An Analysis of Corporate Rule in Globalization Discourse: Why We Need Rhetoric to Explain Conceptual Figures

Abstract

This article analyzes the conceptual metaphor Corporations Are Governments in order to demonstrate the integral relationship between the unconscious operations of metaphor emphasized by conceptual metaphor theory and explicit rhetorical influences such as linguistic choices, patterns of rhetorical response, and overarching narratives that are used to organize and evaluate evidence. It argues that conceptual metaphors are shaped significantly by a give-and-take among ideologically accented and often deliberately considered metaphors, metonymies, and narratives.

Notes

¹I thank RR peer reviewers Barry Brummett and Shawn Parry-Giles for their suggestions in revising this essay.

²A striking example of Argument is War can be found in the film The Great Debaters, in which Denzel Washington's character says, “Debate is combat. But your weapons are words.”

³See, for example, Lakoff's analysis of war and politics (“Gulf”), Lakoff and Johnson's analysis of Western philosophy (Philosophy), and Zoltán Kövecses's analysis of metaphor and emotion.

⁴George Lakoff and Mark Johnson distinguish the “cognitive unconscious” from the more familiar Freudian unconscious. See Philosophy in the Flesh, 9–15.

⁵I focus here on only a few examples from that case study; for additional examples and more discussion of cognitive structures, see “Globalization, ‘Corporate Rule,’ and Blended Worlds: A Conceptual-Rhetorical Analysis of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Conceptual Blending” in Metaphor and Symbol.