Johnson’s apt phrase, ‘we live by’.^30 These dead metaphors are the only ones
that are truly living in that they are constantly transmitted in linguistic
exchange, in that they define the common sense which enables us to apprehend
the world and share this understanding with others: a common sense that is
always in danger of congealing into good sense, the authorised way which
attests that we are indeed, as subjects, in our rightful place.
I speak of subjects as if they were directly interpellated by the institutions
that give them their identity. But the process is more complicated: the subject
is an end-of-the-chain production and its interpellation first of all passes
through rituals, which precisely have the role of attributing an identity to the
subject – that is, a place, a role in the social division of labour and collective
action. This is the privileged moment of the performative speech act, when
the judge adopts a solemn tone (in Britain he used to don a black cap) to
condemn the defendant to death: it is the moment of the instantaneous
incorporeal transformation, to speak in the manner of Deleuze, which produces
notable effects on the bodies that it affects. We are all concerned by such
rituals, which punctuate our daily lives and make us the social character we
are, by determining the place from which we speak. Had I had not, in the
distant past, participated in such academic rituals, it is a safe bet that you
would not be paying the same attention to my words (and this in a directly
material sense: I would have had difficulty finding a publisher). It will be
noted that the subject who emerges here is more collective than individual:
a ritual is not accomplished in solitude and the titles and the qualifications
that make me an authorised author have been personally awarded to me,
but I am not their only holder, as the very name of ‘national qualifications’
indicates. The issue is therefore at what point the individual subject separates
off from the collective subject. And the answer is: when the ritual becomes
a practice.
So a practiceis here something that transforms the solemnity of the collective
ritual into the banality of the daily life of the individual – the everyday life
of the young married people once the ritual of the great day and the exceptional
phase of the honeymoon are over. Here, collective ideology, with its clichés
and metaphors that we live by (and which form a system: Lakoff and Johnson
calls this ‘structural metaphors’ and their canonical example is ‘argument is
166 • Chapter Six
(^30) See Lakoff and Johnson 1980.