ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critique of the metaphor, as a misleadingly narrow approach to understanding modern methods of domination; at the same time, by offering an alternative understanding of those methods, it reveals the metaphor to be their unexamined product. The best way to outline a critique of this approach is to try and bring to light the problematic assumptions about meaning versus reality or structure versus practice embodied in this simple metaphor of the text. There are various reasons for the metaphor's persistence. One stems from the fact that it is indissociable from the readers’ everyday conception of the person. Patterns of domination that before had to be continuously established and re-established are now built into the functioning of economic and social practices. Across the different disciplines of social science, studies of power and resistance continue to be dominated by a single, master metaphor: the distinction between persuading and coercing.
