Theory and metaphor

Theory and metaphor

No research can work without theory, even when it denies it has any. For theory simply means the connection of ideas. Even counting is theory. It requires us to connect ideas of unity, identity, repetition and sequence, which is why it takes some time to learn. Occasionally people write research reports and claim they contain no theory. This could mean that they are incredibly naive, but normally it signals a rejection of a particular kind of theory. They want to let the reporting and writing and making sense of the world, the ‘natural attitude’, confront some preconceived set of ideas. Both quantitative and qualitative research in sociology have their advocates of this kind of approach. One version argues that what emerges is ‘grounded theory’. This challenges theories which base accounts of society on ideas of system, structure, market, rational choice, coding or some other frame of thinking drawn usually from other disciplines. The point is that the theories of other disciplines reflect their concerns with the particular aspect of reality they study. Applied to society they immediately become metaphors or analogies. As one early critic of this approach said, ‘social theorists, instead of finding and employing a method and a terminology proper to their subject,…on the analogy of the physical sciences they have striven to analyse Society as a mechanism, on the analogy of biology they have insisted on regarding it as an organism’. Mechanism is not a metaphor in engineering and organism is not a metaphor for the body in biology. The market is not a metaphor for the economy in economics, nor is code a metaphor for language in linguistics. In each case the theoretical idea is a powerful method for analysing the reality. Grounded theory in sociology, even just fact gathering, often called empiricism, has a point if it challenges undue reliance on the metaphorical use of theory from other disciplines.

At the same time if anyone thinks that sociology can proceed without theorising, seeking a deeper understanding of society through developing the ideas connected with its own special reality, then they will progress no further with its study. This means we have to get beyond the metaphors which inhabit everyday discourse too.

For instance, likening a society to a play has long held a grip on the imagination of both playwrights (Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’) and sociologists. The most famous sociologist in the world in the mid-twentieth century was Talcott Parsons whose theory of society was based on the idea that people fit into roles. The sociologist, who was also the best writer in the discipline, Erving Goffman, employed the drama metaphor, but with focus on the performance rather than the script. There’s a lot of scope for acting skill in his Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, but we still have to match up to demanding outside requirements if we are going to put on a competent show.

The drama metaphor draws attention to the constraints which society exercises over individual people and the way it proceeds in relative independence from them. This in spite of the fact that it can’t work without them. No actors, no performance tonight. But then, on the other hand, no play, no actors. Society is not simply external constraint, it provides opportunities which otherwise would not exist.

We emphasise these features of society when we look at it from the standpoint of individual people. It is external to me and to you, and to every other individual. The stage play, Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap has been showing continuously in London’s West End now for over forty years. No one from the original cast of actors remains and the play goes on.

Just as the play can only be performed by actors so society only exists in what people do. It is then both external and internal. It is constraining but also enabling. So we get nearer to the reality of society if we think of a play in which we make up the parts as we go along. But we can’t do it just as we like. ‘Theatre’, then, is as much a metaphor for the reality of society as ‘system’, ‘organism’, or ‘market’.

The ease with which we fall into metaphorical discourse shows how elusive is the reality of society. Erving Goffman’s emphasis on performance comes close to capturing that reality. But it is not because the idea of performance is imported from drama. That confuses metaphor with reality. Those who can perform on a stage do so because they have first learned to perform in life, not the other way round, even if contemporary culture gives us plenty of examples of life become theatre. We have to look for our theoretical concepts in the idea of society itself.