Metaphor: the post post-modern Tar Baby

Thanks, and a tip of the hat, to Messers. Johnson and Lakoff for the suggestion that it probably does no good to try to logicize metaphors and turn them into conscious similes; even if by so doing we expose them for the vicious, underhanded, cowardly attempts, to persuade by bullying, while avoiding detection as willfully stupid, which most metaphors actually are.   What else, for example, are bad laws' being characterized as "useful tools," or the holding of the world hostage to the insane machinations of weapons manufacturers and their political bedfellows' being called "the protection afforded by a nuclear umbrella"? Perhaps you get my drift.  It hardly seems that anything is too absurd to be "swallowed" in the bland half-disguise of metaphor.   Why then stick at "rôle-playing"?

Is it not true, as Morry van Ments has written in his 1984 book, The Effective Use of Rôle-Play (A Handbook for Teachers and Trainers), that "[just as] when watching a play the audience needs to identify quickly the position of each character...[and] these titles or rôles are indicated in the cast list before the play even begins...[so] the extension of the concept of rôle to the way people behave in everyday life comes from a similar need in real life for people to summarize or condense what may be complex perceptions of another person's appearance or behavior"?

No, in fact, it's patently not true, so let us stop, for just a moment, to say:  HORSESHIT!  There is no such "similar need in real life" for people to metaphorize the job, duties, obligations, functions, and appearances of other people as the "rôles" they are "playing" (presumably in the Drama of Life).   Not even if we go quickly on to assert, as slipperily Mr. van Ments does without a breath, that "throughout our lives we are bombarded by sensations far greater in quantity than we can cope with."  Again, we say HORSESHIT! as we do to van Ments' next couple of sentences:  "The brain has mechanisms for coding and grouping this information so that we can make comparisons and decisions.  This process is called perception."  Note the wooziness of van Ments' antecedents:  "great quantity of sensations" becomes "information"; "mechanisms" becomes "process."  This fuzziness is deliberate, not inadvertent, for, being a somewhat subterfugitive social constructionist/behavioralist, van Ments is asserting, in quite the approved postmodern manner, that 'to perceive is to simplify, and to simplify is to falsify. The perception of identity, therefore, is a choice among relative essential untruths which we may as well call "rôles" as anything else.'   

(1)"The concept of rôle acts as a shorthand way of identifying and labelling a set of appearances and behaviors on the assumption that these appearances and behaviors are characteristic of a particular person and predictable within a given situation.

   

"In everyday life rôles may be ascribed to people in a variety of ways.  They may be allocated by social position such as teacher...cleaner...juvenile delinquent.  Often these rôles imply reciprocal relationships [parent/child, doctor/patient, etc.--as a matter of sickening fact, this is, apparently, always the case in heterosexual sexual rôle-playing].  A rôle is then a way of expressing group norms and the social pressures acting on an individual or group.  It characterizes a person's social behavior(2).

"Sometimes rôle is defined in terms of the context in which people find themselves such as church, concert hall, football match....

"Rôle may also be defined in terms of function or purpose such as [in a hospital] doctor, administrator, patient, chapelain....

"When people take a particular (2) rôle they are using a repertoire of behaviors (2) which are expected of that rôle...This behavior is often the result of internalizing the expectations of others--in other words doing what people expect of the person in that rôle...It is important for people to identify the framework of behavior and hence whether it is in accordance with the rôle which one assumes the other person is taking."

Rôle-taking  

"The process of rôle-taking is a natural and continuous one for anyone who is socialized within his community.  (3) It is a serious matter; most of our social life consists of such activity and failure to adapt to the right rôle at the right time can lead to a breakdown in communication. In conversation, for example...the ability to predict another person's reponse is partly aided by an awareness of the rôle they are taking at that particular time.  

"Of course a person's rôle will change throughout his life and indeed throughout the day....[One's] behavior at any given moment will indicate to others which rôle he is playing, and he in turn will adjust that behavior to comply with what he feels others expect (4).

"Just because rôles in everyday life are largely determined by a person's surrounding culture and his position in it means that that his rôle behavior will not always correspond to his disposition and feelings.  It is a common observation that people dissimulate and pretend to be a different person to what they really are.  (5) In that sense the rôle-taker may at times 'act out' being a president, judge, shopkeeper or doctor."

Rôle-playing

"The idea of rôle-playing derives from this everyday activity.  In rôle-playing one is practising a set of behaviors which is considered appropriate to a particular rôle.  It is a natural part of children's behavior and everyone will have experienced it as part of their childhood games.  

"There is an unfortunate confusion between rôle-playing and acting.  The essential difference is that acting consists of bringing to life a dramatist's ideas (or one's own ides) in order to influence and entertain an audience, whereas rôle-play is the experiencing of a problem under an unfamiliar set of constraints in order that one's own ideas may emerge and one's understanding increase.

 "The rôle-player, in contradistinction to the professional actor, is not concerned with an audience, but ony with himself and his fellow rôle-players.  His aim is to feel, react, and behave as closely as possible to the way someone placed in that particular situation would do...Thus the 'acting-out' in rôle-playing is, for all practical purposes, no greater than that which is done by the majority of people from time to time in the course of their everyday lives.

"The idea of rôle-playing is simple: to give students the opportunity to practise interacting with others in certain rôles.  The situation is defined by producing a scenario and a set of rôle-descriptions.  The scenario gives a background to the particular problem or environment and indicates the constraints which operate.  The rôle descriptions give profiles of the people involved.  

"The rôle play can be run for a few minutes up to a half an hour or even longer.  At the end there is a debriefing session in which observers may comment on the way in which the characters behaved and the lessons to be drawn from this.  The players will always take an important part in this debriefing.

"As a technique, rôle-play has proved to be very powerful.  It is highly motivating and enables students to put themselves in situations they have never experienced before...Much of our behavior in interpersonal interactions is governed by our assumptions about our own rôle, and other people's rôles, and the way we perceive these rôles...Rôle-playing can be used to teach simple skills of communication, to show how people interact, and their stereotyping of others, and to explore deep personal blocks and emotions." (8)

I am reminded of how, as a sixth-grader, I reacted on learning that in the next year I would be taking formal Physical Education, playing contact sports, and showering with other boys:  "No!  You've got my mind--Never will I surrender my body!"  And I didn't.  There were humiliations, and I was forced to shower with the other boys; but fortunately the spontaneous erections I feared under those conditions didn't happen.  And there was at least one triumph:  When compelled, as a high school sophomore, to go out upon a mat in front of the whole damned gym class and wrestle, one-on-one, with other boys, so great was my horror and panic (I suppose, at the actual physical contact), that my strength became as the strength of ten, and I threw my hapless opponents off like a bucking bronco, while (8) I made for the other side of the gym, much to the mingled consternation and amusement of all those present. My "advantage"--which it took putting me into two consecutive attempted "matches" for our P.E. instructor to begin to appreciate--was that I was not playing.  I had as little notion as a wild animal of "wrestling." Rather, in all earnestness, I was fighting for my life, resisting the embrace of death.  Afterwards, one of the boys who had witnessed my ordeal said to me, "You looked really scared out there today!"  To which I replied, "No doubt. It was horrifying."  "What?"  "I wasn't just frightened--I was horrified."

I am also reminded of my first day in a college American Geography class (in which at end of term I got a well-deserved A), a few years ago.  Our professor, a very intelligent young woman from Connecticut whom I grew to like and respect, had us all in that first hour write our names on slips of paper pinned to our chests, and asked that we go around the room introducing ourselves to one another:  I walked out, and when I returned twenty minutes later, I said quietly to Dr. Gresham, "I will not be socialized."  (7)

And so, to return to Rôles, as calmly and complacently expounded by the the utterly horseshitful Mr. van Ments.  No, (1) I do not for a fucking minute allow that my personal physician, for example, is playing the rôle of doctor.  she is a doctor, and she is who she is--and that is her character.  Period. There's not only no need for labelling and identifying her beyond that,--it would be insulting to do so.

(2) I, for one, am always in character--my own.  Nor do I respect anyone who, regardless of his job or position, behaves as anybody other than himself.  There are absolute standards of polite behavior and I adhere to them (while, of course, never for a fucking minute deviating from my primary responsibility of being true to myself).

(3) If I were ever conscious of myself as "taking a rôle," as if it were second nature to me--much less doing so continuously--I would be filled with such remorse and self-contempt that I would probably kill myself.  I think that I can say truthfully that I have never played any sort of rôle socially, and that I owe my not inconsiderable conversational skill both to my complete absence of "side," and to my pleasant ability to detect the actual character and personality of those I'm conversing with.

(4)  I make quite a studied point of never altering my behavior to suit the expectations of others--and I despise, I should hope, quite openly those who do.

(5)  It goes almost without saying, that, having the sympathetic, exquisitely civilized and compassionate character (a word that Mr. van Ments never uses in the substantive form and seems not to "understand") that I have, there is never any reason for me to pretend to be anything whatsoever. Consequently I am never put to the awful bother of 'acting' anything 'out.'