island94.org

We are just now witnessing the collapse of the markets. We may also see the collapse of “the markets” in another sense, the markets as a metaphor for life. Metaphors are not merely ornaments: they are very strange. For instance, the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It’s worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they’ve ceased to generate any new ideas–which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of thhe world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders.

I mean, maybe the market was never supposed to become the dominant metaphor of the content of human livelihood; maybe that’s why it fails.

To add to metaphor, the moment you take a framework (or logic model, or even a well-worded description) as the entirety of your endeavor, you’re toast. I’ve been in planning classes where the student decries “My project doesn’t fit!” to which the teacher replies “It should”—without clarifying whether it is the proposal or the endeavor itself that must acquiesce to the confines of little numbered boxes.