metaphor

metaphor Ordinary language is saturated with corporeal metaphors. We frequently speak of ‘the lip of a cup’, and ‘the legs of a table’, and use expressions like ‘the walls have ears’, ‘the interviewer kept me on my toes’, and ‘let's get to the heart of the matter’. Not only are many of our metaphorical expressions rooted in the body and our experiences of it, but metaphors, in turn, significantly shape our cultural perceptions of the body.

Definitions and interpretations

From the Greek word ‘metaphora’ meaning ‘transference’, a metaphor has generally been understood as a figurative expression which interprets a thing or action through an implied comparison with something else. Aristotle, who is usually considered the originator of ‘comparison’ theories of metaphor, described metaphors in the Rhetoric as elliptical similes — comparisons of ‘things that are related but not obviously so’ without using ‘like’ or ‘as’. According to Aristotle, the best or ‘most well liked’ type of metaphor transfers its meaning from one subject or ‘register’ to another through the principle of analogy. As Aristotle observes in the Poetics, these metaphors often depend on logical relationships between multiple terms. The metaphor ‘old age is the evening of life’, for instance, relies on the relation between a set of terms describing day and another set describing age.

Aristotelian approaches to metaphor remained largely unchallenged until 1936, when I. A. Richards offered what philosopher Max Black has termed an ‘interaction’ view of metaphor. Critiquing both Aristotle's notion of metaphor as special or ornamental use of language, and his assumption that metaphor involves the mere substitution of one term for another, Richards claimed that metaphor relies on a complex interaction of thoughts, rather than a process of linguistic substitutions. To explain how a metaphor functions as a ‘double unit’, Richards introduced the terms ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, which refer to the ‘principal subject’ and the name of the figurative term itself, respectively. (In the metaphor ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example, ‘Juliet’ would be the tenor and ‘sun’ the vehicle.) Richards' theory of metaphor as the product of an interaction between vehicle and tenor was later refined by Max Black in his 1962 book, Models and Metaphors. In this volume, Black suggested that a metaphor acts as a ‘filter’ in which two or more subjects interact according to a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ (a shared set of cultural responses) to produce new meanings for the entire phrase or sentence. In the metaphor ‘Tom is a fox’, then, not only is ‘Tom’ viewed in terms of cultural associations of foxes as sly creatures, but ‘fox’ is also reinterpreted through its juxtaposition with a human male.

In the late 1970s, John Searle rejected both interaction and comparison theories of metaphor, and offered an understanding of metaphor based on the ‘speaker's utterance meaning’. In Expression and Meaning, his 1979 study of speech act theory, Searle criticized earlier approaches to metaphor on the grounds that they tried to locate the meaning of metaphors in the sentences or metaphorical expressions themselves. Instead, Searle suggested, we must examine the slippage between the speaker's meaning and the sentence or word meaning. In other words, metaphorical utterances work not because a certain juxtaposition of words produces a change in the meaning of the lexical elements but because the speaker's meaning differs from their literal usage. Thus phrases like ‘It's getting hot in here’ or ‘Sally is a block of ice’ function as metaphors only in certain contexts with specific truth conditions: there is no single principle according to which metaphors operate.

Despite divergent theories of the ways in which metaphors operate, twentieth-century approaches have almost uniformly attempted to broaden traditional conceptions of metaphor as special use of language, offering an understanding of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process or structure. In short, metaphor came to be seen as ‘the omnipresent principle of language’ ( Richards), as a basic pattern of organizing and concertizing experience. No longer simply the domain of rhetoric or literary studies, metaphor has, over the past three decades, become a central topic of debate for fields like psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and the cultural studies of science.

Bodily metaphors

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars have shown that many of our metaphorical expressions (along with much of thought itself) develop from our perceptions and experiences of the body. In her 1956 volume on reading poetry, Modern English and American Poetry, Margaret Schlauch suggested that one of the most basic types of metaphorical transfer is the naming of a new object through its resemblance to part of the body. Citing such examples as ‘headland’, ‘foothill’, ‘the face of a watch’, and ‘blind alleys’, Schlauch offered a comparison view of corporeal metaphor in which meaning is transferred from bodily parts and sensuous experiences to other objects on the basis of similarity.

Paul Ricoeur's 1978 essay, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, likewise claimed that the body should play a key role in our understanding of metaphor. In accordance with his view that there is a ‘picturing function’ of metaphorical meaning, Ricouer suggested that the term ‘figure of speech’ is rooted in our very understanding of the body as a figure. Just as the body twists and changes position, so, too, do metaphors, which ‘turn’ or ‘twist’ standard meanings through particular usages of words or phrases. According to Ricouer, figures of speech such as metaphor provide language with a ‘quasi-bodily externalization’; in making abstract or foreign concepts more tangible, metaphors ‘embody’ ideas, offering a ‘figurability to the message’.

The body's role in shaping metaphors and cognition was expanded and refined in Mark Johnson's 1987 book, The Body in the Mind. Breaking with objectivist views on metaphor and meaning, Johnson asserted that human embodiment is central not only to metaphorical projection, but also to our most basic processes of developing and articulating meaning. Johnson argued that metaphor, one of our primary cognitive structures for ordering experience, stem from fundamental embodied schema relating to the body's movements, orientation in space, and its interaction with objects. The body's general upright position in space, for instance, creates a ‘verticality’ schema, which influences numerous metaphors. When we speak of ‘upscale living’, and use expressions like ‘she's on top of it’ or ‘he was down on himself’, we are using metaphors based on a hierarchy derived from the body's orientation in space. The body's interaction with objects likewise contributes to the general metaphorical correlation of ‘up’ (as opposed to ‘down’) with ‘more’; as we observe through our bodily interactions, when we add liquid to a container or magazines to a pile, the level increases. Thus even phrases like ‘falling stock prices’ and ‘rising costs’ derive their abstract representation of quantity through basic bodily experience. Other embodied schemata that are projected through metaphorical networks include: balance, in/out, front/back, contained/uncontained, and force or weight. Although revolutionary in its examination of the ways in which human embodiment is encoded into metaphor, Johnson's work has been critiqued by feminist scholars like Katherine Hayles for its failure to account for individual and cultural bodily specificities like gender, ethnicity, and physical ability.

In addition to influencing the names we give to objects and basic patterns of metaphorical thought, the human body has also had an impact on many of the metaphors we employ to describe society. Perhaps the most prevalent of these bodily metaphors, the body politic has contributed to our understanding of institutions like the state and church since the age of Pericles in ancient Greece. Whether in Plato's Republic, where the problems of the polis are metaphorized as diseases, or St, Paul's writings, in which the Church is compared to a human body with unified ‘members’, the metaphor of the body politic has shaped the way scholars have envisioned the hierarchies and interrelationships between various elements of society. Indeed, we still speak of ‘heads of state’, ‘governing bodies’, and crime as ‘a social disease’.

Metaphors for the body

Just as the body has played a crucial role in influencing our metaphorical networks, so too have metaphors shaped our understanding of the body. Metaphors for the body are as diverse as the cultures and civilizations that have created them; however, several key metaphors can be identified as central to Western thought. Dating back to Plato's Cratylus, the metaphor of the body as a prison or house for the soul has influenced philosophical, religious, and other cultural attitudes toward the body — especially the mind/body dualism. At the heart of Plato's metaphor is the notion that the true essence of human beings lies in their soul or spirit; the body is alien, brute matter, a vessel for the soul/mind. The metaphor of the body as dungeon or house took on particular gendered implications with Aristotle's writings on the chora and reproduction, which contend that the mother merely ‘houses’ the child, providing the shapeless matter, while the father provides the form or shape. In the New Testament and other early Christian writings, the body was again conceived of as a house or temple, offering the distinction between the immortal, god-given soul and the mortal, corruptible body in which it dwells.

Another primary metaphor in Western perceptions of the body and the mind/body split is the Cartesian metaphor of the human body as a machine. Intervening in the mechanism versus vitalism debate, René Descartes suggested that the body (res extensa) could be understood as a self-moving machine composed of separate mechanisms that function according to the laws of nature. Descartes' metaphor of body as machine and its association of bodies (but not minds) with nature was fundamental in positioning the body as a universally knowable subject fit for scientific investigation. In the twentieth century, fields like art history and medicine used the body as machine metaphor in interesting new ways. Within the art world, the metaphor intersected with modernist theories of aesthetics, as artists like Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp depicted the body in an increasingly mechanized fashion. Drawing on earlier notions of a mechanistic body, and an understanding of the Fordist mass production system, the medical community utilized new cultural perceptions of the body through its metaphorical elaborations of the ‘Fordist body’. As described by Emily Martin in ‘The End of the Body?’, the Fordist body functioned according to principles of ‘centralized control and factory-based production’. This metaphorical conception of the body not only created a hierarchy among bodily organs, with the brain (centralized control) at the top and the other organs below, but also caused the body to be considered in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Central to much recent work on embodiment is the metaphor of the body as a text or surface upon which our cultural and personal identity is written. Though widely used by many body theorists, the metaphor is most often associated with Michel Foucault. Drawing from Nietzschean notions of the body as a site of social incision, Foucault described the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’) and as an ‘object and target of power’ (Discipline and punish). For Foucault, the body became a text or a medium on which power operates, producing culturally and historically marked subjects. Thus, as various feminist scholars have noted, cultural gender norms are ‘written’ on female and male bodies through diet, make-up, exercise, dress, footwear, and other practices. We should be careful, however, not to see the body solely as a blank slate awaiting cultural markings; as feminist philosophers Susan Bordo and Elizabeth Grosz point out, the materiality of the ‘page’ (the body itself) must be taken into consideration when we examine the ways in which bodies are culturally or otherwise inscribed.

The relationship between metaphor and the body is quite complex. Not only do metaphors affect our cultural perceptions of the body, but many of our metaphors and patterns of metaphorical cognition are shaped by our understandings of the body and embodiment. Thus, as science studies scholar Gillian Beer observes in ‘Problems of description and the language of discovery’, metaphors are both descriptive and productive. As they move from level to level, cutting across disciplines with free movement and flexibility, metaphors become an important ‘resource for discovery’; they become sites for reconceiving and recreating the body in new and exciting ways.

Christina Jarvis

Bibliography

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago and London.
Lakoff, G. and and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London. Sacks, S. (ed) (1979). On metaphor. Chicago and London.