the power of metaphor

Metaphors are powerful constructions, but they are not unwieldy. It is their smallness that makes them particularly attractive as instigators of institutional change. Michel Foucault’s (1972) archaeological description of change showed that change is the outgrowth of slow, laborious discursive struggle. A new discourse emerges, at first, as fragments. These fragments gain momentum and over time, they come to gradually displace older discourses. Consider Brenton Faber’s (2002) attempt to facilitate change at a small technical school. Faber composed a handbook that clearly articulated a unified narrative about its mission and policies. Faber looks to Foucault to explain its shortcomings in retrospect. He suggested that this text was received poorly upon its implementation because it introduced a “complete discourse” that stood in opposition to other discourses already circulating on campus (p. 99). Smaller discursive units, like metaphors, are less likely to encounter such hostility.

Circulating a new metaphor is one type of seemingly minor rhetorical change that can eventually come to effect systematic change. James Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey Grabill, and Libby Miles (2000) maintained that institutions, though powerful, are not monoliths; “they are rhetorically constructed human designs (whose power is reinforced by buildings, laws, traditions, and knowledge-making practices) and so are changeable” (p. 611). Thus, discourse, the foundation of institutions, has the potential to disrupt organizational structures or to reify them. Discursive structures pertaining to space, like the metaphors/names I am interrogating in this webtext, are particularly powerful catalysts within organizations for change because, as Porter et al observed, “space itself is a major factor in achieving systemic change: timely deployment and construction of space (whether it be discursive or physical) can be a key rhetorical action affecting institutional change” (p. 630). I am not, however, advocating the renaming of every computer lab on any campus because this metaphor may be in some ways inimical to writing instruction (as I argue elsewhere). That sort of sweeping discursive shift would be too complete and sudden, and as a result, it would likely fail. What I am advocating, though, is that we (a) analyze metaphors and metaphoric clashes as a means to expose tensions present in wireless writing places (see Sullivan & Porter, 1997, for more on metaphor analysis as a critical research practice) and (b) recognize the opportunity to contentiously name largely unsettled and uncategorized places outfitted with portable technologies and possibly enhance writing instruction’s status.