Freedom and Figurative Language

Friend of Blog Jonathan Pfeiffer raised an interesting issue yesterday in the Comments, and I'm thrilled to be able to put on my Rhetorician's cap and ply my actual trade here on Amor Mundi!

Jonathan Comments: I'm prompted to wonder if it's ever possible to use language in a way that doesn't promote some undesired iconography in some undesired way.

No, we can't.

The distinction of literal from figurative language, at bottom, is the distinction between standard and nonstandard usage, with the intriguing proviso that the nonstandard usages of figurative language (often called "turns of phrase," where the "turn" in question is precisely the veering away from standard usage) are, nonetheless, still communicative, still meaningful, still effective in various ways.

Any literal usage is susceptible to provocative figurative turns, and it is likewise quite easy to misrecognize a comfortable usage with a standard one and so to be less aware of the figurative force of the rhetoric we are using ourselves.

This is troubling sometimes, but we wouldn't really have it any other way since a great measure of our personal freedom is lodged in that slippage between standard and nonstandard but still meaningful and effective practice. (This is especially so if one takes seriously all the many works of critical theory which analogize the unconscious to language as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology to language as in Karl Marx's commodity fetishism and Roland Barthes's mythology, identification and disidentification to performative language as in Judith Butler, all political action to the same as in some appealing construals of Hannah Arendt.)

Anyway, this slippage means, among other things, that we can never manage to fix or stabilize the proper reception of our discourse as a price of the desirable openness of creative expressivity. This basic vulnerability to error, to being misunderstood, to being misrecognized is as fundamental to an understanding of human finitude as is our mortality, which -- yes, my darling technophiliacs, even in a world of fantastic future therapies -- will linger on in an abiding vulnerability to disease, accident, violence, trauma.

But this slippage doesn't mean we are entirely at sea, exactly, since even figurative usages often have trackable histories ("love is a rose" is nonstandard and yet rather conventional, "the mouth of the river" is so conventional by now that the figure has been literalized), genres (we distinguish schemes from tropes, associative, catachretic, and paradoxical turns), characteristic mechanisms (the four master tropes -- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, as per Vico and later Burke -- rely on four basic modes of association: substitution, contiguity, containment, reversal). We do have tools available to us to help navigate and analyze the curiously changeable proprieties that articulate the figurative dimension of language without ever managing to govern it.

To return to the point from yesterday's post that prompted Jonathan's question: Since I know well that technocentric discourse in general is an arena human beings will make habitual recourse to when they need to work through their hyperbolic fears and fantasies of agency -- impotence and omnipotence are the definitive discursive poles here -- and since I know well that there is no more basic move in this discursive bag of tricks than to "naturalize" or "domesticate" what is threatening in ongoing radical technoscientific change by rewriting it in the image of an orderly developmental narrative with a clear direction -- I should have been a bit more wary than I have been hitherto about the ease with which I trotted out the metaphor of "convergence" in my own discussions to simplify the complexity and offer reassurance in the face of the not exactly predictable shapes and impacts of emerging and palpably upcoming NBIC technoscientific change.