The unfortunate thing is that James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, is based in London–which is unfortunate for Seattle readers, specifically, since he doesn’t have plans to visit the Elliott Bay Book Co. to talk about his newest work, I Is an Other.
You’ll have to just read it, perhaps on your Kindle. It’s a very Seattle book, both erudite and practically minded, as prone to quote Abdalqahir Al-Jurjani on eloquence (noting in passing that “the Arabic word for metaphor is isti’ara, or loan”) and Cicero on oratory, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff and physicist Richard Feynman. And of course the title is a riff on Rimbaud.
There’s a chapter on metaphor in advertising, a chapter on metaphor in politics, a chapter on metaphor in business (synectics consulting) and a chapter on metaphor in psychology (symbolic modeling used as part of a therapeutic process).
As to that last, it’s a bit jarring when after 200-odd pages of calm disquisition, Geary uses himself as a guinea pig for an exploration of “clean language.”
Already planning to interview a pair of psychotherapists, Geary recounts that a “few weeks before our appointment, my mother died and I decided that my mother’s death would be the starting point for our conversation.” In Geary’s case, his use of the metaphor of “drab wallpaper” caught the therapists’ attention, and further exploration yielded an insight into what that wallpaper was covering up.
You might compare the modality to a “close reading of the text,” except that clean language doesn’t want to impose a framework or an interpretive lens, so much as expose the metaphor. So the interrogation simply consists of asking for a description of metaphor, for its location, for its relationships in space and time.
That might seem like a kind of magical thinking, except that in the previous 200-odd pages Geary has laid out the groundwork for the book’s thesis, which is that, “We can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else” (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss). Metaphor isn’t just the striking poetic image, or the turn of phrase so heavily used we’ve ceased to recognize it as metaphor (“I see what you mean”). It’s how we think, constantly.
(It’s also how Kanzi the bonobo thinks. He combined the symbols for “water” and “bird” to describe a duck.)
Frequently, metaphors do our thinking for us. That’s why McDonald’s sells you a “happy meal” (no one wants an unhappy meal, after all). Commercials for hand sanitizers want to make you feel uneasy–you’re more likely to reach for the symbolism of hand-washing when you’re perturbed by rooms of glowing germs.
But it’s not just advertising. When you read or watch business news, watch for this: when the market is “climbing” upward, you’re going to hear the market described as a living thing, filled with raw intentionality. When the market “falls,” “dips,” or “plunges,” it’s an object or resource. You rarely hear about the market that hiked back down to a comfortable bivouac.
This matters because when people think the market has intention, they give it credit for getting what it wants–to go higher. But if you mention that it fell like a lead balloon, the only question they have is when it will hit bottom. In the aggregate–and markets are nothing but aggregate–these distinctions can make a difference in whether people bet on a rally or a slump. But of course the market is doing, literally, neither of these things. The market doesn’t “do” at all.
(On a similar note, minute fluctuations in unemployment provoke strange metaphorical responses as well.)
That’s just touching the surface of I Is an Other. Once you get through, you’ll feel like you have at least a master’s in metaphor, and I think a much greater appreciation for the benefits and drawbacks of this cognitive tool. If metaphorical framing can lead us to think of immigrants as invading germs, it can also provide intense insight. Just, you know, good luck talking with people without metaphor at all. They’ll have no clue where you’re going with that.
more stuff
I love james geary’s book and I appreciate your write up of it. Our experience of metaphors in business and community organisations is that they both facilitate and limit the very thoughts we’re capable of.
My husband operates with discussions as though there is just one pan available and if I want one dish he can’t have the other. I operate with discussions like a barbecue where there is room for all dishes and they need space from one another to keep the flavours separate.
For the first few years of our marriage we’d often move from discussion to argument both a bit bewildered as to where it was going wrong. We used clean language questions to explore one another’s metaphor models for discussion – uncovered these hidden metaphors and the rules contained within them.
We use a tool from http://www.trainingattention.co.uk called the clean set-up to design discussions that suit both of us. Although I still value my own model more than his I can treat his with respect while it’s happening and we don’t end up in pointless disputes. We’re running our metaphors not the other way round.
I’ve used this tool with leaders from business and education to make diverse metaphors work.