Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 7:2 (2008) ► pp.290–320

What message does ‘send a message’ send?

| Five Colleges and Amherst College
| Five Colleges and Amherst College
The violent acts of post-modern war are sometimes represented as long-distance communication. This paper examines the phrase send a message and others like it when used to refer to bombings, firing missiles, shooting civilians, etc. The metonymic reduction of killing and destroying to communication promotes message-sending as the single goal of a military enterprise. We provide relevant historical, cultural and political contexts that account for this increasingly prevalent framing: the imperatives of justifying aggressive war in a Post-Nuremburg international legal order; the emergence and intensification of message culture; and the increased strategic importance of perception management and information warfare. The paper includes a richly illustrated analysis of the metonymic structure of send a message and its relationship to the common, well-studied metaphor for communication, the conduit. We argue that the use of send a message to describe acts of violence does more than simply euphemize: it positions the message-senders as rational agents engaged in communicative action; and it displaces responsibility for suffering onto those who fail to get the message.
Keywords: metonymy, metaphor, war, propaganda, political discourse, rhetorical displacement, euphemism, rationality
Published online: 3 November 2008
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.7.2.06ema
References (63)
References
Barcelona, Antonio. 2002. Clarifying and applying the notions of metaphor and metonymy within cognitive linguistics: An update. In: René Dirven & Ralf Pörings (eds). Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast (Cognitive Linguistic Research 20). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 207—277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(ed.). 2000. Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective. (Topics in English Linguistics 30) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Brennan, Rick & R. Evan Ellis. 1996. Information Warfare in Multilateral Peace Operations: A Case Study of Somalia. Report prepared for the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Washington, D.C.: SAIC.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Pratap. 4 Aug 2004. Information Warriors. Rendon Group Wins Hearts and Minds in Business, Politics and War. CorpWatch.
Chilton, Paul. 1991ms. Getting the Message Through. Metaphor and the Legitimation of the Gulf War. [A French version of this paper appeared in Alternatives Non-Violentes, Juin 1991.]
Cienki, Alan. 2005. Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” cognitive models: Theoretical issues raised in an empirical study. Cognitive Linguistics 16.2, 279—312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, John & Ross Glover. 2002. Introduction. In: Collins & Glover (eds).Google Scholar
(eds). 2002. Collateral Language. A User’s Guide to America’s New War. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
D’Andrade, Roy G. 1989. Cultural Cognition. In: M. Posner (ed.). Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 795—830.Google Scholar
Delaney, David & Michele Emanatian. 1999. ‘Unnatural Barriers’: Why Metaphor Matters (or, Linguistics Meets the Geopolitics of Law). In: Leon de Stadler & Christoph Eyrich (eds). Issues in Cognitive Linguistics. (1993 Proceedings of the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference) (Cognitive Linguistics Research 12) Berlin/NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 331—345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. (Language in Social Life series) London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1985. Frames and the Semantics of Understanding. Quaderni di Semantica VI.2, 222—254.Google Scholar
Gibson, James William. 1986. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press.Google Scholar
Grady, Joseph. 1997. Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphor and Primary Scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley.
Gray, Chris Hables. 1997. Postmodern War. The New Politics of Conflict. New York/London: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Haiman, John. 1997. Repetition and Identity. Lingua 1001, 57—70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herman, Edward S. & Noam Chomsky. 1988/2002. Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Michigan. 1991. What’s A “Casualty”? ETC: A Review of General Semantics 48.2, 124—127.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert. 1947. The Nurnberg Case. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Johnson, Mark. 1993. Moral Imagination. Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Craig S. 1998—999. The Perception Management Process. Military Review LXXVII.6 (Dec.—Feb.), 38—44. //usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreviewGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, Lawrence F. 1998. How to Send a ‘Message’: Use AT&T, Not USAF. Wall Street Journal, 23 Dec. 1998, A14.
Kellner, Douglas. 1992. The Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Kirmayer, Laurence J. 1992. The Body’s Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Experience. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6.41, 323—346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kissinger, Henry. 1979. The White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Koller, Veronika. 2002. “A Shotgun Wedding”: Co-occurrence of war and marriage metaphors in mergers and acquisitions discourse. Metaphor and Symbol17.3, 179—203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ky, Nguyen. 2002. Buddha’s Child, My Fight to Save Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1991. Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf.
Open letter to the Internet. x[Also in: Martin Pütz (ed.). 1992. Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution: Studies in Honour of René Dirven on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: Benjamins, 463—481.]Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1996/2002. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t. [2nd ed. published as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think] Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. II: Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Low, Setha M. 1994. Embodied metaphors: Nerves as lived experience. In: Thomas J. Csordas (ed.). Embodiment and Experience. The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139—162.Google Scholar
McKerrow, Raymie E. 1999. Critical Rhetoric. Theory and Praxis. In: John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit & Sally Caudill (eds). Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. A Reader. New York/ London: The Guilford Press, 441—463.Google Scholar
McNamara, Robert. 1995. In Retrospect, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Time Books.Google Scholar
et al.. 1999. Argument Without End. New York: Public Affairs.Google Scholar
Miller, Mark Crispin. 2001. The Bush Dyslexicon. Observations on a National Disorder. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Morgan, Pam. 1997. Self-Presentation in a Speech of Newt Gingrich. Pragmatics 7.31, 275—308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neisser, Philip T. 2002. Targets. In: Collins & Glover (eds), 138—153.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Gerald V. 2003. Indigestible Food, Conquering Hordes, and Waste Materials: Metaphors of Immigrants and the Early Immigration Restriction Debate in the United States. Metaphor and Symbol 18.1, 33—47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pancake, Ann. 1993. Taken by Storm: The Exploitation of Metaphor in the Persian Gulf War. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8.4, 281—295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Panther, Klaus-Uwe & Günter Radden. 1999. Introduction. In: Panther & Radden (eds). 19991, 1—14.Google Scholar
. (eds). 1999. Metonymy in Language and Thought. (Human Cognitive Processing 4) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Panther, Klaus-Uwe & Linda Thornburg. 2000. The EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymy in English grammar. In: Barcelona (ed.), 215—231.Google Scholar
Peters, Ralph. 2004. In Praise of Attrition. Parameters Summer, 24—32.Google Scholar
Quinn, Naomi. 1996. Culture and Contradiction: The Case of Americans Reasoning about Marriage. Ethos 24.3, 391—425. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radden, Günter & Zoltán Kövecses. 1999. Towards a Theory of Metonymy. In: Panther & Radden (eds), 17—59.Google Scholar
Rampton, Sheldon & John Stauber. 2003. How to Sell a War. The Rendon Group Deploys ‘Perception Management’ in the War on Iraq. In These Times, Aug. 4.
Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The Conduit Metaphor — A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 284—324.Google Scholar
Rusk, Dean. 1990. As I Saw It. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. (Revised & updated ed.) New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Sandikcioglu, Esra. 2000. More metaphorical warfare in the Gulf: Orientalist frames in news coverage. In: Barcelona (ed.), 299—320.Google Scholar
Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind. Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W”. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Google Scholar
Tatge, Aletha S. 2001. Perception Management and Coalition Information Operations. Naval Postgraduate School. http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/fulcrum/_main.pl. 118 pgs. Defense Technical Information Center. Access date: 6 Jun 04.
Tester, Keith. 1997. Moral Culture. London: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Tolle, Glenn A. 2002. Shaping the Information Environment. Military Review LXXXII.3 (May—June), 47—49. //usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview Google Scholar
Ullman, Harlan K. & James P. Wade. 1996. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A. 1995. Discourse Analysis as Ideology Analysis. In: Christina Schäffner & Anita Wenden (eds). Language and Peace. Australia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 17—36.Google Scholar
Wells, Donald. 1991. War Crimes and Laws of War. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ruddock, Andy
2011. Cultivation Analysis and Media Violence. In The Handbook of Media Audiences, ► pp. 340 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.