From Viruses to Russian Roulette to Dance: A Rhetorical Critique and Creation of Genetic Metaphors

Abstract

This essay critiques and creates metaphoric genetic rhetoric by examining metaphors for genes used by representatives of the lay American public. We assess these metaphors with a new rhetorical orientation that we developed by building onto work by Robert Ivie and social scientific qualitative studies of audiences. Specifically, our analysis reveals three themes of genetic metaphors, with the first two appearing most frequently: 1) genes as a disease or problem 2) genes as fire or bomb, and 3) genes as gambling. We not only discuss the problems and untapped potential of these metaphors, but also we suggest metaphorically understanding genes interacting with the environment as a dance or a band. This essay has implications for rhetorical criticism, science studies, and public health.Metaphors are modes of perception. As Kenneth Burke notes, "Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this" (503). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson further emphasize this function of metaphors:Metaphors may create realties for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense, metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies. (156) Lakoff and Johnson remind us that metaphors depend upon "a coherent network of entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others" (157). The implications of metaphoric entailments are significant not because the metaphor may be true or false, but rather because of "the perceptions and inferences that follow from it and the actions that are sanctioned by it" (158). Thus, metaphors that circulate have material consequences.The sub-discipline of the rhetoric of science has unique implications for research on metaphors. Historically, metaphors abound in discourses of science even as science has often been regarded as non-metaphorical (Nate 496). Interdisciplinary research on genetic metaphors in rhetorical studies and other fields such as philosophy, sociology, and the biological sciences offers exceptional case studies in the "reality" function of metaphors given what Elizabeth Shea describes as the "material-abstract ambiguity" of the literal gene (508), or how the human genome is invisible to the naked eye, enormously complex, and a still-developing discovery of modern science. For the most part this scholarship critiques the use and socio-political implications of genetic metaphors that come from scientists and media professionals, such as the commonly articulated code and blueprint metaphors for genes. In this essay we share what we believe is an exciting possibility to add another dimension to this work by broadening both

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