and ways of shaping the cultural life of money
One might as well begin with the question of why metaphors matter when at-tempting to come to terms with the cultural life of money? The most obvious an-swer would probably be that discourses about money and the world of finance seem to be teeming with metaphors. As both countless reports on the recent, or ongoing, financial crisis (crises?) in newspapers and the wide range of com-mon com-money metaphors listed on the website www.Metaphorology.com serve to demonstrate, money and the world of finance belong to those domains that peo-ple commonly write and talk about in figurative language.
The main reason for this widespread tendency to talk about crucial events and transformations in the world of the economy and finance in metaphoric terms is not hard to determine. Resorting to metaphors proves to be a means of conceptualizing that which defies direct observation and experience. As with those other abstract political entities that tend to be conceptualized meta-phorically, for example history, government, and the state, both money itself and the crucial changes taking place in money markets are phenomena of consider-able abstractness, complexity and elusiveness and anything but clearly delineat-ed in people’s experience as well as not at all easy to conceptualize or to come to terms with.
Moreover, talking about the ups and downs of the money market in meta-phoric terms is a way of telling a story about, and making sense of, a domain the complexity of which the vast majority of people fails to understand. Philip Eubanks has argued that metaphors project “mininarrations” (Eubanks 1999:
Metaphors We Pay For 49
437), and other theorists have also acknowledged the cognitive and knowledge-creating potential of metaphors. In the preface to his seminal encyclopedia of philosophical metaphors, the editor Ralf Konersmann answers the question of what metaphors actually are by providing a somewhat unusual functional defi-nition:“Metaphors are narratives that mask themselves as a single word”² (Ko-nersmann 2008: 17). The subtitle“figurative knowledge”(“Figuratives Wissen”) of the preface, which is actually a highly interesting essay on the nature and functions of metaphors, sheds light on another key aspect of metaphors: the fe-licitous phrase “figurative knowledge” emphasizes how metaphors do indeed generate knowledge, albeit of this figurative kind.
It is through the production of narrative kernels, emotionally and ideologi-cally charged plots, and figurative knowledge that both money metaphors and the metaphor of crisis, as drawn on by most commentators in their attempts to make sense of the crucial events and changes occurring in the globalized money markets, shape not only culture and theories, but also our worldviews and the cultural life of money. In what has become one of the classics of meta-phor studies,Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson observe that“the people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true […]”(Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 160). Anyone who doubts that they are right has only to recall George W. Bush’s haranguing about ‘weap-ons of mass destruction in Iraq’, which turned out to be weap‘weap-ons of the mind and mere metaphors but which nonetheless got ‘to define what we’ – or at least a large part of the American people– ‘considered to be true’ and them-selves turning into verbal weapons of mass-destruction. This serves to show that metaphors prove a powerful way of world-making, affecting our thinking and sometimes even determining what actually happens.
The same holds true for the ways in which we talk about money and try to make sense of the mysterious and apparently random complexities of the world of finance. As with many of the other crises the media confront us with almost daily in what seems the age of crises and catastrophes, the recent financial crisis was largely conceptualized in metaphoric terms. This arguably has far-reaching consequences given how metaphors shape the ways we think and feel about what is happening: Whoever manages to get to impose their crisis metaphors on the elusive events and changes occurring in the world of finance gets to de-fine what people consider true. Nowhere is the world-making function of meta-phors more palpable than in media discourses able to turn just about any event, situation or cultural change into a severe crisis where not an actual catastrophe.
“Metaphern sind Erzählungen, die sich als Einzelwort maskieren.”
50 Ansgar Nünning
The metaphor of crisis prevailing in accounts and descriptions of the up-heavals of the money markets provides a fascinating case-study of how meta-phors not only serve to shape prevailing views of crucial changes that have oc-curred in money markets worldwide since 2008, metaphors are also simultaneously shaped by the cultures from which they originate. On the one hand, metaphors project structures and emotions onto cultural or financial phe-nomena, which otherwise defy direct observation and thus serve to make sense of them. In doing so, they play a central role in shaping common views of the domains they purport merely to describe. On the other hand, metaphors also get shaped by everyday cultural notions. As Zoltán Kövecses has convincingly shown in a number of publications (1999, 2000, 2002, 2005), metaphors not only reflect prevailing cultural models, they also shape or even constitute cultur-al models. By focussing on this reciproccultur-al relationship between the metaphor of crisis and our culture in general and the cultural life of money in particular, this article explores both the implications of the metaphor and the functions that the metaphor of crisis serves to fulfil within culture, arguing that metaphors and the mini-narratives they entail largely determine the cultural life of money and fi-nancial crises. One might go so far as to argue that metaphors not only shape the forms and fantasies surrounding the cultural life of money, they may even influence financial facts as the course of the financial crises since 2008 arguably serves to demonstrate.
Given the sheer number of today’s crises and the ubiquity of crisis meta-phors in our contemporary media culture, it comes as no surprise that the media themselves have taken up the topic of metaphors of the crisis. In the afore-mentioned article“In Financial Crisis, Metaphors Fly Like Bad Analogies”, Mi-chael M. Philips provides a wide range of interesting examples of how the real financial crisis has generated plenty of metaphors of crisis and illness, some of which are indeed“bad analogies” or unwittingly funny catachreses. What the examples serve to show, however, is that the discourses of crisis generate ever more metaphors, most of which have the body and illness as the main source domains. Cases in point include“the patient’s arteries are clogged, and he’ll get a heart attack unless we do something”, “the image from prognosis to prescription”,‘tainted medicine’, and credit being“the lifeblood of the econ-omy”.
Though the ubiquity and pervasive importance of crisis metaphors in con-temporary media culture may be hard to deny or ignore, it may be less obvious that the word‘crisis’is at all a metaphor, let alone a case in point as far as met-aphors being‘narratives that mask as a single word’ are concerned. However, this is exactly what the metaphor of‘crisis’is, as we have tried to demonstrate elsewhere (see Nünning 2007, 2009). Describing the financial turmoil as a‘crisis’
Metaphors We Pay For 51
or as“putting even healthy businesses at risk”(Willman 2008) serves to struc-ture how we understand them, while also projecting“mininarrations”(Eubanks 1999: 437) onto them. As we aim to demonstrate, the metaphor of crisis provides an ideologically charged plot and explanation of the events that have occurred on the money markets rather than neutral descriptions thereof. It is arguably
“the metaphorical concepts we live by”, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980: 22) felicitous formulation, or, in this case, the metaphors we have to pay for for years on end, that provide the key to understanding the topic at hand, i.e. the cultural life of money. Should one accept the Lakoff and Johnson (Ibid.,106) view “that most of our conceptual system is metaphorically structured”, then one might even go so far as to argue that metaphors and narratives are the most powerful tools we have for making sense of cultural transformations, en-dowed as they are with the power of reason and the power of evaluation (cf. Lak-off/Turner 1989: 65).