Near the end of October, cognitive linguistics guru George Lakoff, who writes books about how the Democrats can close the framing gap with rhetorically savvier Republican speechifiers, wrote this in The Gray Goose (reprinted at The Huffington Post):
"Stay the course" is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions. Because physical actions require movement, we commonly understand action as motion. Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place -- to the refrigerator to get a cold beer, say -- we think of goals as reaching destinations.Another widespread and powerful metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral. In modern conservative discourse, "character" is seen through the metaphor of moral strength, being unbending in the face of immoral forces. "Backbone," we call it.
In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, "stay the course" evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he'd been acting and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.
This is perhaps the pivotal case of an idea Lakoff has been hammering for quite some time: the idea that language is connotative as well as denotative, basically, with specifics about how some language is better at motivating unspoken/unconscious images and attendant emotional freight, and thus more capable of persuading people of positions before they can be arbited in the full light of reason. Moreover, in classic cog-sci fashion, these responses are proposed to be more-or-less hardwired, as the cognitive activity happening in the shadows underlying rationality is quasi-automatic. "The laws of language are hard to defy," as he has it. His sense of the nature-of-the-beast quality of these linguistic actions verges on the absolute, and permeates his own rhetoric, as in this not from a year earlier, plumping his own product:
Negating a frame activates it in the minds of hearers, as Richard Nixon found out when he said I am not a crook and everybody thought of him as a crook. The very title of my book, Dont Think of an Elephant makes the point: if you negate a frame, it reinforces the frame.
Charged with certainty about the invariable effectiveness of certain successful metaphors, he concluded that June 29, 2005 piece, "The Democrats can learn from Bush and Rove: Stick to your guns and stay the course." Meaning: get a well-crafted message that sends out the right cognitive codes, shows a clear and strong direction, and don't waver from that. To drive his point home with a rather obvious irony, he again highlighted the excellence of the Bush slogan, which works not just as a specific emotion-motivating phrase but as a general rhetorical strategy. Stay. The. Course.
If the phrase and strategy is such a winner, how did it lose so baldly earlier this month? The Democrats, as has been more than well-remarked, never found much less hewed to a vision to articulate beyond entirely vague forms of We're not them; after the election, one still heard the Party Chairman proclaiming "this was a call for a "new direction"; that was our slogan, and the American people have blah blah blah." Meanwhile, "stay the course" turned out to be the albatross around the neck of every Republican candidate, if not the anchor.
So how does a cognitive linguist explain that? That is the conundrum and the occasion for Lakoff's late October essay quoted above. It turns out that "stay the course" stopped working because the president failed to stay the course in his speeches:
The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.This is to say, per Lakoff, that the presidential team had made the fatal error of saying "Don't think of an elephant" (indeed, he repeats wholesale that passage from a year earlier, book title and all). Bush's reversal, his failure to stay the course in his rhetoric, becomes utterly damning:"That is not a stay-the-course policy," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday....Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said "stay the course."
What the president is discovering is that it's not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.
To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination -- that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to "complete the mission" and "achieve the goal.""Stay the course" was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses.
Here the conundrum comes into full flower. The phrase can produce only one set of pre-rational, emotional responses. It always works. To abandon the phrase is to doom yourself; as Lakoff himself says, it's this "negating of the frame" that's "fatal." So why would the president even consider abandoning the phrase? Why would anyone trouble to change a successful formula with automatic, guaranteed results?
The answer passes swiftly amidst all framing stuff, and Lakoff buries it in a dependent clause, a bagatelle: "given obvious reality." We would not care to arbit the status of "reality" with Lakoff, insofar as our ideas about it are likely to be so divergent that there would scarcely be grounds for debate. But on this occasion we may find ourselves in a sort of agreement: the phrase "stay the course" stopped working because it referred to historical circumstances that changed. It indicates an idea, and the idea came more and more obviously to suck: to be fatal for bodies, to produce no pragmatic or ideological gains, to indicate a tangle of lies and manipulations.
This is not to pillory Republicans for the morass in the Middle East just now, but to hope to have done with Lakoff's lucubrations. For he himself has conceded, albeit in a three-word aside, that these powerful metaphors work until they don't work anymore; that the response is automatic and pre-rational until it isn't. Despite the scientistic frame that Lakoff invokes about his own studies, it turns out that there's no strong correlation between input and output; that cognitive science in fact can't give a steady account of how connotation works; that while metaphors may be "emotion-laden," there are no fixed (or even quasi-fixed) emotional responses. It may be the case that the phrase "don't think of an elephant" causes one to think of an elephant; how one feels about that elephant depends rather on shifting information about which cognitive linguistics may wish to keep silent, for fear of embarrassing itself.
One last averral. We do not wish to extol the primacy of the fact to reduce this to the simplicities of Ah, but the real world had its way with language, eh? The historical conditions that changed, largely in Iraq, so as to change for a while the connotations of the phrase "stay the course," can't be reduced to "fact." They too involve rhetoric, spin, symbol management, "propaganda of the deed." The conception of a perfectly real world independent of language seems insupportable, and unnecessary; it's as futile as the idea of a sphere of language tied entirely to wired cognitive functions, fixed within a "frame," independent of the real of history an idea that Lakoff has himself invalidated, against his own initial claims. Language, it would seem, is a mediation with history, and the way it works will apparently require negotiations at every turn. This is not a fresh proposition, except insofar as it is news that stays news.
The promise, from whatever political position, that symbol management is a total and self-determining reality, a frame that has achieved ultimate closure, has no historical truth except as a symptom of a quite legitimate fear that there is no outside anymore, no history, no semi-autonomous sphere, no possible form of resistance other than participation at the level of symbol management. This is a basic banality of the spectacle, of course; one takes some small comfort in recalling that the spectacle itself is, if perhaps a kind of fact, necessarily one that is in all ways historical.