This week for Critical Experiences I read excerpts from the book Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson.

I used to love metaphors. From an early age I was showered in metaphors in Sunday school by caring teachers who tried to get us to understand complicated religious topics like free will, infinity, or forgiveness.

“Telling your little brother his food is hot isn’t the same as letting him burn his tongue and figuring it out himself. It’s the same with God giving us agency even when he knows we’ll make mistakes.”

I loved coming up with my own metaphors, and felt obsessed with the idea that if I could just find the perfect one, I could make another person instantly understand a concept or completely see where I was coming from.

However, as I grew up and got more fluent in the language of politics, advertising and business, I started to see metaphors being used as a tool to obscure, not to clarify. It seemed as if every metaphor I saw online, or on the news was meant to trick me, to use flowery language to obscure the reality behind a situation.

“Refugees are like stray cats. You feed one and then they’re going to want to bring their kids, their friends, and everyone they know.”

I started auditing and limiting the use of metaphors in my own language, trying to be as concise and straightforward as possible. It has proven a hard habit to kick though, even in my own mind, as I rapidly try to frame new knowledge in the terms of existing structures.

This reading validated me in two ways. It explained that we as humans necessarily think in metaphors to understand new ideas in ways we can understand. And it also stressed that metaphor both highlight and hide. Because a metaphor is necessary a relation, there will always be a decision on what to highlight and what to hide.

It is important to see that the metaphorical structuring involved here is partial, not total. If it were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely be understood in terms of it.

A metaphorical system that I have tried my best to consciously shift is how I talk about non-human animals. I remember in college seeing a peta tweet that quickly went viral as a meme format.

“feeding two birds with one scone” entered my rotation of ironic things to say amongst friends.

But it did actually get me thinking about all the ways that we commodify and disparage these animals in our speech. Once I became vegan a few years later, I studied more about how violent language perpetuates violent actions, and just how meaningful it can be to switch up those narratives.

One concrete example of this in my life has been the way that I talk about so-called “invasive species.” That phrase positions the animal or plant as the aggressor, the invader that needs to be repelled. In reality, these plants or animals are 99.99% of the time simply adapting and surviving in a new environment that they found themselves a part of through no fault of their own, but through human interference. Living in NYC, where spotted lanternflies became a media sensation a few years ago, I truly believe the label “invasive species” led to people feeling completely empowered to kill on-sight any of the animals they saw. In fact, that label was usually the singular thing that people knew about the animal. They didn’t know where they came from, what potential threat they posed, or anything beyond their label as “foreign” and “undesirable”.

In my personal life, I have switched to calling these interloper “refugee species”. It is a much more apt description of what changes these organisms have gone through. And when framed this way, is enough to get my friends to stop stomping spotted laternflies overnight.

Interviews

This past week I also interviewed three of my friends about the term ‘digital taxidermy’. All three of these people have large degree of experience and expertise around creating and being members of online communities, and thus had many thoughts. I found that all three of them had stark examples of online loss.

  • A fashion collaging site called Polyvore that became defunct in 2018 after being bought out by Sense
  • A 1Direction fandom Tumblr account that was deleted for an unknown reason
  • A Neopets account (Tyson24682199) with over 1 million neopoints that has a forgotten password

In each of these cases, my friends had tried many times to somehow gain access to their accounts with no avail. There was a keen sense of loss and I could hear the emotion in my friend’s voice as they talked about what these online spaces meant to them.

My form

For my midterm project for the class I want to take the form of a physical diorama/showcase. I want to show different examples of preservation techniques and label them with the amount of time they can be expected to survive for. E.g. a taxidermy mount of a usb drive that will last ~20 years. A piece of paper that will last hundreds of years, and a carved stone that could last thousands. I want each entry in the case to be of the same thing, perhaps a common Neopet animal.