Author Archives: Gerard Steen

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Why this website?

My first post in DMT in Action is a personal note. This spring I was preparing for my trip to Messina as a visiting researcher where I will also give a keynote talk at the conference ‘’Cognitive tools in action’’ (Home – Cognitive Futures in the Arts and the Humanities). At that moment, I was also writing my short piece for the Forum section in Metaphor and the Social World, about the card game metaphor in the exchange between presidents Trump and Zelensky at the White House. At the same time, I was considering my future priorities for let us say the last stage of my career: on January 1 2023 I took early retirement in order to improve my health and well-being, but I had not got to the stage yet where I was making new plans. It turned out that this was the moment.

I realized that I wanted to create a new way of interacting with colleagues while having left campus. Regular publication can take ages and can be too piecemeal. I wanted something more continuous and maybe also direct and informal.

I also felt that the public nature of sharing research on the internet had room for yet another format. At first I wanted to go for a more general and less academic level of interaction, in order to increase impact. But then I realized that that was precisely going a step too far. That’s why the website has become entirely academic. It is meant as a new space for academics to play. It will not raise your H-score, but it may increase your understanding of the issues and your feeling of being connected and involved.

At the same time, building bridges to society is clearly also what is needed. RaAM is called RaAM for a reason. Governments are funding science for science but also science for society. And researchers themselves attempt to increase the appeal of their work to the general public by coming up with conference titles like “Cognitive tools in action”, and rightly so. I ended my piece on the card game metaphor in Metaphor and the Social World by briefly raising the question of what metaphor researchers can do. This website is one option.

One thing I have been defending over the past two decades is that metaphor researchers should be more careful in their claims about the power of metaphor. The motto of this website is ‘Not every metaphor in action is a metaphor in action.’ It is the mission of DMT to become maximally precise about the real impact of metaphor in action.

DMT’s engagement with what I called the paradox of metaphor in 2008 has caused misunderstanding, debate, but also high-quality new research. A DMT website may be another, stimulating way in which DMT research can be criticized and improved.

It is my personal agenda to promote this development in ways that continue the traditions of the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam and its summer and winter schools and Metaphor Festivals. I hope that there will be enough colleagues who can join me on this DMT trip without turning it into a psychedelic experience.

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Life is a journey in The Leopard

My first post about Metaphor in Action cannot be about anything else than life as a journey.

For one thing, I am launching this new website and blog from Messina, Sicily; this is one of the many journeys that I took from Amsterdam in my academic life.

For another, LIFE IS A JOURNEY is one of the most famous metaphors that launched the new metaphor studies in 1980, with the revolutionary publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we live by.

And thirdly, examples of LIFE IS A JOURNEY are easy to find, as with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Robert Frost’s ‘The road not taken’.

So here is another illustration, taken from the well-known novel about Sicily (not Messina, but Palermo) by Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (orThe Leopard). Early in the novel, the Prince of Salina is traveling from Palermo to Donnafugata for the family’s summer retreat, and after three days finds the journey rather tiring:

…; waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair. (p. 41)

Life has different periods just like a trip has distinct stages, difficulties in life are obstacles in trips, and so on. It is how many of us can think and talk about life. Lakoff and Johnson recruited this figure as one of their star examples for their new theory about metaphor as thought.

The crux for this particular example, however, is that it really is a metaphor in action. We see the Prince actively setting up a comparison in which he in fact thinks about one thing in terms of something else. The narrator tells us that the Prince is ‘comparing this ghastly journey with his own life’. The grammar of this sentence even suggests a witty reversal of direction of the comparison, which makes you think twice.

What is important is that this is a figurative comparison, since journeys do not literally resemble lives. This involves figurative analogical thinking, in which we mentally project proportionate correspondences from one domain to another. In this sentence, both domains are separately referred to and intentionally set up as part of the composite mental micro-world that the Prince is constructing for himself. And the reader must do the same.

The metaphorical life-journey ends in ‘a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair’. This is a chilling image, with a devastating final and distinct figurative comparison inside the journey metaphor, ‘bare as despair’. And this is what the novel as a whole is about, too. The Prince represents the social class that is on its way out, and the novel recounts how this is happening.

Life is a journey, and this is occasionally expressed in vivid terms. It may indeed take some time to figure out the details of this metaphor, including its reversal. And, who does the smiling, the clambering, the sliding, and the emerging? Is it the Prince or his life? What is it that makes the bareness comparable to despair, to whom or what? Does translation play a role here?

But the more general point is this: not all metaphorically used motion words about life in language use are metaphors in action, making people really compare their lives with journeys. It is the task for metaphor researchers to find out when and how this does and does not happen, with what purpose and effect.

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