Jessop (2013, p. 236) defines a social imaginary as ‘a semiotic ensemble (without tightly defined boundaries) that frames individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or guides collective calculation about that world’. A pervasive imaginary, according to Jessop, is that of the economic imaginary. The transfer and exchange of capital is reified as a conceptual space known as ‘the market’ where capital, in the form of goods, services, commodities and assets, can be valued and traded. I argue that, whilst modes of production and exchange have a material correlate, the historical development of liberal capitalism has moved from the material conditions of production to increasingly abstract conditions of exchange, and that these abstract conditions are circumscribed by the fuzzy parameters of ‘the market’. This approach constitutes an experiment in the development of a Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (see Hart, 2014). Drawing from conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003) and embodied simulation theory (Bergen, 2012), I demonstrate how abstract representations of ‘the market’ in public discourse are grounded in general subjective experience (Barsalou, 2008). Further to this, I argue that ‘the market’ is an imagined reality that possesses the attributes of a divinity in that its functions are expressed as possessing agency, affectivity, force, and process.

1. Investigating Social Imaginaries: Metaphors of
the Market Terry McDonough

2. Sign-posting
1. Background: CPE and ‘social imaginaries’
2. Approach: CLA-CDA with NTL/ECG
3. Data: Tweets about ‘the market’
4. Analysis: Describe constructions (form-meaning)
5. Analysis: Specify and interpret semantic-conceptual composition
6. Analysis: Explain the neural basis of metaphorical construal

3. Some background

4. Cultural Political Economy (CPE)
CPE is a post-disciplinary trajectory within (critical) political economy
that seeks to rethink the role of culture within political economy.
(Schou and Hjelholt, 2018)
CDA and CPE incline to critical realism rather than poststructuralism
and focus analysis on relations between discursive and material
elements of social life rather than just discourse (Fairclough, 2014)
Focus on semiosis or ‘the intersubjective production of meaning’
(Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer, 2013)

5. Economic Imaginaries
• ‘actually existing economy’ as the chaotic sum of all economic
activities;
• The ‘economy’ as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent
subset of these activities;
• Totality… so unstructured and complex that it cannot be an object of
calculation;
• Economic imaginaries rely on semiosis to constitute subsets;
• Partial or material correspondence to real material
interdependencies;
(Jessop, 2014)

6. PRODUCTION
Commodities
Goods
Labour
Services
VALUE
Cost
Price
Trade
Wage
MARKET
Currency
Investment
Speculation
Exchange
SurplusSurplus
‘actual existing economy’ (Jessop, 2014)
‘imaginatively narrated’ economy (Jessop, 2014)
Consumption
70%
30%

7. Guiding Questions
What constitutes the ‘intersubjective production of meaning’?
How are abstract imaginaries co-produced?
How are interdiscursive abstractions realised in text and talk?
How is coherence maintained and preserved?
Is there a neurocognitive correlate? That is, how does the brain ground
complex abstractions?

8. Is the Emperor wearing no clothes..?

9. Outlining an approach

10. A Cognitive Linguistic Approach
(to CDA)
Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995, 2009) and Cognitive Linguistic
Approaches (Lukeš, 2009; Chilton, 2014; Hart, 2014, inter alia)
• ‘…explicitly theorizes the relationship between linguistic structures in texts and
conceptual structures in the minds of discourse participants’ (Hart, 2014: p.11).
• ‘…It also affords a lens on ideological properties of texts and conceptualization
which have hitherto been beyond the radar of CDA’ (Hart, 2014: p.11).

11. A Neural Theory of Language
How does the brain compute the mind? (ICBS/ICSI, UC Berkeley)
• Views language as ‘an embodied neural system’ (Feldman, 2015).
• ‘…we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to
experience the things that the language describes’ (Bergen, 2012).
• Uses Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) to specify ‘schematic idealizations
that capture recurrent patterns of sensorimotor experience’ (Bergen and Chang,
2005).
Discourse (minimal) as a ‘hard’ problem

12. Embodied Construction Grammar
• CxG: form-meaning pairs (usage based)
• Deep semantic specification (Semspec):
embodied schemas (incl. metaphor)
• Parameterize active simulations
• Lattice-based configuration
• Computational formalism: ECG2
Workbench (NLU)
• Stochastic Petri (neural) nets
• Here: underspecify (time constraints)

13. Why underspecify?

14. Collecting the data

15. Tweeting the market
• Twitter as a corpus of ‘searchable talk’
(Zappavigna, 2011)
• Self-reported mood predicts market trends
(Bollen et al, 2011)
Data: Random sampling of tweets (n=47) based
on Boolean operator/s:
(“market” AND “markets”) NOT “marketing” OR “marketed”

16. Describing the data

17. Describing the data: Agency
MARKET AS:
PERCEIVING AGENT
(time-as-space schema)
MARKET AS:
ACTIVE AGENT
(value-as-vertical schema)

18. Describing the data: Force
MARKET AS:
COERCIVE FORCE
(finance-is-war schema)
MARKET AS:
OPPOSITIONAL FORCE
(finance-is-war schema)
MARKET AS:
ORGANISING FORCE
(finance-is-war schema)

19. Describing the data: Space
MARKET AS:
SPATIAL CONFIGURATION
(trajector-landmark schema)
MARKET AS:
SPATIAL CONFIGURATION
(trajector-landmark schema)
MARKET AS:
SPATIAL LOCATION
(container schema)
*water metaphor

20. Interpreting the data

21. NP (ABSTRACT AGENT) = (BLENDED) SENSORY-MODAL STATE
• (i) human perception; (ii) time-as-space
• Agent role ontology is a blended state (perception of time as space)
• The sensory modality is active, continuous, and derived from embodied
perception
• The ‘market’ is an embodied agent; it is grounded
Interpreting the data
MARKET AS:
PERCEIVING AGENT
(time-as-space schema)

22. NP (Abstract) - - > MATERIAL [verbal] PROCESS
• Abstract agent performs a material process (action [rally < - - WAR])
• The material process has a motivation and a goal (S-P-G schema)
• S-P-G subcase - - > container schema (“in”)
• The material process is teleological: it expresses function/s
• The abstract agent is personified (agentic)
Interpreting the data
MARKET AS:
ORGANISING FORCE
(finance-is-war schema)

23. Rwanda gov’t back on the market
Foreign laundered money out of the property market
Twice debuted in an *oversaturated market
MARKET
[container]IN OUT
ON
Interpreting the data
MARKET AS:
SPATIAL CONFIGURATION
(trajector-landmark schema)
MARKET AS:
SPATIAL LOCATION
(container schema)
*water metaphor

24. Explaining the data

25. • Primes from ‘constantly performed motor functions’ e.g. UP, DOWN, IN,
OUT (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: pp.56-57).
• Embodied experience gives rise to image schemas (Johnson, 1987) such as
the verticality schema (up=good; down=bad) or the container schema
(in=close; out=distant).
• Meaning as ‘centrally involving the activation of perceptual, motor, social,
and affective knowledge that characterizes the content on the utterances’
(Bergen, 2012)
• Motor representations are activated by verb usage (Glenberg and Kashak,
2002; Gallese and Lakoff, 2005; Glenberg and Gallese, 2011)
• Schematic orientation affects subject response: ‘eagle is in flight’ vs. ‘eagle
is at rest’ (Zwaan et al, 2001, 2002)
Explaining the data

26. Neural Basis of Metaphor
• Spreading activation and neural choreography binds cortical circuits
(Lakoff, 2009; Narayanan, 2017)
• Observed Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) shows post-synaptic
latency between sensorimotor co-activants and hippocampal PbV
(Narayanan, 2017; Shastri, 2002)
• Latency decreases as domain mappings become entrenched
(Narayanan, 2017)
• Explanation: metaphors initiate cross-domain asymmetric firings
between neural circuits responsible for sensorimotor input and
control

27. Austerity: Grounding Weakens Over
Time
• Result from small sample
corpus (austerity texts
[n=12], 2009 to 2012)
• Concrete relations
between conceptual
constituents lessen over
time
• Abstract relations between
conceptual constituents
increase over time
0.00%
2.00%
4.00%
6.00%
8.00%
10.00%
12.00%
2008.5 2009 2009.5 2010 2010.5 2011 2011.5 2012 2012.5
Frequency
Distribution (Time)
Concrete
Abstract
Space
Force/Motion
Linear (Concrete)
Linear (Abstract)
Linear (Space)
Linear (Force/Motion)

28. FINAL REMARKS
• Further ECG analysis to develop a deep semantics of ‘market-based’
discourses (and other social imaginaries)
• Ways of handling metaphorical complexes
• Statistical evidence from a corpus-based approach (???)
• Comparative study with religious discourses: is ‘the market’
conceptualised as a deity (replete with priesthood, rituals, and
beliefs)?
• Psycholinguistic and neuroscientific evidence

29. Contact: t.mcdonough@lancaster.ac.uk |
www.erotao.wordpress.com
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