In short: metaphors of money and financial crises serve to narrativize and naturalize complex cultural, economic and political transformations, projecting ideologically charged plots onto the developments they purport merely to represent or to illus-trate. In doing so, they arguably do creative work in serving to define how the cul-tural transformations associated with the current economic and financial problems are understood by contemporaries, familiarizing people with complex processes that are largely beyond their ken or understanding. Generating a whole network
Cf. Said (1978/1995: 321), who calls Orientalism a“system of ideological fictions”and who equates that phrase with such terms as“a body of ideas, beliefs, clichés, or learning”(Ibid., 205),“systems of thought”,“discourses of power”, and with Blake’s famous“mind-forg’d mana-cles”(Ibid.,328).
Metaphors We Pay For 63
of ideological implications and normative entailments, the metaphoric mappings in-volved in the metaphor of‘financial crisis’also play“a central role in the construc-tion of social and political reality”(Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 159). Since metaphors have
“the power to define reality”(Ibid.,157), they even constitute a license for policy change and political and economic action (cf.Ibid., 156).
Although the narratology and metaphorology sketched out for the financial cri-sis can certainly not offer a cure to either the banks or countries afflicted by the var-ious financial crises or the medial production of crises, they do nevertheless promise a little healing or relief in how they provide some rays of light that allow one to see better through the crisis-fog spewed out by the media. Narratological and meta-phorological analysis of the metaphors surrounding the financial crisis guides our attention, on the one hand, to the narrative structure and plots that those metaphors entail. On the other hand, analysis of the metaphorical origin and implications of the metaphorical concept of crisis sheds light on the action-roles and plots of the mini-narratives implicit to every diagnosis of crisis.
In conclusion, I would like to provide a brief assessment of the value that a cognitive and cultural analysis of metaphors such as ‘financial crisis’ or ‘life-blood of the economy’may have for the study of the relationship between meta-phors, the cultural life of money, and the history of mentalities. As the above analysis has hopefully shown, crisis and money metaphors may profitably be un-derstood as narrative kernels or mini-narrations that consist of a single word and that shed light on the cultural discourses from which they originate. On the one hand, the metaphors of crisis underscore the hypothesis that metaphors indeed shape both culture and the cultural life of money, turning our contemporary media society into a veritable culture of crises and crisis-managers. On the other hand, the example of the financial crisis also demonstrates that metaphors are themselves shaped by culture in that the ubiquitous discourses and meta-phors of crisis reflect the penchant for exaggeration and sensationalism so char-acteristic of contemporary media-culture. The widespread media manner of speaking about banks, companies, and even entire countries and economies as being plunged‘deep into crisis’, suitably dramatic as it is, targets generating interest, excitement, urgency, and the illusion of great importance, underscoring the newsworthiness of whatever the respective story may be about.
What I hope to have demonstrated is that a cultural and historical analysis of metaphors may hold great value to the study of culture, and for gaining in-sight into the ways in which metaphors affect the cultural life of both crises and money. A reconsidered notion of metaphors which takes into consideration their cultural implications and historical contexts can indeed“help to explain the cultural motivations of metaphoric mappings” (Eubanks 1999:421) and to
“develop a richer account of conceptual metaphor as a cultural phenomenon”
64 Ansgar Nünning
(420). In contrast to the primarily synchronic and ahistorical account of concep-tual metaphors which has so far predominated in cognitive metaphor theory (cf.
Lakoff/Johnson 1980; Lakoff/Turner 1989), a historicized and cultural approach to metaphors throws new light on“how […] metaphors operate concretely in the communicative world”, revealing“not just mental processes but also something of our culture”(Eubanks 1999: 421). As Ana Margarida Abrantes’contribution, as well as other articles in this volume, also proves, money metaphors are very much a cultural and historical phenomenon as they are inflected by the cultural, economic, and political discourses of the period from which they originate, de-termining just how we think and feel about money.
As long as the patient, be it an important bank or a European country in need of financial support,“is still in intensive care”(Willman 2008), politicians will continue to convince us that ‘exceptional times require exceptional rem-edies’, as former British prime minister Gordon Brown and many of his collea-gues often claimed as the banking and financial crises unfolded. In so doing, they have made very effective recourse to both the logical entailments and the emotional and ideological implications of metaphors of crisis that have become so ubiquitous in the countless reports and commentaries on the various crises that the money markets and governments have attempted to cope with since 2008. The‘financial crisis’metaphors examined above have not only served to shape the cultural life of money in many ways, they have also turned into meta-phors that we will have to pay for in the years to come.
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