CC BY
17Approaching crisis discourse via Researcii
ArtiCle
metaphor: Some observations
from the post-Yugoslav public discourses
of the Covid-19 pandemic
Ksenija Bogetic
Abstract
Soon upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that society was faced with not only a health crisis, but also a crisis in communication. Research by now suggests that the pandemic has highlighted notions of collectivity and national belonging in a new key, where figurative, metaphorical language plays a central conceptual role. This paper uses the first results of a work in progress set in the post-Yugoslav area, which explores the intersections of crisis discourse, ideologies of collectivity, and memory politics, to present some observations on the dominant early-pandemic metaphorical representations.
Keywords
metaphor; Covid-19; crisis; public discourse
Received:
14 December 2022 Reviewed: 20 December 2022 Accepted: 23 December 2022 Published: 27 December 2022
UDC:
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2 Novi trg, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 81 42+
811.163.41+811.163.42
Corresponding author:
Ksenija Bogetic (Ms.), [email protected]
For citation:
Bogetic, Ksenija. 2022. "Approaching crisis discourse via metaphor: Some observations from the post-Yugoslav public discourses of the Covid-19 pandemic." Language. Text. Society 9 (2). https://ltsj.online/2022-09-2-bogetic.
Language. Text. Society
Vol. 9 No. 2, 2022
ISSN 2687-0487
Introduction
In March 2020, national leaders across Europe addressed their citizens with solemn televised speeches to announce the outbreak of Covid-19 and the ensuing measures for tackling the spread of the disease. In many ways these speeches set the scene for the ensuing public rhetoric that would attempt to account for the unprecedented health crisis, couched in a notably similar figurative language across the globe (Dada et al. 2021), repeating metaphors such as wars, invisible enemies or lockdowns/closures. Xi Jinping vowed to wage a 'people's war' against the COVID-19 epidemic; Angelo Borelli announced that Italy should know that 'we are now in a war economy, but we will proudly sing our national anthem', while Donald Trump described himself as a 'war-time president' in 'our war against the Chinese'. Common to many of these addresses in the early days of the pandemic, indeed, were the ways in which they subtly or not so subtly combined political reference and hinted at wider politics of differentiation, nationalism and authoritarianism. In the next two months, the media articles would both take up on these metaphorical frames and develop them further, while also soon beginning some explicit questioning of the suitable and unsuitable metaphors for the ongoing emergency.
Conceptually, the discourses of Covid-19 underscore the central, and often troublesome, role of metaphor in making sense of complex and unprecedented events such as the outbreak of a global pandemic. From perspectives of cognition, this importance of metaphor is not surprising. What we seek when faced with new situations is more simple shorthand to think and talk about the unknown, like pandemic waves and invisible enemy. The pervasiveness of metaphoricity in the pandemic reality is similarly expected: as a cognitive process at the core of human thought, metaphor helps us reason about abstract concepts ('target domains') precisely by using more simple, concrete concepts ('source domains'), like seeing IMPORTANCE as SIZE ('today is a big day') or LIFE as JOURNEY ('I got nowhere in life'). While the global understanding of the pandemic in all its abstract and hard-to-describe elements was a metaphorical one from its very beginning (Olza et al. 2021), the use and effects of metaphors in communicating the pandemic have by now attracted a lot of argument, concerning the inadequacy of particular metaphorical frames, or the implications of using particular source domains in making sense of illness.
Indeed, we know from cognitive linguistic research that metaphors are not neutral ways of perceiving and representing reality, as selected source domains always highlight some aspects of a situation and background others. There is by now ample evidence that metaphors have framing effects, affecting how we think and feel about problems and solutions (Semino 2021; see also Gibbs 2017; Thibodeau et al. 2017), and eliciting greater emotional responses than literal counterparts (Citron and Goldberg 2014).
WAR metaphors in particular—dominant in framing of the new virus e.g. battles, front lines, combat)—have attracted an unprecedented amount of criticism from diverse social agents, not only for their widely discussed emotional effects pertaining to illnesses in general, but also for their covert or overt political implications (e.g. Chapman et al. 2020, Sabucedo et al. 2021, Semino 2021). As the early speeches on situations like the US people's 'war against the Chinese', or the national anthem in a 'war economy' already suggested, analysts soon observed particular parallels between the language of discussing nationalism and pandemics (Bieber 2020), where collective histories may both play a role (see also Banjeglav and Moll 2020) and get re-framed themselves in the process. Insights on all these related aspects of metaphor are now beginning to emerge in what has really been an explosion of metaphor research in anglophone and western context in particular, but also appearing elsewhere (e.g. Olza et al. 2021, Sousa et al. 2021, Despot et al. 2020, Rakitic 2021, Panzeri et al. 2020). What most of this work suggests more or less explicitly, is the importance of looking at different sociopolitical contexts in order to understand the realizations and effects of similar established metaphors, as well as the new and creative ones.
This paper uses the first results of a work in progress set in the post-Yugoslav area, which explores the intersections of crisis discourse, ideologies of collectivity and nationhood, and memory politics in the post-socialist, post-conflict region. The analysis below will remain more limited to a discussion of approaches to metaphor and discourse, focusing on the dominant early-pandemic metaphorical representations, observed in different types of discourse in two states of this area. Rather than presenting a quantitative corpus analysis, the paper uses the data and findings to discuss certain observations that may illustrate patterns relevant for the burgeoning studies of metaphor and pandemic discourse unfolding today.
Approaching metaphors of the pandemic in public discourse
This study follows the aims of the wider project that will strive to apply a systematic empirical and socio-historically grounded metaphor approach to discourses of crisis. In the former Yugoslav area, with its revisions of history, and persisting echoes of conflict, such an approach is precious to assess claims of (re)amplified nationalist oppositions in pandemic discourses, but also to observe the wider dynamics of metaphor use—both the established metaphors now described internationally, and the more creative ones.
Specifically, the methodology found productive for this kind of investigation involves linking cognitive linguistic metaphor analysis with the approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA; Fairclough 1995, Wodak 2004). Its underlying stance is that the cognitive linguistic conceptual focus is enriched by CDA's detailed textual analysis, adding dimensions of ideology and power as reflected in language. This makes the approach open to further interactions with areas like political science and memory studies, especially relevant in the case of societies with recent crisis experience and fervid negotiations in memory politics. Finally, for integrative and systematic empirical study, this connection is valuably further complemented by corpus linguistics. In the discussion and case study that follows, however, our aim is constrained to presenting some observations from the analysis thus framed, rather than the full corpus linguistic results. Still, methodological concerns will be highly relevant to this discussion and its implications for future work.
In the end, combinatory methodology is also taken as important to the project's focus on not only the dominant, top-down political discourses, but also their resonance with (new) media and citizen discourse. Specifically, today's co-existence of producer- and user-generated content—like social media, or news articles and online reader comments below them—is transforming the public space, with the power of media consumers coming to parallel media producers. In this view, for many types of metaphor study, expanding the perspective to citizen discourses in online contexts is useful, as attested in the growing numbers of studies of the language of the pandemic in various digital contexts (Colak 2022, Wicke and Bolognesi 2020, Olza et al. 2021, Sousa et al. 2021)
Below, media discourses from two former Yugoslav states, Serbia and Croatia, complemented by online citizen discourses, are used as a basis for discussing the metaphoricity of Covid-19 communication in the public sphere in the first months of the pandemic. At the centre of attention are the WAR metaphors that have emerged elsewhere (Chapman and Miller 2020, Castro-Seixas 2021, Wicke and Bolognesi 2020) as pervasive both in the global public discourses of Covid-19, and in academic research, commentary and criticism. The focus on the post-Yugoslav area, however, brings some fresh insights on the conceptual and social aspects of the WAR metaphors, and will allow a discussion of several selected patterns relevant more broadly.
CASE STUDY: WAR metaphors old and new in two post-Yugoslav states
The early discourses of Covid-19 in the post-Yugoslav area were marked by ample use of WAR metaphors (Banjeglav and Moll 2020), but also some public commentary quite early on about the meanings of such metaphorical frames, especially in the local political contexts. A lot of this, of course, taps into much wider issues of discursive meanings of this particular metaphor. Most notably, while it is no surprise that a new and evasive disease is introduced metaphorically, nor that it has so pervasively called forth the metaphors of WAR, the meaning and possible consequences of this now unrivalled public frame for the pandemic merit attention both given what we know about it from previous research and given what appears its specific discursive shape today. Psycholinguists have shown that the schematic-moral structure of WAR imbues it with distinct emotional and problemsolving effects: as experimentally confirmed, a single WAR metaphor use, compared to e.g. ILLNESS or SPORT, can prompt people to choose radically different solutions to a presented social problem, such as punishment vs. treatment of causes (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). In the discourse of medicine, interestingly, WAR metaphors have been widely found problematic, particularly in the effects on the patients (Semino 2018). In public discourse research, from another angle, any increase in the use of the WAR metaphor has been suggested to signal changes of policy, setting the scene for authoritarian politics and limiting of people's rights (e.g. Ross 1986).
Still, what WAR means in the different contexts of pandemic communication, and what it means for different communities, is in no way uniform. The same holds for the much discussed political resonance and political manipulability of this metaphor, which is likely to have a distinct weight in societies with actual war experience and the centrality of this experience in public discourse, as is still the case in post-Yugoslav societies. Recent observations from this area indeed point to specific interrelations of sociopolitical discourses reflected in the major selected metaphors in the pandemic, and especially in the case of WAR (Babic et al. 2021, Jambrek et al. 2020), though so far discussed mostly in a perspective of cultural and political analysis and analysis of discourse.
Here we expand the existing work on metaphors in the public discourse of the pandemic, in a wider perspective of metaphor contexts and sociopolitical representations concerning the pervasive WAR metaphors, in the context of two ex-Yugoslav states: Serbia and Croatia. The data used include a small specialized corpus of political address and related media texts from the first three months of crisis (25 news articles, 17,512 words, Serbia; 29 news articles, 20,744 words, Croatia), which spans the reports of political leaders' addresses and measures introduced, as well as other thematically relevant articles on the pandemic; this corpus is complemented by corpora of the respective citizen comments posted below the articles (331 comments, 5,282 words, Serbia; 540 comments, 6,914 words, Croatia), and small specialized corpora of thematically relevant tweets (150 Serbia, 150 Croatia), randomly scraped via the Twitter API using covid, kovid and koronavirus as search terms.
A. Observations from media discourse: Explicit analogies and blurred metaphoricity
In both Croatia and Serbia, the WAR metaphor featured with similar prominence in the early political addresses and media reports of the pandemic. The lexical realizations of this metaphor would typically involve repeated instances of war, as well as mentions of specific battles, attacks and victory, and the notorious invisible enemy. Thus, for example, the speech of the Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic on 15th March 2020, when he proclaimed a state of emergency, started with:
(1) Postovani gradani, Srbija je od danas u ratu protiv nevidljivog i opasnog protivnika, koju nasa zemlja mora da pobedi. [...] Ovo ce za nas biti najteza bitka za nas narod bitka za nase stare i bolesne, oni su meta ovog zestokog napada.
'Dear citizens, as if today Serbia is at war against an invisible and dangerous enemy, whom our country has to beat. [...] This will be the hardest battle for our people, a battle for the old and sick, they are the target of this fierce attack.'
A day before, on 14th of March 2020, state media across Croatia reported the similar 'war announcement' of the Prime Minister Plenkovic, with the WAR frame including more than the virus itself:
(2) U ratu smo protiv virusa, panike i ekonomske krize (title). Mi smo u ratu protiv virusa, u ratu protiv panike i u ratu protiv negativnih drustveno-ekonomskih posljedica ove globalne pandemije. U postupanju prema suzbijanju koronavirusa, pratili smo na vrijeme situaciju u Kini i poduzeli prve zastitne mjere i prije nego sto je WHO proglasio opasnost od epidemije.
'We are at war against the virus, panic and economic crisis (title). We are at war against the virus, at war against panic, and at war against negative social-economic consequences of this global pandemic. In acting towards suppressing the coronavirus, we followed the situation in China on time and took the first steps of protection long before the WHO announced the danger of an epidemic.'
A lot of other news titles and news article openings used the same frame, which would soon go from announcements of war, to explanations of its progress and crisis in losing the war:
(3) Brutalna istina: Mi smo u ratu. Rat nosi zrtve. Smrt postaje dio nase svakodnevice
'The brutal truth: We are at war. War brings victims. Death becomes a part of our everyday reality.'
(4) Hrvatska gubi rat protiv korone (title) 'Croatia is losing the war against the coronavirus'
The WAR metaphors in this context indicate that at times of initial Covid communication, representations of crisis entailed not only accounts of current events and measures needed, but also careful political messages. Political actors' accounts of the 'ongoing war' also strove to justify own actions, and instill authority and trust. An important feature of these discourses got to involve a historicization of crisis, a selective, nationally-oriented analogizing with real wars of the past, where literal and metaphorical senses of WAR relate and blend. This was prominent in the speech of Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia, who combined metaphors with references to several historical wars Serbia has fought since 1804 (5); in Croatia, conversely, a common reference point got to involve analogies with the 1990s wars (6):
(5) Vucic je istakao da smo od 1804. godine i od uspostavljanja moderne srpske drzave, "ginuli, ginuli, ginuli", te da je dobro da postujemo istoriju, tradiciju i pokazujemo koliko volimo zemlju.
'Vucic stressed that since 1804, from the first day of the emergence of the modern Serbian state, "we have been getting killed, killed and killed".'
(6) Krizna je to situacija, ali hrvatska prosvjeta prozivljavala je i teze dane. Pa je sve funkcioniralo! Naime, tijekom Domovinskog rata, radio je bio medij kojim su se skole sluzile kako bi ucenicima prenosile znanje. [...] Dobili smo taj rat, dobit cemo i ovaj.
'It is a crisis situation, but the Croatian education system has been through worse. And everything functioned! Namely, during the Homeland War, the radio was the medium that schools used to transmit knowledge to students. We won that war, we will win this one as well'
In historicizing representations of this type, winning literal and metaphorical, past and present wars, gets explicitly compared, while the metaphorical senses easily get blurred with the literal, as in the account of the Serbian people getting killed. In contexts with salient memories of actual wars, such blurred metaphors have the potential to achieve a specific discursive and emotional effect, with resonance of national victimhood and heroicism. While words like solidarity mark the early discourses of Covid, the figuratively coloured statements coming from local positions of power would carefully limit any such solidarity to a national frame, in contrast to 'others' and perceived continual threats to the nation. It is in this vein that the March 15 Serbian speech concluded:
(7) To za nas nije laka stvar, ali da ne smemo prema svom narodu da se ponasamo onako kako se drugi prema nama ponasaju. Predaja nije opcija, predaja nikada nije bila opcija, i nece biti opcija za Srbiju. Boricemo se i pobedicemo'.
'This is not easy for us, but we must not treat our people the way others treat us. Surrender is not an option, surrender has never been an option and will not be an option for Serbia. We will fight and win.'
Arguably, as some emerging analysis from the post-Yugoslav region suggest (see Banjeglav and Moll 2020), the interpretation of such representations rests upon their resonance with the past vocabulary of the war shared in the citizens' collective memory. To give two more examples:
(8) Nije lako biti premijer u vrijeme kada imate pandemiju svjetskih razmjera koja je mnogo jace ekonomije i drzave stavila na koljena. Mogao sam se i ja za vrijeme pandemije skloniti kao sto su mnogi uradili. Kada su vidjeli da je ofanziva prosla, izmigoljili su iz svojih skrovista i sada kritikuju.
'It is not easy to be a prime minister in times of a globally-spread pandemic that has put much stronger economies and states on their knees. I could have also hidden during the pandemic, the way many did. When they saw the invasion had passed, they crawled out of their shelters and now they are criticizing.'
(9) Za to bi bila potrebna nesto produljena karantena, ali cilj bi bio da postanemo jedna od prvih corona-free zona u svijetu. To bi bilo analogno stvaranju oslobodenih podrucja u ratovima, na kojima se zivot moze normalizirati.
'That would require a somewhat extended quarantine period, but the goal would be to become one of the first corona-free zones in the world. It would be analogous to creating liberated areas in war-time, where life can be normalized'.
Interpreting both the explicit analogies (9 above) and metaphorical accounts (8 above) is bound to unfold in distinct ways in post-war societies, or societies with ongoing armed conflict. The meaning of shelters evoked in relation to the behaviour of other politicians in (9) has retained resonance in Croatia in the context of war-time shelters, and does not rest merely on some universal conceptual
effect of metaphors of WAR; the same is true in the media descriptions of invasion or liberated areas in war-time. It is then important to observe that the local realizations of the globally pervasive WAR metaphors will have different effects and allow different forms of instrumentalization power in the context observed. Beyond the illustrations of present pilot study, future work in this project will emphasize the importance and challenges of unifying such careful discursive-historical analysis and conceptual metaphor analysis. Moreover, similar patterns, as well as some differences, are expected to occur in citizen online discourses, to which we turn in the following section.
B. Observations from citizen discourse: Meta-commentary, criticism and creativity
WAR metaphors are an important feature in the citizen discourse corpora, similarly employed in the news comments and tweets. While the news discourses use the WAR frame mainly in reference to national and collective struggle, here WAR is seen to refer to both collective and individual struggle, and questionings thereof. To give just a few examples:
(10) Tesko da je ovo neki rat sem medijskog bombardovanja'
'This is hardly a war, aside from a media bombing' (ComCorpus/Sr, April 2020)
(11) Kad pogledam svoj stan ovih nedelja, jasno je da u ovom ratu s koronom ne pobedujem bas 'When I look at my apartment these past weeks, it is clear that in this war with Covid I am not exactly winning' (TwCorpus/Sr, April 2020)
(12) I opet zazivanje rata. Al generacije koje rat znaju, znaju i gdje ga nema, a demagogije im dosta.
'And calling forth the wars again. But the generations that know war know when it is not there, and they have had enough of demagogy' (ComCorpus/Hr, March 2020)
The examples highlight a notable meta-linguistic dimension in the data, where the posters often explicitly comment on the suitability of the WAR metaphor (this is hardly a war; how long will we be calling forth a war?), and also explicitly negate it. Just for illustration, 3.4% of tweets in the Serbian corpus and nearly 3% in the Croatian corpus, employ the WAR metaphor frames in negation form, while the same is the case in only 0.3% and 0.1% in the Serbian and Croatian news corpus respectively. A common resistance to metaphor (Renardel de Lavalette et al. 2019) refers to the framing of the whole situation as a WAR, with observable references to political manipulations of earlier real wars:
(13) Nije vam ovo rat, mada biste opet od njega nesto ucarili
'This is not a war, though you would like to gain something form it again' (ComCorpus/Sr, March 2020)
In addition, a more specific target of resistance to metaphor pertains especially to personification metaphors. In such examples, it is possible to observe both a resonance with the major current political discourses (as is likely the case with the enemy from some medieval struggle in the Serbian comment in 15), as well as novel and creative realizations (like the old man from another dimension):
(14) Korona nije nikakva osoba, niti dijete koje vam je izgovor za sve.
'Corona is no person, or a kid who's your excuse for everything' (ComCorpus/Hr, May 2020)
(15) A ako korona nije neprijatelj iz neke srednjevekovne bitke, nego starac iz skroz druge dimenzije koji nam ukazuje sta sve ne valja u drustvu? '
And what if corona is not the enemy form some medieval battle but an old man from a whole different dimension showing us all the things that are wrong in society?' (TwCorpus/Sr, April 2020)
Both cases reflect direct metaphor negotiation of two opposed metaphorical frames, in the form of 'A is not B but C', as a kind of 'corrective framing' that achieves specific rhetorical effects (cf. Bogetic 2017) precisely via the direct juxtaposition. The established WAR frame is in this case countered by established or new metaphorical frames, and occasionally also literal descriptions ('we are not facing war, but a health crisis'; 'they are not fighting war, but illness').
In fact, many of the creative metaphor uses in the data occur in direct metaphorical opposition to WAR, whereby creativity can be achieved via metaphor resistance, contrast, extension, particularization, or any combination thereof. To use a few more examples:
(16) Nema tu rata, nama ni ne treba rat nego mali vetric sve da nas srusi
'There is no war here, we don't even need a war, but a light wind to crush us all' (ComCorpus/Sr, March 2020)
(17) Narod dobro zna da ovo nije rat, nego tuca ludaka sa samim sobom, koju gledamo vec decenijama
'The people know well that this is not a war, but a lunatics' fight with themselves, which we have been watching for decades' (TwCorpus/Sr, March 2020)
In (16), the opposition to war presented by the metaphor of a 'light wind' contrasts the seriousness of the representation, and targets the society / social situation and preparedness, rather than the seriousness of the illness itself. (17) similarly employs the resistance to the war metaphor to discuss the pandemic in the social and political context. Unlike the 'light wind', however, the example illustrates metaphorical use where the frame of violence/attack is retained, but changed in content (its trivialized form is used to refer to the (probably post-war) political situation present 'for decades'). The 'lunatics' fight with themselves' can be seen both as a particularization and a narrowing of the WAR representation, which nevertheless produces a novel, one-off metaphorical mapping.
Overall, if we look for creative metaphors, media data, at least in the first three months of the pandemic, do not appear the best source of examples; carefully crafted messages and chosen metaphors present a subset of similar, established metaphorical representations, though their contexts and expansion in discourse can vary to a significant extent. The citizen data, both in news comments and twitter posts, even in the small sub-corpus used here, show a diverse range of metaphorical examples in parallel with the dominant war metaphor from public discourse.
Importantly, as seen above, a resonance of war memories and often explicit negotiation of both dominant crisis discourses and memory politics plays a role in the general meaningfulness of representations of this kind for the local populations. The inaptness of metaphor pointed out in the citizen comments is not just to do with its general connotations or known effects, but centrally linked to the idea that 'we know well what war is' and that 'this is not the case'. While actual corpus analysis of the material is ongoing, it can overall be observed here that in the two post-Yugoslav states studied, citizen discourses exhibit a great metalinguistic challenging, criticism and resistance to the war frame, even if they seem to refer to war as commonly as in the news discourses and political statements illustrated in section A.
Conclusion
The importance of war analogies and collective memory in the Covid-19 discourse observed here suggests the need to look beyond conceptual domain mappings and correspondences, towards a historically sensitive analysis of local contexts and events. In many post-war societies and areas of current conflict, the fact that we know what war is means that this globally common metaphor can have very specific conceptual, emotional and rhetorical effects. Analyses of different forms of discursive contexts, including the top-down media and political discourses, but also the bottom-up citizen discourses, have the potential to reveal further the aspects of the military metaphor as context-bound, dynamic, and socio-historically contingent, especially in societies where they evoke analogies with earlier crises and conflict.
In addition to war metaphors, a lot of resistance to the metaphor is observed in the citizen data in particular, with metaphorical reframing reflecting ongoing negotiations of the sanitary and political realities. From a methodological perspective, the prominence of negation in the citizen data points to the need for carefully connecting quantitative and qualitative analysis, especially as the salience of a single metaphorical representation (in this case war) does not necessarily reflect its acceptance by discursive actors. It is also this resistance to metaphor that often becomes a source of creative and novel metaphors. While these are often one-off, rhetorical devices, the 'A is not B but C' figurative responses have the potential to create alternative frames for the situation that may get established in future discourse. More broadly, tracing the uses of this metaphor over time can be a useful resource for analyzing the political discourses of crisis and understanding the shifting conceptualizations of control, citizen freedoms and social relations, but also for understanding how such frames get adopted, resisted, and subverted.
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