Cresswell - 2013 - Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement

Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions: A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of
Displacement
Author(s): Time Cresswell
Source: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp.
330-345
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Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions:
A Geographical Interpretation of
Metaphors of Displacement
Tim Cresswell
Department of Geography, University of Wales, Lampeter
Metaphor has been the subject of a long and sustained tradition in geographical inquiry. Metaphors
have been seen as evidence for people's attachment to the earth, as ways of developing a new theory,
and as sources of misleadingly simple geographical understandings in the wider realm of "theory."
In this paper, I interpret metaphors which are not obviously geographical in nature to reveal how
metaphors can be understood as ways of thinking and acting with geographical and political
implications. I focus on the ecological metaphor of the "weed," the medical metaphor of "disease,"
and the bodily metaphor of "secretion" and suggest that these have been used to label people and
actions as "out-of-place," as if they were weeds, diseases, or bodily secretions. The point is that these
metaphors are ways of acting and not merely poetic flourishes. Positioning these "metaphors of
displacement" within the theories of, and geographical engagement with, metaphor, I argue that
geographers could profitably engage themselves with interpretations of metaphors as they are used
in contexts of social power and conflict in the world beyond academia. Key Words: disease,
displacement, metaphor, practice, secretion, weeds.
A metaphor ... by virtue of what it hides, can lead
to human degradation (Lakoff and Johnson
1980:236).
he recent interpretive turn in the social
sciences and the advent of cultural studies
have led to an increased interest in issues
of language and representation in general and
metaphorical meaning in particular. Although
metaphor traditionally has fallen within the do-
main of literature and linguistics, in the 1960s
the fields of structuralist and poststructuralist
philosophy (Barthes 1967) and the history and philo-
sophy of science (Hesse 1963; Pepper 1961) be-
gan to take an interest. Geography's interest in
metaphor is even more recent (Barnes and Dun-
can 1992; Price-Chalita 1994; Demeritt 1994).
Geographers have used metaphors to describe
geographical features such as "foothills" (Tuan
1978), to advance geographical understanding
(Buttimer 1982; Livingstone and Harrison 1981),
and to interrogate geographical understandings
in social and cultural theory (Smith and Katz
1993; Bondi and Domosh 1992). Here I examine
a fourth usage of metaphors, a usage less obviously
linked to the discipline of geography. This usage
deploys metaphors to imply the inappropriateness
of particular actions in particular places. Toward
this end I suggest that metaphors are used not
simply to illuminate landscapes and theories; they
are rather central and active components of our
understandings and our actions in the world.
They are inseparable from the way that we live
the world.
The main part of this paper considers the usage
of metaphors that describe people and actions as
out-of-place. Three of these metaphors-weeds,
disease, and bodily secretions-serve to link or-
der to place and space not only as a descriptive
device, but also as a way of thinking and acting. I
begin by noting the incompleteness of objectivist,
interactionist, and antifoundationalist accounts
of metaphor and the advantages of a materially
grounded, experientalist account. I then illustrate
the significance of metaphor in thought and ac-
tion by looking at metaphors of displacement and
their mobilization in political discourse. Finally, I
suggest new ways of using old metaphors by look-
ing at the use of displacement metaphors in post-
modern(ist) texts.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87 (2), 1997, pp. 330-345
(C 1997 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF UK.
Metaphors of
Displacement
331
Metaphor
Objectivist Accounts
During the long history of philosophy and the
shorter one of the social sciences, metaphor has
not stimulated great interest nor much inquiry.
For the most part, metaphor has been thought of
as a residual and decorative device. As Max Black
(1962:25) has suggested: "To draw attention to a
philosopher's metaphors is to belittle him, like
praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting."
Indeed, for philosophers and linguists, metaphor
is regarded as interesting only when transformed
into literal propositions. This attitude is rooted in
"objectivist" accounts of meaning, that is, ac-
counts that rely on the capacity of language to fit
"objective reality" (Johnson 1987). Perhaps be-
cause metaphor crosses conceptual boundaries,
objectivists regard it as a residual of the more
serious debates over truth and literal meaning.
Since objectivists map linguistic constructions
onto a world that has clear categorical bounda-
ries, they tend to devalue metaphor. Its linguisti-
cally transgressive nature, in other words, makes
it unsuitable for objectivist inquiry. Metaphor has
little role to play in the constitution of objectivist
"reality."
Consider the metaphor time is money (Johnson
1987). The objectivist understands metaphor as
an analogy or comparison between its two parts.
The metaphor is meaningful insofar as there are
literal similarities between time and money. Both
can be spent and wasted; both run out. For the
objectivist, these are properties that exist objec-
tively in the world, and thus the metaphor can be
made (through literal translation) to fit the world.
When Tuan (1973) argues that metaphor's im-
portance to geographers lies in the way landscape
is described metaphorically (using body parts, for
example, to describe landscapes, e.g., headlands,
foothills), he relies on objectivist similarities be-
tween the two.
In the objectivist account, metaphor is mar-
ginal and decorative, an interesting artistic and
rhetorical device at best and a camouflage for
serious (read objective) truth at worst. Harvey,
among others, has suggested that metaphors can
"hinder objective judgment" (quoted in Barnes
and Duncan 1992: 10). This view, as Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) point out, reflects an enlighten-
ment view of truth as a product of an empirical
science suspicious of figurative devices. Thus
Locke argued:
if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow
that the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness;
all the artificial and figurative application of words
eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to
insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and
thereby mislead the judgment.... (quoted in Lakoff
and
Johnson 1980:191).
Such suspicions have remained dominant until
quite recently. Since the 1960s other views of
metaphor have been advanced. Structuralism
was one of the first significant challenges to literal
interpretations of metaphor. For structuralists,
metaphor is thought of not as marginal, residual,
or decorative but as central to human endeavor.
One of structuralism's basic tenets (in linguistics)
derives from Jakobson's distinction between
metaphor and metonymy.1 Based on his study of
language disorders (aphasia), Jakobson focused
on speech and the operations of selection and
combination (Lodge 1977).
In selecting and combining words to make
meaningful sentences, selection is the process
that leads to the possibility of metaphor. Selection
is based on similarity and thus the possibility of
substitution. Metaphor can be thought of as a
"substitution based on a certain kind of similarity"
(Lodge 1977), or an "association by substitution"
(Barthes 1967). Similarity and difference com-
bine to form a metaphor. Jakobson's structuralism
thus retains a literal view of metaphor when it
claims that metaphors are selected on the basis of
literal similarities between things. That said,
metaphor in Jakobson's view is no longer mar-
ginal or merely decorative, but central to human
understanding.
Interactionist Accounts
Other philosophers of language have argued
that metaphor plays a serious constitutive/crea-
tive role in our perception and construction of
reality. One line of thought, traced through
Samuel Coleridge, I. A. Richards, and Max Black,
suggests that metaphors create new perceived
worlds and, indeed, that thought itself is largely
metaphorical. Max Black's (1962) interaction
theory suggests that metaphor does not get its
meaning from some antecedent similarity but
332 Cresswell
actually creates similarities, hence the meanings
of at least some metaphors are not reducible to
literal similarities. In this view, the metaphor time
is money acquires its meaning from the interaction
of the entire set of connotations of both time and
money. To break down the metaphor, as objec-
tivists do, is to miss crucial new meanings that
arise from the interaction of the two terms: "for
the metaphor to work the reader must remain
aware of the extension of meaning, must attend
to both the old and new meanings together"
(Black 1962:39).
This view of metaphorical meaning is linked to
scholarly discussions of metaphor in scientific and
philosophical reasoning (Pepper 1961; Colling-
wood 1940) which argue that metaphors trans-
form knowledge in ways that differ from formal
logic. Stephen Pepper (1961), for instance, main-
tains that "root metaphors" are at the heart of
"world theories." These metaphors enable people
to understand the incomprehensible by substitut-
ing a "common-sense fact" for the incomprehen-
sible. Thus the world, and most things in it,
become understandable through the use of either
mechanistic metaphors (world as machine) or
organicist metaphors (world as organism). Meta-
phorical analogies thus generate ideas which pro-
vide leaps in understanding, extending, as Mary
Hesse (1963) has argued, into scientific theoriz-
ing itself. The use of metaphor in the history of
science, though a topic tangential to this paper,
points toward the creativity of metaphors-their
ability to transcend old worlds and create some-
thing quite new.
This interactionist view of metaphor finds geo-
graphical expression in the endeavors of human-
istic geographers. Anne Buttimer (1982)
describes the association of "root metaphors"
with various paradigms of geographic thought.
Metaphors of the earth as organism, map, ma-
chine, and context have provided the language
for positivists, humanists, and Marxists alike. The
use of these metaphors, she argues, exposes the
thought processes active in these various philo-
sophical schools and suggests a way out of the
paradigmatic argument in geography, namely to
create new metaphors for the earth and proceed
from there. Buttimer's concern with root meta-
phors is reflected in the grand historical "meta-
phorical visions" of the "book of nature," of "man
as microcosm," and of the "world as machine"
(Mills 1982). They also arise in Cosgrove and
Daniels's (1993) discussion of textual and visual
metaphors in geography (e.g., landscape
=
text).
They suggest that the competing metaphors of
text and vision in landscape reflect deep-rooted
preoccupations of post-Renaissance humanism
(Cosgrove and Domosh 1993). Their favored
metaphors are contested in turn by David De-
meritt (1994), who focuses on the competing
metaphors used in cultural geography. While en-
vironmental historians use the metaphor of na-
ture as historical actor, the "new" cultural
geographers describe landscapes as texts and
theaters, thus emphasizing human agency over
natural agency. Demeritt proposes new meta-
phors that might open a conversation between
these two camps, e.g., Haraway's "cyborg" meta-
phor that allows for a partly created nature which,
nevertheless, has agency.
Geographers, then, have been intrigued by the
uses of metaphor in their academic discipline and
the ways in which it uses new metaphors to de-
velop new ways of thinking. They have focused
not on the literal translation of metaphors, but
rather on the new meanings that their connota-
tions are capable of producing.
Antifoundationalist Accounts
A third view-the antifoundationalist-re-
gards metaphor as an absurd falsehood that gets
its power from its ability to jolt us out of our
everyday ways of thinking (Davidson 1979). In
this view, metaphor is reducible neither to literal
propositions nor to a creative interaction of sepa-
rate universes of meaning. The antifoundational-
ist account rejects the possibility of mapping
language to the world in any straightforward way.
Thus the metaphor time is money means that time
is (literally) a form of exchange consisting of
paper notes and metal coins the possession of
which entitles the bearer to various privileges.
Metaphor, in this sense, is a "voice from outside
logical space" (Rorty 1991:13). Despite the anti-
foundationalist refusal to translate metaphors
into literal propositions in order to map them to
the world, this account remains an objectivist one
as it depends on the literal absurdity of particular
combinations of meanings. As Johnson (1987)
has argued:
Davidson's motivations are Objectivist through and
through. Meaning is, at base, literal. To grasp the
meaning of an utterance is to know its truth condi-
tions literally interpreted. Since metaphor has no
meaning beyond that of a literal sentence used in
the utterance, what most people call the "meta-
Metaphors of Displacement 333
phor's meaning" is no meaning at all Johnson
1987:72).
In this paper I use an antiobjectivist account of
metaphor, one concerned with the way that meta-
phors are used in the world in its widest sense.
The Materiality of Metaphor
Metaphor in the objectivist, interactionist, and
antifoundationalist accounts remains, for the
most part, a philosophical/linguistic issue. Meta-
phor is decorative, or marginal, or a way of think-
ing and perceiving. The emphasis is on the
workings of creativity and the mind. More re-
cently Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have provided
an experientialist account of metaphor. In this
view, metaphor is at the heart of rationality and
central to the construction of "truth." Truth, they
argue, is neither the objective "view from no-
where" (Sack 1992) nor the subjective product of
individual intuition. Rather truth is relative to
understandings grounded in our experiences as
cultural and social beings and constructed
through metaphor. An example of metaphorical
understanding is the notion of wasting and steal-
ing time. To understand a newspaper article
claiming that employees stole time from their
employers, we have to mobilize a metaphorical
understanding of time as an entity that can be
stolen. Only if we understand this metaphor can
the sentence have any claim to truth (or, indeed,
to make sense). This metaphorical understanding
of time is thus a historical product of western
culture and therefore does not seem problematic.
Such an understanding of time is not a "poetic
flourish," but a deeply engrained way of compre-
hending the world. Such metaphors are taken as
literal and affect our practices. We do not actively
compare time to money, but our temporal prac-
tices are structured through the metaphor when
we spend time; we act metaphorically.
Many of our most important truths are not physical
truths, but truths that come about as a result of
human beings acting in accord with a conceptual
system that cannot, in any sense, be said to fit a
reality completely outside of human experience.
Human experience is, after all, real too.... Since
we act in accord with our conceptual systems and
since our actions are real, our conceptual systems
have a major role in creating reality. Where human
action is concerned, metaphysics, that is, our view
of what exists and what is real, is not independent
of epistemology in the broad sense of human under-
standing and knowledge (Lakoff 1987:296).
While metaphors are usually thought of as
words and language, not as thought and action,
Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is "per-
vasive in everyday life... in thought and action:
(1980:3). They insist that people experience
things and act upon them through a conceptual
system which is largely metaphorical. For exam-
ple, the metaphor argument is war is reflected in
everyday expressions such as "his criticisms were
right on target" or "he shot down all my argu-
ments." Such metaphors are literal. When we
conceive of arguments as war, we attack positions
and lose ground. The way we argue is, according
to Lakoff and Johnson, partially structured by
the concept of war. Thus the argument is war
metaphor, like the time is money metaphor, is
one that we live by in western culture. It is a
metaphor that informs and structures the ac-
tual act of argument. We conceive of argument
as war and act accordingly: a culture having the
conceptual metaphor argument is dance would
argue in a way that is almost unrecognizable as
argument.
We are rarely conscious of such conceptual
metaphors; we do not consciously choose words,
but speak and act on an assumed concept. "We
talk about arguments that way because we con-
ceive of them that way-and we act according to
the way we conceive things" (Lakoff and Johnson
1980:5). Metaphors highlight some aspects of a
concept, but they hide others. The argument is war
metaphor focuses our attention on the competi-
tive aspects of an argument and conceals its co-
operative aspects. Henri Lefebvre (1991) has
suggested that metaphor (and metonymy) may be
thought of as an act rather than a simple "figure
of speech." Metaphorical understanding of a con-
cept such as space tends to naturalize the spatial
realm and, what is more, to make it transparent,
unseen. Metaphor, then, can be understood as a
mode of thought and action that is implicated in
everyday life. This extends metaphor beyond
rhetoric or theoretical understanding and into
the realm of practice and experience.
There is, however, one more step in this argu-
ment. The creation and maintenance of meta-
phorical understanding is an inherently political
process and one that is more likely to be produced
by people in power than by people who are rela-
tively powerless. Power, at least in part, involves
the ability to impose metaphors on others.
334 Cresswell
The power over metaphor is thus not merely
an academic device for encouraging new theo-
retical insights; it is in fact a material power which
is constantly and unavoidably mobilized in every-
day life to define what is thought to be true (and,
thus, as untrue). Metaphorical constructs such as
time is money and argument is war define reality
and sanction an array of activities and prohibit
others. The ability to create and sustain meta-
phors is profoundly ideological.
To summarize, metaphors are culturally
grounded and unavoidable ways of comprehend-
ing the world. These deeply engrained ways of
understanding are inevitably linked to our actions
(practices). The creation and maintenance of
metaphors is, therefore, an inherently political
project with material effects and consequences.
It is my purpose to move beyond introspective
academic discussions of metaphors. While I have
no doubt that root metaphors are at the heart of
ways of thinking about the world (Buttimer
1992), that metaphor and analogy provide new
insights into cultural (Demeritt 1994; Cosgrove
and Domosh 1993) and economic geography
(Barnes 1991), that new metaphorical spaces may
be constructed for a feminist project (Price-
Chalita 1994), and that the adoption of explicitly
geographical metaphors (mapping, travel, etc.) in
social and cultural theory is important (Smith and
Katz 1993; Price-Chalita 1994; Bondi and Do-
mosh 1992), I am also convinced that the geog-
raphy of metaphors provides insights on the wider
world of social and political life.
We must look beyond geography to find meta-
phors considered as a way of thinking and acting
that has geographical implications for life in the
wider world. Dick Hebdige (1993:274) writes of
the "virtual power of figurative language" in
which metaphors are never "just" ornaments on
a mantelpiece of rational language. "Metaphors,")
he argues, "are themselves an essential (if unsta-
ble) component of realpolitik, acting as focalizing
agents capable of drawing together diverse, even
antagonistic constituencies" (Hebdige
1993:272). Metaphors are acts that encourage
some thoughts and actions and discourage others,
and this has geographical implications. Many
metaphors are distinctly geographical acts that
encourage spatial thoughts and actions while pro-
hibiting others. Most metaphors we use in daily
life are neither the root metaphors of grand theo-
ries, nor the obviously geographical metaphors of
mapping and position. Many are metaphors that
tell us what and who belong where; they are, as
such, constitutive moments in the spatiality of
everyday life.
Out-of-Place Metaphors
The remainder of this paper considers meta-
phors used in the media and by governments to
focus attention on the "out-of-placeness" of peo-
ple and actions. Following a brief rationale for my
focus on displacement metaphors, I turn to the
metaphors of weeds, disease, and bodily filth and
their powerful geographic implications for the
treatment of people and practices.
My focus on metaphors of displacement is
rooted in a belief that place is one of the primary
factors in the creation and maintenance of ideo-
logical values (what is good, just, and appropri-
ate) and thus in the definition of appropriate and
inappropriate actions and practices. The notion
that everything "has its place" and that things
(e.g., people, actions) can be "in-place" or "out-
of-place" is deeply engrained in the way we think
and act (Cresswell 1996). Such is our acceptance
of these ideas that they have achieved the status
of common sense or second nature. As Pierre
Bourdieu (1990) has argued, common sense
("doxa" in his lexicon) produces the strongest
adherence to an established order. People act as
they think they are supposed to; they do what
they think is appropriate in places that are also
appropriate. It is therefore essential for powerful
groups in any given context to define common
sense and that which goes unquestioned. When
individuals or groups ignore this socially produced
common sense, they are said to be "out-of-place"
and defined as deviant. Frequently, this labeling
of "out-of-placeness" is metaphorical, based on
analogies which themselves refer to common
sense expectations. Perhaps the most familiar of
these metaphors is that of "dirt." Mary Douglas
(1996) has considered our understanding of dirt
in some depth. Wherever dirt is identified, she
argues, there is "matter-out-of-place." Thus shoes
in their "proper place" are just shoes, while shoes
on the dining table become dirt. The metaphori-
cal use of dirt, then, relies for its effect on an
unsaid and normally unquestioned structure of
"proper places" which (silently) demands appro-
priate behavior. Below I focus on three other sets
of metaphors which imply "out-of-placeness":
weeds, plagues, and bodily secretions.
Weeds
In 1991 the U.S. Department of Justice se-
lected two pilot sites, Kansas City, Missouri and
Trenton, New Jersey, for a new urban program
known as "Weed and Seed." In the words of the
U.S. Attorney General, William Barr:
Weed and Seed is a community-based, comprehen-
sive, multi-agency approach to combating violent
crime, drug use and gang activity in high-crime
neighborhoods. The goal of this strategy is to "weed
out" crime from targeted neighborhoods and then to
"seed" the targeted sites with a wide range of crime and
drug prevention programs (U.S. Congress 1992).
This program was based on an earlier state-
funded project known as the "Violent Trafficers
Project" begun in Philadelphia in August 1988.
The May 20,1992, minutes of the Select Commit-
tee on Narcotic Abuse and Control (U.S. Con-
gress 1992) reported that the Philadelphia project
had produced a "flourishing Spring Green Neigh-
borhood." The Committee also reviewed the pilot
project in Kansas City in the Ivanhoe neighbor-
hood. The pilot project had spent $200,000 on
activities such as neighborhood clean-ups, the
removal of abandoned cars, and an anti-graffiti
campaign. The committee met in the context of
the Los Angeles riots of April 29 after which
President George Bush had announced a
$19,000,000 package for urban renewal in Los
Angeles. Following the Committee's review of the
program, and in light of the events in Los Angeles,
it recommended the wider application of "Weed
and Seed" and approved sixteen cities as future
sites, including Atlanta, Chicago, Charleston,
South Carolina, and Wilmington, Delaware. In
1993, an additional $500,000,000 was to be re-
quested for urban programs. Although Demo-
crats supported the general concept of investing
in the inner city, some were suspicious of the
Weed and Seed program. Charles B. Rangel pre-
sented evidence to the committee that the vast
majority of funds were spent on weeding rather
than seeding and that the program was essentially
funding for police action against poor black com-
munities through the imposition of martial law.
The major strands of activity in the program
include policing, the creation of enterprise zones,
and provision of services. The places selected for
program funds were chosen on the bases of the:
... presence of grass roots community organizations
open to the Weed and Seed concept, high incidence
of gang-related violence; high rates of homicide,
aggravated assault, rape and other violent crimes;
high number of drug arrests; high (school) dropout
rate; high unemployment rate; and the presence of
public housing developments, including high-rise
apartments (William Barr, U.S. Attorney General.
U.S. Congress House Select Committee 1992).
The success or failure of the program is not an
issue here; my concern is with the weed metaphor.
Weeds are the botanical equivalent of dirt. Just as
dirt is matter out of place, weeds are plants out of
place. There is very little that can be said to unite
plants classified as weeds other than their unde-
sirability.
Here is a section on weeds from an ecology
textbook.
Fugitive species ... are the "weeds" of the plant and
animal kingdoms, which colonise temporary habi-
tats, reproduce, and leave quickly before the tempo-
rary habitat disappears. . . . One large group of
fugitive species are the weeds. Weeds are plants
which grow entirely or predominantly in disturbed
areas, and they produce large numbers of seeds
adapted to long-distance dispersal by wind or by
animals (Krebs 1985:52-53).
Weeds are plants that are uncultivated and unde-
sired; they crowd out the cultivated specimens in
the garden or farm field. Many plants become
weeds simply by being in the wrong place. Weeds
(real or figural) are furtively mobile fugitives that
colonize available waste ground, and then move
on to take over new ground. They also reproduce
abundantly. Whereas a garden often implies a
sense of order with each plant in its correct place
forming a harmonious whole, weeds, through mo-
bility and rapid reproduction, spoil this ordered
environment. Weed is also a verb; to weed is to
remove useless, harmful, and undesirable plants
from the order of the garden or cultivated land.
Indeed, the Select Committee on Narcotic Abuse
and Control provided a lexicon of ecological
metaphors in justification of the Weed and Seed
program. The Philadelphia program had pro-
duced a "flourishing Spring Green neighbor-
hood"; Weed and Seed was to be applied to
neighborhoods with strong "grass-roots" commu-
nities; disruptive elements would be "weeded"
out, and "seed" money would be provided to
regenerate the urban environment (U.S. Con-
gress 1992).
Using the "weed" metaphor in the context of
urban areas such as Los Angeles is not merely
336 Cresswell
descriptive. The "Weed and Seed" program re-
ferred also to the government's prescriptive goal
of ridding problem areas of undesirable inhabi-
tants (weeds) and planting them with the proper
inhabitants (community centers, job schemes,
and police stations). This connotation of out-of-
place people is attended by a host of other less
obvious implications based on the characteristics
of weeds. These out-of-place people may be
viewed as weak but cunning, as reproducing
quickly, as "fugitives" always on the move. All of
these reinforce a representation of "aliens" invad-
ing the proper order of the American city. I am
not suggesting here a simple substitution view of
the weed metaphor. Describing people in the
inner city as weeds produces a new set of mean-
ings that arise from the metaphorical interaction
of weeds and allegedly disreputable people.
Behind the weed (and seed) metaphor lies the
ugly history of the more generally organismic
metaphor, city as ecosystem. The metaphor has
long been associated with the Chicago School of
sociology (see Jackson and Smith 1984; Cappetti
1993) and Robert Park's belief that the city is a
"product of nature." Criticisms of the urban ecol-
ogy school are well known and need not be re-
peated in detail (see Smith 1980). What is not
well known is the translation of these metaphors
into legal practice. The city as ecosystem metaphor
is not just theoretically inappropriate; it is a way
of acting which has serious consequences in peo-
ple's lives. As Carla Cappetti (1993) has shown,
Robert Park would quickly slip from the conscious
use of natural metaphors of the virtually literal
description of "moral climate" and "innate dispo-
sitions." It was this biological morality that later
became the centerpiece of the sociology of devi-
ance which described deviance as a "pathology"
of the inner city. It was in the slum that Park
found the embodiment of humanity's "primitive"
traits. The city, in Park's eyes, broke people down,
removed the veneer of culture, and left people
with little more than a "nature" which resembled
plants and animals (Park 1984:41). As David
Delaney and Michele Emanatian (1993) have
persuasively argued, metaphorical reasoning
played a significant role in the legal judgments of
disputes over racial segregation in the U.S. during
the mid-twentieth century. These judicial opin-
ions reveal how judges deployed metaphor in
ways that served powerful interests. Borrowing
metaphors straight from the Chicago School's
theorization of invasion, succession, infiltration,
and encroachment, judges literally decided where
black people could and could not live. Delaney
and Emanatian conclude that these urban eco-
logical understandings helped to create and
maintain certain material conditions in cities and
neighborhoods. The judge who wrote an opinion
statement that a restrictive covenant "furnishes
a complete barrier against the eastward move-
ment of colored population into the restricted
area" (quoted in Delaney and Emanation
1993:10) was using the metaphorical language of
urban ecology and, because his words simultane-
ously had material effects, he was sustaining a
particular set of sociospatial conditions. The pos-
sibilities of challenging and changing urban ethnic
segregation were foreclosed by the metaphorical
naturalization of social conditions. As Delaney
and Emanatian point out:
the decisions reached in these cases were conse-
quential. They were clearly consequential to the
parties involved. Thousands of people ... were put
out of their homes or confined to substandard hous-
ing. More generally, the body of law developed
through these cases created, we might say, a formi-
dable barrier to the use of legal action in the fight
against racial inequality and injustice. It is in this
regard above all that metaphor and metaphorical
reasoning matters (1993:21, emphasis in the original).
In cases involving racial segregation through re-
strictive covenants or by other means, judges
often acted metaphorically; they acted as though
people were plants that invaded spaces, formed
ecosystems, and produced barriers.
Park's city as ecosystem metaphor certainly led
to particular ways of seeing the city and its inhabi-
tants. The grand theory and ethnographic tradi-
tions of the Chicago School both leaned heavily
on the metaphor of nature. This understanding
shifted from the obviously metaphorical (humans
acting like nature) to the status of "dead meta-
phor" (see Barnes and Duncan 1992:11), one
that is no longer recognized as metaphorical (hu-
mans are nature). The usage of dead metaphors
is equivalent to Kuhn's "normal" science, to busi-
ness as usual, to Bourdieu's "doxa," the unques-
tioned realm of common sense which produces
and reproduces the established order. The dead
metaphors of urban ecology through the middle
part of the century influenced the study of devi-
ance and the treatment of "deviance" by social
workers, judges, and others. The metaphor, in
other words, provided not only a new way of
describing the city but also a way of thinking and
acting. Indeed, my use of the past tense is prema-
ture in light of the U.S. Weed and Seed program.
Disease/Plague
Metaphors of ill health (disease, infection,
plague, epidemic) are often used to label people
and activities as deviant and "out-of-place." As
with the weed metaphor, users rarely distinguish
between being described as a disease and being
treated as diseased. One example of the use of
disease metaphors is the press and government
descriptions of the so-called New Age Travellers
in Britain (see Rojek 1988; Vincent-Jones 1986;
Lowe and Shaw 1993). New Age Travellers have
been a feature of British life for more than a
decade. Many travelers believe in a "New Age"
spirituality, and some follow anarchist philoso-
phies. This mixture of people from the city and
country lead a traveling lifestyle, living in cara-
vans, trailers, and buses and camping on common
and unused land. Their mobility is interrupted by
a summer season of free festivals featuring music
and dance. Ethnographies of the travelers reveal
a common desire to escape the materialist trap-
pings of contemporary British life (Lowe and
Shaw 1993). Since the mid- 1980s, the travelers
have been a constant thorn in the side of the
British authorities who have made many attempts
to put an end to their way of life. The police,
media, and Conservative government have in-
sisted that the travelers are often violent and
unhealthy trespassers living off the state. Here I
focus on public reactions to events after the ban-
ning of the free Stonehenge festival in May 1986.
One newspaper article referred to the travelers
as being in "quarantine" from society (Weaver
1986:36); others described them as a "plague of
locusts" ("Plague of Locusts" 1986:6) and as
"pests" ("Crop of Trouble" May 30, 1986:2). A
farmer claimed that the travelers would "poison"
his land and that "the three fields they have taken
over ... will be disease-ridden and unusable as a
result for at least two years" (enkins 1986:3).
After a clash with police in riot gear, one paper
wrote of the need to clear the "pollution of ring
worm, tape worm and viruses from the hippies'
diseased dogs, cats and goats" ("Convoy Is
Halted" 1986:2). Home Secretary Douglas Hurd
described them as an "affliction" on the land
(House of Commons June 3, 1986). The Depart-
ment of Health and Social Security recom-
mended "putting up protective screens in offices
where hippies claim benefits" because, it was al-
leged, many hippies had hepatitis or were carriers
of the disease. The report reassured staff that
blood contact was needed to catch hepatitis, but
went on to recommend against going to campsites
to pay benefits or to inspect the accommodations
as it would be "highly undesirable, unpleasant,
and potentially dangerous." Continuing with the
language of epidemic, the report observed that:
"Wales and the South-west are the most affected
by hippie invasions, although the problem is
spreading to the Midlands, North London, Hert-
fordshire and Essex" (Henke 1986:1, 30). The
implication at the end of the report was that
relatively large numbers of out-of-place people
were taking over an ordered (healthy) environ-
ment. The countryside location of the convoy
and the reference to locusts and pests provides a
rural twist to the metaphorical implications (de-
stroying healthy rural crops). Although these re-
ports stop short of labeling the travelers as foreign,
they do suggest that they are "outsiders" (Sibley
1981), probably from the city.
As with the weed metaphor, the metaphors of
disease and plague imply out-of-placeness. Some
of the characteristics of plagues and disease that
might be attributed to travelers thus include a
disregard for spatial boundaries, a capacity for
rapid spread, a threat to "normal" function, and
the possibility of foreign origin. In using disease
metaphors for transgressive people and actions,
users compare society to the human body. In the
traveler example, the social body is hegemonic
society which is threatened by the actions of the
travelers. Society is, in this case, manifested in the
supposedly "natural" environment of the British
countryside replete with neat boundaries and
property-owning inhabitants.
The use of disease metaphors constitutes a way
of thinking and acting, and this is evident in the
metaphorical connections between disease and
the military reactions to it. Susan Sontag makes
this point in Aids and Its Metaphors (1988) by
describing the variety of metaphors used to dis-
cursively construct the human body and AIDS.
The most powerful of these is the military anal-
ogy. Sontag presents a typical example:
Scouts of the body's immune system . .. sense the
presence of the diminutive foreigner and promptly
alert the immune system. It begins to immobilize an
array of cells that, among other things, produce
antibodies to deal with the threat. Single-mindedly,
the AIDS virus ignores many of the blood cells in its
path, evades the rapidly advancing defenders and
homes in on the master coordinator of the immune
system, a helper T cell . . . (Quoted in Sontag
1988:17).
338 Cresswell
Using the metaphor in this fashion, she observes:
implements the way particularly dread diseases are
envisaged as an alien "other," as enemies are in
modern war; and the move from the denomination
of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient
is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought
of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And inno-
cence, by the inexorable logic that governs all rela-
tional terms, suggests guilt (Sontag 1988:11).
Sontag's argument, in simplest terms, is that
metaphors (e.g., military metaphors of illness)
directly intervene in the perception and treat-
ment of the people to whom the metaphor is
applied, that is, disease and treatment are
thought of and acted upon as war. In war situ-
ations, extreme measures are called for, and nor-
mal legal process is suspended. The use of military
metaphors in the description of AIDS is inevita-
bly linked to the treatment of AIDS. The military
metaphor, Sontag insists, "overmobilizes, it over-
describes, and it powerfully contributes to the
excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill"
(Sontag 1988:94).
We are not being invaded. The body is not a battle-
field. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor
the enemy. We-medicine, society-are not
authorized to fight back by any means whatever....
About the metaphor, the military one, I would
say. . . . Give it back to the war-makers (Sontag
1988:95).
If an actual disease is metaphorically under-
stood in military terms, then a metaphorical dis-
ease (such as travelers) will likely retain the
military implications. It is no coincidence, there-
fore, that the media's use of disease metaphors for
travelers were often connected to military meta-
phors. The press described travelers as "armies"
and their movements as "invasions." The Daily
Mail for instance, headlined "Row over the 'Out-
law' Wandering Army" (June 1, 1986:2). In an
account of travelers' visits to social security of-
fices, the Daily Mirror referred to a "dole office
siege" (Hard Up Hippies" 1986:2). The military
metaphor extended to the House of Commons
where Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred to
the travelers as a "bunch of medieval brigands"
(Weaver 1986:1). The implication is that travel-
ers are a plague and that military solutions are
justified. It thus becomes acceptable to place
perspex screens in front of social security officers
likely to be visited by travelers for fear of hepatitis
(a disease spread only through blood contact), or
to confront a group of travelers with 780 police
in riot gear and armored cars. The destruction of
cars, caravans, and buses in the so-called Battle
of the Beanfield is seen as justifiable. More signifi-
cantly, the successful application of such meta-
phorical understandings legitimate the treatment
of travelers as a disease in the new British Crimi-
nal Justice Bill (1993) which effectively outlaws
nomadism as a way of life (Sibley 1995). Indeed,
the metaphorical description of the travelers as
disease is only one in a series of metaphorical
understandings which have been used to legiti-
mate changes in the law and thus in the treatment
of marginal groups.
As Vincent-Jones (1986) has indicated,
changes in property law (and thus the treatment
of transgressors) require public support for the
institution of private property. Such support is
generated by metaphorical representations which
depict transgressors such as travelers and squatters
as a serious menace to society as a whole (rather
than just to wealthy landowners for instance). This,
of course, is the threat of disease which spreads
without regard for the "guilt" or "innocence" of its
victims. Travelers and squatters are thus described
as a danger to all domestic premises.
In order to generate these fears, the media
referred to the squatters in the 1970s with refer-
ence to the squatters' alleged animal behavior,
toiletry habits, and revolutionary ambition.2 This
metaphorical insinuation of disorderly and dan-
gerous behavior takes the squatting issue out of
the particularity of the cases involved and devel-
ops an understanding of the squatters as a threat
to all. This prepares the ground for society to
insist upon criminal measures against "trespass-
ers." As Stuart Hall has repeatedly shown (1978,
1988), hegemonic power is not based on brute
repression but on appeals to common sense. Meta-
phorical descriptions of threatening transgres-
sions are credible because they make ideological
sense out of an apparent crisis. In the case of
squatters and travelers, threats to private prop-
erty are immersed in a sea of signification which
includes metaphors (such as disease) of degener-
ate out-of-placeness. A division is thus con-
structed that separates "ordinary people" from
the threatening bands of deviants. The descrip-
tion of travelers as a "plague of locusts" is embed-
ded in just such a distinction:
They despise work themselves but make life a pur-
gatory for those who do labour to earn their own
living. They descend like a plague of locusts on land
which is not their own.... The whole of law-abiding,
tax-paying, job doing and job seeking society is taken
for a ride every time one of these hippie convoys
trundles on its sponging way ("Convoy Is Halted"
1986:6).
The metaphor of disease encourages us to think
of the travelers as not "us." Even if "we" have
never seen a traveler, the threat that is posed to
a Somerset farmer is discursively portrayed as a
threat that "we" should wish to neutralize. In this
fashion the metaphorical construction of the
travelers (or squatters) paves the way for changes
in the law.
The Criminal Law Bill of 1977 followed on the
footsteps of the squatting scare (Vincent-Jones
1986). The bill gave police the power of entry in
order to search for and arrest people suspected of
one of several new crimes. The House of Com-
mons debate over the bill included many refer-
ences to the "squatting problem" which fed off the
media's metaphorical representations of squatters
(Vincent-Jones 1986). The common sense that
had been created over the preceding years was
mobilized to legitimate the new law. The moral
panic (Cohen 1972) over travelers involved simi-
lar metaphorical understandings and similar at-
tempts to change the law. The Criminal Justice
and Public Order Bill of 1993 criminalizes the
traveler's lifestyle by making trespass a criminal
offense, banning unofficial festivals, removing the
obligation of local councils to provide sites for
nomadic people, and making it possible for police to
break up large numbers of people suspected of
traveling together. In addition to the bill, the police
have established a computer database to track the
movement of "known travellers" whether or not
they have committed a crime. All of these actions
are legitimated through the constant references to
travelers in metaphorical terms of disease and trans-
gression. As in the case of AIDS, disease metaphors
quickly lead to military metaphors and military
solutions. As Stuart Hall has argued in relation to
the moral panics of the 1970s:
The state has won the right, and indeed inherited
the duty to move swiftly, to stamp fast and hard, to
listen in, discreetly to survey, to saturate and swamp,
to charge or to hold without charge, to act on
suspicion, and to hustle and shoulder, in order to
keep society on the straight and narrow. Democ-
racy, the last back-drop against arbitrary power, is in
retreat. It is suspended, the times are exceptional.
The crisis is real. We are inside the "law and order"
state (Hall 1978:37).
The conceptual metaphor society as human
body makes possible the metaphor of transgres-
sion as disease and legitimates the (military) rem-
edy. In other words, the use of a metaphor such
as disease is not just a tool of language (a discur-
sive trick), but a kind of understanding and a way
of acting. As with the weed and general ecosystem
metaphors, metaphorical understanding has con-
sequences "on the ground" for thousands of peo-
ple whose lives are deemed "out-of-place."
Bodily Secretions
Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection,
disease, corpse etc.) stand for the danger to identity
that comes from without: the ego threatened by the
non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by
death (Kristeva 1982:71).
Bodily secretions provide another metaphor of
displacement. Urine, feces, vomit, and menstrual
blood are all examples of substances used to de-
fine someone as out-of-place. Here I examine the
use of such substances in metaphorical references
to the Greenham Common Peace Camp in Berk-
shire, England. The camp was the result of a 1981
march by a group known as Women for Life on
Earth between Cardiff, Wales, and Greenham
Common Air Base, which was to be the first site
for American Cruise missiles armed with nuclear
warheads. On arrival, the group won the support
of other peace activists and unions and the
marchers decided to stay and set up camp on the
perimeter of the base as a permanent protest to
the presence of the Cruise missiles. Between Sep-
tember 1981 and March 1984 (the arrival of
Cruise), the women became the object of anger
from the Conservative government and the right-
wing media. Up to several hundred women main-
tained a permanent presence at the base, On
several occasions they were joined by up to 50,000
other women supporting them for particular ac-
tions such as an "embrace of the base" (December
11, 1983). Many women stayed on at the base
throughout the 1980s, even after the missiles had
been removed as part of a treaty between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union.
The site became an icon for political action in
the 1980s (Liddington 1989). Here I concentrate
on the language used by the media in reaction to
the camp during the early 1980s. Consider this
reference to the camp:
Almost the entire area within several hundred yards
of the perimeter fence of R.A.F Greenham Com-
mon is in constant use as a lavatory-including the
gardens of local residents. Soiled sanitary towels are
340 Cresswell
used to "decorate" the fences and surrounding areas
(White 1984:18).
In this quotation, bodily secretions are used to
describe phenomena perceived as out-of-place.
In the context of general reporting on Greenham
Common, the reference to defecation and men-
struation, although apparently literal, can be read
as a metaphor for a general notion of the women
as "out-of-place." As Alison Young (1990) has
suggested, the analogies between feminist, sepa-
ratist political protest and functions of the human
body are far from arbitrary. Rather these analogies
served as a means for the media to ensure a
negative image of a dissenting minority.
Of all the possible functions or attributes of a human
body, it is the production of malodorous waste and
effluence that is imposed on the Greenham protest
and made to seem appropriate. The peace camp is
described as if it were both the mechanism for pro-
ducing waste and the result. In metaphor's parade
of resemblance and analogy, the two become indis-
tinguishable (Young 1990:99).
The Greenham women were constantly re-
ferred to as various bodily secretions. One guard
at the airbase told the Daily Mail:
There have been times when the "ladies" pinned
their used sanitary towels to their clothing, or hung
them from the fence for us to remove. They like to
make a point of squatting to relieve themselves on
the path we patrol Games 1983:7).
The truth of such descriptions is not at issue here,
but it is worth nothing that one journalist,
Caroline Blackwood, was so shocked by the de-
scription of bad bodily hygiene that she went to
the camp to find out for herself:
I found the charge that the Greenham women lived
like dogs and that they were smearing Newbury with
their excrement almost the most chilling one....
The claim of Auberon Waugh that the Greenham
women smelt of "fish paste and bad oysters" also
haunted me for it had such distressing sexual asso-
ciations. . . (Blackwood 1984:1-2).
On arrival Blackwood encountered an elderly,
grey-haired woman busily knitting. Blackwood
found herself dreading "that she might suddenly
behave like a dog and defecate" (Blackwood 1984:5).
What I am suggesting here is that the union of
protesting women and bodily secretions in the
media produced a metaphorical understanding of
the women that pointed to their (alleged) dis-
placement. The interaction of women and mal-
odorous bodily products produces a special gen-
dered form of horror like that experienced by
Caroline Blackwood.
The metaphors of bodily secretion or corporeal
waste are frequently used to imply the existence
of a transgression. Building on the work of Mary
Douglas, Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror
(1982) suggests that references to bodily filth
represent the other side of an established bound-
ary, a margin.
Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and ex-
crement, or everything that is assimilated to them,
from nail-pairings to decay, represent-like a meta-
phor that would have become incarnate-the ob-
jective frailty of symbolic order? (Kristeva 1982:69).
Excremental discourse relates the scale of the
body to wider symbolic economies of place. As
Douglas (1966), Stallybrass and White (1986),
and Kristeva (1982) have all suggested, images of
the body often serve as a microcosm for the
anxieties and dreads of the social macrocosm.
Bodily secretions are particular instances of the
more general "dirt" metaphor that Mary Douglas
has specified as meaning nothing more (nor less)
than "matter out-of-place" (Douglas 1966).
Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to
place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in
itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the
bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing, similarly,
bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothes
lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors; upstairs
things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where
over-clothing should be, and so on (Douglas
1966:36).
In a geography of normality that is constructed
through various acts of territoriality, in which
there is a place for everything, nonconformity to
spatial order results in dirt. Douglas's work pro-
vides a useful tool for decoding general references
to dirt in reactions to people and actions consid-
ered out-of-place, but she makes no reference to
the social groups who are able to control the
definition of "dirt." Sophie Laws, on the other
hand, makes this point clear:
Pollution beliefs can be read as statements about
power relations in society. They define, according to
the dominant ideology, what is "matter out of place, "
and this in turn makes it clear who has control of
such social definition (Laws 1990:36).
The Greenham women were metaphorically
described as dirt because they were women on
their own outside a heavily masculinized air force
base (Cresswell 1994; Young 1990). The use of
dirt metaphors to describe Greenham women is
evidence for a way of understanding these women
as out of place.
Bodily secretions are a particular type of dirt.
Most cultures have some kind of pollution rituals
involving bodily cleanliness. The orifices of the
body connect the inside to the outside and the
stuff that goes into them or comes out of them is
subject to the strictest taboos as such substances
transgress the inside/outside ordering of the
world. Metaphorical references to such sub-
stances invariably imply threats to order.
Menstruation is frequently thought of as a form
of disorder in which things have "gone wrong."
We do not have to restrict ourselves to colorful
media reactions to the Greenham women to see
this view of menstruation; it also informs the
presumed objectivity of medical textbooks which
use different metaphors to describe bodily proc-
esses in men and women (Martin 1990,1992). A
common metaphor in the description of female
bodies is that of a production system in which the
body produces estrogen and eggs among other
things. The point of this production system is to
provide the correct conditions for the implanta-
tion of a fertilized ovum in the latter half of the
monthly cycle. Menstruation, then, is inevitably
described as a failure. Here Emily Martin illustrates
the way some textbooks describe menstruation:
The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen "de-
prives" the endometrial lining of its hormonal sup-
port, "constriction" of blood vessels leads to a
"diminished" supply of oxygen and nutrients, and
finally "disintegration starts, the entire lining begins
to slough, and the menstrual flow begins." Blood
vessels in the endometrium "haemorrhage" and the
menstrual flow "consists of this blood mixed with
endometrial debris." The "loss" of hormonal stimu-
lation causes "necrosis" (Martin 1990:75).
This view of menstruation as failed production,
Martin argues, inevitably contributes to negative
views of the process. The female body becomes a
"disused factory." The metaphorical descriptions
are instrumental in producing an image of failure.
By contrast, the metaphorical description of male
reproductive physiology notes that sperm produc-
tion is "remarkable" and "amazing" for its "sheer
magnitude." The difference depends on the value
(or lack of value) placed on the "product." Need-
less to say, there is nothing "natural" or "objec-
tive" about metaphorical descriptions of bodily
processes in physiology textbooks. As Martin
observes:
Menstruation could just as well be regarded as the
making of life substance that marks us as women, or
heralds our non-pregnant state, rather than as the
casting off of the debris of endometrial decay or as
the haemorrhage of necrotic blood vessels (Martin
1990:80).
Metaphors such as these arise out of specific
hierarchical structures of power and serve to re-
produce such asymmetrical power relations. In-
deed, it is hard to imagine such imagery not having
an effect on medical research and the treatment
of men and women by the medical profession. A
possible interpretation of the use of menstruation
metaphors in descriptions of the Greenham
women is that medical notions of menstruation
as failure have been translated into metaphorical
understandings of the women as "failures" who
are not busy in the reproductive and domestic
roles assigned to them.
The Greenham women clearly threatened es-
tablished notions of order by their presence out-
side the airbase. The symbolism of excrement and
menstrual blood was prevalent in descriptions of
them. In addition, at a more sinister level, the
actions of people around them continued the
excremental theme. Air force personnel fre-
quently bared their posteriors to the women and
unknown people poured pig feces over some of
the women's tents at night.
Greenham women were not just described as
dirt, they were treated as dirt. Blackwood de-
scribes the reaction of one local resident to the
view from a window overlooking both the
women's camp and the base:
She took me to her bedroom. The camp looked
rather unimportant from a higher perspective. Mrs.
Scull had a really fantastic view of the desolation of
the missile base. From her window, you could see
much more barbed wire than you could from the
ground. It seemed to roll into infinity.
She asked me to imagine how pretty her view had
been before the women had set up their camp. She
saw that I was taken aback by the uninterrupted
vista of military vehicles and barbed wire (Black-
wood 1984:98).
A similarly surprising observation was made by
the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Lynda
Chalker, in the House of Commons:
I have verified for myself what an eyesore it [the
peacecamp] is. It offends against the normal stand-
ards of Air Force establishments. It spoils some
pleasant common land and is a potential, if not an
actual, environmental health hazard (U.K. Parlia-
mentary Debates 1983:147).
342 Cresswell
Both Mrs. Scull and Lynda Chalker,
MP,
were
able, without a hint of irony, to describe the peace
protesters as an eyesore and an environmental
hazard while looking at a huge base of concrete
slabs and bunkers wherein lay the far greater
environmental hazard of nuclear warheads. Both
thought of the women as dirt and pollution, but
not the base. The U.S. Air Force's deployment of
Cruise missiles with nuclear warheads was viewed
as legitimate while the women were viewed as
threatening. As befits polluting substances,3 local
and national government did their best to expel
the women, at times forcefully.
Ecological, disease, and secretion metaphors
can all be used to imply displacement. Although
their specific implications are different, the result
is a common portrayal of geographical disorder in
which citizens of the inner city, travelers, and
Greenham women are regarded as out-of-place.
Beneath this similarity are nuanced differences.
Bodily secretions prompt revulsion (see Kristeva's
1982 discussion of abjection), weeds prompt a
callous desire for removal (without revulsion),
and disease prompts fear (Tuan 1979). Revulsion,
callous indifference, and fear are feelings that
result from perceptions of displacement and that
guide actions. Weeds demand to be cut down,
secretions need to be made clean, disease must be
quarantined and kept apart. These metaphors
thus mobilize different ways of dealing with dis-
placement, but the end is the same-to restore
things to their proper place.
Metaphors in Action
Metaphorical meaning is not in any way natu-
ral or inherent; metaphors change over time and
across cultures. While metaphors such as weeds
and disease have been used to label and treat
people and actions as deviant, similar metaphors
have gained a more positive meaning in postmod-
ern academic discourse. Displacement has been
positively celebrated (occasionally to excess) by
many writers who have been placed under the
postmodern banner. The geographical metaphors
of travel, tourism, and nomadism have been theo-
retical rallying points for James Clifford (1992)
and lain Chambers (1994). The weed metaphor
in the form of the "rhizome" has been given a
positive twist by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
(1983). Rather than seeing the weed as some-
thing threatening to be removed, they write of the
rhizome as a liberating, dynamic entity which
provides lines of escape from the confines of
territorial power. The nicely ordered garden with
everything in its place displeases Deleuze and
Guattari; they revel instead in the constant mul-
tiplication and unmanageability of the weed/rhi-
zome. While the classic plant (e.g., a tree) is
rooted and understandable in terms of its fixity,
the rhizome exists on a level plane of multiplica-
tion and differentiation. It is never finally trace-
able to Althusser's famous "last instance."
Rhizomes cannot rely on any generative principle
for meaning.
As an underground stem a rhizome is absolutely
distinct from roots and radicals. Bulbs and tubers are
rhizomes.... Even some animals are rhizomorphic,
when they live in packs like rats.... In itself the
rhizome has many diverse forms, from its surface
extension which ramifies in all directions to its con-
cretions into bulbs and tubers. Or when rats move
by sliding over and under one another. There is the
best and worst in the rhizome: the potato, the weed,
crab-grass (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:10-11).
Deleuze and Guattari are masters of meta-
phorical transformation. Their work uses the rhi-
zome/weed metaphor along with schizophrenia
and nomadism (all previously signifiers of chaos
and disrepute) in ways which generate new ways
of thinking about everything from books to theo-
ries of signification. Their tactic is to use the
formally negative in potentially transformative
ways. Displacement ceases to be a threat and
becomes a virtue (or perhaps the threat becomes
a virtue). The use of new metaphors (or the new
use of old metaphors) in intellectual life is, of
course, well documented (Pepper 1961). The
transformation of displacement metaphors in
postmodern discourse, however, hints at the pos-
sibility of metaphorical contestation in the wider
world. This paper has attempted a geographically
informed consideration of metaphors as actions
in a wider political world. I have shown how the
metaphors of weeds, plagues, and bodily secre-
tions have been used to constitute people and
actions as out-of-place. In response we might
suggest new metaphors (as has been the tradition
in intellectual life) as new ways of thinking and
acting toward marginal(ized) groups. We might
also follow the lead of the postmodern theorists
and transform already existing metaphors into
more positive (or at least ambivalent) acts. If
Deleuze and Guattari have been able to transform
weeds, nomads, and schizophrenics into intellec-
tually positive metaphors, then surely it is possible
in the nonacademic realm to contest the value
placed on geographically loaded metaphors.
Clearly the metaphors I have described here
are metaphors in action-ones that are related to
a whole array of more recognizably physical ac-
tions designed to maintain particular forms of
order in space and place. U.S. federal, state, and
local governments, under the banner of "Weed
and Seed," fight antidrug and antigang wars
through the physical removal of public space and
incursions on private space (Davis 1992); travel-
ers branded as a "plague of locusts" find their
lifestyle outlawed; and the Greenham Peace pro-
testers, tarred by an excremental discourse, are
targeted for removal. The metaphorical under-
standings are as much actions as the physical
actions themselves. Once an inner-city resident
is understood to be a weed, he or she can be
treated like one. Weeds, disease, and bodily secre-
tions need to be stopped, hence society is seen to
be justified in taking desperate measures.
The casual acceptance of a metaphor carries a
host of implications that follow, as if by nature,
from the original term. Geographers' engage-
ments with metaphor have been restricted to its
use in language and text, e.g., within the disci-
pline or as geographical metaphors (mapping,
travel, etc.) for the wider society. A more liberal
view of metaphor as thought and action will
enable human geographers to develop a fuller
appreciation of human action in space. The sig-
nificance of metaphor to geography extends, in
other words, well beyond the use of metaphor in
geography. The geographical interpretation of
metaphors as they are thought and acted out in
the realms of politics and ideology can do much
to delineate the praxis of everyday life. Indeed, by
critiquing and transforming established meta-
phors or by suggesting new ones, geographers
might provide alternative and more provocative
ways of thinking and acting in space.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Phil Crang, David Delaney,
Michele Emanatian, Chris Philo, and three anonymous
reviewers for their help and inspiration in the thinking
and writing of this paper.
Notes
1. Metonymy is the linguistic and literary act of
referring to something by one of its constituent
parts, for example, "the crown" for the monarchy
or "wheels" for a car.
2. During the 1970s "squatters" were portrayed as a
"folk devil" in much the same way as travelers
have been portrayed in the 1980s-1990s. Squat-
ters and travelers share the need to use property
and land owned by the other people. While squat-
ting is largely an urban phenomenon, the travelers
tend to move through the countryside.
3. The women were evicted from common land for
the first time on May 27, 1982. They moved to
Ministry of Transport land, from which they were
evicted on September 29, 1982. The evictions
continued throughout the mid-1980s. See Young
(1990) for a complete account of the use of force
in the removal of the women on these occasions.
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