Page 144 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

METAPHOR

Robert Bly’s ‘mytho-poetic’ reading of this ‘lost masculinity’ puts a lot of stress
on initiation rites and myths that express the male journey away from the mother
towards male identity. However, despite his nostalgia, Bly continues to have some
sympathy for feminism. Other writers have been somewhat more antagonistic and 121
have sought to reassert traditional masculine roles. Of particular concern to them
has been the loss of the traditional place of the father and their grievances regarding
the role of the courts in child custody and maintenance payment issues. They
bemoan what they see as an emergent matriarchy and reassert the need for
traditional masculinity.
The differences of analysis and prescription put forward by various men suggest
that there is no coherent and identifiable men’s movement as such. Rather there are
a series of overlapping groups, ideas, themes and practices that form a
heterogeneous ‘men’s movement’ rather in the manner of set theory or a language-
game. In this the men’s movement has characteristics in common with New Social
Movements. There is no doubt that men and boys are facing significant personal
and cultural problems at this moment in history. However, the countercultural
model of confrontation that revolved around an ‘enemy’ that could be identified
and defeated is unlikely to be successful. Rather, men need to find new ways to be
human that bestow masculinity as a side effect of doing and living in a manner that
brings respect, esteem and self-worth.
Links Cultural politics, feminism, gender, masculinity, New Social Movements

Metaphor The concept of metaphor is derived from the Greek word metaphora that
means ‘transfer’ or ‘carry over’. Thus, in general terms, a metaphor involves the
application of a signifier to a referent to which it does not normally or literally
apply. Thus a metaphor entails the replacement of one signifier by another. For
example, the idea of the Panopticon in the work of Foucault acts as a metaphor for
a continuous, anonymous and all-pervading power and surveillance operating at all
levels of social organization. Or we might consider understanding ‘culture’ as ‘like
a language’, ‘conversation’ or ‘performance’ as examples of metaphor in use.
However, this use of the concept of the metaphor implies a valid distinction
between metaphorical and literal meaning. This is something denied by a number
of philosophers of language who have been influential within cultural studies;
namely, Nietzsche, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty. Thus Nietzsche, in
rejecting the idea of an objective and universal knowledge, famously described truth
as a ‘mobile army of metaphors and metonyms’. Here the idea of a ‘literal truth’ is
displaced by understanding the distinction between metaphor and literal meaning
to be one of time and use so that literal meanings are simply metaphors that have
become naturalized (that is, so familiar that we do not see their metaphorical
character).
Thus language is metaphorical ‘all the way down’, by which is meant that all
language is metaphorical. Here truth is the literalization (or temporary fixing
through social convention) of metaphors within a language-game into what Rorty
calls a ‘final vocabulary’ – one without current challenge whose metaphoric