How to Do Things with Metaphor?: Introduction to the Issue

Right on the first page of their Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson state that metaphors are not a matter merely of words, but of action.¹ The reason is that our conceptual system, which governs our thought and our everyday functioning, is made up of metaphorical concepts. In that sense, metaphors govern our lives. This metaphorical governance is quiet and inconspicuous and we are largely unaware of it, hidden as it is in our minds. Metaphors We Live By has served, perhaps more than any other publication on metaphor, to wake us up to the power of these invisible governors. The book showed how metaphors can be made visible by excavating metaphorical concepts such as “more is up” and “life is a journey” as underlying seemingly nonmetaphorical expressions in daily life.

From this starting point, Lakoff and Johnson elaborated their approach to metaphor in various ways. One direction focused on a deeper understanding of the human mind and its conceptual system and culminated in Philosophy in the Flesh.² Thought, this book states, is embodied, largely unconscious and largely metaphorical, and this unconscious metaphorical system functions as a “hidden hand” that shapes our everyday life. The origin of this hidden hand, to be found in our childhood sensorial experiences and their neurological impact, is at the core of the book, as it digs below language into the bodily reality of our minds.

A second direction, taken by Lakoff in Moral Politics and smaller books derived from it, focuses on the way metaphors frame world-views and political common sense.³ This book claims that morality and politics are fundamentally framed by family metaphors, and that conservative and liberal thought in the United States can be understood by excavating their different underlying metaphorical views of the family. The book has given rise to heated debate on metaphors, framing, and politics—the so-called framing wars.

Whatever the direction taken, in Lakoff and Johnson’s theory, metaphors do not color or embellish, as they are typically said to do when they are seen as poetic devices; nor do they mislead or lie, as they have been accused of doing by positivist thinkers in science and philosophy. Instead, they govern, shape, and frame. And they do so not only on the level of language, but also on the level of perception, conception, and affection.

The authors in this special issue are all inspired by this framing perspective on metaphor, and they aim to contribute to its further development. While the Lakovian paradigm claims that metaphors frame thought, language, and action, the action part seems to be relatively under-explored and under-theorized. We will focus on metaphorical action, which involves paying attention to the materiality of world-making rather than to the mind, to politics and ethics rather than to cognition and representation.

We travel more than one road. Our leading question—“How to do things with metaphor?”—is (at least) twofold. First, it pertains to a descriptive level: how metaphors do things in and with the world we live in. From this perspective, all articles can be said to follow the movements and mobilizations of specific metaphors in specific fields and domains. The fields addressed here are heterogeneous; they include nature and science (cloning, genomics, botany, geography, ecology), media and technology (scientific journals, newspapers, computer interfaces, painting, photography), and issues in politics and ethics (contested science, software literacy, research agendas, environmental degradation). But since the metaphors explored in the articles sometimes travel crisscross among several fields and issues, on their way rearranging and sometimes creating the fields as such, a categorization by fields can only be provisional: the metaphors addressed in the articles are continuously on the move. During these travels, their form and action may change. Metaphors in action may become weaker or stronger, get new interpretations, shift frames, clash or blend. And sometimes it is hard to tell whether these transformations are brought about by the metaphors themselves or by the metaphorical analysis employed by the authors. We might...