edwards on the war metaphor

john edwards is increasingly emerging as the legitimate candidate of the true left. in the following speech given before the council on foreign relations the other day, edwards adopts the position that i've been waiting for some national political figure on the left to adopt for some time now, one the george lakoff has already staked out -- namely, that the notion of a "global war on terror" invokes a frame that is in fact ill-suited to the realities of the present situation, that it is in fact an bad metaphor.

some quotes from the edwards speech:

The core of this presidency has been a political doctrine that George Bush calls the "Global War on Terror." He has used this doctrine like a sledgehammer to justify the worst abuses and biggest mistakes of his administration, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to the war in Iraq. The worst thing about the Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired -- our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism has grown. [...]

The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics, not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world. As a political "frame," it's been used to justify everything from the Iraq War to Guantanamo to illegal spying on the American people. It's even been used by this White House as a partisan weapon to bludgeon their political opponents. [...]

By framing this as a "war," we have walked right into the trap that terrorists have set -- that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war against Islam.

The "war" metaphor has also failed because it exaggerates the role of only one instrument of American power -- the military. This has occurred in part because the military is so effective at what it does. Yet if you think all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

naturally, this challenge to the governing trope of our myopic worldview is drawing fire -- which is not surprising. the truth pisses people off.

"When you go so far as to suggest the global war on terror is a bumper sticker or a slogan, it kind of makes the point that I have been making over and over again, that the Democrats, or at least some of them, are in denial." -- Rudy Giuliani

"Remember that old Edmund Burke quote, it's a famous quote, 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' And that, I am afraid is the boiled down version of what John Edwards said, is that good men should do nothing. Put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away." -- Mitt Romney

of course edwards does not advocate doing nothing -- the entire second half of his speech details it all quite clearly. only time will tell what other democrats besides biden and kucinich will get behind this position and what kind of traction it will develop. if there's one thing the democrats still have not learned from the republicans that they must, it's to get everybody on message and repeat that message, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

framing and statistically improbable phrases

one of amazon's text analysis devices that has fascinated me for a while is the statistically improbable phrases (SIP), which in textual analysis appear or emerge as relatively unique to a given text. that is, amazon makes the full text of certain books available online for searching, excerpting, etc. it also has software that performs textual analyses of each book yielding most frequently used words, for example, along with "statistically improbable phrases," that is, phrases that appear relatively unique to that book. of course this uniqueness is never entirely the case, so what's fascinating is how certain SIPs create metaphors and, as cal berkeley linguist and political strategist george lakoff would have it, evoke frames that are rooted in different contexts.

for example, the phrase "intellectual invasion." lakoff would look at how this phrase is essentially metaphorical, that is, it equates ideas with warfare. this is not an uncommon metaphor -- we speak of a "battle of ideas" or a "battle of wills" all the time. lakoff goes further by saying that such a metaphor evokes a cognitive frame, a way of organizing perception and experience that allows that metaphor to make sense and appeal to us and our values. thus, in an "intellectual invasion" there is an invader and an invadee, there are soldiers and weapons, there are strategies and tactics, there are outcomes of victory and defeat.

now in the different contexts in which the phrase "intellectual invasion" appears -- in this case, as SIPs in five different books in the amazon's data -- different frames will be evoked.

• 1. The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder by Bassam Tibi (U Cal Press, 1998) in a passage like the following "Basically, religious fundamentalists denounce cultural modernity as a virus that has befallen Islam and contributed to the weakening of Islamic civilization. Political Islam purports to reverse this condition. Confronting cultural modernity thus becomes a struggle against the west, in particular a struggle against 'the intellectual invasion of the World of Islam'" (73).
  
• 2. Islam Between Culture and Politics, also by Bassam Tibi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) in a similar context or with a similar frame.
  
• 3. Gender & Knowledge: Contribution of Gender Perspectives to Intellectual Formations by Ferial Ghazoul (American University in Cairo Press, 2000) in the following passage: "The inferiority complex born of belonging to humble mothers who were reduced to the level of ignominy by our forefathers, which cultural colonialism and intellectual invasion implanted firmly in the consciousness and mentality of the East, is well known" (200). similar frame, perhaps redoubled to include islam and feminism.
  
• 4. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, by James D. Watson, where its usage is pretty general even though the broad frame is one of western scientific discovery.
  
• 5. Facing Shame: Families in Recovery, by Merle A. Fossum and Marilyn J. Mason (Norton, 1989) in the following passage: "Intellectual boundary violations result from parents' invading the boundary by criticizing, blaming, mindreading, or mindraping.... Another form of intellectual invasion is the 'prying parent'--the overly interested parent who wants to know everything about the child's activities and thoughts and feelings (from the pretense of caring)." (73-74)

of course statistically these five books do not prove much since only a fraction (though i wonder how great or small a fraction) of all published book get into the amazon database (raising another fascinating question of what books get in and what don't, who decides, how much it costs, etc.).

but clearly the islamic context is dominant, and tibi in particular is getting this phrase from islamic scholars, "two exponents of political Islam," jarisha and zaibaq, authors of Asalib al-ghaZu al-fikri It al-'alain al-Islaini / Methods of the Intellectual Invasion of the Muslim World. so there's a sense in which tibi is sort of single-handedly translating this phrase from islamic into english scholarship.

nevertheless, what's fascinating to me is that this frame should be equally suited to islamic political thought, western science and famliy psychology. does this tell us something about ourselves cognitively?

irony and metaphor

if i were to continue in a study of irony i would leave behind wayne booth, whose palpable dismay at the unstable-covert-infinite irony in the work of samuel beckett i do not share, and take up the more recent studies of linda hutcheon and claire colebrook. (all these texts are fully searchable online at amazon.) nevertheless, i found a passage in booth's rhetoric of irony (1974) that i think speaks very well to the orientation of my own poetics, namely a preference for metaphor over irony:

. . . metaphor is essentially "additive"; nothing of importance in "the words themselves" need be discarded en route to understanding. The consequence is that when metaphor is made into the central poetic category, no paradox results. The essential metaphoric act is a putting together, a synthesis of what had not been unified before; when larger and larger elements are thus unified, when finally the universe itself is seen as one grand Metaphor for Itself, there is no problem in claiming, like Coleridge, that it is all held together by the Great Imaginer himself.

But when irony refuses to keep in place, when it becomes increasingly like an end in itself, paradox is inescapable. And the paradox is not just of that happy rich kind which the ironist seeks--the perception of wheels within wheels, the vertiginous but finally delightful discovery of depths below depths; it is a paradox that can weaken and finally destroy all artistic effect, including the perception of paradox itself. Since irony is essentially "subtractive," it always discounts something, and once it is turned into a spirit or concept and released upon the world, it becomes a total irony that must discount itself, leaving . . . Nothing. [177-178, Booth's ellipsis]

it was of course only two years previous that john ashbery wrote famously, "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way" ("the new spirit," in three poems, 1972). jack spicer of course countered this earlier in his "imaginary elegies" with the injunction "poet: be like god."

booth overstates his case in some respects. (his "Great Imaginer" and "Nothing" are hypothetical extremes that language merely approaches asymptotically.) he is correct in that no particular degree of literacy or competence is necessary to interpret a metaphor; "no symbols where none intended" as beckett insisted in his early novel watt. a metaphor is what it says, it does not intend to trick or dissemble. but booth is wrong when he says "no paradox results," indeed paradox can and often does result from metaphor, but that is primarily because the fruits of metaphor may not correspond to anything immediately verifiable or knowable from lived experience; this is parts of its creative power. thus i'd want to nuance booth's statement that the "essential metaphoric act" is not simply "a synthesis of what had not been unified before" but a creation of what had not existed before.

"arctic honey," from the opening line of john ashbery's poem "leaving the atocha station" ("The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness") is my favorite example of this. this entity may perplex the reader at first, if only because it corresponds to nothing s/he immediately knows or recognizes from experience. in fact, "arctic honey" is exactly what the reader suspects the words are, mean and want to say: something cold, sweet, golden, translucent, viscous, etc. that had not existed or been thought to exist until before the poem.

metaphor is creative, affirming and inclusionary. irony is certainly useful, as there are many things in this world that need to be destroyed, negated and excluded. but in the end i want something that was not there before.