On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
> If I had more ambition, I'd tie this to Lakoff's lack of appreciation of
> the relationship between "framing" and power. But to do that, I'd have
> to read more Lakoff, which would be painful. It's all rhetorical to him,
> isn't it? Special bodies of armed men don't figure, right?
His writing in his older books is actually much better than his fatuous framing pieces. He's not actually interested in rhetoric so much as metaphor. As far as he's concerned, there's no such thing as a dead metaphor. They imply pictures that for him are at the bottom of our thought, and determine what we think is logical or nonsense.
IMHO that's not totally wrong. And he writes breezily and collects lots of interesting examples. But he runs into trouble when he tries to figure out how those pictures fit together. Because most of his early books were an attempt to find anthropological universals -- images that were the same in all cultures -- and thus to theorize that they were, if not hard wired, something that resulted from the way thought evolves in humans out of perception, and uses the same neural routines.
So explaining variance was not what his theory was set up to do. His first main foray into it -- and his better one, and the book you should read if you want something worth critiquing (and I'd enjoy your review if ambition ever struck you) -- is _Moral Politics_. There he tries to put his finger on the "master metaphors" at the bottom of the liberal and conservative worldviews. There's deep problems in the details I won't go into. But some seems right. But the deep theoretical problem is that he has no explanation of where these master metaphors come from never mind any empirical assertions backing it up. He says that's not his goal, which is fine -- so long as he's just describing and not telling us to change them. Because if we have to change them, then we do need to know what they are based on.
Further the whole idea of a master metaphor is a way oversimplification. Lakoff is completely innocent of the concept of worldview or Weltanschauung. So he is doubly innocent of the idea that such worldviews are nested in ways of life. And thus is he triply innocent of the idea that oppression or coercion may be involved.
So saying he has no feel for the importance of special bodies of armied men is overkill. He has no real grasp of anything that anchors metaphors that aren't universal.
His forays into Democratic party framing that made him famous went one step further off the cliff. In them he seems basically to assume that all these metaphors are utterly arbitrary -- that we believe them because some clever guy said them and they caught on. But he still inputes to them the same enormous force to foreclose or open options that he ever did. So his advice is, whatever course you want to pursue, think of an image that makes your course look natural, and that in itself will be a big advance. As if that was all there was too it. As if it were irrelevant how the image chimed with all the other images people have in their mind, or with the dominant narratives -- as if you could just push those narratives aside because... well, he doesn't really give a reason. Coming up with the "perfect" image that naturalizes your course solves it all.
My favorite example of this silliness is one of his proferred solutions to "tax relief." He rightly says that "tax relief" is kind of a genius phrase that implies that taxes are a burden and an illness, and thus cutting them is always a good thing. He said that we should speak of taxes as our dues for belonging to society, just like the dues we might pay to a country club. As one Dem party activist said, "Paying taxes is like paying dues to a country club? Parachute me into rural Ohio, boys -- I'm ready to rumble!"
This is the crap that is in most of his occasional pieces and which, I get the impression, fills his book "Don't Think of an Elephant," which I haven't read for exactly this reason.
So basically he's Frank Luntz from hunger. Rather than investigating what resonates with people and advising politicians to craft their word choices to take advantage of that, he makes up images that he wishes people resonated to and suggests we use those.
The basic idea that images are important I'm all for. But *changing* the imagery of a citizenry is a long term thing. It's not an instrument for winning elections, which simply galvinizes what changes have been made. In fact it is often best served by fighting for images/principles even if you lose. And ultimately it's about crafting a coherent worldview in which people can see themselves, identify with, feel gratified by, and reproduce its narratives by themselves. There's much more to it than the individual metaphors.
Now, finally, coming back to this Berkeley incident: having read several of his books, which assert that basically everything is a metaphor that uses prepositions (in, to, behind all seem for him to imply spatial and temporal pictures that constrain what is possible), it seems risky to assert that his megaphone argument on the top of the steps has nothing to do with his idea of images, and thus with nothing to do with his idea of framing, but I think that's the case.
Someone else who thought in rhetorical terms would say it's easy to see how framing is at work here. Lakoff assumes the most important part of his argument, and then builds on it, so that the argument is about the superstructure, not the fundamental point. He assumes the laws about property are more important than the need for expression; that they are inviolable like the laws of nature; and that physical force used to enforce them is as inevitable as same. And none of those things are true. But since none of that has to do with metaphorical images (I'm the one who introduced nature, he just seems to be implying necessity), I don't think he'd call it framing. I think he'd just call it the facts and their necessary implications. I daresay he didn't see himself at this moment as molded by unconscious images, but rather as simply relating the truth of what is. Which of course is just how everyone feels when they talk. Which is why changing their deep imagery is so hard.
Michael