The following is a pre-proof version of a book review that has been
published as:
Forceville, Charles. Book review of Andreas Musolff, Political Metaphor
Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios (Bloomsbury 2016). Cognitive
Linguistics Studies 6(1): 211-215.
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00037.for
If you want to quote verbatim from it, please consult the definitive version
(ChF, July 2019)
Andreas Musolff, Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 194 pp., including index.
Reviewed by Charles Forceville, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Undoubtedly, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), which argued that humans systematically conceptualize abstract and complex phenomena in terms of concrete, more simple ones (such as ARGUMENT IS WAR, TIME IS SPACE, THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS) was a ‘game changer’. This monograph is still highly influential within metaphor studies, and rightly so. But even great books have their shortcomings. In retrospect, one of them is that almost all the examples exemplifying conceptual metaphors were made-up rather than found in actual discourse. This weakness has since been remedied by numerous linguists drawing not just on attested, real-life sources, but often on corpora of such sources. Quantitative work has enormously contributed to the usefulness and impact of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).
The field developed yet further when metaphor scholars began to pay attention again to the rhetorical function of metaphors in discourse by combining CMT with Critical Discourse Analysis. This marriage between CMT and CDA was perhaps first consummated in Jonathan Charteris-Black (2004) – although Mark Johnson (1993) was inspired by a similar urge to discuss the ideological dimensions of metaphorizing. Andreas Musolff’s book clearly belongs in this line of metaphor research, adding to this Ruth Wodak’s DHA (‘discourse-historical approach’) to emphasize that a responsible analysis of discourse always needs to take into account its socio-cultural and historical circumstances. In this monograph Musolff continues the research line embarked upon already a decade ago when he signalled the need to take into account the specific ‘scenarios’ prevailing in the specific political situation in which a metaphor is used (Musolff, 2006).
To achieve this, the analyst will have to take into account the precise wording of a metaphor in “situations of actual use” (p. 4) – a dimension that has received scant attention in metaphor studies since Metaphors we live by. The examples in Musolff’s book are all drawn from two big corpora, EUROMETA and BODYPOL, together comprising over a million words. In identifying metaphors, the author loosely relies on MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and MIPVU (Steen, 2007) procedures.
Musolff begins by discussing the metaphor POLITICS IS WAR with reference to British Prime Minister John Major’s disagreement with other European leaders over beef imports in the summer of 1996. Since the European Football Championship tournament of that year also took place in England, the dispute also spawned many manifestations of POLITICS IS A FOOTBALL MATCH. That a lot of cultural knowledge comes into play transpires from phrases in press coverage such as the “Cattle of Britain”, “a Trojan horse”, “the Wars of the Roses”, and “[the war is] over by Christmas”. Musolff warns that once a specific metaphor scenario has been adopted, and is constantly used in a given situation, the metaphor and its concomitant evaluations may become the standard way of referring to it. In that sense, metaphors may become, as Lakoff and Johnson have it, “self-fulfilling prophecies” (1980, p. 156).
In Chapter 3 Musolff discusses POLITICS IS A FAMILY, distinguishing between three scenarios within this umbrella metaphor for the relations within the Euro-zone: ‘parent-child’; ‘married life’; and ‘love/marriage’, pointing out among many other things that ‘founding-father’ scenarios have lost some of their attraction, while thanks to Angela Merkel’s prolonged political career ‘mothering’ ones have recently become more prominent. Musolff also shows that it is just a few features in each scenario that are used time and time again in writing about Europe, whereas other features never figure at all.
NATION AS BODY is the subject of Chapter 4. Musolff here analyses the often-used ‘Britain at the heart of Europe’ slogan, introduced by John Major, and focuses on two key issues: the
discrepancy between intended and understood meanings; and the fact that the slogan gained popularity because of being contested rather than by being embraced. The author traces its
development in political discourses about Anglo-European relationships, stressing that advocates and detractors cannot but build on Major’s use of the underlying metaphor. But while the BODY domain may be static and general, scenarios are always context-specific. Scenarios moreover may also draw on other source domains, and thus may require a Blending Theory/Conceptual Integration Theory model (e.g., Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to do justice to their complexity.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the venerable THE STATE IS A BODY metaphor. Musolff shows that the BODY domain gives rise to slightly different scenarios diachronically and in different (English, German, and French) cultures.
Next, Musolff charts the historical development of PEOPLE ARE PARASITES, culminating in its infamous instantiation in Nazi-Germany discourse about the Jewish population. Indeed, “this metaphor can be said to have turned into a genocidal reality” (p. 80). It is with concern that Musolff inventories the revival of this racist metaphor in contemporary discussions about immigrants. Since users of this metaphor know very well what they are doing, this is also an occasion for Musolff to express his endorsement of Gerard Steen’s ‘deliberate metaphor theory’ (DMT).
DMT (e.g., Steen, 2017) has spawned fierce controversy (e.g., Gibbs, 2017). I agree with Musolff that Steen rightly insists that conceptual metaphors are often used consciously, namely to “frame” a certain situation with specific persuasive goals in mind. But haven’t we known this since times immemorial? Both sides in the debate seem to have forgotten that before Lakoff and Johnson (1980), whenever there was talk of metaphor, this was by default ‘deliberate metaphor’ – albeit known under other names. In what I consider the single most important modern paper on metaphor, Max Black (1979) only gives examples that manifest a ‘deliberate’ use of metaphor: “man is a thinking reed” (Pascal); “a poem is a pheasant” (Wallace Stevens); “man is a wolf” (Hobbes); “marriage is a zero-sum game”. It is also useful to remember that Lakoff and Johnson leave room for more or less novel creative metaphors, as exemplified in their discussion of LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART (1980: Chapter 21). Evidently, all creative metaphors are deliberate in the sense of Steen (2017). More pertinent to present purposes, however, is the creative/deliberate exploitation of
conventionally ‘unused’ elements of a metaphorical source domain in a conceptual metaphor. For instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 53) discuss “he prefers massive Gothic theories covered with gargoyles” as a novel elaboration of THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS. At the very least, DMT would need to position itself vis-à-vis these respectable predecessors. But all this leaves uninvalidated that Musolff is right to point to the deliberate use of the PARASITE metaphor, and the responsibility its users bear for contributing to a political climate that jeopardizes its victims’ pursuit of happiness – or even their lives.
Chapter 7 zooms in on the HAND EXTENSION TO SHOW PEACEFUL INTENTIONS scenario in Israelian-Arab negotiations, with reference to a 2011 UN speech by Benjamin Netanyahu; and on one delivered more than a century earlier by the German Emperor Wilhelm II, in which he urged his troops to behave as “Huns” in China – a scenario drawing on the STATE-AS-PERSON metaphor, and its unfortunate consequences. As Musolff claims, in both cases, the conceptual metaphors become politically effective because they are integrated in plausible narrative or argumentative scenarios with strong moral dimensions.
Pointing out that variation in the understanding of metaphors can result from differences in the background knowledge and beliefs of its addressees, Musolff reports the results of a pilot experiment asking students from a range of national backgrounds to “explain the meaning of body
politic with reference to their home nation” (p. 116, emphasis in original).The responses reveal that a given metaphor can evoke very different (ideological) perspectives depending on who is doing the interpreting.
Musolff concludes by emphasizing that, given the narrative and argumentative scenarios in which conceptual metaphors are embedded, their use in political discourse is mostly not only deliberate, but also (unlike for instance in artistic genres) results in unambiguous meanings for whose derivation communicators must take full responsibility.
Political Metaphor Analysis is a fine testimony of the trend in metaphor scholarship to show that conceptual metaphors are always used in a specific communicative situation, in which their users want to achieve specific rhetorical (or artistic) goals (see also e.g., Kövecses, 2015; Forceville, 2017; and the journal Metaphor and the Social World). For this reason, socio-historical context and the specific form in which metaphors appear require as much attention as their conceptual nature.
The author clearly feels strongly about the ideological implications of metaphorizing and writes in an engaging, pleasant style. Undoubtedly, therefore, this book will enthuse a new generation of students with interests straddling metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Musolff’s book is one long plea for the importance of his topic. Studying metaphor matters!
References
Black, M. (1979). More about metaphor. In: A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 19-43). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Forceville, C. (2017). From image schema to metaphor in discourse: The FORCE schemas in animation films. In: B. Hampe (ed.), Metaphor: Embodied cognition and discourse (pp. 239-256). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R.W., Jr. (2017). Metaphor wars: Conceptual metaphors in human life. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press.
Kövecses, Z. (2015). Where metaphors come from: Reconsidering context in metaphor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Musolff, A. (2006). Metaphor scenarios in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 21, 23-38. Pragglejaz Group (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse.
Metaphor and Symbol, 22, 1–40.
Steen, G. (2007). Finding metaphor in grammar and usage. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steen, G. (2017). Deliberate metaphor theory: basic assumptions, main tenets, urgent issues.
