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Political Metaphors
Washing the Brain - Metaphor and Hidden Ideology
by Andrew
Goatly (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture: John
Benjamins Publishing) What is meant by the notoriously vague
term 'ideology'? Defining this could take a whole book, so Goatly
provisionally adopts van Dijk's definition and description in
Ideology: "the basis of the social representations shared by
members of a group. This means that ideologies allow people, as
group members, to organise the multitude of social beliefs about
what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong, for them and to act
accordingly.” One major determinant of these social representations
will be "the material and symbolic interests of the group ... power
over other groups (or resistance against the domination by other
groups) may have a central role and hence function as a major
condition and purpose for the development of ideologies". This
emphasis on power is central to my use of the term, and, for
brevity's sake one might adopt Thompson's definition "meaning in the
service of power".
This notion of ideology has something in common with the
classical Marxist definition, which sees ideology as
"false-consciousness", a misleading representation, the
superstructure overlaying and distorting a material reality and the
development of the Marxist concept of ideology into the theory of
hegemony: instead of an overt imposition of an ideology by the
ruling class, hegemony manages the mind in covert ways to construct
a consensus about the social order which benefits those in power.
Hegemony depends upon the naturalization of ideology as
common-sense, and thereby makes ideology latent or hidden.
However, Goatly does not believe in the possibility of
non-ideological thought. To some extent, all consciousness is
false-consciousness. Ideology is not, like halitosis, just something
that the other person has. It is, in fact, often as unnoticeable and
ubiquitous as the air we breathe. After all, we are all members of a
community and share the thoughts and language that make action
within that community or society possible.
Though ideology is ubiquitous in thought, some ideologies or ways of
understanding the world may be more useful than others. Even the
same ideology may simultaneously have useful and harmful effects. It
is helpful, therefore, to see ideology as simultaneously
"empowering, useful and adaptive on the one hand, and disempowering,
distorting and maladaptive on the other.” In principle, therefore,
one ought to adopt an ambivalent attitude to ideology in general and
even to particular ideologies.
Some approaches to ideological analysis, such as
Foucault's, have downplayed the cognitive element. But ideology is
in your head as well as in discourse. "It arises out of cognitive
mechanisms as well as out of technology and social practices.” Van
Dijk's definition places emphasis on both the social and cognitive
aspects of ideology, and their manifestation in or construction by
discourse.
By one of the intricacies of word-formation and subsequent
semantic drift, washing the brain does not mean quite the same as
brainwashing. Though the latter may have originally stressed the
removal of existing patterns of thought in order to introduce new
ones, it now tends to mean the inculcation of propaganda. Washing
the brain, by contrast, suggests the possibility of removing harmful
ways of thinking. The paradox is, of course, that the metaphorical
pattern that this title exploits has itself been recruited in the
cause of harmful ideologies, such as ethnic cleansing and other
drives towards racial or mental purity.
This book draws on two traditions which have, until
recently, remained pure and unadulterated by each other, but which
have been the focus of my research interests over the years. It is
an attempt at cross-fertilization between cognitive linguistic (CL)
accounts of metaphor, and critical discourse analysis (CDA), what
has been called "Critical Metaphor Analysis". It demonstrates the
importance of metaphorical patterns in the vocabulary and grammar of
English for representing and shaping ideologies and social
practices. To do so it relates metaphorical patterns or "themes" to
a wide range of aspects of contemporary life, including medical
practice, adversarial legal systems, time and motion studies, the
politics behind 9/11 and the New Right, racism, urbanization,
defense spending, commoditization and privatization, sexual
exploitation, educational philosophy and practice, biological and
mechanistic theories of "human nature", and our present ecological
crises. It engages with the current debate over the relative
importance of biology and culture, a debate partly dependent upon or
reinforced by metaphorical themes, and traces the ideologies
expressed by metaphorical themes back to a tradition which includes
Hobbes, Newton, Hume, Adam Smith, Malthus and Darwin.
Cognitive linguistic accounts of metaphor, beginning with
Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), are associated with
scholars such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Muller, Eve
Sweetser, Raymond Gibbs, Gerard Steen, Zoltan Kövecses, Gunther
Radden and Antonio Barcelona. The Critical Metaphor Analysis
tradition comprises work by, among others, Roger Fowler, Tony Trew,
Gunther Kress, Jay Lemke, Norman Fairdough, Ron Carter, Michael
Toolan, Teun Van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, and Paul Chilton. The aim of
Critical Metaphor Analysis is "to investigate critically social
inequality, as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized
and so on by language use" (Wodak and Meyer 2001: 2). Critical
Metaphor Analysis purpose, therefore, is to investigate and uncover
ideology, in so far as it is expressed and influenced by language
and discourse.
More recently these two traditions have begun to come
together. Hiraga (1991), Chilton (1996), Lakoff (1996), Balkin
(1998), Jones (2000), Stockwell (2000), Musolff (2004) and Charteris-Black
(2005), among others, have begun to seriously explore the
ideological effects of metaphor. Stockwell's chapter is particularly
interesting in opening up possibilities for alignment,
demonstrating the similarities in Fairclough's and Lakoff's analysis
of Gulf War discourse, and pointing out various commonalities
between the two traditions: both are anti-objectivist, believing
that discourse/metaphor construct or confer a reality or folk model
rather than simply describing it; Fairclough's notion of "Members
Resources" is a cognitive notion, and relies on scripts, frames and
schemata, which are more or less the same as CUs Idealised Cognitive
Models (ICMs); and Stockwell quotes Fairclough's recognition of the
importance of choice of one metaphor rather than another as a
symptom of ideology. Nevertheless he stresses that, for the most
part, the CL tradition sees metaphor as a function of (universal)
embodiment rather than (historical) ideology. So, although within
cognitive linguistic Kövecses (2005) has recently emphasized the
importance of culture to metaphorical patterns of vocabulary, he
does not stress the centrality of ideology to culture.
An extremely important book, Balkin's Cultural Software,
provides a theoretical basis for the intersection of Critical
Metaphor Analysis and cognitive linguistics. Balkin regards metaphor
as a cognitive mechanism of ideology, which will produce
ideological effects (1998: 112-3, 243-8). He stresses the need for
the cognitive and psychological to be taken into account in
discourse and ideological analysis (p. 186). In addition, taking up
the Critical Metaphor Analysis mission, he argues that ideological
analysis does not end with a demonstration that a particular belief
or symbolic form is partly or wholly false or distorted. It must ask
how this falsity or distortion might create or sustain unjust social
conditions or unjust relations of social power.
The present book continues the attempt to combine the
Critical Metaphor Analysis tradition with the cognitive linguistic
tradition. It addresses the agenda set by Peter Jones (2000: 243)
"such CL methods, insightfully applied to the internal semantic
resources of ideological discourse, could usefully augment and
concretize the Marxist analysis of ideologies in terms of
historically specific external relations between conceptualizations
(social consciousness) and social practice (social being)". It
stresses the common ground between the two approaches — that
language is not some transparent medium through which we think, but
that it shapes our thoughts and practices. So the conventional
metaphors in the discourses of race, sex, politics, defense,
economics, environment, and so on, tend to determine our ways of
thinking/consciousness and acting/practice in these social spheres.
The metaphor themes discussed in this book are, of course,
selectively taken from Metalude, and perhaps paint an unduly
pessimistic view of the effects of metaphor on social life. If
metaphor is a form of bricolage, taking something which happens to
be at hand to perform a task for which it was not originally
designed, it may be inadequate to that present task, and though
useful, also distorting (Balkin 1998). Metaphor as a mechanism of
ideology is therefore ambivalent. For example, in chapter two we
look at the DISEASE IS INVASION metaphor, and show how the tradition
of regarding diseases as invaders who have to be killed has become
dominant, but, is rather unhelpful in certain areas of medicine like
auto-immune diseases. Nevertheless, it would be hard to deny that
the eradication and control of disease through antibiotics,
dependent upon this traditional metaphor, has had positive effects
on health. Goatly analyses the favorite metaphors of capitalism,
metaphors of competition and war, quality as quantity, and quality
as wealth. However, it would be perverse to deny that the capitalist
enterprise has, in the past, unlocked human potential for invention
and motivated technological advances, many examples of which are
conducive to an improvement in human well-being. In both these
examples, it may be that once useful metaphors have, in a new
cultural ecology, partially outlived their usefulness: growth is,
for example, maladaptive for mature economies.
Goatly could have written another book about positive
metaphor themes, though it would have been shorter. There are a
number of alternative metaphors which represent humans, not only as
competitive animals, but as involved in productive and co-operative
relationships: social organisations as buildings or as the human
body, and relationships as music. However, Goatly has selected the
themes by way of warning. The world faces a number of pressing
crises - environmental problems, economic unsustainability and
exploitation, poverty, racism, disease and so on - to which neo-
conservative thinking, dependent upon the metaphorical patterns
themes Goatly analyses, seems to have no answer. If this book can
make a tiny contribution to raising awareness of the dangers of
acting out these metaphors it may be modestly successful.
What this book attempts to do is, in fact, rather modest.
It presents little empirical psychological evidence, though perhaps
more sociological evidence, for the suggestions it makes about the
influence of metaphorical patterns on thought and practice. All it
probably succeeds in doing is to be suggestive. Of course, obtaining
psychological and empirical sociological evidence for metaphoric
effects on behavior would be a very time-consuming task One could
for example follow up the claim that metaphors of sex as violence
encourage rape by collecting data from convicted rapists and from a
control group of the male population to ascertain whether the first
group was more likely to use these violent metaphors for sex. Then
one would have some hard evidence of whether ways of speaking
metaphorically correlate with social action or practice. In which
case they perhaps (re)-produce social practices.
Specifically, this book attempts two things. First, it
suggests that the metaphorical patterns observable in the lexicon of
English have widespread effects on the concepts which drive our
social practices and which reinforce social patterns of inequality,
injustice and environmental exploitation within our present
capitalist economies. Second, Goatly addresses the more theoretical
question of the extent to which the metaphorical patterns to be
found in the lexicon have their origins in (universal) bodily
experiences, and the extent to which they are cultural and
ideological constructs.
Goatly introduces terminology for and background in
cognitive approaches to metaphor and critical discourse analysis,
and explains the nature of the database that provides the lexical
evidence for this study.
Goatly explores some salient metaphorical patterns with
consequences for power relations, such as height, centrality, speed,
fighting, violence for sex, linear and divisible space for time,
color for race, and gives evidence of their effects on architecture,
medicine, race (and racing), transportation, military spending, and
industrial working practices.
Goatly shifts the emphasis to mechanical and commodity
metaphors for humans and society (and other natural objects), in
their relation to sexual, industrial, and economic practices. It
considers the treatment of women as food and workers as machines,
the invisible (clock) hand of the market driving capitalist
economies, and the development of bioengineering, as well as the
patenting of genes, the sale of body-parts, and privatization, which
reinforce structures of inequality and the equation of quality with
quantifiable measures such as money.
Goatly explores natural metaphors for humans, either as
landscape, weather or animals, discussing the question of whether
humans are literally or only metaphorically animals, and whether
aggression or co-operation constitute their defining
characteristics or similarities. As a snapshot of the current
ideological positions at the start of the 21st century, it critiques
Gaia theory with its principles of symbiosis, co-operation and
interdependence, theories in socio-biology, right-wing theories
emphasizing property / trade as distinctively human, and
reconstructionist theories idealistically emphasizing humans' use of
symbols, language and cultural institutions which distinguish them
from animals. It points out the relevance to these positions of
metaphors such as disease for ideas, fighting for activity,
calculation for thought, and money / wealth for relationship.
Goatly is concerned with the ways in which metaphorical
patterns interrelate: the use of identical metaphors for different
topics to merge concepts (e.g. good is high and more is high, so
more is good, with its consequences for over-consumption and
obesity); the use of different metaphors for the topics of emotion
and education, leading to different educational practices; conflicts
between the positively evaluated metaphor themes, relationship as
proximity / cohesion versus freedom as space to move, and their
consequences for family life, birth rates and cold-war discourse;
and complex interactions involving similarity as proximity,
category as divided space, impurity as mixing, disease as invasion
and its reversal, as recruited in anti-immigrant discourse.
Goatly questions to what extent our thinking and ideology
is determined by our bodies and the metaphors which they give rise
to, and what variation we have in the metaphor themes across
languages and cultures, two questions that are linked since bodily
experience is assumed to be universal. Beginning with the best
candidate for universality through bodily experience, that is
metaphors for emotions, it explores Damasio's recent theory of their
intimate relationship with bodily responses, and cites scientific
and linguistic evidence to build on Kövecses' work on specific
physiological responses underlying metaphor patterns. However it
summarizes some of the important cultural variations based on the
metonymies of physical responses, showing the effect of culture and
ideology on emotion metaphor. Widening the scope of the argument to
metaphorical patterns in general, by examining Grady's work on
primary metaphors, and comparing his data with Metalude, it reveals
that a considerable number of metaphor themes lack a bodily
experiential correlation as their basis, suggesting
non-universality, and concludes that the experiential hypothesis may
be a form of reductionism, a hypothesis already challenged by the
idea of the body as historical and cultural as well as biological.
Goatly moves from vocabulary to grammar to consider the
influence that typical clauses and "grammatical metaphors" have on
our thinking and ideology. It demonstrates how literal grammar
imposes the rigid distinction between nouns and verbs and between
things and processes, and how it structures the relationships
between subjects, verbs and objects to build a Newtonian model of
our experience. This model is out of step with modern scientific
thinking about our physical and biological environment, and
dangerous in its implications about human domination of nature - as
exemplified in the environmental degradation caused by the civil
engineering mega-projects described in Josephson's Industrialized
Nature. By contrast "grammatical metaphors", which deviate from the
typical clause structure, construct a worldview more sympathetic to
the findings of modern physics and to ecology. But an alternative
worldview is achieved even more radically by the North American
language, Blackfoot. Grammatical differences in the representation
of possession are also shown to have ideological consequences, as
have languages spread throughout Europe in step with the advances in
capitalism.
Goatly traces the ideological tradition of Hobbes, Hume,
Adam Smith, Malthus and Darwin, pointing out the ways they select,
exploit and reinforce many of the metaphorical patterns already
discussed and which are the basis for New Right thinking, and a
resurgent sociobiology and eugenics. It simultaneously demonstrates,
through selective critiques by Tawney and Weber, how the ideological
tradition of Protestant capitalism broke with an earlier ideology
and its metaphors. By way of summary of the contemporary dominance
of neo-con ideology it critiques Lakoff's analysis of left-wing and
conservative US political ideologies in his book Moral Politics. It
concludes that these metaphor patterns are no longer ideologically
neutral and universal but have undergone a process of cultural
selection and reinforcement to produce and construct the dominant
value system. Moreover, naïve universalist cognitive metaphor theory
could be a kind of reductionism to biology, and yet theological,
especially Hegelian, doctrines of incarnation proclaim that
absolute embodiment, far from entailing reduction, is the
realization, fulfillment and perfection of an otherwise vacuous
truth. Nevertheless we should be aware of the reductionist and
misleading tendencies of metaphor itself, as well as its theories,
as conveyors of partial knowledge.
The question of categorization raised earlier in our
discussion of Bourdieu. To start with Goatly acknowledges that the
major metaphor for categories is a divided area.
This is apparent from the lexis in Metalude where divide
means 'to distinguish as belonging to separate categories' (how can
we divide the middle class from the working class?), to place is to
'categorize in a particular class or group' (the law places road
rage in the same category as wife-beating), separate means 'to
consider independently as belonging to different categories' (you
can't separate technology from morality), pigeon-hole means
'categorize' (he can't be pigeonholed as a jazz musician), bifurcate
The results of dividing are the categories or
sub-categories which are divided spaces of various kinds: segment
'subcategory' (a segment of the population of the US lives in dire
poverty), sector 'subcategory of an economy or large group' (the
poorest sectors of the population are immigrants), subdivision
'division of a category into smaller categories' (there is a
subdivision of speech sounds into vowels and consonants), part
'sub-category' (spiders are not part of the insect family),
compartment 'category' (he keeps his studies and his religious
beliefs in separate compartments), demarcation 'separate
categorization' (in some English departments there is little
demarcation between Literature and Film).
The last of these examples introduces the idea of a
boundary, a line which separates spaces and therefore categories:
boundary, dividing line 'distinction between two types of thing'
(the boundary between medicine and superstition is sometimes
unclear), or between the category of what is known and what is not
known as in frontier 'limit of knowledge, (he has extended the
frontiers of particle physics).
When categorization is difficult then the dividing line is
not clear: it may be blurred, smudged 'not clearly differentiated or
categorized' (the line between advertising and press reporting is
becoming badly smudged / blurred), a grey area 'situation difficult
to categories where the rules are uncertain' (surrogate motherhood
is a legal grey area), or so thin it is difficult to detect - a fine
line 'distinction that's difficult to make' (there's a fine line
between paedophilia and natural attraction to children).
Alternatively, the thing to be categorized may fall on the
borderline 'in or between subjects' (medicine is on the borderline
of zoology and psychology).
Category distinctions can be ignored or disappear in
various ways and to various extents. The categories may overlap 'be
partly the same' (the areas of interest in the two organizations
overlap but are not identical). Another topic or text may fit into
two categories, straddle 'combine two different topics' (the study
of metaphor straddles linguistics and psychology). If one category
includes another it will colonize 'take over another subject area'
(literary studies has been colonized by feminism). Alternatively
various categories may be subsumed into a larger more general
category which covers them as in cover-term 'general term of
classification' ( `vehicle' is a cover term for cars, lorries, bikes
etc), or umbrella, blanket 'applying generally' (cat' is also an
umbrella / blanket term for tigers, lions etc). These general
classifications or inclusions are overarching `including or
affecting every type of area, person or thing' (the overarching
principle in all government policy is to make education a priority).
Otherwise a more general term can be seen as a large bag with
several compartments - portmanteau 'covering a wide range of items,
usually for a single purpose' (it was kind of portmanteau bill,
covering everything from fighter planes to army supplies).
Following Benveniste, Bourdieu enjoys delving into the
etymology of such categorical divisions. He identifies the power to
categorise with the power of the king, by analogy with the
delimitation of territory over which the king has control, using the
etymology of the cognate vocabulary regio (`region'), rex (`king'),
regere fines (`to rule straight lines or national boundaries'),
diacrisis, (decree'). He also connects this with language and
discourse through auctor (`author') and auctoritas (`authority').
The etymology of the word region (regio), as described by
Emile Benveniste, leads to the source of the di-vision: a magical
and thus essentially social act of diacrisis which introduces by
decree a decisive discontinuity in natural continuity (between the
regions of space but also between ages, sexes, etc.). Regere fines,
the act which consists in "tracing out the limits by straight
lines", in delimiting "the interior and the exterior, the realm of
the sacred and the realm of the profane, the national territory and
the foreign territory", is a religious act performed by the person
invested with the highest authority, the rex, whose responsibility
is to regere sacra, to fix the rules which bring into existence what
they decree, to speak with authority, to predict, in the sense of
calling into being, by an enforceable saying, what one says, of
making the future that one utters come into being. The regio and its
frontiers (fines) are merely the dead trace of the act of authority
which consists in circumscribing the country, the territory (which
is also called fines), in imposing the legitimate, known and
recognised definition (another sense of finis) of frontiers and
territory - in short the source of legitimate division of the social
world. This rightful act, consisting in asserting with authority a
truth which has the force of law, is an act of cognition which,
being based, like all symbolic power, on recognition, brings into
existence what it asserts (auctoritas, as Benveniste again reminds
us, is the capacity to produce what is granted to the auctor). Even
when he merely states with authority what is already the case, even
when he contents himself with asserting what is, the auctor produces
a change in what is: by virtue of the fact that he states things
with authority, that is, in front of and in the name of everyone,
publicly and officially, he saves them from their arbitrary nature,
he sanctions them, sanctifies them, consecrates them, making them
worthy of existing, in conformity with the nature of things, and
thus "natural".
The point is that the authority, the arbiter, is the one
with the power to make categorizations and assign to social roles.
Kategorein originally meant 'to accuse publicly, to be told what you
are and so "social essence is the set of those social attributes and
attributions produced by the act of institution as a solemn act of
categorization which tends to produce what it designates" . Though
distinctions and categorizations often give the appearance of being
based on objective differences, in fact, especially in the case of
categorizing social classes, we are dealing with continua, and
different critical features used for classification will give us
different categories, since these features seldom cluster
congruently. In education, of course the continuum of marks has to
be divided by the arbiter to separate the lowest pass mark from the
highest failing mark.
For Bourdieu social and political struggle is a "struggle
over the power of preserving or transforming the social world by
preserving or transforming the categories of perception of that
world.” "Science is inevitably involved in this struggle and agents
wield a power which is proportional to their symbolic capital, that
is, to the recognition they receive from the group".
Both Lakoff and Bourdieu are looking for a middle way
between Objectivism and Subjectivism. As the latter puts it this
middle way is "that 'reality' which is the site of a permanent
struggle to define 'reality'", a struggle between an objectivism
which ignores how representations evoke a reality, and a
subjectivism which states there is no reality apart from
representation. One can, perhaps propose some such framework as
follows. There exists a real world, but we have no direct "real"
knowledge of it, since that knowledge is produced discoursally and
linguistically through conventionalized metaphors, some of which are
so conventionalized we call them literal. Knowledge of the world is
mediated through perception, cognition and language / discourse.
However, meaning and cognition certainly is grounded in our
interaction with a real world and we do experience this real world,
especially through the material consequences of our actions.
Although we have no direct knowledge of this world, we develop those
metaphorical models and categories which are positively adaptive to
our environment, both physical, and, hopefully, social, too. They
are tested against experience, through feedback, and if the models
and categories are more or less true they promote our physical and
social survival and well-being. If these models are wrong we become
sick, endangered, or fail to survive. These models, perceptual,
linguistic and discoursal, are crucially dependent on the dominant
metaphors or semantic categories which we absorb with our first
language. And part of the purpose of this book is to raise the
possibility that some of these widespread and unchallenged
metaphorical themes or models are not conducive to the future
survival and well-being of the human race: a lot of negative
feedback is coming our way.
In this chapter we have considered three different kinds of
metaphor theme interaction: multivalency, where sources are shared,
diversification where targets are shared, and evaluative opposition.
At the beginning of the chapter we showed how multivalency can lead
to association between different targets so that GOOD IS HIGH and
MORE IS HIGH taken together suggest MORE = GOOD, which reinforces
patterns of excessive wealth accumulation and consumption as part of
the Protestant capitalist ethic, despite the objections that Small
is Beautiful. We also explored how CHANGE IS MOVEMENT and
DEVELOPMENT / SUCCESS IS MOVEMENT FORWARD might suggest that CHANGE
=DEVELOPMENT / SUCCESS, again an increasingly doubtful and
contentious suggestion, though one which the technologically driven
retail economies of the West have espoused in the cause of selling
the latest and most fashionable consumer products. Goatly also
considers the evaluative oppositions FREEDOM IS SPACE TO MOVE
(PURPOSE IS DIRECTION) V. RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY / COHESION and
CERTAINTY / RELIABILITY
Goatly then exemplifies two kinds of diversification.
Emotion, constructed in opposition to the certainty / solidity of
facts, is diversely structured as movement, liquid, and weather, all
sources sharing grounds of uncontrollability, passivity of the
experiences, and brevity. Diverse metaphor themes for education,
unlike emotion, were quite varied in their grounds, either
undermining attempts at educational reform, through lexis such as
giving, provision, balanced curriculum, according to an ideology
that sees knowledge as a commodity, or encouraging it through lexis
such as exploration, and construction, where the latter metaphors
seem to be reducing the power and control of the educational
authorities over the educational process and giving more freedom to
students.
Goatly also considers a complex nexus of metaphorical interactions
implicated in racism: RELATIONSHIP IS PROXIMITY, SIMILARITY IS
PROXIMITY, CATEGORY IS DIVIDED AREA, SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS A
BUILDING, SOCIAL ORGANISATION IS A BODY, RACE IS
COLOR, IDEA IS DISEASE, DISEASE IS INVASION - a nexus which
suggests that the ideal state is one where the inhabitants are the
same color, and constructs immigrants as invaders, or a disease, or
as bearing dangerous ideologies.
The first part of this study concentrates on the
exploration of how metaphor themes are associated with various
aspects of contemporary social life. The second part becomes more
theoretical and philosophical in nature. In this section Goatly
addresses the question, first introduced indirectly earlier, of the
relative importance of bodily experience and culture in the
patterns and networks of metaphors in the lexicon of contemporary
English. Next Goatly considers much of the persuasive evidence that
metaphors for emotions are grounded in bodily experience, showing
how these are culturally modified to some extent at more specific
levels, though even this bodily experience may be to some extent
culturally relative. Then Goatly takes up grammar as a perspective
on that shows that the most frequently occurring grammatical
structures in English, if not most European languages, and those
first acquired in childhood, structure the world, and humans'
interactions with their environment in ways which are both out of
step with modern scientific theories, and potentially destructive.
"Grammatical metaphors" of various types may go some way to
reconceptualizing in the direction of a more helpful grammar.
However, a radically different grammar and worldview, such as that
of the Algonquin language Blackfoot, could be even more helpful.
Next Goatly attempts to show that various metaphor themes of
competition and conflict, quantification, money and commoditization
have been created, exploited and nurtured from the early capitalist
period onwards, as manifest in the philosophical writings of Hobbes,
Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. It concludes with a discussion of
the theological concept of incarnation and locates this within a
discussion not only of Lakoffian theories of experientialism but
also of metaphorical reductionism.
As my arguments about the issue of the experiential
hypothesis and metaphoric universals are quite subtle and extend
over these three chapters it is desirable at this point to chart the
course of the argument in advance. Goatly presents considerable
evidence that identical metaphorical patterns are extremely
widespread across different languages, if not universal,
particularly those in which there is an intimate relationship
between what is being conceptualized and bodily experience. The most
obvious case is in conceptualizing emotion, since emotion is very
often defined in terms of disturbance to bodily equilibrium, or is
manifest in changes to the body. The strong correlation between
emotion and the bodily experience and perception of the body gives a
real-world or metonymic basis, which can be elaborated
metaphorically. Even here, we find that different languages, though
they may share metaphorical patterns at the general level, differ in
the particular lexis used to instantiate the general pattern.
Moreover, we have to take account of the fact that the body
and bodily experience are affected by culture, so the fact that
bodily experience gives an experiential basis for metaphors does not
entail that that all kinds of bodily experience are universal.
Furthermore, even at the less specific level there are
"exotic" languages such as Blackfoot where even the most general
cognitive patterns do not seem to apply, such as the distinction
between objects and processes caused by or acting on those objects.
The result is that the Event Structure schema, which might seem,
from the point of view of Western languages, a candidate for
universal general metaphorical patterns (CAUSE IS FORCE, CHANGE IS
MOVEMENT, ACTIVITY / PROCESS IS MOVEMENT FORWARD, DIFFICULTY IS
OBSTACLE etc. etc.) may not apply to all languages. In other words
the paradigm metaphor of activity — that independently existing
objects exert a force on other independently existing objects to
move them — is not a universal metaphor for actions or events. In
addition, ideology has effects on the metaphorical patterns to be
observed in the dictionary. The ideology may invent the metaphorical
equation, as in TIME IS MONEY / COMMODITY or DISEASE IS INVASION. Or
it may recruit existing metaphors and encourage, develop and
elaborate them, as when ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT FORWARD 1S elaborated,
through the ideology of competition into the idea that activity is a
competitive race, either against others or against time. In doing
this it may attempt to replace or marginalize alternative metaphors,
such as disease as imbalance, or activity as the harmonious workings
of the body or a machine.
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