Cliches -have a point (sic?)

After pointing out that the philosophers of language are wrong to be looking for a simple 'answer' to the questions about how language works and means, Prof Abhijit Banerjee reckons, in relation to cliches:

 cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience. Like categories, cliches are sets of images, stories and definitions compressed into seemingly simpler concepts that are labelled by some sort of an expression.

It seems to me that 'sets' and 'compressed' are key words there. I think that he's 'naming' the phenomenon of 'clumping' as it might be referred to in educational circles. We do it all the time; we learn that certain things have certain relationships and we find that insightful enough to wish to express it briefly in order to use the new 'unit' of meaning in sentences and to co-ordinate it with other 'units'. So cliches aren't so different from words or phrases given other labels, so what makes them deserve a different signifier?

Cliches are types of categories. Or better still, cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience

This relates to the matters touched on in the Homo Loquens tag-strand of this blog which I note is about categorisation and that categories are fluid enough to be able to nest one inside another and thus the link to clumping.

The cliche, it seems to me has some kind of kinship with Foucault's 'signature' (if I understand Agamben aright) where there is a certain meaning which is transferable to different domains or fields. Cliches capture a semantic 'something' that can be found in various situations, but where at one time it was perhaps insightful, it then passed to fashionable and from there it became a formerly-fashionable-but-now-dead-metaphor. It seems to me that the opprobrium for cliches is about their failure towards the end of their llife to produce insight.

The issue, then, is twofold: whether the application of the 'semantic something' is accurate and whether it is capable of serving the needs or aspirations of the interlocutors for insight. If those things don't take place then Banerjee's concern is realised:

Bad things happen not because somebody wants bad things to happen but because we don’t do our homework. We don’t think hard enough. We’re not open minded enough

This comment helps to connect metaphor and cliche to organisational life and thus to corporisations. There are metaphors and cliches that organisations tend to use ('bottom line'? Silos?) that tend to prompt and co-ordinate or prime behaviours and may consolidate groupthink. All of these things mean that the organisation is less able as a whole to respond intelligently and adaptively because the false friends and misdirection of the internal communications produced by cliched usage hide reality and derail insight. Sometimes bad things happen as a result.

This enable us to see the value of the poets (understood broadly): they can produce a turn of phrase which can capture or frame an insight or slice of reality which displaces (or at least challenges) an tired or ill-fitting (that is cliched) one. Sometimes a truth needs poetry to clump the 'molecule' of insight together from its constituent atoms of noticed-realities and relationships.

This is part of what Dominik rightly notes: "Humanity is engaged in a neverending struggle of personal and public negotiation of concepts" though I think that struggle is over-agonistic: perhaps 'negotiation' would suit me better; there are times when it is not an adversarial matter but co-operative and reflective. That aside, the comment though, enables us to see cliches as part of culture making, perhaps representing metaphors ('memes'?) at a particular point in their life-cycle in the cultural-negotiation ecology.

Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again | Metaphor Hacker: