The Power of Metaphor: Consent, Dissent and Revolution

Erik Ringmar

Political discourse is necessarily profoundly metaphorical; the language of politics is knee-deep in and entirely shot-through by different metaphorical uses. This should not surprise us. Politics, after all, is the art of using power in order to achieve social goals. While some power can be exercised through the army and the police, far more can be accomplished and more easily and cheaply through the power of language. Metaphors give you power since they help to organise social life in a certain fashion. Metaphors tell you what things are and how they hang together; metaphors define the relationship between superiors and subordinates and between social classes; they identify social problems and their solutions and tell us what is feasible, laudable and true.

Perversely, metaphors make sense of things not by telling us what they are but instead by telling us what things they are like. My love is emphatically not a red, red rose but there is nevertheless something about love and about roses which makes it possible to compare the two. What we do when making sense of this image is to draw on the meanings which roses have in our culture; anything we have ever seen or heard about them; the role they play in horticulture, social conventions, in art or in poetry. The rose in question is surrounded by what we could refer to as a system of reverberations. By comparing our love to a rose, certain aspects of this system are highlighted; certain reverberations are picked

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out and in the process my love becomes one certain thing rather than another.

Compare the way in which metaphor exercise power. No one can say what society or the state really are. In fact, societies and states are not 'really' anything at all. Yet they come to be something rather than nothing as they are compared to other things which they are not. Once a particular definition is firmly established, it will influence our thoughts and our actions; it will guide and shape our presuppositions and our theories; it will make some things possible and others impossible. Say, for example, that the members of a political elite manage to convince a sufficiently large number of people to embrace a metaphor which identifies society as sharply hierarchical and social positions as rigidly fixed. Once this metaphor is perfectly accepted, it will simply describe the way things are and as a result it cannot be questioned or altered. The more entrenched the metaphor, the more invisible the exercise of power and the more secure the position of the elites.

In this situation a political dissenter has two basic options. The first is to elaborate on the accepted metaphors and explore their reverberations, looking for alternative and if possible more subversive interpretations. This is an internal form of critique which takes the existence of a certain world-view for granted but which seeks to explore the potentials it contains. Such an internal critique may be limited in scope but this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes very radical demands indeed can be formulated from within a dominant metaphor. The second and more

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obviously subversive option is to seek to replace the dominant metaphor with an alternative which is more congenial to the dissenter's outlook and aims. Yet such a metaphorical replacement is necessarily difficult to accomplish. The people who benefit from the existence of a particular metaphor will naturally insist on its validity and inevitability. And people at large will often defer to tradition and to the powers-that-be.

This chapter develops this understanding of metaphors. The first task is to provide an inventory of metaphors which traditionally have been used to create political consent. The second section discusses the ways in which dissenters can elaborate on established metaphors in order to create a discursive space for alternative interpretations. The third section discusses the ways in which revolutionaries may establish radically new metaphorical usages.

A dictionary of consent ACTOR. This metaphor gained prominence in the Renaissance and it is still commonly invoked today (Apostolids, 1985; Nye, 2004; Review of International Studies, 2004; Ringmar, 1996/2006;Strong, 1973/1984). The state is an actor on the world stage the state is playing a role and inter-acting with other states. The implication is that the state is a unified entity to whom actions can be ascribed and as such it can be compared to a human being. Just like humans, states formulate preferences which they act in order to satisfy. The state-as-actor has a national interest which its foreign policy is designed to further. The formulation of such an interest limits dissent. As political leaders never

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tire of explaining, we can only defend our place on the world stage if we all unite behind the official policy.

In the early modern period the state was always impersonated by the king. This was literally the case in the plays, masques and ritual jousts put on at court, in which the king himself would play a part. On the small stage of the king's palace, the events on the large stage of the world were given a theatrical form. In the persona of Pax, the king would conclude an advantageous peace or, as Mars, he would defeat an enemy. Much in the same way summit meetings and international conferences are today used as stages on which political leaders can be seen acting and interacting with each other. By watching these dramas unfold, newspaper readers and TV viewers are taught what world politics is about; they form allegiances to certain actors and their political goals.

BODY. In the Middle Ages the body metaphor applied above all to the Christian church ( Cassirer, 1946; de Baecque, 1993/1997; Gierke, 1881/1996; Kantorowitz, 1951/1957; Ringmar, 2007; Tocqueville, 1840/1945). Or to be more precise, the Church had two bodies one temporal and one transcendental; one which human beings belonged to while still on earth and another which they belonged to eternally in heaven. Jesus Christ was in charge of the eternal church and the Pope was in charge of the temporal. With the rise of the state as a sovereign entity in the Renaissance, this corporal language was gradually secularised and given a political application. The state also consequently came to be given two bodies one temporal and one transcendental

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and its subjects were simultaneously members of both. In its temporal capacity the state was made up of institutions and agencies staffed by officials but in addition the state was a transcendental idea. This was the Staat as guided by the Weltgeist of history, la France ternelle or the government enshrined in the principles of the American constitution.

The body metaphor provides a convincing solution to the problem of social order. As the metaphor makes clear, the different parts of society are, just like the different parts of the body, intimately related and organically unified. Each social class corresponds to a bodily organ: the aristocracy is the arm, the clergy the heart and the peasants or merchants the stomach. And naturally the person ruling over this body politic becomes the caput or the head of state. As the metaphor makes clear, social diversity is not a problem but instead a requirement for social order to be established. It is precisely because groups and classes have different functions that they come to depend on each other. After all, if we all were the same there would be no reason for us to stay together. Equality of status leads to isolation and eventually to indifference and to the break-up of social life.

The body metaphor is not necessarily repressive. It does not legitimate unlimited kingship since the king in practice always will have to investigate the condition of the heart or stomach or feet before reaching a decision. On the other hand, the metaphor makes conflicts quite inconceivable. Social groups and classes cannot be at war with each other for the same reason that one hand cannot fight the other or the heart

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rebel against the stomach. Instead groups and classes depend on one another for the proper functioning of the whole. The body metaphor, in other words, provides little place for politics; there is nothing much for the various body parts to discuss; there is only one head and one will.

BUSINESS CORPORATION. This metaphor is popular among some contemporary politicians, in particular those with a business background (BBC News, 2001; Beckett, 2000; Collins and Butler, 2003). Having made their fortune, they come into politics promising to run the country as efficiently as they ran their companies. Most commonly this implies that the state bureaucracy should be streamlined and unprofitable sectors should be cut back. People should stop wasting time on discussions and instead subject themselves to the discipline of the market place. Not surprisingly this metaphor is particularly attractive during times of political stalemate or economic decline.

It is worth reminding ourselves that, although business corporations are actors in economic markets, they are not themselves markets. Business corporations are hierarchical systems of authority and subordination. Bosses are not buying the services of their staff but instead ordering them about. A corporation is emphatically not a democratic institution. Although a good boss naturally should consult with the people working for him, he is the one who makes the decisions. The implications for politics should be obvious.

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CONGREGATION. This metaphor transposes the image of the religious community onto the political community (Apostolids, 1985; Frazer, 1890/1994; Mishra, 2004; Sergeev & Biryukov, 1995). The faithful united in prayer come to be equated with the subjects united under the king and the authority of the king is juxtaposed with divine authority. The metaphorical linkage here goes through the figure of the priest, who in Catholicism is regarded as God's representative and as a mediator to the divine. Thus the priest-king may claim to have been chosen by God or to have special miraculous powers such as the power to heal. His sovereignty is the sovereignty of omnipotence; his commands are commandments and his subjects are believers. There is obviously no arguing with this kind of a ruler.

But there are other ways of imagining a religious community. The imperial Russian, and later Soviet, definition of society drew heavily from the Orthodox notion of the sobor. In the Russian church the congregation as a whole stood before God and the priest was neither a representative of God nor a mediator to the divine. This reduced the power of the priest but it strengthened the demand for unity. Soviet leaders drew on this cultural predisposition in order to silence opposition. By contrast the Buddhist religious community the sangha has inspired quasidemocratic decision-making procedures. Since Buddhism has no God, Buddhist priests are neither representatives nor mediators. Unity is not a requirement among Buddhist laymen since no one is tested on their religious beliefs. The political community understood as a sangha is selfruling and egalitarian. And while this metaphor, as one would expect,

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often has been ignored in practice, it has nevertheless served as a source of political dissent.'

FAMILY. The family is an obvious metaphor to apply to social life (Englund, 1989; Lakoff, 1996; Trgrdh, 2002). Although families vary greatly across time and space, we all have a family of some kind or another and the interaction which takes place within it provides a basic model for how relations in society at large should be conceived. Again we are dealing with a metaphor which combines biological and hierarchical principles. Rulers have often found it expedient to define themselves as fathers of the countries they rule and their subjects as children of varying ages, genders and states of maturity. The father in the state, as in all traditional families, is the one who makes decisions and other family members are not supposed to question his judgment.

Yet fathers should not be tyrants. Their first obligation is to care for the members of their family and to make sure that they are happy and well fed. In addition they should educate their dependents and prepare them for whatever challenges lie ahead. The ruler is a pater and the state which has children as its subjects is necessarily paternalistic. The paternalistic state thinks, plans and acts on behalf of the people; it disciplines and regulates people in order to protect them from the unexpected and the disastrous as well as from themselves. In the paternalistic state, just as in the family, care is inseparable from control.

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Families live in homes and the state understood as a family lives in the home constituted by the nation. Compare the Japanese kokka, the national home, or the Swedish folkhem, the home of the people. Understood as a home, the state becomes an institution based on genealogical criteria. The Japanese state was redefined on familial terms in the 1890s and it was only as a result that it started to make sense for Japanese soldiers to give their lives to the emperor. Similarly, the Swedish state employed various practices of eugenics well into the 1960s. This was a socialist-national form of racism rather than a national-socialist. The national home had no place for people who were too obviously alien.

GARDEN. This metaphor is another early modern favourite compare the obsession with gardens which spread across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Englund, 1989; Milton, 1667/2005; Schama, 1995). When applied to the state, the metaphor expressed a desire for order combined with a stress on social hierarchy. Social classes corresponded to trees and plants of various sizes, appearances and degrees of rarity. Aristocrats were like old oak trees, while peasants were like the wheat they themselves produced. Some of this language is still with us. Compare our contemporary references to grass roots organisations.

The king was the gardener, who planned and maintained the garden. Plants, just like human beings, were given by nature but in order to reach their full potential they first had to be cultivated watered, pruned

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and fertilised. The state was the greenhouse in which such cultivation took place. In his garden the king created order and beauty and allowed some plants the space to grow, while others were cut back. He was particularly attentive to weeds and to plants that grew away from their allotted place and he made sure to cut off branches or to pull up plants that were diseased. If not, pests, mites and fungus might spread to other parts of the garden.

MACHINE. The machine metaphor suddenly gained in popularity in the seventeenth-century as a result of a new fascination with mechanical gadgetry of all kinds, above all clockworks (Hobbes, 1651/1985; Hirschman, 1977; Koselleck, 1959/1988; Mayr, 1986; Meinecke, 1957/1998; Mumford, 1964; Ringmar, 2007). If the state is a machine, then the various parts of society become the levers, springs and cogwheels of which the machine is constructed. This metaphor also continues to be invoked. We still speak of bureaucratic machineries, the wheels of administration and of social engineering.

Enlightened autocrats were particularly fond of the machine metaphor. Just like the body, the machine combined a functional differentiation of parts with the need for social co-operation. Since the various components of society are radically different from each other, it is only through cooperation that they can attain their purpose. A refusal to put the collective interest above the individual interest is self-defeating. At the same time not all parts are equally important. While some of the components are easily replaced, others are unique and crucial to its

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operations. All components should fit neatly with each other and any wheel that squeaks must be oiled or replaced.

The state-as-machine may seem to have more repressive implications than the state-as-body. After all, machines are impossible to engage in conversation; machines are cold and heartless. For many of those who have confronted the state this mechanical power is only too real. Yet the machine metaphor also implies constitutionalism. After all, machines have to operate according to some definite and quite impersonal rules. This means that the ruler becomes a clockmaker or an engineer whose main job it is to oversee the operations of the machine. As such the machine comes to work quite independently of the ruler's personal will and whims. There are laws of statecraft, similar to laws of mechanics, which the king has to follow in order to maintain the state in good working order and himself in power. As the theorists of enlightened absolutism made clear, the state and the king are both governed by reason and this raison d'tat can at least in principle be objectively defined and calculated. In this way the machine metaphor served as a check on absolutist power. Not surprisingly the regimes where the metaphor was most popular Prussia and Austria, in particular were also the states which first granted rights to their subjects. Constitutional documents, pioneered in these Rechtsstaaten, were taken as the blueprints for the construction of the machineries of state.

MUSICAL PERFORMANCE. In East Asia, the metaphor of harmony wa in Japanese, he in Chinese has always played an important role (Fei,

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1947/1992; It, 1998; Jullien, 2000; Pocock, 1989; Watson, 1993). Harmony is produced by the sound of instruments that are well integrated with each other. Each instrument plays its own tune but it is their combination which makes the music enjoyable. Harmony requires people to co-ordinate their actions; no discordant voices or awkward squeals should be heard. In both China and Japan the emperor was the conductor who made sure everyone played the same tune. In Europe similar metaphors have been invoked. Europeans too after all are supposed to keep pace with each other and sing from the same hymnsheet.

In a state organised as a musical performance adjustments will happen more or less by themselves. It is above all other participants who notice when someone sings out of tune or behaves gracelessly. Overt repression is for that reason not required, instead some mild form of social disapproval is usually sufficient to set the clumsy performer straight. Here politics is not something that you talk about but instead something that you do. Politics is not about discussions and no confrontations between opposing views are possible. People can certainly object to the music but this is always going to be an aesthetic rather than a political judgment. Music, strikingly, has no contraries. Although you may object to a certain tune, there is no way of contradicting it. In a society where harmony is the highest social goal, there can be no dissent, only correct or incorrect performances.

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SHIP. Before the nineteenth-century ships were the main vehicles of travel, trade and geographical discovery. In the Renaissance, in particular, the image of the intrepid sea-captain sailing off into the unknown captured people's imagination and many contemporary authors fancied themselves as passengers on these ships. Not surprisingly, the ship-of-state was another early modern favourite (de Cillia, Reisgl and Wodak, 1999; Machiavelli, 1531/1983; More, 1516/1965).

As the proponents of this metaphor made clear, the ship has a captain the king and passengers and crew members of varying dignity and rank. The separate decks on which they live are sealed off from each other. The authority of the king-as-captain is absolute, he determines the direction in which the boat is sailing and mutinies are dealt with swiftly and mercilessly. At the same time everyone is dependent on the contributions of all others they are all in the same boat and this is particularly the case if the weather is bad and the ocean stormy. As the kings never tired of point out, it was only by following their direction that they could get off the shoals, onto an even keel and avoid treacherous rocks.

TEAM. This is a contemporary metaphor invoked by politicians of a populist streak (Semino and Masci, 1996; Russo, 2001). Italy is a team, such a politician might say, and we all have to work together in order to win. Winning here is usually taken to mean to be economically successful or to remain in the top division of successful countries. We

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can do it, we are assured, as along as we think as a team and never give up. Forza Italia Go Italy!

This metaphor also makes an appeal to unity and deference. Individual efforts make a difference to the outcome but self-serving behaviour is not allowed. Everyone has to be a team player and co-operate for the benefit of the team as a whole. At the same time players have different ranks and abilities. Some are important goal scorers or play-makers, while others are far more easily replaced. The coach the prime minister is the one who selects the players and decides on the tactics although some consultations with the players certainly may take place. A sports team, however, is not a democracy.

ZOOLOGICAL COLLECTION. There is a long-standing metaphorical connection between political power and exotic animals (Burckhardt, 1860/1958; Foucault, 1982; Fu, 1996; Ringmar, 2006). Already in medieval times kings used to keep rare beasts at their courts lions, leopards, eagles, elephants, rhinoceroses and giraffes. The awe inspired by such curious collections helped exalt the position of the rulers. All European monarchies used lions in their heraldry and put up statues of lions outside palaces and government offices. Some republics did the same Finland is one example while other republics considered lions to be tainted by their monarchical associations and preferred instead large birds of prey compare the American bald eagle.

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Also in the animal kingdom there are differences of rank. In the popular image, the lion is the king of the animals and the king is for that reason the lion among men. By contrast, most ordinary people are compared to some herding animal of little or no individuality most commonly sheep. Ordinary people sound like sheep, are scared like sheep and like sheep they let themselves be led to the slaughter. Varying the metaphor and giving it a pastoral interpretation, the king becomes a shepherd who looks after his sheep, protecting them from ferocious animals and finding pastures for them. Such pastoral power of care and control is similar to the power of the father. See FAMILY above.

In imperial China, scholars of the Legalist school compared the emperor to a huntsman. The emperor hunted down his enemies; some he killed and consumed immediately, others he domesticated and kept as chattel. To assist him in these tasks he had his eagles the state officials and his secret agents who tracked down the prey and prepared it for the kill. A main task was to exterminate the five vermin of the state scholars, freelance politicians, independent knights, persons with connections to senior officials and merchants/craftsmen. What these groups had in common was the fact that they had access to independent bases of power ideas, money, weapons and for this reason alone they were seen as challenges to imperial supremacy.

Metaphorical elaboration The metaphors in this short inventory describe society in a meaningful and more or less complete manner. With their help we make the world

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make sense. The consent we give to the established social and political order and to the elites who dominate it is merely a by-product of this general quest for meaningfulness. Yet consent is not produced in all cases. There will always be those who for one reason or another disagree with the established order of things. Such dissenters may conclude that society is unfair, that the direction of social life must be altered and its elites overthrown. In order to be successful in these tasks the dissenters need access to power. Organisational resources and manpower are certainly crucial in this respect sometimes also soldiers and guns but in addition they need power over language. A way has to be found of replacing, or at least questioning, the entries in the official inventory of metaphors.

One strategy here is what we could call metaphorical elaboration. Metaphors, we said, are interpreted as one system of reverberations is made to interact with another. Thus a word like the state means nothing until we confront it with the reverberations associated with some other thing to which it is compared. Yet only parts of these systems are ever employed. Many, perhaps most, reverberations are left unused since they are plainly inapplicable, ridiculous or perverse. Thus we may nod approvingly when someone identifies the state as a business corporation but still shake our heads if they go on to talk about the lunch room or the water-cooler of the state. Businesses have lunch rooms and watercoolers but states, by common consent, do not.

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The fact that large parts of any system of reverberations remain unemployed opens an opportunity for political dissenters. By investigating these unused references and by making them explicit, they can encourage people to think differently about the metaphors through which they organise their lives. People can be invited to discover more about their world-views and to think more creatively about themselves. If nothing else, dissenters can make fun of the official language and thereby seek to denaturalise it. The great advantage of this strategy is that no fundamental shift in metaphorical commitments is required. There is no need to radically change people's perceptions. The official metaphors are not replaced, only tweaked, recoded and decentred. Consider briefly the following two examples:

MUTINY ON THE SHIP OF STATE. The well-established image of the shipof-state provides interesting opportunities for dissenters to explore (Walzer, 1965). One obvious possibility here is to dispute the direction in which the ship is going. Perhaps the king is ignoring the safest or most direct route, missing a safe harbour or perhaps he is running the ship onto a rocky shore. Another possibility is to make comments on the weather. If the argument can be made that a big storm is approaching, then maybe everyone would be better off abandoning the ship or at least abandoning the rigidly hierarchical division of labour which characterises interaction on-board. Another possibility is to question the unlimited powers granted to the captain. Mutiny has of course always been regarded as a crime and in early modern Europe it was punishable by death. However, as the law of the seas also made clear, crew members

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and even passengers had a right to question the judgment of the captain if they could prove that he was drunk, insane or otherwise incapacitated. Indeed, under such circumstances it was their obligation to relieve the captain of his responsibilities. Not surprisingly this was the precise argument relied on by several early modern dissenters.

WEEDS IN THE GARDEN. Similar strategies can be employed in the case of the state understood as a garden (Englund, 1989; Gernet, 1972/1999). There are different kinds of gardening after all, governed by different aesthetic sensibilities. Like the Daoist recluses of ancient China we could alter the value given to different plants and compare ourselves not to stately oaks but instead to withered old pine trees clinging on to mountain-sides. Or we could prefer the hardy grass to the frail flowers, the indigenous flora to the exotic and the rough to the too highly cultivated. After all, weeds have a power and a beauty unto themselves. We could even argue that the garden should be left to its own devices. Before long it will be completely overgrown and eventually it will revert back to nature. Anarchists prefer anarchic gardening!

Political dissenters would also do well to explore the gardens of other countries than their own. Comparing various European traditions we find that there is a rough analogy between the repressive tendencies of politicians and the repressive tendencies of gardeners. The more liberal the regime, the more freely growing the plants. The gardens of the rulers of autocratic regimes are more regimented, with clearer borders and more tightly pruned hedges, than the gardens of constitutional monarchs.

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Compare the gardens of Versailles with those of Windsor. Not surprisingly a French radical like Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarded English garden art as a far better metaphor for social life.

Another way of creatively reimagining too-well-entrenched metaphors is to look for ways of expanding the system of reverberations to which they refer. Rather than being content with the existing set of possible interpretations, we try to come up with new ones. With more and new reverberations to chose from, new ways of conceptualizing politics become available. Any new development can help in this respect social, cultural or legal changes, scientific discoveries or new technical inventions. The role of the dissenter is to point these changes out to the general public and to explain what political implications they have. In this way the interpretation of society will change as the result of completely unrelated changes taking place elsewhere. Again consider two examples.

DIVORCING THE FAMILIAL STATE. In early modern Europe the received interpretation of the patriarchal state was profoundly undermined as a result of changes in the definition of the family. According to the Protestant interpretation of the Bible, marriage was not a sacrament but instead a contract freely entered into by two independent parties. If one of the parties violated the terms, the contract could be annulled. The political implications of this reconceptualisation are obvious and they were quickly identified by seventeenth-century Puritans as they rebelled against the paternalistic English state (Walzer, 1965). Or as French revolutionaries argued in 1789, if the father is tyrannical enough,

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patricide may indeed be justified (Koselleck, 1959/1988). Such a crime may bring the brothers more closely to each other and thus constitute the basis for a new form of fraternity. Even after the father was beheaded, in other words, the metaphor lived on.

Contemporary redefinitions have altered the meaning of the family metaphor at least as radically (Lakoff, 1996). Families are today quite egalitarian; their members are regarded as separate individuals with their own wants and aspirations; they discuss things together and reach decisions through consensual methods. Not surprisingly a contemporary society modelled on a family will allow a great measure of debate and dissent. The power of patriarchy has also weakened as a result of the increase in divorce rates. Today mothers rather than fathers provide the unifying force which keeps families together. Compare the feminisation of the state, which is evident at least in some countries in northern Europe. Here women constitute an ever-larger proportion of the state's workforce as well as of its leading decision-makers.

NEW DEAL AT WORK. Business corporations have changed too, at least in Europe. Companies are today less hierarchical, more democratic and more participatory. One trend here is what Germans call Mitbestimmung, or co-determination, whereby representatives of the workforce are asked to join in crucial decisions and trade union officials are given legally guaranteed representation on corporate boards. A political dissenter may point to these changes and encourage people to re-evaluate the state-asbusiness metaphor. A prime minister-cum-CEO who fails to understand

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these shifts may be offered a severance package by the citizenshareholders.

Another contemporary trend points to the end of traditional notions of a career (Capelli, 1999). Employees are no longer staying with their companies as long as was the case in the 1950s or 60s; people work on shorter contracts, they switch jobs more often and often shape their careers outside of corporate ladders. Employees, in short, are more demanding and more independent; if they do not like a particular company, they leave. Compare the far more tenuous relationship which many people have developed with the countries to which they ostensibly belong. This trend is most obvious within the European Union. If you do not like the country where you were born, you simply go elsewhere. As a result you are inevitably less likely to bother with politics, to engage with social issues and local concerns.

Metaphorical replacement The alternative option open to a political dissenter is to try to break with contemporary uses and come up with completely new metaphors through which society and the state can be conceptualised (Ringmar, 1996/2006). However, it is obviously very difficult to successfully carry out such a metaphorical replacement. What needs to be changed are not only people's opinions but also the basic categories in which their opinions are lodged. Most people do not want to have their world-views undermined in this manner and this resistance may often include people for whom an alternative metaphorical conception would constitute a great

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improvement. Moreover, the people who benefit the most from the contemporary social order are also the ones who are best placed to block any changes. And still, despite the odds, metaphorical reversals do occasionally happen. Consider briefly two examples.

CONSTRUCTION SITE. Modern politics began when naturalistic metaphors were replaced by constructivist ones. That is, instead of seeing society as a natural organism a body, family or garden or as an impersonal mechanical device, it came to be regarded as something man-made, something constructed, most commonly as some kind of a building (Arendt, 1977; Becker, 1932; Lakoff and Johnson, 2003; Tully, 1980; Vico, 1744/1986). This metaphorical switch opened up a world of exciting new possibilities for political entrepreneurs to explore. If society is a building made by us, we should be able to fully understand it, including the most obscure of its nooks and crannies. And the better we understand society, the better we will be at reconstructing it in accordance with our preferred design. Politics, governed by this metaphor, will be a question of drawing up ever more appealing blueprints which can be presented to our fellow citizens. Political conflicts, accordingly, will be a question of which among many competing plans that should be implemented.

The rationalistic pretensions of this metaphor should be obvious. The construction plans are drawn up by us, not by God or by tradition, and there is in principle no limit to the kinds of projects we can decide to embark on. Before we can start building, however, we need building

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materials and we need machinery but above all we need an opportunity to impose our plans on society taken as a whole. To this end we need access to state power since only the state can coerce people into following the instructions we give them. The state, with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, is the contractor with the greatest entrepreneurial capability. Controlling the state becomes crucial if you want to see your plans implemented. Obviously, if the projects are particularly ambitious, some pretty serious forms of coercion may be required.

CYBERNETIC DEVICE. The other main metaphor of modern politics conceptualises society as a self-organising mechanism or what we could call a 'cybernetic device.' The idea of self-organisation gained popularity thanks to early modern inventions like the thermostat and Watt's famous steam engine. In Newton's cosmology the universe itself was understood as a self-organising system. Order here, as in all cybernetic systems, was produced through the interaction of contradictory forces whereby a push in one direction automatically triggered a pull in the other direction, which restored the overall balance. This was also the model famously adopted by Adam Smith in his description of the economic system as governed by an invisible hand, a metaphor he had initially applied to Newtonian cosmology as the invisible hand of Jupiter in an early essay. The economic system, Smith explained, maintains itself in balance as the self-serving actions of one party are counteracted through the self-serving actions of another party.

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The cybernetic metaphor is appealing in many respects. As it makes clear, little central direction or repression is required. In a self-organising society people are able to settle their differences by themselves. Diversity is not a threat but instead a precondition for social order to be established; the mutual antagonism of opposing interests and groups is what keeps society in balance. Outside intervention by a balancer such as the state risks jeopardising this decentralised harmonisation. In a society which regulates itself, the king can be abolished and the state scaled back. This is the liberal idea of freedom, the freedom to pursue one's own interests constrained only by other actors who pursue theirs. The main problem is the distribution of resources which self-regulation requires. If some people or groups have far less than others, their preferences and aspirations will play no role in determining the overall outcome. Meanwhile any redistribution of resources violates the requirement of self-equilibration which the metaphor stipulates.

Constructivism and self-organisation are the two main metaphors of the modern era. It is with their help more than anything that contemporary politics has come to be conceptualised. Yet the metaphors are at the same time incompatible with each other. For each individual this is not immediately obvious since the plans he or she makes readily can be combined with self-organisation on a social level (Hayek, 1988). If we let each person build whatever buildings they like, our cities will simply become the aggregate of all these buildings. The problem arises when both metaphors simultaneously are taken to apply to social life in the aggregate. If someone tries to reconstruct society as a whole, individuals

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will have to be convinced, coerced or cajoled into contributing to the common project.

Compare the proverbial clash between central planners and the laissezfaire market. The old Soviet Union was a gigantic construction site on which the Communist Party tried to erect its vision of the future; the free-market, as described by American libertarians, is a cybernetic device with which politicians tamper only at their peril. Although most societies have sought to strike some balance between these two models of social organisation, this has been notoriously difficult to do. The metaphors do not mix very well. Rather than trying to combine them, they have been applied sequentially to different sectors of society or perhaps to the same sector over the course of time. Over the last thirty or so years, the self-organising metaphor has gradually become more influential than the constructivist.

Regardless of the contradictions between them, both metaphors constituted radical breaks with previous ways of conceptualising society. The question is how and why they came to be accepted. An obvious answer is that the respective metaphors were backed by powerful groups employing a powerful rhetoric. In the eighteenth century, philosophers and radical reformers did everything in their power to convince people to tear down the ancins rgimes, maintained only by the force of prejudice and the inertia of tradition. Similarly the proponents of cybernetic models, often sponsored by assorted right-wing think-tanks, have

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recently launched campaigns against the central planning and socialism which the constructivist metaphor is said to imply.

Yet it is obvious that the real causes of the metaphorical revolutions are to be found in far deeper social, economic and cultural changes. In both cases the revolutionaries benefited from developments which they in no way can be said to have been responsible for. Above all their success depended on a gradual undermining of the previously dominant metaphors. The world had changed in ways the official rhetoric had been unable to notice. As a result society and its representation in thought had become ever-more separated. Again this is a consequence of the logic of metaphors. Since metaphors highlight certain aspects of reality while hiding others, there will always be things which we fail to see; there will be dark corners, as it were, which our concepts cannot illuminate. If dramatic economic, social or cultural changes take place in these dark corners, outside of the purview of the metaphor, the official interpretations will become less and less relevant. Eventually they can simply be brushed aside. Hence the unexpected ease with which the old regime in France and in the Soviet Union eventually were toppled.

What really determined the success of the constructivist metaphor was thus not the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century philosophers but rather the dramatic social, cultural and economic changes taking place at the time. The construction-site metaphor became believable inter alia because of the weakening of the intellectual hegemony of the Church; the success of rationalistic science; the commercial, financial and

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industrial revolutions; the creation of new media, including printing presses; and the emergence of the state as an entrepreneurial power. Similarly, the cybernetic metaphor gained credibility above all as a result of the all too obvious failures of constructivism. After all, the constructivist plans rarely worked out the way they were intended. Many of the buildings were quite impossible to realise and far too many people died on the construction sites. The buildings, even if completed, turned out to be impossible to live in, to alter or refurnish, and in any case the constructivist projects always gave far too much power to the architects and the contractors.

The making and unmaking of consent No one lives in the world as it 'really is.' There are no such real worlds. Instead everyone lives in a world that is interpreted, made meaningful, and meaning is created as things are compared to things which they are not. Meaning is made through metaphor. The metaphors applied to social life determine how interpersonal relations are defined and how political authority and economic resources are distributed. In this way metaphors come to exercise power. Since different metaphors interpret the world differently it makes a great difference which metaphors a society has come to embrace. For each individual the situation never presents itself in quite this way. The world we are born into is already made meaningful for us; it is pre-interpreted, and as we come to master the interpretative codes of our societies we come to accept these meanings. Metaphors constitute the conceptual furniture of our everyday lives which we use without

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thinking too much or too deeply about. Very occasionally, however, even the sturdiest conceptual furniture breaks; the metaphors stop making sense if they are stretched too far. A broken, over-stretched, metaphor has to be replaced by another. This accounts for the revolutionary shifts that take place in the history of our societies; a political revolution is a consequence rather than a cause of these revolutions in metaphor. Yet such metaphorical replacements are quite impossible to consciously bring about. Metaphorical shifts from organic to constructivist metaphors, say are always deeply embedded in largescale social, economic and epistemological transformations. Such transformations no individuals can carry out no matter how fervently they try. Metaphorical revolutions are rare and if we hope to take part in one we will almost always be disappointed. The alternative open to dissenters is to take the world as it is presented to them -- to accept the leading metaphors of our age as good enough but to reinterpret them in a subversive fashion. The aim is to explore and expand the systems of reverberations looking for ways to undermine, recode and decentre the accepted meanings. This may sound like a limited, reformist, agenda, and this may indeed be the case. Yet very powerful statements can often be made in this way and since they use rather than seek to replace existing metaphors, this is a strategy which is far more likely to meet with success.

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