A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade: The Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor

A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade

A War of Words in the

Discourse of Trade The Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor

Philip Eubanks

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 03 02 01 00 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eubanks, Philip, 1954– A war of words in the discourse of trade : the rhetorical constitution of metaphor / Philip Eubanks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Commerce. 2. Metaphor. I. Title. HF1008 .E78 2000 380—dc21 ISBN 0-8093-2334-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

99-087592

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞

Here, Mom, some light reading.

Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. A Conversation among Metaphors

ix xiii 1

2. Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra

13

3. The Conversation at Large

30

4. Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory

62

5. The Story of Metaphor

103

6. Metaphor, Culture, and Community

134

7. Conclusion

161

Appendix

171

Notes

175

Works Cited

177

Index

187

Preface Metaphor has been studied for a long time and from many perspectives. But it is only in the last two decades that many of us have ceased to think of metaphor as mainly fanciful decoration that adorns literary texts and high-flown rhetorical speeches. Before that, even the most enlightened commentators routinely treated metaphor as special language. In contrast, most important theorists today have come to think of metaphor as fundamental to thought. The best of the cognitive theories of metaphor is “conceptual metaphor theory,” first outlined by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Since then, the importance of conceptual metaphor theory has been well established by subsequent work from Lakoff, Johnson, Mark Turner, and a growing number of researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and literary study. As Lakoff and Johnson observe in their recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh, converging evidence from numerous perspectives makes it difficult to deny that conceptual metaphors are real and can explain a good deal about the way we think and speak. To summarize briefly, conceptual metaphor theory asserts these key things: First, most metaphors are instances of larger cognitive structures called conceptual metaphors. For example, if we say that our love relationship has hit a roadblock or that our marriage has been smooth sailing, we cannot say so without recruiting the overarching metaphor Love Is A Journey. Love Is A Journey structures specific locutions by providing them with a constraining image schema that includes a starting place, a path, and an ending place. Love Is A Journey also encompasses many aspects of journeying that can be applied to love, such as the possibility of impediments, the hope for adventure, and the possibility of psychological or spiritual change in the course of travel. Second, once we observe that specific metaphors are supported and constrained by conceptual metaphors, we are forced to observe that everyday and literary metaphors work in much the same way. From a structural perspective, there is little difference between someone’s speaking mundanely of the road to ruin and Robert Frost’s speaking poetically of the road less traveled; both are instances of Life Is A Journey. Third, conceptual metaphors have cultural consequences. More specifically, conceptual metaphors do not just vivix

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idly describe our experience of the world; they help to make our experience of the world what it is. In the English language and in the culture in which I live, we routinely call upon the conceptual metaphor Life Is A Journey to explain what it means to be alive. We can hardly think about life without this journeying metaphor. That basis for understanding metaphors is what first attracted me to this area of study. In the course of this book, I do my best to rethink conceptual metaphor theory where I see the need and to build upon it where I see the opportunity. Throughout, however, it should not be forgotten that conceptual metaphor theory has opened doors that were long closed. I approach the topic of conceptual metaphor by offering a detailed account of the discourse, or conversation, that constitutes the conceptual metaphor Trade Is War. Indeed, the discourse of trade depends upon a complex web of metaphors that interactively crystallize rhetorical positions. This conversation has yet to be fully described in scholarship on metaphor or scholarship on the rhetoric of trade or economics. But describing this conversation is only part of my objective. I also offer a rhetorically informed analysis of the way metaphor works. The way Trade Is War functions is the way all important metaphors function; we cannot fully understand any single metaphor unless we understand its interplay with related metaphors and literal concepts. At the same time, metaphoric groupings cannot function separately from a concrete discursive setting––a describable conversation that exerts a controlling force over the way any instance of a conceptual metaphor is spoken or written. Considering the influence of discourse at large permits us to see more clearly the localized functions of metaphor that are all but invisible in traditional analyses. While offering this account of metaphor, I challenge the standard Aristotelian view of metaphor, the view that informs most conventional thinking and experimentation on the subject. My claim is this: The conceptual metaphor view, combined with an understanding of metaphor as rhetorically constituted, makes obsolete almost all of the assumptions that have previously guided metaphor study, from hackneyed handbook advice to much of the sophisticated experimentation of cognitive science. In short, this study tells us something more than we have already known about conceptual metaphors. So far, we have learned that when we look at thought and language, we seem inevitably to discover metaphors. This study demonstrates that when we look at metaphors, we find active rhetoric. To describe this rhetoric is to reveal what I call the rhetorical constitution of metaphor. The chapters are arranged as follows: In chapter 1, “A Conversation among Metaphors,” I illustrate the responsive character of Trade Is War by analyzing excerpts from an edi-

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tion of CNN’s Crossfire. The edition focuses on U.S. trade policy toward Japan as the United States considers sanctions against Japan’s automobile manufacturing industry. The Crossfire discussion is particularly revealing because it (by design) represents a variety of influential viewpoints; thus, the discussants express a variety of important trade metaphors. The discussion permits us to see not just which metaphors are important but the politically charged relationship between them. In chapter 2, “Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra,” I challenge the standard Aristotelian view of metaphor, which has been responsible for many or most of the errors made in metaphor study from antiquity to the present. Aristotle’s influence is felt not in the particulars of his theory but rather in his initial identification of the two parts of metaphor––a concept that has subsequently been reified by such terms as tenor and vehicle, focus and frame, and target and source. Once metaphor is seen as fundamentally constituted by two parts, its functioning is seen as both mainly internal and discoverable at the sentence level. Moreover, it is seen as understandable in abstract terms: the metaphor of A is B. It is this treatment of metaphor that the book documents and challenges throughout. In chapter 3, “The Conversation at Large,” I offer an extensive, yet necessarily partial, view of the conversation among Trade Is War and related metaphors and concepts, presenting instances of Trade Is War from the English Renaissance until the present. I analyze numerous variations of Trade Is War, taken from the news media, popular and academic print media, television, and focus groups that were conducted as part of this study. (For the sake of readability, I have edited quotations from members of these focus groups.) In presenting these wide-ranging instances, I make two main arguments: First, although Trade Is War is commonplace, it also encompasses significant variety. Second, for all of Trade Is War’s variety, we can nonetheless identify recurring patterns in its use, especially with respect to its intercourse with other trade metaphors. The way Trade Is War is claimed, ascribed, attenuated, and intensified forms what I call a rhetorical etiquette, a pattern of use that, while not inviolable, crucially constrains the meaning and function of Trade Is War. In chapter 4, “Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory,” I argue that when we see Trade Is War (along with other commonly studied metaphors) as part of a dynamic and diverse conversation, we need to reconsider three commonly accepted notions prevalent in twentiethcentury metaphor theory. First, I challenge the notion of metaphoric life span. Metaphoric life span assumes that metaphors begin as living expressions, then over time lose their metaphoric quality. It is the notion that underlies the everyday expression “dead metaphor,” which is both an everyday and a theoretical construct. In fact, there is scant evidence that metaphors live and die, as an examination of Trade Is War and other

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metaphors demonstrates. Second, I challenge categorical violation. Categorical violation argues that metaphor amounts to a false assertion of category. By challenging categorical violation, I demonstrate that much theoretical and experimental exploration of metaphor is driven by an erroneous idea of what a metaphor is. Third, I begin an examination of mapping, an account of metaphor that offers important insights into metaphor’s functioning. I argue that while mapping is important, it cannot be considered without reference to such rhetorical functions as preference, minimum conditions, and rhetorical modulation. In chapter 5, “The Story of Metaphor,” I demonstrate that metaphor is closely linked to story-based constructions of the world. In particular, I argue that the way we understand and produce metaphors depends upon what I call licensing stories. Because metaphors are “licensed” by stories, whether we find any given metaphor to be apt is not, as has been thought, a matter of generating workable mappings. Instead, metaphors are evaluated with respect to social, political, and philosophical import. My argument is based largely upon focus groups conducted for this study. But the relation between metaphor and story is evident in trade discourse more generally, as is shown at the close of the chapter. There, I present a case study of the metaphors and stories used to characterize Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, Inc. In chapter 6, “Metaphor, Culture, and Community,” I caution against the too-pervasive conclusions about metaphor and culture that have become popular in recent years. Because of current intense interest in metaphor, it is tempting to attribute sweeping cultural significance to it. But a view of metaphor as rhetorically constituted works against this tendency. When we consider metaphor’s rhetorical constitution, we are forced to confront not a stealthy, omnipresent force but rather a patterned fragmentation of considered thought. It is more productive, therefore, to consider important metaphors in relation to discourse communities and the rhetorical etiquettes they enact. Finally, in chapter 7, “Conclusion,” I argue that the analysis I have presented is something more than an academic exercise. The conversation of metaphors that constitutes Trade Is War, like other metaphoric conversations, calls for both criticism and critique. It is good to understand how metaphor works. It is better still to enter into metaphoric conversations, no matter how intimidatingly large and entrenched, in order to affect the necessary political and social consequences of what we say. One of the lessons of rhetoric, and thus one of the lessons of metaphor as rhetorically constituted, is that writing and speech can never be accurately characterized as “only rhetoric.” Trade Is War and the conversation of which it is a part cannot justly be described as “only metaphors.”

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Acknowledgments Most authors observe that their books have been a long time in the making and could not have been completed without the help of others. I see no call here for originality. This book was indeed a long time in the making and could not have been completed without the help of others. I wish here to thank the three people who were most helpful at its inception. I thank Gregory Colomb for giving me his lively conversation, productive skepticism, and many good ideas. I thank Paul Prior for being so generous with his time and insight. I thank Nina Baym for her good judgment and good eye. I also thank the anonymous readers for their valuable comments. For her willingness to take an unpredictable life’s journey, my wife, Mary Lou, deserves more thanks than anyone. I thank Lester Thurow for permission to use material from my interview with him. I also thank the journals Written Communication and Poetics Today for allowing me to include material from previously published articles. Portions of chapter 2 and chapter 3 were published in “Conceptual Metaphor as Rhetorical Response: A Reconsideration of Metaphor,” Written Communication 16.2 (April 1999): 171–99, © 1999 Sage Publications, Inc. Portions of chapter 4 were published in “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 419–42.

1 A Conversation among Metaphors Being neighbors, [trade partners] are necessarily enemies, and the wealth and power of each becomes, upon that account, more formidable to the other; and what would increase the advantage of national friendship, serves only to inflame the violence of national animosity. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 Foreign trade is a war in which each party seeks to extract wealth from the other. —Honda Rimei, Tokugawa philosopher, 1744–1821 The way to conquer the foreign artisan is not to kill him, but to beat his work. . . . The American workman who strikes ten blows with his hammer whilst the foreign workman only strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner as if the blows were aimed at and told on his person. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860

Metaphor is usually seen as a sentence-level phenomenon—a nonliteral figure of speech governed by localized rules of operation, linguistic or cognitive. When the larger import of metaphor is acknowledged, this acknowledgment is all too often a matter of hastily attaching metaphor to rhetoric. Metaphor, it is asserted, functions on the sentence level but can be used as a rhetorical tool. But this is backwards. Most metaphors are thoroughly caught up in the larger give-and-take of rhetoric. They are fundamentally shaped by surrounding, subsuming conversations that are informed by politics, philosophy, economics, social and professional concerns—in short, by the whole of our cultural and conceptual repertoire. The question, then, is how do we forge a sufficient theoretical connection between rhetoric at large and metaphors in particular? One way to begin is to examine not individual metaphors but groupings of metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson took the first step toward explaining how metaphors work in relation to one another in

1

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Metaphors We Live By, identifying groupings of metaphors now commonly called “conceptual metaphors.” Lakoff and Johnson point out that metaphors such as attacking, destroying, and defending arguments do not stand in isolation but rather share cognitive structures with other instances of the conceptual metaphor Argument Is War. They also point out that Argument Is War is more than a phenomenon of the brain. It is a product of our culture. In English, we rely upon numerous conceptual metaphors such as Happy Is Up, Life Is A Journey, Love Is A Physical Force, The Mind Is A Machine, Understanding Is Seeing, Ideas Are Food, and dozens more. The idea of conceptual metaphor is the fundamental tool we need in order to understand the rhetorical constitution of metaphor.1 In this book, I will examine one conceptual metaphor and its rhetorical milieu: Trade Is War. In doing so, I will focus on a different kind of data than has so far been important in studies of conceptual metaphor. Previous studies of conceptual metaphor have relied mainly upon singleword idioms, single-sentence clichés, and very brief quotations, presented with little or no context. This kind of data has been more than sufficient to establish the presence and importance of conceptual metaphors. But it brackets off the communicative setting needed to understand metaphor’s integral relation to rhetoric. When we take into account the many concrete locutions that make up a conceptual metaphor, we find important patterns of variation—rhetorically constituted patterns of use that give us reason to reconsider how conceptual metaphors work. Furthermore, by examining the connection between metaphoric groupings and rhetoric, we can explain the smaller—not to say unimportant—operations of metaphor that traditional accounts have failed to explain. When we view metaphor as rhetorically constituted, we can improve upon the best accounts of metaphor offered under the rubric of conceptual metaphor, and we can abandon traditional accounts of metaphor almost entirely. Instances of Trade Is War are found wherever English speakers discuss trade and commerce. The metaphor has been with us at least since the late Renaissance. Today, we re-envoice it most commonly in the standard locution trade war, but we also speak routinely of conquering markets, of having retaliatory tariffs in our arsenal, of battling for economic supremacy, and so on. However, noting a few common locutions gives us little insight into Trade Is War. It is important to examine the variety of concrete expressions that constitute Trade Is War and to take into account the communicative milieu that subsumes particular instances. Thus, I will take up instances of Trade Is War in the print news media, on television discussion shows, in academic works, in popular nonfiction books, in novels, in economic commentary from the past, and in focus group conversations. The ways we see trade as war are many, some of them routine, others surprising. For instance, in a secretly recorded FBI tape, a Fortune 500

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executive uses a particularly striking trade-as-war metaphor. The FBI’s mole, a corporate vice president, finds it reprehensible, writing: Then [Terry Wilson] said something that was a common phrase around ADM, a phrase that turns up lots of times on the tapes. It was our philosophy. Terry used to say it, and Mick [the son of Dwayne Andreas, ADM’s chairman] would say it: “The competitor is our friend, and the customer is our enemy.” There are tapes of Mick Andreas quoting his father as always saying this.2 (Whitacre 55, emphasis added)

Whether we are offended or amused by “the customer is the enemy,” most of us would recognize that this metaphor is unusual. It is backwards. After all, isn’t the customer supposed to be our friend, and the competitor our enemy? In fact, the competitor, whether a corporation or a country, is almost always our enemy in Trade Is War. That is why we want to defeat our competitors. That is why we battle for economic supremacy. That is why we have trade wars. Trade Is War is like other conceptual metaphors in that it encompasses a broad range of similar metaphors. However, as we can see from this single example, there is more to any instance of Trade Is War than just membership in a metaphoric grouping. Not only do we recognize the possibility of metaphorizing trade as war, we also recognize that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of doing it. This would not be so if each instance operated independently. That is, in order for the conceptual metaphor to be said the wrong way, there must be a right way, a way that is culturally entrenched. ADM’s private war cry would not have its surprise value if it were not contradicting what we all assume to be true. In short, Trade Is War must have a standard rhetoric. And here, there is much to say about Trade Is War in particular and about conceptual metaphors in general. Trade Is War takes part in a far-flung and complex conversation. This conversation comprises a broad exchange of politically and philosophically inflected discourse—in the mainstream media, in academic publications, in public speeches and debate, in private conversations, in all of the writing and speaking that makes up trade talk. In order to see the workings of Trade Is War, we have to look at how the conversation is constituted. Trade Is War takes part in a conversation among metaphors, but that conversation is woven into the fabric of a larger conversation we can call the discourse of trade. The discourse of trade is real enough; we know it when we read it and hear it. But it does not exist discretely any more than the discourse of economics or the discourse of the law or the discourse of the experimental article. The discourse of trade is nested within, overlaps, subsumes, and is subsumed by the discourses of economics, business, politics, gov-

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ernment, and perhaps other discourses. Where these discourses converge upon trade, we often find Trade Is War. My effort here is to describe not the “internal” workings of Trade Is War but rather to describe Trade Is War as a dynamic constituent of the discourse of trade. Ultimately, I will argue that we cannot usefully analyze Trade Is War (or any other metaphor) without at the same time analyzing the discourses that catalyze and shape each metaphoric utterance and the patterns these utterances form.

Trade Discourse: Strange Bedfellows and Standard Rhetorics For all its complexity, the discourse of trade can be described in a general way. We can identify standard rhetorical positions with respect to recurring controversies, and we can identify stable thematic constituents, especially recurrent metaphors that function in patterned ways. It is tempting to use these recurrent metaphors as a toehold, hoping to work our way from the particular expression to the general rhetoric. But a more fruitful approach—because metaphors cannot be well understood apart from their rhetorical milieu—is to consider the broad conversation first, examining recurrent metaphors in light of a guiding rhetoric. To begin, I offer a microcosm of trade discourse: a single edition from CNN’s Crossfire.

Four Discussants, Eight Positions The topic of the program (titled “Head-On Collision”) is a proposed U.S. tariff on Japanese luxury cars. Crossfire features two hosts, one from the political left, one from the political right, who typically interview (or more accurately, argue with) two ideologically opposed guests, liberal grilling conservative and conservative grilling liberal. In this edition of Crossfire, indicative of the complexity of all trade discourse in the United States, the alignments are more complex. Ordinarily ideological opponents, the hosts are united in their opposition to the proposed tariff. Similarly, the guests come from opposing camps, but both favor the tariff. The hosts are Michael Kinsley, a liberal television commentator and a onetime editor of the New Republic, and John Sununu, a former Bush administration chief of staff and former Republican governor of New Hampshire. Their guests are Sander Levin, a Democratic congressional representative from Michigan, and Andrew Card, the current president of the American Automobile Manufacturers’ Association and a former secretary of transportation under President Bush. It is by design that Crossfire presents opposing sides of an issue, but it is inherent in the discourse of trade that there will be opposing sides, even if those sides cannot be dichotomized easily. In recent years, when faced with trade controversies, Republicans and Democrats often find their houses divided and themselves aligned with habitual opponents.

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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggests that this frequent realignment has created what might be called a four-party system (“New American Politics”). According to Friedman, in the past Democrats and Republicans have been easy to pigeonhole. Democrats have favored a government-provided social safety net; Republicans have opposed government as a social guarantor, aligning themselves with laissez-faire economics and, not coincidentally, big business interests.3 With the coming of the global economy, which has been hastened by NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the political parties are divided internally by trade controversies, making for a four-way split. Friedman configures the “fourparty system” as follows: those who favor both a social safety net and free trade, those who favor a social safety net but oppose free trade, those who oppose both a social safety net and free trade, and those who oppose a social safety net but favor free trade. Although Friedman’s scheme does not account for every political nuance in U.S. politics, it represents well the alignments on Crossfire. Kinsley is a free-trade liberal, Sununu a free-trade conservative. Levin is a protectionist liberal, Card a protectionist conservative. (I assign these labels notwithstanding the pejorative connotation of “protectionist.” Even hard-liners such as Patrick Buchanan prefer phrases such as “economic nationalist.”) These multiple alignments can help us make sense of the trade rhetoric displayed on Crossfire. Participants may agree on an immediate goal, but their way of conversing is shaded by other commitments. In other words, even when people share an immediate rhetorical purpose, such as persuading the public that trade sanctions are a good idea, they bring to that purpose individuated sets of political, economic, philosophical, and social momentums. They enter the conversation with what I call a discursive trajectory. Here are a few brief, representative excerpts from Crossfire: Sununu: Let’s talk about getting hurt. Aren’t you afraid that even if you’re right that you get a resulting trade war that depresses everybody’s economies, and your workers and your companies end up getting hurt even worse? Levin: No. No, no. You know, trade is—trade abroad is like trade at home, you have to push for yourself, and that’s what bothers me about the position of the opposition. They’ve got a wall here. How the—how is the wall going to come down, I ask you? We’ve been at this not for 20 months, but for 10 years on auto parts. The only way it’s going to come down is if we push and the Japanese understand we’re serious. This time we’re serious. . . .

6

A Conversation among Metaphors Kinsley: The point is what President Clinton is going to propose tomorrow is going to be a tax on American consumers. Card: It’s out of frustration that we’re saying we have to take a stick out and hit Japan with that stick, and we don’t want to have to take that stick out. Japan could solve this problem tomorrow by opening its market. Kinsley: Well, I wonder. I wonder if you don’t want to take the stick out. I mean, the fact is, if there is a tariff slapped on Japanese cars, that will enable your client, the American manufacturers, to raise their prices, won’t it? Levin: Hey, Mike, can I break in here? Because I’ve heard this song and dance before. . . . Sununu: Andy Card, isn’t this just a game of chicken and we’re going to see who blinks at the last minute? Card: Well, the Japanese have refused to blink for the last 20 years. This time President Clinton, Ambassador Kantor are dead serious. They’re saying, “Open your market. We want to see progress. Change has got to come,” and the change has got to come in the Japanese market. It’s not change in the U.S. market. It’s change in the Japanese market. Sununu: And you—you have no concern about a trade war spreading around the world? Asian Pacific partners to the U.S. are watching what’s happening here, and they’re saying, “If you can do this to Japan, you can do it [to us].” Card: John, I’m actually more afraid than that. I’m afraid that the Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around the world. There should be no sanctuary markets. We want to see free trade in Japan. We want to keep the Japanese manufacturers honest— Levin: Look, every time—I don’t understand this. Every time America stands up for its workers and businesses in trade, you yell trade war. (“Head-On Collision” 2–6)

The above excerpts are, of course, heavily laden with metaphors that signal speakers’ political and philosophical bent. But all language, metaphoric or literal, can always bear a load of political, economic, and philosophical associations. Both the speakers (whose agendas are known) and their language choices (language carries the residue of previous agendas) are inflected by a particular discursive trajectory. Levin, the protectionist liberal, signals his discursive trajectory by calling sanctions an instance when “America stands up for its workers and businesses in trade”—in that order. His priority is to safeguard local interests, workers first, businesses second. Moreover, his view is well known to John Sununu, who preserves the ordering of workers and businesses in his initial question: “Aren’t you afraid that . . . your workers and your companies end up getting hurt even worse?” Representative Levin’s dis-

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trict includes both the auto manufacturers and their employees, but as a mainstream Democrat he re-envoices the words of the labor movement. He is concerned about workers—not the workforce or employees or human resources. The word workers, no doubt, has other associations that resonate beyond the conversation at hand, as far afield as Daily Worker. Yet a competent listener knows that this inflection is almost certainly abhorrent to Levin. Card, the protectionist conservative, is less interested in workers than in the consequences of trade policy on American manufacturers, expressed in his mistrust of “Japanese manufacturers.” American manufacturers are global entities with global interests, and this perspective is embraced by Card. Just as Levin’s local perspective is signaled by his use of workers, Card’s global perspective is signaled by his emphasis upon the word market. Card invents an administration message to the Japanese: “Open your market. We want to see progress. Change has got to come.” He adds to that, “And the change has got to come in the Japanese market. It’s not change in the U.S. market. It’s change in the Japanese market.” And since his concern is about markets as an international system, he expresses global alarm: “I’m afraid that the Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around the world.” We can see, then, that while Levin and Card are allies in this discussion of trade, their discursive trajectories remain quite different. On the other hand, the trajectories of opponents Card and Sununu, as well as opponents Levin and Kinsley, show marked similarities. Note the global perspective shared by Card and Sununu in this exchange: Sununu: Asian Pacific partners to the U.S. are watching what’s happening here, and they’re saying, “If you can do this to Japan, you can do it [to us].” Card: I’m actually more afraid than that. I’m afraid that the Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around the world.

Card does not challenge Sununu’s perspective on the trade problem but instead embraces and intensifies it. As fellow conservatives, they are not concerned about protecting a social safety net at home, a net that would protect workers, but rather they align themselves with global corporations, which can sometimes thrive when the social safety net, manifested by unionism, is removed. Fellow liberals Levin and Kinsley, though opponents with respect to tariffs, treat trade as a local problem. However, even though they share a local perspective, they exhibit nuanced differences between their discursive trajectories. To Levin, trade unfairness is a problem for workers first, and businesses (important mainly because they employ workers)

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second. But Kinsley decries sanctions as “a tax on American consumers.” Kinsley’s local approach is distinct from Levin’s; it is the viewpoint not of unionism but rather of a more recent vintage of liberalism, more anti– big business than pro–blue collar, more in sympathy with consumers and minorities than with workers per se.

The Inflection of Metaphors We are accustomed to recognizing the inflections of words; thus, it is not especially controversial to argue that words are informed by speakers’ rhetorical purposes and discursive trajectories (compare Bakhtin, “Discourse” 275–88). However, the study of metaphor has all but ignored the communicative complex that surrounds and supports individual metaphors, ranges of metaphors that constitute conceptual metaphors, and interactive groupings of conceptual metaphors. Yet just as we can see how the inflections of such key words as worker, market, and consumer are integral to the Crossfire discussion, we also need to see how key metaphors are inflected and how they interact with one another. The most prominent metaphor in the Crossfire discussion is Trade Is War. The possibility of a U.S.-Japan trade war is what draws speakers into conversation. The phrase trade war is uttered not just at the beginning and end of the Crossfire segment quoted but at the beginning and the end of the program as broadcast. It also occurs at emphatic moments, sparking pointed comments all around. Thus, trade war cannot be regarded as a disposable decoration but instead expresses a central controversy in international relations. It carries philosophical and political freight and is inflected by the explicitly expressed and already known discursive trajectories of those who give it voice. When Sununu, the globalist, speaks of a trade war, it is only in order to denounce those who would risk one. When Levin, the localist, utters trade war, it is only in order to defuse alarmist inflections of it—to make Sununu’s trade war seem a careless exaggeration. As important as Trade Is War may be, both to Crossfire and to the discourse of trade at large, it does not operate alone: it participates in a conversation among metaphors. A range of expressions named by Trade Is War perennially compete and converse with other trade metaphors— metaphors usually of games, containers, friendships, and journeys. In general, these metaphors function as either adjuncts or contradictions to Trade Is War. But their specific way of functioning—in a specific sociohistoric moment, uttered by a concrete speaker—depends upon the speaker’s rhetorical purpose and discursive trajectory: trade metaphors conform both to speakers’ immediate goals and to their general political and philosophical orientations. On Crossfire, the discussants enact a com-

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plex rhetorical etiquette: claiming, ascribing, substituting, attenuating, and intensifying metaphors in order to meet rhetorical needs. Consider first the interplay between Trade Is War and Markets Are Containers. Sununu challenges Levin with the Trade Is War metaphor: “Aren’t you afraid that even if you’re right that you get a resulting trade war?” Levin rejects not only Sununu’s assertion but also his metaphor, answering, “They’ve got a wall here. How the—how is the wall going to come down, I ask you? We’ve been at this not for 20 months, but for 10 years on auto parts. The only way it’s going to come down is if we push.” Levin counters Sununu’s war metaphor with a wall metaphor, which is an instance of Markets Are Containers. But this is not a mere duel of metaphor preferences. Levin accomplishes much by substituting his metaphor for Sununu’s. First, he resists Sununu’s ascription of Trade Is War to him. In order not to allow Sununu to pin Trade Is War’s presumed political and philosophical commitments on him—commitments to unyielding nationalism and to aggressive, risky action—Levin shifts from Trade Is War to Markets Are Containers. Second, by shifting metaphors and avoiding talk of war, Levin turns down the rhetorical temperature. This allows him to maintain his position in favor of tariffs without emphasizing potential hazards. Third, Levin ascribes his attenuated metaphor, Markets Are Containers, to the Japanese. According to Levin, it is the Japanese who have made their market into a container, one that we have every right to open. And that is not starting a trade war at all. Levin’s maneuver is a skilled one, executed in dangerous territory. Markets Are Containers is a risky metaphor. It is often poised on the edge of Trade Is War because Trade Is War entails Markets Are Containers. Conventionally, war involves conquering and defending territory—something contained by borders. At the conclusion of a war, the victor typically expands its borders to contain more territory. If trade is war, then the spoils of war, markets, must be conquerable: they must be something contained. The wall that Levin evokes might suggest the wall of a fortress as it is assaulted by a throng of warriors. Or it might suggest the Berlin Wall, the concrete corollary to the Iron Curtain, perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of the Cold War, which was as much an active trade war as it was a potential nuclear holocaust. However, Levin not only shifts to an alternative metaphor, he attenuates his chosen metaphor. His “push” suggests a bare-handed push that tumbles a freestanding wall—not a particularly militaristic image. He might well have said that we must destroy, demolish, or obliterate the wall—images that more strongly suggest war—but he avoids this rhetorical pitfall. He is able to do this because while Trade Is War entails Markets Are Containers, Markets Are Containers does not entail Trade Is War.

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That is, Markets Are Containers often has a military association, but it can also be benign—as in the routine marketing term barrier to entry. How the competition between metaphors plays out depends very much upon the discursive trajectory of the speaker and upon the way in which the standard rhetoric of the metaphor is followed. In this instance, Levin’s discursive trajectory works to his advantage. I have called Levin a “protectionist” for syntactic convenience, but the term, with its bellicose connotation, is explicitly rejected by mainstream Democrats such as Levin. Thus, an opponent may attempt to ascribe Trade Is War to Levin, but the charge is unlikely to stick. In addition, when Levin simultaneously ascribes and attenuates Markets Are Containers, his maneuver is part of a standard rhetorical etiquette. It is rhetorically typical to use nonincendiary instantiations of Markets Are Containers such as the market as pie or the market surrounded by a surmountable barrier. Moreover, whatever combative resonances remain are usually ascribed to the Japanese, whom Western commentators regularly paint as overaggressive traders. Well-modulated as Levin’s wall metaphor may be, Sununu finds the wall metaphor unpersuasive. Minutes later he confronts Levin’s ally, Card, saying, “And you—you have no concern about a trade war spreading around the world?” Card attempts to deflect the hot-button metaphor, but Levin breaks in out of turn to issue a challenge: “Every time— I don’t understand this. Every time America stands up for its workers and businesses in trade, you yell trade war.” Levin refuses to have Trade Is War ascribed to him or his ally. Soon the tug between war and container metaphors continues. After a commercial break, Levin elaborates, escalating the container metaphor somewhat, while doggedly maintaining his ascription of Markets Are Containers to the Japanese. He complains that Japanese informal barriers are “this high,” that you can’t “get through.” “You ought to be urging us to knock down those walls,” he says. In the end, though, neither Sununu nor Kinsley accept Levin’s metaphor. Kinsley claims that history shows one tariff always leads to another, and that leads to a trade war. Sununu agrees that trade wars have been costly to many economies. Like Levin, Card deflects Trade Is War whenever it is ascribed to him. And like Levin, he does so in ways that are rhetorically complex—ways that permit him to reject Trade Is War without sacrificing his favoring of tariffs. At one point, he accepts the Trade Is War orientation but attenuates it, shifting to a less violent stick metaphor: “It’s out of frustration that we’re saying we have to take a stick out and hit Japan with that stick, and we don’t want to have to take that stick out.” By speaking of a stick, he softens likely images and associations. As with Levin’s wall metaphor, stick images are less rhetorically heated than nuclear bombs

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or artillery attacks, probably less heated than swords or muskets. A stick is, generally speaking, not thought of as a weapon of war but rather as a homemade weapon, as in sticks and stones. (We might recall the rhetorical advantage the Palestinian intifada gained because the Palestinians threw rocks rather than firing guns.) Where trade and business are concerned, they also suggest a standard business metaphor involving a mule: the carrot and the stick. For example, in describing the growth of the American Tobacco Company, one writer observes that the company succeeded by “alternately employing the stick of price wars and the carrot of attractive buyout offers” (Franzen 42, emphasis added). To the extent that Card accepts Trade Is War by using a stick metaphor, he does so reluctantly, careful not to claim fully even an attenuated form of the metaphor. Often, he rejects it altogether, as when he counters Trade Is War with Markets Are Containers. “I’m afraid that the Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around the world. There should be no sanctuary markets.” This is in keeping with Levin’s wall metaphor; both wall and sanctuary metaphors treat markets as containers, spaces cordoned off from the rest of the world. Like Levin’s wall metaphor, Card’s sanctuary metaphor is poised on the edge of Trade Is War. Sanctuaries are often places that keep out hostile soldiers; to grant sanctuary is often to protect against military aggression. Thus, when Card argues that there should be no sanctuary markets, he may be suggesting that Japan should not be protected against commercial warfare. But Card moves quickly to ward off this aggressive implication, insisting he is only interested in what is best for everyone: “We want to see free trade in Japan.” The exchange of metaphors in this discussion (and in the discourse of trade generally) is no simple give and take, metaphor versus metaphor. Levin and Card follow a similar rhetorical etiquette, resisting ascription of Trade Is War to them, ascribing Markets Are Containers to the Japanese, and attenuating metaphors in order to make their protariff position less disturbing. But even as they follow a similar etiquette, their divergent discursive trajectories remain. When Levin wants to push down the Japanese trade wall, he is motivated by a desire to protect American workers. Card reluctantly pummels the Japanese with a metaphorical stick and opposes sanctuary markets in order to establish global free trade, which may or may not help Levin’s workers. The conceptual metaphors are the same. The rhetorical etiquette and attendant maneuvers are the same. But the discursive trajectories that inflect the metaphors are different. All of the metaphors that routinely animate the discourse of trade are shaped and reshaped by this rhetorical complexity. Sununu, who persistently ascribes Trade Is War to his opponents, also ascribes an intensified version of Trade Is A Game to them: “Andy Card, isn’t this just a game of chicken and we’re going to see who blinks at the last minute?” Sununu’s

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intensified game metaphor does not undermine Trade Is War the way, say, basketball or soccer metaphors might. Most game metaphors comport with the metaphor Trade Is Friendship, since games are played among friends. But Sununu selects a deadly, irrational game, often played by earnest rivals. At the same time, Sununu’s game metaphor is a metaphor of travel, an instance of Trade Is A Journey, normally a peaceful trade metaphor. But trade-as-chicken suggests aberrant travel, where trading partners who should be moving down the road of commerce together drive toward each other, indicated by the show’s title, “Head-On Collision.” This twenty minutes of Crossfire includes many more exchanges of this sort. In fact, it includes nearly all of the major conceptual metaphors that help to constitute the discourse of trade. This is not incidental. So pervasive are these metaphors that any twenty-minute English-language trade discussion is likely to call upon a full range of related metaphors. Moreover, the rhetorical complexity of such discussion is likely to be commensurate. The point is this: This edition of Crossfire is not extraordinary. It is everyday. Because it is part of the large, entrenched discourse of trade and because the discourse of trade encompasses a patterned conversation among metaphors, we can understand it in the light of rhetorical regularities.

2 Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also the conflict of human interests. —Karl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832 Trade is warfare by other means, and the United States is losing. —Michael R. Kerley, letter to the New York Times, 1996

The conversation that surrounds and subsumes metaphors is a sizable thing to ignore. Yet metaphor theory has largely ignored it, from Aristotle to the present. In fact, we can trace a direct line from Aristotle to current metaphor theory that explains how we have been able to disregard metaphor’s involvement in rhetorical discourse. Twentieth-century theorists purport to take a dim, or at least an ambivalent, view of Aristotle. While they almost universally praise him as the best of the early commentators, they argue simultaneously that Aristotle was mistaken in important ways. The preeminent Max Black offers the “interaction” view as a corrective to Aristotle (“Metaphor” 38–47, “More” 27–39). Paul Ricoeur tempers his tribute to Aristotle with phrases such as, “Aristotle himself did not exploit the idea of categorical transgression” (21). Eva Feder Kittay writes generously that Aristotle “almost got it right” but offers a corrective “perspectival” view (22–23, 138, 176, 301). But in the end, even though theorists agree that Aristotle got the answers about metaphor wrong, they leave it to him to define the questions. Thus, his influence is palpable even in theories that claim to supersede him. This dilemma has been noted by Umberto Eco, who laments that Aristotle is the source of an impasse: Of the thousands and thousands of pages written about the metaphor, few add anything of substance to the first two or three fundamental concepts stated by Aristotle. In effect very little has been said about a phenomenon concerning which, it seems, there is everything to say. (88)

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Eco is correct that metaphor theory, even as it struggles to go beyond Aristotle, finds itself affirming what Aristotle took only a few pages to explain. But we need not share Eco’s despair. It is more accurate to say that recent work on metaphor, from I. A. Richards to the collective contribution of cognitive science, has provided a detailed account of metaphor that is built upon a bedrock of Aristotle, limited not by the insightfulness of metaphor theorists but by the Aristotelian way of looking. Aristotle sees metaphor as a complex expression that is ultimately reducible to two unproblematic parts. He begins by defining metaphor as “the movement of an alien name” from one location to another (“Word Choice” 295). This observation might have opened the door to a rich and nuanced understanding of metaphor had Aristotle’s intellectual bent been different or if he had not been otherwise occupied with laying groundwork for Western thought in almost every imaginable area. In his brief discussion of metaphor, he proffers numerous examples of “alien names” that are complex indeed—examples that reveal basic ways of conceptualizing human activity as life cycles, agriculture, economics, journeys, war, and so on. In Poetics, he proffers: to speak of evening as the “old age of the day”; to say of the sun it is “sowing divine fire” (“Word Choice” 296, emphasis added). In On Rhetoric, he proffers: “The maidens, I note, are in arrears in their marriages”; “My path of words is through the midst of Chares’ actions” (224, 246–47, emphasis added). He himself metaphorizes that Gorgias speaks “without sparring or warm-up,” a sportinflected variant of the metaphor Lakoff and Johnson call Argument Is War (On Rhetoric 265, emphasis added). But rather than pursue large metaphoric patterns, Aristotle focuses upon the dual structure buried within the alien name. That is, when an alien name—a metaphor—emigrates from one place to another, two semantic domains play a role. When Aristotle says that Gorgias speaks “without sparring or warm-up,” these alien names move from the domain of boxing to the domain of oratory. Two places, two parts. Then, having split the metaphor in two, Aristotle performs a bit of linguistic algebra, asserting that all metaphors can be reduced to two-part expressions: similes. He explains: “A simile is also a metaphor; for there is little difference: when the poet says, ‘He rushed as a lion,’ it is a simile, but ‘The lion rushed’ would be a metaphor” (On Rhetoric 229). Citing numerous graceful similes, he concludes: “Whichever are approved when spoken as metaphors clearly will make similes too, and similes are metaphors needing an explanatory word” (230). No doubt, Ricoeur is correct in lauding Aristotle’s subordination of simile to metaphor and is not entirely mistaken in pointing out its chief advantage:

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Furthermore, the transfer [of meaning from one semantic domain to another] rests on a perceived resemblance that simile makes explicit by means of its characteristic terms of comparison. The closeness of metaphor to simile brings to language the relationship that operates in metaphor without being articulated, and confirms that the inspired art of metaphor always consists in the apprehension of resemblances. We shall say that simile explicitly displays the moment of resemblance that operates implicitly in metaphor. (27)

Metaphor does involve, in part, the movement of meaning from one domain to another. And this movement is, in a sense, displayed in simile. But the limitations that arise from saying that simile “explicitly displays” the operations of metaphor are considerable. To habitually restate metaphor as a simile, a this-equals-that formulation, reflects an understandable desire to get metaphor under control. Twentieth-century theorists usually restate metaphors in the form A is B. Replacing knowns with unknowns is advantageous in algebra. It gives us flexibility by providing variables that can later be replaced with specific numbers. But in metaphor theory, this kind of symbolic restatement is not helpful at all. When we replace knowns—words—with abstract symbols, we abandon all of the things that make metaphor work. We ignore the fluid, multifarious associations that are part and parcel of communication. The move toward the metaphor of A is B begins with Aristotle, and the difficulties with his methodology are evident. When Aristotle extracts the simile “he rushed as a lion” from the metaphor “the lion rushed,” he comments, rather offhandedly, that the essence of the lion metaphor, whether in metaphor or simile form, is that “both [the lion and the man] are brave” (On Rhetoric 229). Instead of seeing metaphor as a dynamic alien name, he sees it as a static, two-part expression that can be analyzed by identifying equivalent features. He begins with a dynamic, meaning-based notion of metaphor—open to all of the complexities attendant to communicative situatedness—and almost immediately abandons messy pursuit for pithy analysis. Worse, his analysis is wrong. When we say he rushed like a lion (where he refers to Achilles), the simile does not depend upon bravery as a preexistent feature of lion, even if the expression makes sense as a description of bravery. Max Black first exposed this Aristotelian weakness, dubbing it the “comparison” view, the notion that metaphor compares features that are inherently similar (“Metaphor” 35). According to Black’s influential “interaction theory,” metaphor involves systems of associated commonplaces—features that are projected from one term of a metaphor to the other, whether or not these features are apparent before the metaphor is produced. Metaphor,

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therefore, creates (Black uses “create” in a loose sense) similarity, rather than reports it. In a Blackian analysis, bravery would be part of a “system of associated commonplaces” or an “implicative complex” that is activated by the metaphor. Bravery only becomes salient when a human being—especially a brave human being—is likened to a lion. In this sense, the two terms of metaphor “interact,” altering not just our idea of the human being but also our idea of the lion. As helpful as Black’s kind analysis is, it is nonetheless Aristotelian in its scope. For that reason, it contains its own errors. Metaphor—for Black, for his intellectual progenitor I. A. Richards, and for virtually all important twentieth-century theorists—is a bifurcated expression consisting of a tenor and a vehicle, or a focus and a frame, or target and source domains. (The terms are roughly interchangeable.) Metaphor has become not just reducible to an Aristotelian equation, it has become the equation. Increasingly, metaphor is seen as a differential equation of sorts, or what Ricoeur has schematized as terms “a and a'” (206). In turn, the central question of metaphor has become not how does metaphor work, but how do the two parts of metaphor work in relation to each other? In what sense do the two sides of the equation equate? What are the structural rules that govern the equation of A and B? How can we predict which features will become salient in a metaphor? In other words, metaphor theorists have performed what Thomas Kuhn has called “normal science,” a kind of “research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10). In other words, metaphor theorists have done fine brushwork on an Aristotelian canvas. And the Aristotelian paradigm has been detailed with extraordinary care and creativity, giving us not only a lexicon with which to discuss metaphor but also a workable, if incomplete, notion of metaphor’s way of meaning. To be sure, normal science can be beneficial. Yet there is a great deal to be explained that cannot be explained by looking where Aristotle looked. Metaphor cannot be observed well as an abstraction. To see metaphor as an equation, even a differential equation, is to understand metaphor and perhaps all language as removable from its communicative circumstances—apart from its relevant conversation. Black is explicit about this: I propose to distinguish what is identified merely by a formula like the “metaphor of A as B,” without further specification of its contextual use, as a metaphor theme, regarded as an abstraction from the metaphorical statements in which it does or might occur. A metaphor-theme is available for repeated use, adaption, and modification by a variety of speakers or thinkers on any number of occasions. (“More” 24)

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Black does not claim that communicative circumstances do not matter at all; he merely finds them peripheral. His analyses culminate in abstraction: “G consists of certain statements, say Pa, Qb . . .” (“More” 29). However, when we consider metaphor’s rhetorical constitution, we are able to question the conclusions of abstract analyses in crucial ways.

The Status of Examples The Aristotelian view is particularly evident when metaphor theorists and researchers select and analyze examples. Typically, rhetoricians, linguists, philosophers of language, and cognitive scientists have relied upon brief, free-standing examples: metaphoric expressions that are presented separately from the conversations, large and small, that give rise to them in the first place. Max Black dismisses as trivial the ubiquitous example man is a wolf but is content with a free-standing marriage is a zero sum game, a metaphor richer by his lights but no less isolated from a discursive milieu outside of Black’s commentary (“More” 20, 28). As a result, the change in example is itself trivial. Black could have used either man is a wolf or marriage is a zero sum game to explain his “implicative complex” and to note interaction between what Black calls “focus” and “frame.” For Black and others, this brief-example technique has important advantages. The theorist avoids lengthy discussion of idiosyncratic context. And brief examples are easy to adapt, as when Black recrafts man is a wolf into man is not a wolf but an ostrich, where man is not a wolf is literally true yet evidently metaphorical (“More” 34). The use of fish-out-of-water examples implies that it does not matter that we do not know who said them and why. They lack a discursive trajectory other than the theorist’s meta-stance, which tacitly precedes each example with if I were to say. But when both theorists and experimental subjects express and comprehend metaphors, they are sensitive to discursive trajectories. The meta-stance attached to examples must necessarily influence understanding. When the theorist implicitly utters if I were to say, the utterance blocks out a rich gamut of possible discursive trajectories. This does not entirely disqualify free-standing examples, but it does give them a distinct meta-status and limits their usefulness. The problem with these approaches is simply this: we cannot know what a metaphor means unless we know the circumstances in which the metaphor is uttered—by whom and to whom. Donald Davidson makes this observation in order to argue that metaphors do not “mean” anything. He argues that metaphors belong strictly to the domain of use. Although I reject Davidson’s narrow definition of meaning, his point about use is valid. Use—metaphor’s participation in specific conversations, in more generalized conversations that I call “discourses,” and in

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the conversation of language at large—is precisely what we must consider in order to understand any metaphoric utterance. In short, no matter how we may insist upon the fiction of an isolable metaphoric expression, no metaphor can be separated from its discursive, rhetorical milieu. It is impossible for a metaphor to be uttered except by a concrete, historically situated speaker. Thus, every metaphor is inflected by a range of discursive forces: politics, philosophy, economics, social class, professional alignments, individual perceptions, and so on. Beginning from this premise, analyses of metaphoric exemplars must have very different results. Consider the following kinds of examples.

Simple Predications Many analyses depend upon single-clause “to be” sentences: my love is a rose, he is a pig, man is a wolf. In these kinds of examples, a literal dissimilarity between subject and complement is assumed to be enough to provide all the information needed for analysis. This assumption is always false. For example, in conventional analyses, man is a wolf is assumed to depend upon a projection of wolf ’s predatory nature upon man. This describes many utterances accurately enough, including some clichés that do not take the A is B form. When we say the wolves are at the door, we mean roughly that “predatory” creditors have come to take the money we need to survive. The projection is similar for one of the oldest variations of the metaphor: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, at the morning he devours the prey, at the evening he divides the plunder” (Gen. 49:27, NIV). Here both the predatory and social behavior of wolf are projected onto man, characterizing Benjamin as one who kills, eats, and shares prey in the manner of a wolf. Of course, this example is further complicated because Benjamin synecdochically represents one of the twelve tribes of Israel; thus, the projection from wolf to man might also be understood as wolf to tribe—or wolf to man to tribe. Nonetheless, both wolves at the door and Benjamin is a ravenous wolf tend to support conventional analyses. But suppose, for instance, the president of the Sierra Club were to write an editorial that favors the repopulation of timber wolves in the western United States and that the editorial ends with the statement man is a wolf. Suppose also that the metaphor is preceded by contextualizing discourse: We as human beings struggle to survive in a world of danger and dangerous misunderstanding. Man is a wolf. The editorial and the metaphor are integral to a known discursive trajectory and a well-understood rhetorical purpose. The Sierra Club is an environmentalist group that views man as part of nature, that views the unfettered operation of nature as largely nonthreatening, and that regards with suspicion attempts to al-

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ter the environment for commercial gain. All of its talk is informed by these views, and its support for reintroducing timber wolves is part and parcel of this rhetorical stance. Thus, knowing what we know about the Sierra Club and cued by the contextualizing sentence, we would understand that man is a wolf suggests something other than the standard manas-predator interpretation. Instead, it suggests parallel survival stories between man and wolf.1 Man and wolf still interact, but not in the same way. In most instances, wolf ’s instinctive nature is applied to man. In the hypothetical Sierra Club editorial, instinct is beside the point because the discursive, rhetorical context reverses the ordinary projection. That is, as George Lakoff and Mark Turner point out in their analysis of the conceptual metaphor The Great Chain Of Being, we typically have a hierarchical way of understanding the world (166–81). Inanimate objects are subject to physical laws; animals to physical laws and instinct; human beings to physical laws, instinct, and moral sentience. When we metaphorically compare members of different hierarchical domains, we project the highest ranking attributes from the source domain to the target domain. Thus, for Benjamin is a hungry wolf, it is the wolf’s instinctive behavior that is projected onto Benjamin, not something lower down on the scale such as the wolf’s obedience to the law of gravity. In the Sierra Club example, the projection is just the opposite. When the Sierra Club president says Man is a wolf, we project man onto wolf, and it is humankind’s moral worthiness that is projected, not instinctive behavior or below. If the metaphor depends upon a projection of moral sentience, then the relation between the metaphor’s “two parts” must have shifted: wolves do not have moral sentience for us to project. Of course, I do not have to point out that anthropomorphizing wild animals is a standard metaphorical technique, as much beloved by Disney as it is by environmentalists, but it is no less metaphorical for its conventional nature. When we recast a metaphor by imagining a concrete, historically specific setting, it is no mere parlor trick: it is the key to redescribing what a metaphor is and what it can do. The broad assumption in metaphor theory is that we can examine a free-standing example and know what acts mainly upon what. When we consider man is a wolf in isolation, we may feel assured that man takes on the features of wolf more than wolf takes on the features of man. The metaphor is preconditioned by standard discourse. However, when man is a wolf occurs in the hypothetical Sierra Club speech, the concrete discursive context obtains, and the projection reverses. Tenor and vehicle, focus and frame, and target and source may all survive as theoretical constructs, but with respect to even so lightly contextualized an example, which is which?

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Literary Examples A second typical example is the literary metaphor. Ordinarily, literary examples are taken one by one and stripped of their broad context in the manner of close reading. They have an advantage over brief, isolated metaphors. Usually, they have an identified speaker whose rhetorical purpose and discursive trajectory can be speculated upon. The difficulty with literary examples, as they are employed in metaphor theory, is not that their surrounding conversation is nonexistent but rather that it is largely disregarded. The closest we have to a counterexample would be the early twentieth-century rhetorician I. A. Richards. Richards offers some impressive readings of literary examples and does so within a theory of language that makes it possible to include a broad landscape of speech and thought. Although Richards confines himself to the internal logic of the literary example, he does take into account the thinking of its speaker. In his adroit vivisection of Lord Kames, who objects to Shakespeare’s “steep’d me in poverty to the very lips,” Richards comments, “Let us look at Othello’s whole speech. We shall find that it is not an easy matter to explain or justify that ‘steep’d.’ It comes, as you will recall, when Othello first openly charges Desdemona with unfaithfulness” (104–5). Having established that the metaphor can better be discussed in light of a speaker’s vantage point, Richards agrees with Kames’ objection to the lack of resemblance between poverty and liquid, cites a host of confused liquid images in Othello’s speech, and concludes that the confused metaphors can be justified because “Othello himself is horribly disordered” (105). It is true that Richards’ reading suffers from a want of social, political, and historical context, but he nonetheless considers more surrounding conversation than do most theorists in the broad spectrum of metaphor study. Perhaps a larger problem with the use of literary examples has to do with the distinction implied between literary and ordinary language. Although metaphor frequently has been treated as literary ornament, it is no respecter of the literary versus nonliterary distinction. Indeed, language in general ignores this boundary. This phenomenon has been discussed persuasively by both Mary Louise Pratt and Wolfgang Iser, who argue, in varying but compatible ways, that literariness should be seen in light of speech act theory and that language becomes literary when a specific reader or listener takes it to be literary. Therefore, language usually seen as expository, such as a newspaper article or a student essay, can be both offered as and taken up as literary language. Thus, the metaphors within this ordinary sort of literary language are not qualitatively different from so-called literary metaphors. When we do not attempt a formal distinction between literary and nonliterary language, our approach to literary language must change. We

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must grant, as Turner points out, that literary language is subject to the same enabling conditions as ordinary language (Reading 13). Likewise, we have to recognize that everyday discourse depends upon a literary approach to language. Note the bits of quasi-literary speech we use in everyday business talk—more bang for the buck, a sale without profit is charity, salespeople need a rabbit to chase. The fact is, we find a literary approach to metaphor in the most mundane places. Soy Bean Digest writes, “Will U.S. negotiators actually pull the trigger? Will European Community (EC) officials launch a full scale counterattack? Or is a settlement finally in the works between the two trading giants after nearly five years of exchanging barbs across the Atlantic Ocean?” (Wyant). Literature for the ages? Probably not. But the passage is almost certainly motivated partly by a literary sensibility and by an expectation that readers will appreciate more than its propositional content.

Common Expressions Proponents of conceptual metaphor typically offer a third type of example: the common expression such as the idiom, the cliché, and other habitual words and phrases. As I have already pointed out, a conceptual metaphor such as Argument Is War is induced from everyday expressions such as attacking, destroying, and defending arguments. Likewise, we can induce Happy Is Up from expressions such as I feel up today, I’m floating on air or, conversely, from I’m feeling down, I’m in low spirits. In part, I have induced the conceptual metaphor Trade Is War by noting standard phrases in trade talk such as trade war. A conceptual metaphor is a shared cognitive, cultural resource—something everybody already understands. What better evidence of common understanding than the standard locutions that make up everyday conversation? At the same time, however, we must not make the error of believing the expressions that provide evidence of a conceptual metaphor’s existence provide, by themselves, sufficient evidence of its operation. That we can induce the existence of conceptual metaphors suggests pervasive patterns of thought. But broadly shared patterns of thought do not preclude important patterns of variation—patterns that can only be examined by looking at standard locutions, novel locutions, and the nature of the conversations that prompt the utterance of metaphors. As with man is a wolf, we cannot understand how the metaphor works unless we understand the conversation that prompts the specific utterance. Metaphors are subject to the top-down forces of discourse. Since I argue that the patterns of variation are evident among the concrete instantiation of conceptual metaphors, I urge caution in making inferences from common expressions. We may be able to discover entrenched concepts by induction, but there is no reason to think that those

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conceptual metaphors are singular, unvarying entities. Moreover, while it is a syntactic necessity that we name conceptual metaphors, there is a risk that these names imply a structure and function that is inaccurate. Typically, conceptual metaphors are named in the A is B form: Argument Is War, Happy Is Up, More Is Up, Time Is Money, People Are Plants. The implication, intended or unintended, may be that each subject and each predicate refers to an uncomplicated domain and that target and source stand in fixed relation. The Aristotelian bifurcation appears to be perpetuated. But this appearance is erroneous. Conceptual metaphor provides us precisely the tools we need to go beyond Aristotle’s algebra.

Conceptual Metaphor The most serious challenge to Aristotle has been mounted by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and like-minded others. By explaining that both everyday and literary metaphors depend upon cognitive structures called conceptual metaphors, these theorists—cognitive scientists situated in linguistics, philosophy, and literary study respectively— have provided us numerous advantages that I will discuss in a moment. However, I also want to make it clear that when we consider metaphor in its rhetorical context, we need to rethink substantially the way conceptual metaphors function. The basic premise of conceptual metaphor theory is this: Metaphors are based upon culturally pervasive, cognitively entrenched image schemas and entailments. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, when we re-envoice Argument Is War, no matter what the specific locution, we do not begin anew with each utterance, calculating correspondences between target and source each time we speak. Rather we recruit a well-understood cognitive resource shared by most English speakers. Argument Is War is one of the biologically reified concepts that we use to make sense of our world—habitually, readily, unconsciously. Like all conceptual metaphors, Argument Is War has specific imageschematic entailments.2 In order to speak of argument as war, we must be able to envision a similarity between the skeletal shapes of argument and war. Typically, we see argument as having opposing sides represented by contending speakers. Likewise, we see wars as having opposing sides represented by contending soldiers, armies, or nations. For both argument and war, each side is able to attack or defend, and the objective of each side is to defeat the other. Now, it is possible for us to configure both argument and war in other ways, but it is not ordinary for us to do so. And precisely because we ordinarily configure argument and war in this default manner, we can readily call upon Argument Is War to support a range of concrete metaphoric locutions. The same is true for other conceptual metaphors.

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Because conceptual metaphors have little to do with correspondences of attributes between an isolated term A and an isolated term B, they have extraordinary explanatory power. They help to account for the ease with which we “process” metaphors. For instance, when Time comments, “Two impulses have often been at war within [President] Clinton” (Church 22), we need not pause to consider the configuration of the metaphor, and we can perform a number of mental gymnastics with no particular difficulty. It is easy enough to schematize impulses as contending forces, each intending to defeat the other. In addition, it is easy enough to understand each impulse as arguing its point—carrying out an internal debate, the proverbial angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other. Indeed, the idea of conceptual metaphor allows us to abandon Aristotle’s two-part model entirely, a point that is generally under-emphasized in the current literature on conceptual metaphor.3 The ease with which we process multiple metaphors—impulses as warring parties, impulses as debating opponents, debating opponents as warring parties—suggests not that we simply compare two terms or domains, mapping feature onto feature, but instead that we recognize many domains as having compatible image schemas. Moreover, conceptual metaphors operate even when not explicitly stated. Nothing in Time’s explicit phrasing denotes Argument Is War, but because Argument Is War is already a part of our cultural discourse, it is not only conceivable as a gloss on warring impulses, it is necessarily implied. Clinton’s impulses are not so much compared specifically to war as they are compared to all domains that entail an image schema of contention. Let me offer another illustration. In Gorgias (trans. 1994), Plato need not settle on a single metaphoric comparison to describe argumentative rhetoric. His Gorgias metaphorizes: All the same, [rhetoric] should be used just as one would any other competitive skill. The fact that a person has trained as a boxer or pancratiast4 or a soldier, and can consequently defeat friends and enemies alike, doesn’t mean he has to use this skill of his against everyone indiscriminately; it doesn’t give him reason to go around beating his friends up or stabbing them to death! (20)

In Gorgias’s remark, particular actions (stabbing and striking) are less important than the image schema of contention suggested by boxing, wrestling, and fighting in armor. We might say, therefore, that Argument Is War is inadequate to describe the conceptual metaphor that supports Gorgias’s description of rhetoric. A better name, although not an especially pithy one, might be Argument Is All Abstractly Similar Contending Activities. Our quick understanding of Gorgias’s metaphor(s) cannot be accounted for by a notion of shared features. We may be able to equate stabbing with something like sharply spoken words, but this equation only makes sense

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in the context of broadly comprehended scenes of contention. Stabbing and argumentative words are not, by themselves, comparable. Of course, the use of multiple metaphors has long been condemned by teachers of composition, who have detested “the mixed metaphor,” adhering to Strunk and White’s maxim, “Don’t start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass” (81). But the truth is metaphors mix rather well. They mix in two ways. First, as noted above, some groupings of metaphors are broadly compatible, such as the argumentas-contention metaphors, which are compatible because of an abstract similarity. It is important to realize that this compatibility is, in fact, a mixing of specific metaphors, not merely an application of extreme abstraction. As Lakoff and Johnson argue, extreme abstraction—the notion that disparate domains are precisely equivalent on an abstract level— fails to account for the effect of metaphor (107–10). Metaphors structure one domain in terms of another. When we say that argument is war, argument is structured both by the abstract shape of war and by the particularities of war. Argument acquires the quality of great destructiveness only because we metaphorize it as war. Wrestling and games have particularities that are incompatible with war, and these particularities structure argument when it is metaphorized as wrestling or as a game. Contention metaphors are generally compatible but not specifically equivalent. Another way we mix metaphors is to create conceptual systems: apt groupings of conceptual metaphors that, taken together, construct a coherent world. For example, Lakoff describes the systematic relationship between the conceptual metaphors The Nation As Family and Moral Accounting, which combine to organize the political philosophies of both conservatives and liberals in the United States. The two metaphors encompass an interrelated set of entailments that constitute and constrain political philosophies. The Nation As Family entails that we think of our political leaders as parents, who naturally have parental rights and duties. In turn, parental rights and duties involve morality because parents are traditionally the regulators of children’s moral lives. Thus, when we metaphorize the nation as a family, casting political leaders as parents, we recruit our standard cultural metaphors of morality. One of our important morality metaphors is Moral Accounting, the metaphor that tells us that we owe apologies and that criminals must pay their debt to society. When The Nation As Family combines with Moral Accounting, the two metaphors give structure to some predominant political philosophies. They tell us that political leaders are parents who can guide us in what moral debts we owe and what moral debts are owed us. The difference between liberals and conservatives, Lakoff explains, is not which conceptual metaphors they recruit, but what moral debts they believe parents should enforce. Conservatives adhere to the “strict father”

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model of the family, and liberals to a nurturing model of family. Of course, my quick sketch simplifies Lakoff’s example somewhat, but the crucial point is clear enough. Conceptual metaphors routinely operate in concert with other conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors entail each other in a systematic fashion. It is important to point out that conceptual metaphor theory does not posit innate metaphors, a common misunderstanding. Rather, conceptual metaphors are specific to cultures, arising both from cognitive, bodily constraints and from shared experience. Thus, even when we identify even so pervasive a metaphor as Argument Is War, a metaphor that spans continents and centuries, we cannot call it universal. Argument Is War is only a conceptual metaphor for those cultures that ordinarily perceive argument, war, and other domains of contention as metaphorically similar. This connection between the cognitive and the cultural is the greatest strength of conceptual metaphor theory. But it is also an area that warrants much greater exploration. Once we admit the connection between the way our minds make sense of metaphors and the way we exist as social beings, it is impossible to avoid confronting the complexities of concrete utterances and concrete rhetorics. No instance of a conceptual metaphor can be uttered except by an actual speaker. No actual speaker can utter anything without that utterance’s being implicated in all of the things that constitute discourse, from politics to professional life. To date, discussions of conceptual metaphor have steered somewhat wide of these complications. But it is not necessary to do so. In fact, it is when we see conceptual metaphor in situ, inflected by the vagaries of particular utterances, that we begin to have some idea how metaphor works—how a conceptual metaphor’s rhetorical constitution bears upon particular locutions uttered by particular people.

Conceptual Metaphor and Rhetoric The most obvious way to go beyond Aristotle and the consequent limitations of his view is to look elsewhere—to consider a far-ranging example that is likely to reveal weaknesses in the standard formulations of metaphor theory. Trade Is War offers that opportunity because it encompasses a particularly productive range of expressions. Like other conceptual metaphors, Trade Is War is a cognitively entrenched resource, so pervasive in English that a speaker or writer who cannot describe and comprehend trade as war can hardly discuss trade at all. The entailments of Trade Is War are much like those of Argument Is War, in that we typically envision trade as an activity in which participants are belligerently opposed and aim to conquer or destroy. In addition, Trade Is War functions integrally with other concepts, most promi-

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nently the literal concept trade is peace and the conceptual metaphors Trade Is Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, Trade Is A Game, and Markets Are Containers. The relationship between these concepts does involve the compatibility of image schemas, as with other conceptual systems. But systematicity is only a portion of what forms their relationship. What motivates the relationship is the concrete composition of a particular discourse, the discourse of trade. Within the discourse of trade, typified intercourse and common understandings give rise to an identifiable rhetoric, a richly patterned regularity of writing and talk that constrains the use of Trade Is War and all of the metaphors with which it competes and converses. It is necessary, therefore, to describe how this rhetorical relation works. Ordinarily, when theorists concede that metaphors are contingent upon communicative situations, the contingency is seen as a matter of face-toface conversation, as if metaphor is constrained only by the ad hoc cooperation of one speaker with another. Consequently, it is assumed that when a metaphor’s interpretation is influenced by something other than form, the possibilities for interpretation are infinite. So long as a given speaker provides sufficient interpretive cues, and so long as the hearer willingly takes up the suggested interpretation, the metaphor can be reinvented, within the limits of its form, ad infinitum. However, when we take the influence of rhetoric into account, we cannot see even notably inventive conversations as unconstrained by larger discursive conditions. Even when people say unusual things, they respond to what is more usual; regularities of use constrain the unusual utterance. Since conceptual metaphors are shared across cultures, inhere to particular cultures, and take on specific regularities within communities of discourse, regularities of use are fundamental to the composition of the metaphor. In other words, it is not enough to note that a conceptual metaphor is often said. We also have to understand how it is often said. To understand this idea better, we will be concerned with the specific functions and tools that drive conceptual metaphors as rhetorical entities. These functions and tools are not in addition to, or separate from, the sociocognitive composition of conceptual metaphors but inseparable from it. To date, theorists have described such things as image schemas, entailments, metaphor systems, and conceptual blends without important reference to rhetoric. But no instance of a conceptual metaphor has ever been uttered in a rhetoric-free environment. Because of the shared nature of conceptual metaphors, it cannot be done. Thus, the rhetorical functions and tools that help to constrain conceptual metaphors are always at work. I began identifying these items in chapter 1. Let me now briefly forecast how they will figure into my analysis of Trade Is War. Conceptual metaphors, and instances of conceptual metaphors, can be said to participate in contrastive intercourse. Metaphors are always

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in conversation with conforming and contrasting literal concepts and metaphors. When we utter Trade Is War, we cannot comprehend its meaning except in relation to other rhetorically entailed concepts. This contrastive intercourse is not a logical function of metaphor in the same sense as conceptual systematicity. In other words, as Lakoff and Johnson understand conceptual systematicity, one metaphor may entail another because of structural and logical relations. We cannot, for instance, understand Argument Is War, a metaphor that tells us we can destroy opposing arguments, without at the same time conceiving of arguments as something destructible, often rendered as buildings. Thus, because Argument Is War entails the quality destructibility of arguments, Argument Is War and Arguments Are Buildings can be related systematically. However, more than a systematic relation is always at work. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, conceptual metaphors arise both from our bodilycognitive experience and from our sociocultural experience—which, I argue, cannot be separated from rhetoric. Rhetoric has entailments that are different in kind from systematic entailments. For instance, while Trade Is War systematically relates to Markets Are Containers, the systematic relation never occurs—in the current, concrete discourse of trade—without a simultaneous rhetorical entailment, an effect of the concretely progressing rhetoric of trade. Trade Is War rhetorically entails Markets Are Containers because the discourse of trade, with persistent regularity, juxtaposes the two concepts, calling into contrast the rhetorical contingencies of the two metaphors, the ideas and evaluations that pit one debatable view against another. Because Trade Is War and its complementary concepts operate within this site of rhetorical contention, each is inflected by the political, economic, philosophical, social, professional, and personal commitments of its utterer. We cannot make sense of metaphors unless we understand (however imperfectly) the discursive trajectory of the utterer. Likewise, the utterer must take into account the conventional discourse associated with standard conceptual metaphors. Trade Is War is inflected, therefore, by all of the ethical valences attendant to trade, which can range from a strongly globalist, pro-growth valence, to an economic nationalist valence, to a unionist valence, to a consumerist valence, and so on. All of these valences are stable enough to be observed but are nonetheless contingent upon time, place, and community of interest. Neither Trade Is War nor any other conceptual metaphor can be uttered without inflection because, except in the most rudimentary instrumental utterances, rhetoricity is fundamental to the character of writing and speech. The inflection of metaphors is observable in concrete ways. When we utter a metaphor, we do not necessarily intend the metaphor, as it is typically inflected, to represent our view. Thus, we either claim the metaphor

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and its understood commitments, or just as often, we utter it only in order to represent someone else’s viewpoint: we ascribe it. Degrees of claiming and ascribing are possible. For example, when a newspaper ascribes Trade Is War to a government administration, the ascription can be merely descriptive—a characterization of the administration, to be sure, but not an emphatic one. In editorials, political speeches, television debates and the like, ascriptions are likely to be emphatic. The ascription does not merely characterize another’s views but often promotes a pointed evaluation of that view. In these genres, ascriptions not only amount to a description of another’s view but pointedly contrast with the utterer’s view. Indeed, ascriptions are most evident in moments of disagreement. Nonetheless, it is possible to simultaneously claim and ascribe a metaphor— for instance, when the utterer and target are in emphatic agreement. Another way we can concretely observe the inflection of metaphor is in the patterned ways they are attenuated and intensified. Conceptual metaphors and instances of conceptual metaphors vary in their degree of rhetorical provocation or controversy. In order to adjust a metaphor’s likely rhetorical effect, writers and speakers select alternate metaphors or variant renderings of a given metaphor, thus attenuating or intensifying rhetorical impact. The relative intensity of a metaphor is, of course, a matter of judgment, something best made by someone familiar with the values and controversies of a specific rhetorical milieu. Nonetheless, we can discern with some confidence when a metaphor is attenuated and when it is intensified. For instance, it is an intensified instance of Trade Is War to speak of storming the beaches of a competitor’s market. It is an attenuated instance of Trade Is War to speak of outflanking a competitor. One instance evokes blood and violence, the other maneuvering. It is also possible to intensify or attenuate by shifting metaphors. By and large, it is less intense to recruit Trade Is A Game than it is to recruit Trade Is War. However, language use is nothing if not complex. It is difficult to say whether Japan put a finger in the eye of the United States by dumping semiconductors is intensified or attenuated. My sense is that in spite of its bloodless, nonlethal image, it is nonetheless an intensified instance of Trade Is War (or Trade Is A Fight), because it further personalizes an already bitter dispute. That attenuating and intensifying are matters of judgment is not disturbing, because judgment is precisely what makes them important to a rhetorical explanation of metaphor. This is so for two reasons. First, attenuations and intensifications account for variant renderings of metaphors that have heretofore been explained only in a formalist paradigm. Second, observing these functions (or tools) requires us to link integrally the specific renderings of particular metaphors, as well as the recruiting of conceptual metaphors, to larger rhetorical issues.

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The above functions and tools organize the use of conceptual metaphors into a describable, although not inviolable, rhetorical etiquette. As metaphors come into contrastive intercourse with other metaphors and concepts, we can observe regularities in the ways metaphors are claimed, ascribed, attenuated, and intensified. Thus, only in an abstract, nonrhetorical sense are metaphoric choices unconstrained. In use, the recruiting and rendering of conceptual metaphors is an integral function of rhetoric. For example, Trade Is War is almost never claimed and, even when ascribed, the intensification of the particular rendering adheres to discernible guidelines. That is, it may be possible to render Trade Is War quite intensely, but it is no coincidence that extravagantly intense instances, even in ascriptions, are uncommon. The rhetorical etiquette that governs Trade Is War and related metaphors is a patterned, complex maneuvering within and among metaphors. But it is futile to describe these functions and tools apart from the farranging example. Each utterance of Trade Is War is involved in an intricate conversation, an interchange of entailed metaphors and literal concepts, a variegated negotiation of rhetorical positioning and presentation, a regular yet individually considered re-envoicement of ideas. Yet from this complexity, we can glean the tools used to make the conversation work, as I will show in the following chapter.

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The Conversation at Large

3 The Conversation at Large Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream. —Richard Evans, British Aerospace, 1990 I am a trade hawk. —Patrick J. Buchanan, presidential candidate, 1995

Let me describe in some detail the conversation that surrounds and subsumes Trade Is War, a conversation that spans centuries and continents. Of course, I am describing something of such breadth and variegation that volumes could not describe it all. Nonetheless, I hope to present enough to convey the size, the persistence, the dynamism, the regularity, and the variety of the conversation. In one sense, it is a literal conversation among all the writers and speakers who enact the discourse of trade—the people who converse both face to face in real time and through print and electronic media across space and time. In another sense, it is the “conversation” of the metaphor Language Is Conversation, the metaphor that tells us that words, phrases, and texts are interconnected in much the same way as speakers’ and writers’ responsive talk. The literal conversation and the metaphoric one are interconnected. All language users necessarily address someone else, even if that someone else is the idealized internal respondent theorized by Karen Burke LeFevre. At the same time, all language users are supplied with an already conversing language. They enter an in-progress discursive parlor, to use Kenneth Burke’s famous instance of Language Is Conversation.1 This manifold linguistic interconnectedness is perhaps best explained by Mikhail Bakhtin, who argues that all language is fundamentally responsive; thus, we can never analyze any language without considering “addressivity,” the fact that all discourse answers and anticipates other discourse (“Problem” 95). In order to focus on addressivity, Bakhtin contends that the basic unit of analysis should not be the word or the sentence but rather the utterance, a unit of discourse bounded by a change 30

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of speaking subjects—which is to say, a unit characterized by its participation in the conversation of language. It is a simple but powerful idea, the idea that all utterances, whatever their length or formal structure, are always in dialogue with previous and future utterances. As Bakhtin says in refutation of decontextualized stylistics: When one analyzes an individual sentence apart from its context, the traces of addressivity and the influence of the anticipated response, dialogical echoes from others’ preceding utterances, faint traces of changes of speech subjects that have furrowed the utterance from within—all these are lost, because they are all foreign to the sentence as a unit of language. All of these phenomena are connected with the whole of the utterance, and when this whole escapes the field of vision of the analyst they cease to exist for him. . . . A stylistic analysis that embraces all aspects of style is possible only as an analysis of the whole utterance, and only in that chain of speech communion of which the utterance is an inseparable link. (99–100)

Bakhtin’s notion of language’s dynamic concatenation is profoundly disturbing to formalist stylistics. Likewise, I argue that a recognition of language’s fundamental interconnectedness should cause us to reconsider nearly all that has traditionally been said about metaphor. Simultaneously, let me emphasize that what has been said about conceptual metaphor is crucial to a description of the metaphor’s rhetorical constitution. Conceptual metaphors are more than convenient metaphoric groupings; they embrace the cognitive and cultural regularities that underpin most metaphor use. Trade Is War is a “conceptual metaphor” not simply because our trade talk is peppered with thematically groupable locutions such as trade war, conquering markets, and defeating the competition but rather because these locutions rely upon the same conceptual system. Conceptual metaphors participate in a systematic network of image schemas, entailments, and metaphor systems. Trade Is War is based upon an image schema of hostile action between entities—nation against nation, army against army, business against business, and so on. While particular Trade Is War metaphors vary widely, all but the oddest of them are abstractly structured by this hostile-action image schema. In turn, Trade Is War entails another conceptual metaphor: Markets Are Containers. Since war typically involves conquering territory—contained space— when we imagine trade as war, we must imagine traders vying for markets that are contained or containable. It is not surprising, then, that the two conceptual metaphors are closely associated in trade talk. Furthermore, Trade Is War and Markets Are Containers are persistently contradicted by interrelated metaphors and literal concepts—mainly Trade Is

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Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, and trade is peace. These alternate concepts have mutually entailed image schemas and thus form a metaphor system that contrasts with Trade Is War and Markets Are Containers in standard trade talk. (I will discuss this opposing system later in this chapter.) Because conceptual metaphors and metaphor systems are pervasively entrenched, they structure a diffuse conversation among countless specific metaphors. However, to recognize a broad conceptual structure is not the same as to explain how any specific locution works. While specific locutions do depend upon the image schemas and entailments provided by a guiding conceptual metaphor, the fine detail of actually uttered metaphors cannot be accounted for by conceptual structure alone. Indeed, the strength of conceptual metaphor as an idea is that it permits us to explain metaphors without regard to the idiosyncrasies of particular locutions. Eventually, however, if we are to overcome Aristotle’s algebra, we have to account for specific metaphors as they are specifically used. That means we have to understand metaphors as rhetorically constituted utterances. In particular, I argue that we need to understand the way the rhetorical functions discussed in chapter 2—contrastive intercourse, discursive trajectory, inflection, rhetorical etiquette, claiming/ ascribing, and attenuating/intensifying—shape metaphors. What follows, then, is not just a description of Trade Is War and the conversation in which it participates but rather a description of the conversation and the way it functions to shape specific metaphors. When we see metaphor in the light of Language Is Conversation, we can begin to account for phenomena that conventional notions cannot explain. Consequently, we must either rethink some conventional ideas or put them to rest.

Metaphor and the Literal: Trade Is Peace and Other Common Ideas There is a widespread notion that metaphors are identifiable as metaphoric because they are literally false. As the oft-quoted Monroe Beardsley puts it, metaphors are “obviously false sentences with significant connotations” (142). Of course, Max Black cleverly—perhaps too cleverly— refutes Beardsley, pointing out that if we say he lives in a glass house of a man who actually lives in a glass house, the statement can be both literally true and metaphoric (“More” 34). In addition, Raymond Gibbs makes a strong argument that the notion of literalness is not as straightforward as has been thought; it is complicated by polysemy, by contextual factors, and by the metaphoric foundation of much ostensibly literal language (24–79). Nonetheless, what Beardsley says about metaphor’s falseness is true enough, often enough, to be taken seriously by almost

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all metaphor theorists. And for good reason. Negation has much to do with the way metaphors work. The problem is that the standard understanding of negation is flawed. Usually, the idea that metaphors are false statements assumes that direct, logical negation—an “is not”—is key to making meaning. This is arguable only in the most limited way because it ignores the way language functions in concrete use. Since language is by its nature dialogic, everything we say, metaphoric or literal, is subject to what Bakhtin calls the listener’s “responsive attitude.” Bakhtin writes: The fact is when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. (68)

Thus, all statements are measured against other possible statements, but direct negation is only one possibility for measurement. If I say to you, The sky is blue, you might respond, The sky is not blue. However, you might also respond by amplifying or modifying: Yes, the sky is almost robin-egg blue today or No, the sky is only blue in the places where there are no white clouds. We can imagine roughly the kinds of responses to a given statement that are logically possible, among them negation. That would be all we need to know if writing and talk were merely logical. But language is concretely responsive. Negations carry discursive freight—sets of standard reasonings and judgments that only make sense in specific rhetorical environments. Thus, when we consider negations, we have to consider likely responses in light of a specific discourse. That is to say, the sky is blue is not usually sufficiently interesting to warrant anyone’s bothering to respond that the sky is not blue. However, many statements necessarily imply other contradictory statements. The statement abortion is murder of the unborn cannot be heard in our current culture without echoes of the standard contradictory response a woman has a right to control her own body. We cannot fully understand the first assertion without considering its frequently re-envoiced rebuttal. In short, my claim is that statements need to be considered with respect to relevant statements already afoot. This is true for both literal expressions and metaphors. Now, Beardsley says (and many others agree) that metaphors are “obviously false statements.” Sometimes this seems to be correct, but we need not be so ingenious as Black in order to find counter-examples. Consider this instance of Trade Is War: On a Sunday-morning news program, Newt Gingrich defends farm subsidies, saying, “We cannot unilaterally disarm American farmers” (This Week, 13 Nov. 1994). This statement might be

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taken as true on many levels. For instance, it may actually be a bad idea to eliminate farm subsidies. This makes Gingrich’s metaphor potentially true. In another sense, Gingrich’s expression can be true as a literal statement. Many who discuss economic warfare mean, quite earnestly, that the conduct of international commerce is a tool of warfare no less than the use of armies. What makes Gingrich’s statement primarily metaphoric is not the impossibility of its being literally true, but rather that it implies—comes into contrastive intercourse with—a significant contradictory concept, a concept that is conventionally treated as relatively more literal than Trade Is War: trade is peace.

A Brief History of “Trade Is Peace” Why do we treat trade is peace as a literal concept? Perhaps because trade is an integral component of peaceful life. When we go about our daily activity in a peaceful atmosphere, that activity usually includes trade on some scale. The two domains are related by metonymy. On the other hand, association alone does not explain trade is peace’s literalness. Trade is also integrally associated with war—witness the lend-lease agreement between the United States and Britain in World War II; witness today’s global defense industry. It may be because we do not trade with enemies during a war that trade seems to bear a different relation to peace than it does to war. In any event, trade, peace, and the relations between them are not simple or static. Even a brief look at these concepts reveals important complications that belie a direct opposition between Trade Is War and trade is peace. Trade is peace has long been a part of our own and others’ trade discourse. In Genesis, when Jacob agrees to a marriage between his daughter Dinah and Hamor’s son, Hamor declares: “These men are peaceable with us; therefore, let them dwell in the land, and trade therein” (34:21, KJV). In other words, peace and trade are conditioned upon each other. At its most basic, this is the long-understood concept that enables the concept Trade Is War to be seen as a metaphor. While Trade Is War may be seen as literally true in some cases (such as economic warfare), it is not seen as literally true as often as trade is peace: Trade Is War enters an already progressing conversation that brings it into contrastive intercourse with the long-literal contradiction trade is peace. If trade is peace goes back at least as far as Genesis (and, in this instance, we can probably agree that Genesis is not the very beginning), it has at the same time operated in complex ways, as part of a set of related literal concepts. For just as we have known that trade is peace, we also have known that war is trade—at least in the sense that victory in war brings economic gain. Consider what transpires in Genesis soon after

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Hamor opens peaceful trade with Jacob. Jacob’s sons, harboring a grudge about the premarital defilement of their sister, attack Shalem: [I]t came to pass that on the third day . . . that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. . . . They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field. And all their wealth. (34:25– 28, KJV)

Jacob’s sons are by no means alone in associating war with economic gain. Gathering spoils is standard operating procedure among Old Testament warriors. When Jehoshaphat is threatened by the enemies of Israel and the Lord battles on Israel’s behalf, the children of Israel came to take away the spoil . . . [and] they found among them in abundance both riches with the dead bodies and precious jewels, which they stripped off for themselves, more than they could carry away; and they were three days in gathering the spoil, it was so much. (2 Chron. 20:25, KJV)

Clearly, this is no ordinary trade transaction. However, to corrupt Clausewitz’s famous maxim, war is sometimes trade by other means. Transfers of goods, both peaceful and violent, abound and are bound together in the conceptual system associated with trade is peace. During the English Renaissance, as nations begin to act as trading partners and adversaries, Raleigh is mindful that the point of war is economic, writing in Secrets of Government, “A Commonwealth that consumes more Treasure in the War, than it profits in Victory, seems to have rather hindred than honoured or inriched the state” (206). Raleigh is not suggesting something controversial. Secrets is a book of truisms, as conventional as most books of advice to the prince. Neither is it controversial for him to suggest that economic strength translates, literally, into military strength: “Power and Strength is attained in these five ways, Mony, Armes, Counsell, Friends and Fortune; but of these the first and most forcible is mony: Nihil tam munitum quod non expurgnari pecunia possit. Cic.” (53).2 So standard is Raleigh’s thinking that Francis Bacon calls this kind of observation “trivial” (184). In Raleigh, then, we find a standard pairing of literal concepts: war is for economic gain and money is military power. (I classify money is military power as literal because it does not assert a likeness between money and power but instead indexes a literal process of financing war; money and power are related metonymically. However, the metonymy can give rise to metaphors such as those that liken money to fuel.)

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A century after Raleigh, Defoe exploits the links between trade and war in A Plan of the English Commerce, demonstrating not only that the basic enabling concepts of Trade Is War are at work for him but also that, regardless of the broad similarity of the conceptual system from age to age, speakers refashion concepts to suit their contemporary and individual concerns. Exhorting England to increase its international trade, Defoe expresses money is military power this way: But in our Times . . . the Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally known in all places, that ’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest sword . . . for Money is Power, and they that have the Gelt . . . may have the Armies of the best troops in Europe. (41)

Defoe is concerned with a specific manner of warring, through mercenary armies, and that concern leads him to the general conclusion that “Money is Power,” a locution that has come to be used in nonmilitary contexts, not the least in trade discourse. If we recognize, along with Defoe, that a nation’s war chest is generated by international trade, we can infer a literal version of Trade Is War: international trade finances war. At the same time, Defoe assumes, as many before him have assumed, that trade is not war, it is peace. That is, where nations are concerned, Defoe understands trade to be a basic tool of war, but for individuals trade pacifies instead: “Trade is a friend to Peace; and provides for the People a far better Way: Trade sets them to work for their Bread, not to fight for it” (74). Thus, we have said since the time of Defoe, and probably long before, that trade is peace, that war is for economic gain, that money is military power, and that international trade finances war. In sum, the literal concept trade is peace is implicated in a set of interrelated notions that form a nuanced, even contradictory, understanding of the relationship between peace, war, and trade. With all its complication, trade is peace still remains a stable part of Trade Is War’s constituting conversation in the nascent United States. As the colonies revolt primarily over trade issues, Thomas Paine articulates his vision of a peaceful, commercial future, where a military alliance between Britain and the colonies is unnecessary: Besides what have we to do with setting the world at defiance? Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all of Europe; because it is in the interest of all of Europe to have America a free port. Her trade will always be a protection, and her barrenness of silver and gold secure her from invaders. (40)

Paine’s observation may seem commonsensical, but it is not necessarily empirically sound. While insisting that peace is a natural consequence of

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trade, Paine acknowledges that the point of war is economic gain, hence the importance of America’s “barrenness of silver and gold.” Thus, within Paine’s own logic, trade does not by itself promote peace. In fact, whether economic conditions will promote war or peace is unpredictable. When silver and gold were discovered in the United States territories some sixty years later, the discovery did not invite an invasion but rather led to an explosion of free enterprise. Yet the commonsense quality of trade is peace is nothing if not durable. In a focus group conducted for this study, a college senior majoring in business at a major midwestern university expresses her version of trade is peace, and it remains as viable as it was in Genesis:3 Trade is cooperative, I think. When I think of the Japanese and the U.S., there’s total—I don’t know what it’s called, but—we import so many more goods than the Japanese import of ours, and if you create war between the two, it’s not going to help increase trade. So you have to be cooperative, and you have to be the opposite of fighting— you know what I mean—to trade with people. You’re not going to— two warring tribes are not going to trade or barter with each other if they’re fighting against each other.

The conceptual residue of antiquity is unconsciously re-envoiced by this student, but it is not unusual for the literal and metaphoric linkage between trade and war to reach backwards in time, as it does with the young woman’s reference to “warring tribes.”

“Trade Is Peace” Versus Trade Is War It may seem, as a logical matter, that trade is peace can hardly avoid contrastive intercourse with Trade Is War; they appear to be direct opposites, unavoidable contradictions. However, the complexity of trade is peace as a literal concept makes it all but impossible for actually uttered instances of trade is peace to directly repudiate Trade Is War. When we assert literally that trade is peace, we simultaneously understand the complex relationship between peace, trade, and war and the fluid way these relationships are typically applied to nations, corporations, and individuals. Likewise, when we metaphorically assert that trade is war, we understand that money, trade, and war are interconnected in literal, complex ways. Trade Is War and trade is peace refute one another, but the rebuttal is always as many-sided as the prompting assertion. In a general way, however, Trade Is War persistently elicits a responsive trade is peace and vice versa. Responding to the college student quoted above, a male student also majoring in business answers trade is peace with Trade Is War:

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The Conversation at Large I put that trade is like war. First thing I thought of was the stock market, you know, trading stocks. And, you know, in the pits— you’re, you’re fighting over people and whatever and it’s competitive, because companies are competing to trade with other companies. And you’re fighting against those companies to offer a better price, offer better options, whatever, you know, to, to actually get that company to trade with you, to get a company to trade with you. So I thought of it as more an aggressive thing, rather than a cooperative thing.

His view of Trade Is War is associated with a particular setting, the stock exchange, which brings with it a set of standard implications that may not apply to trade in all its variety. Yet the general relationship holds. Trade can be seen as aggressive, consistent with a hostile-action image schema, or it can be seen as cooperative, consistent with a peaceful-exchange image schema. Indeed, like all of us, this student can see trade variously, as he acknowledges: “I can see it both ways.” In fact, the contrastive intercourse between Trade Is War and trade is peace depends upon our seeing it both ways. To come into contrastive intercourse with a falsifying literal concept is not the same as to be falsified by a logical negation. Logical negation assumes that truth is constant and easily discovered. But in a rhetorical milieu, truth value is debatable. For example, MIT economist Lester Thurow explains that while trade is peace is a widespread truism, it is not necessarily true: I think there’s no empirical evidence [that trade is peace] at all. The Germans and the French have fought war after war, and nobody’s traded with each other more than the Germans and the French. But somehow there is the view some economists like to sell that if you’re having good economic relations in the sense of doing a lot of trade, you won’t end up fighting a war with each other. But factually, I just think it isn’t true. . . . It’s also very American, too. You see it at the moment with China because what the Clinton administration is basically saying is that if we have a lot of economic relationships with China, China will, in some sense, be reasonable in other dimensions—selling fewer nuclear weapons to the Pakistanis or aiming fewer missiles at Taiwan or whatever. But I don’t know of any evidence that it is true. (Personal interview)

Thurow’s evaluation of trade is peace underscores just how complex the truth value of literal statements can be. He recognizes how frequently trade is peace is considered to be true, believes the statement to be empirically false, and thus sees trade is peace with a sort of double vision—true for others, false for him. Robert E. Lighthizer, a former trade official in the Reagan administration, goes even further, arguing that trade can disrupt peace:

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History teaches us that strong trading ties are no guarantee of peaceful relations. The American colonies had powerful economic links to Britain when they declared their independence. The North and the South traded extensively with each other before the Civil War. The German and British economies were tightly intertwined at the beginning of both world wars. Countless other examples could be given, but the point is the same: trade alone cannot douse the flames of international rivalry. In fact, prosperity often contributes to conflict. The enormous growth enjoyed by Germany in the late 1800’s encouraged it to seek a greater role in world affairs, thus contributing to the aggressiveness and nationalism that helped start World War I. Japan’s economic success in the early decades of this century fed a desire for conquest that led to Pearl Harbor.

The factual case for trade is peace is, in fact, fairly weak. The relation between trade and peace is tenuous, changeable, and complex because international relations involve matters other than trade, such as military and geographical alignments, ethnic and religious loyalties, and political ideals. However, this complexity does nothing to change the general contrastive relationship between the metaphor Trade Is War and the literal concept trade is peace. In Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America, Thurow, who doubts the accuracy of trade is peace, explicitly counterposes Trade Is War and trade is peace: On one level the prediction that economic warfare will replace military warfare is good news. . . . There is nothing wrong with an aggressive invasion of well-made, superbly marketed German or Japanese products. Being bought is not the same thing as being occupied. At the same time, the military metaphor is fundamentally incorrect. The economic game that will be played in the twenty-first century will have cooperative as well as competitive elements.4 (31, emphasis added)

The contrastive relation between Trade Is War and trade is peace is integral in Thurow’s comment. That is, he recognizes the tension between Trade Is War and trade is peace by saying that “the twenty-first century will have cooperative as well as competitive elements.” “Competitive” entails Trade Is War’s image schema of contention; “cooperative” entails the image schema of peace, in which two sides exchange not only goods but goodwill. When Trade Is War and trade is peace converse within Thurow’s remarks, it is not a matter of an obviously false metaphor’s being contradicted by an obviously true literal concept. For Thurow, both the literal concept and the metaphor are complex. On the other hand, he clearly treats the metaphor as metaphorical and the literal concept as literal. He

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refers to the “military metaphor,” and he discusses trade is peace as a matter of “empirical evidence,” something that is not “factually” true. It is not the ultimate truth values that help him classify the two notions; it is the conventional treatment of Trade Is War and trade is peace, along with a standard discourse that brings them into frequent contrastive intercourse.

Trade Is War and Its Many Inflections So far, I have said little about Trade Is War and its complexity, except to note that the literal concepts money is military power and international trade finances war can combine to suggest a literal version of Trade Is War. However, Trade Is War encompasses much variation as a metaphor. While the metaphor largely relies upon a standard hostile-action image schema, an abstraction that envisions entities seeking to harm or conquer each other, when we examine numerous historically, socially situated instances, we find complex patterns of variation that cannot be accounted for by simply referring to the underlying image schema. These variations have to do with the inflection that attends the particular locution—the shaping influence exerted by the discursive trajectory of the writer or speaker.

A Brief History of Trade Is War Perhaps the Phoenicians uttered versions of Trade Is War as they launched goods-laden ships into the ancient world. Obviously, most of human discourse cannot be retrieved. In English, however, it seems Trade Is War begins to take hold when it reflects the story of trade between nations— in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, as governments increasingly see trade as a tool of foreign policy. An anonymous trade writer of 1436 offers a geopolitical analysis of the English wool trade in “The Libel of English Policy.” “The Libel” argues that if England controls the sea between Dover and Calais, it also controls the Dutch trade by impeding shipments from Spain. It frequently emphasizes the peace that will result, but it is a coerced peace with a warlike economic payoff: Thane yf Englonde wolde hys wolle restreyne Ffrome Fflaundres, thys followeth certayne, Fflaundres of nede must wyth us have pease, Or ellis he is distroyde, wythowght lees.5 Also yef Fflaundres thus distroyed bee, Some merchaundy of Spayne wolle nevere ithe;6 Ffor distroyed hit is, and, as in chesse, The wolle of Spayne wolle cometh not to press. (161)

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Strictly speaking, it is difficult to say whether or not this amounts to an early locution of Trade Is War. Yet the language of destruction is abundant. And trade is conceived of as chess, itself a war metaphor. At the same time, if Trade Is War motivates this passage, it does so tacitly. More direct is John Wheeler’s bit of 1601 invective toward King Philip, after the king forbids trade with England’s merchant adventurers: “[W]hat could be more injurious or enemy-like in time of open warres? But herein the said King not only shot at the State of England, but withall hee damaged other nations, as though no merchant ought to trade anywhere but in his Countries” (40, emphasis added). Equally direct and developed further is Andrew Yarranton’s 1681 version of Trade Is War in England’s Improvement by Sea and Land to Out-do the Dutch Without Fighting. He proposes that rather than attack the Dutch, who have insurmountable strategic advantages, England would do better to emulate and surpass Dutch trade policies. He metaphorizes, “[F]or as an Army, though never so numerous and strong, yet want of Discipline and good Government, will make them of no Use” (14). Mixing his metaphor and reinforcing the idea of trade as a surrogate for military action, he continues: “[S]o Trade must and will rule; she is a Mistress that must be courted the right way, neither neglected, nor impos’d upon; and because sure Fond7 will answer all our just ends, both as to present defence against a powerful Enemy, and to improve Trade and Commerce” (14). The passage blends the war metaphor with a sexual metaphor, a blend that occurs often today, although usually in a locker-room register, as when former Prime Minister of France Edith Cresson remarks, “The Japanese sit up all night thinking of ways to screw the Americans and the Europeans” (Eigen and Siegel 237). But what is more striking is the energy of Yarronton’s metaphor, which sounds, to my postmodern ear, as if he feels he has latched onto something new, both in policy and in language. I suspect that when Trade Is War begins its activity, there is no distinct first twitch, no discrete original expression that marks its inception. More likely it begins in fits and starts, here with a well-developed locution, there with a single word whose metaphoric quality passes by barely noticed. For instance, as the early nations of Europe take turns raising tariffs, Trade Is War may be buried in the word retaliate. A 1564 dispute involving duties, shipping prohibitions, and monopoly—not to mention robbery—prompts this message to Queen Elizabeth: “We have therefore . . . drawn up two proclamations, one respecting the Flemish manufacturers and raw material for them, prohibiting their exportation to England, and the importation of English goods into this country, in retaliation” (Tawney and Power 44). Similarly, more than a century later, Charles King writes in The British Merchant, “If the Bill of Commerce should pass . . . should we imagine that these countries will not abate of their Consump-

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tion of our Manufactures? or that they will not retaliate upon us by Prohibitions and high Duties[?]” (3). Again, it is difficult to determine whether retaliate amounts to Trade Is War in any profoundly metaphorical sense; it may be a case of Aristotle’s catachresis, where a metaphoric word fills a semantic gap but is not especially suggestive. Nonetheless, in 1888 the tax historian Stephen Dowell has little difficulty seeing Trade Is War in the tit for tat of Tudor trade policy, referring to retaliatory duties as the “international war of tariffs” later to become the mercantile system (178). However the movement of Trade Is War begins, it begins. And it spreads. And as it spreads, Trade Is War reshapes itself in each new locution, inflected by the political, philosophical, and social views of its speaker. Strident nationalist Daniel Defoe describes Henry VII’s strategy to gain the wool trade in words of war: The King acted like a wise and warlike prince, besieging a City, who tho’ he attacks the Garrison, and batters the Out-works with the utmost Fury, yet spares the inhabitants, and forebears as much as he can ruining the City, which he expects to make his own: So the King seem’d willing to let the Flemings keep up the Trade, till his Subjects were thoro’ly enabled to take it into their own hands. (97)

The literal act to which Defoe refers is Henry VII’s not imposing duties on the English export of wool, while allowing foreigners to teach the English the art of manufacturing woolen articles. Interestingly, Defoe’s war metaphor draws upon the stealth and restraint of Henry VII’s strategy, not upon overtly aggressive acts such as imposing duties that might be considered acts of trade war today. Moreover, Defoe—like others of his time and before—claims Trade Is War, saying that Henry VII is “wise and warlike.” It would be unusual indeed for a trade discourser of the late twentieth century to risk the rhetorical cost of even so attenuated a locution as Defoe’s, which after all speaks of sparing lives, not taking them. It may be, though, that the moral view of war in earlier centuries, a view that sees little wrong with war is for economic gain, permits Defoe and others to claim Trade Is War without risking a loss in credibility or ethos. More than a hundred years later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could hardly be more contemptuous of stealthy economic deceptions. But their organizing metaphor is still war, inflected by denunciation. Excoriating the industrial “machine” that reduces all relations to money relations, they complain: The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence those men who are to wield those weapons, the modern working class, the proletarians. . . . Masses of la-

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borers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. (13–14)

Marx and Engels do with Trade Is War what many others do. They ascribe it—which is to say they use it to point the finger at those who betray a literal notion: that trade is peace. Or perhaps their literal notion is trade should be peace. Note, though, that the insistence of the ascribed war metaphor—so strident, so truculent—smothers its own untruth. The stable, complementary literalness of trade is peace is thus challenged with a loud assertion that we may once have traded in peace, but no more. The only remnant of literalness left is that, in fact, crowded factories are not equipped with guns and cannons. But ask Marx and Engels whether people die in an economic war, and they will undoubtedly answer with an emphatic affirmative. Their Trade Is War both insists upon and denies its metaphoricity. Once Trade Is War finds its voice, it seems to be heard perpetually. The discourse of trade could hardly function without it. Can we imagine a discussion of international economics that does not, sooner or later, include a comment such as that of Neville Chamberlain, as he announces that the aim of British protectionism is “to negotiate with foreign countries and to arm Britain” (Abel 97)? Or that of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Francis Bowes Sayre in 1936: “[Economic nationalism] means . . . nation striking against nation with injurious economic weapons” (31)? Or that of an obscure cold warrior in 1959, who warns that the agents of the Third World War will not be “soldiers,” but “salesmen” (Welton 5)?

Trade Is War in Recent Years Trade Is War is not only a part of the current discourse of trade; it is a dominant component of that discourse. The most common locution is the nominal phrase trade war. In general, trade war is a preferred locution of those who oppose aggressive trade policies. It is an epithet to be hurled at those who would draw us into international trade conflict. Trade war, according to this view, amounts to an aberration that interrupts ordinary commerce. There are those, however, who see trade war as a normal state of affairs. “We are not in danger of having a trade war. We have already been fighting one. Only the Japanese realize it, and we don’t,” writes Steve Schlossstein in a book entitled Trade War (13). So we find two main inflections: First, the be-careful-you’ll-start-one inflection, preferred by free-trade proponents (see chapter 1 for a discussion of standard alignments with respect to trade policy). This inflection is almost always uttered as an ascription—a statement that characterizes a rhetorical opponent’s beliefs and commitments. Second, the someone-

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else-has-already-started-one inflection, preferred only by an alarmist faction of protectionists. This inflection is sometimes uttered as a direct claim, a representation of the speaker’s commitments. However, even alarmists are sensitive to the rhetorical cost associated with the phrase trade war and thus ascribe its attendant commitments to an enemy, such as the perennially harangued Japanese. As the Japan-bashing mouthpiece in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun remarks, “The Japanese can be tough. They say ‘business is war,’ and they mean it” (152). In either inflection, trade war incites both heated discussion and a good deal of metaphoric response. In recent years, speculation about a U.S.-Japan trade war arises whenever the U.S. invokes its Super 301 clause, a provision of the 1988 Omnibus Trade Act that leads to punitive tariffs on foreign goods. Various clichéd locutions of Trade Is War find their way into this discussion, as might be expected in quickly produced newspaper prose. When the Super 301 clause is first invoked in 1989, the Los Angeles Times reports, “The United States is about to launch a new weapon in its trade arsenal” (Pine). The Washington Times describes Super 301 as “a potent new trade weapon against Japan” (Riley, “Hills Has”). In the Super 301 scare of 1994, the Washington Post calls Super 301 “America’s ultimate weapon” (Behr, “Administration”). The Chicago Tribune writes of “the most feared weapon in the U.S. trade arsenal” (“Clinton Reimposes”). The Economist observes routinely, “America’s ‘Super 301’ trade weapon has been primed again” (“Gunboat” 71). It would seem that all agree that, at least when international commerce is not going well, trade is war and that the legal provisions used in a trade war may be metaphorically rendered as weapons. Even when trade disputes seem avoidable, the language of war often appears, and in conventional ways. After a recent successful round of trade negotiations, a New York Times headline declares that there is “a truce in U.S.-Japanese trade wars” (WuDunn). However, this broad agreement masks a perpetual shift from mapping to mapping within Trade Is War.8 Depending on the writer’s discursive trajectory, the Super 301 as a weapon can be rendered many ways. The Economist, probusiness and pro–free trade, sees the weapon as “a loose cannon at best” that “threatens America’s trade policy, the world trade system emerging from the Uruguay round—and Japan’s long awaited deregulation” (“Gunboat” 71). The Economist’s cannon, since it is described below the headline “Gunboat Diplomacy,” can be pictured on the deck of an antique warship, raining cannonballs helter skelter. This mapping illustrates a broad tendency for Trade Is War to hark backward in time, to invoke not just well-established ideas of trade conflict but deeply entrenched notions of war. The Economist, though, is especially insistent on making antique connections and offers a literal historical analogy, saying the Clinton administration has “all the diplomatic poise of its nine-

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teenth-century predecessors.” This, of course, links the Super 301 loose cannon to Commodore Perry’s quite literal cannons, so instrumental in “opening trade” with Japan more than a century ago. USA Today, appealing to a broader readership not as intently focused upon international trade issues, agrees with the Economist’s general position on Super 301 but maps Super 301-as-weapon differently. Its headline, “Make Money, Not War,” invokes Trade Is War indirectly by reenvoicing the literal trade is peace. At the same time, it calls to mind a distinctly un-Economist image of peaceniks and hippies. Beneath the headline, the paper is more measured than the Economist in the rhetorical intensity of its metaphorical mapping. It merely disagrees with the administration’s choice of “tools”: “The tools the administration uses to open Japan’s trade doors for foreign goods should be precise not destructive— like a lockpick, not a case of dynamite” (“Make Money”). While the ascribed “case of dynamite” mapping is unmistakably critical of Super 301, by shifting the metaphoric ground from weapons to tools, USA Today leaves room to acknowledge that the administration’s goals are not misguided. Nonetheless, admonishing the Clinton administration, it invokes and ascribes a weapon as old as Perry’s cannons. It advises Clinton, “To begin, drop the blunderbuss” (“Make Money”). On the other side of the Super 301 debate, Washington Post columnist Hobart Rowan remaps the blunderbuss metaphor as he supports the administration with left-handed praise. He is relieved that Super 301 is not the “blunderbuss approach” that might have been taken by Congress. The blunderbuss is thus projected onto actions that have not been taken— an odd mapping of something onto nothing. Indeed, qualified agreement seems to spawn an odd quality of metaphor. A few weeks before Rowan’s blunderbuss comment, the Post’s Peter Behr writes that the invoking of Super 301 was “clearly meant as a warning shot toward Japan, but in keeping with the zen-like quality of the quarrel, it was carefully aimed to avoid coming near its target” (“Clinton Aims”). Here it is not so much the choice of weapon that is striking but the projected mental state of the one who fires the weapon. In a single metaphoric phrase, Behr encapsulates the story of Super 301: The Clinton administration invokes Super 301, bringing the U.S. and Japan to the brink of a trade war, but only because the administration knows that the most feared consequences will never come to pass. In other words, it aims to miss. As Trade Is War maps from weapon to weapon, it simultaneously moves toward personal narrative. That is, just as shooting wars tend to be personalized (the World War II allies did not fight Germany so much as they fought Hitler), Trade Is War moves toward a mano a mano vision of trade war. The cannon is associated with Commodore Perry; the blunderbuss can only be fired by one person at a single target, although

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in a scattershot fashion; the warning shot suggests a shot fired by an individual. In keeping with personalizing the metaphor, the Washington Post drops the weapon mapping altogether and comments that Super 301 “will leave no deep bruises” (“Super 301”). And Carla Hills, trade negotiator for the Bush administration, promises not to use Super 301 “in any bullying way” (Pine). Of course, it is one thing to point out that Trade Is War is malleable, another to make sense of this malleability. The above examples exhibit both a regularity of use—what I call a rhetorical etiquette—and a flexibility within that etiquette. They are predictably regular in that they are all ascriptions: they characterize the beliefs, motives, and commitments of the administration that proposes invoking Super 301. Because the metaphors are ascribed, newspaper writers are free to render Super 301 as weapons from the cannon to the blunderbuss and the trade disagreement as fights from gun battles to wrestling matches. Why not? The metaphor does not represent the writer’s view. Not surprisingly, administration spokespeople—all internationalist free-traders in the last half of the twentieth century—consistently resist the ascription of Trade Is War to them, as we shall see. This ascriptive regularity is dominant in the discourse of trade. Metaphors have costs associated with them. Thus, they entail a rhetorical etiquette for managing those costs. Most participants in the discourse of trade, even when they see trade as a contentious activity, do not want to pay the cost of claiming Trade Is War, a cost that would be paid in loss of credibility or what Aristotle calls ethos. Of course, there are an intrepid few who claim Trade Is War, either disregarding the cost or attempting to make rhetorical recklessness a virtue. In his 1996 run for the Republican presidential nomination, Patrick Buchanan touted economic nationalism and unashamedly called himself a trade hawk. The rhetorical etiquette associated with Trade Is War is not mechanistic; it can be violated. So can all etiquettes. But violation carries a price. Within this ascriptive regularity, however, we see significant variety in the invention of specific metaphors. This inventiveness might be thought to result from the pursuit of vividness. No doubt, vividness is a virtue in newspaper writing. But inventions are not entirely accidental. (And where they may be accidental, they nonetheless come with consequences.) Each rendering of Trade Is War either heats or cools—intensifies or attenuates—the general rhetorical effect of the metaphor. The above examples, though various, all are relatively attenuated renderings of Trade Is War. Note what images are avoided: blood, death, dismemberment. All of these are images of war no less than loose cannons, blunderbusses, and warning shots.

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These relatively cooler images of war are taken from commentaries that are either descriptive (e.g., weapons from news articles) or mildly critical (e.g., the cannon, the blunderbuss, and deep bruises come from editorials). Not only do they attenuate Trade Is War, they do it in ways that are, if not calculated, at least calculable. Weapons is an attenuated rendering because it is nonspecific and thus relatively nonevocative of the negative consequences of war. The specifically invoked weapons—the cannon and the blunderbuss—are antiquated weapons and thus associated with distant times, not immediately threatening. Images of hand-tohand combat attenuate Trade Is War as much as it can be attenuated, removing weapons altogether. What we see in the variety of renderings—the range of specific locutions—that make up Trade Is War is a managed variegation of images, a conversation of various colors from brilliant to muted, more art than accident. Whether through conscious effort or through intuitive competence, writers and speakers typically take care to ascribe Trade Is War to someone such as an administration or an adversary. But the ascription is measured, the specific images conveying calibrated intensity, high or low.

Contrasting Metaphors: Trade Is Friendship and Trade Is A Journey We have seen that Trade Is War and trade is peace converse and that each concept embraces internal variation that must affect their contrastive relation. This conversation is further complicated by other metaphors that complement Trade Is War and trade is peace. Let me turn first to those that typically complement trade is peace: Trade Is Friendship and Trade Is A Journey. Trade Is Friendship is itself a product of a conceptual system comprising Nations Are People and National Allies Are Friends (compare Kitis and Milapides). By now, it should not be surprising to hear that this conceptual system has a part-metaphoric, part-literal quality. We could say that Great Britain is literally a friend to the United States because literal peace and metaphoric friendship are more or less synonymous. Yet we would have to concede that a nation, which is a political entity, cannot be a friend in and of itself but rather stands metonymically for its citizens or is anthropomorphized as a human friend (Nations Are People plus National Allies Are Friends). Trade Is Friendship depends upon conceptualizing nations as friends, at least with respect to international trade; therefore, it sits somewhere between the literal and the metaphoric. Trade Is A Journey is associated with the more general metaphor Life Is A Journey, a metaphor that supports many literary and ordinary meta-

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phors. For example, Life Is A Journey must be recruited in order to comprehend Robert Frost’s poems “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or to comprehend the last paragraphs of The Great Gatsby. In a less lofty register, Life Is A Journey supports the Nissan tag line, “Life is a journey. Enjoy the ride”; the similar Volkswagen tag line, “On the road of life, there are passengers, and there are drivers. Drivers wanted”; and many common locutions such as taking wrong turns in life, walking the straight and narrow, and reaching the end of the road. In turn, the journey image schema applies not just to life but to many of life’s activities or episodes—education, marriage, careers. Trade is one of these activities. Taken together, trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey form a cluster of mutually entailed concepts. In part, they contrast with Trade Is War because they each entail the cooperative image schema, an image schema that has important incompatibilities with Trade Is War’s contention image schema. That is, while both contention and cooperation entail multiple parties, typically two parties or sides, and while they entail mutual intentions and actions toward the other party, one entails hostile action, the other a mutual exchange of goodwill. Thus, while the contention image schema supports metaphors of war, the cooperative image schema supports the literal concept trade is peace and the metaphor Trade Is Friendship. By extension, because the contention image schema entails blocking action, and the cooperative image schema nonblocking action, the cooperative image schema supports Trade Is A Journey. Friends journey together; enemies, except on forced marches, do not. However, it is not just the interplay of image-schematic compatibility that constitutes the relationship between Trade Is War and its opposing concepts. It is the concepts’ persistent copresence in the discourse of trade. Indeed, these metaphors come into frequent contrastive intercourse with each other. For example, during a 1990 debate over proposed trade sanctions on Japanese goods, Senator John Heinz and trade negotiator Carla Hills exchange jabs in side-by-side USA Today columns, re-envoicing the standard rhetorical give-and-take of the metaphors that constitute Trade Is War. Heinz favors new sanctions and, in his choice of metaphors, accuses Japan of treating trade as war. Decrying Japan’s “industrial targeting,” he writes, Our real problem is not access to Japan’s markets but Japan’s destruction of ours. We’re erecting tombstones over U.S. industries— semiconductors, machine tools, robotics, computers—targeted for extinction by Japanese government-business collaboration. Our hightech economy is looking more like an industrial graveyard.

For Heinz, Japan has made international trade into a war—a war the United States is losing.

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But for Hills, who favors a new round of negotiations, and whose rebuttal is headlined “Work with Japan for Trade Cooperation,” the situation calls for a different set of metaphors. She points out that Japan has progressed farther than any other of the U.S.’s “trading partners” (Trade Is A Journey, Trade Is Friendship), urges “cooperation not confrontation” (incompatible image schemas), and says the U.S. needs to “build upon the goodwill of the Japanese people” (trade is peace).9 In her closing paragraph, she emphatically endorses Trade Is A Journey: Down one path lie closed markets and gravely diminished prosperity. Down the other lie open markets, expanded trade and economic growth. Through our policy of global and individual negotiations, and use of our new trade laws, we are determined to walk the path of prosperity.

Of course, one could never “walk the path of prosperity” in a contending situation—the way is obstructed. It is true that some configure the journey metaphor negatively, as does the Los Angeles Times in reporting, “Clinton . . . is pondering a totally new path in U.S.-Japan relations—one that would punish the entire Japanese market” (Jameson). When on rare occasions journeying metaphors are associated with Trade Is War, the journeys are aberrant. For example, “Head-On Collision” is the title of a CNN program about a potential trade war over Japanese luxury cars. Almost always, however, Trade Is A Journey connotes a positive journey that trading partners take together. President Bush’s chief economic advisor, Michael Boskin, insists, “I think President Bush has made it quite clear . . . he supports policies where the United States leads the world to freer and fairer trade” (Brookes). Similarly, the Los Angeles Times renders the journey in navigational terms. It worries that Super 301 could lead to more “scraps with Tokyo just as the two sides try to navigate their way around a head-on trade clash and find calmer commercial waters” (“As Japan”). Economists Patrick Low and John Nash, free traders and multilateralists, title an article on open trade policies, “The Long and Winding Road: Toward Freer World Trade.” The contrastive intercourse between Trade Is War and its conceptual opponents is an emphatic one. The opposing metaphors do not pop up in the course of middle paragraphs as throwaway phrases or elegant decoration. They muscle their way into the emphatic spots of trade discourse—titles, opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs, and the small, emphatic summing-ups that populate essays and conversations. Carla Hills’ claiming of Trade Is A Journey is the final thrust of her essay. Likewise, when trade essays end with Trade Is Friendship or Trade Is A Journey, they counter innumerable essays that end with castigating war metaphors. Typical of these closing lunges is this one from a publisher’s letter in Electronics. Having warned against the use of Super 301, Jonah

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McLeod closes pointedly: “Stop the war before it gets started.” The contrastive intercourse is a persistent competition between a metaphor that emphatically sounds the alarm for trading disaster and opposing metaphors that urge us to view trade as stable, manageable, beneficial. That trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey are thought of positively is important to their rhetorical constitution. Not only does this conceptual system contrast with Trade Is War as an ostensible representation of external circumstances, it attenuates the rhetorical intensity asserted by Trade Is War. A writer or speaker may say emphatically that we need to walk the path of peace and prosperity with our friends, but that emphasized point is less disturbing politically and emotionally than invocations of war. Moreover, because the conceptual blend tends to attenuate controversy, to utter it carries little rhetorical cost. That is, unless the description is patently incorrect, what loss of credibility or ethos is likely to result from advocating a noncalamitous, prosperous future? This low cost is evidenced in the nonascriptive ways trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey are uttered. For example, unlike John Heinz, who accuses the Japanese of “industrial targeting,” thus ascribing Trade Is War to a foreign competitor, Carla Hills fully claims Trade Is A Journey, closing her essay: “We are determined to walk the path of prosperity.” Others may point the accusing finger, but Hills (in this case) indicates unequivocally which metaphor represents her view.

Partially Compatible Metaphors: Markets Are Containers and Trade Is A Game When Trade Is War converses with trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey, the conversation is argumentative in a fairly direct way. Trade Is War’s hostile-action image schema and all of its entailed political, economic, social, professional, and personal commitments oppose the peaceful-exchange image schema and all the commitments it entails. But not all metaphors operate in direct opposition to other metaphors. Trade Is War entails the container image schema, and thus it is associated with the conceptual metaphor Markets Are Containers. In the war image schema, contending sides attempt to conquer each other. Conquering involves ownership of territory. So when we treat trade as war, we have to understand markets as owned or contained—often contained by walls or barriers. Trade Is War is also closely related to the metaphor Trade Is A Game, a metaphor that on the one hand entails the contention image schema but on the other is very different. Trade Is War’s rhetorical etiquette leads most writers and speakers to ascribe war metaphors to someone else—to an enemy or a competitor. As they ascribe Trade Is War, it is not uncommon for them simultaneously

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to claim an alternative metaphor. However, the alternative metaphor need not be a direct opposite. It can be a partially compatible metaphor such as Markets Are Containers or Trade Is A Game, metaphors that concede some elements of the hostile-action image schema but are not necessarily inflected in the same way. This simultaneous ascription of Trade Is War and claiming of an alternate metaphor has the advantage of complexly managing rhetorical costs, because it allows the utterer to ascribe an intensified metaphor while claiming an attenuated, partially compatible metaphor. The utterer gets to have it both ways.

Trade Is A Game Incensed at the administration’s use of Super 301 during a Japanese recession, the Boston Globe’s David Warsh denounces the “trade-war-inthe-making” as “hitting an ally when it is down.” This is wrong, Warsh insists, because we should be “committed to play by the international rules of the game.” This shift from Trade Is War to Trade Is A Game has two components. First, Warsh denounces the administration, ascribing the relatively intense Trade Is War to them: “Hitting an ally when it is down” personalizes and therefore magnifies the conflict. Simultaneously, he recommends what he sees as a correct policy, claiming the attenuating Trade Is A Game (“international rules of the game”) for himself. In the discourse of trade, this maneuver can be observed again and again. Consider Senator Heinz’s editorial warning that Japan’s “industrial targeting” will lead to the “destruction” of U.S. markets. Heinz uses the war metaphor, but like most trade discoursers, he ascribes it—as a political, philosophical commitment—to Japan. At the same time, he claims Trade Is A Game for himself. In the opening of his editorial, Heinz describes the U.S.’s trade policy as “Charlie Brown warning Lucy not to pull the football away again.” “In industry after industry,” he says, “we end up flat on our backs while Japan ends up with the ball.” Here Japan is portrayed as one who undermines the standard scheme (or image schema) of games, turning the game into war by acting out of actual hostility instead of feigning hostility in a context of goodwill. As the editorial proceeds, this negative portrayal escalates into Heinz’s explicit ascription of Trade Is War to the Japanese, while the U.S. remains associated with Charlie Brown, the unfairly deceived game player. Even after urging trade sanctions, which are often seen as warlike, Heinz returns to the metaphor of games, saying, “Even Charlie Brown could tell you [sanctions are needed].” Thus, while Heinz recommends a kind of militant self-defense, he does not endorse the bellicose trade philosophy he ascribes to Japan. Lester Thurow makes the same shift in metaphors. He explicitly attempts to rehabilitate some aspects of Trade Is War, denounces it in general terms, and subsequently claims Trade Is A Game. Thurow’s use of

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the military metaphor is metaphor by denial. The main title of his book Head to Head invokes the hostile-action image schema, and its subtitle, The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and the United States, invokes Trade Is War. But Thurow—having it both ways—persistently challenges his own metaphor in the body of the book, remarking most explicitly, “The military metaphor is fundamentally incorrect” (31). In rejecting Trade Is War, Thurow does not unreservedly reject the hostile-action image schema and its entailments, nor does he unreservedly endorse the cooperative image schema and its entailments. Instead, he carefully manages the rhetorical costs associated with his metaphors: “The economic game that will be played in the twenty-first century will have cooperative as well as competitive elements” (31). He argues, in a sense, that we will have war and peace at the same time. Thus, it works well for him to claim Trade Is A Game, which often means feigned war in the context of peace. He gains the attention that comes with the intensified metaphor Trade Is War but lessens its rhetorical cost by shifting to the attenuated Trade Is A Game. Of course, having it both ways is not easy. Thurow sometimes is seduced by the easy reverse move from Trade Is A Game back to Trade Is War, perhaps by the pointedness of the intensified metaphor. While he declares on one page, “Let me suggest the military metaphors so widely used should be replaced by the language of football” (39), a page later, he says that education will soon be the dominant “competitive weapon” (40). The interface between Trade Is War and Trade Is A Game can be complex indeed. In a student focus-group discussion not centered on imminent trade war, the easy move from war to game is used to justify Trade Is War as a metaphor. One student makes an argument that trade is a bombing mission is not true. She believes it mischaracterizes business, that “bombing mission” is too “severe.” Another student counters that businesses do, in fact, target and destroy competitors. She argues: And, you know, and you’re saying that it’s so—it is such a—what did you use? The term is so drastic? I don’t really think so. I was looking at it from more of an abstract point—that a bombing mission is like football is like a business, where you have a common goal, and there is a team working together, and sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for the end result or for the purpose.

This exchange comprises many sorts of metaphorical motion. It taps into the literal notion that trade is peace but reconfigures it as peace among teammates; it alters the metaphorical connotations of trade is a bombing mission that offend one member of the focus group, turning it into a metaphorical hyperbole—that is, layering the metaphor so that it doesn’t really mean bombing, it means football, a game in which the long bomb never explodes.

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These back-and-forth shifts between attenuating game metaphors and intensifying war metaphors demonstrate well the hologramic quality of Trade Is A Game. Seen from one perspective, Trade Is A Game is feigned war; seen from another it is actual peace. This makes the maneuver from war to games appealingly easy. But it does not guarantee that the move will be persuasive. For example, Thurow’s critics insist that he cannot escape the implications of Trade Is War, no matter how well he argues that game metaphors are more accurate. Economist Paul Krugman objects to Thurow’s metaphors of competitiveness in general. He disparages Thurow’s seeing countries as corporations, corporations as armies or teams, and thus the world economy as a large theater of war or playing field. He derides: The subtitle of Lester Thurow’s huge best-seller, Head to Head, is “The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America.” . . . Suppose that the subtitle had described the real situation: The coming struggle in which each big economy will succeed or fail based on its own efforts, pretty much independently of how well the others do. Would he have sold so many books? (39)

But Krugman counters with his own metaphors, primarily the metaphor of numbers discussed by economist and rhetorician Donald (now Deidre) McCloskey (Rhetoric 79–83). Objecting to estimates of hourly wage loss by Thurow and his intellectual allies, Krugman says, “All one needs to do, then, is spend a few minutes in the library with a calculator to come up with a table that ranks U.S. industries by value-added per worker” (37). In other words, it only takes a few minutes to re-envoice the pervasive economic metaphor Time Is Money. Both ironically and typically, Krugman’s closing salvo at Thurow is to hurl an intensified instance of Trade Is War at him: “A much more serious risk is that obsession with competitiveness will lead to trade conflict, perhaps even to a world trade war” (41, emphasis added). Krugman will not allow Thurow to slip easily between Trade Is War and Trade Is A Game. If Thurow is to raise the specter of war, let it be world war. As with Trade Is War, the widespread use of Trade Is A Game should not be seen as an undifferentiated gestalt. There is considerable variation within Trade Is A Game, including most prominently metaphors of cards, chess, and football. Each concrete instance of Trade Is A Game is keyed to writers’ and speakers’ individuated discursive trajectory—in most cases a free-trade globalist trajectory of some variety. And, in each instance, the metaphor is ascribed or claimed, intensified or attenuated. The main maneuver that I have described—ascribing an intensified Trade Is War while claiming an attenuated Trade Is A Game—is typical. But other maneuvers are to be found. Because Trade Is A Game is malleable, it can sensibly be claimed in a

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positive way, and it can be ascribed in a negative way. William Neikirk of the Chicago Tribune, for example, ascribes and ridicules Trade Is A Game by representing the mindset of Super 301 proponents in the phrase, “If you don’t play with me, I’m going to take my toys away.” That is, Neikirk depicts Super 301 proponents as small children who accuse Japan of undermining the standard game image schema while falsely assuming that the game-image should apply to trade in the first place. Perhaps more than most trade metaphors, Trade Is A Game requires interpretation in light of finely detailed cultural knowledge. How could we begin to understand Trade Is A Game without the intuitive knowledge that to undermine the rules of football (Senator Heinz’s metaphor) is reprehensible and that to expect the rules of young childhood games (Neikirk’s metaphor) always to be obeyed is foolish?

Markets Are Containers It is far from unusual for markets to be seen as metaphorical containers. The word market in its most literal sense refers to a defined space in which merchants conduct business—the ancient Greek agora, the farmers market, the flea market, the supermarket, and so on. By metonymy, the activities that take place in markets are also referred to as markets. The market for new cars, consumer electronics, commodities, and the like can be called lively, slow, hot, dead—all adjectives that describe the rate of activity within a defined, although not always contiguous, space. Likewise, the stock market is contained. It has a trading volume that can be numerically expressed by various indices such as the Dow Jones. In short, the finiteness of markets—their containability—is one of our most fundamental image schemas, so fundamental that we could not understand scarcity, saturation, or supply and demand without it. This container image schema is recruited for many metaphoric variations. As we saw the discussion of trade sanctions on Crossfire (see chapter 1), Representative Levin counters Trade Is War with Markets Are Containers, using a wall metaphor, the wall surrounding the Japanese closed market—a container. In the same discussion, Andrew Card renders Markets Are Containers as “sanctuary markets,” also contained spaces separate from other markets. The “sanctuary market” is the Japanese market, a space contained within Japan’s national borders. But Markets Are Containers also applies abstractly to scattered markets. Throughout business and trade talk, we speak of getting into the business, plenty of room for everyone in this market, and market share—phrases which treat markets as contained wholes. Like Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers can attenuate and remain compatible with Trade Is War. That is, it can concede some of Trade Is War’s entailments, repudiate others, and thereby lower the rhetorical

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temperature. However, let me describe this attenuation somewhat differently from the way I described that of Trade Is A Game. So far I have focused upon the ways rhetorical costs are managed in order to avoid or mitigate the costs associated with hot metaphors, particularly Trade Is War. But adhering to the standard etiquette can also help a writer or speaker to build credibility or ethos. We have seen in the previous section an example in which Carla Hills deflects John Heinz’s metaphors of contention with alternate metaphors of friendship and journeys. At other times, Hills makes a virtue of the metaphor Markets Are Containers. In her exchange with Heinz, Hills opposes trade sanctions, but in other situations, she supports use of Super 301. Super 301 is frequently called by the nickname “the crowbar statute,” a metaphor that depicts Super 301 as a tool for prying open Japan’s markets (Markets Are Containers). When supporting the use of the crowbar statute, Hills makes the most of this metaphor by keeping an actual, symbolic crowbar in her office (Tran). That is, she literalizes the metaphor Markets Are Containers but ascribes its commitments to Japan. Importantly, because Markets Are Containers is associated with Trade Is War, to ascribe Markets Are Containers to Japan, particularly in connection with a hot trade dispute, is to imply that Trade Is War may represent the Japanese view, also. By wielding the crowbar, Hills is trying to open Japan’s war-threatening container so that in the future the U.S. and Japan can be cooperative, friendly traders on a journey to prosperity. What could be wrong with that? The press—no doubt, to Hills’ great approval—seems to take the hint. The Washington Times, while calling Super 301 a weapon in the body of its article, writes in its headline, “Hills has wedge to open closed foreign markets” (Riley); the Washington Post, five years later, describes Super 301 as both a weapon and as the “crowbar statute” (Behr, “Administration”).

Trade Is War in Summary Any description of the conversation that constitutes Trade Is War will be too brief to encompass all of its complexity. Each instance of Trade Is War is shaped by individual commitments, relative willingness to adhere to the standard rhetorical etiquette, and immediate rhetorical goals. I do argue, however, that the kind of general functioning I have described is pervasive, and it happens all at once. For example, even in a somewhat humorous metaphor, we can see the standard rhetorical etiquette at play. The Detroit Free Press criticizes President Clinton, writing, “Invoking Super 301 is like rolling out The Bomb where the rapier will do, and the fallout is likely to be far-reaching, here and abroad” (“Pressuring”). Seen in the Aristotelian way, this might seem a trivial metaphor, based on the

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shared feature “destructiveness” among “The Bomb,” “the rapier,” and “Super 301.” However, what is important is that the Detroit Free Press ascribes the political, philosophical commitments of Trade Is War to President Clinton—ascribes them in an equivocal way that does not entirely reject the image schema of contention but prefers the antiquated domain of sword-fighting, where destruction is one-on-one. This shift of domains is only effective if there is a broad cultural knowledge that the The Bomb has been the defining terror of recent generations and that the rapier is today associated more with Hollywood swashbuckling than with bloody combat. This all-at-onceness is common indeed. It has been a necessary evil for me to present elements of Trade Is War’s constituting conversation one at a time. In analyses, we pause and consider. But in conversation, we speak, understand, consider, maneuver, and respond very quickly. In a sense, even though the metaphor Language Is Conversation may imply sequenced responses, the conversation surrounding Trade Is War transcends sequential time, operating with a quickness that looks like simultaneity. It is rather stunning that we can take in so much metaphor so fast, but it is something we do routinely. This single passage about Super 301 from columnist Warren Brookes encompasses all of the conversation described so far—and, of course, more: Unfortunately . . . Mr. Mosbacher, emboldened by his success in substantially modifying the FSX agreement (to build a fighter plane with Japan), seems as eager to escalate the trade arms race as does Congress—and South Korea’s and Taiwan’s capitulations to “301” threats . . . have only reinforced and ratified protectionist appetites.

To begin with, we are faced with two discursive trajectories embedded within each other. Brookes’ first word (“unfortunately”) signals a competing viewpoint from the one ascribed to Mosbacher, who would “escalate the trade arms race.” In order to oppose Trade Is War, Brookes must champion the literal notion that trade is peace. And although Brookes does not specify an alternate metaphor, the interconnected discourse of trade has already specified alternatives for him. Thus, Brookes’ opposition to Trade Is War entails at least metaphors of friendship, journeys, games, and containers. Moreover, the primary metaphor, “trade arms race,” does not, in this instance, operate in absolute opposition to these competing metaphors. By associating Trade Is A Journey with Trade Is War, Brookes reinflects them and at the same time reconfigures Trade Is War. When Brookes says Mosbacher relishes a “trade arms race,” he accuses Mosbacher of trade war mongering. Trade Is War is the central orientation. Trade war, as we

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have seen, continually maps and remaps into various, politically-freighted weapon mappings. The locution “trade arms race,” a corollary of the nuclear arms race, resists the attenuating tendency of weapon mappings to regress into cannons, blunderbusses, sabers, and so on, pulling the time orientation of weapons forward into the late twentieth century. Simultaneously and ironically, “trade arms race” attenuates Trade Is War from war to games, a race. The phrase arms race had its measure of irony during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Of course, the Cold War irony was terrifying; the race was one we could not afford to lose. Some of that irony is retained in “trade arms race.” And Brookes, perhaps, is using the irony to chastise Mosbacher. In Brookes’ account, Mosbacher is “emboldened” and “eager” for a “trade arms race,” as if he does not understand that this is a game with grave consequences. “Trade arms race” suggests that Mosbacher’s aggressive maneuvering is gamelike and, in the same breath, insists that it is no such thing. A few words later in a remarkable but perfectly comprehensible mixed metaphor, the irony is driven home as Brookes says, “South Korea’s and Taiwan’s capitulations to ‘301’ threats . . . have only reinforced and ratified protectionist appetites.” Here, the game becomes a war again, reduced to a cannibal versus cannibal—or perhaps animal versus animal—struggle, where one eats the other’s wealth like food or where one eats the other entirely. Korea and Taiwan are signatories to their own demise, ratifying their opponent’s appetite as if it were a treaty. In addition, war and game metaphors do not operate without simultaneous container and journey metaphors. Just as trade discourse encompasses Markets Are Containers (usually invoked in order to side-step Trade Is War), the discourse of war refers to both literal and metaphorical barriers: from China’s literal Great Wall to the Soviet Union’s metaphorical iron curtain. Thus, when Mosbacher seeks a “trade arms race”— that is, treats trade as war—he necessarily orients trade as a conflict between containerlike entities, which develop competing weaponry within their own borders. At the same time, a second spatial metaphor is at work, mapped as a race. It is not the cooperative trade journey that animates much of trade discourse but rather an inversion that trumps its opposite. The persistent inversion of Trade Is A Game, Trade Is A Journey, and Markets Are Containers amounts to a web of irony that moves Brookes’ passage into a spiraling tension with standard metaphors of the discourse of trade. Brookes is saying, Doesn’t Mosbacher realize that trade is not war, but only a game, that we should journey peacefully together, that all we really desire is to be allowed through the market’s gates? In addition, the simultaneous movement of this passage involves more than the metaphors already discussed. It also interacts with the orientational metaphors that are part and parcel of the discourse of trade: uni-

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lateral, bilateral, and multilateral. These orientational signals do not fit a bifurcated model easily, as with the orientational metaphor Happy Is Up, where happy is always up and sad is always down (Lakoff and Johnson 14–21). Instead they overlap and bend to the point the speaker is making. Controversy about unilateral and bilateral action is prominent in the press discussion of Super 301 and generally in the discourse of trade. A few days prior to Brookes’ article, the Washington Times reports, “Sousuke Uno, Japan’s newly elected prime minister, said last week his nation had no intention of taking part in talks regarding what he termed as . . . unilateral trade threats” (Riley, “Japanese Will”). Mosbacher’s colleague, Carla Hills, is quoted as reassuring Uno, “Anything that follows thereafter is a bilateral negotiation.” But the contrast between unilateralism and bilateralism is not a simple one. Bilateralism is often condemned by free traders, as in the Boston Globe’s “aggressive bilateralism symbolized by President Clinton’s renewing of Super 301” (Warsh). Bilateralism, in the eyes of staunch free traders, amounts to making a separate peace, betraying multilateral action. A New York Times editorial denounces Super 301, saying, “The key word is unilateral; under Super 301, the U.S. belittles its commitment to resolve disputes in multilateral settings” (“Risking”). When Brookes, then, accuses Mosbacher of escalating a trade arms race, he calls into play all of these orientational metaphors because “trade arms race”—in war, game, container, and journey mappings alike—suggests either a unilateral or bilateral relation between trading partners. Is this all that constitutes the conversation? Surely not. I have presented what seem to me the most salient elements. But the discourse of trade is filled with metaphors that this study has not and will not consider closely—and which may or may not bear upon Brookes’ passage. Trade Is Sex. Trade Is Litigation. The Economy Is A Machine. The Economy Is A Person. Goods Are Water. (Compare Boers; Boers and Demecheleer; David and Graham; Ezrahi; Lakoff, Moral; McCloskey, “Metaphors”; Mio; O’Connor; Rohrer; Sherman.) However, I cannot leave Brookes’ passage without noting in the next section its final maneuver. As in the discourse of trade overall, Brookes’ Trade Is War moves back to the literal.

Trade Is War as Harbinger of War The final move back to the literal is not the same as Trade Is War’s first link with the literal. It is not that Trade Is War entails a literal trade is peace, but that Trade Is War pushes the discourse of trade from a discussion of aggressive trade practices into a discussion of literal war. Brookes nudges the discussion in this direction by mentioning that “Mr.

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Mosbacher [is] emboldened by his success in substantially modifying the FSX agreement (to build a fighter plane with Japan).” Inevitably, it seems, the topic widens to include World War II, with images of Japanese Zeros easily called to mind, and reviving the lingering U.S. fear that Japan cannot be trusted with military power. The discussion of trade war thinly conceals a discussion of actual war—one of the main reasons that Trade Is War is so often ascribed to others, and one of the reasons its mappings are so often attenuated. Trade Is War’s push toward the literal is especially evident when the discussion involves Japan. For example, when trade writers describe a dispute involving Canadian and American beers as “a longstanding trade war,” the contiguity of literal war does not show itself (French). Instead the metaphor remaps into a dispute among families: “the heart of the feud” (French). But literal war with Japan remains easily evoked. In Crossfire’s discussion of Super 301 (see chapter 1), John Sununu jabs, “You keep asking why we don’t put the focus on the Japanese. We are putting the focus on Japan. But we also read history. And what happened in the world before World War II is a trade war that cost everybody.” Similarly, Mitsubishi chairman Akio Morita, during an earlier time of trade friction, is quoted, “Things appear to have gotten as bad as they were on the eve of World War II” (Jameson). Sometimes the literalizing maneuver is reversed, going from literal to metaphoric—underscoring the irony of current war metaphors. Sean O’Leary, tongue-in-cheek columnist for Visual Merchandising and Store Design, makes deft use of the Trade Is War metaphor with such locutions as, “The Japanese citizenry, foot soldiers of the economic miracle, is getting the imperial shaft at the retail level.” This comes, however, on the heels of a textual progress from literal to metaphoric. The article begins with a discussion of the Japanese Shogunate and moves to a burlesque of Perry’s opening of relations: “‘Listen,’ said Commodore Perry. ‘We’d like you to do business with us.’ He came back a year later with a larger fleet, to hear the decision.” Next, O’Leary specifies the link between war and trade: “The rapid growth of Japan’s world economic empire rivals the flowering of our own military machine.” Only then does he move to the metaphoric realm of Japanese economic foot soldiers and an American counterinvasion of McDonald’s and shopping malls. Finally, Trade Is War comes into intercourse with the literal as the metaphor itself becomes literalized. That is, the metaphor Trade Is War stands side-by-side with the literal notion that trade is war (really). This literalization occurs when people believe that economic warfare is part and parcel of military war. Economic warriors extend the category of war to include acts of economic aggression ranging from predatory pricing to industrial espionage—or sabotage. More typically, the literalization of

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the metaphor occurs in ascriptions of Trade Is War to others, usually the Japanese. In Rising Sun, Michael Crichton ascribes Trade Is War/trade is peace to the Japanese in order to accuse them of out-of-bounds trade practices. Likewise, and yet more dramatically, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor casts the Japanese as aggressors who use both military and economic techniques to attack the United States. In Clancy’s novel, Japan militarily occupies the American-owned Mariana Islands, while simultaneously sabotaging computer records on Wall Street. Both acts culminate a nefarious investment scheme through which the Japanese undermine the value of American currency. It is perhaps a testimony to the attractiveness of Japan-bashing that Clancy’s novel has enjoyed considerable success. But it is also testimony to the deep entrenchment of Trade Is War that it can be literalized as the plot of popular fiction.

Trade Is War out of the Ordinary What I have described in this chapter is the conversation that makes up ordinary trade talk. This ordinariness is based upon common assumptions, common knowledge, common culture and is evidenced in cognitive ways. That is to say, war is a category that includes many varieties of war—from small turf wars to nuclear wars. Like all categories, it has a graded structure: some prototypical category members are seen as more central than others. Just as robins and sparrows are seen as more typical of birds than penguins and ostriches, war that pits armies in direct confrontation is seen as more typical of war than, say, diffuse guerrilla wars. When most English speakers metaphorize trade as war, they rely upon this culturally pervasive prototype of war. (I discuss categories more extensively in chapter 4.) But it is imperative to remember that I am describing a cognitive model that is specific to a time and a place: the last portion of the twentieth century in the American and British language. The current cognitive prototype of war—not to mention trade, friendship, games, journeys, and containment—is a product not of a disembodied mind but instead of an experiential collectivity. Thus, the concomitant regularity of rhetoric is by no means a set of rules that cannot be transgressed. Indeed, all of what I have described can be and is transgressed. Some odd examples of Trade Is War, especially when inflected by other cultures, are to be found. For example, in some Asian countries, Trade Is War (and its near relation Business Is War) guides a part of business school curriculums. Chinese and Japanese business schools regularly include Sun Wu’s 500 B.C. treatise, The Art of War, in required reading lists, encouraging students to apply war strategies to trade. But it’s not necessarily the war most Westerners know. And thus, it’s not necessarily the trade Westerners know.

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Chinese consultant Chin-Ning Chu capitalizes on the use of Sun Wu’s text by teaching an Asian permutation of Trade Is War to Western business people. Her Trade Is War does not closely resemble Defoe’s notion of a warlike king placing a town under siege, nor does it recall Commodore Perry’s cannons, nor the nuclear age “trade arms race.” She illustrates Trade Is War with the story of one of her clients, an American grass seed company who wants to sell seed to the Chinese. In her story, Chin-Ning acts as a go-between for the American company and the government of China. But since the Chinese perception of beauty, according to ChinNing, is to eradicate grass rather than to grow it, she tells the Chinese that her American client wishes to buy grass seed. This results in a series of communications, over a period of years, between American and Chinese technicians. In the end, the Chinese fail to sell their poor quality, uneconomical grass seed but are sold on the idea of grass—which they buy from Chin-Ning’s American client. She exults, “In the 1990 Asian Olympic Games in China, the fields were covered with American grass” (50). Chin-Ning, self-described teacher of business warfare and advocate of Sun Wu’s The Art of War, could not be more explicit in invoking Trade Is War as the metaphor that motivates her story, but I—frankly—have a difficult time seeing the war in her Trade Is War story. To me, war is violent confrontation: Gettysburg, Normandy, the Tet Offensive, the raining of Patriot missiles onto Baghdad during the Gulf War. To her, war is something described by Sun Wu: a series of deceptive actions, undertaken to avoid direct confrontation. She has, apparently, a different prototype of war in mind. So it is with Trade Is War and all of the elements of its constituting conversation. We can recognize the way the conversation typically proceeds; we can know the etiquette that guides the conversation at a particular time, in a particular place. But regularities are not rules. An etiquette, though it may seem systematic in ways, is not a universal or rigid system. Yet an entrenched metaphor such as Trade Is War cannot function without an etiquette of some kind. It becomes meaningful as part of a conversation. And conversations are not random motion but motivated activity.

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4 Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory The entire image-structure, in the American mind, of Japan is a metaphor that links World War II, specifically Pearl Harbor, with present-day commerce, such that everything Japan does is open to the possibility of being perceived as invasion, as taking over, as evil. —John Deutsch, on Nightline, 1996

With all its variety of detail, most metaphor theory embeds three premises—fundamental premises that are products of the Aristotelian, twopart model of metaphor. The first is that a metaphor changes in character over time, following the pattern of a life span. Metaphoric life span assumes a metaphor enters the language as a forceful expression, rich in implications; then, after long aging, it dies into a literal expression whose metaphorical quality—if it survives at all—is largely irrelevant. In twentieth-century metaphor theory, the notion that metaphors can be readily identified as “dead” or “alive” is routinely embedded in theorists’ assumptions and, if explicitly mentioned, is afforded usually only a sentence, a paragraph, or a few pages at most. Yet, in important ways, the life span thesis underlies theorists’ selection of metaphoric exemplars and fundamentally shapes their view of what metaphors, dead or alive, are capable of doing. The second premise is that metaphor amounts to a false assertion of category. Categorical violation argues that if we say my love is a rose (to use a favorite example), we recognize the metaphor’s untruth because my love (a person) does not belong to the category flower, which is the common category most immediately superordinate to rose. Categorical violation is said to contribute to, if not constitute, the comparison’s metaphoric quality because it juxtaposes metaphorical truth and categorical falsehood within a single expression, forcing a linguistic, conceptual incongruity.

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The third premise is that metaphor involves isomorphic correspondences—mappings—from source to target. Metaphorical mapping argues that when we say my love is a rose, we attribute the individual features of rose, as well as the relations between those features, to the domain of humankind. For instance, many would say that roses are beautiful, delicate, and sweet smelling, and that the metaphor applies these features to my love, usually a female. While metaphor theory offers varying accounts of mapping, most accounts assume that metaphoric mappings bring into relief one-to-one correspondences between target and source domains and that the aptness of mappings has to do with similarity in structure of target and source domains. These three premises—metaphoric life span, categorical violation, and metaphorical mapping—are described differently by different theorists, but no one questions their fundamental reliability. However, this apparent reliability is an artifact of the methodology of metaphor theory, not an inherent feature of metaphor itself. Typically, metaphor theorists do not consider concretely occurring examples of metaphor, and therefore avoid many of the complex relations between metaphor and its larger discursive and conceptual context. Even when more recent theorists attend to some of the larger landscape of metaphor, they often return, in the end, to rule building on the basis of a few isolated examples, which are examined with little regard to the dynamic conversation that gives rise to them in the first place. Most theory presumes that metaphors have mainly an internal function, a crucial, governing relation between term A and term B. This emphasis on internal function diverts attention away from any given metaphor’s involvement in discourse and its necessarily responsive attitude, making possible premises such as metaphoric life span, categorical violation, and mapping. In turn, the premises reinforce the internal-function, two-part model, each in its own way. The life span premise rules out inconvenient metaphors as objects of study, since few theorists find “dead metaphors” worthy of much attention; categorical violation reifies mistaken notions of cognition, making possible mistaken assumptions about the internal functioning of metaphors; and mapping all too often is used to further a formalist theory of metaphor, which emphasizes preexistent structure rather than language in use. I wish to reconsider these premises in the light of metaphor’s rhetorical constitution. In so doing, I will consider examples routinely used by theorists, suggesting specific ways these examples can show us more than they do when seen in light of an imagined responsive conversation or, where possible, in light of an actual conversation. In addition, I will examine each premise in relation to Trade Is War as it occurs in concrete locu-

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tions and in light of its constituting conversation. When we see metaphor as part of the larger movement of language, inseparable from concrete occurrences, which are in turn inseparable from their discursive and conceptual environment, we can also see that the premises of metaphor theory— which have seemed self-evident to many—either do not function in the way we have believed, do not function for the reasons we have believed, or do not function at all.

Metaphoric Life Span Metaphors, we say, live and die. This life span thesis is most commonly expressed in the phrase “dead metaphor,” which implies, it is safe to say, that the metaphor was once alive. The notion that all metaphors live and die is treated by most students of metaphor with such blasé assurance that it is not afforded much ink. John Searle, for example, writes, “We are all familiar with the processes whereby an expression becomes a dead metaphor, and then finally becomes an idiom or acquires a meaning different from the original meaning” (90). Nelson Goodman echoes the notion in this way: Still metaphor is not sheer ambiguity. Applying the term cape to a body of land on one occasion and to an article of clothing on another is using it with different and indeed mutually exclusive ranges but is not in either case metaphorical. . . . When one use precedes and informs another, the second is the metaphorical one. As time goes on, the history may fade and the two uses tend to achieve equality and independence; the metaphor freezes, or rather evaporates, and the residue is a pair of literal uses—mere ambiguity instead of metaphor. (70–71)

Goodman asserts a questionable etymology here. Cape in its geographical sense derives from the Latin caput, which means head. Cape as an article of clothing once referred to a hooded garment, hence its relation to the head. That association is all but lost in modern usage. Goodman gives us no reason to think he is referring to both capes’ relation to the head but rather seems to mean the geographical term is a lost metaphor that may once have associated the land formation with various aspects of the article of clothing. This etymological vagueness further demonstrates the insidious force of the life span thesis. That is, the life span thesis leads Goodman to assume that his contemporary awareness of cape’s polysemy must be explained in accordance with a life span metaphor. In fact, it is contemporary polysemy alone that gives cape a faint metaphoric quality—no matter how Goodman may wish to deny it. Moreover, while it is interesting that Goodman avoids an explicit life span metaphor, preferring a rabbitor-duck water metaphor (“freezes, or rather evaporates”), he nonethe-

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less uses a life span framework (“As time goes on, the history . . .”) to describe the change from metaphorical to literal meaning. Necessarily, this casts dead metaphors as one-time living metaphors. By itself, the idea of conceptual metaphor does not help us to rethink the notion of dead metaphors, except in a very broad sense. Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, and others have argued that many so-called dead metaphors form conceptual systems that organize our experience of the world. When we utter a dead metaphor such as she’s on top of the world, the metaphor is comprehensible only because we place it within the culturally generated and cognitively entrenched system of metaphors named by More Is Up and Success Is Up. Indeed, Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, and others make a persuasive case that “dead” metaphors warrant serious attention as we try to explain how language works, how culture works, and, in fact, how the brain works. As part of that argument, Lakoff and Turner, as well as Turner alone, maintain that literary metaphors—those usually thought most alive—are generally enabled and constrained by the same conceptual metaphors that underpin more conventional locutions. Nonetheless, even though the idea of conceptual metaphor is important, the question of metaphoric life span remains untouched. Consider Goodman’s example. Cape (as a land formation) might be supported by a conceptual metaphor such as Geographical Formations Are Familiar Objects and instantiated by a cluster of land metaphors: the panhandle of Texas, the boot heel of Italy or Missouri, snow-capped mountains, river bed, ocean floor, and so on. Without insisting that Geographical Formations Are Familiar Objects really constitutes a conceptual metaphor—it might as easily be comprised by other physical analogies that would include I beam, C clamp, hour-glass figure, and the like—we nonetheless can better comprehend the functioning of cape if we see it as operating within a system of conventional metaphors. In fact, this larger pattern probably accounts for Goodman’s assumption that the land formation cape is derived from the article of clothing, rather than from antiquated words for head. To note this pattern, however, does not help us explain why cape sounds, to everyday ears, either nonmetaphorical or only distantly metaphorical. This leaves metaphoric life span standing as the only explanation for the relative difference in metaphoric quality between “dead” and “live” metaphors. Metaphors grow old. They die. But dead metaphor is a problematic idea. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether a metaphor is dead or alive. Zdravko Radman points out that declaring a metaphor dead shortchanges our “semantic memory.” In other words, if dead metaphors are really dead, why won’t they lie down? Why do theorists recognize metaphoricity and attempt to deny it at the same time? Andrew Goatly attempts to explain away this problem by positing a cline—or continuum—between dead and living meta-

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phors. He argues that metaphoric vitality ranges from dead, to sleeping, to tired, to active (31–35). Prudently, Goatly presents dead metaphors as those whose metaphoricity is simply not retrievable without etymological digging. For instance, he points out that only Latin scholars might know that the English word “inculcate” derives from the Latin word meaning “to stamp in”; thus, it has no active metaphoricity. Yet, by taking extreme cases, Goatly sidesteps the question of dead metaphor altogether. In attempting to resolve the dead metaphor problem through careful definition, Goatly highlights a persistent problem. The most commonly cited dead metaphors are what Goatly prefers to call sleeping or tired metaphors, expressions whose metaphoricity is conventionalized, such as squeeze when referring to financial pressure. The existence of these midrange metaphors is what gives rise to the life span thesis. That is, if we can find sleeping, tired, and moribund metaphors in the language all around us, we often assume that dead metaphors must have passed through this stage in their “lifetimes.” But at least two things argue against this assumption. First, as Goatly’s examples show, when we cannot revive a socalled dead metaphor, it is because a literal term has disappeared from the language, not because the metaphor itself has been worked to death. Second, even if some, many, or most lexicalized expressions progress from metaphoric to literal, this process tells us more about the nature of literal words than it does about the nature of metaphors. Some subset of metaphors may become literal words over time, but there is no reason to think that all or most metaphors are subject to this process. Rather, we have a variety of types of metaphors to consider, some vital, some tired, some sleeping, some dead. No progressive sequence need be assumed. Moreover, the distinction between dead, sleeping, tired, and vital—to use Goatly’s convenient taxonomy—requires much reconsideration when we understand metaphor as part of a rhetorical conversation. Max Black is helpful in this regard because he makes explicit what he means by a living metaphor. He objects to the phrase “dead metaphor,” on the grounds that if a metaphor is dead, it is no longer a metaphor at all. He remarks affably, “This is no more helpful than, say, treating a corpse as a special case of a person” (“More” 25). Black points to the “extinct” or “dormant” metaphors muscle (musculus) as a little mouse and obligation as bondage (“More” 25). Thus, Black is consistent with Goatly—or, more accurately, Goatly is consistent with Black—in setting apart “metaphors” whose only meaning is a current literal meaning. So far, so good. In dismissing truly dead metaphors as an object of study, Black may bolster the life span thesis, but he also adds valuable complications. He argues that while some metaphors are “dormant” or “extinct,” others are “vital” or “active.” Among active metaphors, he argues that some are

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particularly “emphatic” and “resonant” and can thus be called “strong” metaphors (“More” 26). By “emphatic,” Black means that the speaker insists upon the metaphor, that the metaphor is not disposable; by “resonant,” he means that its implications can be and are expected to be elaborated upon. Black’s distinctions make good sense. We know a dead metaphor because it does not do anything; we know a live metaphor because it is actively metaphorical; and among live metaphors some seem to be more alive than others. Thus, in distinguishing between “weak” and “strong” metaphors, Black gives us a way of discerning what we mean by a metaphor that is alive—something I will consider more closely below. As I proceed, however, I want to adhere as much as possible to common parlance. What Black calls weak metaphors are what most people call dead metaphors: leg of the table, the eye of a needle, the foot of the mountain. Therefore, I will refer to these weak, sleeping, or tired metaphors as “dead metaphors.” There is ample evidence that metaphors do not follow a progressive life span of the kind usually thought. In fact, when we examine metaphors in the context of relevant conversation, the evidence is strong that no sequence is easily discernible at all. Rather, single metaphors are grouped with—operate in coordination with—other similar metaphors. Some of these may be ossified in form, others expressed with some novelty. But the constituting conversation—the thing that makes both the dead and the live metaphor make sense—is necessarily vital. Trade Is War, like other conceptual metaphors, encompasses the ossified and the novel, demonstrating well the way dead metaphors fit into a dynamic, ongoing conversation. It is, of course, an old metaphor. Although we cannot say with any certainty how old it may be, we do know that it was recorded as early as the English Renaissance and that the opposing literal concept that enables it, trade is peace, was recorded as early as Genesis. The things that happen to very old or “dead” metaphors have happened to Trade Is War in the phrase trade war. Goodman is right that “dead” metaphors seem to have both frozen and evaporated. A “dead” metaphor usually freezes into a fixed locution that refers directly to the literal world; thus, the dead metaphor’s metaphoricity seems to have evaporated. Trade war is just such a frozen or ossified locution. That is, we do not need to play out its metaphoric quality in order to understand it. We readily know the literal state of affairs to which trade war refers: a state in which nations do not trade with each other except with the utmost reluctance, and in which they actively attempt to undermine the trade activities of the opposing nation. We also know very well the precipitating acts that lead to a full-blown trade war. Speakers of trade discourse know rather immediately that the precipitating acts of a trade war are dumping, imposing

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punitive tariffs, enforcing cumbersome regulations on foreign goods, refusing to purchase foreign goods, and so on. When trade war is uttered in talk about trade, its direct literal reference often remains unelaborated—just as it would be with, say, rental agreement or job offer. Sometimes, however, trade war is accompanied by a recitation of its precipitating acts, enumerated with a cautionary tone. Business Week recites Japanese acts of trade war in an article titled, “The Secret Weapon That Won’t Start a Trade War”: for example, “Foreign trade zones in the U.S. allow foreign companies to import parts from home duty-free if the companies create jobs here. . . . Japanese companies, citing quality concerns, resist buying American components” (Harbrecht and Gross). This recitation does not offer new information about what causes trade wars but rather confirms that acts known to cause trade wars have occurred. The recitation thus serves as a warning to policymakers that brinkmanship may go too far. Moreover, by warning against a trade war, and by bolstering its alarmed tone with a recitation of offenses, the article maintains its probusiness, pro-free-trade stance—a seemingly cleareyed, clear-headed acknowledgment of trade risks. Characteristic of a globalist, free-trade trajectory, the article ascribes Trade Is War to an opponent and recommends a moderate course that would avert the trade war portended by Japan’s aggressive trade practices: “The U.S. should consider [changing its trade zone policy] before waving a big stick” (Harbrecht and Gross). Trade war’s range of literal reference is so well known and so central to the discussion of trade disputes that the precise locution need not be present for the reference to do its work. That is, the risk of trade war may be the problem that centers a trade discussion, but depending upon a speaker’s discursive trajectory, it may also be unmentioned. The words are freely uttered by those who want to avoid a trade war or who accuse others of bringing one about by employing its precipitating acts. But those who advocate those precipitating acts usually prefer to leave the explicit words unspoken. We often see the same strategy with respect to shooting wars. Those who favored American intervention in Korea and Vietnam preferred such terms as police action and conflict. These were not only legalistic terms used to circumvent constitutional war powers provisions but also a way to avoid the rhetorically intense war. In a 1990 article, Fred Barnes, a conservative commentator and proponent of trade sanctions against Japan, catalogs literal acts of trade war committed by the Japanese, but characteristic of sanction proponents, he leads with nonwar metaphors closely related to Trade Is War. The article’s title uses Trade Is A Game to attenuate trade war resonances: “The Japan That Won’t Play Fair.” A subhead emphasizes container and journey metaphors, neutralizing accusations of trade war mongering: “While we

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welcome the Japanese into our markets, they fiercely resist our entering theirs. It’s time we made trade a two-way street” (33). Variations of trade war such as “economic warfare” and “adversarial trade” find a place in tertiary headings and in direct quotations, but they apply only to Japanese actions, not our own. They are ascribed. Nonetheless, although trade war is the term Barnes dare not name, there can be little doubt that it permeates the article not only because it is a constant of trade discourse regarding Japan but also because trade war’s indirect literal referents, the precipitating acts of trade war, are spelled out with emphasis—in fact, with outrage. Paragraph one, sentence one: “American construction firms, among the best in the world, are all but excluded from Japan’s $275-billion-a-year construction market” (33). Paragraph two, sentence one: “At one point, Tokyo bureaucrats sought to bar American skis from Japan” (33). Paragraph three, sentence one: “And though Japan brought the game of baseball from America, the Japanese discouraged the import of American bats for years” (33). Barnes recites a litany of trade war–like acts in a style rhetorically reminiscent of the litany Jefferson offers in the Declaration of Independence, accusing the Japanese of inciting a trade war, while demurring when the moment comes to actually utter the locution trade war. Paragraph four, sentence one: “Japan isn’t playing fair with the United States” (33, emphasis added). Barnes is not rhetorically timid; it is just that his hawkish discursive trajectory requires him not to utter trade war. Moreover, the literal references associated with trade war, direct and indirect, are so wellknown, there is no need to say the words. Thus, in at least two ways trade war behaves like a dead metaphor: it is frozen into a single conventional locution, and its metaphoric quality has evaporated, leaving primarily literal reference. However, in other ways, it behaves as if it is very much alive. In fact, it qualifies as one of Black’s “strong” metaphors in that it is both emphatic and resonant. Black argues that emphatic metaphors insist upon themselves; thus, cape is not emphatic because we might just as well say promontory or headland. Dead metaphors are disposable. Trade war insists upon itself. Its near synonyms—economic warfare, commercial warfare, trade conflict, and so on—are not interchangeable with trade war in the way that promontory substitutes for cape. These near synonyms do not preserve the same range of associations, evoke the same implicatures, or provoke the same heat. Moreover, speakers and writers emphasize trade war in two ways: first, by centering the trade debate around it; second, by making its metaphoric quality explicit. Unlike such metaphors as the leg of a table or the heart of the matter, trade war invites controversy. That is, in trade discourse, trade war entails a for-or-against stance—or more accurately, since most are ostensibly against it, trade war requires speakers either to attack it

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or to minimize it. This is why in the Crossfire discussion analyzed in chapter 1, the climaxes—signaled by raised voices and ad hominem confrontation—center around trade war. Congressman Levin accuses John Sununu: “Every time, I don’t understand this. Every time America stands up for its workers and businesses in trade, you yell trade war!” Later, Sununu loses patience with Levin and raises his voice: “We are putting the focus on Japan! But we also read history. And what happened in the world before World War II is a trade war that cost everybody.” While Black is correct that live metaphors tend to be emphatic, the kind of emphasis given to trade war on Crossfire is not necessarily evidence that the locution trade war or the larger category of metaphors named by Trade Is War constitutes a live metaphor. Such nonmetaphorical words as protectionism or simply war often generate as much heat. Nonetheless, since trade war draws emphatic notice, an opportunity is created for its metaphorical resonance to emerge. This resonance meets Black’s second criterion that says strong metaphors entail elaboration. Importantly, while trade war’s literal range of reference is re-envoiced ritually, its metaphorical resonances are seized as an opportunity for creative speech. Trade writers forever renew trade war as a living metaphor. Thomas Friedman—foreign affairs correspondent for the New York Times and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book about globalization—finds trade war to be so resonant as to be humorous (“Trade”). “The only people ever killed in a trade war were the ones who died of boredom,” he writes. His title parodies Sherman’s famous assessment of shooting wars: “Trade War Isn’t So Swell Either.” And his subhead calls to mind Prescott’s equally famous exclamation at Bunker Hill: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their tariff increases!” However amusing Friedman finds “fortress Japan,” “tactical retreats,” and “Japanese bureaucrats as ‘the real enemy,’” he also tries his hand frequently enough as a trade war metaphorizer—and does so with deadly earnestness: “This [trade sanction] would be the trade equivalent of locking and loading a rifle but without pulling the trigger” (“Clinton to”). While trade writers do play out the metaphorical resonances of trade war, to focus upon ways they expand trade war may unintentionally reinforce the life span thesis. We cannot assume that when trade writers create novel elaborations of trade war that they are reviving a “dead” metaphor. In a misguided sense, it would seem plausible that Trade Is War died into the locution trade war, and that each elaboration upon the frozen locution revives an earlier, more vital metaphor. But this line of reasoning ignores the metaphoric give and take that currently influences trade war. Trade war’s resonances can be activated easily because Trade Is War is already in motion, perpetually generating new instances that are related to but do not depend upon the standard locution trade war. On the

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other hand, I suspect that such so-called dead metaphors as leg of the table were dead on arrival, that they never operated within a living, dynamic conversation but rather came into being merely to fill semantic gaps. Leg of the table is akin to mouse, a clever, but nonemphatic, nonresonant computer metaphor. Trade war, a so-called dead metaphor, is a living byproduct of the dynamic conversation of Trade Is War. It moves within an environment that treats not just international trade as war but any business transaction on any scale as war. Consider an article titled “IBM’s Three Battlefronts” from PC Magazine. IBM is not usually a key participant in trade disputes between the U.S. and Japan, and as this passage indicates, IBM’s “trade war” is played out in a domestic theater: Once the most unstoppable force in the world, the Big Blue army finds itself on a cold Northern plateau, confused, outgunned, and surrounded. On the Western front stand the fearsome Windownites [Seattle]. Formerly allied with the Big Blue army, this well-armed legion is determined to do one thing—dominate. Bivouacked on the Eastern front [Boston] are the less aggressive though very focused Lotusputians. This outfit knows exactly what it wants. From the south [Utah], the Oracleians—who are almost as focused as Lotusputians—show the most outward aggressions. (M. Miller)

In this passage, Trade Is War is emphatic, is resonant, and is deployed with some degree of literary novelty. In a conversation filled with vital instances of Trade Is War, trade war—conventional, familiar, entrenched though it may be—is as much a derivative of ongoing activity as it is a beginning point for metaphoric elaboration. Furthermore, death is only death if it is irreversible; it exists as a domain entirely separate from life. But because the “deadest” version of Trade Is War that we have, trade war, stands at the elbow of the most vital instances of Trade Is War, it is “revived” as often as not. If Trade Is War has a life span, it is only in the sense that, at one time, we did not produce instances of it, and someday we will perhaps stop producing instances of it. But Trade Is War’s life span is not one of lively youth, followed by a middle age of conventional familiarity, followed by decay into the literal, followed by death. Indeed, it manages to be both vital and moribund at the same time. Now, having objected as strenuously as I can to the life span thesis, let me also insist upon the possibility of metaphoric dynamism, not just dynamism in a given moment of conversation but long-term evolution. While there seems to be no evidence that metaphors die from long use, and while there is evidence that dead and vital metaphors work in tandem, it is nonetheless likely that metaphors evolve over time—to change in character in keeping with material conditions, ideology, and cultural familiarity. A common misunderstanding about conceptual metaphors is

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that they are thought to be universal. This universality assumption may derive from the emphasis Lakoff, Johnson, and others have placed on embodiment, which is sometimes seen as suggesting that metaphors are innate. But neither Lakoff, Johnson, nor any of the major proponents of conceptual metaphor claim that conceptual metaphors are universal. No matter how widespread, metaphors are always specific to cultures. In turn, we should infer that they are specific to times—which raises the question of evolution. Clearly, Trade Is War responds to political, economic, philosophical, social, and professional conditions, and these conditions evolve. The likelihood, then, is that Trade Is War has also evolved, and is evolving. Chapter 5 cites specific instances that indicate differences in the ethical valence of Trade Is War for pre- and post-Vietnam generations of Americans. Similar long-term changes in metaphoric preferences have been noted in the sciences, particularly in psychology (Gentner and Grudin). So it is not unlikely that as these metaphors passed in and out of fashion that they also changed in character. Tim Linzey suggests a possible structure for the evolution, or life span, of a successful professional metaphor. Nothing in Linzey’s observations indicate that a metaphor necessarily dies after long use. However, he does speculate about the change in character a metaphor may undergo from the time it first enters a professional discourse until the time when it gains general acceptance—if it ever does. Linzey proposes that metaphors pass through distinct stages. First is the metaphor stage in which the possibilities are explored playfully, sometimes extravagantly. Second is the simile in which the metaphor’s valid implications are explored. Third is the model stage in which implications of a metaphor aid in problem solving. The final stage is the metaphoric assumption stage, in which the metaphor is generally considered valid—in which it becomes a metaphoric ontological assumption. Of course, Linzey allows for overlap of the stages and for the possibility that a metaphor will not necessarily make the full journey. Linzey’s most direct evidence for this “life span” thesis—a thesis very different from the common premise to which I have objected—comes from a psychology class he taught. He proposed to his students the metaphor of psychologist as seer (or psychic). In its first stage, the metaphor stimulated much speculation about the nature of psychologists’ work, such as the category extension that psychics might really be the lunatic fringe of psychologists. In the second stage, less extravagant similarities between the psychologist and the psychic were considered, similarities such as the way both psychologists and psychics must persuade clients to accept their professional authority. In the third stage, students used the metaphor to solve problems—for example, to discuss how clients

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must feel when they visit a psychologist for the first time. Fourth, the metaphor was not successful enough to become a metaphoric ontological assumption. Obviously, Linzey’s empirical evidence is not extensive enough to establish beyond doubt that his model is valid for the long-term life span of successful metaphors. But he does suggest a reasonable way of considering metaphor over time—not as progressing from life to death but rather from status to status. Determining the validity of Linzey’s model would require much more research and would, of course, become enormously complex if metaphors other than discipline-forming metaphors are considered. Moreover, each metaphor would have to be considered as it responds to other rhetorically active, relevant metaphors and concepts. Trade Is War, it is clear, has a long history, one that might transgress an ameliorative account of life span such as Linzey’s. What can we say about a metaphor that may have been successful as an ontological assumption, for example in the eighteenth century, during the rise of the mercantile system, but which later falls into general disrepute and simultaneously spreads? Given that the rhetorical etiquette attached to Trade Is War requires the metaphor nearly always be ascribed to a villain of sorts, can we call it successful? Is it at a stage beyond metaphoric ontological assumption? Is it a metaphoric ontological falsehood? Could it gain acceptance again?

Categorical Violation A second premise of metaphor theory, categorical violation, was first touched upon by Aristotle but has only reached its full status in the last half of this century. As I have said, categorical violation argues that metaphor is constituted by a false categorical assertion. That is, when we say A is B, term A is falsely asserted to belong to the category that comprises term B. In keeping with this notion, Aristotle’s oft-quoted definition of metaphor reads, “Metaphor is the movement of an alien name from either genus to species or from species to genus or from species to species or by analogy” (“Word Choice” 295). To apply Aristotle’s scheme—as it has been taken up—to Trade Is War, we might say that trade and war are each species within the genus intercourse between nations. When the alien name—a word such as weapon, drawn from the category of war— moves to the domain of trade, it is not used in its ordinary sense. Instead, we have a categorical violation. Aristotle’s observation is a powerful one, and it has never been expressed so succinctly again. Ironically, while Aristotle prompted the notion of categorical violation, he is one of the few who gives us reason to question it. Perhaps he does so because he is less concerned with theoretical description than with

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giving good advice to speakers. Whatever the reason for his perspicacity on this point, his general formulation is more workable than what has been derived from him. He advises, One should speak in epithets and metaphors that are appropriate, and this will be from an analogy. If not, the expression seems inappropriate because opposites are most evident when side-by-side each other. But one should consider what suits an old man just as a scarlet cloak is right for a young one; for the same clothes are not right [for both]. And if you wish to adorn, borrow the metaphor from something better in the same genus, if to denigrate, from something worse. I mean, for example, since they are opposite in the same genus, saying of a person who begs that he “prays” or that person praying “begs,” because both are forms of asking. (On Rhetoric 223)

In this instance, Aristotle’s emphasis is not on violation of category as a marker of metaphor in general but upon consonance of category to ensure the aptness of a metaphor in particular. Subsequent to Aristotle, and especially in recent decades, aptness remains a research concern, but the relation between metaphors and categories is turned around. I argue that categorical violation, while it sometimes can be observed, is not what it is generally assumed to be. While it is presented as a sophisticated permutation of Monroe Beardsley’s “metaphors are obviously false statements,” categorical violation is not fundamental to identifying metaphors at all. This is so for a variety of reasons that I will discuss, not all of them having directly to do with metaphor as rhetorically constituted. However, once we put categorical violation into a proper perspective, the notion of rhetorically constituted metaphor becomes important to analyzing how metaphors and categories work together. In analyzing metaphor and category, I will focus at first upon some well-worn examples. Afterward, I will return to Trade Is War, demonstrating what it can tell us about categorical violation—and, of course, what categorical violation can tell us about Trade Is War.

Categorical Violation and Asymmetry The idea that metaphor yokes together (to use Dr. Johnson’s verb) things from different categories is widely accepted by twentieth-century metaphor theorists from Paul Ricoeur to an array of cognitive scientists. It usually incorporates a “differential equation” view of metaphor that is integral to what I have called Aristotle’s algebra. That is, theorists configure metaphor not just as a two-part entity but also configure the parts in fixed, asymmetrical relation. The categorical violation thesis is perhaps most thoroughly detailed by Eva Feder Kittay, who argues,

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Literal comparisons take place within fixed, common, or given categories, for example, when hippopotami are compared to elephants—a comparison within the category of large mammals—or when the Church and the State are compared—a comparison within the category of authoritative and powerful institutions. But comparisons in metaphor and simile cross categorical boundaries, for instance when a large mammal is compared to an authoritative powerful institution. (19)

The effect of categorical violation, Kittay tells us, is to make a metaphorical comparison asymmetrical. That is, comparisons within categories are balanced, each side of the equation exerting equal force upon the other. But for metaphorical comparisons, the category (or semantic domain) that is imported dominates: [I]n metaphor one domain will take on the role of an originating field—the field of the source of the metaphor. Metaphorical analogies are asymmetrical for just this reason—that one side of the analogy has a privileged status in regard to the other. A simile based on a metaphorical analogy is not—or at best paradoxically—reversible. A simile based on a non-metaphorical analogy would be. Compare “my love is like a rose” with “the tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of the coastal regions.” While we can reverse the latter comparison without significant alteration of sense, we cannot do so in the former case. (152)

Thus, in Kittay’s view, we can unproblematically identify the source domain, and that source domain—the “originating field”—always exerts a greater semantic force than that of the target domain. That is, we can identify the source domain, rose, as the imported term and observe that its semantic field is incongruously applied to the target domain, my love. Rose changes our understanding of my love. This fixed asymmetry does seem intuitively correct, and it receives some experimental confirmation in cognitive science. Andrew Ortony has found that the source’s features are predictably more salient than those of the target (164). For example, he asked subjects to list important features of various terms such as billboard and wart. The feature (or “predicate”) list for wart included “ugly” as a high-salient feature. The list for billboard, however, did not include “ugly” at all. Thus, Ortony concludes that when we say billboards are warts, the statement derives its metaphoricity from a salience imbalance between similar features in target and source domains (351). Numerous similar experiments have been conducted, giving rise to varying but compatible versions of the asymmetry assertion (compare Becker). Representative of the kind of disagreement that arises, Roger Tourangeau and Lance Rips find that metaphors cause nonsalient features to emerge in both target and source, but they

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also note that features in the source are comparatively more salient than those in the target (460). However, the experimental techniques of cognitive science are not effective for seriously questioning the semantic dominance of the so-called source over the so-called target. Consider Tourangeau and Rips’ method of presenting subjects with examples: “We then culled out [literary metaphors] that were difficult to interpret when taken out of context” (465). Do Tourangeau and Rips really imagine that any metaphor can be interpreted without context, whether supplied by an explicit or tacit ongoing discourse? Their technique—shared by an army of cognitive scientists and psychologists—suggests that they do. Now, to give serious thinkers their due, it is not the case that cognitive scientists are unaware of contextual effects, but these effects are generally thought to be localized and purely pragmatic. Albert Katz, for example, notes with regard to “the context problem”: “Even if we recognize that figurative meaning is intended by a speaker, we must still compute the intended meaning” (608). In other words, Katz—whose perspective, it seems to me, represents his field— understands that context matters but does not see it as far-reaching or fundamentally constitutive. Surprising things happen when we discard the fiction that metaphor can somehow be examined in experimental isolation. We see that even seemingly decontextualized examples operate within an ongoing conversation that preconditions conventional metaphors to have conventional asymmetries. For example, Kittay’s my love is like a rose comes preconditioned as poetic praise for a woman. Here the force of a conventional discourse makes it seem as if the features of rose necessarily project onto my love. So thoroughly preconditioned is my love is like a rose that we can accommodate innumerable nuances within it and still not disturb the semantic power relation between target and source. Consider the role of Female Lovers Are Roses in popular songs of the late twentieth century, when the pronouns you, he, and she almost invariably refer to the singer’s fictional love interest. In a genre so saturated with conventional—in fact, hackneyed—habits, we can hardly overestimate the tacit operation of metaphoric commonplaces about love and lovers. Thus, when Female Lovers Are Roses enters the conversation, the metaphor is conditioned by what we all can be counted on to supply. When Ben E. King sings, “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem” (Spector and Leiber), we understand not only that he is singing—quoting—a love song, and that rose is his love, but also that the garden metaphor is being used paradoxically, a garden metaphor in an urban setting. Still, in spite of considerable reconfiguring, rose exerts its semantic force upon my love, more than the reverse. Imagine, though, an unconventional context in which lovers and roses carry different freight—a conversation in which the tacit assumptions are

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different and that has different metaphors afoot. Suppose a flower grower says to another of his profession: My wife is my life, my passion, my indispensable companion. She’s like my roses. Here the idea of the gardener’s wife is just as dominant as our idea of a rose. That is, the gardener’s discursive trajectory—his presumed commitments and inclinations—mutes the qualities of rose conventionally ascribed to my love, such as delicate beauty, softness, and perfumed fragrance (Barnet, Berman, and Burto 51). His utterance says as much about the way he regards roses as it does about the way he regards his wife because rose is treated as something with which one has an emotional relationship: it takes on human qualities as more than my love takes on inanimate qualities. What we have come to call “target” and “source” are not fixed entities at all. They are products of over-arching discourse. The gardener’s metaphor reconfigures a deeply entrenched conventional metaphor, but its conceptual underpinning is not novel at all. Gardening writers, like my invented gardener, often ascribe a lover’s agency to the rose and to other flowers. For instance, in The Glory of Roses, Allen Lacy, who purports to be on more “intimate” terms with his herbaceous perennials than with his roses (12), quotes Candace Wheeler’s 1902 observation on the rose: “A mysterious something in its nature—an inner fascination, a subtle witchery, a hidden charm which it has and other flowers have not—ensnares and holds the love of the world” (19). Yet more amorous, turn-of-the-century rose lover S. Reynolds Hole advises wouldbe rose gardeners, “To win, [the gardener] must woo, as Jacob wooed Laban’s daughter, though drought and frost consume” (qtd. in Lacy 43). In fact, given the long history of gardening talk, it would not only be imaginable but probable that, speaking of his or her roses, a gardener has uttered the precise locution my love is a rose. Here the qualities of a lover would be attributed to rose, and my love would refer not to a physical lover but to the rose itself as both actual and metaphoric lover. And since there is no human lover to be given the qualities of a rose, it is necessarily the case that the idealized my love influences our understanding of rose more than the reverse. Moreover, the metaphoric transformation of careers into a human spouse is conventional in many venues: musicians are married to music, executives to their jobs, priests to the church. (Compare Perelman 121.) We can say, then, that metaphors are asymmetrical. But we cannot formalistically predict how that asymmetry plays out. Target and source interact, fluidly shifting degrees of influence upon the other. As always, the force of overarching conversation—discourse that coalesces around given topics and encompasses socially shared evaluations of those topics—is more powerful than micro-level rules for metaphor. But its influence is largely invisible to us. When the wind is at your back, it is easy to believe you are moving under your own power. But face the wind and its

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pervasive force is undeniable. Or, to press my wind metaphor a bit further, explaining metaphor while ignoring discourse is like explaining a rainy day while ignoring the jet stream. Conversation at large, not just snippets of prompting talk, constitutes the relation between the parts of metaphor. Furthermore, the conversational quality of metaphor involves more than two parts in most metaphors, because the two parts that Aristotle first noticed are always enmeshed in the give-and-take of other metaphors and concepts. As a consequence, Black’s interaction theory is essentially correct, more correct than many of Black’s embedded assumptions take into account. Whether or not my love or rose dominates in my love is like a rose, they always act upon each other, and this interaction always has to do with larger metaphor systems. It is worth noting also that conventional assumptions about target and source have much to do with the sentence structure used in most discussions of metaphor. Even considering the gardener’s use of my love is like a rose, where my love semantically dominates rose, we nonetheless feel the pull of rose as a would-be dominating force. This is because the simple copula structure of the sentence places rose in the emphatic position— at the end. Even without our conventional understanding of my love is like a rose, the sentence structure would have its effect. My love is the topic; like a rose is the comment. (See Joseph M. Williams for a lucid explanation of emphasis, what he terms “topic-stress.”) Topic-comment structure influences literal comparisons in the same way. My favorite illustration involves two chain-smoking priests who have difficulty foregoing nicotine during prayer. One priest queries his bishop, “Would it be all right if I smoke while I’m praying?” His request is denied. The other queries, “Would it be all right if I pray while I’m smoking?” His request is granted. The order of terms always makes a difference. Similarly, Kittay’s the tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of the coastal regions implies that tornadoes are being compared to hurricanes, more than the reverse, simply because hurricanes of the coastal regions appears at the end of the sentence. An alternative phrasing that places both tornadoes and hurricanes in the subject slot puts the comparison on a somewhat more equal footing: The tornadoes of the interior plains and the hurricanes of the coastal regions are alike. Even so, word order still matters. Why, then, do theorists prefer the simple topic-comment structure when stating and analyzing metaphors? In part, this preference derives from Aristotle’s algebraic reasoning. But in addition, we have to take into account tendencies in canonical phrasings. Yeshayahu Shen has conducted experiments to study the effect of canonical phrasing in zeugma, a figure of speech that presents dissimilar terms in an incongruous equal relation: for example, I caught three fish and my breath. Zeugma can be thought of as metaphorical categorization: fish are something caught lit-

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erally; breath is something caught metaphorically. Shen presented participants in an experiment with lists of zeugmas and asked prompting questions a few minutes later to stimulate recall. For example: What did the baby do? Answer: The baby swallowed milk and kisses. The participants showed a marked tendency to reverse noncanonical zeugmas into standard order, placing the metaphorical term at the end—in the emphatic position. Indeed, our habits of mind are quite strong. But there is more to the standard formulation of metaphors as simple copula than habitual thought and phrasing. Aristotle originally proposed that metaphors are “alien names,” a formulation that reveals more accurately what underpins metaphor’s functioning than the simple copulas that theorists select as examples. The alien name formulation depicts metaphor in its larger operation—not as a metaphoric word appearing in a sentence predicate but rather as a word made metaphoric because of its emigration from one discourse to another. To note this emigration is to note asymmetry writ large. For example, when Ben E. King sings, “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem,” rose is an alien name substituting for woman. This substitution cannot not take place unless the alien name enters a larger discursive context. In “Spanish Harlem,” the topic of romantic love is already established by tacit convention. Since a female lover is the topic at hand, it is only natural for rose to comment upon it, not the other way around. But it is not an internal function of metaphor that creates the asymmetry; it is the preponderance of female lover in the conversation, its tacit presence as a topic awaiting comment. When we state metaphors habitually in the simple copula form, we are comporting with the way the conversations that guide metaphors generally work.

Asymmetry in Literal Comparison In light of metaphor’s persistent asymmetry, we must ask whether asymmetry (or nonreversibility) is a property that distinguishes metaphor from literal comparison. Put another way, we must question the pervasive premise of metaphor theorists that asymmetry distinguishes comparison across categories from comparison within categories. In fact, it does not. Amos Tversky and Itamar Gati point to asymmetry in some literal comparisons: for instance, that North Korea is typically seen as more similar to Red China than Red China to North Korea. But this tendency is more far-reaching than is ordinarily noted. We can see that asymmetry functions as pervasively and complexly in literal comparisons as it does in metaphor if we consider two things: first, recent theories of categorization; second, literal comparisons’ relevant conversation. Lakoff, who broadly applies and expands upon Eleanor Rosch’s research on categorization, tells us that categories do not operate in the classical fashion as bundles of features but as socially generated, cognitively en-

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trenched units (Women 5–8).1 One key difference between classical categories and cognitive categories is their internal structure. Classical categories depend upon shared features. They award all members equal status on the basis of requisite characteristics. For example, in the classical view, birds are birds because they have wings, beaks and feathers, lay eggs, and so on. Any creature that has these features qualifies as a bird and has equal status within the category. In the cognitive view, categories are made up of unequal members, whose shared features are secondary to our perception of membership. For example, as Rosch’s experiments show, when people identify members of the category bird, they identify “prototypical” members such as robins more quickly than they do “nonprototypical” members such as ostriches (41–42). This does not mean that ostriches, penguins, swans, chickens, and so on are not viewed as birds; it means instead that we accept some birds as more “birdlike” than others. There is an asymmetry within categories based upon goodness of example. Moreover, this cognitive effect has a social origin. Lakoff accounts for the prototype effect by positing idealized cognitive models (ICMs). ICMs are cognitive deployments of social knowledge. As Lakoff points out, a category such as mother is constituted by social knowledge and values that have a crucial effect upon categorization. On the one hand, we have a cluster of ICMs that converge: the biological model that emphasizes birth mother, the nurturing model that emphasizes childcare mother, the marital model that emphasizes wife-of-father mother, and the genealogical model which emphasizes the closest-female ancestor mother (74–75). Taken together, these models organize our social experience and allow us to make judgments about membership in the category mother. On the other hand, we use (or have used) the housewife mother as a metonymy for all mothers. That is, the housewife mother tends to be the best example of mother, the prototypical robin or sparrow. ICMs, therefore, encompass our social knowledge and reflect our asymmetrical judgments. When we see categories as cognitive units with a graded structure, the question of reversibility in literal comparisons changes radically. To take an example from Kittay once again, we have to ask why we can so easily reverse the tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of the coastal regions. It is not because the comparison is within one category but rather because both tornadoes and hurricanes are prototypical members of the superordinate category natural disasters. Natural disasters’ membership list may vary from place to place and from time to time. Nonetheless, for most of us, the central members of natural disasters would be such things as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, and so on. A peripheral member of natural disasters might be heat wave. We can compare tornado and heat wave, but while the com-

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parison is within-category, it is—on the face of it—quite different from a comparison between tornado and hurricane. But let us consider it in the light of some conversation, for the sake of good habits. A city might apply for natural disaster funding after a deadly heat wave and argue that a heat wave is like a hurricane. Following a deadly heat wave in July of 1995, Chicago’s medical examiner made just this sort of comparison: “The medical examiner said that residents must realize that the heat wave was a natural disaster just like a hurricane or a flood” (Kaplan and Stein). The city is not only urging a literal comparison, but it is also depending upon the asymmetry within the comparison in order to make its point. That is, the city does not want it understood that a hurricane is like a heat wave but that a heat wave is like a hurricane, a disaster that nearly always warrants federal funds. Moreover, since the city’s assertion of categorical membership is made in earnest, the comparison is not metaphorical but decidedly literal. But asymmetry between prototypical members and nonprototypical is not all we need to consider. Unconventional discursive trajectories can create an asymmetry between hurricane and tornado into relief, even if they are both central, salient members of the same category. Hurricane and tornado are seen as similar in explanatory, taxonomic discourse. Conventionally, speakers compare tornadoes and hurricanes for the express purpose of pointing out the features these storms share: high wind, destructive power, and so on. In addition, tornadoes and hurricanes are conventionally paired—lions and tigers, cars and trucks, tornadoes and hurricanes. Thus, what makes it seem that hurricane equals tornado equals hurricane is a typified discursive trajectory and rhetorical purpose, not just that they are prototypical members of the same category. Suppose we depart from the standard taxonomic talk that emphasizes constant similarities between types of storms. Instead, imagine a midwestern columnist who is concerned about a regional slight. She thinks that her part of the country is given too little notice for its hardships. News reporters do not cover tornadoes so extensively as hurricanes; the national weather service does not glorify them by giving them names; tornadoes are too soon forgotten. This is unfair, she argues, a result of the fact that hurricanes are so lumberingly slow. She writes: Why not name tornadoes? Tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of the coastal regions. Here it matters a great deal what is being compared to what. Tornadoes are like hurricanes—significant and worthy of a name; hurricanes are not like tornadoes—disastrous, but ephemeral. The literal comparison is asymmetrical. It is crucial that we notice, both for the standard taxonomic comparison and for the columnist’s asymmetrical comparison of tornado and hurricane, that the literal nature of the comparison does not arise because

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it is within-category. Once we dispose of a supposed inherent symmetry of within-category comparisons, we have no good reason to distinguish within-category and cross-categorical comparisons, automatically calling one literal and the other metaphorical. Instead, just as overarching conversation controls asymmetry, it also controls the metaphoric quality of comparison. That is, it is entirely possible for within-category comparisons to be metaphors. Imagine another midwestern columnist, this one not concerned with a regional slight but concerned with a particularly destructive tornado that has destroyed many homes and businesses. She might refer to the tornado as an inland Andrew, giving the tornado the name of a large and famously destructive hurricane. The utterance is metaphoric hyperbole, not unusual since almost all metaphors incorporate either overstatement or understatement. Calling a tornado Andrew amounts to a within-category metaphor that is, like many literal comparisons, asymmetrical and nonreversible. Similarly, we might imagine a mixed metaphor (they come that way most often): A tornado is a hurricane on fast forward. Both tornado and hurricane are likened to the spool of a tape recorder, which is a standard cross-categorical metaphor. However, tornado and hurricane within the metaphor are both within-category and nonreversible. Within-category metaphors do occur naturally and not infrequently. Consider the metaphor so often uttered by owners of intrepid but foolish chihuahuas. He thinks he’s a Doberman pinscher, they say. Both are dogs. Consider a man’s home is his castle. Both are places to live. And some literal comparisons are cross-categorical. The [pick an object or space] is a big as a bread box. The object or space need not be categorized as a container or a kitchen item or something manmade—or fall into any of the categories that immediately subsume bread box.

Metaphor as Category So far I have argued these five things: First, within-category literal comparisons can be asymmetrical. Second, metaphors are also asymmetrical, but asymmetry is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor. Third, both within-category and cross-categorical comparisons can be metaphorical. Fourth, most metaphors are cross-categorical, but cross-categorical comparison is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor. Fifth, in asymmetrical comparisons, literal or metaphoric, asymmetry is influenced by a subsuming conversation. A change in discursive trajectory or rhetorical purpose can change what part of the comparison semantically dominates. These five points lead us to two unavoidable broad conclusions: First, categorical violation, as it has been described in metaphor theory to date, is wrong; it is neither a distinguishing feature nor a necessary condition

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of metaphor. Second, asymmetry between target and source is a feature of metaphor, but since it is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor, it has also been understood wrongly—that is, it describes metaphor, but it does not help us identify metaphor. Yet it bears considering why these two notions about metaphor have been so widely accepted. Metaphor theorists have been mistaken in treating categorical violation and asymmetry as distinguishing features of metaphor, but they have not been mistaken in observing categorical violation and asymmetry in the metaphors they have studied. There is a reason for this. Metaphor is itself a category. It is the category of nonliteral statements that we call metaphors (this is tautological, I recognize, but accurate nonetheless). Like all other categories, it is a graded category in which some exemplars seem more centrally representative than others. But remember, prototypes are a consequence of entrenched social conditioning. In discussions of metaphor from Aristotle forward, the prototypical metaphor has become the simple copula A is B, the conventional my love is like a rose, the for-the-sake-of-discussion man is a wolf. These exemplars—as well as many similar prototypical exemplars—obey the “rules” of metaphor: categorical violation and asymmetry. However, prototypes neither outnumber other categorical members, nor do they tell us all there is to know about the broad spectrum of categorical members. Just as an ornithologist would not study birds by studying only robins, sparrows, and seagulls, we cannot study metaphor by studying only prototypical members of the category metaphor—particularly since those members have been made prototypical largely as a consequence of theorizing. Furthermore, much of theorists’ concern over how we can identify metaphors directly results from a mistaken notion of metaphor as a category. Unlike bird, metaphor is not amenable to classical, feature-based categorization. Scientists have identified features that qualify birds as birds. But metaphor is a category more akin to Wittgenstein’s famous example, game (3). The expressions we loosely refer to by the name metaphor are related through family resemblance. Some have the feature of categorical violation, but many do not; all have the feature of asymmetry, but all birds have legs, and this does not help us tell birds from people. Nonetheless, we have little difficulty as competent speakers of English in identifying metaphors—especially prototypical metaphors. It is crucial that we notice the primacy of recognition over criteria, even among those theorists who attempt to find universal criteria for identifying metaphor. Each time an apparently sensible scheme for recognizing metaphor is laid to rest, it is laid to rest by a metaphoric exemplar that belies the criteria—an expression that everyday speakers and theorists alike feel so intuitively certain is a metaphor that we simply must trust our intuition over the theoretical yardstick. For instance, I have noted Monroe Beards-

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ley’s criterion that metaphors are literally false. Max Black refutes this rule of thumb by proffering literally true, yet undeniably metaphorical statements—such as people in glass houses should not throw stones, when spoken of someone who actually lives in a glass house. I have used the same sort of strategy in refuting categorical violation and asymmetry. I have proffered exemplars that do not depend upon categorical violation, and I have proffered literal comparisons that are asymmetrical. This is possible because metaphor is a graded category that includes members that do not share all of the features of prototypical members. When we recognize metaphor as a category by virtue of family resemblances, we are left without a hard and fast technique for knowing metaphors when we see them. However, I would argue that this is a cost we can easily bear because as competent speakers of English, we invariably rely upon more than theorized criteria. We are sensitive to the conceptual and discursive influences that inflect the metaphors we recognize, and we make competent judgments about what is meant literally and what is meant metaphorically. Most of us know when the hypothetical midwestern columnist refers to an inland Andrew that she knows hurricanes do not occur in her part of the country, and that this was a particularly large tornado, and that when she utters her comment, she knows we will not think she really thinks the town has been leveled by a hurricane. We know, with general accuracy, what the speaker knows. A younger audience, however, might not know that hurricanes are a coastal phenomenon and take the comment literally. Moreover, if the child were to metaphorize a tornado as a hurricane, we might wonder whether the child knows the difference between tornadoes and hurricanes, and we might then take the comment as both literal and incorrect. This is not to say that anything one of us deems to be a metaphor is a metaphor for all. Some matters are ontologically debatable—the JudeoChristian creation story, for instance. It is to say that we use our familiarity with culturally specific conversations in order to take expressions as they are meant. And most of the time, we get things roughly right. We know metaphor in the same way that we know literary language, when expressions are offered as metaphors and are taken up as metaphors. There is a substantial benefit to discarding the pursuit of identification criteria. When we see metaphor as a category that includes both prototypical and nonprototypical members, we are able to see a larger landscape of metaphors and to see that landscape as part of a larger rhetorical environment. Furthermore, when we consider metaphor’s discursive and conceptual milieu, we can more readily examine the ways metaphor is related to categorization and asymmetry. By setting aside the question of identification or by simply admitting that identifying a metaphor is always in some sense tautological, we are then able to replace is it or isn’t it? with what are metaphor’s capabilities?

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Trade Is War and Categories Trade Is War manipulates categories and asymmetry in a complex, ambiguous fashion, stretching metaphor’s capabilities to its limit. First, let us consider categories. Like other entities, trade and war are categorized in multiple ways, and these categorizations overlap. Nonetheless, one of the ways we most commonly categorize them is in relation to their international function. Trade and war belong to the category foreign relations. They are, in fact, prototypical members. Consider the three United States executive departments that deal extensively with foreign affairs: Commerce, Defense, and State. Defense, by and large, deals with war, Commerce, by and large, deals with trade, and State deals with both. Of course, if trade and war are central members of the category foreign relations, it follows that some other members must be peripheral. These peripheral members would include such things as athletic exchanges, environmental agreements, cooperative science projects, and so on. Thus, in foreign relations’ graded structure, trade and war almost certainly share a similar degree of prototypicality. It is difficult for us to say whether trade and war are precisely equal as prototypical members, but semantic symmetry is always an approximation. Second, it may be that the symmetry between trade and war contributes to their productivity when they are linked in metaphor. Trade and war are basic-level categories, mid-level categories in a hierarchy of categorical types that have a distinct social and cognitive status (Rosch). For example, we most commonly identify domestic canines as belonging to the basic-level category dog, rather than to the superordinate categories animal or mammal or to such subordinate categories as Russian wolfhound, Pomeranian, and wire-haired terrier. We are capable of categorizing multiply, but basic-level categorization differs from categorization at levels above and below because, as Lakoff explains, at the basic level we (1) name things readily, (2) give things simple names, (3) attribute cultural significance, (4) remember easily, and (5) perceive holistically. Such basic-level categories as dog, cat, tree, trade and war satisfy all of these criteria. Foreign relations is a superordinate category above trade and war. Below trade and war, we find specific activities that constitute the basiclevel category. Below trade, we have purchases, shipments, contracts, and so on; below war, we have battles, attacks, missions, and so on. According to Mark Turner, basic-level categories (and categories above the basic level) make good candidates for analogy because they have little or no overlap in their membership: they are categorically distinct (Reading 129–31). Turner’s use of “analogy” is somewhat idiosyncratic, taking in both literal and metaphoric analogies. For present purposes, since Turner emphasizes that ostensible falsehood signals analogy, we can with-

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out great harm substitute “metaphor” for “analogy” (Reading 131). When we see an instance of Trade Is War such as the headline “U.S. Fires Retaliatory Shot Over EC Oilseed Dispute” (Wyant), we might analyze it according to Turner’s scheme, which claims that it is the basic category that is one step up in the hierarchy of categories that matters. To fire a retaliatory shot is an activity of the basic-level category war. Likewise, “oilseed dispute” is an activity of the basic-level category trade. Thus, we have a metaphor that juxtaposes categorical domains that have little or no overlap in membership. The metaphor urges a comparison that is impeded by cognitively entrenched categorical boundaries. Most analyses of Trade Is War would operate in roughly the same way as the one above, but not necessarily so directly. As we have seen, Trade Is War operates within a larger conversation, what I am calling for convenience the discourse of trade. We cannot, then, lift an instance out of its context and declare our understanding complete. Even a brief passage such as this one from a review of Lester Thurow’s Head to Head complicates the analytical task immensely: [Japan’s] “communitarian capitalism” has proved murderously effective in head-to-head competition with individualistic, US-style capitalism. Like good generals, Japan’s corporate chieftains seek expansion, in the form of market share, rather than higher profits. They rally their troops not just with money . . . but with job security, perks and pride of belonging. (Case)

The passage first evokes violence with the word “murderously.” Then it makes its metaphor explicitly military in a simile, “Like good generals. . . .” But the route from category member to superordinate basic category is not direct. The passage names only two members of the basic category war, “generals” and “troops.” Other members of the domain of war are referenced indirectly: money, job security, perks, and pride of belonging. Even though the first three in the list—money, job security, and perks—are directly traceable to the category business, which is part and parcel of trade, they bid for metaphorical membership in the category war. Money, job security, and so on equate to such things as military discipline, training, soldierly esprit de corps, medals and awards. I would not venture to guess what equals what, and even a good guess would not be enlightening. More important than the precise equation—since there very likely is no precise equation, even in the writer’s mind—is that “money, job security, perks and pride of belonging” have been made metaphorical, not from the bottom up but from the top down. In other words, in such locutions as “U.S. fires retaliatory shot over EC oilseed dispute,” the metaphor occurs with the entry of the alien name “fires.” In the Thurow passage, “money, job security, perks and pride of belonging” are all, in a

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sense, alienated from their basic category, trade. Because they are controlled from above by the category war, they no longer reference ordinary activities of business and trade in an uncomplicated way. Instead, they refer indirectly to things such as military discipline, training, and so on. These indirect referents cannot be specified, but nonetheless, they point upward to their superordinate category, war. What becomes evident is this: at some point metaphor comprehension becomes a top-down process, similar to the top-down textual comprehension process described by Gregory Colomb and Mark Turner (407– 10). In the passage above, the basic category war, having been suggested by explicit naming of members, saturates the discourse enough to influence our understandings of things ordinarily in the category of trade. But what enables this saturation to happen so quickly and thoroughly? Would a top-down permeation take place so effortlessly if the writer had written, Like good dominant dogs, Japan’s corporate leaders discipline their pack not just with money, but with job security, perks, and pride of belonging? This alternate metaphor makes some sense. Dogs are predatory, territorial, gregarious, hierarchical, and are metaphorically comparable with humans. Yet the category members indirectly referenced by money, job security, perks, and pride of belonging, while perhaps retrievable, are not readily at hand. The like generals simile, though, is enabled from the top down because we know the category list well, and we habitually compare the domains of trade and war. In chapter 3, we saw that Trade Is War has been a part of the discourse of trade for at least several hundred years and that, over time, it has come to show itself in typified ways. The reviewer who writes, “Like good generals, Japan’s corporate chieftains” uses the same port of entry as Defoe, who writes of England’s one-time corporate chieftain, Henry VII, “The king acted like a wise and war-like prince . . .” (97). It is the same port of entry used by Marx and Engels: “As privates of the industrial army [workers] are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers” (13–14). The same port of entry is used by Lester Thurow, who describes the old Soviet system in Head To Head, saying, “Basically plant managers were army officers . . .” (99). Indeed, this port of entry has been used so often, we can only recall a minuscule fraction of its instances. The top-down force of Trade Is War’s constituting conversation makes the metaphor accessible, enabling the juxtaposition of the basic categories trade and war to make an effective metaphor. In the sense that trade and war are juxtaposed basic categories, Trade Is War is, at least in many of its instances, an exemplar of categorical violation—a prototypical metaphor. However, in at least two senses, it is not. First, as I have already noted, trade and war are each members of the common superordinate category foreign relations. This makes the metaphor within-category. Second, and just as importantly, as Trade Is War

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occurs in the discourse of trade, it is frequently triggered by the locution trade war. Trade war may or may not constitute a basic-level category, but it does name a legitimate, common category of some sort, one that is composed of the metaphor Trade Is War and generates much of the motion in Trade Is War. We know that trade war is a legitimate category because its categorical members—the activities that constitute trade war— are easy to name. Earlier I have called them trade war’s indirect referents: dumping, imposing punitive tariffs, imposing cumbersome regulations on foreign goods, refusing to purchase foreign goods, and so on. Moreover, trade war has a graded structure with both prototypical and peripheral members. A prototypical act of trade war would be imposing a punitive tariff. Peripheral or nonprototypical acts would be such things as displaying a “Buy American” bumper sticker or writing a book titled The Japan That Can Say No (Shintaro). That trade war names a category makes Trade Is War ambiguous with respect to categorical violation. Trade Is War is, on the one hand, an unexceptional metaphor that abuts two basic categories, activating itself by importing an alien name from war to trade. On the other hand, it conventionally manifests itself as trade war, a literal phrase, the name of a common category. Thus, the category trade war both encompasses and effaces a categorical violation. Trade Is War’s ambiguous position with respect to categories calls to mind Boaz Keysar and Sam Glucksberg’s notion that every metaphor is a categorical assertion, that the linking of seemingly disparate categories always amounts to creating a new superordinate category (647–48). For example, they argue that when we say his sermon was a sleeping pill, we are not juxtaposing incompatible categories so much as we are invoking a broad category that encompasses soporific things such as sleeping pills, sermons, lectures, and lullabies (647). In a sense, Keysar and Glucksberg argue for a world that is infinitely categorizable. Like contestants on the long-running game show The $25,000 Pyramid, we are presented with seemingly disparate member candidates and through induction categorize such things as sermons and sleeping pills as things that make us sleepy. However, when we are presented with an instance of Trade Is War, we do not need to induce its superordinate category. Usually, the superordinate category is trade war, a category that has long been created—that is in fact deeply entrenched. Moreover, trade war stands side by side with foreign relations, a deeply entrenched category that encompasses trade and war as prototypical members. If the world is infinitely categorizable, it also accommodates overlapping categories. Likewise, metaphor accommodates the multiplicity and messiness of categorizations without sacrificing its metaphoric quality. The common category trade war accommodates the cross-categorical metaphor Trade Is War embedded within it, and we have no difficulty recognizing it as both category and metaphor at once.

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What is more, the basic categories that make up Trade Is War accommodate within-category metaphors. For instance, in the Crossfire discussion analyzed in chapter 1 (in a portion not previously quoted), Representative Levin says, “Trade abroad is like trade at home. You have to push for yourself” (2). Certainly, Levin means to assert a conventional analogy, but it is not a literal analogy. Economists perennially debunk the notion that local economic activity can be literally likened to international trade. Economist Paul Krugman, for example, makes the same argument first advanced by Adam Smith: “Countries . . . do not go out of business. They may be happy or unhappy with their economic performance, but they have no well-defined bottom line” (31). Levin evades the logical fallacy of asserting a far-reaching literal similarity between international and local trade by making his metaphoric comparison explicit: “You have to push for yourself.”His rhetorical purpose makes trade abroad is like trade at home metaphorical within the category of trade. Moreover, this withincategory metaphor is embedded within a prototypical cross-categorical metaphor that likens aggressive economic activity to physical pushing. We can see by now that Trade Is War utilizes categories ambiguously, simultaneously acting as a cross-categorical comparison and as a larger category in the phrase trade war, as well as accommodating within-category metaphors. In addition, the conversation that guides Trade Is War sometimes shifts the semantic power relation between target and source, trade and war. Trade Is War—as the ordering of my simple copula tends to indicate— ordinarily allows war to semantically dominate trade. In the examples so far proffered, we have seen the domain of war imported into the domain of trade, causing us to rethink the nature of trade. Or rather, since Trade Is War is so conventional, we go through the mental motions of rethinking the nature of trade. For example, when the Los Angeles Times writes, “The United States is about to launch a potent new weapon in its trade arsenal” (Pine), the alien name, “weapon,” emigrates from the domain of war to the domain of trade. Nothing could be more commonplace. We need to consider, though, what makes this semantic relation between trade and war within Trade Is War so standard, so predictable. It is predictable because the metaphor enters a discussion of trade, making trade the topic upon which we comment. The conversation surrounding Trade Is War is largely homogenous in this way. We are reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a time when trade and its growing conflicts are seen as central to international affairs. It has not been long, however, since the world’s focus was upon war. In the aftermath of World War II, nations were conceptually divided into military superpowers and their surrogates. While balance of trade has been a working concept at least since the time of Elizabeth I, it was less central to twentieth-century Cold War discussion than balance of power. Although I make no claim that

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the conversation constituting Trade Is War in the postwar world precludes war from semantically dominating trade in some instances, I would suggest that the war-focused conversation of the 1950s enables a discursive trajectory that reverses the polarity of trade and war in other instances of Trade Is War. For instance, in the first paragraph of a 1952 work titled Economic Warfare, Yuan-li Wu summarizes a dominant portion of the conceptual and discursive context of his time: To a generation whose memory of the last war is still fresh, it is commonplace to point out that total war today requires the application of a country’s entire resources in waging it on all fronts: military, political, psychological, and economic. But for policy-makers as well as for the intelligent citizen it is not enough to know that wars may be fought on other than the military front. It is necessary to go a step further in the inquiry as to how this should and could be done; and what is more, it is incumbent to find out whether by waging a successful war on one or all of the other fronts it would not be possible to avoid a military conflagration. (1)

This passage stands in startling contrast to current discourse about international affairs. Speaking from a U.S. vantage point, ours is a time of limited wars in carefully circumscribed spaces. In keeping with the broad character of Cold War discourse, Wu’s framing of Trade Is War blocks the conventional configuration of asymmetry that gives war more force than trade. It is key to Wu’s discursive trajectory that war is not a stable concept, that we may have known what it was once, but no more. According to Wu, the concept of war is distinct from military conflagration. We can wage “a successful war on one or all of the other fronts” and “avoid a military conflagration.” In other words, he asserts that the category of war is larger than previously thought; the military aspect is only one of four crucial aspects. This category assertion—“total war”—rather than being conceptually surprising, is “commonplace.” Once the superordinate category of Trade Is War is reconceived—no longer foreign relations or trade war, but rather war— the semantic power relation between trade and war reverses its polarity; trade now dominates war. Consider the treatment of the word weapon in Wu’s discussion, compared to weapon in earlier examples. Wu writes, “Such is our problem. How to use economic weapons in fighting a war, what weapons to use in a period of sustained emergency . . . and above all, whether an economic war could be substituted for a shooting war” (6). There is no metaphoric hyperbole in Wu; compare Wu to the Los Angeles Times’ metaphorizing of Super 301 as America’s “potent new weapon.” In Wu’s book, there is no mapping of economic weapons as cannons, sabers, cudgels,

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and such. To Wu, economic weapons are just that—weapons—because economic war is indeed war. In short, his weapons are not old trade tricks metaphorized as weapons but new weapons of a new kind of war, untested and unfamiliar to us. Wu is, it seems, aware that he is reconfiguring Trade Is War. He takes care to distinguish economic warfare, the trade dominant version of Trade Is War, from trade war, the war dominant version of Trade Is War. He heads a section of his first chapter: “Differences Between Economic Warfare and a Protective Trade Policy.” He argues that in economic warfare we do not serve the interests of domestic corporations, who benefit from protectionist policies. Instead, economic maneuvering serves a national defense interest. Importantly, we must bear in mind that in Cold War discussions of economic warfare the objective of war is not to gain economically but to resist the forces of tyranny; thus, the domestic economic effects of an economic war are byproducts of war, not indicators of success or failure. In keeping with the large movement of Trade Is War over time, Wu stresses not only that economic warfare is novel but that it disrupts conventional ideas of Trade Is War, denouncing protectionism as “mercantilist” (9). In fact, economic warfare cannot substantially be confused with trade war. Their categorical membership lists, while they may overlap, are different. Economic warfare shares with trade war tariffs, regulations refusing to purchase foreign goods, and so on, but trade war does not share with economic warfare military strikes on economic targets, sabotage, and blockades. Economic warfare is war reconceived in terms of trade; trade war is trade reconceived in terms of war. Since economic warfare entails a literal category assertion that makes war superordinate to both military and trade activity, we might well ask whether economic warfare constitutes a metaphor at all. It does. Just as Trade Is War can accommodate and be accommodated within the category trade war, it can both encompass and be encompassed by the category economic warfare. Trade Is War’s metaphoric quality is not lost; it is only relocated. No matter how insistent Wu and others may be in categorizing economic warfare as war, they cannot undo the sociocognitive entrenchment of both trade and war as basic categories. This is evident in the need for adjectives to distinguish between “economic wars” and “shooting wars.” The very titles of books on economic warfare in the midst of World War II (e.g., Battles Without Bullets [Brockway, 1939] and The New Economic Warfare [Basch, 1941]) underscore Trade Is War’s metaphoric quality— that the broadening of war to include economic warfare, while widespread, is more wish than fact. Lastly, the shift in Trade Is War’s semantic asymmetry is enabled by World War II’s discursive emphasis on war, but it is not exclusive to World

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War II and its aftermath. We can see the same shift in recent Trade Is War fiction such as Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, in which—as discussed in chapter 3—the Japanese attack the United States by infiltrating key financial institutions, then simultaneously dumping U.S. Treasury Bills, sabotaging the New York Stock Exchange’s computer system, and occupying the Mariana Islands. In the plot of Clancy’s novel, we see both the metaphor Trade Is War and a simultaneous literalization of the metaphor. For Clancy’s Japanese caricatures, just as for Cold War hawks, Trade Is War.

Mapping Although mapping is an integral feature of metaphor, it is often credited with a fundamental force that it does not have. While the formal constraints of mapping have typically been seen as the sole reason for metaphors to be apt or aesthetically pleasing, mapping constraints are at most minimum conditions for acceptable metaphors. Metaphors extend and resonate in concert with a constituting conversation. And while metaphors do not tend to violate mapping constraints, metaphoric mapping functions in a way that is subordinate to larger discursive conditions. Mapping encompasses a number of things. We often speak of metaphorical mapping without using the term mapping. When students in a focus group discuss the aptness of Trade Is War by overlaying features of war onto corresponding features of trade, they are discussing mapping without knowing it. Metaphor theorists often use everyday terms such as resemblance to discuss the relation between target and source domains, taking for granted that there should be a corresponding pattern of features between the two. That is also mapping. For both the casual observer and for the theorist, when features of the source do not correspond isomorphically—that is, map—onto features of the target, an incoherence is perceived in the metaphor. The metaphor does not “make sense.” For instance, a business student argues that Trade Is War does not “make sense” because in war you destroy your opponent, but in trade you cooperate with a partner. In the same way, I. A. Richards objects to Othello’s “steep’d me in poverty to the very lips” because liquid is a presence and poverty is an absence. It doesn’t “make sense.” Among explicit theories of mapping, it is useful to identify three main varieties: feature mapping, systematic mapping, and image-schematic mapping. As I will show in this chapter, and in yet more detail in chapter 5, none of these varieties operates discretely. Nonetheless, they are three distinct aspects of an interpenetrated mapping process. Feature Mapping. Feature mapping is usually seen as the simplest way of understanding and evaluating metaphors because it sometimes involves

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only physical correspondences between source and target. For example, in the cliché as skinny as a rail, we map primarily, although not exclusively, the physical feature slenderness. In her discussion of children and metaphor, Ellen Winner calls these kinds of feature mappings “primitive metaphors” (39–40). However, feature mapping is seldom so rudimentary—at least, not for adults. Even simple mappings have discursive, rhetorical ramifications. Take, for example, she is a giraffe to mean she is tall, an example of single-feature mapping once used by Dedre Gentner. The expression seems straightforward enough—except that to be tall, and to be a woman, and to be a tall woman all have implications that are bound to a specific time and place. Moreover, there are many tall things to which a woman may be compared, but none seem to have the same effect as giraffe. She is as tall as a tree. She is as tall as a flagpole. She is as tall as the Empire State Building. In addition, we often ascribe social or psychological qualities to physical characteristics, as in he’s smooth to mean he has good manners or he is deceptive. I will discuss the way single features index larger social situations in chapter 5. Systematic Mapping. It has long been recognized that metaphor often involves more than simple feature correspondences, that the correspondences between target and source can be systematic. Notably, Max Black refers to a “system of associated commonplaces” or an “implicative complex” (“More” 28). In a more codified way, Dedre Gentner observes that we usually prefer metaphors (or metaphoric analogies) that map multiple features and preserve the relations between those features, as in analogies of the hydrogen atom and the solar system. According to Gentner, when the hydrogen atom is likened to the solar system, not only do we map the surface similarity of the two systems but also the relation between its parts. If the central object (the sun or the nucleus) were less massive, the attraction between it and its satellites would decrease, and the distance between them would thereby increase. Image-Schematic Mapping. Image-schematic mapping refers mainly to the way we perceive image-schematic correspondences between and among domains. It refers to the kinds of complex mappings that underpin the conceptual metaphors discussed in this book. It is important to note that the idea of image-schematic mapping does not repudiate singlefeature and systematic mapping theories. Rather, it offers a way of accounting for metaphoric processes for which the other mapping theories are inadequate. All three notions of mapping—especially taken together—have value and, in fact, help us to explain the way metaphor works. In chapter 5, I will look at each mapping type, offering specific evidence for its interrelation with what I call licensing stories. However, first I want to note the general way we need to rethink mapping in light of rhetorically consti-

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tuted metaphor. Mappings are sensitive to rhetorical contexts and purposes, and we cannot understand mappings unless we understand the rhetoric that saturates virtually all metaphor use. Let me, then, briefly identify three ways mapping is implicated in rhetoric.

Mapping as Preference Gentner’s systematicity proposal is correct in that metaphor’s impulse is to expand, to seek systematic mappings where it can, rather than to rest with single-feature correspondences, but this impulse depends not on structure but upon rhetoric. In other words, Gentner argues that it is the structural possibility of mappings that drives the mapping process. But when we examine metaphors in specific discursive settings, the implications of systematic mappings appear to be very different. Mapping is one of metaphor’s microsystems, and it is both enabled and constrained by a metaphor’s guiding conversation. Gentner’s example of the solar system/hydrogen atom analogy is controlled by a discourse so conventional that it nearly escapes our notice. In science, and science education especially, we often compare the solar system and hydrogen atoms, using the well-known systematic relations of the solar system to explain the lesser known relations of atomic particles. But the solar system and the atom are not always compared as physical entities that have a similar shape, not even in discourse about science. For instance, Thomas Kuhn likens the solar system and the hydrogen atom as objects of study because both helped to shift research paradigms through quantitative means. Comparing the work of the early astronomer Johann Kepler to that of physicist Niels Bohr, Kuhn writes: Claims [that raise new difficulties] are particularly likely to succeed if the new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly better than its older competitor. The quantitative superiority of Kepler’s Rudolphine tables to all those computed from the Ptolemaic theory was a major factor in the conversion of astronomers to Copernicanism. . . . And in this century the quantitative success of . . . the Bohr atom quickly persuaded many physicists to accept [it] even though, viewing physical science as a whole, [it] created more problems than it solved. (153–54)

It is true that Kuhn’s comparison between the solar system and the hydrogen atom is only implicit; he compares theories about the solar system and the atom. But it is easy enough to make the solar system-hydrogen atom metaphor explicit through the conventional technique of allowing the object to stand synecdochically for the activity. That is, we can easily append this sentence: The solar system was the hydrogen atom of its day. Kuhn’s discursive trajectory inflects the explicit metaphor in a way that makes the physical similarity of the solar system and the hydrogen

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atom largely irrelevant. Moreover, Kuhn’s rhetorical context might make us note other kinds of systematically related correspondences—that both the atom and the sun are central to cultures, that each holds both creative and destructive power, that each is fundamental to life. But whether we play out systematic correspondences in this way depends upon what point is being made. The mapping comports with the rhetorical action. Put another way, the impulse to discover systematic correspondences is both a mental and a rhetorical preference. We all recognize the metaphor game that often occurs during argumentative give and take. Consider a hypothetical discussion of science education as food. Someone says, We have to teach our children math and science because these subjects are our bread and butter. Someone else replies, True, but man does not live by bread alone. We need to nourish children’s spirits also. Make room for philosophy, literature, music, art. The first replies, So you’re saying, Let them eat cake. Well, we have too much dessert in school today. The second parries, The arts are not dessert. They’re nourishment for all of us, day in and day out. And so it goes. Of course, the conceptual metaphor that underpins this exchange is Ideas Are Food, and that metaphor is implicated in a metaphor system that constitutes and is constituted by the discourse of education. Nonetheless, the mappings within Ideas Are Food are subject to rhetorical impetuses and constraints. We love to map metaphors to their systematic limit—to play out plausible structural correspondences in order to make our rhetorical points. Usually, since structural correspondences are inherently limited, the metaphor breaks down as the correspondences quit “making sense” or as they become disputed. The crucial point, however, is not that metaphors have limits but that we have a preference for exploring those limits.

Mapping as Minimum Condition While we do have a preference for mapping as thoroughly as sense and rhetoric allow, it is also important not to overstate the impulse to map and to take into account the conditions that preclude mapping altogether. To explain these aspects of mapping, George Lakoff and Mark Turner— who, as we have seen, argue that metaphor is based importantly, but not entirely, upon image schemas—propose the invariance principle (Lakoff, “Contemporary”; Turner, “Language”). The invariance principle is a judiciously limited formal principle that points out this simple fact: We do not necessarily map everything imaginable, but all of the abstract shape that makes sense. And where the abstract shape makes no sense, we do not map it. Turner proffers the example of metaphors whose source domain is death. According to Turner, death is an event whose shape is “one in which an entity, over time, reaches a final state, after which it no longer exists”

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(“Language” 730). Thus, when we map death onto a given target, we do not necessarily project every detail of death, or every part of death’s image schema, but we do map as much of its image schema as is consistent with the target’s image schema. Thus, the invariance principle places mapping constraints under one umbrella, covering such image-schematic structures or generic-level constraints as static orientations (up, down, forward, back, vertical, horizontal, in, out, and so on), moving orientations (rising, dipping, spinning), and, importantly, event shapes such as “continuity, extension, discreteness, completion, open-endedness, circularity, part/whole relations, and so on” (729). At the same time, it avoids the pitfall of predicting with fine precision what will be mapped. It does seem that most or all metaphors adhere to the invariance principle. We do map compatible portions of image schemas, and we do not map incompatible portions. But it is important to realize that while it is a formalist principle, it is a modest one. It leaves a large portion of mapping unexplained, the portion that is connected to metaphor’s rhetorical constitution. Simply put, it does not attempt to explain how we come to apply image schemas in the first place. We must ask, therefore, how the invariance principle operates in relation to metaphor’s larger conversation. How do abstract mappings come to make sense in concrete discourse? The functional relation between concrete discourse and abstract mapping can be demonstrated well with respect to Turner’s strange but fascinating example language is a virus. Turner explains language is a virus this way: “We map the generic-level information in the nature of the virus onto language, to arrive at the interpretation that those who show the symptoms of ‘having language’ pass language on to others, who consequently develop the same symptoms” (732). In other words, the skeletal shape of virus’s events are mapped onto language. Turner’s reading of language is a virus is reasonable enough—we can easily imagine a conversation in which this mapping would make sense. But the nature of the virus is itself a fluid construct. Disease is understood in various ways—as clinical phenomenon, as a behavioral phenomenon, even as divine earthly retribution. Each way of understanding disease is inflected by political and philosophical concerns. A striking example of this is the AIDS virus, a politically volatile disease whose nature is seen differently by various interest groups. But all diseases are understood through some political, philosophical paradigm. If a physician says that language is a virus, he or she very likely means something different from a social worker, from a fund-raiser for a disease foundation, from a Christian Scientist, or from William Burroughs, the author of this odd metaphor. Burroughs’ idea of virus is not one in which people who “show the symptoms of ‘having language’ pass language on to others.” Instead, he

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subordinates language is a virus to a very strange sequence of events. He says, Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls “biologic mutation” affecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. . . . He postulates that alterations in the inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness. And vot an occasion! . . . Since the virus in both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation of the sex centers in the brain, the male impregnated the females in the death spasms and the altered throat structure was genetically conveyed. (qtd. in Lydenberg 129)

Burroughs’ story preserves some of the skeletal shape of Turner’s conventional virus events, but it also adds some notable elaborations to it. He not only specifies the type of virus in language is a virus, one of “biologic mutation,” but also he overlays dramatic elements upon the nature of the virus—such as sexual frenzy at the moment of death. And that is not all. In further comments, Burroughs builds an evolutionary aspect into language is a virus, theorizing that human beings are currently at a state of equilibrium with the virus, which makes the virus undetectable. The dormant virus might at any time become deadly again (Lydenberg 130). Admittedly, Burroughs tells a peculiar story. But then, it is part and parcel of Burroughs’ rhetorical stance to tell peculiar stories. Burroughs, the literary iconoclast, cuts prose into strips and randomly puts them back together. He trades upon his suspicion of establishment power and the hidden force of its language. Because Burroughs tells a peculiar story, language is a virus becomes a peculiar metaphor. That is, just as narrative’s impulse is to elaborate, metaphor’s impulse is to map in concert with the elaborations of a controlling story—to map more things and different things than we might guess when examining a bare metaphor. Moreover, we can easily see that such an odd story can only be told as part of an iconoclastic rhetoric. The rhetoric governs. Of course, Lakoff and Turner make no claim that image schemas are immutable. They are akin to what Lakoff calls idealized cognitive models, broad understandings of physical and social phenomenon that are specific to cultures (Women 68–76). If we stipulate that image schemas can vary depending upon cultures and even for subcultures, the invariance principle works well for predicting minimum mappings, something we need to know in order to understand how metaphors work. But it is just as important to emphasize the variability of image schemas as it is to note the invariance of mappings that depend upon image schemas. The selection of image schemas is key to the variability inherent in metaphor. Metaphor is subordinate to larger discursive conditions—the rhetorical

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points we want to make, the cultural evaluations we embed in our writing and talk, the degree of resistance we exert (or do not exert) against contextualizing culture.

Mapping as Modulation One of the main points I have made in this book is that metaphors can be regulated. We may rely upon broadly understood conceptual metaphors to give our particular metaphoric utterances abstract shape and cultural coherence, but particular locutions tend to intensify or attenuate the larger metaphor. Here, I want to distinguish between attenuation and intensification between metaphors (for example, attenuating Trade Is War by shifting to Trade Is A Game) from controlling the rhetorical intensity of a particular metaphor. When we control the intensity of a particular metaphor, we are mapping in accordance with rhetorical imperatives. For example, we often instantiate the metaphor Happy Is Up with standard locutions such as I’m feeling up today, she’s riding high, he’s floating on air, I’m on cloud nine, and so on. We even see outlandish literalizations of it such as the character in Mary Poppins who floats on the ceiling while singing, “I Love to Laugh.” Neither common locutions nor any that we might invent conveys precisely the same degree of rhetorical force. But the way we modulate these locutions is not random. An intensified instance of Happy Is Up makes use of the abstract image schema, exaggerating it, while at the same time relying upon our general knowledge of the physical and social world. It’s nice to feel up, but it’s nicer to defy gravity and walk on clouds. And it is both nice and culturally significant to feel, as the Rodgers and Hammerstein post–World War II song puts it, “high as the flag on the Fourth of July.” This modulation of image schema and cultural knowledge is evident in every concrete instance of a conceptual metaphor. Moreover, modulation is not simply a matter of turning the rhetorical heat up or down; it’s about understanding what rhetorical response a particular mapping will stimulate. Consider Ideas Are Food. We might say that a university’s course offerings are an intellectual cafeteria. Or we might say that the course offerings provide an intellectual feast. Both are relatively intense mappings, but they call for different responses.

Trade Is War and Mapping When we consider mapping as part of a rhetorical conversation, one that involves competing trajectories and numerous metaphors, any account of a particular mapping becomes a complex interpretive problem. Seldom can one mapping be comprehended without taking into account other mappings. That is, not only do conceptual metaphors respond to other conceptual metaphors in a broad sense, particular locutions respond to

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other particular locutions, as well as to other general concepts. Trade Is War is subject to the same mapping processes as other metaphors. Its impulse is to map as thoroughly as it can until the mapping inevitably reaches its limit; it maps in conformance with a variable yet broadly comprehended image schema; and it is modulated according to long-term and immediate rhetorical requirements. Moreover, every mapping is implicated in the larger conversation so far described. Consider this subtly complicated mapping from a 1993 Atlantic Monthly article written by James Fallows. The article appeared near the outset of the Clinton administration and advocates a government trade policy similar to that of Japan. Such a trade policy flies in the face of the philosophy that guided the Reagan and Bush administrations, who pursued a laissez-faire, antigovernment ideal with an almost religious zeal. In 1993, observers did not anticipate the Asian economic crisis that currently worries the United States, and fear of Japan’s economic success in automobiles, consumer electronics, and high-tech products caused some commentators to recommend the U.S. emulate Japanese economic policies. Fallows, typical of the alerting voices, admires Japanese success, warns of its deleterious effect on Western economies, and attributes Japanese postwar economic gains to a distinctly foreign way of thinking and behaving. Citing Japan’s large and nationally insular semiconductor market, Fallows asserts that Japan does not follow the “nationally blind, priceminded mentality” that most policy makers—and Japanese spokespeople who write in English—would have us believe is a universal economic fact. Instead of buying less expensive semiconductors from other countries, Japan developed and bought its own. He explains, In Japan the companies that made chips were tightly connected to the companies that bought chips—and connected by something beyond the prospect of business advantage which momentarily binds buyers to sellers in the American marketplace. The closest analogy from American life is the military. Just as the U.S. Air Force, with its allies in industry and congress, competes bitterly against the Army and the Navy (and their respective allies) for budget dollars and prestige, so do Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu, with their allies, compete bitterly against one another for primacy and market share. Yet each kind of competitor recognizes limits to its rivalry. Fundamentally, it is on the same team as its rivals, and at certain points all must suppress their immediate interests for the common good. According to Western economic theory there is virtually no “shared interest” among business competitors. Members of the American military system, and of the Japanese business system, need no theory to articulate why they are on the same side. (78)

Fallows’ conceptual metaphor is couched beneath the theme of unspoken, shared assumptions. But, clearly enough, he does what many eco-

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nomic nationalists do. He ascribes Trade Is War to Japan. In so doing, he enacts complicated metaphoric mapping. At this point in my argument, I hardly need to mention that Fallows’ Trade Is War is implicated in a conversation among related metaphors. Certainly, Fallows will not revert in the next paragraph to metaphors of friendship and journeys. (He does not.) And we should not be surprised if the metaphors of games and containers come into play. (They do.) The questions, then, are, how does Fallows modulate Trade Is War, what role does the systematic mapping impulse play, and how do image schemas constrain the metaphor? First, let me note that modulation is a matter of controlling emphasis, and emphasis is a matter of relative degree. What might amount to an intensification of metaphor in one writer’s prose might amount to an attenuation in another’s. Fallows writes, as most Atlantic contributors do, in a measured, cerebral register. It is fair to say that the Atlantic trades more upon intellectual challenges than upon sensational phrase making. In keeping with this stylistic parameter, Fallows’ thesis is that tacit assumptions inform action such as economic policy making. Therefore, when Fallows sidles into his instance of Trade Is War—two thousand words into a twelve thousand word piece—the very mention of the metaphor is an intensification. No need to mention bombs and blood. Second, the placement of the metaphor is emphatic. It comes at the end of an important section, the culminating moment when Fallows at last asserts why American semiconductors have declined and Japanese semiconductors have ascended. This is the stressed position Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb call “the point slot” (“Coherence II”). Not only does Fallows introduce a rhetorically incendiary metaphor, he puts it where it will have the greatest effect. The mapping, then, is modulated both with reference to a large conversation and with internal reference to the writer’s register. The metaphor nonetheless uses the same tools for modulating previously identified. While he avoids such standard feature mapping as bombs and arsenals, he does select an image-schematic mapping that is intensified. Many image schemas entail internal competition paired with outward unity. Metaphors of games, social clubs, families, and orchestras do. In fact, Fallows implies a game metaphor by using the word “team.” But none of these alternative metaphors exaggerate the image schema. The U.S. military, on the other hand, entails the hostile-action image schema on a global scale. Although understatement can at times be pointedly devastating, when it comes to modulation of metaphors, more is, generally speaking, more. This upward modulation is reinforced by the systematizing impulse. Fallows is explicit in his penultimate and ultimate sentences—an emphatic

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rhetorical slot—that his point has mainly to do with similarity of tacitly shared interests: “According to Western economic theory there is virtually no ‘shared interest’ among business competitors. Members of the American military system, and of the Japanese business system, need no theory to articulate why they are on the same side.” In a sense, this explicit interpretation of his own metaphor gives Fallows plausible deniability—he can claim not to have characterized Japanese industry as military in every respect but rather merely to have asserted the similarity of a single feature. But this claim of single-feature mapping rings hollow, coming on the heels of a mapping that links actors, actions, objectives, outcomes in a complex, isomorphic overlay. In Fallows’ metaphor, the branches of the U.S. armed services correspond to internally competitive Japanese industries, the U.S. Congress corresponds to the Japanese markets, gaining U.S. tax-funding corresponds to gaining Japanese market supremacy, and so on. These corresponding systems may be driven by similar tacit assumptions, but because the military metaphor is described in detail and Japanese industry is asserted to be systematically similar, the single-feature mapping—shared interest corresponds to shared interest—takes a back seat to the preponderance of mapped social action. Of course, it might be said that the mapping of the military image schema requires that we comprehend all of these systematic overlays. In some sense, that is correct. We do need to comprehend a degree of internal competition paired with cooperative, outwardly directed hostile action. But Fallows’ particular systematic mapping emphasizes the aspect of internal competition. That is, Americans generally realize that the Navy and the Marines compete in many respects, but this is not an important part of the abstract image schema that informs most instances of Trade Is War. This phenomenon—the recasting of image schemas—raises the question of invariance. That is, if the invariance principle is valid, then why so much variance? Two things are important to remember: First, the invariance principle makes no claim about the universality of image schemas. All image schemas and the values placed upon them are culturally variable. We have the cognitive capacity for deploying and recognizing image schemas, but we are not “hard-wired” to configure or judge them in any particular way. As I pointed out in chapter 3, war has many possible image schemas— war as direct confrontation, as indirect maneuvering, as siege, as deceit, and so on. When we observe the rhetorical etiquette of Trade Is War, we have to realize that the image schemas that underpin metaphors are potentially as variable as the rhetoric that attends them. Second, the invariance principle takes into account both what will be mapped and what will not be mapped. That is, the invariance principle claims that we map as much of the source domain’s image schema as is

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compatible with that of the target domain. It stands to reason, then, that as we reconceive the target domain, more or different aspects of the source domain’s image schema will map. This is just what has happened in Fallows’ mapping of Trade Is War. He has explicitly re-explained the nature of Japanese industry, making it compatible with an aspect of the standard war image schema that has always been available to be mapped but that has been previously unimportant. Moreover, there are numerous aspects of the most common war image schema—the direct confrontation model—that almost never map in instances of Trade Is War because they are incompatible. For instance, many or most English speakers understand war to entail grief, moral imperatives, and victory celebrations. None of these aspects tend to map in instances of Trade Is War. They are not compatible with generally shared notions of trade. As we have seen, mapping is complex and fluid—sensitive both to the regularities and vicissitudes of rhetoric. But even an account of mapping that encompasses various sorts of mapping is not enough to give us a complete picture of how mapping works. It is not sufficient to link mapping as a micro-system and rhetoric as a macro-system without acknowledging that other factors may be involved. That is why, in the following chapter, I explore the interanimating force of narrative.

5 The Story of Metaphor “Business is business,” the Little Man said, “A battle where ‘everything goes,’ And the only gospel is ‘get ahead,’ And never spare friends or foes. ‘Slay or be slain,’ is the slogan cold; You must struggle and slash and tear, For Business is Business, a fight for gold, Where all that you do is fair!” “Business is Business,” the Big Man said, “A battle to make of earth A place to yield us more clothes and bread, More pleasure and joy and mirth; There are still some bandits and buccaneers Who are jungle-bred beasts of trade, But their number dwindles with passing years And dead is the code they made!” —Berton Braley, “Business Is Business,” 1927

Metaphor is not the only figure of speech we use to make sense of our world, although current emphases may make it seem so. Perhaps because metaphor study has been so prolific in recent decades, it is tempting to infer a sort of metaphor chauvinism: that no matter what the question, metaphor is the answer. Jeanne Fahnestock, for one, responds to this seeming hegemony of the metaphor by pointing out that so obscure a figure as antimetabole (obscure in language scholarship, not in speech) has important ramifications for scientific discovery. But metaphor chauvinism is probably more impression than actuality. From time to time, although not as often as one might like, theorists and researchers have observed the complementary relation of metaphor, metonymy, and irony. I want to show here that a rhetorical view of metaphor makes it impossible to describe metaphoric functioning without acknowledging its integral relation to other discursive forms: in particular, narrative.

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Since Roman Jakobson, metaphor theorists have, by and large, assumed that metaphor and story are distinct, that metaphor operates on the paradigmatic or synchronic axis and that story (or narrative) operates, along with metonymy, on the syntagmatic or diachronic axis (369–70). This assumption is embedded in virtually all metaphor theory simply because it so persistently discusses metaphor without discussing story at the same time. Of course, narrative theory generally recognizes that the totality of narrative effect includes ostensibly synchronic elements. But the precise relation between metaphor and story has never been adequately explored in a discussion of how metaphor itself works. I have made a habit in this book of criticizing the Aristotelian view of metaphor, but Aristotle does get one thing right. He claims that the best metaphors are those that achieve a “bringing-before-the-eyes,” which are metaphors that “signify things engaged in an activity” (On Rhetoric 245– 48). Bringing before the eyes—making sequential, motivated human action visible—is an important function of stories. But the specific way stories are intertwined with metaphors goes beyond what Aristotle observes. Aristotle and others have noted that most metaphors can be made into mini-narrations. This suggests something about the fluid interface between metaphor and story. Yet it also suggests a simple conversion mechanism, as if the relation between metaphors and stories is really a matter of alternate forms and degree of elaboration. Along this line, some see metaphor as the root of a story. In his study of organizational problem-solving and “generative” metaphors, Donald Schön argues that the “framing of problems often depends upon metaphors underlying the stories which generate problem setting” (138). Although Schön is correct that stories play an important role in framing problems, and that particular metaphors are conventionally associated with certain problem-setting stories, it is erroneous to assume that a metaphor can “underlie” any story—as if it were the hidden origin of the story. Similarly, Richard Boland and Ralph Greenberg see metaphors as creators of “organizational myths, images, and stories” (31). But, aside from a commonly held belief that metaphor holds near mystical generative powers, there is no reason to think that metaphor is the origin of even mythical stories. Perhaps the best effort to define the relation between metaphor and story has been made by Donald McCloskey, who argues that in economics all stories are answered by metaphors, and all metaphors are answered by stories (“Storytelling” 5). Thus, McCloskey begins to explore the way that economists’ metaphors are more than just seeds of stories, that it is part and parcel of both metaphor and story to be attached to a rhetorical position. However, McCloskey does not explore the complementary relation between metaphor and story, except in its most conventional

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form, allegory, where one story corresponds isomorphically to another. He links metaphor and story in dialogic relation, but he configures them as opposites. Some stories can contradict some metaphors. But metaphor is not fundamentally opposed to story. When we select our metaphors, we validate our stories; conversely, when we comprehend the world through story, we license some metaphors and not others. Moreover, because what I call licensing stories overarch the more localized function of mapping, story is one of the chief means through which we understand and deploy metaphor. That is, licensing stories help us to determine the viability of particular metaphoric mappings and guide our endorsements of metaphors. Having said this, it is important to reemphasize that theorists have not been mistaken in seeing metaphor as a partial mapping of source onto target—and that various sorts of mapping play an important role in the way we make sense of metaphor. I have said as much, with some crucial elaboration, in chapter 4. Some cognitive scientists make a much larger claim: that because we understand metaphor through mapping, metaphoric mapping constitutes a basic structure of our thought. This claim grows out of what Raymond Gibbs calls “the cognitive wager,” the wager that language is not separate from thought but representative of it (15). If we accept the cognitive wager, as I am inclined to do, then we must then take special care in examining how all of the language associated with metaphor functions, not just that language which leads us to notice mapping. In other words, since metaphors are inseparable from larger communicative circumstances, we cannot assume that one mechanism for understanding metaphor functions in the same way or with equal importance for every metaphor. Rather, we must note a repertoire of tactics for interpreting metaphor. These tactics include various sorts of mapping; they include story-based tactics; and all of these tactics operate in concert with each other. I base my argument primarily upon data gathered in a series of focus groups, in which licensing stories were a prominent tactic for interpreting and evaluating metaphors. However, the phenomenon of licensing stories is observable in naturally occurring discourse, as shown in the brief case study of Bill Gates that closes this chapter.

Story and Understanding At least since Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” people have spoken of the world and its events as stories. Life Is A Story is a conceptual metaphor long re-envoiced by literary writers and everyday speakers alike. David Copperfield begins “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else,

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these pages must show.” That Life Is A Story is so often associated with fictional genres may account for its often suspect status compared to nonnarrative writing. It is often seen as artifice, inadequate to represent facts. Many current researchers, however, view story as vitally important to the construction and conveyance of fact. For example, in urging that story be legitimized in composition classrooms, Anne DiPardo argues, “The narrative urge is as ubiquitous as our desire to understand our condition, and just as important as knowledge gleaned through more systematically rational means” (63). Similarly, research into disciplinary writing shows that story is integral to fields most closely associated with, to borrow DiPardo’s phrase, systematic and rational means. Greg Myers not only concludes that story is important to the biological research article and to understanding scientific facts but also that unlike literary stories, which are open to virtually endless interpretation, scientific stories reach consensus, which in constructionist paradigm is tantamount to fact: To say that these scientific texts are stories is not to say that they are just stories, and that therefore the literary and anthropological specialists in stories can understand them on a deeper level than the understanding of the scientists themselves. Scientific texts are different from literary texts. . . . As we have seen, scientific texts seem to have many different versions at the beginning, but as the process of interpretation within the discipline and in the public proceeds, one version is used for practical purposes, for placing one’s claim in historical context, for drawing lessons for the research community, for explaining one’s research to the public, for training students to be researchers. We end up with just one standardized story of split genes, one “adenovirus” story. (120–21)

Similarly, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Misia Landau, Donald McCloskey, Hayden White, Richard Boland and Ramkrishnan Tenkasi, and Elinor Ochs and her associates point out that stories are a key to constructing both standard and provisional truths in hard sciences, in social sciences, in historical writing, in the workplace, and in everyday talk. However, the importance of story goes beyond ubiquity of use. As Jerome Bruner argues, story is a basic psychological capability. Bruner differentiates between story (or narrative) and what he calls “paradigmatic” forms of expression—logical, nonsequential discourse associated with science (Actual Minds 11). He argues that story is not only as important as paradigmatic discourse but also that story is fundamental to the way we construct notions of ourselves and of the world (Acts of Meaning, “Life as Narrative”). With respect to autobiography, Bruner argues, “Culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the selftelling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose—build the very

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events of life” (“Life” 15). For Bruner, story is not just a way of telling about our lives, nor are the stories we tell about our lives just stories. Story is a cultural and mental instrument without which we cannot perceive, remember, or tell about our lives and our worlds; it is not a possible way of conveying fact but rather a cultural and cognitive structure that is fundamental to fact. An even stronger version of this thesis has been offered by cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson. Schank and Abelson propose: 1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences, 2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories, 3. The content of story memories depends on whether and how they are told to others, and these reconstituted memories form the basis of the individual’s remembered self. (“Knowledge” 1) Thus, according to Schank and Abelson, story is not an important structure in human understanding, it is the important structure in human understanding. Of course, most strong theses are met with opposition, and Schank and Abelson’s story-as-understanding thesis has been criticized. But even Schank and Abelson’s critics support some weaker version. William Brewer rebuts Schank and Abelson, saying, “Story memory is an interesting and important part of human memory, but clearly human memory is a mansion of many rooms, including spatial memory, causal memory, and musical memory” (113). David Rubin says simply, “All knowledge cannot be reduced to a single system, even if that system is stories” (153). In other words, story may not be all there is to human understanding, but it is most certainly a large part of it. Schank and Abelson’s argument is essentially this: Thinking and understanding are functional. While we may know static facts such as whales are mammals, this sort of factual knowledge has little to do with ordinary cognition. Ordinary thinking and understanding take place as part of social interaction. Since social interaction is characterized by the indexing and exchange of stories, it makes sense that we understand each others’ stories by mapping them onto our own similar stories. Importantly, what Schank and Abelson mean by story is something more than mere scripts or episodic memory, both of which apply to known situations. Through story, we make sense of unknown situations in light of our stories about known situations. They argue: Understanding the world means explaining its happenings in a way that seems consonant with what you already believe. Thus, the task

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The Story of Metaphor of an understander who has a memory filled with stories is to determine which of those stories is most relevant to the situation at hand. The old story is then used as means for interpreting the new story. (“Knowledge” 5)

In short, Schank and Abelson refute cognitive theories that argue that understanding is a rule-governed processing of bundles of decontextualized facts or propositions. The evidence Schank and Abelson use for storybased understanding is taken largely from conversations (as is much of the evidence in this chapter), but they argue that conversation is a reliable indicator of what is important to understanding—and an important component of memory and understanding: “Conversation plays a major role in the shaping and alteration of memories. Material that is not talked about, or at least rehearsed, is not edited and integrated into the rest of memory. For all practical purposes, such material remains inert and useless” (“So All” 228). For the sake of my argument, it is not important that we accept Schank and Abelson’s strong hypothesis but rather that we recognize the general consensus about story that is now coalescing. This consensus suggests that story is essential to the construction, memory, and conveyance of facts and beliefs. Facts and beliefs are versions of truth as we understand it. And stories are—at least—among the fundamental ways we engage issues of truth and falsehood. I argue that stories are essential to our understanding of metaphors. We treat metaphors, like all other meaningful utterances, as verifiable—true or false in varying degrees. The main way we determine the truthfulness of metaphors is through licensing stories.

The Focus Groups Focus groups provide a way of examining cognitive and social processes because they allow participants to elaborate upon their views and to interact with other points of view. As Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone observe, “Focus groups can reveal cognitive or ideological premises that structure arguments, the ways in which various discourses rooted in particular contexts and given experiences are brought to bear upon interpretations, the discursive construction of social identities, and so forth” (96). My purpose in conducting numerous focus groups with varying demographic compositions was to generate a variety of talk about metaphors that would put their social and discursive dimensions on display. I conducted eight focus groups. The groups had as many as eight discussants and as few as three (thirty-eight participants in all). Each group was composed of people who were roughly similar in age and professional status. In order to prompt talk about metaphors, discussants were presented with a questionnaire that asked them to rate the truthfulness of a

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series of trade and business metaphors (see appendix). Discussants rated the metaphors on a five point scale as follows: 1 = not very true, 2 = could be seen as true, 3 = somewhat true, 4 = very true, 5 = absolutely true. Discussants took “truthfulness” to be roughly equivalent to “aptness.” That is, while occasionally a discussant noted that trade is not actually war, by and large, discussants assumed that the metaphors were not literally true and discussed their metaphorical aptness. Most of the metaphors drew from conceptual metaphors that permeate the language of business and trade such as Trade Is War, Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers, Trade Is A Journey, Companies Are People, The Economy Is A Machine, Companies Are Animals, and Companies Are Machines. The questionnaire also included dance metaphors (e.g., trade is a dance), which are present, though rarely, in the standard language of trade and economics. The metaphors were selected specifically for these focus groups and were worded both as equation-like metaphors (A is B) and similes (A is like B). They included conventional metaphors such as trade is war, business is like football, business is a two-way street, IBM is a giant, and the economy is a machine. They also included whimsical metaphors such as business is a bombing mission, IBM is Babe Ruth, trade is a voyage of exploration, business is the process of choreography, and markets are bubbles. (Even these relatively whimsical metaphors represent a kind of expression found in standard trade talk. For instance, it is standard to describe the end of a short-lived market boom as the bursting of a bubble.) Although it is not always possible to categorize a metaphor definitively— markets are fortresses, for example, can be categorized equally well as a war metaphor and as a container metaphor—the questionnaire presented approximately five metaphors from each category. After rating the metaphors, discussants wrote brief rationales for four or five metaphors that they found to be most true and four or five metaphors that they found to be least true. Both the numerical ratings and the brief rationales formed the basis of audiotaped discussion. I encouraged discussants to compare answers and to explore areas of agreement and disagreement. Because the focus groups were held in informal settings, the discussions were relaxed in tone. Discussants spoke freely, shared ideas, wandered from the topic, and made jokes both about each others’ answers and about the questionnaire task itself. However, in the main, discussants spoke seriously about the metaphors and the issues raised by the metaphors.

How Mappings Are Licensed The focus groups provided evidence for all of the varieties of mapping that have been mainstays of metaphor theory: feature mapping, system-

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atic mapping, and image-schematic mapping. As discussed in chapter 4, by feature mapping I mean the Aristotelian notion of corresponding features; by systematic mapping I mean the notion that we prefer relational mappings to simple feature mappings; and by image-schematic mapping I mean mappings based on image schemas such as the verticality image schema of More Is Up or the pathway image schema of Life Is A Journey. No variety of mapping operates discretely. Rather, feature mappings always carry a hint of systematic and image-schematic mappings; systematic mappings entail features and image schemas; and image-schematic mappings readily accommodate feature and systematic mappings. Thus, for focus group discussants, all of the tactics were ready-at-hand all of the time. However, while all of the mapping varieties were possible—indeed, discussants showed considerable facility in generating many mappings— the aptness of any particular mapping depended upon the ideological bent of the discussant. That is, discussants evaluated possible mappings in the light of their political, philosophical, social, and personal commitments. These commitments were at minimum revealed by, and perhaps were constituted by, what I am calling licensing stories. Licensing stories come in different varieties. Some are stories of personal experience: narrations short and long that provide first-hand evidence of how business and trade typically functions. Many of these personal narrations are presented as recollections (I once had a boss, who . . . ). Some licensing stories are common-knowledge stories: narrative truisms that sum up what “everyone knows.” These might be thought of as the “whenever” stories (whenever a company tries to . . . ). Other stories are authoritative: repetitions of published stories or of those told by an expert. Still others are fables: anecdotal truths about the world that are not represented by actual occurrences but rather are exemplified by idealized tales. The stories may be of any length, some more elaborated than others. In fact, many fables and authoritative stories are so well known that they can be indexed very briefly. Whatever the length or style of presentation, they hold in common an explicit or easily recovered narrative structure that includes such elements as characters, sequence, complication, and resolution. Moreover, and importantly, they are all—whether fact or fiction—touchstones of truth, demonstrative instances of the way people, companies, societies, and nations function. A licensing story may sound whimsical, but there is no whimsy at its root because even the whimsical story is evidence of how the world works. Licensing stories are not merely supporting narratives that happen to be confluent with a given metaphor. They are individual and cultural keys that people use to establish some disposition toward a metaphor—either a conceptual metaphor or a specific instance of it. As Tim Linzey points out, metaphors may be deployed in various ways that give them varying degrees of force in a conversational context. He identifies heuristic, ex-

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planatory, and fiduciary “repositioning capacities” of metaphor—which I take to mean roughly that conversants may utter metaphors with greater or lesser insistence upon its ultimate truth value. In evaluating a metaphor, we may be disposed to endorse it wholeheartedly, to reject it altogether, or to negotiate its interpretation or aptness. All of these dispositions, from endorsement to rejection, are licensed by stories. Because in the focus groups licensing stories exerted a controlling influence over mappings, I want to propose something akin to Lakoff and Turner’s invariance principle. As I have said, the invariance principle asserts in part that metaphoric mappings will not violate image-schematic correspondences. Similarly, for us to regard any mapping as apt, it must comport with our licensing stories—our repertoire of ideologically inflected narratives, short and long, individual, professional, and cultural, that organize our sense of how the world works and how the world should work. Below I offer evidence of how licensing stories guided discussants’ feature-based, systematic, and image-schematic mappings.

Feature Mapping and Licensing Stories One difficulty with the idea of single-feature mapping is that single features are always made up of parts. Even so common a physical-feature metaphor as he’s hard as rock to mean he’s muscular involves at least some analysis of hardness: that hard things do not give when we press on them, that hard things do not feel pain, that it hurts to be hit by hard things, and so on. The single feature is never quite single. Nonetheless, we do combine these analyzable features into gestalts. The gestalt becomes analyzable in a different way when we ascribe psychological qualities to physical characteristics, as in he’s a rock when uttered to mean roughly he’s dependable. When we map psychological qualities, feature mappings are licensed by both individual and standard cultural stories. When he’s a rock means he’s dependable, the feature dependability indexes a standard repertoire of stories that constitute dependability. This repertoire would, no doubt, include stories of people who help in times of crisis, people who always arrive on time, people who maintain an emotional equilibrium in the face of trouble, and so on. Indeed, the utterer of he’s a rock would probably have in mind a set of dependability stories specifically about the person to whom the metaphor refers. In focus groups, discussants frequently explained their metaphor preferences on the basis of one or more shared characteristics. For example, explaining his high truth rating for business is combat, Peter, a college junior, noted the feature competitiveness in both business and combat: I think that one’s—I think that one is absolutely true because in business you constantly—you’re competing against people. People, people inside of a business are competing against each other and it’s

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The Story of Metaphor basically a fierce—it’s basically a fierce battle. And that’s what I get from the word combat, it’s a battle. So it’s a struggle between people as—in business to succeed and get higher in the business. Or, also in the business world, it’s, it’s a struggle between companies. So those are my reasons behind that.

Although Peter’s explanation centered ostensibly on a single, shared feature, it entailed broader cultural understandings that were evidenced by key words, words that referenced standard stories. He equated “combat” with “battle,” a word commonly used to describe business activity. With this shift toward the commonplace business parlance that associates competition with success and speaks of the process of succeeding as a “battle” or a Darwinian “struggle,” Peter evoked in just a few words the most standard of business stories, found in popular business books, in earnest business theory, and in the satiric plot of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Mead). Moreover, the story was deployed with multiple orientations. At first, he framed business competition as personal combat, worker against worker. Toward the end of his comment, he noted that the competition between businesses is also fierce, adding, “Or, also in the business world, you know, it’s, it’s a struggle between companies.” It was not a single story that licensed Peter’s mapping but two related stories—or more likely a larger set of stories, some of which were tacit. Moreover, Peter’s story embedded a number of tacit metaphors and concomitant image-schematic mappings. He spoke of a “struggle between people as—you know, in business to succeed and get higher in the business.” Thus, he invoked a blend of the standard conceptual metaphors More Is Up, Happy Is Up, and Success Is Up. These metaphors, familiar to all English speakers, are part and parcel of everyday business discourse. Unless we remain at the bottom of the totem pole, we climb the corporate ladder or rise through the ranks in order to become upper management. And when we reach the pinnacle of success, we may find the verticality metaphors literalized by a penthouse office. These verticality metaphors blend readily with war metaphors because, while war and battle usually operate on a horizontal plane, victory is vertical. We come out on top or become king of the hill. And our enemies are flattened, laid low, and beaten down, where they will never rise again. Now, although Peter’s specific comprehension of business is combat depended upon a global comprehension of common metaphors, the aptness of business is combat—its capacity to convey a truthful representation of circumstances—depended not upon the standard conceptual blend of metaphors alone but rather upon Peter’s assessment of how the world works, an assessment that was expressed in brief narrative phrases and in key words that indexed standard business stories. He found business is combat true because “in business you constantly, you know, you’re

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competing against people,” “people inside of a business are competing against each other,” and it is a “struggle between people as—you know, in business to succeed and get higher in the business.” In short, Peter’s licensing stories encompassed a view of external circumstances that, to him, were not merely comprehended but known—known, in Peter’s case, in the form of narratively structured truisms. Not all licensing stories are drawn from truisms. Often licensing stories are historically specific, learned from the press or crafted from personal experience. Jim, a software entrepreneur, invoked competitionsuccess narratives in mapping survival behavior from animals onto companies. He explained his endorsement of companies are animals as a simple, isomorphic correspondence: Survival behavior is a salient feature of animals; likewise it is a salient feature of companies. But he used this simple mapping as focal point for a complex of licensing stories. Jim’s first story was nonspecific, like Peter’s truisms: “A company, I think, is an entity quite above and apart from the people who run the company because the company is an entity. It’s an economic entity, and its goal is survival. And it survives no matter what.” The company’s need for survival meant, “It doesn’t matter who gets fired or laid off or what it has to do.” Subsequently, perhaps because of his long business experience, Jim’s repertoire of business survival stories included an authoritative thumbnail history of U.S. business, its electronics industry in particular. He explained, Well, animals survive. They adapt because of their environment, and businesses do, too. I mean, American business has adapted a lot in the last fifteen, twenty years. And that wasn’t their choice. [Laughs.] They’ve paid no small price in order to retool their electronics industry. It’s something they had to do because if they didn’t do it, they wouldn’t survive.

Jim saw the story of the U.S. industry as pervasive, empirical, and generalizable. Because most of us are at least loosely familiar with the changes that have come about in U.S. electronics, we can easily imagine the many subsidiary stories that are indexed by Jim’s brief narrative—stories of large corporations challenged by new, low-price foreign competitors who attain market share, forcing American corporations to streamline manufacturing operations, often laying off workers as they do so. So familiar are these stories, we can readily appreciate Jim’s darkly humorous comment, “And that wasn’t their choice.” But it isn’t just our familiarity with American industry over the “last fifteen, twenty years” that makes the abbreviated story accessible; it is the long-standing master narrative of economic Darwinism that is attached to the word “survival,” especially when it is invoked with respect to both

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animals and economics. Economic Darwinism is one of our standard cultural allegories, and it licenses any number of metaphoric clichés such as it’s a jungle out there, dog-eat-dog, and commerce’s food chain. We can easily fill in the richly detailed stories that are indexed by such features as survival behavior—and, in turn, for these standard stories to license a metaphor.

Systematic Mapping and Licensing Stories In chapter 4, I discussed systematic mapping in terms of physical systematic correspondences, as exemplified in the analogy of the solar system and the atom. In addition to this physical systematicity, Catherine Clement and Dedre Gentner have explored systematic mappings in analogies between stories. Clement and Gentner found that when people are asked to find analogic correspondences between brief stories, they map features whose “causal antecedents” are similar from story to story. Like Clement and Gentner’s subjects, focus group discussants often mapped one story onto another, finding correspondences between both features and causal structures. However, the relation between two stories always went beyond formal, systematic correspondences. Where correspondences between stories were noted, discussants also asserted that their licensing stories were either especially accurate or ethically defensible. In other words, the stories represented the individual’s ideologically inflected perception of the “true” nature of target and source. Typical of this pairing of formal correspondence and story-based licensing were narrative mappings of machine functioning onto economic behavior. One discussant found the economy is a machine apt because, like machine parts, workers necessarily wear down over time and are callously replaced because of larger exigencies. Another discussant rejected the economy is a machine, since the economy seemed to her unmanageable. Yet she endorsed companies are machines because workers who function badly can, like machine parts, be replaced. On one level, these two mappings were the same. Economic activity corresponded with machinelike operation; workers corresponded with machine parts. However, the causal sequences varied. One discussant focused upon workers who lacked agency to control impersonal causes, the other focused upon managerial agency that effected positive change. The aptness of the metaphors the economy is a machine and companies are machines depended not upon the possibility of corresponding causal sequences but instead upon the perceived truth-value of the discussant’s narrative construction of the world. So far, I have presented instances of conventional metaphors that were licensed by stories. But licensing stories can also support novel metaphors such as trade is a dance. Constructing a systematic correspondence be-

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tween trade stories and dance stories, one focus group, composed of female professionals, co-constructed an interpretation of trade is a dance. Together, they explained that the physical moves of dancers are similar to the commercial and marketing moves of businesses. In a sense, their interpretation could be seen as single feature mapping because they identified motion as a common feature shared by business and dance. However, their mapping of dancing motion onto business maneuvers also incorporated a story-based systematicity. Dance and business were understood in light of recursive stories in which one motion prompts another. Importantly, the motions described were not mechanical actions and reactions but conscious responses made by participants in a story— protagonists and antagonists. After the group explicitly agreed that trade is a dance would make the most sense if it referred to the dance of a couple, rather than a solo or ensemble dance performance, they improvised: Lynn: Competitors make different moves and you have to respond. Rikki: Yeah. Me: What kind of moves? Lynn: They may decide to copy your product, and you have to react or— Rikki: Sue the shit out of them. Lynn: Or change yours, whatever. Zoey: Or they get in the market, and you decide you have to move to a different market or expand your market. Lynn: Right. All: Price cutting moves.

No discussant mentioned familiar attributive qualities of dance such as grace, rhythm, or expressiveness. Instead, they stressed awareness of another’s motion and the decision to move in response. Like dancers, business people “have to respond,” “decide to copy,” decide to “sue the shit out of,” “decide to move to a different market,” or counter with “price cutting moves.” Offering a different story-based systematic mapping of trade is a dance, Tony, a marketing executive, ignored the possible correspondence between specific dance moves and specific business moves altogether. He emphasized that dancelike motion depends upon the consent of both dance partners and trade partners: So, anyway, my notion is that a dance is a shared . . . symmetry of motion between two entities. You kind of are agreeing on what you’re doing, even if the girl doesn’t really know where you’re leading her, you know. And if you don’t dance smoothly together, well,

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The Story of Metaphor you’ll step on each other, and you’ll stop dancing—you’ll stop trading. In other words, if you, if you exceed the rules of engagement, either with trade or with a dance, you’ll stop doing it, and it’ll no longer exist. So to me, that’s why trade is a dance.

Although Tony did not note the correspondence between dance moves and business maneuvers that many other discussants saw, he did map some specific features (or characters) and link them systematically. For him, dance partners equated with trading partners, and one partner’s motion was the cause of the other’s cooperative motion—until, as he projected in his story, the mutual agreement breaks down and the symmetrical motion ends.

Image-Schematic Mapping and Licensing Stories More than any other variety of mapping, image-schematic mapping operated tacitly. Yet its operation was easy to infer. Most striking were occasions when discussants grouped similarly structured metaphors together, readily transferring underlying image schemas from domain to domain. Tony, who described dance and trade as a “shared symmetry of motion between two entities,” preceded his schematization of dance and trade with a tacit acknowledgment of the image-schematic similarity between business is a joint excursion, business is a two-way street, and trade is a dance. Responding to another discussant’s high rating of business is a joint excursion, he began, Yeah, like the business is a two-way street, it’s a joint excursion. And then, trade is a dance, I gave it a five because I believe once you make contact with [customers], then that’s all you do, for the rest of your relationship—is you’re dancing with the person you’re bartering with.

After several exchanges, in which discussants agreed with Tony’s point, and Tony expanded his approval of business is a two-way street to include all travel metaphors, Tony specified what it was he saw in common among these metaphors: exchange. “But each encounter is a, a dance, between ex—a dance of exchanges, continuously. What we’re doing here today is an exchange of things. Since I didn’t know what this was, I was doing it as an exchange of friendship with my friend Dave.” It might be the case that exchange amounts to a feature shared by target and source in business is a joint excursion, business is a two-way street, and trade is a dance; thus, Tony’s explanation could be seen as simple feature mapping in related metaphors. However, he soon linked “exchange” to “shared symmetry of motion between entities”—a description that does not evoke strong attributive associations but rather divorces the image schema from attributive elements.

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Moreover, the ease with which he associated several metaphors suggests that it was not an equation between types of exchange with their concomitant features that facilitated Tony’s explanation. That is, it did not seem that exchanged money equaled exchanged dance steps equaled exchanged motion on two-way streets but rather that the shape of the exchange event—cooperative, symmetrical motion—was transferred from one domain to another, allowing Tony to fill in specific varieties of exchange in keeping with conversational or situational prompts. The specifics cited by Tony ranged from money to dance steps to friendship— which was not part of the metaphors being discussed at all. Also striking were image-schematic mappings linked together in conceptual systems, where conceptual metaphors’ image schemas were mutually entailed. Milo defended trade is war not by discussing trade and war but rather by illustrating his notion of a market as a pie, a common instance of the conceptual metaphor Markets Are Containers. That is, for Milo markets were discrete, bounded entities that, like nations, must be defended: I thought that I was very original when I sat down with my bosses years and years ago, and I said to them, “The market is a pie.” [He drew a simple bird’s-eye view of a pie and divided it into segments.] The market is a pie. Now, if you’re going to divide it four ways, or six, or eight, or sixteen, or twenty, thirty-two—it doesn’t make any difference. It is the same pie. . . . So who’s going to buy my product is a question of my ability to sell my product better than anybody else. It’s war.

By asserting the aptness of trade is war and the conceptually entailed container metaphors markets are containers and markets are walled-in spaces, Milo prompted a debate among discussants who also grouped war and container metaphors together but disagreed with Milo’s endorsement of them. What ensued was a debate between licensing stories. Opposing markets are containers and markets are walled-in spaces, Joan offered a personal-experience story: You know, I maybe took [container metaphors] from our side of the business, for what we do. We work in a very select, narrow field. And yeah, it’s one of the things that was probably wrong about how we started out. We should have been broader. I think you always have to keep looking to figure out where your goods and services can be used. And where you can expand. And where you can grow.

Milo responded with a news-based story: I’ll give you a, a good example. Philip Morris. Fifty percent of their business is not cigarette related business because they discovered that their market can no longer expand. And, and they are trying to get

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The Story of Metaphor away from the businesses that are more lean, probably. So, they are trying to get away from it. You will find many, many companies who are expanding into other areas—I don’t know, hundreds of them.

After this exchange of stories, Joan acknowledged that Milo had identified a situation that can arise in marketing. Jim, her business partner, agreed, adding, “I think markets do have limits, and some companies manage to saturate a market, like the cigarette companies.” The possible imageschematic mappings were comprehended by all. At issue was the relative correctness of the stories licensing a cluster of trade metaphors that shared or entailed the container image schema.

Tacit Mappings and Licensing Stories Explicit explanations of mappings were, of course, an artifact of the focus group task itself. In natural conversation, metaphoric mappings are usually assumed. From time to time, however, a focus group became relaxed enough to permit what seemed to be authentic conversation about trade and business metaphors. In these relatively unguarded moments, stories dominated the talk, stories that both licensed and embedded metaphoric mappings. Once, after the formal focus group task had been completed, I informed a group that my study centered specifically on war metaphors in trade and business. I asked for some general comments about war metaphors that they encounter in their work lives. The discussion that followed was wide-ranging, covering cultural attitudes toward war, careers, world markets, specific industries, metaphors in entertainment, attitudes toward language, and so on. Instead of weighing the merits of specific mappings, they explored and debated whether any mapping of war onto trade and business was compatible with both their generational and individual notions about war and business. And they illustrated their points with licensing stories. Mike, a business executive in his forties, opened the general discussion by theorizing that war metaphors make more sense to an older generation who fought in World War II and Korea and who brought a military mentality into the workplace. Soon Mike began to express his own attitudes toward work and war in the form of a licensing story that described a basic change in how businesses operate: If you take the structure of companies, if you look at the military organizational chart, and how that worked through the fifties, and, and the whole concept of if you were a good cog, a good wheel, you stayed with the company, you did your job, you did what you were told, you’d retire from that company with a nice package. I mean, that whole thing’s been turned upside down. It just doesn’t exist anymore.

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Mike’s notion of how business works today was incompatible with military metaphors. It rejected a conceptual blend of metaphors: companies compete in a warlike manner (Trade Is War); companies, therefore, need to be structured in an orderly way, like armies and machines (Armies Are Machines; Companies Are Machines); machinelike organizations are organized hierarchically (verticality image schema). In rejecting this conceptual blend, he also rejected some feature mappings: workers correspond with cogs or wheels in the machine. But his story was about human agency. That is, according to Mike’s licensing story, when the World War II generation began to retire, the structure of business changed. Consequently, business people began to behave differently, especially younger business people: But the military—I see it in our company all the time—the older guys are terrified of conflict with, with people in positions of power that are higher than theirs. The other guys [younger guys]—they’ll have conflict all the time. But they expect a more fluid life in the first place.

It is significant that Mike generalized his view of how business works to how the world works. He rejected militarylike orderliness in business and in life overall—and this story of how the world works inflected his understanding of Trade Is War in its many venues and variations. Later in the conversation, he told a story of international trade that he saw as incompatible with Trade Is War and its entailed container metaphors: I mean, look, I love this whole concept of buying an American car. Define that for me. I mean, you see that ad for Honda. Honda says, “Here’s our car. And it’s all our bumpers from Lexington.” And by the time you get done with it, the only thing that isn’t American is the name. And that’s absolutely intentional on the Japanese’ part.

Again, Mike implicitly rejected a conceptual blend that was not licensed by his story. For Mike, international trade did not have the clearly delineable structure of the military sphere, where containerlike sides act aggressively toward each other (Trade Is War, Markets Are Containers). This, of course, might invite us to infer that Mike rejected Trade Is War simply because of an incompatibility of image schemas. At root, though, it was not image schemas that drove his assessment of metaphoric aptness. He was perfectly capable of comprehending business and trade as belligerent, competitive activity between discrete sides, as his ascription of this view to an older generation shows. But his narratively expressed (probably narratively constituted) construals of external circumstances belied the metaphors—and thus made them inapt. Mike’s licensing stories were challenged by Brian, who was willing to see at least some parts of trade and business as adversarial. For example,

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he commented, “I look at something more like the apparel market, where they haven’t, where dollars aren’t—even international finance, where it is war, where somebody’s got to lose. If you win, somebody’s got to lose.” Brian’s rebuttal not only comported with an oppositional image schema, it acted as a brief how all business works story. That is, Brian did not offer his observation in order to cite a possible exception to Mike’s way of seeing things but rather offered it as a representative story of how business generally works. It was in keeping with his remarks throughout the focus group, just as when he challenged Mike’s generational theory, saying, “Our generation is just as combative. We just don’t put it in the same terms is what I think.” The discussion of Trade Is War did not remain within the boundaries of the metaphor long before it became a discussion of the nature of not just business but life, of the history of mankind, of personal experiences, and so on. (Indeed, narrative licensing often expands beyond the metaphor at hand.) As Keith explained both his understanding and rejection of Trade Is War, he gathered into his explanation language-use issues paired with a personal life-experience story: I don’t think—the reason that I don’t agree that it’s like war, and all that thing, is because it’s not like war. War, people die. I, I think that you can keep that spirit, that aggressive spirit, harness it and use it to, to an end in business, and not necessarily go out and maim people. We used to come off the stage in the band, and we’d say, “Oh, we killed ’em tonight.” Well, we didn’t actually kill anybody. We didn’t want to. But we made them like us. And we said we killed them.

Disagreeing, Brian pointed out that, after all, Trade Is War is just the language of trade, in the same sense that “we killed them” is just the language of entertainment. Keith was not satisfied. For him, Trade Is War had resonances that—although he clearly understood and could generate plausible mappings—made the metaphor neither true nor apt: But I’m saying, to take it to today’s terms, in modern terms, that business is where we’re doing that battle now. So to take that language and bring it to business—I don’t think we have to have the actual feeling of gutting an opponent to say things like that. So that’s why I think likening to war is bad, but—

Keith’s story of how business works might be characterized equally well as how business should work. He is an entrepreneur in his late thirties, once a musician and an artist, who has built a successful company that markets products throughout the United States and internationally. But because he chafed at his work experience in companies whose style was adversarial, he rejected the language of war—especially intensified feature mappings of it such as “maim” and “gutting.” It was the totality of his

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thought and experience that combined to create his licensing stories, stories that licensed trade is a voyage of exploration but not trade is war, and which were distilled in his rejection of Trade Is War generally. Struggling perhaps with the clash between his culturally intuitive comprehension of Trade Is War and his personal opposition to war and conflict, he summed up his view, saying simply, “Well, we can aspire to something better.”

The Storied Bill Gates Companies are people. In the case of Microsoft, Inc., the company is Bill Gates. No corporate symbol has ever been more alternately lauded and vilified than this Harvard dropout who, along with his partner Paul Allen, first revolutionized, then monopolized, the computer software industry. It is no wonder he has been both the beneficiary and victim of stories. The Internet—Gates’s most recent object of desire—is brimming with Gates haters, who exchange stories of Microsoft’s nefarious business practices and derogatory jokes about Gatesian megalomania. Gates is regularly accused of pursuing world domination. One circulating e-mail message purports to be a Microsoft press release in which Gates announces his ownership of the English language. Likewise, Gates is skewered for over-promising and releasing “buggy” products. One Web site relays a joke about Bill Gates’s arrival at the pearly gates, where Saint Peter offers him a chance to preview heaven and hell before making his choice. Heaven is the paved-in-gold, angels-and-harps place of Renaissance paintings. Hell is a Caribbean vacation spot. Gates chooses hell. A week later Saint Peter visits hell, where the bespectacled software mogul is being singed with hellfire and pricked with Satanic pitchforks. “You lied to me!” Gates cries out. “Nice demo, huh?” Saint Peter replies. Gates may be frequently demonized by press and public. But he is at least equally admired for his intelligence, his enthusiasm for his products, his reworking of corporate culture—his success. In a sense, Bill Gates may be corporate America’s Richard Nixon. The verdict is in for Nixon: he is remembered more for Watergate than for opening China. But for Bill Gates, it remains to be seen whether he will be remembered for uncommon success or for unscrupulous business tactics. In other words, will he be remembered for his commercial journey or for his commercial war? It is currently under rhetorical consideration. Bill Gates’s public image is enmeshed in the rhetoric that constitutes Trade Is War—or, more properly, the related metaphor Business Is War.1 The Bill Gates debate parallels the conversation of Business Is War—it is the same in constitution and character. That is, in the discourse of business, the question is unsettled whether business really is war or whether it really is peace, friendship, journeying, and the like. But the rhetorical exchange is not simply a matter of shouts from stubbornly opposing sides.

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It is a matter of opposing sides arguing plausible positions and leaving open the possibility of persuasion, without which there would be no real debate, no conversation. In the same way, Bill Gates’s public image is made up of two plausible components, one that is crystallized largely in the metaphor Business Is War, the other largely in the metaphor Business Is A Journey. These metaphors are licensed by stories that are circulated on the Internet, in journalistic articles, and in nonfiction books. By looking at some of these stories, we can see the relation between metaphors and stories from a different perspective than in the focus groups. In discourse as it occurs naturally, there is no obvious sequential relation between metaphors and stories. That is, speakers and writers do not necessarily encounter a metaphor and consequently seek stories to either bear out or contradict the metaphor’s aptness. Nor do speakers and writers necessarily encounter stories and then recruit compatible metaphors. Instead, there is a simultaneous dynamism to the rhetorical environment. Stories suggest metaphors; metaphors are bolstered by stories. Thus, what fixes the relation between them is not what comes first—a chicken or egg conundrum—but what role each plays. Metaphors make coherence. They emphasize feature matches, systematic correspondences, and image-schematic correspondences, as well as likely inferences from all of these things. These mappings are almost always implicated in metaphor systems and conversations that have a rhetorical and cultural resonance. Metaphors, therefore, crystallize rhetorical positions. When Bill Gates is metaphorized as a commanding general, and Microsoft his attacking army, we not only comprehend an abstract hostile-action image schema, we also infer what kind of business people make up Microsoft, what they are likely to do in the future, whether they can be trusted, whether their actions will ultimately benefit us, and so on. Because they express and index standard ideas, stories may also crystallize rhetorical positions. But they also function in an evidentiary way. Stories are more than sense-making devices: they are proof. True, some stories prove things more directly than others. For instance, fables are self-consciously fictional, but they are nonetheless taken up as evidence of the way the world actually works because they index parallel nonfictional narratives, which inductively represent the actually functioning world. As I saw in one focus group, the fable of David and Goliath indexes actual events such as the triumph of small computer companies over IBM. In the case of Bill Gates, most stories are biographical—presented as factual, even though some “biographical” stories must certainly be apocryphal. Some of these stories license Gates as Business Warrior. Others license Gates as Business Journeyer. Taken together, they create a contradictory—which is not to say incoherent—account of Gates’s character, actions, and intentions.

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Gates as Business Journeyer Bill Gates has been profiled in many a magazine, featured on television news programs, and fleshed out in several biographies. Stories about Gates are unquestionably plentiful enough and well-known enough to license some crystallizing metaphors. But not every Gates story licenses a metaphor. Biographies and profiles have generic requirements; thus, we can expect the customary recountings of Gates’s childhood hobbies, his family life, and his personal quirks. These are not necessarily the stories that license important Gatesian metaphors. The stories that license Gates as Business Journeyer reveal Gates’s character and practices as a business person. They explain his success. While they may not always directly express Business Is A Journey, they nonetheless characterize Gates as someone whose personality, beliefs, and desires are consistent with a business journeyer. That is, while Business Is A Journey is a cultural mainstay, available to be ascribed to any business person, we need a collection of evidentiary narratives if the ascription to Gates is to be persuasive. Business journeys are mainly considered to be commendable. They are taken by people who begin their road to success with limited resources and through talent, hard work, vision, and good intentions arrive at a prosperous end: a financial reward that is not so much a gratification of the journeyer’s desire for money as it is a consequence of his or her personal virtue. To be sure, all lives are journeys. Some may be commendable and others not. Some people follow the road to hell. But the metaphor Business Is A Journey is almost always applied to those whom we admire. Therefore, the stories that license Business Is A Journey recount the journeyer’s commendable acts. Bill Gates’s aggregate public biography is replete with stories that license Gates as Business Journeyer. He is depicted as a talent, a hard worker, a visionary, a public benefactor—all of the things that make up a good journeyer. Given the desirability of these qualities, it is not surprising that Gates tells many of these stories about himself. Likewise, it is not unpredictable that one of his most comprehensive statements about his business accomplishments and future plans is titled The Road Ahead. His preferred public face is that of the business journeyer, the successful businessman whose prosperity is really to others’ benefit and has not come, unjustly, at others’ expense. Talent Stories. Like all heroes, business journeyers have more than ordinary abilities. This high talent comports with Business Is A Journey because business journeys progress toward a success that is commendably attained. It is easy to make a case for Bill Gates’s uncommon abilities and their connection to his business success. The stories that license Gates as Business Journeyer are not false—better that they are not. Typically, biographies begin with tales of his early intellectual accomplish-

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ments: memorizing the Sermon on the Mount on a short car trip; scoring a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test; understanding the intricacies of computers as a freshman in high school. That there is plentiful narrative evidence of Gates’s high intelligence is beyond doubt. What makes these narratives licensing stories that apply to Gates as Business Journeyer is that they characterize Gates as a business person. The childhood talents augur the talents that will someday bring him wealth and prominence. In 1984, when Microsoft first reached distinction in the nascent personal computer software industry, Time featured Bill Gates on its cover. Inside, in a sidebar to an article about the new importance of software, Time profiles Gates, emphasizing the remarkable talent that made his journey a success (Moritz). It tells of an important high school accomplishment, Gates’s creation of a class-scheduling program for the private school he attended. It tells that his talent wasn’t just for computers but for business, relating one of the best-known Gates fables: While he was working as a congressional page in 1972, he and a friend snapped up 5000 McGovern-Eagleton campaign buttons for a nickel each just after South Dakota’s George McGovern dumped Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. They later sold the scarce mementos for as much as $25 each.

These talent stories lead to the unsurprising conclusion that Gates’s business journey has been a successful one. The article ends by describing Gates hunched over his IBM PC in his $750,000 house, where the CEO of Microsoft spends his evenings working. The final sentence intones, “It’s been a long way from McGovern buttons” (emphasis added). Not all talent stories are followed immediately by a re-envoicement of Business Is A Journey. But it would be a mistake always to expect an obvious pairing of licensing story and licensed metaphor. The discourse of business is large and repetitious, and the people who participate in it have good memories for the elements that matter to them. When we encounter instances of Business Is A Journey, in order to judge the aptness of the metaphor, we must either conjecture what licensing stories might be available or draw upon relevant knowledge. In Gates’s case, people interested in business have at least a few talent stories readily available to them. Visionary Stories. Better known, perhaps, than stories of Gates’s personal talents are stories of his ability to predict the future accurately. In a 1995 interview with Fortune, Gates and one-time partner Paul Allen reminisce about their early vision, which was really an ability to look at a current trend and extrapolate future events from it: Allen: I remember having a pizza at Shakey’s in Vancouver, Washington, in 1973, and talking about the fact that eventu-

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ally everyone is going to be online and have access to newspapers and stuff and wouldn’t people be willing to pay for information on a computer terminal. Gates: Yeah, we were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That’s why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set on it—you know, smiley faces and boxes and stuff. We were thinking we’d like to do a clone of Wang word-processing someday. (Schlender 70)

Their vision story comports well with Business Is A Journey. When we travel a path, we look forward. Talented business people see farther and more clearly than others and, therefore, succeed. The less talented are surprised by what’s down the road and, therefore, fail. Very likely, Gates and Allen thought of doing a Wang clone down the road. The importance of seeing down the road is exemplified dramatically in the story of Gates and Allen’s first glimpse of the personal computer. While Bill Gates was attending Harvard, Paul Allen saw in Popular Electronics the first personal computer: the MITS Altair, a rudimentary machine made in a storefront shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Allen, a Shakespeare aficionado, showed the photo to Gates, declared that their vision of the future was at hand, and urged Gates to pursue it. He quoted an instance of Life Is A Journey from the bard himself: There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. (Wallace and Erickson 67)

Even more significant than Allen’s long-ago re-envoicement of Life Is A Journey is the way Allen, Gates, and their admirers continue to craft the story of Microsoft’s success in visionary terms. In their Fortune interview, Allen and Gates share several tales of their accurately guessing from current developments what would occur in the future: In 1971, they read about the Intel 4004 chip and predicted a faster, world-altering chip to come; in 1980, they licensed MS-DOS to IBM, predicting that Microsoft’s larger success would come with clones of the IBM PC; today, Gates sees the Internet as the “seed corn” of many products to come. So important are these seeing-down-the-road stories to constructing Gates’s public image that he makes them the main emphasis of his book, The Road Ahead. In the second edition, he confesses his failure as a visionary with respect to the Internet but plays a game of visionary catchup. He says that when the Internet became too important to ignore, Microsoft was “surprised, fascinated, and pleased” that people “would

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endure a lot more in the way of shortcomings than we had expected” (xi). Then, exercising a kind of retrospective forward vision, he remarks: All it had taken was for modems to get fast enough, communications switches to get cheap enough, PCs to get popular and powerful enough, and content of the Internet’s World Wide Web to get rich enough, and there was no turning back. I can’t tell you exactly when this point-of-no-return was reached, but by late 1995 we had crossed the threshold. (xi, emphasis added)

Now, having sufficiently updated his vision, Gates says that Microsoft is almost entirely focused on the Internet—that it is the main technology on the road ahead. Hard Work Stories. Talent and vision are good things, of course. But an indispensable part of what makes a business hero in U.S. culture is hard work. Stories of hard work are not so easily overlaid upon the journeying image schema as intelligence and vision. Directly, hard work has more to do with the Business Is Building metaphor. Businesses build vendor relationships, a customer base, an organization—a business. This building has less to do with the serendipity of talent and vision than with up-bythe-bootstraps effort. Nonetheless, hard work stories license Business Is A Journey because journeyers are also builders: Business Is A Journey and Business Is Building are companion metaphors that combine to characterize worthy businesses and worthy business people. Stories of Bill Gates the indefatigable worker are numerous and prominent. As a young programmer, he is said to have worked several-day stretches, falling asleep next to his computer only to resume when he awakened. The fledgling Microsoft was peopled with “hard-core” programmers who worked day and night (quite literally), swilling Coke and pizza, breaking only for an occasional movie. Tales of Microsoft’s recent work environment depict the same work-till-you-drop atmosphere, top to bottom. When Paul Allen considered returning to Microsoft after a bout with Hodgkin’s disease, he concluded he could not work at Microsoft’s pace. As Gates puts it in Fortune, “There was no part-time way to come back to Microsoft. If you were going to be there, you were really going to work hard. We all knew that. It’s still that way” (Schlender 78). Good-Intention Stories. As important as making a profit is to American culture, the profit motive can be suspect. Even the most committed American capitalist is likely to decry those who are “just out to make a buck,” people and businesses who make money in unscrupulous ways. One of the main ways to offset the negative side of the profit motive is to claim that its risks are counterbalanced by its benefits—to say that selfinterest ultimately accrues to the public interest. Free-market economists such as Milton Friedman have argued this point in a scholarly way, but it is also a commonplace idea. Thomas Edison may have wanted to get

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rich on his inventions, but the rest of us are well-served by his light bulb, his phonograph, his movie camera. Similarly, Bill Gates and his proponents rhetorically offset the huge profits of Microsoft by emphasizing the public benefits of Microsoft products. This offsetting strategy is best seen when Gates is accused of predatory business practices. When the federal government denounces Microsoft for anticompetitive and unfair tactics, Gates answers: Innovation is part of the process of building a better operating system. The heart of this dispute is that the Justice Department wants to make it illegal for us to be able to put new functions into our operating system. The only right we’ve asked for is to be able to listen to customers and add new capabilities based on that input. Was putting a graphical interface in Windows a good thing? Font management? File-system management? I think so. (Isaacson, “Exclusive” 58)

The stories of Gates’s providing the public with new and affordable technology are incontrovertible. Perhaps that is why, even as Gates’s public image has declined, a level of acceptance of Gates as Business Journeyer remains intact. The rhetoric of business permits us both to view business as war and as a journey, to view customers as friends and also to set about conquering markets, to see commerce as a peaceful activity and also to approach it with a warlike spirit. The conversation of metaphors is not constituted by incompatible ideas but rather by opposing complements.

Gates the Business Warrior Gates’s public image is currently more warrior than journeyer. This is probably the result of several factors. First, Gates’s success and power have become intimidating. After Microsoft’s initial public offering, Gates became a multibillionaire, and nothing draws criticism like success. Second, the computer software market have begun to mature. No longer is the market unsure about what operating system and software packages will dominate. If business is war, Microsoft is the victor. This market dominance has spawned a host of Gates critics—competitors—who ascribe Business Is War and other violent metaphors to him. Third, there is an inconsistency between Gates’s public journeyer image and Gates’s in-company warrior image. It is common to read such comments as this from U.S. News and World Report: Explaining the Justice Department’s zeal in pursuing an antitrust suit against Microsoft, the magazine notes, “When Microsoft executives are widely quoted talking about how they intend to attack and destroy rivals such as Sun Microsystems, some antitrust experts believe they are giving ammunition to the [antitrust] enforcers” (Holstein, Mitchell, and Vogelstein 26, emphasis added). When Gates plans to sell PC banking software, the headline in United States Banker reads, “Look out home bank-

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ing, here comes William the Conqueror,” and the lead invokes World War II: “Thursday, October 13, 1994, may never be known as banking’s Pearl Harbor, but it’s already pretty infamous. It was on that day that Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates announced his $1.5 billion acquisition of Intuit Inc., publisher of the leading home banking software” (Radigan 22). Twelve years after he made the cover of Time, Gates appears again on Time’s cover, now over the headline, “Whose web will it be? He conquered the computer world. Now he wants the Internet. If Microsoft overwhelms Netscape, Bill Gates could rule the Information age” (16 September 1996). Inside, a full-page drawing shows Gates on top of a tank, a three-star general’s helmet on his head, a cigar clamped in his sneering mouth. These metaphoric crystallizations are licensed by stories that contradict the journeyer stories. Like the journeyer stories, the warrior stories are grounded in factual accounts of a business person whose historical behavior and values suggest one to whom Business Is War may be justly ascribed. Business warriors are overly competitive; they take more than ordinary risks in order to compete; they lie; and while they may succeed in the end, the nature of this success is the satisfaction of greed. Stories that license Gates as Business Warrior abound. Competition Stories. Peruse any recent account of Bill Gates and stories of his competitive obsession will crop up again and again. These stories are consonant, of course, with the metaphor Business Is A Game. However, as we have seen, game metaphors are pliable. They are readily attenuated so that they fold into friendship and journeying metaphors. They are also readily intensified so that they suggest war metaphors. That is to say, game metaphors have a hologramic quality. Seen from one angle, they are competitive action in the context of goodwill. Seen from another, they are competitive action in which winning is everything. By all accounts, Gates’s competitive urge is fierce, unbridled, even unnerving. Like the talent stories, the competition stories are often about Gates’s formative years. In the 1997 Time cover story, Gates’s father says that games were a part of the Gates household and that “winning mattered” (Isaacson, “In Search” 47). He describes family getaways at Hood Canal: “On Saturdays there was tennis tournament, and on Sundays our Olympics, which were a mixture of games and other activities.” Time notes that this family tradition was carried on after Microsoft had grown large, when Gates invited friends and coworkers to the “Microgames.” The connection between Gates’s game-playing and Gates’s business style is direct enough. For example, after quoting Gates on the ways Microsoft out-competes other companies, Time invokes Business Is A Game this way: Gates is enjoying this. Intellectual challenges are fun. Games are fun. Puzzles are fun. Working with smart people is superfun. Others may see him as ruthless, but for him the competition is like a sport, a blood

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sport perhaps, but one played with the same relish as the summer games at Hood Canal. (Isaacson, “In Search” 56, emphasis added)

There is, indeed, a broad tendency for commentators to note not just Gates’s love for games but the nature of that love—and therefore to escalate Business Is A Game, as Time does with “blood sport.” Biographies and profiles report that among Gates’s first computer programs was a digital version of Risk, a game of world domination. Much is made of Gates’s time at Harvard, where, rather than attend classes, he played marathon high-stakes poker games with an intensity that bespoke something beyond ordinary competitiveness. A former roommate is quoted in Hard Drive, “He had a monomaniacal quality. . . . Perhaps it is silly to compare poker and Microsoft, but in each case, Bill was sort of deciding where he was going to put his energy and to hell with what anyone else thought” (Wallace and Erickson 61). The roommate is not silly at all. High-stakes poker, an intensified instance of Business Is A Game, has more in common with instances of Business Is War than with many game metaphors. In poker, consequences are real—not just winning and losing in the abstract but winning and losing money. Time links the poker metaphor with Business Is War in their cover article on Gates’s pursuit of the Internet. Next to Gates’s helmeted portrait, a headline reads, “An epic battle is taking place between Microsoft and Netscape. Each company wants to be your guide to the Internet, the key to personal computing in the future. The victor could earn untold billions; the loser could die. Winner take all” (Ramo 58, emphasis added). Many stories of Gates’s competitiveness have little to do with games, but rather to do with personal intensity. Gates’s fast driving has become legendary, evidenced by stories of customers who have refused to ride to the airport with him and the story of his receiving two speeding tickets on the way from Albuquerque to Seattle during Microsoft’s first move, caught twice by the same police airplane. Similarly, abrasive behavior and a competitive conversational style is part of Gates lore. The most common Gatesism: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” This kind of competitive intensity—a refusal to be impeded—is more than an interesting character trait; it indicates a negative approach that is not merely a desire to win. Journeyers want to win for the sake of achievement. Warriors want to win because they take pleasure in others’ defeat. Deception Stories. Poker is a game of deception, but it is agreed-upon deception. Other forms of lying suggest a business person who will deceive customers and competitors in a warlike fashion. The kind of deceit attributed to Gates is not of the General Eisenhower variety, the clever duping of an evil enemy. Instead, he is likened, mainly by competitors, to the evil enemy itself. At 3Com, a company that once joined forces with Microsoft, Microsoft’s programmers were known by some as “the Hitler Youth”

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(Manes and Andrews 377). And Gates, perhaps inadvertently, has played into this demonization by quoting Admiral Yamamoto, who, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, feared the Japanese had “awakened a sleeping giant.” Gates quoted Yamamoto on 7 December 1995, as he announced Microsoft’s plans to enter the competition for Internet dominance (Ramo 58). No one—not even the most enthusiastic competitor —wants to be thought of as Hitler, whose military aggression was enabled by a series of broken agreements, or Yamamoto, whose most famous operation was a sneak attack. Gates stories suggest a pattern of lying about matters large and small. For instance, the biography Gates refutes the story of his making a large profit on McGovern-Eagleton campaign buttons while a U.S. Senate page, contradicting numerous aspects of the story Gates told to friends and reporters. Gates claims to have attended the famous McGovern news conference in which the candidate pledged “a thousand percent” support for his soon-to-be-abandoned running mate. But Gates was in Washington, D.C., and the news conference was in South Dakota. Gates claims to have sold buttons for ten to twenty-five dollars. But contemporary advertisements offered buttons for one dollar. Gates claims to have distributed the buttons through congressional pages, who wore the buttons on the Senate floor. But campaign buttons are not permitted on the Senate floor, and former pages do not recall wearing the buttons. These small lies might be chalked up to insignificant boasting. But when numerous small deception stories become linked to more significant deception-in-business stories, the narrative pattern licenses Gates as Business Warrior. In a chapter entitled “King of the Hill,” Hard Drive asserts, “As far as Bill Gates is concerned, business is war. You fight to win” (Wallace and Erickson 381). It goes on to prove the point by citing examples of aggressive pricing, personal betrayals, and a series of deceptions perpetrated on Microsoft’s corporate partners. John Warnock, chief executive of Adobe Systems, a leader in font technology, complains that Gates feigned interest in Adobe’s software but after making a woefully inadequate offer, teamed up with Apple, Adobe’s largest customer, to produce competitive software. Alan Kessler, General Manager of 3Com, complains about a joint marketing venture with Microsoft. 3Com was to pay a fixed monthly royalty for the right to sell Microsoft networking software. But when sales were sluggish, and 3Com was paying royalties on unsold packages, Microsoft took advantage of a contractual loophole and sold the product directly to customers. Other software development companies complain that Microsoft routinely enters into talks about joint ventures, previews software applications, then withdraws from negotiations only to emerge with similar software. The head of one such company, Paul Grayson, remarks that the only person with fewer friends than Bill Gates is Saddam Hussein (Wallace and Erickson 381–92).

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These and many similar stories may not prove that Gates and Microsoft are unscrupulous—after all, all stories have two sides—but they do give plausibility to Gates as Business Warrior. These deception stories extend the competition stories by demonstrating a lack of moral restraint in competitive situations, a valuing of victory over peace and friendship. But, by themselves, they do not fully characterize a warrior, because they only describe warlike actions, not a warlike motivation. In business, the usual warlike motivation is greed. Greed Stories. In a materialistic way, Bill Gates simply cannot be characterized as greedy. He incongruously combines the possession of vast wealth with a vast unconcern for money. Even his forty-million-dollar home, which is fantastically equipped with computer gadgets, says more about a love of technology than a lust for possessions. Gates’s own assessment is assented to by everyone. Asked about a possible drop in Microsoft stock, he remarks, “I have an infinite amount of money. I would still order the same hamburger. Believe me, I’m not thinking about the stock price.” In fact, the richest man on earth leads an impressively unostentatious life and works harder than many a hungry newcomer. The kinds of greed of which Gates may be fairly accused—and that many stories recount—is a greed for control and attention. Competitors charge that Gates is not content to succeed in his own, well-earned niche but is also driven to take other companies’ markets. These stories make up the factual account of Microsoft’s growth from a two-person start-up, offering a version of the simple programming language BASIC, to the licenser of the MS-DOS operating system, to the licenser of the Macintosh-inspired (but Xerox-developed) graphical interface program Windows, to purveyor of software applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and home banking, to creator of a Windows/Internet browser package and Windows NT for networks—not to mention Microsoft’s forays into “content” such as the online magazine Slate and MSNBC. Gates and many others would, no doubt, call this diversified growth a successful journey. To competitors, and even to many customers who prefer less concentration of commercial power, the story of Microsoft’s growth is one of greed for power and position, and it licenses Gates the Business Warrior.

Metaphor, Story, and Thought Metaphor and story—though surely not the only factors involved in making metaphors meaningful—work together to establish a particular metaphor’s rhetorical positioning and, not coincidentally, its truth value. Evidence of this mingling of metaphor and story gives us reason to question what is ordinarily posited about metaphor. Specifically, the metaphor chauvinist position mentioned at the outset of this chapter suggests that

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when we uncover important metaphors, we reveal the exclusive silent means through which we comprehend and evaluate the world. But when we see metaphor as constituted by rhetoric, and when we also see the crucial interaction between metaphor and story, “uncovering” a metaphor means something quite different. To uncover a metaphor is not to reveal the tacit underpinning of thought but rather to glimpse a complex process of evaluation that involves metaphors, stories, and, no doubt, other figures such as metonymy, synecdoche, chiasmus, and the like. In this sense, metaphor and story help to co-constitute thought, the means through which we determine what is real, what is not, what is likely to happen in the future, what is not, what we should do, and what we should not. One of the main reasons metaphor and story, separately, have attracted such interest among scholars in the past few years is that they are increasingly seen as constitutive of thought. But what is meant by “thought” varies. Many cognitivists seek the rules by which we can simulate or duplicate human thought, believing—as Bill Gates believes (Isaacson, “In Search” 47)—that the main difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is that the human mind is carbon rather than silicon based. In part, it is this view of the mind that motivates cognitive experimentation with metaphor. This experimentation assumes an inference-from-fact model of cognition. That is, presented with the fact of a given metaphor, experimental participants are assumed to make predictable, rule-governed inferences. However, the kind of truth seeking shown in this chapter belies this view of the mind. Both metaphor and story are deeply social in their constitution. In turn, the kind of thought evidenced by the integral interaction of particular metaphors and particular stories is more “social” than “cognitive.” This does not mean that we need to reject the “cognitive wager” that Raymond Gibbs posits. As I have said, I am also inclined to believe that language reveals the mind as much as anything can. But we do need to heed signals from the kind of rhetorical activity that metaphor and story jointly reveal. We need to regard cognition as more distributed than contained, more interpersonal than personal, more communitarian than individual. Of course, a collectivist view of the mind has been voiced by some. Early in this century, Lev Vygotsky challenged Piaget’s cognitive egocentricism, and the Vygotskyian paradigm is gaining some prominence in rhetorical study that focuses upon how we learn to write. More recently, Edwin Hutchins offers a radically distributed view of cognition in Cognition in the Wild, in which he challenges the discretemind model of problem solving in favor of a social cognition model. In most rhetorical study, commentators pay little attention to the mind as a cognitive entity, assuming the mind—or thought—to be so distributed and unpredictable as to be ineffable. Social conventions, on the other

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hand, are not linked to cognitive function. But as we begin to integrate the kinds of observations that can be made in a cognitive paradigm with the kinds of observations that can be made in a rhetorical, or naturalistic, paradigm, we begin to glimpse a fuller and markedly divergent picture of what it means to think. Although I reject the notion that carbon and silicon are all that differs between human thought and computer processing, I wonder if some recasting of The Mind Is A Computer might help us to rethink the relationship between metaphor, story, and thought. Typically, The Mind Is A Computer is instantiated by mapping a single, discrete computer onto a single, discrete mind. But computers do not work that way. Rather, stand-alone personal computers are linked by modem or cable to other computers: personal computers, servers, mainframes. Sometimes the personal computer processes data—thinks—within its own space, but just as often it links to other computers that do some of the processing. And the success of any personal computer, even when the computer seems to be operating discretely, depends upon its compatibility with other computers. It may sometimes process “alone,” but it is a poor computer that processes uniquely. The communitarian nature of thought goes to the heart of rhetoric and to the heart of metaphor as rhetorically constituted. We cannot understand the functioning of metaphor unless we take into account the rhetorical inflections that influence the way we create, re-envoice, comprehend, endorse, and reject metaphors. In other words, what we do with a metaphor cannot be separate from how the metaphor works. At the same time, it is impossible to study metaphor—the preeminent figure of speech lauded by one and all—without at the same time studying other forms and figures. Metaphor is integrally enmeshed in rhetoric and all that makes up rhetoric. When we recognize the integral relationship between metaphor and story, we see more of the way metaphor is constituted. But I doubt we see it all.

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6 Metaphor, Culture, and Community Sometimes the news from Washington is not what they say but what they don’t say: Have you noticed that the Clinton Administration has stopped bashing Japan? It’s possible, of course, that the White House has simply been distracted by more urgent matters like the budget and next year’s elections. But the true explanation, it seems, was signaled earlier this month in a speech by Lawrence H. Summers, the Deputy Treasury Secretary. Without quite saying so, he suggested that the sophomoric notion of trade as war had lost its appeal now that the Japanese economy has been badly wounded by recession. “Prosperity, unlike power, is not a zero sum game,” he said. —Peter Passel, New York Times, 1995

In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson say that conceptual metaphors reveal something basic about cultures. They remark: Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)

There is gut-level good sense to the observation that we do not understand a culture until we understand its metaphors, good sense akin to the cultural anthropologist’s truism that we do not understand a culture until we understand its jokes. Entrenched metaphors, like jokes, are based upon tacitly shared perceptions, the invisible underpinnings of culture. Perhaps that is why so many commentators so easily agree with Lakoff and Johnson’s assessment, and why some make even stronger assertions. Donald Schön, who notes a connection between the stories we tell and 134

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the metaphors we speak, says this about the fragmentation metaphor prevalent in discussions of social policy: Under the spell of the metaphor, it appears obvious that fragmentation is bad and coordination, good. But this sense of obviousness depends very much on the metaphor remaining tacit. Once we have constructed the metaphor which generates the problem-setting story, we can ask, for example, whether the services appropriate to the present situation are just those which used to be integrated. . . . In short, we can spell out the metaphor, elaborate the assumptions which flow from it, and examine their appropriateness in the present situation. (138, emphasis added)

What is most interesting here is the phrase “under the spell.” When we think of metaphor as an agenda setter or, more broadly, a basis of culture, we frequently impute to it the status of enchanting, enthralling power— as if we are helpless in the face of metaphors. Similarly, Donald McCloskey points to unexamined metaphor as the locus of disciplinary nonthinking, if not the source of it: Self-consciousness about metaphor in economics would be an improvement on many counts. Most obviously, unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them. (Rhetoric 81)

He offers the invisible hand, Adam Smith’s famous metaphor, as an example, suggesting that it diverts many economists’ attention from the contradictions of capitalist theory. He suggests not just that free-market economists have not considered whether their metaphor is valid but they have not confronted the mystical force of metaphor that surreptitiously controls them. As important as metaphor may be, we should nonetheless be leery of arguments that ascribe mystical force to it. For example, my evidence suggests it is likely that the invisible hand is licensed by philosophically and politically motivated stories about capitalism, stories that economists, policy-makers, and business people can explicitly recount rather easily. Moreover, it seems unlikely that the invisible hand metaphor itself is unexamined. The economic debate that has raged since the Reagan years has made the invisible hand more fully examined and cross-examined than any other economic metaphor, with the possible exception of trickle down. The question, then, is what leads us to attribute such power to metaphor. In part, I speculate that metaphor is a kind of linguistic scapegoat. We need ways of accounting for beliefs that, to some of us, seem unbelievable. To me (and perhaps to McCloskey) it seems impossible to look at the sometimes heart-wrenching cruelties of capitalism and still insist

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on the inevitable benefits of the invisible hand. But we cannot attribute the persistence of the invisible hand to its being unexamined. I suspect the invisible hand is used as part of a larger disingenuousness. Hard-line laissez-faire economists may turn a blind eye toward the market’s brutality, but that does not mean they are blind. Whether or not I am correct in this, we must nonetheless recognize that laissez-faire economists do think. They are not helplessly manipulated by the invisible-hand metaphor but rather they consciously give it their endorsement. Rhetoric is thought—thoughtful discussion of matters that have not yet been settled. If metaphors further thoughtful debate, if they are rhetorically constituted, then they are not quite the unexamined assumptions that the strong metaphor-as-culture view might lead us to believe. A more productive view is community-inflected metaphor. Schön and McCloskey hint at this view by locating metaphoric power and invisibility within disciplinary communities. Their mistake, and indeed the mistake in much scholarly talk about metaphors, is in the characterization of the metaphoric power itself. We cannot infer unconsciousness from tacitness. Important conceptual metaphors operate tacitly exactly because they are not unconscious. Ask any competent English speaker whether life is a journey, and you are likely to receive a well-considered, self-aware response. Ask an English speaker about metaphors that obtain in his or her community of competence, and you are likely to receive a well-considered, self-aware, fine-grained response. I argue this: Metaphors do reveal culture. But culture is complicated. It encompasses numerous communities, each of which is a self-conscious location of rhetorical activity. Thus, we cannot sufficiently analyze a conceptual metaphor without taking into account the intellectual habits, conventional values, and points of controversy that unite communities around particular topics and communicative occasions. At the same time, there is such a thing as a culturally pervasive concept. As Lakoff and Johnson say, Argument Is War, Life Is A Journey, Happy Is Up, More Is Up, Ideas Are Food, and other conceptual metaphors are basic constituents of at least some English-speaking cultures. They are pervasive across communities. This overlap may seem to be irresolvably contradictory, but it is not. When we marry the conceptual metaphor view to an understanding of metaphor as rhetorically constituted, we can account for both the way metaphors are shaped by particular communities and for the way metaphoric concepts exert a pervasive cultural influence. In this chapter, I want to discuss these competing ways of functioning in three ways: First, let me explain community-inflected metaphor by comparing Trade Is War with the related metaphor Business Is War. Conceptually, Trade Is War and Business Is War might be considered one and the same. Indeed, I have

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sometimes conflated them in previous chapters, where no theoretical harm was done. But when we consider the two metaphors in relation to community habits and interests, we can make important distinctions between them. Second, let me suggest that the cultural pervasiveness of conceptual metaphors is organized by networks of community metaphors. Even though Trade Is War and Business Is War are concentrated in community conversations, we can see their influence in conversations far afield. In particular, I will discuss conceptual networking in relation to the marketplace of ideas metaphor. Third, let me apply the idea of metaphor-ascommunity to one of the most influential and flawed areas of metaphor commentary: writing pedagogy. As sophisticated as writing pedagogy has become, as is shown by the burgeoning field of writing studies, commentary on metaphor ignores some of the most fundamental ideas about writing and communication. When we understand the relation of metaphors and community, we can cast aside almost all of what teachers of writing have told students about metaphor.

Metaphor and Community Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that written and spoken utterances are always situated. For him, speech is always constituted by “the concrete utterances of individual speaking people,” and these utterances are always implicated in the “chain of speech communication” (“Problem” 69, 71, 93). Similarly, my argument has been that metaphor is subject to the same forces that shape and reshape language more generally—that metaphor is fundamentally constituted by concrete utterances that respond to other concrete utterances. However, in making such an argument I have taken certain risks. Because I have said that we cannot adequately understand metaphors without examining them as uttered by situated speakers, I have necessarily made certain assumptions about the communities “within” or “among” which Trade Is War operates: I have posited “the discourse of trade” without first defining who I mean by the community that enacts such discourse. In the end, though, it is important to clarify what I have meant by “a discourse” and to explain how Trade Is War functions in relation to communities. Among rhetoricians, writing scholars, and applied linguists, the notion of “discourse community” has become an important component of nearly all discussion of workplace and student writing. Yet the current prevailing understanding of “discourse community” is the result of a standoff between equally valid positions on discourse and community. One position argues that discourse communities are constitutive of all writing and talk, that without taking into account situated practices, formal and informal governance, and shared interests and goals, we cannot fully

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realize what makes a text come to be. In this view, community membership is characterized by unique, although perhaps evolving, social conventions and thought. The other position argues that discourse communities are porously related to multiple, interpenetrated, interanimating discursive forces and therefore cannot be said to operate discretely. It suggests that while discourse communities may shape many utterances and texts, we usually belong to multiple communities, and we always operate in potentially multiple contexts. Thomas Kent calls these opposing positions the “thick” and “thin,” summarizing, So—again, generally speaking—we uncover a spectrum of different uses of the term community; on one end of the spectrum are thick formulations that depict a community as a determinate and codifiable social entity, and on the other thin formulations that depict a community as a relatively indeterminate and uncodifiable sedimentation of beliefs and desires. (425)

The two positions—the thick and thin formulations—seem to be largely incompatible. How can a writer or speaker fully realize a truly community-based discourse and, at the same time, embody an interanimated discursive world? It is no wonder, then, that many theorists and researchers split the baby. One of the most notable Solomons is James Porter, who recognizes difficulties with various formulations of community and, adopting a Foucaultian approach, defines the discourse community as an attracting space that both unifies discursive activity and encompasses dynamism and diversity. Porter uses the example of Magnavox, a corporate setting that is at once diverse and unified. That is, Porter observes that Magnavox comprises a network of disciplinary and organizational conventions, as well as interrelationships with other companies, other plants, government agencies, and society at large—all of which combine to forge a writer’s “discursive identity” (106). He writes, The discourse community here is this network, in all its complexities. Now this “community” is quite different from Kuhn’s sense of “paradigm,” because there is more than one paradigm operating here. Writing within this community is much more complicated than merely determining a simple set of paradigmatic conventions. This discourse community has broader and more open borders than Fish’s “interpretive community” and is much broader than either Kinneavy’s sense of “situational context” or Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation”—both of which vary from discourse to discourse. This discourse community is not a nice, neat compartment built by the accumulation of knowledge from within (Kuhn’s description of “normal science”). Rather, this discourse community is . . . a network of intersecting systems, institutions, values, and practices. This discourse

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community is not, however, the same as culture; this discourse community is unstable, changing, dynamic—it is a turbulent, chaotic system that nevertheless operates with some kind of regularity. The discourse community here is a “strange attractor”—a force field providing a unity for an entire set of dispersed practices. (107)

A disintegrated integration. A coherent incoherence. A container that is not too particular about containing. Yet all of this is not so contradictory as it may sound. Everything that is contained in one way is also integrated in other ways. Porter—and, for that matter, almost everyone who writes about discourse community—gets the question right. How do we make sense of the social world that motivates writing, and at the same time make sense of so finite an artifact as a text? To do that, I suggest, we have to make sense of broadly shared concepts and the way they are rhetorically inflected by discourse communities. It seems to me both viable and illuminating to see discursive coherences based upon geographies, organizations, activities, and topics and to call these coherences communities. No community is hermetic; members always bring with them a variety of influences. But all communities, once they reach a critical mass of coherence, always influence how members speak. In the terminology of this book, communities have standard rhetorical etiquettes, and community members contribute utterances that both adhere to the etiquette and that are inflected by a variety of influences. The community I have posited in studying Trade Is War is “the discourse of trade.” It coheres mainly around the topic of trade. Not all who speak about trade are actively involved in trade between nations, or even trade on a smaller scale. Journalists, for example, merely comment upon trade without themselves trading. Government officials make and implement trade policies without themselves trading. Corporate spokespeople are directly involved in trading but must influence journalists and government officials in order to create a favorable atmosphere. Thus, the topic attracts speakers and writers from a range of interrelated activities, each of whom understands others’ roles. It is not a case, then, of mere adjacency of divergent discourses but rather a convergence of discursive influences into one. When a journalist, a government official, or a corporate spokesperson contributes to the discourse of trade, that contribution is informally governed by what I have called a rhetorical etiquette. With respect to important metaphors, each follows the same guidelines for claiming, ascribing, intensifying, and attenuating. Each understands in much the same way the rhetorical consequences of violating this etiquette. Moreover, the etiquette inheres not to a formal metaphor—its imageschematic mappings and entailments—but to the community within which the metaphor operates. We can see this in the contrast between the

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metaphor Trade Is War, a metaphor that is topically relevant to international commerce, and Business Is War, a first cousin of Trade Is War that is topically relevant to business-versus-business competition. Business Is War is conceptually similar to Trade Is War. It entails the same image schema and converses often with the same metaphors and concepts. But it follows a different etiquette. It does so largely because the rhetorical consequences of Business Is War are far different from Trade Is War. To the degree that some cultural regularity is attached to a very broad metaphoric grouping—say, all commercial war metaphors—the regularity acts as a general guide. Nevertheless, it is not controlling. That is, a cultural reticence about war metaphors may always require some way of addressing rhetorical risk, but how that risk is managed depends on community habits, agreements, controversies, awarenesses. Managing the risk does not necessarily mean avoiding or ascribing the metaphor. We are not innocent utterers. There is always communicative cunning—commonplace rhetorical shrewdness—to be accounted for, a phenomenon that makes it difficult for us to distinguish re-envoicement from endorsement. That is, even when a risky metaphor is not defensively ascribed, there is always a potential gap between what we say and what we endorse. Not only may we ingenuously re-envoice entrenched metaphors, embracing their implications, but also we may cunningly re-envoice them, distancing ourselves from them and denying their most disturbing implications. This cunning can produce what seem to be contradictions. If, for instance, we ask people whether or not the metaphoric sentence trade is war is true, it is entirely possible for someone to respond that it is not— and to express that objection in language that re-envoices Business Is War. One focus group discussant, Jim, consistently objected to commercial war metaphors. He argued, with conviction, that the image of killing business opponents misrepresented the way business works because business is more gamelike: in business, we live to play another day. Yet when Jim expressed a liking for business is international peace negotiations, which he saw as inconsistent with war metaphors, he embedded Business Is War in his endorsement: “This time France is our ally; this time France is our enemy. You know, that sort of thing. Business is a lot like that.” If we give any weight at all to what Jim has repeatedly said he endorses, we cannot assume his use of enemy represents a deeply held belief that business really is war, after all. Yet there it is. He said it. It would not be entirely mistaken to chalk up these kinds of apparent contradictions to ordinary carelessness. Rhetorical etiquettes are not executed perfectly, and we all, much as it embarrasses us, contradict ourselves from time to time. But taking the larger conversation into account, weighing its persistent regularities more heavily than its inevitable glitches, we can arrive at a more telling explanation, such as the one that emerged in

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a focus group exchange: Russell countered Keith’s objection to Business Is War with a pithy distinction between what we say and what we endorse. He simply observed, “Yeah, but we’re talking about language here.” In other words, we are not always willing to be accountable for the implications of our metaphors. Whether we have the courage of our metaphors has much to do with discourse communities. Trade Is War and Business Is War have associated etiquettes that handle the endorsement problem differently. They are metaphors for different communities. As closely associated as trade is with business, the “discourse of trade” is not identical to related discourses of industrial sales, or accounting, or shopping, or other subsets of commercial talk. The metaphors that operate in these discourses are too similar to support an analysis that treats these discursive locations as conceptually discrete. But the rhetorical patterns of claiming, ascribing, attenuating, and intensifying vary. Consider this voice-over from a television commercial. The visual is soldiers in Civil War uniforms loading antique rifles. The sound bed is drum and fife music punctuated with gunfire. A deep-voiced, high-energy announcer declares: The two biggest new car dealers in Champaign County have declared a price war! Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet have fired the first shots! It’s the North versus the South! . . . This will be a fight for sales leadership! . . . This will absolutely be the biggest automotive sales war this county has ever seen! Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet! The battle has begun! (Hill Ford)

Some of the elements found in Trade Is War are no doubt a part of this extended war metaphor. It depends upon a hostile-action image schema, one side opposing another, Hill Ford versus Sullivan Chevrolet, North versus South. It entails the container image schema, configuring the metaphorical battleground as a contested space, “this county.” It uses some of the conventional language of Trade Is War: “fight,” “fired,” “the first shots,” “battle.” It is relatively attenuated, drawing images from the antiquated warfare of the Civil War, just as Trade Is War often harks back to blunderbusses and cannons and rapiers. Yet, for all these similarities, a key difference is undeniable. One can hardly imagine a heartier claiming of the language of war than is heard in this commercial. Why is it acceptable, on the one hand, to declare a sales war on a competing car dealership and unacceptable, on the other, to declare a trade war on a competing country such as Japan or China—or, for that matter, the European Community? Why is it a breach of rhetorical etiquette to claim Trade Is War and not a breach of rhetorical etiquette to claim Business Is War? In one sense, the answer is fairly obvious. We have seen historically that trade wars precede shooting wars—for ex-

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ample, the period of intense trade friction that preceded World War II. Even if we believe the consequences of a price war between car dealerships could be severe, measured perhaps in lost jobs, they are not as great as for a shooting war. But compelling as this distinction may be, we also have to take into account communicative cunning. When Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet jointly announce their “price war,” it is, of course, contrived—and tolerably clever in the way that it plays upon the traditional rivalry between Ford and Chevrolet. The competing dealerships perhaps intend to drop prices in order to stimulate sales. Nonetheless, they obviously mean for this “war” to be mutually beneficial. Thus, when they hype their products using the language of war, they do not really mean that they are undertaking, even figuratively, a fight to the death. In this sense, the ad’s apparent claiming of Business Is War does not amount to an endorsement at all—not as a deeply held philosophy. This is not to say that the authors of this ad necessarily reject Business Is War as an apt metaphor, but only to say that the ad does not amount to an endorsement of its full ramifications. The subtext of the ad is similar to the focus group discussant’s assessment of war metaphors—it is only language. In fact, the ad’s playfulness depends on our recognition that it is only language. Of course, it is not impossible to utter Trade Is War cunningly in the discourse of trade. Asked about the bellicose metaphor in the title of his book Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America, Lester Thurow was quick to disassociate himself from it. The publisher, he informed me, had chosen the title—and had chosen yet a more objectionable one for foreign editions: War for the 21st Century (Letter). At the same time, Thurow’s conceptual, philosophical, and rhetorical repertoire accommodates both a sincere objection to war metaphors and a habitual use of them to describe economic activity. It was presumably Thurow, not his publisher, who wrote, “Americans cannot strengthen their economic team unless the president is first willing to tell them the news from the economic battlefields is very bad” (Head 273, emphasis added). I see no reason not to believe Thurow’s regular protestations against war metaphors; his views are articulated at length, well considered, and consistent. Thus, if Thurow uses Trade Is War in contradiction to his fundamentally globalist trajectory, he must be using it as only language. His metaphors sometimes represent his endorsements—as he insists his game metaphors do. Sometimes, though, they do not—as he insists his war metaphors do not. Indeed, in an interview, Thurow acknowledges criticisms of his war metaphors by bracketing them off with the remark: “I suppose I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to use a few of these war metaphors, but don’t take them literally.’”

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When Thurow is serious about his trade metaphors, he tends to follow, consciously or unconsciously, the standard rhetorical etiquette that permeates the discourse of trade. Note the forceful ascription when, describing Japanese business as a place where market share is valued more highly than profitability, Thurow writes, One hears differences in motivation in the very language of conversation. The average Japanese employee loves to tell you how he works for a company with the biggest market share in its industry. He or she will even take pride in having the third-largest market share—in being a soldier in the third most powerful warlord in the industry. (142, emphasis added)

Similarly, of the old Soviet command economy, he writes, “Basically plant managers were army officers. Converting a military mentality into a market mentality is not easy” (Head 99). For Thurow, when the Japanese see trade as war, it is a threat; when the Soviets see it as war, it is a liability; but in any case, the war metaphor belongs to someone else—to the Japanese, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and perhaps to others. When we see trade as war, though, it is fanciful, decorative, not serious. We do need to take some care accepting the claims writers and speakers make. Like all claims, the only language claim can be suspect. We may have no special reason to disbelieve Thurow when he says his war metaphors do not represent his beliefs, but we do have reason to disbelieve people who use the word nigger—even if they claim the word does not represent their beliefs. At the same time, we have to apply a different standard to the only language claim when this word is used by a Ku Klux Klansman than when it is used by an African American rap artist. It is difficult to argue that this word—because it is so very inflammatory—is ever really only language, but it nonetheless embodies varying personal, political, and philosophical beliefs, depending upon who says it. The same is true of Trade Is War and Business Is War. It is evident from a wide range of instances that in the discourse of trade Trade Is War is claimed, ascribed, intensified, and attenuated in an earnest fashion, and that in the discourse of business Business Is War follows patterns that can only be followed if some cunning is involved. This cunning, broadly enacted, is strong evidence that there is a distinct discourse community associated with business-to-business competition, a community separate from the discourse of trade. And it is evidence of a different kind from that usually noted in metaphor study. Typically, when metaphors have been used to characterize communities, a particular metaphor is said to have gained a particular ontological hold on a research paradigm. This phenomenon is real enough. But it is not, by itself, evidence of community thought, for at least two reasons: First, concepts

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overlap discourse communities. Many unrelated discoursers have the ability to see, even to credit, the war image schema and its cultural value and to evaluate in a grounded way the ramifications of the metaphor; in the focus groups, this was demonstrated by a teacher, a nurse, a homemaker, and two musicians. This overlapping points to the broad cultural operation of commercial war metaphors, not to their importance to particular discourse communities. Second, all specialized communities adopt and recast general concepts. Many create concepts that become accepted broadly. And the only way we can tell what stems from culture and what from a discourse community is to note the distinct etiquette a discourse community insists upon. These distinct etiquettes are evidence of tacit assumptions, the unspoken but articulable rules that constrain what can be said—how rhetoric is enacted. Trade Is War and Business Is War do share the same kinds of cultural endorsements. The cultural value of commercial war metaphors is the same and, when asked, both trade discoursers and business discoursers, who are generally free-market globalists, tend to condemn commercial war metaphors. This conceptual and cultural similarity should be no surprise. In a sense, international trade is local business in the aggregate. Business people are likely to be attuned to international trade; international traders are in business. Most economists, however, are careful not to equate the functioning of individual companies with the functioning of nations. Thus, when economists and other commentators compare local business to international trade, the analogy is metaphorical. This is the case when Adam Smith famously compares international trade deficits with the trade deficit one might have with the local alehouse (459). It is the same when George Will compares trade deficits with the trade deficit one might have with one’s barber (This Week, 20 Feb. 1994). What we have then is a conceptual affinity between local business and international trade, and it shows up in such things as shared metaphors and similar licensing stories. But the overlap of concepts and culture does not negate the distinction between the discourse communities that make Trade Is War and Business Is War distinct metaphors. As John Swales points out, we often have multiple affiliations with discourse communities (27–29); thus, the same person may participate in the discourse of trade and the discourse of business, meeting a different set of expectations in each community. Nonetheless, the same refusal of endorsement—the rejection of commercial war metaphors—underlies two different etiquettes. In trade, most ascribe or avoid Trade Is War because participants do not want to endorse it. In bus-iness, it is permissible to seem to claim Business Is War because participants are tacitly certain it is not being endorsed. To put it another way, Business Is War is nearly always uttered with an invisible wink—an unspoken assumption that everyone is in on the

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joke. This invisible wink makes possible some remarkably intensified mappings of Business Is War, mappings that would have harsh rhetorical consequences for Trade Is War. Marketing Warfare, in print since 1986, likens marketing to virtually every aspect of war-making from flanking to guerrilla fighting and does so with little restraint. For instance, it emphasizes the principle of force, a dictum reminding us that superior numbers inflict greater casualties. Under the heading “The Mathematics of a Firefight,” it invokes high-casualty confrontations from wars that remain fresh in the minds of many readers: There’s no secret to why the Allies won World War II in Europe. Where the Germans had two soldiers, we had four. Where they had four, we had eight. The skill and experience of an enemy who had practically invented modern warfare and the leadership of men like Rommel and Von Rundstedt could not change the mathematics of the battleground. In the military, the numbers are so important that most armies have an intelligence branch known as the order of battle. It informs commanders of the size, location, and nature of the opposing force. (The case of General William C. Westmoreland against CBS was based on whether order of battle documents in the Vietnam war were falsified or not.) (Ries and Trout 24–25)

Invoking World War II—thus casting business competitors as Nazis— is vivid. Invoking Vietnam, the blood-soaked debacle, is near shocking. But, then, it’s only business talk. Marketing Warfare mixes horrendous war images with liberal doses of game metaphors. It is all in fun. On the book cover, the authors are pictured smiling broadly as they ride atop a military vehicle, wearing trench coats, ties, and helmets. On the other hand, when the etiquette of Business Is War is violated, the violation has little to do with recklessly intensifying a mapping, but everything to do with failing to treat the metaphor as only language. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Dwayne Andreas, former head of Archer Daniels Midland Company, is said to have a motto that configures Business Is War this way: “The competitor is our friend, and the customer is our enemy” (Whitacre 55). If Andreas actually said this, it violates the etiquette of Business Is War in two ways. First, it reverses our ordinary expectations for the roles of competitor and customer in the Business Is War metaphor. Second, and more importantly, it fails to wink. It is not only language. Andreas’s metaphor, as presented in the press, was used to justify price fixing and to persuade competitors to become secret conspirators. Indeed, it is not the reversal of the mapping—making customers into enemies and competitors into friends—that makes this metaphor an egregious violation but that it represents illegal business practices. ADM whistleblower and later-to-be-convicted embezzler Mark Whitacre describes a company that is uncommonly ruthless, not toward its

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customers (the so-called enemy) but toward its competitors (the so-called friends). Whitacre, once an ADM vice president, describes the company’s way of entering the market for a feed additive called lysine: Our first strategy with lysine, of course, was to get customers. Now, if you’re just starting out, and you sell your product at the same price as the competitors who have been in business 30 years, you’re simply not going to be competitive. We decided that our first priority had to be market share and that profitability would come in the second phase. That’s the normal practice at ADM. . . . When we started selling, prices started falling, and there was a tremendous price war. Lysine went from about $1.30 a pound down to about 60 cents a pound. (53)

Whitacre describes robber-baron practices in which the competitor is clearly the enemy, an exaggeration of the standard competitive situation exemplified by Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet. However, unlike the car dealerships who only say the competitor is their enemy, ADM behaves as if it means it. After this initial price war, Whitacre tells of ADM’s approaching competitors who have been badly harmed by price competition. ADM allegedly proposes that both they and the competitor stand to gain by colluding to raise world lysine prices. And it is only then that ADM calls customers enemies and competitors friends. But this kind of friendship is coerced at best. For ADM, at least as it is portrayed in its bad press, business is always war. Finally, the discourse community that re-envoices Business Is War does accommodate both diversity and change. While Business Is War has for quite some time been acceptable in its only language form, it may be becoming less so. Some focus group discussions indicated an evolution in progress. One discussant commented about the likely attitudes toward war metaphors among his fellow executives: I find it real interesting that at the table tonight, almost all of us objected strongly—we gave ones to all the things that were about conflict. All of the war analogies at the this table were “no.” I’ll bet you if you ask my dad and my uncle and that age group, the seventy-year-olds, they’d all give them fives. All these ones that you and I said, “No way. It’s not how it works.” Those are the fives.

In fact, one of the biggest surprises of the focus groups was the persistent complaint—across groups and genders—about war metaphors in business, which seemed to many discussants wrong-headed and passé. This changeability does not mean that the boundaries we often draw between communities are invalid. If anything, that these spaces permit internal change is a confirming fact. When we follow an exemplar such as Trade Is War, we find important differences in etiquette, in philosophical and political consequences, and, therefore, in community-based meaning.

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Conceptual Networking of Metaphors Generally speaking, communities are distinguished more by their rhetorical etiquette than by the uniqueness of their concepts. While some concepts attain prominence and are fully explored because of specialized research or experience, these concepts are often culturally pervasive nonetheless. For example, the mind-as-computer metaphor that has been important to cognitive science has its roots in the everyday mind-as-machine and body-as-machine metaphors. What we need, then, is to examine the ways concepts, especially metaphoric concepts, move from one community to another—how they network throughout cultures in various community inflections. I have argued that we cannot understand the functioning of Trade Is War except in light of concretely operating, community-inflected locutions. But that is not to say that Trade Is War and related metaphors of containers, games, friendship, and journeying are conceptually isolable. In fact, they are networked throughout much of English writing and speech. A good example of this is the metaphor the marketplace of ideas, a metaphor that is well known and vigorously debated in venues from the U.S. Supreme Court to recent public debate over censorship on the Internet. Usually the marketplace of ideas is phrased in just that locution. To make sense of the particular locution, we need to recruit Ideas Are Products, the conceptual metaphor that allows us to buy, sell, trade, value, and cheapen ideas. Some ideas, of course, have a literal economic value, as any intellectual property attorney can tell you. But this literal concept does nothing to interfere with the metaphoricity of Ideas Are Products, just as the literal concept of economic warfare does nothing to interfere with the metaphoricity of Trade Is War. In fact, the literal adjacency of ideas and economic activity probably gives Ideas Are Products more cultural importance than it might otherwise have. On the most basic level, conceptual networking in relation to the marketplace of ideas means this. We cannot speak of the marketplace of ideas without recruiting the metaphors and concepts that explain what a marketplace is. We cannot help but call upon the rhetorically constituted metaphor system that defines what it means to promote, price, sell, purchase, warehouse, distribute, merchandise, and, perhaps, go out of business. Even if none of these particular activities were explicitly mapped in any instance of Ideas Are Products (although many of them are), we still would depend upon the general rhetorical value we give to the domain of marketing: marketing—doing business—has an ethical dimension that cannot be ignored. At the same time, the value any writer or speaker gives to marketing activities varies in accordance with political, philosophical, economic, and professional considerations. Not every instance of the marketplace of ideas evokes the same model of marketplace.

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Likewise, not every instance evokes the same model of idea. This variation has the potential to disperse what is meant by the marketplace of ideas, what its consequences might be, and, therefore, whether it is true or apt. Nonetheless, the marketplace of ideas has a dominant rhetorical inflection. Haig Bosmajian traces the origin of the marketplace of ideas in U.S. Supreme Court decisions to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 coining of the phrase “free trade in ideas,” a measure of “the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” (13). The model Holmes has in mind is an ameliorative marketplace, a Smithian market of unfettered self-interest in which an invisible hand ultimately brings about benefits for all—a market where competition takes place in a peaceful, ever-improving context. Similarly, when the precise locution marketplace of ideas arises in a 1965 opinion penned by William Brennan, it evokes the Smithian model of the marketplace. When Brennan wrote his opinion, the Cold War was at its peak, and the Court had decided to end a postal regulation that required detention of communist propaganda. Brennan writes, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It should be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers” (qtd. in Bosmajian 49). Thus, the bellicose framework of censorship in which competing ideas are threatening is refuted with the peaceful framework of the marketplace in which ideas, even bad ones, are beneficial. It is, as Brennan makes clear, a free market. Brennan’s metaphor makes little sense without conceptual networking, and it networks in a relatively simple fashion. The main metaphor that opposes Brennan’s political position is the Cold War. In the Cold War metaphor, all acts that oppose communism are mapped as acts of war. To censor communist materials is to fight communism. In order to refute censorship and its affinity with the Cold War, Brennan recruits a wellunderstood concept associated with peace. That is, the marketplace of ideas networks with trade is peace. Furthermore, marketplace suggests all of the metaphors that constitute trade is peace such as Trade Is A Journey, Trade Is Friendship, and often Trade Is A Game. Thus, the marketplace of ideas is easily extended in ways consistent with a standard rhetorical position favoring peaceful trade: if we operate in the context of a peaceful marketplace of ideas (Ideas Are Products), in the end (Trade Is A Journey), we can trust our friends to buy the best ideas (Trade Is Friendship), and the best ideas will win out (Trade Is A Game or Trade Is War as only language). In short, one way the marketplace of ideas networks is to recruit an already operating conceptual system that rebuts an opposing metaphor. Not all marketplace of ideas networkings are so straightforward. Other metaphors and models may be involved, with networkings less obvious.

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For example, Bosmajian criticizes some legal scholars for tracing the marketplace of ideas to John Milton and John Stuart Mill, who use explicitly military metaphors (53). In Areopagitica, Milton writes of truth and falsehood grappling in “a free and open encounter” and subsequently refers to “the wars of Truth.” Likewise, Mill contends that truth can only be found through “the rough process of combatants fighting under hostile banners.” These metaphors directly recruit Argument Is War, a metaphor that might seem incompatible with the marketplace of ideas and its apparently peaceful, ameliorative implications. But Argument Is War is a close cousin of Trade Is War, and thus a networking of Argument Is War and Ideas Are Products is possible. Argument Is War follows more than one pathway to reach Ideas Are Products. One pathway is Argument Is War to Argument Is A Game to Ideas Are Products. That is, argument is not only war but all other competitive activities, sometimes a game. (Arguers put their cards on the table, punt, strike out.) Since war and game share some image-schematic similarities, the metaphors are partially compatible, even though a shift from one to the other has important rhetorical consequences. Therefore, while one writer or speaker may infer Trade Is A Game from the marketplace of ideas, remaining true to the Smithian model of markets, another writer or speaker might compatibly intensify the competitive metaphor, shifting upward from Trade Is A Game to Trade Is War. Another pathway leads more directly from the marketplace of ideas to Trade Is War. The marketplace of ideas does not necessarily evoke a Smithian marketplace. Instead, the marketplace might easily be a warlike space in which victorious ideas vanquish enemylike foes. Argument Is War’s image schema is isomorphically compatible with Trade Is War, permitting argument and the marketplace metaphors to map unproblematically. There is some potential for incompatibility, but it is rhetorical: Trade Is War is, in most inflections, incompatible with free market ideology. However, depending upon values of the time and community, Trade Is War might support a free marketplace of ideas and form a strongly claimed metaphor. At some historical moments, the evocation of Argument Is War, like war itself, might have a positive value, and thus might be strongly endorsed, just as Milton and Mill endorse Argument Is War and some later commentators by implication endorse a military model of the marketplace of ideas. Simply put, if both war and the marketplace are seen as ameliorative, then the conceptual networking makes good rhetorical sense. Conceptual networking permits a multiple linking of metaphors. It may seem fairly obvious, by now, that the marketplace of ideas (Ideas Are Products) networks with the various trade metaphors that have been the subject of this book but less obvious that it networks in other directions. It may help to imagine a series of complex of pathways and inter-

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sections linking the marketplace of ideas and the conceptual metaphor Ideas Are Products to other metaphors in all directions. For example, Ideas Are Products is readily connected to The Mind Is A Machine: if the mind is a machine, and if machines make products, then ideas are products. Somewhat more complexly, Ideas Are Products connects to The Economy Is An Organism, the metaphor that gives us healthy economies and failing economies: if economies need to be healthy, and if healthy economies produce marketable products, and if some of these products are produced by intellectual means, then an abundance of good ideas makes for a healthy economy. In less syllogistic formulation, we might simply say that when we envision a healthy economy, we imagine the activities of health, among them thinking of marketable ideas. The networking may sound complex, but in fact we make these connections quickly and easily. Indeed, we make them whenever we say such things as an open marketplace of ideas makes possible a healthy exchange of ideas. Many networkings are possible, but they are not all rhetorically equal. The networking of the marketplace of ideas and metaphors of peaceful commerce is particularly effective rhetorically in the United States because it calls upon beliefs that are deeply entrenched. The United States is not a monolith, but for a great majority, individualism and free enterprise are core values. Still, there may be situations in which the marketplace of ideas is advantageous even when it is networked with Argument Is War and Trade Is War. For example, during the Cold War, the threat of military conflict—in fact, the threat of nuclear annihilation—was unmistakable. At the same time, no military conflict was in progress. In part, then, the Cold War was an argument, as exemplified by the famous KhrushchevNixon kitchen debate (Argument Is War). To permit this argumentative war to proceed in the United States was thought dangerous, perhaps not as dangerous as nuclear annihilation but still quite threatening. In this circumstance, the marketplace of ideas has the advantage of being imageschematically compatible with Argument Is War, but rhetorically cooler. That is, Argument Is War is less threatening than nuclear war, even if losing the argument has real consequences. The marketplace of ideas further metaphorizes Argument Is War, so that it is less evocative of actual dangers. Better to have an argument than to fight a nuclear war. Better to buy and sell ideas than to pound one’s shoe on a podium. Furthermore, we must consider trade and economic metaphors tendentially. It is possible to evoke a Trade Is War model of the marketplace of ideas, but the tendency of the metaphor leaves open the possibility of attenuation. The marketplace of ideas tends to attenuate Argument Is War because the free market ideology is so prevalent in the United States. This tendency is brought into relief when we imagine places where the shift to a market metaphor would not be seen as attenuating at all. Marxists,

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for instance, are attuned to the cruelty of the so-called free market, to what they view as its inherent inequities and inefficiency. Similarly, among many university educators in the United States and Canada, who are often self-described liberals and leftists, the metaphor Ideas Are Products carries with it some undesirable implications. If ideas are products, then teachers and university professors become sellers and their students buyers. An emphasis on the market ultimately selecting the best ideas becomes secondary to the immediate need for the ideas (as products) to be useful—that is, income-producing—for the student customers. Indeed, the metaphor is easily literalized when some proponents of Ideas Are Products see tuition as a payment for goods. No doubt, Ideas Are Products as instantiated by the marketplace of ideas is as complex as any other metaphor and cannot be uttered competently or understood well without reference to the fine-grained communicative circumstances that constitute it. The conceptual networking I have described adds a layer of complexity to analyses of it, but the conceptual networking of Ideas Are Products is not special. All metaphors have the potential to network with other metaphors.

Metaphors We Write With Community-inflected metaphor has important ramifications, not just for the way we understand metaphoric functioning and how we analyze metaphors in rhetorical texts but also for the most common truisms about metaphor that affect how we teach metaphor as something we write. In writing research of the past two decades, no concept has been more influential than the idea of community. The social view of writing has, it seems, won the day. But the connection between understanding that writing is a social process and the teaching of particular aspects of writing has not been well established. Only a few theorists have struggled with the link between communities and particular texts, notably Norman Fairclough, who applies broad critical analysis of discourse to specific texts, and Susan Peck MacDonald, who traces the textual instantiation of community influence in academic disciplines. Few have considered what, in light of the social view of writing, we need to say to our students about writing metaphors. In writing research, metaphor is treated not so much as something to be written but as a force outside the writing process. Usually, writing research assumes what educational research attempts to prove: that metaphors are potentially misleading in learning new concepts (e.g., Gentner and Gentner; Spiro, Feltovich, Coulson, and Anderson). That is, writing scholars have worked hard to dispel mistaken notions about what constitutes the writing process, arguing, in effect, that writing is an unknown

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or misdescribed domain, over-determined by metaphors. Simply put, writing research typically shines its light on misleading metaphors that lead to false assumptions about writing. Because metaphor itself is largely misunderstood, writing scholars usually object to one metaphor at a time, ignoring the metaphor systems against which their views are pitted. Drawing on the work of Michael Reddy, Darsie Bowden objects to the language-as-container metaphor because of its harmful effect on composition pedagogy. Timothy Weiss urges us to abandon the outdated technical-writing-as-sales-job metaphor in favor of a Bakhtinian “ourselves-among-others” metaphor. To take an especially wellknown example, Carolyn Miller refutes the windowpane theory of language, a metaphor that erroneously treats technical language as if it were a transparent medium through which we perceive unaltered reality (“Humanistic”). Miller’s refutation has been remarkably influential, garnering sixty-eight citations between 1988 and 1992 in five major technical writing journals, not to mention numerous textbook endorsements (E. Smith). Ironically, this tenacious condemnation of erroneous metaphors goes hand in hand with a consensus that metaphors are both pervasive and important. In that vein, Nancy Nelson Spivey offers a thoughtful account of the social constructivist metaphor that has strongly influenced writing studies. All of this, however, is meta-analysis. Thus, it provides us nothing useful to say to students about metaphors in their writing. The field of writing studies does not benefit by ignoring the connection between rhetorical theory and the particulars of sentences, paragraphs, text structures, and figures of speech. Ultimately, though, these connections cannot be denied, because what often seem to be mere particulars (or, worse, “surface” features) are constituted by a larger rhetoric. James Seitz frames the problem well when he laments the way a “reductive view of metaphor has contributed to a reductive view of composition” (25). Seitz observes that metaphor is among those things that teachers of English, and teachers of writing especially, wish students came to class already knowing. If students could only recognize a metaphor, goes the common complaint, then I could teach more substantive things. I prefer to frame the problem somewhat differently. It seems to me that metaphor is treated ambivalently. Increasingly, teachers of English and composition recognize that metaphor has far-reaching significance, yet—I speculate for lack of adequate theoretical tools—it is treated reductively in the classroom. Indeed, what writing theory needs is a cogent understanding of the relationship between particular metaphors and the larger milieu that makes any important metaphor possible. A good beginning point, as Dona Hickey has recognized in her recent textbook, Figures of Thought for College Writers, is to recognize explicitly the unavoidability of conceptual metaphor.

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But that alone is not sufficient because conceptual metaphor theory has not fully woven rhetoric into its fabric. The present study, I suggest, provides the required theoretical connection—it can tell us what to say. And if there is any doubt that teachers of writing need better guidance, we need only look at the paucity (and impoverishment) of handbook commentary on metaphor (compare Seitz). Typically, handbooks rely upon the passé view of metaphor as stylistic flourish—making metaphor seem a dispensable decoration that is neither conceptually nor rhetorically valuable. Thus, the handbooks almost always couple a certain kind of praise with a certain kind of caution. To cite but one example, Richard Marius issues this warning: Metaphors should make a point sharply. Extended metaphors seldom interest readers. You may think it clever to create an extended metaphor that likens getting a college education to climbing a mountain: Admission is like arriving at the base; enrolling in your first classes is like putting on your helmet and climbing tentatively over the first rocks; social life is like rain on the side of the mountain because a little of it is refreshing, but too much may wash you off the cliffs. You can go on and on with such metaphors, but to most readers they are contrived and tedious, and by the time you have climbed to the top, they will long since have abandoned your work. (182)

Marius goes on to praise other metaphors lavishly. But even in dispensing praise, he encourages us to treat metaphor with near dismissive suspicion. His praise treats metaphor as exceptional language—dazzling when used well, dismal when used poorly, and therefore not altogether necessary. Like Marius’s commentary, most conventional advice about metaphor is on the one hand sensible and on the other hand oddly naive. Marius simply advises students not to belabor metaphors such as college-asmountain-climbing. Most of us would agree that Marius has a good ear and offers some valid guidance. However, like most writing gurus, he offers no validation for his advice other than his good ear and perhaps his experienced hand. This leaves important questions—the key questions— unanswered. For instance, why would college-as-mountain-climbing appeal to a student writer in the first place? In fact, we can easily account for its attraction. A standard blend of conceptual metaphors, associated with the educational community and familiar to most students, supports college-as-mountain-climbing. This standard conceptual blend probably attracted Marius when he selected college-as-mountain-climbing as a bad example: he “invented” the example because its constituting concepts are already afoot in the discourse of education. The first metaphor in the blend is Life Is A Journey. As we have seen with Trade Is A Journey, not only life but many of life’s main episodes are metaphorized as journeys. Not surprisingly, then, Life Is A Journey

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has the subsidiary metaphor Education Is A Journey. Many journeys, including educational journeys, follow an upward trajectory. Thus, the journeying metaphor combines with the upward-oriented metaphors Happy Is Up, More Is Up, and Success Is Up in order to form Education Is An Upward Journey. In addition, this upward journeying blend entails the metaphor Success Is A Place. At the end of the upward journey we reach a happy place of abundance, where we are successful. We have arrived. Our everyday language about education depends upon these metaphors. We issue progress reports; we promote students to the upper grades in hopes they will partake of higher education and perhaps receive an advanced degree. It is no great leap from metaphors of progressive, upward motion to college-as-mountain-climbing. In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine someone of our place and time who cannot intuitively metaphorize education as climbing a mountain. But, as always, more than the ability to conceptualize is at work. Though dominant, Education Is An Upward Journey is nonetheless part of a rhetorical conversation about the nature of education and the direction educational policy should take, a conversation that is actively carried out within the U.S. community of educators. Writing scholars Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb explicitly challenge the value of what they call “progress as linear movement,” a metaphor that tacitly warrants views of unsuccessful students as “regressive” and supports Piaget-influenced theories of educational development (“University of Chicago” 97– 101). They counter: Another—and perhaps, more productive—metaphor for growth is the equally familiar one of an “outsider” trying to “get into” a community, a metaphor that models the movement of a learner situated outside a bounded field, who then “enters” the field and so “joins” the community by acting like its members. (This metaphor does not place any single community at the upper right of the chart as an ultimate goal.) To join a disciplinary community is, in part, to master a body of knowledge. But that knowledge does not exist “out there,” independent of those who control it, just waiting to be acquired. Knowledge belongs to groups of people who have some shared stake in exploring, preserving, and expanding it. The outsider must acquire knowledge from insiders, usually through some form of an apprenticeship. (101)

Williams and Colomb’s alternative metaphor requires a radically different view of both writing education and education on the whole than the view that has prevailed for most of the twentieth century. And they are not alone in promoting education-as-joining. A far-reaching reconsideration of writing pedagogy is underway that embeds this very competition of metaphors. My earlier discussion of communities is prompted by this reconsideration.

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Therefore, the question of college-as-mountain-climbing’s attraction is complex, substantive, and community specific, not just a matter of serendipitous invention or awkward execution. Students, educators, parents, school boards, and politicians have much at stake in endorsing or rejecting a metaphor such as college-as-mountain-climbing. Perhaps more important than whether the metaphor seems awkward is whether, in re-inventing the metaphor, a student writer is mouthing unexamined assumptions about what four years of high-priced college are for. We ought to ask him or her not, Why did you use such an awkward metaphor, but, Why are you content to endorse the standard view? At the same time, we should ask ourselves what makes Marius’s bad example bad. As presented, college-as-mountain-climbing does seem clumsy. Here, some sympathy for student writers, and perhaps for all writers, may be in order. One editor’s clumsiness is all too often another’s elegance. One thing the education-as-joining metaphor reminds us is that “good” writing is not an absolute. Nonetheless, there is something other than mere insider judgment that alerts us to the badness of Marius’s bad example. Most (although not all) effective metaphors are based upon standard conceptual metaphors. However, this does not mean every instance of a standard, conceptual metaphor will be pleasing or effective. When a writer belabors similarities, saying, as Marius imagines, “admission is like arriving at the base” and “social life is like rain on the side of the mountain because a little of it is refreshing, but too much may wash you off the cliffs,” the metaphor Education Is A Journey falls flat—and falls flat for a particular reason. The execution is predicated upon a false theory of metaphor. It assumes that metaphors have only to do with corresponding features. The more the better. Not so. The mountain-climbing metaphor can be fully expressed—its image schema sufficiently conveyed, its entailed cultural understandings amply suggested—in a single word. If the writer says, for example, “We enter college, hoping one day to stand on the summit,” summit encompasses the full blend of Life Is A Journey, Education Is A Journey, Happy Is Up, More Is Up, and Success Is Up. Moreover, summit calls up associations particular to mountain climbing (such as struggle, danger, adventure, and extraordinary achievement) that are easily understood without elaboration. In short, the underlying metaphor in Marius’s example is not an inherently bad one at all, but the execution is overspecified, largely because it derives from a misguided view of what a metaphor is. Some suitably applied feature-mapping might be in order, especially if there is a need to intensify or attenuate the metaphor. But it is not essential. Furthermore, it may even be that Marius’s bad metaphor is not really a metaphor at all in its execution—or if a metaphor, a peripheral variety not worthy of the name. Consider this sentence: “Social life is like rain on the side of the mountain because a little of it is refreshing, but too much

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may wash you off the cliffs.” In form, it is a specified simile. It depends on a single, corresponding feature that needs explaining, which means it has more in common with bad jokes than good metaphors. For example, here is a very bad joke that I heard on A Prairie Home Companion, where many bad jokes may be found. Why is a divorce like a hurricane? When it’s over, your trailer’s gone. The joke specifies a shared feature (removes your trailer), but the feature is so far-fetched that its revelation is humorous (at least, it is to me). Likewise, social life and rain may share the similarity the wrong quantity is harmful, but the revelation of this similarity is more a punch line than a metaphoric association. That is, neither the divorce joke nor the rain simile is associated with a well-understood conceptual metaphor; neither illuminates a range of cultural associations; thus, neither has much hope of resonating well. We can say, then, that college-as-mountain-climbing is probably a good metaphor. However, to be well written, it must take into account both the conceptual structure and the rhetorical consequences of the metaphor within a community of discourse. Rain and social life simply do not fit. However, Education Is An Upward Journey does allow room for some effective variations. In a recent election year, one politician chastised those who would discontinue college loans, saying roughly, “Your own rise was funded by the federal government, and now that you’re on top, you want to pull up the ladder.” This metaphor, of course, makes good use of the verticality image schema of Education Is An Upward Journey. It also networks with other success metaphors such as the ladder to success. Both metaphors are extended in a humorous way by a subversive mapping. Usually, Education Is An Upward Journey and the ladder to success map only an individual’s climb, not a rear-guard action that ensures others’ downfall. It might be objected that we need only our intuition to recognize the goodness of the pulling-up-the-ladder metaphor. But my point here is not that we need to avoid giving intuitively good advice but rather that if this advice is also founded on an accurate theory of metaphor, we have much to gain. A better theory of metaphor leads to substantive interrogations of what student writers have to say, not merely as a brainstorming heuristic but as a way of entering into important rhetorical activity. It would only be a beginning to point out that college-as-mountain-climbing comports with Education Is An Upward Journey and that it converses with such newer community-based metaphors as education-as-joining. A research paper on the topic of college education might uncover numerous competing metaphors and, perhaps, evolving values of those metaphors. Certainly Education Is A Journey and education-as-joining have the potential to be invested with rhetorical values other than those I have so far noted. Over time, the social and ethical value of Trade Is War has changed. Other important metaphors will likely change also.

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For example, Gregory Clark argues that the metaphor of discourse communities that emerged in the 1980s may not be as helpful as he and others once thought. While he once favored the notion of education-asjoining that Williams and Colomb advocate, he now recognizes the exclusionary aspect of emphasizing discourse communities. In this view, the metaphor of discourse community becomes less community-as-attractor, as James Porter describes it, and more community-as-container—a container that both keeps in and keeps out. In place of the discourse community metaphor, Clark proposes we emphasize writing-as-travel, a metaphor that is supported by Education Is A Journey. But Clark is not proposing a return to the linear progress model. He recruits a standard conceptual metaphor, but instead of the usual progress-toward-success mapping, he selects an importance-of-the-journeyitself mapping. Clark says, I am arguing that we need to imagine the discursive collectivities that are essential to individual and social life in a way that requires participants to acknowledge and respect the distinctiveness and the differences of others, and to commit nonetheless to the transformative work of cooperation and connection. When we imagine these collectivities as communities we can deny diverse and digressive identities and purposes that constitute them; when we imagine them as cities we can deny the interdependence that is required of individuals who inhabit the same bounded place. My suggestion is that we can remember to acknowledge the reality of both difference and reciprocity in social interaction by imagining discursive collectivity as not a kind of place but as a kind of process, and that we do that by exploring the conceptual resources provided by the metaphor of travel. If we envision the collectivity that is constituted in a discursive interaction as a place, its participants occupy a territory where they must assume and negotiate conflicting proprietary claims and where the object of their cooperation is the establishment of boundaries. If, however, we envision that collectivity as a pragmatic encounter of fellow travelers whose itineraries are their own but who find themselves sharing temporarily some problems and some opportunities, our students might learn to read and write as if they were embedded in an expansive social space where they must confront and account for relationships of agency, obligation, and interdependence. (22–23)

Whether Clark’s interpretation of Education Is A Journey will take hold remains to be seen. Nothing prevents him from arguing at length for a novel mapping of an established conceptual metaphor, but at least one factor militates against ultimate success. The metaphor is tendentially determined by existing community rhetoric. No matter how well Clark expresses his journey-itself thesis, a likely response will include some version of Education Is An Upward Journey. I would argue—fully noting the irony of my argument—that no matter how Clark may wish for writing

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to be travel, the metaphor he selects is still a matter of community, preconditioned by rhetorical discourse and, therefore, inflected in ways he cannot fully control. Nonetheless, there is value in noting that Clark’s writing-as-travel is far from the Education Is A Journey that shaped writing pedagogy before the discourse community metaphor came along; it is a re-envisioning of what it means to write in the context of a classroom, a university, a society; and it is probably incompatible with college-as-mountain-climbing. Considering college-as-mountain-climbing as part of a rhetorical conversation, the student writer might decide to cast his or her metaphor aside or to explore its most important consequences. Either way, it is important for the writer to view metaphors as something other than a decoration. The writer’s metaphors are contributions—witting or unwitting— to rhetorical conversations that are enriched more by informed utterances than by accidental ones.

A Final Word about Community The idea of community is inseparable from a rhetorical understanding of metaphor. Without it, we risk an overcompensation that, in rightly rejecting the worst aspects of the Aristotelian model, leaps to the opposite error: an assumption that everything is metaphor. This view argues that if discourse writes us, then we are also written by our metaphors, that signs are so inherently unreliable that the checks and balances of rhetoric do nothing to constrain metaphoric meaning. The idea of community, however, helps us to avoid this excessiveness. Community—in the sense that communities embody intersubjective construals of external circumstances and constrain responses to our lived-in worlds—encompasses the particularity of our rhetorical lives. We converse about known circumstances and controversies not just in the context of a vast discursive world but in coordination with immediate and visible concerns held in common with others. Thus, when we utter Trade Is War and related metaphors, when we write and speak of the marketplace of ideas, when we “invent” a metaphor such as college-as-mountain-climbing, or—for that matter—when we recruit and re-envoice any important metaphor, we cannot do so competently without navigating the rhetorical intricacies of a community discourse. This competence is probably a matter of degrees. In general, I have assumed throughout this study that public, prominent utterers of trade metaphors are competent utterers. I have assumed also that while students or other novices may fail through imperfect competence to comport with the rhetorical etiquettes of particular communities, they nonetheless are competent enough. My assumptions are not wholly arbitrary. Community membership, central or peripheral, is prima facie evidence of rhetorical competence to some degree. The members of a community create with

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each utterance and each nuanced inflection of an important metaphor the particularities of a community. Communities are not, therefore, static entities. They are always changing in the aggregate through a process of assimilating a broad confluence of variegated activity. This point has been made best by writing and genre theorists, who over the past decade have pointed out that the genres through which communities are inscribed are malleable in relation to community needs and consensuses (e.g., Bazerman; Berkenkotter and Huckin; Blakeslee; Cross; Devitt; Freedman, Adam, and Smart; Hunt; Miller “Genre”; Prior; Schryer; Swales). This capacity for evolution is implicit in my brief histories of Trade Is War and related metaphors. If Daniel Defoe once unabashedly endorsed Trade Is War in what would now be thought a reckless violation of rhetorical etiquette, that does not mean he speaks from a different community. Rather, it means the community of trade discoursers has evolved a different etiquette over time, an etiquette that responds to a collective experience of trade that makes some metaphors more or less rhetorically perilous. Still, the community itself is relatively constant, drawn to the topic of trade and placed in the rhetorical arena by ongoing, interanimating activity. The emphasis I am placing, then, on the particularities of community is not unconstrained. Just as I would guard against the postmodern propensity to see discourse as amorphous, unpredictably shifting, and tacitly controlling, I would also guard against particularism in its ad hoc sense. While every conversation of metaphors is responsive to some finegrained nuances that only particular conversers in particular conversations may attend to, we do not begin every conversation anew. We necessarily respond not just to the nuances of the moment but to regularities within a temporal frame that marks as relevant concerns within a collective rhetorical memory. This rhetorical memory—which is really a way of gauging relevance—permits us coherence in spite of ever-progressing, moment-to-moment evolution. There is no conversational tabula rasa. The idea of community is inseparable from all of the aspects of metaphor’s rhetorical constitution that I have discussed in this book. It is decidedly not an addendum. The Aristotelian algebra so sorely wanting in rhetorical context is not improved upon by undifferentiated reference to cultural discourse. Instead, it is the structured makeup of discourse—its interanimated segmentation and situated concerns—that trumps formalistic, internal-functioning analyses of metaphor. Many metaphor theorists and other language scholars have always been willing to say—if somewhat dismissively at times—that metaphor has broad significance in thought and language. But this concession has led to no substantive abandonment of algebraic analyses, because without the notion of community the spacious significance of metaphor remains but an afterthought. A view of metaphor as rhetorically constituted calls for us to recog-

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nize patterned specificity among metaphors because rhetoric reveals language in its most active and necessary form, where such things as metaphors, metonymies, ironies, narrative, and argumentative schemes are indispensably implicated in the common pursuits of communities of discourse. Communities of discourse coalesce around topics and activities that cannot be confronted except in relation to others’ similarly construed realities. In short, rhetoric is what gives coherence to our most complex symbolic exchanges. When we view metaphor not just as an incidental tool of rhetoric but as a product of it, we begin to see more than simply that metaphors have far-ranging significance; we begin to see the way that significance takes and makes shape.

7 Conclusion Generally, in war the best policy is to take the state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. —Sun-tzu, The Art of War, approx. 500 B.C. It is generally better to dominate a whole organization or market with superior service and innovation than to splinter it with destructive tactics. —Donald G. Krause, The Art of War for Executives, 1995

When I began studying Trade Is War, I expected to find the kind of cultural pervasiveness and mystical force so often attributed to metaphor. It took some time for me to abandon this view, although, in retrospect, I might have recognized some early hints that this would be necessary in the end. As I pondered Trade Is War as a possible topic, I asked friends and family the casual question, “Do you think trade is war?” Almost always, the answerers lamented the fact that trade has become war or claimed that trade really isn’t war, even though many people think it is. It was sometimes explained to me that trade is, if anything, a game. Where was the mystical power of the seemingly ubiquitous Trade Is War? In focus groups, while views of Trade Is War varied, it became clear that Trade Is War did not clandestinely control people’s thoughts at all. Discussants recognized the metaphor and often had given serious thought to its wrongheadedness long before I arrived with questionnaire in hand. Oftentimes, when a discussant found the metaphor to be “true,” he or she supported this assessment with a story of egregious behavior from a client or an employer who too often metaphorized trade or business as war. While it is not always wise to accept a study participant’s self-assessment, the frequency of this anti–Trade Is War view, sometimes passionately expressed, convinced me that, if nothing else, discussants were clear about their ideals. Thus, I came to think that cultural approval of Trade Is War is a mile wide and an inch deep (as the saying goes). Similarly, one of my secondary hypotheses fell by the wayside. I expected to find, if not cultural unanimity that trade is well thought of as 161

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war, at least a masculine tendency to metaphorize trade and business as combat or as rough games. But this proved not to be the case. I do not discount the possibility of gender differences in many areas, but no salient gender pattern emerged with respect to Trade Is War. Men and women generally agreed that war metaphors are not ideal or true. This was so in mixed groups and in single-gender groups. Moreover, while women did consistently (as expected) dislike war metaphors, they also showed no special reticence in creating playful war metaphors for sales and marketing. In an all-female focus group, the women collaboratively applied Business Is War to sales and marketing situations, agreeing upon an oddly stylized locution: “kabuki combat.” Me: Back when you were in marketing, did you ever think of it as combat? Zoey: Yes. Rikki: Absolutely. Zoey: No doubt about it. Lynn: I mean, when you’re on a sales call, you’re thinking of it as combat. Zoey: Absolutely. Yeah, you’re trying to trash them. Lynn: If the call right before you was your competitor selling a similar product— Zoey: I mean, I just sat in a meeting yesterday where there was a client and two sets of consultants, and you could feel the consultants, as we consulted [it was] really, “I want the business. I want the—” I mean, you could just feel it. Rikki: Yes— Jane: Combat— Zoey: I mean, we wanted the business, so we would subtly move into the direction of our expertise, and then they would subtly move into the direction of their expertise. Rikki: It’s kabuki combat. Zoey: Yeah, exactly. And then there was an independent, one woman, and she was pulling in another direction. There was definitely combat going on. Jane: Combat and competition being related. Lynn: Right. Jane: Combat being the expression of the competition. Lynn: But no matter how subtle, there is a strategy happening here, and you’re planning your defense and— Jane: Right. Zoey: And you’re trying to beat out somebody else— Jane: Beat out somebody else— Zoey: Because they’re all going, in this case, everybody was going for the same business.

This was not, perhaps, an example of the loftiest of feminist ideals. But it was certainly an example of the rhetorical constitution of metaphor. It

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may seem, at first blush, that the women were claiming, indeed heartily endorsing, Business Is War. Yet it is of no small significance that their version of war mainly relates to maneuvering rather than to confrontation. This attenuates the metaphor significantly. And more telling, they move fluidly from the domain of combat to the domain of entertainment (“kabuki”), which indicates a playfulness of tone. War is not really war; it is, instead, a surreal theatrical representation of war. In a way, it is good news that my initial hypothesis of a culture-forming metaphor was mistaken. If Trade Is War had that kind of power, imagine what kind of commercial atmosphere it would generate! Every transaction would become an act of unmitigated aggression, every competition a fight to the death, every competitor a reviled foe. The happy truth is Trade Is War is not really a profound shaper of culture so much as a prevalent component of a cultural debate. At different historical moments, the influence of Trade Is War waxes and wanes. Even at times when Trade Is War does not draw the general condemnation that it currently does, it always operates in contrast to the long-stable concept trade is peace and intertwines with other economic metaphors. Likewise, it is good news that Trade Is War is almost always ascribed rather than claimed and that Business Is War is used almost universally as only language. Good news for us. Bad news for others. We have seen that Americans often ascribe Trade Is War to Asians, especially to the Japanese. I have not studied Japanese metaphors, but it seems likely to me that other cultures encompass competing metaphors, competing ideologies. But seldom are foreign cultures given credit for internal diversity. Ascription of metaphors to foreign cultures is one way of “orientalizing” other cultures, to use Edward Said’s word. Not only do we ascribe Trade Is War to Asians, but we also impute to this metaphor a mystical, totalizing force: the ascription implies not just that Asians believe trade is war but that it is all they believe. On the other hand, to say that a metaphor does not signify culture in the overarching way that I had originally assumed is not to say that the metaphor is less significant than I had thought. In fact, Trade Is War appears more significant when regarded as a rhetorically constituted figure than when mistakenly thought a cultural determiner. Rhetoric is about discussion, disagreement, sometimes progress toward consensus, and always hope for improvement of the human condition—all of the things that make human activity worth bothering about. We can say with some optimism, then, that metaphor is not just about thought, it is also about rhetorical action. It is of no small importance that an economist such as Lester Thurow cares to explain that Trade Is War, as a habitual way of metaphorizing commerce and trade, may be misguided. On the other side of the issue, it is equally important that one-time presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan cares to explain that Trade Is War, as a clear-eyed way of understanding

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our country’s history and prospects, may help us all. And it is surely of no less importance that people in more anonymous walks of life give serious thought to whether commerce should be a war, a game, a journey, or a seeking of friends. While conducting this study, and especially in my role as moderator of focus groups, I felt it important to remain neutral about the relative worth of trade metaphors. I confess now that while I have been successful in not expressing my judgments to others, I have not been dispassionate about the issues raised by Trade Is War, Markets Are Containers, Trade Is Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, and trade is peace. And being exposed to discussions of these metaphors has led me to some surprising conclusions—conclusions that, at the outset, I would have found strange and, indeed, unacceptable. Like most Americans, I have favored the globalist position, assuming almost as a matter of faith that protectionism is futile and destructive. Like most Americans of Baby Boom age, I find commercial war metaphors troublesome. I was weaned on the politics of Vietnam, and the intervening years have only provided further evidence of that war’s moral vacuity. For that reason, I have no liking for the images, words, and spirit of war—not even in playful only language metaphors. But upon long reflection, it seems to me that of the social and economic dangers we face today, Trade Is War represents a small one, and its literal counterpart, trade is peace, a large and growing one. Trade is peace is the great truism of the post–World War II era. It is the touchstone of well-intentioned globalism, which is motivated by the same spirit of peace that inspired the Marshall Plan and the United Nations. What could be wrong with such a spirit? In fact, I believe there is much wrong with it as it is applied to trade policy. Before World War II, we lived in a world of contained markets. National governments protected local commerce by using high tariffs to shield against foreign competition. This “protectionism” is often denounced now as short-sighted, fear-inspired, and dangerous. In some ways, that is so. But the postwar era has its own excesses. In its desire to help devastated foreign countries rebuild and underdeveloped countries mature—all in the hope of avoiding a third world war—the United States has opened its markets to all comers. The resulting loss in manufacturing—of automobiles, consumer electronics, textiles, and semiconductors—has been considerable. But the loss that should concern us most is not the loss of manufacturing dollars. What we sacrifice by indiscriminately opening our markets is two hundred years of social progress. In the nineteenth century, the United States legally permitted slave, child, or coerced labor. Even free adult workers would have been astonished to hear of a forty-hour work week—with paid vacation. A heavy price was paid in order to right the wrongs of the unfettered marketplace. We fought a civil war to end slavery. The trade union

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movement paid for its victories with blood. However, because we have almost universally accepted the notion that trade is peace—both that it is a necessary activity of peace and that it engenders peace—each of us is more likely than not to wear clothes, drive cars, and compose books on computers that are produced by slave or child labor. At the very least, we depend upon world markets to provide us with goods produced by workers who are paid deplorable wages and who have no right to bargain collectively. Trade may be peace—but is it peace at any price? When we open our borders to products produced by enslaved, underaged, and oppressed workers, we pay a moral cost, to be sure. This cost, however, goes beyond being drawn into the ethical vacuum of buying and using tainted goods. We face an even greater ethical problem when we squander our ability to influence foreign conditions. By failing to preserve minimum acceptable conditions within our borders while acquiescing to appalling conditions outside of them, we recast all of what we do commercially into a transnational agnosticism. Simply put, the original reason for promoting free trade was to promote peace, a presumed natural consequence of trade. That rationale remains prominent in trade discussion today. But the unintended consequence has been the creation of nationless corporations for whom a moral and ethical obligation to workers is hardly a matter for concern. Unions once bargained for a living wage and decent working conditions. Now enormous multinational corporations are increasingly accountable only to faceless stockholders who are not confronted daily with the tie between exploitation and profit. We need only to check our retirement plans to verify that we are, most of us, among these faceless stockholders. Meanwhile, as factories and jobs are dispersed around the globe, millions who once benefited from social progress in the United States are now thrust into uncertainty, working for lower wages and left relatively powerless in relation to employers. The devastating consequences of this are perhaps not strikingly evident today because we are enjoying a flush economy. Most workers in the United States currently derive some benefit from the law of supply and demand with respect to labor. But a downturn in the U.S. economy could bring the problem into stark relief. Moreover, even with today’s robust economy, we see can see fissures in the social foundation of the U.S. commercial environment. In real dollars, average wages are falling steadily. And the disparity between executive pay and worker pay is greater than ever. At the turn of the century, J. P. Morgan said that executive pay should never exceed worker pay by more than twenty fold. Today top executives make more than two hundred times the salary of the average factory worker (Kadleck, Smolowe). This tangible harm to domestic workers emanates from the seemingly commendable idea that trade is peace. Am I recommending, then, that

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we revive and claim the metaphor Trade Is War? No. No matter how we may try to delimit it, the standard Western model of Trade Is War entails aggressive action toward others. Neither the United States nor any other nation benefits from commercial harm to others. However, I do claim that Markets Are Containers has positive value. That is, we need to retain some sense of separation between our markets and others’—not for the sake of hoarding profit but for the sake of maintaining a humane working environment. While most nationalistic stances emphasize the wages lost by some American workers, I urge an emphasis upon social progress lost by the United States as a whole. We cannot ameliorate conditions around the world while permitting our own conditions to deteriorate. Some may argue that when we treat our market as a container, protecting our workers behind a wall of tariffs, we deprive equally deserving workers abroad of the chance to make a living, no matter how meager at first, and that we further deprive foreign workers the opportunity to make economic progress in the future. But this argument follows the false logic of trade is peace. It cannot be helpful for us to fund oppressed labor with pieces of our own economy. The way to improve foreign workers’ conditions is through political action, not through economic acquiescence. Meanwhile, our own corporate community needs to restore its productive bond with its workers of all levels. A corporation or a country that is not answerable to its own workers will be answerable to no one, especially not while its profits continue to grow. To be clear, in claiming Markets Are Containers, I do not also claim Trade Is War. Remember that while Trade Is War entails Markets Are Containers, Markets Are Containers does not necessarily imply Trade Is War. Some of our most common instances of Markets Are Containers either dramatically attenuate Trade Is War or can just as easily suggest other metaphors such as Trade Is A Game. At the same time, when I argue the case for Markets Are Containers, I am suggesting a somewhat novel interpretation of what containment means. Certainly I do not intend to emphasize the exclusionary aspect of containment suggested by, say, the fortress metaphor. Indeed, I do not know of a common locution that inflects Markets Are Containers in the way I have in mind, a way that emphasizes preservation of social well-being without at the same time fearing or prohibiting outside influence. Thus, what I offer is a position that requires a new metaphor. Tempting as it is to offer up a new metaphor, I will not. Instead, let me describe what characteristics the metaphor should have and how it will fit into the conversation of trade metaphors already proceeding. Like Trade Is A Game, the needed container metaphor must have an attenuating effect, less rhetorically heated than either Trade Is War or Trade Is A Game. Lester Thurow, who projects a future world economy with both

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competitive and cooperative elements, suggests the metaphor of soccer, a relatively nonviolent game. But I am leery of this metaphor because the ultimate goal of even the most benevolent soccer teams is to defeat the opposition. What we should desire in the United States is a world in which our economic counterparts succeed well. We cannot, therefore, follow any fundamentally competitive model. We need to envision contained spaces that are essentially cooperative and mutually beneficent. We need not erase all borders in order to wish success for nations and corporations around the world. When we contain our market, what we are comprising is not a hoard of goods but a model for commercial and economic behavior. We can succeed in this and work for others’ success at the same time. The attached metaphor of success must not be the prevalent Zero Sum Model. The success of the U.S. market need not be measured in growth that supersedes others’ growth, and the growth of another market need not come at the expense of ours. Instead, we need to view the success of markets qualitatively. The preservation and improvement of economic benefits, justly shared, should be what matters—what makes a “container” of value. It would seem that even free-market economists would agree with this objective in principle. Otherwise why would they argue with such persistence that the principle of self-interest works, ironically, for the common good? Yet I doubt the free-market ideology, which touts trade is peace while accepting no responsibility for economic devastation, will move us toward that objective. Notwithstanding the law of unintended consequences, to argue that the unbridled exercise of self-interest somehow guarantees the general good rings false. It is backwards-speak. If the common good is what we value, we need to make it our first objective, not merely hope that it will be an agreeable byproduct of unrestrained self-interest. As for metaphors themselves, the effect this study of Trade Is War has had on me should be instructive. Whether or not my conclusions about world economics are correct—I have been wrong before and about matters far less complex—I argue unequivocally that metaphors as they systematically compete and converse are fundamental to public and private rhetoric. Metaphors of trade index and constrain what we say and do about commercial interactions as ordinary as buying butter at the supermarket and as consequential as voting to create the World Trade Organization. The role of metaphors is not only tacit and cognitive but also publicly rhetorical. It seems to me that most metaphors are more like Trade Is War than not. I readily acknowledge that Trade Is War is a more obviously political metaphor than some others. But every metaphor, to some degree, calls upon the way we see the world of action. The chestnuts analyzed ad infinitum by theorists show this well. We cannot say man is a wolf or my

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love is a rose without pronouncing on the nature of humankind. And this pronouncement is assuredly woven within living, rhetorical conversation. I set out to study Trade Is War in order to study metaphor itself. But we cannot study any metaphor well without taking into account the larger patterns that related metaphors form. Once we recognize that metaphors form meaningful clusters, we must also recognize that these clusters have far-ranging rhetorical significance. And once we acknowledge metaphor’s rhetorical significance, we must acknowledge that conversations among metaphors are complex and refuse to surrender completely to our analyses. Our conclusions about the relation between metaphor, thought, and rhetoric must inevitably remain dependent upon our ordinarily unvoiced sensitivities to cultural and community nuance. This does not mean, however, that we cannot usefully observe the entrenched and evolving patterns of rhetorical use that constitute metaphor. It does not mean that we need to retreat into the Aristotelian formalisms so prevalent in twentieth-century metaphor theory. If there is a single point I wish to make most strenuously, it is that metaphor is constituted not by its internal function but rather its internal function is constituted by a larger rhetorical environment. Thus, we can never fruitfully train our eye upon a single metaphor. To study metaphor should always be to study something else.

Appendix Notes Works Cited Index

Appendix Questionnaire Number One Each of the following may seem true to you in some sense. Rate how true each seems according to the following scale: 1 = not very true; 2 = could be seen as true; 3 = somewhat true; 4 = very true; 5 = absolutely true. 1. Businesses are hungry tigers. 2. Companies are people. 3. Companies are animals. 4. Business is combat. 5. Trade is like a ballet. 6. The economy is a locomotive. 7. Business is a game. 8. Business is IBM. 9. Trade is war. 10. Companies are heroes and villains. 11. The economy is a conveyer belt. 12. Business is a bombing mission. 13. Businesses are mammals. 14. IBM is a giant. 15. Trade is a dance. 16. Companies are like people. 17. Trade is like a war. 18. Business is like football. 19. Business is a ballet. 20. Business is peace negotiations. 21. Business is a production at the Bolshoi. 22. The economy is a computer. 23. Companies are like animals. 24. Businesses are dogs. 25. Business is the process of choreography. 26. IBM is Babe Ruth. 27. The economy is a machine.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

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28. Business is like a machine. 29. Trade is a game. 30. Trade is all about keeping score.

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Please list the statements you rated the most true and the most false. Explain why.

Questionnaire Number Two Each of the following may seem true to you in some sense. Rate how true each seems according to the following scale: 1 = not very true; 2 = could be seen as true; 3 = somewhat true; 4 = very true; 5 = absolutely true. 1. Companies are like animals. 2. Trade is all about keeping score. 3. The economy is a machine. 4. Trade is like travelling. 5. Business is combat. 6. Trade is like a ballet. 7. The economy is a locomotive. 8. Business is a two-way street. 9. Business is a game. 10. Business is IBM. 11. Trade is war. 12. Markets are walled-in spaces. 13. Companies are heroes and villains. 14. The economy is a conveyer belt. 15. Business is a bombing mission. 16. Markets are fortresses. 17. Businesses are mammals. 18. Business is like football. 19. Trade is a dance. 20. Trade is a journey. 21. Companies are like people. 22. Trade is like a war. 23. IBM is a giant. 24. Markets are containers. 25. Business is a ballet. 26. Business is peace negotiations. 27. Businesses are hungry tigers. 28. Business is a joint excursion. 29. The economy is a computer. 30. Business is a production at the Bolshoi.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

Appendix

31. Businesses are dogs. 32. Markets are bubbles. 33. Business is the process of choreography. 34. IBM is Babe Ruth. 35. Companies are animals. 36. Business is like a machine. 37. Trade is a voyage of exploration. 38. Trade is a game. 39. Companies are people. 40. Markets are like countries.

173

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

Please list four or five statements you rated the most true and explain very briefly why they seemed true to you. Please list four or five statements you rated the most false and explain very briefly why they seemed false to you.

Notes 1. A Conversation among Metaphors 1. In addition to Metaphors We Live By, some excellent introductions to conceptual metaphor may be found in Raymond Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding; Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason; George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor; and Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. 2. I use Whitacre’s account as an example but do not necessarily accept its accuracy. After making public his accusations against ADM, thus forcing the company to plead guilty to federal price-fixing charges, Whitacre was himself convicted of a multimillion dollar embezzlement of ADM funds. 3. For an excellent discussion of the metaphors associated with this dichotomy, see George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t.

2. Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra 1. This example is, of course, contrived to preserve the locution man is a wolf, but man is a wolf underlies such similar expressions as wildlife photographer Jim Brandenburg’s comment, “If, one day, the wolf no longer finds the world a fit place in which to live, we may face a similar and inescapable destiny.” Brandenburg has also written a book whose title suggests man is a wolf and probably also wolf is a man: Brother Wolf. 2. For a fuller discussion of image schemas, see Mark Johnson’s The Body in the Mind. 3. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier have theorized a many-space model of conceptual integration, calling the standard two-domain model of metaphor a special case of the many-space model (Fauconnier and Turner; Turner, Literary; Turner and Fauconnier). They point out that when we imagine such things as counterfactuals and hypotheticals, we use two input spaces, a generic space, and a blended space, which allows new properties to emerge in the blended space. Conceptual integration will continue to be a fruitful area in research on mind and language, but it is distinct, nonetheless, from my critique of the Aristotelian twopart model of metaphor. 4. A pancratiast combines boxing and wrestling.

3. The Conversation at Large 1. In fact, Kenneth Burke’s conversation metaphor encompasses an extrava175

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Notes to Pages 35–121

gant mixed metaphor that combines Language Is Conversation, Conversation Is A Journey, Argument Is War, Emotion Is Hot, and Meaning Is An Object. 2. Raleigh quotes from Cicero’s attack on Verres. Cicero, as prosecutor, characterizes his defendant, Verres, a high political official known for bribery. In English it can be translated, “Nothing is so fortified that it cannot be captured by money.” Michael Grant renders the sentence, along with the sentence preceding, “Nothing, he declares, is too sacred to be corrupted by money; nothing too strong to resist its attack” (Cicero 38). Thus, what Raleigh cites is a Latin metaphor that treats money as a weapon of war. 3. See chapter 5 for a full description of focus groups. 4. You will, no doubt, have noticed, that in rejecting Trade Is War, Thurow shifts to the metaphor Trade Is A Game, but let us hold off discussing that for a moment. 5. without doubt 6. thrive 7. foundation, fund, or founded 8. In chapters 4 and 5, I will discuss the term mapping and its technical meanings. Until then, I use mapping simply to mean ways of rendering metaphors in particular ways, such as asserting or denying likenesses. 9. In chapter 6, I discuss conceptual networking of metaphors. In Hills’ phrase “to build upon the goodwill,” we find an example of integral networking. That is, we need not end an analysis of Trade Is Friendship by noting just its dependence on Nations Are People and National Allies Are Friends nor by noting its complementary relation to Trade Is Friendship. We might also note all of the metaphors that combine to structure the idea of friendship, among them Human Relationships As Architecture, which tells us that relationships have solid foundations, that people are connected by bridges, and often that relationships need to be built.

4. Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory 1. As is often the case in academic study, Lakoff has his critics, among them John Vervaeke and Christopher Green, who defend the classical view lucidly and well, but to my mind unpersuasively. Nonetheless, they do succinctly explain what is at stake in Lakoff’s argument.

5. The Story of Metaphor 1. See chapter 6 for a discussion of the differences between Trade Is War and Business Is War. The main difference is that Business Is War is frequently nonpejorative. In this case study of Bill Gates, however, Business Is War is, by and large, a strongly ascribed pejorative. Thus, there is no need to distinguish its rhetorical etiquette from Trade Is War. It is also worth noting that Business Is A Journey is not as incompatible with Business Is War as Trade Is A Journey is with Trade Is War. This is because business discourse focuses more upon the success or failure of a single entity rather than the relationship between traders. Thus, a company may journey toward success and win a war at the same time.

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Index Abelson, Robert P., 107–8 addressivity, 30–31. See also response, rhetorical Adobe Systems, 130 alien name, metaphor as, 14–15, 73, 79, 86, 88–89 Allen, Paul, 121, 124–26 American Automobile Manufacturers’ Assoc., 4 analogy, 44–45, 65, 73–75, 85–86, 89, 93–94, 99, 114, 144, 146 Andreas, Dwayne, 3, 145 anthropomorphizing, 19, 47 antimetabole, 103 Apple Computers, 130 aptness, metaphoric, 24, 63, 74, 92, 109–12, 114, 117, 119–20, 122, 124, 142, 148 Archer Daniels Midland Corp. (ADM), 3, 145–46 Aristotle, x–xi, 13–17, 22, 25, 32, 42, 46, 55, 73–74, 78–79, 83, 104, 110, 158–59, 168, 175 ascribing metaphors, xi, 9–11, 28–29, 32, 43–47, 50–51, 53–56, 59–60, 68–69, 73, 77, 93, 100, 111, 119, 123, 127–28, 135, 139–41, 143– 44, 163, 175. See also attenuating metaphors; claiming metaphors; intensifying metaphors Asia, 6–7, 60–61, 99, 163 asymmetry in metaphors and comparisons, 74–77, 79–85, 90–91 attenuating metaphors, xi, 9–11, 28– 29, 32, 42, 46–47, 50–55, 57, 59, 68, 98, 100, 128, 139, 141, 143, 150, 163. See also ascribing meta-

phors; claiming metaphors; intensifying metaphors attributes. See features and attributes Bacon, Sir Francis, 35 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 30–31, 33, 137, 152 Barnes, Fred, 68–69 Beardsley, Monroe, 32–33, 74, 83 Bible, the, 34–35, 37, 67 bilateralism. See unilateralism, bilateralism, and multilateralism Black, Max, 13, 15–17, 32–33, 66–67, 69–70, 78, 84, 93 Bohr, Neils, 94 Boskin, Michael, 49 Bosmajian, Haig, 148–49 Brennan, William, 148 Britain, 34, 36, 39, 40–43, 47, 60, 87 Bruner, Jerome, 106–7 Buchanan, Patrick, 5, 46, 163 Burke, Kenneth, 30, 175–76 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 4, 49 Bush administration, 4, 46, 99 Card, Andrew, 4–7, 10–11, 54 catachresis, 42 categorical transgression. See categorical violation categorical violation, xii, 13, 62–63, 73–75, 82–84, 86–89 categories, 13, 59–60, 62–63, 70, 72– 75, 78–91, 109; basic-level, 85–89; classical, 80; cognitive, 60, 79–91 chiasmus, 132 China, 38, 57, 61, 79, 121, 141 Cicero, 176

187

188

Index

Civil War, 39, 41, 164 claiming metaphors, xi, 9, 28, 32, 46, 49, 51, 53, 139, 141–42, 163, 166. See also ascribing metaphors; attenuating metaphors; intensifying metaphors Clancy, Tom, 60, 91–92 Clark, Gregory, 157–58 Clinton, Bill, 6, 23, 45, 49, 55–56, 58 Clinton administration, 38, 44–45, 99 cognitive science, x, 14, 17, 22, 74–76, 105, 107, 147 Cold War, 9, 43, 57, 89–91, 148, 150 Colomb, Gregory G., 87, 100, 154, 157 comparison view of metaphor, 15 compatibility of metaphors, 23–24, 26, 48–51, 54, 96, 101–2, 119, 149–50, 158 composition pedagogy. See writing and composition pedagogy conceptual integration, 175 conceptual metaphor, theory of, ix–x, 2–3, 8, 11–12, 21–24, 31–32, 35, 71–72, 93, 98–99, 105, 110, 112, 117, 136, 147, 150, 152–53, 155– 57 conceptual metaphors: Argument Is A Game, 149; Argument Is War, 2, 14, 21–25, 27, 136, 149–50; Arguments Are Buildings, 27; Armies Are Machines, 119; Businesses Are Machines, 119; Business Is A Game 119, 128–29; Business Is A Journey, 122–26, 176; Business Is Building, 126; Business Is War, 60, 121–22, 127–30, 136–37, 140–46, 162–63, 176; Companies Are Animals, 109, 113; Companies Are Machines, 109; Conversation Is A Journey, 176; Economy Is A Machine, The, 58, 109; Economy Is An Organism, The, 150; Economy Is A Person, The, 58; Education Is A Journey, 153–54, 156–58; Emotion Is Hot, 176; Female Lovers Are Roses, 76; Geographical Formations Are Familiar Objects, 65; Goods Are Wa-

ter, 58; Happy Is Up, 2, 21–22, 112, 136, 154; Human Relationships As Architecture, 176; Ideas Are Food, 2, 95, 98, 136; Ideas Are Products, 147–51; Language Is Conversation, 30, 32, 56, 176; Life Is A Journey, ix–x, 2, 47–48, 110, 125, 136, 153; Life Is A Story, 105–6; Love Is A Journey, ix; Love Is A Physical Force, 2; Markets Are Containers, 9–11, 27, 31–32, 50–51, 54–55, 57, 109, 117, 119, 164, 166; Meaning Is An Object, 176; Mind Is A Computer, The, 133; Mind Is A Machine, The, 2, 150; Moral Accounting, 24; More Is Up, 22, 65, 110, 112; National Allies Are Friends, 47, 176; Nation As Family, The, 24; Nations Are People, 47, 176; People Are Plants, 22; Success Is A Place, 154; Success Is Up, 65, 112, 154; Time Is Money, 22, 53; Trade Is A Fight, 28; Trade Is Friendship, 12, 47–50, 148, 164, 176; Trade Is a Game, 11–12, 26, 28, 50–55, 57, 68, 98, 109, 148–49, 166, 176; Trade Is A Journey, 12, 26, 32, 47– 50, 56–57, 109, 148, 153, 164, 176; Trade Is Litigation, 58; Trade Is Sex, 58; Trade Is War, x, 2–4, 8–12, 21, 25–34, 36–61, 63, 67–68, 70–74, 85–92, 98–102, 119–121, 136– 137, 139–50, 158–59, 161–64, 166–68, 176; Understanding Is Seeing, 2. See also metaphors, common; metaphors discussed in focus groups conceptual networking, 137, 147–51, 156 conceptual systems, 24, 26–27, 31, 35– 36, 47, 50, 65, 117, 148 contrastive intercourse, 26–27, 29, 32, 34, 37–38, 48–50 copula, simple, 78–79, 83, 89 Crichton, Michael, 44, 60 Crossfire (TV show), 4–12, 54, 59, 70, 89 cunning, communicative, 140, 142–43

Index Darwinism, economic, 112–14 data, 2, 105. See also examples, use of David Copperfield, 105 Davidson, Donald, 17 dead metaphor, xi–xii, 1, 64–67, 69, 71 Defoe, Daniel, 36, 42, 61, 87, 159 dialogism, 31, 33, 105 DiPardo, Anne, 106 discourse and disciplinary communities, 26, 136–39, 141, 143–44, 146– 47, 151, 154, 157–60 discourse of trade, x, 3–4, 8, 11–12, 26–27, 30–32, 36, 42–43, 46–48, 51, 54, 56–58, 67–69, 86–88, 109, 139, 141–44, 159 discursive trajectory, 5–6, 8, 10, 18, 20, 27, 32, 40, 44, 53, 68–69, 77, 81– 82, 90, 94, 142 domains, conceptual and semantic, 14, 16, 19, 23–25, 34, 56, 63, 75, 86– 87, 92–93 Dutch and Flemish, 40–42 Eco, Umberto, 13–14 economic warfare, 34, 39, 43, 59, 69, 90–91, 147 Engels, Friedrich, 42–43, 87 England. See Britain entailments, 9, 22–27, 29, 31–32, 39, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 69–70, 91, 100, 102, 110, 112, 117–19, 139–41, 154, 166 episodic memory, 107 ethos, 42, 46, 50, 55 Europe, 21, 36, 39–41, 52–53, 141– 42, 145 everyday and ordinary language, 12, 20–22, 47–48, 60, 65, 73, 83, 92, 105–6, 112, 147, 154 examples, use of, 14, 17–21, 33, 63, 76, 79, 153. See also data extreme abstraction, 24 Fahnestock, Jeanne, 103 Fairclough, Norman, 151 Fallows, James, 99–102 family resemblance, 83 Fauconnier, Gilles, 175

189

features and attributes, 15–16, 19, 23– 24, 63, 75–76, 79–81, 83–84, 92– 93, 95, 110–14, 116–17 focus and frame, xi, 16–17, 19 focus groups, 105, 108–11, 122, 144, 146, 161, 164 formalism, 28, 31, 63, 77, 95–96, 159, 168 France, 4, 38, 140, 143 free enterprise, 37, 150 free trade, 5–6, 11, 44, 58, 68, 148, 165 Friedman, Milton, 126, 135 Friedman, Thomas, 5, 70 Frost, Robert, ix, 48 Gates, Bill, xii, 105, 121–32, 175 gender, 162 genre, 28, 76, 106, 156 Gentner, Dedre, 72, 93–94, 114, 151 Germany, 39, 45 Gibbs, Raymond, 32, 105, 132, 175 globalism, 5, 7–8, 11, 27, 34, 49, 53, 68, 70, 142, 144, 164 Glucksberg, Sam, 88 Goatly, Andrew, 65–66 Goodman, Nelson, 64–65, 67 Hammerstein, Oscar, 98 handbooks, x, 153 Heinz, John, 48, 50–51, 54–55 Hickey, Dona J., 152 Hills, Carla, 46, 50–51, 54–55, 175 Hitler, Adolf, 45, 129–30 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 148 Hussein, Saddam, 130 Hutchins, Edwin, 132 hyperbole, 52, 82, 90 IBM, 71, 109, 122, 124–25 idealized cognitive model (ICM), 80 identification of metaphor, 2, 16, 32, 62, 65, 74–76, 79, 83–85, 88, 152 image schemas, 22–23, 26, 31–32, 38– 40, 48–52, 54, 56, 92–93, 95–98, 100–102, 110–12, 116–20, 122, 126, 140–41, 149–50, 156; container, 50, 54, 118, 141; contention,

190

Index

image schemas (continued) 22–24, 39, 48, 50, 56; cooperative, 39, 48–49, 52, 101, 116–17, 167; death, 96; game, 52, 54; hostile-action, 31, 38, 40, 48, 50, 52, 100– 101, 141; journeying, 48, 126; linear progress, 154, 157; peace, 38– 39, 50; verticality, 96, 110, 112, 119, 156; war, 24, 48, 50, 102, 144 implicative complex and system of associated commonplaces, 15–16, 93 inflection of metaphors, 3, 6–8, 14, 18, 25, 27–28, 32, 40, 42–44, 51, 56, 60, 84, 94, 96, 111, 114, 119, 133, 136, 139, 147–49, 151, 158–59, 166 intensifying metaphors, xi, 7, 9, 11–12, 28–29, 32, 45–47, 50–53, 68, 98, 100, 120, 128–29, 139, 141, 143, 145, 149. See also ascribing metaphors; attenuating metaphors; claiming metaphors interaction theory of metaphor, 13, 15– 17, 78 invariance principle, 95–97, 101, 111 invention, 46, 155 invisible hand, the, 135–36, 148 irony, 57, 59, 103 Iser, Wolfgang, 20 Jakobson, Roman, 104 Japan, xi, 4–11, 28, 37, 39, 41, 43–45, 48–56, 58–60, 68–71, 86–88, 92, 99–102, 119, 130, 134, 141–43, 163 Johnson, Mark, ix, 1–2, 14, 22, 24, 27, 58, 65, 134, 136, 175 Kantor, Mickey, 6 Katz, Albert, 76 Kepler, Johann, 94 Keysar, Boaz, 88 Khrushchev, Nikita, 150 Kinsley, Michael, 4–8, 10 Kittay, Eva Feder, 13, 74–76, 78, 80 Korea, 56–57, 68, 79, 118 Krugman, Paul, 53, 89 Kuhn, Thomas, 16, 94–95, 138

Lakoff, George, ix, 1–2, 14, 19, 22, 24–25, 27, 58, 65, 72, 79–80, 85, 95, 97, 111, 134, 136, 175 Leiber, Jerry, 76 Levin, Sander, 4–11, 70, 89 licensing stories, xii, 93, 105, 108–14, 116–26, 128, 130–31, 135, 144 life span, metaphoric, xi, 62–73 Linzey, Tim, 72–73, 110 literal concepts: international trade finances war, 36, 40; money is military power, 35–36, 40; trade is peace, 26, 32, 34–40, 43, 45, 47–50, 52, 56, 67, 148, 163–64, 166; trade is war, 59; war is for economic gain, 35–36, 42. See also reference, literal literalization of metaphors, 55, 59–60, 92, 98, 112, 151 literary language, literary metaphors, and literary examples, 20–22, 47– 48, 65, 71, 76, 84, 97, 105–6 MacDonald, Susan Peck, 151 mapping, xii, 23–24, 44–46, 56–59, 63, 90–102, 105, 107, 109–22, 133, 139, 145, 147–49, 156–57 Marius, Richard, 153, 155 Marx, Karl, 42–43, 87 Marxism, 150–51 McCloskey, Donald, 53, 58, 104–6, 135–36 metaphors, common: college-as-mountain-climbing, 154–57; educationas-joining, 135–36, 148; invisible hand, 135–36, 147–51, 158; man is a wolf, 17–19, 21, 167, 175; marketplace of ideas, 137, 147–51, 158; my love is (like) a rose, 18, 62–63, 75–78, 83; trickle down, 135; windowpane theory, 152; zero sum, 17, 167. See also conceptual metaphors; metaphors discussed in focus groups metaphors, conceptual. See conceptual metaphor, theory of; conceptual metaphors metaphors discussed in focus groups: business is a bombing mission, 109;

Index business is a joint excursion, 116; business is a two-way street, 109, 116; business is combat, 111–12; business is like football, 109; companies are animals, 113; economy is a machine, the, 109, 114; IBM is a giant, 109; IBM is Babe Ruth, 109; markets are bubbles, 109; markets are containers, 117; markets are fortresses, 109; markets are walledin spaces, 117; trade is a dance, 109, 114–16; trade is a voyage of exploration, 109, 121; trade is war, 109, 117, 121, 140. See also conceptual metaphors; metaphors, common metonymy, 34–35, 47, 54, 80, 103–4, 132, 160 Microsoft Corp., 121–22, 124–31 Mill, John Stuart, 149 Miller, Carolyn, 152, 159 Milton, John, 149 Mitsubishi Corp., 59 mixed metaphors, 24, 57, 82 Morita, Akio, 59 Mosbacher, Robert A., 56–59 multilateralism. See unilateralism, bilateralism, and multilateralism Myers, Greg, 106 narrative. See stories and narrative negation, 33, 38 Netscape, 128 Nixon, Richard, 121, 150 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 5 O’Leary, Sean, 59 only language, metaphor as, 142–43, 145–46, 148, 163–64 ordinary language. See everyday and ordinary language Ortony, Andrew, 75 Paine, Thomas, 36–37 Perry, Matthew, 45, 59, 61 perspectival view of metaphor, 13 Plato, 23 point slot, 100–101

191

polysemy, 32, 64 Porter, James E., 138–39, 157 postmodernism, 41, 159 preconditioning of metaphor, 19, 159 protectionism, 5–7, 10–11, 36, 43–44, 56–57, 70, 91, 134, 166 prototypes, 60–61, 80–81, 83–85, 87– 89 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 35–36, 175 Reagan administration, 38, 99, 135 recognition of metaphor. See identification of metaphor Reddy, Michael, 152 reference, literal, 68–70, 86–87. See also literal concepts response, rhetorical, x–xi, 26, 30–31, 33, 37, 44, 56, 72–73, 98–99, 137, 140, 157–59 rhetorical cost, 42, 44, 46, 50–52, 55 rhetorical etiquette, xi–xii, 9–11, 29, 32, 46, 50, 55, 61, 73, 101, 139–41, 143–47, 158–59, 175 Richards, I. A., 14, 16, 20, 92 Ricouer, Paul, 13–14, 16, 74 Rips, Lance, 75–76 Rodgers, Richard, 98 Rosch, Eleanor, 79–80, 85 Russia. See Soviet Union Schank, Roger C., 107–8 Schön, Donald A., 104, 134–36 scripts, 107 Searle, John, 64 Seitz, James, 152–53 Shakespeare, William, 20, 105, 125 Shen, Yeshayahu, 78–79 simile, 14–15, 72, 75, 86–87, 156 Smith, Adam, 89, 135, 144 Soviet Union, 57, 87, 143 Spain, 40 Spector, Phil, 76 speech act theory, 20 stories and narrative, 19, 40, 45, 93, 97, 103–8, 110–35, 144, 160 substituting metaphors, 9, 69 Sun Microsystems, 127 Sununu, John, 4–12, 59, 70

192

Index

Super 301 clause, 44–46, 49, 51, 54– 56, 58–59, 90 Swales, John, 144, 159 synecdoche, 18, 94, 132 system of associated commonplaces. See implicative complex and system of associated commonplaces target and source, xi, 16, 19, 22, 63, 75–78, 83, 89, 92–93, 95–96, 102, 105, 114, 116 tenor and vehicle, xi, 16, 19 3Com Corp., 129–30 Thurow, Lester, 38–39, 51–53, 86–87, 142–43, 163, 166 topic-comment structure, 78–79 Tourangeau, Roger, 75–76 trade war, 2, 5–6, 8–10, 21, 31, 42–45, 52, 56, 59, 67–71, 88–91, 141, 143 truisms, 35, 38, 110, 113, 134, 151, 164 truth value, 38, 40, 111, 131 Turner, Mark, ix, 19, 21–22, 65, 85– 87, 95–97, 111, 175 Tversky, Amos, 79

United States, xi, 1, 4–8, 18, 21, 24, 28, 34, 37, 43–45, 47–49, 51–53, 55, 57–60, 68–69, 71, 85–86, 92, 99–101, 113, 120, 126–27, 130, 147–48, 150–51, 154, 164–67 Uno, Sousuke, 58 Vietnam, war in, 68, 72, 145, 164 Vygotsky, Lev, 132 Weiss, Timothy, 152 Westmoreland, William, 145 Williams, Joseph M., 78, 100, 154, 157 Winner, Ellen, 93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 83 World War II, 34, 45, 59, 62, 70, 89, 91, 98, 118–19, 128, 142, 145, 164 writing and composition pedagogy, 24, 106, 137, 151–54, 158 Xerox Corp., 131 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 130

unilateralism, bilateralism, and multilateralism, 34–35, 49, 57–58

zeugma, 78–79

Philip Eubanks is an assistant professor of English at Northern Illinois University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and technical/professional writing. His work has appeared in Written Communication, Poetics Today, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.