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.
3 comments:
Pat,
As a friend said to me recently, too, Welcome to the blogosphere! I like your picture at the top.
I did read Lakoff's Elephant and liked it better than some of my friends did, but did not take it down as deep as you're attempting to. I'll be interested to see those examples.
I understood a frame as both the context I give my argument or presentation and the assumptions I disguise as givens before I start to argue -- when really, those assumptions posing as givens are already part of my argument and not givens at all, except from my point of view. So, if you buy into them, accepting them as givens and letting them become the structure of the situation, then I have you. You've already accepted too many of my "givens" to refute me effectively. Or, at least, that's what I hope if I'm just trying to win the argument and not get to any deeper truth which might require that I listen to you and see from your viewpoint for a while.
But you seem to be pushing the idea toward the framing of one's own life. So, I'll be interested to see where you go with it. (And I've never gotten into Jung at all; so that too will be interesting.)
I'll look for more from you.
Dick
Dick,
Taking Lakoff's framing deeper is something Lakoff has done in his more recents books, "Thinking Points"(2006) and "The Political Mind"(2008). I'm trying to follow him there!
Yes, a frame includes the "assumptions posing as givens," but I didn't wrap my head around that upon reading "Don't Think of an Elephant." In the interim, I've read a number of other books that have (finally!) gotten through to me just how integral one's metaphors are to one's thinking. He emphasizes that these metaphors ("givens") are physically in one's brain. They are not just "word-images", which is how I had previously thought of them; they are synaptic connections in the neural "wiring" of the brain. In this sense, then, metaphors are very real-- regardless of how much or how little they actually correspond to elements in the domain in which they are applied.
For example, Lakoff takes on the left-to-right scale metaphor that dominates our political thought. He says,
"Those who are thoroughgoing progressives hold to American democratic ideals on just about all issues. They are the bedrock of our democracy. But, when seen metaphorically on a left-to-right scale, the bedrock of our democracy is on one side--the 'extreme left.' The left-to-right scale metaphor makes it look like the bedrock of our democracy is 'extreme.' And conservatives have been characterizing defenders of treditional American ideals like civil liberties, the welcoming of immigrants, and public education as extremists.
"Accordingly, the left-to-right scale metaphor creates a metaphorical 'center' with about a third of voters located between the two 'extremes'--even thought their views vary every which way and don't constitute a single mode of thought at all." [p. 46 TPM]
Lakoff helped me see that it is not just a matter of getting others to accept my givens--but framing my points using their own givens and taking it in the direction I support. (A sort of ju jitsu move.) He helped me see that I'm not going to quickly or easily change someone's basic frames (givens) because they are held physically in the brain. So "winning" an argument rarely change anyone's mind (physically.) The best you can do with an argument is flummox them--render them unable to trump your argument--for the moment.
Pat
Pat,
Framing one's own arguments in terms of the other person's frame or givens or basic metaphors seems to me a matter of being contextual in communicating -- meeting the other person where s/he is. I think that can be manipulative but need not be. Affects and scripts seem important to me in understanding people where they are in life and speaking to them (respectfully) in terms of that context.
I don't understand how these metaphors are physical -- that is, I hear what you're saying, but I haven't heard enough yet to accept and assimilate the idea. And I admit to some skepticism. Is this close to the Tomkins Talk discussion of the difficulty of altering scripts, or is it even more deeply into our hardwiring?
Dick
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