I find myself working over the same material from year to year. I've been reading psychological theory for years, investing time pursuing theological and philosophical interests, and learning about recent neuro-science particularly as it applies to consciousness. Just when I think I've got something figured out, something new turns up to be added to the mix and integrated.
Although it may not be so much that something really new turns up as that I finally have absorbed enough and integrated it enough that I'm able to recognize the meaning of something I've already been exposed to. And it is possible that the rest of the intellectual community is integrating and writing about the very thing that I've been struggling to pull together.
Back a few years ago, we were reading "Don't Think of an Elephant," by Geo. Lakoff. I was interested, but at the same time a little put off by the idea of framing--at least what I understood of it at that time. It seemed like "spin", like putting one's own agenda into appealing words ("re-spin"), to appeal to an audience that didn't know its own mind. Are people really that stupid? Don't "facts" matter more than "images"?
Well, I've been reading Gerald Edelman's "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" and getting a picture of how deeply hard-wired our metaphors are, how fundamental these metaphors are to the way we experience the world. They arise from the interaction of our general human neurological/brain structure with what we do, what happens to us, and how we respond (affect and action) to what happens.
I've never had much interest in Jungian psychology and the idea of archetypes, but now with a sense of how metaphor is the underlying structure of the mind, it is much more interesting to me. Certain narratives, certain characters in those narratives, show up in most people's lives. They are of "mythic" proportion.
Revisiting Lakoff recently ("Thinking Points" and "The Politcal Mind"), I see that he has addressed my concern about "spin" and "re-spin" and is defining frames--deep framing--as that level of neurological structure in the brain that is formed by early experiences, held in place by the emotional charge associated with those experiences. "Fact" is something for the logical mind to relate to, but to matter to the individual it has to be wrapped in metaphoric imagery that is associated with the emotional charge you want to tap. "Fact" without metaphor makes no sense. Literally. We "make sense" of facts, events, objects, etc., in terms of their metaphoric similarity with previous experiece, which is associated with some feeling. Without feeling, there is no "sense" of things. So to "frame" or "re-frame" at the level of discourse (explicit) is to access the deeper, "hard-wired" metaphors of experience and feeling (implicit) that direct our political (and religious) feeling/thinking.
Lakoff talks about the various metaphoric narratives that one lives by. We have more than one narrative, and some narratives are incompatible and mutually exclusive. He gets behind the narratives in a way that helps me make sense of the apparent inconsistencies in the "moral" issues held by [people I disagree with politically].
I'm going to have to work on this some more, but for now, I'll post it. I'll try to give examples next time.
