Abstract
Warring with Words is a diverse interdisciplinary collection of 12 papers exploring the nature and content of narrative and metaphor in domestic and international political discourse. Its concern is with the ways in which these two discursive technologies operate to create particular versions of worlds and to generate particular kinds of possibilities for being in the world. It is a welcome addition to a long conversation about the importance of understanding the constitutive nature of language-in-use. The editors set out to bring together the separate scholarships of narrative and metaphor, via an interdisciplinary field, addressing issues of real-world significance, and offering a collection relevant to an international readership. Topics include, amongst others, the understanding of selves in social identity theory (Hammack), the Burke and Paine pamphlet war following the French Revolution (Sinding), a critical exploration of contemporary security politics (Wibben), presidential oratory (Wright and Shore), and international relations (Marks). The empirical focus of the volume is rewarding for the way in which it is grounded and illustrated throughout in consequential real-world examples. In its aim to speak to an international audience it makes a more muted contribution. Frequently, the USA is the anchor around which arguments and illustrations are based but there are welcome examples from further afield, such as Liu and Khan’s exploration of history narratives and contemporary identities in Indian national politics, but also more minor excursions in other chapters.
The editors have assembled a strong case for the everyday importance of narrative and metaphor as meaning-making, world-making, communicative technologies. Hanne’s opening chapter has a scholarly reach. He maps the historical terrains of narrative and metaphor scholarship in an engaging way and while it is inevitably partial, it is a broad-ranging, accessible, and stimulating resource for anyone interested in the operative power of language to shape political worlds.
What is captured well, and revisited across the volume, is the fluidity and persistence of narrative and metaphor. An outstanding contribution comes in Wibben’s chapter on the politics of security. Wibben asks a familiar but particularly productive question: what is made possible by understanding things in this way rather than in some other way? She argues that it is neither possible nor useful to find the “real” meaning of security. Rather, what matters is what understandings of security are made possible in the narratives we tell about it. Wibben precisely captures the performative and constitutive nature of security narratives. She makes the point that critical approaches asking vital questions of security narratives are not recognised as contributions to security narratives because they do not reproduce the expected structure of those narratives. Because of this, alternative ways of opening up security debates are held at the margins of discussion rather than being brought into the centre. Recognising the impact of narrative fit is core to understanding the potential for intervention. Danner and Hanne’s chapter, reflecting on the central themes of the book, similarly articulates the way in which metaphor makes possible certain ways of knowing the world and constrains others. Metaphor accomplishes things: it creates worlds. It also creates ambiguity and that is its power, its creativity, and its inherent riskiness.
The liveliness of narrative and metaphor is highlighted in Bottici’s chapter distinguishing myth and history narratives. While Bottici tends to a conception of the human subject that is overly rationalised, the presentation of myth not as an object but as a process is effective: myth is a process in that it must be flexible and flexed to meet the requirements of new contexts. The capacity for both stability and creativity is also illustrated in the final chapter, by Crano. Here the discussion explores the function of narrative in both the maintenance and disruption of in-group and out-group boundaries. It is in recognising this tension between the fluidity and stability of narratives and metaphor that holds out promise for making different worlds.
Where the collection does frustrate is in a tendency to an uncritical uptake of psychological concepts of cognition. For those readers immersed in cognitive studies of language there will be concepts that resonate; for those readers more immersed in critical social psychology, there may be too light a touch in recognising the contested nature of those cognitive concepts and the different ways in which language-in-use is theorised within psychology. For instance, Hammack, who does present a rich account of the narrative-mind relationship, refers nevertheless to narratives being “anchored in beliefs” (p. 58). Empirically, the production of a narrative by a speaker does not tell us about their beliefs, it tells us about a narrative they have available to deploy in that situation, one to which they may be more, or less, committed. Similarly, Sinding’s instructive discussion of the “pamphlet war” in Britain following the French revolution recognises the socio-political business accomplished in language, but presents alongside this an uncritical story of the “cognitive structures” underpinning that discourse. The social psychology of language-in-use has very fruitfully questioned concepts of inferred cognitive structure in favour of concepts of socially shaped cognitive process. In sympathy with the author, it is extraordinarily difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries without walking headlong into fiercely contested debates. In a volume enriched by disciplinary diversity this is a particular problem for the editors to grapple with. Their resolution sides with avoiding much of this debate in favour of getting on with applied empirical illustrations. While this may leave them and their authors somewhat open to accusations of theoretical insufficiency, the light that is shed on disciplinary concepts by the way in which they are taken up in inter- or trans-disciplinary writing is itself informative. So, for a reader coming from a perspective of critical social psychology the strength of the collection is not in those attempts to explicate the cognitive processes of metaphor and narrative. Rather, the strength of its contribution, throughout, lies in its exploration of the constitutive social life and power of metaphor and narrative in empirical examples of substantial importance. It is a valuable contribution.