Weaponization: Metaphorical Ubiquity and a Shared Rejection of Politics

This paper presents a discourse analysis of metaphor emergence from coinage to conventionality, responding to calls for metaphor analysis that take social context and chronology into account. It does this through a case study of the career of the metaphor of weaponization that became ubiquitous around the United States’ 2016 presidential election. As a concept, the word originated in the Cold War defense industry as a literal description of the logistical deployment of weapons systems. As its use mutated into a metaphor between 1999-2003, it took on its contemporary moral meaning of over-politicizing things that had been, and should remain, neutral or peaceful. By 2017 “the weaponization of everything” implied that all aspects of social life were newly embroiled in illegitimate politics, making the metaphor a profound act of nostalgia that erased even recent conflicts. Weaponization demonstrates that a metaphor can retain its meaningfulness when it becomes ubiquitous by marshalling a temporal narrative tension against widely shared perceptions of recent social change. This is surprising because contemporary metaphor theory implies that ubiquitous metaphors become mere descriptions or concepts if they are not used in different ways that are embedded in competing discursive communities. Because metaphors derive their meaningfulness through tension, weaponiz- shows how temporality, or social time, can be marshalled to attempt to create a shared public that understands itself as deeply divided. Weaponization is thus instructive as an act of folk sociology that exposes as social and conflicted, things that were previously natural or innocuous. Weaponization indicates a yearning for a shared polity in divided times, and shows that political metaphors can create broad publics that share the same meaning for all sides among competing political groups, even if that meaning is a naïve or utopian rejection of politics altogether.