Re: One-Dimensional Thought/Human Capital

["Ben B. Day" <bday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Stephen Smith wrote:

> In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse observes how affixing certain adjectives to
> nouns (e.g, "industrial park," "representative democracy") serves ideological
> functions and promotes one-dimensional thought by blurring distinctions and
> flattening contradictions. Is anyone on the list familiar with 
> work--including,
> but not necessarily limited to, technical linguistic analyses--that develops,
> pursues, and/or critiques Marcuse's observations.

Well, there's a whole industry within linguistics and philosophy on the
importance of metaphor in the creation of meaning and the bringing
together of terms, and how eventually metaphors are normalized - or become
"literal" - thus changing the social symbolic order of any given language.
For example, speaking of the "mouth" of a river may once have been
metaphorical, but today it would be considered literal.
Although not exactly the same phenomena, the same dynamic is involved. Two
formerly disperate terms - or imageries - are brought together and
normalized. And this, of course, has political consequences.

Nietzsche is the grand-daddy of language-as-metaphor, but I don't have any
specific references at hand (you might check the last section of The Gay
Science, though).
Jacques Lacan inspired a lot of work in this direction, and his essay "The
agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud" (found in
Ecrits), is a central piece. Bruce Fink's _The Lacanian Subject_ has a
chapter on "Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity" which is
probably more comprehensible, though.
Paul Ricoeur has a whole book, entitled _The Rule of Metaphor_.
Donald Davidson's _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_ places
metaphor as central to the modern pragmatist break from traditional
linguistics.
Rorty also comments on this (working largely from Davidson, relating
theory on metaphor to Heidegger's project) in his _Essays on Heidegger and
Others_ (first chapter).

Thanks for pointing this, out, though, as it relates to some of my current
work/readings.

Good luck,
----Ben