FOR ACADEMICS WORKING IN PUBLICLY FUNDED third-level institutions in Britain, the twenty-first century announced itself as the age of impact. In 2002, the Arts Council England published a report entitled Measuring the Economic and Social Impact of the Arts calling for “arts impact research” and an “arts impact agenda.” In 2008, the British Academy launched a report entitled Maximising the Impact of Humanities and Social Science Research in which the humanities in particular were encouraged to justify their value in terms of their social and economic “impacts.” Such reports are designed to influence public policy, and they suggest that impact currently serves as a key metaphor in the debate about culture and its effects. It is used to establish the importance of cultural entities or processes and deployed as a tool to measure their role in society — with the main aim of placing them in direct competition with social and economic initiatives for public and private funding. While other national contexts may currently favor different metaphors, the concept of “impact” serves as a salient example of ways in which metaphors shape our thinking about the role of cultural artifacts in society.

Where a more philosophically inclined age might favor a truth-oriented focus on the inherent “nature” or “essence” of a cultural phenomenon and seek to define its “boundaries” in order to situate it in a given taxonomy, our more rhetorically oriented times are concerned above all with effect in the public space and place the highest value on emotional impact. Like “reception,” the concept of “impact” focuses not on origin or inherent structural features, but on the target context. Unlike reception, which foregrounds the receiving human beings and may connote passivity, impact suggests a dynamic physical force and foregrounds an event that brings two objects into contact with each other. Where reception may be gradual, rationally controlled, and selective, impact has a sudden effect that will tend to bypass the rational faculties and be apprehended emotionally or viscerally. The prominence of the metaphor in the current discourse about culture is due to the fact that it seems well suited to proving the powerful effect of culture in a highly contested public space — though the persuasiveness of the proof arguably weakens in direct correlation to the rising currency of the metaphor.