Asymmetries of Power and the Power of Asymmetry in Metaphorical Language

Introduction: Metaphors We Die For

For those hoping to understand society from a soicolinguistic or intellectual-historical standpoint, the title of Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 Metaphors We Live By make it seem as if it should be shelved alongside Newton's Principia Mathematica, Darwin's Origin of Species, or Marx's Capital in a "Widely Cited, Rarely Read" section. However, unlike the religious-secular and political-revolutionary rifts engendered by these works (whether intended/desired by the author, as in Marx's case, or not, as in Newton's), the most striking fact about the content of Lakoff and Johnson's work is its blandness, its failure to connect the dots between the metaphors discussed and the exciting political or social contexts out of which they emerged.

In this sense, the blandness of the work contrasts sharply with Raymond Williams' Keywords, a work in more or less the same genre, published only four years earlier. Williams' short, etymological explorations of politically-charged terms immediately catalyzed further waves of linguistic-historical studies within the broader program of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. From its publication to the present, socially- and politically-minded authors and publishing houses have explicitly drawn on the tradition of Williams' book as a framework for understanding political-rhetorical concepts: Martin Jay's Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (1998), Bennett et al.'s New Keywords (2005), Andrew Levine's Political Keywords (2009), John Patrick Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (2019), Keywords in Policing, Keywrods in Australian Politics, and so on, not to mention an entire book series, Keywords in Literature and Culture, published by Wiley-Blackwell with the following editorial summary:

Indebted to the work of Raymond Williams, the series identifies and documents keywords as cultural analysis, taking the reader beyond semantic definition to uncover the uncertainties, disagreements, and confrontations evident in differing usages and conflicting connotations.

Metaphors We Live By meanwhile, despite its comparable subject matter (a subject matter that, we argue, is in fact even more fertile for this kind of socio-political analysis) and sociolinguistic approach, did not give rise to a similar wave of context-aware cultural studies of metaphorical-linguistic meaning.

In this work, therefore, we aim to combine the political and cultural awareness of Williams' approach with the linguistic-analytic rigor of Lakoff and Johnson's, to shed light on how metaphor can be used to clarify but also to obfuscate meaning within political rhetoric.

Specifically, we draw attention to how individuals and groups who wield relatively greater power with respect to extant social asymmetries–-for example, whites with respect to relations of race in the US and men with respect to relations of gender in much of the world–-use metaphor instrumentally, by conflating (whether intentionally or not) acts of resistance against these asymmetries with acts that serve to reinforce them.

Why Does the US State Celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and not Malcolm X Day?

The answer to this question, we argue, stems from the fact that King provided and continues to provide–-regardless of his intentions (as emphasized in the previous section)–-whites in the US with a metaphor that has the effect of legitimating white supremacy despite its laudatory surface appearance of embracing racial equality. Specifically, what "average" US citizens tend to know of King's legacy, from among all of his writings and speeches, is the following quote from his 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If the rhetorical techniques of metaphor were solely available to the abolition-of-white-supremacy "side" of debates around race in the US, for example, those committed to this abolition could simply point out the following: if a society wants to assess how close or far it is from King's "dream", that society should (and, in fact, must) make judgements on the basis of skin color. The usefulness of metaphor immediately becomes apparent: to slightly modify a powerful metaphor used in the work of Judith Butler, for example (that we will use without modification later on), how exactly could one evaluate a claim like

"People who are double-jointed and people who are not double-jointed are treated equally in the US"

without making judgements about whether or not people are double-jointed?

The use of double-jointedness as the subject for the metaphor, in this case, was chosen deliberately to highlight the contrast between race and double-jointedness. To someone who didn't immediately "get" the point that the metaphor-creator is trying to make, they could continue by explaining how

Unlike the case of race, US society is not plagued by the rampant murder of double-jointed people with impunity by police. The US state does not mass-incarcerate millions of double-jointed people for minor drug offenses, does not choose to reduce millions of double-jointed people to penury en masse in order to bail out banks and financial institutions, and so on.

The choice of metaphor was also chosen deliberately, however, to emphasize that there is a particular asymmetry in how the metaphor should be brought to bear on our understanding of white supremacy. While this asymmetry is often tacitly/implicitly understood in day-to-day conversation, in this context it is important that it is "spelled out" explicitly: without background knowledge on e.g. the speaker and the listener of the metaphor and the context in which it was uttered (for example, if a computer algorithm was trying to understand its meaning), there are two prima facie "logically valid" inferences that could be drawn.

• (a) This metaphor points out the intensity of the injustices faced by black people in the US, using double-jointedness as an "intuitively" non-morally-relevant attribute of a person (i.e., an attribute that the speaker hopes the listener takes to be "intuitively" non-morally-relevant), to show how much the differential treatment of black people in the US stands in contrast to the equal treatment of double-jointed and non-double-jointed people, and thus showing how we ought to make blackness operate more like double-jointedness, with respect to its neutral impact on one's ability to live free from fear in their day-to-day life
• (b) This metaphor points out the ease with which double-jointed people in the US live in the present day, not having to worry about whether they will be brutalized or murdered by a police officer or suddenly pauperized by a federal financial decision, thus showing how we ought to make double-jointedness operate more like blackness, with respect to its negative impact on one's ability to live free from fear in their day-to-day life

The fact that most people in the US will be able to identify (a) rather than (b) as the more-likely intent behind the metaphor illustrates precisely the crux of the issue, however: namely, that this ease-of-interpretation is aided by the fact that most people in the US do not come from a society with a centuries-long tradition of anti-double-jointed violence, but do come from a society with a centuries-long tradition of anti-black violence.

The parameters of this metaphorical setup, therefore, are "calibrated" specifically to match the polemical (and normative) intent: that white supremacy in the US should be actively combated.

This technique of metaphor construction can, however, be used for precisely opposite ends. Note how above we made the assumption that it was available only to one "side". In reality, it is available to any "side", including a side that benefits from and/or hopes to strengthen or at least maintain the regime of white supremacy.

We argue that this side has an advantage, in fact, in that the original quote from King's speech can be employed as a metaphorical "weapon" against measures for racial equality more easily than for it. Several key policies that have been used by US institutions and administrations with the (purported) aim of reducing racial inequality, for example, are easy for this side to dismiss via "reverse racism"-style metaphorical constructions. For example, implicitly-metaphorical arguments like the following are continuously proferred and disseminated, making their way into e.g. the regular Supreme Court rulings which affirm the illegality of affirmative action in higher education and other crucial spheres of US society:

"MLK said black people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But affirmative action is a policy which unjustly introduces the latter consideration in a way that diminishes the former consideration. Therefore, if we 'agree with MLK', then this policy should be abolished."

Similar "templates" could be constructed for, e.g., instrumental uses of the quote by those who oppose celebrations of black artists, black history month, and so on. And although some in the US (like myself) exist in bubbles where the fallacy of this type of argument–-due to the overall asymmetry of higher-educational and employment opportunities for black people in the US relative to white people–-is "obvious", its regular appearance in the Supreme Court along with the majority view in the US that "little or nothing needs to be done" to address racial inequality demonstrates that it is far from "obvious" to a numerical majority of elites, and people in general, in the US.

Why is Gandhi Called a "Hero" while Yasser Arafat is Called a "Terrorist"?

This question has the same answer as the question from the previous section, and in fact there is a deeper-than-metaphorical connection between the two, given that King directly studied and drew inspiration from Gandhi's nonviolent Satyagraha practice. King titled the written account of his travels in India "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi", and emphasized his intellectual and spiritual debts to Gandhi throughout:

"While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India's Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change. We spoke of him often. So as soon as our victory over bus segregation was won, some of my friends said: "Why don't you go to India and see for yourself what the Mahatma, whom you so admire, has wrought."

And so he went, once

"The Gandhi Memorial Trust of India extended an official invitation, through diplomatic channels, for our visit",

and then

left India more convinced than ever before that non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom

As Arundhati Roy has eloquently explained throughout her career covering liberation movements across the Third World, however, Gandhian nonviolence is a mixed bag: while perhaps a useful strategy for members of oppressed groups who are somehow able to get cameras and media attention trained upon them at the point of its application, it is a disastrous strategy for most others.

For example, it is a disastrous strategy for millions of Naxalite rebels who operate from isolated bases of power deep within forests running along the eastern coast of India: when they are massacred in the thousands by Indian police during "emergency actions", who is there to witness the inspiring power of their nonviolence, besides the trees which are splattered with their blood or the soil which covers their mass graves?

Cui Bono?

In both of these cases, we see that metaphors work like any other weapon, in the sense that those with more power can wield them to maintain this imbalance, while those with less power can wield them to combat it. Hence, in the same way that we can ask cui bono?–-who benefits?–-from e.g. the US Defense budget, we can also ask who benefits from the popularity of certain quotes, metaphors, and interpretations, and the un-popularity of certain other quotes, metaphors, and interpretations.

In the case of MLK vs. Malcolm X, for example, we have argued that the "official" popularity of the former and the lesser degree of "official" popularity of the latter results from the fact that particular words and quotes from MLK can be used more easily to maintain white supremacy than can particular words and quotes from Malcolm X.

In the case of Gandhi vs. Yasser Arafat, Gandhi's words and quotes can be employed easily and straightforwardly to villainize the Naxalite rebels (among other "official" enemies of the Indian state), while Arafat's words and quotes cannot be employed quite as easily towards this end.

Who Ceded Ownership of Tools to the Master?

This approach can also help explain why Audre Lorde's mantra "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" is so damaging as a "rule of thumb" for social movements. In the case of nonviolence, as we've discussed, a movement which blindly chooses to adopt this tactic due to its "moral righteousness" could quite literally doom itself to decades of mass graves and eventual extermination.

While this should consign both nonviolence-as-principle and pacifism-as-principle to the dustbin of history, the quote from Lorde manages to one-up them in terms of self-defeat. While nonviolence and pacifism remove one tactic from the collection of tactics among which a liberation movement might choose, Lorde's principle removes any tactic that the oppressor has used from this collection.

All states in the modern world have grown, quite literally, out of the barrel of a gun. The story of every single state is a variation of the following: some group of people was able to establish, through superior force of arms, a monopoly over the "legitimate" use of violence, i.e., as "legitimated" by themselves. This is not some sort of radical Maoist belief, but rather, literally the accepted definition of the state in mainstream Western liberal thought. In the Western liberal tradition, therefore, saying that

"the state is the institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force"

Has the same non-controversial, definitional connotation as claims like

"Tricameral legislatures are split between legislative, executive, and judicial branches"

or

"In parliamentary systems of proportional representation, seats in the parliament are allocated to parties based on their proportion of all votes cast in an election".

So, in sufficiently "intellectual" discussions around Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian liberation struggle, for example, the Western liberal tradition actually (and somewhat surprisingly if you're not expecting it) does not bat an eyelash at claims like

"Israel exists as a state in a more robust sense than Palestine does because Zionist paramilitary groups (and the IDF post-1948) established and entrenched a monopoly over the legitimate use of force across a wider territory than Palestinian paramilitary groups have been able to."

This means that, returning to Lorde's idea, any liberation movement which refuses "the master's tools" ensures their own defeat, for all intents and purposes, in terms of how the modern world-system operates at a political level: Similar to how for-profit capitalist firms literally cannot act out in the interests of social benefit (it is illegal to do so, as it violates "shareholder primacy", a legal principle that has been continuously upheld in state and federal courts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries), a political body like a State of Palestine literally cannot exist unless it can demonstrate its monopoly over the legitimate use of force throughout whatever territory it claims–-this is what it means, legally (in international law), for a state like Somalia to be a "failed state", for example.

To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, Worte Sind Auch Waffen! (Words Are Also Weapons!) We should study them as such, and use them wisely as part of our various struggles to make the world slightly less shitty overall.