As clear, transparent communication is key for helping to prevent or reduce the risk of serious incidents occurring in the workplace, perhaps it is time that those involved in OHS put their ‘linguistic house’ in order. (Everley, 2010)
Why a house? And whose house, exactly? What kind of order does the author imagine?
Instantly, the metaphor invites us into a world where language is a private dwelling, owned by someone, arranged by someone, and policed for tidiness. It is a revealing choice, for Safety likes to describe itself as a literal discipline. It speaks in the clipped tones of authority, confident that the world arranges itself neatly into hazards and controls. It treasures the preferred description and the correct classification, as if objective language tames uncertainty.
Yet this confidence rests on an illusion. What if human beings do not think literally? What if we have always interpreted the world poetically?
In the ancient Greek sense, to think poetically is to engage in poiesis: the bringing-forth of meaning, the creative act by which the world becomes intelligible. We do not receive reality; we bring it into being through the interpretive structures of our minds.
As cognitive linguists have shown our minds are woven through with figurative processes long before we learn the word ‘figurative’. Metaphor, metonymy and irony are not decorative features added to thought. They are thought. They are the scaffolding through which we organise experience and share it with others.
This has explosive implications for Safety. While it claims to operate in a world of objective meaning, its imagination is actually shaped by metaphors it is oblivious to.
Once we begin to notice those metaphors, the whole enterprise looks different. Its language of war and machinery, purity and control, exposes not just how Safety speaks but how Safety thinks. Every line of fire. Every barrier diagram. Every non-compliance. All are metaphors revealing far more about Safety than Safety would choose to disclose.
If metaphor is “a fundamental mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world through the conceptual mapping of knowledge from one domain onto another.” (Gibbs, 1994, p. 207), then Safety’s metaphors reveal the startling limitations of its epistemology. They show us a discipline that cannot understand the human condition because it has chosen metaphors that objectify it. A discipline that cannot imagine uncertainty because it has chosen metaphors that deny it. A discipline that cannot imagine ethical responsibility because it has chosen metaphors that protect systems rather than persons.
To deconstruct Safety, we must understand its poetics. Not the poetry of conference slogans or glossy consultant handouts, but the metaphoric structures through which it constructs an artificial order, flattens complexity, and confuses its figurative constructions for objective truth.
Rob long says
A great piece Simon. So insightful.