Framing

Really though, is there anything here the sophists weren’t familiar with?

Lakoff doesn’t claim to have created the concept. If I remember correctly, he defines framing within a historical context in one of his books.

Lakoff simply applies the concept to liberal politics in a way that hasn’t been achieved–or even seriously attempted–before.

As Josh notes, Lakoff doesn’t pretend to have created the concept of framing, and cites Goffman and several others in the reference section on framing in Moral Politics, but he does much more than apply the concept to liberal politics. He reframes framing in terms of his conceptual metaphor theory, and all of his political works (starting with the essays on the Gulf War) use a fairly unique version of framing analysis to explore American politics and suggest ways for liberals to use framing better.

There seem to be a lot of people who like his conceptual metaphor theory. That’s OK until people start to try to use it, in politics for example. Lakoff’s growing influence genuinely scares me because of how bad his theory really is. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Just look at the empirical evidence. You could start here, here, here, here (all are pdf files), and then read:

Keysar, K, & Bly, B. (1995). Intuitions of the transparency of idioms: Can one keep a secret by spilling the beans? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 89-109.
and
McGlone, M. S. (1996). Conceptual metaphors and figurative language interpretation: Food for thought? Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 544–565.

There are many more where those came from.

“Reframing” has been around in a popular form for some time. Self-help guru and zombie titan Anthony Robbins included a chapter on it in his first book, “Absolute Power”. Success-driven businessmen – the kind Teresa Nielsen Hayden calls “pointy haired bosses” – love it. It lets them reinterpret failure as something else.

To turn to the political side of this debate for a moment:

For those on the left, I think Lakoff’s book might be a double edged sword. Many people are turned off the left for two reasons – they dislike what they perceive to be a relativist approach to morals and reality; and they dislike the idea of being manipulated, either by self-appointed philosopher kings or focus-group oriented politicos.

Of course, these are not necessarily true accusations. But they are common perceptions. I know that at one time I shared them. And Lakoff is talking about perception.

Ironically, therefore, I would say that if democrats are too widely perceived to be reading books about manipulating people’s perception, they will do themselves no favours image-wise.

It might be better to spend more time sorting out what people on the left actually believe in and then communicating that, as simply and clearly as possible, to as many people as possible – and defending it trenchantly and fiercely.

At the very least, they could be a bit more bloody subtle!

nick, I’m not sure Lakoff’s goals in the two political books allows that sort of thing to be within his project in those books. Even if it were, I imagine it would bore the stew out of the majority of his readers. The books are written for people who are more interested in the practical, rather than theoretical aspects of Lakoff’s framing analysis. In other words, they’re books for laypeople, not for experts (or even amateurs who like to read the sort of stuff you mention). Neither book is meant to be an academic presentation of framing analysis. If you want something like that, read his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which is much more thorough than Metaphors We Live By, by the way). He doesn’t really detail the history of framing in great detail, there, but he discusses framing at length, without explicit political motivations. That’s where you’d have to go to do a serious scholarly critique of Lakoff’s theory of framing anyway.

I read Metaphors a few years ago, and very much enjoyed it.

So, I picked up Moral Politics and read that, and just bought 25 copies of Elephant to pass out to people.

If you want to dig into what Lakoff really says, read Moral Politics. Elephant is just a shortened version of it – still quite good, but not covering everything.

Jimmy Carter was labelled as a ‘flip-flopper’ in 1976.
John Kerry was labelled right out of the gate as a ‘flip-flopper'(before the ‘I was against before I was for’ comment).
Kerry spent his whole campaign fighting that ‘frame’.
Other years the ‘tax and spend’ frame is used to great affect.
What’s the last Democratic frame, you can recall, that the Republicans had to address for the duration of a campaign?
It’s not framing that’s new it’s that the democrats have never utilized it to any effect.

Perhaps due to an arrogance that if people knew the opponent they would agree with the democrats. That isn’t an effective approach obviously.

I have been following Lakoff’s work since Metaphors We Live By. It has been interesting to watch him move slowly move away from being an interesting academic to someone who has become increasingly involved in the electoral political process.

Whatever else you may say about Lakoff’s analysis of language in the political arena, he is at the very least trying to engage progressives in a debate about message. It’s true that framing is not a new idea, and Lakoff does not claim to have invented it. But what he has come to do, more than anyone else I can think of, is push us hard to understand why the images and the metaphors which Democrats have relied on for long are not as resonate as we expect them to be. Much of what he writes sounds like common sense once you have heard it, and yet one can only imagine Lakoff’s frustration at watching one election after another go by (Moral Politics came out in 1997) without the Democratic Party ever engaging in a wholesale critical review of how it presents itself to the world.

As “passing fancy” said above, Tony Robbins and others have done much to popularize framing and other such concepts which, they claim, form a part of NeuroLinquistic Programming (NLP). These people see NLP as a well developed, complete (and proven!) system for “personal change”. Their working vocabulary includes frames, metaphors, mental models, and many other such things. See also the entry on NLP in the skeptic’s dictionary (skepdic.com/neurolin.com) for, well, a skeptical view of NLP and NLP-based “technologies”.