fly wherever we wish to at the lowest possible price and in the most convenient fashion. Second, ‘to fly’, as in ‘flying in an aircraft’ or ‘flying to a destination’, has also acquired powerful and positive connotations in the modern age. In the popular imagination, in novels, in films and in the world of advertising, the image of international airports, jet flight, pilots and stewardesses, as well as the exotic destinations which are put within easy reach, have become quintessential signifiers of the cosmopolitanism, excitement, speed and adventure of our increasingly ‘small world’. As the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus attests, the exhilaration, thrill and danger of flight and flying – connected strongly with ideas of escape and liberation – are deeply inscribed in ancient Greek mythology, and it continues to operate on contemporary popular consciousness as a sign of progress, freedom and pure possibility. The name Freedom to Fly was able to tap into these strongly held fantasies and collective imaginaries that structure the mentalities of subjects in the modern world and was used to try to displace the discourse of ‘demand management’, which it was feared was emerging and beginning to take root as an alternative discourse on aviation. Tapping into these fantasies and collective imaginaries, Freedom to Fly stressed the articulation between aviation and travel and holidays (see Figure 13.3). In Flying Responsibly into the Future, aviation, it claims, ‘has opened up opportunities for ordinary people to fly for a holiday in the sun, visit friends and relatives or experience other cultures. Being able to fly away on holiday is a valued part of people’s quality of life . . .’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 4). As Dean (2002) elaborates: ‘Today ordinary people can contemplate taking the family to the Med, have a romantic weekend in Venice or even visiting grandchildren in Sydney. Flying is no longer the preserve of the wealthy.’ Indeed, aviation is persistently portrayed through populist appeals to aviation as a force for social progress. Thus, on the one hand, aviation has ‘broadened minds as well as mobility’, with 15 per cent of young people flying to the UK coming here to study (Freedom to Fly 2002: 5). It has enabled ‘ordinary people to fly’. On the other hand, additional environmental charges on aviation would wrongly undermine such freedom for ‘ordinary people’ adding up ‘to £340 for a family of four flying to holiday in Majorca. This would be unjustified, unfair and ineffective’ (Freedom to Fly 2002: 7). This populist appeal facilitates the redescription of expansion, not as the agenda of profit-maximising companies, but as a response to rising consumer demand and social progress. And, as Freedom

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 209 to Fly (2002: 7) points out, for the predicted growth in demand to be realised: all that it would mean would be for each of us on average to take one summer holiday and one other return trip by plane each year (for example, a weekend break, a winter holiday, a study visit, a business trip or to stay with friends and relatives). It is here that a second kind of rhetorical redescription can be discerned. Here, efforts were made not just to redescribe aviation as sustainable aviation, but to redefine the very terms of argumentation themselves. Richard Rorty, for instance, distinguishes between ‘interesting philosophy’ and philosophy that is simply concerned with examining ‘the pros and cons of a thesis’. ‘Implicitly or explicitly’, the former approach, amounts ‘to a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a halfformed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things’ (Rorty 1989: 9). Indeed, as he goes on to argue, the [l]atter method of philosophy is the same as the method of utopian politics or revolutionary science (as opposed to parliamentary politics, or normal science). The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of non-linguistic behaviour, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions. (Rorty 1989: 9) Endeavouring to redescribe the situation of the aviation industry in this way, those in the Freedom to Fly coalition endeavoured to shift the debate away from concerns about the environment, the control of demand and issues about equality and social justice, and more to questions about our Freedom to Fly and about the threat to jobs and economic competitiveness and our opportunities for pleasure, if such expansion was blocked or threatened. In this way, Freedom to Fly provided the ideological framing device within which to locate the signifiers of ‘sustainable aviation growth’, ‘sustainable aviation’ and ‘socially responsible development’ more generally.

FACT: In 1977 Britons took 7 million holidays abroad. Now we take 38 million holidays abroad each year.

Figure 13.3 The appeal to collective imaginaries (source: Freedom to Fly (2002: 4)).

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Steering a tertium quid between Leftist demands for state and governmental intervention to lower consumer demand, and demands from the Right to leave the aviation industry in the hands of the market, Freedom to Fly sought to undercut both by articulating the notion of sustainability within the framework of a socially responsible corporate capitalism that was sensitive to environmental and social concerns on the one hand and to the overall economic development of the United Kingdom as a whole on the other.

Conclusions We have explored the way in which Freedom to Fly sought and managed to provide ideological cover for the New Labour government in the period running up to the formulation of the pro-growth Future of Air Transport. In pinpointing and describing this logic, we focused on the way organic intellectuals welded together a diverse range of pro-expansion interests by securing agreement that the demand for growth ought to be the overriding demand to be defended in the policy and public domains. The analysis stressed the ideological means and mechanisms – especially the devices of rhetorical redescription, catachresis and the logic of equivalence – through which this discourse was constituted and disseminated, as well as the processes through which Freedom to Fly sought to displace and reshape the argumentative terrain underpinning the debate on aviation. And finally, although we believe that in doing so this discourse coalition was significant in providing New Labour with the requisite room for manoeuvre to take the lead on this policy, we did not adduce direct empirical evidence to demonstrate this case. Rather, to use the language of speech act theory, our focus was on the illocutionary, rather than perlocutionary, dimensions of the language practised by intellectuals supporting the proexpansion campaign. That is to say, we have concentrated on what Freedom to Fly was doing in saying they wanted expansion, rather than a thorough analysis of the overall effects and take up of their speech acts. However, it does not seem overly speculative, especially given the kind of legislation that was proposed by the government, and in the way in which Freedom to Fly became the ideological target of those campaigns opposing expansion, to claim they partly secured the policy outcomes they desired.

References Airport Operators Association (2002) Building a Sustainable Aviation Policy, London: Airport Operators Association. Bennington, G. (1993) Jacques Derrida, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caves, R.E. and Gosling, G.D. (1997) Strategic Airport Planning, Oxford: Pergamon. Clark, A. (2002) ‘Battle Looms over Airport Expansion’, The Guardian, 22 July. Dean, B. (2002) ‘We All Benefit from More Air Travel’, The Observer, 3 November.

Metaphor, catachresis and equivalence 211 Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press. Department for Transport (2003) The Future of Air Transport: White Paper, London: Department for Transport. Dudley, G. (2004) ‘ “Predict and Provide” Dominates New Air Transport White Paper’, Local Transport Today, 382: 14–15. Freedom to Fly (2002) Flying Responsibly into the Future, London: Freedom to Fly Coalition. Griggs, S. and Howarth, D. (2002) ‘An Alliance of Interest and Identity? Explaining the Campaign against Manchester Airport’s Second Runway’, Mobilization, 7: 43–58. Griggs, S. and Howarth, D. (2004) ‘A Transformative Political Campaign? The New Rhetoric of Protest against Airport Expansion in the UK’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9: 181–201. Griggs, S. and Howarth, D. (2006) ‘Airport Governance, Politics and Protest Networks’, in M. Marcussen and J. Torfing (eds) Democratic Network Governance in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse, Buckingham: Open University Press. Howarth, D. (2005) ‘Applying Discourse Theory’, in D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds) Discourse Theory and European Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howarth, D. and Torfing, J. (eds) (2005) Discourse Theory and European Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Humphreys, I. (2003) ‘Organizational and Growth Trends in Air Transport’, in P. Upham, J. Maugham, D. Raper and C. Thomas (eds) Towards Sustainable Aviation, London: Earthscan. Kripke, S. (1980) Naming and Necessity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1995) ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’ in J. Weeks (ed.) The Greater Evil and the Lesser Good, London: Rivers Oram. Laclau, E. (2000) ‘Identity and Hegemony’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Zˇizˇek (eds) Contingency, Hegemony and Universality: New Discussions on the Left, London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Miliband, R. (1969) The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Mulhall, S. (1996) Heidegger and Being and Time, London: Routledge. Parker, P. (1990) ‘Metaphor and Catachresis’, in J. Bender and D.E. Wellbery (eds) The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitelegg, J. (2003) ‘The Case for “No Growth” ’, in P. Upham, J. Maugham, D. Raper and C. Thomas (eds) Towards Sustainable Aviation, London: Earthscan. World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zˇizˇek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

14 Love and life in Heart-less Town Or, the use of metaphor in local planning Merlijn J. van Hulst

Each metaphor intensifies selected perceptions and ignores others, thereby helping one to concentrate upon desired consequences of public policies and helping one to ignore their unwanted, unthinkable, or irrelevant premises and aftermaths. Each metaphor can be a subtle way of highlighting what one wants to believe and avoiding what one does not wish to face. (Edelman 1967: 218)

This chapter focuses on a metaphor used in a decision-making process in a Dutch municipality.1 Actors in the municipality are deciding where in the municipality a new centre should be built, a centre that should be the heart of the town. The importance of the metaphor ‘the centre is a heart’ only came to my attention after being in the field for several months. It posed the question of how the metaphor was used in decision making and in what way this usage confirmed or contradicted what was written about metaphor in the field of policy making, especially the influential work of Donald Schön. This first section of this chapter identifies the methods used to generate the data. The second section considers the way metaphor has been conceptualised in the work of Schön. In order to show the way the metaphor under study was used, the subsequent sections chronologically recount the decision-making process. This is followed by an analysis of the process, focusing on the metaphor ‘a centre is a heart’ and the conclusion. This chapter is part of a study of Heart-less Town, which entailed observations made over a period of six months; 45 interviews and many conversations with politicians, civil servants and actors around local government. It also included the analysis of minutes of meetings of various sorts, policy documents and newspaper articles. Half a year after the process took place, a report was sent to 14 actors in the field requesting that they respond. Twelve of them gave feedback.

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Schön’s metaphors in policy making In the words of Lakoff and Johnson, ‘the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Referring to social policy, Schön (1979/1994) gave a similar description stating that a generative metaphor makes us see ‘A’ as ‘B’.2 He used the example of social housing policy where a slum – ‘A’ – is seen either as disease – a first possible ‘B’ – or as nature – a second possible ‘B’. Schön argued that because ‘B’ is more familiar to us (1979/1994: 150) and has a normative feel that follows from familiar cultural meaning (1979/1994: 147–8), seeing ‘A’ as ‘B’ makes us know what to do with respect to ‘A’. Metaphors, by pointing towards implied action, can help actors to make a ‘normative leap’ from is to ought (see also Rein and Schön 1977: 240–1). In other words, metaphors generate new insight into a policy matter and suggest one or more lines of action, which are implied by some kind of cultural logic. Actors often do not even notice that they use metaphors, because they are ‘unaware of the metaphors that shape [their] perception and understanding of social situations’ (Schön 1979/1994: 148). Nevertheless, once actors see the problem of social housing in terms of the cultural distinction disease/health or artifice/nature, it becomes obvious to them what should be done. This ‘sense of the obviousness of what is wrong and what needs fixing is the hallmark of generative metaphor in the field of social policy’ (Schön 1979/1994: 148). Schön’s early treatment of metaphors teaches us a great deal about the work of metaphors in the practice of policy making. Metaphors help actors to develop a perspective on a problematic situation. Although their cultural logic often remains tacitly known, they help actors to move from making an analysis of the situation to taking action in response to it (cf. Yanow 1996). Schön also reminds us of the relevant side effect of metaphors, they make actors see what they want to see and thereby ignore other things (Edelman 1967). Nevertheless, there is more to metaphors. This can be discerned from the limits of Schön’s example from policy making which provided a basis for his theoretical ideas. First, in the case of housing policy, there were two metaphors – social housing seen as disease and social housing as natural – that are distinctive. This may be a consequence of focusing upon ‘deep metaphors’ (Schön 1979/1994: 149), i.e. metaphors that underlie the way actors talk about a problem. Although he argues that the division between these deep metaphors can be overcome when a third metaphor is introduced, the metaphors in first instance approach the policy problem in opposite ways. The actions implied by the competing metaphors are that slums should be redesigned or should be maintained as they are. Second, reading Schön’s article today, it is the obviousness or transparency of these metaphors, their meanings and their cultural logic that suggest it is possible

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for a researcher to reconstruct a clear cultural logic behind every metaphor. The result is that whereas in the policy practice ‘[a] situation may begin by seeming complex, uncertain, and indeterminate’ (1979/1994: 148), the cultural realm appears quite simple, certain and determinate. This is clearly not the case for metaphorical usage in all situations. Various authors have suggested that the meaning(s) of a metaphor might be more ambiguous than transparent/obvious (Yanow 1996: 134–5; Stone 1988/2002: 157–61). This could be used to put into the question Schön’s approach to metaphor. Except for Miller (1985),3 who has conducted a thorough and direct critique of Schön’s theory, there has not yet been much attention for the lack of recognition of ambiguity in his work. The meaning of a metaphor is arguably relative to the context of use. In the case under study, I found support for several of Schön’s claims. But as will become clear in the analysis, ambiguity was of greater importance than the idea of generative metaphor. This is not recognised in the work of Schön (see also Schön and Rein 1994: 23–8).

Centre planning in Heart-less Town Halfway through the 1970s, a small shopping centre was built in Heart-less Town, a Dutch municipality with approximately 25,000 inhabitants. From the second half of the following decade, a discussion about the planning of a new centre arose. Most political actors were in favour of some version of an enlargement of the present (small) centre on Location 1, while others were in favour of building a new centre on Location 2, a spot with some sporting facilities and a park. During the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, the local authority came close, on two occasions, to actually building a centre on Location 1. The last plan was the most popular plan. As the title of the plan indicated, it aimed for a ‘complete and lively’ centre, not just a shopping centre. Due to a conflict with the project developer about costs, two ‘independent scientists of fame’ investigated the plans. At the beginning of 2002, just before the municipal elections, they concluded that the design of the new centre was unfeasible both financially and legally.

A new period Before the municipal elections in March 2002, some citizens organised a small campaign to promote the candidature of a fellow citizen in the municipal council. Although the man in question was on the list of candidates for the Democrats, his position would normally have not made him eligible for a seat. According to a leaflet distributed to many inhabitants, he was knowledgeable about local issues and had the capacities and administrative experience to deal with complicated planning matters. Within a week after the elections, the new coalition appointed him alderman in charge of plan-

Love and life in Heart-less Town 215 ning a new centre. This policy issue received the highest priority in the political programme of the board. The new alderman energetically made a new plan for the realisation of the centre. To begin with, the council had to distance itself from the last plan. In the regional newspaper, the new alderman already stated: In the past ambition has prevailed over feasibility. There was a lack of expertise that is again the result of the size of the municipality. My starting point is: with both feet firmly on the ground. We are here to build a centre that suits Heart-less Town, not to realise daydreams. (The Regional Post, 14 April 2002) In the second half of 2003, the board started with the proposal for a new ‘working agreement’ between the municipality, the association of entrepreneurs and the project developer. As in the 1990s, the choice of a proper location was central to the planning phase. In the working agreement, involved parties recognised that in order to determine the new location for the centre, the planning process should go through two phases. In the first phase, an investigation would determine the kind of centre the town needed. In the second phase, a site investigation analysis would compare five locations for their suitability as town centre. Investigating five locations, and not just the two locations that were central to the planning in the past, was to help distract attention from the battle between Locations 1 and 2. Therefore, many local government actors did not, at first, take the other locations very seriously. They referred to them as window dressing. On the basis of the investigations, the board was to decide on the location, and the council (after discussing the choice of the board in its council committee for Spatial Matters, which consists mostly of council members) would then either reject or endorse this decision. The report on the necessary type and the size of centre was published in November 2003. Given the observation that the current centre was economically in bad shape, because it no longer attracted local customers, the report argued that to prevent things from getting worse, the municipality should build a ‘main (shopping) centre’ that is commercially viable. The report was based on calculations of supply and demand. Corrections on the results of these calculations were made on the basis of a regional benchmark that took ‘the specific situation of Heart-less Town’ into account. Even though the report focused primarily upon calculations of, e.g., ‘critical mass’, ‘customer needs’, ‘the proportion of food and non-food’, it also acknowledged the wish in Heart-less Town to build a centre that was more than ‘just shops, [a] centre that will become the “sparkling heart” of the municipality’. In December 2003, the council approved the report and allowed the board to use more money to continue investigations during the second phase. The first step of the second phase, as the alderman formulated it, was to ‘determine the DNA’ of the five selected locations. At the beginning of the

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second phase, the local bureaucracy and the newly installed Project Organization began gathering figures for the so-called ‘location report’. In the meanwhile, the project developer and the board determined the criteria on which the locations would be compared and the relative importance of the criteria. The criteria were categorised into three groups. These included the physical aspects of the location, its costs and benefits and its relation to the urban and retail structure of Heart-less Town. As a second step in the second phase, the same agency that wrote the report for the first phase developed a ‘multi-criteria analysis’ to decide which location was the most suitable for a new centre. The board itself identified a further special criterion to make its own decision: societal support. According to the members of the board, this criterion was not measurable like the others, so the members of the board would determine it themselves. While the local bureaucracy was busy gathering figures and making calculations, the alderman chaired meetings with representatives of various segments of society (churches, entrepreneurs, sports clubs, etc., in total ten groups) and with the residents who lived in the vicinity of the locations under investigation. During these meetings, the alderman told his audience the what, how and why of the centre planning. He stressed the selection procedure had to be done in a rational way, even though emotions were also important. In March 2004, the location report was finished. The scores of the various locations were added up to a final score that indicated the suitability of the location on a scale of one to one hundred, to one decimal point. Location 2 was identified as the best location (with 81.6 points), followed at quite a distance by Location 3 (68.4). Surprisingly enough for the actors involved, Location 1 (one of the two main contenders in the eyes of the politicians) only reached third place (66.2). Although there was discussion among the members of the board halfway through April, it chose Location 2, after re-ranking the importance of some criteria over others and adding amongst others that an ‘organic link’ had to be created between Location 2 and Location 1.

Political struggles After taking the decision, the board made it public and defended it. The location report was discussed in a long additional meeting in the council committee for Spatial Matters. It took place over three nights. In addition, the board organised three public meetings in which they, the alderman, supported by civil servants, gave an explanation of the choice of the board. One of the political parties also opted for a public hearing on the choice of location, and others inquired about the possibility of organising a referendum, neither of which materialised. Various committee members were not satisfied with the poor results for Location 1 and asked for additional calculations.

Love and life in Heart-less Town 217 As the political debate evolved, battles that were fought between advocates of Location 1 and Location 2 during the 1990s were repeated in the committee meetings. On the second evening of the additional committee meeting, however, the spokesman of the Christen Democrats put forward a new option. In a passionate speech, he argued that the decision for the centre was not a decision for the 30 years to come, as the alderman had argued, but for the coming 100 years. According to his reasoning, Location 3 was better suited for building a centre, among other things, because the town would grow in the direction of Location 3. After a suspension of the committee meeting, during which the board and civil servants discussed among themselves the best way to react, the alderman gave a ‘counter’-speech in defence of Location 2. This time, instead of depending on the report, the alderman attempted to convince the committee of the superiority of Location 2 by articulating a broad vision of the future. It envisioned the new centre as an area that involved both Location 1 and Location 2 because they would be organically linked. When the decisive council meeting drew near some members suggested that the council formulate its own proposal, the board indicated that the council should either reject or accept its proposal. According to the board, it was not acceptable that the council make its own proposal. Nevertheless, on the night of the council meeting, Labour and the Christian Democrats (two coalition parties) delivered an amendment to the board’s proposal that could de facto be seen as an alternative proposal. The amendment stated that the new centre should be built on Location 3. After suspension of the council meeting with debates among the members of the board and members of the coalition, the board threatened to resign. The final vote at the end of a night, filled with tension, resulted in a victory of 13 over 7 in favour of the board’s proposal that the centre be built on Location 2.

The heart of the matter The decision-making process described above appears at first glance a regular political fight. However, the constant use of the concept of ‘a heart’ to talk about the centre in the political debates of Heart-less Town was puzzling. Why did almost everybody use this imagery to talk about a new centre? Talking about a centre as a heart is not original to Dutch town planning. Describing the period when he became alderman in the 1980s, Duivensteijn (1994) for example described the problem facing The Hague as its lack of a heart. In addition, this ‘heart’-talk in planning has not only been limited to municipalities. As Van Eeten (1999) demonstrated, the ‘Green Heart’, the name of an area between various big Dutch cities, has played an important role in Dutch planning at national level. When I recognised ‘a centre is a heart’ as a metaphor, I began to consider what work it might be doing for those who used it in this particular case.

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Life and love In the political process described above, actors presented a centre as a heart. The central feature highlighted by the metaphor is the difference between a centre of a town and a heart of a town. As many actors in interviews explained about their town, it does perhaps have a centre, but it does not have a heart. For many actors in Heart-less Town, the language of ‘centre’ and especially ‘shopping centre’ would seem only to point to the place where shops are located. A ‘heart’ by contrast points to more than ‘just shops’. One of the entrepreneurs said ‘just shops’ would lead to ‘shopping island’. Despite the technical and rational way the alderman approached the centre planning, he and his compatriots acknowledged that the proposal for a new centre had to include more than ‘just shops’ to become acceptable enough to gain votes in the council. But in what way exactly is a heart more than ‘just shops’?4 Analysis of the language used in the debates in Heart-less Town suggests that ‘heart’ is being used here as a symbol of life. This is a meaning that is arguably familiar to most members of the Dutch, Western society in which Heart-less Town finds itself. Nevertheless, that this meaning is familiar does not necessarily mean that actors will know in what way a centre has something to do with life. It becomes clearer in analysing the similarities in the structure of which both are a part: the metaphor implies that the relationship between the centre and the town should be like that between the heart and the body that contains it. This concept of heart-as-life has several implications. The centre is the part where life should be located. Next to shops there have to be activities that make the centre a lively place and not a place where after six o’clock you could ‘fire a canon without hitting anybody’, as one of the politicians stated. The new centre can gain its support of the public and can be considered legitimate because it is a place for everybody (not just consumers) all the time (also after the shops close). In the planning process, this use of the metaphor was quite prominent. The ambition put forward in the final plan was to make a centre that is ‘lively and complete’. After the council found itself forced to admit that the final plan was not affordable, the alderman described the centre at Location 1 as ‘dying’. If the cultural logic of the metaphor is projected on the problem, a dying centre has terrible consequences for the town. Once the centre-heart stops pumping blood, the town body is dead. By arguing that the planning for Location 1 was ambitious and not realistic and that the old centre is dying, the alderman created space to look at the ‘new life’ of a centre from a rational perspective. He depicted creating a new centre as something that should make actors in Heart-less Town focus on the future. The first report was an important part of his rational perspective; it started with the calculations of a centre that is both big and small enough to be ‘viable’. It also argued that the ambition was to build a ‘sparkling heart’ of the municipality. In a subsequent investigation, the aim was, as the alderman put it, to measure the ‘DNA’ of various locations.

Love and life in Heart-less Town 219 Determining ‘viability’ and ‘measuring DNA’ are acts that are metaphorically in line with the heart-as-life idea. The language of the specialists in town planning research is attuned to the problem definition that is common in Heart-less Town. Nevertheless, the use of persuasive rhetoric and the rational language of reports, arguing for incorporating more than shops alone, was not enough, since the decision making began in the political settings of the board of aldermen, mayor, the municipal committee and council. In the first political setting, almost all members of the board expressed a desire for their choice of location to fuse technical criteria with the need for a heart. The need for a heart was no longer something that could be calculated. The board’s idea of an ‘organic link’ between Location 1 and Location 2 is in line with the idea of a heart-as-life. Metaphorically, the link represents the vital, physical connection between various parts of town as connecting various bodily organs. By arguing for a link, the board recognised that Location 2 could not be ‘more than shops’. The link was meant to add something to the envisioned centre on Location 2. At the same time, the link also represents the way in which the board wanted to unite a rational solution (81.6 is more than 66.2) and the most desired solution. In other words, at a more abstract level, the organic link united reason and emotion. By recognising the effort to make the centre planning ‘more than just reason’ from the perspective of the heart metaphor, it becomes possible to identify a second meaning of ‘heart’ in this context. A heart is a symbol of love. This heart-as-love part of the metaphor is commonplace in society at large, but perhaps less obvious in the case of a centre. Nevertheless, the biggest political party in Heart-less Town used this aspect of the meaning of a heart as their election slogan: ‘A heart for Heart-less Town.’ In other words, they told the audience, ‘we care about Heart-less Town’. The heart-as-love aspect of the metaphor, however, has implications for making a rational decision about the centre. This is because a centre-as-heart cannot be built and attributes of a proper location cannot be calculated in a straightforward manner. A centre-as-heart is the result of a historical process that develops over time and expresses itself in feelings for a certain location. In this view, a heart is no longer a vital organ (or machine) that pumps blood (or money), but the place where feelings are located. A heart refers to a love relationship that a community supports. Moreover, since this relationship develops over time, heart-as-love directs attention to the past. The heart-as-love aspect of the heart metaphor connects the citizens of a town in a more abstract way than the heart-as-life. A location that has been shared in this way for a longer time seems to give a sense of identity. This is why Location 1 had support among political parties. For many actors in local government Location 1 was where the heart of the town – its caring, emotive centre – already was. A member of Labour referred to Location 1 as ‘a heart grown throughout history’. The Liberals said it is ‘emotionally and historically the real heart’ of town. This sense of realness and historical identity might be lost forever if a centre is built elsewhere. Although the board

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claimed that Location 1 should not be seen as the heart of Heart-less Town, it argued to ‘have attention for the emotional perception of Location 1 as the centre from a historical perspective’. Hence, the organic link that the board proposed tried to connect the love of the past with what the board saw as the viable future. In the committee, some, however, portrayed the link as a political deal, something to make up for the loss of Location 1 as the centre.

Reframing or choosing After the report was made public, many of the written questions from the committee members to the board indicate that some political parties still believed it was possible to build on Location 1. A final political clash seemed in the making when the decisive council meeting drew near. When the board presented a vision statement that elaborated on ideas like the organic link, it created more ambiguity than it solved. With the proposal, the board tried to do what the final plan was unable to do. The final plan united heartas-life and heart-as-love, but it was unable to match both images with the image of a centre selected rationally. This was, because it would cost the municipality a large sum of money. Instead, the new plan, a centre based on a rational perspective, used calculations and numeric comparisons to make it fit the image of a heart. Basing their choice on both reports, the board did not on the one hand choose between what the calculations and comparisons identified as the best place for a centre. Nor on the other hand, did they choose between the two images of the centre based on heart-as-life and heart-as-love. Although the context of rational planning allowed for the use of the heartas-life aspect of the metaphor, the board argued that the new centre should in some way transcend this notion. This conclusion was based upon their knowledge of the context of the political debate in Heart-less Town. In this light, it is not strange that they sought a transcendence of the heartas-life aspect of the metaphor. According to the interviewees, years of political debating had made the centre issue an emotional one. The proposed link between Location 1 and Location 2 illustrated the way in which the board thought it could unite all ways of looking at the problem. Calling a link ‘organic’, however, did not necessarily make it ‘natural’ to the audience. The tacitly known and therefore underestimated complexity of the heart metaphor made the proposal appear artificial. To the council members, it was not obvious that they should agree with the board. The proposal entered a state of ‘meaning-overload’ and became ambiguous. While the board tried to construct a story that united the report and various meanings of the heart metaphor, one of the actors in the committee took up the role as main storyteller. The decision, he announced, was not one concerned about the coming 30 years, but the coming 100 years. The town will have moved in the direction of a location that had not been in the picture: Location 3. The sudden popularity of Location 3 did not develop

Love and life in Heart-less Town 221 until after the committee members had realised that Location 1 was (financially) impossible.5 For the council members who did not support the board, this recognition brought with it the realisation that it was impossible to unite both meanings of the heart metaphor in one plan. The spokesman of the Christian Democrats argued that if they have to build a heart all over because past planning had proved unfeasible, they might as well really look ahead and focus only on the future. Since they could not have the centre they desired, they should think about the centre they could imagine. This focus on the future corresponded to choosing the heart-as-life aspect of the metaphor and maximising its meaning. The future stretches out over 100 years and therefore the planning should not focus on present or past states of affairs, but on the changes that can be seen over a longer time.

A heart without citizens? Even though the proposed choice for the heart-as-life animated the debate, it was also a break with the idea of heart-as-love. Important to this idea was the love for a certain location among members, or rather citizens, of Heartless Town. If we look at the criteria for choosing the location, this was not made part of the calculations and comparisons that lead to the location report. This was because societal support for possible locations was, in the view of the board, impossible to establish in the same way as the other criteria. The board labelled societal support as something that it alone, in its role, could gain insight into. Possibilities to gain a sort of ‘measurement’ from citizens, such as through a referendum or a survey, were not considered. Discussions in and around the committee meetings also did not establish a clear way to define societal support. Irrespective of this, the board claimed to have put much energy into finding out about societal support. Meetings with citizens and representatives of segments of society were organised, and a ‘sounding board’ with citizens was convened on several occasions. However, during all these kinds of meetings, the alderman and his colleagues never asked actors present whether they supported one or another location. On the initiative of one board member, a small ‘public’ vote took place in the sounding board. The result was a big majority for Location 1. Was this what the alderman feared and why he had not inquired into actors’ preferences? Building societal support for the board seemed to mean explaining what the board was doing rather than finding out which location the people preferred. In addition, once the board had taken its decision and defended it in public, the criterion of societal support changed into lack of ‘societal protest’, which was what the board experienced after announcing its decision.6

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Ambiguity at work In contrast to the way the ambiguity of the heart metaphors worked against the board, the ambiguity that surrounded the criterion of societal support and with it the heart-as-love aspect of the heart metaphor did important work for the board. It not only prevented possible support for Location 1 from surfacing, it also helped to evade the question of support for a centre in general. The moment the question of the absence of the voice of the citizens is raised, the alderman argued that citizens no longer wanted one particular location as long as a centre is built somewhere. Political parties also did not do a lot to uncover a possible lack of legitimacy among citizens.7 This was perhaps because identifying such a lack would call into question the legitimacy of all the work that they had invested in solving their perception of the problem. As a consequence, the stories about a ‘heart’ that is looked for, a town that is divided and an administration that is solving all these problems concealed other kinds of stories featuring those who did not care and those who liked the centre as it was. By invoking the notion of the heart in the discussion, attention was diverted from the necessity of the centre in general. The idea that Heart-less Town has no heart and should have one was the unquestioned starting point of the debate. Accepting the notion of a heart-as-life as the only option was substituted for the question of public support for the new centre as such. This enabled the political actors to proceed with business as usual, because how could anyone protest against the noble ambition to create a heart? If political actors in the board and the council had evaluated whether the meanings of their heart metaphor were shared in a larger political context that included the citizens of Heart-less Town, they might have asked this question.

The work of a policy metaphor In this final section, I will return to the Schön’s (1979/1994) treatment of metaphors and the work the heart metaphor performed Heart-less Town. As expected, the metaphor helped actors in Heart-less Town to define their planning problem. The problem definition that was dominant in the political setting was the statement that the town had no heart. This metaphor made actors prefer seeing ‘A’ – a centre – as ‘B’– a heart – over ‘C’ – just shops. Schön’s proposed way of analysis runs into problems the moment that ‘seeing as’ moves to ‘knowing what to do’, because the familiar ‘B’ did not have a cultural logic behind it. It could not give obvious signals about how to solve the problem. Even though actors in Heart-less Town gave priority to one and the same metaphor, it could not resolve conflicts about the right solution. Calling the centre a heart makes it hard to decide on a proper centre for those who establish the facts – researchers using a rational

Love and life in Heart-less Town 223 perspective. Although to those who attribute values – politicians putting forward an abstract vision – a heart was something more than ‘just shops’, the heart metaphor itself concealed various meanings. ‘A’ – a centre – can be seen in terms of ‘B’ – a heart, but ‘B’ in its turn leads to the meaning ‘B1’ – a heart as life – and ‘B2’ – a heart as love. At one level of abstraction the metaphor moves policy makers to think of a centre that should be lively, and at another level it urges them to look for a centre that is loved. The introduction of the heart metaphor did not point to a clear way out of the problem. Even if it presented a ‘normative leap’, it was a leap in the dark. In the context of rational planning the heart-as-life aspect of the metaphor still seemed to suffice, but in the context of political debate a heart-as-love aspect of the metaphor became more important. These contexts were however integrated with actors from the board and council exchanging debate. In addition, there was not a cultural logic that actors could draw upon to impose a choice. The metaphor could be used in different ways to defend choices in both contexts. Moreover, if the politicians would have followed up on the second aspect of their own metaphor, it would have perhaps made them admit that love for the certain centre – outside the small community of actors in and around local government – was a construction they, more than others, wanted to believe. The persuasive rhetoric that was used not only helped actors in local government to choose between ‘B’ and ‘C’, it also kept the idea that there was total lack of support for a new centre at a distance.

Conclusions To sum up, this chapter demonstrated how a metaphor can both hide and highlight certain ways of seeing a policy problem and reacting to it. These are commonly accepted ideas about the manner in which a metaphor functions. The chapter also demonstrated that the use of metaphors in policy making does not necessarily enable a single and obvious cultural logic. Actors may not just use distinctive metaphors; they may use the same metaphor in distinctive ways. The result is that the use of a metaphor can create more ambiguity than it solves. Since the contexts in which a metaphor becomes meaningful can overlap and interact, a single metaphor can simultaneously call for and advise against the same action.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented during 2005 at the Department of Public Administration of the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the ECPR Workshop on ‘Metaphor in Political Science’ at the Joint Sessions in Granada and a session on metaphors during the Public Administration Theory Network conference in Krakow. Apart from the participants in these meetings, I especially want to thank Harry Daemen, Arthur Ringeling, Linze Schaap, Henk Wagenaar and Dvora Yanow for their comments and support.

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2 The generative connotation that Schön adds to the idea of a metaphor in my view only points at the interest that he has in seeing things in a new or other ways. Metaphors generate insight, experience, etc. This does not differ a lot from metaphors in general I would say. All metaphors are generative (construct a world), although they do not always give us insight that we consider valuable. 3 Miller’s comment was at a more philosophical level and mostly aimed at a next step Schön proposed: reframing the situation with a new metaphor. 4 Even though the actors used the metaphor all of the time, those actors in Heartless Town with whom I discussed an earlier version of this chapter had not realised the possible meanings structure behind it. 5 In the end, a majority of the members of the Christian Democrats helps the board to its victory. According to there statements however, this is not because of the content of the plan, but because of the administrative instability that threatens the municipality. 6 A lack of protest, in its turn, might have to do with a public that thinks protesting does not lead to anything. 7 Only one of the parties publicly questions the legitimacy of the need for centre planning from the point of view of the citizens. This new party, however, has not worked on the centre planning before and does not try to stop it now.

References Duivensteijn, A. (1994) Het Haagse Stadhuis: Bouwen in een Slangenkuil, Nijmegen: Sun. Edelman, M. (1967) ‘Myths, Metaphors, and Political Conformity’, Psychiatry, 30: 217–28. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D.F. (1985) ‘Social Policy: An Exercise in Metaphor’, Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 7: 191–215. Rein, M. and Schön, D.A. (1977) ‘Problem Setting in Policy Research’, in C.H. Weiss (ed.) Using Social Research in Public Policy Making, Lexington: Lexington Books. Schön, D.A. (1979/1994) ‘Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Setting in Social Policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schön, D.A. and Rein, M. (1994) Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies, New York: Basic Books. Stone, D.A. (1988/2002) Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Van Eeten, M.J.G. (1999) Dialogues of the Deaf: Defining New Agendas for Environmental Deadlocks, Delft: Eburon. Yanow, D. (1996) How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

15 Cognition meets action Metaphors as models of and models for Dvora Yanow

Teachers in urban centers did not just need adequate pay or comparable pay: they needed ‘combat pay’. (Stein 2004: 60)

In this epigraph, Sandra Stein is quoting a phrase used by teachers in talking about their working conditions in schools implementing Title I of the US federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally passed in 1965 and subsequently reauthorised until it was replaced by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Why did those teachers feel it necessary to draw on a military metaphor – ‘combat pay’ is the additional money, on top of basic salary, earned by soldiers at war – in talking about their desired income? Was the metaphor ‘purely’ descriptive – some ‘doily’ adorning ‘normal’ language that could be removed with no loss of meaning, indeed, perhaps even making the meaning clearer and less ambiguous? Or did it serve some other purpose in daily conversation? One need not go as far back as Aristotle (in the Poetics; see Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 189) to reclaim for contemporary political studies ideas that have bearing on the role of metaphor in political action, including both political acts (among them public policies and their implementation) and theorising about those acts. Aside from contemporary theorising about metaphors in organisational studies, significant theoretical contributions to metaphor analysis in politics and policy have been made in work published in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Metaphor analysis in political (and social) science has taken one of two streams: exploring the roles of metaphor in social and political theories and theorising (e.g. Landau 1964; Myrdal 1968; Brown 1976; Miller 1979; Rayner 1984; McCloskey 1985; Yanow 1994) and exploring the roles of metaphor in what might be called practice settings, such as public policy issues or organisations implementing policies (e.g. Bosman 1987 and Howe 1988 on political discourse; Edelman 1977, Schon 1979, Miller 1982, 1985, and Yanow 1992 on professional practices). In either circumstance, metaphoric language enables a ‘seeing-as’. The question for metaphorical

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theorising is, How does this seeing-as process work? What is seen, and what is concomitantly not seen? Where does the vision come from, and – especially in empirical circumstances – what action does it enable? Applied to empirical cases, such questions give form to an analysis of the language of policy texts and debates, and the language use of implementing organisations, that can elucidate communicative difficulties (e.g. the experience of contending parties ‘speaking past’ each other) and implementation blockages. At times, such analysis may lead the contenders to mutual understanding, if not to resolution of their differences. I begin this chapter with a discussion not so much of what metaphors are as of what they do. That is, I approach this topic from the perspective that there is a relationship between language, and in particular metaphoric language, and action, whether that is individual action or collective, organisational action. My understanding of metaphors in this way grew out of my analysis of an extended case study of a government corporation charged with implementing national policy, and so I draw on that work, first, to illustrate the theoretical approach. I then turn to a provisional analysis of a current example, the ‘evidence-based’ movement in policy and professional practice, which combines the two strands of metaphor analysis – metaphors in theory and metaphors in use – in interesting ways. What becomes clear in this approach is that theorising ‘metaphor’ in this fashion is, itself, not just a theoretical undertaking, but also an action-oriented one. So, an interpretive approach to metaphor such as this – one that sees metaphor in the context of a much broader, meaning-focused approach to the human sciences – is methodological: it combines theorising about how metaphors work – an epistemology – with practical steps for how to analyse them – a set of methods (see Yanow 2000; Yanow and SchwartzShea 2006).

‘Seeing-as’: metaphors in practice Unlike metaphors informing theoretical understanding, metaphors-in-use in practice settings and contexts have direct, sometimes immediate, implications for action. One of the intriguing questions about metaphors concerns their genesis: do they originate elsewhere and hence may be said to be applied to the situation to which they are brought or do they derive from the situation itself? In other words, are metaphors-in-practice models of some prior and typically as yet unarticulated understanding of the situation they describe and characterise? Or are they models for taking action in that situation? In this chapter, I argue that they are both and that they do both in a mutually interactive way. ‘Seeing-as’ – the practice entailed in metaphorising – concretises prior conceptualisations, sometimes inchoate, often known tacitly but not explicitly. The language of ‘housing decay’, for example, draws its meaning from some unarticulated, prior notion that housing deteriorates much in the same

Cognition meets action 227 way that teeth, or some other substance in the natural world, decay.1 Housing is an activity in the human realm: ‘housing decay’ is not used in a policy context to mean building materials physically decaying; instead, it says something about the social character of brick and cement high-rise apartment blocks. Therefore, we are more inclined to draw our understanding of its ‘decay’ from a human, social context than from a natural setting. That is, we are more likely to think ‘teeth’ than ‘wood’. It is in this way that metaphors are models of prior conceptualisation: they embody and reflect context-specific prior understanding of their subject matter, drawing – usually implicitly, through tacit knowledge – on metaphoric meaning in its source origins. But seeing-as also projects onto the unknown in a way that suggests a course of action to be taken in some future time. Understanding the social problems connoted by ‘housing decay’ in the context of ‘tooth decay’ leads to a seemingly logical course of action. When one has a decaying, bothersome tooth, one heads to a ‘tooth doctor’ – a dentist. In a parallel fashion, when one faces ‘decaying, bothersome’ housing, one consults with ‘housing doctors’, specialists in town planning and urban design, such as those found in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development or their state and/or local governmental counterparts. Furthermore, much as when a dentist, diagnosing an irreparably damaged tooth, yanks it out, housing specialists prescribed bulldozing the offending housing blocks, thereby leaving a gaping hole that could be filled – with newly constructed housing, much as the dentist fills the hole with a newly manufactured, artificial tooth. This is what ‘urban renewal’ policies and practices in the 1960s–70s entailed. Metaphors, then, are also models for: they embody seeds for subsequent, future action that follows from the underlying logic of the prior understanding on which they draw. This makes metaphors both models of and models for in a way that is mutually interactive. Without the prior experience of dentistry and an understanding of its practices, it is less likely that federal policy would have led to the wholesale eradication of housing in neighbourhoods marked by poverty and crime. The problem definition could have been framed differently. Evidence for these claims may be found in the fact that such neighbourhoods still exist in the United States, yet ‘urban renewal’ has fallen out of fashion. Seeing metaphorically–analogically, the analyst draws on ambient knowledge existing at that time and conceptualises policy solutions accordingly. The metaphor is a proxy for a much larger, nested set of concerns; one might even see it as a synecdoche, that figure of speech that uses one part of the subject to stand in for the whole (as, for example, when nurses on a hospital ward refer to ‘the broken leg in Room 17’ when they want to know if Joe Green got his medicine). This cognition-action process holds for policy analysis, as well as for other forms of analytic practice (such as organisational diagnosis). In some ‘pre-textual’ way – before the analogy between housing and teeth could be drawn on in an explicit fashion – the link was made;

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language use articulated that link, but still without spelling out the entailments of the metaphor. These were known tacitly, in Polanyi’s sense that ‘we know much more than we can tell’ (1966: 4). The knowledge unarticulated was also contextual: it was specific to that time and that place. In framing the definition-of-the-situation in one way, metaphors focus attention in certain directions. At the same time, they deflect attention from other ways of seeing-as. Put somewhat differently, at the same time that metaphors draw on pretextual, often tacit, contextual knowledge of the situation, they commonly occlude alternate possible subtextual readings of that same situation. This is clear from a metaphor analysis of the US abortion policy debate, for instance. The names used to denote the two parties to the debate might usefully be seen as synecdoches. Framing the issue as ‘pro-life’, by the logic of language use, forces the oppositional label ‘anti-life’. Not wanting to be forced into such negative language, the ‘for access to abortion’ camp narrates itself as ‘pro-choice’. Sufficiently compelling to dominate the framing of the debate, these metaphors, while directing attention towards certain features of the issue, blind us towards other aspects that might enable reframing of the issue, a lowering of tensions, and movement towards constructive policy-making addressing the concerns of both parties. In the housing decay-urban renewal policy issue, the decay metaphor occluded the fact that residents of these neighbourhoods had developed a rich network of social relationships that sustained them. In bulldozing the housing, policy-makers did not relocate the residents in a way that preserved these social networks. Instead, they were scattered to the four winds, severing these ties in ways that affected their morale (see Fried 1963). Seeing-as, in other words, is also a way of not seeing. Much of this metaphor work is done tacitly, as noted above. We typically do not spell out that we are thinking of tooth decay and dentists when we hear the phrase ‘housing decay’. We hear the phrase, and its meaning resonates. The American phenomenologist (albeit better known as a humanistic psychologist) Carl Rogers described this process as first forming inner hypotheses, in a subjective mode of knowing within oneself, about what is going on in the event, ‘making patterned sense out of [one’s] experiencing’ from within one’s ‘own internal frame of reference’ (1964: 110, 112). It is, I think, in this fashion that metaphors proceed from being models of prior understanding to models for subsequent action. Without our paying attention, metaphoric meaning rides in on the backs of words from their source contexts into their new settings; metaphors are the ‘moving vans’ – metapherein, in contemporary Greek – of meaning. From this understanding of what metaphors do, and drawing on Black (1962, 1979) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), I derive the following definition: a metaphor is the juxtaposition of two superficially unlike elements in a single context, where the separately understood meanings of both interact to create a new perception of each and especially of the focus of the metaphor. Subjected to analysis, the surface unlikeness yields a set of criteria which are shared by both

Cognition meets action 229 metaphoric vehicle and focus (Yanow 1992). So, for example, ‘teachers’ combat pay’ (from the epigraph) brings together a concept from a military setting with a situation in schools, shedding new light on teachers’ work conditions as experienced by them. It was this sort of understanding that led D.F. Miller (1982) to enumerate seven kinds of metaphor – analogy, translation, exchange, contradiction, synecdoche, and metonymy, and metaphor proper – all of which share a referential character, drawing meaning from a source context that comes riding in, unnamed, to the focal context through the vehicle of the metaphoric term. This process characterises theory metaphors, too, which at times also shape not only conceptualisation but also applications in practice. There are many parallels in metaphoric thinking, in both theoretical and practice applications, in feminist theory and science studies. One example, for instance, which draws on the intersection of feminist theories, the history of medicine, and science studies, shows that Aristotle, Galen, and later medieval (and even later) physicians conceptualised female reproductive systems by drawing on what they knew from male bodies, including seeing the foetus as a ‘little man’ and the uterus as a penis (see, e.g., Tuana 1989). Such metaphoric theorising carried over into medical practices. In organisational studies, in the eighteenth to nineteenth century, the experience of machines carried over into conceptualisations of organisations marching unilinearly forward towards progres; the mid-twentieth century brought images of organisations as biological cells or cybernetic devices narrated through systems theories (see e.g., Morgan 1986; Yanow 1987). In some respects, the perception of public policy processes themselves that most shapes – problematically – our understanding of them grew out of that nineteenth-century understanding of organisation as machine. Its manifestations in the bureaucracy theory that emerged out of the ‘machine’ age or ‘industrial era’ influenced understanding of the policy process, including the actions of organisations during the implementation phase of that process. Most traditional, institutional models of policy-making conceptualise it as an assembly line: a bill introduced into the legislature, moving through subsequent stages of committee and subcommittee assignments and readings and deliberations, until it passes (if it does), is signed into law and is sent to the executive department for administrative execution (see, e.g., Stone 1997 on this point). Even subsequent process models that expand policy-making beyond legislative action on both ends adopt a similar analogy in their modelling, tracing movements (to use the US case again) from personal idea to general agenda to institutional agenda through Congressional steps to publication in the Federal Register, to delivery to the appropriate implementing organisation, whereupon action moves down through the ranks until programmes are in place. The assembly line metaphor generates two interlocking ‘production’ processes – the first produces a bill; the output of the second is a programme.2 Drawing on the war theme that predominated in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, social policies (and policy

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theories subsequently) designated those on the receiving end of this policy programme assembly line as ‘targets’ (e.g. Sapolsky 1972; Schneider and Ingram 1993), denying them agency in the policy process. These two assumptions – that language is transparent in meaning (i.e. through words unambiguously designating their referents) and that subordinates act on orders (or risk insubordination and its consequences) – yield a model that ignores the ways in which meanings are shaped by metaphors, potentially leading to differences in interpretation that affect implementation. Indeed, in this model, language does not come into play at all, any more than street-level workers’ interpretations would (see Lipsky 1978). This approach to metaphor analysis draws on cognitive theories (such as the position articulated by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 and in subsequent studies, e.g. 1999), but also on the pragmatic philosophy of Schon (e.g. 1979; see also Rein and Schon 1977), which sees metaphors in the context of action. I differ from Schon, however, in holding that it is metaphor ‘all the way down’: that is, we can neither rid policy (or other) language of metaphor, as D.F. Miller (1985) also argues, nor can we necessarily make all of our metaphors explicit (thereby achieving the same end). Much in the same way that Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life, we, in our policy discourse as well as in our everyday speech, speak metaphors all the time, ineradicably and inextricably. Let me illustrate this mode of analysis by reference to the empirical research from which it emerged. Then, I will turn to a contemporary case.

Case 1: community centres and supermarkets My theorising about metaphors is drawn from an empirical analysis of the policy and administrative practices of the Israel Corporation of Community Centers (ICCC) (Yanow 1992, 1996). An extended metaphor emerged during the founding period at a time when ‘community centre’ was largely an unknown concept in local parlance. While articulating some tacitly known understanding of what the desired community centre was intended to be (as a model of that prior knowledge), the metaphor came to shape architectural, programmatic, and administrative actions and practices in the not-yet-created centres (as a model for). The metaphor was highly contextual, articulating prior knowledge and masking alternative narratives. To summarise the case briefly, the community centre idea that spawned the creation of the agency came from the United States, having been introduced to the Minister of Education and Culture during a meeting with some American visitors. Operationally, this presented a problem: how to ‘translate’ the locally abstract concept of a ‘community centre’ into daily organisational practices, especially as the direct translation of the term into Hebrew had no particular meaning.3 How to think about it became clear in the aftermath of an early meeting of the founding Board of Directors during the agency-creation phase at which a Board member said, the community centre

Cognition meets action 231 would be ‘a functional supermarket’. Drawing in a metaphoric – which is to say non-explicit – fashion on the entailments of this metaphor, the founders were able to give shape to centre buildings, programme practices, personnel practices, evaluative measures, and so on. The metaphor became a model for what a community centre could and should be (and it was adopted by personnel throughout the agency during the first ten years, at least, of its existence, leading me to conclude that it had moved beyond the thought patterns of individuals within the agency to become an organisational metaphor; Yanow 1992). But why should the community centre not have been a functional something else – a library, for example? Because the metaphor was also a model of: it modelled context-specific prior, albeit tacit understanding, of the purpose of the agency, its buildings, and its activities. To understand these two different facets of the metaphor, we need to spell out its entailments. For the first instance, it is sufficient to be able to say what a ‘supermarket’ entailed contextually at that point in time (late 1960s to early 1970s, when the ICCC was created and developed) and in that place (Israel), in terms of its physical design, its products, personnel, marketing, and evaluation practices, and any other dimension relevant to community centre operations, moving back and forth between supermarkets and community centres to make the analysis. Supermarkets, newly introduced in Israel at that time, presented a strong contrast with the two other known forms of food-selling institutions: open-air markets and corner grocery stores. Adopting ‘supermarket-style’ attributes distinguished the ICCC and positioned it as equally modern, innovative, and ‘Western’. For the second instance, it is necessary to understand what was special about supermarkets ‘subtextually’ – what other, unwritten, tacitly known meanings were connoted by that term that other terms would not have brought into play. They might have emulated other known and familiar public buildings, such as libraries, synagogues, museums, university halls, and concert halls – but none of these had the cachet that ‘supermarket’ carried: the innovativeness and excitement that attached to this new, heretofore unknown enterprise that also came from the West, the United States in particular.4 This case illustrates a situation in which organisational members ‘invented’ their own metaphor, which spread through the organisation as it was repeatedly invoked in conversation and in printed materials. It was not created by an outside consultant seeking to prompt critical (or other) thinking (see, e.g., the ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ metaphor discussed in Smith and Simmons 1983). It illustrates, then, the intimate situatedness of pretextual, contextual, and subtextual metaphoric knowledge. The next case combines theoretical and practical metaphors in interesting ways. Unlike the first case, in which the metaphor emerged out of the context of practice itself and is traceable to a single event, if not to the individual who first uttered it, in this one, the history is much more diffuse, and

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the practice ranges from the more conceptual (what should policies look like?) to the more specific applications (how can this particular policy area comply with this condition?) to concrete implementations. As this case is still unfolding, my discussion of it is much more tentative.

Case 2: ‘evidence-based’ policies and practices The so-called ‘evidence-based’ movement in various public policy issues and other areas of practice appears to have originated in the United Kingdom, in the context of medical practices. The problem there appears to have been, and currently to be, the professional practice of administering various treatments whose use is not necessarily grounded in empirical research – specifically, in the randomised controlled trials (RCT) that serve as the basis for experimental testing. I say ‘appears to have originated’ because while the preponderance of published work has been done in evidence-based medicine in the United Kingdom, at least one source (Trinder 2000) traces its origins to the United States (although without attribution or designation of place, year, or issue).5 As the movement has spread, beyond medicine to other policy issue areas and over (or back) to the United States, various practices have come under attack for not – as their critics claim – grounding themselves in empirical research. For example, county-based mental health departments have been called to task for administering psychotherapeutic interventions for troubled children – even when these programmes have been used for several years – if they cannot provide experimental evidence for their success (Jamal Granick, personal communication, November 2003). One reading of the present Bush administration’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ educational policy – which mandates school-wide testing at several grades and ties funding to test-based performance (Stein 2004) – might see it as an effort to institute evidentiary grounding for teaching practices. Stein cites one research report’s claim that this policy ‘refers to “scientifically based research” over 100 times’ – without ever defining what that means or discussing who should conduct it (2004: 133). Similar efforts may be seen in welfare policy: the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act may be read as an effort to ground federal assistance in demonstrable evidence that financial and other support were achieving their intended goals (see Schram 2002 for an extended discussion of welfare reform). In some sense, the evidence-based movement may be seen as an outgrowth of the impulse that led to institutionalising evaluations within the policy cycle: a desire to know that governmental funding – taxpayers’ sterling or dollars or euros – was achieving desired ends. Policy evaluation has its own difficulties, including problems in determining what is capable of being assessed. The evidence-based movement, on the face of things, would seem to be no different from a call for evaluation. Treating it as a metaphor, however, opens the door to other forms of analysis and insight.

Cognition meets action 233 From a metaphor analysis perspective, inquiry begins with a focus on language and its contextual, pretextual, and subtextual meanings. What ‘work’ is this metaphor doing? What does ‘evidence’ mean in this context – what is (are) its source(s) and what meaning(s) is (are) carried from there to its focal point; what is it taken to mean and by whom (which communities of meaning and practice); and, centrally, what meaning(s) is (are) occluded? That ‘evidence’ is serving in a metaphoric fashion is clear: it is a shorthand or proxy for an enormous discourse that rides in to any of these policy contexts on its back. Many hearing the phrase ‘evidence-based practice’ or ‘evidence-based policy’ ‘know’, in some fashion, without the entailments having to be spelled out, that its users intend it, rhetorically, to refer to experimental evidence – evidence derived from methodologically positivist procedures – rather than to evidence derived, say, from local knowledge emerging from the lived experience of participants in the situation under study, such as might be generated through the methods of field research. The latter follow the scientific canons of interpretive research, based on phenomenological, hermeneutic, and other presuppositions (on this argument, see Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006); yet, there seems to be no room for such science in the dominant understanding of ‘evidence’ in this arena of policy practice. If this understanding is not apparent in the phrase itself, it quickly becomes so in looking at discussions of the issue. As Schram (2002: 129) notes, ‘evidence-based’ policy and practice arguments tend ‘to encourage the idea that practice should proceed only on the basis of scientifically validated research results’ – yet without considering what constitutes ‘scientific’ validation. For interpretive research, indicators of validity are different from what they are for methodological positivism (Schwartz-Shea 2006). This touches on some of the central issues in contemporary political science, including its standing as a ‘science’ and its methodologies and methods. The unreflective use of ‘evidence’ narrows the range of otherwise accepted and legitimate scientific procedures for conducting research. In the context of social policies, arguments that limit funding to those programmes based on ‘evidence’ imply that without complete ‘scientific’ ‘proof’ (of whatever the subject is), no action can legitimately be taken. In this case, the metaphor is being used less at the descriptive end of the continuum, as with the supermarket metaphor, and more at the argumentative, rhetorical end. It serves to close down debate and exploration: tacitly and rhetorically, it lays claim to a domain of scientific practice that has a particular coloration, and in laying that claim, it rules out of bounds – again, without saying a word explicitly against them – an entire set of scientific procedures – those that are not experimental. My argument should not be construed as an attack on the use of evidence to support various policy programmes and practices. What I do hope to highlight is the extent to which the policy metaphor forecloses discussion of the character of ‘evidence’, much in the same way that ‘pro-life’ does in the

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abortion debates. It is an example of the way in which categories of thought may shape action. As Stein (2004: 22) noted with respect to the design and implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ‘One is not born “Title I” or “educationally disadvantaged.” ’ When naming attributes leads, beyond mere description, to their use as labels in a metaphoric process that focuses attention in particular directions, thereby narrowing the scope of discourse through categorising, seemingly logical treatments or solutions emerge from the pre- and subtextual framing. This is the diagnostic model that is so characteristic of policy practices (and organisational ones). Metaphors can be powerful, indeed.

Que(e)rying metaphors Language that is metaphoric – that is not a transparent reflection of the social world (if that were even possible) but a shaping of it – may become a reified construct presented with certainty as a meaningful category of thought, and this category then shapes subsequent conduct, as Stein (2004) has shown so well in the context of educational policy. The question, then, is whether this metaphoric process of meaning making can be made explicit: can we, through reflection, make our seeing-as explicit in a way that would put a stop to the sway of tacit knowledge in shaping policy practices? This would, or could, arguably, keep us from thoughtlessly bulldozing the fabric of meaningful social relations or eradicating whole areas of scientific practice. Such reflection is, after all, what analysts, especially of the academic sort, are supposed to be doing. Argyris and Schön (1974) argued that such surfacing of tacitly known frameworks – what they termed ‘theories-in-use’ (as distinct from ‘espoused theories’) – among managers and executives in an organisational context would lead to more effective management. Schon (e.g. Rein and Schon 1977) argued similarly with respect to metaphors in policy practices. Or would it? The ‘evidence-based’ argument comes at a time when quantitative, computer-based forms of analysis are the dominant modes of doing science among the social sciences. To claim that reflective practices would not only spell this out but enable one to halt the movement because of its deleterious effect on other modes of scientific practice suggests an impoverished sense of the power of metaphoric framing, especially when the metaphor gives voice to accepted views. Such a claim suggests that countering metaphoric power is simply a matter of reason – the reasoned use of language and the rational power of explicit thought. Instead, one might consider that the invocation of the evidentiary metaphor is, and has been, part of a much broader assault on nonquantitative scientific practices. If, indeed, this is the case, then it is equally likely that, had ‘evidence’ not been the vehicle for carrying such meanings, some other metaphor might have arisen and caught on that would have joined the same battle on the side of the same set of ideas. It is erroneous, in

Cognition meets action 235 other words, as D.F. Miller (1985) also pointed out, to think that it is possible to get away from metaphors entirely in our speech – which is the implication of Schon’s arguments (1979; see also Argyris and Schön 1974). Following Lakoff and Johnson (1980), we would understand metaphors not only as figures of speech, but as figures of knowing. They enact a central pedagogical principle, articulated so well by Paolo Freire (1973): in order to learn something new, we commonly start with what we already know (a principle also embedded in the idea of the hermeneutic circle). And in arenas of practice, practice-oriented knowing leads to action. This is the work that metaphors do, whether as figures of thought and speech or as figures of action: they take an idea or a set of ideas from a context with which we are familiar and move it or them over into a new context, thereby enabling us to understand the new in terms of the ‘old’.

Conclusions What this means is that we can never get away from a metaphoric epistemology: we seem to be ‘hard-wired’ to see and to learn that way, and metaphors are not doilies decorating daily speech and thought – and ensuing action – but integral parts of it. They cannot be taken away, leaving behind them some perfectly clear, unambiguous set of terms that have a one-to-one relationship with their referents. This was the ideal of many earlier metaphor theorists and of the analytic language philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems, today, from this perspective, a misplaced hope. Playing with the languages of text – context, pretext, subtext – draws attention to the fact that metaphoric knowledge operates below or prior to the level of literal meaning. Metaphoric meanings are brought into play, in both theoretical and practice settings, without much cognisance of that fact. Categories and categorising are themselves forms of seeing-as, with their own characteristics (see, e.g., Star and Bowker 1999; Yanow 2003). Categories, too, often become labels which attach identities to others and shape administrators’ and policy-makers’ behaviours towards them. We cannot escape such forms of metaphoric reasoning, although we can essay to be more cognisant of them analytically. ‘[A]sking what all the labels mean and questioning how they shape daily practice’ – and, I would add, how they came to have those meanings – ‘is an important start’ (Stein 2004: 143). Yet, we should pay close attention, too, to the possibility that metaphoric reasoning needs to be subtextual, at least at times, at least for a while. A strong dose of passionate humility (Yanow 1997) – the passionate conviction that we are right, married to the possibility that we might be wrong – would help us move from what Stein called ‘a language of certainty’ towards ‘a language of enquiry’ (2004: 140). We might then be more likely to que(e)ry our metaphors – in the spirit of ‘queering’ the text, to draw attention to their focus, in a way that intentionally ‘others’ the idea, makes it

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stand out, displaces it from the ordinary and accepted way of thinking – but with a sensitivity to the possible costs of turning metaphors into explicit texts.

Notes 1 I first heard this policy programme named as a metaphor from Don Schon (course in public policy analysis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, Spring 1977). Its elaboration, however, is my understanding of his identification, influenced by his discussion of the paintbrush metaphor (Schon 1979). 2 While these could be (and are) also described from a systems perspective, a system is a more complex form of machine (see also the chapter by Ringmar in this volume). I know of no ur-text that explicitly identifies organisations as machines, but evidence of this metaphoric thinking can be found in various linguistic forms that suggest it is present as a framing device, e.g. the individual who ‘blows off steam’ emulating the newly invented steam engine in releasing pent-up energy. The linearity and orientation towards progress that characterise the industrial era are found in other workings of bureaus, such as their structural design. 3 That is, it sounded like a translation of a non-indigenous phrase: the two words separately made sense in translation, but in combination, they conveyed nothing that was recognisable to a native speaker of Hebrew. 4 It is hard for many Israelis, even, to imagine this or to remember now that this was the case in 1967–69. The first Supersol had opened in Jerusalem just off King George Way in a solidly middle-class neighbourhood, on a major bus line that also served the then main university campus. A rather modest building by today’s standards, at the time it was a major attraction for local ‘tourists’ who would come to see the variety of products in a clean, well-lit, orderly (by comparison) place. It had, in fact, become such a magnet that it was the site of a bomb in 1968, killing and wounding several people. A fuller and more detailed empirical and methodological argumentation for the brief summary presented here can be found in Yanow (1992, 1996, 2000). 5 Reading between the lines, I detect an allusion to an earlier call in the United States to provide experimental evidence for drug prescriptions, but at this time, I am unable to pin this down any more exactly.

References Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Black, M. (1979) ‘More about Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bosman, J. (1987) ‘Persuasive Effects of Political Metaphors’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2: 97–113. Brown, R.H. (1976) ‘Social Theory as Metaphor’, Theory and Society, 3: 169–97. Edelman, M. (1977) Political Language, New York: Academic Press. Freire, P. (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: Seabury Press. Fried, M. (1963) ‘Grieving for a Lost Home’, in L.J. Duhl (ed.) The Urban Condition, New York: Basic Books.

Cognition meets action 237 Howe, N. (1988) ‘Metaphor in Contemporary American Political Discourse’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 3: 87–104. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books. Landau, M. (1964) ‘On the Use of Metaphor in Political Analysis’, in Political Theory and Political Science, New York: Collier-Macmillan. Lipsky, M. (1978) ‘Standing the Study of Public Policy Implementation on its Head’, in W.D. Burnham and M. Wagner Weinberg (eds) American Politics and Public Policy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCloskey, D.N. (1985) The Rhetoric of Economics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Miller, D.F. (1982) ‘Metaphor, Thinking, and Thought’, Etc., 39: 134–50. Miller, D.F. (1985) ‘Social Policy: An Exercise in Metaphor’, Knowledge, 7: 191–215. Miller, E.F. (1979) ‘Metaphor and Political Knowledge’, American Political Science Review, 73: 155–70. Morgan, G. (1986) Images of Organizations, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Myrdal, G. (1968) Asian Drama, vol. 3, New York: Pantheon. Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension, New York: Doubleday. Rayner, J. (1984) ‘Between Meaning and Event’, Political Studies, 32: 537–50. Rein, M. and Schon, D. (1977) ‘Problem Setting in Policy Research’, in C. Weiss (ed.) Using Social Research in Policy Making, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Rogers, C. (1964) ‘Toward a Science of the Person’, in T.W. Wann (ed.) Behaviorism and Phenomenology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sapolsky, H. (1972) The Polaris System Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schneider, H. and Ingram, A. (1993) ‘Social Construction of Target Populations’, American Political Science Review, 87: 334–47. Schon, D.A. (1979) ‘Generative Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schram, S.E. (2002) Praxis for the Poor, New York: New York University Press. Schwartz-Shea, P. (2006) ‘Judging Quality: Evaluative Criteria and Epistemic Communities’, in D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea (eds) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Smith, K.K. and Simmons, V.M. (1983) ‘A Rumpelstiltskin Organization’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 377–92. Star, S.L. and Bowker, G.C. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stein, S.J. (2004) The Culture of Education Policy, New York: Teachers College Press. Stone, D.A. (1997) Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, 2nd edn, New York: Norton. Trinder, L. with Reynolds, S. (2000) Evidence-based Practice: A Critical Appraisal, Malden, MA: Blackwell Science. Tuana, N. (1989) ‘The Weaker Seed: The Sexist Bias of Reproductive Theory’, in N. Tuana (ed.) Feminism and Science, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yanow, D. (1987) ‘Toward a Policy Culture Approach to Implementation Analysis’, Policy Studies Review, 7: 103-115. Yanow, D. (1992) ‘Supermarkets and Culture Clash: The Epistemological Role of

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Metaphors in Administrative Practice’, American Review of Public Administration, 22: 89–109. Yanow, D. (1994) ‘Ecologies of Technological Metaphors and the Theme of Control’, in L. Hickman and E. Porter (eds) Technology and Ecology, Proceedings of the 7th Biennial International Conference, Society for Philosophy and Technology, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Yanow, D. (1996) How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Yanow, D. (1997) ‘Passionate Humility in Interpretive Policy and Administrative Analysis’, Administrative Theory and Praxis, 19: 171–7. Yanow, D. (2000) Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Yanow, D. (2003) Constructing American “Race” and “Ethnicity”: Category-making in Public Policy and Administration, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds) (2006) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Part VI

Language

16 The application of conceptual metaphor theory to political discourse Methodological questions and some possible solutions Alan Cienki Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has become widely known for its claims about metaphor as a fundamentally cognitive phenomenon, as opposed to a purely linguistic one.1 Propounded most notably by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), and developed by many others in the field of study known as cognitive linguistics, CMT builds on the premise that many expressions in everyday language reflect deep-seated ways of characterising one conceptual domain, often a more abstract notion, in terms of a different domain, one which is often more closely related to our physical, embodied experience. A frequently cited example from Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 8) is that many expressions in English about time (spending time, saving time, how much time an activity costs us, etc.) reflect a pattern in which TIME is characterised as MONEY. The tradition in the literature is to denote the pattern of A being talked about in terms of B with the formalism ‘A IS B’ in small capital letters (that is TIME IS MONEY) with ‘IS’ representing not equivalence, but a partial mapping of some concepts from the second domain, or the ‘Source’ (in this case, MONEY), onto the first domain mentioned, or the ‘Target’ (here, TIME). If indeed metaphoric expressions (can) reflect metaphoric patterning of concepts, the theory should offer a powerful tool for getting at the roots of political thought. Yet, there has been limited application of CMT by political scientists since the inception of the theory. Several reasons can be suggested for this, including theoretical isolationism separating individuals from different traditions of scholarship, and the fact that the research questions asked by scholars from political science and linguistics naturally tend towards quite different goals. However, another issue may be that the methods employed in CMT research in the past may not have lent themselves to application in political research. For many years, research methodology in work on CMT was an unmentioned subject. Going back to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), many, if not most, of the examples were constructed. They were intuitively plausible sentences, but not attested examples of linguistic data from any identified source. There are historical reasons for this, stemming from the domination of the

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field of linguistics in North America and much of Europe by the tradition of generative grammar. Since a major goal in that school is to describe the knowledge of linguistic structure that is below the level of conscious awareness, research in it relies on native speakers’ intuitive judgements about whether constructed examples are grammatical or not in their language. Such examples are therefore untainted by the vagaries of actual language use, such as memory restrictions, coughs, and interruptions. This practice was tacitly carried over into CMT and remained unquestioned for many years, even though it was against the spirit of this new theory. Only more recently have CMT researchers turned more towards investigating language use from the populations of speakers about which they are making claims. Witness the increasing use of databases of texts, known as linguistic corpora (see Deignan 2005), and the conference series entitled Researching and Applying Metaphor, which has recently founded an international association (www.raam.org.uk). What are some of the ways in which CMT has been applied in analyses of political rhetoric? We will consider several examples, with special attention to specific aspects of the research methods which were used. The goal will be to point to ways in which CMT has been, and might be, made tractable for research on political rhetoric.

A proposal for two sets of conceptual metaphors First, Lakoff himself has brought CMT to bear on the realm of political discourse. In his 1996 book Moral Politics (reprinted in 2002), Lakoff argues that American politics is structured by two opposing worldviews. The two worldviews are structured around two gender-stereotypical models of how a family might function. One is described as the Strict Father (SF) model and is associated with the right-wing worldview. Its reference point is a family with a hierarchical power structure, one with the father as the main authority figure whom the wife and children obey and with the children being disciplined so as to learn the clear-cut rules of right from wrong. The goal is for the children to grow up to be independently self-reliant, and therefore ‘strength’ is a highly valued characteristic. By contrast, the model described as characteristic of left-wing values is the Nurturant Parent (NP) model. This model involves a shared, horizontal power structure in which the members of the family work together as a group. The main values are caring and empathy, and so growth is stimulated through nurturance. The assumption is that each way of thinking about which kind of family structure is the ‘right’ kind serves as a basis for structuring one’s understanding of behaviour and how to evaluate it – in short, one’s views of morality. It is argued that metaphor plays an important role in both models, especially with respect to how people conceptualise morality. So for adherents of the SF model, the claim is that, probably even unwittingly, they understand MORALITY AS STRENGTH, AUTHORITY FIGURES AS PARENTS, and

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 243 to be followed. (Reference to conceptual metaphors with different wordings, either as ‘X IS Y’ or as ‘X AS Y’, depends on the citation context and is not intended to reflect any theoretical distinctions.) These are just 3 of the 23 conceptual metaphors in Chapter 5 of Lakoff (1996, 2002), characterising the SF model. A specific linguistic example of the last metaphor would be when one talks about ‘not giving in to peer pressure’ because one should have the metaphorical moral strength to withstand it. Metaphors linked to the NP model are quite different, for example MORALITY IS EMPATHY, MORAL ACTION IS NURTURANCE, and SOCIAL TIES ARE CHILDREN NEEDING CARE. Former US President Bill Clinton demonstrated an adherence to the first metaphor with his frequently used line ‘I feel your pain.’ Lakoff (1996, 2002) gives 20 relevant conceptual metaphors in Chapter 6, devoted to the description of the NP model. How do these metaphors for morality relate to politics? This is explained by their connection to the general NATION AS FAMILY metaphor, with the specifications of THE GOVERNMENT AS A PARENT and THE CITIZENS AS THE CHILDREN (Lakoff 1996, 2002: 154). Thus, one can view the nation as either an SF family or an NP family, and there will be very different assumptions about the role of the government, and thus the president, depending on whether one assumes it (or he), should function as an SF or as an NP. It should be noted that these models have received significant attention among American politicians on the national level, particularly on the side of the Democratic Party, whose congressional members have repeatedly brought Lakoff in for consultation (Bai 2005). However, what are the models based on? As Musolff (2004: 3) observes: RIGHTS AS PATHS

In Moral Politics, the linguistic evidence of the FAMILY metaphors consists in the first place of a short list of idiomatic phrases, such as ‘founding fathers’, ‘father of his country’, ‘Uncle Sam’, ‘Big Brother’, ‘fatherland’, its ‘sons’ going to war. Such a small basis of empirical data is consistent with Lakoff’s general approach to observable communication phenomena as ‘surface’ manifestations of underlying conceptual structures. Another critique of CMT in general, which also applies to this specific work, concerns the scope of the claims being made. For example, if one claims that English speakers use the conceptual metaphor MORALITY IS STRENGTH because we may utter expressions such as ‘having the moral fibre to resist evil’, does that include the claim that every speaker of English ‘possesses’ that conceptual metaphor cognitively? Steen (1994: 16) observes that many analyses of conceptual metaphors are really making claims on the level of a hypothesised ‘supra-individual’, rather than on the level of real individuals. [On this point, see also Gibbs (1999).] Thus, the language used in a group may reflect certain conceptual metaphors which are part of the repertoire of many members of the group, but not of all of them.

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Testing those models against a corpus of data The project described in Cienki (2004, 2005), and summarised here, tested the degree to which the SF and NP conceptual metaphors proposed in Lakoff (1996) were actually manifested in a corpus of language used in a political context by American politicians. The data involved were the transcripts of the three televised debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore before the US presidential elections in 2000, as obtained from the US Commission on Presidential Debates (http://www.debates.org). Each debate lasted 90 minutes, and the total of three yielded a corpus of approximately 41,000 words. The debates between the candidates in the presidential election were chosen for several reasons. First, they are an example of rhetoric by representatives of the two dominant political parties in the United States, speaking as representatives of their respective parties. The debate data constitute an example of one kind of discourse which is representative of the supraindividual level; in this case, the team which has constructed strategic ways of framing issues verbally for the campaign. Second, the debates occurred approximately within a month before the election. One can assume that by this late date, it is more likely that the candidates would be reiterating elements of the argumentation and wording which had been developed by their campaign team during the preceding months. Third, the debates covered a variety of issues of domestic and foreign policy, and provided each speaker an equal opportunity to address each one, making the contributions of the two speakers comparable in terms of topic content. The transcripts were coded specifically for metaphorical expressions which were judged to be direct expressions of any of the 43 SF or NP conceptual metaphors found in Lakoff (1996, 2002). The unit of analysis was syntactic phrases at or below the sentence level, most often consisting of only one to three words. Small sections of the transcript were coded by myself and another trained analyst until we were able to achieve reliable agreement on 20 per cent of the data. The system used at that point provided the basis for coding the rest of the transcripts. As an example, when Gore talked about parents needing assistance in controlling their children’s access to the Internet, he said the government needs to give parents ‘the tools to protect their children against cultural pollution’; this phrase, with the metaphorically used word marked here in italics, was coded as an SF metaphorical expression (reflecting IMMORALITY AS IMPURITY). As it turns out, relatively few direct expressions of SF and NP conceptual metaphors were found in the corpus – in fact a total of only 48. Agreement with the second coder was optimal for the identification of both SF and NP metaphorical expressions (Cohen’s kappa = 1.0 for both categories), partly because of the rarity and salience of the expressions when they occurred. How can we account for the fact that the SF and NP models do not receive much direct expression in the data? Could it be that there was simply not

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 245 much metaphorical language in the debates? A follow-up study with the debate data, described at the end of this chapter, indicates that this was not the case. The explanation I propose in my studies draws on Clausner and Croft’s (1997) point that metaphors are structured at different levels of schematicity, and are also productive to different degrees, but the two scales are not necessarily dependent on each other. It seems that the SF and NP conceptual metaphors studied here could be seen as schematic. ‘Nurturance’, for example, is itself a more abstract notion than ‘feeding’, and using it to understand another abstract concept, ‘morality’, only tells us about it in a schematic way. However, if metaphors such as these, that have been argued to hold a central position in the SF and NP models, are not directly productive in actual language use, this leaves us with the practical methodological question of how we can ascertain whether, or where, such schematic-level metaphors ‘exist’.

Two other corpus-based approaches In the research just mentioned, CMT was applied from the top down, through testing of the degree to which a proposed model was found in a sample of linguistic data. How have other corpora of language from political contexts been studied for metaphor use with CMT? One example is provided by Charteris-Black (2005), who examined the rhetoric of seven US and British leaders for their individual patterns of metaphors of persuasion. He compiled a small corpus of speeches by each leader (most of the corpora were about 50,000 words in size) and examined the salient, recurring patterns of metaphors used by each speaker and their implications. One question which may be asked is how the relevant linguistic expressions in the data were selected as being metaphoric. Here, the author relies on his own application of the following criterion for metaphor: it is ‘a linguistic representation that results from the shift in the use of a word or phrase from the context or domain in which it is expected to occur to another context or domain where it is not expected to occur, thereby causing semantic tension’ (Charteris-Black 2004: 21). The author argues that the subjectivity inherent in this method, as seen in the reliance on the reader’s expectations, is not problematic in this case because of the critical discourse analytic approach in which this study is framed. Thus, what is important is the individual, subjective interpretation of metaphor – and of what constitutes metaphorically used language – based on one’s experience and expectations. A first question that remains with this study, however, is how to interpret the emphasis placed in it on the quantification of metaphors, summarised in six of the appendices in the book. If the analysis is intended to reflect one individual’s understanding of certain expressions as metaphorically used, to what extent are these results generalisable? A second question that arises for this type of research is how the

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underlying conceptual metaphors were identified. Charteris-Black helpfully notes the specifics of some of the decisions which had to be made in categorising linguistic expressions into groupings which he labelled under separate conceptual metaphoric mappings. He adds (2005: 29) that the ‘[i]dentification of conceptual metaphors may appear subjective’, and this is inevitable because (as noted in the previous paragraph) ‘[t]here is an element of subjectivity in all experience of metaphor’. But what implications does this have for one’s research findings? To take one case in point, we are told that the following expressions by Tony Blair were interpreted as representative of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY: ‘I can only go one way’, ‘I’ve not got a reverse gear’, and ‘This is our challenge. To stride forward where we have always previously stumbled’ (Charteris-Black 2005: 27). However, how do we ‘know’ what the relevant target and source domains are here? What is the proper level of specificity? For example, is the target domain here best characterised as LIFE or rather something having to do with PROGRESS or perhaps ACHIEVING A GOAL? If the method of identifying metaphorically used language is challenging with corpora consisting of tens of thousands of words, even greater challenges remain if one wants to use larger corpora, in the millions of words, in order to potentially make claims which have broader applicability. Even though there have been significant developments in the fields of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence to develop automated systems to recognise metaphorically used words in texts (see, for example, Barnden 2006), most of the coding of metaphor still must be done manually, due to the subtleties of meaning and use in context. When working with large corpora, there are obvious practical difficulties. Musolff (2004) offers one effective solution to this problem of using a large corpus for metaphor research. He follows the proposal of Cameron and Deignan (2003) that one can first search a representative small corpus of text in some detail according to the particular research question of one’s project. Then one can perform a focussed search of a larger corpus for the frequency and patterning of occurrence of the particular features found in the smaller corpus. Musolff’s goal was to investigate how the use of metaphor might reflect attitudinal differences towards European integration policies in the United Kingdom and Germany between 1989 and 2001. To this end, he assembled a pilot corpus consisting of 2,110 texts from 28 British and German newspapers and magazines (half of the texts in English and half in German), with a total of 388,600 words. Twelve overarching source domains of metaphors were found to occur frequently in this corpus for characterising the target domain of ‘attitudes towards Europe’. Examples include scenarios relating to WAY-MOVEMENT-SPEED, LOVE-MARRIAGE-FAMILY, and GAME-SPORTS, with the hyphenated names indicating the superordinate level of metaphor groupings. The categories of metaphors found in this smaller corpus, and the specific linguistic expressions in which they appeared, provided the words and phrases which could be searched in much larger

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 247 corpora, namely the Bank of English (which is owned by Collins Publishers and held at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom) and the German ‘COSMAS’ corpus. As an additional step, both of these large corpora, consisting of 450 million words and 1,500 million words, respectively, were narrowed down for this study so as to yield two corpora which were more comparable to each other in size and in the type of newspapers and magazines they contained. This allowed Musolff to investigate and compare the use of metaphor on political topics in a larger collection of data from the press in the two languages. The resulting project combines both bottom-up and top-down approaches to the study of metaphor in how categories were discovered in the small corpus and then searched for in the large corpus. The question that remains, however, is how the metaphorically used words were identified in the small corpus, and how reliable the counts of such words were if performed by one individual.

Further methodological questions and some possible solutions Let us consider three main questions we are left with from these studies. What criteria are being used to identify metaphorically used language? Comparison between different studies on metaphoric expressions would be facilitated if researchers consistently made explicit their criteria for deciding which words are being used metaphorically (e.g. Cameron and Low 1999). An example of such a set of criteria is the procedure developed by the socalled ‘Pragglejaz’ group, named after the first initials of the ten-member team (see Steen 2002 for a synopsis of the project). Working from 2000 to 2006, the group developed an explicit and reliable procedure for the identification of metaphorically used words in texts. This work was based on texts in English, but it is intended that the procedure can be adapted for use with data from other languages. The following is the concise description of that procedure, as presented in Pragglejaz Group (2007). 1

Read the entire text discourse to establish a general understanding of the meaning. 2 Determine the lexical units in the text discourse. 3(a) For each lexical unit in the text, establish its meaning in context, that is, how it applies to an entity, relation, or attribute in the situation evoked by the text (contextual meaning). Take into account what comes before and after the lexical unit. 3(b) For each lexical unit, determine if it has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in the given context. For our purposes, basic meanings tend to be • more concrete (what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel, smell, and taste);

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related to bodily action; more precise (as opposed to vague); historically older. Basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meanings of the lexical unit. 3(c) If the lexical unit has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the given context, decide whether the contextual meaning contrasts with the basic meaning but can be understood in comparison with it. 4 If yes, mark the lexical unit as metaphorical. While each of the steps requires more detailed explanation, only a few points will be made here. Note that the term ‘lexical unit’ is broader than the individual written word and encompasses frequently co-occurring word combinations which express a single unit of meaning. Instances of uncertainty about lexical units are resolved in the procedure through use of a dictionary appropriate to the variety of the language being analysed, with citation as a headword in the dictionary being the main criterion for a lexical unit. Regarding Part (b) of Step 3, note that the procedure involves a familyresemblance approach to determining the basic meaning, by providing a set of criteria which basic meanings ‘tend to’ exhibit. These are not necessary and sufficient conditions, but criteria according to which a judgement must be made. The result is a procedure that is maximally inclusive, intended for use in identifying lexical units with ‘potential metaphoricity’ in the context in which they were used. Designed with the goal of striving for replicable analyses, it provides one set of explicit rules (among the many that are imaginable) for making decisions about where to draw a line along the continuum of metaphoricity. We will see an application of the procedure below. However, the second question is: If one wants to do a quantitative study of metaphor use, why should others believe the numbers that one claims to have found? In other words, we have this question: How reliable is that coding, if that is a relevant factor for the genre of research being conducted? Replicability has not traditionally been a goal within the research cultures of linguistics nor of anthropology [as Borgatti (1994) notes]. However, with cognitive claims being made in CMT research, there is increasing attention to the principles and methods being used in the field of cognitive psychology. This includes consideration of the reliability of any categorisation of behavioural data (such as language production), as determined by agreement in coding between multiple raters performing the same task independently (inter-coder reliability). Of course, this issue may be less relevant or irrelevant for projects in which the subjective nature of one individual’s interpretation of the data is what is at stake. However, if one is going to do quantitative analyses of metaphor use, the reliability of the ori-

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 249 ginal counts of metaphors serves as the foundation for one’s ultimate conclusions. Having at least two coders achieve statistical reliability in the judgements they make with, for example, 20 per cent of the data provide a benchmark for assessing the findings of such research. And our final question: How is one finding patterns of relations between metaphors in those expressions? The Pragglejaz procedure, mentioned above, actually arose out of an attempt to test a five-step procedure (Steen 1999) for moving from the identification of metaphorically used words in a text, through a propositional analysis of the text, to the identification of the metaphoric concepts which those words may represent. Such a procedure will be useful for showing us what researchers in the discipline see in the data. However, how might we get a sense of what patterns (non-specialist) language users more broadly find in metaphorically used language? For example, one could have participants in an experiment, who knew nothing about CMT, classify expressions previously identified as metaphorical according to whatever relations they see among them. This is in the spirit of a critique raised by Sandra and Rice (1995) about cognitive linguistic research: ‘Mirroring whose mind – the linguist’s or the language user’s?’ It also provides a way of ascertaining what groupings of metaphoric expressions, and therefore potentially what patterns of metaphoric mappings, are recognised not by the individual researcher, but by groups of native speakers of the language. This can be of particular importance if we take the point of view that conceptual metaphors reflect the supra-individual level of language use.

Investigating patterns of metaphor interpretation To test out this idea, I conducted an experiment in which participants performed a pile sort task with metaphorical expressions. The pile sort task has been used to analyse various types of cultural domains and, in linguistics, for example, to gauge judgements of acceptability of usage (Low 1999) and perceptions of linguistic dialect regions (Tamasi 2003). What it usually involves is giving participants a stack of cards, with a name of an item or a picture on each card, and asking them to sort them into piles that are more similar to each other than they are to items in separate piles. In the unconstrained pile sort, which will be used here, participants can make as many or as few piles as they wish. Sentences from the transcripts of the Bush/Gore debates served as the materials to be sorted in the pile sort task described below. The debates from the year 2000 were chosen again, rather than the more recent debates between George W. Bush and John Kerry from 2004, so that the participants in the experiment would be less familiar with the source of the expressions they were being given, and so be less likely to classify them according to the speaker.

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First, the debates were coded according to main issues, a few of which would provide the sources of sets of metaphoric expressions which participants in the experiment would sort. The structure of the debates was such that they consisted mostly of extended turns at talk in response to questions about different social issues. A research assistant and I coded the debate transcripts for a set of nine issues which were prominently featured in them, namely the economy, education, foreign policy, health care, justice, leadership qualities, military policy, natural resources/the environment, and social programmes. Limiting the coding to the longer turns, that is, approximately those longer than 130 words, we were able to reach reliable agreement with each of us independently coding one-third of the material (Cohen’s kappa = 0.86). In order to narrow down the criteria for performing the pile sorts, three domestic policy issues were chosen: the economy, education, and natural resources/the environment. The transcripts were then divided into utterances by sentence, with compound sentences being divided according to coordinating conjunctions (e.g. ‘and’, ‘or’). Each sentence was then coded in three ways. 1 2 3

Is the sentence about the main topic of the turn (be it economy, education, or natural resources)? Yes or no. If (1) is yes, are there any metaphorically used lexical units in the sentence, using the Pragglejaz criteria described above? Yes or no. If (1) is no, then no here as well. If (2) is yes, is the metaphorical expression about the main topic of the turn? Yes or no. If (2) is no, then no here as well.

The sentences with expressions coded ‘yes’ for Step 3 were thus sentences on the main topic of the turn at talk, and they each had a metaphorical expression which characterised that topic. After training, a second analyst and I were able to reach agreement based on the results of our independent codings in Step 3 that was reliable, if marginally so (following Markert and Nissim 2003), at the level of Cohen’s kappa = 0.74. The sentences selected in this way from each of the three topics formed the pool out of which sentences for the pile sort task were selected. Thirty sentences were randomly chosen from each of the topics, with an equal number taken from Bush (15) and Gore (15) in order to eliminate the source/speaker as a possible bias in the pile sort. The sentences were then printed on equal size cards with the relevant metaphorically used lexical unit underlined in each sentence. An example from the sentences on the economy was, ‘He says he’s going to give you tax cuts.’ The participants in the experiment were 34 American university undergraduate students, mostly aged 18–22, participating for credit in research methods as part of a psychology course. They were tested individually and asked to do a single-sort of the sentences for each topic (see Weller and

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 251 Romney 1988). Each student received each set of randomly ordered cards one at a time, and they were then asked each time to sort them into piles in which the underlined words were more related to each other than they were to those they placed in separate piles. At the end of each of the three pile sorts, I asked participants to tell me on what basis they created each of the piles, and with their permission, I tape-recorded their explanations. Most of the participants were not studying political science nor were they familiar with metaphor research, as indicated by a questionnaire they completed after finishing the task. The pile sorts for each topic were then analysed using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). MDS has the advantage of sorting the mass of data into frequently occurring groupings which can be analysed visually. It can provide multi-dimensional images, showing items which were grouped together by more people as points which are closer. For a three-dimensional image, one can think of the analogy of a constellation of stars, which would look differently if viewed from different directions in space. In some directions, the individual stars would line up and appear to be a clump. When this is the case with MDS, it means there is a parameter of some commonality which caused the items to line up in this way. The Sysdat software used for the MDS allows one to rotate the image (the set of data points) to see which angle of view shows such groupings. Figure 16.1 shows an example of one of the three-dimensional images obtained from the results with the pile sort from the expressions relating to education. Each dot indicates one of the cards with a phrase on it that was sorted, and next to each one is a short label which I have used to identify the full phrase that it represents. The software also tells how good the ‘fit’ of the scaling is given the number of participants you have. This is indicated as the amount of ‘stress’ on a scale from 0 to 1, with the lower the level of stress, the better. The stress of the configuration from the pile sorts on this topic was 0.22, which means that it is showing the largest divisions in the data, but that further analysis would be needed to determine more subtle resolution of the most frequent groupings. Rotating the image allows one to discern the labels in any overlapping group. Let us look in detail at one group which is representative of the results found on the whole. The following is a list of the phrases which appear in the bottom left clump in Figure 16.1, circled with a dotted line: • • • •

And then I want to make sure that we have job training on top of that and lifelong learning. That is my vision for public education all around America. Give every child a chance to learn with one-on-one time in a quality – high quality, safe school. More than 90 per cent of America’s children go to public schools. And it is the largest number ever this year.

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Figure 16.1 One view of the MDS configuration for the results of the pile sort of phrases in the category of education.

• • • • •

My proposal gives $10,000 hiring bonuses for those teachers who are – who get certified to teach in the areas where they are most needed. 94 per cent [of funding for education] comes from the local level. But do not fall prey to all this stuff about money here and money there because education is really funded at the local level. Now, private schools play a great role in our society. So you can choose what to do with the money. One size does not fit all.

While MDS indicates that this is a subgroup of items that was frequently grouped by the participants, it cannot tell us on what basis this was done. Here is where the narratives, provided by the participants after they did the task, are useful. By returning to each participant’s data, I was able to determine which individuals had made this grouping and then check with their recorded narrative explanations to see their stated reasons for placing these items together. For the group listed above, the explanations they gave fell into several categories:

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 253 1 2 3 4

size (with participants describing that pile saying, for example ‘areas’, ‘size and dimension’, ‘more, bigger’); levels (e.g. ‘different levels’, levels ‘high and low’, ‘involve physical areas or levels’); positive evaluation (e.g. ‘say positive things’, ‘the positive pile, trying to better education’); linguistic categories (e.g. ‘adjectives or nouns’, ‘adjectives’, ‘prepositional phrases’).

Preliminary analysis of the data shows a similar pattern of results for many of the other groupings examined, whereby the levels at which people articulated the relations between the metaphoric expressions often focussed on: • • •

the lexical semantics of the metaphor vehicle terms (focussing on the images expressed, such as ‘size’ or ‘level’ here), evaluative interpretation of the metaphoric expressions (e.g. whether they were ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ words), and/or the lexical categories of the words themselves (‘nouns’, ‘adjectives’, etc.).

Also similar for other groupings were the differences between speakers in which strategies they used: some groups of participants focussed more on the images involved (thus the visual level), for others the types of words used were more important (the verbal level), and others concentrated on aspects of the words’ use (their evaluative function). We can conclude the following from the pile sort task and a brief look at its analysis in terms of MDS. 1

2

We may find several models arising from non-specialists’ interpretations of metaphors that were drawn from one topic in one data set. These models may also be of various types, perhaps based on different ways of understanding the metaphoric expressions. An advantage of using a maximally inclusive procedure for metaphor identification (such as the Pragglejaz method) at the start is that it leaves it up to the participants to determine what kinds of metaphoric patterns they will find in the data – or even whether they will focus on the metaphoricity of the target words at all as a principle for making groups in the pile sort task. This has not been imposed by the researcher. The kinds of models of metaphors we might have from an analysis in which they are built from the bottom up will look quite different from those that have been proposed in CMT research. Here, we do not find the neat many-to-one type of mapping (i.e. many metaphoric expressions explained by one proposed conceptual metaphor) that is characteristic of analyses in CMT.

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Conclusions The metaphorical language of a group has the potential to reflect patterns of metaphorical thought (conceptual metaphors, in the parlance of CMT) which are common currency within the group. Likewise, these patterns may be represented in the discourse of an individual who is engaged in the role of representing the group. From the other perspective, talk by individuals in the public arena who are presenting their group’s positions, as in political speeches or debates, can set out patterns of metaphors which are intended to be taken up by the audience – not only in their talk, but also in their reasoning. This chapter treated the question of how one can go about researching these conceptual metaphors and also what the results of such research may reveal. We saw three paths which such research can follow: • •

•

Conceptual metaphors may be intuited. The intuition of experts is a valuable tool, but is not itself a method, nor can it be easily taught or learned. Conceptual metaphors may be devised through (metaphor) experts’ analysis of data, such as linguistic corpora of various types. While individual judgements are still at the time-consuming crux of such analysis, a variety of methods as well as ongoing technological developments can help facilitate the process. Patterns arising from the responses of language users themselves about a set of data may suggest underlying conceptual metaphors shared on the supra-individual level. Research coming from this direction could support, or put into question, other analyses of the types suggested above. In addition, the responses of participants who are naïve to metaphor research can bring new perspectives on the data. This can include not only the recognition of different patterns of metaphors, but also the perceived relative importance or unimportance of metaphorical language as it is used in various contexts. This, in turn, can help put the claims of CMT into a broader perspective.

Given the different potential offered by each of these approaches, it suggests that the application of multiple methods to the study of metaphors in a given set of data, rather than using just any one of them, could yield the richest results.

Note 1 I am indebted to Phillip Wolff, whose collaboration was instrumental for the MDS analysis, and to Elizabeth Milewicz for research assistance. I am grateful for comments on this research received from participants in the ECPR workshop on ‘Metaphor in Political Science’ (Granada, Spain, April 2005), and those at the conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2006). My participation in the ECPR workshop was supported by a faculty

Application of conceptual metaphor theory 255 travel grant from the Institute of Comparative and International Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, USA.

References Bai, M. (2005) ‘The framing wars’, The New York Times Magazine, 17 July. Online. www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html?ex=116227080 0&en=3c35f12bf6eb76b5&ei=5070 (accessed 20 July 2005). Barnden, J. (2006) ATT-Meta Project: Metaphor, Metonymy and Mental States. Online. www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jab/ATT-Meta/index.html (accessed 5 December 2006). Borgatti, S.P. (1994) ‘Cultural domain analysis’, Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4: 261–78. Cameron, L. and Deignan, A. (2003) ‘Combining large and small corpora to investigate tuning devices around metaphor in spoken discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18: 149–60. Cameron, L. and Low, G. (eds) (1999) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2004) Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. (2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cienki, A. (2004) ‘Bush’s and Gore’s language and gestures in the 2000 US presidential debates: a test case for two models of metaphors’, Journal of Language and Politics, 3: 409–40. Cienki, A. (2005) ‘Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” cognitive models: theoretical issues raised in an empirical study’, Cognitive Linguistics, 16: 279–312. Clausner, T. and Croft, W. (1997) ‘Productivity and schematicity in metaphors’, Cognitive Science, 21: 247–82. Deignan, A. (2005) Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gibbs, R.W., Jr (1999) ‘Taking metaphor out of our heads and putting it into the cultural world’, in R.W. Gibbs Jr and G. Steen (eds) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lakoff, G. (1996) Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (2002) Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd edn, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. Low, G. (1999) ‘ “This paper thinks . . .”: investigating the acceptability of the metaphor an essay is a person’, in L. Cameron and G. Low (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Markert, K. and Nissim, M. (2003) ‘Corpus-based metonymy analysis’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18: 175–88. Musolff, A. (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Pragglejaz Group (2007) ‘MIP: a method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol, 22: 1–39. Sandra, D. and Rice, S. (1995) ‘Network analyses of prepositional meaning: mirroring whose mind – the linguist’s or the language user’s?’ Cognitive Linguistics, 6: 89–130. Steen, G. (1994) Understanding Metaphor in Literature, New York and London: Longman. Steen, G. (1999) ‘From linguistic to conceptual metaphor in five steps’, in R.W. Gibbs Jr and G.J. Steen (eds) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steen, G. (2002) ‘Identifying metaphor in language: a cognitive approach’, Style, 36: 386–407. Tamasi, S. (2003) ‘Cognitive patterns of linguistic perceptions’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Athens: University of Georgia. Weller, S. and Kimball Romney, A. (1988) Systematic Data Collection, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

17 Metaphorical moves ‘Scientific expertise’ in research policy studies Philippe Sormani and Martin Benninghoff

This chapter addresses the question of metaphorical moves in specific studies of research policy.1 Among the various types of policy inquiry, formal studies of research policy seem to be bound up in a hermeneutic circle: the expertise they call upon takes part in the domain of science it defines. This may be observed mutatis mutandis for other forms of social inquiry. However, the critical question of the reflexive implication of scientific expertise – its status, form and content – in research policy studies is rarely addressed on the basis of particular cases, let alone answered in actual detail. The expression enclosed within single quotes in the title indicates this situation of inquiry. Puzzling as it may appear, the situation had already been pointed out in vivid terms by Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar in their initial laboratory study (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 17–18). Having said that, three preliminary remarks are in order. First, though the present contribution may have critical implications, it is written from a descriptive stance. Its point and purpose is to describe the accountable organisation of the studies considered, not to propose a ‘better science’ than theirs, nor to convince their respective or purported authors of the proposed description as an indispensable alternative. This would be both naïvely misconceived and pretentiously misleading. Second, our descriptive stance implies that we consider discursive phenomena in a definite, procedural sense. The leading questions, then, are the following, How are these discursive phenomena organised? What particular reading do they yield? Hence, the initial allusion to ‘metaphorical moves’ is only a provisional gloss for specific practices and procedures that remain to be described. Third, the procedural description will be provided, not for its own sake, but to specify what kinds of metaphorical moves are involved, where they are, in the discursive articulation of scientific expertise. In other words, before turning its ‘reflexive implication’ into a critical issue, we have to address it as an empirical phenomenon. Our contribution is structured as follows. In a first step, we will briefly discuss formal analysis in political science, as the selected studies of research policy rely upon it, too. In a second step, we shall introduce the distinctive perspective of an ethnomethodological approach to metaphorical moves as

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discursive phenomena and particular devices of formal analysis. In a third step, we will deliver a detailed analysis of a single abstract and describe those moves as actually encountered, in line with our approach (focusing on ‘accountable organisation’, ‘particular reading’ and ‘procedural description’). Finally, we will discuss the proposed description as to its implications, regarding research policy studies and policy inquiry in general.

Formal analysis in political science A concise formulation of standard procedures in political science is provided by the notion of ‘formal analysis’ (Garfinkel 2002). This notion refers to the various methodical procedures for reformulating observable details, pertaining to empirical phenomena, in accordance with an a priori conceptual framework. Those procedures are designed to ‘remedy’ the concrete character of these details by substituting conceptual and (arguably) objective expressions for them. As Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks succinctly put it, ‘remedial formulations are overwhelmingly advocated measures to accomplish proper subject matter, proper problems, proper methods, and warranted findings’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 353). Though their disciplinary orientation may differ, the research policy studies we have considered draw upon such formal analysis, in one way or another; be it in terms of ‘variable analysis’, conventional distinctions of ‘micro-, meso- and macro-levels’ of analysis, reformed specifications thereof or particular models of institutional relationships between ‘science’ and ‘politics’, and so on (e.g. Henkel 1997; Wilts 2000; Boden et al. 2004). Particular metaphors, such as ‘principalagent games’, ‘corporate enterprise’ or ‘cognitive developments’, provide further formal devices and objective expressions, insofar as they define an analytic outlook without describing participants’ own substantive orientations within the fields considered (e.g. ethnographically). The notion of ‘formal analysis’, then points to a common array of recognisable procedures. A common objection, at this point, might be to say that this array of procedures is not specific to political science or professional sociology, let alone to research policy studies as such. However, we wish to take up another line of argument for present purposes: the argument according to which formal analysis, be it in political science or professional sociology, depends and draws upon the ‘mastery of natural language’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). This mastery can be qualified as ‘natural’, insofar as it depends on vernacular competencies (such as ‘writing English’, ‘speaking French’ or ‘reading Spanish’). Moreover, the mastery of natural language, in textual form or ordinary speech, can be (and has been) shown already to embody a ‘natural sociology’ occurring, by and large, ‘without deliberate professional direction’ (Rose 1960: 194); that is, ‘a set of shared commonsense conceptual understandings of society’ (Watson 1997: 81), as evolved through habitual, socially sanctioned usage. There is, then, not only an internal relationship between ‘technical’ and ‘untechnical’ concepts (Ryle

Metaphorical moves 259 1954), but more importantly their very application, conjunctive or disjunctive, presupposes the mastery of a common language (prior to any critical, polemic or ironic distinction between ‘science’ and ‘commonsense’). Whatever its disciplinary specificity, formal analysis seems thus to involve an unacknowledged dependency of a double kind, upon ordinary language and mundane reasoning, respectively (e.g. about ‘society’, its ‘components’, ‘culture’ and ‘institutions’). Remedial formulations, as alluded to above, evidence this dependency, while covering it up. Note, in this respect, that the dependency is unavoidable, while covering it up might be avoidable. The critical point will be taken up for discussion in due course. A succinct introduction to our descriptive approach may be appropriate now.

Ethnomethodology, methods and metaphors Ethnomethodology can be defined as the descriptive analysis of everyday activities in their natural accountability, considered as a methodical achievement (Garfinkel 1967: vii). The sociological argument is not only to presuppose everyday activities as socially organised but to describe how involved participants make them ‘accountable’ (that is ‘observable and reportable’; Garfinkel 1974) as being socially organised in a particular way, be it under the auspices of ordinary conversation, scientific practice or any other activity (Sharrock and Anderson 1986: 56). The descriptive task, then, is to make explicit just how competent members devise their courses of action so as to make them recognisable for what they appear to be, e.g. as yet another instance of their typical accomplishment and social organisation. In short, ‘methods’ become a topic rather than a resource for inquiry (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970/1990). This line of programmatic argument begs the typical question of the ethnomethodological investigator’s own methods. As with other phenomenologically oriented approaches (e.g. symbolic interactionism, ethnography or conversation analysis), one major concern is to fit investigative methods to the encountered phenomena, and not the other way round, as virtually any standard methodology textbook wants to have it (Bogen and Lynch 1997). Hence, depending on the encountered phenomenon, different methods will be used to exhibit and analyse the everyday activities it is made of (Maynard and Clayman 1991). However, there is a stronger requirement for adequate description. Insofar as natural accountability (of ordinary conversation, scientific practice, etc.) is considered to be a methodical production by involved participants themselves, the analyst has to involve him- or herself to learn and eventually become competent in the everyday activity considered (e.g. he or she has to gradually master ‘members’ methods’ for conversational talk, scientific practice or policy inquiry, etc.; in short, ‘go native’). Finally, the procedural description an ethnomethodological study can come up with should make explicit the internal methods of the practice considered in and for their actual use (i.e. an adequate description should be

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usable as a technical instruction to the described practice; cf. Garfinkel and Wieder 1992). Metaphors, from the outlined perspective, are thus not only to be defined as generic ways of, say, speaking and writing, but also to be described in terms of when, how and why they are drawn upon in a specific setting, if at all. As a generic definition, the definition of metaphor to be found in R. Brown’s A Poetic for Sociology may be appropriate. It reads as follows: 1 2 3 4

Metaphor involves the transfer of one term from one system or level of meaning to another; for example Dante’s ‘Hell is a lake of ice’. Metaphor is literally absurd. Metaphor is meant to be understood. Metaphor is self-consciously ‘as if’ (Brown 1977: 80–5).

However, this (or any other) generic definition does not replace (nor is it indispensable to) the procedural description of particular, discursive practices, such as a ‘culturally competent course of reading’ (McHoul 1982), say Émile Durkheim’s Rules or Max Weber’s Essays (or, alternatively, Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal). Instead of dismissing generic definitions altogether, we may ask how they figure in particular practices, on specific occasions; that is, analyse them as indexical expressions whose sense and determinacy (e.g. as ‘generic’ ones) is contextually elaborated and established, too (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). For present purposes, we shall emphasise a particular feature of natural language use: the observable fact that society members (among which professional sociologists and political scientists) can and do speak, as well as write and read, in a ‘specifically vague’ sense (Garfinkel quoted in Lynch 1993: 307). As Garfinkel and Sacks put it: the work is done as assemblages of practices whereby speakers, [writers or readers] in the situated particulars of speech, [writing or reading] mean something different from what they can say, [write or read] in just so many words, that is, as ‘glossing practices’. (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 342; emphasis added) Metaphors, and metaphorical moves, provide a particular case of such practices, as we shall see in the following section, focusing on their actual occurrence in specific studies of research policy.

Abstracts and abstractions: studying research policy studies Though it might be considered a subfield of political science, the amount of literature in the topical area of research policy is sizeable. Indeed, there are various journals covering the area. In addition to specialist journals such as Research Policy and Science and Public Policy, studies of research policy are also

Metaphorical moves 261 to be found in Higher Education Policy and the Journal of Public Policy or Social Studies of Science. Also, we may add to the reading list classic contributions (e.g. by Weber or Robert K. Merton), without forgetting recent publications (cf. the series of studies quoted above). However, our present purpose is not a comprehensive literature review but a detailed procedural description of their discursive articulation. Literature reviews, on the other hand, seem to be part and parcel of the very studies we wish to describe. Having consulted the mentioned journals, we may feel obliged to respond to two methodological questions. First, given the sheer amount of studies, which ones shall we include into our analysis? Second, given its descriptive outlook, which parts of the selected studies shall the analysis deal with? The first question concerns the definition of the corpus studied, the second one the selection of extracts analysed. Above, we selected and referred to a series of studies that, upon cursory inspection, appeared to be conducted under the auspices of formal analysis. Now, instead of turning the questions raised into heuristic obstacles, we may treat them as empirical topics in their own right. In line with the descriptive move advocated, we shall be interested in how members themselves deal with them; that is competent writers and readers, considered as practical reasoners and/or professional analysts (including ourselves). Hence, we will try to answer two alternative questions. First, how does any of the encountered studies exhibit and achieve its corpus status as a scientific study of research policy, with a specific disciplinary orientation? Second, within that particular study, are there particular places to have such corpus status exhibited and achieved, to and for a competent readership of sorts? Any answer to the first question presupposes an answer to the second one. In short, that is the place we have to start with, for analytic purposes at least.

A single abstract analysed Articles in scientific journals manifest their corpus status at a special place: the abstract. Though perhaps not the only place, it is a standard place to have that task accomplished. That is, the abstract allows one to recognise a ‘scientific study’, as well as its ‘disciplinary orientation’, virtually at a glance. Offering readers an initial summary of the article, the abstract provides them with reading instructions, too. The preceding title, the actual outline and the subsequent keywords are part and parcel of an instructive sequence, providing readers with a way into the ensuing article (Lee 1984; Woolgar 1988). From the outset, its mere publication in a specialised journal may, of course, yield a specialised reading as the preferred corollary. Hence, the abstract may be considered as the place where such a reading, if not substantiated, has to be sustained and provided for.

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Accountable organisation and particular reading For analytic purposes, the accountable organisation of an article and the particular reading it eventuates may be distinguished. That is, an abstract makes available, given its apparent organisation, the related article for a specific reading, at the expense of other possible readings. As the distinction is analytic, it applies to the competent reading of other texts as well. Conversely: when one is reading a text, as a practical matter, one is, in all likelihood, unaware of the distinction. The first aspect is the way in which the text is organised so as to potentially predispose readers towards a given set of relevancies, and the second is the way that the actual practices of reading the text actualize those relevancies. (Watson 1997: 89) This presents the following procedural description of a single abstract with a double task. Put simply, having read the abstract, we want to consider how it provided for our reading. The abstract in question is to be found in Figure 17.1 below (names, affiliation and dates have been altered). As readers of this chapter, we were able to read the abstract in Figure 17.1, not just in any way, but in a particular way. That is not to say that there is, or should be, ‘one best way’. All we are suggesting is that, on the one hand, there may be involved a limited set of candidate readings and that, on the other, the textual organisation of the abstract considered makes available certain of these candidate readings as preferred readings (Sacks 1963, 1974, 1992). The tasks involved in a particular course of reading may be ‘indeterminate’, its methods ‘diverse’, as well as its ‘inquiries’ and ‘findings’ variable, given the occasioned character of reading as a practical affair (Sharrock and Ikeya 2000: 271–9). The contingent character of reading, then, suggests the corollary idea of texts being organised so as to reduce the expectable indeterminacy of its tasks. More than that, we wish to describe how the ‘internal configuration’ of our reading’s contingencies (Anderson and Sharrock 1993: 145) teaches us the accountable organisation of the text read: the abstract in Figure 17.1.

Oriented reading and procedural description To start with, we remind present readers of the ‘oriented character’ of our particular reading. Having come across the article before, we selected it for the present analysis of its abstract. The distinctive character of our reading may thus be said to consist of background assumptions and prior understandings; in short, commonsense reasoning as a presupposed basis, underpinning the specific tasks of academic work. Through familiar remedial practices, formal analysis may single out a theoretical substitute for the actual operation of the former and its internal relation to the latter. Alternatively, a procedural

Metaphorical moves 263

1 2

Politics of Science 32 (1974) 412-436

3 4 5 6

Science policies as principal-agent games Institutionalization and path dependency in the relation between government and science

7 8 9

Peter F. Example Institute for Science Analysis

10

Received 30 February 1974; revised 30 June 1974; accepted 30 October 1974

11 12

Abstract National science policies seem to converge in policing the double-edged problem of how

13

to get policy and industry interested in the conduct of science and how to get science

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

interested in the problems of policy and industry. However, similarity in the labels of institutes and instruments for science policy conceals traditional differences in the institutionalization of the relation between the state and science. This article conceptualizes the relation between government and science as an ongoing principalagent game, with different possibilities for stabilization. Each of these differ to the extent the principal or the agents can pursue their strategy. Institutionalization of The Endless Frontier ideology, of consensus-making and of competition between agents is elaborated. Path dependency emerges as costs for institutional changes are often higher than the accommodation of new instruments and policies to existing structures. The argument is mainly and deliberately analytical, but empirically illustrated by the development of foresight in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. Keywords: Science policy; Principal-agent theory; Institutionalization; Path dependency; Foresight

Figure 17.1 A sample abstract, Politics of Science 32 (1974) 412–436.

description exhibits how such commonsense reasoning operates, as a textually mediated affair, in the present case (cf. Watson 1997: 94). Among others, two presuppositions oriented, and still orient, our reading: 1

2

We take it for granted that the selected article and abstract present, indeed, a research policy study of a scientific kind (in contrast, say, to a short story or a newspaper article) and, given its topic, a study in political science (addressing research policy rather than laboratory practice). We presuppose that if metaphors, or metaphorical moves, are part and parcel of political science, a place to look for them is in abstracts of journal articles. Abstracts, as authoritative summaries of such articles, typically exhibit their ‘scientific’ status, inter alia, via metaphors.

These presuppositions, however, provide only a general orientation for our envisaged description. What this description will amount to in particular,

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we cannot stipulate in advance, nor do wish to do so (given our phenomenological outlook). Quite the contrary, any particular reading is to be made explicit via the descriptive analysis of its procedural character (given our ethnomethodological approach). As a particular kind of glossing practice, metaphors, or metaphorical moves, are thus to be described where they occur, without stipulating that they must occur, anywhere and everywhere. Rather, the selected abstract provides a pertinent occasion for us to describe their specific involvement in the discursive articulation of scientific expertise. Let us, then, reconsider the abstract-as-read. Having only read the abstract, why do we still consider the article to be a scientific study? ‘Still’, in the present case, means on the sole basis of the abstract, and not ‘not yet’, given pending or further reading of the ensuing article. That is, we seem to readily read it that way, without explicit or longwinded judgement, but on the basis of tacit, immediate agreement, as enacted through communal practice. This familiar (and yet curious) phenomenon gives us a useful hint as to the basic rules applying to particular readings. Akin to membership categorisation of persons (as, say, police officers, social scientists, etc.), our reading, as an everyday activity, seems to operate here in accordance with (at least) two basic rules: a consistency rule and an economy rule (cf. Sacks 1974). First, we identify the article consistently with its medium of presentation (e.g. published in a scientific journal, the article is recognisable as a scientific one prima facie). Second, once the article has been identified as such, it may get read economically under the auspices of the identifying category (e.g. as a political science paper, not a newspaper article). This, of course, does not mean that inconsistencies or misinterpretations, deceptions or surprises, cannot occur, in and as a result of this (or another) particular reading. On the contrary, it is their noticeable occurrence that confirms the operation of the rules, their programmatic relevance (Sacks 1992, vol. 1: 336–40). Furthermore, if we were able to read the abstract, and identify the article, as outlined, we take this to be, not an idiosyncratic reading, but a common one: any other reader may have proceeded in the same way (as some subsequent readers may formulate criticism about having proceeded that way; cf. Livingston 1995). The immediate identification of the scientific paper as such provides us with two candidate readings at least: reading with collegial trust, on the one hand, and reading in systematic doubt, on the other. Paradoxically related, they both provide category-bound candidate readings (that is, typically associated with the category ‘science’; Woolgar 1988). Having said that, we may consider how the abstract is accountably organised so as to achieve the first reading, as the preferred one (ensuring scientific status), and the second reading, as the dispreferred one (threatening such status). How is the abstract organised so as to have this ‘double duty’ accomplished (Turner 1976)? What sensible grounds does it provide for the basic reading rules to operate accordingly (as described above)?

Metaphorical moves 265 For a start, the nominal identification of the journal (Politics of Science), followed by its numerical qualification (‘32 (1974) 412–436’), provide typical grounds for its possible categorisation as a scientific journal (e.g. in contrast to a book, novel or newspaper, cf. Figure 17.1, line 1). The adjacent symbol of the publisher (not reproduced here) entitles that categorisation. The ensuing title may appear consistent with it as well, insofar as the title not only announces a general topic (‘Science policies . . .’) but also indicates a particular treatment of the topic (‘. . . as principal-agent games’, line 3). Complex analogy, simple metaphor or theoretical model, the indicated treatment appears as a specialised one (hence, eventually as a scientific one, too). As a consequence, a partitioning of actual readership may occur, between initiated readers and novices (as to what ‘principal-agent games’ are, line 3). The subtitle displays an orientation to that possible partitioning, insofar as it instructs one as to the cases selected for the announced, specialised treatment (‘Institutionalization and path dependency . . .’, line 4). Initiated or novice, readers may thus infer case-specific treatment as the articulate promise of an epistemic gain (implying trust, rather than doubt). This gain is directly specified for the domain where it is to be obtained (‘. . . in the relation between government and science’, lines 4 and 5). At this point, ‘government’ and ‘science’ appear as the selected candidates to occupy the formal categories of ‘principal’ and ‘agent’, ‘science policies’ being conceived as ‘games’ between them (lines 3–5). Having analysed the heading and title of the article, we seem to have identified a metaphorical move (from ‘policies’ to ‘games’). The move, however, does not match Brown’s generic definition of metaphor in all aspects (quoted above). Noticeably, analogy or simile seems to be involved (treating ‘policies as games’), rather than metaphor (‘policies are games’). What about the expression ‘principal-agent games’ then (line 3)? Isolated from its immediate context, it may appear as a metaphorical expression (e.g. ‘games’ standing for ‘theory’). This reading, however, presupposes a familiarity of a double kind, with some principal-agent theory and metaphor definition, respectively. Metaphorical or analogical, a particular gloss seems to be involved, in the text, ‘meaning differently than (one) can say in so many words’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 344). That is, title and subtitle, as formulated, do not only announce a treatable topic but also postpone its actual treatment. Whatever title and subtitle ‘say’ provides the ‘very materials to be used in making out what (is) said’ (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 344; emphasis original). That readers may have temporal difficulties in doing so is taken into account by the organisation of the text. Indeed, title and subtitle are followed by the indication of entitled authorship (lines 7–10), abstract (lines 11–24) and keywords (lines 25 and 26). The indicated authorship exhibits expectable expertise, the abstract its authoritative summary and the listed keywords its general orientation. Sequentially organised, the respective components provide contextual clues as to how the text is to be read (as a matter of collegial trust, rather than

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systematic doubt, as it were; cf. Livingston 1995: 14). Our present, analytic reading may thus be pursued as follows. First, the provision of a name (line 7) allows one to categorise the named person; the subsequent indication of institutional affiliation (line 8) provides the necessary grounds for such a categorisation (as, say, ‘analyst of science’; Sacks 1992, vol. 1: 289–90). Follows the indication of the review process in terms of a successful progression, resulting in the accepted publication of the submitted paper (line 10). The prior categorisation may thus be achieved as a correct one (e.g. on the exhibited basis of the peer review). Further qualifications or provisions are neither supplied nor needed for the reader to proceed that way (that is, in line with the basic rules of consistent and economical reading). Second, the abstract, titled as such, may then provide an authoritative summary on the achieved basis of entitled authorship. As title and subtitle provide glosses to be ‘unpacked’, the abstract provides an initial place for this ‘unpacking’ to occur (Jefferson 1985), as well as their metaphorical or analogical status to be specified. Alternatively, the abstract may be skipped, and the reader’s gaze immediately directed to the keywords listed below (lines 25 and 26). Insofar as these, by and large, provide a reiteration of the glosses in the title and subtitle, the abstract is constituted not only as an initial but also as the relevant place for their provisional unpacking (i.e. before reading the ensuing article). This seems to be the case all the more so since the instant comparison between title, subtitle and keywords may raise local puzzles. For instance, in the list of keywords, ‘principal-agent theory’ appears as one among them (line 25). Does that mean the title, given its possible metaphorical status, is to be read au fond as ‘Science policies as principalagent theory’? In the abstract, ‘national science policies’ appear as a complex empirical topic (not a peculiar, formal ‘game’ anymore), seemingly involving a shared policy problem (cf. first sentence, lines 12–14), while actually presupposing traditional institutional differences (cf. second sentence, lines 14–16). The initial gloss, in the title, appears then as a metaphorical move (again), in contrast to the two first sentences, in the abstract. Readers may thus be led to ask themselves, How is the stated topic to be dealt with? What is the role of metaphor, rather than analogy, in that respect? In other words, one may ask how topical preservation is achieved and oriented to (for the scientific purposes of adequacy, specificity, clarity, etc.). On the other hand, insofar as topical orientation may go astray, in ‘self-derogatory’ ways, such a move may give some control over it (cf. Sacks 1992, vol. 1: 539–41). These questions, if not actually occurring, are to be expected. The third sentence in the abstract displays an orientation to their expected character, insofar as it can be read as an answer to them: ‘This article conceptualizes the relation between government and science as an ongoing principal-agent game’ (lines 16–18). Presently appearing as metaphorical, the initial gloss is to be developed in a subsequent conceptualisation. In other words, the metaphorical expression in the title has provided readers with an instructive gloss: a

Metaphorical moves 267 reading instruction to keep on reading, not only the abstract but also the article. In the abstract, the answer to what ‘principal-agent games’ actually are is thus postponed again: the game is qualified as ‘ongoing’, ‘with different possibilities for stabilization’ (line 18). That is, the qualification, as a matter of course, begs the question of the definition of its phenomenon (though maybe not in the same way, if at all, for novices and expert readers). Conversely, the reference to the article – ‘this article’ (line 16) – may be read as the indication of the proper place to have the question answered. In that respect, it is a marked appeal to collegial trust not only in the instructive gloss but also in its subsequent unpacking (in terms of scientific expertise, a particular disciplinary orientation, etc.). Consequently, the gloss is not unpacked in the abstract; instead a list of other topics to be developed in the article is provided (lines 19–24). As an instructive kind of gloss, metaphors may thus be said to be involved in the discursive articulation of scientific expertise, insofar as they allow for and participate in its authoritative summary. As used in a title or an abstract, they achieve performative moves of a double kind, yielding further reading to proceed, for them to be left behind. Moreover, they appear to take part in the accountable organisation of scientific papers, so as to have collegial trust and systematic doubt inversely supported (the former as its preferred reading, the latter as its dispreferred one). In the present case, the ‘principal-agent game’ metaphor appeared to achieve that distinctive task; in line with reading rules and contextual clues, as the procedural description of a single abstract allowed us to suggest.

Conclusions A single abstract was analysed above. What are the implications of the proposed description for the considered study, other research policy studies and policy inquiry in general? Let us sum up the epistemic payoff of the proposed description before addressing the question it raises. Focusing on the accountable organisation of a single abstract, our description was conducted as a procedural one. That is, the description focused on the procedural kind of commonsense reasoning involved in the analysable course of a particular reading. The analytical task pursued may thus be summarised as a systematic effort to make explicit not only that commonsense reasoning may be presupposed but also how it is drawn upon in particular reading practices. Hence, we made reference to, and detailed analysis of, basic reading rules, candidate and preferred readings, as well as possible categorisations and contextual clues. The internal configuration of these concepts and components make up the mundane competence of reading: the tacit ability to proceed with topical reading, without having to inquire into its procedural basis. The descriptive analysis aimed at exhibiting just how that basis may be involved in such reading, given the accountable organisation of the text read, the single abstract described. Having come up with a description that

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may count as an instruction (for just how to read this abstract), the proposed analysis may be considered as an ethnomethodological study, insofar as it exhibits the internal methods of the practice described, not anywhere or anyhow, but in and for their actual use (as stated, from the outset). Its epistemic payoff consists in making explicit how the competent reading of sophisticated texts is accountably organised by mundane and hence ‘takenfor-granted’ procedures. Yet, these procedures, metaphorical as they may be, are irremediably involved in making those texts appear under the auspices of scientific expertise and disciplinary orientation. This paradoxical involvement, we may add, seems all the more interesting, if not puzzling, as the moral high ground is claimed for the ‘scientific’ status of policy inquiry. This critical remark brings us to the question of the broader relevance of the proposed analysis. As a practical matter, activities are typically judged on the basis of their success (or failure), not upon the skills they presuppose (which may or must remain enigmatic). As political scientists or professional sociologists, we may then ask for the general point and purpose of a procedural description of basic reading skills, beyond its epistemic payoff per se. There is no single answer to this question. For instance, we may take up local puzzles, as discovered in the abstract so far, to orient further investigation, of the related article, or other similar articles. In the present case, we may wish to figure out what it means to cast ‘science policies’ in terms of ‘principal-agent theory’, ‘games’ or ‘game theory’, eventually. To do so, further reading of the article is necessary, while other articles may be consulted as well. If the proposed analysis focused upon a single abstract and its accountable organisation, this focus was maintained to describe in detail the basic understanding – as textually implied and uncovered in reading – necessary for such further questions to be posed at all (e.g. as a starting point for exegetical reading and paradigmatic criticism). This holds mutatis mutandis for the detailed examination of other, similar studies. At the outset of the present chapter, the notion of formal analysis was invoked as a concise formulation of standard procedures in political science. Research policy studies were referred to as well, insofar as that notion points to familiar similarities in its and, by implication, their accountable organisation. Furthermore, it was suggested that conceptual reformulation proceeds usually not only under the auspices of a theoretical question, derived from the authoritative corpus of a specialised literature, but also on the basis of reasonable suppositions, derived from the mundane experience of everyday life and the corollary mastery of natural language (in and for speaking, writing and reading). Taken together, theoretical outlook and everyday experience, as linguistically articulated, provide the political scientist and/or professional sociologist with both background assumptions (‘about what to expect’) and search procedures (‘how to look for it’). A tricky issue, then, is not only the relationship between his or her theoretical outlook and everyday experience but also their respective relationship to the mundane

Metaphorical moves 269 experience and indigenous concepts of the institutions or members studied (‘How and what for, if at all, are they listened to?’). The detailed examination of metaphorical moves in research policy studies may be considered as a first step to clarify that tricky issue for policy inquiry, more generally. The indicated issue, however, is far from new. For cultural anthropology, it constitutes a familiar pitfall: ethnocentrism – the age-old ‘belief’ that one’s own culture is better, more subtle or sophisticated, than the studied foreign culture. Policy inquiry, conducted under the auspices of formal analysis, may be criticised for capitalising on a tacit type of ‘methodological ethnocentrism’. That type of ethnocentrism, by and large, seems to operate in two related ways. On the one hand, it amounts to a projection of (arguably) ‘scientific’ procedures and concepts onto mundane practices, a projection which makes them available under the discursive auspices of policy inquiry (in terms of its topical agenda, methodological outlook, etc.). On the other hand, that projection makes it virtually impossible to recover these mundane practices, as methodically achieved and ordinarily recognisable by their entitled participants in the first place (regardless of any ‘scientific’ reformulation of their ultimate character or analytic interest). The criticism this raises is particularly true for any inquiry conducted under the banner of ‘political science’ with normative aspirations: such inquiry not only tends to miss how participants themselves go about a particular task (as their ‘ethno-methods’ typically remain unexamined, dismissed or both) but further has noble ideas of how to correct them (as an ‘evaluation’ of sorts has to be delivered). Alternatively, the proposed analysis may not only be read as a descriptive analysis of ‘scientific expertise’ in research policy studies but also as a distinctive contribution to a critical anthropology of scientism in policy inquiry.

Note 1 Acknowledgements are due to Alain Bovet and Esther González Martínez for their careful reading and critical remarks as well as to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support (SNF, Project Nr. 100012–104048).

References Anderson, R. and Sharrock, W. (1993) ‘Can Organizations Afford Knowledge?’ Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1: 143–61. Boden Cox, D., Nedeva, M. and Barker, K.E. (2004) Scrutinising Science: The Changing UK Government of Science, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogen, D. and Lynch, M. (1997) ‘Sociology’s Asociological “Core”: An Examination of Textbook Sociology in the Light of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, American Sociological Review, 62: 481–93. Brown, R. (1977) A Poetic for Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Garfinkel, H. (1974) ‘The origins of the term ethnomethodology’, in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited and Introduced by A. Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, H. and Sacks, H. (1970) ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’, in J.C. McKinney and E.A. Tiryakian (eds) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Garfinkel, H. and Wieder, L.D. (1992) ‘Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies of Social Analysis’, in G. Watson and R.M. Seiler (eds) Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology, London: Sage. Henkel, M. (1997) ‘Academic Values and the University as Corporate Enterprise’, Higher Education Quarterly, 51: 134–43. Jefferson, G. (1985) ‘On the Interactional Unpackaging of a “Gloss” ’, Language in Society, 14: 435–66. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, London: Sage. Lee, J. (1984) ‘Innocent Victims and Evil-doers’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 7: 69–73. Livingston, E. (1995) An Anthropology of Reading, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lynch, M. (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McHoul, A. (1982) Telling How Texts Talk, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Maynard, D. and Clayman, S. (1991) ‘The Diversity of Ethnomethodology’, Review of Sociology, 17: 385–418. Rose, E. (1960) ‘The English Record of a Natural Sociology’, American Sociological Review, XXV: 193–208. Ryle, G. (1954) ‘Technical and Untechnical Concepts’, in G. Ryle (ed.) Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1963) ‘Sociological Description’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 8: 1–6. Sacks, H. (1974) ‘On the Analyzability of Stories of Children’, in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation, vols 1 and 2, ed. G. Jefferson, Oxford: Blackwell. Sharrock, W. and Anderson, R. (1986) The Ethnomethodologists, London: Tavistock. Sharrock, W. and Ikeya, N. (2000) ‘Instructional Matter: Readable Properties of an Introductory Text in Matrix Algebra’, in S. Hester and D. Francis (eds) Local Educational Order: Ethnomethodological Studies of Knowledge in Action, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Turner, R. (1976) ‘Utterance Positioning as an Interactional Resource’, Semiotica, 17: 233–54. Watson, R. (1997) ‘Ethnomethodology and Textual Analysis’, in D. Silverman (ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, London: Sage. Wilts, A. (2000) ‘Forms of Research Organisation and Their Responsiveness to External Goal Setting’, Research Policy, 29: 767–81. Woolgar, S. (1988) Science: The Very Idea, London: Horwood, Tavistock. Zimmerman, D. and Pollner, M. (1970/1990) ‘The Everyday World as a Phenomenon’, in J. Coulter (ed.) Ethnomethodological Sociology, Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

18 A metaphorical election style Use of metaphor at election time Dieter Vertessen and Christ’l De Landtsheer

When studying political language, researchers tend to follow three different but related paths. The first is to concentrate principally on the mere content of political language. These studies mostly relate to ethos, the norms and values that are hold by the communicator or the ideological content of the message. This type of research is commonly practiced in communications and in political science. The second is followed by researchers who try to unravel what politicians say by focusing on the structuring of arguments and their validity. Turning to the popular terminology of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, these researchers focus on logos (Covino and Jolliffe 1995; Herrick 2001) or the appeal to logic. This type of research has persisted in almost all branches of the study of political language. The third is somewhat less obvious, though at least equally rewarding: by focusing on the style of political language or its form, researchers try to complement studies that take only manifest content into account. They argue correctly that how politicians say things and how they verbally express their thoughts both affect the meaning the words acquire. These studies are rooted in rhetoric and mostly relate to pathos (Covino and Jolliffe 1995; Herrick 2001), because they examine language in its concrete use and because they look for connotative meanings and emotional effects. More and more researchers turn to analyses of style in order to penetrate deeper into the complex ways political language generates meaning and aims to persuade. In the ‘sound byte culture’ that influences contemporary politics, the importance of the use of persuasive style becomes more and more apparent. In line with the rhetoricians Windt and Ingold (1987) we call this communicative style ‘impressive’, because making impressions on the public becomes more important than the actual communicative content or meaning. The current study follows a fourth path because it connects style (as well as content and argumentation) to political context. In this chapter, we study how political style relates to two aspects of political context: whether or not elections are approaching and whether commercial and popular or public and prestige media are involved.

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Style and political communication The meaning of the word ‘style’ is not immediately clear as it consists of different verbal and non-verbal ‘style components’. Determining which style components to examine is a paradigmatic choice. In this chapter, we focus on metaphors, whereas we also include complexity and modality analyses to enhance the validity of our conclusions. Metaphors are indeed typical style elements as they are examples of language use instead of being structural language elements. Aristotle defines them as applications of alien names, emphasising the act of applying (Beer and De Landtsheer 2004; De Landtsheer and De Vrij 2004). Our metaphor and style research has two important features that distinguish it from other research in the field (see e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Billig and MacMillan 2005; Charteris-Black 2006). First, we argue that the style of the political language is subject to change. Sometimes speakers are unaware of the style shift as it can be part of more general changes (e.g. economic evolutions) in society that exert a profound influence on political practice and on political language. However, in this chapter, we examine two or sometimes more deliberate forms of style shift: we study the influence of approaching elections on style, and we try to assess the role of media in promoting a specific style. Media formats and politicians’ style have to match for politicians in order for them to receive attention. The second characteristic of our research is related to the way we handle our samples of political language: we literally calculate the so-called ‘metaphor indices’ (De Landtsheer 1994) that represent how emotionally powerful a specific use of metaphors is.

Different perspectives on metaphors Prior to addressing the metaphor and style changes at election time, we briefly highlight some critical perspectives on metaphors and on metaphor research. We offer a cognitive frame in which our research must be interpreted. Although the practices of different types of metaphor research often seem to be irreconcilable, the etymological meaning of metaphor (‘to transfer’ or ‘to carry beyond’) seems to be universally accepted. A metaphor transports something, and this transportation has effects. It creates a distinction between the original context in which the metaphor is being introduced and the literal meaning of the metaphorical expression. This distinction results in the application of different names to both the metaphorical expression (‘vehicle’, ‘focus’, ‘ground’, ‘subsidiary subject’ and ‘source’) and the context (‘tenor’, ‘frame’, ‘topic’, ‘principal subject’ and ‘target’) (Richards 1936; Black 1979; Kittay 1987; Cacciari 2001; Beer and De Landtsheer 2004). However, there is also some disagreement between the different research traditions. Here we distinguish between two major approaches (Glucksberg

A metaphorical election style 273 2001; Steen 2002). The first builds on Aristotle’s classical writings and considers metaphors to be rhetorical and linguistic elements. This semantic approach stresses how metaphorical substitution transforms meaning from literal to figurative identified in samples of discourse (see the chapters by Fridolfsson, Honohan and Mottier in this volume). The second considers metaphors to be cognitive or conceptual devices. They can be powerful framing devices that guide thinking. As the conceptual constitutes perception, conceptual metaphors can be found almost everywhere, and they mostly remain unnoticed. Although Lakoff’s (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) fairly recent cognitive metaphor theory is the most visible in this approach, the idea of metaphors taking part in cognitive processes was all but ignored before. For example, the empiricist Thomas Hobbes considered the use of metaphor as an abuse of language that could obfuscate thinking (see the chapter by Howarth and Griggs in this volume) (Hobbes 1651; Grey 2000). Regardless of which approach is chosen, metaphor analysis is, methodologically, still rather underdeveloped (Schmitt 2005). We propose an integrative strategy that combines the first and the second approaches, because these research traditions offer different perspectives on the same thing. We consider metaphors to be linguistic elements (first approach) that can have important cognitive and emotional effects (second approach).

How political metaphors work Before turning to the dynamics that drive style changes, we address the question why politicians use metaphors. What advantages result from wellthought-out use of metaphor? Why do metaphors have the effects that they have? In order to understand how the use of metaphor changes, we have to comprehend how metaphorical language works and what effects they have. As a lot of seemingly unrelated effects are being addressed in the literature, we turn again to Aristotle’s triple appeal to structure this short overview (for more information on effects of metaphor use, see e.g. Sopory and Dillard 2002; Beer and De Landtsheer 2004). Metaphors are mostly associated with the appeal to pathos. Most scholars equal this appeal to pathos to the appeal to emotion. Metaphors can indeed arouse strong emotions. For example, by describing supposed enemies and all kinds of threats to the Nazi state as dangerous diseases and deadly plagues, the Nazis incited both fear and hatred (Edelman 1977). Also recent experiments (see e.g. Gibbs et al. 2002; Sopory and Dillard 2002) seem to confirm the relation between metaphors and emotions. Emotions are crucial in metaphorical effects. However, Aristotle did not restrict the appeal to pathos to arousing emotions. His interest in emotion has to do with how emotions enable politicians to make close contact with their audiences and how emotions affect their judgement (Herrick 2001). As metaphors can make language impressive, emotions can bring the audience into the state of mind that the speaker thinks appropriate.

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Furthermore, the emotive aspect of metaphors can also be used to appeal to logos. This may sound a bit contradictory, because viewing reason and emotion dualistically as opposing forces has been a common practice for a very long time. However, advances in neurosciences and cognitive sciences make it clear that rational thinking only becomes possible because emotional experience precedes cognitive processes (Marcus 2002). Emotions direct attention towards the most important thing. In sound byte culture, this need for selection becomes even more urgent. That way political metaphors become clusters of condensed meaning that, for example, can simplify complicated policy proposals. Finally, metaphors can also appeal to ethos. Studies have shown how using ‘images in words’ is related to being charismatic (see e.g. Emrich et al. 2001). Politicians who are good at ‘painting followers’ pictures of what can be accomplished with their help’ also can help in ‘evoking attributions of greatness among followers’ (Emrich et al. 2001: 527). Again, emotions are important, because charisma emphasises the affective bonds between politicians and followers.

A dynamic metaphor style Politicians use different language styles when confronted with different situations. Being emotive and persuasive is not a condition that has to be fulfilled to the same degree at all times. The ‘rhetorical situation’ that shapes the context in which politicians create their messages is all but stable (Bitzer 1995). According to Bitzer, the rhetorical situation is defined by, first, the necessity that urges anyone to communicate; second, a specific public that is being targeted; and, third, more general constraints and influences. Earlier research has examined some of them. For example, rhetoric at crisis times is a popular research subject. Lasswell’s innovative research illustrates well how during crises an ‘ornamental, effect-contrasted, emotive, repetitious and accessory’ crisis style becomes important (Lasswell 1949), and De Sola Pool, too, concluded that during peace time, language is more varied than during war (De Sola Pool 1956). Other more recent research stated that during economic crises, when unemployment rates rise, politicians use more persuasive metaphorical language (De Landtsheer 1994). Also, when soldiers abroad fail to fulfil their mission, the same is to be expected (De Landtsheer and De Vrij 2004), as well as when extremist political leaders upset the political system (De Landtsheer 2007). What these examples have in common is that the necessities that shape each of these rhetorical situations resemble each other. During all sorts of crises, politicians try to reassure the public and try to manage anxiety and levels of ‘social stress’ (Fritzsche 1994). Emotive and impressive language may help in achieving this goal. Research also concentrated on the relation between discourse and ideology. Extremists’ speeches, whether they are left-wing or right-wing, are more

A metaphorical election style 275 metaphorical than the language of other political groups (De Landtsheer 1998). The rhetorical situations that influence their rhetoric are different. In this study, we examine how approaching elections change the rhetorical situation. We argue that political languages at election time and at crisis time are similar. Politicians need impressive metaphorical language that makes persuasion possible both at election time and at crisis time. We also look at how the type of media may constrain the rhetorical situation. We discriminate between four types of media: public television, commercial television, quality papers and tabloids. As in sound byte culture, television becomes more and more important, so we focus mainly on the first two types of media. Our starting point is that public and commercial broadcasting differ. In a democratic society, state-financed public broadcasting has to ‘entertain, inform and educate’, whereas commercial broadcasting has no other function than to survive in a highly competitive media world (Holtz-Bacha and Norris 2001). One of the most important implications of this difference in aim is that television news on commercial stations shows more aspects of ‘tabloidisation’, focusing on soft news and emphasises the sensational (Esser 1999). As triggering strong emotions is important for commercial media, we argue that the political language on commercial media features the same style as the crisis rhetoric. Therefore, we expect to see a lot of powerful metaphors. Of course, the prevalence of strong metaphorical language in commercial media has two causes: on the one hand, the media select metaphorical language, and, on the other hand, some politicians may deliberately change their language style. We expect to see the same difference between prestige and popular newspapers.

Hypotheses First, based on the review of literature, we expect politicians to make an extra rhetorical effort at election. We assume this effort results in a metaphorical stronger language: politicians use stronger metaphorical language. Triggering emotions in order to persuade really becomes necessary when voters are about to execute their democratic task. Second, previous research shows it might be useful to distinguish between language styles in popular media and quality-guarding media. We argue that politicians’ speech in popular media is more sensational and therefore metaphorical than in quality-guarding media. Third, we assume this metaphorical language is part of a broader persuasive language pattern. Metaphors are not the only devices at hands of politicians and media owners, eager to win the votes and to make the biggest earnings. To examine language styles, we use an umbrella theory called the Crisis Communication Combination (CCC) theory encompassing three style components, namely metaphors, integrative complexity and the pragmatic

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ambiguous use of modals (De Landtsheer and De Vrij 2004; De Landtsheer 2007). As we focus on metaphors, we devote more attention to the metaphor power index than to complexity scores or to modality.

Metaphor power The ‘metaphor power index’ (De Landtsheer 1994) conceptualises a quantitative metaphor content analysis. Although it was developed to gauge the level of anxiety in society during crises, this chapter uses it to study political language at election time. The index is based on three variables, namely metaphor frequency, intensity and content. How frequently metaphors are used (F) provides us with important clues about the metaphor power of discourse. The metaphor frequency should be calculated relative to the total amount of language or speech of the sample. When examining spoken language, for example the appearances of politicians on television news, we divide the total number of metaphors (f) by the total number of minutes politicians speak (st). Metaphor frequency then denotes the average number of metaphors per minute. When considering written language, for example interviews in newspapers, we calculate the metaphor frequency per sample of 200 words in length (total number of words = tw). We use 200 as it is close to the normal Dutch speech rate (180) (Schreuder and Gilbers 2004). [Written language: F = f/(tw/200), spoken language: F = f/st.] The second variable is the intensity (I) or the originality score of the metaphors. Metaphor theory states that innovative, creative and original metaphors are more intense than dormant or dead metaphors (Tsoukas 1991). If the reference strength to the literal meaning is still strong, then we call it a strong metaphor. In contrast, if the literal meaning does not come to mind, metaphors are weak (Mooy 1976). The distinction between the two is important, because the intensity of metaphors has an impact on their potential effects (Tsoukas 1991). In the metaphor power model, metaphors were given intensity scores with values ranging from (1) for ‘weak’ (w) metaphors, over (2) for ‘normal’ (n), to (3) for ‘strong’ (s). ‘I’ stands for the sum of the weighted values of metaphor intensity divided by the total number of metaphors (T). [I = (1w + 2n + 3s)/T.] The third variable introduces the content (D) of the metaphor. Different semantic fields, according to Kittay (1987) identified by different lexical fields, have different metaphor power. Different semantic fields are awarded scores on a scale ranging from 1 to 6. These scores have been empirically validated. As the metaphor model was primarily constructed to analyse language during crisis times, the classification is based on the ability of language to raise support during crises. We suppose crisis language and campaigning language have in common their orientation towards persuasion and emotion. Therefore, we assume that those semantic fields that have proven to be efficient during times of crisis equally contribute to persuasion

A metaphorical election style 277 at election time. Whether these assumptions are correct should appear from our data. The first content category consists of metaphors that use images from the semantic field ‘everyday life material reality’. This category includes images of things in material reality, family metaphors and popular sayings (p). Because the connection between them and the real material world itself is still strong, there is little chance of them making escape from reality possible. Therefore, we give them the lowest score (1). Nature metaphors (n) belong to the second category. We give them the score (2) as we associate them with conformation and natural order, though they always contain the possibility of change. Third, political, technological and construction metaphors (po) are often sophisticated constructs, suited for simplifying complex political processes. On the one hand, they enable politicians to provide a perspective for framing multi-dimensional processes. On the other hand, they do not produce the same amount of emotive power as our higher categories. This ambiguity justifies the intermediate score (3). Disaster and violence metaphors (d) are much less neutral than the metaphor categories we have mentioned before. They have in common the expression of despair, depression or aggression. Their ominous character implies a stronger emotional involvement with the value (4). Sports, games and drama metaphors (sp) receive the value (5). They appeal to many people, and they are highly manipulative. The category we attribute the highest metaphor power (6) is the category of body, disease, medical and death (m) metaphors. According to Gregg (2004) metaphors have more emotive power if they are closely related to the body, as ‘embodied meaning’ plays a central role in our cognitive processes. Hitler’s ‘medical’ language for example only was effective through its extensive use of emotional, medical and body images (De Landtsheer and De Vrij 2004). (D = (1p + 2n + 3po + 4d + 5sp + 6m)/T) Multiplying the scores on each of the three variables (frequency, intensity and content) gives the metaphor power index (C). (C = F ⫻ I ⫻ D.)

Language complexity Besides metaphors, the CCC theory makes use of Suedfeld’s theory of integrative or cognitive complexity (Baker-Brown et al. 1983; Suedfeld et al. 1992). According to this theory, low levels of complexity in public speech represent black-and-white thinking, intermediate levels represent increasing differentiation between point of views and high levels point to integrative thinking or the ability to synthesise and to react flexibly. As De Sola Pool (1956) concluded, political discourse grows simpler or more standardised during crises, and we expect the same to happen at election time, when persuasion is needed. We follow the detailed coding instructions provided by Suedfeld et al. (1992).

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Modals Modals are verbs that express possibility, obligation or necessity (e.g. ‘can’, ‘may’, ‘ought’, ‘need’, and ‘must’) (Sweetser 1995). Some of the modal verbs (the pragmatically ambiguous modals) can be used in two different ways: they can refer to the speaker’s state of mind (epistemic or empathic modality) or they can refer to a possibility, obligation or necessity in the social or physical outside world experienced by the speaker (root or content modality). Inspired by Anderson’s (1998) findings, we expect the epistemic or empathic (E+) use of modals to be more important during election time or, more general, when impressive language is advantageous (Windt and Ingold 1987). The ‘content’ use of modals (E–) or the reference to an outside source of possibility, obligation or necessity, is expected to be more frequent if no greater persuasive effort is required.

The crisis pattern The CCC is symbolised by the CCC index and can be calculated by multiplying the metaphor index C by the number of empathic modals E+. Then, we divide the result of this multiplication by the integrative complexity level CC, multiplied by the number of non-empathic or content modals E–. Higher CCC indices testify that language is condensed, simple and emotive. Lower CCC indices denote that language is more expressive, complex and therefore less persuasive. [CCC = (C ⫻ E+)/(CC ⫻ E–).]

Sampling and coding In order to answer our research questions, we used samples of different origins in our analysis. A first sample consisted of news broadcast from three different two-week periods: two non-election periods (T1: January 2003 and T3: December 2003) and one election period (T2: May 2003) preceding the Belgian Federal Elections of 18 May 2003. Everyday we analysed the main evening news broadcasts on two different television stations: VRT, a public Flemish broadcaster, and VTM, a commercial station. Our final sample consisted of 82 news broadcasts (as one VRT and one VTM broadcast were missing). We were only interested in the politicians’ speech, and therefore we neglected for example journalists’ commentary. This selection method yielded 255 minutes of politicians’ speech, more or less equally divided between VRT (128 minutes) and VTM (127 minutes). When we assessed metaphor power, we used the entire sample. For the coding of our two test variables, we reduced the sample and only selected for each non-election period and television station the ten longest sound bytes. We then added election-time sound bytes comparable in length. This resulted in a sample of 60 sound bytes and 44 minutes of speech time. In newspapers, we only analysed the front page, because this is where the

A metaphorical election style 279 most influential news can be found. We selected only politicians’ quotes between quotations marks, in order to be sure that what we analyse remains the closest as possible to the politicians’ actual words. The research periods were the same as the one in the other research. As the study aimed at establishing differences between quality papers and tabloids, we used three quality papers (De Standaard, De Morgen and De Tijd) and three tabloids (Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad and Gazet Van Antwerpen). The total sample consisted of 210 newspapers (two newspapers are missing) and 8,554 words. Unlike the television news study, we analysed all three CCC variables using the entire sample. An expert coder, trained by two other experts, performed the coding of all samples.

Results As this chapter focuses on metaphors, we start with the metaphor language study. The data seem to confirm that politicians make an extra effort to use metaphorical language at election time. We also find differences between quality media and merely commercial media, although the data and results should be interpreted cautiously, because we were not able to detect significant differences. Table 18.1 presents an overview of the metaphor power indices and their three constitutive parts. It is clear that there are important differences between metaphor use at election time and in between elections. For example, at election time, the lowest C score is 8.678 (VTM), whereas in between elections, the highest C score is 6.910 (VTM). An ordinary regression analysis indicates that metaphor power is significantly higher at election time than between elections. This confirms our first hypothesis. Table 18.1 also reveals that the elevated metaphor indices at election time are mainly caused by the larger number of metaphors applied and by their intensification. At election time, politicians use on average slightly more than three metaphors every two minutes, whereas between elections, the rate drops to two-and-a-half. Metaphor intensity rises on average from 1.634 between elections to 1.920 at election time. However, metaphor Table 18.1 Metaphor frequency (F), intensity (I), content (D) and metaphor power (C) on 2003 Belgian public (VRT) and commercial (VTM) broadcasting television news at election time (T2) and between elections (T1 and T3) T1

Frequency (F) Intensity (I) Content (D) Metaphor index (C)

T2

VRT

VTM

1.034 1.75 3.075 5.567

1.435 1.659 2.795 6.654

■VRT 1.594 1.982 3.055 9.648

T3

VTM 1.600 1.857 2.920 8.678

■VRT 1.232 1.44 3.08 5.462

VTM 1.240 1.676 3.324 6.910

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content scores seem to exhibit a different pattern as they are not elevated at election time. This may suggest that the hierarchical ordering of categories is affected by crisis but not by election time. What can be said about the differences between commercial and public television? In general, television news on VRT, the public broadcaster, is – if we neglect the influence of elections – significantly less metaphorical than on VTM, the main commercial station. However, the increase of metaphor power at election time is much larger on the public station than on the commercial station. The same can be seen even more clearly in Figure 18.1. We did find some support for the second hypothesis, although the relation between media type and language style does not seem to be onedimensional. Table 18.2 presents an overview of the metaphor power in newspapers. A first finding is that C scores are much higher. Front pages have other metaphorical needs than full-length news broadcasts as they serve as ‘eye and attention catchers’. Front pages have to feature metaphorical ‘sound bytes’ at all times. Table 18.2 and Figure 18.1 show clearly that metaphor power indices of quality papers also confirm the first hypothesis. However, the pattern could not be found in the tabloids. The third period shows metaphor scores which are much too high. We see two possible explanations. The first is methodological: as they only constitute a minor part of the total sample, our results did not fully reflect the dynamics that guide metaphor use in tabloids. However, a second explanation is that from the television study, we already expected the pattern to be more visible in quality papers. More research is needed. Summarising the above, our data support the first hypothesis, whereas there is some doubt on the validity of the second: if we neglect whether it is election time, commercial news offers more sensational and metaphorical news than does news on public television, although at election time, public television has higher scores than the commercial broadcaster. In newspapers, we find a clear election pattern in quality papers, while it lacks in tabloids. Table 18.2 Metaphor frequency (F), intensity (I), content (D) and metaphor power (C) in 2003 Belgian quality papers and in tabloids at election time (T2) and between elections (T1 and T3) T1

T2

Quality

Tabloid

Frequency (F) 5.788 Intensity (I) 1.721 Content (D) 2.934 Metaphor index (C) 29.233

3.936 1.682 2.955 19.556

■Quality 5.501 1.906 3.25 34.078

T3

Tabloid 4.712 1.926 2.407 21.847

■Quality 4.195 1.72 3.72 26.839

Tabloid 4.361 1.762 3.524 27.078

A metaphorical election style 281 40 35

Metaphor Index

30 25

T1

20

T2

15

T3

10 5 0 Commercial TV

Public TV

Tabloid

Quality paper

Media type

Figure 18.1 Metaphor power (C) in different 2003 Belgian media types at election time (T2) and between elections (T1 and T3).

The metaphorical election style seems to be more visible on public television news and in quality papers. A possible explanation for this is that the public broadcasters or prestige papers consider it their public duty to stimulate participation at election time more than ever. The persuasive shift at election time is part of a larger effort to increase the involvement of the people in politics. Commercial broadcasters and tabloids show less interest in being more persuasive at election time. Table 18.3 shows the CCC indices for television news. In general, CCC scores provide us with striking evidence for the presence of a persuasive and emotive language pattern that emerges clearly at election time. Due to the nature of the CCC index, the combined effect of C, E+/E– and CC magnifies the language styles differences. Looking at the values, at election time, the CCC score is much higher than between elections. This is caused partly by increased metaphor power, which we discussed before, but the results indicate that the use of modals follows the same persuasive or empathic shift. The self-defined empathic use of modals gains popularity at election time, resulting in a more impressive use of language. Language complexity, however, does not produce the expected results: although language complexity on public stations is lower at election time, commercial television shows a slightly higher complexity level at election time than between elections. In other words, at election time, the simple language on commercial stations becomes more complex, whereas the more complex language on public stations simplifies. Once more we have to conclude that public television illustrates more clearly that election time is a turning point for language use. Although significance could not be established, the signs of the correlations between C, E+/E– and CC are as expected and Hypothesis 3 should be accepted.

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Table 18.3 Metaphor power (C), empathetic use of modals (E+/E–), integrative complexity (CC) and the crisis communication combination (CCC) on 2003 Belgian public (VRT) and commercial (VTM) broadcasting television news at election time (T2) and between elections (T1 and T3) Variable

Broadcaster type

T1

C

Public Commercial Total

5.567 6.654 6.040

9.648 8.678 9.150

5.462 6.910 6.276

E+/E–

Public Commercial Total

2.125 (17/8) 0.571 (4/7) 1.4 (21/15)

4.667 (14/3) 1.286 (9/7) 2.3 (23/10)

0.667 (6/9) 0.7 (7/10) 0.684 (13/19)

CC

Public Commercial Total

2.222 1.625 1.941

1.909 2.182 2.045

2.636 2 2.318

CCC

Public Commercial Total

5.323 2.340 4.356

23.583 5.114 10.289

1.381 2.418 1.852

Pearson correlations between (on public and commercial television):

T2

T3

C & E+/E–: 0.648 C & CC: –0.414

Table 18.4 indicates that even greater CCC differences between campaigning and non-campaigning periods exist in newspapers. The CCC value at election time (56.27) is almost six times as high as the average value between elections (10.155, not showed in Table 18.4). In general, complexity scores in newspapers are lower than complexity scores on television news, probably again due to the specific demands of the front page. In newspapers, the persuasive pattern for complexity scores and empathic use of modals is more pronounced than on television news: without exception, election time shows the lowest complexity scores and the highest relative use of empathic modals. However, the correlation between metaphor power indices and complexity scores reminds us that our data have to be handled with caution. Although we expect metaphor power to be negatively correlated with complexity scores, the measured correlation is positive. To explain this anomaly, we suggest a larger sample is required as we were only able to collect 8,554 politicians’ words on front pages of 210 newspapers.

Conclusions If politicians’ discourse on television news contains one metaphor every minute, and if their frequency further increases at election time, it is clear

A metaphorical election style 283 Table 18.4 Metaphor power (C), empathetic use of modals (E+/E–), integrative complexity (CC) and the crisis communication combination (CCC) in 2003 Belgian quality newspapers and tabloids at election time (T2) and between elections (T1 and T3) Variable

Paper type

T1

T2

T3

C

Quality paper Tabloid Total Quality paper Tabloid Total Quality paper Tabloid Total Quality paper Tabloid Total

29.23 19.56 25.88 0.56 (9/16) 1.1 (11/10) 0.77 (20/26) 1.62 1.38 1.55 10.15 15.58 12.85

34.08 21.85 30.06 1.91 (21/11) 1.14 (8/7) 1.61 (29/18) 1.38 1.26 1.34 47.08 19.85 59.27

26.84 27.08 22.11 0.88 (7/8) 0.27 (3/11) 0.53 (10/19) 1.4 1.72 1.56 16.77 4.29 7.46

E+/E– CC CCC

Pearson correlations between (in quality papers & tabloids):

C & E+/E–: 0.264

that metaphors are more than just ornaments. By using a metaphor power index, we demonstrate that metaphors become more important at election time. This way, metaphors are part of a broader persuasive language pattern in which ‘being emotive’ plays a central role. By using more and other metaphors, by simplifying language and by connecting with the public through the use of empathic modals, politicians prepare their audience for persuasion and action. This pattern emerges more clearly both in quality papers and on public television news. Our findings illustrate that language style is important for both politicians and media. Politicians, eager to win the votes, adhere to a specific style to persuade voters, whereas media apply a style to attract the largest possible public and, in case of quality media, to perform a public function. Our data also show that ‘dynamic’ style analyses can be extremely valuable. Concentrating exclusively on the ‘mere content’, ‘argumentation’ or ‘style’ would overlook dynamic style processes that underlie the political language used. Future research should bring content, argumentation and style back together with context in order to understand how they relate to each other.

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A metaphorical election style 285 Glucksberg, S. (2001) Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms, New York: Oxford University Press. Gregg, R.B. (2004) ‘Embodied Meaning in American Public Discourse during the Cold War’, in F.A. Beer and C. De Landtsheer (eds) Metaphorical World Politics, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Grey, W. (2000) ‘Metaphor and Meaning’, Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 4. Online. (accessed 28 May 2007). Herrick, J.A. (2001) The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Hobbes, T. (1651) Levithian. Online. (accessed 28 May 2007). Holtz-Bacha, C. and Norris, P. (2001) ‘To Entertain, Inform, and Educate: Still the Role of Public Television’, Political Communication, 18: 123–40. Kittay, E.F. (1987) Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lasswell, H.D. (1949) ‘Style in the Language of Politics’, in H.D. Lasswell and N. Leites (eds) The Language of Politics: Studies of Quantitative Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, G.E. (2002) The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mooy, J. (1976) A Study of Metaphor: On the Nature of Metaphorical Expressions with Special Reference to their Reference, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. Richards, I.A. (1936) A Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmitt R (2005) ‘Systematic Metaphor Analysis as a Method of Qualitative Research’, The Qualitative Report, 10: 358–94. Schreuder, M. and Gilbers, D. (2004) ‘The Influence of Speech Rate on Rhythm Patterns’, in D. Gilbers, M. Schreuder and N. Knevel (eds) ‘Introduction’ to On the Boundaries of Phonology and Phonetics, Groningen: University of Groningen. Sopory, P. and Dillard, J.P. (2002) ‘The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A MetaAnalysis’, Human Communication Research, 28: 382–419. Steen, G.J. (2002) ‘Metaphor Identification: A Cognitive Approach’, Style, 36: 386–407. Suedfeld, P., Tetlock, P.E. and Streufert, S. (1992) ‘Conceptual/Integrative Complexity’, in C. Smith (ed.) Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis, New York: Cambridge University Press. Sweetser, E. (1995) ‘Metaphor, Mythology, and Every Day Language’, Journal of Pragmatics, 24: 585–93. Tsoukas, H. (1991) ‘The Missing Link: A Transformational View of Metaphors in Organizational Science’, Academy of Management Review, 16: 566–85. Windt, T. and Ingold, B. (1987) Essays in Presidential Rhetoric, 2nd edn, Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing.

Reflections Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo

This has been a book about the use of metaphor in political science and not about political metaphors as such. Contributors have explored the complex concept of metaphor, tracing the history of its varied definitions and uses to tell us something about language and meaning, and perforce about political science itself. While the utility of a view about how meaning is ‘properly’ constructed, and about how one should avoid ‘improper’ or confused constructions, may seem obvious, the contributors to this volume have taken care to show how these apparently ‘linguistic’ discriminations and theories have necessarily been linked to philosophical frameworks. These frameworks consist of varying ontologies and epistemologies consonant with views of meaning and metaphor that are offered as ‘linguistic’ truths. Unsurprisingly for those working in political studies, these philosophical frameworks can be shown to have political import. In short, they are the philosophical side of political ideologies and projects. As a linguistic artefact, ‘metaphor’ does not have a timelessly true definition, and the definitions offered throughout history are in fact closely linked to wider philosophical views and broader political projects. However, this finding is not a crude reductionism of ‘thought’ to ‘politics’, even less of ‘politics’ to ‘interest’. The linkages between linguistic theory, philosophical worldview and political project work precisely because they are subtly expressed and convincingly argued, often in ‘scientific’ terms. But as we know, science itself is subject not just to change, but to reconceptualisation, sometimes in drastic revisions and redirections, and often with a politics of violence on both sides of any paradigm shift (Kuhn 1996). A science of language, like a science of politics, is a reflexive undertaking, since politics and science themselves are already linguistic phenomena. From this understanding, it is possible, as contributors to this volume have shown, to examine the linguistic constituents of science itself, as well as politics itself. Science and politics are often more closely linked than the commonplace dichotomies between ‘political’ and ‘non-political’, and ‘science’ and ‘non-science’, would encourage us to believe. In particular, it is possible to see scientific projects, such as a ‘science of society’, as overtly political in character, and ‘scientific’ precisely because they draw on the same metaphors

Reflections 287 as are used to explain what a ‘scientific outlook’ actually is (and is not). Abstraction, quantification and observation are no escape from the language through which scientific meaning is constructed; at some point, a range of metaphors is required to convey the truths, and more particularly, the rightful applications of any science, no matter how physical or how ‘hard’. Science as an activity is a social one, proceeding in and through language, inevitably confronting the political world where opportunity and constraint take their toll. Nietzsche was right to refer to language as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’, though the interpretative gloss is more often on the ‘mobile’ part of the remark than on the ‘army’ side of things (Nietzsche 1971). Metaphors are the weapons of struggle in the linguistic theatre of operations, so claims that science is ‘clean’ or ‘clinical’ or ‘non-political’ are merely forward deployments in battle. It is interesting to reflect on the subject matter through which the chapters in this volume have developed the analyses that argue and illustrate the utility of the methodology sketched above. All contributors face a problem of limitation and selection, of course, and not just in terms of geographical area, timeframe, social and political issue or project, and focus on some individuals and groups rather than others. Beyond that, the actual type of ‘linguistic material’ chosen for these chapters further argues the power of this methodological approach. Official documents from national and international politics, political memoirs and histories, newspaper stories and photographs, speeches and soundbytes, ancient and modern classics of political theory, interest group and party-political proposals, policy documents and grassroots interviews, television content and style, all figure in this volume in lively ways. This attests to the power of metaphor in interpreting and changing the world. While some contributors adopt strict protocols of selection and quantification, and others pursue methods that are more literary and intuitive, there is a notable lack of imperialism in this volume on either side of any putative methodological divide. The focus on language, and in particular on the metaphors through which meaning – in the widest sense – is constructed, provides a common framework and indeed a commonality. Rather than experiencing the incomprehension and exclusion from presuming a gulf between outlooks, contributors to this volume take a synoptic view: the ‘other side’ is merely deploying a different register in language, an alternative range of metaphors. Thus, it is not so much the object of study that unites (i.e. the examination of metaphor), but the consciousness that whatever is under consideration – even metaphor itself – can only be analysed through the deployment of metaphors in logical and consistent ways. Far from being mere ornament or superfluity, metaphors are the defining constituents of any methodology or outlook, and it has been the goal of this volume to highlight this. While it cannot be said that self-conscious readings of metaphor can resolve all differences, perhaps an understanding of the forms through which differences themselves arise is more important, a

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strategic reductionism that founds a healthy pluralism. The editors of this volume hope that the preceding chapters have brought readers to similarly hopeful and constructive conclusions.

References Kuhn, T. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, F. (1971) The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, London: Chatto & Windus.

Further reading

Beer, F.A. and De Landtsheer, C. (2004) Metaphorical World Politics, East Lansing: Michigan University Press. Edited collection in which contributors illuminate the importance of metaphor in the construction of political realities worldwide. Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Introduces the ‘interaction’ view through which metaphor is theorised as semantically productive. Charteris-Black, J. (2005) Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Very readable study showing how metaphor was variously used to establish credible leadership by Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Howarth, D. (2000) Discourse, Buckingham: Open University Press. Foundational account of discourse theory and discourse analysis that clearly outlines the new methodology. Howarth, D., Norval, A.J. and Stavrakakis, Y. (eds) (2000) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Multi-focal volume outlining post-structuralist, post-Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches to the study of discourse. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live by, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Highly acclaimed introduction to the study of metaphor arguing that metaphors not only play a role in language use but also structure our perceptions and understandings imperceptibly. Miller, C.A. (2003) Ship of State: The Nautical Metaphors of Thomas Jefferson, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Historical inquiry into the use and meaning of nautical metaphors in Thomas Jefferson’s political writings. Musolff, A. (2004) Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Analysis of arguments about and attitudes towards the EU as expressed through metaphors in the German and British press, 1989–2001. Ortony, A. (1993) Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Further reading

Lengthy volume exploring the nature and function of metaphor in language and thought from a variety of approaches – philosophy, linguistics, psychology, education and science. Ricoeur, P. (1978) The Rule of Metaphor, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Highly praised volume comprising eight studies outlining the processes through which the linguistic imagination creates and re-creates meaning through metaphor. Shapiro, M.J. (1986) ‘Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences’, Culture & Critique 2: 191–214. Classic article demonstrating that different paradigms in social science are constructed through different metaphorical vocabularies: change your metaphors and you change your science and vice versa. Yanow, D. (2000) Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Widely used study, based on qualitative methodological principles, introducing interpretive techniques and methods for policy research.

Index

Adams, C. 139 American politics see politics, American Aristotle 72, 152, 183–4, 225, 271–3 Austin, J.L. 190 aviation policy, UK 9, 197–210 barbarism 157, 159–63 Baron-Cohen, S. 190 Barthes, R. 24, 191 Berlusconi, S. 139 Bitzer, L.F. 274 Black, M. 2–3, 43–4, 123–4 Blair, T. 246 Bodin, J. 64 Bush, G.W. 135, 244, 249 Butler, J. 151 Calhoun, C. 75, 80 Campbell, D. 20, 25 capital, social see social capital Carver, T. 192 catachresis 9 children 153 Cicero 182 civilisation 157–63 class, social 72 Clinton, B. 243 Cognition 9, 125 cognitive linguistics see linguistics, cognitive Cold War 20–5, 50 communication 83 community, political 70, 73; epistemic 167 constructivism 44–5, 119, 129, 168 Copernicus, N. 47 critical discourse analysis see discourse analysis, critical

cybernetics see metaphor, machine Darwinianism 155–6 De Sola Pool, I. 274, 277 Dean, B. 202, 206 democracy 84, 88, 120, 127, 144–5 Derrida, J. 120, 133, 151, 200 Descartes, R. 48 determinism 29, 33, 39 discourse analysis, critical 36–9 dissent 58, 66 Duivensteijn, A. 217 elections 10, 275–83 Enloe, C. 139 environment 198 equality 8, 51, 58, 66 ethnic groups see groups, ethnic ethnomethodology 259–60 Europe 6–7, 66, 120–8; see also European Union European Union 6–7, 105–15, 127–8, 246; see also Europe Fairclough, N. 36–7 Farr, J. 78–9 fatalism 39 feminism 169–70, 166, 169–70, 173, 176–8 Foucault, M. 8–9, 188–91, 200 Fox Keller, E. 170 fraternity 69 freedom 58, 66 Freire, P. 235 Freud, S. 132 Gadamer, H.-G. 187 Galen 229 Garfinkel, H. 258

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gender 8, 132, 134, 139, 143, 163, 165–78; see also gender equality; gender mainstreaming gender equality 171, 178 gender mainstreaming 8, 165–78 Goodhart, D. 73–4 Gorbachev, M. 124 Gore, A. 244, 249 Grice, P. 184–5 Grotius, H. 159 groups, ethnic 74–5 Habermas, J. 85 harmony see music hegemony 206–7 Heidegger, M. 199 hermeneutics 8–9, 10 Hobbes, T. 47, 49, 52, 64, 71, 73, 154 Hodges, D. 205 Hülsse, R. 105 human rights 58, 66, 156–7 Hume, D. 72 Hyvärinen, M. 192 ideology 36–8, 191, 202–3 individualism 51 Jacobson, N. 183–4 Jäkel, O. 107 Jakobson, R. 183–4 Johnson, M. 33–6, 39, 70, 92, 123, 125, 133, 184, 186, 213, 241 justice, social 198 Kerry, J. 249 Kohl, H. 124 Kramerae, C. 172–3 Kripke, S. 201 Kukathas, C. 71–2, 77–8 Lacan, J. 201 Laclau, E. 133, 200–1, 206–7 Lakoff, G. 33–6, 39, 70, 92, 123, 125, 133, 184, 186, 213, 241–3, 273 language, literal 42 Lasswell, H. 274 Latour, B. 257 legitimacy 83–100 legitimation see legitimacy liberalism 71 linguistics 9–10; cognitive 125 literal language see language, literal Locke, J. 47–9, 73, 158

Malthus, T. 156 Martin, E. 169 Marx, K. 156; see also Marxism Marxism 36; see also Marx, K. Masci, M. 139 masculinity 7, 8, 158–9, 161, 171, 177 mechanism see metaphor, machine Merleau-Ponty, M. 186 metaphor: animal 8, 151–3, 155–6, 163; body 5, 58–60, 71; conceptual theory of 33–6, 37–9, 241–7, 254; container 111–12, 114–15; crisis 85; definition of 1–5, 33–6, 42–5, 58, 66–7, 91–7, 105–10, 115–16, 119–29, 133–4, 144–5, 167–71, 182–92, 199–202, 222–3, 225–30, 233–4, 235–6, 271–83; equilibrium 111–12, 114–15; family 60–1, 73–5; friendship 75–6; heart 212–22; machine 5, 8, 15–25, 41–52, 63–4; 66–7, 151, 154–6, 163; motion 111–12, 114–15; new middle ages 111–12; power 246–7; ship 71–2; solidarity 6, 69–81 methodology, research 9–10 Mill, J.S. 81 Miller, D.F. 214, 235 monarchy 71 morality 154–6 Morgenthau, H. 21 Mouffe, C. 133 Munro, W.B. 50 music 61–3 Musolff, A. 243, 246, 247 Myers, K. 178 narrative 4, 8–9 nationalism 73–4 nature 5, 15–16, 52 Nelson, J. 168, 172, 177 Newton, Sir I. 46–52, 65 Newtonianism 15–25, 46–52, 63–6 Nietzsche, F. 132, 286 Nixon, R.M. 162 Oakeshotte, M. 72 objectivism 42 order, social 6, 57–8 Paine, T. 18, 49 Persson, G. 137, 142 Plato 71–2 Plummer, K. 192

Index 293 Plutarch 182 poesis 15–16, 41, 132, 183, 192 poetry see poesis Polanyi, M. 228 policy, research 10 political community see community, political political protest see protest, political political science 1–5, 257–69, 286–9 political thought, American 16–19, 23 politics: American 15–25, 50, 88–97, 100, 227–30; Belgian 278–83; community 9, 212–23, 230–4, 242; see also political thought, American; British 88–97, 100, 197–8, 202–10, 245–6; Dutch 212–23; German 88–97; Irish 166–7, 178; Israeli 230–2, 236; Rwandan 187–8; Swedish 132; Swiss 88–97 positivism 42–3 power 4, 5, 10, 66, 151 Pownall, T. 18 Pragglejazz Group 247–9 protest, political 7, 134–45 Putnam, H. 44

Schram, S. 233 science 15–25, 41–52, 286–7 science, natural see science science, political see political science Searle, J.R. 190, 201 Semino, E. 139 sexuality 7–9 Shapiro, M.J. 44, 123 Silk, M. 183–4 Skinner, Q. 199 slippery slope 5, 28–33, 35–6 Smith, A. 65 social capital 78–9 social class see class, social social order see order, social sovereignty 51, 58–9, 73 Sperber, D. 185, 187 state 57–8 Steen, G. 243 Stein, S. 225, 232 Strawson, P.F. 190 Ström, P. 142 Suedfeld, P. 277 Swift, J. 59

Quintilian 199

Tickner, A. 171–2 town planning 9–10; see also politics, community

research methodology see methodology, research research policy see policy, research Ricoeur, P. 5, 17, 24, 132–3 rights see human rights rights, human see human rights rights, women’s see women’s rights Rogers, C. 228 Rousseau, J.-J. 71 Sacks, H. 258 Saussure, F. 186–7 Schauer, F. 31, 37 Schleiermacher, F. 187 Schmitt, C. 76–7

van Dijk, T.A. 36–7 van Eeten, M. 217 virtue 58, 66 war 8, 34, 157–62 Washington, G. 59 Wilson, D. 185, 187 Wittgenstein, L. 151, 190 women 7, 141–5, 171, 177–8 women’s rights 171, 175–6 Woolgar, S. 257 Zˇizˇek, S. 133, 201–2