Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising

Charles Forceville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134663149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the past few decades, research on metaphor has focused almost exclusively on its verbal and cognitive dimensions. In Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising, Charles Forceville argues that metaphor can also occur in pictures and draws on relevant studies from various disciplines to propose a model for the identification, classification, and analysis of 'pictorial metaphors'. By using insights taken from a range of linguistic, artistic and cognitive perspectives for example, interaction and relevance theory, Forceville shows not only how metaphor can occur in pictures, but also provides a framework within which these pictorial metaphors can be analyzed.
The theoretical insights are applied to thirty advertisements and billboards of British, French, German and Dutch origin. Apart from substantiating the claim that it makes sense to talk about `pictorial metaphors', the detailed analyses of the advertisements suggest how metaphor theory can be employed as a tool in media studies. Context in its various manifestations plays a key role in the analyses. Furthermore, the results of a small-scale experiment shed light on where general agreement about the meaning of a pictorial metaphor can shade over into other more idiosyncratic but equally valid interpretations. The final chapter sketches the ways in which the insights gained can be used for further research.

1 Introduction

The past few decades have witnessed an avalanche of publications on metaphor. Three bibliographies on metaphor (Shibles 1971, van Noppen et al. 1985, van Noppen et al. 1990) together list some 10,000 books, articles and conference papers originating in a wide range of academic disciplines. Although there is an increasing interest from cognitive scientists in metaphor, the vast majority of the publications focus on verbal metaphors, or at least on verbal manifestations of metaphor. However, as Lakoff and Johnson claim in their influential book Metaphors We Live By, ‘metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action, and only derivatively a matter of language’ (1980:153). This perspective paves the way for an investigation of the question whether other media than language can manifest metaphor as well. In this book I argue that metaphor can occur in pictures, more specifically in printed advertisements and billboards, and I propose a theoretical framework within which these pictorial metaphors can be analysed. The most important aim of this study is to make a contribution to a theory of pictorial metaphor. After the theoretical framework has been outlined, a substantial number of advertisements and billboards will be analysed in the light of this theory, the analyses themselves naturally leading to further subdivisions of the concept ‘pictorial metaphor’. Accordingly, the second aim of the book is to show how the theory can be applied in the analysis of specific advertisements. Finally, it is hoped that validation of the concept ‘pictorial metaphor’ in turn will help to advance the more encompassing theory of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon.

Whereas the order of the chapters in this book is motivated by the overall goal of developing a model for the analysis of pictorial metaphor, an attempt has been made to ensure that chapters that may be of interest to those whose primary concern is with other topics than pictorial metaphor proper—such as ‘verbal metaphor’, ‘word and image relations’, ‘Relevance Theory’, or ‘advertising’ —can, with minimal difficulty, be read independently. The structure of the book is as follows.

Chapter 2 contains a detailed discussion of Max Black’s (1962, 1979a) interaction theory of verbal metaphor. This theory, enriched by the insights of later scholars of metaphor, will in slightly adapted form serve as the starting point for the analysis of pictorial metaphors in Chapters 6 and 7. Some elliptical passages in Black’s two articles are clarified and expanded on, and the objections of Kittay (1987) to the interaction theory are examined at length. This chapter is intended to be of intrinsic interest to students of verbal and cognitive metaphor.

Chapter 3 evaluates a number of earlier studies which pertain to the concept ‘pictorial metaphor’. A critical survey of these studies, some of which focus on artistic texts while others also include non-artistic texts in their corpora, highlights some of the theoretical problems attending an attempt to present a theory of pictorial metaphor. On the basis of the strengths and weaknesses of these previous approaches I explain my choice of static advertisements as corpus material.

Chapter 4 discusses in what ways context plays a role in the interpretation of advertisements generally, and pictorial metaphors occurring in them specifically. Within a communicative framework adapted from the well-known model by Jakobson (1960), a distinction is made between text-internal and text-external elements of context. The former can be further subdivided into pictorial and verbal context, drawing on Roland Barthes’ (1964/1986) concept of ‘anchoring’. It is argued that an examination of text-internal context does not suffice, however; in addition, text-external factors such as cultural conventions, expectations, and genre-attributions need to be considered as well.

Although Chapter 4 outlines various aspects outside the advertisement text proper that affect interpretation, two major factors are there left out of consideration: the role played by the communicator of the advertisement message, and its addressee, respectively. Chapter 5 delineates how the identities and interests of the originator of the advertising message and its envisaged reader/viewer crucially co-determine its possible interpretations. In an application of the theory of Sperber and Wilson (1986), who claim that the principle of relevance is the key concept governing human communication, it is shown what consequences their approach has for the analysis, first of metaphors, and then of advertisements. Of particular importance are their claim that relevance is always relevance to an individual and the distinction they propose between strongly and weakly communicated aspects of a message. Apart from constituting a vital step in the elaboration of a model of pictorial metaphor, this chapter can also be read independently as an application of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory beyond the realm of language, namely to messages that are (partly) non-verbal, and mass-medial.

Chapter 6, a key chapter of the book, combines Black’s interaction theory with the insights of Sperber and Wilson to analyse pictorial phenomena in some thirty advertisements and billboards in terms of pictorial metaphor. On the basis of the various text-internal (verbal and pictorial) contextual levels that can be distinguished, a subdivision is proposed into pictorial metaphors with one pictorially present term (MP1s), pictorial metaphors with two pictorially present terms (MP2s), verbo-pictorial metaphors (VPMs), and pictorial similes. While the discussions of the advertisements and billboards are first and foremost intended to substantiate the validity of the concept pictorial metaphor in itself, the analyses hopefully are of independent interest to students of advertising, and of word and image relations more generally.

Since the advertisements and billboards discussed in Chapter 6 are all interpreted by myself, the analyses—in line with Sperber and Wilson’s claim that relevance is always relevance to an individual—necessarily suffer from a degree of subjective bias. By way of a modest counterbalance, Chapter 7 reports the results of an exploratory experiment testing the responses of some forty people to three billboards all purportedly containing a verbo-pictorial metaphor. Apart from assessing whether the participants are capable of identifying the metaphors as such, the experiment gives some idea of the degree of freedom in interpretation a pictorial metaphor allows. In addition, the results provide evidence that some viewers, when given a chance to do so, are happy to volunteer interpretations that run counter to those in all likelihood intended by the advertiser. This latter finding suggests that there may be a discrepancy between how viewers realize they are supposed to respond to the billboards and how they actually react. In view of the exploratory character of the experiment, the chapter reflects amply on methodological matters.

Chapter 8, finally, briefly hints at ways in which the insights of this book may give rise to further research into issues concerning pictorial metaphor, word and image relations, advertising, and other pictorial tropes.

2 Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphor

INTRODUCTION

The theory of metaphor upon which I will ground my account of pictorial metaphor is Max Black’s (1962, 1979a) interaction theory. Despite minor shortcomings this theory can be regarded as the most satisfactory theory of metaphor hitherto developed. Many writers on metaphor are explicitly or implicity committed to it: they accept its central tenets wholly or with small variations, or at least take its premises as a foundation on which to expand or vary (see for instance Ricoeur 1977, Verbrugge 1980, MacCormac 1985, Kjärgaard 1986, Kittay 1987, Hausman 1989, Indurkhya 1991, 1992). Apart from its widespread acceptance, Black’s theory has another great merit: it has been formulated in such a manner that theoretical explicitness goes hand in hand with transparent principles of operation—that is, Black gives a very lucid account of how metaphor works. In this latter respect it is superior to the account of Richards (1965/1936), the other theorist commonly associated with the interaction theory.¹ As Ricoeur points out, ‘Richards made the breakthrough; after him, Max Black and others occupy and organize the terrain’ (1977:84). Thirdly, Black shows an awareness of the importance of metaphor’s pragmatics that is still insufficiently shared by many contemporary commentators: metaphorical meaning cannot be adequately discussed without resorting to metaphorical use.

Since Black’s two articles constitute the basis for my account of pictorial metaphor, I will in this chapter discuss his interaction theory in some detail. It is to be realized that Black’s account pertains to the realm of verbal metaphor, with no more than brief digressions on metaphorical thinking and no references at all to pictorial metaphor. At this stage I will follow Black in largely limiting myself to verbal and cognitive metaphor. After all, since I will heavily rely on Black in later chapters, my first task is to show that the theory is sound on its own terms before making a use of it that Black himself did not, at least not explicitly, envisage. Moreover, a careful examination of Black’s theory enables me to evaluate some obscure or controversial passages in his articles with reference to improvements and elaborations suggested by other commentators. In the latter part of this chapter, I will briefly discuss, still with Black’s views as a starting point, some well-known problems besetting the theory of metaphor. Here I will refer to Lakoff and Johnson, since these authors extensively develop an idea that Black only briefly touches upon, namely the idea that metaphor is a matter of cognition rather than language (see also Indurkhya 1992). As will become clear, this notion, captured in their insight that ‘the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5, my emphasis), is crucial for my own undertaking.

With respect to the issues discussed in the latter part of this chapter (starting with the section ‘Other views held by Black’), it is to be emphasized that no exhaustive treatment has been attempted. The main point of these sections is to make clear to which positions concerning these questions I am committed when in later chapters I turn to pictorial metaphor, although students of verbal metaphor may find certain sections useful in their own right. I will end the chapter with a summary of my enriched, and slightly modified version of Black’s theory—a version that I think is true to all of the spirit and most of the text of Black’s two brilliantly brief, clear, and profound articles on metaphor.

MAX BLACK’S INTERACTION THEORY OF METAPHOR: A FIRST OUTLINE

Black (1979a) opens with the statement that ‘this paper is intended to supplement the earlier study in which I introduced and defended an “interaction view of metaphor”’. The sensible approach, therefore, is to take the later article as the more representative of Black’s views, and return to the earlier piece (referred to as Metaphor by Black himself) only when this sheds light on issues about which the later piece is silent or unclear. The essence of the interaction view is summarized by Black himself in a page and a half, worth quoting in its entirety:

1 A metaphorical statement has two distinct subjects, to be identified as the ‘primary’ subject and the ‘secondary’ one.

In Metaphor, I spoke instead of the ‘principal’ and ‘subsidiary’ subjects. The duality of reference is marked by the contrast between the metaphorical statement’s focus (the word or words used non-literally) and the surrounding literal frame.

2 The secondary subject is to be regarded as a system rather than an individual thing.

Thus, I think of Wallace Stevens’s remark that, ‘Society is a sea’ as being not so much about the sea (considered as a thing) as about a system of relationships (the ‘implicative complex’ discussed below) signaled by the presence of the word ‘sea’ in the sentence in question. (In Metaphor, I proposed that the primary subject, also, be taken as a system. But it seems in retrospect needlessly paradoxical, though not plainly mistaken, to say that Stevens was viewing society, too, as a system of social relationships.) In retrospect, the intended emphasis on ‘systems’, rather than upon ‘things’ or ‘ideas’ (as in Richards), looks like one of the chief novelties in the earlier study.

3 The metaphorical utterance works by ‘projecting upon’ the primary subject a set of ‘associated implications’, comprised in the implicative complex, that are predicable of the secondary subject.

The label ‘implicative complex’ is new. ‘Projection’ is, of course, a metaphor, [sic] that will need further discussion. In the earlier study, I spoke of a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ (which later provoked some pointed criticisms by Paul Ricoeur). My notion was that the secondary subject, in a way partly depending upon the context of metaphorical use, determines a set of what Aristotle called endoxa, current opinions shared by members of a certain speech-community. But I also emphasized, as I should certainly wish to do now, that a metaphor producer may introduce a novel and nonplatitudinous ‘implication-complex’.

4 The maker of a metaphorical statement selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the primary subject by applying to it statements isomorphic with the members of the secondary subject’s implicative complex.

The mechanism of such ‘projection’ (a still serviceable metaphor) are discussed and illustrated in the next section.

5 In the context of a particular metaphorical statement, the two subjects ‘interact’ in the following ways: (a) the presence of the primary subject incites the hearer to select some of the secondary subject’s properties; and (b) invites him to construct a parallel implication-complex that can fit the primary subject; and (c) reciprocally induces parallel changes in the secondary subject.

This may be considered a crux for the interaction view (an attempted explication of Richards’s striking image of the ‘interanimation of words’). Although I speak figuratively here of the subjects interacting, such an outcome is of course produced in the minds of the speaker and hearer: it is they who are led to engage in selecting, organizing, and projecting. I think of a metaphorical statement (even a weak one) as a verbal action essentially demanding uptake, a creative response from a competent reader. In Metaphor, I said— scandalizing some of my subsequent critics—that the imputed interaction involves ‘shifts in meaning of words belonging to the same family or system as the metaphorical expression’ (p.). I meant, of course, a shift in the speaker’s meaning—and the corresponding hearers [sic] meaning— what both of them understand by words, as used on the particular occasion.

(Black 1979a: 28–9)

This dense passage is best discussed point by point.

A metaphorical statement has two distinct subjects, to be identified as the ‘primary’ subject and the ‘secondary’ one. To facilitate the discussion, it will be convenient to refer to an example. In tribute to Black I will align myself with the army of metaphorists that have echoed Black’s example (itself probably derived from Hobbes’ famous homo homini lupus):

1 Man is a wolf.

In Black’s terminology, ‘man’ is the primary subject of the metaphor and ‘wolf the secondary subject. Black’s emphasis on the metaphorical statement is crucial. A metaphor does not obtain at the level of the word but at the level of discourse. As Black himself formulated it, ‘a “statement”, in my intended sense, will be identified by quoting a whole sentence, or a set of sentences, together with as much of the relevant verbal context, or the nonverbal setting, as may be needed for an adequate grasp of the actual or imputed speaker’s meaning’ (1979a: 24). Moreover, Black here points to the potential relevance of the nonverbal context—a notion that I will have occasion to come back to time and again and that will be elaborated in later chapters. The terms ‘frame’ and ‘focus’ refer to, respectively, the literal and the metaphorical elements in the metaphorical statement. Black defines the ‘focus’ as ‘the salient word or expression, whose occurrence in the literal frame invests the utterance with metaphorical force’ (1979a: 26). Our truncated example 1) is not very illuminating when it comes to explaining these terms, since the frame here more or less coincides with the primary subject, and the focus with the secondary subject. But if we expand 1) into 1a),

1a Yesterday Harmen and Marcel were discussing the nature of man. Harmen stated as his belief that man is fundamentally good, but Marcel firmly rejected that notion. ‘He is a wolf, Marcel maintained,

the difference is clearer. Here the frame of the metaphorical statement comprises everything in (1a) except the word ‘wolf’ —which is its focus.

The necessity of studying metaphor primarily at a level higher than the word, i.e., at the level of the sentence and beyond, is also maintained by Ricoeur: ‘Metaphor, and above all newly invented metaphor, is a phenomenon of discourse…’ (1977:180). The move from word to sentence(s), and thereby to discourse, is an important one, for ‘in the phenomenon of the sentence, language passes outside itself; reference is the mark of the self-transcendence of language’ (ibid.: 74). Because of its predicative character, metaphor contains observations about the (or rather ‘a’) world.

The secondary subject is to be regarded as a system rather than an individual thing. While Black considers his earlier view that this claim holds with equal force for the primary subject ‘not plainly mistaken’, he apparently does no longer want to endorse it without qualification. This is an unfortunate lapse from the older, and highly correct, notion. It is not clear where this hesitation stems from² —but it certainly is mistaken, for it is essential that the primary subject is regarded as a system of things. But Black himself in his formulations elsewhere in the 1979 article suggests that in fact he is committed to the view that the primary subject is a ‘system of things’. Thus, in the section ‘how metaphorical statements work’ Black refers to ‘the relations between the meanings of the corresponding key words of the two implication complexes’ and ‘the connection between the two implication-complexes’ (1979a: 30), and in the section ‘metaphors and similes’ he remarks about the metaphor ‘poverty is a crime’ that ‘“crime” and “poverty” are nodes of isomorphic networks’ (ibid.: 31, my emphases). Since these phrases suggest ‘systems of things’ rather than mere ‘things’, I would argue that in spite of the partial disclaimer in the summary quoted above, a sympathetic reading of Black’s entire article yields the conclusion that he holds the view that both primary and secondary subject are systems of things rather than mere individual things. Black is certainly right about seeing the emphasis on ‘systems’ as a vital contribution to the theory of metaphor. Indeed, it is not exaggerated to claim that this insight is one of the premises underlying for instance Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) influential study.

The metaphorical utterance works by ‘projecting upon’ the primary subject a set of ‘associated implications’, comprised in the implicative complex, that are predicable of the secondary subject.

The implicative complex of the secondary subject must be envisaged as the theoretical totality of properties, features, notions, beliefs, metonymic extensions that in one way or another adhere to the secondary subject. In our example, properties that could be projected from the secondary subject ‘wolf’ to the primary subject ‘man’ would probably be, say, ‘cruel’, ‘scavenging’, ‘carnivorous’. In his 1979 article, Black does not much elaborate the notion of the implicative complex, but in the earlier study— discussing the concept under the label of ‘associated commonplaces’—he makes a number of valuable comments on this issue. To start with, he points out that a metaphor cannot be understood by someone ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphor
• 3 Towards a theory of pictorial metaphor
• 4 Advertising
• 5 Communicator and addressee in the advertising message
• 6 Pictorial metaphor in advertisements and billboards
• 7 Individuals’ responses to three IBM billboards
• 8 Closing remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography