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.