One of the best ways we have of leaping out of the box of our own experience is our use of metaphor. The Wikipedia gives this definition: “…a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea….” Itself a metaphor (figure for an arrangement of words). We can use a familiar word to point at a mysterious thing (Her jeweled gaze.). Or, by using a strange word to signify a familiar object or action(The committee sludged its way to a vote.), we find our way to new knowledge and the potential of new understanding. This new knowledge serves us the better for being suggestive rather than definitive. Once upon a time, for instance, someone used the word “legs” to indicate the appendages on which a table or chair rests. Besides giving life to an inanimate object (a thing with legs could be said to be standing, or squatting, or perched, or any number of active, lifelike, behaviors), the metaphor opened the door to imaginative speculation on the similarities that tables, chairs, beds, and other furnishings with “legs” share with animals and people. This metaphor so aptly applied to its subject that it became the word normally used; it became a definition, what we call a “dead” metaphor. The things hanging down from a table top are its legs. And we don’t even remember what the original word or words might have been.
The theatre has contributed an inordinate number of now dead metaphors to our daily English language. We use theatrical terminology in all sorts of situations, as the name for all sorts of objects and actions. We speak of a death in the family as a “tragedy”; of our “role” in the firm; of the “human comedy”; a “theatre of operations” in warfare; and so forth, on and on. We say that this or that occasion was “great theatre,” when of course it was nothing of the kind.
Erving Goffman wrote a whole book of sociology using theatre as the primary metaphor, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Rob Austin and I, in Artful Making, showed how the language and lore of theatre could help us think about post-industrial work and management.
I bring this up to heighten our sense of the “action” as distinct from the “content” of speech and other behavior. When you’re alert to, sensitive to, metaphor, you tend to look behind the present speech or behavior to the “meaning” or, in theatre terms, the “action.” This is an essential skill for collaboration. Goffman ascribes intention to the presented self we see and hear. Properly to collaborate we need to become sensitive to the intentions of our co-workers, our team mates, and let ourselves respond out of our sympathy and empathy as well as out of our intellectual appreciation of content. This can be very difficult, as any parent knows: when Snookums wails in the night, the content (that electrifying sound) overwhelms; very difficult to get past that to the source of his trouble.
The difficulty that applies when using theatre as a metaphor in the way Goffman does is that so many of the metaphors he uses are dead metaphors, and thus there’s a sense of “Duhh!” as we read.
