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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Winfried Fluck · Herbert Grabes Donald Pease · Jürgen Schlaeger 25 Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory Edited by Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 075109 REAL 25 - Grabes_Nu? nning: 055308 REAL 24 - Schlaeger Titelei 26.08.2009 7: 42 Uhr Seite 3 Notice to Contributors The editors invite submission of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2010 volume, edited by Winfried Fluck, Frank Mehring, and Stefan Brandt, will be on “Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment”. The 2011 volume, edited by Donald Pease and Winfried Fluck, will be on “Transnationalisms in Theory and Practice”. Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and 15 offprints of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to one of the editors or via an advisor. They should reach one of the editors by November 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 15,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disk; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers and Research Papers, 7 th edition (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009). Editors Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstrasse 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Giessen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel- Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany Donald Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Jürgen Schlaeger, Humboldt-Universität, Großbritannien-Zentrum, Mohrenstrasse 60 , D-10117 Berlin, Germany Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (Swansea University), Avrom Fleishman (Johns Hopkins University), Ronald Shusterman (University of Montpellier), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Albert E. Stone (University of Iowa), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen). Text-editing and final layout: Mirjam Horn and Jutta K. Weingarten © 2009 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed by: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-4180-2 ISSN 0723-0338 075109 REAL 25 - Grabes_Nu? nning: 055308 REAL 24 - Schlaeger Titelei 26.08.2009 7: 42 Uhr Seite 4 Contents Contributors .......................................................................................................... vii A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH Introduction: Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking, or: Where Metaphors and Culture Meet .................................................................. xi I. T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORKS W HERE M ETAPHORS AND C ULTURE M EET Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES Metaphor and Culture ........................................................................................... 3 G RETA O LSON Metaphors and Cultural Transference: Mediating Cognitivist and Culturalist Approaches ........................................ 17 R ONALD S HUSTERMAN All Thought is Sorting — or is it? Metaphor and the Bounds of Sense ........... 33 R ÜDIGER Z ILL Metaphors as Migrants: Towards a Cultural History of Rhetorical Forms .. 47 II. M ETAPHORS S HAPING C ULTURES - C ULTURES S HAPING M ETAPHORS : H ISTORICAL C ASE S TUDIES H ERBERT G RABES Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment ............................................................................................ 65 A NN L ECERCLE ‘Out-of-jointedness’: From Shakespeare to Derrida and Deleuze .................. 81 C ATHERINE B ELSEY Phantom Presences: Figurative Spectrality and the Postmodern Condition 95 S IBYLLE B AUMBACH Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor: The Metaphorical Dimension of Mythical Figures ........................................ 111 Contents S EAN F RANZEL Is This a Dialogue? Discursive Community and the Media of the Humanities ............................................................................ 127 M ARCO DE W AARD Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination: The Case of Ian McEwan ................................................................................... 145 K RISTINA K ÖHLER Dance as Metaphor — Metaphor as Dance: Transfigurations of Dance in Culture and Aesthetics around 1900 ............. 163 P HILIPP S CHULTE The World as Stage and Representation: Notes on the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor ......................................................... 179 III. M ETAPHORS S HAPING T HEORIES - T HEORIES S HAPING M ETAPHORS : H ISTORICAL C ASE S TUDIES J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE Leaving the House of the Text: Deconstructing the Metaphor of Construction ............................................... 197 M ARTIN Z IEROLD Metaphors We Communicate By: Changing Metaphors of Communication in Everyday Language, Communication Theory, and the Academia ......... 211 A NSGAR N ÜNNING Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises: On the Functions of Metaphors as Figurative Knowledge and Mininarrations ..... 229 H UBERT Z APF Metaphors of Literary Creativity ...................................................................... 263 A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH Metaphorology of Networks ............................................................................. 285 M ARTHA B LASSNIGG Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema: The Mirrored Metaphor of Culture and Technology ..................................... 299 M ICHAEL P UNT Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor ................................................. 315 v i Contributors B AUMBACH , S IBYLLE . International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Giessen, Germany. B ELSEY , C ATHERINE . Department of English, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales UK. B LASSNIGG , M ARTHA . Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, Portland Square, PL4 8AA Plymouth, UK. DE W AARD , M ARCO . Department of English, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. F RANZEL , S EAN . Department of German & Russian Studies, University of Missouri, 451 Strickland Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-4170, USA. F RIEDRICH , A LEXANDER . International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Giessen, Germany. G RABES , H ERBERT . Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Justus-Liebig- Universität Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B, 35394 Giessen, Germany. K ÖHLER , K RISTINA . Seminar für Filmwissenschaft, Universität Zürich, Plattenstr. 54, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland. K ÖVECSES , Z OLTÀN . Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Rákóczi út 5, H-1088 Budapest, Hungary. L ECERCLE , A NN . Université Paris X - Nanterre, UFR d´anglais, 200, Avenue de la République, F-92001 Nanterre Cedex, France. L ECERCLE , J EAN -J AQUES . Université Paris X - Nanterre, UFR d´anglais, 200, Avenue de la République, F-92001 Nanterre Cedex, France. N ÜNNING , A NSGAR . Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Justus- Liebig-Universität Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B, 35394 Giessen, Germany. O LSON , G RETA . Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Justus-Liebig- Universität Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B, 35394 Giessen, Germany. P UNT , M ICHAEL . Department of Art and Technology, University of Plymouth, 22 Portland Square, PL4 8AA Plymouth, UK. Contributors viii S CHULTE , P HILIPP . International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Giessen, Germany. S HUSTERMAN , R ONALD . Université Bordeaux 3 - Michel de Montaigne, F-33607 Pessac, France. Z APF , H UBERT . Philologisch-Historische Fakultät Anglistik / Amerikanistik, Universitätsstr. 10, 86159 Augsburg, Germany. Z IEROLD , M ARTIN . International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Giessen, Germany. Z ILL , R ÜDIGER . Einstein Forum, Am Neuen Markt 7, 14467 Potsdam, Germany. Acknowledgements The present volume has received support from a variety of sources. The editors are deeply indebted to the Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft for their generous support of a conference on the topic, which facilitated inspiring discussions between international scholars and experts in the field. Furthermore, we wish to thank all contributors for their fascinating exchange of ideas on the topic, as well as their responsiveness and efficiency in developing their papers for the volume. Finally, we are indebted to our research assistants Mirjam Horn and Jutta Weingarten for their invaluable support in editing the volume and for the excellent job they did in checking numerous details, as well as to Sara B. Young for proofreading the articles. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking, or: Where Metaphors and Culture Meet I Why Metaphors? Introducing the Focus, Goals, and Outline In their seminal work Metaphors We Live By, which of course provides one of the key texts and inspirations for this volume, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson observe that “the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true […].” 1 Anyone who doubts that they are right only has to look at a random selection of examples to realize to what extent metaphors have indeed served ‘to define what we consider to be true’ and to shape our views of culture and our theories. No matter what the domain is, we apparently cannot do without metaphors: Whether it is our notions of communication (see Martin Zierold’s contribution to this volume), research and knowledge (Herbert Grabes), the ways we conceive of literary creativity (Hubert Zapf), culture or cultural transference (Greta Olson), history (see Demandt), political power (see Rigotti) and the state (see Peil), or computers, their defects (e.g. ‘viruses’) and the internet: We always resort to metaphors whenever we try to make sense of complex phenomena. Though the ubiquity and pervasive importance of metaphors in culture and society at large which provides the point of departure for both this introduction and the volume in general may be hard to deny or ignore, one might still ask the question of ‘why metaphors’ or ‘why metaphors again’? The answer is that despite a plethora of contributions to the burgeoning fields of metaphor theory, metaphorology, and contemporary metaphor studies in general, there is still a number of areas that have not yet received the degree of attention they arguably deserve. As the programmatic title “Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory” already indicates, this volume focuses on the cultural, epistemological, and political work that metaphors do, concentrating on the complex ways in which metaphors shape both our views of cultural phenomena and our theories. Metaphors are not only “the understanding of something in one conceptual domain [...] by conceptual 1 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1980) 160. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xii projection from something in a different conceptual domain,” 2 but they also serve as subtle epistemological, conceptual, and cultural tools that are imbued with a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and ideological connotations. Using these preliminary observations as a point of departure, the articles in this volume explore how metaphors structure not only what we perceive and experience in our everyday realities, 3 but how they also provide the tools in terms of which we conceptualize, structure, and understand culture, cultural change, and even our theories. As Herbert Grabes shows in his article, metaphors like ‘mirror,’ ‘anatomy,’ and ‘enquiry’ are very interesting metaphoric cases in point insofar as they have profoundly shaped our understanding of research and knowledge. Serving as a means of structuring, narrativizing, and naturalizing cultural phenomena and transformations, metaphors can be conceived of as important sense— and indeed worldmaking devices. Metaphors not only serve to structure how we understand cultural transformations, but they also project “mininarrations” 4 onto them, thereby providing ideologically charged plots and explanations of cultural and historical changes rather than neutral descriptions thereof. It is arguably “the metaphorical concepts we live by,” 5 to use Lakoff and Johnson’s felicitous formulation, that provide the key to understanding the topic at hand, i.e. “Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory.” If one accepts Lakoff and Johnson’s view “that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured,” 6 then one might even go so far as to argue that metaphors and narratives are the most powerful tools we have for making sense of cultural transformations, being endowed as they are with the power of reason and the power of evaluation. 7 This volume focuses on the role of metaphors for exploring ways of worldmaking. When Nelson Goodman coined the term ‘ways of worldmaking,’ he was mainly concerned with the claim that the world we know is always already made from other worlds. According to Goodman, there is no such thing as a given world - the only thing we can ever have access to are culturally shaped world models. Recent years have seen an increasing interest across all disciplines in the question of exactly how worlds are made and how the relation between worldmaking and orders of knowledge can be 2 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “A Mechanism of Creativity,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 403. 3 See Lakoff and Johnson. 4 Philip Eubanks, “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings? ” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 437. 5 Lakoff and Johnson 22. 6 Lakoff and Johnson 106. 7 George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1989) 65. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xiii described. Useful concepts for exploring this question, which have come to the forefront of research, are the notion of narrative, archives, and media. What has received much less attention, however, is the prominent role that metaphors play in the ways in which we construe the world. Exploring a wide range of examples from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to modernity, postmodernity, and contemporary media society, the articles in this volume provide fascinating casestudies of how metaphors not only serve to shape prevailing views of culture and theory, but are also, at the same time, shaped by the cultures and theories from which they originate. On the one hand, metaphors project structures onto cultural phenomena which defy direct observation and serve to make sense of them. They thus play a central role in shaping both culture and theory. On the other hand, metaphors are also shaped by both everyday cultural notions and by theories. As Zoltán Kövecses has convincingly shown in a number of publications, metaphors not only reflect prevailing cultural models, but they also shape and even constitute cultural models. 8 Kövecses is also the first theorist to explore the various dimensions of metaphor variation across and within culture. 9 By focussing on this reciprocal relationship between metaphor and culture, the articles also explore the functions that metaphors serve to fulfil within cultures and theories. Despite the productiveness of the metaphor industry, both the cultural implications and ideological functions of metaphors and the constitutive rather than just reflective role of metaphors in determining the perception of culture and theories have not yet been sufficiently explored. This volume tries to redress the balance by examining in detail the relationships between metaphors and culture and between metaphors and theory. As a number of scholars have shown, metaphors have played a much more important role in the history of science and in theories than is commonly assumed. 10 8 See e.g. Zoltán Kövecses, “Does Metaphor Reflect or Constitute Cultural Models? ” eds. Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerald J. Steen, Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999) 167-88. See also Kövecses’ seminal books listed in the Works Cited. 9 See Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), see especially chapter 10, “Metaphor Variation Across and Within Cultures.” 10 See e.g. Bernard Debatin, “Der metaphorische Code der Wissenschaft: Zur Bedeutung der Metapher in der Erkenntnis- und Theoriebildung,” European Journal for Semiotic Studies 2 (1980): 793-820; Evelyn Fox Keller, Das Leben neu denken: Metaphern der Biologie im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Kunstmann, 1998); Petra Drewer, Die kognitive Metapher als Werkzeug des Denkens: Zur Rolle der Analogie bei der Gewinnung und Vermittlung wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis (Tübingen: Narr, 2003); Gerd Mattenklott, “Metaphern in der Wissenschaftssprache,“ Bühnen des Wissens: Interferenzen zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xiv One of the main reasons for the great interest that metaphors hold for the cultural historian 11 and for anyone interested in cultural theory is that they show how cultures and theories are understood by the contemporaries. As Rüdiger Zill, following Hans Blumenberg, has emphasized, metaphors provide insight into the ‘substructures of thinking,’ 12 into what has been dubbed the ‘history of mentalities,’ i.e. habits of mind or structures of ideas and attitudes. Providing a preliminary introduction to some of the theoretical underpinnings, the second part of this introduction will give a brief outline of cognitive metaphor theory and of the central role metaphors have played in shaping culture and theories. The third part will then give a brief account of the more recent historical study of key metaphors and consider its consequences for metaphor theory. In the final section an attempt will be made to assess the importance of metaphoric projections for the study of culture and theory in the context of the history of mentalities, suggesting that such a metaphorological approach can open up productive new possibilities for the analysis of the reciprocal relationships between metaphors and culture and between metaphors and theories. II Theoretical Premises: On the Role and Functions of Metaphors in Culture and Theory Since cognitive metaphor theory is arguably of central relevance for any attempt to gain insight into the complex relationship between metaphors and culture, a brief summary of some of its premisses and insights may provide a ed. Helmar Schramm (Berlin: Dahlem UP, 2003); Wolf-Andreas Liebert, “Metaphern als Handlungsmuster der Welterzeugung: Das verborgene Metaphernspiel der Naturwissenschaften Eine Rose ist eine Rose…: Zur Rolle und Funktion von Metaphern in der Wissenschaft und Therapie,“ ed. Hans-Rudi Fischer (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2005); see also the interesting volumes edited by Lutz Danneberg, Andreas Graeser, and Klaus Petrus, Metapher und Innovation: Die Rolle der Metapher im Wandel von Sprache und Wissenschaft (Bern/ Stuttgart/ Wien: Haupt, 1995) and Wolfgang Bergem, Lothar Bluhm, and Friedhelm Marx, Metapher und Modell: Ein Wuppertaler Kolloquium zu literarischen und wissenschaftlichen Formen der Wirklichkeitskonstruktion (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996). 11 For the relevance of metaphors for the history of mentalities see Peter Burke, ”Stärken und Schwächen der Mentalitätsgeschichte,“ Mentalitäten-Geschichte: Zur historischen Rekonstruktion geistiger Prozesse, ed. Ulrich Raulff (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1987) 139-40: “Dennoch kann es für die Beschreibung der Unterschiede zwischen Mentalitäten sehr nützlich sein, sich an die wiederkehrenden Metaphern zu halten, insbesondere wenn sie das Denken insgesamt zu strukturieren scheinen.” 12 See Rüdiger Zill, “’Substrukturen’ des Denkens: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg,“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002) 209-58. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xv convenient point of departure. It is arguably no coincidence that most of the terms that we have at our disposal for talking about such abstract and elusive phenomena as history, time, the state, human creativity, communication, emotion, research, or the world at large tend to be metaphoric. The main reason why we tend to resort to metaphors whenever we try to conceptualize abstract entities and complex processes is not hard to determine: Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.). This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system. 13 There is apparently a great need for metaphors in our conceptual system because so many cultural phenomena are not only fairly abstract and difficult to grasp, but they also defy direct observation or experience. Resorting to metaphors is thus one way of coping with and making sense of cultural phenomena. In order to see in detail what is involved in metaphoric projections and the knowledge they generate, we must first have a clearer idea of some of the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive metaphor theory and of the constitutive rather than just reflective or rhetorical role metaphors play in cultures as well as in many of our theories. One might as well begin by pointing out that metaphors pervade both our culture and our theories. The reason for this widespread tendency to talk about complex cultural changes and phenomena in metaphoric terms is not hard to determine. Resorting to metaphors has always been one way of conceptualizing something that defied direct observation and experience. Like other abstract political entities which tend to be conceptualized metaphorically, e.g. history, government, and the state, 14 cultural changes are often a highly elusive phenomenon of considerable abstractness and heterogeneity, being anything but clearly delineated in people’s experience. 15 The same 13 Lakoff and Johnson 115. 14 See the encyclopedic monographs by Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken (München: Beck, 1978); Dietmar Peil, Untersuchungen zur Staats- und Herrschaftsmetaphorik in literarischen Zeugnissen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (München: Fink, 1983); Herfried Münkler, Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994) and Francesca Rigotti, Die Macht und ihre Metaphern: Über die sprachlichen Bilder der Politik (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1994). 15 See MacKenzie, who emphasizes that the empire was “at least four separate entities. It was the territories of settlement [...]. It was India [...]. It was a string of islands and staging posts, a combination of seventeenth-century sugar colonies and the spoils of wars with European rivals, China, and other non-European cultures. And finally, Empire was the ‘dependent’ territories acquired largely in the last decades of the nineteenth century.” John M. McKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester/ New York: Manchester UP, 1984) 1. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xvi holds true for the far-reaching cultural and economic transformations that have occurred in the wake of 9/ 11 which the great majority of people do not experience in any direct fashion and which therefore have to be comprehended indirectly, via metaphor: 16 “we tend to structure the less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts […] in terms of more concrete concepts, which are more clearly delineated in our experience.” 17 Metaphors allow people to understand the somewhat abstract and elusive domains of politics and economics in terms of much more concrete and familiar domains of experience like illness. Moreover, metaphors for cultural phenomena are themselves subject to both cultural variation and historical change. There is arguably more than just fashion in the changing use of metaphors, however. Just as metaphors have an underlying logic in their own right, the changing preference for certain dominant metaphors (what Blumenberg has called ‘Leitmetaphern’) also - at least for those who have the privilege of the benefit of hindsight - displays a certain degree of logic. The images that form the source domain of such metaphors do not arise out of nowhere and do not by mere chance suddenly become favoured suppliers of schemas to be mapped onto important target domains. It shows that their choice is linked to changes of culture at large and in particular in technology, social formations, and practices. This aspect has so far not received sufficient attention and needs to be studied in detail to learn more about the interdependence between cultural changes and the changes of central metaphors. What metaphors that shape culture and theory have in common is not only that they serve to structure how we understand and interpret the respective target domain, but also that they do this cultural work in a more or less systematic way, foregrounding particular aspects while masking others. By virtue of their more or less coherent entailments, metaphorical concepts provide a systematic way of talking about and making sense of cultural phenomena. Lakoff and Johnson (chapter 2) have emphasized what they call the “systematicity of metaphorical concepts” 18 and have spelled out its implications: “The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another […] will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor.” 19 Metaphors “form coherent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experience” 20 - and cultural phenomena 16 Lakoff and Johnson 85. 17 Lakoff and Johnson 112. 18 Lakoff and Johnson 7. 19 Lakoff and Johnson 10. 20 Lakoff and Johnson 41. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xvii and theories, one might add. Highlighting certain aspects while hiding or even repressing others, metaphors serve as both sense-making devices and as “‘strategies of containment’ whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.“ 21 Far from being mere poetical or rhetorical embellishments, metaphors arguably play an essential and constitutive role in shaping the structure(s) of both cultural phenomena and theories. One might even go so far as to argue that they create the very realities they purport merely to describe: 22 “changes in our conceptual systems do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.” 23 Offering ways of organizing complex experiences and cultural processes into structured wholes, 24 metaphorical concepts like evolution, improvement, or progress “not only provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others,” 25 they are also capable of giving people a new understanding of the respective target domain, playing “a very significant role in determining what is real for us.” 26 As the articles in this volume serve to show, metaphors are never a completely disinterested or neutral way of viewing reality, but always function as important structuring and sense-making devices that serve to structure, explain, and evaluate cultural phenomena. Although it is well-known by now that metaphors are not restricted to poetry or literature, the study of metaphors used to belong to the domain of literary studies, which regarded metaphors as a purely literary phenomenon. The interest that linguists have displayed in metaphors and the rise of cognitive metaphor theory, however, have ushered in new phases in the study of metaphors, which have in recent years become a subject of interdisciplinary interest. In their concise introduction to what is a particularly useful and rich collection of articles on recent approaches to metaphor, Monika Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman (1999) provide a very good overview of the several sea changes that metaphor theory has undergone in the course of the 20 th century. These changes have not only alerted us to the ubiquity and pervasive importance of metaphors in culture at large, but they have also highlighted “the intrinsic linkage between linguistic processes in general and the more specifically literary instances of them.” 27 Moreover, according to cognitive metaphor theory, 21 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; London: Methuen, 1983) 10. 22 Lakoff and Johnson 145, 156. 23 Lakoff and Johnson 145-46. 24 Lakoff and Johnson 81. 25 Lakoff and Johnson 139. 26 Lakoff and Johnson 146. 27 Monika Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman, “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 384-85. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xviii [l]anguage is generated as a result of general cognitive processes which [...] are characterized by specific principles that constrain mappings across mental spaces. Cognitive metaphor theory is therefore a radical version of constructivism and subsumes linguistic expression under more general conceptual and behavioural parameters. 28 Working with the processual meta-metaphor of mapping, cognitive approaches attempt to explore how a source domain is mapped or projected onto a given target domain. Cognitive metaphor theory has alerted us both to the ubiquity of metaphors and to the central role they play in our conceptual systems, affecting as they do the ways in which we perceive, think, and act. Cognitive metaphor theory conceptualizes what is involved in the complex processes of metaphoric projection in terms of ‘blending’ or ‘conceptual integration.’ 29 Foregrounding the mapping process and exploring how the source domain is mapped onto the target domain, cognitive approaches characterize metaphoric blending processes as a ‘mechanism of creativity: ’ 30 Image-schematic projection creates a new virtual realm, the blend, which is no longer subordinate to either the source (vehicle) or the tenor (target) but instead creates emergent structure that exists neither in the source nor the target domains. 31 This model not only takes into consideration the fact that people draw on their pre-existing cultural knowledge when they use or process metaphors, but it also demonstrates that metaphoric projection is anything but a onesided, uni-directional affair. On the contrary, what is involved is a process of mutual integration of two distinct conceptual domains. In the present case, both the personal sphere of illness and the political and economic sphere of wide-ranging changes and transformations are projected into the blended space, which, while bringing together salient features of the two knowledge domains involved, “exactly resembles none of them […]. This selective borrowing, or rather, projection, is not merely compositional - instead, there is 28 Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 393, 385. 29 It is, of course, beyond the scope of the present paper to present a detailed account of cognitive metaphor theory or of the conceptual integration network theory. For a brief introduction, see Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 387-92, Turner and Fauconnier; for comprehensive accounts, see Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994); Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks,” Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 133- 87; Mark Turner, Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1996). 30 See Turner and Fauconnier. 31 Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 387. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xix new meaning in the blend that is not a composition of meanings that can be found in the inputs.” 32 Another thing that cognitive metaphor theory has taught us is that metaphoric projections involve much more than just feature mappings, i.e. individual correspondences between the source domain and the target domain: “It has long been recognized that metaphor often involves more than simple feature correspondences, that the correspondences between target and source can be systematic.” 33 One reason for the great attraction that metaphors of crises and catastrophes had for the language of popular imperialism may be that they not only tend to map multiple features, but also preserve the relations and hierarchies, between those features. Moreover, family metaphors entail a wide range of cultural implications, including ethical norms and values. Acknowledging the great importance of such a cognitive turn in the theory of metaphors, we will argue that metaphors should first and foremost be conceptualized as a cultural phenomenon. We would thus like to call for a “second fundamental paradigm shift, one toward greater historicity and cultural awareness” 34 and make some modest proposals for historicizing cognitive metaphor theory and for exploring metaphors as a culturally determined attempt to account for complex cultural and theoretical transformations. 35 Even though the cultural genesis and variability of conceptual metaphors has in general been recognized, 36 most theorists, viewing mapping primarily as a cognitive phenomenon, have not bothered to explore the cultural implications and ideological functions that may be involved in metaphorical projections. In a pioneering article, Philip Eubanks has provided important steps towards closing the gap between cognitive approaches and the cultural underpinnings of conceptual metaphors: “Because metaphors are always uttered by historically and culturally situated speakers, metaphoric mappings are subordinate to the speakers’ political, philosophical, social, and individual commitments.” 37 32 Turner and Fauconnier 398. 33 Eubanks 429-30. 34 Bruno Zerweck, “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability in Narrative Fiction as Reflection of Cultural Discourses,” Style 35.1 (2001): 151. 35 For a more detailed account of how cognitive metaphor theory might be historicized, see Ansgar Nünning, “Metaphors the British Thought, Felt and Ruled By, or: Modest Proposals for Historicizing Cognitive Metaphor Theory and for Exploring Metaphors of Empire as a Cultural Phenomenon,” eds. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning, Literature and Linguistics: Approaches, Models, and Applications: Studies in Honour of Jon Erickson (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002) 101-27. 36 See e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 142, 146. 37 Eubanks 419. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xx One might go even further than that and suggest that, since metaphors are deeply entrenched in the cultural discourses of their age, the study of metaphors can give us insight into those habits and structures of thought, feeling, and ideas that Foucault christened the episteme and that is the object of the history of mentalities. Moreover, metaphor studies would arguably stand to gain by cross-disciplinary interaction between cognitive linguistics, literary theory, and cultural history. Cognitive metaphor theory, literary studies, and cultural history, despite their contrary theoretical and methodological assumptions, are not as incompatible as is suggested by the fact that their respective practitioners tend to ignore each other’s work. The findings of cognitive linguistics or cognitive metaphor theory, literary theory, and cultural history can illuminate each other’s understanding of the use and functions of metaphors. 38 Such an alliance could open up productive new possibilities for the analysis of both the relationship between metaphors and their cultural contexts, and the cultural implications and functions of metaphors. In addition, such an alliance promises to throw new light on the actual use and functions of metaphors. Or to put it in a nutshell, the more conscious of conceptual metaphors literary and cultural history becomes and the more historically and culturally orientated cognitive metaphor theory becomes, the better for both. 39 III Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory: A Selective Historical Overview For all it is worth, cognitive metaphor theory remains largely fictitious as long as it is not linked to empirical evidence, in this case actual examples of metaphors placed in their textual and cultural context, and all such examples will be historical, no matter whether encountered yesterday or found in source material several centuries old. Led by our own needs, we may well be most interested in the metaphors that shape the culture we live in and the kind of theory we presently hold to be the most powerful, but to investigate these tends to be rather difficult because - as George Lakoff and Mark Turner have pointed out - it are precisely such “basic” metaphors “whose use is conventional, unconscious, automatic, and typically unnoticed.” 40 Regarding the metaphors underlying our most deeply entrenched convictions we are in the same helpless position as we are in regarding the mythical part of our world view, or, as Roland Barthes has demonstrated, as “users” of a myth we 38 Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 388. 39 See Hunt, who argues that “the more cultural historical studies become and the more historical cultural studies become, the better for both.” Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkley: U of California P, 1989) 22. 40 Lakoff and Turner 80. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xxi have no Archimedean point from which to study that myth as “mythologists” as long as we are inside that myth. 41 In order to be able to investigate how and to which extent “basic” or central metaphors are not only created by but also shape culture and theory we therefore better choose examples which allow for the amount of distance that is necessary for a somewhat sober analysis. Such a distance can, of course, also be guaranteed on a synchronic level by reverting to examples from a quite different, foreign culture but in this volume we decided to focus on casestudies from the history of our own Western culture because they may still tell us something about our present cultural condition. The study of metaphors that held a certain position in Western culture is, of course, not altogether new. It was begun in a more serious way by Ernst Robert Curtius in terms of an investigation of “historical metaphors” of which he gave an impressive example in his history of the book as metaphor and symbol, 42 was further developed in studies like M. H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and supplied with a sophisticated theoretical foundation by Hans Blumenberg in his Paradigmen einer Metaphorologie (1960). Blumenberg’s aim was to free at least some metaphors from their traditional assessment of being merely intermediate stages in the progress from mythos to logos, stages which had to give way to more concise concepts - an aim he reached by showing that even in philosophical language there are metaphors that are “absolute” in the sense that they can never be replaced by concepts. On the other hand, such “absolute metaphors” nevertheless have a history because they can be substituted by other metaphors and what “metaphorology” investigates is the “substructure of thought” that gives testimony of “the courage with which the spirit is ahead of itself in its images and how it projects its history in this courage to work by conjecture.” 43 What will become apparent in the case histories is that metaphors of this kind are not only results but also constitutive elements of our worldmaking, our notion of what are legitimate ways to truth, and our philosophical reflection on both, so that their history is a genuine part of cultural history, the history of science and learning, as well as the history of philosophical thought. At the same time such metaphors are only one determinant among others of the world view, knowledge structure, and theory dominant during a particular period in a particular region, and they therefore have to be investigated in that wider context if we want to get beyond a description of their mere factuality or seeming contingency. That one can indeed get beyond this 41 See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seize, 1957). 42 Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948) chapter 16. 43 Hans Blumenberg, “Einleitung,” Paradigma einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1962) (our translation). A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xxii stage regarding the interdependence between central metaphors and culture (or theory respectively), is borne by more than a few contributions to this volume. As already mentioned earlier, it shows that the changes of central metaphors are closely linked to cultural changes. What is further revealed by the supplied casehistories is that the theoretical distinction Lakoff and Turner make between “image metaphors” that “map rich mental images onto other rich mental images” and “conceptual metaphors” that merely map the conceptual structures taken from “imageschemas” onto other conceptual structures, is not sufficient to describe what actually happens in the case of metaphors shaping culture and theory. For it shows that the metaphors that gained a central position generally have a source domain that consists of a “rich mental image” from which not one but several “image-schemas” or conceptual structures can be derived and mapped onto other target concepts, which means that the image serving as source domain can be made to function in several ways. Take as an example the modern and postmodern career of the ‘net’ of which a more detailed account is given in this volume by Alexander Friedrich. In the traditional discourse of religion we will find it used as an instrument to slyly catch a victim and we have to watch out that the devil will not catch us in his net just as a spider catches a fly. For the circus artists on the flying trapeze, however, the net spread out beneath them is meant to be life-saving, just as the social net will be for those who cannot sustain themselves. With the advent of electricity, the net has also come to indicate that the electrical current can be transported to any number of destinations, spread out so to say - in an inverse relation to a river net consisting of many brooks and rivulets all flowing into the same stream. Then with the telephone, the net came to signify an interconnection of a host of participants in such a way that messages could travel in either direction, and subsequently it became invisible not only with radio and television but also with radio telephone and finally the internet. In all these cases the source domain is the image of a concrete net, yet the image-schemas or conceptual structures derived from it and subsequently mapped onto other target domains are quite different. It is not hard to see that it is exactly this feature that has made it possible for the ‘net’ to gain such an important position in more recent culture. This shows that a closer examination of the role of metaphors that have gained such a position in the culture or theory of the past or more recent times is not only illustrative. It confirms our view that the many casestudies included in this volume are important because they may well instigate a revision and further development of metaphor theory. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xxiii IV Why Metaphors Matter: On the Value of Metaphor Theory for the Study of Culture We should like to conclude by providing a brief assessment of the value that a cultural and historical analysis of metaphors may have for the study of culture, the history of mentalities, and for theories of culture. A reconsidered notion of metaphors which takes into consideration their cultural implications and historical contexts can indeed “help to explain the cultural motivations of metaphoric mappings” 44 and to “develop a richer account of conceptual metaphor as a cultural phenomenon.” 45 In contrast to the primarily synchronic and ahistorical account of conceptual metaphors which has so far predominated in cognitive metaphor theory, 46 a historicized and cultural approach to metaphors can throw new light on “how [...] metaphors operate concretely in the communicative world,” revealing “not just mental processes but also something of our culture.” 47 As the articles in this volume will hopefully serve to show, metaphors are very much a cultural and historical phenomenon, since they are inflected by the cultural, political, and social discourses of the period they originate from as well as by theoretical and ideological commitments of the people who use them. Moreover, a cultural investigation of the nature and functions of metaphors belies the idea that metaphors are merely ornamental or literary devices rather than inferential, creative, and constitutive ones. While purporting merely to represent their respective target domains, metaphors arguably shape the prevailing view of cultural phenomena and of theories. One might even go so far as to argue that they serve to construct cultural models and theories. They not only popularize certain values, biases, and epistemological habits, they also provide agreed-upon codes of understanding and cultural traditions of looking at the world, forging a widespread consensus by drawing upon culturally rooted views and values. Working simultaneously on different cognitive, emotional, ethical, normative, and ideological levels, metaphors of crises and catastrophes should thus be seen as a productive medium or ‘mechanism of creativity’ 48 that has played an active role in the generation of both many theories and the cultural fictions that we live, think, and feel by. Metaphors have also served as means of structuring, narrativizing, and naturalizing cultural transformations which defy direct observation and experience. Shaping habits of thought, popular feeling, and people’s views of the present and the past, metaphors have 44 Eubanks 421. 45 Eubanks 420. 46 See Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner. 47 Eubanks 421. 48 See Turner and Fauconnier. A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xxiv played, and continue to play, an important part in shaping mentalities and worldviews because they have served to organize the conceptual and emotional realities and conditioned the way in which people perceive, emotionally experience, and evaluate cultural phenomena. If Umberto Eco’s hypothesis that the “success of a metaphor is a function of the socio-cultural format of the interpreting subjects’ encyclopedia” 49 is valid, then it is anything but a coincidence which metaphors gain particular popularity in a given culture. For the history of mentalities, the cultural historian and the history of science, metaphors prove to be a very fertile source of evidence. They are of real interest to the cultural historian because they shed light on how cultural phenomena and transformations are perceived, understood, and discursively constructed, how they are given shape and meaning. The significance of metaphors for the history of mentalities and of science is in the light they throw on the habits of thought, the attitudes, and the values that inform a given culture. Moreover, they also illuminate how societies collectively deal with and account for culture and how interpretive communities (sensu Stanley Fish) conceive of their objects, methods, and theories. The articles in this volume support the hypothesis that metaphors embody what Elizabeth Ermarth in a different context has called “the collective awareness of a culture.” 50 By giving shape and meaning to cultural transformations, metaphors can even construct an important “article of collective cultural faith.” 51 In sum, we hope that this volume will serve to show that anyone interested in the study of culture and in the underlying assumptions and structures of theories would profit a great deal from taking the study of metaphors into consideration, just as the study of literature and culture might in turn profit from taking into account research in cognitive metaphor theory, Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, and other branches of metaphor studies. Taking a fresh look at the insights of cognitive metaphor theory and historicizing the models and categories it has developed could be an important force in the current attempts to enrich the linguistic and literary study of metaphors in the framework of cultural history and to explore the role that metaphors play as cognitive instruments which impose structures and stories onto cultures and theories. In order to reassess the changing cultural functions that metaphors have fulfilled, it is worth looking more closely at the role of such discursive processes as metaphoric mappings in determining the perception and construction of cultural phenomena and theories. 49 Umberto Eco, “The Scandal of Metaphor: Metaphorology and Semiotics,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 254. 50 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840-1895 (London/ New York: Routledge, 1997) 89. 51 Ermarth 122. Metaphors as a Way of Worldmaking xxv Cultural historians and theorists would therefore arguably be well advised to intrepidly rush in where linguists, literary critics, and most traditional historians usually fear to tread. Whether or not they would be fools in doing so may be an open question, but the fascinating area where language, literature, culture, and the history of mentalities meet is simply too important to be neglected, and cultural studies and the German variant of the study of culture known as ‘Kulturwissenschaft(en)’ 52 can only continue to ignore this crucial interface at their own peril. These concluding suggestions are not, however, meant to be the last word on any of these complex issues, but rather should be seen as modest proposals for a reconceptualization of the central role that metaphors have always played and continue to play in man’s attempt at world-making and in shaping our cultures and theories. 52 Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, eds., Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften: Theoretische Grundlagen - Ansätze - Perspektiven (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008). A NSGAR N ÜNNING , H ERBERT G RABES & S IBYLLE B AUMBACH xxvi Works Cited Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London/ New York: Oxford UP, 1953. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seize, 1957. Bergem, Wolfgang, Lothar Bluhm, and Friedhelm Marx, eds. Metapher und Modell: Ein Wuppertaler Kolloquium zu literarischen und wissenschaftlichen Formen der Wirklichkeitskonstruktion. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996. Blumenberg, Hans. 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Zill, Rüdiger. “Wie die Vernunft es macht: Die Arbeit der Metapher im Prozeß der Zivilisation.” Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg. Eds. Franz Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. 164-83. ---. “‘Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg.” Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. 209-58. I. T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORKS — W HERE M ETAPHORS AND C ULTURE M EET Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES Metaphor and Culture 1 I Culture as Meaning My goal in this essay is to examine some of the aspects of the relationship between metaphor and culture. In order to be able to do this, we have to be clear about what is meant by metaphor, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. Since my idea of metaphor is a particular version of the view proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, 2 and I am assuming some familiarity with their basic notions, I will not describe the theory at the beginning of this article. Some of the main ways in which my views concerning metaphor are different from theirs can be found in Metaphor in Culture 3 and the revised edition of my introductory text, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 4 However, some of these differences between their view and mine will become clear by the end of the article. But it is also essential that we have a clear understanding of what we mean by the concept of culture in the humanities and in the study of culture and society for the purposes of this essay. A good way of leading into this issue is to ask: What kind of work are we engaged in in the study of languages, literatures, and cultures? In the study of, say, English literature, we make sense of literary texts; in cultural studies, we interpret various kinds of cultural experience; in historical linguistics, we study the evolution of meaning; in FLT (foreign language teaching), we try to find the most efficient ways of acquiring meaning in a foreign language; in translation studies, we seek to understand how meaning is rendered in another language, and so on and so forth. Is there a unified way of handling such a diverse set of activities? Or to put the question differently, can we approach this diverse range of topics from a more unified perspective than is traditionally done and currently 1 I am grateful to Greta Olson and Daniel Casasanto for their helpful comments on this essay. Needless to say, all remaining errors or misconceptions are my responsibility. 2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). 3 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005). 4 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002; New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 4 available? I believe this is possible if we recognize that in all of these activities, we are engaged in what I will call “meaning making.” 5 The relationship between culture and language can be dealt with if we assume that both culture and language are about making meaning. This view of culture comes closest to that proposed by Clifford Geertz, who wrote: Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. 6 In this spirit, I suggest that we approach both culture and language as “webs of significance” that people both create and understand. The challenge is to see how they are created and understood—often in multiple and alternative ways. It is important to understand that I use Geertz’s idea for his emphasis on culture-as-webs-of-significance that makes it possible to think of culture as a non-monolithic social construction, and not because I necessarily agree with the entire theoretical baggage that comes with his theory. For example, Geertz did not, and obviously could not, have the sophisticated theory of meaning-making that we have today. The cognitive linguistic enterprise that started in the early 1980s provides exactly the apparatus with which we can describe how we make meaning. 7 Further, I do not accept the Geertzian idea that the analysis of culture cannot be an “experimental science.” Clearly, it can be (and should be), as demonstrated below. We have a culture when a group of people living in a social, historical, and physical environment makes sense of their experiences in a more or less unified manner. This means, for example, that they understand what other people say, they identify objects and events in similar ways, they find or do not find behaviour appropriate in certain situations, they create objects, texts, and discourses that other members of the group find meaningful, and so forth. In all of these and innumerable other cases, we have meaning-making in some form: not only in the sense of producing and understanding language but also in the sense of correctly identifying things, finding behaviour acceptable or unacceptable, being able to follow a conversation, being able to generate meaningful objects and behaviour for others in the group, and so forth. Meaning-making is a cooperative enterprise (linguistic or otherwise) that always takes place in a large set of contexts (ranging from immediate to background) and that occurs with varying degrees of success. People who can successfully participate in this kind of meaning-making can be said to belong to the same culture. Spectacular cases of unsuccessful participation in joint meaning making are called ‘culture shock.’ 5 Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford UP, 2006). 6 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 5. 7 For a summary see Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture. Metaphor and Culture 5 II Brain / Mind, Meaning, and Culture What is required for meaning-making? The main meaning-making organ is the brain/ mind. The brain (and the nervous system in general) is the organ that performs the many cognitive operations that are needed for making sense of experience. These include categorization, figure-ground alignment, framing knowledge, metaphorical and metonymic understanding, conceptual integration, and several others. Cognitive linguists and cognitive scientists in general are in the business of describing these operations. Cognitive linguists believe that the same cognitive operations that human beings use for making sense of experience in general are also used for making sense of language. In the past half century, two general trends can be distinguished in the study of the human meaning-making apparatus. What is called the ‘first cognitive revolution’ is epitomized by Noam Chomsky’s work and is largely based on the ‘computer metaphor’ of the mind. By contrast, the ‘second cognitive revolution,’ which started in the late 1960s and early 70s, adopted the ‘embodiment premise.’ In the latter approach, the mind was seen as resulting from characteristics of the human body and its interaction with the environment. Very clear differences have emerged between what we can term “an objectivist view of the world” and what Lakoff and Johnson describe as “an experientialist view.” 8 In the objectivist view, thought is independent of the body. Thus, the mind is transcendent, in that it goes beyond the body. Thought is also abstract; it consists of the manipulation of abstract symbols. The mind is like an abstract machine, on the analogy of a computer that manipulates abstract symbols, where the mind is the software and the body (brain) is the hardware. As regards language, the question arises: Should we think of it as highly structured form, especially syntactic form, or as meaning and conceptualization? Is grammar best conceived as a structured set of forms, as in the syntactic rules of the Chomskyan kind, or as form that only serves the purpose of conveying our conceptualized knowledge of the world? Is language essentially the manipulation of abstract symbols, analogous to a computer, or is it predominantly a process devoted to the conceptualization and communication of meaning? In short, is language mostly a matter of form or that of meaning and conceptualization? Furthermore, we can ask: What is meaning? Can we define meaning in terms of truth conditions for the application of particular forms (e.g. words, sentences)? Do we know the meaning of the word snow or tree because we know the conditions on which the use of these words depends? Is there a 8 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 6 checklist of features that we need to know if we want to use words and larger groups of forms in an appropriate way? Or, alternatively, can we identify meaning with the concepts we have in our conceptual system? In this case, the issue becomes how our knowledge that forms the basis of concepts is represented in the mind. And then there is the even deeper question of how the forms (linguistic or otherwise) that we use become meaningful. Given a form (a sign), how does its meaning arise? Even more generally, we can ask how language acquires meaning. Is meaningfulness a matter of convention and reference (this sign will refer to this object, event, etc.), or something else? Is it conceivable, for example, that the human body plays a role in making forms and signs meaningful? In objectivist philosophy, meaning is a correspondence between symbols and things/ events in the world (or, more precisely, between symbols and elements in sets). Meaning can be defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Take the word square. It can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. For something to be a square, it has to be characterized by four equal sides and four equal angles. If any of these features is absent, the thing is not a square. In addition, symbols become meaningful because of their conventional connections to things and events that make up the world. By contrast, in experientialist philosophy meanings are conceptual categories that are defined by a central member of a category - an abstract conceptual prototype. 9 Further, in this view, symbols become meaningful as a result of our embodied experiences. Take the simple example of the concept of ‘tree’ and let us see what makes this concept meaningful for us. Among other things, certain image schemas play an important role in this. We conceptualize trees as ‘tall’ and ‘vertical’ because of certain embodied experiences; namely, that the human body has an average height with respect to which trees can be said to be tall and that its prototypical position is perpendicular to the surface of the earth. We make use of such image schemas in our understanding of what trees are. Thus, meaning partially derives from embodiment, and thought that uses such conceptual categories can be said to be embodied. In this view, then, we can take culture to be a large set of meanings shared by a group of people. To be a member of a culture means to have the ability to make meaning with other people. This requires, of course, for people to have the organ of meaning-making, the brain, the cognitive processes of meaning-making, the body that makes linguistic and non-linguistic signs meaningful and that imbues with meaning all objects and events that are not signs themselves (e.g. a tree that we conceptualize as being vertical and tall), 9 See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy; Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture. Metaphor and Culture 7 and the physical and social environment in which the brain and the body jointly evolve. Particular cultures consist of the particular meaning-making processes that a group of people employs and the particular sets of meanings produced by them; in other words, a particular conceptual system. The meaning-making organs of the body and brain are shared universally and thus they do not belong to particular cultures. They are thus responsible for universal meanings — meanings shared by all groups of people (though universal meanings always have culture-specific aspects to them). However, as objects, or targets of conceptualization, both the body and the brain may be imbued with culture-specific meanings in particular cultures. As noted above, a key component of meaning-making is the physical and social environment. Cultures differ considerably relative to their physical and social environment. What this means in our terms is that the environment contributes a large portion of the meanings that members of groups use to understand other aspects of their world. This influence of the environment is most obvious in metaphorical conceptualization. 10 Also in this view, language can be regarded as a repository of meanings shared by members of a culture. This lends language a historical role in stabilizing and preserving a culture—due, in part, to linguistic relativity, the notion that language shapes thought. Language is thus a part of culture because it gives us clues for meaning. At the same time, however, language often under-determines interpretation; we create particular meanings (construals) in and by means of context (in other cases, particular construals are explicitly indicated by language). In the course of their interaction for particular purposes, members of a culture produce particular discourses. Such discourses can be thought of as particular assemblies of meanings concerning particular subject matters. When discourses provide a particular perspective on especially significant subject matters in a culture and when they function as latent norms of conduct, the discourses can be regarded as ideologies, 11 which may have an impact on other discourses within the culture. Discourse in this sense is another source of making meaning. A large part of socialization involves the learning of how to make meaning in a culture. In sum, the view of culture as a system of meanings involves considerable variance among systems - both across and within cultures. We will see some examples for this claim in relation to metaphor in the remainder of the essay. 10 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. 11 See e.g. Jonathan Charteris-Black, Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Andreas Musolff, Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates About Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 8 III Imaginative Reason Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of human reason in the experientialist view of the world is that it is imaginative. What this entails is that we can conceptualize the world in alternative ways. As was suggested above, language is structured by the same principles of operation as other modalities of the mind. However, these cognitive operations are not put to use in a universally similar manner; that is, there can be differences in which cognitive operations are used to make sense of some experience in preference to another and there can be differences in the degree to which particular operations are utilized in cultures. This leads to what is called “alternative construal,” as developed by Ronald Langacker in cognitive linguistics. 12 Alternative construal is simply the understanding of the “same” situation in multiple ways (e.g. by applying different cognitive mechanisms to the situation, such as metaphor versus metonymy). Moreover, the minds that evolve ‘on brains’ in particular cultures are shaped by the various contexts (historical, physical, discourse, etc.) that in part constitute cultures. 13 This leads to alternative conceptual systems. Two of the most obvious cognitive operations that can give rise to alternative construals of the world and alternative conceptual systems are framing and metaphor. Frames have to do with how we represent knowledge in the mind. Categories that encapsulate our knowledge of the world are mentally represented as “frames,” “schemas,” or “mental models”. 14 We can use the following working definition of frames: A frame is a structured mental representation of a coherent organization of human experience. Frames are important in the study of almost any facet of life and culture — and not just language. The world as we experience it is always the product of some prior categorization and framing by ourselves and others. A crucial aspect of framing is that different individuals can interpret the ‘same’ reality in different ways. This is the idea of ‘alternative construal’ mentioned above. Thus, meaning is relative to how we frame experience. If I say, “I paid five dollars for the drink,” I take the perspective of the buyer, but if I say, “I sold the drink for five dollars,” I take the perspective of the seller. 15 Different people can frame the same event in different ways, depending on their perspec- 12 See Ronald Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987). 13 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. 14 Robert Schank and Robert Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977); Charles Fillmore, “Frame Semantics,” Linguistics in the Morning Calm (Seoul: Hanshin Publishing, 1982) 111-37; Ronald Langacker, Foundations; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 15 See Fillmore. Metaphor and Culture 9 tive. In other words, meaning is not simply a matter of conceptual content, it is equally a matter of how we construe some conceptual content. Now there can be differences across and even within cultures in the use of this meaning-making device. An interesting example is provided by a study by Glick 16 conducted among the Kpelle of Liberia. Kpelle farmers consistently sorted objects into functional groups (such as knife and orange; potato and hoe), rather than into conceptual categories (such as orange and potato; knife and hoe). The former is what we would call ‘frame-based categorization,’ whereas the latter is ‘similarity-based one.’ On the whole, Westerners prefer to categorize objects based on similarity. When Glick asked the Kpelle how a fool would categorize the objects, they came up with such neat similarity-based piles. Clearly, cultures can differ in the use of meaning-making devices, and these differences may produce differences in the use of categories and language in general. Many of our most elementary experiences are universal. Being in a container, walking along a path, resisting some physical force, being in the dark, and so forth, are universal experiences that lead to ‘image schemas’ of various kinds. 17 The resulting image schemas (‘container,’ ‘source-path-goal,’ ‘force,’ etc.) provide meaning for much of our experience either directly or indirectly in the form of ‘conceptual metaphors.’ Conceptual metaphors may also receive their motivation from certain correlations in experience, when, for instance, people see correlations between two events (such as adding to the content of a container and the level of the substance rising), leading to the metaphor MORE IS UP . 18 When meaning-making is based on such elementary human experiences, the result may be (near-)universal meaning (content) — though under a particular interpretation (construal), that is, conceived of “in a certain manner,” to use Hoyt Alverson’s phrase. 19 The cognitive linguistic view of metaphor 20 that uses ‘primary metaphors’ as its fundamental construct assumes that primary metaphors are based on correlations in bodily experience and, hence, that these metaphors are embodied. 21 Since embodiment such as the correlation between amount and verticality, purposes and destinations, similarity and closeness, anger and 16 Joseph Glick, ”Cognitive Development in Cross-Cultural Perspective,“ Review of Child Development Research, ed. Frances Degen Horowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 595- 654. 17 See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987); Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 18 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors. 19 Hoyt Alverson, ”Metaphor and Experience: Looking Over the Notion of Image Schema,“ Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 97. 20 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors; Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 21 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 10 heat, and the like, characterizes all human beings, the corresponding primary metaphors will be, or at least can potentially be, universal. In this view, nonuniversal aspects of metaphor are accounted for by the various ways in which primary metaphors are put together in different cultures to form “complex metaphors.” The main focus of research is, however, on universal aspects of metaphor. By contrast, another line of research within the cognitive linguistic paradigm takes as its point of departure the huge amount of variation we can find in metaphor, and places a great deal of emphasis on the attempt to account for such variation. As I have observed, the major driving force behind variation is context. 22 This is defined by a variety of contextual factors, such as differences in key concepts in a culture, in history, and in the environment. Thus, given conceptual metaphor theory, it appears that we can have two research interests, one primarily concerned with universality and another primarily concerned with variation. Taking into account the causes of universality and variation, we get two general lines of research: Embodiment - Universality Context - Variation In Metaphor in Culture, I made an attempt to reconcile the two programs by making the claim that when we comprehend something metaphorically in particular situations, we are under two kinds of pressure: the pressure of our embodiment and the pressure of context. I called this double pressure the “pressure of coherence,” that is, metaphorical conceptualizers trying to be coherent with both their bodies (i.e. correlations in bodily experience) and their contexts (i.e. various contextual factors), where the body and context function as, sometimes conflicting, forms of constraint on conceptualization. (This use of the word ‘pressure’ is not to be confused with the concept of ‘pressure’ as used, for example, in the conceptual metaphor ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER , to be discussed below.) IV Experientialism and Postmodernism Clearly, the idea of alternative construal and alternative conceptual systems is compatible with several postmodernist ideas about the nature of meaning. Most obviously, the cognitive linguistic (i.e. experientialist) idea of alternativity in understanding the world is similar to a social-constructionist and relativistic attitude in postmodernist-poststructuralist thought. The version of postmodernist thinking I specifically have in mind is the one that emphasizes the social construction of meaning, and the concomitant idea that if meanings 22 Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. Metaphor and Culture 11 are socially constructed, then they are also variable according to culture, history, ideological persuasion, and so on. In short, they are relative to context. However, an important feature of experientialism seems to be in conflict with the notion of both alternativity in conceptualization in experientialism and the relativism of postmodernism. Experientialist philosophy is based on experimental cognitive science. This means that experientialism tries to base itself on psychologically real aspects of the mind. Since experientialist philosophy is experimental philosophy, psychologically real, cognitively valid experimental results that point to universal and essentialist aspects of human cognition potentially weaken not only the thesis of alternativity proposed by cognitive linguists and some cognitive scientists but also the constructionist and relativistic features of meaning emphasized by postmodern theorizing. We can see one such challenge in some recent experimental work on embodiment as it relates to metaphor. A particularly powerful demonstration of the embodiment hypothesis can be found in cognitive psychologist Daniel Casasanto’s recent work on the mental representation of abstract concepts. 23 The idea is simple: If the particular bodies we have play a role in how we mentally represent abstract concepts and result in particular abstract concepts, then different bodies should result in different abstract concepts. Casasanto examined the GOOD IS RIGHT and BAD IS LEFT conceptual metaphors, exemplified in English by such phrases as “He is my right-hand man.” These conceptual metaphors seem to be universal. As Casasanto suggests, it is likely that the apparent universality of the association of good things with the right side comes from the predominance of right-handed people worldwide, who perform actions with their right hands more fluently than with their left hands. In one of the experiments he conducted, subjects were asked to draw a good animal (representing good things) in either of the boxes placed on the right and left side of a cartoon figure. (The experimental design was actually more complicated, but I am leaving out some of the details.) The subjects were instructed that the cartoon figure likes certain animals and thinks they are good, but does not like others and thinks they are bad. If the bodyspecificity idea of the embodiment hypothesis is correct, then right-handed people will place good animals in the box to the right of the cartoon figure, whereas left-handed people will place them in the opposite box. And if embodiment does not play a role in the mental representation of abstract concepts, then both rightand left-handers will place the good animals on the right-hand side of the figure because of the linguistic conventions found in 23 Daniel Casasanto, “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Rightand Left-handers,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 12 languages of the world (where good things are expressed as ‘right’ and bad ones as ‘left’). Sixty-seven percent of the right-handed participants put the good animals in the right-hand box and 74% of the left-handed ones in the box on the left of the cartoon character. In other words, the majority of both the rightand lefthanders performed the task consistently with their handedness: For the righthanders, good was right ( GOOD IS RIGHT ), whereas for the left-handers, good was left ( GOOD IS LEFT ). This result indicates that we conceptualize abstract concepts in body-specific ways. The embodiment hypothesis was thus confirmed. At the same time, however, the experimental results present a challenge both to the possibility of unlimited alternativity in conceptualization and, consequently, to that of unlimited social constructions. Such results appear to be more damaging to postmodernist views, though, than to the cognitive linguistic view of embodiment. The reason is that while postmodernist views embrace the idea of (at least potentially or theoretically) unlimited “ways of worldmaking,” in the cognitive linguistic approach ways of worldmaking are delimited by embodiment. Especially in the Lakoff-Johnson view, human thought and meaning emerge from embodied experience. 24 Cultural studies scholars might object that there is a huge amount of ‘cultural and historical baggage’ that comes with our Western conception of left and right and that this baggage is inseparable from (our conception of) the physical human body. But consider again how the experiment is set up. The two parts that the experiment attempts to separate make different predictions: Cultural experience should lead to GOOD being associated with RIGHT (conventional idioms in the English language and culture make this manifest) for both right-handers and left-handers (there are no idioms in English where GOOD is LEFT ), while physical experience should lead to GOOD associated with RIGHT in the case of right-handers and LEFT in the case of left-handers. If cultural experience is all-powerful, then both leftand right-handers should have associated GOOD with RIGHT and BAD with LEFT . But, as we have seen, for most left-handed people GOOD was LEFT . Thus, the result of the experiment clearly indicates, first, the separability of cultural experience from bodily experience and, second, that body-specificity leads to specificity in conceptualization. In other words, we have strong evidence for the embodied nature of thought. However, in some cognitive linguistic work embodiment is conceived somewhat mechanically; more specifically, along the lines that, given a particular target domain associated with a physical experience, that physical experience will mechanically determine which source domain is used to conceptualize the target domain. Several cognitive linguists have challenged this 24 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy. Metaphor and Culture 13 mechanical conception of embodiment. 25 Caroline Gevaert studied the historical development of the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor in great detail. 26 She found on the basis of a variety of corpora that heat-related words account for only 1.59% of all the words describing anger before 850. The number of heatrelated words for anger dramatically increases in the period between 850 and 950. Then the number of these words decreases between 950 and 1050 to 6.22% and then to 1.71% by around 1200, and then to 0.27% by around 1300. After 1300 the number starts growing again, and after 1400 it becomes dominant in texts that describe anger. These numbers indicate that the conceptualization of anger in terms of heat is not a permanent and ever-present feature of the concept of anger in English. How can this fluctuation occur in the conceptualization of anger over time? It cannot be the case that people’s physiology of anger changes every one hundred years or so. It is more plausible that universal physiology provides only a potential basis for metaphorical conceptualization — without mechanically constraining what the specific metaphors for anger will be. Heat was a major component in the concept of anger between 850 and 950, and then after a long decline it began to play a key role again at around 1400 — possibly as a result of the emergence of the humoral view of emotions in Europe. 27 We can notice the same kind of fluctuation in the use of the domain of ‘swelling,’ which corresponds to the ‘pressure’ component in the conceptualization of anger. Pressure was a major part of the conceptualization of anger until around 1300, but then it began to decline, only to emerge strongly again, together with heat, in the form of the HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER metaphor centuries later. In another publication, I referred to this phenomenon as ‘differential experiential focus,’ meaning that a particular abstract concept may have multiple bodily bases, such as body heat and pressure. 28 The general point is that universal embodiment associated with a target domain may consist of several distinct components, or of distinct aspects. The conceptual metaphors that emerge may be based on one component, or aspect, at a certain point of time and on another at another point of time. Which one is chosen depends on a variety of factors in the surrounding cultural context. Moreover, the conceptual metaphors may be based on one component, or aspect, in one culture, while on another component, or aspect, in another culture. 25 See Dirk Geeraerts and Stephan Grondelaers, ”Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns,“ Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, eds. John Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995) 153-80. 26 Caroline Gevaert, “The Anger Is Heat Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on the Conceptualization of Anger through Diachronic Corpus Analysis,” Perspectives on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative, eds. Nicole Delbacque, Johan Van der Auwera, and Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005) 195-208. 27 See Geeraerts and Grondelaers. 28 See Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 14 V Embodiment, Metaphor, Culture What then is the relationship among embodiment, metaphor, and culture? Mostly based on my research on emotions, 29 my suggestion has been that when people metaphorically conceptualize a conceptual domain in a situation, they are under the “pressure of coherence.” 30 What this means is that they are to obey two simultaneous pressures (or constraints): the pressure that derives from the human body and the pressure of the global and local context in which the conceptualization takes place. In successful cases of being coherent within the constraints of the two pressures, we can come up with conceptual metaphors that successfully answer both forms of pressure. Not surprisingly, such metaphors are well-known and deeply entrenched ones in a culture, such as the conceptual metaphor we have seen above: THE ANGRY PERSON IS A PRESSURIZED CONTAINER . What metaphors of this kind show is that very often we deal with what I elsewhere termed “body-based social constructionism.” 31 These are cases where both the body and the surrounding context play a motivating role in the emergence of the metaphor. In different languages and cultures, the details of this skeletal, generic-level metaphor motivated by universal bodily experience will be filled out in different ways. In some, the cause of the pressure comes from a heated fluid inside the container; in some the material that fills the container will not be fluid but gas; in some the container will be the stomach/ belly area and not the body as a whole, and so on. 32 In other words, we can find both universality and variation in the same metaphor. However, some conceptual metaphors will be cases of predominantly body-based metaphors. One of the best known conceptual metaphors in this group is KNOWING IS SEEING . The tight correlation between knowing, understanding, finding out something with being able to see it and examine it provides universal motivation for the existence of this metaphor. This does not have to mean that it actually exists in all languages and cultures or that there are no alternative conceptual metaphors that are available for the same purpose as this metaphor. As a third group, we can identify metaphors that have a predominantly cultural basis. Perhaps the most celebrated example here is the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY . 33 The metaphor results (mostly) from the (once? ) prevailing philosophy of capitalism that associates (and correlates) the profit 29 Zoltán Kövecses, Emotion Concepts (Berlin/ New York: Springer Verlag, 1990); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (2000; New York: Cambridge UP, 2003). 30 Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture 237. 31 See Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion 183. 32 See Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion and Metaphor in Culture. 33 See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors. Metaphor and Culture 15 one can make with the amount of time needed to make a product. Notice, however, as this view of production and the correlation it relies on is accepted, the motivational basis of the metaphor will also be expanded to bodily experience: Given that things work this way, we will find the correlation between these experiences entirely natural. In sum, then, we have a gradient of metaphors as based on bodily experience to cultural experience. We can summarize this as follows: Bodily basis : Body-based social constructionism: Cultural basis At some level of analysis and in some rare (but valuable) instances (such as the GOOD IS LEFT conceptual metaphor), we find body and culture separated (in that there are no conventional linguistic or cultural idioms to reflect this particular conceptualization). But, as I briefly indicated, there appear to be no ‘pure’ cases. Bodily basis is almost always tinged with some cultural influence and cultural basis always becomes ‘real,’ ‘natural’ bodily experience. To put it differently, we are dealing with a cline from cases where the body dominates and culture is less noticeable through cases where the body and culture are present in more or less equal proportions to cases where culture predominates over the body. In other words, body and culture work jointly at all stages of the cline - one being inseparable from the other. And when, as exceptional cases, we find them separable, we get wonderful evidence for their inseparability as a rule. Z OLTÁN K ÖVECSES 16 Works Cited Alverson, Hoyt. “Metaphor and Experience: Looking over the Notion of Image Schema.” Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Ed. James W. Fernandez. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 94-117. Casasanto, Daniel. “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Rightand Left- Handers.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Forthcoming. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Fillmore, Charles. “Frame semantics.” Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing, 1982. 111-37. Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stephan Grondelaers. “Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns.” Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. Eds. John Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995. 153-80. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gevaert, Caroline. “The Anger is Heat Question: Detecting Cultural Influence on the Conceptualization of Anger Through Diachronic Corpus Analysis.” Perspectives on Variation: Sociolinguistic, Historical, Comparative. Eds. Nicole Delbacque, Johan Van der Auwera, and Dirk Geeraerts. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 195-208. Glick, Joseph. “Cognitive Development in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Review of Child Development Research. Vol. 4. Ed. Francis Degen Horowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. 595-654. Goatly, Andrew. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Kövecses, Zoltán. Emotion Concepts. Berlin/ New York: Springer Verlag, 1990. ---. Metaphor and Emotion. 2000. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ---. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2002. New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming. ---. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. ---. Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. ---. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Langacker, Ronald. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Musolff, Andreas. Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates About Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schank, Robert, and Robert Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977. G RETA O LSON Metaphors and Cultural Transference: Mediating Cognitivist and Culturalist Approaches 1 This essay rests on the premise that the so-called ‘cognitive turn’ in metaphor research has changed the way literary and cultural studies scholars now deal with metaphors. By ‘cognitive turn,’ I refer to a series of widely accepted insights made by cognitive researchers that activities of the mind, specifically in this case the mapping of one concept or domain onto another, are integral to using metaphors in language. Quite obviously, this turn has brought with it some palpable benefits in terms of making readings of texts less anecdotal by offering a concrete, if implicit, model of cultural transference. Yet the wide acceptance of the cognitivist approach has been attended by several problems as well. The ‘cognitive turn’ causes theoretical discomfort to those who hold a material and historical view of culture and cultural variation because of its perceived determinism and essentialism. Moreover, the cognitivist approach to metaphor brings with it practical as well as philosophical difficulties. These concern in particular a reductionist approach to analyzing metaphors as well as the assumption of the primority of universal, somatic experiences. These problems more beset what I will call the ‘hard’ cognitive approach of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson than the more culturally relativist approach of Zoltán Kövecses in his most recent work. After enumerating problems involved in accounting for cultural and historical variation within the scope of cognitivist approaches, I will suggest a possibility for augmenting cognitivist metaphor theory with other approaches to metaphor. This amalgamated approach better accounts for individual, historical, and cultural variation in metaphor usage. Finally, I wish to voice some suggestions for how those working in literary and cultural studies may utilize insights from cognitive metaphor research while not adopting a simplistic view of metaphor. 1 I wish to express my gratitude to Sibylle Baumbach, Ansgar Nünning, and Herbert Grabes for their having provided a wonderful forum in which to think about the issues addressed here. My thanks also goes to Zoltán Kövecses for his sharing his essay for this volume prior to publication and for his gracious attempts to build bridges to those who work on metaphors outside of the cognitivist framework. G RETA O LSON 18 I Gains to Literary and Cultural Theory Through the ‘Cognitive Turn’ in Metaphor Research Cognitive metaphor studies have given cultural historians an effective set of tools with which to describe how ideas and images are transferred synchronically across fields of cultural production. A potentially invaluable tool, the conceptual theory of metaphor allows practitioners to describe with some specificity how cultural transference occurs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the adoption of the Lakoff-Johnson model of metaphor, which was initiated by the publication of their Metaphors We Live By in 1980, has been widespread if not universal. In hosting a session on metaphors for the International Association of Literary Semantics, Monika Fludernik reports in conversation that she had difficulties finding any literary scholars to speak on the subject of metaphor. The field has become dominated by the work of cognitive linguists. Similarly, a review of recent MLA publications and other databases shows that ‘conceptual metaphor’ or CMT is listed in the key words of the vast majority of publications on metaphor. Perhaps this trend has been caused by the perceived added value of conceptual metaphor theory. Arguably, the cognitive approach helps researchers to move beyond the employment of Foucauldian discourse analysis in which similarities are noted between texts and hypotheses are formulated about how such topoi contribute to existing power relations and the contemporaneous epoché. By contrast CMT suggests a model for how cultural transfer actually operates. An existing conceptual metaphor precedes its specific articulations in language and image. Once this metaphor can be located, finding its extensions and tracing their cultural and ideological implications appears to be a straightforward task. Furthermore, the cognitive theory of metaphor participates in the ‘cultural turn’ in literary scholarship. (And I promise the reader to avoid any more mention of turns.) I mean by this the move away from literary scholarship’s concerning the analysis of canonized print texts to its embracing the study of culture as a field of significations. Few of us in language departments now work solely on printed, literary works; our field has become as much about parsing the cultural ramifications of visual culture as locating conceits in metaphysical poems. We operate under the premise of a more generous definition of what the literary and the aesthetic is. Cognitive metaphor theory allows us then to deal with non-verbal texts. Whereas traditional metaphor theory dealt only with manifestations or ‘extensions’ of metaphors in language, cognitive theory allows us to likewise handle visual realizations of underlying metaphors. (Arguably, this application of conceptual metaphor research is still under-theorized, but the model implies this application.) The assumption is that the conceptual metaphor precedes its visual or verbal Metaphors and Cultural Transference 19 manifestations. Thus metaphorical overlaps and repetitions can be traced in both visual and verbal texts. By implementing conceptual metaphor theory in our analyses of visual and verbal texts, practitioners of cultural studies may avoid charges that our work is too anecdotal or associative. Metaphor theory gives us a concrete account of transference: one basic conceptual metaphor which rests on fundamental bodily or spatial experience is integrated into existing cultural models which are in turn likewise based on metaphor. Larger cultural patterns can thus be documented through noting the recurrence of metaphors and metonyms. Moreover, one can use one and the same vocabulary for metaphorical mappings to describe verbal and visual phenomena. This approach may work better than other trans-medial methods of conducting textual analysis. As a point of comparison, narratology - or the study of stories - developed out of the analysis of novels. Its application to other media or aesthetic phenomena has often been problematic, because narratology’s central terms were invented to deal with literary prose and prove to be unwieldy in descriptions of visual or aural texts. The vocabulary for metaphorization and blending is by contrast equally applicable to the visual and the verbal. Or, this has been my experience in using this theory to analyze verbal and visual manifestations of the metaphor CRIMINAL IS ANIMAL in a wide variety of texts. 2 II Problematic Aspects of Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory to Read Culture Yet the adoption of conceptual metaphor theory in literary and cultural studies entails difficulties and elicits resistance. Most centrally, resistance occurs due to what appear to be the de-historicizing and de-individualizing premises of conceptual metaphor theory. Such premises are anathema to an understanding of history and culture as being radically subject to variation and material influences. If I may presume to speak from the perspective of a collective we, many of us working within a culturally critical framework eschew essentialist statements about, for instance, the nature of men and women, differences between members of different nationalities, races, or ethnicities, or, indeed, about any supposed essentials of human behaviour. We do so with good reason. Deconstruction has taught us that categories thought to be the most basic exist only in relation to one another and do not pertain to some logos behind them. Binary concepts such as man and woman or pres- 2 Conceptual metaphors are commonly rendered using small caps. I adopt this practice here. For a further discussion, see my ‘Criminal Animals’ and the Rise of Positivist Criminology - From Shakespeare to Dickens (forthcoming). G RETA O LSON 20 ence and absence have been shown to lack any essential truth; their referentiality functions only in their relation to the complementary terms. Scholars as diverse as Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, and Edmund Leach have demonstrated that cultures are relative: truths about, for instance, the behaviour of men and women are valid only within the context of a given culture at a given time. Moreover, the writings of cultural theorists such as Althusser, Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Foucault have convinced us that power relations function - more often than not - invisibly. They are naturalized in art and science so that what seems ‘normal’ and ‘right’ is in fact the expression of existing hegemony. Thus cultural critics express a wariness of explanations of human behaviour that appear to be deterministic or essentializing, even if these theories, such as many of those being currently offered by neuroscientists, are backed up by empirical studies. The cultural critic may respond to the incontrovertible experimental data by pointing out that the natural sciences have quite frequently simply perpetuated the views of the society in which their breakthroughs arose. One remembers, for example, late 19 th -century experiments which unequivocally proved that blacks, women, criminals, and so-called primitives were mentally and developmentally inferior to their white European, male counterparts. This was demonstrated by accumulating the supposedly irrefutable evidence or measurements made of comparative brain or chin size, or of whatever objective standard happened to show that the perceived difference could be documented with hard physical ‘facts.’ For the cultural studies scholar the cognitive metaphor theory appears reductive as well as deterministic. First, it suggests that metaphor-making is the basis to all human sense-making experience; second, it argues that a certain limited number of conceptual metaphors are basic to all human experience. Thus universal concepts of ‘the’ human and of ‘the’ central human experiences are expostulated. Such postulations fail to account for variations according to gender, age, wealth, nationality, ethnicity, acculturation, etc. Moving beyond its implicitly deterministic concepts of human experience, the adaption of cognitive metaphor theory in cultural studies brings with it other difficulties. These are of a practical and a philosophical kind. On the practical level, a plethora of cultural phenomena has to be extrapolated from the basis of only a few spatial and bodily schemata, which are presumably primary. Accordingly, the multivalance of the literary or aesthetic metaphor is reduced to one essentialist meaning. We move then from tracing multiplicity to naming the few. This is a far cry from the richness of metaphoric ambiguity which it has been the traditional provenance of literary studies to locate. Often the Lakoff-Johnson model appears to be adopted in a simplistic fashion by literary scholars who have adopted CMT wholesale. Rather than Metaphors and Cultural Transference 21 stressing the richness and variability of metaphor, much research now goes about reducing topoi to a few existential archetypes. Documenting this pattern, Bo Pettersson has pointed out the narrowness of simply naming “central metaphors and motifs” through the specification of “base metaphors.” 3 A great deal of cognitive research in literary and cultural studies functions by creating etymologies of metaphors which narrow a multiplicity of metaphoric expressions down into only a few schematic roots. 4 Another problem concerns how to explain the enormous cultural differences which occur in the figuration of emotions, for instance, if in fact metaphors based on the body are universal. The understanding of certain corporal experiences as primordial to metaphor creation necessitates a monolithic view of how the body is lived. It is a central tenant of the Lakoff-Johnson approach that experientiality, meant here as embodiment, precedes all other experience, including metaphor creation. The primority and similarity of corporal experience is assumed as a given. Quoting Johnson’s seminal work on this subject: Through metaphor, we make sense use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organize our more abstract understanding. Understanding via metaphorical projection from the concrete to the abstract makes use of physical experience in two ways. First, our bodily movements and interactions in various physical domains of experience are structures, (as we saw with image schemata), and that structure can be projected by metaphor onto abstract domains. Second, metaphorical understanding is not merely a matter of arbitrary fanciful projection from anything to anything with no constraints. Concrete bodily experience not only constrains the “input” to the metaphorical projections but also the nature of the projections themselves, that is, the kinds of mappings that can occur across domains. 5 Johnson appears to set up a historically and culturally blind model of metaphor creation. 6 If all infants experience the same schemata of spatial and bodily relations and these relations help them to grasp the world and reflect on it using metaphorical expressions, then their linguistic expressions should be identical or quite similar; they rest on supposedly universal experiences. Bodily experience is accordingly not only primary to metaphor sensemaking, it is also universal. Johnson’s claim that the somatic is primary provides the basis for the Lakoff-Johnson-model’s account of bodily and spatial schemata. Arguably, this 3 Bo Pettersson, “Afterword: Cognitive Literary Studies: Where to Go From Here,” Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice, eds. Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson, and Merja Polvinen (Helsinki: U of Helsinki P, 2005) 308. 4 Pettersson 310. 5 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1987) xv. 6 Johnson xiv-xv. G RETA O LSON 22 model has not changed considerably since the authors published their seminal Metaphors We Live By. While Lakoff and Johnson now account for a variety of new insights made by neuroscience, they continue to argue for the primority of the somatic. In their Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) the authors refer to this phenomenon as the ‘embodied mind.’ Alternatively, they call it there and elsewhere ‘embodied realism’: Mind is embodied, meaning is embodied, and thought is embodied in this most profound sense. This is the substance of an embodied realism. Embodied realism, as we understand it, is the view that the locus of experience, meaning, and thought is the ongoing series of embodied organism—environment interactions that constitute our understanding of the world. According to such a view, there is not ultimate separation of mind and body, and we are always ‘I touch’ with our world through our embodied acts and experiences. 7 I want to call this the ‘hard’ school of conceptual metaphor theory and differentiate it from the more culturalist work being done by Zoltán Kövecses. While Kövecses also makes claims for the centrality of somatic experience, particularly in the constitution of image schemas, he contextualizes this experience by seeing it as infused and inflected by cultural and historical experience. Particularly his most recent work moves away from a vision of the corporal as the deus ex machina in metaphor production. He understands bodily experience to intersect with acculturation and individual preference in terms of metaphor creation and use. 8 Lakoff and Johnson stress that metaphorical expressions must cohere to the fundamental values of a given culture, which are themselves expressed in metaphorical models. 9 Furthermore, while basic experiential conceptual metaphors are few, their application in metaphorical linguistic expressions is virtually limitless. The limits which are imposed upon the applications of basic experiential metaphors are of a pragmatic nature; they concern their cohering with larger metaphorical systems. The authors differentiate between conventional metaphors that reflect “the ordinary conceptual system of our culture” and new metaphors that “make […] sense of our experience in the same way conventional metaphors do: they provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others.” 10 Yet this account still fails to explain historical and cultural variation within existent metaphorical models. 7 Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism,” Cognitive Linguistics 19.1 (2002): 249 (emphasis in the orginial). 8 Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 172. 9 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1980) 22. 10 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 139. Metaphors and Cultural Transference 23 The following questions arise: one, how does individual metaphor creation interact within the scope of larger pre-existing models? Two, how do cultural models change - and our experience tells us that they do - if they are based on universal somatic experiences? Three, how are differences between cultural models to be explained if they are based on extensions of the same general pre-linguistic experience? III Cultural Transfer as a Problem in Cognitivist Accounts of Metaphor Following up on Lakoff and Johnson’s work, Kövecses has addressed the issue of how new metaphors are created within a given culture and vary between cultures in his Metaphor and Culture: Universality and Variation. Like Lakoff and Johnson, Kövecses stresses that metaphorical expressions depend on their cultural contexts. He goes farther than Lakoff and Johnson, however, in explicating and accounting for cultural and historical variation in metaphor creation and use. Thus I would call his work the ‘soft’ school of conceptual metaphor theory. To avoid the gender stereotypes that inhere to the descriptors ‘soft’ and ‘hard,’ Kövecses’ scholarship could also be described as culturalist in contradistinction to that of his colleagues Lakoff and Johnson. In Metaphor and Culture Kövecses describes how in most Indo-European languages, anger is depicted metaphorically as a hot fluid. A medieval and early modern belief in humours still informs such metaphorical expressions as, “He was about to boil over.” Yet, since humoral physiology never played a part in Chinese and Japanese medicine, metaphors of this kind do not exist in Chinese and Japanese language communities. Kövecses returns to Johnson’s claim that metaphors are in the first instance based upon embodied experience, but notes that they are entirely culturally dependent, and thus variable. He also works to account for individual as well as diachronic variation. Individual styles of cognition, according to Kövecses, explain the creation of new metaphors through processes of selection, elimination, and combination. New cultural models then give rise to new metaphorical possibilities. The metaphor of hot, fluid anger did not exist in Old English but seems to have become dominant only through the acceptance of humoral medicine. 11 Thus the wide acceptance of the body as being determined by the four humours during the medieval period led to the production of the concept of ANGER IS HOT FLUID. Citing Eve Sweetser’s work on metaphorical and cultural 11 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 104-105. G RETA O LSON 24 aspects of semantics, 12 Kövecses furthermore points out that metaphors which describe psychological and cognitive experiences in terms of physical phenomena are particularly pervasive. Based in corporal experience, these metaphors are particularly resonant and resistant to change. This would explain why the conceptual metaphor of ‘anger as fluid’ still makes sense to members of Western cultures despite the historical supplanting of the idea of humoral imbalance being the basis for emotions and illness. Despite his efforts to describe metaphors as culturally-bound phenomena, Kövecses falls into logical lapses that suggest the continuity of experientiality and hence the unchanging quality of conceptual metaphors. Take the following: It would be unreasonable to suggest that young children consciously learn conceptual metaphors by constructing coherent folk theories of source domains and applying the entailments of the source to the target. A more likely way for this learning to take place is that we subjectively experience our bodies as containers; we have the experience of a fluid inside the body; we experience heat or lack of heat in certain parts of the body; we also feel pressure when angry; and so on. These are unconscious experiences that we have very early on in our lives. In the cognitive view of metaphor, these experiences are assumed to play a crucial role in acquiring conceptual metaphors. 13 According to this view, the Galenic understanding of anger as a hot fluid within the containing body - e.g. “His boss made him so angry that he felt that he would boil over” - would be universal and immutable, something that Kövecses elsewhere denies. Thus, even within the scope of a more culturalist approach to metaphor, one allowing for greater cultural and historical variability, Kövecses may fall prey to a tendency to universalize the basics of somatic experience. Corporal experience - despite linguistic evidence - may well not be universal. A recurrent problem in CMT which needs to be briefly mentioned here is that linguistic data provides the basis for the postulation of basic spatial and bodily schemata: the evidence which is gathered for the basic schemata is drawn from individual linguistic expressions which are quite distant from the structures of experience that supposedly predicate them. Thus it is difficult to verify or falsify claims for their existence. The conceptual metaphors based on the body that supposedly underlie most sense-making have not been proven to exist across time and various cultures. Let us take the example of the container which Kövecses explicates in the above quote. That the body is experienced as a container is a prima facie truism in Johnson’s The Body in Mind. As he writes there: 12 Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). 13 Kövecses, Metaphor and Culture 98. Metaphors and Cultural Transference 25 Our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most pervasive features of our bodily experience. We are intimately aware of our bodies as threedimensional containers into which we put certain things (food, water, air) and out of which other things emerge (food and water wastes, air, blood, etc.). 14 This truism is repeated in virtually all of the major cognitivist accounts of metaphor which have followed upon The Body in Mind. Historically speaking, women have traditionally been viewed as less contained in their bodies than men. Women’s experiences of menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, partition, and lactation have all contributed to their being conceived of as deviant ‘leaky vessels’ in comparison to the supposedly more bounded bodies of men. 15 This leakiness has, moreover, been considered reason for women’s being closer to nature, more like animals, less capable of reason, or in need of greater protection at various historical and cultural junctures. Thus the contained body may be a cultural ideal which has helped to ensure the power structures of patriarchy and paternalism by projecting the female body as sub-standard. The philosopher Christine Battersby has traced Johnson’s assertion of the universality of the body as a container back to the philosophy of Kant. Reacting to the Romantics, Kant, she asserts, developed a vision of selfhood as having illimitable boundaries which were defended through reason. This notion of self is based on an ideal of autonomy, absolute separateness from others, and hostile containment. Battersby points out that other notions of self than those of Kant and the cognitivists who have followed after him are possible. Rather, the self may be based less on separation of the inside from the outside than on a process which involves flow: “But the self does not disappear. Instead, it emerges in a ‘workshop of possibilities’: a workshop in which echo and feedback-loops link an (uncertain) past to an (undetermined) future.” 16 Such a view confers with many postmodernist conceptualizations of identity which do not assume an inviolable core of self but stress a more fluid process of perpetual becoming. Thus Johnson’s assumption of the universality of the container metaphor may be the result of a process of acculturation through which women’s bodily experience has been viewed as deviant and a masculine ideal of the corporal has been projected as normative. Battersby’s insights are striking in this context for a number of reasons. Firstly, they suggest that what is viewed as a universal bodily schema may in fact be a cultural construct. This, secondly, implies that this construct is vari- 14 Johnson 40. 15 I mention Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) as just an example of the rich scholarship on this topic. 16 Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman (Cambridge: Polity P, 1998) 172; qtd. in Janice Richardson, “The Law and the Sublime: Rethinking the Self and its Boundaries,” Law and Critique 18 (2007): 240. G RETA O LSON 26 able and subject to change. In Janice Richardon’s reading of Battersby’s work within a legal context, the container metaphor may furthermore be a construct of selfhood which helps to preserve private property as a privilege of the powerful and to keep the disempowered without. 17 In other words, not only is the container metaphor non-universal and non-generalizable, but it may also be a historical construct which has served to further the privileges of the propertied. IV Mediating Cognitivist and Culturalist Accounts In my own work I have found that amending cognitive research on metaphor with insights from Lacanian theory, science studies, and explanations of power structures provides a solution to some of the problems with adopting CMT which I have enumerated above. On the one hand, I have adopted Lacanian theory because, as a psychoanalytical approach, it describes the individual’s process of making sense of experience within a network of common meanings. Lacan’s ‘real’ describes, on the one hand, the primality of bodily preverbal experience and, in this way, confirms the spatial experientiality which cognitive researchers envision as informing basic conceptual metaphors. The interaction that Lacan describes as occurring between the real, imaginary, and symbolic orders, however, helps to understand how individual metaphor creation occurs within the context of pre-established verbal and social meanings. Lacan’s explication of the mirror phase explains the individual’s narcissistic fascination with the imaginary order and its inevitable distortion of images including that of the self. The initiation into the shared and communal, linguistically arranged symbolic order then assigns names to these distorted images. The infant’s romance with the misrecognized image is in itself metaphorical; it is a simultaneous placing of that image within the context of a world of prior signification, the symbolic order. In cultural terms this can be understood as the transition between an individual’s using metaphor to make sense of the world to the embedding of this process in an already preexistent set of meaning relations. Indeed, Lacan’s theory offers a bridge between individual psychological development and cultural context by accounting for how an individual interacts with the collective into which s/ he is born. We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the 17 I am summarizing the argument of Janice Richardson in “The Law and the Sublime: Rethinking the Self and its Boundaries,” Law and Critique 18 (2007): 229-52. Metaphors and Cultural Transference 27 subject when he assumes an image - whose predestination to this phase - effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago. 18 Lacan’s analysis accounts for the individual’s response to symbolic culture at any given time. It de-universalizes the cognitivist model while still stressing the centrality of corporal pre-verbal experience. On the other hand, I have relied on insights from science studies to describe the historical variation of conceptual metaphors. Science studies addresses the topic of how the physical sciences interact with other cultural phenomena. This includes the topic of metaphor usage, which is particularly interesting due to the hard sciences’ traditional distrust of the figurative in general. Sabine Maasen, for instance, suggests that metaphoric transfer between disciplines can be described as having two phases. The first of these involves the transfer of a trope from one realm of discourse to another. Thus a figure familiar in everyday speech is adopted as a model in science. For instance, the simile “This protein really looks just like sand” may initially be used to help explain a yet unknown quantity. 19 In a second stage of transfer, however, the metaphor moves beyond its initial heuristic usage to have a transformative function. In this phase the initial openness of the metaphor - all of the qualities of a grain of sand that might potentially be applied to a newly discovered protein - is narrowed down; and the metaphor may then actually change the way the target domain is perceived and questions about it are asked: “The distinction between transfer and transformation gives rise to a conception according to which a metaphor challenges the concepts and perspectives of a ‘target discipline’ to interact with it.” 20 Maasen follows James Bono in conceiving metaphors as destabilizing phenomena. On the one hand, they need to be constantly reconstituted as they are passed along historically. On the other hand, they are altered synchronically through their interactions with other discursive fields: Metaphors and tropes may be transmitted over time, but their meaning must always be reconstituted synchronically. That is to say, such meanings are socially and culturally situated, carrying resonances that speak forcefully to individual members of specific communities. But this very process of reconstituting the meaning of metaphors subjects them to the interferences of other discourses - and, I might add, other metaphors - which, indeed, allows them to speak resonantly to 18 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1949; New York/ London: Norton, 1977) 2 (emphasis in the original). 19 Karin Knorr, “The Scientist as an Analogical Reasoner: A Critique of the Metaphor- Theory of Innovation,” Communication & Cognition 13.2/ 3 (1980): 83-208; qtd. in Sabine Maasen, “Who is Afraid of Metaphors? ” Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors, eds. Sabine Maasen, Everett Mendelsohn, and Peter Weingart (Dorderecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer, 1995) 23. 20 Maasen 26. G RETA O LSON 28 communities of individuals. Such meaning is synchronically constructed: the metaphors and topological features of extrascientific discourses — whether religious, political, social, economic, or “literary” — through individual acts of interference and interaction work to “fix” the meanings of inherited terms, and metaphors, within a newly constituted scientific language. By fixing meanings in highly specific, local, though still plastic, ways, the diachronic dimensions of scientific discourse come to constitute a synchronically coherent, if now metaphorically reordered and situated, language. Such language constitutes a particular discourse and makes possible its production of theories. 21 Bono provides a particularly rich way to understand the transference of ideas and images over time and between discursive arenas. Transfer is according to him based on diachronic and synchronic processes of metaphor use and reiteration. An inherited metaphor is restated in a given historical context within the framework of any number of discourses which will inevitably affect its meaning. Bono cites the changing meaning of Galenic medicine as a case in point. Medieval thinkers understood Galen’s medical spirits in new ways: By linking the ancient metaphor of spirit to Biblical and poetic models and analogies, they re-inscripted it within emergent understandings of psychology. 22 A metaphor is both a point of re-instantiation for existing ideas as well as a site of exchange for new ones. Importantly, Bono suggests - against Kövecses and other cognitive linguists - that conceptual metaphors are not numbered, universal, or unchanging, but are subject to constant reformulations and possible multiplications. This model is helpful because it also captures two features of metaphor creation or blending. Creating metaphors involves a process of mapping one or more domains onto another; yet it also contributes to the formation of new conceptualizations of the domains which the mapping process enacts. Thus the punctual as well as the processual aspects of metaphor making are captured by Bono’s analysis. Finally, power relations need to be accounted for in a description of how conceptual metaphors and metaphoric models gain cultural valance. For a new metaphorical concept to become widely adopted it must be successfully disseminated. A number of factors influence this process. One, the dissemination of a metaphor and hence its social power depend on who uses it. 23 These individuals must have influence and access: “The spread of the new meanings will often depend upon whether those who use them have powers on their side, for example access to the mass media.” 24 Two, dissemination 21 James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse and Literature: The Role/ Rule of Metaphor in Science,” Literature & Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990) 77. 22 Bono 78-80. 23 Andrew Goatly, The Language of Metaphors (London/ New York: Routledge, 1997) 166. 24 Goatly 132-33. Metaphors and Cultural Transference 29 depends on whether the emergent conceptual metaphor can find a place within dominant cultural patterns. Here, I recur to Raymond Williams’ still quite useful understanding of dominant culture: “Since we are always considering relations within a cultural process, definitions of the emergent, as of the residual, can be made only in relation to a full sense of the dominant.” 25 The new figuration must answer a new cultural need or cohere with existing values. Three, the frequency with which a new figure is used determines its eventual scope on the level of individual texts and its wider ideological ramifications on the level of culture. Used repeatedly and successfully, a new conceptual image may then alter pre-existent systems of meaning. What I am suggesting here is simply one method of mediating insights from cognitive metaphor theory with more cultural and materialist understandings of human experience and communication. Patently, other methods of mediating CMT exist as well. V Further Mediations I wish to close with some brief suggestions for ways in which those of us working within cultural and literary studies may use conceptual metaphor theory in helpful ways. I believe that we need to critically consider the notion of universal corporal experience postulated by some - let us call them the ‘hard’ - cognitivist accounts. We have no prima facie evidence that experiences of embodiment are either universal or monolithic. As cited above, there may be evidence that the image of the body as a container is a cultural construct that projects an ideal of the masculine body as the norm. This metaphor may be based on an image of Enlightenment selfhood which can be traced back to Kantian philosophy. A universalist account of corporality reduces the plethora of human experience and may be determinist. Moreover, it risks perpetuating norms of a culture which have favoured the privileges of one group of people over another. On the other hand, those of us who espouse more culturalist views of metaphor need to take the claims of cognitive science and cognitive metaphor theory seriously. Such theories provide valuable challenges to our assumptions about culture and cultural variation. To dismiss the claims of CMT out of hand would be to indulge in a reductionist science phobia that may limit our capacities to question. A simplistic application of the Lakoff-Johnson model in work on textual and cultural metaphors needs to be guarded against. While it is indeed very helpful to canvas a variety of texts for similar metaphors and to hypothesize that they arose from a single conceptual metaphor, this practice may not be 25 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 123. G RETA O LSON 30 all that helpful in documenting the variety of functions metaphors may have in a variety of situations. Cognitive metaphor theory needs to be integrated into models of cultural transference which better account for historical and cultural variation. Finally, I wish to suggest that we need to continue to explore and account for individual, cultural, and historical variation in individual metaphors as well as the metaphoric models that inform our understanding of the world. Culturalists need to work with cognitivists on how to apply valuable insights into how the mind works to a non-reductive and non-essentializing view of the body, the individual, and of culture. Metaphors and Cultural Transference 31 Works Cited Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman. Cambridge: Polity P, 1998. Bono, James J. “Science, Discourse and Literature: The Role/ Rule of Metaphor in Science.” Literature & Science: Theory and Practice. Ed. Stuart Peterfreund. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990. 59-89. Goatly, Andrew. The Language of Metaphors. London/ New York: Routledge, 1997. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1987. Johnson, Mark and George Lakoff. “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism.” Cognitive Linguistics 19.1 (2002): 245-63. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” Écrits: A Selection. 1949. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York/ London: Norton, 1977. 1-7. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Knorr, Karin. “The Scientist as an Analogical Reasoner: A Critique of the Metaphor- Theory of Innovation.” Communication & Cognition 13.2-3 (1980): 183-208. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. ---. Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Maasen, Sabine. “Who is Afraid of Metaphors? ” Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors. Eds. Sabine Maasen, Everett Mendelsohn, and Peter Weingart. Dorderecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer, 1995. 11-35. Olson, Greta. ‘Criminal Animals’ and the Rise of Positivist Criminology — From Shakespeare to Dickens (forthcoming). Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Pettersson, Bo. “Afterword. Cognitive Literary Studies: Where to Go From Here.” Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice. Eds. Harri Veivo, Bo Pettersson, and Merja Polvinen. Helsinki: U of Helsinki P, 2005. 307-22. Richardson, Janice. “The Law and the Sublime: Rethinking the Self and its Boundaries.” Law and Critique 18 (2007): 229-52. Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN All Thought is Sorting — or is it? Metaphor and the Bounds of Sense I Commutativity I think I may have gotten the whole thing wrong. When I was asked to contribute in a volume on ‘metaphor shaping theory,’ my first reflex was to turn to the seminal work on metaphor contained in I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). But when one stops to think about it, the book is really about ‘The Rhetoric of Philosophy.’ Or is this ultimately the same thing? That is, is there a kind of commutativity involved in this chiasmus, some kind of deeper identity where any philosophy of rhetoric is always already a rhetoric of philosophy? Normally language does not work that way, as Lewis Carroll showed us long ago: “[…] [Y]ou should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least-at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit! ” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’! " “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’! ” “It is the same thing with you,” said the hatter, and here the conversation dropped. 1 One does not have to be a mathematician of Carroll’s calibre to know that 7+5 is the same as 5+7; but it would be a sad though somewhat calmer world if everyone did indeed sleep whenever they breathed. In language, order matters, in arithmetic it does not. But perhaps if metaphor is indeed the omnipresent principle of all thought, as Richards would have it, and as we shall see shortly, then ultimately there may be no need to distinguish differences of order. If all thought, at this basic level, is indeed permeated by the same enabling metaphors, then rhetorics and philosophies are really one and the same thing. There is certainly an obvious point to be made, and a space for serious and extensive scholarship, on the way metaphor has shaped culture and theory throughout history, just as there is an obvious case to be made for the 1 Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 95. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 34 claim that there are metaphors we live by in our daily lives, as Lakoff and Johnson have famously argued. This idea goes further back than Lakoff and Johnson, of course; it goes all the way to I. A. Richards or to Max Black, or (somewhat more recently) to the articles included in an anthology edited by Andrew Ortony on Metaphor and Thought in 1979. To take just one quick example from this volume, Richard Boyd argues that there is “an important class of metaphors which play a role in the development and articulation of theories in relatively mature sciences” and that “they are used to introduce theoretical terminology where none previously existed.” He adds that “the utility of these metaphors in theory change crucially depends on [their] openendedness” 2 — that is, it is not by precision and total clarity that these metaphors become useful, but rather by means of a certain imprecision and flexibility. Now this is a rather convincing position, and historians can easily and fruitfully spend time documenting it. But my own goals will be slightly different, as I wish to go behind the details of the operation of metaphor in order to investigate the presuppositions and conclusions that this view often implies. It may turn out that some of the conclusions or implications do not really follow from the linguistic operations that can indeed be documented. To help me in this task, I initially turned to Richards but ultimately to Kant. Or, to be more precise, I turned less to Kant and more to Peter Strawson’s representation of Kant in his The Bounds of Sense. If I were a better Kant specialist, I would be able to show how and where Strawson is being unfair or unsympathetic to the Königsberg philosopher — at least this is the impression the analysis leaves on me. As it is, I am only able to show why this is so, since it is clear from the start that Strawson reproaches Kant for not being an analytic philosopher like himself. Thus he does his best whenever possible to amend and to correct Kant by turning him into one, by making his positions sound like verificationism or by arguing roughly that Kant is right to claim that there are limits to intelligible thought and experience but wrong to see the source of these limits in our cognitive constitution. 3 The main gist of Strawson’s argument is thus realist, and my conclusion will have much to do with what some form of realism implies for the reign of metaphor. II The Reign of Metaphor The title of the second part of my article is thus ‘The Reign of Metaphor’ and is, as such, a metaphor itself. There is also a homophone involved, and if I 2 Richard Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for? ” Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 357. 3 See Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (1966; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 15-17. All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 35 were to spin out the metaphor (the verb ‘to spin’ being a metaphor I like less than the French verb ‘filer’), I would have several directions in which to go. All this goes to show the omnipresence of metaphor, as I can barely get past my title without getting tripped up in tropes. If I am to believe Jacques Derrida, however, I would be wise to eliminate the meteorological connotations of [ re I n ], much too cloudy in this context, and concentrate on the more kingly figure of the sun. In an article on the art of Olafur Eliasson, to whom I will also turn shortly, Daniel Birnbaum has argued: Philosophy as such seems to have started as a kind of sun dance; the tropes of language itself turn towards the celestial light. Writing about heliotropism as the foundation of all philosophical metaphors .[ …] Jacques Derrida spells out the solar obsession in Platonic discourse: “There is only one sun in this system. The proper name, here, is the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor, the father of all figures.” 4 Birnbaum goes on to ask if the sun is not indeed the original metaphor or the “anchoring point” of all figures, 5 and this, of course, ties in with what we can read elsewhere in the work of Derrida: “Avant d'être procédé rhétorique dans le langage, la métaphore serait le surgissement du langage lui-même.” 6 It also ties in, of course, with the work of Richard Rorty, for to emphasize the role of the ‘mirror’ (or of our “glassy essence” 7 ) is simply another way of emphasizing the sun. In a sense, some of the impetus for a conference on how metaphor shapes theory seems to be derived from Rorty’s brand of pragmatism: It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations - some accurate, some not - and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. 8 In this kind of pragmatism, a change in metaphor is a change in philosophy and thus a change in truth. One of Rorty’s main points is that the dominant metaphor of the ’mind’s eye’ was just an accident of history: “There was [...] no particular reason why this ocular metaphor seized the imagination of the founders of Western thought.” 9 Of course, if one could show that there is a reason for the prevalence of this metaphor - in other words, if one could 4 Daniel Birnbaum, “Heliotrope,” Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007) 142. 5 Birnbaum 142. 6 Jacques Derrida, L'Écriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 166. 7 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979) 42. 8 Rorty 12. 9 Rorty 38. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 36 justify it in some sense, then one would be well on the way towards refuting certain aspects of Rorty’s pragmatism. Indeed, in the same passage, Rorty himself goes on to admit that the mind’s eye metaphor was a “powerful” one 10 - though he never fully explains why some metaphors are ‘powerful’ and others are not. But such latent contradictions hardly troubled Richards as he prepared the first radical theories of metaphor back in the thirties. The Philosophy of Rhetoric was originally presented as a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr where the concern for metaphor went hand in hand with a blossoming interest in what we might call today information theory, cybernetics, or communication sciences. But metaphor is indeed the object of a central chapter: That metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language can be shown by mere observation. We cannot get through three sentences of ordinary fluid discourse without it, as you will be noticing throughout this lecture. Even in the rigid language of the settled sciences, we do not eliminate or prevent it without great difficulty. […] In philosophy above all, we can take no step at all without an unrelaxing awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing […]. 11 In the pages that follow we learn that “[t]hought is metaphoric” 12 and that “a command of metaphor” is a “command of life” 13 - hardy and heady words, but hardly surprising from a future poet. What interests me is not the rhetoric of philosophy here, but the deeper implications involved. Richards’ main idea is that thought itself is fundamentally metaphorical. To quote a less familiar work, Interpretation in Teaching (1938), Richards argues that all mental processes […] operate in the main mode of metaphor. For all thought is sorting, and we can think of nothing without taking it as of a sort. Logic is the Art or discipline of managing our sortings […]. 14 I think that this notion of ’sorting’ is not unlike later theories of metaphor, and notably Nelson Goodman’s general discussion of what he calls “transfer 10 Rorty 41. 11 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: UP, 1936) 92. 12 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric 94. 13 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric 95. 14 Richards, Interpretation in Teaching (New York: Harcourt, 1938) 16; see also Philosophy of Rhetoric 30. For similar ideas in a recent work by a popular philosopher, see Douglas Hoftstadter, I am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic, 2007): “One of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know […]” (xv) and “in the final analysis, virtually every thought in this book (or in any book) is an analogy, as it involves recognizing something as being a variety of something else” (xviii). To say that all thought is based on analogy is obviously quite close to the slogan that “all thought is sorting.” All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 37 of symbol schemata.” 15 In metaphor, according to Goodman, the symbols of one domain get transported to another. One recalls that the same transportation metaphor was already at work in Richards’ terminology of tenor and vehicle. Now the act of sorting seems to imply the same sort of transference. If all things were absolutely identical from the outset, there would be no need to classify them. Sorting is a way of applying the criteria and labels of one domain to some particular entity which may or may not fit in. It is not simply a matter of putting things into the categories to which they already automatically belong; it is a matter of putting new things into old categories, or a matter indeed of creating new categories for equally new things. In all of these cases, there is, Richards argues, a metaphorical operation going on. But this theory of sorting is, of course, itself a metaphor with further implications. It gives us a picture of a world with no inherent order, a world composed of a collection of disparate things, that we later sort, but that we might have sorted differently. Indeed, in a stronger version, close to the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the things themselves are already the result of linguistic sorting, or, in other words, reality itself is a linguistic construct. Inevitably, realists will be tempted to object to this stronger version, by arguing that 1) the sorting is never really arbitrary, for the operation of metaphor latches on to true features of the world, and that 2) there are also levels of experience where things just are, and are not sorted — i.e. there are non-linguistic, nonmetaphorical levels of experience that involve thought (in some sense of the term), but do not involve comparing. This is a rough description of my own strategy in the following remarks. I intend to pursue this strategy with a series of examples and observations where I will not necessarily be talking about metaphor in the narrowest sense, but rather about a whole series of operations that we can call ‘transfer’ in the sense adumbrated by Goodman. III Singularities The third part is entitled “Singularities” and is inspired by a recent and ground-breaking article on stylistics by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. “Pour une stylistique des singularités” is “an attempt at elaborating a stylistics informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze around the concepts of singularity, of remarkable point, and of problem.” 16 I trust I have gotten at least this bit right, as I am quoting from Lecercle’s own abstract of the article. Indeed, it is important for me to get things right here, since, for once, I am quoting in total agree- 15 See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976) chapter II, and more particularly 74-85. 16 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, “Pour une stylistique des singularités,” Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise 31 (2008): 21 (my translation). R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 38 ment with his analysis, and I hope to argue that what he has to say about stylistics casts a light on what we can say about the way metaphor shapes culture. More specifically, I have the feeling that the perception of such a ‘singularity’ may indeed involve a different or even opposite procedure than that involved in the perception of a dominant metaphor. It may be that my understanding of Lecercle’s position is wrong, for I am even less a specialist of Deleuze than I am of Kant, if that is possible, but it also may be that my misunderstanding might still be fruitful in this context. For Lecercle, the concept of singularity “allows one to concentrate on the individuality of the text, conceived as a set of remarkable phenomenal points, and as an individual built upon virtual singularities.” 17 For example, and no doubt to oversimplify, the massive presence of oxymorons in Dracula (Lecercle’s own example) is a singularity which responds in its own way to the remarkable points (“being a woman, being a vampire”) which in turn embody in a special way the vaster problem involved in being a woman in the late-Victorian era. 18 To take Lecercle’s other example, the problem behind a more traditional Annunciation is not the same as that which motivates Tintoretto’s version, a version which confronts “the violence of the contact between the human and the divine.” 19 I am not sure I have the system worked out perfectly, for I may be confusing the three different levels — singularity, remarkable point, and problem — but I think one gets the gist of the demonstration. In conversation with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, I once wondered if, after all, this stylistic concept of singularity might be related to its cosmological counterpart. In astrophysics, a singularity is “a region in space-time at which matter is infinitely dense,” 20 or more generally, a point where for some reason the laws of physics break down. My goal in mentioning this is not to engage in the kind of abuse of language that sent Sokal and Bricmont into battle, but simply to suggest that the transfer from one realm to the other - from science to stylistics — might be useful. If the artwork involves some sort of agrammaticality, as both Lecercle and I have variously argued, 21 then it could be because a problem of some sort is generating the need to break the rules. To say that an Italian Annunciation (my favourites are those of an earlier period) involves the representation of “matter” which has become “infinitely dense” is, of course, to speak metaphorically. But how else could one speak of the 17 Lecercle 24. 18 Lecercle 25-26. 19 Lecercle 30. 20 “Singularity,“ Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). 21 For my own references to this concept, see Ronald Shusterman, “Les Delvoye, Duchamp, et ‘autres’ Kapoor: pour une théorie agrammaticale de l’art,” Figures de l’art 10 (2006): 201-17; also “Désinvolture et agrammaticalité: quelques ‘maisons témoins’ en visite libre,” La Désinvolture de l’art, Figures de l’art 14 (2008): 235-47. All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 39 irruption of the divine into the finite, and the metaphor may be an enlightening one. Yet though I am referring to these singularities via metaphor, I am not convinced that they themselves involve metaphorical operations in any useful sense of the term, and certainly not in the sense of the term implied by the linguistics of Lakoff and Johnson. To that extent, Richards’ work on metaphor was more interesting than the current work of cognitive linguistics, since Richards emphasized what he called the “disparity action” of metaphor, i.e. the fact that the differences between tenor and vehicle were just as relevant as their resemblances, a point made in a different context by the art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman. 22 In this kind of vision of metaphor, the goal is less a mapping of generalities than an appreciation of singular events. And I think that this leads us to conclude that there is a kind of art history or literary history or history of ideas that is less interesting than artistic appreciation and pure philosophy in their richest forms. For history seeks out recurrences or even invariables, whereas close reading or attention, and pure philosophical debate engage the singularities as ends in themselves. Richards would say that the initial moment of sorting, the initial event or singularity, is a moment of metaphorical operation; I do not know if Deleuze would have said that, or if Lecercle thinks it is so. But I am certain that all would agree that the recurrence of metaphor and its transformation into a dominant mental set takes away much of the thrill of the initial encounter. As Rorty could have put it, to study metaphor in this sense means spending less time on creativity and more time on the accidents of history. It would be silly to deny the ubiquity of certain metaphors which have shaped culture and history, but one must admit that these regularities are at best only the background for the singularity of art. IV Visual Transfer To understand the role of one kind of metaphor in the visual arts, I intend to examine briefly an example of what I call ‘Visual Transfer’ — this being the title of the fourth section. I apologize for choosing the kitsch rather than the sublime, but I find it does the job more efficiently. One can find lost in a corner of the Vatican Museums a painting by a certain Lucas Hasegawa called either Our Lady of Japan or Introduction of Christianity in Japan (1925). 23 In a sense, this representation, like all representation, is a visual theory, and it is based on the metaphorical operation of transfer. The problem, one could say, 22 For Richards, see Philosophy of Rhetoric 127; for Didi-Huberman, see Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et figuration (1990; Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 23 The painting was listed as Our Lady of Japan in the museum, but the second title appears on the website. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 40 is Western, but the singular actualization of this problem is, of course, hybrid. First of all, the format is that of a scroll, more typical of Japanese art no doubt than of the Italian Renaissance. 24 Second and quite obviously, there is a transfer or translation of habitual features into Japanese equivalents. Madonna and Child are, of course, Asian here, the countryside corresponds to the canons of Japanese landscape art, and the angels seem to combine the swirls of a Hokusai with the symbolism of traditional Christian iconography. There are dozens of other examples, of course, such as the two portraits of Our Lady of China listed in note 23. All of these are indeed representations of the ‘Introduction of Christianity and of Christian Representation’ the Orient, but I do not intend to comment further on their plastic characteristics or on the singular solutions they adopted. None of this is particularly new, and one can go back to Ernst Gombrich for much better examples. 25 My point is that this kind of analysis remains somewhat outside of the languagegame that the initial spectator was asked to play. As art historians, it is our job to see how transfer shapes a work. As art appreciators, we are forced to admit that these works warrant our attention if and only if they possess something more than the vagaries of this particular transfer. V Room for One Colour My fifth section is called ‘Room for One Colour’ and it is devoted to the work of Olafur Eliasson and its relation to phenomenology. I will use Eliasson primarily as a counterexample, since the point is that some artists do not want to be shaped by anything but phenomenology itself. Where an artist like Anish Kapoor will often provide his works with highly metaphorical titles, Eliasson often keeps language and paratext to a minimum. One can see an obvious transfer involved in Kapoor’s decision to call the vast red membrane he installed in the Tate Modern Marsyas (2002). 26 The connection to the classical theme is easily perceived. Eliasson tends to give his works more purely descriptive titles, often insisting on possessive pronouns and adjectives of the second person: Your Colour Memory, Your Mobile Expectations, Your Black Horizon, Your Compound View, and so on. Your 24 Please consult the the following addresses for these images: 24 June 2009 <http: / / www.sistinechapel.va/ 3_EN/ pages/ x-Schede/ METs/ METs_Sala05_01_01_03 1.html>; <http: / / i18.photobucket.com/ albums/ b129/ joeymyson/ virgin-china-26.jpg>; <http: / / i18.photobucket.com/ albums/ b129/ joeymyson/ Our-Lady-of-China.jpg>. 25 See Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960) chapter V, “Formula and Experience” and passim. 26 24 June 2009 <http: / / www.tate.org.uk/ modern/ exhibitions/ kapoor/ images/ new _marsyas07. jpg>. All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 41 Black Horizon (2005) is more or less just that, a light installation in black and white at the Venice Biennale in 2005. 27 Your Colour Memory (2004), another very famous project on the borderline between art and phenomenological research, is similarly restrictive in scope. Its goal is to provoke the experience of retinal after images, and it does so via the installation of a room where a screen gradually changes colour. 28 There are no allusions to classical mythology or religious experience here; just a call to pay attention to things themselves and more specifically to our sensation of colour. Now unless we are ready to claim that all of this is not art, then we may be forced to admit that metaphor is not as ubiquitous as some may think. We might also want to impose restrictions on Gadamer’s concept of ‘Sprachlichkeit’ and all of its attendant notions, if we mean by this term that absolutely all mental life is inherently linguistic. If ‘Sprachlichkeit’ means the ‘linguisticality’ of all understanding, then we should admit that it is false. I think it is fair to say that I understand an experience provided by Eliasson without being able to, or even necessarily wanting to, put it into words. A compromise would be to preach an intermediate doctrine that would defend ‘the linguisticality of verbal understanding’ - i.e. a doctrine that claimed the linguistic character of everything that can be put into words. But that does not seem a very useful or informative middle ground. Were Wittgenstein here, I would goad him as follows: Indeed, one cannot speak of what one cannot speak, and the limits of my language are indeed the limits of my linguisticality. But they are not the limits of my world, nor of my thought. Experiencing a work by Eliasson might push me to try to formulate words that are adequate to the phenomenology; then again it might not, but we would still want to say that the awareness that it provokes is part of my mental life and part of my world. “What you see is what you see,” 29 Frank Stella famously said in 1964, which means that minimalist art resists the inevitability of language. Of course, like anything else, a minimalist work may suffer the assault of metaphor — but that does not mean that any one particular metaphor is particularly relevant. This is art concerned with the singularity of experience. Another good example can be found in a piece called Room for One Colour (1997), a room saturated with yellow light to the extent of negating all of the other colours of the spectrum. Here the desire for singularity and concentration is palpable. 30 In a sense, Eliasson is interested in privation and literalness as a means of giving intensity to experience. This is in many ways the opposi- 27 24 June 2009 <http: / / www.mimoa.eu/ projects/ Croatia/ Lopud/ Your%20Black%20Ho rizon%20 Pavilion>. 28 24 June 2009 <http: / / gargoyle.arcadia.edu/ gallery/ archives/ eliasson/ images/ eliasson _3_jpg.jpg>. 29 24 June 2009 <http: / / sfmoma.org/ exhibitions/ 160>. 30 24 June 2009 <http: / / www.artinfo.com/ media/ image/ 50613/ 006_Eliasson_RoomFor OneColor2.jpg>. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 42 te of metaphor, the opposite of transfer, and the opposite of metaphorical art. Where Fra Angelico says, in effect, “See this particular dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit,” Stella says “What you see is what you see,” and Eliasson adds, “See yourself sensing.” 31 This is indeed one of his often-repeated slogans, and it captures his phenomenological and non-metaphorical urge. Eliasson notes that in Room for One Colour “our brain has to handle or digest less visual information” but this means in fact “that we see more details than usual.” 32 The work is thus both a perceptual experience and a non-linguistic reflection or consciousness of experience, all of this taking place without the operation of language. The work would be “a room for one colour” and would be perceived and problematized as such even if it were called Untitled 1997. The phenomenological dimension would be the main interest even if Eliasson had decided to call it Our Lady of Bryn Mawr. The point is that the experience itself is the goal, and whether or not the experience is shaped by metaphor - at one level it is impossible for experience not to be so shaped - the linguistic elements that may or may not be attached to the experience remain a surface phenomenon. In other words, and in his own way, Eliasson is interested in the bounds of sense. VI Conclusion: The Bounds of Sense This brings me to my sixth and final part. I return to Strawson, author of The Bounds of Sense and of an influential volume called Individuals (1959) that deals with the concept of singularity in its own way. It is here that I will certainly part ways with some or most of my readers since like Strawson I believe it is wise to temper our metaphysics and epistemology with a dose of realism: It is possible to imagine kinds of world very different from the world as we know it. It is possible to describe types of experience very different from the experience we actually have. But not any purported and grammatically permissible description of a possible kind of experience would be a truly intelligible experience. There are limits to what we can conceive of, as a possible general structure of experience. The investigation of these limits, the investigation of the set of ideas which forms the limiting framework of all our thought about the world and experience of the 31 Seeing Yourself Sensing 2001 is the title of one of his works and comes up often in interviews and related articles. See for example his essay, “Seeing Yourself Sensing 2001,” Olafur Eliasson, eds. Madeleine Grynstejn, Daniel Birnbaum, and Michael Sparks (London: Phaidon, 2002) 124-27. 32 Olafur Eliasson, “Some Ideas About Color,” Your Colour Memory (Glenside, PA: Arcadia Gallery, 2006) 75. All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 43 world is, evidently, an important and interesting philosophical undertaking. No philosopher has made a more strenuous attempt on it than Kant. 33 As I mentioned at the outset, Strawson wants to turn Kant into a stricter realist, and his emphasis on the limits of experience is a way of giving credence to the idea that there are bounds of sense. But if there are bounds of sense, then there are bounds of metaphor as well, and that would mean that before metaphor can shape culture, it will be shaped itself, at least to some extent. In his presentation of Kantian epistemology, Strawson writes: “If any item is even to enter our conscious experience we must be able to classify it in some way, to recognize it as possessing some general characteristics.” 34 Note how close this is to “all thought is sorting.” This capacity to see the general in the particular (and vice versa) is what Kant calls “intuition” and it is this that leads Kant to his famous dictum: “[T]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” 35 But Strawson insists that the content is not provided only by the mind itself - the so-called “noumenal” world is indeed there as a foundation. And even some more recent theorists of metaphor end up saying the same thing. Richard Boyd’s project, you may recall, was the study of “Metaphor and Theory Change,” but in fact he argues “that the use of metaphor is one of the many devices available to the scientific community to accomplish the task of accommodation of language to the causal structure of the world.” 36 And we can find a similar position in the writings of a more recent epistemologist and metaphysician, Robert C. Stalnaker. Stalnaker is a “possible worlds theorist,” someone who has participated in a kind of limited renewal of metaphysics within the strict confines of analytic philosophy. In Ways a World Might Be, he defends what he calls “a more robust conception of property” which yields “not just a grouping of individuals” but implies the existence of “something about the individuals in virtue of which they are grouped.” 37 This goes beyond ‘all thought is sorting’ to imply that the sorting is never arbitrary. If there is something about the individuals that helps putting them into certain groups, then there are not only different ways a world might be, but also certain ways any world has to be, in order for the groups to make sense. Ultimately, and from a different perspective, I suppose I am being bold enough to argue that, perhaps more often than we think, metaphor does not shape theory or culture in any essential way. Take, for instance, the title of Strawson’s essay on Kant. Speaking of the “bounds of sense” involves indeed 33 Peter Strawson 15. 34 Peter Strawson 20. 35 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/ B76, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s P, 1929) 93. 36 Richard Boyd 358. 37 Robert C. Stalnaker, Ways a World Might Be (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003) 9. R ONALD S HUSTERMAN 44 speaking metaphorically, but that does not mean that Strawson is taking his metaphor seriously. One need not imagine that these bounds or borders have customs officials checking the passports of symbols seeking exile from their original domains. The whole problem is that the indubitable omnipresence of metaphor does not mean that metaphor is always extended, intended to be re-applied, or worked out in its finest details. Sometimes it is just a figure of speech, a façon de parler, and nothing more. Indeed, humour often comes from interpreting literally things that were only meant figuratively, and with no ramifications, or from interpreting figuratively things that were only meant literally. And it may be that metaphor is really, more often than not, the omnipresent shorthand of thought, rather than its omnipresent and fundamental principle. Now I admit that I have not demonstrated the eternal validity of realism in the limited space allotted. I have done little more than use the singularity of Eliasson as an example of what the reign of metaphor would have to exclude, and to argue that this would be unfortunate. More importantly I have done little more than invoke an outdated philosopher of the bounds of sense to support my point. But, if I may finish peevishly and with a bit of acrobatics, I should like to ask, Why and how does a philosopher become outdated, and what proves him to be so? Is there an injunction against quoting thinkers whose works went out of fashion thirty years ago? One might as well insist that we only refer to philosophers who have an “s” in their name, a measure the Monty Python group would certainly endorse. 38 To say that Strawson is “outdated” is to support implicitly the very realism that he defended. One could claim, indeed, that his ideas have been refuted by subsequent philosophies, but that would imply positing a world that is not just a jumble of open-ended metaphors shaping culture and theory in any way they want. If there is a structure of the world which language and philosophy can somehow partially conform to, then some kind of realism is indeed justified, and metaphor, like everything else, will need to respect the bounds of sense. 38 See “Part IV: Middle Age” in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983). All Thought Is Sorting - or is it? 45 Works Cited Birnbaum, Daniel. “Heliotrope.” Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson. Ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Boyd, Richard. “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for? ” Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Derrida, Jacques. L'Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et figuration. 1990. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Eliasson, Olafur. “Seeing Yourself Sensing 2001.” Olafur Eliasson. Eds. Madeleine Grynstejn, Daniel Birnbaum, and Michael Sparks. London: Phaidon, 2002. 124-27. ---. “Some Ideas About Color.” Your Colour Memory. Ed. Olafur Eliasson. Glenside, PA: Arcadia Gallery, 2006. Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Gombrich, Ernst H. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon, 1960. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Hoftstadter, Douglas. I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1929. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Pour une stylistique des singularités.” Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise 31 (2008): 21-32. Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1936. ---. Interpretation in Teaching. New York: Harcourt, 1938. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. Shusterman, Ronald. “Les Delvoye, Duchamp, et ‘autres’ Kapoor: pour une théorie agrammaticale de l’art.” Figures de l’art 10 (2006): 201-217. ---. “Désinvolture et agrammaticalité: quelques ‘maisons témoins’ en visite libre.” La Désinvolture de l’art, Figures de l’art 14 (2008): 235-47. Stalnaker, Robert C. Ways a World Might Be. Oxford: Clarendon, 2003. Strawson, Peter. The Bounds of Sense. 1966. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975. R ÜDIGER Z ILL Metaphors as Migrants: Towards a Cultural History of Rhetorical Forms I Towards a Cultural History of Metaphors The theory of metaphor is very often bound to basic, culturally independent structures. 1 This is to be found even where the author is driven by a hermeneutic interest, as for example in the writings of Hans Blumenberg who tried to combine phenomenology and anthropology. 2 This seems, however, to contradict Blumenberg’s main concern: to write a history of “metaphoricity.” If we look for anthropological structures, there is hardly any scope for historically changing meanings. But it is man’s very historicity that, according to Blumenberg, constitutes his anthropological heritage. Blumenberg follows Arnold Gehlen’s concept of man as a deprived being (‘Mängelwesen’) - deprived of biological instincts which must be compensated for by culture. Blumenberg thus never gave in to investigating the instruments human beings have invented to fight “the absolutism of reality.” One of these instruments is rhetoric. The development of rhetorical devices is the history of man’s struggle for self-assertion and we must therefore reconstruct this history. But even here where history is a constituting part of anthropology, the influence of different cultures remains unclear. 3 Over the last few years, the theoretical preoccupation with metaphors in German philosophy has been very much along the lines of Blumenberg’s practical endeavours, although not of his theoretical reflections. Several plans for editing a historical encyclopaedia of philosophical metaphors have been debated, sketched out, and even accomplished. 4 But since they were very suspicious of the anthropological underpinnings, these histories of particular 1 For comments and helpful suggestions I would like to thank Catherine Bindman, Martin Schaad, and Angela Spahr. 2 Hans Blumenberg, “Anthropologische Annäherung an die Rhetorik,“ Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981). 3 See Rüdiger Zill, “’Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg,“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002) 243-45. 4 The first one to appear was Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern, ed. Ralf Konersmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007). R ÜDIGER Z ILL 48 metaphors tended to go to the other extreme and very often amounted to nothing more than a tracing of the history of the textual usage or the constructional relevance of the examined metaphors within their particular philosophical system. I would like to take a passage which avoids the Scylla of a universal theory as well as the Charybdis of a mere recounting of the facts. This passage leans towards what I have already called a “historico-cultural reformulation of metaphorology.” 5 But if we look for such a cultural history of rhetorical forms, we have to reconstruct the particular contexts, the historically changing life world in which the concepts exist, and develop their meanings. Therefore I would like to suggest a new reading of an influential although heavily criticised theory in the light of cultural history: Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphor as it was first developed in his fundamental article “The Metaphor” of 1954. 6 To begin with a very simple fact: A metaphor is not a word. To be a metaphor, a word must be confronted with a second one, and between these two there must be a certain tension. Ivor Armstrong Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric was the first to insist on using the term “metaphor” only for the double unit of what he called the “tenor” and “vehicle” of a metaphor. 7 Black reformulated this distinction as the “frame” and “focus” of a metaphor; in his famous example ‘man is a wolf,’ wolf is the focus and man the frame of the metaphor. In the decisive passages of his article, he never speaks of words as metaphors but of “metaphorical statements.” Therefore metaphor - at least in the interesting philosophical instances - is always a relationship or, as Black puts it, a “metaphorical theme.” This will be a serious problem for dictionaries of philosophical or other metaphors, because on this basis their lemmas could not simply be concepts or even words but themes. Instead of simply ‘border,’ for example, we might have among others ‘man as border’ (a concept of medieval philosophy where human beings incorporate the line between the brutish and the divine) and ‘borders’ or better still ‘bounds of sense.’ 8 A second important feature in Black’s approach that we must remember in the context of a cultural theory of metaphor is the fact that he calls the elements of these themes a “system of associated commonplaces.” They are not clearly defined ‘things’ whose meanings we can find in a dictionary (as, for example, a definition of the species ‘wolf’) but patterns of implications 5 Rüdiger Zill, “Substrukturen des Denkens“ 252-54. 6 Max Black, ”Metaphor,“ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954): 273-94. Reprinted in Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962) 22-47. 7 Ivor Armstrong Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford UP, 1936) 123. 8 Rüdiger Zill, “Grenze,“ Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern, ed. Ralf Konersmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007) 135-46. Metaphors as Migrants 49 shared by the ordinary man in the street of a particular society (wolf as a wild beast, hungry, always fighting each other etc.). Different societies may have different systems of associated commonplaces but within a given society at least, at a certain point in history, these commonplaces should be traceable, although even here parts of the system might not be shared by all of its members. (Paul Ricœur pointed out - and Black agreed - that literature in particular very often constructs separate realms of metaphorical implications for certain words.) A very basic element of any particular culture is, of course, its language. In the case of ‘wolf’ a translation into other languages is fairly easy, but even here, foreign expressions for ‘wolf’ might - as we have seen - allude to very different cultural commonplaces. Compared to the history of philosophical concepts, ‘wolf’ might be an easy case. For if we want to write, for example, the conceptual history of the German term ‘Freiheit’ and extend it to other languages, we must include at least the English terms ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ Nevertheless, even in these cases it should be possible to write the history of such a philosophical concept without too much difficulty, whether the texts we are dealing with speak of ‘Freiheit,’ ‘liberté,’ or ’freedom/ liberty.’ The more the concepts are terminologically coined as elements of a professional jargon, the easier this is. But metaphors normally use words from everyday language as their focus. In these cases, the translation itself is mostly non-linear; the original term has a number of equivalents, and each of these cover in themselves a broader field of meaning than the concept of their departure. The German word ‘Grenze,’ for example, translates into English as either ‘border’ or ‘bounds’ or ‘boundary’ or ‘frontier’ or ‘limit.’ But while the German word suggests a continuity an English translator is working with different notions that effectively serve to break this continuity and to fragment the field. In other words, the expression ‘Grenze’ incorporates a range of different concepts that become visible when we translate the word into another language. As in literature, philosophical metaphors travel poorly; they have severe problems crossing the borders between cultures. That which might appear as problematic, however, turns out to be to our advantage if we want to investigate the cultural dependence and development of philosophical metaphors. In comparison to other languages they openly display their peculiarities. For my present purpose I will deploy the differences in another, philosophically very prominent example: the German twin concepts of ‘Grund’ and ‘Boden’ (2) and how they are used in the texts of some prominent German-speaking philosophers (3 and 4). But ‘Grund’ and ‘Boden’ are not only the material for a metaphor among others; they point into the direction of ‘metaphor’ itself. They serve as key metaphors for the concept of metaphor. Along these lines, I will suggest not a definition but a meaning for metaphor: R ÜDIGER Z ILL 50 the metaphor as migrant (5). And finally, I will suggest that the migrant is a metaphor itself, just as the metaphor is a migrant (6). II The Word ‘Boden’ and Its Concepts ‘Boden’ literally translates into English as either ‘bottom’ (the bottom of a bottle is ‘Flaschenboden,’ for example) or ‘floor’ (to clean the floor is ‘den Boden wischen’), or any sort of base, but it also means ‘soil’ (as it is famously-infamously known in the phrase ‘Blut und Boden’ or ‘blood and soil’) or ‘land,’ or, most generally, ‘ground.’ On the other hand, if we retranslate ‘ground’ into German we might also use ‘Grund.’ ‘Grund,’ however, is not only ‘ground’ but also - among other minor possibilities - ‘cause’ or ‘reason,’ i.e. ‘grounds for.’ To further complicate matters: when certain German legal texts use the phrase ‘Grund und Boden’ they are referring specifically to ‘land,’ real estate. But why do we need two words for one concept? What is the difference? Is there any? Since this is legal language we would expect it to be very precise. In fact, there is no difference at all. The phrase simply means ‘land.’ One possible explanation says that the formula ‘Grund und Boden’ was used as early as the fifteenth century in legal terminology and the duplication only indicated the significance and seriousness of the notion; it puts a special stress on the phrase to make the act even more legally binding. This is already then a special type of rhetoric, one used as an affirmative act. In other, non-legal appearances of the phrase ‘Grund und Boden,’ ‘Boden’ is explained as the lowest part of a thing, as, for example, the bottom of a barrel or the floor of a room. ‘Grund’ has an additional meaning: it is not only the lowest part, but the one that carries what is above, like the foundations of a house. 9 In this sense ‘Grund und Boden’ might allude to the land as the base on which a structure could be built but also as the surface on which something grows. This is where soil comes in. If we put some stress on the fact that ‘Grund’ is something that carries a structure above it, then we clearly see the metaphorical origin of ‘Grund’ as reason or cause. The ‘Grund’ of an event or a chain of actions is the ‘cause’ for everything that follows: The ‘Grund’ in a line of thought is the ‘reason’ for my deductions and conclusions. But, of course, we do not use it as metaphor anymore; at this point it is a simple concept, and we usually remain unaware of its origin. 9 Johann August Eberhard, Synonymisches Handwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Leipzig: Grieben, 1910). Metaphors as Migrants 51 III On Solid Ground: The Fate of ‘Boden’ in Philosophical Metaphors After a while, if metaphors become very common, they lose their tension, they no longer consist of a double unit but revert to mere concepts, but now with a new meaning. But it is always possible to revive a metaphorical context. This is what Karl Marx did, for example, when he wrote in the chapter on the “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectics and Philosophy in General” in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “Die Erde ist die natürliche Form des logischen Grundes.” (“The earth is the natural form of the logical ground.”) 10 Marx uses the word ‘Erde’ but he might equally well have used ‘Boden.’ Of course, the terms ‘Boden’ and ‘Grund’ can be found in quite a lot of philosophical texts, but normally they are used in a rather weak, general sense. Nonetheless, they have a very important position in phenomenology. Edmund Husserl uses ‘Boden’ quite regularly. Again, it is cognition which needs firm ground. He promises to lead his readers along a path he has walked himself and which he has tested not only for its feasibility but also for its soundness, its ‘Bodenfestigkeit,’ literally for its “solid groundedness.” 11 And he sometimes speaks of an ‘absoluten Erkenntnisboden,’ an absolute ground of cognition. 12 For him ‘die Lebenswelt,’ the life-world is the ‘Boden’ for all action and theory. But it is not only a normative demand that science and philosophy must build on solid ground. All of us have a ‘Boden,’ a ground from which we start: this is the ‘Lebenswelt.’ Heidegger also held the term ‘Boden’ in high esteem. And he very often uses Boden in its negative form: ‘bodenlos, ‘literally meaning ‘bottomless,’ but maybe better translated as ‘groundless,’ ‘without foundation.’ The most prominent passage of his early work in which the term ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ - a word referring to the condition of groundlessness - appears is in paragraph 35 of his Being and Time of 1927 titled Das Gerede (Idle Talk). It is, of course, difficult to talk about this concept without explaining the whole structure of Heideggerian thinking. Nevertheless, I would like to give at least an impres- 10 Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, vol. 40 (Berlin: Dietz, 1968) 587; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959). 11 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, (1936; Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992) 16; ”In the following I shall attempt to show the paths that I myself have taken, the practicabiltiy and soundness of which I have tested for decades.“ Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970) 18. 12 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences 81: “[…] an absolute ground of knowledge.” R ÜDIGER Z ILL 52 sion of the metaphoric elements he uses as far as ‘Boden’ is concerned. ‘Gerede’ in German is normally used in a pejorative sense and refers to something like gossip, chatter, idle or mindless talk. And although Heidegger insists on a purely neutral use of the term, a native German language-reader cannot ignore the negative taste of the word. In Being and Time, ‘Gerede’ is sort of public opinion. We do not usually understand the meaning of the things themselves but what we hear and read about them. We do not pass judgement on them based on our own first-hand observations. ‘Gerede’ is what governs a conversation because of its ‘Bodenlosigkeit,’ its absence of ‘Boden.’ As Heidegger writes here: “Die Sache ist so, weil man es sagt. In solchem Nach- und Weiterreden, dadurch sich das schon anfängliche Fehlen der Bodenständigkeit zur völligen Bodenlosigkeit steigert, konstituiert sich das Gerede.“ 13 Macquarrie and Robinson translate this passage in their Blackwell edition of Being and Time as follows: “Things are so because one says so. Idle talk (‘Gerede’) is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along” [or as I would translate it: “is constituted by such a repeating and keeping on talking: Nach- und Weiterreden”] “a process, by which its initial lack of ground to stand on (‘Bodenständigkeit’ [down-toearthness]) becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness (‘Bodenlosigkeit’).” The repeating is not only founded in hearsay but also in what we have read (‘das Angelesene’). The result is not necessarily wrong but it represents a merely “average intelligibility.” 14 And so this very ‘Bodenlosigkeit,’ this being without firm ground (and we can add: without good reason, ‘ohne guten Grund’) “is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this.” 15 The ‘Gerede’ that everybody can pick up immediately provides dispensation from the actual task of understanding. Anyone can participate in the conversation and is taken seriously. So in this case, being without a solid ground does not mean that you fall into an abyss. Here something happens that Heidegger sees as being typical of everyday life, what he calls the “freischwebende Auslegung, die keinem und allen gehört,” 16 the free floating interpretation, which belongs to no one and everyone. On the other hand, with the ‘Gerede’ we can not really get to the bottom of things, to the constitution of their ‘being’ (their ‘Seinsverfassung’). Therefore the ‘Gerede,’ by its very nature, “is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked 13 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993) § 35, 168. 14 Both Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) 212. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time 213. 16 Martin Heidegger, “Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs,“ Gesamtausgabe, vol. 20 (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1979) 372. Metaphors as Migrants 53 about [‘der Boden des Beredeten’] is something which it leaves undone.” 17 It is a certain kind of being characterised by an understanding of “being there” that has been uprooted: ‘ein entwurzeltes Daseinsverständnis.’ This kind of ‘being there,’ literally ‘Dasein,’ that exists in and through the Gerede is cut off from an original and true relatedness to the world it “keeps floating unattached” 18 : ‘Es hält sich in einer Schwebe,’ which means literally that it is floating above the ground. As I said, we cannot get into a close reading of Heidegger’s text here, but it should be clear that his description of this type of discourse, the ‘Gerede,’ as ‘bodenlos’ is deeply metaphorical, and that the ‘Boden’ is closely related to being without roots, and being in suspension, in abeyance, floating in the air without touching the ground, having a lack of ‘Bodenständigkeit.’ It activates the ground part of the metaphor (floating without foundation) as well as the soil part (being uprooted) and via the ground metaphor even the meaning of being without any good reason. And although Heidegger would have neglected it - and indeed does several times in the book - ‘Boden’ is basically something positive. It is a minor but nevertheless significant detail that he finishes the whole chapter by writing that his analysis has now revealed the existential constitution of Dasein and therefore the ‘ground is prepared’ for the next steps of his enquiry: or as he literally says: “der phänomenale Boden [ist] gewonnen” - ‘the ground is gained.’ 19 IV Deprived of the Ground: Vilém Flusser in Praise of ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ We might think that ‘Boden’ and ‘Grund’ are very common metaphors in philosophy, although perhaps not with the specific emphasis with which Heidegger endows them. Ground and foundation seem to have been basic concepts at least since Descartes, elements necessary to the architecture of a conceptual structure. But there are prominent counter-examples. Theodor W. Adorno, for instance, very much rejects this search for firm ground. He was always a critic of ‘Verdinglichung’ (reification). And although he concedes that on the surface Heidegger is himself opposed to reification, he nevertheless blames his opponent because he cannot escape it. Or as Adorno puts it in his Negative Dialectics: “Under no circumstances is 17 Heidegger, Being and Time 213. In German “Das Gerede ist sonach von Hause aus, gemäß der ihm eigenen Unterlassung des Rückgangs auf den Boden des Beredeten, ein Verschließen.“ Sein und Zeit 169. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time 214. 19 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit 180. R ÜDIGER Z ILL 54 Being to be a thing, and yet, as the metaphors keep indicating, it is to be the ‘Boden’ (ground) and something solid.” 20 It is no surprise, therefore, that ‘Boden’ has no systematic place in Adorno’s own writings. Of course he uses the word in a colloquial sense: ‘den Boden bereiten für etwas’ - to prepare the ground for something, or: ‘auf gemeinsamem Boden sein’ - to be on common ground. But it is very interesting that even in this respect, he very often applies it in a negative sense or in more-or-less destructive images. He characterizes Kierkegaard’s subjectivism, for example, as something that ‘auf den Boden aufschlägt,’ something that hits the ground; in the same book on Kierkegaard he speaks of his desperation which in its sickness unto death even ‘den Boden der Subjektivität durchschlägt,’ smashes through the bottom of subjectivity. There are also formulas like ‘den Boden entziehen,’ to deprive of the ground, to cut the ground from under somebody, ‘den verdorrenden Boden bereiten für Aberglauben’ - to prepare the dry earth for superstition and so on. 21 I would like to turn to a philosopher who actually uses the metaphor of ‘Boden’ systematically, but with an entirely different intention. Vilém Flusser is probably best known as a media theorist. But his work addresses a wide range of other topics as well. He actually started as a theorist of language in the early 1950s, living as a completely unknown Jewish-Czech emigrant in S-o Paolo, Brazil and writing in Portuguese. It was only in the 1970s after his return to Europe, where he settled in the small village of Robion in southern France, that he began publishing in German, one of his first languages. His “philosophical autobiography,” titled Bodenlos, was published in 1992, but he had written it as early as 1973-74 immediately after his return to Europe. (The manuscript is entitled Zeugenschaft aus der Bodenlosigkeit, Witness out of the ’Bodenlosigkeit’.) 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990) 90. “Um keinen Preis soll Sein ein Ding sein und dennoch, wie die Metaphorik immer wieder indiziert, der ‘Boden,’ ein Festes.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997) 97-98. 21 “In der äußersten Tiefe der existentiellen Dialektik: in der Apersonalität der Verzweiflung, in welche der bloße Geist des Existierenden durch die Strudel kreisender Wiederholung endlich versinkt, schlägt Kierkegaards Subjektivismus auf seinen Boden auf.“ Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktionen des Ästhetischen, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997) 120. “Die verbleibende aber ist geteilt gleich jener Verzweiflung, die im Sturz der Krankheit zum Tode den Boden von Subjektivität durchschlägt [...].“ (Adorno, Kierkegaard 175). “In der Meinung, ohne strikte Beschränkung auf Tatsachenfeststellung und Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung bliebe der erkennende Geist allzu empfänglich für Scharlatanerie und Aberglauben, präpariert es den verdorrenden Boden für die gierige Aufnahme von Scharlatanerie und Aberglauben.“ (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, ed. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997) 13. Metaphors as Migrants 55 The book begins with a short description of bourgeois Prague before the Second World War, a mixture of Czechs, Germans, and Jews, everybody living within his own culture but closely connected to each other. “Of course,“ Flusser says, “everybody was a Praguian, this was not questioned. This was der Boden, the common ground, on which all other questions were posed. But as Praguians were we Czechs, Germans, or Jews? ” 22 This situation changed in 1938 when the German army invaded Czechoslovakia. The common ground was immediately destroyed and Jews in particular were marginalized, persecuted, threatened with death. Flusser, who very soon at the age of 18, decided to go into exile with his future wife and her parents - first to London and soon afterwards to Brazil - describes his situation in the very terms of ‘Bodenlosigkeit.’ In Flusser’s writings the term ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ displays an ambivalent meaning; it shifts from a negative to a positive experience. Flusser looked down on Prague and on his own life von ‘schwindelnder Höhe,’ from a great dizzying height. He felt estranged from his former life. Even the most familiar streets and squares looked like foreign terrain, a “realm of shades.” He was left with nothing but himself, but this dizziness he talks about was also “a dizzying feeling of liberation,” liberation to oneself. “From now on one belongs to nobody else but oneself, one was ‘oneself’ in the most radical sense of the word.” 23 And Flusser would not have been Flusser if he had not been aware of the original sense of the term ‘radical’ which derives from the Latin radix, meaning root, a word that gives the whole sentence a paradoxical meaning. And he continues: Although from now on one was bodenlos, der grenzenlose Himmel, the infinite sky [or literally: the sky without borders] arches above us. From now on everything was possible. It was this infinite [borderless] potentiality one plunged into, with a bleeding heart, but with an open mind. 24 ‘Bodenlos’ is the term Flusser uses to characterize his own life. He already begins reflecting on the title in his introduction. He compares the word ‘bodenlos’ to the absurd. “The original meaning of the word ‘absurd’” he says in his first sentence, “is bodenlos, in the sense of ‘rootless’.” Etymologically this is clearly wrong, but let us consider this as another metaphorical alliance. To explain the meaning of ‘bodenlos’ he draws three analogies: the first one from botany, the second from astronomy, and the third from logic. ‘Bodenlos’ is a plant that has been picked: Flowers on a kitchen table are his example of an absurd life: “If you try to immerse yourself in these kinds 22 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Bensheim: Bollmann, 1992) 15 (my translation). 23 Flusser, Bodenlos 29. 24 “Zwar war man von jetzt ab bodenlos, aber über einem wölbte sich der grenzenlose Himmel. Von jetzt ab war alles möglich. In diese grenzenlose Möglichkeit stürzte man, zwar blutenden Herzens, aber aufgeschlossenen Geistes.“ Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos 29-30. R ÜDIGER Z ILL 56 of flowers, you can empathize with their desire to put down roots and to dig these roots into the soil.” 25 ‘Bodenlos’ is also absurd in the sense of meaningless, futile. For Flusser the planetary system is ‘bodenlos’ because you cannot ask why it circles around the sun: ‘in der gähnenden, abgründigen Leere des Weltalls’ - “in the yawning abysmal void of the universe.” 26 And ‘bodenlos’ is absurd in the sense of being without any reasonable foundation. Just as, for example, the sentence ‘two plus two is four at seven pm in S-o Paolo’ is bodenlos. It is an example of absurd thinking. With it we have the dizzying feeling of floating over an abyss, one in which the concepts of ‘true’ and ‘false’ have ceased to function. 27 Flusser uses these analogies to give us a sense of his mood, but also of the atmosphere represented by surrealism, existentialism or absurd literature and theatre. But as soon as ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ is discussed in public, Flusser says, it vanishes. “It is an experience of loneliness and it dissolves if publicly talked about into idle talk (leeres Gerede).” 28 Flusser’s introduction is a wonderful example of the richness of the ‘Boden’ metaphor and its philosophical context. In his ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ he activates the components of soil, foundation, ground, and reason (a notion suggested by the term ‘Grund’). His sense of ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ emerged when he left his original home, he is uprooted like a plant removed from the soil. He has lost the solid ground under his feet, he is free floating. His life no longer has any foundation: neither literally - he was abroad without money and qualifications - nor psychologically, at least in the beginning. It appeared to him absurd: meaningless, without cause or reason. The example of the planetary system reminds us of Husserl’s ‘Boden’ of the life-world. But Flusser puts it exactly the other way round. Husserl cannot imagine any point of view without a ‘Boden,’ even if it is floating around; Flusser’s emphasis is precisely on such a position. And even Heidegger’s ‘Gerede’ reappears here - although perhaps unintentionally. But whereas for Heidegger the ‘Gerede’ was the place of ‘Bodenlosigkeit,’ for Flusser ‘Gerede’ destroys it. Although at first glance Flusser seems to be describing a negative experience, he claims from the outset an at least ambivalent feeling about it. And later in his life he completely re-evaluated the experience. 25 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos 9. 26 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos 8. 27 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos 9. 28 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos 10. Metaphors as Migrants 57 Bodenlosigkeit becomes a positive connotation in Flusser’s own understanding of his life, and he represents it on different levels of his theory. 29 Although he lived in Brazil for more than 30 years, he finally moved back to Europe, settling in France but travelling around a lot and mainly publishing in West Germany until he died in a car accident in 1991. He was very proud of the fact that he not only published but also wrote and even thought in at least five different languages: in German, his mother tongue and admittedly his privileged language, the language he used with his wife, the one he wrote his youthful poems in, and the one in which - as he said - “I probably also dream” 30 in Czech and Yiddish, the other languages of his childhood; in Portuguese, the language of his first and most important country of immigration, in which he wrote his first scientific and philosophical texts; and in French, the language of his last home. These other languages were supposed to balance, to relativize, to bridle the German, the main language of his later and most successful writing. But the same was true of the mutual relations of and for German towards the other languages. Migration was always an important topic for Flusser; at the same time it functions as a specific category, as, for instance, in his book on Brazil, 31 in which “Immigration” is not only the title of a chapter but also an important principle of his considerations. The chapter is a reflection on the different conditions under which uprooted flowers can be successful in digging their roots into new soil, sometimes without losing their ties to their original home. This is, for example, the difference between the United States and Brazil, according to Flusser. To be successful as an immigrant, in building up a new identity in the United States, it is important to retain a certain amount of the old identity he suggests, while in Brazil it is better to loosen one’s past ties. 32 And finally Flusser generalizes the status of migration. He considers it as an inevitable status for everybody’s future life. And this is not only because we are always on the road, as tourists, for example, or as migrant workers or scientific jet setters, but because we are about to become habitual “nomads,” as he describes it. Our homes are by now full of holes made by the cables of telecommunication. To describe it with the title of one of his books, this condition represents “The Freedom of a Migrant.” 33 29 See Rüdiger Zill, “Nomadentum als konkrete Utopie: Unterwegs zu einer Philosophie der Migration,“ Das Dritte Ufer: Vilém Flusser und Brasilien, eds. Susanne Klengel and Holger Sievers (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009) 231-43. 30 Vilém Flusser, Retraducao enquanto método de trabalho 1, qtd. in Rainer Guldin, Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém Flussers Werk (München: Fink, 2005) 261. 31 Vilém Flusser, Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen: Phänomenologie der Unterentwicklung (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1994). 32 Vilém Flusser, Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen 26. 33 Vilém Flusser, Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus (Bensheim: Bollmann, 1994). R ÜDIGER Z ILL 58 In Flusser, the connection between life and theory is evident. But even Adorno’s critical view of the concept of Boden might be seen as having been influenced by his fate as an emigrant. V Leaving the ‘Ground’: Metaphor as Migrant In his early text about the Paradigms of Metaphorology, Hans Blumenberg mentions the theory that the stylistic differences of certain ways of life are based on a level of elementary ideas, most clearly represented where a certain stock of imagery is used. 34 He considers this theory methodologically interesting and takes it as a starting point for his chapter on so-called “background metaphoricity” (‘Hintergrundmetaphorik’). Background metaphoricity is not obvious imagery, no ensemble of clear metaphors, but it can even be involved if at first glance there are only purely terminological sentences. But sometimes this terminology is organised by a guiding idea underneath (a ‘Leitvorstellung’). After all, we are aware of the ‘ground’ in ‘background,’ something that is, again, a certain kind of ‘Boden.’ Manfred Sommer, one of Blumenberg’s most successful students and the main editor of his posthumous work goes even further. In an article on Husserl’s concept of ground and underground - yet another ‘Boden’ - he says: [B] elow the surface of the text manifest to the reader there is an imaginary substratum. And the metaphors are the places where this sub-stratum projects out into the text and becomes visible. Thus metaphors scattered through the text are not to be understood as isolated occurrences. Instead, one has to conceive of them as indications and parts of a whole pictorial structure. The metaphors are interconnected underground and thus form an allegory. 35 I do not object to the diagnosis in general but I would like to point to the metaphoricity Sommer has chosen himself. His main claim in this article is that the metaphors of ‘ground’ and ‘underground’ which are of utmost importance for Husserl rely on an architectural background as well as on a geological one. Then, in a way, he changes his perspective by using the same metaphors so important for his object, Husserlian phenomenology, for his own diagnosis: “below the surface,” “sub-stratum,” “pictorial structure,” “interconnected underground.” In doing so he petrifies the metaphorical process. 34 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1960; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) 91. 35 Manfred Sommer, “Husserl on ‘Ground’ and ‘Underground,’” Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-World, eds. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Chan-Fai Cheung (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1998) 139. Metaphors as Migrants 59 I therefore would like, to suggest a slight change of perspective and to focus some more attention on the procedure. If it is true that metaphor is always a tension brought about by the interaction of two different concepts then it is very insecure ground on which to build. Let us change our own metaphors for the metaphorical process. It very much resembles Flusser's description of the migrant. Like the migrant, the metaphor is something that settles on new ground without losing its ties to its original home. At least in the beginning: During its later life it might assimilate itself to the new realm and turn into a concept, just as, for instance, ‘Grund’ did when it meant ‘reason’ or ‘cause’ without alluding further to the original meaning of foundation. The sociologist Alfred Schütz in his famous article on “The Stranger” 36 characterizes the migrant as somebody who comes to a new country equipped with what he calls a certain “thinking as usual” and tries to understand the new situation, the foreign customs and way of life in terms of his old world. And since, inevitably, they do not fit entirely, there will be a crisis. In the new world the migrant’s old ‘thinking as usual’ is devalued and he has to construct a new system of orientation. He is looking at the new society through the glasses of his old mentality. We could call the old ‘thinking as usual’ a filter, and this exactly is what Max Black called the metaphor, a seeing of the object through the glasses, the filter of the old theory. But this old ‘thinking as usual’ is, of course, not an objective scientific theory, but a cluster of tools developed to deal with certain problems, sometimes even incoherent, more like a collection of recipes than a well constructed logical system. It is a pattern of implications - just as in metaphor the focus is surrounded by a cluster of cultural implications that are now applied to the new realm. Just as the migrant’s thinking as usual will work in the new world in part and has to be reconstructed in other parts, in metaphor, the frame, i.e. the new context the old world is applied to, filters some meanings which are useful and applicable and ignores others. As I have mentioned, this resembles the type of migrant in Flusser’s theory who defines his new identity by remaining in touch with his old one. And Flusser points to the fact that in a situation like this it is not only the migrant who has to change his mindset (which is basically what Alfred Schütz describes), but that the new world is changed (although perhaps only to a small degree) by the migrant himself. Again, we can apply this to metaphor. This is what is called the interaction of the poles in metaphoric tension. 36 Alfred Schütz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” The American Journal of Sociology XLIX.6 (1944): 499-507. R ÜDIGER Z ILL 60 VI A Glimpse at a New Continent: The Migrant as Metaphor To reflect finally on what I have just done myself, the migrant is not only a metaphorical resource for metaphor but metaphor is also a metaphor for the migrant. We can describe the migrant as a living metaphor. In other words, Richards and Black considered interaction as one of the decisive features of metaphors. Meaning is not only transferred from focus to frame but evolves in a complex progress of mutual influence between frame and focus. If ‘migrant’ now serves in my line of thought as a focus for the framing concept of metaphor (‘metaphor is a migrant’), this likewise has not only to be understood as a unilateral process of transfer; it is not only a projection in one direction, but has to be an interaction itself. Therefore, meaning is not only floating from migration to metaphoricity but from the metaphor to the migrant as well. If we understand the migrant as a living metaphor 37 we will stress his status as a person who is not yet at rest but consists - even more than other people - in a tension, somebody who is influenced by different, sometimes even opposing and therefore inconsistent forces. This is what distinguishes metaphors from translation, where the original and the new languages might be originally in tension as well, but at a certain point a decision has to be made. Although several versions of a translation are possible, the translator’s deliberation has, at some point, to come to an end. To call the migrant a metaphor rejects the idea that he could be a translation, although in his later life he (or his children or grandchildren) might become a translation. But to further explore the implications of this metaphor would mean to leave the country of rhetoric (whose map I have tried to draw here, at least in part) and travel to the continent of migration which at the present time is not within the range of my visa. 37 ‘Living metaphor’ can be understood both literally and figuratively. (Richards pointed out already that a statement sometimes can be read both ways simultaneously.) In the literal sense ‘living metaphor’ indicates a certain type of metaphor as opposed to dead metaphors, both being termini technici. In the figurative sense, it considers the migrant as an incarnated rhetorical figure, a metaphor transfigurated into flesh. Metaphors as Migrants 61 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard: Konstruktionen des Ästhetischen. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. ---. Negative Dialektics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1990. Black, Max. “Metaphor.“ Models and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962. 22-47. Blumenberg, Hans. “Anthropologische Annäherung an die Rhetorik.“ Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. ---. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. 1960. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Eberhard, Johann August. Synonymisches Handwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 17 th ed. Leipzig: Grieben, 1910. Flusser, Vilém. Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie. Bensheim: Bollmann, 1992. ---. Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen: Phänomenologie der Unterentwicklung. Mannheim: Bollmann, 1994. ---. Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus. Bensheim: Bollmann, 1994. Guldin, Rainer. Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém Flussers Werk. München: Fink, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. “Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs.“ Gesamtausgabe. Ed. P. Jäger. Vol. 20. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1979. ---. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. ---. Sein und Zeit. 1927. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Ed. Theodor W. Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Husserl, Edmund. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. 1936. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992. ---. “The Crisis of the European Sciences.” The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, Il: Northwestern UP, 1970. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Konersmann, Ralf, ed. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007. Marx, Karl. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, Marx-Engels- Werke. Vol. 40. Berlin: Dietz, 1968. ---. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. Richards, Ivor Armstrong. Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1936. Schütz, Alfred. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” The American Journal of Sociology. XLIX.6 (1944): 499-507. R ÜDIGER Z ILL 62 Sommer, Manfred. “Husserl on ‘Ground’ and ‘Underground’.” Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-World. Eds. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Chan-Fai Cheung. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1998. 131-49. Zill, Rüdiger. “’Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg.“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker. Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2002. 209- 58. ---. “Grenze.” Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. Ed. Ralf Konersmann. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007. 135-46. ---. “Nomadentum als konkrete Utopie: Unterwegs zu einer Philosophie der Migration.” Das Dritte Ufer: Vilém Flusser und Brasilien. Eds. Susanne Klengel and Holger Sievers. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 231-43. II. M ETAPHORS S HAPING C ULTURES — C ULTURES S HAPING M ETAPHORS : H ISTORICAL C ASE S TUDIES H ERBERT G RABES Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment To study metaphor is to be confronted with hidden aspects of one’s own mind and one’s own culture 1 Since my first study of the history of central metaphors 2 (where I was motivated by the work of Ernst Robert Curtius 3 and Hans Blumenberg 4 ), the theory and more concrete study of metaphor have been intensively pursued in the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and language and literature, with a steady flow of important contributions ranging from Paul Ricoeur’s La métaphore vive (1975), Earl R. MacCormac’s Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (1985) and the volume Metapher und Innovation edited by Lutz Danneberg, Andreas Graeser, and Klaus Petrus (1995) to the critical anthology entitled Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte (2002) edited by Hans Erich Bödeker, Zoltan Kövecses’ study Metaphor from the same year, Eckard Rolf’s survey of Metapherntheorien (2005), and Ralf Konermann’s Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern (2007) - to name but a few. While considered as one of the most precious elements of poetic language, metaphors were long held to be inferior to abstract concepts in the discourses of both philosophy and science until Max Black’s Models and Metaphors (1962), Mary Hesse’s The Structure of Scientific Inference (1974), and cognitive studies like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) made clear how essential they are for the development and functioning of our cognitive faculty. And wider-ranging studies of the functioning of the mind such as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think (2002) have substantiated this view. What I would like to do in this article is to show how theory and historical research can profit from each other. More concretely, my choice of topic was prompted by Hans Blumenberg’s remark that “absolute metaphors have 1 George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1989) 214. 2 Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), trans. of Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973). 3 Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1952). 4 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1962). H ERBERT G RABES 66 a history,” too, and that “metaphorology tries to reach the substructure of thought” by investigating this history. 5 When attempting to frame a manageable task within such a vast project I recalled not only the enormous extent to which the mirror metaphor both enabled and controlled the Medieval and Early Modern knowledge of the world and the self, but also the astonishing frequency of metaphorical anatomy-titles in the 17 th century. Title metaphors are highly significant for my topic because they very often indicate the way in which the knowledge of whatever is being presented was acquired, how it was validated, and with what kind of intention it was disseminated. So I reviewed the metaphorical anatomy-titles of the period until a striking doubling with ‘enquiry’ led me to my title metaphor, and in a similar way I came to include the concept of the ‘essay,’ which, however, few would take to be metaphorical. My intention is to show that — at least in Britain — the pursuit of knowledge from the Middle Ages to the end of the 18 th century was guided if not determined by these conceptual metaphors, whose relative dominance has changed historically. Until the mid-16 th century it was the mirror that ruled, then the anatomy emerged to flourish in the 17 th century until it gave way to the enquiry after 1660 with ‘essay’ becoming a strong rival to all three from the late-16 th century onwards. I will begin my account of the historical changes regarding the metaphors guiding research and knowledge by referring to Blumenberg’s view that even in philosophical language metaphors can be more than mere rudiments on the way from mythos to logos, mere preliminary modes of representation that yet have to be replaced by more precise and concise concepts. 6 He holds that there are ‘absolute metaphors’ in the sense that they can never be replaced by conceptual language, though they may historically be replaced by other such metaphors. I largely share this view but am of different opinion regarding the reasons for the historical changes. Instead of pursuing an abstract philosophical argument I will, however, present some concrete evidence for my view that the scholarly and scientific pursuit of knowledge or the ‘truth’ from the Middle Ages to the late 18 th century was guided by the above mentioned central metaphors and that this had a significant impact both on the relation between investigators and their objects and the results of their effort. The attempt to render such a probing of the dependency of research and knowledge on some central metaphors during several centuries within the space of an article like this may seem presumptuous. Yet at least with regard 5 Blumenberg 13 (my translation). 6 Blumenberg 10. Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 67 to the mirror, I can with confidence rely on an extensive study of my own covering the period from the 13 th to the 17 th century. It was no wonder that during a time when - as Ernst Robert Curtius has shown 7 - the understanding of the world was determined by the reception and imitation of given conditions the mirror functioned as a ‘basic metaphor,’ as defined by Max Black. 8 The 310 metaphorical speculum-titles from the 12 th to the 17 th century already sufficiently demonstrate prominence, but there are also an additional 296 metaphorical mirror-, looking-glass and glass-titles from the 16 th and 17 th centuries. In order to see why the mirror seemed so attractive as a metaphor for the acquisition and presentation of knowledge we need only note the particular features of the real object. Thanks to its smooth, even, and glossy surface it not only reflects but also shows an image of whatever comes before it. Because it does not possess an image of its own, the mirror can show a likeness of all kinds of things, and it is easy to see why it became the basic metaphor of a worldview determined by analogy and correspondences. That the mirror leaves the objects it represents whole and untouched was also highly important at a time when the urge to obtain knowledge was restricted by the religious conviction that God’s creation could be described and imitated but must not be harmed, let alone destroyed, in the process. Yet the most precious and popular quality of the mirror, the ability to let one see oneself in it, very early on also bred the conviction that it might be more generally able to show what otherwise remains concealed, which turned it into an instrument to acquire occult knowledge by magic or divination. It became the most powerful metaphor for the human mind and its ability to grasp even the transcendent or God indirectly, “in a glass darkly,” to quote St. Paul in Corinthians 13: 12. “Mans mind a mirrour is of heavenly sights,/ A briefe wherein all marvails summed lye” we read, for instance, in John Bodenham’s Belvedere from the year 1600, and as we see the mind is not only granted the ability to reflect but also to produce a summary of everything. This ability we understand better when we remember that up to the 15 th century all and for the following two centuries still many glass mirrors were made from segments of blown glass balls and therefore convex mirrors that actually possessed such a contracting quality. It was this quality that most probably also suggested first the speculum and then the mirror titles for encyclopaedias, from the famous Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais from 1244 that consisted of a Speculum naturale, Speculum doctrinale, Speculum morale and Speculum historiale to William Caxton’s Mirrour of the Worlde from 1481 and John Swan’s Speculum Mundi from 1635. Also the compendia of wider or narrower domains such as the various writings called Speculum ecclesiae that appeared from the 12 th century onwards or later descriptions of specific branches of 7 Curtius chapter 16, § 8. 8 Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962). H ERBERT G RABES 68 knowledge like Thomas Moulton’s Myrrour or glasse of helth from 1539, William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glass from 1559, Robert Tanner’s Mirror for Mathematiques from 1587, Lucas Janssen Wagenaer’s Mariners Mirrour from 1588 or John Norden’s Speculum Britanniae from 1593 carry the metaphorical mirror-title with some right. It has already been mentioned that the human mind was held to be able to even indirectly as in a mirror catch a glimpse of God or the Divine. As to the secular uses of the mirror to reveal something hidden, there were the metaphorical equivalents in the shape of satires, polemical pamphlets, or diatribes against vanity that carried mirror titles. The faculty to reveal something hidden seems to have also been the basis for the metaphorical mirrors presenting events from the past or the future. Regarding the representation of the past, I will only mention the famous Mirror for Magistrates from 1559 with its ample demonstration of the fall of princes, and for the mirror’s prescience there are numerous prognostic mirror-titles given to the almanacs of the 17 th century. What remains to be mentioned is the aspect of reliability that is so important for the gaining of knowledge. Suffice it to point out that after the close of the 16 th century the frequent allusions to the distorting, deceiving, or flattering mirror give way to those of the true mirror, which quite logically gained prestige in the emerging Enlightenment. To summarize the consequences of the choice of the mirror as a basic metaphor for the theory and practice of obtaining knowledge: (1) the aim was imitation in terms of the creation of a most perfect likeness or image of any object; (2) this aim could be achieved by ‘mirroring’ without changing or damaging the object; (3) due to the assumed magic quality of the mirror the domain of possible objects extended far beyond the directly accessible to something hidden or future or even transcendent; (4) the knowledge obtained was collected and represented in writings that were therefore considered as mirrors; (5) as for the human acquisition of knowledge, there was a close connection between the noetic and the ethical: The mirror of the mind or soul had to be kept pure and polished by an ethically upright stance and practice in order to avoid distorted images. In the later 16 th century, at least in Britain, the still dominant mirror began to get competition from metaphorical anatomy-titles. The arising question why this came about leads us into the domain of cultural practices and discovery. Just as the mirror craze throughout Europe was instigated by the fact that around 1500 the Venetian glass manufactories had begun with the mass production of cheaper and better mirrors, the career of the anatomy-titles is unthinkable without the upsurge of the medical anatomy at the time of the Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 69 Renaissance. 9 Knowledge of the structure and functioning of the human body had for a long time been based on the writings of the 2 nd century Greek philosopher and physician Galen and of the Persian physician Avicenna from the early 11 th century, combined to the mediaeval Canon medicinae, when their anatomical teachings were displaced in the mid-16 th century by those of Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish physician who had gone to Padua where he got permission to dissect the corpses of criminals and therefore was able to acquire an infinitely more precise knowledge of the human body. Thanks to the new print culture this knowledge was soon disseminated all through Europe, above all due to the very detailed plates in his Corporis humani Fabrica from 1543. In England, where anatomical investigations had already been carried out in 1540, 10 a pirated version of this work with the plates was published by Thomas Geminus in London as early as 1545 under the title Compendiosa totius Anatomie delineatio, and the number of genuine anatomy books in Britain soon rose from twelve in the 16 th century to 79 in the 17 th and some two hundred in the 18 th century. The earlier ones were almost entirely based on foreign sources, for instance Thomas Vicary’s often reprinted Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of mans body (1548) on an anatomical treatise by Henri de Mondeville or John Banister’s History of Man (1578) according to the title on the Most Approved Anathomistes in this Present Age (as it says in the title), and the first important English contribution was William Harvey’s Exercitatio de motu cordis from 1628. Notable here is also the application of the anatomical method of systematic analysis to the study of plants by Nehemiah Grew in his Anatomy of Vegetables Begun (1672) and other works and to all living creatures in Samuel Collins’ Systeme of Anatome, Treating the Body of Man, Beasts, Birds, Fish, Insects, and Plants from 1685. The desire to gain more detailed and reliable knowledge by dissecting the object of enquiry quite early spread to other domains and led to metaphorical anatomy-titles. Not surprisingly in an age of religious controversy, the first one was An Anatomi, that is to Say a Parting in Peeces of the Mass by one “Anthoni de Adamo” (Agostino Mainardi), a compendious anti-Catholic tract published during the reign of Queen Mary in 1556 at Strasbourg. It was, however, from the later 1570s onwards that the career of the anatomymetaphor really began. As Richard Sugg points out in his recent Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England, “[a]round 1575 the wider English public appeared barely to have heard of anatomy; by 1600 it seemed at times unable to talk about little else” 11 - and the pertinent book-titles quite certain- 9 See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot/ London: Ashgate Publishing, 1999). 10 Richard Sugg, Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007) 2. 11 Sugg 2. H ERBERT G RABES 70 ly contributed to this change. In this early period we still find cases in which the metaphor of the anatomy equals or replaces the exemplary mirror and means ‘model’ or ‘pattern,’ such as John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), Palmerin d’Oliva’s Mirrour of Nobilitis, Mappe of Honour, Anatomie of Rare Fortunes (1588), or the anonymous Myrrour for English souldiers: or, an Anotomy of an Accomplished Man at Armes (1595). With this exception, the use of ‘anatomy’ as a title metaphor quite generally indicates that what is being presented has been achieved by a metaphorical dissection and close inspection of the inner condition or structure of the object under investigation. Thomas Rogers, for instance, who was one of the first to resort to the metaphor of ‘anatomy’ in A philosophical discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the minde (1576), writes in his preface, “I haue named the whole, the Anatomie of the mind, because the minde in them is diuided, and euerie part of eyther of them sufficiently manifested.” 12 Most widely known, however, are probably such early satires as Phillip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses (1583) and Thomas Nashe’s Anatomy of Absurditie (1589), and there are quite a few more from the 17 th century, for instance Henry Hutton’s Follie’s Anatomie (1619), the ballad The Phantastick age: or, The Anatomy of England’s vanity (1634), the anonymous Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue, divided into five Parts: a Medicine, a Poison, a Serpent, Fire, and Thunder (1638), the likewise anonymous Character of a pilfering taylor, or True anatomy of Monsieur Stich in all his tricks and qualities (1675) or Savile Halifax’s Anatomy of an Equivalent (1688) that ridicules the excessive use of euphemisms. The rather aggressive attitude with which the metaphorical dissection is carried out in the satires is also to be found in the many polemical religious or political books or pamphlets with anatomy-titles. In the 16 th century such writings still carry mirror-titles, with the exception of the already mentioned Anatomie, that is to say a Parting in Peeces of the Mass from 1556. Most of the dozen from the period leading up to the Civil War are also anti-Catholic, like the notorious Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, whose author Thomas Robinson promises in an opening address to the reader that “he hath truly anatomized this handmaid of the Whore of Babylon; laying open her principall veines and sinews.” 13 There are also some directed against the High Church, such as John Sprint’s Anatomy of the Controversed Ceremonies of the Church of England (1618) or anti-Protestant tracts like The Uncasing of Heresy, or, the Anatomie of Protestancie (1623). As was to be expected, many of the anatomy-pamphlets from the time of the Civil War and around the Glorious Revolution, for instance, John Taylor’s Rebells Anathematized Anatomized (1645) or the anony- 12 Thomas Rogers, “To the Reader,” A Philosophical Discourse Entituled: The Anatomie of the Minde (London: Andrew Maunsell, 1576). 13 Thomas Robinson, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon (London: R. Mylbourne and P. Stephens, 1622). Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 71 mous Treason’s Anatomie Or the Duty of a Loyall Subject (1647) and Anatomy of a Jacobite Tory (1690), are political in intent, but there are also religious ones, most of them again anti-Catholic. Only some of the numerous publications in which the anatomy-title indicates the revealing of some evil are satires or partial pamphlets. Many are just warnings, like James Mason’s Anatomie of Sorcerie (1612), or works exposing the vanity of human life, like Robert Greene’s Anatomie of Fortune (1584) and John Donne’s Anatomie of the World (1611). Yet though many of the moral and religious anatomies of this kind professed to present the ultimate truth, this truth was anything but new, and therefore other kinds of writings are more interesting in the present context. First there are some which, like John Woolton’s A New Anatomie of whole man, aswell of his body, as of his Soule (1576) or Samuel Haworth’s Anthropologia, or, A philosophic discourse concerning man being the anatomy both of his soul and body (1683), seek to correct the one-sided concentration on the body. Then there are studies attempting a comprehensive or systematic presentation of their subject, like George Strode’s Anatomie of Mortalitie (1618), Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) or Thomas Robinson’s Anatomy of the Earth (1694), and on a smaller scale also John Davies’ The Writing Scholemaster, or, The Anatomie of Faire Writing (1631) or Thomas Crumpe’s Anatomy of Orthography (1712). Finally have to be mentioned a few instances in which ‘anatomy’ has taken on the meaning of ‘scientific analysis,’ as in John French’s Art of distillation […] and of the anatomie of gold and silver (1651) and William Sampson’s Hydrologia chymica, or, The chymical anatomy of Scarbrough, and othe spaws in York Shire (1669). All in all, it can be said that the choice of the anatomy as a title metaphor implied (1) that the professed aim was the revelation of a hidden truth; (2) that this aim could only be achieved by a metaphorical dissection, with the object of investigation inevitably being taken apart; (3) that the method of anatomizing could be applied to any kind of belief system, including even transcendent and religious creeds; (4) that the authors felt obliged to disseminate for truth’s sake what they claimed to have uncovered, and just as in the genuine anatomy books this knowledge was displayed in a fairly systematic manner. While the dominance of the mirror-titles lasted several centuries, that of the anatomy-titles hardly persisted for longer than half a century, because already in the period from 1661 to 1700 the nevertheless remarkable number of 94 metaphorical ‘anatomies’ was already topped by some 299 ‘enquiries’ that were published during that time. This is astonishing, given the fact that there are no more than two enquiry-titles known from the late 16 th century, only five more from before the Civil War, and only 23 from 1640 to 1660. The popularity of enquiry-titles in the late 17 th century was thus quite sudden. It H ERBERT G RABES 72 continued into the 18 th century, during which no fewer than 1017 ‘enquiries’ were published (with a peak around the mid-century and no significant drop towards the ending). Yet what kind of metaphor are we dealing with in the case of the ‘enquiry’ - or, rather, are we dealing in this case with a metaphor at all? The question is significant, because the OED presents as the first and oldest meaning of the word “[t]he action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something; search, research, investigation, examination” or “a course of inquiry, an investigation.” Listed second is “[a] question, an interrogation, a query,” and, third, “[c]ourt of Inquiry, a court legally constituted to inquire into and investigate any charge against an officer or soldier of the army, or any transaction in which the conduct of persons may be found to call for proceedings before a court-martial,” so that there are, fourth, terms like “inquiry-office” or “inquiry rooms” to be found. 14 However, when we look more closely at the early examples that are listed, we will notice that they all indicate that ‘inquiry’ originally signified not just any kind of “seeking […] for truth, knowledge, information,” but specifically a formal and thorough investigation carried out by a superior authority or an official body. “It langis to youre lordshippe […] As souereyne youre selffe to sitte of enquery” reads a quotation from a York Mystery dating around 1440, “[t]he Kyng […] ordeyned, that the processe with diligent inquirie should be furnished” - one from Aurelio & Isabel (1556), “To call the empanelles, for the enquiry, as the use and order is” - one from Hall’s Chronicle (1548), and “[e]ach Jury of enquiry ought to conteine twelve in number at the least” - one from Abraham Fraunce’s Lawiers Logike from 1588. The earliest instance of ‘enquiry’ as a title metaphor, dating from 1537, The enquirie and verdite of the quest panneld of the death of Richard Hune which was founde hanged in Lolars tower, also supports my view, and the fact that three of the five ‘enquiries’ from the period 1601-1639 are Articles of enquiry issued by a bishop of the Church of England for his diocese on the occasion of a visitation, as well as the considerable number of such titles from the later 17 th century, show that the quite concrete or ‘literal’ meaning indicated here persisted. Thus an early ‘enquiry’ like George Langford’s Search the Scripture: Or, An enquirie after veritie Discoursing of, and discussing the Scriptures sufficiency, Perspicuity, Necessitie from 1623 can with good reason be considered as being metaphorical, with the only aspect transferred in this case being the seriousness of the search for the truth. Not much more of the early concrete meaning can be found, for instance, in J.oshua Childrey’s Indago astrologica: or, a brief and modest enquiry into some principal points of astrology (1552) or in an early example of a rigorous rejoinder like Henry Stubbe’s Clamor, rixa, joci, furta, cachini, or A 14 “Enquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 73 severe enquiry into the late oneirocritica published by John Wallis, Grammer-reader in Oxon from 1657. It comes as no surprise to find that by far the most frequent later ‘enquiries’ from the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth are either religious or political or both, and the revived fear of a return of Catholicism, the quarrels with the Dissenters, and the political turbulence connected with the Glorious Revolution may explain why this remained so until the end of the 17 th century and beyond. Typical, for instance, are John Tickell’s A Sober enquiry about the new oath enjoyned on non-conformists according to act of Parliament (1665) and William De Britaine’s A Sober enquiry, whether it be lawful for subjects without royal authority to take up arms in defence of the Protestant religion, to prevent popery (1684), where the attribute ‘sober’ stands, of course, in direct contrast to the obvious bias of the work, and we also often get the attribute ‘impartial’ in quite partial pamphlets like the Earl of Warrington’s An impartial enquiry into the causes of the present fears and dangers of the government being a discourse between a lord lieutenant and one of his deputies, summoned to hold a lieutenancy for raising the militia (1692). Yet at that time already the ‘enquiries’ pertain to a wide range of cultural domains, from science, medicine, political economy, or language learning to spectacular events. Although, through most of the 18 th century, many ‘enquiries’ are still about religious questions or politics, the range of objects becomes even wider. In the domain of religion there is new trouble with the ‘natural religion’ of deists like Charles Gildon and his Deist’s manual: or, a rational enquiry into the Christian religion (1705) and some early freethinkers like Samuel Pycroft who in 1713 published his Brief enquiry into free-thinking in matters of religion; and some pretended obstructions to it, […]. In politics, there are also new themes, as in John Roebuck’s An enquiry, whether the guilt of the present civil war in America, ought to be imputed to Great Britain or America (1776), and some topics of perennial actuality, as that of The important question discussed; or, a serious and impartial enquiry into the true interest of England with respect to the Continent (1746). There are social ‘enquiries’ like Arthur Young’s An enquiry into the state of the public mind amongst the lower classes: and on the means of turning it to the welfare of the state (1798) or substantial legal ones like Robert Plumer Ward’s An enquiry into the foundation and history of the law of nations in Europe: From the time of the Greeks and Romans, to the age of Grotius (1795). Many of the numerous medical ‘enquiries’ are about the popular water cures; in the realm of science there are more general ones like Thomas Vivian’s Cosmology: An enquiry into the cause of what is called gravitation or attraction […] (1791) as well as more specific ones like John Smeaton’s Experimental enquiry concerning the natural powers of wind and water to turn mills and other machines depending on circular motion (1794). We find historical inquiries like the anonymous Prejudice detected by facts: or, a candid and impartial enquiry, into the H ERBERT G RABES 74 reign of Queen Elizabeth, so far as relates to Mary Queen of Scots (1740) and among the considerable number of philosophical ones are David Hume’s An enquiry concerning the Principles of morals (1751), Edmund Burke’s A philosophical enquiry into the origin of the sublime and the beautiful (1764), and Frances Reynolds’ An enquiry concerning the principles of taste, and of the origin of our ideas of beauty (1785) — not to forget some early discussions of literary genres like Pierre-Daniel Huet’s The history of romances: An enquiry into their original […] from 1715 or Thomas Purney’s A full enquiry into the true nature of pastoral (1717). What is typical of almost all metaphorical ‘enquiries’ is (1) their professed aim to discover the whole truth about a matter; (2) their achievement of this aim by an investigation whose results depend on the questions with which a subject is approached; (3) that they may concern any domain of nature, culture and society or the transcendent; (4) that their authors render the ‘truths’ they have discovered rather than the process of investigation and that we therefore get a more or less systematic and sometimes very detailed description of the results of their search. So far I have been able to show the shift over time from one dominant title metaphor to another: mirror to anatomy and anatomy to enquiry, though there are overlapping phases and the earlier one does not entirely disappear. While searching for enquiry-titles, some which additionally featured ‘essay,’ like John Cockburn‘s An enquiry into the nature, and evidence of Christian faith, in several essays (1699) or James Taverner’s An Essay upon the Witham Spa, Or, a brief enquiry into the nature, virtue, and uses of a mineral chalybeate water at Witham in Essex (1737), for example, made me look for the ‘essay’ as a title metaphor that could have constituted a possible competitor to both the ‘anatomy’ and the ‘enquiry.’ My main reason for doing so was the suspicion that with the unmistakeable growth of an inquisitive, searching attitude together with the multiplying of publishing outlets the monopoly of any single guiding metaphor for the obtaining and dissemination of knowledge might have been over. The result of the search for titles bearing the word ‘essay’ immediately proved overwhelming. With a very modest beginning their number rose already in the course of the 17 th century to 643 and there are no fewer than 3,460 extant from the 18 th century, not counting all those that make up the numerous collections of essays, of which we have eight from the 16 th , 186 from the 17 th , and 1,390 from the 18 th century. Yet, even though these numbers demonstrate the popularity of the signifier ‘essay,’ the more important question is whether any metaphorical meaning was at least in a number of cases still involved, especially in view of the fact that in more recent times an ‘essay’ is considered to be merely a prose genre of a “composition of modera- Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 75 te length on any particular subject.” 15 That this cannot have been so from the 16 th to the end of the 18 th century can, however, already be gathered from the fact that the size of published texts called ‘essay’ ranged from a single page (as in the case of An Essay upon His Royal Highness the Duke of York his adventure against the Dutch from 1672) to no fewer than the 848 pages of Robert Gell’s Essay toward the amendment of the last English-translation of the Bible from 1659 and that many of the books called an ‘essay’ right up to the end of the 18 th century are several hundred pages long. My conjecture that in a significant number of cases ‘essay’ still meant more than just ‘treatise’ or ‘book’ or some such was supported by the fact that the first seven (and oldest) meanings listed in the OED are —though all now obsolete —all metaphorical. Derived from the Latin ‘exagium,’ which means ‘weighing,’ the early French ‘essai’ already referred to any kind of testing or examining, an attempt or experiment, and a sample or specimen, and in 17 th century Britain we find not only all these meanings but also “the result of an attempt,” “a hostile attempt,” “[a] first tentative effort in learning or practice,” and “a rough copy; a first draft.” As it is all too evident that most of these earlier meanings are significant in terms of obtaining, validating, and disseminating knowledge, it appeared to be rewarding to trace them in the essay-titles. The result of the investigation of a large number of ‘essays’ from the 17 th and 18 th centuries proved to be even better than I had expected. In some titles - for instance, The truth of our times revealed out of one mans experience, by way of essay by Henry Peacham (1638) - the early metaphorical meaning of ‘trial,’ ‘testing’ or ‘experiment’ cannot be overlooked. There is also a significant number of titles in which ‘essay’ obviously means ‘attempt,’ as in the case of the first extant collection of essays dating from 1584, The essayes of a prentice, in the divine art of poesie by James I or in that of the much later anonymous A Bridle for the tongue: or: The trial and condemnation of Whispering-Backbiter. Being a profitable and pleasant discourse designed as an essay to detect the sin of detraction, an evil too common in this age (1700). Even more important in the present context are the numerous titles in which the attempt indicated by the term ‘essay’ is more specifically “[a] first tentative effort in learning or practice,” as in Bassett Jones’ Herm’aelogium or, an essay at the rationality of the art of speaking (1659) or Daniel Defoe’s An essay at a plain exposition of that difficult phrase a good peace (1711). Sometimes ‘essay’ also means a mere proposal, as in An essay for the regulation of the practice of physick upon which regulation are grounded the composure of all differences between physicians and apothecaries […] from 1673 or in George Berkeley’s An essay towards preventing the ruine of Great Britain (1721). There are some works, such as Nahum Tate’s An essay of a character of the late Right Honourable Sir George Treby Kt. Lord Chief Justice of His 15 “Essay,” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). H ERBERT G RABES 76 Majesty’s Court of Common Pleas from the year 1700, where ‘essay’ indicates that what we are getting is merely a first draft or an inevitably incomplete rendering, and there is, further, the legion of titles in which we find ‘on,’ ‘upon,’ ‘of’ or ‘concerning’ attached to ‘essay’ and where what we get is simply a shorter or longer treatise on any more general or particular subject. In these cases we cannot be sure whether there is any specific metaphorical meaning involved and will only be able to come to a more adequate conclusion by considering the relationship between title and text in each particular instance. I suspect, however, that the indication that what one is offering is ‘a mere attempt’ may have been implied in the choice of the essay-title more often than not because it is, after all, in the shape of ‘being a first draft’ still around today. All in all, I gained the impression that quite frequently the authors of an ‘essay’ at that period (1) aimed at a presentation of some knowledge they had acquired; (2) intended to express the fact that, though they were wellinformed, their work was merely an attempt to render the truth; (3) ranged widely regarding their themes, and especially in the 18 th century sometimes chose titles like “Essays upon several subjects” or “Miscellaneous essays; ” (4) quite obviously felt the urge to disseminate their knowledge and even quite personal views; (5) sometimes used the term ‘essay’ as a mere gesture of modesty, as, for instance, John Locke in his 484 pages long Essay concerning humane understanding in four books from the year 1700. What can we learn from these historical observations in regard to the theoretical aspect of our theme? Blumenberg held that even the metaphors he called ‘absolute’ have a history and that “the human spirit is ahead of itself in its images.” 16 I think we can now share these views with more confidence, yet have to add that the images, which through their operation as basic metaphors guide this historical process, do not come out of nowhere, and are not the result of pure speculation but instead are closely linked to the changes in culture at large, technology, and social formations and practices. As Rüdiger Zill has already mentioned in his article on Blumenberg’s conception of metaphorology, “even more than with concepts […] metaphor is the place where the social and cultural practices come into play.” 17 There is certainly no crude causality at work, but without the mass fabrication of glass mirrors, the innovation and spread of human anatomy, the increasing role of enquiries in the religious and secular judicial system, and the enormous enhancement of 16 Blumenberg 13 (my translation). 17 Rüdiger Zill, “’Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg,“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002) 247 (my translation). Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 77 the dissemination of writings by print culture ‘mirror,’ ‘anatomy,’ ‘enquiry,’ and ‘essay’ could never have become so central that they could function as basic metaphors in the domain of the acquisition, validation, and dissemination of knowledge. At the same time, we need to register the changes of attitude these metaphors implied. Once confident that a mere mirroring of phenomena was sufficient, those searching for the truth from the 16 th century onwards found it necessary to dissect and destroy in order to know, and were ready to do so. Soon, however, they must have realized that the unilateral process of anatomizing had its limits and that research is more like an inquiry, because one only gets answers to the questions one asks. At the same time, however, both of the latter procedures were the result of a new sceptical stance, an awareness that the search for truth will finally remain an ‘essay,’ a mere attempt that often results in no more than a first draft. Regarding the connection between the changes in material culture, cultural practices, mental attitudes regarding research and knowledge, and ideas about the truth that we were able to observe, it becomes clear that the mediators quite obviously were basic conceptual metaphors. To be more precise, the mediation relied on a constant shifting between the wealth of manifold features of the image underlying these metaphors, the limited number of features selected for use as quasi-concepts, and the single dominant one reduced to an abstract concept. As I have already shown this elsewhere with respect to the mirror, let us take the ‘enquiry’ as an example instead. The concrete image of the process of an enquiry by an authorized body implies, first, a lack of knowledge regarding a matter of some importance, the hope of obtaining that knowledge by means of a thorough investigation that includes a judicious sifting of evidence, the asking of the right questions as well as a directing of those questions to those who might be able to contribute to finding the truth. It further implies that those carrying out the enquiry are qualified to do so and have sufficient authority to be trusted. All these, or some, or only a single one of these features of the image can be brought into play when a text is offered as an ‘enquiry,’ but it is likewise possible to do without all of them and employ ‘enquiry’ as an abstract concept for a ‘search for the truth.’ More often than not, the authors of the ‘enquiries’ I have looked at do not decide for the one or other of these possibilities but combine them by shifting between them or by operating in a fuzzy zone of interference. Of course, the title metaphors I have investigated lend themselves to such a procedure thanks to their imagistic base and potential for being conceptualized. In the terminology of cognitive psychology, 18 the imageschematic structures of the mirror, anatomy, enquiry, and essay as source 18 See besides the works already mentioned George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s early study More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) that has proved to be still quite useful. H ERBERT G RABES 78 domains were chosen for some time as models for the structure of the target domain of the acquisition and presentation of knowledge. Yet there are certainly more source domains with image-schematic structures that qualify for such a metaphorical mapping, and some got a chance later. Just think of the role of ‘development,’ or ‘growth,’ or ‘evolution’ in the 19 th century, of ‘structuring’ and ‘construction’ in the 20 th , and ‘net’ in more recent decades. Quite obviously, their incidence was also linked to cultural, technological, social, and ideological changes - and therefore the history of the metaphors guiding the search for truth can tell us much about what was held to be valid knowledge of the world and the self and the beyond and also about cultural history at large. Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge 79 Works Cited Black, Max. Models and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigmen einer Metaphorologie. Bonn: Bouvier, 1962. Bödeker, Hans Erich, ed. Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. New York: Pantheon, 1952. Trans. of Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: Francke, 1948. Danneberg, Lutz, Andreas Graeser, and Klaus Petrus, eds. Metapher und Innovation: Beiträge aus philosophischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht. Bern: Haupt, 1995. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. French, Roger. Dissection and Vivisection in the English Renaissance. Aldershot/ London: Ashgate, 1999. Grabes, Herbert. The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Trans. of Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973. Hesse, Mary. The Structure of Scientific Inference. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. Kövecses, Zoltan. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. ---. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. MacCormac, Earl R. A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Trans. of La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Robinson, Thomas. The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon. London: R. Mylbourne and P. Stephens, 1622 (STC 21123). Rogers, Thomas. A Philosophical Discourse, Entituled, The Anatomie of the Minde. London: Andrew Maunsell, 1576 (STC 21239). Rolf, Eckard. Metapherntheorien: Typologie, Darstellung, Bibliographie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Sugg, Richard. Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Zill, Rüdiger. “’Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg,“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker. Göttingen; Wallstein, 2002. 209-58. A NN L ECERCLE ‘Out-of-jointedness’: From Shakespeare to Derrida and Deleuze Few Shakespearean phrases have had the fortune of the couplet that closes Hamlet’s first act. After the hero’s “wild and whirling words” and the weird pacifying of the “old mole” under the floorboards, Hamlet suddenly does a volte-face from delirium to diagnosis: “The time is out of joint,” says he. “O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.” 1 The latest episode in the saga of “out-of-jointedness” as time-travelling metaphor is its resurgence in modern French philosophy (in Bataille on Nietzsche, Deleuze on Kant, Derrida on Marx). If such is its resonance down the ages and across continents it is because the phrase carries with it as an undertow, is the symptom, the point of emergence - in the literal sense, the ana-morphosis - of something other than most accounts have subsequently furnished of it. Hic et ubique, like Hamlet’s Ghost, this metaphor is a representation which, in its root form as in its ramifications, haunts Shakespeare’s opus, and is, I suggest, only exorcised at its close, because it belongs (though not in the Freudian sense) to ein anderes Schauspiel which is the measure and the mark of its historical moment, but which is also what fuels it for the future. What, then, does Shakespeare mean by “out of joint”? Or rather, to take Terry Hawkes’ point, what is meant or signified by it? In 2002, Lukacs’ pupil Agnes Heller devoted an entire book to our metaphor, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History, 2 announcing a prior “unpack[ing] the sentence” 3 and defining the title’s problematic as: “To be born to put time right is Hamlet’s fate, his destiny.” 4 “Set,” alas, is not the same as “put” - something, given the historical moment, which the Elizabethans heard loud and clear, for in none of the various, some notably foul, states of the text (and Hamlet is one of the most revised) does the metrically possible “put” appear. Why, and its consequences, are the subject of this essay. 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London/ New York: Methuen, 1982) 1.5.196-97. 2 Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 3 Heller 11. 4 Heller 6. A NN L ECERCLE 82 What is certain is that never, in all the myriad mutations which constellate drama, 5 is a Shakespearean joint - whatever its state of repair - of the carpentering, craftsmanly or more generally construction business kind: in a word, a hinge. Not once. Nor could it be, given what is at stake. And if proof were needed, apart from reading the plays, it lies in the fact that on one occasion, and only one, Shakespeare actually goes to the length of creating a comparison with a hinge - but even there, note well, a hinge that is no hinge (when the archrebel Northumberland, in Henry IV Part 2, laments that “[his] feverweak’ned joints, / Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life.” 6 The same speech, conversely, throws up the only joint in the corpus that is, indeed, not of blood and bone, but nonetheless riveted to the human joint, predicated on and exactly espousing it - the joint in the glove that is the gauntlet: (“A scaly gauntlet now with joints of steel [Northumberland continues] / Must glove this hand” 7 ). For Shakespeare, therefore, a joint is not a hinge, and on the sole occasion when it is, it is in human form. So much for what it is not. What is it therefore (something apparently far from obvious if we look at its subsequent history, and even some of Shakespeare’s own uses)? Symptomatic, not to say emblematic, of what is consistently convoked by the Shakespearean joint is the servant Alexander’s portrait of Ajax (who has yet to appear) in Troilus and Cressida (in Act 1, as in Hamlet): This man, lady, [...] [is] as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant [...] [with] joints of everything, but everything so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use, or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight. 8 This is the paradigm of what is touched upon, or called up, by Shakespeare’s recourse to human jointing. In this portrait, antimetabole and anamorphosis -that is to say out-of-jointing, respectively, in the de-constructive, then reconstructive sense -, are spectacularly two sides of the same coin: Form exists only as deformed. Which raises the question: When is a joint not a joint? The answer: Whenever Shakespeare writes it into his texts. Or, to put it another way, in Shakespeare a joint is only a joint if and when out of joint - even if the latter phrase does not necessarily appear. Thus the most conventional evocation of joints thrown up by Shakespeare’s opus are those on the dissecting table of what the period would have identified as ‘anatomies’ (portraits): desperate ones like the York 5 My remarks confine themselves to the drama to which Hamlet’s initial quotation belongs. 6 William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968) 1.1.140-41. 7 Shakespeare Henry IV Pt. 2 145-47. 8 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer (London/ New York: Methuen, 1982) 1.2.26-30 (my emphasis). ’Out-of-jointedness’ 83 family’s anatomy of supplication in Richard II, or devastating ones 9 like Suffolk’s anatomy of malediction in Henry VI, which verbally prefigures the outof-jointing he wishes on his enemies: “Would curses kill as doth the mandrake’s groan / [...] My tongue should [...] / Mine eyes should [...] / My hair [should] [...], / And every joint should seem to curse and ban [...].” 10 If Shakespearean joints are not hinges, more often they are not even joints. A mangled mess, they are all the ransom Henry V is prepared to offer his victors. 11 Already Suffolk’s joints were cursing mouths; in Troilus, if a joint is a wound in a war (“let him [Aeneas] die with every joint a wound” 12 ) it is a window in a whore (“her wanton spirits look out at every joint” 13 ) and in Achilles’ remarkable apostrophe of Hector (“Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee [...] And quoted joint by joint” 14 ), the quotation sends the joint back to its original sense of quota pars, serving up a quasi cannibalistic helping of the hero to his slavering enemy. If Troilus offers an unrivalled range of joints, it is for a reason that leads to the core of our problematic case: it is par excellence the play of betrayal: sexual betrayal, whore-caused and warcausing, that is to say, private betrayal. In the public sphere, betrayal is treason, and rarely if ever has the aesthetic of drama been so intimately bound up with its politics, “one’s role as theatre-goer with one’s role as subject,” 15 especially since, as one historian points out, “Tudor treason tended to be not only unbelievably maladroit,” it was “more wildly fantastic than any fiction.” 16 With, in addition, an excommunicated queen and papal djihad, historical figures like Marlowe and Munday 17 are there to prove that dramatic text and dire treason exist in a state of near osmosis. 18 9 William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002) 5.3.97-99. 10 William Shakespeare, Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (1957; London/ New York: Methuen, 1980) 3.2.312-20. 11 Even though it fits the picture, I omit Othello’s (F, Q2) splint-requiring “broken joint” (ed. M.R. Ridley, 1982; London/ New York: Methuen, 1958: 2.3.313) since compared to Q1’s “brawl,“ it smacks decidedly of a posteriori rationalization. 12 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 4.1.29-30. 13 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 4.5.57. 14 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 4.5.230-2. 15 Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm (London/ New York: Routledge, 1990) 2. 16 Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England, vol. 3. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986) 1. 17 See notably Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992; London: Vintage, 2002). 18 Which is why the most recent biographer of Walsingham has called this an age of terror. Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror (London: Constable, 2007). And if Walsingham departed this life in the 1590s, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is there to prove the underlying, undying pertinence of the phrase. A NN L ECERCLE 84 What veritably articulates this interface, however, is the Shakespearean joint as quintessentially out of joint. From the outset, from Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet, the place of the joint is a place of terror, unhinging joints and mind alike: Quintus shudders at “this unhallow’d and blood-stained hole [...]” that sets his joints a tremble 19 and Juliet quails at “the terror of the place,” a “foul mouth,” 20 like Suffolk’s, but strewn with her “forefathers’ joints.” 21 Out of her mind since they are out of their joints, she will, she says, brain herself with a bone. 22 This scene, like Suffolk’s curse, is placed under the sign of the mandrake, 23 which reconfigures the place of terror as a place of execution, for it was by gallows that they supposedly grew. 24 Thus, the ‘fester’d joint’ York wants cut off in Richard II is his own son turned traitor; and if the latter’s mother utters the anatomy of supplication she does, it is to forestall the ultimate anatomy imposed on the traitor by the state apparatus. That apparatus, in its abstract as well as its concrete form, is most graphically adumbrated in the only Shakespearean joints which, paradoxically, are not only in place but “fine joints,” when, learning of Juliet’s recalcitrance to his “decree,” 25 Capulet bids her, wrenching language itself out of joint, “Thank me no thankings and proud me no prouds, / But fettle your fine joints ‘gainst Thursday next [...] Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.” 26 The phrase “fine fettle” is, of course, itself disjointed and in the process sent back to its origins in German ‘Fesseln,’ chains, thereafter English “straps.” 27 For “hurdle” here is not the vertical kind that fence fields but the horizontal, to which, having been marched down from the death cells, condemned traitors were strapped, “fettled,” and dragged through the streets at a horse’s tail towards a disjointing even more absolute than the out-ofjointing on the rack which had invariably gone before. Conveyance was by hurdle not so much because they might run away, but because, radically out of joint, walking to the gallows was, literally, not a going proposition. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the joint surfaces in a context so seemingly conventional and contrary as to preclude its pertinence; but this very conventional- 19 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. J.C. Maxwell (1953; London/ New York: Methuen, 1985) 2.3.210-12. 20 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.3.34. 21 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.3.51. 22 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.3.52-55. 23 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 4.3.57. 24 “That it is never or very seldome to be found growing naturally but under a gallowes” may be pooh-poohed by John Gerard in his Herbal (Bk.2, chapter 60, “Of Mandrake”) as a “doltish dream” (ed. M. Woodward, London: Bracken Books, 1985) 85; in Shakespeare the plant nevertheless comes complete with its traditionally fantastic imagery. 25 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 3.5.138. 26 Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet 3.5.152-55. 27 “fettle”: “A girdle, belt; ” “Abandage; ” “A handle in the side of a large basket.” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). ’Out-of-jointedness’ 85 ity paradoxically liberates the alchemy of Shakespeare’s imagination. Holofernes must find actors “worthy” enough to play the Nine Worthies before the court: “this gallant gentleman [for] Judas Maccabeus; this swain, because of his great limb or joint, shall pass Pompey the Great; the page, Hercules,” 28 etc., turning the list into a nonsense on a well-worn convention. However, the unarticulated proximity between Judas Maccabeus and “the swain with the great joint” suffices to activate the Shakespearean scenario, because the next time we hear of Judas Maccabeus he has inexplicably turned into Judas Iscariot, been labelled “[a] kissing traitor” 29 and promptly disjointed (“Ass to the Jude ? [...] Jud-as, away.” 30 ) Towards the end of Shakespeare’s career, the scenario becomes more and more transparent. Already in Henry IV, though not the rackmaster, it is the constables about to whip her that put Mistress Quickly’s shoulder “out of joint; ” 31 and as Timon opens, Apemantus wishes himself a rackmaster: “Aches contract and starve your supple joints,” 32 “starve” reverting to its Saxon origin, sterben. Prospero orders his ministers to “grind their joints / With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews / With aged cramps,” 33 and in the juridically titled Measure for Measure, the wise councillor Escalus makes no bones about it: “To th’rack with him! We’ll touse you joint by joint,” 34 “touse” being a good old medieval name for out-of-jointing. 35 In the last analysis (historically the first), it is the “Fount of Justice,” King Richard II himself, who sets the Shakespearean joint in its defining mode between law and awe, to which we shall have cause to return in our second part, as he orders: [...] the fearful bending of thy knee Because we thought ourself thy lawful king And if we be, how dare thy joints forget To pay their awful duty to our presence. If we be not, show us the hand of God [...] 28 William Shakespeare, Love´s Labour´s Lost, ed. R. David (1951; London/ New York: Methuen, 1987) 5.1.119-21. 29 Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.595. 30 Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.623. 31 “The constables have delivered her over to me, and she shall have whipping enough” (Henry IV, 5.4.1-3). 32 William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. Harold J. Oliver (1959; London: Methuen, 1979) 1.1.257. 33 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (1964; London: Methuen, 1983) 4.258-60. 34 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Julius W. Lever (1965; London/ New York: Methuen, 1984) 5.1.309-11. 35 “to touse”: “to wrench by tugging; ” “to pull roughly about; to drag or push about; to handle roughly” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). A NN L ECERCLE 86 For well we know no hand of blood and bone Can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre. 36 As Ajax has “joints of everything” but “everything out of joint,” it is precisely in so far as Bolingbroke’s joints are in place that they are out of place. Under absolutism, awe is critically poised between the holy and the horrendous, wryly instantiated, respectively in “the hand of God” and the “hand of blood and bone.” 37 And since Richard begins “thus long have we stood / To watch (the fearful bending of thy knee),” the scenario that rises is that of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson where the cathedra obscurely figures forth the throne, and the surgeon the “regal phantasm” which did indeed loom over the torture chamber. Before his ministrations Elizabeth’s rackmaster Topcliffe told 38 those soon-to-be-out-of-joint that in his person they came face to face with the Majesty itself, and not only with maiestas, but with its ghostly father in the literal sense: “[H]e [Topcliffe] did not care for the [Privy] Counsell, for he had his authoritie from Her Majesty; ” 39 indeed so close was he to her “that she had allowed him to feel her breasts, legs and belly, and said unto him, ‘Be not thease [sic! ] the armes, legges and body of King Henry’? ” to which Topcliffe, one of the rare male appointments to her household, answered “Yea.” 40 In Hamlet, out-of-jointedness is presided over by the ghost of his father; in Elizabeth’s England, by the ghost of hers. Objectors may see my reading of Shakespeare’s metaphor as sensationalist, but to this Francis Barker responds in his great “essay on subjection,” The Tremulous Private Body: The effort of historiographical denial of the situation for discourse and the body abolished by the [subsequent dispensation] is [...] [a]bove all [...] evident in the indictment for sensationalism which has so frequently secured the Jacobeans’ inferior status in the calm and hygienic moral order that obtains in literary criticism, if nowhere else. In part, the charge of sensationalism goes to the substantive and recklessly bodily contents of the scenes and images [...] said to elicit the sensation [...]; but also [...] it more covertly denigrates the Jacobean mode of representation 36 Shakespeare, Richard II 3.3.73-79 (my emphasis). 37 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 4.5.77 and 4.5.79. 38 If, of course, we are to believe him, but even if the veracity of his declaration can no longer be proven, the thrust of its (alleged) argument is eloquent enough of his attitude to his role, as it is seemingly of others,’ or it would not have come down to us as it has. 39 Frank Brownlow, “Richard Topcliffe: Elizabeth’s Enforcer and the Representation of Power in King Lear,” Theatre and Religion, eds. Richard Dutton, Alison G. Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003) 165. 40 A wealthy Lincolnshire gentleman, Topcliffe had taken over the role of rackmaster general on his recent capture of Robert Southwell, writing of it not to Burghley or the Privy Council but directly to Elizabeth. British Library Ms. Harley 6998, fol. 46, qtd. in Brownlow 173. ’Out-of-jointedness’ 87 itself, which is alien to the history which succeeded it and the historiography which has refused its significance. 41 In the 1986 winter issue of the review Philosophie (Paris) appeared an article by Gilles Deleuze entitled “Four poetic formulas to resume the philosophy of Kant,” 42 later chapter 5 of Critique et clinique. 43 The “four poetic formulas” constitute a first foray into canonic literature, even if it is a tangential one, for the logic of the problematic is one of analogy between Kant’s texts and Shakespearean characters. Deleuze’s introduction to the volume, entitled “On literature and life,” stresses from the outset the “painting and music specific to writing, [...] it is through and between words that one sees and hears,” he writes, and Beckett is adduced for his recommendation to “‘bore holes in words’ (“forer des trous”) to see and hear ‘what lurks behind it.’” 44 One is thus led to expect a degree of reactivity, if not sensitivity, to the riches “packed” 45 into Shakespeare’s metaphor. What happens is rather different, and highly illuminating, for two reasons. On the one hand, Deleuze is interested in the signifier (as opposed to the signified) only in so far as it is capable of becoming other than it is, as a site of Werden not Gewesen Sein. On the other hand, he is a great believer, like Machiavelli or the Futurists, in speed, celerità, Geschwindigkeit, hence his admiration, which I share, for the whirlwind style of Kleist (in Michael Kohlhaas, for example). And like a Kohlhaas, Deleuze rides roughshod over Shakespeare: “Out of joint” has to do not with blood and bones but with the building industry. Full stop. He begins: “Le Temps est hors de ses gonds [...].” Time, in Deleuze, is off its hinges, which is what it never is in Shakespeare. “[H]inges,” begins Deleuze, “are the axis around which the door turns. The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to the precise cardinal points through which the periodic movements it measures pass,” and he adds, “[a]s long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to the movement of extension - of which it is the measure, the interval or the number.” 46 What Deleuze envisages, “la Porte tournante [...] la porte-tambour,” resembles rather the revolving door of the Grand Hotel, the hotel being the universe, gone wonky. Hamlet’s formula marks, for Deleuze, the first major Kantian reversal - that operated in Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft -the reversal from a cardinal to an ordinal conception of time as ordering rather than or- 41 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London/ New York: Methuen, 1984) 15-16. 42 Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourraient résumer la philosophie kantienne. (All translation from French are my own unless stated otherwise.) 43 Gilles Deleuze, “Four poetic formulas to resume the philosophy of Kant,” Philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986). 44 Deleuze 9. 45 Heller 11. 46 Deleuze 40. A NN L ECERCLE 88 dered by movement, replacing a circular revolving time - the time of aeons, and of rurality, with an overarching time or aion, itself immutable, subsuming the sequential linearity of the ordinal - as nature subsumes mutability in Spenser’s “Mutability Cantos” in Book VII of The Faerie Queene. Both the tone and tenor of the Deleuzian excursus into Elizabethanism has more to do with these than with either Hamlet or his out-of-jointedness. Hamlet, concludes Deleuze, is no sceptic or doubting Thomas, but the man of the Kritik. Given the original sense of our metaphor, what is interesting is that one of the cardinal hinges of Deleuze’s own philosophy is what he calls (after another dramatist, Antonin Artaud) the Body without Organs, Corps sans Organes, or CsO, which he writes like H 2 O for water, no doubt for a supplement of the precious fluidity he promotes. The major exposition of this concept, in A Thousand Plateaus, begins by quoting the ethnologist Griaule on the Urmyth of the Dogon tribe: The problem of the organism, then, - how to ‘make’ an organism of a body? - was that of articulation [...]. The Dogons [...] put the problem thus: the blacksmith’s body became an organism through some machine [...] ‘With the force of the blow, the hammer and the anvil had broken his arms and legs at the level of the elbows and knees he did not yet have. Thus he received the articulations needed for the new human form, about to sweep the earth, destined for work [...] In order to work, his arm had bent itself. 47 Deleuze then focuses exclusively on the molar and the molecular in chemistry and morphogenesis: as if joints, like Hamlet’s out-of-jointing, were beyond the horizon of the usefully thinkable. Thus, if Deleuze hears the preorganic of myth, he is (typically) deaf to the post-organic of history. And if this is revealing of his method, it is nonetheless ironic, for if the “Body without Organs” is devoutly to be wished, Hamlet’s out-of-jointedness engages directly with the problematic of his subsequent essay “For an end to judgment” (“Pour en finir avec le jugement”), 48 where he opposes (and seems to prefer) the system of a finite justice as physical cruelty, in Kafka’s Strafanstalt, to the theological doctrine of judgment and infinite debt in Der Prozeß. What Deleuze does with “out of joint” is a splendid prolegomenon for reading Deleuze. In 1993, Derrida begins his Spectres de Marx with Hamlet’s liminary ghost which becomes Marx’s “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa: das Gespenst des Kommunismus” (opening of the Manifesto), whereafter, says Derrida, Shake- 47 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 41. 48 This is an abbreviation of the title of Antonin Artaud’s radio play/ poem “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu,” which created a furore in 1947; Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) 65ff. ’Out-of-jointedness’ 89 speare is to Marx as Marx is to Derrida “absolutely determining.” 49 As in Deleuze, Derrida’s “out of joint” prefaces an entire essay, but this time a book-length one, where, no longer lifted in splendid isolation, it comes complete with twenty line context (and even a hypercorrection [time: “thime”] not, to my knowledge, to be found in any Quarto or Folio). Unlike Deleuze, however, Derrida is no contemptor of the signifier, on the contrary: For him, translators are the only real readers (“les seuls à savoir lire et écrire” 50 ). Thus, after reeling off multiple possibilities for “out of joint,” 51 Derrida retains four: 1. the artisanal “off its hinges” (hors de ses gonds), 2. the industrial “off the rails” (détraqué), 3. the inappropriately festive “topsy turvy” (à l’envers), and 4. André Gide’s whimsical “dishonoured” (déshonoré). Derrida may have recently endowed the French language with a durable rendering of that old Hegelian chestnut, Aufhebung (henceforth relève), this, as Lear’s fool says, “is nothing.” But there is a reason for this. Derrida’s proposal is to oppose the negativity of this out-of-jointedness, which he underlines but does not understand, with the need for a “messianic” dissymmetry in the space which was indeed the stage for Shakespeare’s scenario, that between crime and punishment: a space, writes Derrida, untainted by revenge, where justice becomes a gift (don) beyond law, computation, reparation - where, in this following Heidegger on dikè rather than Marx, the decorporealisation of our metaphor is complete in that this justice is nothing less than harmonic, its new jointedness (Heidegger’s Fug) that of the fugue (die Fuge): Die Fuge ist der Fug (Der Spruch des Anaximander). 52 What is interesting is that the ultimate destination of Derrida’s Spectres de Marx is that in which Elizabethan “out-of-jointedness” arose: justice and the persecution in the flesh of an ideological minority (communism in Derrida, Catholicism in Shakespeare’s day). 53 Under the auspices of out-ofjointedness, Derrida dedicates Spectres de Marx (1993) to the South African Chris Hani: “Je rappelle que c’est un communiste comme tel [...] qu’un émigré 49 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993) 36. 50 Jacques Derrida, Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction relevante (Paris: Seuil, 2002) 21. 51 Including désarticulé, the exact translation of the English. In 1986, Jean-Michel Déprats, the main translator of the authoritative Gallimard “Pléïade” edition, had perfectly rendered it with the synonymous “disloqué” (Hamlet, Paris: Granit), for example. One should perhaps point out that both Fanny Deleuze and Marguerite Derrida, the wives of the two philosophers, were not only fluent in English, both were professional translators (from English into French). 52 Qtd. in Derrida: 49. (Spectres de Marx or Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction relevante) 53 Gerard Kilroy, “Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet,” Theatre and Religion, eds. Richard Dutton, Alison G. Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003) 143-60. A NN L ECERCLE 90 polonais et ses complices [...] ont mis à mort il y a quelques jours,” 54 and militates for a politics of memory in the name of justice, learning to live with ghosts: Hamlet’s liminary ghost, Marx’s liminary ghost. The really fascinating case, however, is the exception, an exception written in exceptional circumstances, by a man who was himself, in most things, an exception as scandalous as Hamlet’s “out-of-joint.” This is Georges Bataille, 55 who rejected the Surrealists’ emblematic eagle for what he himself called “the old mole” burrowing in the dirt and darkness of the Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. 56 In 1944, Bataille wrote On Nietzsche, partly to defend the philosopher who marked his life from the charge of proto-fascism. In the midst of Bataille’s studiedly Nietzschean prose is a short text in six slim sequences originally entitled “Time is out of joints,” where this time Shakespeare’s metaphor is not only excerpted from poetry, but it is integrated back into it under another (first person) speaking voice. 57 In the corpus of the essay it is this text itself that is out of joint, embedded but enigmatic (which On Nietzsche is not); in poetry not prose; laconic not logorrheic; above all, uniquely written not in post-Stalingrad 1944 (February- August) like the rest of the essay, but from the abyss of early 1943 (January). 58 On Nietzsche is prefaced by John Ford’s “Enter Giovanni with a heart upon his dagger.” 59 Like Giovanni’s heart in Ford’s play, “Time is out of joints” is the essay’s “accursed share,” part maudite or potlach which disjoints exchange into an excess (“beyond the settling of scores”) which is a salto mortale (“une nouvelle sorte de saut”) out of time (“hors du temps”) - that time, all time - a share accursed perhaps but above all assumed. Mole apart, of Hamlet, Bataille retains, and introjects, two things: 1. out-of-jointedness 2. the mouse, less the mouse-trap than the mouse trapped (traquée), dead and deleterious within, 60 à la manière de Madame Edward and Hans Bellmer’s 54 “I stress, it is a communist as such [...] that a Polish émigré and his accomplices [...] did to death.” 55 I am grateful to Fred Botting for having stressed the importance of the Bataille text. Botting, with Scott Wilson, is the author of a provocative essay entitled “Pow Pow Pow: Hamlet, Bataille and Marxism Now,” parallax 4 (February 1997): 119-36. 56 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, la mort à l’oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) 177. 57 Bataille’s manuscript presents the poem sequence of On Nietzsche in Oeuvres complètes, vol. VI (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 98-103, as one poem entitled “Time is out of joints”; in the printed version, the Gallimard editor, however, presents the verbless “Time out of joints” as a sort of italicized warcry presiding over the sequence (97). 58 Nietzsche, Œuvres complètes 105. 59 John Ford, ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, ed. Brian Morris (London: E. Benn, 1968) 5.6.7-8. 60 Nietzsche, Oeuvres complètes 98: “in my heart hides / a dead mouse / / hunted / the mouse dies / / and in my hand the world is dead / the candle blown out / before my ’Out-of-jointedness’ 91 engravings of her/ him/ it, engravings which are no doubt the nec plus ultra in the conjunction of mousetrap (or trapped mouse) and out-of-jointedness. The speaking “I” of “Time is out of joints” being him-/ herself the paradoxical plenitude of this contorted coincidentia, the salto mortale beyond is the ecstatic, hallucinated mix of cosmos and crypt (not forgetting the lethal belly of the wooden horse) that occupies the ensuing stanzas. Haunted by the blind syphilitic eyes of his paralysed father, no one more than Bataille faced the physical facts of out-of-jointing. This is why, I finally want to argue, there are two readings of Bataille’s “out of joints.” There is a weak reading (a mistake) 61 and a strong one. The latter, firstly, follows the logic of the text: Unlike his successors,’ Bataille’s “jointing” implicates the body in time (a new kind of leap implies a new disposition/ dislocation of the joints). 62 Above all, however, it remembers that Bataille was a chartiste, trained in the minutiae of editing and paleography at the École des Chartes which produces the great librarians of France (where he always came out top). 63 By his own admission there were two determining influences in his life: 1. Nietzsche, and 2. the unspeakable images of the Chinese execution by “A Hundred Pieces” of Fou-Tchou-Li in April 1905 for attempted regicide (“this photo had a decisive role in my life”), as a literalization of ex-stasy. 64 Written on the edge of the abyss, On Nietzsche incorporates its own abyme, the ex-static cry “Time out of joints”: the punitive whittling away of the body of Fou-Tchou-Li by the executioner in 1905; that of France by the Nazis in early 1943, the unoccupied zone having just been invaded (November 1942), and the Jews and resistants began to be deported. Shakespeare’s “out of joint” testifies to the enduringly obsidional mentality of such pillars of the Elizabethan régime as the Cecils and Coke; besieged, the body politic of France in 1943, like Fou-Tchou-Li, was running out of joints, of constitutive members, to be violated and cut off. Whether intended or not, what it is at work in Bataille’s plural is the scandalous return of the repressed logic of history itself. It is as if, except in Bataille, the nucleus (the body) has been scotomized from the scenario (rather than simply the image) of law-and/ or-awe that is the bedtime / / disease the death of the world / I am the disease / I am the death of the world.” 61 The American translation simply erases the plural: George Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boon (1945; New York: Paragon House, 1992) xvii. 62 And this even though in the poem the “I” describes his mental state, in his mix of distress and delight, as unhinged (“hors des gonds”): “And I cry / unhinged / what is it / hope no more.” 63 More exactly in the top 3: 1st in his first year, 3rd in his second and 2nd in his last year. 64 Four photos were taken by Louis Carpeaux and one shown to Bataille by his psychoanalyst Adrien Borel in 1925. See inserted illustrations in Surya 370-71. A NN L ECERCLE 92 metaphor. Only the halo of iridescence surrounding the nucleus survives: that is, of the affect generated at the point where the Real perforates the Symbolic. It seems to be this that propels the metaphor, through a glass darkly, deformedly, into the cultural future. From this point of view any approach to metaphor which does not at some point integrate some account of (human) desire, and the method of its seeming madness, myth-making or other, would suggest itself as being problematic. ’Out-of-jointedness’ 93 Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. XIII. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection. London/ New York: Methuen, 1984. Bataille, George. On Nietzsche. Trans. Bruce Boon. 1945. New York: Paragon House, 1992. Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. “Pow Pow Pow: Halet, Batille and Marxism Now.” parallax 4 (February 1997): 119-36. Brownlow, Frank. “Richard Topcliffe: Elizabeth’s Enforcer and the Representation of Power in King Lear.” Theatre and Religion. Eds. Richard. Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 161-78. Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et Clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: L'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993. ---. Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction relevante. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Ford, John. ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore. Ed. Brian Morris. 1633. London: E. Benn, 1968. Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herbal. Ed. Marcus Woodward. London: Bracken Books, 1985. Heller, Agnes. The Time is Out if Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Kilroy, Gerard. “Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet.” Theatre and Religion. Eds. Richard Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 143-60. Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. 1992. London: Vintage, 2002. Pye, Christopher. The Regal Phantasm. London/ New York: Routledge, 1990. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. ed. Harold Jenkins. London/ New York: Methuen, 1982. ---. Henry IV Part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. ---. Henry VI. Ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. 1957. London/ New York: Methuen, 1980. ---. Love´s Labour´s Lost. Ed. R. David. 1951. London/ New York: Methuen, 1987. ---. Measure for Measure. Ed. Julius W. Lever. 1965. London: Methuen, 1985. ---. Richard II. Ed. Charles R. Forker. London: Thomson Learning, 2002. ---. The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. 1964. London: Methuen, 1983. ---. Timon of Athens. Ed. Harold J. Oliver. 1959: London: Methuen, 1979. ---. Titus Andronicus. Ed. J.C. Maxwell. 1953. London/ New York: Methuen, 1985. ---. Troilus and Cressida. Ed. Kenneth Palmer. London/ New York: Methuen, 1982. ---. Romeo and Juliet. Eds. Harold F. Brooks, Harold Jenkins, and Brian Morris. London/ New York: Methuen, 1980. Smith, Lacey Baldwin. Treason in Tudor England. Vol. 3. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Wilson, Derek. Sir Francis Walsingha: A Courtier in an Age of Terror. London: Constable, 2007. C ATHERINE B ELSEY Phantom Presences: Figurative Spectrality and the Postmodern Condition I Metaphoric Ghosts The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. Gori became a ghost town as Georgian residents fled the advancing Russian troops. The leaves stirred in the ghost of a breeze. At a ghost station the trains never stop. A ghost ship is derelict, found floating without its crew. Racism survives in Britain as the ghost of empire. On 23 January 2009 the front page of The Guardian announced, “Obama shuts network of CIA ‘ghost prisons’.” Inside, the text went on to claim that there were secret centres all around the world, their existence officially unrecognized, holding an unknown number of “ghost detainees.” In fact, that issue of The Guardian was particularly haunted. On the same day Simon Jenkins claimed to have discovered the oxymoronic existence of something called “The Printed Blog” in Silicon Valley. “The ghost of Gutenberg has returned to live in San Francisco,” he crowed. 1 Are these phantasmic allusions no more than dead metaphors, habits of speech that have lost their valency as belief in the supernatural has all but petered out? There are many such buried comparisons. Who now remembers the literal meaning of such familiar phrases as ‘pipe down’ or ‘the game is not worth the candle? ’ ‘Plain sailing’ has largely lost its nautical associations and few people these days would associate ‘broadcasting’ with scattering seeds. Are figurative ghosts as residual, inert vestiges of belief that once had currency in a more superstitious epoch? Although they continue to populate Hollywood movies, where they have had considerable success in Ghost (1990) for instance, or Truly Madly Deeply (1990) and Ghost Town (2008), for most of us ghosts do not actually exist; they are confined, in other words, to fiction. The souls who once walked on Halloween are now impersonated by children, often in costumes that owe more 1 The Guardian 23 January 2009: 18, 35. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 96 to television than to the supernatural. 2 As a child myself at the fair, when I paid for a trip on the ghost train, I counted on terrifying moans and screams, and the sudden luminous appearance, as we rounded a corner, of a skeleton or a mummified corpse in a shroud. Along the walls of the tunnel, fluorescent figures loomed featureless before the petrified eyes of delighted passengers. There was no doubt in my eight-year-old mind that these creatures were illusions. The journey brought fiction to life in three dimensions and was the more thrilling for that. But no one would choose to travel on a ghost train if they supposed its apparitions real. Ghost stories exercise a similar charm: They are enjoyable to the degree that we enter into the spirit of the fiction, knowing all the while that they are not true. “The story had held us, round the fire,” begins The Turn of the Screw, alluding to the tale that prompts the narrative which will constitute the novel itself, and thus proleptically locating its own fable of the supernatural. “It was gruesome, as on Christmas eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be.” 3 M.R. James, whose Edwardian ghost stories continued to hold audiences spellbound when they were revived in Cambridge in the winter of 2005, designed his self-proclaimed fictions to make people feel “pleasantly uncomfortable; ” 4 he did not expect them to be believed. Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost parodies the whole tradition and J. K. Rowling’s Nearly Headless Nick is much more disarming than frightening. It was as Gothic fantasy that ghosts survived the age of reason, living on behind its back as imaginative inventions. The Enlightenment, in other words, has done its work on revenants, relegating them to fireside tales — or metaphors. 5 And already by the 19 th century even figurative apparitions were evidently for the gullible. Walter Skeat coined the compound ghost-word to denominate terms that had no real existence. Delivering the Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1886, he was scathing (in a desiccated sort of way) about scholars who had reproduced and given elaborate etymological explanations of verbal forms that did not exist outside scribal errors and misunderstandings. “The unfortunate editors have had, for the most part, no instruction in palaeography […],” he complained. 6 Meanwhile, the meta- 2 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (London: Virago, 2003) 144-45. 3 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, eds. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991) 1. 4 Montague R. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 337. 5 I bracket sporadic post-Enlightenment outbreaks of spiritualism. The ectoplasm of the séances represents a manifestation, certainly, but the phenomenon merits separate analysis, not least because spiritualism has its own distinctive vocabulary. 6 Walter W. Skeat, “Report upon ‘Ghost-Words,’ or Words which Have no Real Existence,” Transactions of the Philological Society 26 (1885-7): 366. Phantom Presences 97 phoric spectre of communism that Karl Marx perceived haunting Europe in 1848 was no more, he insisted, than the effect of a horror story, to be replaced by the truth explained in the Manifesto to follow. 7 The pejorative connotations of spectrality lived on. Attacking Cartesian dualism in 1949, Gilbert Ryle admitted to a “deliberate abusiveness” when he described the prevailing belief that the mind was a distinct but shadowy counterpart of the body as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” “I hope,” he continued, “to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake.” 8 Phantom presences had evidently become a byword for superstitious error. And yet, as these instances ironically confirm, figurative ghosts retain an active role in our vocabulary. Spirits continue to haunt linguistic usage to a degree that still bears the imprint of a once-powerful residence in Englishspeaking cultures. Revenants from a more credulous age do not always rest in the graves where rationality supposes it has buried them. Instead, they continue to manifest themselves in the form of images. Apparitions survive in any number of familiar figurative phrases: we still ‘give up the ghost’ metaphorically when we die, even if most of us have lost the belief in the exhalation of a separable and immortal soul with the last breath. ‘A spectre’ can still trouble the feast, while at his Inauguration President Obama promised to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet.” And a man who has lost weight, either literally or so to speak, may appear a ‘shadow’ of his former self. These phrases do not invoke any particular scepticism. What is it, then, that draws us back to figures that are so self-evidently archaic? Perhaps postmodernity relishes a trace of the paradox which is the defining property of ghosts. Belonging to the past but haunting the present, they contradict the familiar distinctions that define our knowledge. Spectres are neither living nor dead in the accepted meanings of those terms: to all intents and purposes inanimate, they walk, nevertheless, like breathing beings; visible, at least sporadically, to mortal eyes and capable of speech, they are barred, all the same, from participation in everyday human contact. At once material and insubstantial, phantoms defy the categories of presence and absence. My Roget’s Thesaurus, invaluable to anyone who wants to speak of ghosts without undue repetition of the term, opens, as it happens, with the antithetical categories ‘existence’ and ‘nonexistence.’ Where do wraiths belong? Marking a loss, their appearance also has the ironic effect of reaffirming the impossibility of restoration. 7 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,“ Marx: Later Political Writings, trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 1. 8 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949) 15-16. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 98 Later, Roget juxtaposes entries for ‘life’ and ‘death.’ Revenants deconstruct that opposition. Skeat’s repudiated ghost-words were no more than the effect of ignorance but they appeared, large as life, on the printed page. The spectre of communism that haunted Europe in 1848 might have been a figment of the imagination, but it still carries a weight of terror today, and with more justification in the light of the subsequent totalitarianism practised in its name. When Arthur Koestler set out to attack the behaviourism he ascribed to Gilbert Ryle among others, he appropriated the philosopher’s graphic image as the title of his own book, The Ghost in the Machine, transvaluing the phrase to reassert an updated cogito. 9 Meanwhile, a phantom pregnancy is imagined and yet can have material effects on the body; a phantom limb arouses physical sensations in the amputee. If figurative ghosts live on in our world picture, then, it is to legitimate thought beyond the binary oppositions that structure logic. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find them also haunting some instances of post-Enlightenment reflection on the human condition. II Modernity Among the works that propelled drama into modernity, scandalous in its own time, Ibsen’s play Ghosts participates in the shift from the literal invocation of the term to the figurative. There are no ghosts in Ghosts, and yet, as the title might lead us to expect, the metaphor of spectrality structures the play. When he seeks the joy of life in opposition to the prevailing morality, Osvald reincarnates his dead father; in trying to make love to Regina, he repeats his father’s sexual adventure in his own home. And his mother shivers, “Ghosts! The couple in the conservatory — walking again.” 10 This theatrical moment at the end of Act 1, coming so soon after Mrs Alving’s revelation to Pastor Manders of her husband’s impregnation of their housemaid, is surely as eerie as any literal haunting depicted in contemporary Gothic fiction. Does it even, perhaps, propel the drama into generic undecidability — of the kind Freud identifies with the uncanny — when mimesis seems to give way to the supernatural? 11 In the event, I think not, but the play certainly pushes at the boundaries of its chosen realism. Ibsen was not happy with the English title: His own Norwegian name for the play, Gengangere, means “Those-Who-Walk-Again.” 12 The dead Captain 9 Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967). 10 Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts,” Ghosts and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) 54. 11 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985) 374. 12 Ibsen 291. Phantom Presences 99 Alving returns in the person of his son, and Osvald’s inherited syphilis represents the penalty for the sins of the father, paid in the next generation. 13 But the revenants of the title go deeper: They also represent the old joyless pieties that haunt the living, the inexorable demands of duty that impelled Mrs Alving to marry without love and Pastor Manders to drive her back to her husband when she appealed to him for refuge. Theology, convention, orthodox morality all deprive people of life, the play proposes, reducing them to a condition the Thesaurus cannot accommodate, identifiable as less than existence but short of nonexistence, neither living nor dead: I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts, Pastor Manders; it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They’re not actually alive in us, but they’re rooted there all the same, and we can’t rid ourselves of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country — as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light. 14 Like Skeat’s and Ryle’s, Ibsen’s revenants are aligned with superstition and falsehood, and yet the tragedy seems less confident that scepticism will dispatch them as Osvald succumbs to the ravages of the disease. The past, in other words, is not easily cast off in the present. Figurative ghosts, dead and buried but reanimated beyond their own lifetime, register the play’s acknowledgement of history’s continuing threat. Ibsen was not the only 19 th -century writer to recognise that the tradition of the dead generations weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living. 15 Nor was he alone in figuring cultural incursions of the past as phantom presences. A century later, when Jacques Derrida wrote a book in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he called it Specters of Marx. Here again, the spirits Derrida conjures up lie at the heart of his argument. Marx’s own writing, he demonstrates, is pervaded — shaped, indeed — by ghosts as metaphors for commodity fetishism, ideology, religion, all seen as emanations of bourgeois economy, and all due to be exorcised, laid by the revolution to come. If the 19 th century supposed that apparitions could be dispelled by the truth, our own epoch, older and wiser, knows better, its major conflicts justified, if not generated, by ideological difference, the ghost of an archaic ethnicity prominent among them. (And how about our own “war on terror,” where one phantasmic fundamentalism has confronted another? ) Derrida’s point is that reason has not so far banished error. Instead, the material consequences of dogma promoted as certainty have had the effect of 13 Ibsen 74. 14 Ibsen 61. 15 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,“ Marx: Later Political Writings 32. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 100 calling into question the metaphysical opposition between truth and falsehood, conviction as either solid fact or pure fiction, and it follows that deconstruction between binary oppositions and the identification of the trace of the other in the selfsame must be the philosophy for our times. Even if Marx subscribed to a metaphysics of his own, or to what Derrida calls “a — critical but pre-deconstructive — ontology of presence as actual reality and as objectivity,” 16 for us now to dismiss the ghost of Marxism — or ghosts, since there is self-evidently more than one — would be merely to repeat Marx’s own pre-deconstructive gesture. Instead, Derrida urges, we should engage with the spirit or spirits of Marxism. We all inherit from the past, none of us is wholly free from the tradition of the dead generations, he insists. To that degree, we remain the heirs of Marx, and not least in his decentring of the cogito, the undertaking he shared with Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud (and, in his own way, Gilbert Ryle, though his influence was limited and Derrida does not mention him). 17 In that sense above all, deconstruction at once inherits from Marxism, Derrida claims, and develops it, takes it further: Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism. There has been, then, this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction […]. But a radicalization is always indebted to the very thing it radicalizes. That is why I spoke of the Marxist memory and tradition of deconstruction, of its Marxist “spirit”. It is not the only one and it is not just any one of the Marxist spirits. 18 And yet what Derrida calls the “arch-ghost” is not in the end Marxism but the cogito itself, the essence of Man, hero of humanism. 19 We cannot, he argues, in the light of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and Marx himself, continue to believe in this phantom among phantoms, nor yet, in view of our intellectual heritage, simply dismiss it either, as if by nominating it a fiction we dissipate its power. “They are always there, specters, even if they do not exist” — there to be questioned, learned from, challenged, as well as called to account. 20 16 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) 170. 17 Derrida 97-98. 18 Derrida 92-93. 19 Derrida 175. 20 Derrida 176. Phantom Presences 101 III Uncertainty The metaphor permits a form of debate that welcomes this recognition. For better or worse, ghostly figures, disrupting the complacent antithesis between presence and absence, fact and fiction, return from the past to trouble the current moment and unsettle the distinctions given by our tenses between then and now. There are no ghosts at Strindberg’s “ghost supper,” any more than there are in Ibsen’s play: Only old people who eat together largely in silence because they know the unspeakable secrets of each other’s pasts. 21 Not fully part of the human community, they cannot escape it either, except in death. While metaphoric phantoms allow the intrusion of the past into the present, however, they can also serve to mark an absence. If “I don’t stand a ghost of a chance with you,” as Bing Crosby and after him Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and others so melodiously claim, 22 my predicament is doubly hopeless. Unable fully to rejoin the living, a ghost is not the person but inevitably other than the one it represents and whose place it takes. Supplanting the dead, revenants act as reminders of what is irretrievably lost and, if in the first instance ghosts are uncanny, they are also sad, themselves haunted by what they are not. A late work, something of a curiosity, by William S. Burroughs, the short novel Ghost of Chance (1991) is set in Madagascar, where isolation from the continent of Africa has allowed the island a separate evolution. Many of Madagascar’s species are unique, including the lemur, so-called in Latin because its native name means ‘ghost.’ In about 1700, the aptly named Captain Mission, whose colonial regime confirms the native taboo on killing these sad-eyed, vegetarian primates, sets off into the interior in quest of a larger species, known to the indigenous population as Big Ghost. Under the influence of the local mind-altering substance, what he finds in this terrain without predators, cut off from the mainland, is the biological Garden of Lost Chances, full of “creatures too trusting and gentle to survive.” 23 On the other side of the water that protects the island from the continent, Homo Sap, born in time and wedded to killing, follows his characteristic path of destruction. When Homo Sap’s artillery takes over Madagascar, Captain Mission’s settlement is destroyed and his own special ghost-lemur dies in his arms. The ghosts of Madagascar constitute the last trace of an irrecoverable innocence. But in case the island should evoke a Christian Garden of Eden, the 21 August Strindberg, “The Ghost Sonata,” The Father, Miss Julie and the Ghost Sonata, trans. Michael Meyer (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976) 171-72. 22 “I don’t stand a ghost of a chance,” music Victor Young, lyrics Ned Washington and Bing Crosby, 1932. 23 William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995) 38. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 102 text is quick to repudiate any such allegiance. The only god it endorses is Pan and 25 December 00 AD was the moment of his death. 24 Instead, the allegory here is more or less explicitly Lacanian, oddly enough. 25 Homo Sap differs from the ghost-primates thanks above all to language, or what Burroughs calls the representation of a thing “by something it is not.” 26 The Otherness of the symbol introduces a fissure into the human organism, like the channel that separates Madagascar from the mainland. “One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.” 27 It is not clear to me that Jacques Lacan himself would have been happy to acknowledge this eccentric offspring of his work, with its heavy ecological nostalgia, not to mention its apology for hard drugs. But he might, I think, have relished the idea of organic existence as a revenant from the unknowable real, lost to the subject constituted in language and yet persisting as a vestige to exert its own pressures from a place that exceeds what we know. Since the drive is made perceptible — to both the subject and the analyst — at the level of the signifier in its Otherness, where it is represented by something it is not, its manifestations threaten the cogito and its phantom presence marks a corresponding absence in the symbolic order, an emanation of the unnameable. 28 But Lacanian ghosts are less palpable than those depicted by Burroughs. When he locates the paranormal in the terrain of the real, Lacan is not inviting us to resort to psychopharmacology or to lament a lost innocence. Nor does he subscribe to otherworldly beliefs. Instead, the supernatural belongs to the unnameable realm beyond the reach of the signifier; it exceeds what culture defines as knowledge and in the process throws into relief the limitations of our culturally-induced understanding. “The gods belong to the field of the real.” 29 A god, Lacan repeats, “is something one encounters in the real, inaccessible,” and the presence of the divine “is indicated by what doesn’t 24 Burroughs 25. 25 There is even a reference to “the Thing” inside Homo Sap: Burroughs 48. 26 Burroughs 48. 27 Burroughs 49. 28 Ironically, in this respect psychoanalysis effectively reverses the image of the Cartesian ghost in the machine repudiated by Lacan’s contemporary, Gilbert Ryle: Ryle’s ghost is consciousness; Lacan’s lost presence organic (Gilbert Ryle, 1900-76; Jacques Lacan, 1901-81). In the same year as Ryle published The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), Lacan told an audience of analysts in Zurich that psychoanalysis led him to oppose “any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) 1). One way or another, dualism was evidently bothering their generation, and not without reason. 29 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979) 45. Phantom Presences 103 deceive — anxiety.” 30 This unease is evidence that we have reached the limits of the territory mapped by the language we have learnt, not awe before the absolute. Even Derrida becomes uncharacteristically Lacanian when he identifies a ghost as what “no longer belongs to knowledge,” “an unnameable or almost unnameable thing.” 31 Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to glance at the possibility that uncanny spectrality might be identifiable with das Ding, the psychoanalytic source of the drive to know: “And what if it were the Thing itself, the cause of the very thing one is seeking and that makes one seek? The cause of the knowledge and the search? ” 32 If the gods give names to the unaccountable, however, Lacanian ghosts mark a double loss. Death makes a “hole in the real” that can be filled in the process of mourning by nothing less than “the totality of the signifier.” Apparitions in their very spectrality represent that absence: not the return of what is lost but its irretrievable demise. 33 To my mind, this brings Lacan closer, in the end, to Bing Crosby than to William Burroughs. And closer, too, perhaps, though the connection may be no more than coincidental, to Philip Roth, whose novel Exit Ghost (2007) invokes the metaphor to show its protagonist living what, citing Keats, he calls “a posthumous existence.” 34 At 71, the reclusive novelist Nathan Zuckerman, now impotent, incontinent, and uncertain of his memory, returns to New York to make one last bid for vitality, “to recover something lost.” 35 Painfully for Nathan, the drive persists in an organism not now equipped to obey it: this self-confessed “revenant” in the city is drawn back into the turmoil of life above all by a young woman 30 Jacques Lacan, Television and A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990) 90. 31 Derrida 6. 32 Derrida 173. This is offered as a reading of Freud’s essay on “The ‘Uncanny’” but it also plays a part in Derrida’s argument concerning the obligation to reckon with (figurative) ghosts. Lacan discusses the Thing, archaic object of the drive, in Seminar 7. He himself is more ambivalent towards the desire for knowledge: “Sophocles represents [Oedipus] as driven to bring about his own ruin through his obstinacy in wanting to solve an enigma, to know the truth” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 272); “I think that throughout this historical period the desire of man, which has been felt, anesthetized, put to sleep by moralists, domesticated by educators, betrayed by the academies, has quite simply taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for knowledge. That’s the passion that is currently going great guns and is far from having said its last word” (324). The context makes clear that the passion in contemporary question is science, which Lacan denigrates throughout Seminar 7 for the invention of atomic weapons. 33 Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins UP, 1982) 38-39. 34 Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (London: Vintage, 2008) 221, 231. 35 Roth, Exit Ghost 104. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 104 who exerts what he describes as “a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire.” 36 Exit Ghost puzzles over the contest between the spectrality of organic being, an inadequate, incomplete actuality, and the symbolising capabilities of fiction. Is there consolation to be found at the level of the signifier? Nathan himself eventually goes back to writing and seclusion, where he becomes the spectator of a dying nature at the desk by the window, looking out through the gray light of a November morning, across a snow-dusted road onto the silent, wind-flurried waters of the swamp, already icing up at the edge of the foundering stalks of the skeletal bed of plumeless reeds. 37 But he does so in order to complete the script of his play, He and She, in which She yields to His overtures. Only in fiction is anything possible. Where else can we “wish what is into what is not,” except on the page? 38 (The writer finds “the imaginary ‘She’ vividly at the centre of her character as the actual ‘she’ will never be.” 39 ) It seems, then, as if art compensates for the living death which is old age, or perhaps for the unrealisable possibilities that constitute existence in its entirety, offering another kind of apparition in their stead. “For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.” 40 But the book does not end there. If the fictional He and She has the last word in Roth’s novel, replacing the gaunt, wintry vegetation of the northern swamp with “the chocolate-milk-colored water” of an imagined bayou, its last word is of a missed encounter. In the play She agrees to come to his hotel but He evades their meeting: “(She’s on her way and he leaves. Gone for good.)” 41 Exit ghost. The signifier does not deliver gratification after all, or not, at least, at the thematic level: Fiction is not, it seems, reducible to a form of wishfulfilment. Instead, it aligns itself with another kind of spectrality, conjuring presences only to record a loss. The defining metaphor of Exit Ghost permits the novel to leave unresolved the question it repeatedly poses: where is life to be found? Its characters are all what the text calls “no-longers” or “notyets.” 42 When, if ever, do shadows give way to substance, whether literal or 36 Roth, Exit Ghost 31, 66. 37 Roth, Exit Ghost 280. 38 Roth, Exit Ghost 273. 39 Roth, Exit Ghost 147. 40 Roth, Exit Ghost 147. 41 Roth, Exit Ghost 292. 42 Roth, Exit Ghost 256-57. Phantom Presences 105 figurative? What is the relation between the human animal subject to decay and the language in which it both finds and loses its proper location? IV Ghost Writers Exit Ghost treats ghostliness not as an archaic survival but as a current condition. In an earlier novel a closely related metaphor framed an investigation of the writer’s place in the text. Amy Bellette, a “wraithlike” figure in Exit Ghost, 43 first appeared in The Ghost Writer (1979), where Nathan, then an aspiring author of 23, sought legitimation from the writer E.I. Lonoff, long dead by the time of the later work but a phantom presence in Amy’s apartment. The Ghost Writer begins, like many good ghost stories, by the fire, as a December dusk falls in a secluded old farmhouse. And yet there are no ghosts in The Ghost Writer either. The characters include a range of candidates for the title role (given as two words), among them the self-sequestered Lonoff, both writer and metaphoric ghost, who has outlived his own success and has since progressively arranged his affairs for the sake of his art in order to avoid living, while his work is reduced in consequence to turning sentences around. Alternatively, perhaps the title alludes to Anne Frank, who haunts Nathan’s imagination to the point where she lives on there, masquerading now as Amy Bellette and driven “to ‘come back’ as the avenging ghost,” 44 but whose Diary retains its power to testify to atrocity only on condition that she did not survive. Anne Frank, the dead child writer, had a story to tell, in contrast to Nathan, who wants to be a writer but, guilty of a safe, suburban childhood in Newark, New Jersey, can only ghost other people’s stories and, even then, is sure he cannot “approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! ” 45 How substantial is a shade, this manifestation that might so easily be illusory? The Ghost Writer identifies an affinity between spectrality and writing: ghost as writer, writer as ghost. In the process, it draws out all the paradoxes of the phrase itself. Understood in the technical sense of the term, a ghost writer (one word) is at once present in and absent from the finished work. How material, then, is the ghost’s contribution? On the one hand, in the popular conception the ghost writer, as one who does the writing on behalf of another, is no more than an intermediary between protagonist and reader, while the story belongs to the experiencing subject. On the other hand, from a literary-critical point of view, the ghost-writer is the true maker of the piece of writing we hold in our hands. In that sense, are not all novelists ghost- 43 Roth, Exit Ghost 17. 44 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (London: Vintage, 2005) 148. 45 Roth, The Ghost Writer 121. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 106 writers, at once there in the writing and absent from the story, drawing on imagination to invent beyond their experience and tell tales that are not in the end their own? Robert Harris’ bestseller The Ghost exploits this paradox in another key. The narrator here is a professional ghost writer, hired to make readable the memoirs of an ex-prime minister who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tony Blair. So spectral does the ghost writer appear to the other characters that he is never named: His role is too insubstantial, his appellation too immaterial for anyone to remember. At first, then, the distinction seems clear between the protagonist who shaped history itself and the ghost paid to shape the record of that history. At the same time, we are to understand, the quality of the ghost’s writing will make all the difference between the book’s success and failure, determining its readership and sales figures. The novel reflects repeatedly on the symbiotic relationship between ghost and named author. How far does the ghost himself create the recollections his tape recorder elicits from his subject? Whose are the memories readers will eventually encounter? As he works, however, the narrator gets caught up in a plot to bring the former premier to trial for war crimes and, in the event, the central adventure he recounts turns out to be his own. Ironically, the anonymous ghost writer becomes the hero of his own story. By the time his book is finally completed, the truth about the prime minister cannot safely be told. In the event, then, the ghosted memoir, marketed as history, is in practice predominantly fictitious; the ghost’s own tale, as he records it for us, is, we are to understand, true. At the same time, of course, this anonymous narrator is entirely imaginary and the book is a work of fiction. The ex-premier, however, is not exclusively fictitious. Both characters inhabit a popular novel and yet the mystery of the prime minister’s unquestioning allegiance to American policy in the Middle East is rooted in contemporary history. Harris’ book plays wittily with the paradoxes of ghost-writing, including some others that I ca not reveal without spoiling the story. We are left to ponder the possibility that all writing creates much of what it appears to record and at the same time transcribes a good deal of what it seems to invent. Political thrillers may capture the misgivings of their own moment; Philip Roth’s fiction, to return to that, at once imagines and records a social and cultural history of contemporary America. Where exactly is the boundary between fact and fiction, or between history as one kind of story and the novel as another? The insubstantiality that informs the term ghost-writing throws those questions into unexpected relief. Phantom Presences 107 V Intertextual Ghosts If all writers are in a sense ghost writers, all texts are haunted by earlier texts, as the past returns to inform the literary and, indeed, the philosophical present. Four Quartets makes a sudden appearance in Exit Ghost at the moment when the now 71-year-old narrator sees Lonoff’s furniture in Amy’s apartment: I thought, “What! Are you here? ” and then remembered where that very line appears in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” at the point where the poet, walking the streets before dawn, meets the “compound ghost,” who tells him what pain he will encounter. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.” How does Eliot’s ghost begin? Sardonically. “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age.” Reserved for age. Reserved for age. Beyond that I cannot go. A frightful prophecy follows that I don’t remember. I’ll look it up when I get home. 46 He does not. The prophecy Nathan represses includes the loss of sensation, a powerless rage against the folly of others, and then the rehearsal of a life and the exasperation at its public assessment. But while all these conditions are foregrounded by the story in Exit Ghost, the allusion also acknowledges a debt. In the eyes of its compound ghost, T.S. Eliot’s poem of 1942 records “the sudden look of some dead master,” a poet, certainly, and specifically William B. Yeats, perhaps, who had died three years before. Yeats also called on the dead, Homer among them, to tell whether all old men and women raged, as he did then, against old age. 47 Spectre has recourse to textual spectre here in what seems an infinite regress — from Nathan to his fictitious master, Lonoff, from Eliot to Yeats and, beyond him, through all dead writers to Homer. Eliot’s compound ghost, “[b]oth intimate and unidentifiable,” 48 surely represents the cumulative literary tradition that permits individual talent to flourish for a while. Last year’s words are inevitably superseded by next year’s, delivered in another voice, for better or worse, but always in a relation of difference, which presupposes a resemblance, to a textual history that is the condition of writing’s intelligibility. As an evocation of the dead person, an apparition, however palpable, can never resume the identity of the living being. Dis-embodied, not the thing itself, the revenant is irreversibly changed. In that sense, is not all writing haunted? While intertexts inhabit a work, they are at the same time no more than shadows of themselves, rewritten as other than they were. Marx re- 46 Roth, Exit Ghost 169. 47 T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1944) l. 92. William B. Yeats, “The Tower,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1958) 219-21. Ll.145-46 of “Little Gidding” seem to allude to “Byzantium” (Yeats 280-81). 48 Eliot, “Little Gidding,” l.96. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 108 writes Hegel, Derrida reinterprets Marx. Ibsen’s Ghosts surely rewrites the sagas of his native Norway, where the ancestors come back from their graves, malign and larger than life, to spread pestilence. And perhaps it also invokes Hamlet, that earlier story of a dead father who revisits his son with fatal consequences while his loving mother stands by too helpless to intervene. Roth’s Ghost Writer, meanwhile, explicitly references Swift, Keats, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol. Other phantom presences play a still larger part in its composition. The novel paraphrases Anne Frank’s Diary and summarises a short story by Henry James about the unforeseen effects of Dencombe’s art. If novelists now see more than their predecessors, it is because they stand on the shoulders of giants. In one of those knowing ironies that make Roth’s novels so pleasurable, the young aspiring writer steps onto the volume of Henry James stories on Lonoff’s desk in order to eavesdrop on the conversation in Amy’s bedroom above: “Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art! Dencombe would understand. James would understand. But would Lonoff? Don’t fall.” 49 Does The Ghost Writer also silently invoke Hamlet in its story of Nathan’s longing for a (literary) father who turns out to be living like a ghost? If T.S. Eliot features in the argument about art and life that is conducted in the pages of Exit Ghost, and if Macbeth and Keats, Ibsen, Chekhov, Conrad, and Hemingway are all accorded more than honorary mention there, the title surely alludes once again to Hamlet. This time the comparison is between Nathan and the old king, Shakespeare’s own Ghost, powerless now to effect his will in his own person but reluctant to surrender control. If so many modern textual wraiths lead back ultimately to that one ghost story, no wonder Hamlet also forms the thread that binds the argument of Specters of Marx. Derrida’s book begins and ends with quotations from the play and reverts at intervals to this text that dramatises a time which is radically “out of joint.” 50 Is Hamlet, then, a point of origin for a culture that acknowledges the continuing but phantom presence of its own past? Yes and no (predictably): Hamlet, too, had its antecedents. But that is another story. VI Postmodernity On the basis of this handful of examples (there are surely others), it seems clear to me that, despite the Enlightenment’s dismissal, ghosts continue to walk, however anachronistically, in the 21 st century, introducing a strangeness into what is familiar. Postmodern morality, politics, and textuality find ways to confront their anxieties in the form of attendant spirits. If we no 49 Roth, The Ghost Writer 117. 50 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982) 1.5.196. Phantom Presences 109 longer lend credence to literal revenants, then we cannot easily give up their figurative survivors. In the first instance, these metaphoric spectres register a contemporary uncertainty, not only as an additional presence, a memory of the past intruding into the present, but also as a loss, something subtracted from the self-sufficiency of the current moment. The trope casts doubt on the belief in a consciousness fully present to itself, as well as the autonomy of the text. Mysterious, unaccountable or uncanny, phantoms mark the incompleteness of our positive terms and, indeed, our cultural maps. In this way their continuing figurative presence at once menaces our knowledge and allows the possibility of thought beyond the categories orthodoxy legitimates. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 110 Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. London: Virago, 2003. Burroughs, William S. Ghost of Chance. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1944. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature. Ed. Albert Dickson. London: Penguin, 1985. Harris, Robert. The Ghost. London: Arrow, 2007. Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts and Other Plays. Trans. Peter Watts. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. Eds. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. James, Montague R. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine. London: Hutchinson, 1967. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”’ Literature and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1982. ---. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. ---. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. ---. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1979. ---. Television and A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Marx, Karl. Marx: Later Political Writings. Trans. Terrell Carver. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Roth, Philip. Exit Ghost. London: Vintage, 2008. ---. The Ghost Writer. London: Vintage, 2005. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1982. Skeat, Walter W. “Report upon ‘Ghost-Words,’ or Words which Have no Real Existence.” Transactions of the Philological Society 26 (1885-87): 350-74. Strindberg, August. The Father, Miss Julie and the Ghost Sonata. Trans. Michael Meyer. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976. Yeats, William B. The Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1958. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor: The Metaphorical Dimension of Mythical Figures I The Hermeneutics of Metaphor — the Metaphor of Hermeneutics The understanding of metaphor is a highly interpretative act: Combining two expressions from two different domains and suggesting their sameness, metaphors incite a complex thought process. The hearer has to figure out what the speaker means ― he has to contribute more to the communication than just passive uptake ― and he has to do that by going through another and related semantic content from the one which is communicated. 1 While challenging our imaginative faculties, metaphor supports our understanding of the unknown by linking it to something which is (more) familiar. All we have to do is to ‘connect,’ to engage in the transit from one domain to another. The process of transfer, interchange, and transition is fundamental to the hermeneutics of metaphor and central to the metaphor of hermeneutics. What seems a circular argument in fact leads me straight to the topic of my essay, which is concerned with the connection of myth and metaphor. The link between metaphor and hermeneutics is not a myth and yet both concepts are closely connected to mythical thinking. While the etymology of the term ‘hermeneutics’ is debatable, very often Hermes enters the scene when its origin is explained. And rightly so: There is hardly a more adequate figure for epitomizing the concept of translation, transferral, and interpretation than the wingfooted courier who delivers messages of the gods to the humans, bridging the gap between the unfamiliar and the familiar. Communicating between two different domains, embodying the act of crossing-over and providing insight into something unknown, Hermes cannot only be regarded as the patron of interpretation but also as the patron of translation and thus of metaphor. As it will be argued in this essay, there is an intimate connection between myth and metaphor: not only is metaphor a key component of mythical thinking, but figures that emerge from myth serve as useful metaphors, which continue to 1 John R. Searle, “Metaphor,” Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2 nd ed. (1979; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 111. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 112 shape our culture and furthermore reflect the ways in which we think metaphors. Myth, in the way it will be understood in this essay, does not follow the Aristotelian concept of mythos or ‘plot,’ but instead will be used to refer to stories deriving predominantly from Greek mythology. Thereby the focus will be set especially on the metaphorical quality of mythical figures, which allows them to become detached from the myths in which they were originally embedded. At least in Western culture, quite a few mythical figures have been conventionalized and become widely established as metaphors. One might think of Echo and Narcissus, for instance, as well as of expressions involving mythical figures, ancient heroes, or characteristic elements of classical myth such as ‘Janus-faced,’ ‘Argus-eyed,’ ‘Oedipus-complex,’ ‘Herculian task,’ ‘Pandora’s box,’ ‘Sisyphean labour,’ ‘Trojan horse,’ or ‘Orphic language’. These expressions have entered our lexicon as fixed terms and even though they seem to fall into the category of ‘dead metaphors,’ 2 they continue to maintain a strong connection to the original myths, which have to be retrieved in order to understand their full semantic scope. Figures such as Hermes, Pegasus, or Medusa, for instance, have advanced to become popular and very ‘living’ metaphors in Western culture where they appear in quite different contexts: Thus we meet the patron of travellers and traders as an email-server, as a public transportation service (the name of a bus company in the Netherlands), or as a journal of classical philology and of language and communication. All of these examples connect to the function of the mythical figure as bearer of messages, quite literally as transporter and transmitter of knowledge about different, partly lost cultures and languages — even EU-funding lines have tapped the potential of Hermes’ metaphoric quality, alluding to his role as communicator of knowledge, and translator of information across (national) boundaries. 3 Pegasus, the winged steed of the Muses, returns as an airline company, as a digital library catalogue, an agency for authors and playwrights, as constellation and as satellite, 4 suggesting the movement of ideas and creativity of thought; and Medusa, the snaky-heard woman with her petrifying looks (or locks) greets us as a fashion label (Versace), as the name of a German publishing company (Medusa Verlag), and even from bottles of the alcoholic beverage absinthe. 5 It is remarkable that a figure that draws its power from ‘seeing’ nowadays 2 For patterns of ‘metaphor death’ see esp. Richard Trim, Metaphor Networks: The Comparative Evolution of Figurative Language ( Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 141-51. 3 See e.g. http: / / hermes-email-server.pcfiles.com/ ; http: / / www.hermespaketshop.de; http: / / www.steiner-verlag.de/ Hermes/ ; http: / / hermes2.asb.dk/ (15 March 2009). 4 See e.g. http: / / www.flypgs.com/ en/ , http: / / pegasus.library.ucsb.edu; http: / / www.pegasusagency.de, http: / / www.astronautix.com/ craft/ pegasus.htm (15 March 2009). 5 See http: / / absinthe.cc/ abs_germany.htm (15 March 2009). Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 113 appears primarily as visual metaphor, or rather: as metalepsis, as “metaphor for a metaphor” as it alludes to a literary source, “a text which in itself is already figural.” 6 Even though pictures cannot claim that ‘A is B’ and do not operate with words to establish a connection between a source and target domain, they can become successful metaphors insofar as they effectively establish a relation between the represented image and its context, 7 between the head of the Medusa and the inebriant power of ‘the green Muse,’ of absinthe. 8 Wherever it appears, the image of the Medusa suggests attractiveness, fascination, and intoxication. Furthermore, her metamorphic quality (she turns her beholders into stone) as well as her own ‘translation’ from a beautiful woman into a horrible monster, and finally her multimodal reception in text and image point to a rather complex relation to metaphoric thought and theory. The Medusa seems an adequate image for conceptualising metaphor since she embodies Unbegrifflichkeit (Hans Blumenberg) insofar as she cannot be beheld nor, due to her petrifying look and the poisonous snakes attached to her, touched (be-griffen), nor can her horror be encapsulated by words, and yet words turn out to be the most adequate media to narrate her story and circumscribe her appearance. While Medusa points to the need for translation and metamorphosis, in which the object is transformed while its essence remains the same and is elucidated in the act of transferral, Pegasus suggests a creative space, and Hermes epitomises translation, which suggests that mythical figures can serve to provide some insight into the hermeneutics of metaphor. Thereby they not only shed some light on the ways in which metaphors are created but furthermore direct our attention to what can be lost in the course of translation. “Metaphor,” as Jacques Derrida reminds us, “is never innocent” insofar as “[i]t orients research and fixes results.” 9 The hermeneutics of metaphor requires a critical reflection on ways of ‘how to do things with metaphors’ and also with myths in postmodern society. Even though his etymological relevance remains contentious, it is again Hermes who leads the way for he is not only known in classical mythology as messenger and translator but also as trickster, pointing to the doubleness of metaphoric meaning and the ambiguity of language. In comparison to myth, however, metaphor seems less ambiguous and more ‘hermetic’ with regard to the meaning it conveys. 6 Patricia Vicari, “Renaissance Emblematica,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (1993): 162. 7 For visual metaphor, see John M. Kennedy, “Metaphor and Art,“ The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) 47-61. 8 Especially in the 19 th century, absinthe was a popular beverage amongst poets and was referred to as the ‘green Muse’. See Marie-Claude Delahaye, L’Absinthe: Muse de Poètes (Auvers-sur-Loise: Museé de l’Absinthe, 2000) 26-27. 9 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 17. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 114 As these examples indicate, mythical figures seem to have been dormant rather than dead insofar as nowadays they are constantly revived to shape our perceptions of the world and are used as metaphors, thus remaining a key element of our culture. In the following, the connection between myth and metaphor shall be further investigated, focussing on the ways in which mythical figures develop and sustain their metaphorical qualities. Do some myths or mythical figures prove to be more appropriate than others as far as their metaphorical potential is concerned? And what conclusions can be drawn from the relation between myth and metaphor for current theories of myth and the dialogue between ancient and modern cultures? II The Relation between Myth and Metaphor At a first glance, myth and metaphor do not really seem to connect. As cognitive theorists emphasize, metaphor involves the coactivation of two domains, the target domain and the source domain. Thereby, an abstract, complex, not well-delineated concept is linked to something that is more concrete, physical, and well-delineated in order to make the unfamiliar more familiar. The requirement for the understanding of metaphor involves the immediate understanding of the literal meaning of the expression from the source domain. As Sam Glucksberg observes, “[m]etaphor comprehension like language comprehension in general, is automatic and mandatory. We cannot refuse to understand, and when metaphoric meaning is available, it will be processed.” 10 And there’s the rub: Myth does not seem to provide the source domain required for metaphor since it is not unambiguous. Quite the contrary: Myth, as narrative, can adopt very different forms and reach us in quite a variety of stories, which might focus on diverse aspects of one particular myth and, even though not being contradictory, create variations of the original story. The meaning that is assigned to a specific myth thus ultimately depends on its course of reception, which can stress some elements while neglecting others. In their travels across space and time and their translation into different languages and cultures, myths lose some of their original property while gaining new aspects, which become firmly integrated into their stories. Relying on language, mythical narratives are subject to change not only due to culture-specific modifications but also due to language development. A certain room for variation, however, must also be granted to metaphors. While, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued, 11 metaphors are 10 Sam Glucksberg, “How Metaphors Create Categories - Quickly,“ The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) 80. 11 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 115 based on embodied human experience and can thus be claimed to be widespread and (nearly) universal, there are some “cross-cultural” and “withinculture variations,” 12 which have to be taken into consideration. Metaphors do not only shape their physical and cultural contexts but are also shaped by the social, ethnic, and regional influences, by personal interests, and by the communicative situation in which they arise. It seems indisputable that myth exceeds metaphor regarding its wide spectrum of interpretation and its great number of variables. For myth not only connects to a single embodied experience but can comprise several narratives and embraces a broad net of different meanings and experiences. It thus provides a complex semantic space, which can be conceived as accommodating several metaphoric sub-spaces and a broad field of imagery, which might integrate other myths in its narrative web. 13 This is, for instance, illustrated by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work that contains a system of myths and transformations, which — as the title suggests — continuously shifts between the literal and the figurative. Ovid’s anthology of mythical narratives provides numerous examples illustrating the connection between myth and metaphor not least because it presents a lexicon of mythical figures, which have inscribed themselves into cultural memory and dominate our conception of classical myth still today. It is especially when we consider mythical figures rather than complex mythical narratives that the connection between the composition of meaning in metaphor and myth becomes most obvious, for mythical figures such as Narcissus embody a sensual experience. However, since the name ‘Narcissus’ means ‘benumbed’ in ancient Greek and is thus a literal translation, it is stricto sensu not a metaphor but rather a personification of the feeling of ‘numbness’. Nonetheless, in the course of reception, it has developed a metaphorical quality since ‘Narcissus’ is no longer recognised as literal translation of ‘benumbed’ but has become a meaningful expression in its own right. And yet, even though referring to someone as a narcissist, or using any other term from the lexical field surrounding ‘Narcissus’ no longer requires any knowledge of the original myth in either the sender or receiver of this information, the connection to the mythical figure is continuously re-evoked and, to a certain degree, sustained in the repeated usage of the term. Before tracing the ‘career’ of mythical metaphors, however, let us briefly resume some further points of connection between myth and metaphor. 12 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge UP, 2005) 67-116. 13 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologica (Frankfurt a.M. : Suhrkamp, 1976) 436. See also: Bernhard Debatin, Die Rationalität der Metapher: Eine sprachphilosophische und kommunikationstheoretische Untersuchung (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995) 188-89. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 116 While myth, in most cases, cannot serve as metaphor itself, it is based on metaphorical thinking : 14 Abstract notions are coupled with concrete objects to explain their meanings, which are conveyed through images or transformed into mythical figures, gods, demons, or heroes; as well as through a story, a fictional account which serves to explicate certain natural phenomena. Myth can also give an incentive for the creation of metaphors, which henceforth almost immediately become conventionalised. Thus, the expression ‘to grasp an opportunity’ derives from the Greek figure Kairos, the spirit of opportunity, who was completely bald except for a long lock of hair which hung down across his forehead. Running swiftly, Kairos can only be caught as he approaches; once he passes, you grasp at nothing. 15 In the proverb, the notion of a missed opportunity is expressed figuratively by linking the abstract idea to a more concrete action, which makes ‘opportunity’ tangible. The understanding of proverbs, therefore, is based on the same source-totarget-domain linkage 16 which is espoused by conceptual metaphor but which is also fundamental to myth. While it can be claimed that all language has evolved from metaphorical conceptions of the world insofar as the formation of words and the establishment of meaning in language is based on the same connection between an abstract target and a more concrete source domain, it is especially mythic language that is essentially metaphoric. Like metaphor, myth operates on a continuum of figurative and literal expression to explain certain phenomena and to articulate relations in a seemingly incoherent environment. Hence, Northrop Frye, for instance, argues that myth and metaphor are inseparable. 17 The highly figurative scope of mythical language might be regarded as characteristic of possible-world semantics. Mythical world-making becomes a means to account for certain inexplicable and indescribable phenomena. Thus, for myth there is no other opportunity than to resort to metaphors. The aesthetic experiences in the reception of myth and metaphor closely correspond as myth and metaphor follow the same strategies in the communication and generation of world-knowledge: They both provide the mind with a system of cultural categories and stimulate our imagination, which enables us to connect the relevant source and target domains and to establish mean- 14 Ernst Cassirer, “The Power of Metaphor,“ Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946) 83-99. 15 Callistratus, Descriptions 6, Phaedrus 5.8. 16 Raymond Gibbs Jr. and Herbert L. Colston, “Psycholinguistic Aspects of Phraseology: American Tradition,” Phraseologie / Phraseology: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, ed. Harald Burger, vol. 2 (Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2007) 832-33. 17 Northrop Frye, “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language,” Myth and Metaphor: Selected essays, 1974-1988, ed. Robert D. Denham (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1990) 3-17. Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 117 ing of mythemes and metaphoric expressions by re-contextualising these elements and retrieving their greater narratives. While myth comprises a network of metaphors, one could argue that every metaphor is a myth-inminiature or an abbreviated myth. 18 Operating within the mythical context and challenging the structural organisation of myth, metaphors “invite reinterpretation of not only the myths in which they are embedded but also those grammars of common discourse that have lost touch with the generative character of expression.” 19 Connecting to Blumenberg’s claim that metaphors can be conceived as relics which have been left on the way from mythos to logos, 20 one could regard them as residuum of mythical configurations of the ‘real’. In this context, metaphors would attest, as Sybille Krämer suggests, to a continuous mythical perception of reality, and the usage of ‘living’ metaphors in everyday speech would continuously reverse the transition from mythos to logos. 21 While this is not the place to further pursue the scholarly debate on the progression from mythos to logos or vice versa, the employment of metaphors in everyday language is not only an exercise in human creativity and imagination but also revitalizes mythical conceptions of the world in an enlightened, multimedia, and globalized world. Insofar as myth and metaphor provide ways of structuring and organising our experiences and knowledge of the world, they share the same aim and become equally indispensable for human thought. As Lakoff and Johnson remark, “they give order to our lives. […] [P]eople cannot function without myth any more than they function without metaphor.” 22 The significance of myth formations in the classification and organisation of human experiences is one of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ key arguments in his structural analysis of myth where he maintains that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” 23 To a certain extent, this notion can also be applied to metaphor even though it challenges traditional comparison theory, which assumes that metaphor can only describe preexisting similarities but not create new ones. 24 This claim, however, has been rejected by metaphor theorists such as Glucksberg and Lakoff and Johnson. 18 Stephen Daniel, Myth and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990) 10. 19 Daniel 11. 20 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) 10. 21 Sybille Krämer, “Die Suspendierung des Buchstäblichen: Über die Entstehung metaphorischer Bedeutung,“ Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 15 (1990): 68. 22 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2003) 185-86. 23 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 443. (repr. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (1958; New York: Basic Books, 1963) ch. 11). 24 See Lakoff/ Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 153, 244; Glucksberg 66-83. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 118 The latter even see it as one of the “four greatest historical barriers to the understanding of the profundity of metaphorical thought,” and add that “[t]he primary function of metaphor is to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. This may involve pre-existing isolated similarities, the creation of new similarities and more.” 25 The creative scope of metaphor seems to be even greater than that of myth considering that myth per definitionem entertains an intimate relation to logos. While myth is warranted and also, to a certain extent, sanctioned by its ancient, supposedly divine origin but first and foremost by its interconnection with logos, metaphor may present itself as fiction and distinguishes itself by opening up one possible explanation. 26 The differentiation between a fictional origin versus rootage in logos seems useful (with reservations) for distinguishing myth and metaphor. For the communication of knowledge, however, myth resorts to fictional elements, which are included in the mythos to allow for figurative world-making while entertaining a close connection to logos. One well-known example are the artificial myths used by Plato in his Dialogues. The most popular of them is his ‘myth of the cave,’ which emerges from a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon and illustrates Plato’s theory of ideas. It tells the story of man’s progression from the grotto where people are chained and engage in the contemplation of shadows, which they regard as ‘real’ even though they are only reflections projected on the wall by ‘real’ objects passing in front of a fire behind their backs. One man manages to escape from darkness into light, from ignorance to knowledge, to daylight where he beholds the sun. The image of the sun as a source of light and understanding as well as the journey from the world of representations into the ‘real’ is, of course, per se highly metaphorical, involving conventionalised metaphors, the most popular of which are the sun and darkness. Hence, Plato’s cave has been read as a story about self-fulfilment, or transcendence of man’s faculties and his horizon of knowledge, and as a founding myth of cultural history. Furthermore, as well as being metaphorical in its content, Plato’s ‘cave’ has advanced to become a second-order metaphor, which can be retrieved as an expression for restricted knowledge and darkening of the senses. This expression, however, is a highly restricted metaphor insofar as it requires a pre-knowledge of Plato, his philosophy, and the myth itself. The significant role of second-order myth-metaphors as well as their development into cultural memory becomes much more obvious when it comes to mythical fig- 25 Lakoff/ Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 154. 26 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) 112. Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 119 ures. At this point, let me stress that it is not my intent to blur the boundaries between metaphor, allegory, and symbol. Myths and mythical figures undoubtedly fulfil an allegorical and symbolical function. However, it is my contention that some myths (like Plato’s cave) and particularly mythical personae, for reasons which have been partly explained above and are to be further explicated in the following, have developed a metaphorical quality. As stated above, in the course of their transferral and re-contextualisation in different eras and cultures, some mythical figures become quite independent from the myths they were originally embedded in. Since the development and establishment of their ‘meaning’ depends on their (creative) reception, however, it is only those figures that appear in well-received and popular myths which have this particular metaphoric power. With repeated use of the same aspects connected to a specific mythical figure, its ‘meaning’ becomes condensed, which enables its career as metaphor. This is not to say that these figures are no longer ambiguous: They retain a certain semiotic complexity by maintaining the link to their original myths, which resonate in references to these figures even though they are not necessarily required for a basic understanding of their meaning. III The Career of Myth-Metaphors At the outset of myth-metaphors (1), there is the desire to explain an unknown (natural) phenomenon, which is met by weaving a mythical narrative that ties together the abstract and more concrete, the figurative and the literal to account for the unexplained. The myth under construction thereby benefits from already existing mythical stories, which provide the tools necessary for mythical world-making as well as a complex net of narratives to connect to. In a second stage (2), which can coincide with the invention of the myth, a mythical figure is introduced which incorporates a specific phenomenon or sensual experience. Taking the couple of Echo and Narcissus as an example, the ‘sound’ becomes represented by the former while the name of the ‘benumbed’ already anticipates his fate. As suggested above, the question of what is in a name becomes very significant in the interpretation of mythical figures and their metaphorical quality as many of them reveal their characters by name. As in the case of Echo and Narcissus, the coupling of two or more mythical figures becomes a useful tool for overcoming contradictions and providing a greater cognitive structure, which supports the memorization of the story and its establishment as part of the cultural archive. It is especially myth’s (self- )integration into the greater mythical network which secures its future reception and persistence: the more points of connection it can comprise, the more intimate the relation between its figures, the more effective it will become in embracing the world by its mythical-metaphorical framing. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 120 The pairing of Narcissus and Echo, for instance, covers the domains of both visual and verbal or auditory perception and thus offers an image of two major strains of human communication — as well as explaining the failure of the faculties of eye and ear. While Narcissus does and, at the same time, does not see his own image, Echo’s speech and her lament fade away unheard even though they do not pass silently. As already suggested with regard to other mythical figures, the embodiment of Echo, who per definitionem lacks a physical appearance, can also be regarded as illustrating the way in which metaphor is constructed; the transferral of words into another ‘voice,’ which does not affect the content of speech but only alters the sound and manner of its presentation, can be read as an image of metaphoric translation. Metaphor connects, or at least pretends to connect, two expressions which reside in different domains but are essentially ‘the same’. Even though the relation between the verbal and the visual, between Narcissus and Echo, is an intimate one, it fades in the course of reception just like it is ruptured as the story of the myth proceeds and the two figures become more and more alienated as Narcissus remains utterly ignorant of ‘his’ Echo, focussing entirely on ‘his’ vis-à-vis. (3) Once the narrative web is woven, myth starts its travels across different times and cultures to communicate its knowledge. Through repetition of the same aspects of specific myths or mythical figures and through the embedding and translation of these aspects in popular and influential texts, their meaning becomes condensed as the stories and the figures are canonised. It is through reception and repetition of specific elements of a myth or mythical figure that mythemes emerge, which can be regarded as constant elements of a particular myth (as they were seen by Lévi-Strauss) 27 only on the basis of their persistence through time. (4) In the course of the reception and repetition of particular characteristics, mythical figures become more and more detached from the story they have been embedded in and establish themselves in cultural memory as independent personae insofar as they are regarded as embodying ‘their’ myth, which no longer has to be retrieved for their (basic) understanding. Rather than being clear-cut categories, there is a smooth transition between stages three and four, allowing a re-contextualisation of the figure in the original myth even after the process of detachment has begun. The possibility of evoking these figures independently from their stories allows for a considerable spectrum of meanings to be attached to them and to expand their canonised meaning: Going back to our example of Echo and Narcissus, their personae can be evoked as effective metaphors for the limitations of communication, or as an image of the ephemeral nature of love. While these meanings are preferably communicated by pairing these figures, Narcissus 27 Lévi-Strauss 428-44. Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 121 has furthermore emerged as a metaphor for the confusion of reality and image, of self and other, signifier and signified, and can even be conceived as illustrating the numbness and subliminal awareness with which we embrace our own technology in daily use, as Marshall McLuhan suggested. 28 In their gradual detachment from the myth, mythical figures undergo a process of gradual abstraction: Eventually, their most popular ‘meanings’ are conventionalized and processed to finally enter our ‘lexicon’ as metaphors, comprising what establishes itself as the kernel of their myths. (5) Furthermore, a fifth level should be added, which illustrates the possibility of the Verfremdung of these metaphors: Mythical figures might appear in contexts which contradict the meaning and the myth they embody. These cases of ‘defective’ employment oppose the expectation of the recipient, who is urged to return to the original myth and reintegrate the myth-metaphor in its original context in order to make sense of this unexpected contradiction. While the process of counter-determination lies at the core of the creation of metaphor, mythical metaphors — provided that they are recognised as such by the recipient — raise certain expectations with regard to their usage, which motivates a return to the original myth if these expectations are not met. In addition to their own metaphoric career, some mythical figures also offer a conceptual framework, which could support the analysis of metaphors and metaphorical patterns. The mirror-image in the myth of Narcissus, for instance, comprises a physical as well as a psychological and philosophical dimension: The reflection of the face in the water resembles the (failed) reflection of the reflected and the reflecting, or (psychologically speaking) nonreflecting, self. The interrelation between the literal and the figurative as well as the reflection of their likeness and difference, which are seminal aspects in this specific myth, closely relate to the way in which metaphors are created and recognised. Narcissus, therefore, could not only be regarded as a metaphor but also as a kind of meta-reflection on the way metaphors are composed while also drawing attention to the possibility of their misconception and a fatal confusion of the literal and the figurative. Bringing Echo back into the picture, however, it is first and foremost the process of metamorphosis, which serves to conceptualise how to do things with words in order to create metaphorical expressions since the object of metamorphoses essentially remains the same in its translation from one domain to the other, from the literal to the figurative. 28 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 51. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 122 IV Myth-Metaphors in Psychoanalysis and Science The metamorphosed figures which we encounter in Ovid experience further ‘translations’ as they enter the language of science. In fact, science and especially psychoanalysis had a considerable share in the promotion and establishment of these figures. It was Sigmund Freud who brought ‘Narcissus’ and ‘Oedipus,’ as well as their mythical stories, back to people’s attention and secured these figures ever-lasting fame as metaphors. His seminal essay “On Narcissism” establishes the self-consuming youth as archetype of a narcissistic personality, which is characterised by the obsession with its past, present (and future) ‘images,’ with its received and projected identities. Expanding on this essay, George Lacan also draws on the myth to explain the mirror stage, in which the child, presented with its imago for the first time, recognises and identifies itself. Henceforth, the term ‘narcissist’ has remained a popular metaphor for self-obsession. Freud’s utilisation of the Oedipusmyth to communicate ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children had a similar effect: After he introduced the term in his Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the ‘Oedipus complex’ became a universal metaphor for expressing the desire for sexual involvement with a parent of the opposite sex, and has prompted a further myth-metaphor, coined by C. G. Jung: the ‘Electra complex,’ which applies to the same desire in female children. Freud’s reading of “Medusa’s Head” as an image of man’s innate fear of castration provides another example of condensing a myth to its psychoanalytic value, which then becomes regarded as being at the centre of the myth. The reason why particularly psychoanalysis utilised myth as metaphorical models for their theories lies in their ‘ability’ to expose the unconscious. According to C. G. Jung, “[m]yths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings.” 29 Furthermore, as narratives, which are read and ‘experienced,’ myth is not only regarded to prove the existence of an unconscious but also to provide access to it, to revive the myth in connection with one’s own personal story, which is only feasible in projection. While psychoanalysis itself presents readings which are highly debatable and which themselves, as Wittgenstein claimed, amount to a “powerful mythology,” 30 they were very influential in promoting certain mythical figures as metaphors and prompting the coinage of further metaphorical expressions. One of the most recent myth-metaphors has been introduced by the psychologist Robert J. Lifton in his work on The Protean Self (1993) and was fur- 29 Carl G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” trans. R. F. C. Hull et al., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung vol. 9.1, ed. Sir Herbert Read et al. (1959; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968) 154. 30 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics: Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966) 52. Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 123 ther developed in sociology by Jeremy Rifkin. The ‘Protean self’ alludes to the Greek sea-god Proteus, who possessed great prophetic knowledge but escaped tedious questions by constantly changing his shape. The metaphor thus accounts for the multiple role-play as well as for the extremely flexible identities people are taking on in their lives as a reaction to the radical changes in their environments and the strong influence of the world-wideweb. Proteus entered scientific discourse even before the ‘Protean self’ was introduced to denote a certain kind of bacteria, which was associated with the Greek god, and furthermore appeared as metaphor in the ‘Proteus- Syndrome,’ which referred to a congenital disorder, in which the overgrowth of certain body parts, muscles, or skin causes physical deformity. The connection of myth, metaphor and science, however, does not seem obvious at first since scientific language is supposed to be objective, literal, unemotional and somewhat colourless. According to John Locke, metaphor cannot be a vehicle for truth and consequently has to be banned from scientific discourse: […] all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement […] and therefore […] they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided. 31 And yet, scientific language includes figurative and metaphoric expressions, for instance in the naming of certain phenomena: Thus, we meet the Medusa, for instance, as adult jellyfish. The similarities between the mythical figure and its fellow-being in the Atlantic are self-evident considering the animal’s long, poisonous tentacles. The scientific ‘career’ of the Gorgon also affected its reception in literature and inspired Sylvia Plath’s metaphoric usage of the Medusa in her eponymous poem “Medusa” (1962). There, the Gorgon is employed to describe the dysfunctional relationship between Plath and her mother, who lives across the Atlantic, yet still reaches out for her daughter as if for a prey with her “eely tentacles.” The metaphor does not end here but is expanded to resemble the “Atlantic cable,” which crosses the sea and continues to transport her mother’s dreaded, ‘hissing’ voice to the other continent. The different employments of the Medusa-jellyfish-metaphor in science and in literature suggest a different aim in the usage of metaphorical expressions. Whereas in literature this metaphor serves to defamiliarize the familiar, in science, it is used to define something unfamiliar by something else that is (supposedly) more familiar. Scientific discourse employs metaphorical expressions as media of knowledge transfer and exchange. As James Bono has pointed out, metaphors are seminal for science “because they ground com- 31 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Basset, 1690) bk. 3, chap. 10. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 124 plex scientific texts and discourses in other social, political, religious, or ‘cultural’ texts and discourses.“ 32 In this context, Sylvia Plath’s poem serves as an illustrative example of how the communication between myth, literature, and science can benefit from exchange, which is fostered by the usage and interchange of metaphors. V The Regeneration of Myth-Metaphors As suggested by the examples given above, which provide some insight into the metaphorical quality of mythical figures, myth and metaphor closely interlink. Myth-metaphors do not only permeate literature and can be traced in scientific discourse; they not only form a seminal part in everyday communication but they also shed some light on ways of how to do things with metaphor and offer a means for further conceptualising our metaphorical and figurative thinking. As the daily usage of these metaphors indicates, myth becomes more and more prominent as an alternative medium for the communication of knowledge, which retrieves ways of worldmaking which seem to have been lost in the secularised information society. Without necessarily being recognised immediately at their appearance, mythical figures succeed in reawakening and re-establishing themselves in contemporary culture almost like ‘Trojan horses’. Disclosing their meaning, they provide access to a complex net of mythical stories, whose revival and retrieval they promote in their everyday usage. It is especially in the age of multi-media that these ‘dormant’ mythmetaphors, once re-introduced, can become widely spread in very little time — even if they are ‘truncated’. This last image motivates a return to the Medusa, who serves as an adequate example in this context insofar as her broad reception is already anticipated in her myth and her ‘career’ calls further mythmetaphors into existence. It is said that immediately after her decapitation, the winged horse Pegasus sprang from her severed neck. By a kick from his hoof, thus the story goes, Pegasus opened the fountain Hippocrene on the Muse’s mountain Helicon. Sacred to the Muses, the fountain was associated with imagination and literature: From it sprang poetry — and with it also metaphor. 32 James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/ Rule of Metaphor in Science,” Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. S. Peterfreund (Boston, MA: Northwestern UP, 1990) 61. Travelling the Worlds of Myth and Metaphor 125 Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Bono, James J. “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/ Rule of Metaphor in Science.” Literature and Science: Theory and Practice. Ed. S. Peterfreund. Boston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 59-89. Cassirer, Ernst. “The Power of Metaphor.“ Trans. Susanne K. Langer. Language and Myth. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. 83-99. Daniel, Stephen. Myth and Modern Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Debatin, Bernhard. Die Rationalität der Metapher: Eine sprachphilosophische und kommunikationstheoretische Untersuchung. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 1995. Delahaye, Marie-Claude. L’Absinthe: Muse de Poètes. Auvers-sur-Loise: Museé de l’Absinthe, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Frye, Northrop. “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language.” Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1990. 3-17. Gibbs, Raymond Jr. and Herbert L. Colston. “Psycholinguistic Aspects of Phraseology: American Tradition.” Phraseologie / Phraseology: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Vol. 2. Ed. Harald Burger. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2007. Gibbs, Raymond W. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Glucksberg, Sam. “How Metaphors Create Categories - Quickly.” The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Raymond W. Gibbs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 67-83. Jung, C. G. “The Psychology of the Child Archetype.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 1959. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, et al. Trans. R.F.C. Hull, et al. Vol. 9.1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Krämer, Sybille. “Die Suspendierung des Buchstäblichen: Über die Entstehung metaphorischer Bedeutung.“ Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 15 (1990): 61-68. Kennedy, John M. “Metaphor and Art.“ The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Raymond W Gibbs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 447-61. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. ---. Metaphors We Live By. 1980. Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2003. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428-44. ---. Mythologica. Vol. 1. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Basset, 1690. S IBYLLE B AUMBACH 126 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: McGraw- Hill, 1964. Ortony, Andrew, ed. Metaphor and Thought. 1979. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Searle, John R. “Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. 1979. Ed. Andrew Ortony. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 83-111. Trim, Richard. Metaphor Networks: The Comparative Evolution of Figurative Language. Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrage Macmillan, 2007. Vicari, Patricia. “Renaissance Emblematica.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (1993): 153-68. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. S EAN F RANZEL Is This a Dialogue? Discursive Community and the Media of the Humanities “If we could say we (but have I not already said it? ), we might ask ourselves: where are we? And who are we in the university, where apparently we are? ” 1 Ever since Socrates, the metaphor of dialogue has guided scholarly selfunderstanding. When engaging with authors of the past or with students, teachers, or colleagues, proponents of liberal education repeatedly suggest that divergent forms of mediated communication are akin to a conversation or discussion. 2 If academic life is to enable students and instructors alike to develop skills essential for democratic citizenship (as humanists have consistently argued throughout history), how could it be that this discursive community would not be ‘reciprocal,’ ‘Socratic,’ or ‘dialogical’? And yet the more incongruity between supposedly dialogical discursive forms, the more figural—and hence the more tenuous— the metaphor of dialogue becomes. 3 Histories of media and scholarly institutions have begun to show that it is often difficult to situate varied, often divergent modes of scholarly discourse under the conceptual umbrella of dialogue: from oral oratory to scholarly journals, from archives of national libraries to electronic circulation of research, the public manifestation of orators, authors, teachers, 1 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties, “ Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992) 3. 2 Not only is the dialogue a popular metaphor for describing pedagogical interaction, but the dialogue as genre has displayed remarkable longevity throughout the history of scholarly publication. See Herbert Grabes’ contribution in this volume on how metaphors guide the naming and genre classifications of modes of scholarly discourse. On the genre of the dialogue see also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Über die (Wieder-) Geburt der Naturwissenschaften aus dem Geiste des Dialogs,” Siegener Studien 35.4 (1983): 66- 77. 3 If, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, “the primary function of metaphor is to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience” (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 154), then the dialogue operates increasingly metaphorically the more it is displaced from Schober’s definition of the dialogue as “one-on-one language use with a partner,” and “joint activity to which both participants continually contribute” (Michael F. Schober, “Dialogue and Interaction,” Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Amsterdam/ London: Elsevier, 2006) 564). S EAN F RANZEL 128 respondents, and editors depend in large part on the dominant media of the day. A related impulse to historicize various forms of scholarly practice has emerged from recent debates about the contemporary university, as writers question whether humanistic education remains the university’s driving force or whether scholarship manifests a unified intellectual community. 4 In this light, an attempt to gain both descriptive and prescriptive clarity about scholarly communication would do well to interrogate the metaphor of dialogue. Certain theorists continue to rely on a notion of dialogue or conversation, while others are wary of it. Take Jeffrey J. Williams, who argues that insofar as the “conversation” has become the prevalent figure synecdochically naming what we do, it occludes other dimensions of our tasks as […] professors. […] The figure of “the conversation” tacitly conflates our work as scholarly debate, as a self-contained genealogy of discourse, obscuring the very real parameters and effects of the institutions that mediate our work. This figure abstracts our particular and in fact rarefied activities […] from the very real tasks that comprise our jobs, like teaching or myriad other academic duties. 5 Drawing on recent studies of academic labour, 6 Williams argues that the figure of conversation obscures a) our status as actors in diverse institutions, b) the “professional terms and institutional conditions of entry” into scholarly communities, and c) the often very specialized language organizing academic publics. For Williams, a critique of the notion of conversation “as a stage set apart,” should draw attention to how “our institutional location forms our work, and how we are institutional actors,” a task that his studies of the idea of the university and its institutional past undertake. 7 4 See among many others Jacques Derrida “Mochlos“; Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996); and Rüdiger Vom Bruch, “A Slow Farewell to Humboldt? Stages in the History of German Universities, 1810-1945,” German Universities Past and Future, ed. Mitchell Ash (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997) 3-27. Derrida’s opening words of an essay on Kant and the university (quoted as the epigraph of this paper) underline the precarious state of liberal education in the contemporary university. In the face of the disaggregation of scholarly knowledge production and the growing marginality of the humanities, Derrida questions the idea of universities as unified groups of individuals even as he invokes it with the pronoun ‘we.’ Nonetheless, he simultaneously points to the difficulty of doing away with the idea that the modern university has a single purpose vis-à-vis a community of individuals ‘in-‘ and ‘outside’ the university. 5 Jeffrey J. Williams, “Introduction: Institutionally Speaking,” The Institution of Literature (Albany: SUNY P, 2002) 7. 6 Marc Bosquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York UP, 2008); Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997). 7 See Jeffrey J. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” JAC 25.1 (2005): 55-74; Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Post-Welfare State University,” American Literary History 18: 1 (2006): 190-216. Williams also calls upon us to ‘teach the university,’ i.e. to make the past, present and future of higher learning a topic of interdisciplinary study in Is This a Dialogue? 129 In this article I want to follow Williams and explore how two recent accounts of scholarship as dialogue by Edward Said and Mieke Bal inadequately describe concrete institutional and medial practices. I compare their embrace of dialogue to Michael Warner’s critique of the concept/ metaphor. This comparison reveals both the potential and limits of each thinker’s critical methodology—in this case, Said’s hermeneutic philology, Bal’s deconstruction-inflected rhetorical analysis, and Warner’s theory of publics and the public sphere. In particular, all three take up the idea that reading sets in motion expressly dialogical communication and thereby founds discursive communities. Said and Bal propose interdisciplinary ideals of scholarship— of what ‘we’ do as teachers, writers, students, and readers in the humanities — that re-affirm traditionally humanist medial practices. Said claims that quasidialogical reading is the paradigmatic form of critique, while Bal proposes that critical engagement with other scholars involves a reading practice that imagines the printed word as if issued from the speaking voice of a teacherfriend. Despite their differences, both recapitulate longstanding humanistic accounts of print and oral media in their idealization of dialogic interaction. In contrast, Michael Warner historicizes modes of scholarly communication, attempting both to expand our conception of medial practice and to reveal the weaknesses of traditional humanistic self-understanding in describing contemporary scholarly media and institutions. Both Warner and Williams continue to conceptualize how scholarly practices generate discursive communities— how, in other words, academic situations cultivate varied ‘we’s’— and yet both call for more nuance than the metaphor of dialogue can allow. I Edward Said’s posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism 8 attempts to update humanism for the present day by defending anew critical, humanistic reading as a “sympathetic dialogue across ages and cultures.” In combining a hermeneutics of reading with a concept of the scholar as both part of and foreign to dominant discursive communities, Said addresses the question of the ‘we’ of scholarship in a provocative, yet traditionalist fashion. For Said, humanistic study concerns “the products of human labor,” “the achievement of form by human will and agency.” 9 Taking issue with deconthe humanities: See Jeffrey J. Williams, “Teach the University,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8: 1 (2007): 25-42. 8 Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 2004). All Said quotes will be from this book unless otherwise noted. 9 Said, Humanism 13. S EAN F RANZEL 130 struction’s destabilization of individual subjectivity, Said thinks of critical humanistic practice as a realm where distinct subjects “commit to” interpretations of the world and connect judgment to “the world in which [intellectuals and academics] live as citizens.” 10 In turn, “attentive, imaginative close reading” is the paradigmatic practice of humanist scholars, and he defends critical reading as an emphatically philological activity. Against the idea that philology is old-fashioned or that reading can be passive and open to manipulation, 11 Said claims that a philologically “trained openness to what a text says” sets in motion a “process of unending disclosure, discovery, selfcriticism, and liberation,” 12 a vehicle, in other words, for the development of the self through the encounter with the other. In this way, Said draws on the methodological foundations of 19 th -century hermeneutics most prominently articulated by Schleiermacher and Dilthey when he describes interpretation as entering into an empathetic, ‘dialogical’ interaction with an author: “for the humanist, the act of reading is the act therefore of first putting oneself in the position of the author, for whom writing is a series of decisions and choices expressed in words.” 13 Readers encounter authorial activity through empathetic identification and an “irreducibly personal act of commitment to reading and interpreting.” 14 This putting oneself in the position of the author — a reformulation of the hermeneutic ideal of understanding the author better than he understood himself — links reading to the figuration of concrete persons, as the relationship between reader and text becomes a “sympathetic dialogue of two spirits across ages and cultures.” 15 Like past hermeneuticians, Said deploys the concept of dialogue to describe the encounter of reader and text without fully interrogating its status as metaphor. At the same time, the personificatory openness to the text/ author—the genesis of a figural “we” established across ages and cultures through reading, if you will — is only one side of the philological coin for Said. The other entails ‘resistance,’ a critical stance that pertains less to the objects of study and more to the discursive communities in which such acts of reading take place. Humanistic criticism must offer a counterbalance to the “prepackaged and reified representations of the world that usurp consciousness and pre- 10 Said, Humanism 6. 11 Martha Nussbaum gestures to this claim by drawing on the Socratic/ Platonic critique of reading in a defense of liberal education. Nussbaum articulates a notion of ‘Socratic’ education based on the presence of the teacher as a questioning interlocutor. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997) 33. 12 Said, Humanism 21f. 13 Said, Humanism 62. 14 Said, Humanism 66. 15 Said, Humanism 92. Is This a Dialogue? 131 empt democratic critique.” 16 Drawing on his frequent analyses of the mass media and political elites, Said sees humanistic reading as an alternative medial operation that occasions sustained critical rationality: “Humanistic reflection must literally break the hold on us of the short, headline, soundbite format and try to induce instead a longer, more deliberate process of reflection, research, and inquiring argument.” 17 In a world of mass media, humanistic close reading functions as media critique by arresting the transmission speed of other media and expanding the breadth of content. On this model, the university becomes an oppositional arena, “one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices,” 18 where the assumptions of dominant discursive communities are interrogated. The positive association with others via humanistic philology has its flip side in a critical gesture of disassociation with groups constructed on the basis of the inclusionary pronouns of ‘we’ and ‘us’ and the exclusionary ‘you all’ or ‘they: ’ The deployment of such pronouns as “we” and “us” are also the stuff of lyrics and odes and dirges and tragedies, and so it becomes necessary from the training we have had to raise the questions of responsibility and values, of pride and extraordinary arrogance, of an amazing moral blindness. Who is the “we” who bombs civilians or who shrugs off the looting and pillaging of Iraq’s astonishing heritage with phrases like “stuff happens” or “freedom is untidy”? One ought to be able to say somewhere and at some length, I am not this “we” and what “you” do, you do not do in my name. 19 Deliberately bringing the rhetoric of anti-Iraq war protests (‘not in our name’) into resonance with literary figures of apostrophe and personification as well as with modes of scholarly address, Said emphasizes that discursive community is as much a negative as a positive concept for criticism and pedagogy. In this way, Said likens this position of resistance to that of the exile, a conceptual Leitmotif throughout his scholarly, political, and autobiographical work. For Said, the exile is a subject position that generates new forms of thought and experience through the crossing of geographical, cultural, and cognitive borders. 20 Even though exile is often imposed by harsh political realities, its experience can lead to the exploration of alternatives to the mass institutions of modern life, and thus stands as a metaphor for the intellectual’s provisional relationship to dominant discursive communities. 21 Liken- 16 Said, Humanism 71. 17 Said, Humanism 74. 18 Said, Humanism 71. 19 Said, Humanism 79f. 20 See Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and other Writings (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 173-82. 21 “The intellectual’s provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solution. But only in that pre- S EAN F RANZEL 132 ing the necessity of forging new modes of self-presentation in exile to both the reader’s empathetic encounter with other writers and the alienation from majority communities, Said argues that his intellectual heroes (Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Auerbach, to whom one chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism is devoted) achieved their literary successes in large part through the transformation of their often very painfully real experiences of exile into vigilant critical innovation. Said’s understanding of humanistic scholarship thus comes into focus as a dialectical process of the formation of and disassociation with discursive communities. On the one hand, empathetic reading forms ‘dialogical,’ ‘democratic’ community, and on the other, the gaze of the exile critiques other discursive worlds of which he or she is not fully a part. In this way, Said updates the long-standing trope of scholar/ writer as exile with a modernist, Adornian sensibility and brings lessons of 19 th and 20 th century history, philosophy, and culture to bear on the humanistic tradition. And yet his model of (dis-)association with discursive communities is firmly in line with a classical self-understanding of humanist personality for whom, in the worst of political and cultural atmospheres, “the only home truly available […] is in writing” (as Said writes of Adorno 22 ), and who, in the best, can find sympathetic, horizon-fusing interaction with contemporary and past humanists alike. 23 That said, Said’s configuration of the scholar as exile presents certain problems when we return to the issue of the institutional situation of scholarship. Despite his exemplary engagement as scholar and public intellectual, Said’s figuralization of scholarly discourse as dialogue tends to idealize the university as an alternative public space not subject to the exigencies of the rest of the professional world: the academy—with its devotion to reflection, research, Socratic teaching, and some measure of skeptical detachment—allows one freedom from the deadlines, the obligations to an importunate and exigent employer, and the pressures to produce on a regular basis, that afflict so many experts in our policy-think-tank riddled age. 24 carious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then go forth to try anyway” (Said, Humanism 144). 22 Said, “Reflections on Exile” 184. 23 Here I would draw attention to the recent issue of Cultural Critique entitled “Edward Said and After: Toward a New Humanism” 67 (2007). Though I agree with many points of the editors and authors of this volume (especially Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism,” Cultural Critique 67 (2007): 13-42, and Matthew Abraham, “Introduction: Edward Said and After: Toward a New Humanism,” Cultural Critique 67 (2007): 1-12), the tendency of my paper is to question the newness of certain aspects of Said’s humanism. 24 Said, “Reflections on Exile“ 71f. Is This a Dialogue? 133 Viewing the university as a quasi-exilic, Socratic space independent from external influence neglects a wide range of contemporary institutional realities; Said seems oblivious of the pressures on students and teachers that involve the same accelerated consumer culture that humanistic reading is supposed to combat. If we take the study of labor practices in the university by Williams and others seriously, it becomes questionable whether Said’s idealized account of scholarly conversation adequately theorizes the wide range of concrete discursive practices in which we as teachers and students engage. Is not interpersonal interactivity in academia more variegated and often less utopian than Said claims? Are we to neglect the medial and discursive practices of teachers and students as late-night e-mailers, job applicants, academic advisors, or research assistants — that is to say as readers, viewers, and listeners in a wide variety of situations for which the figure of free, unencumbered dialogic sociability doesn’t quite apply? Said’s concept of exilic empathy and resistance can certainly be an element of critical pedagogy, but it would seem to oversimplify the medial and institutional layering of scholarly practices and roles at work today. II More so than Said, Mieke Bal’s account of the humanities problematizes concepts of author, intention, and sympathetic commerce between stable subjects. Bal scrutinizes rhetorical operations that ascribe authorial voice to cultural products and imagine reciprocity between text and critic. In the end, however, she puts forth a model of critical, dialogical communication strikingly close to Said’s idealization of scholarly community. Bal’s 2002 Travelling Concepts in the Humanities is an admirable hands-on attempt to enable and encourage interdisciplinarity: Bal calls her reflections a ‘rough guide’ to how scholars might ‘travel’ (one of the central metaphors of the book) between disciplines. The book’s main thesis is that interdisciplinary cultural analysis must seek its basis in concepts rather than method or coverage. Concepts are sites of agreement and debate across different concerns and methods and thus “tools of intersubjectivity; ” 25 theorizing interdisciplinarity as a negotiation of concepts thus reveals the interactive, interpersonal stakes of conceptual work in the humanities. Travelling Concepts works through specific concepts that are particularly suggestive in their ability to function across disciplines: image, tradition, intention, framing, mise-en-scène, performance and others. 26 25 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002) 22. All subsequent Bal quotes are from this book. 26 Here, I limit my focus to Bal’s configuration of pedagogy; it is hopefully a consolation that this conceptual intervention grounds the methodology of the larger book. S EAN F RANZEL 134 In a noteworthy rhetorical move, Bal proposes that we approach her exploration of concepts as if it were “happening on a stage: in a classroom, in a study.” 27 Bal self-consciously puts forth a notion of a scholarly text as an interplay of different voices located in an “imaginary classroom,” be they voices of actual artists, scholars, or fictional students. However, Bal is quick to note the fictional quality of this discursive space: Academic debate is staged, not real, in a monologic text that only approaches dialogue through quotation and representation of the other voice. It is an instance of prosopopeia, a rhetorical figure that represents an imaginary or absent person as speaking and acting. 28 In this way, scholarly discourse deploys the trope of giving an absent or imaginary person a face and voice in order to populate its text or lecture with personal pronouns, with the ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they,’ and ‘we’ of (dis-) agreement. The call to enter this imaginary classroom requests that reader and writer perform an imaginary operation, a figural transport to this hypothetical realm. Through the metaphor of the stage, Bal understands this figural quality of scholarship as a theatrical gesture that sets in motion the interpersonal interaction of subjects (elsewhere she uses the concept mise-en-scène) while at the same time maintaining an awareness of the experimental and artificial quality of those subject personae. Bal thus proposes a non-essentialist concept of the subject, what she calls “post-humanist view of subjectivity, but one that reaffirms the subject’s importance.” 29 And yet despite her emphasis on the figural nature of dialogue, it would initially seem that lingering with this classic trope betrays a commitment to traditionally humanistic modes of scholarly self-understanding. The final chapter continues to explore the scene of pedagogy. In her account of the critical encounter with other writers — i.e., how one brings an interlocutor into the fictive space of reciprocal dialogue — Bal takes us through a reading of Gayatri Spivak, whom she views as an exemplification of the figure (or what she also calls “the conceptual character” 30 ) of the teacher. The act of reading another writer as a teacher takes us back to the question of the mediality of humanistic discourse under examination thus far, the question, in other words, of the relation of figure and media, of rhetoric and concrete practice that scholarly discourse sets in motion. In circling around the concept of the teacher, Bal combines an argument about Spivak as an inspiring example of critical pedagogy with a defence of Spivak’s oft-maligned style. For Bal, an appreciation of Spivak must treat her work as inherently pedagogical. The trick with Spivak, she informs us, lies in 27 Bal 4. 28 Bal 326. 29 Bal 132. 30 Bal 20. Is This a Dialogue? 135 reading her written text as if it were spoken, in effect transporting Spivak into Bal's imaginary classroom: “Read her as if you hear her teach, and all difficulty fades away.” 31 The injunction that Spivak’s work “is best read as spoken” 32 is based on two related claims about her style. The first addresses Spivak’s tendency to write long and difficult sentences, as Bal claims that dense scholarly discourse might be better appreciated as oral instruction in a class: meandering speech is often a feature of a scholar thinking on her feet and relying on linguistic and gestural cues from her audience. On a point with higher methodological stakes, Bal proposes that Spivak’s writing manifests a tentative openness that readers should approach as a pedagogical elicitation of critical response, and that it is thus inherently dialogical. “Teaching is communicative, dialogic; it operates on an authority constantly questioned in its work; ” 33 an openness to input from others, however figural, is characteristic of a pedagogy based on a sense of reciprocity between teacher and student in both actual and imaginary classrooms. The openness to self-criticism (“without self-criticism, dialogue is foreclosed” 34 ) is indicative of the pedagogical core of Spivak’s work, which invites us to imagine the author in the intimate role/ voice of mentor, friend, and teacher. Spivak thus offers a dialogical mode of writing from which, in our personae as students, we would do well to learn through “listening, knowing that you can object to it, argue with it, ‘apply’ it to your own work.” 35 This configuration of study as reading/ listening draws on the notion that mediated communication triggers an active response that in turn is a vehicle for the development of individual subjectivity. The reader/ listener coming to free activity, to his or her ‘own work: ’ This is a classic trope of liberal, humanistic education that we likewise encountered in Said. Whether or not Bal’s suggestions actually help us find Spivak more readable is not the point here—instead I simply want to note that Bal takes recourse to a relatively traditional logic of humanistic practice. The notion that an oralization of the text (whether actual or figural) generates a productive personalization of humanistic practice has been at the core of humanistic letters since antiquity. Take, for example, practices of reading aloud; 36 the popularity of the ‘dialogues with the dead’ form in antiquity and the early modern period, which pitted literary and philosophical non-contemporaries 31 Bal 316. 32 Bal 296. 33 Bal 316f. 34 Bal 317. 35 Bal 322. 36 See Roger Chartier, “The Text between the Voice and the Book,” Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, eds. Raimondo Mondiano, Leroy Searle, and Peter Schillingsburg (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2004) 54-71. S EAN F RANZEL 136 against each other in scenes of face-to-face debate; 37 or the foundational conceit of hermeneutics that reading sets a ‘dialogue’ with the text in motion. We might be inclined to consider how Bal’s continuity with long-standing configurations of reading, writing, speaking, and listening subverts the ‘post’ness of her post-humanism. Bal seems to recognize as much when she calls the conceptual figure of the teacher “both a traditionalist and a theatrical gesture.” 38 The gesture is traditionalist insofar as Bal steps into the comfortable folds of dialogistic humanistic self-understanding operative since antiquity, and yet theatrical in that the role, character, or mask (persona) of the teacher is understood to be as much a performative gesture as a fixed or stable subjectivity. Here we return to the conundrum of who the ‘we’ of interdisciplinary study in the humanities really is. For Bal, this ‘we’ is a productive metaphor, a useful theatrical fiction set in motion by mediated communication. Restating her reading of Spivak, Bal writes: By putting a colleague in the role of main character […] I hope to reveal an element of theatre that is perhaps its most utopian: the relinquishing of the claim to authenticity that sustains the individualistic view of identity. On the premise of theatricality in these senses, then, I am willing to reinstate “we.” 39 Scholarly discursive community thus appears as a provisional compact, a suspension of medial disbelief that assumes intersubjective reciprocity but at the same time situates this assumption as an imaginary horizon organizing the humanities’ self-image. Taking a step back, Travelling Concepts seems to push against Said’s account of humanist subjectivity, viewing the humanities as a shifting realm of quasi-theatrical experimentation rather than as a venue for the solidification of actionable subject positions. At the same time (and this I think is a noteworthy result of comparing the two thinkers), Bal is not all that different from Said in offering intriguing, yet rather conventional modifications of a traditional logic of humanistic scholarly personhood and its media. In effect, it becomes hard to do away with the medial manifestations of the person of the scholar even when one is theoretically committed to the instability of the subject. In this way, hermeneutics and deconstruction-inflected rhetorical 37 On the medial implications of the dialogue of the dead, see Jürgen Fohrmann, ed., Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wien: Boehlau Verlag, 2005). For more on hermeneutics as a ‘dialogue’ with absent or dead interlocutors, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: a History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999). 38 Bal 54. 39 Bal 326. Is This a Dialogue? 137 analysis seem to propagate a compatible medial logic of the humanities: 40 both bear witness to the persistent allure of understanding scholarly practice via the trope of interpersonal ‘dialogue.’ Bal’s notion of the “imaginary classroom” certainly helps us to think about the classroom (as well as reading and writing) as a realm of possibility and experimentation. In contrast to attempts to directly link the practical/ moral and the figural/ performative in the arts, 41 it can be fruitful to think about instruction as an experimental space in which students and teachers test out modes of diverse communication that are representative, however figurally, of functions that they will perform in discursive communities outside of the university. The classroom, then, as a site for role-playing, for skits and scenes, for taking opposite sides and for ‘staging’ dialogue. This idea is eminently plausible and compelling, especially for (but obviously not limited to) all of ‘us’ with any experience in a language classroom. At the same time, an emphasis on the figurality of this discursive community tends to neglect the more concrete responsibilities and activities of teachers and students in educational institutions. If it is even plausible to say that a ‘we’ spans across all institutions of humanistic study, we would be naïve not to recognize that such a community is constituted by many different localized ‘we’s’ imbedded in concrete power structures. Following Williams, we might ask how the mise-en-scène of teacher and student roles changes across different medial practices and institutional locations. Does the ‘we’ of the imaginary classroom include adjunct faculty or graduate instructors? And do we figurally oralize student voices when grading their papers or responding to their emails? While Bal may be an exemplary citizen in her home institution, one might argue that that the more her concept of the imaginary classroom becomes strictly figural, the more our attention is shifted from the concrete plurality of discursive situations in academic institutions. The significance of both thinkers’ accounts of the mediality of discursive community seems to me to lie in a shared traditionalism: both bear witness to the persistent allure of configuring scholarly practice through the trope of interpersonal ‘dialogue.’ In this light, Said’s hermeneutics and Bal’s rhetorical analysis are more complementary than antagonistic. Both operate with a regulative ideal of interpersonal reciprocity abstracted from (and sometimes 40 Carsten Strathausen’s elegant diagnosis of deconstruction’s reliance upon certain basic conceptual and methodological presuppositions of hermeneutics should resonate here: “Deconstruction works homeopathically: using hermeneutics to undo hermeneutics.” Carsten Strathausen, “A Rebel Against Hermeneutics: On the Presence of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,” Theory & Event 9.1 (2006). http: / / muse.jhu.edu/ journals/ theory_and_event/ toc/ tae9.1.html (access June 2009). 41 As Martha Nussbaum would have it, for example, in her account of liberal education in Cultivating Humanity. S EAN F RANZEL 138 standing in contrast to) the multi-layered practices of academic life, an ideal that follows humanists of old in theorizing our relationships to students and to cultural products alike. III Like Williams, Michael Warner attempts to (as he puts it) “disentangle public discourse from its self-understanding as dialogue” 42 by historicizing the institutional and medial practices often subsumed under the term. Warner’s work explores the interrelation of media and institutions while engaging the idea that scholarly life engenders positive forms of intersubjectivity. In contrast to Said and Bal’s description of reading through a unifying scene of dialogue, Warner questions the humanistic fixation on a normative ideal of reading where “acts of reading are understood to be replicable and uniform.” 43 His article “Uncritical Reading” takes aim at the notion that ‘critical’ reading is the ultimate benchmark of scholarly research and pedagogy. For Warner, critical reading is not a universal ideal, but rather a manifestation of certain media and characteristic of the particular historical moment of modernity. 44 In a move typical to histories and theories of media, Warner historicizes the hermeneutic model of textual encounter. 45 For Warner, the unquestioned adoption of a model of critical reading can blind us to other past or present medial practices: We tend to assume that critical reading is just a name for any self-conscious practice of reading. This assumption creates several kinds of fallout at once: it turns all reading into the uncritical material for an ever-receding horizon of reflective selfpositing; by naturalizing critical reading as mere reflection it obscures from even our own view the rather elaborate forms and disciplines of subjectivity we practice and inculcate; it universalizes the special form of modernity that unites philology with the public sphere; and it blocks from view the existence of other cultures of textualism. 46 For Warner, hermeneutics’ equation of ‘dialogue’ with the text with ideal intersubjective reciprocity elides the existence of multiple competing modes 42 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002) 90. 43 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” 115. 44 “Critical reading is a historically and formally mediated practice, with an elaborate discipline of subjectivity, and one that now confronts rivals as it has done in the past.” Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004) 35. 45 This is also a foundational gesture in Friedrich Kittler’s media theory. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/ 1900 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). 46 Warner, “Uncritical Reading” 16. Is This a Dialogue? 139 of textual encounter, rendering all reading that is not ‘critical’ compromised and alienated. We can thus read Warner to diagnose Said’s opposition of critical reading and the ‘sound-bite format’ of other media; in a corrective to the privileging of modes of reading that exclusively cultivate the modern author/ subject, Warner argues that medial practices produce a wide variety of often divergent subjectivities and interpersonal relations. To imagine a more expansive range of acts of reading, Warner calls forth the image of a composite scene of a humanities classroom, taking us back, we might say, to something like Bal’s pedagogical theatre: Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they aren’t supposed to. They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors. They mime what they take to be authorized sentiment. They stock themselves with material for showing off, or for performing class membership. They shop around among taste-publics, venturing into social worlds of fanhood and geekdom. They warm with pride over the national heritage. They thrill at the exotic and take reassurance in the familiar. They condemn as boring what they don’t already recognize. They look for representations that will remediate stigma by giving them “positive self-images.” They cultivate reverence and piety. They try to anticipate what the teacher wants, and sometimes to one-up the other students. They grope for the clichés that they are sure the text comes down to. Their attention wanders; they skim; they skip around. They mark pages with pink and yellow highlighters. They get caught up in suspense. They laugh, they cry. They get aroused (and stay quiet about it in class). They lose themselves in books, distracting themselves from everything else, especially homework like the reading I assign. 47 Warner suggests that pedagogy intervenes in multilayered discursive contexts and thus connects the classroom to sites of mediated communication and interpersonal interaction—other ‘social worlds’ or ‘taste-publics’— that point beyond the pedagogy of critical philological dialogue. If a notion of a Socratic classroom imagines a unified exchange between teacher and student then Warner’s image of an imaginary classroom describes a multi-layered space of reading and response. For Warner, acknowledging the existence of competing modes of textual encounter can enable a more complex view of the media and institutions that we inhabit. In contrast, Said and Bal’s accounts of scholarly communication fall short of describing how teachers and students are ‘uncritical’ readers either by choice or by necessity: how we skim articles for main arguments, just read the bibliographies of scholarly books, peruse the websites of our competitors, look at encyclopaedia entries on a novel because we don’t want to read the whole thing, and sometimes — the horror! — even consult Wikipedia. Both Bal and Said seem to ignore a wide variety of medial practices that bear on the fabric of our everyday life as 47 Warner, “Uncritical Reading” 13. S EAN F RANZEL 140 teachers and researchers. Not all of our daily interactions function as an intimate conversation with a teacher/ friend, nor should they. Though he focuses most of his attention on reading in “Uncritical Reading,” I would argue that Warner offers the conceptual tools for describing how scholarly practice cultivates a multiplicity of “forms and disciplines of subjectivity” across a range of visual, aural, and textual media. In contrast to ‘dialogic’ communication that assumes an author personality behind each medial product, Warner suggests that we do different things with different texts in different situations: we instrumentalize and we appropriate, we cutand-paste, and yes, we read ‘critically,’ too. In a similar vein, Warner’s theory of publics serves to ‘disentangle’ the concept of discursive communities from the conceptual pitfalls of dialogism. Warner defines publics in more functional terms than Habermas’ classic theory of the public sphere, who relies on a normative conception of face-toface conversation to organize his account of mediated communication. 48 Taking issue with the notion that discursive communities qua publics can be imagined first and foremost through the trope of dialogic relation, Warner argues that publics should be differentiated according to the media through which discourse circulates, moving from a model that posits one, unified realm of public discourse (the public) to one of multiple, often conflicting publics. For Warner publics come into being through a layering of communicative functions, some of which can be described through a speakeraddressee model, others which cannot. A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse. This dimension is easy to forget if we think only about a speech event involving speaker and addressee. In that localized event, circulation may seem irrelevant, extraneous. That is one reason why sender/ receiver or author/ receiver models of public communication are so misleading. 49 The actual ways that a text is transmitted medially — its form, temporality, reception, etc. — can stand in contrast to a rhetoric of dialogic reciprocity that permeates it. 50 For this reason, the claim that a text addresses a public takes the term public “to name something about the text’s worldliness, its actual destination, which may or may not resemble its addressee.” 51 For Warner, we are better off describing the academic ‘publics’ generated around the journal in which the article you are now reading appears, for example, through reference to modes of circulation (whether we read it in print or 48 For a critique of Habermas’ grounding of his theory of communication upon a dialogic model of face-to-face interaction, see John B. Thompson, Ideology in Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). 49 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” 90. 50 Warner gives the example of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography where the figural addressee (his son) is incongruous with the actual audience (a set of disparate readers). 51 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” 72. Is This a Dialogue? 141 online, whether we pick out single articles or follow ongoing debates, whether we browse indiscriminately or bring temporalities of circulation from other discursive communities to bear on our reception of articles) rather than through recourse to an abstract notion of dialogue. Warner’s injunction to recognize the figurality of certain texts’ structures of address is thus akin to Bal’s rhetorical reading of texts as only hypothetically dialogical, except that Warner wants to draw our attention to substantial differences between rhetoric and actual circulation rather than reifying the hermeneutic encounter as regulative ideal. In particular, Warner argues that the temporality of the circulation of discourse has considerable bearing on academic publics, i.e. the variegated disciplinary, departmental, or instructional communities in which we find ourselves. Recognizing that study, instruction, and scholarship manifest varying temporal logics helps to distinguish different kinds of scholarly communities as well as to compare academic communication to other kinds of publics. For example, academic discourse sometimes approaches the punctuated speed of political debate, while in other contexts operates according to extended timelines (of review and publication, for example) that share very little with the accelerated circulation of the mass media. As Warner points out, taking account of the temporality of discursive circulation helps to condition certain blanket claims that academic discourse is properly ‘political.’ Differences in tone, medium, temporality, etc. exist between speech in a classroom and an article, in a university-wide roundtable and in a regional newspaper, and even if we conceive of each situation as in some way political, we should be cognizant of how the term’s meaning shifts across different publics. Warner’s emphasis on medial circulation gives a more nuanced account of the multiplicity of ‘we’s’ invoked in academic life. Though he doesn’t discuss the institutional features of academia as explicitly as Williams, Warner offers tools for conceptualizing the layering of institutionally situated medial and discursive practices. The advantage of this theoretical approach lies not in abandoning scholarly philology as such, but to place it in a larger context of varied discursive forms and styles of discursive communities. To recognize that we dialogue with texts and individuals but also that we participate in many other discursive contexts is to approach the mediality of communication more open-endedly. By focusing on concrete institutional situations, both Williams and Warner historicize as well as institutionalize hermeneutic philology. They do not call for the replacement of hermeneutics by theories of media technologies, 52 but instead situate critical reading in a larger context of professional life. 52 See, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A Farewell to Interpretation,” Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) 389-402. S EAN F RANZEL 142 Works Cited Abraham, Matthew. “Introduction: Edward Said and After: Toward a New Humanism.” Cultural Critique 67 (2007): 1-12. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Bosquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York UP, 2008. Chartier, Roger. “The Text between the Voice and the Book.” Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies. Eds. Raimondo Mondiano, Leroy Searle, and Peter Schillingsburg. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2004. 54-71. Derrida, Jacques. “Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties.“ Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Ed. Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. 1-34. Fohrmann, Jürgen, ed. Gelehrte Kommunikation: Wissenschaft und Medium zwischen dem 16. und 20. Jahrhundert. Wien: Boehlau Verlag, 2005. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “A Farewell to Interpretation.” Materialities of Communication. Eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 389-402. ---. “Über die (Wieder-)Geburt der Naturwissenschaften aus dem Geiste des Dialogs.” Siegener Studien 35.4 (1983): 66-77. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/ 1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Nelson, Cary, ed. Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism.” Cultural Critique 67 (2007): 13-42. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. ---. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and other Writings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 173-82. Schober, Michael F. “Dialogue and Interaction.” Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Amsterdam/ London: Elsevier, 2006. 564-71. Strathausen, Carsten. “A Rebel Against Hermeneutics: On the Presence of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.” Theory & Event 9.1 (2006). http: / / muse.jhu.edu/ journals/ theory_and_event/ toc/ tae9.1.html (access June 2009). Thompson, John B. Ideology in Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Vom Bruch, Rüdiger. “A Slow Farewell to Humboldt? Stages in the History of German Universities, 1810-1945.” German Universities Past and Future. Ed. Mitchell Ash. Providence: Berghahn, 1997. 3-27. Is This a Dialogue? 143 Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. 65-124. ---. “Uncritical Reading.” Polemic: Critical or Uncritical. Ed. Jane Gallop. New York: Routledge, 2004. 13-39. Williams. Jeffrey J. “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University.” JAC 25.1 (2005): 55-74. --- “Introduction: Institutionally Speaking.” The Institution of Literature. Ed. Jeffrey J Williams. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. 1-18. ---. “Teach the University.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8: 1 (2007): 25-42. ---. “The Post-Welfare State University.”American Literary History 18.1 (2006): 190-92. M ARCO DE W AARD Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination: The Case of Ian McEwan I Long a punchball of poststructuralist theory and criticism, the “liberal humanist subject” is making a comeback in critical and literary discourse. Genres such as biography, biofiction, and the biopic are (re-)installing the myth of a coherent, unified self to ever wider scholarly interest, and in its classic, 19 th century and secular form liberal humanism has found a self-proclaimed bard in Ian McEwan, who wishes to celebrate it in his novels and who aligns himself with it in his political interventions. 1 What is remarkable about the recent spate of liberal humanist imaginings is, first of all, the regularity with which they graft the humanist subject onto representations of the 19 th century past, anchoring a vision of enhanced and privileged agency in what this article will refer to as a “neo-Victorian” mode of temporality. 2 Just as remarkable, secondly, is that these imaginings are now endorsed in precisely those quarters which used to be most critical of classic liberal humanism’s ethical claims. In her recent study Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, for example, Cora Kaplan details the emergence of a “‘new’ literary humanism” in neo-Victoriana of the last two decades to argue that the 19 th century has come to function as a privileged site for developing and articulating affirmative accounts of individual and cultural agency. 3 In brief, her argument is that “the seismic shifts in world politics from 1989 onwards” have given “liberal humanism, and the universalist versions of subjectivity and agency that [de- 1 McEwan’s ambition to reinstall a 19 th -century, secular and scientistic humanism is in evidence in many of his interviews and public performances. As this article suggests, it not only informs his ever more conspicuous retour à Darwin but also the anti-modernist and anti-postmodernist polemics in some of his recent works. 2 The adjective “neo-Victorian” was first used by Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel,” Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 538-60, to reference postmodernist historical fiction that is set in Victorian Britain. A peer-reviewed e-journal for “Neo-Victorian studies,” founded in 2008, extends the definition of “neo-Victorian” to include all post-1901 revisitations of the Victorian past. 3 Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007) 161. M ARCO DE W AARD 146 fine] it, an ethical boost in unexpected quarters,” including the “left-leaning English departments” which used to engage in critiques of the subject and its literary counterpart, the author. She contends that in effect, neo-Victoriana have been instrumental in salvaging the subject from the “paradoxical suspension” in which poststructuralism had placed it, confirming its psychic as well as political “necessity.” 4 A new scholarly journal for Neo-Victorian Studies, to give a second example, likewise credits neo-Victoriana with a redemptive capacity for reinfusing contemporary culture with ethical and humanistic content. Its editor Marie-Luise Kohlke, alluding to Fredric Jameson’s seminal critique of the shallow, simulacral historicity of postmodernist fiction, asserts that by comparison, “the neo-Victorian project” constitutes “a worthwhile, even necessary process of historical analysis” which “[contributes] formatively to an ethically informed subjectivity” as it is “mindful of the long-term consequences of socio-political policies, strategic decisions, and ideologies” which date back to Victorian times and “continue to reverberate in the cultural echo chamber over a hundred years later.” 5 Suspending my criticism for a moment, I am in principle ready to accept that neo-Victorian critical and literary discourse may take part in a larger, ongoing attempt to accommodate (late) postmodernist critical sensibilities to a new ethical awareness. Indeed, the continued attachment to humanist values and the attendant wish to reconfigure them in a new, post-foundational ethics has long been recognised as a viable trajectory within postmodernity. Some twenty years ago, Linda Hutcheon already characterised postmodernism as “contradictory and [working] within the very systems it attempts to subvert,” these systems prominently including “what we usually label our dominant, liberal humanist culture.” 6 More recently, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has observed that “the term ‘post’modernity” itself, and the sense it creates “of being ‘after’ a watershed,” “invokes history” as “a central, perhaps the central humanist convention,” while Amy Elias, in her seminal study of postmodernist historical fiction after its initial, formalist phase, asserts that history in the unrepresentable and sublime form as theorised by Jean-François Lyotard and others “leads to ethical action in the present.” 7 4 Kaplan 42, 36-7. Kaplan’s appraisal of a “‘new’ literary humanism” is most fully argued in her chapter “Biographilia.” Insofar as this chapter recognizes that the fiction of humanist agency can be regressive, narcissistic, or simulacral, such fears are deflected onto a scathing analysis of Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (50-62). 5 Marie-Luise Kohlke, “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter,” Neo-Victorian Studies 1 (2008): 5. 6 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 4, 6. 7 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “Agency in the Discursive Condition,” History and Theory 40 (2001): 39; Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) 97. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 147 Given this trajectory within the postmodern, what is surprising about neo- Victorianists’ critical master narrative is not so much the trope of a humanist “return” as such as the fact that its comeback should be located on the temporal horizon of the present — or even, retrospectively, on yesterday’s — and thereby turned into a genuine hic et nunc event. Yet for at least two reasons, it seems to me that the humanist subject that is presently being resurrected is left dangerously under-theorized. First, the suggestion that the autonomous, empowered, and “ethically informed” subject owes its return to “history” — a cultural category so easily mistaken for an ontological one — ignores that postmodernist historical fictions can represent, conjure up, and place us in relation to the past in a stunning variety of ways. To trace the construction of humanist agency and subjectivity through the many forms of postmodernist historical representation which are available, and thus to define the “new” humanist subject more closely in relation to the sites of its re-emergence, is unlikely to sustain the general conclusion of an ethical or humanistic turn. 8 Second, I am sceptical about neo-Victorianists’ assurance that the new humanist subject does not return to the same, stupendous political and ethical costs as the agent of classic, bourgeois liberal humanism of old. Kaplan casts neo-Victorian literature’s self-reflexiveness and theory-savviness as a guarantee against a critical relapse: as she confidently puts it, “the humanist subject cannot come back unaltered from the moment of theory.” 9 Yet this assurance rests on a notion of textuality which too easily assumes the possibility of a self-reflexive, dialogic attitude towards the past and its traces in the present. One critic, subsuming neo-Victorianism under a “critical paradigm” which “blurs the distinctions between criticism and creativity,” uses the metaphor of “palimpsestuous” textual play to insist on the dialogic nature of neo-Victorian discourse and on how it revitalises our awareness of some of the defining moments of the modernity we have inherited. 10 Kaplan herself says that Victorian fiction “exists ‘inside’ for me as a sort of palimpsest of all my encounters with [it]” from an early age onwards, and she construes this internalised store of literary memories as a metaphor for neo-Victorian textuality more generally in order to stress its 8 That neo-Victorian critics easily conflate the “historical” and the “ethical” appears from Kaplan’s argument, in which the historical moment of 1989 is not only said to have propelled an “ethical boost” but where, metaleptically, it also serves as its guarantee (Kaplan 42). Kohlke’s argument is similarly flawed where she attributes a politicizing impulse to our apocalyptically inflected, post-9/ 11 disaster culture, implying that the fascination with (man-made) catastrophe which is registered in contemporary literature and film has a self-evidently ethical dimension (Kohlke 1-18). On the dangers of modern apocalyptic narratives for morality and ethics, see Marina Warner, “Angels and Engines: the Culture of Apocalypse,” Raritan 25 (2005): 12-41. 9 Kaplan 71 (emphasis added). 10 Mark Llewelyn, “What is Neo-Victorian Studies? ” Neo-Victorian Studies 1 (2008): 170. M ARCO DE W AARD 148 potential (to borrow Kohlke’s words) for “consciousness-raising,” “witnessbearing,” and “cultural memory work.” 11 It seems to me that precisely in this self-assured usage, however, the metaphor of the “palimpsest” risks downplaying the considerable ethical challenges of a condition in which everything appears to us as always already mediated by textual processes and forms. I want to suggest that especially in regard to the figuration of agency, the metaphor may just as well obfuscate the ways in which postmodernist literary techniques are currently being appropriated and re-used in the service of revisionist, possibly reactionary political agendas. In what follows, then, I will submit the figure of the newly reconstructed humanist agent to closer critical scrutiny in order to demonstrate its contingency: that is to say, to analyse it as a cultural and historical construction which is by no means “natural” or inevitable, let alone redemptive. To this aim, the present paper will not only ask the question how the figure of the fully empowered, self-directing agent is established in neo-Victorian discourse (i.e. through which textual strategies and devices), but also why this figure and the hegemonic, bourgeois and capitalist ideal of individuality which it embodies is now being reconstituted in the first place (i.e. in which field of possibilities). 12 As we will see in the case of Ian McEwan, both questions can be given relief, not only by acknowledging that the “new” humanist agent is constructed through metaphorical procedures which entail particular, and still often overlooked rhetorical displacements, but also by reconsidering the conceptual metaphor of the “palimpsest” itself, which, functioning at the intersections of neo-Victorian critical theory and textual practice, is not only instrumental in shaping but also in limiting the neo-Victorian as a form of historical and ethical imagining. II I want to take as my basic starting point that in the postmodern or “discursive” condition (to use Ermarth’s term), subjectivity, identity, moral freedom, individuality, and indeed agency can no longer be assumed as foundational essences, universal values, or metaphysical absolutes, but that we are constantly aware of their constructedness in language and cultural codes. 13 This 11 Kaplan 10-1; Kohlke 9. 12 In giving priority to the “why“ question, I am committing myself to the radical project of history writing and cultural criticism as forms of critique in the Marxian, Nietzschean, and Foucaultian sense. For a recent defence of this tradition of critique see Joan W. Scott’s contribution to Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, et al. (London/ New York: Routledge, 2007) 29. 13 For an astute theorisation of the problem of individuality and agency in the discursive condition, see: Ermarth, “Agency in the Discursive Condition”; and also Elizabeth Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 149 insight has, of course, been pursued through numerous deconstructions of the “subject” and the ideological formations that sustain it. In recent years, following the lead of gender theorists, scholars have shifted their concerns towards the study of agency as process or performance by which subjects who function as agents of power can occasionally empower themselves within the linguistic or semiotic structures that contain them. In keeping with the reorientation towards enlightened modernity which is currently underway, however (not least in Victorian studies), these conceptualisations of agency as a culturally situated practice with counter-discursive potential are now criticised in the name of a liberal, rationalist, and public sphere model of politics and identity that has little patience with the paradoxes of “theory.” Amanda Anderson in particular has castigated scholars’ deployment of tropes of “aggrandised agency” by which exceptional agents are allotted a “critical lucidity” and “political potency” for which present “cultures of theory” in her eyes fail to offer satisfying explanations. 14 My concern in this paper is not with carving out a new theoretical position in this widely ramifying debate. Rather, my aim is to tease out some of the ways in which neo-Victorian literature itself envisions agency and in a sense produces its own theory or conceptual understanding of it, as embodied in its poetics. Specifically, my claim is that agency in neo-Victorian texts is always already “aggrandised” (or self-aggrandising) in proportion to the auto-suggestive presence of the classic humanist agent of old, and that the logic of aggrandisement by which “new” humanist agents are currently being represented takes shape as a metaphorical logic of substitution which both flaunts the agent’s metaphoricity and seeks to contain it. If we recall that the notion of “metaphor” literally refers to a process of transferral or a “carrying over” of meaning from one thing to another, the idea of metaphorical agency can be seen as integral to the postmodern or discursive condition. The subject of language - the subject through which language speaks - strives to become a “self” at the moment of its articulation. But this moment involves a metaphorical transfer in that the self wrests agency from something external or even alien to it, constructing a “face” with which it cannot fully identify. The moment we see agency embodied or represented, then, we are within a process of metaphor or metaphorization by which one thing (an agent who is Deeds Ermath, “The Closed Space of Choice: A Manifesto on the Future of History,” Manifestos for History, eds. Keith Jenkins et al. (London: Routledge, 2007) 50-66. In the latter article, the discursive condition is defined as “the condition in which [...] semiological (differential) systems of meaning and value lie at the basis of knowledge and consciousness” (60). See Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist / Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) for a sympathetic exploration of the possibilities for a post-foundational humanism. 14 Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006) 47. M ARCO DE W AARD 150 free from determining structures) is made to stand in for another (the constrained, containable subject of language). Clear instances of the problematic of aggrandised agency can be found in the novels of Ian McEwan. As the case of Saturday and On Chesil Beach exemplifies, his work simultaneously offers a representation of agency (people seizing or regaining control over their lives), a model of agency that is pitted against the erosive forces of time (and which is functional within McEwan’s philosophy of the “defining moment,” in which agents are presented as realising themselves ethically through the choices they make or fail to make), and a cultural practice of agency (as in the public interventions which McEwan himself makes through interviews, newspaper articles, or blog entries when he dismisses some (geo-)political decisions or strategies and endorses others). In regard to each of these aspects, however, McEwan’s liberal humanist faith in coherent and uniquely capable and autonomous selfhood proves difficult to maintain in the face of the postmodern dispositif in which his fiction is implicated. The controversial “Dover Beach” scene in Saturday is a case in point. 15 As readers of the novel know, its narrative about a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a successful, affluent, and contented neurosurgeon of forty-eight, is set against the backdrop of the large anti-war demonstration that was held in London in protest of the pending invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003. At the apex of the plot, the scene sets Perowne against Baxter, a thug whom he had a violent encounter with that morning and who now intrudes on a lavish family reunion party at his Fitzrovia residence. Their final showdown is a drama of agency, played out as a drama of consciousness. Baxter, on the one hand, is a mere cipher with little interiority. Suffering from Huntington’s disease (as Perowne astutely recognizes), he faces the decline of his mental abilities as well as physical coordination skills. While he sizes up the company at Perowne’s place to measure the damage he could inflict by way of his final, resentful message to the world - “[the] scale of retribution could be large” - his mood swings and physical tics establish him as an incompetent troublemaker. There is a sense in which the spectacle of his eclipsing mind is homologous to Saturday’s famous opening scene: the intimations of apocalypse which Perowne strains to interpret while watching an apparently firestruck plane descend over London in the early hours of the morning are by it 15 The following articles offer a critical discussion of the “Dover Beach” scene: Elaine Hadley, “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48 (2005): 92-102; Deryn Rees-Jones, “Fact and Artefact: Poetry, Science, and a Few Thoughts on Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (2005): 331-40; Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday,” Studies in the Novel 39 (2007): 465-80; Michael L. Ross, “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England,” Twentieth-Century Literature 54 (2008): 75-96. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 151 reduced to comprehensible, if ludicrous proportions. Perowne himself, meanwhile, observes Baxter and analyses his condition in McEwan’s characteristic blend of third-person narration and free indirect discourse, here inflected with a mixture of neurosurgical, Darwinian, and genotypical language. While Perowne passively looks on as the thug breaks the nose of his father-in-law, and then holds his wife at knife-point and threatens his daughter with rape, he ironically calculates that Baxter’s disease may come to the rescue: while in one way it makes him an antinomian, in another it only gives him “a bleak kind of freedom,” isolating him in “the confining bright spotlight of the present.” As Perowne considers, with the apparent endorsement of McEwan’s narratorial voice, it is “of the essence of a degenerating mind” like Baxter’s “periodically to lose all sense of a continuous self.” 16 But if Saturday defines Perowne’s agency in the terms of modern (neuro-) science, the “Dover Beach” scene simultaneously offers a model of cultural or aesthetic agency in that it links Perowne to the tableau of civilisation that is so impressively embodied in his family. The cast of characters who are assembled at his house replicates in miniature a Victorian “intellectual aristocracy” in which Perowne’s surgical gifts blend with the considerable intellectual, poetical, and musical talents of his wife Rosalind, his father-in-law John Grammaticus, and his children Daisy and Theo, who, between the four of them, conjure up a 19 th -century atmosphere of progressive civilisation, in which clear lines of familially transmitted talent guarantee an unbroken “march of minds.” Daisy in particular functions as a symbolic connecting piece: the daughter of Rosalind (a fragile, “reddish-brown” haired beauty of the Pre-Raphaelite type) and the inheritor of Grammaticus’s poetic muse (her début My Saucy Bark stands up to his towering oeuvre), she also cements the relations between art and science in Saturday as she has given Perowne the biography of Charles Darwin to read which triggers many of his scientific meditations on human character, and confirms for him that “there is grandeur in this view of life.” 17 It is against the backdrop of this Victorianized tableau of cultural capital that Daisy plays her role in the taming of Baxter. Being forced to undress, she narrowly escapes a rape by reciting not her own poetry for him, as he asks her to do (but which is erotically charged), but Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” This tranquillises Baxter and sets in motion the final chain of events in which he can be overpowered. All things considered, the scene symbolically unites, in the platitudinous fashion of Victorian melodramatic fiction, a masculinized scientific rationalism and a feminised model of the civilising agency of art to pit both against the threat posed by an evil, pathologized other. 16 Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) 207, 214, 224, 223. 17 Charles Darwin qtd. in McEwan, Saturday 55-6. Cf. p. 6 and p. 134. On Rosalind see p. 40. M ARCO DE W AARD 152 As John Banville puts it, the “Dover Beach” scene has “a level of bathos that is hard to credit.” 18 One of the problems is that, against all apparent ironies, the scene’s tableau-like visualizability and Baxter’s place in it as an obvious stand-in for something else invest it with a strangely unengaging political-allegorical potential. The different interpretations one must at least entertain - that Baxter signifies the dispossessed, the third world, or perhaps an Arab extremist 19 - seem facile or even absurd, and yet cannot be ignored. Are we really invited, to specify one blatantly literalist reading, to see Perowne’s operation of Baxter towards the end of the novel as signifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq (just as the cutting up of Otto’s body in The Innocent supposedly allegorised the partition of Germany)? Is Perowne himself, by implication, a metaphor for what philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “moral exceptionalism,” the special commitment to altruistic action, of our Western, Judeo-Christian civilisation? 20 Could McEwan’s point “really be,” as Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace asks, to suggest that, when confronted by those who hate us, the West need only resort to its wits, its encyclopedic knowledge of science, and to hold out hope of a ‘cure’ in order to distract those who would otherwise seek to harm us? That, in the end, we will easily overpower those who invade the sanctity of our homes, and that it will then be our obligation and duty to ‘fix’ whatever injuries they’ve received in the process? 21 Can McEwan really be effacing his own, carefully devised grotesquerie when he appends Arnold’s poem at the back of the book, casting the “Dover Beach” scene retroactively as educational matter in a bid to uplift the reader? 22 What interests me here is not McEwan’s politics as to the Middle East or the third world, but rather the political instrumentality of his elusive intertextual techniques more generally. The “Dover Beach” scene flaunts the metaphoricity of Victorian models of agency: anchoring Daisy’s action in a dramatic moment where the self is under threat, the scene momentarily invests her with enhanced, aggrandised agency, as if she is a “nonce agent,” installed 18 John Banville, “A Day in the Life,” The New York Review of Books 52 (26 May 2005): 14. 19 See Lee Siegel, “The Imagination of Disaster,” The Nation (11 April 2005): 34. 20 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 397. 21 Wallace 476. 22 On the face of it, Arnold’s poem chimes with McEwan’s brand of humanism. As Elaine Hadley puts it, with its emphasis on the redemptive power of love and affection in the face of apocalyptic angst, Arnold’s verse “details” McEwan’s “belief in the liberal subject’s ability to seek out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy, where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and intentional in relation to themselves and to each other, in spite of the chaotic world without”; Hadley 93. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 153 for the occasion. The dubious fact that it should be Arnold’s lines, and not Daisy’s own poetry that should do the civilising here only further underlines her spectral quality; as in a metaphor, the agent is other than herself. Yet in the novel’s penultimate paragraph, where Perowne reflects upon the events of the day, McEwan’s narrative endorsement of the scene by far exceeds his self-created bounds of credibility: Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. […] Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him. Some 19 th century poet - Henry has still to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure - touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won’t last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn’t pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin. This is his dim, fixed fate, to have one tiny slip, an error of repetition in the codes of his being, in his genotype, the modern variant of a soul, and he must unravel - another certainty Henry sees before him. 23 With Perowne as in turns internal and external focalizer, this passage emplots “Dover Beach” within a progressivist and scientistic conception of history. Over and against Arnold’s fears that moral progress might be a fiction, history cyclical, and civilisations the subject of perpetual ebbs and flows, it reinstates a conception of human self-direction as supremely effective, if only the space for its interventions would be maximised. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a more eloquent plea for resurrecting the eugenics movement than the above passage. To better understand this forceful erasure and reinscription of the Arnoldian text (a procedure of which Perowne’s ignorance as to who Arnold was functions as a residual sign), we need to examine McEwan’s neo-Victorianism more closely as a palimpsestuous form of textuality. III The history of the metaphorization of the “palimpsest” is relatively young. Described in one dictionary as “a written document, typically on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible,” 24 the palimpsest did not become a metaphor until Thomas De Quincey used it to theorise the workings of the human mind in his Suspiria de profundis (1845). In De Quincey’s usage, 23 McEwan, Saturday 278f. 24 Qtd. in George Bornstein, Ralph Williams, eds., Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993) 1. M ARCO DE W AARD 154 the palimpsest signifies both the simultaneity of the entire stock of memories which the mind contains (its capacity for “retention”), and the potential of forgotten memories to become newly visible and legible (to be “resurrected”). 25 More recently, the metaphor has been taken up by structuralist critics such as Gérard Genette and by editorial theorists who study processes of textual construction, revision, and transmission. George Bornstein for instance calls the palimpsest “less a bearer of a fixed final inscription than a site of the process of inscription, in which acts of composition and transmission occur before our eyes.” 26 Between them, these examples already indicate some of the ambiguities of the “palimpsest” as a constructivist metaphor. It has both a passive and an active side; it refers to a process of layering by means of erasures and re-inscriptions, but also to the surface structure that results from that layering. These different, pliable meanings are captured by the adjective “palimpsestuous,” which, coined by French structuralists, has recently been recovered by Sarah Dillon to refer to the “complex structure of (textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest,” or, “the structure that one is presented with” as a result of the “process of layering that produces [it].” 27 At this place, I want to recruit the notion of “palimpsestuousness” as the structuring principle of a range of textual operations by which the Victorian past is reconfigured in Ian McEwan’s fiction, in particular his latest novel, On Chesil Beach. 28 Published in 2007, On Chesil Beach is McEwan’s most elaborate neo-Victorian text to date. Although situated in 1962, its plot about a young couple of newlyweds who are mortified at the prospect of their wedding night is shaped with reference to a rigid social structure whose fixed class and gender barriers are construed as relics from the Victorian past. The sexual inhibitions of the novel’s protagonists Florence and Edward — which censor their strained conversations over dinner, are played out in a disastrous sexual encounter, and finally drive them apart in a prolonged quarrel on the shingle near their hotel at the Dorset coast — are stereotypically defined in terms of the “repressive hypothesis” for which the adjective “Victorian” often functions as an eponym. Indeed, McEwan capitalises on the cliché of Victorian sexuality as “repressed” when he has Edward say to Florence, at the height of an argument in which he reproaches her for prudishness: “You carry on as if it’s eighteen sixty-two. You don’t even know how to kiss.” In addition, the novel presents Edward’s early-1960s conception of history as hopelessly Victorianized. Although he is waking up to new forms 25 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007) 23- 34. 26 Bornstein/ Williams 4. 27 Dillon 4. 28 Dillon too has analysed “palimpsestuous textuality” in McEwan’s work, in particular Atonement, but differs from the present essay in that she offers a far more positive appreciation (Dillon 92-101). Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 155 of political empowerment (he took part in a ban-the-bomb demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1959) and, holding a degree in history, takes notice of the new developments in historiography that would soon democratise the discipline of history in Britain (he reads Norman Cohn’s 1957 study of apocalyptic popular movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium), in the end he is most interested, to his tutor’s dissatisfaction, in pursuing the Carlylean and rather undemocratic “‘great men’ theory of history”: a project which throws into comic relief not only his narrow, masturbatory mindset (“How extraordinary it was, that a self-made spoonful, leaping clear of his body, should instantly free his mind to confront afresh Nelson’s decisiveness at Aboukir Bay”), but also his insignificance as a lower-middle-class anti-hero who feels intimidated by his distinguished Oxford in-laws. 29 Yet while McEwan ironically overstretches the historical reference of “Victorian” to dramatise the late 1960s and 1970s moment of emancipation, shoring up models of agency that are slightly more recent than those actually represented in his text, he simultaneously recovers the early 1960s as a temporal layer through which the Victorian past can exert greater, not less appeal to readers. Making an obvious allusion to the Arnoldian intertext in Saturday, the title of On Chesil Beach also directs us to John Fowles’ neo- Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which cites “Chesil Bank” as a minor location and which, like McEwan’s text, is set in a preemancipation temporal mode. 30 This intertextual relationship is underlined by the cover of the novel upon its first release in the UK: depicting the figure of a woman in a virginal white dress, walking away over the shingle, isolated in a coastal landscape, it links Florence to Fowles’ Sarah Woodruff (and to Meryl Streep’s iconic rendering of her in Karel Reisz’ filmic adaptation). But if Fowles’ novel enters the relational structure of McEwan’s Victorian palimpsest as one extra textual layer, the palimpsestuous operations in On Chesil Beach are more complex than its simple plot and chiselled prose suggest. The cover hints that Florence can be read as a rewriting, not only of Fowles’ Ernestine (the fiancé whom Charles Smithson, in Fowles’ multiple endings, does or does not marry for her money and family connections), but also of the exotic, seductive Sarah Woodruff. If anything, this conflation of both female characters dramatises the social difference between Edward and his wife, and redefines the class struggle between them in terms of natural or sexual selection. Remark Edward’s occasional relapses into the “spectacular tantrums” by which his early childhood had been “marked”: well into his time at college, and establishing him as an outsider compared to his better 29 Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) 144, 43, 13, 20. 30 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Vintage, 2004) 72, 178, 232. Fowles’s novel opens in March 1867, less than half a year before the passing of the landmark Second Reform Act that would reshape Britain’s political culture. M ARCO DE W AARD 156 behaved and more upper-crust peers, “Edward found in fighting a thrilling unpredictability, and discovered a spontaneous, decisive self that eluded him in the rest of his tranquil existence.” 31 This inclination for violent physical release stalks him during the failed attempt at marital intimacy with Florence, and again contributes to his loss of self-control when he vents his anger and resentment towards her family during their final encounter on the shingle. The novel’s gestures towards Edward’s and Florence’s unrealised potential for political, social, and sexual self-direction, then, are not as fully endorsed as, on the face of it, readers are led to believe. While on the level of its mildly ironising narratorial register, On Chesil Beach guides readers into correcting Edward’s “great man” theory of history, and into ascribing more agency to him than he allots himself (permitting a notion of agency as a linguistic function by which subjects achieve a degree of freedom in consequence of the meaning which they attribute to their actions as social agents), on another level the novel re-erects the social Darwinism to which we have already seen Henry Perowne subscribe, and credits it with full explanatory authority. Mapped onto the rigid class structure that is in place in the world of On Chesil Beach, McEwan’s Darwinian model of sexual selection functions with a deterministic logic. Space forbids me to develop my analysis of On Chesil Beach at greater length. The point to make here is that McEwan’s palimpsestuous procedures amount, once again, to an incisive erasure. First, they undo Fowles’ far more playful reinvention of Darwinism as a postmodern interpretive framework in its unsettling, but potentially redemptive and liberating de-centring of the human and anthropomorphic. 32 McEwan’s fiction, by contrast, endorses a fundamentalist Darwinism to provide a grounding for the thematic linkages between society and sex in his neo-Victorian plot. 33 Second, McEwan erases the existentialist humanism that informs Fowles’ device of multiple endings, replacing it by a moralising variation on the theme of the “missed chance.” If we take into account that McEwan’s authorial self-fashioning often focuses on a defence of his palimpsestuous re-inscriptions of Victorian models of agency - in interviews he takes the moral high ground when explaining why 31 McEwan, On Chesil Beach 91. 32 For this point, I am indebted to Tony E. Jackson, “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” Twentieth-Century Literature 43 (1997): 221-42. 33 By his own account, McEwan seeks to align with the physical sciences because he finds a “real sense of wonder” in them and a bulwark against “pessimism”: Ian McEwan, Antony Gormley, “A Conversation About Art and Nature,” Kenyon Review 28 (2006): 111. McEwan’s project to mythologise the atheist worldview put forward in other fields by modern Darwinists like Richard Dawkins is very usefully discussed in Arthur Bradley, “The New Atheist Novel: Literature, Religion, and Terror in Amis and McEwan,” The Yearbook of English Studies 39.1-2 (2009): 20-38. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 157 he privileges 19 th century above modernist literary models 34 - the contours of a revisionist project become visible in which new metahistorical strategies are turned against older, modernist or postmodernist strategies of historical representation to reinstate less self-reflexive, and more deterministic conceptual models. The extent to which McEwan seeks to literalise Victorian models of agency should not be underestimated. He says somewhere that “I do think that the 19 th century invented for us some extraordinary things,” such as “the notion of character,” and that “we’d be crazy to turn our backs on them.” 35 Yet while he talks the language of individual agency, the metaphorical displacements in his fiction indicate that he is rather talking about human nature. What is ultimately erased, in my view, are postmodernist qualities like distrust of empiricism and anxiety about historical narrativization per se which Fowles, for one, brought to bear on his recreation of the Victorian past. IV This essay has sought to question the assumption that the neo-Victorian is so much wedded to the defining moments of modernity that it has a redemptive capacity to (re-)connect us to the real stuff of history. Neo-Victorian imaginings, we are now regularly invited to believe, as they shed the much narrower political and cultural identifications of “Victorian,” as they analyse the 19 th century “as a harbinger of our own trauma culture” in regard to sexuality, ethnicity, and empire, and as they draw upon an international idiom that can be understood around the globe, are too implicated in “on-going historical processes,” too involved in “consciousness-raising,” “witness-bearing,” and “cultural memory work,” to reduce the past to that numbing flatness which other postmodern temporalities may indeed produce. 36 My reading of McEwan’s reinscriptions and erasures of the (neo-) Victorian palimpsests of “Dover Beach” and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, however, suggests a second, and very different trajectory within the neo-Victorian: one in which the 19 th century does not so much function as a sublime domain whose pastness and ineffability permit a critically detached, yet dialogic attitude towards modernity and enable us to reconfigure it along more humane and ethically acceptable lines, but rather, a trajectory in which the social aesthetic of a 19 th century, bourgeois and empiricist liberalism is reinstalled in the name of a neo-conservative supremacism which encourages only the most reified and 34 See esp. David Lynn, “A Conversation with Ian McEwan,” Kenyon Review 29 (2007): 38- 51. See Jonathan Noakes, “Interview with Ian McEwan,” Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide, eds. M. Reynolds et al. (London: Vintage, 2002) 10-23. 35 McEwan qtd. in David Lynn 51. 36 Kohlke 7, 9. M ARCO DE W AARD 158 hackneyed models of reciprocity and has very limited tolerance for otherness. 37 The metaphor of the “palimpsest” not only figures as a structuring principle within both trajectories, but, when submitted to critique, may also help us spell out some of their implications. Of course, as a metaphor derived from the source domain of textuality, the palimpsest has also become a metaphor for textuality, for what it means to think, act, and live historically in a condition in which so much appears to us as always already textualized. But if metaphors are never innocent, this one is not exempted from the rule. In some of the critical remarks that were quoted earlier on, the metaphor of the palimpsest was blended with either that of dialogic “exchange” or that of the personal “encounter” to suggest that the relationality between the different palimpsestic layers - or between the agents who do the work of (re-) inscribing - is an open, positive, equal, and democratic one. Yet it seems to me that precisely at this point, critics risk missing out on some of the more problematic consequences of a practice of palimpsestuous textual operations for how agency and subjectivity can be imagined - and realised - within the discursive condition. I want to propose that, in effect, the palimpsest forms a “weak” constructivist metaphor which barely sustains neo-Victorianists’ high hopes. When its passive side is emphasised, and the subject it assumes stands in awe of, or is saturated by, the richness of historically accumulated signs which the palimpsest incorporates, the metaphor tends to naturalise our position in the “prison-house of language.” In this view, qualities like selfreflexiveness or the ability to engage with alterity naturally seem to fall under the rubric of the textual. The metaphor’s active side, however, presupposing an aggressively intervening subject who disrespects the integrity of the palimpsestuous structure as a whole (and even the principle of relationality per se which this structure bodies forth), should not be disregarded. In McEwan’s neo-Victorian project, the classic “humanist subject” is reinstalled at the site of an erasure. McEwan’s literary principle is to deploy postmodernist techniques of intertextuality to fold a literalised figure of aggrandised agency over and against the alternative historical models of agency which he blots out and reinscribes. This is a palimpsestuous practice that works against agency in that it limits the extent to which it can be understood historically at the present, critical juncture: that is, as shaped by a condition of textuality 37 For three incisive discussions of how revisitations of the Victorian past in the public and political domains since the early 1980s have supported neo-conservative or neo-liberal agendas, see: Elaine Hadley, “The Past is a Foreign Country: the Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 7-38; Raphael Samuel, “Mrs. Thatcher and Victorian Values,” Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London: Verso, 1998) 330-48; Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio UP, 2007) 111-39. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 159 which is permanently fragile in its post-foundationalism, and permanently at risk of collapsing - or being collapsed - upon itself. 38 Unless “neo-Victorian studies” is alert to the possibility of this second trajectory and its dangers, I fear it will not nearly be neo-Victorian enough. 39 It would be implicating itself in the reinstatement in neo-Victorian literature - and possibly in historical representations more generally - of what I can only designate as a pre-postmodernist social imaginary: one in which social and cultural barriers which we have come to see as contingent and open to transformation and critique are reaffirmed and re-naturalised, and in which alternatives to an outworn, ethically weakened liberal humanism are cancelled out. What is required is a self-reflexive, and indeed a metaphorical engagement with the myth of palimpsestuous history itself: a form of engagement which allows us to reinflect and re-inscribe the sites of memory which neo- Victorian writings mediate and transmit, but which also incites us to be on our guard against the politics of their erasures in the present. 38 It is worth emphasising that the fragility of human agency in the discursive condition is not a merely academic point for which postmodernist “theory” is to be held responsible. As Joanna Bourke has recently observed, the growing imperviousness to and neglect of natural law thinking in world politics in the last ten or twenty years testifies to a dramatic, and dramatically widespread, erosion of the integrity of the individual: Joanna Bourke, “Foreword,” Manifestos for History, eds. Keith Jenkins et al. (London: Routledge, 2007): xi. 39 If my usage of Kaplan and Kohlke à titre d’example in this article seems questionable or uncharitable, it should be considered that Shiller’s article (see footnote 2) already set neo-Victorian novels off against a grossly oversimplified version of the Jamesonian analysis of postmodern historicities. Distrust of and impatience with 20 th century postmodernisms (poststructuralist, neo-Marxian, and other) appear to have been constant in “neo-Victorian studies” from its inception, and persist at the present moment of its institutionalisation. M ARCO DE W AARD 160 Works Cited Anderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Banville, John. “A Day in the Life.” The New York Review of Books 52.9 (26 May 2005): 12-4. Bornstein, George, and Ralph G. Williams, eds. Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. Bourke, Joanna. “Foreword.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Jenkins, Keith, et al. London: Routledge, 2007. Bradley, Arthur. “The New Atheist Novel: Literature, Religion, and Terror in Amis and McEwan.” The Yearbook of English Studies 39.1-2 (2009): 20-38. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum, 2007. Elias, Amy J. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Agency in the Discursive Condition.” History and Theory 40.4 (2001): 34-58. ---. “The Closed Space of Choice: A Manifesto on the Future of History.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins et al. London/ New York: Routledge, 2007. 50-66. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. London: Vintage, 2004. Hadley, Elaine. “The Past is a Foreign Country: The Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10.1 (1997): 7-38. ---. “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency.” Victorian Studies 48.1 (2005): 92-102. Halliwell, Martin, and Andy Mousley. Critical Humanisms: Humanist / Anti-Humanist Dialogues. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jackson, Tony E. “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Twentieth-Century Literature 43.2 (1997): 221-42. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow, eds. Manifestos for History. London/ New York: Routledge, 2007. Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio UP, 2007. Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter.” Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1 (2008): 1-18. Llewelyn, Mark. “What is Neo-Victorian Studies? ” Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1 (2008): 164-85. Lynn, David. “A Conversation with Ian McEwan.” Kenyon Review 29.3 (2007): 38-51. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. ---. On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. McEwan, Ian, and Antony Gormley. “A Conversation About Art and Nature.” Kenyon Review 28.1 (2006): 104-12. Noakes, Jonathan. “Interview with Ian McEwan.” Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide. Eds. Margaret Reynolds, Jonathan Noakes. London: Vintage, 2002. 10-23. Agency and Metaphor in the Neo-Victorian Imagination 161 Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Fact and Artefact: Poetry, Science, and a Few Thoughts on Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30.4 (2005): 331-40. Ross, Michael L. “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England.” Twentieth-Century Literature 54.1 (2008): 75-96. Samuel, Raphael. “Mrs. Thatcher and Victorian Values.” Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso, 1998. 330-48. Scott, Joan W. “History-Writing as Critique.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, et al. London/ New York: Routledge, 2007. 19-38. Shiller, Dana. “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel 29.4 (1997): 538-60. Siegel, Lee. “The Imagination of Disaster.” The Nation (11 April 2005): 33-8. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. “Postcolonial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Studies in the Novel 39.4 (2007): 465-80. Warner, Marina. “Angels and Engines: the Culture of Apocalypse.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 25.2 (2005): 12-41. K RISTINA K ÖHLER Dance as Metaphor — Metaphor as Dance: Transfigurations of Dance in Culture and Aesthetics around 1900 1 Influenced by the Tanzand Lebensreform (dance and life reform movements) and the general dynamic of the arts, dance around 1900 emerges as a central cultural metaphor: Friedrich Nietzsche conceives his philosophy by using dance metaphors, 2 Arthur Symons (in analogy to the idea of the theatrum mundi) employs the metaphor of ‘The World as Ballet,’ 3 and the British social reformer Henry Havelock Ellis imagines all spheres of human life as dance in his book The Dance of Life (1923). At the turn of the century, dance as a prominent figure of thought particularly inscribes itself into the discourses on art and aesthetics. In this context, depictions of dancing and dancers not only become popular visual motifs, 4 but dance also emerges as “the key medium of all arts trying to reflect the new technological age as an era defined by motion.” 5 Hence, the avant-garde movements use the paradigm of dance at the end of the 19 th and at the beginning of the 20 th centuries to articulate 1 Translated by Henry M. Taylor. 2 See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Also sprach Zarathustra,” Sämtliche Werke/ Kritische Studienausgabe Vol. 4, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München/ Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 1980); Rudolf zur Lippe, “Sprung, Paradox, Metapher, Tanz,” Tanz als Form des Denkens, eds. Rudolf zur Lippe und Gisela Röller (Lüneburg: Jansen, 2001) 215-26; Alain Badiou, “La danse comme métaphore de la pensée,” Danse et Pensée: Une autre scène pour la danse, ed. Ciro Bruni (Sammeron: GERMS, 1993) 11-22. 3 Arthur Symons, ”The World as Ballet,“ Studies in Seven Arts (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1906) 387-91. 4 Here I can only mention a small selection of the numerous publications in the last twenty years dealing with the history of motifs in literary studies and art history: Leona Van Vaerenbergh, Tanz und Tanzbewegung: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung deutscher Lyrik von der Dekadenz bis zum Frühexpressionismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1991); Ralf Hertel, Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne (Eggingen: Isele, 2002). Zum Tanzmotiv in der Kunstgeschichte: Jean-Yves Pidoux, ed., La danse, art du XXe siècle? (Lausanne: Payot, 1990); Heekyeong Yun, Tanz in der deutschen Kunst der Moderne: Wandlungen des bewegten Körperbilds zwischen 1890 und 1950 (Taunusstein: Driesen, 2007); Verena Senti-Schmidlin, Rhythmus und Tanz in der Malerei: Zur Bewegungsästhetik im Werk von Ferdinand Hodler und Ludwig von Hofmann (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007). 5 Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1995) 35 (translation H. M. Taylor). K RISTINA K ÖHLER 164 programmatic concepts of a dance-like poetry and literature, 6 a theatre essentially influenced by dance (as with the theatre reformers Edward Gordon Craig and Georg Fuchs 7 ), as well as dance poetologies in the fine arts. 8 Finally, employing such enigmatic terms as ‘choreo-cinema,’ ‘cinedance,’ or ‘cine-choreography,’ film theory, and film aesthetics articulate concepts with dance as the model for regarding film as choreography. 9 In these avantgardistic concepts, the idea of dance seems to have become its own metaphor, as dance critic Helmut Ploebst notes. 10 Also current theories of intermediality such as Uwe Wirth’s typology of different forms of intermedial rapports describe the functioning of such intermedial agendas as metaphorical appeals. In distinction from concrete medial manifestations of intermediality, according to Wirth these art theory manifestoes have to be understood as conceptual transferences between media: “A conceptual graft is the metaphor for a medial graft.” 11 However, in so far as the poetological manifestoes around the turn of the century rely on the model of dance, they remain largely vague about whether they are speaking of it literally or in a metaphorical sense. The writers and artists drafting art manifestoes under the paradigm of dance rather seem to raise doubts about their speech being metaphorical. It is this ambiguity of the metaphorical in speaking about and through dance that I want to focus on in the following considerations and, in using the example of the theoretical discourses around 1900, examine the relationship of dance to metaphor. Where does literal speech of and about dance end, and where does a discourse begin which has to be understood and contextualised as metaphorical? What is the difference between the non-metaphorical, ‘actual’ being of 6 See Gregor Gumpert, Die Rede vom Tanz: Die Körperästhetik in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (München: Fink, 1994). 7 See Edward Gordon Craig, Gordon Craig on Movement and Dance, ed. Arnold Rood (New York: Dance Horizons, 1977); Georg Fuchs, Die Revolution des Theaters: Ergebnisse aus dem Münchener Künstler-Theater (München/ Leipzig: G. Müller, 1909). 8 See Brandstetter 386ff. 9 See Kristina Köhler, “So wird es schließlich Dein Bild sein, das für Dich tanzt: Theoriegeschichtliche Konzepte einer Interart-Poetik von Film und Tanz,” Geste: Bewegungen zwischen Film und Tanz, eds. Reinhold Görling, Timo Skrandies, and Stephan Trinkaus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). 10 See Helmut Ploebst, “Walzer der Schornsteine: Zur Erweiterung des Tanzbegriffs in den ’ersten Avantgarden’ des 20. Jahrhunderts,” corpus: internet magazin für tanz — choreografie — performance (2008), 6 March 2009 <http: / / www.corpusweb.net/ index. php? option=com_content&task=view&id=720&Itemid=32>. 11 Uwe Wirth, “Hypertextuelle Aufpfropfung als Übergangsform zwischen Intermedialität und Transmedialität,“ Transmedialität: Zur Ästhetik paraliterarischer Verfahren, eds. Urs Meyer, Roberto Simanowski, and Christoph Zeller (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006) 33 (translation H. M. Taylor). Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 165 dance, and an understanding of dance the meaning of which has ‘simply’ been transferred? I “Not a mere metaphor? ” First doubts about the metaphorical status of popular dance imagery around 1900 are voiced by the already mentioned British sex researcher and social reformer Henry Havelock Ellis, whose book The Dance of Life exerted sustained influence on contemporary cultural and philosophical discourses, as well as on theories of dance. 12 Interestingly, in a metalinguistic commentary Havelock Ellis explicitly points out that his speech of the “dance of life” is not to be understood metaphorically: [...] [I]t is necessary to insist upon life as a dance. This is not a mere metaphor. The dance is the rule of number and of rhythm and of measure and of order, of the controlling influence of form, of the subordination of the parts to the whole […]. Thus, our world is, even fundamentally a dance, a single metrical stranza in a poem which will be for ever hidden from us […]. 13 Being much more than “simply” a linguistic analogy, Havelock Ellis stresses that his talk about the “dance of life” refers to a conceptional or structural figure of ideation and perception which aligns life and dance in analogy to one another. Life itself is to be understood as dance, just as, conversely, the dancer’s movements represent the essential emanation of the dance of life. I would like to begin with this explicit negation of metaphoricity in Ellis, because it strikes me as symptomatic in two ways concerning the relationship of metaphor and dance in the aesthetic discourses: First, Havelock Ellis insists that behind what we initially and linguistically comprehend as dance metaphor, there already exists a ‘wide’ notion of dance, which prevents it from being primarily defined in institutional terms or through its tie to the human body (and hence Ellis may almost be considered an early exponent of cognitivist metaphor theories 14 ). Instead of a purely linguistic transposition, Ellis’ “dance of life” in effect aims at a relationship of mutual (and interactional 15 ) influence of both metaphorical speech and cultural conceptions of dance. Starting from this premise, on a first level of reflection I would like to explore in a meta-theoretical perspective the discur- 12 See Judith B. Alter, “Havelock Ellis’s Essay ’The Art of Dancing’: A Reconsideration,” Dance Research Journal 24 (1992): 27-35. 13 Henry Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (London: Constable, 1923) x. 14 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). 15 See Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell UP, 1962). K RISTINA K ÖHLER 166 sive field of ideas around the turn of the century in which dance is not only discursively, but also conceptionally metaphorized as a potential ‘dance without a dancer.’ Therefore, we must ask, what are the intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic conditions encouraging a comprehension of dance which seems in itself already metaphorized? Secondly, Havelock Ellis’ meta-linguistic commentary also makes clear that these historical theories which productively align dance and metaphor not only claim dance’s metaphoricity, but also negotiate the very terms according to which metaphorical meaning is produced. Different from Havelock Ellis, who explicitly marks his speech as non-metaphorical, the relationship in the models under scrutiny tends to be present itself as ambiguous, and as productively making use of an ambivalent, blurry rapport. Hence, in an inverted perspective, dance becomes a figure of thought through which the metaphorical may be conceived. From this perspective, I would like to propose reading the discourses on the metaphoricity of dance on a second level as the locus in which the concept of metaphor is both negotiated and reconceptualised. In order to fathom the relationship of dance and metaphor as a double question pointing in either direction, dance and metaphor should not be limited in their meanings by a priori definitions, but considered as two flexible variables shaping each other and positioning one another in both theoretical models, respectively. Subsequently, I want to explore the processes and conditions of the affinities between dance and metaphor through three select theoretical positions on aesthetics, ranging from Mallarmé’s texts on dance in the 1880s to Valéry’s Philosophie de la danse in 1936. II ‘Dancing’ as a Metaphor: Metaphoricity as a Poetological Model in Mallarmé’s Writings on Dance Source and focal point of the following considerations is a much commentedon passage from French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s writings, “Crayonné au theatre” (1886). In Ballets, a feuilleton review of the ballet performances of Viviane and Les deux pigeons, two dancing parties typical of 19 th -century theatre and dance productions, Mallarmé criticises the illusionism of contemporary dance and staging practices. These he counters with his own, alternative conception of the ideal dance: Le jugement, ou l‘axiome, à affirmer en fait de ballet! A savoir que la danseuse n‘est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposés qu‘elle n‘est pas une femme, mais une métaphore résumant un des aspects élémentaires de notre forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc., et qu‘elle ne danse pas, suggérant par le prodige de raccourcis ou d‘élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu‘il faudrait Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 167 des paragraphes en prose dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans la rédaction: poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe. 16 By virtue of this paradoxical double negation (the ‘ideal’ dancer is not a woman, and she doesn’t dance), Mallarmé crosses metaphor and dance in a continuous undecided oscillation between the described dance performance on the one hand, and an imaginary, metaphorical speech of dance on the other. In pursuing his idea and line of argument, it is revealed that his concept of metaphor is itself metaphorized. By analogising his notion of an ideal dance with the functioning of metaphor, Mallarmé declares metaphor as the poetic paradigm of his imagined ideal dance. Just as the metaphorical meaning is constituted by shift away from its ‘actual’ context, Mallarmé considers dance to be defined by a process of being detached and transposed: it becomes an expressive event separated from the moving body. Now no longer a woman, but only a metaphorical sign, the dancer herself (“jamais qu’emblème, point quelqu’un [...]” 17 ) becomes the medium (in an almost mystical sense) of a dance transcending and continuously eluding her. In Mallarmé’s symbolistic art conception, metaphor and dance are equally negotiated as models of a suggestive mediality, as a movement of departure from unambiguity. 18 A few years later, Mallarmé sees his programmatic design of dancelike mediality realised in the serpentine dances of the American Loïe Fuller, whose performances he eulogises in his essay Autre Etude de danse: Les fonds dans le ballet. 19 Through the use of the newest light and projection techniques as well as metre-long web panels animated with the help of sewn-in sticks, Fuller, the ‘electric fairy’, creates motion sculptures up to three metres high which seem to dissolve her physicalness. According to the accounts of fascinated contemporaries, Loïe Fuller’s veil dances seem to transcend the dancer’s body, the viewer perceiving only traces of movement or signs of a dance transmitted in space through wavy panels. 20 The decisive relocation of dance in both Mallarmé and Loïe Fuller’s dance aesthetics, therefore, consists of defining the mediality of dance by recourse to metaphor and no longer via the dancing body, but as a process of abstraction and transference. This in itself already metaphorized notion of dance allows Mallarmé by reverse logic (this being his second argumentative twist) to postulate dance 16 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crayonné au théâtre,“ Kritische Schriften, eds. Gerhard Goebel and Bettina Rommel (Gerlingen: Schneider, 1998) 170. 17 Mallarmé 170. 18 See Brandstetter 332ff. 19 See Mallarmé 180-85. 20 See Giovanni Lista, Loïe Fuller: Danseuse de la Belle Epoque (Paris: Stock-Somogy, 1994); Gabriele Brandstetter and Brygida Maria Ochaim, Loie Fuller: Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art- Nouveau (Freiburg: Rombach, 1989). K RISTINA K ÖHLER 168 itself as a metaphor for the elusive production of meaning in the other arts, particularly in poetry. As “écriture corporelle” or “poème dégagé de tout apparareil du scribe” 21 dance becomes the paradigm of a poetic writing seemingly generating itself automatically, while relegating the author to the background. 22 Between the concept of a dancelike poetry and dance imagined as writing process, Mallarmé opens up a dynamic field of metaphorical transferences and counter-transferences in which metaphor, dance, and writing mutually affect and replace one another. Hence, the metaphorical seems to be at work in Mallarmé’s conception of dance on (at least) three continuously overlapping levels: first, as metaphorical speech about dance (dance as metaphor or writing); second, metaphor as a model of dancelike mediality (dance as detached, ambiguous transference); and third, the metaphorical transposition of the dancelike to other arts (poetry as dance). It is precisely through the fuzziness of these three lateral or superimposed levels that Mallarmé is able to stage his concept of dance as an ambiguously localised, creative principle capable of realisation beyond ontological media boundaries, which can take place in the performance of the dancer as well, in the performance of dance as well as in poetic writing. Hence, the distinction between actual and metaphorically transposed dance, with the often implied devaluation of metaphorical speech as derivative, is suspended in Mallarmé’s approach. III Dance as “Weltentanz“: The Suspension of the Metaphorical in Rudolf von Laban’s Universalist Dance Theory Interestingly, concepts of metaphorical dance transcending the human body not only emerge in dance-extrinsic contexts (as in the notes of a poet like Mallarmé), which might understandably be presumed to employ a transposed notion of dance. In the aesthetics and dance theories of the protagonists of the so-called freie Tanz and Ausdruckstanz (ranging from Isadora Duncan to Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman), 23 discursive and conceptual metaphors also cross in diffuse ways. The dance aesthetics of the freie Tanz via explicit proximity to the corporeal, nature, and Lebenswelt (lifeworld) seeks to establish a comprehensive reform of life. 24 Hence, in the midst of the dance discourses there emerges around 1900 a ‘broad’ notion which locates 21 Mallarmé 170. 22 See Felicia McCarren, “Stéphane Mallarmé, Loie Fuller, and the Theatre of Feminity,” Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, eds. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995) 217-30; Brandstetter 338. 23 Brandstetter 33. 24 See Sabine Huschka, Moderner Tanz: Konzepte — Stile — Utopien (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002) 29ff. Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 169 the essence of dance in its ubiquity and abstraction. Correspondingly, this new dance is no longer staged exclusively within the instutional frame of theatre and opera, but declares nature or the mythical space of ancient ruins to be the actual place of performance and source of inspiration for the creation of dance movements. 25 The universal claim of the freie Tanz also manifests itself in contemporary theoretical writings eager to establish their new conception of dance as ideological paradigm. In 1920, the Austro-Hungarian dance theoretician and pedagogue Rudolf von Laban publishes his book Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen, in which he comprehensively presents his theoretical ideas on the subject. Among adherents, the publication quickly becomes the “bible of the new dance.” 26 Already the book’s title, “a round dance of ideas,” suggests that its subject is excessively metaphorized not only on a linguistic level, but also conceptualised in a dense field of metaphorical references. 27 Interestingly, Laban himself notes the ambiguous status of his speech. “Such fundamentally different things are called dance or the art of dance,” he writes in the introduction, “that neither definite idea nor full evaluation may be attained.” 28 And further: “Dance is never a pure term, it never or hardly ever expresses an agreed-upon meaning.” 29 Defying conventional usage, the expression’s fuzziness allows Laban to found his understanding of dance in a universal dance philosophy (‘choreosophy’) aiming to transcend the “erroneous understanding of dance performance as purely material physicalness.” 30 Through recourse to contemporary philosophies of vitalism, 31 Laban considers dance a “ubiquitous tension force” 32 which reveals itself in different cultural and social phenomena, but above all in the dancer. Tanz ist es, der aus dem Gedankenreigen des Dichters, dem Klangreigen des Musikers und den Bildern der Maler, Former und Geräteschaffer zu uns spricht. Tanz ist alle Kultur, alle Gesellschaftlichkeit. Tanz ist die Schwungkraft, die unantastba- 25 See e.g. Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927). 26 Inge Baxmann, ”’Die Gesinnung ins Schwingen bringen’: Tanz als Metasprache und Gellschaftsutopie in der Kultur der zwanziger Jahre,“ Materialität der Kommunikation, eds. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995) 360 (translation H. M. Taylor). 27 See Claudia Böttger, “Mythen und Metaphern des modernen Tanzes,” Journal für Psychologie, 11.4 (2003): 387-412. 28 Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920) 4 (translation H. M. Taylor). 29 von Laban 46. 30 von Laban 1. 31 See also Evelyn Dörr, ”Rudolf von Laban: Tänzerische Identität im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Wissenschaft und Politik,“ Tanz. Politik. Identität, eds. Sabine Karoß and Leonore Welzin (Hamburg: LIT, 2001) 103-34. 32 von Laban 6. K RISTINA K ÖHLER 170 re Vorstellungen zur Religion reiht. Tanz ist alles Wissen, Schauen und Bauen, das den Forscher und Tatenmenschen erfüllt. Doch das reinste Abbild des Tanzes der Tänze, des Weltgeschehens, ist der Reigen, den der Menschenkörper schwingt. 33 More than a gymnastic physical practice, Laban views the dancer’s movements as a crystallisation of the holistic principle of a ‘dance of dances,’ the kinetic energy of which is thought to be present in all phenomena of life and culture. Obviously influenced by romantic concepts of thought, Laban imagines this higher dance force as indicator of an ineluctable holism suspending the differences of body and soul, the abstract and the concrete, of microand macrocosm. Elsewhere, Laban states that in dissolving dichotomies this holistic principle constitutes the ‘profound’ content of the art of dance. 34 It therefore seems that Laban’s concept of dance at its core reverses the relationship between the actual and the tropical: While he declares the ‘dance of dances’ to be the effective essence of dance, the dancer’s dance is merely its derivative or, in Laban’s terminology, its Abbild (copy). It is precisely the dance notion’s ambiguity, as reflected on by Laban himself, which seems to enable the mutual transpositions between the macroand microcosm of the choreographic world affairs. As such, his approach is virtually founded on a puzzling notion presupposing the commutability of dance as both actual and metaphorical, corporeal and world-embracing. Just like Mallarmé, Laban’s theory assumes an unfettered transferability of dance, which can be neither located materially or phenomenologically, nor related to a specific medium. With such a totalising conception, separated from the dancer’s body, everything becomes ‘dance’ (— supposedly in a non-metaphorical sense —), and connected with the holistic dance of the world. By suspending the difference between actual and metaphorical speech, Laban’s concept effectively cancels out the possibility of a metaphorical meaning of dance: hence, as a radical consequence, strictly speaking all discourse on dance would have to be read literally. IV Intermedial Metaphoricity: ‘Absolute’ Dances in Paul Valéry’s Dance Philosophy and the 1920s Avant-Garde Discourses ”Encore un peu de courage. Poussons un peu plus loin: un peu plus loin de ’idée immédiate et accoutumée que l’on se fait de la danse.“ 35 With these words, French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry encourages his readers to 33 von Laban 8. 34 von Laban 9. 35 Paul Valéry, “Philosophie de la danse,” Œuvres I, Variété (Paris: Nrf, Gallimard, 1957) 1401. Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 171 take one more step of abstraction in thinking about dance. Roughly fifty years after Mallarmé’s essay Ballets, Valéry picks up on his teacher’s ideas in his paper “De la danse” from 1936. He writes: ”Mallarmé dit que la danseuse n’est pas une femme qui danse, car ce n’est point une femme, et elle ne danse pas.“ 36 Interestingly, Valéry seems to take the double negation of the dancer, which I have previously tried to situate in the context of a poetics of metaphorical detachment and transposition, quite literally, as the following passage indicates: La plus libre, la plus souple, la plus voluptueuse des danses possibles m‘apparut sur un écran où l‘on montrait de grandes Méduses: ce n‘étaient point des femmes et elles ne dansaient pas. [...] Là, dans la plénitude imcompressible de l’eau qui semble ne leur opposer aucune résistance, ces créatures disposent de l’idéal de mobilité, y détendent, y ramassent leur rayonnante symétrie. Point de sol, point de solides pour ces danseuses absolues; point de planches; mais un milieu où l’on s’appuie par tous les points qui cèdent vers où l’on veut. 37 What Valéry celebrates in a series of superlatives as the apotheosis of dance (“la plus libre, la plus souple, la plus voluptueuse des danses possibles”), paradoxically refers to an event which empirically is not a dance at all, but a film depicting underwater encounters of jellyfish. This ‘dance’ has, as Gabriele Brandstetter notes, 38 already undergone a double media shift: from the dancer’s physicalness to the fluid consistencies of the Medusas, and from the presence of the stage performance to the light projection of the film. Through their filmic representation and the poet’s aestheticizing look, however, the Medusas phenomenologically reveal themselves to be “danseuses absolues.” 39 Therefore, the authority to define the absolute dance is shifted to the level of interpretive reception. 40 Locating dance in the viewer’s perception allows Valéry’s concept a chiastic inversion of the actual and the metaphorical, as already implied in Laban’s writings: an at first glance ‘metaphorical’ motion sequence, detached from the actual meaning of dance and transposed to the medium of film, is now declared to be the true, ‘absolute’ dance. Valéry is less concerned than Laban with the fuzziness of actual and metaphorical speech, than with positing the principle of dance as absolute, as “une idée assez abstraite de la Danse,” which he distinguishes from dance in 36 Paul Valéry, ”De la danse,“ Degas Danse Dessin (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) 33. 37 Valéry, ”De la danse“ 34. 38 Brandstetter 306. 39 Valéry, ”De la danse“ 34. 40 See Huschka 69-70; for the ”Master-Narrative of Absolute Dance“ also see Susan A. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 20-21. K RISTINA K ÖHLER 172 the narrow, literal sense, “la danse proprement dite.“ 41 While in Mallarmé and Laban actual and metaphorical dance mutually overlap, Valéry’s postulated absolute dance appears at the outset detached from any material or medium-specific being. While Mallarmé describes the process of a dancer being metaphorized or turned into a sign, Valéry’s account of ‘dance’ is already the product of a transfer (achieved by the interpreter and the filmic medium), a dance already become sign. Moreover, dance in Valéry’s conception becomes the very idea of artistic poiesis; a kind of hyper-medium encompassing all the individual arts as particular instances of the one dance as a general principle of creation. 42 In this sense, the media change to film not so much implies metaphorization, but rather that at this point the principle of dance is actualised through the form and medium of film. This idea of absolute dance manifesting itself beyond the body of the dancer also runs through the dance-theoretical discourses of the 1920s. Hence, in his book Tanzkunst from 1926, dance theorist Fritz Böhme refers to the potential of dance as realising itself not via the human body, but through the supposedly dance-like movement of objects — with inklings here both of Kleist’s Marionette Theatre and the dance avant-garde’s striving towards transcending physiological dance. 43 Tellingly, Böhme conceives these instrumental dances (Instrumentaltänze) as a process of “transferring dance’s inspiration to material other than the human body.” 44 Apart from coloured light projections, above all (experimental) film is thought to make it possible to “largely disconnect the physiological tie between work and body, so that one may speak of an absolute creation of motion.” 45 The assumption that the essence of dance could be prominently featured through the medium of film found its continuation in the notion of a dance-like cinema in contemporary film criticism and theory. In a critical review of 1921, the film theoretician Bernard Diebold discusses Walter Ruttmann’s abstract film experiments and concludes that the motion-play of rhythmically animated geometric forms in Lichtspiel Opus 1 “comes closest to being ‘absolute dance.’“ 46 These meta-narratives of an ‘absolute dance,’ equally present in discourses on dance, film, and aesthetics are no longer specific to a given medium and subvert both intermedial borders and the separating line between literal and metaphorical speech. Hence, this essentialist notion of dance con- 41 Valéry, “Philosophie de la danse” 1400. 42 “[...] [T]ous les arts peuvent être considérés comme des cas particuliers de cette idée générale.” Valéry, “Philosophie de la danse” 1400. 43 See for example Mary Wigman, Die Sprache des Tanzes (München: Battenberg, 1986) 12. 44 Fritz Böhme, Tanzkunst (Dessau: Dünnhaupt, 1926) 51 (translation H. M. Taylor). 45 Böhme 52. 46 Bernard Diebold, ”Eine neue Kunst: Die Augenmusik des Films,“ Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, 2 April 1921 (evening issue). Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 173 stitutes the vanishing point of the interplay between dance metaphors and transposed dance concepts described above. Crystallising the production of dance, the discourse of absolute dance is committed neither to clear definition nor to concrete idea; rather, it suggests itself as an all-embracing and instinctive description of visual phenomena in motion, which now can only be depicted ’as dance.’ V Conclusion and Outlook: Dance as a Theory of Metaphor From the metaphorical dance of the dancer in Mallarmé, through Laban’s ‘universal dance,’ to film’s dance potential in Valéry and Böhme: this cursory overview of the relationship between dance metaphors and concepts in the avant-garde’s manifestoes has revealed the distinction between definition and metaphor of dance to be extremely unstable. In the aesthetic theories of Mallarmé through Valéry, literal and transposed usage of the term dance oscillate ambiguously and continuously revolve the dichotomy of conceptual and metaphorical speech. This result is partly attributable to dance’s frequently evoked ambivalence, which at the beginning of the 20 th century seems to vouch for the compatibility of opposing tendencies. 47 Thus, French dance critic André Levinson writes in 1927: "De tous les arts, la danse se révèle le plus matériel mais aussi le plus abstrait. Elle résout l'antithèse de la chair et de l'esprit; c'est là son miracle." 48 In a similar vein, literary scholar Frank Kermode considers the dance metaphors of the symbolist art theories as a paradigm allowing for the dissolution of modernity’s central dichotomies: “The dancer [...] reconciles antithetical movements: the division of soul and body, form and matter, life and death, artist and audience.“ 49 As a puzzling, doubly reversible figure, dance has the potential of unifying principles that occidental philosophy traditionally conceives as opposites, which would also account for the metaphor’s power in the discourses outlined here. Different from contemporary Sprachkritiker (linguistic critics) like Fritz Mauthner or Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, the theories under consideration refrain from pitting the utterable against the unutterable, or the literal against the figurative; rather, they make productive use of the oscillating field of transference and counter-transference between idea and metaphor in articulating the mutual relationship of dance metaphors and concepts. Hence, Mallarmé, Laban, and Valéry use fuzzy referentiality as a strategy of 47 See Julie Townsend, “Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 18.1 (2005): 127-28. 48 André Levinson, Paul Valéry: Philosophie de la danse (Paris: Tour d'Ivoire, 1927) 10. 49 Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London/ New York: Routledge, 2002) 72. K RISTINA K ÖHLER 174 legitimising a wide understanding of dance or, on the contrary, to transcend the physicalness of dance by a universalist claim. The commutability of metaphorical and conceptual references not only appears grounded in the ambiguity of the term dance, but can also be attributed to the specific rhetoric of the historical discourses examined here. As artistic theories, the paradigms of Mallarmé, Laban, and Valéry are less concerned with establishing a coherent and consistent terminology than with producing enigmatic, dynamic systems of thought characterized by internal tensions, turns, and logically insoluble paradoxes. As forms of “aesthetic thought” 50 these discourses seem less eager to communicate through theoretical models or concepts, 51 preferring instead the ambiguously metaphorical as a more open, flexible, and subjective form of speech. Yet despite their affirmation of subjectivity and contradiction, these manifestoes also indicate that the distinguishability between metaphorical and literal speech is not a necessary condition for understanding the dance metaphors examined here. Their fuzzy, ambiguous status does not seem to impair their communicative power. Rather, these theoretical contexts appear to dissolve the distinction of idea and metaphor in a dynamic ‘x as well as y’: thus, the speech of the ‘dance of life,’ of ‘universal dance’ or of the ‘dancer as metaphor’ on the one hand functions as conventional metaphorical discourse capable of evoking systems of associated commonplaces which are transferred into new contexts. On the other hand, the metaphoricity of such speech is mirrored by an enhanced concept of dance capable of positing the tropical nature of this discourse as the actual purpose of dance, without confining any of its suggestive power. All these vertiginous twists, turns, oscillations, and transpositions between the metaphorical and dance finally also affect the notion of metaphor itself. Considering the latent fuzziness of literal and metaphorical speech, it seems that the latter may no longer be defined through its difference from the actual. Therefore, based on these thought models, how can the metaphorical be grasped if the distinction of proprum and improprum, literal and figurative speech, has become unreliable? As a possible answer I would like to suggest one final inflection that seems to be implicit in the discourses quoted here. In exposing the meta-theory of metaphor negotiated by these theories, dance would appear as the privileged idea of a changed understanding of the figurative. At the risk of introducing one more metaphor in this discussion (if only they are the “good ones” 52 , as Max Black points out), dance as the meta- 50 See Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990) 46ff. 51 See Rüdiger Zill, “Metapher als Modell: Die Figur des Neuen in der Genese wissenschaftlicher und philosophischer Theorien,” Die Figur des Neuen, ed. Wolfgang Sohst (XENOMOI: Berlin, 2008) 55-56. 52 Black 39. Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 175 phor of metaphorical speech thus particularly stresses the dynamic functioning of transferred meaning. In view of the oscillation outlined here between actual and figurative speech, this dynamic should not be imagined as a linear displacement of a term from A to B; rather, it should be considered as cyclical reference continuously exchanging the extremes of metaphor and concept, focus and frame in mutual displacement and deference. Hence, metaphor’s figurative movement could be depicted as an endless turning and spinning, or as a pirouette, as Paul Valéry indicates towards the end of his essay “Philosophie de la danse” (1936): “Qu’est-ce qu’une métaphore, si ce n’est une sorte de pirouette de l’idée dont on rapproche les diverses images ou les divers noms? ” 53 As a way of imagining the metaphorical, the pirouette not only suggests the centrifugal dynamic described by Valéry 54 , but also its transference and circular reference. Pointing to Mallarmé, Jacques Derrida similarly conceives the pirouette as a self-referential movement, which, turning on itself, aspires to the place of the Other, blending the same and the new in its referential turn: Comme pirouette, la danse de l’hiéroglyphe ne peut se jouer intégralement en dedans [...] à cause d’un certain déplacement latéral: en tournant incessament sur sa pointe, l’hiéroglyphe, le signe, le chiffre quitte son ici, comme se fichant, toujours ici en passant d’ici à là, d’un ici à l’autre [...]. Chaque pirouette n’est alors, dans son tournoiement, que la marque d’une autre pirouette, tout autre et la même. 55 As an impermanent sign of as-if, fluctuating between selfand external reference, the pirouette-like game of metaphorically produced similarities and self-cancellation cannot be arrested, nor can the oscillation between the actual and the figurative, between analogy and difference. Hence, and more poignantly, the metaphoricity of dance implies a notion of metaphor no longer determined by difference; instead, and seen under the paradigm of dance, the process of metaphorical meaning production has to be negotiated as a dynamic oscillation of actual and figurative speech. 53 Valéry, “Philosophie de la danse” 1403. 54 See Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007) 88. 55 Jacques Derrida, ”La double séance,“ La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 294-95. K RISTINA K ÖHLER 176 Works Cited Alter, Judith B. “Havelock Ellis’s Essay ’The Art of Dancing’: A Reconsideration.” Dance Research Journal 24 (1992): 27-35. Badiou, Alain. “La danse comme métaphore de la pensée.” Danse et Pensée: Une autre scène pour la danse. Ed. Ciro Bruni. Sammeron: GERMS, 1993. 11-22. Baxmann, Inge. ”’Die Gesinnung ins Schwingen bringen’: Tanz als Metasprache und Gesellschaftsutopie in der Kultur der zwanziger Jahre.“ Materialität der Kommunikation. Eds. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 360-73. Black, Max. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell UP, 1962. Blumenberg, Hans. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. Böhme, Fritz. Tanzkunst. Dessau: Dünnhaupt, 1926. Böttger, Claudia. “Mythen und Metaphern des modernen Tanzes.” Journal für Psychologie, 11.4 (2003): 387-412. Brandstetter, Gabriele. Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1995. Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Brygida Maria Ochaim. Loie Fuller: Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art-Nouveau. Freiburg: Rombach, 1989. Craig, Edward Gordon. Gordon Craig on Movement and Dance. Ed. Arnold Rood. New York: Dance Horizons, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. ”La double séance.“ La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 215-348. Diebold, Bernard. ”Eine neue Kunst: Die Augenmusik des Films.“ Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, 2 April 1921 (evening issue). Dörr, Evelyn. ”Rudolf von Laban: Tänzerische Identität im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Wissenschaft und Politik.“ Tanz. Politik. Identität. Eds. Sabine Karoß and Leonore Welzin. Hamburg: LIT, 2001. 103-34. Duncan, Isadora. My Life. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. Fuchs, Georg. Die Revolution des Theaters: Ergebnisse aus dem Münchener Künstler- Theater. München/ Leipzig: G. Müller, 1909. Gumpert, Gregor. Die Rede vom Tanz: Die Körperästhetik in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende. München: Fink, 1994. Havelock Ellis, Henry. The Dance of Life. London: Constable, 1923. Hertel, Ralf. Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne. Eggingen: Isele, 2002. Huschka, Sabine. Moderner Tanz: Konzepte — Stile — Utopien. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002. Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London/ New York: Routledge, 2002. Köhler, Kristina. “’So wird es schließlich Dein Bild sein, das für Dich tanzt: Theoriegeschichtliche Konzepte einer Interart-Poetik von Film und Tanz.” Geste: Bewegungen zwischen Film und Tanz. Eds. Reinhold Görling, Timo Skrandies, and Stephan Trinkaus. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. von Laban, Rudolf. Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen. Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920. Dance as Metaphor - Metaphor as Dance 177 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Levinson, André. Paul Valéry: Philosophie de la danse. Paris: Tour d'Ivoire, 1927. zur Lippe, Rudolf. “Sprung, Paradox, Metapher, Tanz.” Tanz als Form des Denkens. Ed. Gisela Röller and Rudolf zur Lippe. Lüneburg: Jansen, 2001. 215-26. Lista, Giovanni. Loïe Fuller: Danseuse de la Belle Epoque. Paris : Stock-Somogy, 1994. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crayonné au théâtre.“ Kritische Schriften. Eds. Gerhard Goebel and Bettina Rommel. Gerlingen: Schneider, 1998. 158-209. Manning, Susan A. Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. McCarren, Felicia. “Stéphane Mallarmé, Loie Fuller, and the Theatre of Feminity.” Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. Eds. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 217- 30. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Also sprach Zarathustra.” Sämtliche Werke/ Kritische Studienausgabe. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München/ Berlin/ New York: 1980. Pidoux, Jean-Yves, ed. La danse, art du XXe siecle? Lausanne: Payot, 1990. Ploebst, Helmut. “Walzer der Schornsteine: Zur Erweiterungt des Tanzbegriffs in den ’ersten Avantgarden’ des 20. Jahrhunderts.” corpus: internet magazin für tanz — choreografie — performance (2008). 6 March 2009 <http: / / www. corpusweb.net/ index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=720&Itemid=32 >. Senti-Schmidlin, Verena. Rhythmus und Tanz in der Malerei: Zur Bewegungsästhetik im Werk von Ferdinand Hodler und Ludwig von Hofmann. Hildesheim: Olms, 2007. Symons, Arthur. ”The World as Ballet.“ Studies in Seven Arts. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1906. 387-91. Townsend, Julie. “Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 8.1 (2005): 126-48. Van Vaerenbergh, Leona. Tanz und Tanzbewegung: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung deutscher Lyrik von der Dekadenz bis zum Frühexpressionismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1991. Valéry, Paul. “Philosophie de la danse.” Œuvres I, Variété. Paris: Nrf, Gallimard, 1957. 1390-403. ---. ”De la danse.“ Degas Danse Dessin. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. 27-36. Welsch, Wolfgang. Ästhetisches Denken. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990. Wigman, Mary. Die Sprache des Tanzes. München: Battenberg, 1986. Wirth, Uwe. “Hypertextuelle Aufpfropfung als Übergangsform zwischen Intermedialität und Transmedialität.“ Transmedialität: Zur Ästhetik paraliterarischer Verfahren. Eds. Urs Meyer, Roberto Simanowski, and Christoph Zeller. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. 19-38. Yun, Heekyeong. Tanz in der deutschen Kunst der Moderne: Wandlungen des bewegten Körperbilds zwischen 1890 und 1950. Taunusstein: Driesen, 2007. Zill, Rüdiger. “Metapher als Modell: Die Figur des Neuen in der Genese wissenschaftlicher und philosophischer Theorien.” Die Figur des Neuen. Ed. Wolfgang Sohst. XENOMOI: Berlin, 2008. 17-81. P HILIPP S CHULTE The World as Stage and Representation: Notes on the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor 1 I ‘The Great Theatre of the World’ WORLD: Well, what do you plan to do? Is there anything I can do for you? DIRECTOR: […] I want you to make a festival To celebrate my power So when my greatness is made manifest All Nature will rejoice. Everyone loves it when a show really works And the audience shouts ‘Bravo! ’ Human life is not but acting, so Let Heaven sit in the best seats To watch a play on your stage, World. As I’m Director and the play is mine, It shall be acted by my company Whether they want to act or not. As I chose human beings to be The most important creatures of all They’ll be the members of my company And they shall act out, as well as they can, The story of the play that’s called The World. I shall cast each in a suitable role Now an entertainment of this kind Needs beautiful props and transformations And richly-decorated costumes. […] Work quick as light, for I’m Director, You are stage manager, humans the actors. WORLD: Great Director, the actors and I Will obey your every word. I am the Great Theatre of the World And I am your Stage Manager Here to carry out your orders, For though the scenery is mine, the play is yours. 2 P HILIPP S CHULTE 180 And thus the ‘Great Theatre of the World’ which Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca conjures up before the audience’s eyes in his homonymous religious play El gran teatro del mundo, is dedicated. Calderón’s play received its premiere on the Feast of Corpus Christi, 1645 3 , in Seville. He had, however, not been the first to use the idea of world-as-stage and, correspondingly, life-as-play. In fact, the notion dates back as far as classical antiquity, and it is likely that, during Calderón’s own time, it had already turned commonplace. Still, no other playwright before the Spaniard, whose Christian parable presents all of world history since Creation, had with such consistency put on the idea of a play-in-play. Barely has Calderón’s world been chosen — as quoted above — to act as stage, when, instantly, it equips itself with two stage doors: an entrance in the form of a cradle; and an exit represented correspondingly by a grave. And through this cradle, the Lord and Stage Director calls all of those human players to their entries, for them to be assigned their various roles. There is the King, the Sage, the Belle, the Rich Man, the Peasant, the Beggar, the innocent and all-too-soon-dying Child. ”Do Right, for God is God“ is the seemingly tautologous title of the play that is being performed. The players are free to act within the bounds of their respective roles, until they are again called offstage, to be judged by God according to their onstage conduct. In using this image, Calderón falls back on a motif that in seventeenthcentury Spain already had a long tradition, a motif that can be found in Plato and St Augustine, in the Sceptics of antiquity as well as in Stoics such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. 4 As Alexander Demandt, who has presented the arguably most comprehensive survey of the manifold manifestations the theatre metaphor has undergone since ancient times, sums up: Figures of speech taken from the general realm of theatre have at all times served to clarify beliefs about history. Tragedy and drama, puppet and extra, role and unmasking, entry, scene and peripeteia, staging and Iron Curtain are familiar images of historical political speech. Their basic outlines persist; they have been 1 Translated by Tobias Gabel. 2 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, ”The Great Theatre of the World,” Three Plays (1993; London: Oberon Books Ltd, 2003) 174-75. 3 For the date of the first performance, different years have been suggested. I follow Ansgar von der Osten, “Das große Welttheater,“ Harenberg Schauspielführer (Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1997) 181. 4 See Adriana Hass, ”Theatrum mundi,“ Theaterlexikon: Begriffe und Epochen, Bühnen und Ensembles, eds. Manfred Brauneck and Gérard Schneilin (1986; Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992) 1051. The World as Stage and Representation 181 elaborated variously according to the development of theatre and the permutations of our way of looking at history. 5 The world is like the stage in a theatrical production, whether the roles are cast by Fate, as the ancients believed, or, as in baroque times, by the Christian God. Needless to say the metaphor has, time and again, been used in drama itself: in Lope de Vega, in Shakespeare, 6 later in the opening prologue of Goethe’s Faust, in Büchner’s Dantons Tod, and, explicitly, in Hofmannsthal’s plays Das kleine Welttheater (‘The Little World Theatre’) and Das Salzburger große Welttheater (‘The Great Salzburg World Theatre’). Just as the notion of the world as a stage with human players was not invented in one of Calderón’s plays, then, it did not cease to exist with the end of the baroque era. On the contrary, its various forms pervade, down to the present day, the dominant aesthetic, mundane, and scientific discourses. Over the course of the 19 th century, admittedly, its Christian character got lost somewhere along the way. God, at any rate, who had thus far served as both stage director and sole spectator of the global spectacle, left the theatre and henceforth let the players act on their own and, apparently, un-watched from the outside. Those very actors, however, stayed on the minds of many artists and theorists who still put their hopes for an adequate description of the world in the theatrical model. The most consistent exponent of this kind of metaphorization in the 20 th century might be Jewish-Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman first presented his take on the subject in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 7 “[The] ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and termination replies,” 8 as Goffman puts it. In his theory, theatre is used as a descriptive model of the 5 Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historischpolitischen Denken (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978) 421. (Own translation, T.G.) 6 See e.g. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Jonathan Bate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007) II.7: “All the world‘s a stage, [/ ] And all the men and women merely players. [/ ] They have their exits and their entrances; [/ ] And one man in his time plays many parts, [/ ] His acts being seven ages.”; William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Jonathan Bate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007) V.5: “Life‘s but […] a poor player [/ ] That struts and frets his hour upon the stage [/ ] And then is heard no more.” — Especially the concept occuring in Shakespeare of a play-within-the-play can, in this context, be seen as a first development of the theatrum mundi metaphor: embedding theatrical acting within a background story (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) makes possible meta-reflection upon the relationship between ‘theatre’ and ‘world’. For this suggestion I am indebted to Sibylle Baumbach. 7 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959; New York: The Overlook P, 1973); the title of the German translation (Wir alle spielen Theater, i.e. ‘We all put on an act’) makes the leaning towards a theatrum mundi metaphor even clearer. 8 Goffman 72. P HILIPP S CHULTE 182 social sphere. Accordingly, Goffman has everybody play a role all the time, creating certain façades and a “‘setting’, involving furniture, décor, physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props for the spate of human activities played out before, within, or upon it.” 9 Later on Goffman, too, draws on many other terms from the realm of theatre, such as ‘team,’ ‘audience,’ ‘costume,’ ‘proscenium,’ ‘backstage,’ ‘dramaturgy’ — and, of course, ‘role’. Just nine years later, another, more abstract book with a marked propensity for theatrical imagery was published, this time in France. It was Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle, in which the controversial artist and theoretician develops 221 theses — some of them emphatically gloomy and provocative — about how human existence turned spectacle. Debord claims that present-day life takes place within a detached, phoney world of its own. Moreover, he contends, modern man wrongly assumes that it is himself he sees in a kind of spectaclist mirror image, being thus rendered incapable of comprehending his own, ‘real’ existence. The more time people spend just looking on, Debord says, the less time they have at their disposal for actual living; the more readily they settle for identifying themselves with the prevalent representations of need, the less they understand their own existence and their own desires. “Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation,” 10 Debord writes right at the beginning of his book. Lastly — to bring this brief overview to a close — a look at American philosopher Judith Butler is in order. In framing her idea of a discursive, actionoriented, performative identity, Butler does not balk at employing theatrical imagery: “the acts by which gender meaning is performed bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts.” 11 At her most explicit, Butler compares the discursive power structure which surrounds us all to a theatrical text of sorts which largely — albeit not completely — determines that we are “actors, always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance.” 12 Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives. 13 9 Goffman 22. 10 Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (1967; Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1989) 9. 11 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy et al. (New York: Columbia UP, 1997) 403. 12 Butler “Performative Acts” 410. 13 Butler “Performative Acts” 410. The World as Stage and Representation 183 II Comparison and Interillumination: Different Views of Metaphor Following Max Black What is it then that connects all these different artistic and scientific approaches? What do they have in common? They draw on the concept of ‘theatre’ in order to better describe the concept of ‘world’ — and some of them, vide Calderón, use the concept of ‘world’ to arrive at a more adequate description of ‘theatre.’ In any case, ‘world’ and ‘theatre’, theatrum and mundus, are — within a certain framework — equated with each other, in a hope of gaining further insight into both. Using the term developed by mathematician, philosopher, and metaphor theorist Max Black in his essays “Metaphor” 14 and “More about Metaphor,” 15 one could call this view “a comparison view of metaphor.” 16 The theatrum mundi metaphor consists in the representation of an underlying analogy or resemblance: ‘The world’ is, in some respects, just like ‘the theatre’, e.g. regarding the finite nature of human existence, the necessity of living up to certain fixed social roles, the aspect of ‘staging’ etc. Whoever thus employs the theatrum mundi metaphor with all its shades of meaning in fact speaks, as Black points out, in a parable. Black also stresses that likeness of any kind between primary and secondary subject (i.e. that which is meant and that to which it is compared) is never given objectively. Rather, he says, it is always to be interpreted as gradual, as likeness always admits of nuances, and this is exactly why Black at first doubts the value of such a comparison: “The main objection against a comparison view is that it suffers from a vagueness that borders upon vacuity.” 17 But Black goes even further when he states that any resemblance between two compared subjects is established no sooner than the respective metaphor is used: “It would be more illuminating in some of these cases to say the metaphor creates the similarity than to say it formulates some similarity antecedently existing.” 18 In the particular case of the theatrum mundi metaphor, I also think it misleading to adopt the comparative view of metaphor. This is due, I think, to one specific ambiguity: It is unclear which of the two subjects compared is the primary, and which is the secondary subject of comparison. It is true: ‘World’ is compared to ‘theatre’, and thus, one would assume that ‘world,’ like brave Achilles in ‘Achilles is a lion,’ is the primary subject. At the same 14 Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LV (London: Harrison & Sons, Ltd., 1955) 273-294. 15 Max Black, “More about Metaphor,”Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (1979; New York: Cambridge UP, 1993) 19-41. 16 Black, “Metaphor” 283. 17 Black, “Metaphor” 284. 18 Black, “Metaphor” 284-85. P HILIPP S CHULTE 184 time, however — and Demandt calls this a “dual primary reference” 19 — the image resorted to for the purpose of comparison (‘theatre’) is usually understood in one specific historical sense, namely as an aesthetic form of representation which itself represents the world to begin with. The primary subject is compared to a secondary subject which, in turn, is often used as a primary subject to the original primary subject, which thus becomes a secondary subject. Instead of a rigid scheme with two opposing sides that are in a fixed relationship, we are now looking at a dynamic process. One could best describe this relationship of incessant mutual influence in the form of a spiral, if only this did not at the same time imply an ideal vanishing point, and thus a forward movement. ‘World’ is equated with ‘theatre,’ which in turn represents a specific, new version of ‘world,’ which itself has to confront a new notion of ‘theatre’ and so on ad infinitum. Black would not be as intriguing, though, had he left it at this comparative theory of metaphor, which — in this case at least — falls short of providing a real solution. His considerably more complex “interaction view of metaphor” 20 might offer a solution more adequate to this spiral movement. In context, Black also talks about “interillumination,” 21 which he takes to mean the following: [W]hen we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together […]. To speak of the ‘interaction’ of two thoughts ‘active together’ (or, again, of their ‘interillumination’ or ‘co-operation’) is to use a metaphor emphasizing the dynamic aspects of a good reader’s response to a non-trivial metaphor. 22 Looked at it this way, the two subjects — in our case: ‘theatre’ and ‘world’ — are no longer considered fixed and immovable variables, but are instead perceived as two distinct systems of things — as “system[s] of associated commonplaces.” 23 In other words, aspects that are usually associated with one of the two subjects, should, within the frame of the metaphor, be associated with the other subject as well, and vice versa. “The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the principal subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject,” 24 and the other way around. On the ‘boards that signify the world’ (‘Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten’), as Schiller famously called the theatre stage, many different aspects of this world, some of them worth imitating, others merely imitable, are used in order to present a theatrical version of this world. The social world, on the other hand, is often characterised as, in some regards, resem- 19 Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte 332. (my translation, T.G.) 20 Black, “Metaphor” 285. 21 Black, “Metaphor” 286. 22 Black, “Metaphor” 285-86. 23 Black, “Metaphor” 287. 24 Black, “Metaphor” 291-92. The World as Stage and Representation 185 bling the theatre — be it with respect to the observation that it, too, functions largely by representation, and that dispositifs and structures can be regarded as arranged and thus ‘staged’; be it the notion that, furthermore, there are certain, fixed codes of conduct, and that these are regulated — rather like the script for a film — by something Butler calls the ‘discourse’, which predetermines each and every one of us in every social interaction. Those partial aspects which correspond to both metaphorical subjects Black aptly calls ‘commonplaces,’ i.e. generally held opinions which need not be correct or even verifiable, and which are of course liable to a certain degree of historical or cultural deviation. Hence, every time the theatrum mundi metaphor is used, this is to be understood as part of such a process of semantic transfer, which one could call, with all due caution, ‘performative.’ Every time ‘world’ is described as ‘theatre,’ it is not only our look at the world that is changed and manipulated, it is also the meaning of ‘theatre’ that is remoulded into something somewhat different and new. To quote Black: The presence of the primary subject incites the hearer to select some of the secondary subject’s properties; and […] invites him to construct a parallel implicationcomplex that can fit the primary subject; and […] reciprocally induces parallel changes in the secondary subject. 25 Black is, in this context, bent on describing a dynamic system; this is why he talks of transformation and change. I would, however, like to complement this notion of dynamicity with the following thesis: The mutual influence exerted by both subjects of metaphor does not necessarily lead to a steady process of change; it can just as easily lead to the coinage of a new, fixed metaphor — and the commonplaces which appear to ‘work well’ and prevail within the frame of metaphorical interplay are thus perpetuated. It is exactly this consolidation of meaning which causes me discomfort, and which shall be traced in the next part of this essay. III Theatre and its Commonplaces At the outset, I tried to provide a tentative delineation of exactly which commonplaces are taken from the realm of ‘theatre’ and applied to our world. Now it is time to consider briefly the kinds of fixation these commonplaces have acquired through metaphoric usage regarding the ‘social world,’ and to contemplate in turn the possible inferences for the ‘social world’ implied by this usage. As a rule, these current commonplaces are stereotyping ideas whose historical point of origin can be located quite clearly, and whose continued influence on the performing arts is beyond doubt. At the same time, it can hardly be said that they still in an emphatic sense represent con- 25 Black, “More about Metaphor” 28. P HILIPP S CHULTE 186 temporary theatre with its multifarious manifestations. A considerable portion of these commonplaces can be traced back to the 18 th and 19 th centuries and to Europe, exclusively. This means that they accrue from a historical situation in which representational theatre was not only well on its way to complete illusionistic dominance, but also, ultimately, led to the rise of a perspective which further and further marginalised alternative ways of thinking about and staging something which could be called ‘theatre.’ These alternative approaches were obliterated to an increasing degree, and sometimes fell into complete oblivion. As the middle classes were growing stronger throughout the 18 th century, a new kind of theatre gained a foothold in Germany, and in Europe in general. Its declared goal was to present to the audience a credible and convincing illusion of reality. By trying to suppress all tokens of the fictionality of what was happening onstage, the concept of the Fourth Wall created a new fictional space apart from the audience. In this space was then to be presented an illusion as coherent and consistent as possible. This aspect of the proscenium-type stage plays an important role: The Fourth Wall separates the fictional events on stage from the real world of the audience, just as if the action were taking place in another world completely. Another metaphor, which itself continues to be used often in connexion with the theatre, comes into play here: that of the mirror. These intensified efforts to create a credible theatrical fiction went hand in hand with the supposition of a certain fixed inner essence of man, as can be first observed explicitly in the 18 th century bourgeois theatre of illusion. This type of Enlightenment theatre, along with its naturalistic descendants, can well be considered as a downright stronghold of a ‘fiction of essence.’ The theatrical system of representation characteristic of these genres made intensive use of various means of fictionalisation, in order to emulate onstage, generally speaking, a plausible succession of events supposed to be understood as a faithful reproduction of reality. In particular, it conveyed an image of man peculiar to the Enlightenment, a conception according to which the identity of man emanated from an inner essence which could be appropriately displayed through physical actions. Just as, according to the opinion of the age, a mimetic reproduction of reality by the theatre was within the realm of possibility, so the fixed inner essence of man, too, was thought to be representable by means of the proper outward signs. The bourgeois theatre of illusion, which experienced a ‘second raising’ with the rise of 20 th century naturalism, has, to this day, been formative in dramatic art — one need only think of the Anglo-American notion of the ‘well-made play.’ In fact, this kind of dramatics has had such a strong influence upon our current conception of ‘theatre’ that a mere mention of the term more often than not calls to mind the classic picture-frame stage all’italienne with its strict segregation between auditorium and stage, and a psychological conception The World as Stage and Representation 187 of ‘role.’ The latter assumes that an actor plays a role within a clearly defined stage area. The actor, it is furthermore supposed, is especially good at this whenever the impersonation is particularly credible; if the audience does not buy into his illusion, he is not doing a good job. Even mainstream cinema has largely made this notion its own. We do not think, at least not right away, of the numerous non-European traditions of theatre such as, for instance, the extremely elaborate and formalistic Asian styles of acting seen in Beijing opera and Bunraku; we do not think of the pre-illusionistic forms of theatre thought to have been in existence during ancient and mediaeval times; we do not think of the historical avant-gardes around 1900, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Brecht’s Epic Theatre or the Performance Art movement emerging in the 1960s. In other words, the commonplaces about ‘Theatre with a capital T’ are much more unanimous, uniform, and repetitive than all the manifold modes of acting which today are subsumed under the same heading of ‘theatre’ might lead one to believe — but that is just the way it is with commonplaces. ‘Theatre,’ today, does not depend on the said psychological impersonation to the degree it used to: Actors often pretend not to act at all in an emphatic sense, but rather make believe it is themselves they present onstage, acting the way they act in everyday life; hence modern theatre’s penchant for employing amateurs. But as much as we are aware of this development, as much as we know that the theatrical frame today is constantly challenged — by a theatre which has long abolished the curtain, integrates the audience, or takes place in unusual locations —, as much as we are conscious of all this: The phrase ‘All the world’s a stage’ still takes us right back to the world of ideas of the 19 th century. IV The Misleading Nature of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor But why should this be a problem? Whence the uneasy feeling mentioned above? As has been suggested, it is most likely due to the fiction of essence which is usually associated with the concept of theatre just described. ‘Theatre,’ in this context, is thought to be a second-order illusion, imitating something ‘real’ — or, at any rate, something more real than its reproduction. Implicitly, at least, it refers back to an antecedent entity for which an adequate representation can be found. This, of course, is to be taken in a thoroughly baroque, Calderónian sense: The world is a theatrical performance only in as much as truth and something like substantiality can exclusively be attained in an eternal afterlife. After the ‘performance’ has ended, every ‘actor’ is rewarded or punished according to whether or not he has satisfactorily discharged his role, and those successful are granted entry to an authentic afterlife. In my estimation, this is precisely the problem of the theatrum mundi P HILIPP S CHULTE 188 metaphor: It tries to fake authenticity and substance where we do not need it — at least not for the time being. This does not mean that the use theorists such as Butler or Goffman have made of the concept was naïve. After all, it was Butler’s comments which provided us with an increasingly antisubstantialist perspective of the world in the first place, and Goffman, too, voices misgivings as to the metaphorical nature of his own model. At the end of his discussion, he points out that the conceptual analogy between ‘theatre’ and ‘world’ introduced by him may only be understood as a “rhetorical manoeuvre.” Goffman admits that theatre is solely about ‘artificial illusion,’ while everyday life deals with actual, real things: The claim that all the world’s a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation, knowing that at any time they will easily be able to demonstrate to themselves that it is not to be taken too seriously. An action staged in a theater is a relatively contrived illusion and an admitted one; unlike ordinary life, nothing real or actual can happen to the performed characters — although at another level of course something real and actual can happen to the reputation of the performers qua professionals whose everyday job is to put on theatrical performances. 26 And, a little later on, he adds: A character staged in a theatre is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but successful staging of either of these types of fake figures involves use of real techniques — the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations. 27 When scrutinising his model, Goffman, therefore, can only find one shortcoming, of all things: that it makes a distinction between illusion and reality. For Goffman, the theatrical act is merely and exclusively fictitious; hence, it cannot ‘infiltrate everyday life.’ As a consequence, he seems to ignore the current tendencies in dramatic art which have already been mentioned: tendencies to break the bounds of the imaginary in order to very well come across as a part of so-called reality. Considering when his book was written, of course, it is not very surprising that Goffman should have been ‘oblivious’ of these developments. Contentious as Goffman’s theatrum mundi metaphor and similar analogies are, then, they can hardly be reconciled with the trajectory of postmodern theatre. Caution is due in the reception of these and similar texts: It is crucial not to fall for the cryptosubstantialism which can, as discussed above, be ascribed to the theatrum mundi metaphor. Maybe, or rather, probably, the current scholarly concepts of, and discussions about, the more abstract notions of theatralicity and spectacularity could serve to make 26 Goffman 254. 27 Goffman 254-55. The World as Stage and Representation 189 the said relationship between world and theatre more flexible, as I am advocating. Conceivably, for an adequate description of this relationship we might even employ the term ‘performativity,’ which has mainly been debated in the German-speaking world, and is often used in a misleading manner. To elaborate on the lively and intensive debates about the concept would be to go beyond the scope of this essay. Therefore, without wanting to focus on the complex and inconsistent uses of that term, ‘performativity,’ we shall examine something more specific. When one looks at the discussions about ‘performativity,’ there is one recurring aspect which may very well contribute to an improved understanding of the dynamic between ‘theatre’ and ‘world’: It is the notion of abundance, which can already be found in the writings of speech-act theorist John Austin, and, more precisely, in his treatment of what he calls ‘perlocutionary acts.’ 28 It does, however, also play a role in the works of Derrida 29 (as ‘event’), Butler 30 (as ‘subversive element’), and not least in those of German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, who manages to give a very straightforward description by differentiating between the performative and referential elements of, for example, a theatre performance: While the referential function focuses on the theatrical depiction of characters, actions, relationships, situations and so forth, the performative function concentrates on the carrying out of actions by the actors (or, sometimes, the audience) as well as on the immediate effect of these actions. 31 28 Austin calls that speech act ‘perlocutionary’ which, by virtue of its performance, manages to bring about certain consequences for reality, namely that it causes reality to be either reshaped or constituted in the first place. Assuming that is the case, speech act and effect do no longer coincide; a perlocutionary act is carried out by way of its consequences. According to Butler, it is precisely this asynchronous nature of the consequences of such a speech act which causes a considerable lack of clarity and thus of controllability in its effects. Moreover, she holds said uncontrollability, which is usually considered as failure, to be potentially liberating: It can free us, Butler says, from the obligation of following in all details a rigid discursive standard. Rather, we are free not to comply fully with that standard, but, on the contrary, challenge it and, ultimately, — if other requirements are met — shift it. See John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London et al.: Oxford UP, 1971), as well as Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, (New York et al.: Routledge, 1997). 29 See e.g. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc., ed. Jacques Derrida (1988; Evanston, IL.: Northwestern UP, 1993), 1-23. 30 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York et al.: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York et al.: Routledge, 1993). 31 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel: Auf dem Wege zu einer performativen Kultur,” Theater seit den 60er Jahren: Grenzgänge der Neo-Avantgarde, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, et al. (Tübingen/ Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1998), 2-3 (Own translation, emphases added, T.G.). P HILIPP S CHULTE 190 Accordingly, the referential parts of a theatrical performance are those which represent, which stand for something else, which serve as a symbol — or metaphor — of the world, or rather, something within it. The performative, however, is that which overshoots this claim to symbolic relevance, for the two cannot merge completely. It is that which comes to pass during a process of action — and this can be any symbolising, met aphorising process —, that which somehow transcends the referential, that is to say the comparison which had possibly been intended. The performative produces a surplus in meaning which precisely does not make use of the referential mode to indicate something outside of the theatre. In other words, it does not serve as a symbol for anything else: In the act of carrying out itself, it self-referentially signifies nothing but this its own execution. Thus, inevitably, the performative influences the world surrounding it. It is exactly this surplus in meaning which can be considered the engine of the dynamic described. Indeed, there is a relationship between theatre and world. This relationship, however, is neither purely metaphorical, nor purely mimetic, as every depiction in turn alters that which is being depicted; every image influences reality; every performance modifies the world, or rather — let us stay modest — a small fraction of it. Nonetheless, a static interpretation of the theatrum mundi metaphor, one that regards both of its poles as immutably fixed, should be banished from scientific discourse. Not least it is the consideration of Goffman’s abovequoted remarks which clarifies why this is so: After all, a mere comparison of theatre and world is bound to impair the relevance and the political potential of theatre, neither of which are usually very high to begin with. Certainly, theatre, sometimes, is like our world, but be that as it may — it first and foremost is to be considered part of our world, which means that it is capable of actively influencing the same. The notion of a disconnectedness of ‘world’ and ‘theatre’ as it is implied in the theatrum mundi metaphor quite invalidates this possibility. Theatre and performance art do not so much describe our world the way it is, as at times depict it the way it should (or should not) be — if, that is, they do not altogether refuse the obligation to function as a mimetic mirror for that social world which they surround, whose constituent part they are, and in which they can only intervene by clearly asserting this their constitutive status. No question: The theatre still plays a privileged role in all this, there still exists the contract between the performer and his audience that whatever is presented is institutionally framed, even though this contract is sometimes outside of the performer’s consciousness, as Helga Finter argues in her essay The World as Stage and Representation 191 “Disclosure(s) of Re-Presentation: Performance hic et nunc? “ 32 But if one states that theatre only functions as a model for the world, as Goffman describes it, than one simply underestimates the attempt of so many artists since the beginning of the 20 th century: to put this frame into question again and again. 32 Finter, Helga, ”Disclosure(s) of Re-Presentation: Performance hic et nunc? ,“ Aesthetics and Contemporary Discourse: REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 10, ed. Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr, 1994) 153-67. P HILIPP S CHULTE 192 Works Cited Austin, John L. How To Do Things With Words. London et al.: Oxford UP, 1971. Black, Max. “Metaphor.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Vol. LV. London: Harrison & Son, Ltd., 1955. 273-94. ---. “More About Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony, 1979. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 19-41. Brauneck, Manfred, and Gérard Schneilin, eds. Theaterlexikon: Begriffe und Epochen, Bühnen und Ensembles. 1986. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York et al.: Routledge, 1990. ---. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York et al.: Routledge, 1993. ---. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York et al.: Routledge, 1997. ---. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 401-17. Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. ”The Great Theatre of the World.” Three Plays. 1993. London: Oberon Books Ltd, 2003. 169-204. Conboy, Katie, et al., eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. 1967. Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1989. Demandt, Alexander. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Ed. Jacques Derrida. 1988. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993. 1-23. Finter, Helga. “Disclosure(s) of Re-Presentation: Performance hic et nunc? “ Aesthetics and Contemporary Discourse: REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 10. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994. 153-67. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Grenzgänge und Tauschhandel: Auf dem Wege zu einer performativen Kultur.” Theater seit den 60er Jahren. Grenzgänge der Neo- Avantgarde. Eds. Erika Fischer-Lichte, et al. Tübingen/ Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1998. 1-20. Fischer-Lichte, Erkika, et al., eds. Theater seit den 60er Jahren: Grenzgänge der Neo- Avantgarde. Tübingen/ Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1998. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959. New York: The Overlook Press, 1973. Harenberg Schauspielführer. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1997. Hass, Adriana. “Theatrum mundi.” Theaterlexikon: Begriffe und Epochen, Bühnen und Ensembles. Eds. Manfred Brauneck and Gérard Schneilin. 1986. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992. 1051. Ortony, Andrew, ed. Metaphor and Thought. 1979. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. The World as Stage and Representation 193 Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007. von der Osten, Ansgar. “Das große Welttheater.” Harenberg Schauspielführer. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1997. 181-82. III. M ETAPHORS S HAPING T HEORIES - T HEORIES S HAPING M ETAPHORS : H ISTORICAL C ASE S TUDIES J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE Leaving the House of the Text: Deconstructing the Metaphor of Construction I Introduction The call for papers for this conference suggests that ‘construction’ and ‘constructivism’ are ‘basic analogies for epistemological and logical paradigms.’ I propose to extend the metaphor of construction to language (the sentence), to the text, and to examine its importance in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language, and to suggest ways of going beyond the metaphor, of leaving the house of the text, which might well be what Jameson, in another context, called “the prison-house of language.” 1 My point of departure is the adoption by the French language of the concept déconstruction, proposed by Derrida as what was at first a translation of the Heidegerrian term Destruktion. What puzzles me is why the translation he suggested was not the French word, destruction, why he had recourse to a word whose negative prefix presupposes the construction it seeks to negate in what sounds more like denial than negation. You will answer, of course, that this is the very movement of deconstruction: what it cancels, it retains under erasure. But perhaps there is more to Derrida’s choice than this. There is something radical in destruction: after the bomb, only rubble remains. Whereas deconstruction is slow and methodical, as in Hobbes’ famous paradox of the ship of Theseus: the ship rots bit by bit, and each plank is removed and replaced as it becomes rotten; but someone gets hold of each discarded plank in order to build himself a ship, or rather to rebuild the ship; at the end of the process there are two identical ships of Theseus, one brand-new, one rotten, which creates problems for the ascription of identity and for its stability over time. The ship has been at the same time deconstructed and reconstructed. But the real reason for the adoption of the term may well be that the metaphor of construction, as applied to either sentence or text, is inescapable, that it both frames and imprisons our thought about language and the text. The metaphor, of course, has a long history. It is not my intention here to chart its emergence in grammatical thought (where, etymologically, syntax has always been treated as a form of construction) and its contamination of 1 Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972). J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 198 the thought of the text, where it rivals the older metaphor of the text as cloth, derived from the etymological representation of the text as the result of a process of weaving. But what we call the moment of structuralism is certainly one of the moments when such contamination was most obvious. Then it was that the text became a prolonged sentence, supported by a structure, analogous to the syntactic structure of the sentence (and we remember that it is with Chomsky that syntax, formerly excluded from Saussurian langue and restricted to parole, became the core of the system of language). We find a literary illustration of this shift in a story by Donald Barthelme entitled “Sentence,” where the reader comes to realize that the apparent narrative is of no importance whatsoever, as the real protagonist is the sentence itself (and the story, which runs to several pages, is composed of one single sentence), a sentence that uses all the devices of embedding, parenthesis, and digression not to reach the final full stop that finally kills it. 2 If we wish to reconstruct the metaphor in order to deconstruct it and leave the house of the sentence and of the text, we must proceed in order, beginning with the sentence as construction. II The Sentence as Construction A dictionary of linguistic terms gives us two meanings of ‘construction’ in grammar. The first, called ‘traditional,’ refers to the way words are combined into sentences, according to meaning and syntactic function, in accordance with the grammatical rules of the language. The second, called ‘structural,’ states that a construction is any relevant combination of words or morphemes that enter into a larger construction. 3 Apart from the obvious circularity of such definition it is not in any way different from the definition of a syntagma, as opposed to paradigm, except that a syntagma fulfils a definite syntactic function, whereas the meaning of ‘construction’ is more vague, as the term can apply to almost any group of words, whether they constitute a proper syntagma or only a subpart of it. The most interesting aspect of the definition, however, concerns the shift from the traditional to the modern structural meaning of the term, as it illustrates the Chomskyan shift towards syntax as the core of language, with the use of an array of construction metaphors in his theoretical metalanguage: the syntactic trees that structure grammatical units are but visual representations of the step by stepconstruction of the sentence through the development of an algorithm of rules; the opposition between deep and surface structure gives the sentence 2 Donald Barthelme, “Sentence,“ Forty Stories, ed. Donald Barthelme (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988) 157-63. 3 Jean Dubois et al., Dictionnaire de linguistique (Paris: Larousse, 1973) 119. Leaving the House of the Text 199 the form of a construction, each syntactic transformation contributing to the final erection of the complete grammatical sentence; the multiplication of the modules that produce the building-blocks for the construction being an extension of the older dichotomy of the double articulation of linguistic signs, on which structural linguistics is founded. In the sentence, the scope of the construction metaphor is not limited to morphology and syntax. As the Italian word costrutto, meaning both grammatical construction and meaning as the result of a semantic construction indicates, the semantics of a language is also described through the construction metaphor. Here, a simple model of semantic construction will be represented by the treatment of the sentence as a Markov chain, that is as a series of finite states, represented by words, such that the choice of the first word of the sentence is entirely free, the choice of the second syntactically and semantically constrained by the first, and so on and so forth, till we reach the last word, the choice of which is totally constrained by the preceding choices. Thus, I can choose, in total freedom, to begin my sentence with the word ‘pride.’ A syntactic constraint (with limited choice) will induce me to choose a verb as a second word (the choice of the verb, however, is only limited by semantic constraints of compatibility with ‘pride’): The sentence is now ‘Pride comes… .’ ‘Come’ being an intransitive verb, I must choose for my third element an adverbial, not a noun phrase: so my sentence is ‘Pride comes before a… .’ You will not be surprised if I tell you that the last word is totally constrained, and the sentence must end with the noun ‘fall.’ The most interesting aspect of this theory of the syntactic cum semantic construction of the sentence is that, if it is not downright false, as Chomsky suggested in a celebrated essay, by pointing out the existence of syntactic operations of embedding which cannot be accounted for by recourse to a Markov chain, it is at least defeasible, the stylistic freedom of the speaker always allowing her to defeat the constraints, as when I choose not to end my sentence with the expected noun, ‘fall,’ but with another form of words, and my sentence now reads: ‘Pride come before a vote of impeachment.’ So I meant to tell you about Richard Nixon all the time, not merely to quote the most trite of proverbs. Here you have the essence of the Lacanian theory of the stitching point or upholstery button (point de capiton). The metaphor of the sentence as construction can be extended to the whole of language. Grammar is nothing but the construction of meaning through syntax. In the terms of Aristotle, it is a systematic passage, a path that is not yet a construction, from phone to logos. In the more modern terms of Jakobson, language works, in other words literally ‘makes’ sense (not only a praxis, but also a poiesis) along two axes: the paradigmatic axis, or axis of equivalence and selection, and the syntagmatic axis, the axis of combination; a vertical axis where metaphor thrives, versus a horizontal axis where me- J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 200 tonymies deploy. When the metaphor of construction comes to dominate, language is understood as a pyramid of layers which are themselves made of the building-blocks of language, phonemes, morphemes, words, and syntagmata. The construction of language takes the form of the piling up of phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels. Aristotle’s horizontal path has become a vertical construction. III The Text as Construction, or the House of the Text The structural metaphor that allows us to move from the sentence to the text takes the form of a syllogism: a SENTENCE is a BUILDING, a TEXT is a PROLONGED SENTENCE, therefore a TEXT is a BUILDING. As is the case with the sentence, this metaphor is developed on several levels. The first level is grammatical or syntactic. Here the text is endowed with a structure in the architectural sense. Even as the glass skyscraper is held together by a metal structure, the text is kept together by the structuring of its narrative building-blocks. They can be fragments of text (clichés, scripts, quotations), but they can also be structural in a deeper sense, as in Greimas’ actantial model according to which a story is always the story of a gift and of a quest, as the sender gives the object to the receiver and the subject goes in search of the object: 4 Sender Object Receiver Helper Subject Opponent The six actants make up the abstract structure of the text: Their roles are filled by various actors (there may be more than one actor for a single actant, and a single actor may play the part of more than one actant). The structure of the six actants determines the combination and intersection of the narrative threads or sentences — indeed, in this model, the organic metaphor of weaving which still informs, for instance, Barthes’ reading model in S/ Z, 5 no longer holds, as the relationships between the various actants provide the sequences of narrative that are used as building-blocks. Thus, the first half of Dracula, in which the vampire is on the attack and travels to England where he vampirizes the heroines, Lucy and Mina, may be described as having the 4 Greimas’ semantic theories may be found in Algirdas J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1973). See also Ronald Schleifer, A.J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 5 Roland Barthes, S/ Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Leaving the House of the Text 201 structure of a quest (Dracula is the subject, the women are the objects) combined with a failed gift (nobody gives Dracula the right to take possession of the women), while the second half, in which the vampire is on the defensive and the leagued goodies travel to Transylvania in order to destroy him, may be described as a quest (where the goodies are the collective subject and the vampire the object), combined with a rightful gift (God, or the right that is on their side, authorise the goodies to hunt the vampire). But there is a second level of text structure: not the narrative/ syntactic level, but the deeper semantic level. Greimas’s actantial model is described by him as a surface structure, the deep structure being provided by basic logical-semantic oppositions between contraries, contradictories and subcontraries, as appears in the following diagram: 2. The Haunted A. Alive B. Dead 1. The Living 3. The Dead C. Not Dead D. Not Alive 4. The Undead The A,B,C,D squares represent the semantic oppositions between the two basic terms, ‘alive’ and ‘dead,’ that provide Dracula with its deep structure: A and B are contraries (there is the possibility of a third term, ‘between life and death,’ or ‘in the throes of death’); A and D or B and C are contradictories (there is no third term); A and C, or B and D are sub-contraries. Positions 1 to 4 indicate the realizations of the oppositions, taken two by two, in the novel: they distribute the characters into four categories (category 4 is occupied by the vampires — you have recognised their name in the novel: ‘the undead; ’ category 2 by those who have been bitten but are not quite dead yet). They also determine the narrative paths the characters take by opposing the normal horizontal path from life to death (1 to 3) to the unnatural vertical path taken by the vampirized, Lucy for instance (2 to 4). Mina Harker, the female heroine, who is vampirized by Dracula, escapes a fate worse than death, namely undeath, because of her unassailable virtue and married state. Therefore she goes from 1 to 2, from 2 to 4, and, fortunately, back to 1, which will enable her to proceed to 3, when her time comes, outside the compass of the novel, which ends on the announcement, or annunciation, of the birth of her first child. There is a third level of text structure, or text as construction: the argumentative level. It is at this level that the metaphor of construction comes into its own, as it provides not merely a figurative account of the structure of the J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 202 text, but constitutes that structure itself. I have already alluded to Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of structural metaphors in stating that the TEXT is a BUILD- ING. The metaphor of the building duly figures in Metaphors We Live By in the following form: THEORIES (and ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS Is that the foundation for your theory? The theory needs more support. The argument is shaky. We need some facts or the argument will fall apart. We need to construct a strong argument for that. I haven’t figured out what the form of the argument will be. Here are some more facts to shore up the theory. We need to buttress the theory with solid arguments. 6 We recognize the usual characteristics of structural metaphors according to that theory: They are not dependent on the materiality of language, but they form a system of set phrases; they intersect and combine with other structural metaphors. All we need to do to introduce the text is to combine the structural metaphor that is developed here with another one: the TEXT is an ARGUMENT; in other words, the text has an argumentative structure. That metaphor may not concern all texts, but it has sufficient generality to be of use to us (a narrative has the argumentative structure of a theory: It is regular, coherent, and methodical — playing with such structure, as in modernist or postmodernist texts does not cancel what it denies). What I am suggesting is merely the existence in many, perhaps in most texts, of a narrative or discursive structure which provides a frame for the construction of the text. It is time to sum up the characteristics of the construction metaphor in its two domains. We can do this through the following propositions: Proposition one: The text is a prolonged sentence. This in itself is yet another structural metaphor. It defines the moment of structuralism. Proposition two: Like the sentence, the text is composed of building blocks, whose combination, at their various levels, makes up its structure (the units may be narrative, discursive, actantial, semiotic, argumentative, or even philosophemes, if the text adopts the structure of a theory). A text is a kind of game of Lego. Proposition three: Language itself is a construction, made up of layers of structure, the building-blocks in each layer being ideally made up of the combination of building-blocks of the preceding layer (this is the principle of the double articulation of language). This proposition generalises, through analogy, the first two propositions: The metaphor allows us a va et vient, a going to and fro, between the local level of the text and the general level of language. 6 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 46. Leaving the House of the Text 203 Proposition four: Like language, and like the sentence, its actualisation, the text, is a layered structure (at the syntactic, semantic and narratological levels). This proposition combines the preceding two. It suggests that the text is a construction at two levels: the level of the elementary units, the buildingblocks, and the level (or rather levels) of the layers of building-blocks. Proposition five: The construction that makes up the text is its structure. Here the metaphor takes its truly architectural overtones; the text is not a mere piling up of layers of building blocks, it is a complex, because architectured, artefact. Proposition six: The consequence of the first five propositions is that the text is conceived of as an object, namely a building. This gives it a spatial existence (the text has clear spatial limits between the two covers of the book; metaphorically it has also narrative limits, namely a beginning, a middle, and an end, as in Aristotle’s famous definition of the complete story). And this gives it a temporal existence, which means that it is mortal but relatively stable (the degree of that stability in time, which can last for centuries, distinguishes the literary or philosophical text from others). The structure does not only provide internal coherence, but it also provides material coherence in space and time. Proposition seven: The spatial coherence of the text qua building makes it a unitary entity with a relevant solidarity of all its parts. The text is a totality and must be analysed as such. An explication de texte must account for the whole of the text, down to the semi-colons. And Lucien Goldman used to say that an interpretation of the text that leaves a remainder of unexplained aspects is a failure. Proposition eight: The temporal stability of the text explains not only the text’s survival in various historical conjunctures, and its capacity for recontextualisation (which is another specificity of the literary text), but can be extended to the internal coherence of the text in the form of its teleology: The text not only persists or endures in time, but it develops in time (the internal time of the text) as the actualization of a semantic or narrative programme, which means that the whole of the text is already contained in its very beginning (narratologists describe a narrative trope named the boucle of the text). Proposition nine: So far, we have neglected what is probably the philosophically most important characteristic of the metaphor: A building presupposes a builder, a structure in the architectural sense an architect. The metaphor, therefore, presupposes, in the matter of the sentence and of the text, a subject facing an object, or rather a subject creating or producing an object. And here the metaphor is not only structural but metaphysical: if the text qua construction is an object, a product, it can be isolated from the rest of phenomena, it can be handled and tampered with. It is the result of an activity of etymological poiesis, rather than mere praxis, in which language is the instru- J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 204 ment of the production process, and the text its result. Once we have reached these metaphysical heights, at the very top of the house, perhaps the time has come to take a jump and leave the house of the text. IV Leaving the House of the Text The last proposition has strongly suggested that the construction metaphor, in spite of its many advantages and obvious success, is linked to the metaphysics of subjectivity. This is a justification for the adoption of the term ‘deconstruction,’ in a philosophical tradition whose object is a critique of such metaphysics. We need only allude to Heidegger’s 1927 lectures on the fundamental problems of phenomenology, where he launches a critique of what he calls the metaphysics of production. This tradition would also concern interpretations of Marx such as the reading recently proposed by the French Marxist Franck Fischbach, where Spinoza, not Hegel, is seen as Marx’ philosophical predecessor. 7 In this Spinozan reading of Marx, man is an objective being, a part of nature, and emancipation does not take the form of an increased consciousness, but of man’s objectification. Conversely, consciousness and self consciousness are secondary effects of man’s objectification, in other words of the relation with the rest of nature that constitutes his essence. Alienation, in this view, is not the oppression of the conscious subject by a commodified world, but it is the focus on the individual conscious subject at the expense of man’s natural essence, an essence which is ‘generic,’ that is immediately social and collective rather than individual. According to Fischbach, Marx and Spinoza have three theses in common: 1) the secondary character of self consciousness; 2) the identity of nature and history; 3) an ontology of productive action. 8 The last thesis is of interest to us, not least because its formulation deliberately pastiches and inverts Habermas’ ontology of communicative action. This philosophical detour makes us aware of a contradiction within the construction metaphor. On the one hand, the text, being the result of productive action, acquires objectivity, and confers it to its producer (we are reminded here of the title of Macherey’s seminal book on the theory of literature, within another Spinozan tradition of reading of Marx, initiated by Althusser). 9 On the other hand, the metaphor insists on the instrumental quality of language, on authorial responsibility for the text, possibly through an intention of meaning, as an architectural structure is the consequence of a design. The ambiguity of the metaphor is embodied in the very term ‘struc- 7 Frank Fischbach, La production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza (Paris: PUF, 2005). 8 Fischbach 29. 9 Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Maspero, 1966). Leaving the House of the Text 205 ture’: A structure can be natural, what scientific enquiry discovers in nature, independently of human action, as in the structure of a molecule; and it can be the result of human action and human planning, as in an architectural structure. This ambiguity in itself provides sufficient reason for abandoning the metaphor, leaving the prison house of language and the house of the text. In a sense, the science of language, as founded by Saussure, has always already left the house. The metaphors Saussure uses to help us think language through the new concept of langue are not metaphors of construction: a game of chess; the two sides of a single sheet of paper; language as a field of value, that is as a field of differences without fixed or substantial elements. The last metaphor is incompatible with the construction metaphor to the point of contradicting it: If there are only values, that is relations between elements that have no other existence except those relations (even as, in the Marxist doctrine, classes do not exist as independent entities, but only as the result of the class struggle), then there cannot be building blocks for the construction of either sentence or text, or rather such building-blocks (Saussure does not deny the existence of words) are only effects or actualizations of the field of value relations. We understand why Chomsky’s research programme, which presents itself as a continuation of Saussure, is a regression rather than a development because it relies heavily and almost explicitly on the construction metaphor. That Chomsky’s programme is a philosophical regression is well-known: It goes back to antiquated notions of innate ideas. And Chomsky translates the Saussurian dichotomy of langue and parole into his own dichotomy of competence and performance, which is supposed to play the same part in the system. But it does not: Whereas langue is collective and independent of the individual speaker, competence is situated in the individual speaker, in her genes or neurone circuits, so that speech is both maximally constrained (all creativity is rule governed, constrained by the innate apparatus of language, down to the smallest details, like the choice of reciprocal or reflexive pronouns) and located within an individual subject. Whereby Chomsky combines the gross materialism of biological determinism and the arrant idealism of methodological individualism. And his research programme also constitutes a grammatical regression in that, having abandoned langue as a collective entity separated from individual speakers (it is anterior and exterior to the speaker who has to assimilate it) and subject to historical change (whereas competence is situated in the arrested time of evolution), he resorts to the ancient metaphor of construction by treating the sentence as a construction made up of fixed building-blocks (the morphemes or words that combine into syntagmata), rather than as a meaningful path through a field of differential values. Chomsky’s syntagmatic markers, or grammatical trees, are not so much the actualisation of an algorithm of rules as blueprints for J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 206 the erection of a grammatical structure, the end product of which is the surface grammatical sentence. It is clear that in order to avoid the unwelcome philosophical and grammatical aspects of the Chomskyan research programme we must leave the house of language and the metaphor of the text or sentence as constructions. I shall briefly envisage one such escape with the help of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, in which we find series of concepts that allow us to think language outside the metaphor, even, Deleuze would argue, outside all metaphors. The reason why Deleuze cannot think language as a construction is that his ontology is an ontology of process and relations, of becomings, the actualization of the virtual, of transductivity, a concept he borrowed from Gilbert Simondon (a transductive relation is a relation which constitutes its terms instead of being posterior to them, and in an inductive or a deductive relation; Deleuze’s maxim is to always begin in the middle). 10 If you begin in the middle, in language and in the text, you will conceive it not as a construction, not as a tree but as a rhizome, a network rather than a structure, which can be entered at any point, in other words always in the middle. Rather than fixed units that can be used as building-blocks, you will have unstable elements in a state of continuous variation. Rather than a fixed structure that holds the text together, you will have a deployment on a plane of immanence. Rather than fixed rules that structure the structure, you will have regularities, agrammaticalities that make up a style, and lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization (in the field of language, such movements constitute a process of minorisation of the standard dialect). Rather than an individual speaker constructing her utterance or text, you will have assemblages: machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation. In all this, Deleuze, who is explicitly hostile to Chomsky (to whom he tangentially assimilates linguistics as a whole, for instance in the fourth plateau of Mille plateaux), 11 is closer to Saussure than he thinks. So we have a series of concepts, plane of immanence, lines of flight, deterritorialisation, rhizome, variation, assemblages, agrammaticality (the rolling and pitching of language), and style that enable us to think language and the text without having to recourse to the metaphor of construction and its unwelcome philosophical grounding. I have tried elsewhere to detail the consequences that this philosophical language may have for an analysis of texts. 12 There are, however, two qualifications to be made here. First, the machinic in Deleuze is not the mechanical, so that a Deleuzian machine must not be treated as a construction: A machine is a constituent part of an assemblage, a 10 Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Millon, 1995). 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980) 95-139. 12 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Leaving the House of the Text 207 linking, which is not an articulation, of ontologically diverse elements. There is no builder of a machine, rather the human subject is an end product of the machinic assemblage, of which he is an integral part — no poiesis is involved. Second, we have left for good the realm of metaphor with the celebrated slogan: not metaphor but metamorphosis. The machine with its elements must be taken literally and in a constant state of flux, without stability or fixity. This is the view of language and of the text that can be derived from the common work of Deleuze and Guattari. The use of this series of concepts with regards to the text will be found in their Kafka and in Deleuze’s last collection of essays. 13 But there is an earlier version of Deleuze’s philosophy of language to be found in Logique du sens (and it is significant that in that book he seeks to think together language in general and the literary texts of Lewis Carroll). 14 Here, since the book is described in the preface as “an attempt at a logical and psychoanalytic novel,” 15 language is conceived as a series of Freudian modules, but not as layers or structure. The genesis of language in Logique du sens can be represented in the following table: Primary order Secondary organisation Tertiary arrangement Passion and Action of bodies Circulation of event Self, World and God: Individual as Person Scream Sense Doxa (good sense and common sense) Depth Surface Height Freud Lewis Carroll Plato Satire Humour Irony In the primary order, we find the violence of bodily affects, whose linguistic expression is the scream; in the tertiary arrangement, we have language as communication system, according to doxa, in other words good sense (the right direction of meaning) and common sense (a meaning shared with the community). In the middle we find the secondary organisation where Deleuzian events thrive: sense in this technical acceptation is not meaning, it logically and chronologically precedes it; it hovers over it as the 13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975); Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993). 14 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969). 15 Deleuze, Logique 7. J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 208 event of the battle hovers over the battle like a mist. Sense keeps on the surface of language, in the paradoxes and portmanteau words of which Lewis Carroll was so fond of, it avoids the depths of the Freudian primary order, and rejects the heights of Socratic irony: Its domain is the domain of humour, as opposed to violent satire and patronizing irony. This system of metaphors, and the concept, ‘sense’ that emerges out of it, is what enables us to leave the house of the language, to think about language outside the construction metaphor. V Conclusion The path I have followed (I dare not say the argument I have constructed) can be summarised by the following propositions. Proposition one: The construction metaphor, as applied to sentence and text, is part of our common sense (hence its proximity to the theory of metaphor advocated by Lakoff and Johnson). In the thinking of language, it is of considerable antiquity. Not quite so with regards to the text (here, the moment of structuralism is of particular importance). Its explanatory advantages are not in doubt. Proposition two: Its philosophical background is characterised by the tension between an ontology of production and a philosophy of the selfconscious subject, a philosophy which adopts as its first concepts a subject and an object facing each other, with precedence being given to the subject. Proposition three: In a sense, linguistics as the science of language has always already avoided the metaphor, which plays no part in Saussure’s conceptual system. Proposition four: But the metaphor has invaded linguistics with the Chomskyan research programme, which is heavily dependent on ancient grammar (in the shape of the parts of speech that provide the building-blocks for the construction of the sentence). The Chomskyan programme is therefore a regression, both in its philosophy of language and in its linguistic theory. Proposition five: Contemporary philosophy (and philosophy of language) provides various routes of escape from the metaphor. I have evoked three, deconstruction, a renewed Spinozan interpretation of Marx, and Deleuze’s conceptions of language. At the end of this argumentative path, I hope that the philosophical and linguistic advantages for leaving the house of the text are equally not in doubt. And I hope to have answered two questions. One, this was my starting point, why did Derrida choose ‘deconstruction’ as the name of his critical practice? The answer is: Because the term indicates what it does: in order to think language, and the text, we must go through the metaphor of construc- Leaving the House of the Text 209 tion, and we must leave it (hence the negative prefix). And since the practice may be generalised, from thinking language to thinking tout court, I think I have answered a second question, which I never asked: Why are poststructuralist philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze so fascinated with, and hostile to, metaphor (in the case of Deleuze, the hostility is explicit)? Because, in order to think, we must go through the common sense that systems of metaphors, in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson, embody, and we must leave it in order to reach the realm of the philosophical concept, which, going against the grain of doxa, of common sense, has no truck with metaphor and involves a different type of systematicity. I shall leave the last word to Gilles Deleuze, by repeating his slogan: ‘Not metaphor, but metamorphosis! ’ J EAN -J ACQUES L ECERCLE 210 Works Cited Barthelme, Donald. “Sentence.” Forty Stories. Ed. Donald Barthelme. London: Secker & Warburg, 1988. Barthes, Roland. S/ Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. ---. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. ---. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1993. Dubois, Jean, et al. Dictionnaire de linguistique. Paris: Larousse, 1973. Fischbach, Frank. La production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza. Paris: PUF, 2005. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1973. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison House of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Macherey, Pierre. Pour une théorie de la production littéraire. Paris: Maspero, 1966. Schleifer, Ronald. A.J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Millon, 1995. M ARTIN Z IEROLD Metaphors We Communicate By: Changing Metaphors of Communication in Everyday Language, Communication Theory, and the Academia I Introduction When I first attended a workshop on public relations, years ago at the University of Münster as an undergraduate student, held by a well-known and respected spin doctor and communication consultant who had worked for the German media mogul Leo Kirch and Chancellor Helmut Kohl among others, I was eager to learn how to improve my professional communication skills. Asked about suggestions for further reading on public relations — a field flourishing with a wide choice of handbooks, tutorials, and academic publications — the lecturer said there was only one good book on strategic communication: Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1 the Prussian general’s theoretical reflections on warfare and its strategies and tactics. Surprising as that book recommendation was to me at the time, the notion that communication can be considered metaphorically as war is well-known from everyday life. It is also one of the well-known examples Lakoff and Johnson give in their seminal Metaphors We Live By 2 to illustrate how metaphors “govern our thought,” and “structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.” 3 In everyday life and everyday language, the communicative activity of arguing is often structured with the conceptual metaphor “Argument Is War”: In debate, we ‘attack weak points’ of our ‘opponents,’ we ‘demolish’ or ‘shoot down’ arguments, and in the end, we ‘win’ or ‘lose.’ 4 While, following Lakoff and Johnson, the role metaphors play for human communication and cognition to structure our everyday life as conceptual systems has been widely discussed, it might be considered surprising that there has been significantly less research on the question of which concepts of communication themselves our metaphors of communication imply. This 1 Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (1932-34; Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996). 2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). 3 Lakoff and Johnson 3. 4 Lakoff and Johnson 4ff. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 212 question is going to be my main focus in this article: Put briefly, I will not try to analyze metaphors as (a part of or a means of) human communication, but metaphors of human communication. In a first step, I will give an overview of ‘classic’ metaphors of communication and their implications for our understanding of communication, drawing primarily on work by the Annenberg School of Communication scholar Klaus Krippendorff. 5 In a second step, I will try to take a look at the dynamics of metaphors of communication, differentiating between everyday language, academic research on communication, and finally even conceptual metaphors of academic communication itself. II Containers, Conduits, Wars — Classical Metaphors of Communication In his study “Major Metaphors of Communication and Some Constructivist Reflections on their use,” Klaus Krippendorff took stock of metaphors of communication and lists a number of major metaphors, each of which represents or implies a specific concept of human communication with profound consequences not just on a conceptual and theoretical level: Applying the conceptual metaphor that communication is conflict or even war will structure the way we communicate and will lead to battles of communication with the main focus on establishing and increasing power, on being right. Taking up an idea from Lakoff and Johnson, 6 Krippendorff contrasts the notion of communication as war with quite a different conceptual metaphorical field: that of dance and ritual. These metaphors highlight very different aspects of communication than the war metaphor, aspects which are often overlooked not least by scholars in media as well as literary studies, who all too often concentrate on communication and media content, rather than taking into account the various ways in which communication processes are embedded into social practice. However, it is important to note that hardly any metaphor of communication can be used for all kinds of communication as each metaphor highlights certain aspects of communication and allows us to see and conceptualize 5 Klaus Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors of Communication and Some Constructivist Reflections on their Use,” Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2.1 (1993): 3-25. See also Klaus Krippendorff, “Der Verschwundene Bote: Metaphern und Modelle der Kommunikation,“ Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft, eds. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Wieschenberg (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994) 79-113. Krippendorff’s analysis is in parts a continuation of Michael Reddy’s critique of the ‘conduit metaphor’ of communication; see Michael Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,” Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (1979; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 164-201. 6 Lakoff and Johnson 5. Metaphors We Communicate By 213 communication in a certain way, at the same time hiding other aspects. Thus one specific metaphor might be common, plausible, and productive for interpersonal communication but not for mass media communication (and vice versa), or have a major influence in a specific social system but not in others: The war metaphor might be used widely for interpersonal arguments and most often in business and political communication contexts, but — hopefully — not so regularly in educational, religious, and other social systems. It follows that each metaphor of communication should not only be analyzed with regard to its conceptual implications, but also to its specific context of use. 7 Further necessary dimensions for a differentiated analysis are the historicity of metaphors and the cultural context. 8 While historical changes of metaphors will be analyzed in the third part of this paper, I cannot go into details regarding the culture-specificity of metaphors of communication. However, it is likely that cultures with different concepts of individuality and community, time, and space (and other key concepts) will also develop different metaphors and concepts of communication. Notions of communication as ‘dance,’ which will be analyzed in the following, might play a more dominant role in cultures that put less emphasis on individuality and linearity but focus rather on community and circularity of temporal experience. The metaphor of ‘ritual’ is particularly useful for some kinds of mass media communication. The concept of communication as ritual highlights that our uses of mass media very often take the form of rituals held dear, like the daily reading of a newspaper at breakfast, or family gatherings in front of the TV on a Saturday night and so on. 9 Seen as a ritual, it is not so much the content of the television shows, nor even that of the papers, that really matters, but the social, ritualistic functions they serve: The daily paper at breakfast gives the morning a structure in a temporal dimension, listening to your iPod on the tube creates a private space where you can ignore people around you, gathering in front of the TV with the family every Saturday night serves a social function and so on. “The metaphor of the ritual directs attention to what is invariant in communication: the endlessly repetitive performances not aimed at a practical purpose and the unifying of those involved into a community,” Krippendorff argues. 10 7 Krippendorff himself does not distinguish between interpersonal, mediated, and mass media communication explicitly, nor does he take into account social contexts of use. 8 Even cognitivist approaches of metaphor theory, which for some time focussed on supposedly universal metaphors alone, today take cultural variation into account. For a seminal work from this background see Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 9 See also James W. Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. James W. Carey (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 13-36. 10 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 12. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 214 The idea of ‘communication as dance’ seems to be more adequate for specific forms of interpersonal communication and dialogue, and is directly opposed to the idea of ‘communication as war.’ Small talk or, as Krippendorff suggests, conversation, might be prototypes where this conceptual metaphor applies: Seen in the light of dance, communication is not about winning or losing, but about “maintaining the process of mutual engagement.” 11 Here, communication is conceptualised primarily as a communal and cooperative activity, and everybody is supposed to have his or her turn. While the metaphors mentioned so far each have very specific implications and are thus linked closely to certain limited contexts of use — e.g. war and arguments, dance and conversation —, Krippendorff also names a very prominent group of conceptual metaphors of communication which to this day play a key role in shaping our everyday ideas of communication in a very general sense and which also play a prominent role in communication theory: the ‘container’ and ‘conduit’ metaphors. “What is in the letter? ”, “What did you get out of that article? ”, “Don’t read this into my statement! ”, “These are empty phrases! ” — All of these expressions can be seen as being derived from a container metaphor of communication which is based on the idea that communication consists of discrete messages and that these messages contain a meaning, feelings, information etc. This metaphor shapes our concepts of communication in a very special way and has at least four major implications: First of all, this conceptual metaphor puts an emphasis on the content of communication, on messages, and masks the process of communication and its materials. Following this metaphor, we would not want to look at the container, but at what is inside. Second, the container metaphor suggests that communication contents are themselves “entities with objective qualities,” 12 as Krippendorff argues. Once taken out of the container, they are not ambiguous and not in need of interpretation: The meaning is there, and it simply has to be unpacked; it has to be taken out of the text, the film, the utterance. 13 This, as a third implication, leads to the idea that communication processes are processes of mere transportation. We have to get the container from here to there, so that the message can be unpacked. Once it is where it should be, we can expect understanding to take place ‘by contact.’ Scholars of communication and particularly literature might consider this notion so naïve that it may be hard to believe it plays a major role in any context where 11 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 13. 12 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 6. 13 It could be argued that this notion also supports a consumerist approach towards communication, expecting messages to be something that can be consumed like other commodities. Metaphors We Communicate By 215 communication is essential. However, if you think of the advertising industry, this metaphor and the idea that ‘contact is effect’ is the economic basis of every contract: Companies pay publishers a price for their adverts what is based on the number of people who will be seeing the ad, the so called ‘costper-thousand’ (CPM). 14 A fourth implication of this metaphor is the idea that communication should lead to shared ideas. If many people get the same text, they should unpack the same message, as Krippendorff underlines: Indeed, just as we would not believe anyone who claims able to pour wine, milk, or oil out of a bottle filled with water, the physics invoked by the container metaphor implies that one can remove from a message only, what had been put into it and that this would have to be the same for everyone. It offers no logical place for variations or discrepancies. 15 However, if people do come to different understandings of a text, the logical consequence of the container metaphor is not to regard them as different (and possibly equally valid) interpretations, but to check whether everybody really had access to the same texts (that is, if the transportation was successful), to call upon authorities (if possible, the author) to state what ‘really’ is inside the text or to simply fight about who is right. The most productive approach would probably be to abandon the metaphor and the concept of communication it offers, but from within the concept, this is hard to achieve. The conduit metaphor of communication is closely connected to the container metaphor and in a way offers a more concrete concept for the question of transportation of the container. The idea that human communication requires ‘channels’ — be it auditive and visual channels for interpersonal communication or more technical channels like wires and electromagnetic waves for mediated communication — emerges in the 19 th century with the invention of the telegraph and, later on, the telephone. The staggering question of how messages could be “squeezed through copper-wires,” 16 a phenomenon unheard of before and only explainable by a complex technical knowledge, asked for a metaphorical answer: Still today, the logic of electronics is explained by schoolteachers with the help of a vocabulary from fluid mechanics: A cable ‘is’ a channel; electricity ‘is’ water which flows through the tube. Regarding communication, the idea of communication flowing through channels may have shifted the notion of messages from being discrete entities 14 Obviously, hardly any advertising agency really claims that seeing an advert inevitably leads to the desired effect. It is, however, striking that the business model of advertprices still relies on this very notion of communication: The more people you reach, the greater the effect, and the more you have to pay. 15 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 7. 16 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 8. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 216 in favour of a continuous flow, but the idea that it is the content of the channels that matters, and that at the end of the wire understanding is not a problem unless the message has been altered along the way is still active. The experience that acoustic noise can interfere with telephone lines or radio can suggest metaphorical explanations for misunderstandings even in non-mediated contexts: We think of ‘barriers’ for communication that prohibit the message from reaching its destination. But at the end of the transportation process, the container metaphor stays in place: “What comes out of a channel […] can neither be qualitatively different nor quantitatively exceed what entered it.” 17 As we have seen with the conduit metaphor, innovations in communication technology can bring about changes in metaphors of communication in general. A very old, but suggestive technology is that of cryptography, which originated in ancient times and today is brought to close perfection by modern computer systems which are capable of encryption following complex algorithms that no human being is able to decrypt without the help of computer technology, and — so the industry claims — not even without the correct key. The idea of enciphering and deciphering is also at the heart of Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication 18 which stresses that even in a technical sense you cannot put messages into channels of communication as they are, but that the transmitter has to translate the message into some technologically apt form and the receiver has to perform the inverse operation: In Shannon and Weaver’s terms, “messages” have to be translated into “signals” and vice versa. Krippendorff calls this the ‘transmission metaphor’ of communication and it is more complex than the mere conduit metaphor, as it involves a process of translation at both ends of the communicative process. While Shannon and Weaver had intended their model only to be used as a mathematical and technical concept, it has often been used as a metaphor or model of human communication in general, and it even seems to be at the heart of models like ‘encoding/ decoding’ that formed the early model of mass communication used in British cultural studies. 19 In this transmission metaphor, it is not the author or speaker alone who puts a message into a container and then sends it, but the receiver also plays an active role by decoding and deciphering the signals. While the ideal of 17 Krippendorff, “Major Metaphors“ 9. 18 See Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1963; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998). 19 See Stuart Hall, “Encoding/ Decoding,” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (London: Hutchinson, 1980) 128-38. Metaphors We Communicate By 217 ‘functioning’ communication remains that the message should be the same at the beginning and the end of the communication process, the transmission metaphor adds the aspect of a ‘code’ that is used in communication and can explain misunderstanding not only by a failure of transport or a barrier in the channel, but also in a problem of encoding and decoding, possibly because of different codes being used. 20 But even this concept seems very simplistic to anybody involved in communication research and theory: Where do the ‘codes’ come from? What about the reflexivity of communication that is completely masked in technical models of transmission without feedback, etc. Indeed, the transmission metaphor and especially the container and conduit metaphor have been heavily criticized for a number of reasons, the argument being that they suggest a misleading concept of communication. That they clearly are still in use in everyday language, and even in some fields of communication research, as I have hinted at with regard to the advertising industry and its models of media effects, might suggest that they nevertheless play a productive role in offering a simple concept for communication. And it could even be that the criticism of these metaphors has been too harsh, stressing some obvious points in which, for example, the conduit metaphor suggests a simplistic and essentialist model of communication. A number of scholars, including Joe Grady 21 or Philip Eubanks, 22 have tried to show that such a criticism might be short-sighted, not because they want to argue for a more simplistic concept of communication, but for a more complex analysis of metaphors of communication. Eubanks makes this point clear by stating: Most of us have said that the Conduit Metaphor is wrong because language does not work the way the metaphor assumes. I want to argue the opposite point: Prevalent objections to the Conduit Metaphor are wrong because metaphors do not work the way the objections assume . 23 As sceptical as I am about the container and conduit metaphors of communication as seen from a perspective of communication theory, the argument Eubanks makes still seems to be a valid one in the light of metaphor theory, 20 Stuart Hall, with his model of ‘encoding/ decoding,’ obviously argues that there indeed are different ways of using texts to generate (individual) meaning. Thus, the architecture of his model is still based on a concept of transmission of mass communication; however, different ways of decoding would not be regarded as ‘misreadings’ or misunderstandings, but rather as productive and possibly subversive, forms of decoding. 21 Joe Grady, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor’ Revisited: A Reassessment of Metaphors for Communication,” Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap, ed. Jean-Pierre Koening (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998) 205-18. 22 Philip Eubanks, “Understanding Metaphors for Writing: In Defense of the Conduit Metaphor,” College Composition and Communication 53.1 (2001): 92-118. 23 Eubanks, “Understanding Metaphors” 93. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 218 and it holds true not only for the case of metaphors of communication, but for the analysis of metaphors in general. Eubanks puts forward two main objections to current criticism of the conduit metaphor. First, he argues that most critics have so far ignored that metaphors hardly ever come on their own, but that they are instead part of networks and relations of metaphorical systems. Joe Grady makes the same point and suggests that the idea that meanings are objects might simply be one form of a more basic metaphor which suggests that “constituents are contents,” as we do not only talk about the message in a letter, but would also accept sentences like “There are seven days in a week” or “Oranges are full of vitamins.” 24 In this context hardly anybody would argue that these expressions suggest that a week is a mere container of days or an orange a container of vitamins. It is rather that days are constituents of weeks, and vitamins constituents of oranges, but this is expressed by using the metaphorical concept that constituents are contents. Seen in this light, the container metaphor is part of a more basic metaphorical concept and it could be argued that to ask about the message ‘in’ a letter does not primarily distinguish a letter as a container and an isolated message therein, but regards the message as one constituent of a more complex concept, i.e. the letter. Eubanks, on the other hand, does not look for a more basic metaphor, but tries to relate the conduit metaphor to other metaphors of communication: Conceptual metaphors operate most commonly as part of larger conceptual systems. We cannot, therefore, gain important insights into a single metaphor without also considering the metaphors that support it and to which it responds. Accordingly, the Conduit Metaphor is part of an interrelated, dynamic conceptual system that includes the metaphors Language is Power, Writing is Conversation, Ideas Are Products, Argument is War, Truth Is Light, Understanding is a Journey, and surely others. 25 Eubanks makes a strong point that common criticism of the conduit metaphor is short-sighted, as it usually simply analyzes the metaphor in isolation. Instead metaphors should be considered as functioning within a network of metaphorical concepts and thus need to be critically considered with regards to their position within a metaphorical field. The second objection to traditional criticism of the conduit metaphor Eubanks makes comes from a different direction: Most of the critics regard the conduit metaphor as making only an ontological assertion about the way communication works. However, Eubanks stresses that metaphors usually combine an implicit (or supposed) ontology and ethical idealism. 26 Regarding 24 Grady 212ff. 25 Eubanks, “Understanding Metaphors” 94. 26 This idea is supported by focus-group interviews Eubanks led about the conceptual metaphor “Trade is War.” Participants did consider the ontological implications of this Metaphors We Communicate By 219 communication, one productive aspect of the conduit metaphor could lie in a productive concept not of how communication actually works, but possibly how communication should work. Eubanks claims that the metaphor proves helpful for everybody teaching communication and writing skills. Seen in this light, the conduit metaphor could be used to formulate rules for how a transmitter should ‘pack’ his message so that it can be easily ‘unpacked’ by the recipient. As an ethical or at least pragmatic guiding metaphor, the conduit metaphor can be seen as advocating receiver-oriented communication which is supposed to be clear, direct and accessible, and thus the metaphor might be used to support sticking to the classical maxims of cooperation in communication which Grice has tried to describe. 27 III Liquid Times, Liquid Metaphors? — The Dynamics of Metaphors of Communication Even though some ‘classic’ metaphors of communication seem to be very dominant and persistent, we have also seen that metaphors do change over time. Developments in the field of communication technology can lead to changes in the field of metaphors of communication as well, and these dynamics will be my main focus for this investigation. 28 However, it is important to note that other aspects of cultural and social change can also stimulate dynamic changes of metaphors of communication: Social and economic processes of globalisation, commoditization and the marketization of social spheres might lead to new metaphors of communication or give new strength to older metaphors. At the same time, philosophers as well as communication and media studies scholars have tried to introduce new metaphors of communication which in their view are more adequate than established traditional metaphors. For example, researchers such as Marshall McLuhan or German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler have tried to put a stronger emphasis on the technical aspect of mass communication. McLuhan’s famous claim ‘the medium is the message’ can be seen as an attempt to enforce a new metaphor of concept by commenting on whether they thought the metaphor to be a valid description of trade. But, in addition, they also made ethical statements about the implications of the metaphor, reflecting not only on the question whether trade ‘is’ war, but also whether trade should be war — or rather not. See Philip Eubanks, A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade: The Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000). 27 See Eubanks, “Understanding Metaphors” 112ff. 28 A similar co-evolution of media technology and metaphors can be found with regard to metaphors of human memory; see Douwe Draaisma, Die Metaphernmaschine: Eine Geschichte des Gedächtnisses (Darmstadt: Primus-Verlag, 1999). M ARTIN Z IEROLD 220 mass communication, arguing that media technologies dominate the communication process rather than simply being a ‘container’ or ‘channel’ for content. 29 The same goes for Kittler and his thesis that all culture consists of electronic circuitry. 30 Again, this metaphor tries to highlight only those aspects which traditional metaphors mask, changing the perspective from the ‘invisible’ transmission of content to a dominance of solid electronic circuits over the irrelevant ‘software’ and arbitrary ‘signals’ therein. Constructivist philosophers such as Paul Watzlawick, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Gebhard Rusch have also tried to overcome classical container, conduit and transmission metaphors of communication, arguing for epistemologically more valid concepts for human communication. Constructivists’ approaches to reform concepts of communication were highly productive and successful in the development of complex and convincing theories of communication processes, 31 or the concept of ‘understanding’ in interpersonal communication. 32 However, it might be that their main advantage, i.e. their degree of complexity and self-reflexivity, was also their main disadvantage. The terms these concepts introduce 33 are highly developed as theoretical terminology but appear abstract and lack the almost visual and intuitive persuasive power classical metaphors have. This could be the reason why constructivist concepts of communication have become very powerful (at least in ‘mainstreamed’ versions) in academic and theoretical contexts, but never really succeeded in altering exactly those everyday-language metaphors which they tried to attack. 29 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 30 Kittler develops this argument in his collection of essays “Draculas Vermächtnis”; see Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Leipzig: Reclam, 1993). 31 See Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin-Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: Norton, 1967). 32 See Siegfried J. Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie und soziale Orientierung: Konstruktivistische Bemerkungen zum Zusammenhang von Kognition, Kommunikation, Medien und Kultur (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996) 150ff.; for more details see Gebhard Rusch, Erkenntnis, Wissenschaft, Geschichte: Von einem konstruktivistischen Standpunkt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987) 148ff. and Gebhard Rusch, “Kommunikation und Verstehen,“ Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft, eds. Klaus Merten, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Siegfried Weischenberg (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994). 33 An example for these abstract terms might be the productive, yet counter-intuitive differentiation between ‘understanding’ (‘Verstehen’) on a social level and the cognitive production of meaning each participant in communication processes constantly undertakes, which Rusch and Schmidt call ‘Kommunikatbildungsprozesse’ (Schmidt, Kognitive Autonomie 150ff). For a brief introduction into constructivist concepts of communication see Ansgar Nünning and Martin Zierold, Kommunikationskompetenzen: Erfolgreich kommunizieren in Studium und Berufsleben (Stuttgart: Klett, 2008) 49ff. Metaphors We Communicate By 221 Many more metaphors of communication and media technologies can be studied in the history of communication and media theory and philosophy. Just like constructivist concepts, they might not have travelled too well into everyday language and its metaphors and implicit concepts of communication, but a history of communication and media theory should always also be a history of metaphors, as the brief notes above have indicated. 34 If advances in media and communication theory usually prove unable to change our everyday talk about communication, we might still expect that matters might be different with communication technology. During the 15 years since Krippendorff published his account of metaphors of communication, communication technology and practice has changed fundamentally with the rise of the World Wide Web, mobile media, social network sites, user-created media content, the continuing commercialization of communication and more. If it is true that communication technology in the past has brought about new metaphors of human communication in general like the transmission metaphor, it seems quite likely that our present-day ‘new’ digital technologies of interpersonal and mass communication could again lead to a dynamics of metaphors of communication — either in the specific context of these technologies or even for human communication in general. However, at the moment it seems hard to find any valid empirical data that would suggest this is the case on a broad level, at least not in any sense which might suggest that these new metaphors could play a dominant role in our everyday language: The established metaphors of communication like the container and the conduit metaphor quite obviously are still being used widely and shape our concepts of communication in many ways. We are still talking about the content of an e-mail or a text message sent with a mobile phone, and we are willing to consider websites as containing information. Thus I can only state some hypotheses as to which aspects of communication new metaphors derived from emerging and new media technologies probably are starting to stress and highlight and which could play a more important role in the future. Referring to Vilém Flusser it might be argued that our process of learning how to handle new media technologies will take us centuries to come — and so might the development of new metaphors that 34 For example, Rüdiger Zill has contributed an inspiring analysis of Cassirer’s metaphor of the ‘refracting media’ (‘brechende Medien’). Cassirer argues that media and symbolic forms serve as the only access to reality, where each medium functions as a lens with its own radius and thus its own productive function in visualizing aspects of reality, while at the same time masking others. See Rüdiger Zill, “Gebrochene Strahlen, zersplitterte Spiegel: Zur Partikularisierung der Weltbetrachtung,” Philosophie und Weltanschauung, Dresdner Hefte für Philosophie 1, ed. Johannes Rohbeck (Dresden: Thelem, 1999) 179- 96. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 222 evolve in the context of these technologies. 35 So any guess we make today might look strange and implausible in some years — however, it might be worth a try. As digital media still are quite commonly associated with ‘the virtual’ as opposed to the supposedly more ‘real’ experience in encounters that do not make use of digital media devices, it seems plausible to take a look at the metaphors the discourse about ‘the virtual’ is shaped by . . 36 Ulrike Schultze and Wanda J. Orlikowski from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed common metaphors of virtuality 37 in journals directed at business managers who want to make use of digital technologies in order to organize work in their companies, such as virtual teams working from home offices using intranet platforms, and business websites on the internet etc. 38 While there were a number of different metaphors in use, five tendencies were very common to metaphors of the virtual as opposed to metaphors used to describe organisation and organisational communication in the socalled real world: 39 1. Virtuality was associated with liquids, fluidity, and continuous change rather than solid or stable states of the real world; 2. Virtuality was associated with an undefined ‘space’ rather than an identifiable ‘place’; 3. Virtuality was associated with active and responsive customers/ recipients rather than passive or unresponsive customers/ recipients; 4. Virtuality was associated with community rather than competition; 5. Virtuality was associated with trust rather than control. 40 35 See Vilém Flusser, Medienkultur, ed. Stefan Bollmann (1992; Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008) 27. See also Rüdiger Zill’s contribution to this volume for a more detailed discussion of Flusser’s work. 36 However, there are various other equally plausible paths one could pursue in looking for possible directions of future developments with regard to metaphors of communication. Metaphors focussing on visuality and performativity like the theatre metaphor, which have already been well researched in the context of computer technologies (see e.g. Peter Matussek, “Performing Memory: Kriterien für einen Vergleich analoger und digitaler Gedächtnistheater,” Pragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für historische Anthropologie. 10.1 (2001): 303-34.), seem particularly relevant, in addition to the metaphors connected to notions of ‘virtuality’ analysed here. 37 See Ulrike Schultze and Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Metaphors of Virtuality: Shaping and Emergent Reality,” Information and Organization. 11.1 (2001): 45-77. 38 They chose these kinds of publications as a source for their analysis because they assumed that the constructive and structuring function of metaphors is very likely to play a prominent role in magazines aimed not primarily to present complex theories, but to offer easy-to-use advice to be put into practice. 39 Schultze and Orlikowski 53. 40 Just as an aside, I would like to note that some of these are tendencies which sociologists like Bauman (see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, Metaphors We Communicate By 223 Regarding metaphors of communication, in my opinion, all of these tendencies can be seen as working against a container metaphor of communication, as the container metaphor stands for a rather ‘solid’ or static concept of linear communication with passive recipients. Thus, one might argue that digital communication will be in need of other metaphors than the container metaphor. New metaphors that take up these notions of virtuality and which help shape a new concept of communication would not highlight the idea of fixed messages as identifiable objects with a set location in a set place (i.e. a concrete text that has the form of an object), which only allows the reader to ‘take out’ meaning and not respond and thus renders communication a means of control and competition rather than communal practice. But there is still no dominant or even convincing metaphor for the actual process of communication (rather than for the organisational forms that emerge out of digital communication like ‘networks’ or ‘communities’) that could replace the container metaphor in everyday language. However, in particular fields of online communication, new specific metaphors seem to be playing an increasingly important role. Indeed, the metaphors of communities and networks which are often used for digital forms of organisation and communication tend to focus on other aspects of communication than the static container metaphor does. And looking at online chatting it might well be that some ideas which resemble the metaphor of communication as a form of dance and ritual will play a prominent role in shaping the concept of online chatting or activities as “gruscheln” — a compound made of the German words for greeting and cuddling 41 —, when members of networks can send each other messages without any content, which simply symbolize a cuddle. I do not want to suggest that digital forms of communication are forms of communication that ‘in reality’ are indeed free of control, ideology or competition. However, this seems to be what a dominant discourse about certain forms of online communication suggests, and it will be one thing for future communication and media scholars to do empirical research on these dis- 2000)) or Beck, Giddens, and Lash (see Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, eds., Reflexive Modernisierung: Eine Kontroverse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007)) see as key aspects of late modern societies in general — though without the optimistic undertone often implied by protagonists of ‘virtual culture’ —, and it seems striking that metaphors for the virtual in discourse on digital technology resemble the metaphors in use for the analysis of present-day societies in general like that of ‘liquidity’ which Zygmunt Bauman has so prominently made his major metaphor to describe and analyse late modernity. 41 The term ‘gruscheln’ has been introduced by the German Facebook-clone StudiVZ and is now rather common in online communication in Germany. It is the equivalent to the ‘poke’-function on Facebook. M ARTIN Z IEROLD 224 courses and their metaphors, and a second just as important step to analyse these metaphors in the form of a critique of the underlying ideologies. 42 IV Metaphors of Academic Communication and Practice As a final step for this article, I want to take a look at metaphors of academic communication. Just as society and culture are constantly changing and metaphors change with them, the system of science and the academia is constantly developing, and at the moment it seems that this is happening with ever accelerating speed. Herbert Grabes and Sean Franzel have presented two impressive accounts of conceptual metaphors shaping the idea of communication within the academia. 43 Seen from our present-day perspective, it seems striking that most of the metaphors on offer which shape our concepts of academic communication are about producing and sharing knowledge — starting from the ‘mirror’ metaphor up to the romantic idea of an academic dialogue even within monological texts like published lectures. I want to make a tentative attempt to draw attention to two other source fields of metaphors for academic practice in addition to those of enquiry and acquisition of knowledge: politics and economy. These are without doubt traditionally quite closely connected to the realm of knowledge: Knowledge, as we say, is power; and power usually is linked to money. 44 However, even in the light of a long interwoven tradition of the metaphoric fields of economy and power with that of knowledge, we can observe some changes in the way academic communication is described today, as both of these fields play a growing role in the daily practice of academic work. Today, the University of Amsterdam tells its students to consider themselves not primarily to be independent researchers, but ‘entrepreneurs’ 45 — a metaphor coming from the field of economy that would have been heavily 42 Ansgar Nünning’s contribution to this volume can serve as an example of a critical analysis of metaphors and their implicit ideologies, in this case the metaphor of ‘crises.’ 43 See their respective contributions within this volume. 44 Dick Pels offers a concise overview of the interconnected analyses of knowledge, power, and property, sketching a history of the theory of knowledge which constantly oscillates between the two poles property/ economics and power/ politics; see Dick Pels, “Mixing Metaphors: Politics or Economics of Knowledge? ” Theory and Society. 26.5 (1997): 685-717. 45 As many other universities, the University of Amsterdam encourages its students in all departments to take part in courses about entrepreneurship; it also prides itself in ‘producing’ more successful entrepreneurs than any other Dutch university (see University of Amsterdam Press Office, “Successful Dutch Entrepreneurs Highly Educated: UvA Produces Successful Entrepreneurs,” Amsterdam 2007. 26 Feb 2009 <http: / / www.fee.uva.nl/ english/ object.cfm/ 6833B8AD-F283-41B6-B3F3D728F7D43BC A/ 8F7A8AB7-1321-B0BE-68F4991B9D650C29>. Metaphors We Communicate By 225 protested by students only a few decades ago and today is embraced by professors making curricula including career services and students hunting for the next internship alike. Professors are supposed to be professional fundraisers, just as an emerging enterprise needs to find sponsors or ‘business angels’ (note the metaphor...) who are willing to give money. Seminars have to be evaluated just as new products are tested by market research. Universities need to have public relations offices just as any business does. Research foundations need to have lobbyists close to the political decision-makers; and while this might not be so new, the fact that it is actually called ‘lobbying’ just as the tobacco industry subscribes to the term certainly is a rather recent development. Once more, for the time being I do not want to make any judgement about these changes in metaphors that conceptualize our ideas of academic practice and especially of academic communication. I am certainly all for career services and legitimizing academic work by making it accessible to a wider public. However, I do feel that if we think about metaphors of academic work and academic communication, we should include those areas more thoroughly that have for ages not been seen as part of the core competences of scholars, but which today make up an ever-growing amount of time for anybody involved in a job inside the academia. And, yet again, a selfreflexive form of ideology critique (not cultural pessimism) seems to be needed. Summing up, I was hopefully able to show that metaphors are not only a means of communicating and making sense of the world, but they are also a means of making sense of the very concept of communication. I have taken a look at established metaphors of communication and the criticism especially the container and conduit metaphor has provoked, and also sketched positions that question this harsh criticism. As a next step, I have tried to at least suggest possible directions for future developments in the field of metaphors of communication which might shape our understanding of new communication technology and, at the same time, surely will be shaped by these technologies. Finally, I have tried to add a side note to the ongoing discussion about metaphors of academic communication. As a conclusion, I can only hope that this monologue of an article seemed a bit like a dialogue to my readers and will be opening up fruitful research and discussion on the changing metaphors of communication. Let’s dance, shall we? M ARTIN Z IEROLD 226 Works Cited Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, eds. 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A NSGAR N ÜNNING Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises: On the Functions of Metaphors as Figurative Knowledge and Mininarrations 1 I Metaphors as Figurative Knowledge and Mininarrations: Introducing the Focus, Goals and Outline In the preface to his seminal encyclopaedia of philosophical metaphors, the editor Ralf Konersmann answers the question of what metaphors actually are by providing a somewhat unusual functional definition: “Metaphors are 1 The present article is based on an article on crisis published in German (see Ansgar Nünning, “Narratologie der Krise: Wie aus einer Situation ein Plot und eine Krise (konstruiert) werden,” Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien, eds. Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister (München: Fink, 2007) 48-71.) and on the results of a larger research project that investigated the construction of Britain’s imperialist memorial culture in the 19th century, one part of which was concerned with ‘metaphors of Empire’, about which I have published several articles (see Ansgar Nünning, “On the Discourse Construction of an Empire of the Mind: Metaphorical Re-Membering as a Means of Narrativizing and Naturalizing Cultural Transformations,” Metamorphoses: Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20, ed. Jürgen Schlaeger (Tübingen: Narr, 2005) 59-98 and Ansgar Nünning, “On the Knowledge and Functions of Metaphors: Interfacing Literature, Culture, and Science,” La conoscenza della letteratura / The Knowledge of Literature, Vol. VII: Literature and Science, ed. Angela Locatelli (Bergamo: Bergamo UP, 2008) 195-217.). The project was part of the “special research centre” devoted to the investigation of “memorial cultures” (Sonderforschungsbereich 434: Erinnerungskulturen) based at Justus-Liebig- University in Giessen and funded by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). I would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous support of this institution and to thank the members of my research team, Prof. Dr. Astrid Erll, Dr. Hanne Birk, PD Dr. Birgit Neumann, Jan Rupp, and Meike Hölscher for their invaluable support. I am also very grateful to Herbert Grabes, Zoltán Kövecses, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Greta Olson, and Sabine Schülting for valuable suggestions, and to Manfred Pfister, who first encouraged me to work on ‘a narratology of crisis’. Special thanks to my research assistants Ilke Krumholz and Simon Cooke, who translated the German article on which this much revised and expanded contribution is based, and Mirjam Horn, who carefully formatted and proof-read the document, for their excellent and valuable support. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 230 narratives that mask themselves as a single word.” 2 The subtitle (“Figuratives Wissen“) of the preface, which is actually a highly interesting essay on the nature and functions of metaphors, sheds light on another key aspect of metaphors: the felicitous phrase “figurative knowledge” emphasizes that metaphors do indeed generate knowledge, albeit of a figurative kind. Konersmann is, of course, neither the first nor the only scholar to draw attention to the fact that metaphors can be conceived of as condensed narratives and that they produce a special kind of knowledge. Philip Eubanks, for instance, has argued that metaphors project “mininarrations,” 3 and other theorists have also acknowledged the cognitive and knowledge-creating potential of metaphors. It is through the production of narrative kernels and figurative knowledge that metaphors shape not only culture and theories, but also our world views and world models. In what has become one of the classics of metaphor studies, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson observe that “the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true […].” 4 Anyone who doubts that they are right has only to recall George W. Bush’s harangues about ‘weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,’ which turned out to be weapons of the mind and mere metaphors but which nonetheless got ‘to define what we’ — or at least a large part of the American people — ‘considered to be true.’ The same holds true for many of the crises that we are almost daily confronted with in the media in what seems to be the age of crises and catastrophes: Whoever manages to get to impose their crisis metaphors on the respective culture gets to define what people consider to be true. Nowhere is the worldmaking function of metaphors more palpable than in the discourses of the media, which can turn just about any event, situation, or cultural change into a severe crisis or even a catastrophe. Given the sheer number of today’s crises and the ubiquity of crisis metaphors in our contemporary media culture, it comes as no surprise that the media themselves have taken up the topic of metaphors of crisis. In an article published in The Wall Street Journal tellingly entitled “In Financial Crisis, Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies,” Michael M. Philips provides a wide range of interesting examples of how the real financial crisis has generated a plethora of metaphors of crisis and illness, some of which are indeed “bad 2 Ralf Konersmann, “Metaphern sind Erzählungen, die sich als Einzelwort maskieren,“ Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008) 17. Except for Lotman, all German sources are my own translation and state the originals in the bibliography. 3 Philip Eubanks, “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings? ” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 437. 4 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P) 160. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 231 analogies” or unwittingly funny catachreses. What the examples serve to show, however, is that the discourses of crisis generate ever more metaphors, most of which have the body and illness as the main source domains. Cases in point include “the patient’s arteries are clogged, and he’ll get a heart attack unless we do something; ” “the image from prognosis to prescription; ” “tainted medicine; ” and credit being “the lifeblood of the economy.” The author goes on to ask, “Why the rush to deploy metaphor to describe the Wall Street crisis? ”, providing an initial answer by quoting John D. Casnig, founder of the ‘Metaphor Observatory’: “Metaphor is used when we can’t understand something in its own context.” 5 Although one can readily agree with this explanation, it does not provide much in the way of enlightenment concerning either the metaphorical implications and mininarrations of metaphors of crisis, nor the functions they serve to fulfil. Though the ubiquity of crises and the pervasive importance of crisis metaphors in culture and society at large may be hard to deny or ignore, it may be less than obvious that ‘crisis’ is a case in point as far as metaphors being ‘narratives that mask themselves as a single word’ are concerned. Moreover, despite the obvious central significance of crises in both contemporary culture and world literature, anyone who is careless enough to attempt to write a scholarly article on the topic of the ‘metaphorology and narratology of crisis’ will be confronted with an apparently paradoxical result upon starting the research. On the one hand, it is obvious that all kinds of crises play a pivotal role not only in the narrations of the mass media but in a multitude of works of literature as well. On the other hand, there is hardly any academic research on the topic of the ‘metaphorology and narratology of crisis’ which could be used as a basis for further research. In April 2004, when I first conducted research on this topic, a Google-search for the German word ‘Krise’ yielded 1,080,000 hits; in March 2005 Google produced no less than 2,500,000 results for world-wide ‘Krise’; and in February 2009 the figure had escalated to 13,330,000, while the English word ‘crisis’ elicited no fewer than 350,000,000 hits. (The fact that even the word ‘Krisenmanagement’, i.e. ‘crisis management’, now boasts 1,870,000 hits, i.e. almost twice as many as ‘crisis’ four years ago, shows just how intense the crises are felt to be and that crisis management has indeed become a growth industry.) This confirms the intuitive impression of many media users, namely that, in today’s media society (both real and medially constructed), crises have growth rates which the global economy can only dare to dream of. In contrast, the results produced by the MLA bibliography are downright meagre: Depending on the precise terms and the combination of the search criteria (e.g. “narrative & crisis” or “narrative & plot”) one finds a mere one or two 5 All from Michael M. Philips, “In Financial Crisis, Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies,” The Wall Street Journal (September 27, 2008): A16. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 232 dozen articles, which furthermore mainly deal with the much-lamented crisis of narration in ‘postmodernism’ and are therefore hardly profitable for the question of a metaphorology or narratology of crisis. The world-wide crisis inflation is in contradistinction, then, with an astonishing reluctance to explore this apparently ubiquitous phenomenon in the realm of literary and cultural studies. Thus, ‘crisis’ is a high-priority cultural topic which seems to fascinate great portions of the public, yet to which academic research, and cultural studies in particular, have not yet paid sufficient attention. This disproportion between the cultural ubiquity of crises and the lack of metaphorological and narratological research on the topic forms the basis for the cognitive interest and the aims of this article, which deals with the question of how cognitive metaphor theory and narratology — the theory of narrative — can contribute to shedding light on the metaphor and narrative of ‘crisis’ and on the functions that this condensed metaphor serves to fulfil. When we look more closely at the actual cultural, epistemological, and political work that metaphors do, it becomes obvious that “no metaphor comes without ideological freight.” 6 On the contrary, metaphors are not only “the understanding of something in one conceptual domain [...] by conceptual projection from something in a different conceptual domain; ” 7 they also serve as subtle epistemological and political tools that are heavily imbued with cognitive, emotional, and ideological connotations. Using these preliminary examples and observations as a point of departure, this article argues that our concepts and metaphors not only structure what we perceive and experience in our everyday realities, 8 but also provide the categories in terms of which we conceptualize and structure culture, cultural change, and even our theories. Terms like ‘crisis,’ ‘catastrophe,’ or ‘metamorphosis’ 9 are very interesting cases in point. The focus will be on the questions of how societies collectively deal with and account for cultural transformations, and of what role metaphors play in these processes. I will argue that in order to come to terms with the role that metaphors play in shaping culture and theory we would be wise to begin by looking at the discursive, literary, and cognitive strategies deployed in the attempt to cope with disastrous changes, because they not only serve as means of structuring, narrativizing, and naturalizing cultural transformations, but are also, as I will try to show, important senseand indeed world-making devices. 6 Eubanks 437. 7 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, “A Mechanism of Creativity,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 403. 8 See Lakoff and Johnson. 9 See Jürgen Schlaeger, Metamorphoses: Structures of Cultural Transformations (Tübingen: Narr, 2005). Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 233 And this, arguably, is where metaphors like ‘crisis’ come in. Metaphors not only serve to structure how we understand cultural transformations, they also project “mininarrations” 10 onto them, thereby providing ideologically charged plots and explanations of cultural and historical changes rather than neutral descriptions thereof. It is arguably “the metaphorical concepts we live by,” 11 to use Lakoff and Johnson’s felicitous formulation, that provide the key to understanding the topic at hand, i.e. “Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory.” If one accepts Lakoff and Johnson’s view “that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured,” 12 then one might even go so far as to argue that metaphors and narratives are the most powerful tools we have for making sense of cultural transformations, being endowed as they are with the power of reason and the power of evaluation. 13 Using the metaphor of crisis as a case study of a phenomenon which illustrates that metaphors are indeed ‘narratives that mask themselves as a single word’, and analysing how they not only project structures onto cultural changes, but also try to make sense of them, this paper pursues three goals: first, to argue that metaphors play a central role in shaping both culture and theory, i.e. in both everyday cultural notions of changes and disastrous events, and in theories of culture and cultural transformations; second, to provide an overview of some of the uses and implications of the discourses of crises; and third, to explore the functions that the metaphor of crisis serves to fulfil. Using the crisis metaphor as a paradigm example, this article will attempt to throw some light on the various ways in which happenings are turned into events and then into crises through metaphoric projections, and on how we perceive and conceptualize the world in terms of such metaphors. Although a recent volume explores the discourse of crisis, 14 both the cultural implications and ideological functions of the metaphors of crisis and the constitutive rather than just the reflective role of such metaphors in determining the perception of events and cultural transformations have not yet been sufficiently explored. Following some preliminary considerations on how crises are treated in the media society and some theses on the inflation of crisis that emerge from the society of crisis (section 2) the two main sections will primarily deal with the development of the building blocks of a narratology of crisis with the help of some key concepts from narrative theory and from metaphor theory (section 3 and 4 respectively). This attempt to outline the main features of a 10 Eubanks 437. 11 Eubanks 22. 12 Eubanks 106. 13 George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1989) 65. 14 See Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister, eds., Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien (München: Fink, 2007). A NSGAR N ÜNNING 234 narratology and metaphorology of crisis will be concluded by a short outlook on the functions which the thematization and staging of the metaphors and plots of crises can fulfil in media and in literature (section 5). II An Age of Crises: Preliminary Considerations on Crises and Crises Inflation As self-evident as it may be that the perception and the awareness of any kind of crisis is sharply emphasized as soon as one starts dealing with this topic in detail, one can nevertheless justifiably speak of a crisis inflation in today’s media and in crisis society. No matter what newspaper one reads or which television channel or radio station one tunes in to, one always finds that, apart from award shows and quiz programmes, there seems to be little but reports on various kinds of crises or — to note a subtle but significant difference — reports on situations and phenomena which the respective medium dubs as ‘crisis.’ The ubiquity of the medially thematized, staged, and constructed crises confirms the thesis that crises have become an essential part of today’s media-culture society: We seem to be living in crisis-ridden times in which crises have entered all realms of society. Colloquially put: During the past few years, crises have been breeding like rabbits. This thesis is also supported by the fact that earlier decades dealt with their crises a lot more sparingly than today’s media-culture society does. The 1970s were characterized by an oil crisis followed by an economic crisis or depression, but everything was relatively easy to get an overview of. This is different today: Everywhere you look and in every sphere of society there are crises. In politics, both national and international crises are legion: Whether it is Afghanistan or Iraq, Cuba or Macedonia, Haiti or Chechnya — there is hardly a country which has not been promoted to an idiomatic component of the crisis-compound in the newscast. This is no different in the economic and the financial world where the same holds true for almost every industry, and many companies: everyone seems to be in a crisis. Everyone except for those companies which have already overcome this stage and are now bankrupt — of which Worldcom and Lehman Brothers were just the multi-billion dollar tips of the huge crisis iceberg. If the enormous number of internet results for crises can be believed, not just the arts, the media, the music, and the publishing sectors, but also online publishing, online studies and online advertisement are also ‘deep in crisis.’ In view of the demographic crisis, the pensions crisis, the crisis of most of the car industry, and the big banks crisis in general, the crisis of the labour market, of agriculture, of the building industry and health care, the Cabinet crisis, the lasting budgetary crisis, the government crisis and, of course, the university crisis (and the permanent crisis of the humanities), to name just a few of the most important current crisis sites Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 235 and crisis scenarios, there can be no doubt about the fact that crises have become ubiquitous. This medial proliferation of ever new crises does not, of course, provide neutral or objective status reports but rather attributions and diagnoses which are perspectiveand media-dependent. These, in turn, are based upon a mode of perception specific to the respective time, or a discourse strategy for which ‘crisis’ has become the medial counterpart to the uninteresting normality of everyday situations. One does not have to be a radical constructivist to agree with the opinion that the media talk of ‘crises’ has actually contributed to turning certain situations and stories into media events. In the end, is there anyone who understands the complicated background, or is interested in political or economic details? The language of ‘crisis’ is both common and catchy. In the media it functions as a cipher or abbreviation which attracts attention, attributes a high degree of significance to the respective matters and, in doing so, ensures interest for the news coverage. The severe and very real world-wide economic crisis notwithstanding, our media themselves create such an increase of crisis that one can justly speak of a crisis inflation and a society of crisis. To put it bluntly: the real and threatening economic and inflation crisis of the Weimar Republic has been replaced by a downright crisis inflation in today’s media culture society. Whether it is BSE or SPD, Haiti or trading, the British Monarchy or the American and European banks, the “Crisis of Values” or the “Global Crisis” — there are crises everywhere you look. New crises emerge on an almost weekly and daily basis: some years ago the crisis of the European Union and of the EU Constitution was the latest shooting star in the crises charts, but nowadays the world wide financial crisis, according to current media reports, gets worse every day. Of course, private and personal lives have not been spared in the epidemic spread of crises. Mental crises, identity crises, midlife crises, relationship crises, marriage crises, in a crisis because of a child or in a crisis because of childlessness — the kinds of crises and crisis scenarios in this realm are as manifold as the diagnoses and therapies offered. For instance, many homepages inform us that the word ‘crisis’ signifies an opportunity for positive change. The implication is that you are invited to change something essential — not a new realization, by the way. Something similar, yet considerably more differentiated, can be found in William James and Carl Gustav Jung. At any rate, this briefly outlined crisis inflation in our media culture society supports the opinion of Renate Bebermeyer, namely that the term has been “turned into and hyped as a catchword-puppet: ” [F]amiliarization to the omnipresence of the verbal crisis creates a certain ‘consensus-background’ in front of which the crisis-commonplace is accepted without A NSGAR N ÜNNING 236 criticism […]. [E]verybody can have their own thoughts about crises and search the available crisis options for something appropriate: The chosen crisis. 15 The crisis inflation has even generated particular genres: On the one hand, there is the genre of the “words on the crisis,” 16 on the other hand, there are the “ever more and more…” texts: “More and more people suffer from allergies; more and more teenagers take drugs; etc.” Speaking in terms of the popular metaphors of crisis and disease, our media, our society, and the average citizen seem to be “infested with an unidentified crisis-virus; ” and this metaphoric crisis disease has now reached epidemic proportions. One of the main reasons for this is the “immunodeficiency which is due to the lack of definition” of this “unimmunized, contentdeficient” 17 term itself. An effective therapy for this crisis epidemic is nowhere to be seen: “So we will go on using uncalibrated crisis-thermometers, and the media language will continue to diagnose every slight cold as a disease with a crisis climax.” 18 This medial and metaphoric sweeping swipe may suffice to exemplarily point out the fact that today the condition of crisis can apparently be attributed to everything and everybody and that the use of the same term may not and should not conceal the fact that we are dealing with different kinds of crises in the distinct social realms. Instead of attempting to create an anatomy or phenomenology of a single one of these innumerable crises, the confusing multitude and diversity of worldwide crises has induced me to begin with basic inquiries about the narrative pattern which is concealed behind these partially real and partially medially staged crises. III Concepts for a Narratology of Crisis The problem for anyone attempting to develop a narratology and metaphorology of crisis lies in the fact that hardly any preliminary work has been done to which one can refer. The definition of the key concept of ‘crisis,’ the meaning of which seems self-evident at first glance, is already problematic: Intuitively, everybody knows what a crisis is, and what an event is. Why go through the trouble of defining these terms? The answer is: because there is nothing less self-evident than, or as profoundly preconditioned as, the concepts of event and crisis. 15 Renate Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise: Eine Vokabel im Sog ihrer Komposita und auf dem Weg zum leeren Schlagwort,” Muttersprache: Zeitschrift zur Pflege und Erforschung der deutschen Sprache 91 (1981): 347-48. 16 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 351. 17 Both Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 349. 18 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 356. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 237 Just like other events, crises are also the result of selection, abstraction, and distinction. Tying in with the colloquial meaning of ‘significant occurrence’ or ‘significant event,’ narratology first of all distinguishes between the chaotic and the contingent totality of all occurrences and the event as a particularly relevant and significant part thereof. 19 Both the emphatic eventconcept of narratology 20 and the metaphoric concept of crisis are not concerned with everyday occurrences but with incidents or changes which are collectively thought to be of great relevance and importance. Thus, the configuration of such an event and a crisis situation is based on singling both out from the continuous flow of occurrences and qualifying them as something special or surprising; thus, it is based on selection and distinction by an observer. Thus, events and crises are not only based on selection but on a high degree of abstraction as well. Every media event and every aggravating situation which is labelled ‘crisis’ consists of a multitude of (previous) actions, status changes, and events which are then subsumed under a universalized generic term like ‘crisis.’ Hence, the constitution of an event that falls into the ‘crisis’ category is a kind of distinction implying that the most important aspects are emphasized and the irrelevant facts are neglected. The fact that those distinctions can be considered as attributions, assessments, and acts of sense-making becomes even clearer in the case of those crises, historical key events, and transnational media events which are considered as ‘great’ or ‘epoch-making.’ For this reason alone, we need criteria by means of which we can agree on when a historical occurrence can be considered as an event or is even perceived as such a ‘great’ event or situation that we speak of a crisis. Crises are a special kind of event, or perhaps rather non-event, since they — according to their etymology — precisely mark the critical point at which a decision about the further progress of the incident is made amongst a number of possibilities. Thus, though crises admittedly do not constitute a particularly eventful incident themselves, they have usually been preceded by one or several important events. So, crises are a certain form of diagnosis or description of a situation which is normally preceded by especially eventful occurrences which are considered as significant. Since narratology offers criteria for distinguishing the term ‘event’ from the term ‘occurrence’ and for differentiating various degrees of ‘eventfulness,’ it also provides clues for describing important aspects of the metaphor of crisis. In narratology the event is defined as “a status change, which meets 19 See Karlheinz Stierle, “Geschehen, Geschichte, Text der Geschichte,” Text als Handlung: Perspektiven einer systematischen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Karlheinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1975). 20 See Wolf Schmid, Elemente der Narratologie (Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter, 2005). A NSGAR N ÜNNING 238 certain criteria.” 21 Wolf Schmid has developed a catalogue of criteria and basic prerequisites that a status change needs to fulfil in order to be perceived and characterized as an ‘event.’ According to Schmid, events are defined as status changes which need to meet a number of criteria. Schmid attempts to determine the degree of eventfulness by means of the following five criteria which, at the same time, shed light on the phenomenon of crisis: 1. relevance or significance of the change in question; 2. unpredictability (or unexpectedness); 3. consecutivity (or consequentiality) of the change; 4. irreversibility; 5. non-iterativity or non-repeatability. These narratological criteria for eventfulness provide multiple starting points for coming to terms with the phenomenon or metaphor of crisis. Since they specify precise criteria for the selection and qualification of particularly ‘eventful’ occurrences, they provide clues as to when an occurrence is perceived as a crisis. In order to distinguish a certain situation or sequence of action from a mere occurrence and mark it as a special event or even as a crisis, it needs to meet the following three criteria: First, the moment of surprise or the extraordinary: “the pre-linguistic experience of contemporaries whose belief is unsettled by what has happened.” 22 Second, the standards according to which “normal and ‘unsettling’ experiences can be distinguished would have to be of a collective quality.” 23 Third, in contrast to mere occurrences, crises — much like events — need to have “structure-altering consequences […] which are perceived by the protagonists.” 24 While the first criterion approximates the relevance or significance of change in Schmid’s catalogue, the third corresponds to the consecutivity or ‘consequentiality.’ The context of this definition of the term ‘event’ and the criteria for the determination of eventfulness support the hypothesis that crises are not something objectively given. On the one hand, they are in fact to be understood as the result of selection, abstraction, and distinction, and, therefore, as discursively created constructs. On the other hand, the attribution clearly is not entirely random since a situation, which is diagnosed as a crisis, apparently needs to meet certain preconditions. Thus, one does not have to be a constructivist or a discourse theorist in order to want to add three further characteristics to the already formulated conditions and features of crises: the discursivity of crises, the constructivity of crises, and the fact that they are not ‘givens’ but the result of diagnoses. An occurrence only becomes an event or potential crisis by being reflected in discourses and stories. The constructivity of crises is based on the fact that 21 Schmid 19. 22 Andreas Suter and Manfred Hettling, Struktur und Ereignis Sonderheft 19 von Geschichte und Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001) 24. 23 Suter and Hettling 24. 24 Suter and Hettling 25. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 239 they are not just ‘given’ or ‘there,’ but are made by the people and media ‘reporting’ on them. As a result of this constructivity a crisis is always dependent on the system of concepts, the conventions and the discourses of the respective epoch, and the media which formulate the crisis diagnoses. Two further characteristics, namely the cultural and historical variability of crises, can be derived from the discursivity and the constructivity of crises. Occurrences that are considered as particularly eventful as well as those considered as critical are not irrevocably defined once and for all, but rather depend on the respective criteria of relevance that are subject to historical change and are culturally variable. This also means that incidents which are considered as ‘great’ events of history or as a ‘crisis’ from today’s perspective were or are not necessarily already perceived in the same way from the perspective of the protagonists. Conversely, many former media events and crises are largely forgotten today. According to Lotman, “the qualification of a fact as an event depends on a system of concepts […]” of the respective epoch and that it is always carried out “in accordance with the general world picture.” 25 Thus, if eventfulness is to be understood as “a culturally specific and historically variable phenomenon of narrative representations” 26 then the same also holds true for crises. The plots associated with the metaphor of crisis which are available in an epoch or culture are themselves part of the respective reality models or world views: Consequently, crisis plots can be conceptualized as a certain form of narrative patterns for the organization and sense making of far-reaching changes or disasters, and the cultural life of crises and catastrophes always sheds light on particular cultures of description or cultures of disasters. 27 The rapid increase of crises staged by the media, referred to as ‘crisis inflation’ above, is a clear indicator for the fact that the present culture of description significantly differs from those of earlier centuries. Incidentally, the order of the contributions in the excellent volume on crisis edited by Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister offers evidence for the thesis that both different academic and scientific disciplines as well as every epoch and every culture have developed their own respective cultures of description and crisis models. 28 Comparing the respective contributions reveals the fact that the concept of crisis in the Greek ancient world differs more or less clearly from the ‘Renaissance crises’ and crisis awareness in the 25 Jurij M. Lotman, “The Problem of Plot,“ The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977) 235. 26 Schmid 25. 27 For these concepts, see the call for papers for the ESSCS 2009 in Copenhagen and the research project on cultures of disasters that Gerrit Schenck runs at the University of Heidelberg; see also Siegfried J. Schmidt, Geschichten und Diskurse (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003) 42. 28 See Grunwald and Pfister. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 240 17 th century. 29 Since hardly any preliminary work exists in this area, studies on the cultural and historical variability of ‘crisis models,’ on epoch-specific crisis awareness, on the respective socially dominant or culture-specific plots, schemes and frames, and on cultures of crisis and disaster, are an especially noteworthy desideratum. Based on the differentiation between occurrences and events, crises can be conceptualized as the results of narrative transformations by means of which an occurrence first of all becomes an event, then becomes a story and finally becomes a certain kind of story or a specific plot pattern, namely a crisis narrative. From the point of view of literary and cultural studies, crises can only become tangible, and are only observable, in their textual or medial manifestations, i.e. in the discursive presentation as crisis narratives in a concrete text or another media product. Thus the medial mode of speaking about crisis is a special form of narration which is defined by its content as well as being the result of using certain schemes of narration. Accordingly, crisis narrations merely present one of several possible ways of interpreting an event and of assigning meaning to a situation. Crisis narrations are based on a special kind of configuration and emplotment of the respective events and make use of culturally available (crisis) plots. Thus, for the analysis of any kind of media event considered a ‘crisis,’ both the selection of events and, in particular, the narrative arrangement and configuration of the material to form certain narratives is of great importance. The term emplotment, coined by Hayden White, points to the circumstance that historical facts and events are always embedded in a super-ordinate context. Emplotment strategies serve the purpose of overcoming the contingency of the historical event and of narratively structuring the selected events, of molding them into a certain story and, in doing so, interpreting them at the same time: “Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind.” 30 This is very important for understanding the constitution of crises since crises are ‘stories of a particular kind’: The context which every crisis diagnosis is based on is not inherent in the respective historical occurrence or the events but is created by choosing a certain narration and genre pattern. It is worth mentioning the fact that White’s theses on the significance of emplotment are of central importance for the question of how a historical occurrence becomes an event in the first place and of how a crisis is made or constructed by the use of certain emplotment strategies. 29 See the articles by Renate Schlesier, Eckhard Lobsien, and Helmar Schramm in Grunwald and Pfister. 30 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD/ London: Routledge, 1973) 7. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 241 Since the identification of a crisis greatly depends on the perspective of the observer, crisis can be described as attributions of sense and meaning which are observerand perspective-dependent. To prevent misunderstandings, I would like to point out that the emphasis of the discursivity, constructivity, and perspective-dependence of crises is by no means meant to deny the possibility of a real existence of crises — both in the original, nonmetaphorical sense of the word as well as in the figurative sense. However, it is important to point out that the vast majority of crises in today’s media society are based on the discursive and narrative practices of distinction, configuration, and staging described above. In this context the widespread use of the phrase ‘real crisis’ is especially striking in that it is self-unmasking, since it contains a downright “flag-flying confession of the illusory nature of many crises.” 31 IV The Metaphor of Crisis: Towards a Metaphorology and Narratology of Crisis It is not only the categories of narrative theory, however, that are profitable for the development of a narratology and metaphorology of crisis. The theory of metaphor can also shed light on the narrative structure and the discursive construction of crises. If the term ‘crisis’ is transferred to the analysis of plots, it is necessary to remember, above all, that we are dealing with a metaphor: As a brief look into the history of the concept reveals, the term crisis originates from the vocabulary of ancient medical science, 32 as Alexander Demandt points out in his seminal book Metaphors for History: “Originally it meant ‘decision’ and in antiquity this quite unmetaphorical meaning was already applied to history.” However, the modern concept of crisis is not determined by this original meaning but by its derivative medical application: “In the writings of Hippocrates and Galen krisis [in the original Greek lettering! ] describes the point of time during a course of disease at which the fate of a patient, whether he recovers or dies, is determined.” This organologyrelated background is preserved in the modern discourse of crises in history: “Wherever a crisis is identified, a patient can be discovered as well; be it in reality or in the mind of the person speaking of the ‘crisis’.” 33 Thus, speaking of a crisis is equivalent to the diagnosis of a disease, yet it does not merely evoke images of disease, of a patient, and of healing; rather, the metaphorics 31 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 353. 32 See Rolf Winau, “Krise (in) der Medizin: Die Entwicklung des medizinischen Krisenbegriffs und das ärztliche Selbstverständnis,“ Grunwald and Pfister 41-47. 33 All Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken (München: Beck, 1978) 27. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 242 projects both a diagnosis and certain story or plot pattern onto the situation as well. Cognitive metaphor theory conceptualizes what is involved in such a complex process of metaphoric projection in terms of ‘blending’ or ‘conceptual integration.’ 34 Foregrounding the mapping process and exploring how the source domain is mapped onto the target domain, cognitive approaches characterize metaphoric blending processes as a ‘mechanism of creativity’: 35 Image-schematic projection creates a new virtual realm, the blend, which is no longer subordinate to either the source (vehicle) or the tenor (target) but instead creates emergent structure that exists neither in the source nor the target domains. 36 This model not only takes into consideration the fact that people draw on their pre-existing cultural knowledge when they use or process metaphors, it also demonstrates that metaphoric projection is anything but a one-sided, unidirectional affair. On the contrary, what is involved is a process of mutual integration of two distinct conceptual domains. In the present case, both the personal sphere of illness and the political and economic sphere of wideranging changes and transformations are projected into the blended space, which, while bringing together salient features of the two knowledge domains involved, “exactly resembles none of them” 37 : “This selective borrowing, or rather, projection, is not merely compositional — instead, there is new meaning in the blend that is not a composition of meanings that can be found in the inputs.” 38 By creating conceptual blends between the private and personal domain of illness and the public sphere of economics, politics, or international rela- 34 It is, of course, beyond the scope of the present essay to present a detailed account of cognitive metaphor theory or of the conceptual integration network theory. For a brief introduction, see Monika Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman, “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 387-92; Fauconnier and Turner, “A Mechanism of Creativity”; for comprehensive accounts, see Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994); Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks,” Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 133-187; Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996); Zoltàn Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000); Zoltàn Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002); Zoltàn Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Zoltàn Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). 35 See Fauconnier and Turner, “A Mechanism of Creativity.” 36 Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 387. 37 Fludernik, Freeman, and Freeman 393. 38 Fauconnier and Turner, “A Mechanism of Creativity” 398. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 243 tions, crisis metaphors profoundly affect the way in which cultural, economic, military, and political changes are perceived and understood. They suggest, then, that the essential character of such changes is that of a dangerous illness of the respective system. Moreover, the choice of the metaphor largely determines human understanding of, and reactions to, the situation or transformation designated as a crisis. Once a certain situation is metaphorically marked as a crisis, this kind of definition or diagnosis of a situation at the same time automatically implies and immediately activates certain frames and narrative schemata. To start with, ‘crisis’ implies great difficulty and danger, a threat, and insecurity. In the case of a crisis the climax and turning point of a dangerous development is reached, or imminent. As the English saying “We must bring things to a crisis” nicely puts it, a crisis is always also a moment of decision-making. Thus, labelling an event as a ‘crisis’ not only provides a specific definition of the respective situations, but also evokes certain narrative schemata, development patterns, and plots. On the one hand, these schemata interpret the events lying ahead in a specific way. On the other hand, describing a situation as a ‘crisis’ is also always a diagnosis from which certain therapeutic perspectives and action scenarios for future development can be derived. Who and what is sought after in a situation like this is apparent according to the respective culturally available crisis plots, because when talking about a ‘crisis’ specific actions and developmental patterns are invoked at the same time. Depending on the social realm of action there are different crises, but the fundamental scheme remains the same, both from a narratological perspective and from the point of view of metaphor theory: What are in demand in a crisis are active crisis managers (physicians, politicians, management boards, ‘experts,’ etc.), crisis management plans, and purposeful actions (in short: successful crisis management). Let us take football (or ‘soccer’) as an example: As soon as the media rules that a club is in a crisis there is already a plot for a further course of action, namely: emergency meeting, media speculations about the imminent dismissal of the coach, denials of the reports, denials of the denials, dismissal of the coach, new coach, a good tidying up — at least until the dismissal of the next coach. Even though it has not been possible to avoid every single relegation this way, this example teaches us that the mode of speaking about a crisis always evokes conventionalized schemata and plot patterns which sketch out the future course of action. For this reason a crisis diagnosis is always already more than a specific definition of the situation and, in retrospect, oftentimes appears as a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, it is worthwhile, heuristically, to bear in mind the fact that the common talk about crisis actually is a metaphor and that this metaphor does not only represent or embellish the respective realm of reality but also fulfils A NSGAR N ÜNNING 244 extensive structuring, narrativizing and constructive functions — just as metaphors do in general. 39 The medical vehicle ‘crisis’ provides particular elements or ‘slots’ which characterize the special features of crisis plots. For a start, two central members of the cast are of importance: a patient or crisisridden organism; and a physician or observer, who diagnoses the disease from a “privileged control-room.” 40 Moreover, the crisis metaphor implies a number of further aspects which include the following (which make no claim to being comprehensive): Disease symptoms or aspects of the crisis condition; an anamnesis, i.e. the inquiry about the medical case history of the disease (according to the patient); the diagnosis, i.e. the detection or evaluation of the kind and quality of the disease as well as the condition of the patient, which is based on precise monitoring and examination; the therapy, i.e. the identification of every possible remedy and method of treatment; and the therapist, namely somebody who administers the therapy (he or she can be, but does not have to be, the same person as the physician or the privileged observer). In addition, the metaphor ‘crisis’ always evokes a number of culturally determined connotations and associations, the main ones including disease or illness, threat, disturbance and danger, anxiety, alarm, fear and concern, and a search for remedies. The fact that the metaphor of crisis already largely pre-structures the respective target domain and that it furthermore implies a general developmental scheme with regard to the structural or narrative pattern which potentially forms the basis of every crisis scenario is therefore crucial for a metaphorology and narratology of crisis. The latest cognitive metaphor theories have shown that metaphors not only structure the way in which we understand cultural phenomena and processes, but they also project “mininarrations” 41 onto the respective tenor or target domain. As soon as we speak about ‘crisis,’ a course-of-disease scheme is invoked: “There is an identifiable beginning which is to be understood as a cause and which starts a development which leads to a reasonable ending; disturbances of this structure provoke an extensive awareness of danger.” 42 Moreover, by projecting a particular plot upon cultural changes metaphorical concepts serve to narrativize and naturalize them. The projection of crisis-plots can be understood as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process 39 On the cultural functions of metaphors see Ansgar Nünning, “On the Emergence,” Ansgar Nünning, “On the Knowledge,” and Section 5 below. 40 See Martin Hielscher, “Kritik der Krise: Erzählerische Strategien der jüngsten Gegenwartsliteratur und ihre Vorläufer,” Literarisches Krisenbewusstsein: Ein Perzeptions- und Produktionsmuster im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Keith Bullivant and Bernhard Spies (München: Iudicum, 2001) 319. 41 Eubanks 437. 42 Keith Bullivant and Bernhard Spies, “Vorwort,” Bullivant and Spies 17. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 245 of the sort that has come to be known as ‘naturalization,’ which makes complex socio-historical phenomena intelligible in terms of culturally accepted frames. To interpret cultural transformations in terms of such culturally bound plots can be thought of as a way of naturalizing changes by giving them a function in some larger pattern supplied by accepted cultural models. Culler clarifies what ‘naturalization’ means in this context: “[T]o naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural or legible.” 43 This kind of metaphoric naturalization is so much an ingrained part of our everyday cognitive strategies used in dealing with and accounting for cultural changes that, in all probability, we are not conscious of it and hardly, if ever, notice it. Consequently, speaking about or diagnosing a crisis includes not only defining certain action-roles but, as a result of the systematic logic of the metaphor, also linking past, present, and future in a comprehensive plot. With regard to the past, the diagnosis of a crisis implies a negative, more or less teleological development towards a crisis. By contrast, the present in a crisisdiagnosis is perceived and interpreted as a decisive moment and as a realm of possibilities. With regard to the future this results in a spectrum of different possibilities and potential development structures, which range from the extremes of death and destruction at one side to recovery and the overcoming of the crisis on the other. The age-old similes for particular peoples and states are typical examples of this. Organic crisis metaphors were frequently used to describe the Fall of Rome: sickly Rome lying on the deathbed. 44 With clear reference to the medical language use, Rousseau applied the term ‘crisis’ to the body politic. The connection between crisis and disease is also brought to one’s awareness through Goethe’s organic interpretation of the term ‘transition time’ [‘Übergangszeit’]: “Every transition is a crisis, and is not crisis a disease? ” 45 Aside from the already mentioned action roles and fundamental images, the metaphoric origin of the rhetoric of crisis draws attention to further aspects which are of interest for a metaphorology and narratology of crisis. This includes the question of the causes or the initiators of the crisis, the question of concepts and solutions, and the question of selecting crisis managers and agents to find a solution for the crisis, as well as the question of the crisis experience of the respective protagonists, not to mention the cultural crisis awareness of an era. The respective demeanour or attitude towards a 43 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul, 1975) 138. 44 Demandt 80. 45 “Alle Übergänge sind Krisen, und ist die Krise nicht eine Krankheit? ” qtd. from Demandt 219. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 246 crisis can range from resignation and melancholy on the one side to euphoria on the other: The experience of a crisis can lead to the resolute refusal of accepting the impending loss and provoke the impulse to seriously defend the endangered goods; however, the experience of a factual commotion of what was valid so far can also be turned into an argument for the necessity of its downfall. 46 It is obvious that due to the range of implications that the metaphor of crisis offers, different attitudes towards a crisis can produce entirely different plots. Speaking of ‘the’ crisis plot would therefore be highly questionable. Rather, by means of the metaphoric language of crisis, a broad spectrum of possible development structures is evoked, according to which the option which actually occurs depends on the skills of the protagonist in crisis management. The spectrum of possibilities ranges from the extreme of recovery or even improvement to versions of sitting it out and twiddling one’s thumbs in the middle (which usually leads to an aggravation and worsening of the crisis) right to the other extreme of death and destruction, which can befall both individuals and the Roman Empire as the result of a crisis. Further indications for a metaphorology and narratology of crisis are not only given by the metaphoric origin of the word ‘crisis,’ but also in its current use, particularly the morphology and emerging crisis idiomology, which is able to shed light on both the multitude of the cast roles as well as the narration and plot patterns connected to crisis. Renate Bebermeyer analysed “the nature, character and manifestations of the buzzword-like, pseudo-‘crisis’compounds which increase in a compulsive and explosive way” 47 from a linguistic point of view in two articles which are rich in both material and insight. She attributes the semantic and morphological crisis inflation as well as the “habit, which already reveals compulsive-manic traits, of seeing everything under the aspect of a crisis which is considered as dominant” 48 to two trends: namely to the “necessity to constantly ‘find’ the newest and most sensational and to present it by means of a handy ‘adequate’ motto — in a pseudo-scientific way” 49 on the one hand, and to the widespread crisis mentality (which was common in 1980 already! ) on the other. Considering the crisis-compounds which were actually circulating already in 1980, the spectrum of roles and actions designated or possible for crisis plots, is clearly going to be very broad. It ranges from the crisis initiator and crisis aggravator to the crisis observer and crisis manager and crisis management, to crisis administration and the crisis squad, the head of crisis 46 Bullivant and Spies 15-16. 47 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 345. 48 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 346. 49 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 345. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 247 squad and the leader of crisis squad. Their task is to discover the origin or origins of the crisis and, on the basis of crisis counsels, crisis conferences, crisis meetings or crisis squad sessions, develop an appropriate crisis concept, a crisis strategy, a crisis schedule or a mechanism for dealing with the crisis and, by means of crisis intervention, contribute to solving the crisis or at least by containing it or limiting the damage. If they are successful they will be celebrated as crisis conquerors on account of their effective crisis strategy. The crisis tourist, the crisis observer and the crisis winner as well as those who use crises as a reason for developing a crisis philosophy, deserve mentioning as well. What all of these metaphorical crisis-compounds have in common is that they serve to show that metaphors, by virtue of their more or less coherent entailments, provide a systematic way of talking about and making sense of cultural changes and disasters. Lakoff and Johnson have emphasized what they call the “systematicity of metaphorical concepts” 50 and have spelled out its implications: The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another […] will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. 51 Metaphors “form coherent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experience” 52 — and cultural transformations, one might add. Highlighting certain aspects of historical changes while hiding or even repressing others, metaphorical concepts serve as both sense making devices and as “‘strategies of containment’ whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.” 53 As a further element for the development of a metaphorology and narratology of crisis to be borne in mind is that there is no such thing as one particular crisis plot, but rather there is always a broad spectrum of possible courses of action — because both the duration of a crisis and the respective course of a crisis usually depend on a multitude of factors, measures, and events. Nonetheless, I hope it has become clear that, on the one hand, it is possible to specify the most important roles which are constitutive for the metaphor and narratives associated with ‘crisis’ while, on the other hand, crises are nothing ‘natural’ but are based on a specific mode of emplotment 50 Lakoff and Johnson 7. 51 Lakoff and Johnson 10. 52 Lakoff and Johnson 41. 53 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; London: Methuen, 1983) 10. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 248 (sensu Hayden White), by means of which a situation becomes (made into) a plot and a crisis in the first place. V Functions of Crises and Crisis Plots The question continues to present itself as to what functions might be fulfilled by the metaphor, narrative, and rhetoric of crisis so ubiquitous (and inflationary) in politics and the media. Rather than just taking the dominant rhetoric of world wide crises and catastrophes implied in these metaphors at face value or even mistaking such tropes for a simple reflection of economic, historical, or political reality, one might look more closely at the functions that such metaphors serve to fulfil. There are several functions that can be identified, although many of them are syncretized in specific texts and media. First of all, the widespread manner of speaking of someone or something as being plunged ‘deep into crisis,’ is aimed at generating interest and “pageturner excitement,” 54 especially in the media. A further general function to be seen is that drawing on crisis-plots offers a means of making sense and coherence: situations perceived as ‘crises’ are those “which are virtually urged to be narrated, for the production of coherent, sense-making and identityproviding stories, models, and attempts at arrangement, which bring coherence, sense and identity to produce.” 55 Renate Bebermeyer has concisely sketched out further fundamental functions from the perspective of linguistics: The original academic terminus crisis has two simultaneous functions to fulfil, one of which is structural, deriving from its availability as a ready-made buildingblock for the quick production of ever new composites. Besides its building-block capacity, the ‘crisis’ concept has a second, double-sided task: on the one hand, it is called on as a demonstrative and at the same time expression-varying substitute word for its compositional derivates; on the other, it offers, free from the grip of its compositional role, a general and generalised, negatively loaded catchword summary of all developments and changes calling forth unrest and angst. 56 In politics in particular, crisis metaphorics has long been part of the rhetorical basics of polemics against other parties and those who think differently. For politicians “crisis is […] — depending on need — confirmation and alibi, both are offered one from the most different of motivations; one profits massively from the crisis-pound.” 57 The reasons for this are clear: 54 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 352. 55 Hielscher 314. 56 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 354. 57 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 349. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 249 Some politicians need pessimism, ‘the world of growing crises and dangers’ and therefore also the vocabulary of catastrophe, in order to effectively place themselves and their strategies in the light; the current journalistic compulsion to overuse and sensationalism — a report needs a media-justifying (big) format to be heard — does the rest. 58 The implicit message launched by the steely crisis managers and media pros is thus: “A danger named is a danger banned.” 59 Moreover, by reducing the complexities and elusiveness of the source domains and the cultural transformations they refer to, metaphors of crisis impose form upon a chaotic reality. Another function is therefore to impart some sort of structure and plot to amorphous economic or political phenomena and to complex cultural changes, thus serving as unifying and ordering devices. What deserves to be emphasized is that the structure which metaphorical mappings allow us to impart to a given domain “is not there independent of the metaphor.” 60 Metaphoric projections represent coherent organizations of complex phenomena in terms of ‘natural’ (or naturalized) categories like illness: metaphors are “structured clearly enough and with enough of the right kind of internal structure to do the job of defining other concepts.” 61 Despite their inevitably reductive character, crisis metaphors can fulfil heuristic or cognitive functions in that they represent a particular diagnosis of a situation. 62 As conceptual tools, metaphors resemble models. Imposing form and structure upon an untidy, contingent, and chaotic reality, metaphors like crisis serve as models for thought, as conceptual fictions people and whole cultures live by. 63 To identify the functions of metaphors entirely with those of models, however, is to miss significant cultural functions that they are often asked to perform. It would be reductive and misleading to suggest that the metaphors of crises and catastrophes were nothing but conceptual models, for at least two reasons. Equating these metaphors with models ignores the creative uses of metaphors in the representation of cultural objects or transformations. In contrast to models, which represent structural relations, metaphors impose structures: they “often do creative work.” 64 The ubiquitous metaphor of ‘cri- 58 Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 355. 59 See Bebermeyer, “’Krise’ in der Krise” 356. (“Gefahr benannt — Gefahr gebannt.”) 60 Lakoff and Turner 64. 61 Lakoff and Johnson 118. 62 See Grunwald and Pfister. 63 See Lakoff and Johnson. 64 Mark Turner, Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 1987) 19; See also Harald Weinrich, Sprache in Texten (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976) 309. Weinreich also argues that metaphors create their analogies and correspondences; also see Fauconnier and Turner, “A Mechanism of Creativity”. For the similarities and differences between metaphors and models, see the articles in Anselm Haver- A NSGAR N ÜNNING 250 sis’ serves to show that metaphors not only create individual target domain slots, but can also determine the way in which a given target domain is perceived and understood in the first place. The second reason why metaphors are more than just conceptual or cognitive models is that the evocation of emotion is an important aspect of the metaphorical process, as Paul Ricœur and other theorists have convincingly shown. 65 Of far greater interest for the cultural historian than the functions that metaphors have in common with models are those functions of such metaphors that shed light on the “representational politics” 66 of such a popular metaphor as crisis. In addition to their power to impose structure, metaphors of crises and catastrophes also serve as an important means of determining an emotional response, fostering as they do reactions of fear, shock, and stress. This emotional function is particularly obvious in the case of metaphors of crises and catastrophes because they imply a feeling of being personally threatened and a sense of collective threat, which is arguably the dominant affective component in metaphors of crises and catastrophes. Metaphors of crises and catastrophes not only help to generate emotions, they also rhetorically assert the need for effective crisis management. A third function of metaphors of crises and catastrophes consists in providing contemporaries with simplified, but more or less coherent frameworks for interpreting recent economic, historical or political developments. As mental models, metaphoric fictions provide powerful tools for making sense of complex situations and cultural changes. By actually commenting upon the events and relations they purport merely to reflect or to report, metaphors of crises serve as a means for explaining complex processes and cultural transformations. The structure and logic inherent in the crisismetaphor, for instance, not only greatly reduces the complexity of the phenomena in the target domain, but also transforms a chaotic series of events into a simple story or a crisis plot (see sections 3 and 4 above). With regard to how “metaphors can be made into mininarrations,” 67 the metaphor of crisis is a perfect case in point. kamp, ed., Theorie der Metapher, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996); Wolfgang Bergem, Lothar Bluhm, and Friedhelm Marx, eds., Metapher und Modell: Ein Wuppertaler Kolloquium zu literarischen und wissenschaftlichen Formen der Wirklichkeitskonstruktion (Trier: WVT, 1996). 65 See Paul Ricœur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 143; Wilhelm Köller, Semiotik und Metapher: Untersuchungen zur grammatischen Struktur und kommunikativen Funktion von Metaphern (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975) 202. Köller also emphasizes the connotational components and emotional shades of values implied by them. 66 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840-1895 (London/ New York: Routledge, 1997) 125. 67 Eubanks 437. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 251 Fourth, metaphors of crises fulfil important normative functions because they authorize and propagate ideologically charged diagnoses of a situation they purport merely to describe. By providing a diagnosis, they project particular norms and values onto the target domain. Although as a rule one cannot extract a very sophisticated philosophy from any of these metaphors, they tend to leave no doubt as to what the desirable form of reaction should be: effective crisis management. In other words, metaphors of crises are never used merely in a descriptive, but always in a prescriptive way, subtly propagating normative views rather than providing neutral descriptions. Drawing on values deeply embedded in culture, metaphors of crises not only project features and structural relations from the various source domains onto the respective target domains and cultural transformations, they also imply how the entities of the two domains are to be evaluated in the new blend resulting from their conceptual integration. 68 Fifth, metaphors of crises and catastrophes are often used as political arguments in that the form of the diagnosis usually already implies what the best political remedy is supposed to be. As the politically motivated uses of crisis metaphors in the recent discussions about the global financial and economic crises have illustrated, the often fierce debates about the pros and cons of the various bailouts were carried out at least as much in metaphorical as in literal terms, even though many of the political protagonists are unlikely to be aware of the metaphorical nature of the discourses of crisis. Though ‘crisis’ is, of course, also an economic concept, the actual uses of the term in the media and the discourses surrounding it show that the metaphoric implications, more often than not, gain the upper hand. Other salient examples here are the host of articles in The Financial Times and many other newspapers about the volatile stock markets. In contrast to other more covert uses of the metaphor of crisis, the metaphoric nature of the medicinal discourse of crisis is forgrounded as soon as other metaphors belong to the same metaphoric field, i.e. to what Weinrich and others have felicitously called Bildfeld. A typical case in point is an article published in The Financial Times entitled “Fear Prevents Patient from Responding to Treatment”: “The patient is not responding. Liquidity infusions, co-ordinated rate cuts, state-sponsored band bail-outs — nothing seems to be working. The London market is in cardiac arrest.” 69 Politicians from the opposition can, of course, raise the question of whether “the right medicine is being given in the right dose at the right 68 See Lakoff and Turner 65. 69 Neil Hume, “Fear Prevents Patients From Responding to Treatment,” Financial Times, 11 October 2008 <http: / / www.ft.com/ cms/ s/ 0/ 04aafa5e-972c-11dd-8cc4-000077b07658. html> 20 June 2009. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 252 time.” 70 Even though politicians, business leaders, and economists may agree on the diagnosis, the metaphorical implications of ‘crisis’ provide no guarantee that agreement on remedies is likely to be achieved. Sixth, metaphors of crises and catastrophes can fulfil legitimizing or licensing functions because they provide rationalizations of cultural changes and justifications for whatever diagnosis and therapy the ‘crisis managers’ come up with. Forging emotional and functional links between such manifestly unlike phenomena as the world of banking and finance and the realm of illness, the metaphor of crisis serves as an important means of legitimizing whatever desperate measures are proposed by the government. As the example quoted above serves to illustrate, even desperate remedies are in order to try to cure a sick patient’s disease because exceptional times like the global banking crisis require exceptional remedies. Though people tend to agree that even someone like President Obama cannot cure a sick world economy alone, the prevailing diagnoses of global economic crisis seems to legitimize just about any desperate and tough remedy, the more so as long as everybody agrees that ‘the patient is still in intensive care,’ that there is great danger of contagion or infection, and that the financial turmoil has begun to put even formerly healthy businesses at risk. In short: The legitimizing or licensing functions of the metaphor imply that crises call for immediate crisis intervention by experienced crisis managers, even radical attempts to try first aid are no longer questioned, and if prolonged therapy seems to be unavoidable, this is also readily accepted once agreement on suitable remedies is achieved. In doing so, metaphors not only provide highly simplified accounts of complex cultural changes, they implicitly also project what Eubanks aptly calls “licensing stories: ” 71 [F]or us to regard any mapping as apt, it must comport with our licensing stories — our repertoire of ideologically inflected narratives, short and long, individual and cultural, that organize our sense of how the world works and how the world should work. 72 In the light of Eubanks’ hypotheses about what motivates metaphoric mappings, it is probably no coincidence that metaphors of crises and catastrophes are currently the most popular of all of the tropes used for describing the state of affairs. This may largely be attributed to the fact that the licensing 70 David Bowers, “View of the Day: Bad Medicine,” The Financial Times, 3 December 2008 <http: / / www.ft.com/ cms/ s/ 0/ ed8faf98-c153-11dd-831e-000077b07658.html? nclick_ch eck=1> 20 June 2009. 71 Eubanks 424. For a concise definition, see Eubanks 437: “Licensing stories are narratively structured representations of an individual’s ideologically inflected construal of the world.” 72 Eubanks 426. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 253 stories associated with fatal illness ensure that the measures proposed are generally regarded as especially apt, reflecting as they did a broad cultural, ethical, and normative consensus: “That is to say, our world-making stories give us the license — provide the requisite justification — needed to regard possible metaphoric mappings as sound.” 73 The licensing stories implied in metaphors of crises and catastrophes provide historical mininarrations about the ‘natural’ origin and genesis of the problematic situation. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, metaphors of crises are central to the formation and maintenance of collective identities, because they provide simple and coherent accounts of complex developments and because the mininarrations entailed in these metaphors have important propagandistic and ideological implications, nurturing a culture’s dominant fictions. Metaphors of crisis, for instance, arguably tend to serve as subtle ideological handmaidens of capitalism, because they glorify the world that the crisis manager set out to save. Metaphors thus help to create that culturally sanctioned system of ideas, beliefs, presuppositions, and convictions which constitutes sets of beliefs, hierarchies of norms and values, or a “system of ideological fictions” like capitalism. 74 The images and stories projected by metaphors are thus instrumental in what one might call the imaginative forging of the fictions of late-capitalism. After all, not only a nation but “any imagined community, is held together in part by the stories it generates about itself.” 75 In short: Metaphors of crises serve to narrativize and naturalize complex cultural, economic and political transformations, projecting ideologically charged plots onto the developments they purport merely to represent or to illustrate. In doing so, they arguably do creative work in that they serve to define how the cultural transformations associated with the current economic problems are understood by the contemporaries. Generating a whole network of ideological implications and normative entailments, the metaphoric mappings also play “a central role in the construction of social and political 73 Eubanks 426-27. 74 See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995) 321. Said calls Orientalism a “system of ideological fictions” and equates that phrase with such terms as “a body of ideas, beliefs, clichés, or learning” (205), “systems of thought,” “discourses of power,” and with Blake’s famous “mind-forg’d manacles” (328). 75 Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 1. For the concept of imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). A NSGAR N ÜNNING 254 reality.” 76 Since metaphors have “the power to define reality,” 77 they even constitute a license for policy change and political and economic action. 78 VI Metaphors and the Collective Unconscious: On the Value of Cognitive Metaphor Theory for the Study of the Discourses of Crisis Even if these building-blocks for a metaphorology and narratology of crisis may raise more questions than they have managed to answer, perhaps they can make a small contribution to illuminating the complex processes involved in the discursive, metaphorical, and narrative construction of crises. The sketched out narratology and metaphorology of crisis can certainly not offer a cure for the medial production of crises, but it can nevertheless promise a little healing or relief, in that it can provide some beams of light that allow one to see better through the crisis fog spewed out by the media. A narratology of crisis guides our attention, on the one hand, to the narrative transformations through which a happening becomes an event and a story with a particular narrative pattern of the type ‘crisis’. On the other hand, an analysis of the metaphorical origin and implications of the metaphorical concept of crisis can shed light on the action roles and plots of the mininarratives which are implicit in every diagnosis of crisis. It offers the prerequisites to describe the action roles as well as the structural and narrative patterns that bind together the scenarios that the metaphor of crisis projects. In conclusion, I would like to provide a brief assessment of the value that a cognitive and cultural analysis of metaphors like ‘crisis’ may have for both the study of the relationship between metaphors and culture, and for cultural history and the history of mentalities. As the above analysis has hopefully shown, metaphors can profitably be understood as narrative kernels or mininarrations that consist of a single word and that shed light on the cultural discourses from which they originate. On the one hand, the metaphors of crisis underscore the hypothesis that metaphors indeed shape culture, turning our contemporary media society into a veritable culture of crises, catastrophes, and disasters. On the other hand, the example of crisis also serves to demonstrate that metaphors are themselves shaped by culture in that the ubiquitous discourses and metaphors of crisis reflect the penchant for exaggeration and sensationalism so characteristic of contemporary media culture. The widespread manner of the media of speaking of people, companies, whole economies, and even nations as being plunged ‘deep into crisis,’ suita- 76 Lakoff and Johnson 159. 77 Lakoff and Johnson 157. 78 Lakoff and Johnson 156. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 255 bly dramatic as it is, is aimed at generating interest, excitement, urgency, and the illusion of great importance, underscoring the newsworthiness of whatever the respective story may be about. The significance of metaphors of crises for any history of mentalities is in the light they throw on the habits of thought, the attitudes, and the values that inform a given culture. Moreover, they also illuminate how societies collectively deal with and account for catastrophes, disasters, and other negative cultural transformations. As the above analysis of the popular metaphors of crises and catastrophes have shown, it is not only poets who think in terms of metaphors, but also journalists, bankers, politicians, and theorists who try to account for cultural transformations, and arguably even whole cultures. 79 The plethora and ubiquity of such metaphors support the hypothesis that such metaphors embody what Elizabeth Ermarth, in a different context, has called “the collective awareness of a culture.” 80 By giving shape and meaning to cultural transformations, metaphors can construct an important “article of collective cultural faith.” 81 Rather than being merely a passive vehicle that reproduces the ideology of our time, metaphors of crises should be conceptualized as playing a creative role in shaping our cultural awareness and in constructing the ideological fictions that provide the mental framework of collective consciousness, or rather of what Fredric Jameson has called ‘the political unconscious.’ Instead of regarding them as mere ornamental devices of literature or political rhetoric, it is more rewarding to conceptualize metaphors as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon, and as an active force in their own right which is involved in the actual generation of ways of thinking, feeling, and of attitudes and, thus, of something that stands behind historical developments. The suggestive metaphors of crises and catastrophes, one might add, that our age lives by show that we, without apparently being aware of it, seem to have already found the discursive spell which can make sense of the complex economic, political, and social changes we generally fail to grasp: “When a metaphor comes to be regarded as an argument, what an irresistible argument it always seems! ” 82 One might add that the same holds true for most of the theories and accounts of cultural transformations which are usually also couched in terms of 79 See Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing, “Einleitung,” Bewegung und Stillstand in Metaphern und Mythen, eds. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984) 14, who argue that metaphors to a great extent pre-structure mentalities and who emphasize the collective nature of this process: “Nicht nur Dichter [...] ‘denken in Bildern’, auch ‘Kulturen’ insgesamt.” 80 Ermarth 89. 81 Ermarth 122. 82 Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; London: Macmillan, 1900) 344. A NSGAR N ÜNNING 256 metaphors. The trouble is that such metaphorical accounts of cultural changes as ‘crisis,’ ‘development,’ or ‘progress’ all too often come to be regarded as an argument, especially in the discourses of politics and economics. In addition, more often than not, they are naturalized to such an extent that people forget their metaphorical nature altogether, mistaking a vivid metaphor for a ‘neutral’ or even realistic description of the actual state of affairs or of changes in the world ‘out there.’ It may also be worth mentioning in passing that there is always more semantic energy in a metaphor than anyone who uses it is ever aware of. As a result of this uncontrollable semantic surplus, a metaphor can just as well have self-disruptive effects, being hoisted with its own petard in that some of the metaphorical entailments may deconstruct the narratives that a metaphor serves to project. 83 On the one hand, all of these metaphors have remarkable metamorphic power in that they actually serve as shape changers, conveniently narrativizing and naturalizing cultural transformations by projecting familiar concepts onto elusive and abstract phenomena that defy direct observation. In doing so, metaphors “can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.” 84 On the other hand, however, the metaphoric entailments are always potentially more numerous, complex, and contradictory than any writer or public speaker is ever likely to fathom. The central metaphor explored in an earlier volume, metamorphosis, 85 for instance, not only provides a very vivid account of a process leading to a complete change in form, structure, substance, or character. It also implies a wide range of threatening aspects like mutability and disruption, which are arguably quite misleading and even detrimental to any attempt at trying to conceptualize and come to grips with the structures of cultural transformations. The metaphor of metamorphosis highlights certain features which are arguably not readily applicable to, or even provide a very distorting view of, cultural transformations while hiding others which are arguably very important, e.g. the question of what agents stand behind, drive, and are responsible for the economic, historical, and cultural changes conveniently subsumed under a metaphoric umbrella term of ‘crisis.’ One might even go so far as to argue that it might be wise to avoid the metaphors of metamorphosis and crisis altogether if one wants to come to terms with cultural transformations and their possible structures. 83 Steven Fink’s popular book Crisis Management (1986; Lincoln, NE: Universe Inc., 2002) provides an interesting case in point in that among its key phrases one does not only find such likely compounds as ‘crisis management plans,’ ‘acute crisis phase,’ and ‘acute crisis stage,’ but also improbable metaphorical phrases like ‘poison pill,’ ‘postdecisional regret,’ and even ‘tampon crisis’ and ‘tampon usage.’ 84 Said, Orientalism 94. 85 See Schlaeger. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 257 In sum, what I hope to have shown is that anyone interested in the structures of the kind of cultural transformations that are dubbed ‘crisis,’ might profit a great deal from taking the study of metaphors into consideration, just as the study of literature and culture might in turn profit from taking into account research in cognitive metaphor theory. Taking a fresh look at the insights of cognitive metaphor theory and historicizing the models and categories it has developed could be an important force in the current attempts to enrich the linguistic and literary study of metaphors in the framework of cultural history and to explore the role that metaphors play as cognitive instruments which impose structures and stories onto amorphous and contingent historical changes. In order to reassess the changing cultural functions that metaphors have fulfilled, it is worth looking more closely at the role of such discursive processes as metaphoric mappings in determining the perception and construction of the way in which events and situations are transformed into ‘crises’ in the first place. These concluding suggestions are not, however, meant to be the last word on any of these complex issues, but rather should be seen as modest proposals for a reconceptualization of the central role that metaphors have always played in man’s attempt to grasp and to make sense of the complex cultural transformations that societies undergo and that people experience and that we call ‘crises’ or ‘catastrophes.’ Though the severity of today’s landslide crises may go far beyond what most people could have imagined, any crisis is unlikely to really reach a country until everybody believes that there really is a crisis. It is only when a metaphor comes to be regarded as, or mistaken for, reality, that a crisis is likely to become a catastrophe. From the point of view of metaphor theory and a narratological perspective there is, in any case, much to be said in favour of a sceptical opposite standpoint to the medial inflation of crisis, for not taking every crisis-story and crisis scenario at face value. In the light of the above considerations, it also seems to be wise to differentiate between the representation of real crises and the medial production of fictional crisis scenarios and generally to give more attention to the discursive strategies, metaphorical implications, plot structures, and medial practices of crisis diagnoses than it has been the case for so long. Precisely because there has for so long been a lack of studies of culturally and historically variable, epoch-specific crisis models and because the histories of literary crisis perception and crisis processes are yet to be written (this goes equally — so far as I can tell from an overview of the research — for all national literatures), it remains to be hoped that there will be further study of this central cultural theme of our times, and that an analysis of the functions of metaphors as figurative knowledge and mininarrations that shape culture may continue to provide new insights and impulses for A NSGAR N ÜNNING 258 research on a phenomenon that can only be fully grasped in an interdisciplinary framework. Steps Towards a Metaphorology (and Narratology) of Crises 259 Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. 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Henning Grunwald and Manfred Pfister. München: Fink, 2007. 41-7. Zerweck, Bruno. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability in Narrative Fiction as Reflection of Cultural Discourses.” Style 35.1 (2001): 151-78. Zill, Rüdiger. “Wie die Vernunft es macht: Die Arbeit der Metrapher im Prozeß der Zivilisation.“ Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg. Eds. Franz Josef Wetz, and Hermann Timm. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. 164-83. ---. “’Substrukturen des Denkens’: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg.“ Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. 209-58. H UBERT Z APF Metaphors of Literary Creativity I Introductory Remarks: Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory The assumption that metaphors and metaphorical language are not just borderline cases of normal speech and rhetorical embellishments of rational argument but form a constitutive element of human discourse and knowledge is not entirely new in cultural and philosophical history. Outside the grand narrative of Enlightenment rationalism, there had been a long, alternative philosophical tradition from Vico, Herder, and the Romantics to Nietzsche and Vaihinger, for whom the fundament of language was not literal but imaginative and metaphorical. Nietzsche postulated a Fundamentaltrieb, a fundamental anthropological drive of human beings towards metaphor-making, which corresponded to his conception of language and thought as world-producing, life-enhancing forms of cultural productivity rather than as representations of pre-existing realities. 1 In the 20 th century, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg was one prominent voice who, building on ideas of Ernst Cassirer and others, pointed out the necessary role of what he called “background metaphors” (such as Light, Book, or Shipwreck) for knowledge which went beyond the reductivism of abstract concepts, and which took account of the hermeneutical embeddedness of human thought in the complexities of the lifeworld. Yet it was only in the latter part of the 20 th century that this fundamental role of the metaphorical mode has been gaining increasing acceptance in the humanities. One direction of current transdisciplinary scholarship in which the significance of metaphors has been emphasised is cultural ecology, according to which metaphoric rather than logocentric speech is seen to correspond to the interrelational, dynamical, and metamorphotic world-view and epistemology of ecology. According to Gregory Bateson, the pioneer of cultural ecology, there is an affinity between the metaphorical, “poetic” mode of 1 Nietzsche says about this drive of metaphor-building: “[Es ist ein] Fundamentaltrieb des Menschen, den man keinen Augenblick wegrechnen kann, weil man damit den Menschen selbst wegrechnen würde.“ Friedrich Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn, Vol. III/ 2. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873, eds. Giorgio Golli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967) 381. H UBERT Z APF 264 language and ecological thinking because both are relational and assume analogies between heterogeneous spheres, particularly between the spheres of culture and of nature. 2 Another direction of contemporary scholarship which has systematically addressed the world-making and mind-shaping power of metaphors and which has become increasingly visible in recent years, is cognitive linguistics and the cognitive sciences. Combining linguistic, anthropological, evolutionary, and neurological research, cognitive science newly assesses the role and function of metaphors in language and culture on the interface between different disciplines. In the works of cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Merlin Donald, Peer Aage Brandt and others, metaphors are not only a hallmark of literary writings, but a formative and indispensible aspect of all human language, thought, and, indeed, of life. Metaphors We Live By, the title of Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal book on the subject, has become a catchword phrase that indicates the extent to which the epistemological power of metaphors has found the attention of cognitive linguists, who simultaneously integrated findings from areas such as brain research, evolutionary biology, psychology, and cultural history. For a considerable time, however, cognitive scientists tended to focus primarily on the role of metaphors in everyday language and thought, and to take metaphors in literary texts merely as instances of the universal range of collectively shared cultural metaphors, demonstrating how these general “conceptual metaphors” 3 — such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, DEATH IS A FI- NAL DESTINATION, TIME IS A RIVER, ANGER IS HEAT — also provide the imaginative material of literary texts. It has only been more recently that attention has been directed, at least to some extent, to the specific ways in which art and literature deal with these metaphors, in which they extend, intensify, differentiate, defamiliarize, recombine, and recontextualize those conventional metaphors in innovative ways, thereby creating new metaphorical and imaginative spaces which can be productively reintegrated into the larger process of cultural evolution. This interest in the creative potential of art and literature has been documented in an essay collection edited by Turner, The Artful Mind, 4 in which art and literature are no longer viewed as a separate, more or less marginal supplement to everyday language and thought but as an exemplary site of exploration and collectively relevant testing-ground for the ways we think, in which the mind works, and in which human creativity functions. 2 Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) 237-42. 3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980). 4 Mark Turner, ed., The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). Metaphors of Literary Creativity 265 In my paper, I would like to take up these cues and focus on the question of how the phenomenon of literary creativity can be newly illuminated by relating such findings of cognitive linguistics and contemporary creativity research to literary studies. More specifically, I would like to ask to what extent the generative power of metaphors that is described in different but comparable ways by cognitive science and by cultural ecology, is paradigmatically expressed and explored in the metaphors of creativity that have shaped and continue to shape literary history and theory. I am therefore not merely “applying” concepts of cognitive linguistics or cultural ecology to literary studies but rather ask how the particular form of cultural knowledge provided by literature and literary studies can contribute in significant ways to elucidate the crucial issues of metaphors and cultural creativity that are addressed within those transdisciplinary directions of research. My argument can be summarized in the following points: 1. Creativity is an important concept in contemporary science which is discussed and explored in different disciplines but which has been rather neglected in literary studies, even though art and literature are especially instructive examples of cultural creativity. 2. Literary texts are meta-cognitive, they are self-reflexive models of human cognition and creativity. Since metaphors are a constitutive mode and medium of literary production, metaphors of creativity in literary texts are a central site of the articulation and reflection of creative processes in literature and culture. 3. The two poles of traditional metaphors of literary creativity are “inspiration” and “composition.” They have shaped different periods of literary and cultural history, but more often than not, they can be seen to interact in complex and productive ways in actual texts. 4. The structure of creativity as it emerges from these metaphors is paradoxical. It includes rational and pre-rational, conscious and unconscious, selfreferential and relational factors which cannot be brought into one closed or coherent system. 5. This corresponds to findings of contemporary creativity research, which describes the structure of creativity as a combination of incompatibles, a paradoxical integration of the non-integrated, as an “excess structure” (Brandt) in which the logical order of thoughts is suspended and the otherwise inaccessible can be symbolically represented. 6. Metaphors are a central form of this creativity because they involve the mapping and blending of heterogeneous domains onto each other. Acts of multiple conceptual blending in art generate “emergent structures” (Turner) of high semantic density and complexity in texts, which are at the same time highly indeterminate and open to interpretation, and therefore depend on the creative response of the reader to actualize their possible meanings. H UBERT Z APF 266 7. These processes and metaphors of literary creativity can be usefully described from the perspective of cultural ecology. As can be seen from numerous examples, nature and the body are particularly frequent source domains of metaphors of creativity in texts. This indicates that the culture-nature relationship as the fundamental matrix of cultural ecology is an especially productive source and generative principle of metaphors of literary creativity. 8. Metaphors of literary creativity in this view are interpendent with more general cultural functions of literary texts such as critically balancing cultural deficits, breaking up collective traumas, activating marginalized or excluded dimensions of the civilizing system, developing alternatives to established cultural practices, and thereby renewing the vitality and creativity of the larger culture. Literary creativity as symbolic representation of the nonrepresented has thus not only ecological but ethical implications for a more open, inclusive, and pluralistic concept of life and human culture. II Cultural Ecology, Cognitive Science, and Literary Creativity Cognitive science and cultural ecology have in common that their work is positioned in an intermediate realm between the natural and the cultural sciences. While cognitive science combines linguistics with anthropology and neurology, cultural ecology transfers the study of natural ecosystems to cultural ecosystems. Both approaches, however, if they are to be convincingly related to phenomena of culture and literature, must be aware of functional and epistemological differences between the areas of knowledge they are trying to integrate. Science and literature, evolutionary biology and cultural studies represent distinct cultures of knowledge that have evolved in their own ways in modern history, and that can only fruitfully be brought together in a non-reductive transdisciplinary dialogue which avoids simply subsuming the one under the other’s premises. In cultural ecology, this difference between disciplines and cultures of knowledge has been acknowledged even while the attempt to create a new “unity of knowledge” 5 across the specialised subdisciplines of contemporary science seems a fascinating and indispensable project since reality in an ecological view is not characterized by isolated phenomena but by complex interrelations and interactions between them. If interdependence and diversity are complementary principles of an ecological epistemology, the dialogue between different disciplines and cultures of knowledge must observe these principles as well. Cultural ecology has branched out from biological ecology into a multidisciplinary project in a process in which former deter- 5 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1999). Metaphors of Literary Creativity 267 ministic assumptions about the culture-nature relationship have been superseded by more complex views of interdependence-yet-difference. 6 On the one hand, cultural ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles. On the other hand, it recognizes the relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. Even as the dependency of culture on nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, gain ever more interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and natural evolution is acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution. 7 While causal deterministic laws are therefore not applicable in the sphere of culture, there are nevertheless productive analogies which can be drawn between ecological and cultural processes. Gregory Bateson’s project of an Ecology of Mind (1973) is based on general principles of complex dynamical life processes, for example the concept of feedback loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within the mind itself. What is foregrounded in this view is the processual, interactional, and selfreflexive qualities of mental, psychological, and communicational phenomena. Bateson’s methodological move opened up an innovative new area of research in which cultural processes could be investigated in their structural coevolution with natural processes, while at the same time their irreducible complexity, flexibility, and creativity were brought out in even greater force. In the recent versions of cognitive science I am referring to in my article, too, this awareness of a double epistemological perspective, of the recognition of both the interrelatedness and the difference between nature and culture, brain and mind, natural and cultural evolution seems to be present as a necessary working hypothesis for transdisciplinary work across the boundaries between the natural and cultural sciences. In the work of Turner and others, the complex operations and the creative potential of the “artful” human mind in its activities of cognitive integration and conceptual blending emerge as a culture-specific feature of the human species, which distinguishes it from other species. 8 This view recognises both the interdependence and the semi-independent dynamics of cultural versus natural evolution, mind versus brain, and creative adaptability versus genetic determination. Creativity, as a faculty of the human mind and a force of cultural evolution, is a crucial aspect of this evolutionary dynamics. Creativity, however, is by 6 Disciplines on both sides of the divide thereby turn into “shifting hybrid domains” (Wilson 10) in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurred. 7 See Peter Finke, Die Ökologie des Wissens: Exkursionen in eine gefährdete Landschaft (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2005). 8 Turner, The Artful Mind. H UBERT Z APF 268 definition a non-deterministic concept. It designates a phenomenon which simultaneously triggers and resists the attempts of its scientific explanation. It thus epitomizes, in the attempts to illuminate and “domesticate” this phenomenon within different frames of reference, the double epistemological status between conceptual appropriation and resistance to conceptualization, between causal-empirical explanation and transcausal agency and intentionality which is characteristic of the study of phenomena and processes of human culture. III The Concept of Creativity in Science and Literary Studies It is remarkable to see that while the question of creativity has become an important topic and focus of attention in many different disciplines, it has almost disappeared from the agenda of recent literary scholarship. In 2005, for example, the German Congress of Philosophy in Berlin, an international conference featuring twenty-eight sections with over a hundred papers, was devoted to the topic of “Creativity,” including interdisciplinary contributions not only from philosophy but from law, economics, religion, ethics, psychology, genetic research, neuroscience, linguistics, and art history but no contribution from literary studies. This conspicuous abstinence and scepticism is in part understandable as a reaction to the romantic idealization of the creative genius as a God-like creator of immortal works, a myth which remained influential into the 20 th century, but appeared no longer acceptable in modern and postmodern times, in which instead the dependence of all art on previous art, of texts on intertexts, of individual works on cultural conditions, has become the prevalent view of literary production. On the other hand, the concept of creativity in science and technology has its own ambivalences. Its emergence as a widely used and discussed concept was initially connected to a political context, the competition of the superpowers in the Cold War, in which the United States after the Sputnik shock of 1957 tried to mobilize the creative minds of scientists to serve the cause of democracy by producing new ideas, inventions, and military technologies. In the field of economics, too, creativity became an influential concept which, building on ideas such as Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” taught managers and business leaders that to be truly innovational, they also had to be destructive and have the courage to radically demolish and rearrange previous forms of production and economic structures. While creativity thus became an instrument of strategic planning during the Cold War and an ideological tool in the global expansion of a laissez-faire capitalism, it simultaneously became a favourite subject in psychology and in the wider culture as well, particularly in the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, where it was a key concept in the democratic self- Metaphors of Literary Creativity 269 empowerment and liberation of individuals and communities from the constraints of a conformist, one-dimensional society. If creativity was, on the one hand, instrumentalized for political, economic, and military purposes as part of a discourse of innovation based on an unlimited belief in scientifictechnological progress, it became, on the other hand, a metaphor of personal and communal emancipation from those same forces of technology and social conformism, which found expression in alternative lifestyles, in popular culture, in guides to creative self-fulfilment, in antiauthoritarian education or in experimental forms of postmodern art such as, for example, Joseph Beuys’ assumption of the universal creativity of humans and his famous proclamation that every human being is potentially an artist. 9 Creativity is thus a highly ambivalent but powerful concept in contemporary culture and science. The lack of attention in literary studies to the phenomenon of creativity is all the more astonishing because there is a long tradition in literature and literary theory which, implicitly and explicitly, has dealt with this phenomenon in particularly instructive and complex ways that appear specifically relevant today. As Merlin Donald among others observes, literary texts are meta-cognitive, they are self-reflexive models of human cognition and creativity. 10 Since metaphors are a constitutive mode and medium of literary production, it appears that metaphors of creativity in literary texts are a central site of the articulation and reflection of creative processes in literature and culture. IV Metaphors of Creativity in Literary History and Theory Metaphors of literary creativity have been traditionally positioned between the two poles of inspiration and composition, one referring to the sources of the inner mental, emotional, and psychological energy of the artist for creating artworks, the other to the craft, rules, techniques, and formal requirements of the successful execution of the artwork. One pole goes back, basically, to Plato, for whom poetry was a pararational, philosophically questionable form of magical inspiration, the other to Aristotle, for whom poiesis was a rational form of making and composing symbolic action in language as a carefully structured whole based on the mimesis of culturally representative experience. Both positions have been present in different forms and mixtures in literary history. Associated with the pole of inspiration, typical metaphors are the invocation of muses, of divine or demonic spirits, visions, dreams, hallucinations, flashes of insight, epiphanies, journeys into underworlds or 9 Surprisingly enough, this view seems to tie up with recent findings of cognitive science in which the human mind, too, is “artful” by its nature and its cultural evolution. (See Turner, The Artful Mind) 10 Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” ed. Turner, The Artful Mind 5. H UBERT Z APF 270 surreal trance states — in other words, imaginative scenarios in which the poetic self experiences borderline states of ecstasy, of being “outside of itself,” which bring it into contact with a transhuman sphere and agency that lends him a rare power of speech and insight into the deeper meanings of the human world. Literary creativity is staged here as an encounter between the poetic self and an Other whose symbolic presence is regarded as a necessary but never fully available source of imaginative energy and inspiration. Eros and love, of course, have been preferred topoi of this inspirational force throughout literary history, which is not only true of classical examples like minnesongs or renaissance and romantic love poetry but persists in modern literature as well, as, for example, in Emily Dickinson’s poem: Love — is anterior to Life — Posterior — to Death — Initial to Creation, and The Exponent of Earth. 11 It also occurs in contemporary novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, or Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, in all of which an intensely beloved Other becomes the inspirational power for the narrative process. Another predominant manifestation of this inspirational power has been the fascination with great poets and texts, some notable examples being Chapman’s translation of Homer to Keats, the visionary encounter with William Blake for the poetological awakening of Allen Ginsberg, the magic of a Schubert song for Samuel Beckett’s short film Nacht und Träume, or the magnetic pull of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) for Marc Estrin’s novel Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa. On the other hand, the pole of ‘creativity as composition’ is associated with metaphors such as ‘art as work,’ ‘as technique,’ ‘as mastery of forms and materials.’ It refers to the ‘making’ and formal and material production of an artefact which is designed to achieve maximum cultural representativeness and effect. To achieve this purpose, the knowledge and observance of the rules of the trade, of the use of language, the genres, the structural principles of successful writing have primary significance. This Aristotelian view of art as carefully structured, culturally representative mimesis engineered towards certain effects and audience response was, of course, the long-dominant view of the classical tradition from Horace to the Renaissance and into the 18 th century. In the 19 th century, Edgar Allan Poe’s essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” is a programmatic statement of the concept of artistic creativity as a rational, carefully planned and executed activity, explaining how an apparently mystical, dark romantic poem like “The Raven” was in fact com- 11 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little Brown, 1924) 1037. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 271 posed in such a way that every detail of its form is deduced with inevitable logic from its intended effect and overall thematic design. Realism, naturalism, and modernism tended to objectify the process of literary production even further. In T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for example, poetic production is radically depersonalized and is likened to a chemical experiment in which heterogeneous elements from lived experience are brought to mutual reactions in the act of their imaginative synthesis. 12 And in terms of literary innovation, according to Eliot, new works of art can only claim validity if they are aware of the history of their precursors, if the poet has the whole tradition of literature “in his bones.” 13 In postmodern times, this view of the individual text as a site of endless intertextual recycling has been radicalized. Constructivist metaphors and theories of creativity have gained prominence, and concepts from systems theory like emergence, autopoiesis, or self-organization have tended to replace the idea of individual creativity, emphasizing a quasi-objective, demystifying, and often subject-less view of literary creation, which has also influenced contemporary conceptions of art. An extreme form of this practice, of course, are computer-produced texts where individual authorship is wholly replaced by the automatic writing and composing of word sequences or indeed of music and visual art by self-generating computer programs. Yet as has been indicated, the metaphor of spontaneous, inspirational creativity has not wholly disappeared from art and literature. Instead, it has reappeared in ever new combinations with the compositional, intertextual, and intermedial pole especially in postcolonial and multicultural literatures. Indeed it seems that the traditional opposition between inspiration and composition has been translated in post-romantic literature into two kinds of interrelated metaphorical fields and imaginative spaces — into metaphors of creative energy and into metaphors of connecting patterns. The first of them is a chaotic, explosive, disruptive, and radically defamiliarizing textual force, the other a connective, integrational, pattern-building, webmaking, and intertextual force. Rather than an exclusionary opposition, an often conflictive yet also complementary interaction between the two poles is characteristic of how creative processes work and are staged in literary texts. V Contemporary Creativity Research and Literature The paradoxical structure of creativity as it emerges here seems to be confirmed by modern creativity research. 12 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” ed. Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971) 785. 13 Eliot 784. H UBERT Z APF 272 According to the recent consensus of research, the structure of creativity lies in the integration of alterities and dualities, the bipolarity of product features, the oscillation of processual factors and the paradoxical nature of the components. 14 Hallmarks of the creative mind are originality, spontaneity, and “divergent thinking,” which especially includes the ability to combine opposites and to bring together contradictory mental domains — rationality and emotion, planning and spontaneity, distance and empathy, a sense of order and a tolerance of chaos. 15 The creative process is usually differentiated into the four stages of preparation, incubation, illumination, and elaboration 16 — whereby the first and fourth stage is clearly related to the metaphor of creativity as work and composition, the second and third to the metaphor of creativity as inspiration and “unconscious intuition.” 17 This double dynamics appears to transform itself into the creative product: Arthur Koestler calls this phenomenon “bi-sociation,” which he describes as a “clash of two incompatible codes” and which “always operates on more than one plane” simultaneously. 18 The evolutionary biologist Manfred Eigen refers in this context to the two hemispheres of the brain, with which different dispositions and faculties of the human mind are associated — conscious, verbal, intellectual, analytical, logical-constructive versus unconscious, musical, visual, holistic, and metaphoric faculties. 19 While in everyday thought and cultural practice, these spheres are usually kept apart, the act of creativity, according to Eigen, is characterized by a complex interplay of the two habitually separated hemispheres of the brain. Even if this distinction seems meanwhile less rigid in current neuroscience, it still provides a useful hypothesis that helps to illuminate the lateral, transversal dynamics of creativity. 20 14 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ed., Kreativität — ein verbrauchter Begriff? (München: Fink, 1988) 11 (my translation). 15 Norbert Groeben, “Literary Creativity,” The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: Utrechtse Publikaties voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap 35, eds. Dick Schram and Gerard Steen (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001) 17-34. 16 Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” trans. George Bruce Halsted, The Fountain of Science (1908; Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1915). 17 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964). 18 Koestler 35. 19 See Manfred Eigen, “Mozart — oder unser Unvermögen, das Genie zu begreifen,” Kreativiät, ed. Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla (Berlin: Springer, 2000) 27-46. 20 The activities of the two hemispheres cannot be sharply separated but are linked by the corpus callosum. Nevertheless, the production of metaphors and emotionally charged images seems to be primarily located in the right hemisphere and the production of linear, nonmetaphoric verbal concepts in the left hemisphere. What this means is that metaphors go beyond a specifically verbal thinking and are based on preverbal recognition of similarities. Metaphorical thinking, in its preverbal dimension as basic perception of similarities and its verbal dimension as a rhetorical device of language, thus seems to be one form of mental activity which extends across the two hemispheres of Metaphors of Literary Creativity 273 In this light, literary creativity appears as a cultural form which partakes of and combines elements from both sides of this polarity. It is a form of cultural textuality whose “generative signature” 21 consists in symbolically bringing together what is habitually or culturally separated, opening up closed systems of thought towards complex dynamical interactions of rational and pre-rational, abstract and concrete, analytic and holistic modes of language and experience. If the human brain strives “for the integration of perceptual and conceptual material over time,” 22 and towards the construction of unity in the diversity of information that the brain has to process, then the literary imagination seems to be a form of cultural creativity which specifically corresponds to and draws on this inherent human disposition. Metaphors in literary texts are an exemplary form of this activity because they perform the mapping and blending of heterogeneous domains onto each other in ways which generate both diversity and unity, the semantic pluralisation, and the imaginative “compression” 23 of their material. This imaginative compression of divergent domains of knowledge, according to Turner, is rooted in basic everyday operations of the human mind, but gains its characteristic and most productive cultural expression in art. “Double-scope blending”, that is the blending of divergent mental spaces into a new, “emergent structure,” “is the crucial incremental cognitive capacity that makes it possible for human beings to create and share art.” 24 The acts of multiple conceptual blending which achieve the imaginative compression of divergent domains of knowledge generate emergent structures of high semantic density and complexity in texts, which are at the same time highly indeterminate and open to interpretation, and therefore depend on the creative response of the reader to actualize their possible meanings. In art and especially in modern art, this compression and complex integration is not an easy and harmonious process but involves tension and conflict, because it specifically aims at the inclusion of the non-integrated, the incompatible, the excluded and forbidden into language and cultural discourses. A particularly interesting mode of such cognitive integration is the the brain: Katrin Kohl, Poetologische Metaphern: Formen und Funktionen in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007) 153. 21 Wolfgang Iser adopts this term from William Wimsatt’s concept of “generative entrenchment,” which Wimsatt relates to evolutionary history but which Iser transfers to the aesthetic conceptions that have evolved in cultural history and that have shaped the conditions of literary emergence and productivity. See Wolfgang Iser, “Von der Gegenwärtigkeit des Ästhetischen,” Theorien der Literatur: Grundlagen und Perspektiven, eds. Hans Vilmar Geppert and Hubert Zapf, (Tübingen: Francke, 2003) 9-28. 22 Donald 4. 23 Turner, The Artful Mind. 24 Turner, The Artful Mind 94. H UBERT Z APF 274 mode of “forbidden fruit-integration,” 25 that is the juxtaposing and blending of mainstream cultural concepts with cultural taboos, of official discourses with repressed zones of the collective consensus, of established norms with the culturally excluded or stigmatized. The forbidden fruit metaphor takes the story of the Fall of Man from Genesis as a prototypical scene of creative transgression, opening up a self-enclosed normative system towards a process of discovery and self-knowledge which is both painful and potentially regenerative. The act of cognitive integration of the excluded is thus highly conflictive and problematic yet also highly creative, generating new structural connections in otherwise unrelated material but also, as Per Aage Brandt formulates it, an “excess structure” in which the variously conceived “Other” of dominant cultural assumptions and truth-claims can be articulated, which remains unarticulated in non-literary modes of speech and discourse. 26 This excess structure can relate to a cultural other, an erotic or transhuman force, the rationally unavailable, a non-linear process, the nonhuman other of the pre-cultural world of nature, or the indeterminacy of the text itself, which in this view is not simply a resistance to structural order and control but a necessary source and element of the text’s creative process. VI Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity I would like to suggest that one of the ways in which this dynamical interactional structure of literary creativity can be usefully illuminated is by looking at it from the perspective of cultural ecology. In Peter Finke’s project of an evolutionary cultural ecology, Bateson’s ecology of mind is fused with concepts from systems theory. The various sections and subsystems of society are described as “cultural ecosystems” with their own processes of production, reduction, and consumption of energy — involving physical as well as psychic energy. This also applies to the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own internal forces of selection and selfrenewal, but also have an important function within the cultural system as a whole. From the perspective of this kind of cultural ecology, the internal landscapes produced by modern culture and consciousness are equally important for human beings as their external environments. Human beings are, as it were, by their very nature not only instinctual but cultural beings. Literature and other forms of cultural imagination and cultural creativity are necessary to continually restore the richness, diversity, and complexity of those inner landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the emotions, and interpersonal communication which make up the cultural ecosystems of modern 25 Turner, The Artful Mind 111. 26 Peter Aage Brandt, “Form and Meaning in Art,” The Arful Mind, ed. Mark Turner 176. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 275 humans, but are threatened by impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomized, standardized, and depersonalized contemporary world. Viewed in this context, literature appears itself as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of “cultural ecology” in the sense that it has staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and non-human “nature,” and from this paradoxical act of creative regression has drawn its specific power of innovation and cultural selfrenewal. 27 Literature in this view acts like an ecological force within language and the larger system of cultural discourses, transforming logocentric structures into energetic processes, and opening up the logical space of linear conceptual thought into the “ecological space” 28 of non-linear complex feedback relationships. As a transformative ecological energy-field within language and cultural discourses, literature is, on the one hand, a cultural-critical medium which exposes and stages the imbalances, repressions, hidden conflicts, ossifications, and blind spots of a civilizational reality system, and, on the other hand, a regenerative medium which articulates the culturally excluded and repressed in ways in which it is symbolically reintegrated into the larger ecology of life and into a renewed vital interrelationship between culture and nature. Literature thus operates between the poles of deconstruction and regeneration, of cultural criticism and cultural self-renewal. 29 In this productive force-field between literature and culture, the self-reflexive staging and imaginative exploration of the relationship between culture and nature represents a specifically powerful focus and source of creative energy. VII The Culture-Nature Relationship as Source Domain of Creativity Metaphors in Literary Texts It is remarkable to see to what extent nature and the body have provided significant source domains for metaphors of creativity throughout literary history. Even though they have gone through multiple changes and historical transformations, the reference to these source domains connects archaic with 27 See Hubert Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans (Tübingen: Narr, 2002) and Hubert Zapf, “Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies,” Anglia 124, 1 (2006): 1-10. 28 See Peter Finke, “Kulturökologie,“ Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998) 294-96. 29 See Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie and Hubert Zapf, “New Directions in American Literary Studies: Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology,“ English Studies Today: Recent Developments and New Directions, eds. Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger (Trier: WVT, 2007) 139-64. H UBERT Z APF 276 most recent forms of literature. Their continuing presence indicates that the reconnection of cultural evolution with natural evolution, of technocentric with “biocentric” 30 forms of life and sources of energy, seems a fundamental ecological matrix of literary texts. One significant source domain are the four elements as fundamental forms of experiencing the biocentric environment of human cultures. 31 The element of fire is specifically relevant as an inspirational force that is both creative and destructive, a sign of radical discontinuity yet also of new beginnings, of liberation and rebirth. It is connected to heat, light, intensity, and to productive yet also self-consuming creative energy. Personified in archaic mythological figures such as Phoenix the mythical firebird who dies in the fire and is reborn from the ashes, or Prometheus the bringer of fire and creator of humans, it has a memorable manifestation in the Pentecost event of the Bible, where the Holy Spirit appears in tongue-shaped flames above the heads of the assembled disciples, empowering them to inspired speech and transcultural communication beyond the boundaries of their own language. When such traditional mythological symbols are employed as metaphors of creativity in literary texts, of course, they have to be used creatively themselves. Otherwise they would remain clichés and be ill-suited to perform the process of literary and cultural self-renewal which they are intended to engender. Thus in the evolution of literature, they have been constantly extended, transformed, defamiliarized, ironized, recontextualized, and turned into self-referential signifiers of creative energy as in Nietzsche’s famous poem from Ecce Homo: Ja, ich weiß, woher ich stamme: Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme glühe und verzehr ich mich. Licht wird alles, was ich fasse, Kohle alles, was ich lasse — Flamme bin ich sicherlich. 32 Emily Dickinson in her paradoxical, radically revisionist way speaks of the “black light” inspiring her poetic imagination, and the modernist poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, too, describes the intensity of her creative self in the image of a candle consuming itself in the fire: “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night, / But oh, my foes, and ah, my friends, / It gives a lovely light.” 33 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, the letter A as the central textual signifier is associated with the inspirational heat of fire (when 30 See Wilson. 31 See Gernot Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989). 32 Nietzsche Vs 62. 33 Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Pig,” A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922) 9. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 277 the narrator finds the original letter, a faded piece of cloth, among the forgotten archives of the Custom House and instinctively puts it on his breast, he feels a “burning heat” as of “red-hot iron,” and lets it fall to the floor in a moment which marks the return of his long-paralyzed imagination and enables him to write his novel). 34 A contemporary example would be Louise Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love, where fire not only supplies the central metaphor for the mutual emotional and erotic obsessions of the four protagonists but for the metamorphotic powers of the postmodern Trickster narrator, who supposedly has died and been cremated but later unexpectedly reappears, alive and well, rising like Phoenix from his ashes. The volcano is a related metaphor. It points to a strong tension between surface and depth, to powerful underground energies which are striving for explosive release — as in Dickinson’s highly paradoxical poem “A Still, Volcano Life,” in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, or Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover, all of these examples where the tension between explosive, formless chaotic energies and the normative strictures of social and linguistic conventions becomes the generative principle of the text. Air and wind, as the sound and energy of moving air, equally have been important signifiers of creativity, as in the myth of the Aeolian harp whose sounds are produced not by human hands but by the air itself, with Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest as a prime example representing the merging of wind, music, and the artistic imagination, or Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind” invoking the wind as “creator and destroyer” to renew the paralyzed creative imagination of the poetic self. Of course, the earth itself is presented as a source of literary creativity in the myth of the Magna Mater, in its cycles of fertility, of growth and decay, of death and rebirth, of day and night, of the seasons and the weather, of seascapes and landscapes, secluded valleys and sublime mountains — all of them becoming possible generative sites of the literary imagination throughout Western and non-Western literatures alike. A particularly frequent and significant source domain for metaphors of literary creativity is water. Springs and fountains as symbolic sites of origins and beginnings are frequent analogies of poetical creativity, as in gothic romantic form in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” whose mighty pleasure dome is built on a “savage place” from whose “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, / A mighty fountain momently was forced; [...] / It flung up momently the sacred river.” 35 So are, less spectacularly, creeks or brooks as in Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, where the brook becomes an alter ego of 34 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008) 41, 196. 35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ”Kubla Khan,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, eds. Meyer H. Abrams et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 355. H UBERT Z APF 278 the human traveller inspiring a series of intensely emotional images, or in Robert Frost’s West-Running Brook, where the brook is addressed as a source of human and poetological origins — “It is from that in water we were from/ Long, long before we were from any creature [...] The tribute of the current to the source.” 36 Rivers, too, are frequent sites of literary inspiration as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where the flow of the text is modelled on the flowing stream of the Mississippi, or in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the personified imaginative energy of the text, the ghost of the dead daughter, emerges from a river: “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water,” 37 a scene in which images from nature and culture are blended in a symbolic rising from the dead which initiates a polyphonic process of storytelling and remembering of a traumatizing past. Above all, the sea has been a major inspirational model for the poetic rendering of the contradictory forces of birth and death, beginnings and endings, Eros and Thanatos, culture and nature, a site of transformation and metamorphosis, of continuous change and endless return. The mythological birth of Venus from the sea foam has inspired numerous writers, among others Schiller, Rilke, Valéry, or Kate Chopin, whose Edna Pontellier in The Awakening is symbolically reborn on the beach in the ultimate scene of her awakening before her final return to the element of water: “She felt like a new-born creature opening her eyes in a familiar world she had never known.“ 38 The voice of the sea the protagonist hears even from a distance provides the rhythm for her continuous process of self-discovery and for the rhythm of the narration itself, which progresses in wave-like back and forthmovements that correspond to the undulating lines of the Undine-motif in fin de siècle-literature and that set the tone and theme of her many awakenings. In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the waves of the beach are analogues to the cycles of days and the overlapping life cycles of the fictional characters. In Gary Snyder’s poem “Wave,” the image of the wave supplies a structural archetype relating to the domains of nature, the human body, Eros, love, and, indeed, the physical concepts of wave and particle. In Jörg Schneider’s novel Das Wasserzeichen, water becomes a medium for the creative symbiosis of human and non-human life forms as personified in the amphibious protagonist. Plants and vegetation, too, are frequently used, especially flowers — from Wordsworth’s daffodils to the blue flower of his dreams in Novalis’ Heinrich 36 Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook,” Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, eds. Ronald Gottesmann et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 1131. 37 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Penguin/ Signet, 1991) 168. 38 Kate Chopin, The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 136. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 279 von Ofterdingen, the rose throughout literary history in romantic love poetry to Joyce’s rose epiphany in chapter four of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Rilke’s death poem on his epitaph about the rose as “reiner Widerspruch,” as pure contradiction, to William Carlos Williams’ ironic concession “The rose is obsolete BUT each petal extends,” up to Gertrude Stein’s autoreferential modernist version Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, but also the leaves of grass as a poetological principle of Walt Whitman’s poetry, and the soot-stained sunflower in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Sunflower Sutra,” which in its external shabbiness but beautiful yellow inside represents an alter ego of the poetic speaker opening to him the creative potential of his hidden self in the midst of an industrial waste land. An equally prominent source domain of creativity metaphors is the animal world. Melville’s white whale in Moby Dick is an example of a sublime animal turning into a textual signifier which shapes the novel’s style and process and opens it up to an exploration of infinite interpretations and cultural meanings. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” a snake becomes an image of the ambiguity of life and death inspiring her poetry, and in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” too, the snake is a central structural force of the text, which changes from a conventional symbol of evil to an African-American signifier of the female protagonist’s survival. Birds, of course, are frequent alter egos of poets and incarnations of the power of poetic speech and imagination, from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the spotted hawk in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The White Heron,” and Robinson Jeffers’ “Vulture” to Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem.” In Native American literatures, the Trickster figure as a God-like figure of creation and destruction is often personified in animal shape as in Simon Ortiz’ “The Creation according to Coyote,” in which the biblical account of creation is overwritten by a Native American version where the Trickster’s creativity precisely results from the playful openness and unreliability of his speech, or in the mythopoetic figure of the spider-woman in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony as the imaginative source of the novel’s storytelling and symbolic healing ceremony: “Thought-Woman, the spider, / named things and / as she named them / they appeared.” 39 A particularly striking example for this imaginative blending and “compression” of the animal and the human world as the generative signature of a highly innovational text is the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl.” In the story, a human observer is fascinated by axolotls, a species of amphibians which remain in a larva state all their lives and have the ability to fully replace lost organs and even parts of the brain. They live in the aquarium of a zoo which the entranced first-person narrator visits daily and whose form of existence he imagines so intensely that at the end he finds himself turned into an axolotl in the aquarium watch- 39 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 1. H UBERT Z APF 280 ing through the glass the human observer watching him from the outside. The perspectives of subject and object, self and other, human und nonhuman life have been reversed, and it is the inescapable interdependenceyet-difference between the two that opens up the creative space of the story and of its reception by the reader. Apart from the manifold phenomena of the natural environment, bodily functions and forms of self-expression such as breathing, crying, laughing, dancing, or playing, and sensory perceptions such as seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, or tasting are metaphoric source domains for creative processes. Vision and epiphany, as sublime experience as in Romanticism or as momentary perception of everyday objects as in Modernism, and inspiration by sounds, noises, and the music of nature, both serve as such source domains. Gernot Böhme among others has shown to what extent bodily perceptions and sensations such as hot/ cold, soft/ hard, or solid/ fluid pervade language and thought as semiotic markers of an ongoing, life-sustaining ecological exchange relationship between the human organism and its environment, which constitutes the material of aesthetic productivity and sense-making. 40 VIII Conclusion I break off here. The examples I have mentioned, which could easily be multiplied, demonstrate that phenomena and processes of nature, of the human body, and of intense emotional states in their relation to processes of human culture, are used as particularly frequent metaphorical sources of literary creativity. Biocentric images from natural evolution are mapped onto and blended with images of a modern economic and technocentric culture. Thereby metaphors of physical energy are translated into metaphors of psychic and cultural energy, and this translation process is one important form that literary creativity seems to assume. The fundamental ecological relation between culture and nature thus emerges as a particularly powerful generative signature of texts. Its metaphorical transformations generate ever new emergent spaces in texts, in which conventional dichotomies of thought are dissolved and new ways of perceiving the vital interconnectedness between culture and nature are envisioned. This seems to correspond to fundamental features of creativity as described in cognitive theory, in which the integration of the non-integrated and culturally separated appears as a particularly important factor in creative acts (Brandt, Turner, etc.). 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Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger. Trier: WVT, 2007. 139- 64. ---, ed. Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH Metaphorology of Networks I Introduction The ubiquity of the “net” or “network” in both scientific and everyday discourse raises the question: What makes this metaphor so popular? To understand it as a buzzword means neglecting its status as a technical term in theoretical discourses. But since the word is also used colloquially it cannot simply be defined as a paradigm. 1 With network theories presently engaged in developing terms to describe the laws of networks dominating our “interconnected world,” we have become accustomed to using the word colloquially to refer to new technologies, infrastructures, pressure groups, economic and natural phenomena. We can thus speak of a cultural key metaphor, providing us with a key concept seemingly for all of life matters. ‘Cultural’ in this context means that this all-encompassing thought pattern is determined by a longing for familiarity. The metaphor both satisfies and menaces this longing: Promising to make us familiar with basic structures of reality, it also alienates us from familiar perceptions of the world and the self. This ambivalence generates a peculiar fascination, involving both hopes and fears. I intend to focus on this ambivalence within cultural key metaphors as exemplified by the metaphorological field of networks. 2 1 Jochen Koubek, however, considers ”networking“ as a ”cultural paradigm“ in his dissertation Vernetzung als kulturelles Paradigma (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 2004), but his definition of “paradigm” consequently has a broader meaning than Thomas Kuhn’s definition in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962). 2 In the German dictionary of philosophical metaphors, the editor Ralf Konersmann proposed the concept ‘title metaphor’ (Titelmetapher) to signify metaphors framing and inducing coherent world views. See Ralf Konersmann, “Figuratives Wissen“ Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007) 7- 21. Stephen C. Pepper introduced the similar concept of root metaphors for metaphors on which every world view or world-theory is based upon. See Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942; Berkeley: U of California P, 1972). However, in this paper I intend to highlight the ambivalent state of such metaphors. Emphasizing this ambivalence I propose the expression ‘cultural key metaphor.’ A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 286 II The Metaphorical Field of Networks Unlike in German, in English we can distinguish between webs, nets, and networks. In the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam Webster Dictionary we can find the following definitions: A web can be a spider’s web, a woven fabric, gossamer, an endless wire mesh, a membrane that joins the toes of some birds and animal that swim (for example ducks and frogs), and the World Wide Web. Furthermore it is lexicalized as a complicated pattern of things that are closely connected to each other. A net can be a meshed fabric made of string, thread or wire, twisted, knotted or woven together at regular intervals; something resembling a net in reticulation (as of lines, fibers, or figures); it can be used as a piece of sports equipment or as a device for catching fish, birds, or insects. Furthermore it is lexicalized as an entrapping situation (for example, one can “be caught in the net of suspicious circumstances”) and last but not least as a group of radio or television stations, as in network. Aside from being a group of broadcasting stations, networks are complex systems of roads, lines, tubes, nerves, wires, and waves that cross and connect each other. Likewise, a closely connected group of people, companies, and institutions that exchange information or cooperate with each other is called a network. Accordingly, to network or networking is an activity of meeting and connecting. As the Oxford Dictionary exemplifies: “Conferences are a good place to network.“ 3 Depending on its context the German word ‘Netz’ can mean both ‘web’ and ‘net.’ The English ‘net’ as well as the German ‘Netz’ are related to the Gothic ‘nati’ and the Latin ‘nodus’ which means ‘knot.’ ‘Netz’ can be translated just as well with ‘web.’ In this regard the word ‘Netz’ has strong associations to the German counterparts of ‘tissue,’ ‘cocoon,’ or ‘textile.’ And since the ‘net,’ ‘web,’ and ‘network’ are used metaphorically, a rich interaction between their different meanings can be evoked by implying one context in another. Accordingly, the domain of contexts that ‘nets,’ ‘webs,’ or ‘networks’ implicate can be considered as the ‘metaphorical field’ of networks. According to Max Black, a metaphorical field can be defined as the association of frames (source domains) that can be implied by a focus (target domain). In other words, a metaphorical field consists of the interaction between different systems of associated commonplaces. 4 The number of the possible frames relies, 3 All in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, eds. Sally Wehmeier, Colin McIntosh, Joanna Turnbull, and Michael Ashby (Oxford/ New York: Oxford UP, 2006). 4 Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962) 40: “From the expert’s standpoint, the system of commonplaces may include Metaphorology of Networks 287 first, on traditional manners of use or “commonplaces” which may be lexicalized in dictionaries and, second, on new usages of particular metaphors, be it in poetry, science, or everyday life. As can be seen in the case of networks we do not deal with only one system of commonplaces. In the following, I will focus on the interaction between the ancient and the modern “web of life.” III The Web of Life The metaphorical field of networks has a long tradition. In several cultures we encounter the net as a symbol of trapping and gathering. But as already mentioned there is another important context: the domain of textile processing — a domain, which, at least in Europe, was presumably female. In several mythologies of ancient cultures we encounter spinning and weaving goddesses of fate wielding power over death and life, above and beyond the patriarchic peak of the cosmos. 5 In Greek mythology the Moirai spin, measure, and cut off the thread of a person’s life. Let us visualize the process of spinning: The yarn is wound around a spindle. The thread is coiled up to a cocoon just like a shroud which spiders spin around their prey. And viewing the life of a person as a spun thread, life as a whole must result in an interwoven web, the “web of life.” 6 Athena, the goddess of wisdom and the patroness of weaving was offended by Arachne, who had once defeated her in a weaving contest. In revenge, the goddess destroyed the tapestry and loom of the mortal weaver and finally turned her into a spider. 7 Relying on different contexts the web can embody either life-saving, lifesustaining or ominous, life-threatening situations. According to Homer, Penelope, waiting for Ulysses, had to weave his shroud daily to prevent his half-truths or downright mistakes (as when a whale is classified as a fish); but the important thing for the metaphor's effectiveness is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely evoked.” 5 See Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, trans. Frederick J. Fielden (New York: Norton, 1964). 6 See Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's Handbook of Greek Mythology (London: Routledge, 2004) 28; Ferdinand Christian Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie: Oder die Naturreligion des Alterthums, Zweiter oder Besonderer Theil (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1825) 329-30: ”In demselben Sinn kommt der Ausdruk epikloqein zuspinnen, sehr häufig von der Schiksals-Bestimmung vor. [Author’s note: epiklothein is related to the name of Clotho who spins the thread], Odyss[ey]. I. 17. III. 208. IV.208. VIII. 259. Il[ias]. XXIV. 525. Spinnen und Weben ist ein sehr allgemeines Symbol für die Wirksamkeit der Natur und Schiksalsgottheiten, und überhaupt für alles dasjenige, wobei nach dem Geseze des Causal-Nexus und in successiver Entwiklung eine Vielheit zur Einheit verbunden wird.“ 7 Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (New York: Penguin, 2004) VI 1-145; See Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook 180-84. A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 288 odyssey ending with failure upon his return. If she had finished it, it would presumably have sealed his fate. By unravelling in the night what she had woven by day she preserved his life as the king of Ithaca. More a life-threatening than a life-sustaining entity, the web as a fateful metaphor traverses The Oresteia. By blending in the context of hunting and trapping, Aeschylus employed the metaphorical field of networks to stage history as a disastrous chain of human action involving violence, revenge, and deceit. 8 On the one hand, the web woven by the fates and the web of fate in The Oresteia; on the other, Penelope’s weaving as the attempt to escape from fate: Webs and nets as products of weaving, plaiting, tying, and braiding represent one of the oldest and yet also the most modernized cultural techniques. The invention of the Spinning Jenny (ca. 1764) figures as a milestone of the industrial revolution. And due to the rapid progress of science and technology the metaphorical field of networks has extended into the context of physiological and technological communications systems. As Laura Otis has shown, 19 th -century physiologists and physicists drew upon each other’s representations of communications networks, studying telegraphs and nerves, stimulating one another in a “complex feedback loop.” This metaphorical coupling still affects “the way we see our bodies, our neighbours, and the world; ” for example: The image of the world wide web […] did not begin with the computer. Emerging from studies of nervous and electromagnetic transmissions, the web has been upheld for two centuries as nature’s own apparatus for transmitting information. Images of bodily communications nets have inspired us to build technological ones, and images of technological ones have inspired us to see them in the body. 9 In other words, since the functionality of nerves had been understood in terms of electrical telegraphy, a new target domain was established in two steps: Represented on a map, the centralized telegraph system looked like a spider’s web — without this mode of visualization the telegraph system would not have been called a network. 10 But since nerves and neurons have 8 Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides, trans. Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian (Oxford/ New York: Oxford UP, 2003) 566-67: “ELECTRA . Remember the strange net they cast to catch you in! / ORESTES . You were tangled in chains forged by no blacksmith, father! ”; 632-35: “ORESTES . The plan is simple: Electra, you go inside / and keep what we’ve arranged to do a secret, / so that the ones who killed an honored lord / by treachery, will by treachery be killed, caught in the tangling net they caught him.” 9 Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001) 2, 13. 10 In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1822), “network” is defined as “[a]ny thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” The existence of interstices, however, requires some cross Metaphorology of Networks 289 been understood as a communications system they have been called a network, too. 11 In 1883 the Italian physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate Camillo Golgi published his Recherches sur l’histologie des centres nerveux. In this paper he proposed the existence of an anastomotic network connecting the whole nervous tissue: ”the diffuse nerve network.“ 12 Although a detailed analysis of the metaphorical field of networks still needs to be done, I would give a first tentative outline concerning this particular context: During the late 19 th century the target domain (focus) “telegraphy” became a source domain (frame) for “neurophysiology” with both together becoming a second-order target domain: “communications systems.” Having been established within the metaphorical field of networks, the new target domain “communications systems” began to interact with the system of commonplaces associated with the traditional metaphor “web of life” by applying it as a source domain. 13 This can be seen, for example, in Herbert Casson’s History of the Telephone (1910). In this paper Casson described the work of the switchboard operators in a telephone exchange as “weaving a web of talk” whose rhythm represents “the very pulse of the city’s life: “ These telephone girls are the human part of a great communication machine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into new patterns every minute. […] [W]hoever has seen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of connections within the star topology of the telegraphy stations. See Sebastian Gießmann, Netze und Netzwerke: Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik, 1740-1840 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006) 57-69. 11 In 1860 the philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer noted: “the comparison of telegraph-wires to nerves is familiar to all.” Herbert Spencer, “The Social Organism,” The Westminster Review, January 1860, qtd. in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Library Edition, Containing Seven Essays Not Before Republished, and Various Other Additions (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891) 306. A decade earlier, the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond introduced the telegraph metaphor to describe the function of the nervous system. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Über thierische Bewegung: Rede gehalten im Verein für wissenschaftliche Vorträge am 22. Februar 1851 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1851) 11; Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Dokumente einer Freundschaft: Briefwechsel zwischen Hermann von Helmholtz und Emil Du Bois-Reymond 1846-1894, ed. Christa Kirsten (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1986) 111. 12 Camillo Golgi, “Recherches sur l'histologie des centres nerveux,“ Archives Italiennes de Biologie 3 (1883): 285-317 and 4 (1884): 92-123. An excerpt of this paper can be found in The Human Brain and the Spinal Cord: A Historical Study Illustrated by Writings From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, eds. Edwin Clarke and Charles Donald O'Malley (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968) 91-96. 13 In terms of the cognitive-linguistic theory of metaphor this “complex feedback loop” or “metaphoric circuit” could be described as a “feeding back” metaphorical entailment. Concerning the concept of “metaphorical entailments” see Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical Introduction (Oxford/ New York: Oxford UP, 2006) 91-105. A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 290 the switchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse of the city's life. 14 Christian Emden described the complex epistemological interaction between images and language of neurophysiology and telegraphy in the 19 th century as a “metaphorical coupling,” which was about to become a concept. 15 Today, the concept of networks has been developed into an almost ubiquitous term in biology, chemistry, physics, ecology, sociology, economics, ethnology, linguistics, computer science, and mathematics — only humanities are said to be still resisting. But aside from being a descriptive term it has gained a new, prescriptive dimension, since “networking” is considered a matter of socialization — associated with the promises and discontents of the “network society: ” On the one hand, Manuel Castells — the theorist of the “network society” — argues, in a world which is constantly changing, it is essential to adopt the logic of networks to provide what he calls ”a combination of secure personalities and flexible personalities.“ 16 On the other hand, the promises of networking correspond to the demonization of networks — be it in the shape of computer-aided observation, epidemics, or terror. IV The Connected Age Succeeding as a name for new technologies, infrastructures, and pressure groups, networks are considered a key factor of social change and stratification. Connoting the good and the bad fortune of the web of life, the network has become an cultural key metaphor. Engaged in developing concepts to describe the laws of networks dominating our “interconnected” world, the emerging “network science” has been defined by the National Research Council (USA) as ”the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.“ 17 According to Duncan J. Watts — profes- 14 Herbert Newton Casson, The History of the Telephone (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971) 65. Sebastian Gießmann follows this metaphorical instruction by comparing the switchboard to the Jacquard loom, see Sebastian Gießmann, “Repatch! “ Netzwerke der Moderne, eds. Jan Broch, Markus Rassiller, and Daniel Scholl (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007) 48. 15 Christian J. Emden, “Epistemische Konstellationen 1800-1900: Nerven, Telegrafen und die Netzwerke des Wissens,“ Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne, eds. Jürgen Barkhoff, Hartmut Böhme, and Jeanne Riou (Köln: Böhlau, 2004) 127-54. 16 Harry Kreisler, Conversation with Manuel Castells, ed. Institute of International Studies, University of California (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001) 9 May 2003. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age, vol. 1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 17 Network Science, ed. National Research Council and Committee on Network Science for Future Army Applications (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005). Metaphorology of Networks 291 sor of sociology at Columbia University in New York and a member of the Committee on Network Science for Future Army Applications — the “science of networks” is the “science of the connected age.“ 18 Particularly known for his mathematical theory of the “small world phenomenon,” Watts did not just deliver the scientific evidence for the platitude that everything is connected with everything else somehow. He and other network scientists such as Albert-László Barabási 19 emphasize the fact that the ways of mutual influences between different agents in complex societies are very short even though the connections concerned might still be unknown. Aware of the numerous interdependencies in complex societies, we use network metaphors colloquially to label the ways things are connected in our daily existence — while not really understanding all these relationships in detail. But it is a widespread assumption in our society that, somewhere out there, there are scientists able to offer us the explanations that will fill in these gaps. Max Weber denoted this state of assumption with his famous expression of the “disenchantment of the world” — die “Entzauberung der Welt.” We should remember that the “disenchantment of the world” does not mean an increasing general knowledge of our living conditions […] but rather it means something else: the knowledge or belief that we could know, if only we wanted to; that there are in principle no unpredictable or uncanny forces, that play into it, but rather that all things — in principle — could be controlled by calculation. 20 As Weber illustrated, we do not need to know exactly how the engine works when we go by tram. It is sufficient to know that it was made by engineers. By the same token, we do not need to know the physical causes of lightning to enjoy it as natural phenomenon and not to fear it as the wrath of God. It is sufficient to know that it has been explained as an effect of atmospheric electricity. Now, 90 years after Weber’s lecture on Science as a Vocation (1919) it still describes our living conditions: Although it is a permanent feature of our life, 18 Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (London: Vintage Books, 2004). 19 Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means For Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 2003). 20 Max Weber, Soziologie, Universalgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik. ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992) 317: “Die zunehmende Intellektualisierung und Rationalisierung bedeutet also nicht eine zunehmende allgemeine Kenntnis der Lebensbedingungen, unter denen man steht. Sondern sie bedeutet etwas anderes: das Wissen davon oder den Glauben daran: daß man, wenn man nur wollte, es jederzeit erfahren könnte, daß es also prinzipiell keine geheimnisvollen unberechenbaren Mächte gebe, die da hineinspielen, daß man vielmehr alle Dinge — im Prinzip — durch Berechnen beherrschen könne. Das aber bedeutet: die Entzauberung der Welt.” See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations, ed. John Dreijmanis (New York: Algora, 2008) 25-52. A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 292 nobody who is not an electrical engineer actually knows exactly how a mobile phone works for example. Thus treating modern societies as “complex” does not mean to consider them as more sophisticated than others. Instead it means that society as a whole is profoundly mediated by economics, technology, and communication. Furthermore, this society lacks a general representation of its identity, and as a result of these two facts, it is obliged to deal with a multiple set of concepts, all competing for the honour of representing the unity of society. V Cultural Key Metaphor Obviously, metaphors are well-adapted to supersede this position. As a cultural key metaphor the “network” has become an “absolute concept,” in the words of the German theorist Erhard Schüttpelz, who argues that it claims a universal validity. 21 Referring to its metaphorical substructure, his argument implies Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “absolute metaphors” with which the German philosopher and cultural theorist founded what has come to be called metaphorology. Blumenberg has defined absolute metaphors as metaphors that can neither be reduced to nor replaced by an “actual” term. Nevertheless, such metaphors are unavoidable in theories or assertions referring to the ”never perceptible whole of reality.“ This phenomenological insufficiency of our “world view” demands metaphorical evidence. Absolute metaphors give an answer to the least decidable and — for that very reason — always decided question: what the world actually is. 22 Based on an anthropological history of ideas, Blumenberg argues that the answer is different from age to age. 23 But the problem is always the same, since it is a question of being. Any culture has to cope with what he called the “absolutism of reality.“ 24 As the embodiment of life-threatening hazards and existential menaces, “absolutism of reality” means for Blumenberg the state 21 Erhard Schüttpelz, “Ein absoluter Begriff: Zur Genealogie und Karriere des Netzwerkkonzepts,“ Vernetzte Steuerung: Soziale Prozesse im Zeitalter technischer Netzwerke, ed. Stefan Kaufmann (Zürich: Chronos, 2007) 25-46. 22 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999) 25-6: “Absolute Metaphern […] repräsentieren das nie erfahrbare, nie übersehbare Ganze der Realität. […] Absolute Metaphern ’beantworten’ jene […] prinzipiell unbeantwortbare Frage: Was die Welt eigentlich sei diese am wenigsten entscheidbare Frage ist doch zugleich die nie unentscheidbare und daher immer entschiedene Frage.“ 23 See Herbert Grabes’ paper in this publication on the metaphorology of the changing concept of truth in the early modern age. 24 Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006). Metaphorology of Networks 293 of consciousness prior to culture. As a “limit concept” 25 (Grenzbegriff) the “absolutism of reality” signifies an existential menace to desires for familiarity and safety, clearness and continuity, predictability and control, assertiveness and autonomy. In this context, the function of “absolute metaphors” is to make the world a familiar and therefore reliable place; what Rüdiger Zill describes as “domesticating the uncanny and the alien“ — but in the process of domesticating, as Zill points out, these metaphors also alienate the familiar. 26 Indeed, this can be observed in the case of the network metaphor: As a cultural key metaphor the concept of networks promises to acquaint us with basic structures of reality, apparently providing us with a key concept for all manner of life matters. By the same token, however, it undermines the quest for familiarity, alienating us from our familiar concepts of the world and the self. VI Conclusion I would like to conclude by giving an example: The German philosopher and cultural theorist Hartmut Böhme sees a need for a network theory in the humanities. He argues that, since the “semantic core” of networks is both the spider’s web and the fishing net, there is no use for a systematic distinction between “culture” and “nature,” and he proposes the following definition: Networks or webs are biological or anthropogenic artificial forms of organization for producing, distributing or communicating material or symbolical objects. […] They do this according to stable principles but in instable balances, (they are) selfregenerating, self-steering, self-expanding, thus autopoietic and evolutionary. 27 25 See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 5. 26 Rüdiger Zill, “Substrukturen des Denkens: Grenzen und Perspektiven einer Metapherngeschichte nach Hans Blumenberg,“ Begriffsgeschichte — Diskursgeschichte — Metapherngeschichte, eds. Hans Erich Bödeker and Mark Bevir (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004) 209-58. 27 Hartmut Böhme, “Netzwerke: Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Konstruktion,“ Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne, eds. Jürgen Barkhoff, Hartmut Böhme, and Jeanne Riou (Köln: Böhlau, 2004) 19 (my translation): “Netze sind biologische oder anthropogen artifizielle Organisationsformen zur Produktion, Distribution, Kommunikation von materiellen und symbolischen Objekten. Netze bilden komplexe zeiträumliche dynamische Systeme. Sind die Objekte homogen, so sind die Netze konnektiv; sind sie inhomogen, so sind die Netze interkonnektiv. Netze synthetisieren sowohl die Einheit des Mannigfaltigen wie sie auch eine Vielfalt ohne Einheit ausdifferenzieren. Sie tun dies nach stabilen Prinzipien, doch in instabilen Gleichgewichten, selbstgenerativ, selbststeuernd, selbsterweiternd, also autopoietisch und evolutionär.“ A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 294 Obviously this definition is meant to apply to more than just communications or supply systems, but actually it applies best to them. Furthermore, when we try to apply it to the above-mentioned “semantic core” of network, the spider’s web and the fishing net, we obtain a paradoxical consequence: The definition misses its primary object. Neither do cobwebs produce material objects nor do they communicate symbols. This circumstance dispenses with the question of whether they behave according to stable principles or not. The same applies to fishing nets: Just imagine how surprised a fisherman would be to find that his net had suddenly grown since the last time he had used it; or if a second net had emerged overnight! Likewise, a spider’s web can hardly be described as “self-producing” (autopoietic) without defining the spider as an executive agency of the evolutionary procedures of its web. If we are not inclined to approve these paradoxical consequences, we ought to assert a difference between ‘nets and webs as items’ and ‘networks as structures of organization.’ Then we can recognize this difference as crossing the difference of culture and nature. In both “nature” und “culture” we can find netted and reticular objects as well as networked proceeding structures. But considering the difference between them we have the ability to watch how attributes and properties of networked or woven items affect and shape networked structures, or more specifically: affect the network as a term for talking about complex interdependencies. To sum up: By claiming universal validity, the cultural key metaphor of the network intertwines the ancient and mythical with the modern scientific implications of the “web of life,” as can be seen in the conclusions of Hartmut Böhme: Captured by the fascination of the epistemological concept ‘Netz’ we get increasingly entangled in this self-woven web and become increasingly aware of the fact. Webs are thus our prison as well as the mode of our liberation. The same act creates both our entanglement in the web and the reflexive emancipation from this entanglement. The web as a universal metaphor of biological or social existence implies that we are always simultaneously inside and outside the web, in the meshes and through the meshes. 28 The attempt to appropriate the preconditions and consequences of network theory in the humanities is certainly relevant and productive. But as promising and fascinating as it might be: We ought to pay attention to the fact that 28 Hartmut Böhme, “Netzwerke“ 32 (my translation): “Im Bann des epistemischen Modells ’Netz‘ stehend, verfangen wir uns in diesem selbstgewobenen Netz immer mehr und wissen dies immer genauer. Netze sind dadurch sowohl unser Gefängnis […] wie der Modus […] unserer Befreiung geworden […]. Die reflexive Emanzipation von der Verstrickung ins Netz erzeugt im selben Akt das Netz, in dem wir uns verstricken. Das Netz als universale Metapher biologischer oder sozialer Existenz heißt deswegen, dass wir immer zugleich im Netz und außerhalb des Netzes sind, in den Maschen und durch die Maschen.“ Metaphorology of Networks 295 the modern “web of life” increasingly tends to interact with the implications of the ancient “web of life.” Thus, we can say, the more network science claims to be disenchanting the world by reasoning and predicting events, the more it runs the risk of re-enchanting the world, and the more it will tend to reinforce the uncanny instead of domesticating it. 29 To acknowledge this ambivalent state of cultural key metaphors does not mean merely asking what such metaphors can say about “structures of reality.” It means asking what such metaphors can tell us about the concerns and expectations of a particular culture. I see the posing of this question as a major task for metaphorology. 29 Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, for example, can be read as a narrative evolvement of the web metaphor and as a fictional examination of this problem: The more the protagonists tied phenomena and events to the mysterious web of life, the more the occult history becomes real to them. I owe this observation to Daniela Meinhardt. A LEXANDER F RIEDRICH 296 Works Cited Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. Eds. and trans. Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian. Oxford/ New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means For Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Penguin, 2003. Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Symbolik und Mythologie: Oder die Naturreligion des Alterthums, Zweiter oder Besonderer Theil. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1825. Black, Max. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. 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M ARTHA B LASSNIGG Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema: The Mirrored Metaphor of Culture and Technology 1 I Introduction This paper concerns the issue of metaphor as a material cultural manifestation of ingenuity by addressing the way technology functions as a metaphor for cultural aspirations as in the case of the early cinematographical apparatuses. The main argument that underpins this paper is that in the flow of material metaphors that prompt theoretical, poetic, and scientific visions lay the roots of a widespread and dubious agency that is invested in matter. A paradigmatic example of this process can be seen in the histories of the invention of moving image technologies and the philosophical discourses they provoked. Drawing on examples from early projection technologies and some aspirations of the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, this paper proposes an interpretation of chemical, optical, and engineering solutions to technological problems as provisional texts that, once in the public domain, became consolidated as both a practical adjunct to, and a metaphorical expression of cultural aspiration. Some of these aspirations can be retrieved by including the perspective of the audiences in their very experiences of the cinematic séance. In doing this, the early cinema can be understood as a philosophical dispositif and as a very precise double of these preceding inspirational imaginary processes, in that it replicates both the problem and problematic of matter and memory in a metaphorical form. By revisiting Henri Bergson’s philosophical take on these issues, it will be argued that the cinematic apparatus exemplifies a synthesis of time flow and movement analysis and mirrors two contradictory models of memory: as database of the past in its material mani- 1 This paper has been developed as part of two interconnected presentations at the GCSC conference “Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory” in conjunction with Michael Punt, whose parallel paper is included in this volume. These consecutive presentations proposed that a useful way to approach the metaphorical dimension of images and visual culture is to separate the symbolic from the material investment of culture in technological artefacts, objects, and techniques, which are often discussed in ways designed to hide these immaterial affordances. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 300 festation and as a forward moving momentum contemporaneously formed with, and impinging on perception. This perspective will attempt to approach the imaginary dimensions of cultural metaphors in technology (as they relate to the early cinema and Michael Punt has coined as the ‘technological imaginary’ 2 ) by situating the audiences’ aspirations within the perceptual processes of the cinema experience. In this way, the creative dynamisms that constitute the metaphorical inscription of cultural aspirations in the very material of technological procedures and artefacts (in particular as they are implied in the various interpretations and imaginary dimensions of the cinema) can be located in the two crucial vectors that constitute the perceptual engagement of the audiences: the experience of time and the activity of memory. When various optical recording and projection devices, which had been developed within the framework of positivist science, entered the public domain in the late 19 th century, they were frequently advertised with reference to the supernatural, as it was particularly the case with apparatuses in connection with the emerging cinema. 3 While the Lumières chose the name Cinématographe 4 for their device with reference to a scientific meaning — the ‘inscription of movement; ’ on a more mundane level, numerous associa- 2 Michael Punt proposes in Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary (Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Cromwell P, 2000) 20: The ‘technological imaginary’ “[…] refers to ways in which technology was thought about both in terms of its hardware and as a representation of cultural aspirations — imagined and actual.” It “[…] provides a framework to factor in both rational and irrational ideas to the processes of invention in order to accommodate and consolidate the range of understandings that surround new ideas. Without the inherent negotiability of the concept of the technological imaginary, it becomes difficult to account for technology as anything other than a hard cultural determinant — something it evidently is not.” 3 This apparent connotation of the supernatural preceded the cinematographic technologies. Sir David Brewster, for example, who had vehemently rejected connections with spiritual realms in favour of the scientific rationalist paradigm regarding optical illusions, nonetheless used analogies with supernatural qualities as teasers in advertisements for stereoscopes in 1858. See Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny,” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995) 47. 4 The Lumières renamed what originally was called ‘projecting chronophotographe’ to ‘Cinématographe’ when they patented their apparatus in February 1895. The original name drew on Étienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotographe of which the Lumières possessed a proto-type; they were well-connected with Marey as they supplied his institute with photographic plates. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago UP, 1992) 193-94. Marey himself commented on this novel solution of projection technique: “[This invention], under the name Cinématographe, attained considerable success, and its name, which is only that of a particular chronophotographe, will long remain associated in memory with all syntheses of movement.” Qtd. in Braun 195. (Emphasis in the original.) Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 301 tions with the survival of the dead or the re-animation of life were explicitly reflected in the names of devices such as Robert Paul’s Animatograph, Jenkins’ Phantascope, later renamed Vitascope, or Skladanowsky’s Bioskope. Although the devices were advertised by featuring the technological mechanism, the advertising rhetoric often invoked spiritual references or connotations with ‘magic,’ such as, for example, Randall Williams’ Grand Phantascopical Exhibition, or the Kinemacolor posters displaying angels and floating women. 5 Even the Lumières’ Cinématographe made no exception; although it was advertised as a scientific apparatus, the announcements were frequently accompanied by poetic descriptions. 6 Every novelty had to have something ‘extra’ — a term that was also used to describe the ghostly apparitions on spirit photographs. 7 Thomas Alva Edison was at the forefront to induce technology with spiritual aspirations, especially with his belief in the survival of the individual personality after death, which was consistent with the Victorian cult of death 8 as well as with the popular fascination with the cults of ancient Egypt. 9 The apparatuses of the emerging cinema provided novel platforms for the constructed visibility and resurgence of the dead, spirits, and other ghostly apparitions; so much so that it was considered to bring them to life and in this way exemplified the fascination with death and bodily transcendence. Analogies and metaphors drawing on death and resurrection were not only frequently used in advertisements announcing novel cinematic devices, but also in film content, most notably by Georges Méliès 5 See Colin Harding and Simon Popple, In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996) 158ff. For the crucial connection between the early cinema and conjuring practices see also Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York/ Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981); Gunning 42-71; Matthew Solomon, “Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film,” Theatre Journal, 58 (2006): 595-615. 6 Harding and Popple 8. 7 Gunning 51; see also John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) 98. Peters illustrates how communication and interpersonal contact between humans or between humans and spirits were inspired by, or became associated with, innovative technological apparatuses and communications technologies, such as the notions of: “[…] making contact, tuning in or out, being on the same wave-length, getting good or bad vibes.” (5) 8 See James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David & Charles, 1972) and Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 9 Antonia Lant explores the complex interrelations between the emerging cinema and references to the preservation in time like mummification, their chemical treatments, the cinema as necropolis, film text as hieroglyphics and the aspired revelation of mystery, the fantastic and visualisation of (especially female) sexuality. See Antonia Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (1995): 45-73 and “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” October 59 (1992): 86-112. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 302 and Ferdinand Zecca 10 who both featured the imagery of resurrection and phantoms 11 in their fantastic apparitions and transformations. The apparent reassurance that both communities (rationalist and spiritualist) drew from each other was instrumental as one of the key attractions of the emerging cinema through a persistent suspicion of trickery that surrounded photography and a scepticism regarding the reliability of the photographic apparatus as scientific instrument. This way, the impact of the human affective participation with technology was seen as not necessarily a straightforward contract of cause and effect. The interpretations of the photographic image became a focus of a number of pressing issues in the course of the 19 th century, most notably the crisis and redefinition of subjectivity in light of the shifting conceptions of time and its rationalisation. 12 The detachment of vision from the body of the observer in the first half of the 19 th century, as Jonathan Crary argues, led to an approach of instrumentation that reconstructed and reinterpreted the disparity between the description and the actual experience. 13 The original multiplicity of forms, contents, and technological diversity, was progressively absorbed into the two main continuous forms of optical/ chemical representation: the photographic and the cinematographic image. At the same time, although increasingly dismissed or neglected by science, within popular culture the occupation with the ‘paranormal’ or ‘supernatural’ persisted, and this is visible in various forms of reception and referential connotations related to the emerging cinema and its technological dispositif. As a consequence the undercurrent of an occult, or less polemically a specific avant-garde, worked its way through the established canon of film form as popular metaphysical investigations, and has remained ever since as an important momentum even in mainstream cinema. This thematic trend with relevance to its reiterations in contemporary film culture — in reference to persistent mythologies, 10 Richard Abel emphasises the particular influence of Méliès on the films of Zecca who worked for Pathé. See Richard Abel, French Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 81-82. 11 Tom Gunning explores the metaphorical character of the “phantom” through an “ontology of mediated vision” in a discourse of visual culture by tracing the historical connotations of the term ‘phantasma,’ in particular in the way it constituted an element of the cultural imaginary at a nexus between popular fascination with the otherworldly and pre-modern scientific metaphorical referents for perceptual phenomena. See Tom Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94-127. 12 For a discussion on the issue of time see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983); see also Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 2002). 13 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 303 imaginative or so-called science fiction narratives, in a convergence with contemporary technology and science — defines the platform for the vantage of the present from which to investigate further into the spectators’ expectations, desires, and involved cognitive processes, which, as it is proposed here, constituted the very drivers of the imaginary and metaphorical engagement of popular culture with technology. The creative and imaginary dimensions that drove the scientific investigations into projection technologies in the first place and shaped their material outcomes and popular reception at the late 19 th century are particularly apparent in the scientific studies of movement and dynamisms of animate bodies and elements by the physiologist and engineer Étienne-Jules Marey. Marey’s visionary and innovative approach in the applications of technology to the studies of movement as a vital force demonstrates a significant challenge to instrumental realism and an invocation of the perceptual processes in the beholders. Against the backdrop of the recognised limitations of the human perceptual apparatus in the course of the 19 th century, Marey was a key figure in the pioneering of technologies as extensions of bodily functions and reliable graphing instruments for the analysis and synthesis of movement. He believed that technology offered a more perfect and capable extension of the human sensory system for a more detailed and quicker perception of kinema (Greek for ‘movement’) and the analysis of the vital functions, and consequently postulated the superiority of ‘technological perception’ over human observation. His occupation with the analysis of movements in the body (such as muscles and organs) and the particular requirement of the recording of very small time intervals of sometimes for the observer invisible movements led him to his method called chronography (writing in time), which, through the implementation of photographic techniques in the 1880s, he called chronophotography. Marey introduced the engineering solution of a slotted-disk shutter that masked the plate while it moved and exposed the plate when it stopped (which he also carried forward in his fixed-plate chronophotographic camera) in order to take more than one picture on the (glass)plates or celluloid film strips, which resulted in his well-known images of superimpositions of single postures in one frame. Set against a black background, he eschewed the single frame in favour of a selected time/ space continuum. Marey deployed the photographic recording devices usually in conjunction with his graphing instruments. In this way he was able to record a multiplicity of measurements in a continuous inscription of movement over time. Considering that he did not study movement in its visual expression alone, but also through sounds (for example pulse, beats within the body, insects’ sounds), frequencies, speeds, and flows, the elimination of space in his set-up M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 304 clearly demonstrates that his main intention was to increase the perception of movement in relation to time through a continuous extension of the smallest measurable intervals. This created complex systems of sensors and wearable instruments for diverse measurements, integrated with the activities of the body of the subjects for capturing data from various kinds of kinetic processes, which in some ways anticipated current wearable technologies. Sometimes the studied subjects even produced the graphing inscription themselves through their movement in space; as in the example of Marey’s synoptical notations that expressed the graphical inscription of various gaits in an almost artistic manner similar to musical scores. 14 Marey regarded movement as the effect of those forces that constituted the primary functions of life; in this sense his interest can be primarily located in the forces that drove movement. He constantly pushed the boundaries of the recordability of the physical expressions of these underlying (in themselves invisible) forces in his struggle to reduce the interstices between moments of apparent stability. In reference to his studies of human walking and running he explained: “The periods of contact are short, and separated from one another by intervals during which neither foot is in contact with the ground — a period of suspension.” 15 In this respect he emphasised that “[…] one of the characteristics of running, and even of walking, is to maintain a continuous position of unstable equilibrium.” 16 The material limitations of technology both liberated and also restricted Marey’s investigation in his life-long quest to establish technologically based observation beyond ordinary perception as standardized scientific method for the discipline of physiology. He continuously worked on the perfection of technology, which appears probably most drastically in his motion capture technique called ‘Geometrical Chronophotography,’ also referred to as trajectoires squelettiques or l’homme squelette. 17 In this method, the surface of the object under observation was reduced to a fine white line or points, produced by a reflective metal or white paper strips, placed along the side of a black body suit. 18 The images obtained reflected the movement exercised in abstract white lines against the black background, which according to Marey subordinated space to a more precise graphing of the aspect of time: “In the diagram thus obtained, the number of images may be considerable, and the notion of time very complete, while that of space has been voluntarily limited to what was strictly necessary.” 19 14 See Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement: The Results and Possibilities of Photography (London: William Heinemann, 1895) 8-13. 15 Marey 8. 16 Marey 8-13. 17 Marey 60-61. 18 For illustrations and context see Marey 60; see also Braun 83-84, 94-95, 98-103. 19 Marey 60-61. Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 305 In Marey’s studies it is obvious, however, that neither the technology nor the images in themselves were of primary interest, but they served his scientific analysis and were continuously modified, refined, and altered according to the requirements of the objects of study. By his relentless innovation he recognised the limitations of the provisional character of scientific knowledge and continuously readjusted the shifting boundaries of what was considered as knowable and accessible to the scientific method. II Time In his attempts to record duration rather than instantaneity, Marey understood time scientifically, as mathematical, measurable, and homogeneous quantity. In contrast, the contemporary influential philosopher Henri Bergson, originally trained in mathematics, extended the mathematical notion of time with his definition of durée (duration) as qualitative experience of time as we perceive it in action; this ‘real time’ for him was elusive to mathematical, scientific, and intellectual treatment. In this way he shifted the significance of the term ‘t’ in equations of mechanics to an awareness of the impact of perceptual processes on the relativism of time as psychological quality. By frequently referring to the scientific method of movement analysis through instantaneous photography, Bergson criticised the commonly confused concept of time, which he regarded as a fusion to be distinguished between an externalised quantity (science) and an internalised quality (metaphysics). According to Bergson, the only dimension that could be actually measured was the space traversed — in other words ‘instances.’ From this perspective of time, chronophotography in itself, detached from the wider scope of Marey’s œuvre, merely took the external passages of bodies moving through space into account, as they can be observed from an externalised point of view. According to Bergson, it is instead in our experience that we internally conceive of continuous movement and time as a quality rather than a measurable quantity. In his view duration (durée) can only be perceived internally, “[…] for the interval of duration exists only for us and on accounts of the interpenetration of our conscious states.” 20 These internal states of consciousness permeate each other, which constitutes a sense of duration and only when they are ‘measured’ and interpreted (for example through language), the whole splits up into single units and time is projected into space. Analogous to the conception that every spectator sees a film in slightly different ways, Bergson proposed that the heterogeneity of perspectives that split the whole into parts (as in a textual analysis of chronophotography) 20 Qtd. in Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001) 116. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 306 stood apart from the integrity of the object perceived in duration. He commented: […] [I]t is movement which is anterior to immobility, and the relation between positions and a displacement is not that of parts to a whole, but that of the diversity of possible points of view to the real indivisibility of the object. 21 Marey’s superimpositions of single instantaneous attitudes as a simulation of duration — a synthesis in a symbolic way — expressed his recognition of the representational constraints of instantaneous photography. The movement that had to be imagined made them appear as if merging into one whole — in other words, they appeared as if representing simultaneity. This exemplifies, among other things, why Marey continued to combine the analysis of photographic images with his other graphing instruments in order to measure the time interval as a whole uninterrupted momentum in a single and legible representation of the various forces at work. It is an aspect that is unavoidably overlooked when interpreting his chronophotographical images solely through a textual analysis in their apparent single heterogeneous states. Marey indeed recognised and anticipated the interpretative potential of his images, and from the perspective of his exclusive scientific endeavour, he made very clear in his comments on movement synthesis that “[…] it is useless to attempt to gain a knowledge of the successive phases of movement, by examining the successive photographs of a consecutive series […].” 22 In contrast to Bergson, however, the space for reflection and interpretation to him was an unavoidable fallacy of perception, which he sought to overcome through continuous technological improvement. Rather exceptionally he even referred on one occasion explicitly to the faculty of perception in terms of affordance, and, by this, he accommodated the dimension of imagination. In this way he can be said to have sanctioned some aspects of Bergson’s philosophy by expanding the scope of his own investigation. This is, for example, evident in his description of how, in his view, chronophotography superseded ordinary perception. Marey proposed: Although chronophotography represents the successive attitudes of a moving object, it affords a very different picture from that which is actually seen by the eye when looking at the object itself. In each attitude the object appears to be motionless, and movements, which are successively executed, are associated in a series of images, as if they were all being executed at the same moment. The images, therefore, appeal rather to the imagination than to the senses. 23 21 Qtd. in Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1999) 44. 22 Marey 254. 23 Marey 304. Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 307 Marey’s main pursuit to study the very complexity of vital forces that drove movement beyond the physical form remains an underexplored dimension of his work, which became even more explicit toward the later part of his life, in his studies of forces that in themselves remained invisible. His focus turned from the moving subjects to the media or the elements in which they moved, especially in his experiments that made the invisible movements of water and air visible. In these attempts Marey shifted away from physiology and moved more into the terrain of physics as he created wind tunnels for visualising airflow, and where he had previously studied the movement of water animals, he modified the tanks to trace the movement of water itself. Some of the most extraordinary graphic examples of these investigations into the invisible are Marey’s studies of smoke trails, produced by obstacles attached to his Machine à Fumée — a construction that by 1901 allowed fortyeight different trails of smoke to be processed. He was especially interested in the observation of small air currents around plain figures of different shapes, which relayed back to his earlier research into aquatic locomotion and his studies of aerodynamics. This intrinsic concern with the invisible and with dynamism can also be retrieved in some of the applications and interpretations of Marey’s legacy in the early 20 th century avant-garde arts movements, but also featured in certain representations in the popular entertainment during his lifetime. There is, for example, a traceable connection between Marey’s studies of the lemniscate in insect flight or the undulating movement of aquatic animals and the dynamic movements of the popular dancer Loïe (Marie Louise) Fuller in her Danse Serpentine (Serpentine dance). The famous dancer and actress brought her extraordinary movements and innovative application of light and colour in her skirt dancing to the attention of artists in the Paris theatre Folies Bergère, who shared an interest in dynamism and movement over time (e.g. Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Cheret, and Auguste Rodin, in whose work she also featured as a model). 24 Her movements evoked similar shapes of the figure Eight, which Marey had found in his studies of the up-and-down impulse of an insect wing’s movement, which was distorted by air resistance and wind influence due to its unequal flexibility and consequently created a double loop (lemniscate). 25 Most importantly, however, her movements featured an intense dynamism that Marey similarly sought beyond the study of the expression of movement, comparable to the art historian Aby Warburg’s 24 Fuller’s dances have frequently been captured in early movies, as in the Lumières film from 1896 with the title Danse Serpentine. She also appeared in many imitations around the world, such as those captured by W.K.L. Dickson in 1894 in a film entitled Anabella Serpentine Dance (I and II). For an extensive account on Fuller’s work, see Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2007). 25 Marey 226-39. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 308 contemporary study of motion beyond the appearance of the figures in the iconography of the image. Marey’s interest in invisible forces beyond the appearance of movement seems to intersect with the psychical dimensions of the beholders in both the experience of movement as duration during execution and the perception of movement during the synthesis of his movement analysis exemplified in his projection technologies. Although he addressed movement explicitly beyond the mere shift of a body in spatial coordinates in relation to time, he only implicitly addressed time as an experienced activity in duration within the perceiver (of both the actual movement and the technologically enhanced mediation). These two movements, which significantly contribute to the understanding of the cinema as a philosophical dispositif, have also been addressed by Warburg in his Mnemosyne Atlas. 26 In a certain sense Warburg’s significant intervention appears to have extended some crucial aspects of Marey’s underlying conceptions and met those objectives in a cultural historical context of art in his transference of movement to an inner principle which he saw no longer as an external force — as the embodiment of life in motion — but as the psychology of the interior. The spaces in-between the perceived manifestation of matter, to which Warburg referred to as Andachtsraum or Denkraum der Besonnenheit (space for reflection) in his method called iconology of the interval, 27 have been anticipated by Marey’s method of the graphical inscription of time and projection technologies in which the scientific intentions and the imaginary dimensions converged in the perception of the beholder. 28 III Memory A crucial link to the internalised processes of movement in the participatory engagement of the beholder has been recognised in the study of memory as cognitive faculty that appears to swing between external spaces and imagination, between the concrete and the metaphorical, or it could be said, between fact and so-called fiction. Bergson identified memory as the most tangible element in the interiorised forces of what can be conceived as a forward mo- 26 See Aby M. Warburg, “Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE,” Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe, Band II.1, eds. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). 27 See Aby M. Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Baden- Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1992) 267. 28 The interconnections between the work of Étienne-Jules Marey, Henri Bergson, and Aby Warburg have more fully been elaborated in Martha Blassnigg, Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Cinema Experience: Revisiting Ideas on Matter and Spirit (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 309 mentum of time in duration. He exemplified how memory extends into the present in a continuous recycling and entanglement with the processes of perception. By this, he argued against theories that saw perception as mere projections of internal states, and emphasised the partial coincidence of the moment of pure perception in the object to be perceived (as an externalised perceptual process of extended consciousness) with the simultaneous impinging of memories from the past into the present. He explained: “These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis.” 29 These two states, according to Bergson, are commonly mixed up and undifferentiated, regarded as a difference in intensity and not in kind. He attempted to illuminate this difference by assigning to pure perception a specific time quality called durée. Bergson proposed: Pure perception, in fact, however rapid we suppose it to be, occupies a certain depth of duration, so that our successive perceptions are never the real moments of things, as we have hitherto supposed, but are moments of our consciousness. Theoretically, we said, the part played by consciousness in external perception would be to join together, by the continuous thread of memory, instantaneous visions of the real. But, in fact, there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of our memory, and consequently, of our consciousness, which prolongs into each other, so as to grasp them in one relatively simple intuition, an endless number of moments of an endlessly divisible time. 30 By defining memory as the point of contact between consciousness and things, between the body and the spirit, Bergson proposed that memory did not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progression from the past into the present. The past in this sense is a potentiality, which might actualise again and turn recollections into perceptions once more. Bergson described this movement as follows: We start from a ‘virtual state’ which we lead onwards, step-by-step, through a series of different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialised in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state — up to that extreme plane of our consciousness against which our body stands out. 31 In Bergson’s view, the past is no less intense than the present, since the idea does not derive from a perception, but, on the contrary, our perception derives from our ideas; in this sense “[…] the essential process of recognition is not centripetal, but centrifugal.” 32 He put it even more strongly that memory 29 Qtd. in Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 67. 30 Bergson, Matter and Memory 69-70. 31 Bergson, Matter and Memory 239-40. (Emphasis in the original). 32 Bergson, Matter and Memory 130. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 310 does not emerge from matter, but quite the contrary, he proposed that “[…] matter, as grasped in concrete perception which always occupies a certain duration, is in great part the work of memory.” 33 Memory images are continually forcing themselves into the present in order to modulate habit, and, especially when directed by free will and choice, a greater variety of past experiences can shape ideas creatively in the actualisation of our becoming. The ‘spiritual’ dimension for Bergson is consequently not simply determined by the realm of the ‘virtual’ (multiple planes of consciousness, including the past), but is constituted by its actualisation through embodied action in the present and by its degree of the creative potential that sets out to mould matter. The spiritual, or it could be said the imaginary dimension, in this sense, is characterised by action and by choice. In this way Bergson did not conceive of memory as a purely imaginative realm, since its actualisation is always coexistent with the present moment of action of cognitive activity; nor is it to be situated in a material form or space to which the discourse of the very popular notion of the trace in the literature alludes to. If we draw on this specific intersection of Marey’s and Bergson’s work, it becomes apparent that there is a crucial distinction to be made between objects of memory from what Johannes Fabian called “practices of memory.” 34 In this we can allocate a necessary distinction between the metaphorical use of memory in the inscription, projection, and retrieval of meaning through objects (or image content), and the practices of memory within consciousness that have to be regarded as dynamic processes, which like ‘virtual images’ constantly evade the confinements of material manifestation. Through Bergson’s definition of ‘images’ as something in-between an object and its representation, Fabian’s notion of ‘memory at work’ can be extended into a broader spectrum of perceptual processes and relayed into a Warburgian treatment of images in their potential of affective dynamograms. In this sense Warburg’s notion of a ‘ghost story for adults’ (‘Eine Gespenstergeschichte für ganz Erwachsene’) can be related to Bergson’s virtual in the sense that it constitutes a revival of past memories in the present, of an energy that not only persists but also continuously pushes evolution forward in multiple pathways and hence leaves traces in cultural forms. Bergson understood the virtual as the realm of l’esprit (the mind) in the context of his study of memory that tends to re-conquer the influence it has lost by actualising itself in the present. He suggested that “[c]onsciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realise and to associate with it.” 35 Bergson referred to this 33 Bergson Matter and Memory 182. 34 See Johannes Fabian, Memory Against Culture: Arguments and Reminders (Durham/ London: Duke UP, 2007). 35 Bergson, Matter and Memory 150. Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 311 process of recollection as a continuous recirculation of memory-images in order to strengthen, enrich, and complement perception with ever-greater details, a constant process of recreation and reconstruction. He maintained that […] every attentive perception truly involves a reflection, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mold itself. […] [R]eflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always find its way back to the object from where it proceeds.’ 36 By situating the locus of the heritage of images as well as the metaphorical mirroring of culture in technology within the perceptual processes of the beholder, a productive negotiation with the metaphorical interpretation of the ‘technological imaginary’ can take place and recuperate from technology and image techniques those dimensions that led to their creative production in the first place. By applying a dynamic approach to memory processes in time, it becomes transparent how the cinematic apparatus unifies the mechanical analysis of movement with the projector’s synthesising, forward moving mechanism through an interactive dynamism of time-flow in the spectator’s experience. In this the cinematic dispositif mirrors two contradictory models of memory: as database of the past (the celluloid filmstrip) and as a forward moving momentum within the spectator impinging on perception interfacing in the screen. When the necessity for action (as inscribed in body-memory) ceases then, so Bergson, the virtual can infiltrate and actualise the imaginary and creative potential of the mind and grasp perception “in one relatively simple intuition.” 37 Memories, recollection images and imagination: the seeming inexhaustibility — the perpetual mobile — of the cinematograph in this way becomes a metaphor for consciousness or spirit (l’esprit — the mind) which is not causally linked to the limitations of body memory in action but finds a line of flight in imaginary extensions and aspirations — the very potential for future action. In this view the culturally persistent animistic metaphors of the technology in cinema can be understood as a technological imaginary that liberates the creative potential of the mind in the reception of audio-visual media. When technology is regarded as an open text within a dispositif of complex forces rather than as a closed material manifestation, the metaphor becomes a tactic to accommodate the immaterial dimension as a temporal solution in the heterogeneous interpretations of the material. This dimension in the 36 Bergson, Matter and Memory 102-4 (Emphasis in the original). 37 Bergson, Matter and Memory 69. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 312 wider discussion of the uses of technology is commonly either masked in the discourse of materialism that takes technology at face value, or detached from its necessary material carrier in discourses of the digital image. By including the perspective of the audiences’ cognition in their very experiences of the cinematic séance, the cinema reveals its potential as a philosophical dispositif and can be understood as a very precise double in that it replicates the problem and problematic of time, matter, and memory in a metaphorical form. Time, Memory, and the Philosophical Dispositif of Cinema 313 Works Cited Abel, Richard. French Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Albright, Ann Cooper. Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2007. Barnouw, Erik. The Magician and the Cinema. New York/ Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 1896. Trans. Nancy M. Paul and William S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991. ---. An Introduction to Metaphysics. 1903. Trans. Thomas E. Hulme. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1999. ---. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 1889. Trans. Frank L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Blassnigg, Martha. Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Cinema Experience: Revisiting Ideas on Matter and Spirit. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Curl, James Stevens. The Victorian Celebration of Death. London: David & Charles, 1972. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 2002. Fabian, Johannes. Memory Against Culture: Arguments and Reminders. Durham/ London: Duke UP, 2007. Gunning, Tom. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 42-71. ---. “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision.” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94-127. Harding, Colin, and Simon Popple. In the Kingdom of the Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. London: Cygnus Arts, 1996. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. Lant, Antonia. “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania.” October, 59 (1992): 86-112. ---. “Haptical Cinema.” October, 74 (1995): 45-73. Marey, Étienne-Jules. Movement: The Results and Possibilities of Photography. Trans. Eric Pritchard. 1894. London: William Heinemann, 1895. Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Punt, Michael. Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Cromwell P, 2000. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. M ARTHA B LASSNIGG 314 Solomon, Matthew. “Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film.” Theatre Journal, 58 (2006): 595-615. Warburg, Aby M. Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen. Ed. Dieter Wuttke. Baden- Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1992. ---. “Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE.” Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe, Band II.1. Ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000. M ICHAEL P UNT Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor According to legend and most reliable reports, when it came to dancing Fred Astair was a hard task-master constantly rehearsing the same piece for days on end. Famously, Ginger Rogers recalls that practice could last for fourteen hours and at times her shoes were covered in blood. Typically, Astair and Rogers danced as a couple and in the early sound films such as Swing Time 1 they are recognised to be in top form. Much of the dance in this and other Astair/ Rogers vehicles is ‘tap dancing’ in which the rapid movement of the feet and the steel plates attached to the shoes produce a percussive accompaniment to the music. As a dance form it has a long precedent in clog dancing, jigs, and slave dancing (in the USA), but at the turn of the 19 th century it was embraced by the United States of America largely as an attraction at Burlesque and Vaudeville theatres in which the demonstrations of virtuosity and the inevitable leg-show produced an intoxicating libidinous mix which affirmed the youth, exuberance, and independence of an emerging nation. If it had a metaphorical significance in these contexts, they were quite weak and long since overshadowed by the formalism of the choreography and the exhibition of performative virtuosity. Tap dancing has its own critical discourse and network of histories and became most popular in the USA of the early 20 th century as “Hoofing,” a form of tap in which exaggerated movements of the legs gave a force and gusto to the “Tap.” Hoofing was a wilfully coarse dance form that maximized the raw eroticism of the dance mixing an adult liberation with a juvenile pleasure in unnecessary and noisy repetition. Although as Kracauer argued in the Mass Ornament, this kind of dancing was not without social meaning, in its aestheticization of pointless work it had no metaphorical significance. Astair, of course, knew that, if he was to have a broad star appeal in the cinema he needed to embourgeoise the form while, at the same time, maintaining his contact with a working class audience. He achieved this by developing a special form of Tap, later known as Broadway Tap, in which the leg movements are less exaggerated and the sounds are only made with the bottom of the shoe. This became a style associated primarily with him in a calculating strategy which elevated his performance from admirable skill to an auteur art. In Swing Time, we see this passage in the three key 1 Swing Time, dir. George Stevens, prod. Pandoro S. Berman, chor. Hermes Pan, 1936. M ICHAEL P UNT 316 dances in which the Hoofing style of “Pick Yourself Up” gives way to Broadway Tap in the final number “Never Gonna Dance.” Strategically accentuating this stylistic difference was important for ambitious stars like Astair and Rogers, and doing it very well was crucial, but Tap in any dance form is a highly demanding performative system that calls for great skill and training to freely reproduce a particular set and the added value of innovation cannot be underplayed. Nonetheless, still the question remains as to why the rehearsals were so demanding: What was it in the dance that insisted on such relentless repetition to achieve perfection? Why was it so important to get it absolutely right for a film which would be seen and forgotten by an audience as intent on dating as they were on movie going. At this distance, with the advantage of repeated viewing and even freeze frame and under cranking, it is clear that a dance such as the Astair/ Rogers duet ‘Pick Yourself Up’ in the Gordon School of Dancing in Swing Time is not merely an exhibition piece but a burgeoning metaphor consistent with the lyrics of the song. Its plot strategy, vernacular semiotics and the formal composition propel the scene into a Depression era narrative of native skill making its own luck. It begins the journey from virtuosity to art by framing the dance in such a way that it stands in for a necessary and particular kind of ebullience that is required to sustain endeavour in the face of massive adversity. As the plot charts the passage of John ‘Lucky’ Garrett (Astair) and Penny Caroll’s (Rogers) relationship from interpersonal antagonism to physical synchronicity, the narration of adolescent sexual dynamics in Swing Time means that “Pick Yourself Up” can also be understood metaphorically — but quite what for is another matter. Even in their relative maturity (they are both in their thirties) as the couple swirl through the dance school in the first number they stand in for the narcissistic exuberance of youth, the energetic parry and thrust of adolescent dating bound up in a universal discourse of conquest and resistance. But with such conveniently resonant names such as John ‘Lucky’ Garrett (luck and artistic deprivation/ poverty) and Penny Caroll (modest hope and Christian celebration) the dance may also be seen as a historical metaphor for the emancipating power of the muscular individualism that ’won’ the USA in the previous centuries. In this reading it is a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress for the American 1930s. As such it is a Republican metaphor: a metaphor for how the power of individuals looking after themselves can produce the dynamics necessary for progress in a hostile world. Alternatively, it is a metaphor for the progressive synergetic union of individual difference epitomized in heterosexual bonding and family that produces an impregnable force for the future, and which also rectifies the omissions and errors of the past. It is a metaphor of the consequences of democratic collaboration between individuals sharing surplus gifts in a collective enterprise for Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor 317 good. Alternatively, it can be seen as an ode to the pleasures of the fit and able body when shared in a synergetic relationship with a separate other: a metaphor for an ideal youth. Such interpretation could extend much further, endlessly extracting the metaphorical significance of the dance and, within the broad spectrum of permissible interpretation that the narrative allows, all metaphorical readings of the same sequence would be valid, or at the very least their competing claims could be fought out in a minute textual and intertextual analysis. Indeed, the whole dance could stand in for the subsequent interpretative interactions of generations of films scholars picking themselves up and starting all over again. None of this, however, suggests why Astair and Rogers needed to rehearse so intensely that their feet bled. Broadly speaking: All they had to do was sparkle and to be in the right place to leap out of the confines of the dance floor and then to willingly return only to leave it again for good with a certain rebellious dash. This is perhaps how the stage direction for a live show might have read and, of course, there would be no second takes and edits to micro-construct the best performance. Even so in live theatre it would be uneconomical to pay for extensive rehearsal and preparation that this film (and those like it) seemed to demand. In the movies, however, the stakes are high and a good film makes good money (a budget of $886,000 for Swing Time yielded the third highest USA box office for 1936). In addition, Astair/ Rogers numbers used extended long takes and film is an unforgiving medium since, once it is printed, the imperfections are indelible and a matter of record moreover errors are invariably picked up by the alert film buff and antagonistic critic to alert the moviegoer. Hence a galaxy of regulated and unionized professions collaborate with performers to produce, if not the perfect take, at least one that is acceptable within the constraints of convention and budget that can be printed and (possibly) included in the final immutable product. In the so-called ‘Classical Hollywood’ era when films were produced by Majors, a system of vertical integration insisted that the whole process from script idea to release print and even the exhibition venue were in the purlieu of the studio. Film products for the cinema (as distinct from other cinema products such as live-acts, auditoriums, sound systems, fast food, etc.) emerge from a wellplanned phased construction which can be demarcated in several ways. For example, four of the broadest phases might be characterised as 1. idea/ script/ screenplay/ shooting script, 2. performance/ cinematography/ effects, 3. editing/ post production, publicity/ release. From there the finished product (including its publicity packages) was 4. distributed to a circuit of first run houses which were usually owned by, or under contract to the studio, and then on to the independent sector of second and third runs etc. Each of these four phases is accompanied by its distinct concerns, conventions, and M ICHAEL P UNT 318 priorities and it is the task of the production company, the ‘studio’ (a deceptively domestic name for a vast industrial and financial apparatus), to ensure that the final release is coherent, and will yield a maximum return. As film goers, critics, and film analysts we often overlook the making of the film as a determinant of meaning and give special attention to the exhibited film as a trace of a production process which are, by and large, ignored as active agents in the final form of the finished product. Production histories are sometimes used to explain why some films are the way they are, in support of a textual reading. However, with the exception of a few scholars, textual readings of films proceed from the release print and, possibly, work back through production history to account for film and narrative form — usually explaining anomalies through production detail. In the practice of film production, however, each phase and group of contributing technicians also has its own vision of the product, its own criteria and its own specialist technologies to realise an acceptable standard which does not necessarily correspond with the release version. Finally bringing these divergent visions together as a theatrical and/ or television product is the responsibility of the executive producer who has the final responsibility to the financial backers. The spate of re-releases as ‘Director’s Cuts’ and even ‘Final Director’s Cuts’ remind us that between the script idea and the pay box a film is many different things to many different people in the various processes of production. The virtue of separating these phases in this essay is that it allows us to cosider the decision making processes in the performance/ cinematography/ special effects phase as a determining factor in the final film form. Clearly, it is in this phase where Astair and Rogers had the clearest vision of their own version of the film and their greatest influence over its quality and meaning. It was at this stage that they rehearsed with lighting riggers and cinematographers, all of whom were at some remove from the script and the final product, until they got the ‘look’ that they imagined. This compartmentalization of the production process provides the logical context for their scope and limits of the performers’ agency and suggests that we might look afresh for the meaning of Astair and Rogers’ relentless regime (or at least part of it) in the context of the technologies and processes of making photographic images appear to move naturally rather than in the film text. Perhaps most significantly, Astair and Rogers, unlike their audiences, could repeatedly review their performances on film as daily rushes both projected on a screen and analytically at an editing desk. They could see their dance numbers at considerably reduced speeds or even frame by frame. Mistakes and poor choreography could, within limits, be rectified in further rehearsal and shot again. For most cinema-goers, however, the movie was an unrecoverable event and much of the subtlety and virtuosity of their dance routines simply evades the viewer in the relentless forward momentum of Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor 319 the narrative and the apparatus. Outside the major capitals, where there may have been repertory houses, once the film had ended its run through the various chains of exhibitors it was never to be seen again. More often than not the studio left the (invariably worn) release print at the final theatre on the circuit since it was not worth the carriage cost of returning it, and where, fortunately for us, many of the great finds for the archive have been made. Programmes changed at least twice a week and so, although there must have been exceptions, seeing the same film twice was a rarity and fanzines, sheet music, and still photographs met the residual appetites of the audience — until the next film. Only with the domestic VHS recorder did film become something that could be revisited over again and be analytically slowed or accelerated. Slowing the dances in Swing Time, although never intended as part of the release version, offers a special insight into how this couple, at their best, literally flies. For long periods of the dance it seems that they spend more time in the air than on the floor as each toe tapping click becomes the engine of levitation. But the great trick of these dances is that this flight is naturalized through a dazzlingly complex and difficult set of steps and, perhaps most importantly, seamless transformations between one rhythm and another. Reminiscent of J.W.M. Turner’s paintings, these dances are made by the spaces in between the dramatic flourishes which are consistent with the overall style of the key gestures and, as such, are distinct from the fanzine photographs which “merely” depict them momentarily airborne as in a chronophotograph. Astair and Rogers worked so hard in the rehearsal room, it seems, in order to convincingly counter the overbearing demands of gravity. Viewed from this position, the metaphorical significance of the dance in Swing Time lies not only with the meaning of the performance as an adjunct to the narrative, but also in a parallel, technologically facilitated metaphor of transcendence — one that the early cinematographe ensemble constructed in its projected form, in the very first encounter with an audience. Including the metaphorical dimensions of technology invites a reexamination of the emergence of cinema as a popular form of entertainment in relation to the contemporary discourses of movement, science, and technology, and in as far as it can be separated, entertainment. As Martha Blassnigg has argued in her parallel paper included in this volume, the discussion of movement was not only central to a dominant philosophical system in France in the latter part of the 19 th century, but it also provided the foil for the scientific examination of movement using chronophotography. Moreover, as I have discussed elsewhere, the technological arrangement that produced a cinema experience in the years following the presentation of the Cinematographe in 1895 can only be understood if the realist argument is suspended in favour of a more fully located transcendent imperative. If, as it is now generally understood, the audience did not confuse the image of a mov- M ICHAEL P UNT 320 ing train with a pro-filmic moving train, what was the lure of the grubby little image shown in the basement of the Salon Indienne? This is an issue that I have addressed extensively elsewhere and in this paper I want to examine the counter-realist version of cinema by looking ahead from 1936 to the signature dance of another musical icon of the Classical Era, Singing in the Rain. 2 Like Swing Time, Singing in the Rain follows the ‘show within a show’ narrative format and is a film that is structured around the phases of its own production. Both films foreground the idea that in the cinema (if not elsewhere) the technology functions at both a practical and metaphorical level. Singing in the Rain was also a box office success, although not quite the hit that Swing Time was (it cost around $2,500,000 and yielded $7.5 million on its first release). It also features dance routines which demanded intensive rehearsals and, as with Swing Time, there are apocryphal stories of practising endlessly in blood soaked shoes to get the dance numbers right. Stories of the difficulty of production are necessary studio spin to raise the value of the film. Many of these marketing ploys are inspired by the correlation between art and suffering which gained currency in 18 th century Romanticism and persisted in the popular arts well into the 20 th century. The Romanticist challenge to an overbearing rationalism derived from an unquenchable belief in the exclusive capacity of humans to be creative in oppressive regimes; and as such it may be ideologically dubious, but it has sustained a wide diffusion of high cultural assets and ideas at various times. Many of the musicals that were produced by Arthur Freed featuring talents such as Gene Kelly, Cid Charisse, Fred Astair, and Judy Garland exhibited a modernist appetite for minimalist decors and modern dance that were relatively easy to stage and had an international style. The vast uninterrupted sets with clean bold colour were cheap to produce and could be moved around on dollies to open up tracks for the camera as it changed angles. At times whole sets would be dismantled and reformed in a choreography no less complex than that of the dancers themselves. Such simple styles could be invested with higher production values if the production narratives could be underwritten by a ‘difficult’ and somewhat distorted concept of 18 th century Romanticist art that was always accompanied by suffering. Singing in the Rain reflects this antinomy in its story of film production technology on the cusp of the so-called ‘sound era.’ Although synchronized sound is mostly presented as a technological ‘improvement’ on the silent form of cinema (which, of course, was never silent since there was always some integral sound accompaniment), in fact there was a profound scepticism in the industry as to its virtue. The idea and the technology had been around for most of the 20 th century but the key players in the industry resisted for good economic reasons. Some are evident in Sing- 2 Singing in the Rain, dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, prod. Arthur Freed, 1952. Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor 321 ing in the Rain, for example they had a satisfactory product, and many films could be made simultaneously in the same studio, moreover the universality of the silent codes meant that each product had worldwide distribution. However, once the major studios were more or less forced (by Warner Bros.) to invest in the technology, they destroyed the silent back-libraries and invested in publicity that presented earlier forms as primitive so as to ensure that their investments were safe. Although costly and fraught with problems, sound movies, the “Talkies,” had a singular advantage in that they deprived the exhibitor of any product control since all films had to be run at a standard rate. Whereas previously over-cranking and under-cranking the projector in response to audience reaction was part of the projectionists’ art, with synchronised sound film, however, it always had to run at twenty-four frames per second. The downside to sound film was that it segmented a market that had formerly been international. Films now had to be language-specific and it is often noted that the lavish musical film emerged as a genre in this period as an attempt to produce an international product that was not entirely dependent on understanding the spoken language. This, however, produced one of the unforeseen opportunities that sound film offered the studios which was to renegotiate the contracts with actors and particularly stars whose fees had risen substantially through fan discourses. A major tactic in this renegotiation was the suggestion that the star’s voice was unsuitable for the talkies. Singing in the Rain produced in 1952, at the time when sound film had finally become the accepted and irrevocable standard for the future of the industry, takes its cue for the ‘unsuitable voice’ ploy and presents a twodimensional narrative of excessive ambition on the part of an adored star thwarted by technological ‘progress.’ The story of Singing in the Rain concerns the creative artist’s struggle against the changes in exhibition technology imposed by the industry and the studio boss R. F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell). Some artists fail, notably the unfortunate Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) whilst others, through wit and talent, especially Cosmo (Donald O’Connor), are relentlessly promoted throughout the film on the basis of their ability to solve intransigent problems with simple answers. The Don Lockwood character (Gene Kelly) also succeeds as a star and a man, but rather through his athletic and creative skill as a dancer and his developing passion for Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) and increasing dislike of Lina Lamont. Almost all the decisions he makes are driven not by a professional creativity and his experience as an actor, but by his growing infatuation with Kathy — a rather ordinary looking and gently aspiring contract player. Their first two meetings are engineered to set out the polemic between high art and popular culture as mutually exclusive domains. After their first meetings the work of the rest of the narrative is to resolve this opposition and create a durable heterosexual couple for whom art is popular M ICHAEL P UNT 322 cinema. An ambition which remains unresolved until the last poster shot advertising the film within the film. In this, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds stand, shoulder to shoulder, admiring a huge advertising billboard comprising a crudely drawn double portrait of them. Cinema becomes the high art set against the static and approximate achievements of the graphic arts. As with Swing Time, metaphors for the struggle between the individual and the oppressions of a system abound such as in poor Lina’s attempt to do what she does well in the new technological regime of synchronized sound. The crew also suffer from the technological oppression of the talkies as they are forced to work in make-shift sound-proof boxes removed from the glamour of the action on the set. Studio boss R.F. Simpson’s embrace of new technology is also driven by darker and more powerful forces to whom he has to answer. The underlying themes of social opposition and individual reconciliation in Swing Time are present in Singing in the Rain, nowhere more so than in Kelly’s dance to the signature tune which heralds the beginning of the end of the film. Singing and dancing in the rain, this ‘thirty-somethings’ realization that love can liberate his body so that he can enjoy the pleasures of a thorough soaking from what Kathy calls ironically the exceptionally heavy ‘California Dew.’ He is so in love that he dances, skips, and stamps his way around the minimalist set until his bohemian moment is brought up short by a cold wet cop (who is presumably not in love). The dance to “Singing in the Rain” (in Singing in the Rain) is the culmination of the successful strategy to reinstate a necessary order to movie-making that the technological change has temporarily disrupted. The inspiration for this new order occurred earlier in the day as Cosmos hatched the idea that the Don Lockwood/ Lina Lamont silent vehicle The Duelling Cavalier can be saved from ‘bombing’ by becoming a musical called The Dancing Cavalier. But this success comes at a personal price, which is that Kathy will have to sacrifice her own visibility and career prospects by singing Lina’s tunes off camera. The trio split up for the evening and become a heterosexual pair who enjoy the evening in the glow of a shared vision of a promising future. After a chaste goodnight kiss (in which Kathy begins to take command of the relationship) Don realizes that he is in love and the polemic between art and popular culture dissolves in an overtly synthetic studio-bound song and dance number in which the progressive euphoria of his actions evoke the reckless abandon of first love. In a simulation of a spontaneous expression of the irresponsible exuberance of adolescents he dances in a manufactured storm of “piped rain” which was mixed with milk to make it photogenic. With the mounting exaggeration of a love-induced regression, the dance runs its course until a passing policeman (Robert Williams) brings him back to his thirty-four years and citizenship. He wanders off, down what is obviously a stage set, handing his umbrella to a non-descript passer-by played by Harry Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor 323 Pollard, a comedian from the silent era who worked with Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach. This dance number is a profound and mobile metaphor for male infatuation: one can imagine generations of love-struck men (usually somewhat younger) reliving this number in real life — albeit briefly and without the skill. It is also a reprise of the Astair and Rogers’ number ’Pick Yourself Up,’ in that an overbearing environment (the economic depression in Swing Time and the inescapability of love and the weather in Singing in the Rain) provides a narrative rational for a movement-driven metaphor for the individual’s struggle against these apparently unalterable oppressions. The metaphors are, however, very different because in the intervening years between 1936 and 1952 something quite crucial appears to have changed in the movies that is quite independent of film style. Most obviously, the later film is in colour; a distinction which, in popular (and some scholarly) language, marks a historical shift: Old films are black and white and modern ones are in colour — despite the fact that this is a crude reduction of the evidence. It is now generally acknowledged that about 80% of all films produced up until 1920 were coloured in some way or another, and after that date release prints progressively became black and white until the 1960s when they were again routinely coloured. The wisdom of this popular periodization and corruption of the evidence, however, should not be overlooked since this particular slippage of history alerts us to the metaphorical aspect of technology. The story of colour, like the story of sound, is not a simple tale of technological progress. The Technicolor Corporation was formed in 1912 and although it successfully developed the technology for colour systems for film production, it was not until the 1930s that the full colour spectrum was used on screen, and it was only at the end of that decade that audiences appeared to prefer coloured films. By 1950 Eastmancolor, which used a single strip, made the Technicolor dye transfer process obsolete, but it continued to be used for a while, in part because studios were equipped for it, and also because it was understood as a carefully monitored and high-quality product that imparted ‘class’ to a picture. Singing in the Rain appeared at a time when full spectrum colour had become the industry standard for cinema products that were marketed with high production values, and indeed as the posters show, the film was billed foregrounding the technological aspects of the product as ‘MGM’s Technicolor Treasure.’ This tag-line draws the film ever closer into a recursive relationship with an industry: a film within a film, a film about film and, above all, a film about Hollywood films. The film begins in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and never leaves that corner of Los Angeles. It tells the tale of the human impact of changes in film technology as it impacts on people in Hollywood. It shows, mostly in the background, the structural changes to Hollywood production as the habit of M ICHAEL P UNT 324 shooting two or three films simultaneously in one studio had to give way to the dedicated sound stage, and with that the possibility of a totally synthetic product — including dubbed sound (disavowed as it is also acknowledged as the standard). Told in the symbolic naturalism of Technicolor, Singing in the Rain is a film that in every aspect never leaves the major studios or American movie history. As we have seen, even its bit players all have their place in the major and minor histories of Hollywood. At times it is almost pathologically tied to the studio, at best reluctant to leave the Hollywood club and the vast apparatus that turned film technology into cinema products. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that when the signature number in this film is slowed it shows that rehearsal time was not spent in making the dancer fly (as in Swing Time), although it is an equally complex dance routine as ‘Pick Yourself Up.’ Instead the demanding rehearsal of dancer, bitplayers, and camera was needed to ensure that everything — every prop, player, and lighting rig — was meticulously in the right space at the right time. The song, “Singing in the Rain,“ has an uncertain beginning, but Arthur Freed published it in 1929 and there are a number of filmic version of it from that date. It has the rhythmic form of a child’s doggerel, each beat foreshadowing the next and each rhyme predictable and easily anticipated. Initially, so are Kelly’s movements; after thirteen steps stage left against a blue background he stops at the moment the background becomes red. The umbrella breaks the divide and after a twirl or two and another thirteen steps against a red background a jump takes him up to the lamp post where he twirls again and there is a close up. Another ten steps and legs akimbo another close up in full rain — this time picked out against the blue ground with a green bush as a halo. Another thirteen steps takes him to the window of the Mahout boutique which provides the backlight for his next routine. Mahout’s offers him a mini stage, and in front of this the routine is carried over to a darker ground with a green door lit with a key light and the dance is repeated, but this time the umbrella becomes an active participant. The close-up at the end of this passage leads him to the Millinery shop-front which provides a larger stage (the sum of the first two smaller backdrops) and a larger sound from the orchestra accompanies him. At this point, the gushing down-pipe provides the moment for cathartic release from the confines of the sidewalk parallel to the shop fronts and he leaps into the road with the familiar flamboyant circling dance concluding with puddle-jumping and reckless splashing in front of the Hollywood Art School. The policeman arrives and Kelly departs with stuttering steps, handing his umbrella to a passing “Snub” Pollard, and as Kelly walks stage left Pollard leaves stage right and they both reach the edge of the frame simultaneously offering a satisfying geometric closure to the scene as the orchestra fades. Swing Time: Technology as/ &/ as Metaphor 325 Clearly structured around the body, “Singing in the Rain“ (the dance) is a metaphor for what might have transpired had Kathy not kissed him sweetly and sent him on his way. But it is so displaced by its formal structuring in relation to the mode of representation as to be almost incoherent as a metaphor for sex; or, at the very least, this metaphor becomes a secondary reading of its meaning when set against the visual and aural materialism of the performance. The cinematographic apparatus, a technology that became a metaphor for the disembodied in its early phases, had by 1950 become transformed into a metaphor for technological order — largely through the naturalization of synthetic colour achieved in a synergetic relationship between Max Factor and Technicolor. The cosmetics used to heighten colour contrast on film negative and to amplify the allure of the stars increasingly became fashion essentials for the audience since they were particularly light and “natural.” As Singing in the Rain refused to leave Hollywood, the audiences became inscribed in the film. It is necessary to be brief in the summary, although tempting to look harder at later films such as Matrix, Fight Club, and The Lake House and to see another technological metaphor as the industry naturalizes CGI and the reliability and significance of the pro-filmic referent dissolves completely. Perhaps in the context of this essay the 2005 Mint Royale re-mix of “Singing in the Rain” accompanied by a CGI version of the dance used to advertise Volkswagen deserves the last word. 3 In this version, the determining referent is the memory of the film itself. As such it throws into stark and memorable relief that the only “real” “real” is the Volkswagen motor-car as it appropriates our memory of a juvenile doggerel and produces a moment of misrecognition. However, once the original is restored to memory there are no discourses of punishing rehearsals and bleeding feet, in their place is the professional internet chat traffic about CG techniques, texture skins, and a collegiate admiration for the dedication and sacrifice of the programmers to achieve the effect: bleeding feet become bleeding fingers, the 24 hour pizza, and Coke coding sessions. What it shares with the other examples in this essay, however, is the non-metaphorical imbrication of the body and the technological processes in order to invest human value and make metaphorical reading a possibility. This brief excursion into the history of film technology might lead us to consider more fully the metaphorical significance of technology in our reading and “decoding” of media products, and perhaps invite us to attend a little more closely to the processes of production that precede the public text and the agency and individuals who contribute on the way to the construction of the final exhibited form. What is at stake here is that the machine (like this essay) is running as we become aware of it. Only 3 It can be seen at <http: / / www.tellyads.com/ show_movie.php? filename=TA1540 &advertiser=Volkswagen/ >. July 7, 2009. M ICHAEL P UNT 326 through the critical reflection on technology as a human construct, which has a metaphorical dimension that is independent of the text, can we stay in touch with the processes through which technology acquires a spurious claim to cultural determinacy and, through this, restore agency to the domain of human action. 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London: William Heinemann, 1925. Thomas, David. The First Colour Motion Pictures. London: HMSO, 1969. Turner, Graeme. The Film Cultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Usai, Paolo. Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema. London: BFI, 1994. Whittock, Trevor. Metaphor and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Winston, Brian. Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography, and Television. London: BFI, 1992. Wood, Leslie. The Miracle of the Movies. London: Burke Publishing Co., 1947. ---. The Romance of the Movies. Kingswood: Windmill Press, 1937. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.francke.de · E-Mail: info@francke.de Michael Meyer English and American Literatures UTB basics 3., überarb. und erw. Auflage 2008 VIII, 241 Seiten, zahlreiche Abb., €[D] 14,90/ Sfr 27,90 ISBN 978-3-8252-2526-1 English and American Literatures bietet kompaktes Basiswissen über: • die Analyse lyrischer, narrativer und dramatischer Texte • literaturwissenschaftliche Methoden und Theorien • die Vorbereitung auf Referate, Hausarbeiten und Prüfungen Der Band ist in englischer Sprache verfasst und auf die Gegebenheiten an Universitäten im deutschsprachigen Raum zugeschnitten. Er ist sowohl als Grundlage für Einführungskurse in die englische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft als auch zum Selbststudium geeignet. »Das Buch ist uneingeschränkt empfehlenswert.« Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht Englisch 041108 Auslieferung Ma rz 2008.i13 13 03.03.2008 20: 41: 51 Uhr Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This introduction to linguistics is especially designed for students of English with a German-speaking background. It concentrates on the traditional core areas of linguistics without neglecting interdisciplinar y and applied branches. For this 4th, revised edition all chapters were updated and supplemented with historical content, and a chapter on the history of the English language was added. New: the comprehensive online-glossar y and online-exercises. „Gut verständlicher, instruktiver und teilweise auch recht detaillierter Einblick in fast alle wichtigen Gebiete und Disziplinen der Linguistik“ Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Paul Georg Meyer et al. Descriptive English Linguistics An Introduction narr studienbücher 4., überarb. und erw. Auflage 2008 XX, 375 Seiten, zahlreiche Abb. und Tab., €[D] 22,90/ SFr 41,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6400-9 094208 Auslieferung Oktober 2008.indd 27 22.10.2008 12: 24: 46 Uhr Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This volume contains a selection of papers from the conference on Mediality / Intermediality held at the University of Zurich in May 2007. The essays explore a wide diversity of medial phenomena ranging from Shakespearean drama to contemporar y literature, and from the motif of the Arthurian Round Table to the treatment of a metafictional novel in cartoon form. The core issues discussed include theory and methodology, the practical value of mediality for literary studies, the relationship between the written text and visual representation, and the role of performance and performativity. Collectively, the essays constitute a comprehensive investigation of some of the most pressing concerns in the study of mediality and intermediality. Martin Heusser Andreas Fischer Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Mediality/ Intermediality Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, Band 21 2008, 170 Seiten, €[D] 49,00/ SFr 83,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6457-3 071108 Auslieferung November 2008.indd 13 24.11.2008 14: 19: 21 Uhr