sssh! this is a working library.

How ideology is like a park bench:

Ideology … is not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in that situation itself. It is no good my reminding myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked ‘Whites Only’; by the act of sitting on it, I have supported and perpetuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench; not in my head. Eagleton, Ideology (40)

A lovely side benefit to this analogy is the solidification of ideology. In Eagleton’s hands, ideology becomes a heavy object of iron and wood. You don’t carry it with you so much as look for it when you need to rest.

Getting back to the nature of truth:

Moral judgements are as much candidates for rational argumentation as are the more obviously descriptive parts of our speech. For a realist, such normative statements purport to describe what is the case: these are ‘moral facts’ as well as physical ones, about which our judgements can be said to be either true or false. The Jews are inferior beings is quite as false as that Paris is the capital of Afghanistan; it isn’t just a question of my private opinion or of some ethical posture I decide to assume towards the world. To declare that South Africa is a racist society is not just a more imposing way of saying that I happen not to like the set-up in South Africa. Eagleton, Ideology (17)

Eagleton has this endearing metaphorical tick in his language: he reaches for a metaphor to illuminate a concept, and then reaches – again – for another example, just to make sure you really got it. In the wrong hands this could read like a stutter – awkward, self-consciously repetitive. But Eagleton’s sense of rhythm is so acute that it comes off like a rimshot instead. (Sometimes literally so – often the second metaphor is a Jon Stewart-esque jab.)

Definitions:

‘Criticism’, in its Enlightenment sense, consists in recounting to someone what is awry with their situation, from an external, perhaps ‘transcendental’ vantage-point. ‘Critique’ is that form of discourse which seeks to inhabit the experience of the subject from the inside, in order to elicit those ‘valid’ features of that experience which point beyond the subject’s present condition. ‘Criticism’ instructs currently innumerate men and women that the acquisition of mathematical knowledge is an excellent cultural goal; ‘critique’ recognizes that they will achieve such knowledge quickly enough if their wage packets are at stake. Eagleton, Ideology (xxiii)

In other words, from-the-heavens versus on-the-ground. In reality I think the division here is often less clear-cut, but I won’t argue with a good metaphor.

On postmodernism, politics, plastic surgery, and the serendipity of a good metaphor:

[The current administration’s] disdain for anything as prosaic as reality also aligns it, rather oddly, with postmodern culture, for which reality – rather like the body in the cosmetic surgeon’s operating theatre – is pliable stuff to be moulded into whatever shapes you fancy, not recalcitrant material that thwarts your attempts to mould it. Eagleton, Ideology (xv)

I am evidently in good company when it comes to being self-conscious about metaphor:

Despite the seemingly fortuitous, purely English-language nature of the connection between type ‘faces’ and human ones it is hard to resist some attempt to follow the implied analogy. It might be that a typeface is made up of elements (its letters or characters) which are like the parts of a human visage: ears, eyes, nose, mouth and perhaps finer sub-divisions. The parts have their own expected formal properties: we know what a mouth is, and – taking an enormous leap into the particular – we know what her mouth is like. And, so the analogy would go, we know what a ‘g’ is like and – again jumping to the particular – we know what a Baskerville ‘g’ is like. This analogy could be pushed a little further. The parts, though formally different, should fit together: the ‘g’ should look as though it belongs with every other character; her mouth sorts with every element of her face, becoming part of a whole that is unique (thus the photograph on her passport, or in her lover’s wallet). At this point, one introduces ideas of value and perhaps beauty. Do some mouths fit their faces better than others?…At this level of direct comparison the analogy soon becomes absurd.…Anthropomorphism has its uses and its pleasures, but has severe limits too: letters are made by human beings, but are not human outgrowths. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (116)

No analogy holds when followed to the ends of the earth; it’s a tool whose power lies in suggestion – a fleeting kiss instead of a lifelong partnership.

I’m fond of metaphor. It’s probably the most common trick in my literary arsenal – especially when joined with a little hyperbole – and for that reason alone I know I have to keep a watchful eye over them when I write, lest they get too far away from my purpose that they obscure instead of clarifying.

So, in the first, rough draft of my previous post, when reaching for examples of things that are “archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to,” I wrote “tuberculosis and the catherine wheel.” Tuberculosis seems to make sense; it’s a word that invokes the diseases of yesteryear, before vaccines and clean hospitals; and it’s ugly, at odds with the antiseptic vision of medical care we hold today. But that catherine wheel: at first, it seems well enough; it’s an image of medieval barbarism, and a vicious one at that. It has the right balance of antiquity and masochism to sit alongside the reference to TB. It was sufficiently over the top to arouse, but not quite absurd enough to send the whole thing careening off the road. And yet something wasn’t right.

Is the catherine wheel a thing of the past? Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, phrases like “waterboarding” and “stress position” and “illegal rendition” have entered (or reentered) the lexicon. In this climate, who’s to say the catherine wheel won’t yet see a renaissance? And then it wouldn’t be a relic; and then the analogy doesn’t hold.

Which left me with just one example when the rhythm of the sentence required two. What belonged alongside tuberculosis as a relic of things past? I considered an extinct animal (the wooly mammoth, perhaps); but the phrase was intended to suggest things that we are happy to have behind us, things which we are glad to have moved on from. I don’t know about you, but I think the world would be a more interesting place if the wooly mammoth were still with us, immune to the spears we throw at it, unconcerned about our privileged place in the world, unaware of the gods on our side.

The gods on our side. There it is. If there’s anything certain about the American political establishment today, it’s that the worshipping of one god (and a particular one at that) is not on the decline. I deleted “catherine wheel” and typed in “polytheism” instead.