Of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Corporate Money: Rhetorical Choices in Supreme Court Decisions on Campaign Finance Regulation - Linda L. Berger

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Publication year: 2007
• Citation: Vol. 58 No. 3

Of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Corporate Money: Rhetorical Choices in Supreme Court Decisions on Campaign Finance Regulation by Linda L. Berger^*

Introduction

When a corporation participates in the public sphere, its participation often takes the form of money. Corporate money must be given to someone to bring corporate participation into being—money to spend on public relations, advertising, or lobbying, or money to spend in a political campaign. Though the form is the same, the Supreme Court has treated these modes of corporate participation very differently. on the one hand, corporate money is seen as speech when it is the means used for corporations to sell products or state positions on issues. on the other, a majority of the Rehnquist-O'Connor Court perceived corporate money spent in election campaigns as the root of evils threatening the political process.¹

Transforming corporate money into protected speech is metaphorical; it requires three metaphors acting together to compose the full picture—(1) the corporation must be viewed as a person, (2) spending money must be viewed as speech, and (3) the free market must be viewed as the appropriate model for analyzing free speech issues. With those metaphors mapping the way, corporate money talks,² and it is protected as speech.³

Isolating money as the reference point for corporate participation in election campaigns is metonymical; once money is designated as the stand-in to refer to an entire concept, it is again metaphorically transformed, but with a different result. Corporate money in election campaigns is portrayed as the wellspring of evil, a source of temptation, a taint or a poison, a torrent that will flood the market and drown individual voices. These metaphors free regulatory impulses; if money corrupts, tempts, poisons, and flows out of control, it must be subject to regulation.

At first glance, the outcome seems ironic:⁴ for the purposes of commercial speech⁵ analysis, corporate spending to create and distribute advertising and images is increasingly accepted as speech equal to that of other speakers in the marketplace of ideas; for the purposes of regulating corporate participation in elections themselves, corporate spending is "only money." Speech in the metaphorical market deserves protection; money in metonymical isolation requires regulation.

This Article examines the metaphorical and metonymical framing of corporate money in recent Supreme Court decisions about campaign finance regulation. In an earlier article,⁶ I focused on the use of metaphor to shape decisions about commercial speech protection by analyzing the briefs filed in Nike v. Kasky,⁷ a lawsuit in which Nike challenged California's attempted regulation as commercial speech of what Nike characterized as political speech.⁸ Similar metaphorical influences affected early decisions about the regulation of corporate spending in election campaigns. More recently, however, a metonymical move to isolate corporate money and then to focus on its malevolent tendencies has displaced the earlier view of corporate money as speech. This movement is best depicted in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission,"⁹ the Supreme Court's 2003 decision on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA").¹⁰ In McConnell a majority of the Court severed corporate money from the concepts of corporate speech and political participation in election campaigns¹¹ and focused instead on corporate money's potential to corrupt lawmakers, buy influence, flood the market, and distort the election process.

This Article will examine rhetorical choices in the debate about how to view corporate participation in election campaigns. Choices among different ways of portraying the target of governmental action affect judicial, lawyerly, and public understanding, reasoning, and evalua-tion.¹² Competing rhetorical moves appear to lead to different results: the marketplace of ideas in which corporations speak goes unregulated for First Amendment purposes, while the corporate money from which potential evils flow must be regulated to protect the election process. Courts may find it useful to behave as if these outcomes are determined by neutral principles, but it may be only the frame selected that makes it appear to be so.¹³

I. Metaphorical Mapping or Metonymical Stand-in

[N]either metaphor [nor] metonymy can take the stand as witness without perjuring itself. Metaphor can "swear to tell the truth, the whole truth" but would lie if it implied that it also tells "nothing but the truth." In contrast, metonymy can "swear to tell the truth . . . and nothing but the truth" but is unable to promise to tell "the whole truth."¹⁴

Metaphor and metonymy allow us to account for abstract and unfamiliar concepts by making connections to things we already know. While metaphor makes connections by imprinting a world on a word (from a source domain to a target domain), metonymy isolates essences and aspects as it displaces one word with an associated word, with a part of the whole, or with "that which surrounds or accompanies it, or the traces of its retreat."¹⁵ Because it focuses on only one aspect of the target, metonym cannot tell the whole truth; because it superimposes the characteristics of the source domain onto its target, metaphor cannot tell "nothing but the truth."

Although neither is contiguous with "the truth," metaphor and metonymy communicate meaning; they are thought to constitute the basis for much of our understanding of the world.¹⁶ The traditional view of metaphor was that it relied on resemblance or similarity: a metaphor was based on two entities that resembled each other in crucial ways.¹⁷ In metonymy (a word which I use to encompass the tropes traditionally identified as metonymy and synecdoche), "a thing is displaced by an attribute or something with which it is contiguous. Metonymy is the trope of shared association rather than similarity, of shared context or convention rather than the deeper logic of a shared meaning."¹⁸ In metonymy, meaning is displaced rather than trans-ferred.¹⁹ To call a thing by another name is a metaphor; to identify or capture a thing by one of its aspects is metonymy.²⁰ Though they work in different ways, metaphor and metonymy often work together.

In the case of metaphor, a decision-maker may conclude that one thing is sufficiently like the other to justify treating them the same way; this is so even though metaphor makes connections across domains (the target and the source are from different worlds or are of a different order). This is similar to the process of legal reasoning by analogy but happens without an explicit discussion or examination of similarities and differences. In the case of metonymy, a decision-maker may conclude that the association between the one thing and the other within the same domain is "so close that one may stand for the other as its crucial attribute."²¹ Again, the conclusion is drawn implicitly, not explicitly, without conscious examination of the closeness of the association or the crucial nature of the attribute.

A. Metaphor is More Than the Truth

Metaphor, formerly maligned²² and misunderstood, is ascendant.²³ Literal descriptions of truth—of how things are—are viewed as impossible.²⁴ In earlier times, "metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought."²⁵ Quintilian described metaphor and other figures of speech as "a purposeful deviation in sense or language from the ordinary simply form . . . [or] that which is poetically or rhetorically varied from the simple and immediately available means of expres-sion."²⁶ In contrast, contemporary theorists claim that "the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another."²⁷ As a result, metaphor "is primarily conceptual, conventional, and part of the ordinary system of thought and language."²⁸

Metaphor requires us to imagine a new idea "as" a more familiar one or an abstract concept "as" a concrete object. In this way, metaphor is crucial to accounting for how we see and understand the world; it is both a product (the perspective or frame which we impose when we see one thing "as" another) and a process (the way in which understanding and persuasion come into existence through mappings from one domain to another). Although similarity seems to be its basis, an initial unrelated- ness is the starting line—the reader must make an imaginative leap to see the resemblance.

Central to development of contemporary metaphor theory was a concept contributed early in the twentieth century by I.A. Richards: that metaphor works as "two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction."²⁹ Metaphor reflects "a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts."³⁰ As metaphor helps us understand the unfamiliar concept, it also shapes our thoughts about the new concept because it maps on top of the new experience the structures, inferences, and reasoning methods of the old.³¹

Another of the early theorists, Max Black, argued that the use of one complex system to select, emphasize, and organize relationships in another system was a distinctive intellectual operation, one that created meaning. Black explained the interaction theory of metaphor as a process of filtering and organizing, using one system as a lens for understanding another, rather than a process ofcomparison.³² That is, in the metaphor Man is a Wolf, the properties and relationships commonly believed to be true of man interact with the properties and relationships commonly believed to be true of Wolf to produce new meaning.³³ Rather than comparing objects to determine what similarities they share, Black suggested that we use an entire system to filter or screen or organize our conception or our perspective of some other system.³⁴ "The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and...