ABSTRACT
It is important to grasp that metaphor, however we might define it, constantly exceeds the literary even as it forms its basis; metaphor is the common substratum of the representation of institutions, corporations, public bodies. The French Marxist thinker Louis Althusser described how we are ‘interpellated’ through language (Althusser 1977: 162-70); that is to say, how we are constituted as subjects. We are given to believing, he said, that we are in some sense free agents, coherent subjects in our own right, when in fact we are at the mercy of an ideological flood that threatens to engulf us. Although Althusser did not say as much, we might suggest that the principal way in which we are interpellated is through metaphor, and also that we are interpellated as metaphor.
