Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari

Recent work in the cultural studies of science has shown the importance of metaphoric networks for scientific inquiry. Sometimes these networks have functioned to lead scientists in the wrong direction. For example, metaphoric equations developed in nineteenth-century physiology mapped Africans, women, and animals onto one another to the detriment of all three categories, as Nancy Leys Stepan has shown. But more often, metaphors have opened up fruitful lines of inquiry, as when Norbert Weiner saw metaphoric correspondences between prosthetic devices and cybernetic machines (“Sound Communication”). It is not easy to determine where the limits of metaphor should be drawn. In some sense almost all language can be considered metaphoric, as Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse argue in discussing metaphoric resonance in measurement. Indeed, even mathematics can be considered metaphorical, as Norbert Weiner pointed out when he observed that mathematics was “the most colossal metaphor imaginable” (Human Use, 95). So can sense perception, as Walter Freeman and Gregory Bateson among others have argued, for perceptual experiences are metaphors for reality rather than representations of reality. In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give this idea a linguistic turn when they argue that metaphor connects abstract thought with embodied experience, providing a grounding we often fail to see precisely because it is so pervasive and fundamental. These diverse explorations make clear that metaphor is not opposed to scientific work but intrinsic to it. Metaphor performs essential functions in orienting and guiding thought; it connects abstraction and embodiment; it allows us to discover regularities between what we perceive and what exists outside of ourselves; and it entwines cultural presuppositions with scientific frameworks. These complex functions can be summed up by saying that metaphor works to connect and contextualize, broadening the space of abstract thought by embedding it in physical, sensory, linguistic and cultural contexts. [End Page 144]