A Comment on Evelyn Fox Keller's 'Cognitive

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 2020, VOL. 45, NO. 3, 446–458 https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1794382 Not a metaphor: a comment on Evelyn Fox Keller’s ‘cognitive functions of metaphor in the natural sciences’ Stefan Helmreich Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article examines the strategies that Evelyn Fox Keller has Metaphor; genetics; employed to analyze the work of metaphor in the language genomics; decolonization; and practice of science, particularly in biology. It offers that zeugma; material-semiotics; the rhetorical device of zeugma –‘the use of a word to transbiology; informatics modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense …’ (Merriam-Webster) – is worth leaning upon to further open up the linguistic operations Keller identifies as animating scientists’ talk of genetic codes and programs. Inspired by Indigenous and trans scholarship on the limits of metaphor, the piece argues for reinvigorated conversation about the politics of analogy in biology. In ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ Eve Tuck (Unangax, enrolled Aleut) and Wayne Yang argue that decolonization is ‘about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ (2012, 1), about territorial and physical liberation from settler- colonial appropriation and occupation, in places such as those that, these days, are commonly known as the United States of America, Canada, and Aus- tralia. Decolonization, they urge, should not be used as a metaphor for other projects of social justice or civil and human rights. Thus, to speak of ‘decolonizing education,’ or ‘decolonizing the mind’ is to turn ‘decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track toward liberation’ (2012, 7). It is to tarry, they argue, with equivocation, to traffic in words with double meanings and to do so with the effect of leaching from the words those political circum- stances and stakes that have animated them. In another domain of discussion, transwoman Julia Serano has written on how often ‘trans people are depicted as merely symbols or metaphors,’ a move that may deflect attention from embo- died transgender priorities and situated lives (2016, 220). Putting a point on it, an online critic of the Japanese anime Wandering Son (放浪息子 Hōrō Musuko), a hugely popular graphic novel about trans kids, goes after allegorical readings of CONTACT Stefan Helmreich [email protected] Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA © 2020 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining Published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Institute INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 447 the text as about gender in general, writing, ‘Trans is not a metaphor.’1 These cautions about the extended use of metaphor are not against metaphor as such, but rather against the extension – the thinning out – of word-concepts through their rhetorical rarefaction in ways that may not only breeze to the side of specific grounded political investments, but also may mute or appropriate them, shoring up, for example, self-congratulatory white settler liberalism or complacent cisgender reflexivity.2 Think, at least to start, of Evelyn Fox Keller as having offered her philosophi- cally and politically game-changing examinations of the use of metaphor in the biological sciences in a complementary mode. Keller has pointed out, for example, that genetic information is a metaphor, that gene action is a discourse – observing as she has done so how the discursive and ideological power of cano- nical bioscience has depended on occluding its metaphor-reinforced scaffolding (Keller 1995). In her early work, Keller was concerned to call attention to dominant metaphors about nature, bodies, and gender, and specifically those that figured the aims and practice of science as calculatively masculine while render- ing nature as passively feminine (see e.g. Keller 1983, 1985, 1992). She was keen to make clear the work these metaphors did to buttress the patriarchal frames of reference that made them seem natural, inevitable, rational, or just. Thus, as she recounts in her piece in this issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, she took aim at framings of science as ‘a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature,’ at descriptions of DNA as ‘the master molecule of life,’ and more. Keller became ever more interested, after her foundational critiques, in how metaphors might, even as they obscured some processes, also point to unexpected dynamics or operate in more underdetermined ways than advertised, opening up space for multiple lines of reading and re-reading (Keller 2000, 2002; see also Doyle 1997). ‘Information,’ for example, oscillating between senses as meaning and measure3 might, in resonance and dissonance with the idea of the ‘program’ (Keller 2000, 81–82), sometimes offer novel ways of think- ing about the processual character of organic formation (and see Oyama 1985). And once dominant genderings of science as heteronormatively masculine were made explicit (in works such as Harding 1982; Keller 1983; Bordo 1983; and Haraway 1988, to take early examples), it became possible to see how, within the always present constraints of power, gender could be upended, turned inside out, appropriated, revalued, and more.4 As Donna Haraway noted, gender was ‘a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual 1See ‘Stay Away from Canon Trans Characters,’ https://protect-wandering-trans-kids.tumblr.com, accessed 7 June 2019. 2In ‘Disability Is Not Just a Metaphor’ (2014), an article in The Atlantic about abled actors playing disabled characters, Christopher Shinn lays out kindred arguments about the abstracted politics of treating physical disability as a metaphor for the challenges that ‘all of us’ face. 3In the information theory of mathematicians Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, ‘information’ came to refer to the content of a message as well as to a quantitative measure of the linear complexity of a message (see Hayles 1999; Kline 2017). 4On the notion of ‘making explicit,’ see Strathern (1992). 448 S. HELMREICH difference’ (1991, 131; see also Keller 1992, 17) and that contestability made gender a concept not to be abandoned, but rather, perhaps, refigured and remixed, while never letting go of its politics. Tracking the ongoing de-essentia- lization, at least in some quarters, of genes and genders, Keller thus became interested in the simultaneous limits and affordances of metaphors. Differently from Tuck and Wang – and very much because, in the case of genetic metaphors, the politics of the metaphors Keller went after were so different, so glued, at least as she first found them, to structures of power (rather than, as with ‘decolonization,’ about critiquing power) – she came to welcome the extension of metaphor, in part because of the unexpected and possibly productive ways it could wrinkle and warp as it was stretched. In so doing, Keller built upon and offered correctives to Mary Hesse’s work in her landmark 1963 book, Models and Analogies in Science. There, Hesse argued that understanding unfamiliar phenomena scientifically was often aided by analogy – electricity is like water, gas molecules operate like billiard balls, light is like a water wave. Hesse named three species of analogies: positive, in which the structure of both the source and target domain are well characterized; negative, in which there is a discrepancy between domains, with one side radi- cally under-understood; and neutral, in which the positive or negative disposi- tion of an analogy is not known. A famous example of an initially neutral analogy suggested that light worked analogously to a water wave, with scientists committed to that analogy searching for a medium in which light might propa- gate, which they called a ‘luminiferous ether.’ Light, the tale goes, turned out not to need a medium for travel. The light-wave analogy was positive in some regards, negative in others. The difficulty with this model, of course, is that it assumes that there is a rhetoric-free way to get at the reality of things – that is possible to describe light as a wave without any recourse to … description. Evelyn Fox Keller’s approach to metaphor avoided this trap – as well as one that opened up beneath some parts of Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By (1980), which fell for another kind of literality, positing an unme- diated universal human bodily experience undergirding all metaphor (for a critique from symbolic anthropology, see Howe 2008; for a critique from disability studies, which marks Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis as able-ist, see Vivaldi 2010). Keller instead centred attention on how language – with its ambiguity and multiple meanings – inescapably conditions scientific theory all the way through. Metaphors may come alive, bust open with contradiction, collapse into the dead literal, and or may even operate in a kind of rhetorical oscillation akin to zeugma –‘the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense …’ (Merriam-Webster). Literary theorist Gillian Beer (1996, 298) offers a famous example of zeugma from Charles Dickens: ‘Miss Bolo … went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair’ (Another example comes from Groucho Marx, from the movie Duck Soup: ‘You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS 449 taxi, you can leave in a huff.’). These are examples in which a phrase – here a verb plus the preposition ‘in’–vibrates between two meanings, one literal, the other figurative, destabilizing what was thought to be literal in the first place. The uneasy laughter generated by many examples of zeugma, meanwhile, indicates the affective valence of language, and, more, emphasizes the politics of situated meanings – and in ways that resonate with Tuck and Wang’s call for an atten- tiveness to the politics of metaphor.

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