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Title: A Tsunami of Metaphors Author: Artis Date: Summer 2021 Language: en Topics: language, technology, Anarchie!, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #7 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 7 Notes: Previously appeared as Un tsunami de métaphores in anarchie! (journal mensuel), Issue 8, November 2020
“Your bedroom is a place to recharge yourself”. That was the slogan of a
new advertising campaign of a furniture manufacturer. “Because good
sleep is important”. Nobody will be surprised anymore that this
manufacturer compares human beings with batteries that have to be
recharged and of which the energy can be measured in percentages (in the
commercial the battery goes from 1% in the red to a green 100% after a
night in a room furnished by them). Human beings are nowadays
“connected”, “batteries”, “computers”. The metaphors borrowed from a
technical jargon and reflecting only a technical world are legion.
On average we use one metaphor every 20 words. Thus metaphors have left
their mark on our language, our way of expressing ourselves. If language
creates worlds then there are also those who have created languages to
instil worlds in us. Actually, linguists all agree that metaphors play a
dominant role in the conception of our thoughts and behaviour.
We – batteries – decide to not put energy any more in a relationship
with a certain friend after having made an analysis of gains and losses
of the respective friendship. As if we are perfect accountants that
submit everything to a monetary analysis. Because time is money (you
waste time and you gain time), and money, in turn, is health. When
businesses take many losses then the economy is ill. When a human being
is ill then something is not right in the machinery. There is a bolt
that’s not fitted very well or organs that don’t do their job anymore.
Even though they might seem sometimes complicated, metaphors are used to
make things more understandable. It’s the only way to talk about certain
things because literal language falls short when it’s about abstract,
relational, emotional things. We lack the physical experience of
abstract concepts and so we use words that invoke a tangible suggestion.
Thus we can “see” these concepts and almost have a physical experience
of them. One example is our way of talking about time. We talk about it
as if it is a space: the future is in front of us, the past behind us.
Literally speaking, most metaphors are insane. They confuse our senses.
Arthur Rimbaud considered poetry to be an elementary hallucination that
shakes our way of perceiving (our perception). That is exactly what
metaphors do. They make us taste vengeance (sweet) and feel loneliness
(chilling cold). Aristotle defined metaphors as the process of giving
something a name that actually belongs to something else. We transfer
the meaning of one word to another word. The old Greek already knew that
it is a formidable weapon, especially in political discourse - “because
a metaphor isn’t blindingly obvious”. Aristotle went so far as to say
that they who masters the use of metaphors, are masters of their
surroundings. The thinker of the modern state, Thomas Hobbes, discarded
metaphors as an abuse of speech. In his Leviathan he accused those who
use metaphors of deceiving others. Numerous thinkers have considered
metaphors as belonging to children, as an almost ridiculous trick for
feeble minds. It was the terrain of the poets with their absurd
inventions.
Today the use of metaphors is certainly not anymore the privileged
terrain of poets. In all domains of society language abounds with
metaphors. For example, the more technology advances – of which the real
functioning generally evades our understanding, the more we use
metaphors to try to grasp at least something. Even if we generally grasp
the results of a certain technological process rather than its sequence.
So we visualize “data” evidently as huge libraries, with the unfortunate
consequence that bits and bytes of information take in our imagination
the characteristics of intelligence and wisdom which are generally
linked to the “culture” contained in the books of a library. An object
becomes “intelligent” because it “interacts” while it is only
preprogrammed sequences of algorithms. Intelligence will soon become
“artificial” which points towards it supposedly surpassing “natural”
intelligence, which belongs to human beings. The more our direct
experience (not only physical but also mental and emotional) passes
through a mediation (being nowadays mainly technological or religious or
political), the more our language integrates metaphors that in turn,
confirm the inescapability of the mediation. Metaphors become the prism
through which we experience the world and that inevitability determine
the experience that we make from this world.
So nobody will be surprised to learn that for a long time intelligence
services have entire departments dedicated to the study of metaphors.
For example, to understand and map certain conceptions in a given
population. But also to create metaphors, yes, to guide feelings and
thoughts. Orwell isn’t far off. The methods can be very simple, as when
in this text I ask you not to think about a pink elephant and
subsequently you cannot stop “seeing” this pink elephant in front of
your nose. A consultant who works for a privately owned business that
“designs” metaphors for the campaigns of NGOs and charity foundations,
has a metaphor for metaphors: “It’s a room. The windows and doors allow
for a certain view, a frame to see the exterior through. Put the windows
higher in the room and people will see only trees. Put them lower and
they’ll only see grass. Put the windows only on the south side and
they’ll always see sun. The inventor of the metaphor makes their
architectural choices unavoidable.” Unavoidability and coercion merge
fast. Coercion in thoughts and in imagination; imprinting moral
imperatives in brains and behaviours. When we think about it there are
thousands of metaphoric expressions that participate in the reproduction
of domination by the sensations they evoke. In the military domain there
are “surgical strikes” or “peacekeeping missions”, in the economical
domain we have “the stock market that crashes” (there’s nothing anyone
can do about it) or “the economy recovers” (thanks to the political
measures). And to what extent has this awful metaphor dating back to
Antiquity become established that society is like a human body with each
organ its place and function and where the head commands and the arms
get tired? How rapidly did we absorb the concepts of cybernetics and
computing that say people are “connected” even when they never saw each
other, “networks” are “social” while they atomise, technology is “green”
while it’s colourless, flavourless or else rather white and grey?
And the jargon of anarchists? Certainly, the new world we hold in our
hearts also has to find an expression through a language capable of
creating worlds, a subversive language, an imagination that peers into
the untold horizons. But all that is very different from illusions
bordering on frauds. We call to make “war on society”, but how many
really leave the comfort zone of differences of opinion? We say we want
to liberate our passions… by affirming it on the internet. The anarchist
language creates worlds, should create worlds, but cannot be open to
fraud, to self-deceit, to a kind of collective hypnosis that will only
strengthen patterns of followers or the consumption of any subversive
tension. Did you already notice how comfortable expressions like “the
seed of subversion lies beneath the snow” can be for those seeking to
justify waiting? Besides, the “fire” that burns in our hearts can
extinguish very fast when things turn complicated and the “solid rocks
of our ideas” erode rather surprisingly fast when the trumpet of the
next “social movement” sounds.
Should we then abandon the imagined language, the metaphors to talk
about what we cannot talk about, declare the death of poetry (in
passing; isn’t it already numbed and then killed by the progress of
technology and its world of images?), in order to purge language from
manipulations, from biased strategies, from camouflaged hypocrisies,
from moral imperatives imprinted in the expressions themselves? A fact
in and of itself is nothing. The statement of a fact, stating something
“objectively”, is impossible. Language relates our being with our
experience. It will always be lacking, a bit false, approximative. For
that reason it would be a declaration of defeat to oppose the metaphors
that shape dominant thought with a factual language. The battle of
metaphors is being waged on the terrain of imagination. The language of
subversives cannot be “detached” from reality like the technological
language “detaches” us evermore from our direct experience. But it
cannot want to coincide with reality, because it would block the horizon
of imagination with its massacres, its oppression, its dullness, its
exploitation. No, subversive language has to build bridges, always anew
and different, between a fact and its expression, between a fact and its
interpretation, between a fact and its surpassing. To end with a
metaphor, breaking through the vicious circle of the production and
reproduction of the existent also goes through the expression and
language other than the one of modern domination that is technical and
riddled with nonsensical metaphors.