Conclusion

Developing a Metaphorical Language for the Future (Part #11)

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Particular metaphors for configuring understanding of the future have specific advantages. They usually also have unsuspected weaknesses through which more fruitful initiatives may be handicapped. It would be a mistake to reject metaphor or aspire to the metaphor-free discourse desired by some information scientists. Metaphor is too fundamental to our conceptual processes. And as Kenneth Boulding, author of Image (1956), teasingly puts it: "Our consciousness of the unity of self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of group, organization, department, discipline or science. If personification is a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors -- we might be one ourselves" (55). Ways should rather be sought to develop the conceptual scaffolding and flexibility that they offer for framing the future, especially to facilitate the emergence of new and more sustainable forms of social organization and problem responses. Many such policy-relevant possibilities have been reviewed elsewhere (40).

A marriage, if only of convenience, needs to be negotiated between the role of model and metaphor. Global modelling has proven inadequate to the challenge, and there is now a desperate search for unifying imagery -- if only for media sound-bites. Models need the inspiration of richer metaphors. Use of metaphors needs the discipline of modelling. The inadequacies of a model may well derive from pushing the underlying metaphor "too far". As Gregory Bateson has argued, a touch of poetic insight may increase understanding of how to move productively between metaphors, rather than pushing them to exhaustion.

"Future" itself may prove to be a metaphoric trap because of the way it is tied to time -- and especially linear time. As such it obscures a wider spectrum of understandings of the emergence of new situations -- notably surprises. A key debate (November 1992) in the UK House of Commons even focused on a policy "blackhole" -- the ultimate constraint on the sight metaphor. In the present confused times, with the loss of policy directionality, perceptions of shapes "looming" out of a fog or "bubbling up" from turbulent waters might have offered more appropriate metaphors. In this light, given Slaughter's (18) emphasis on "emerging situations", is our fundamental concern not more generally with "potentials" and their emergence, rather than specifically with those represented by "futures"? Or perhaps both are members of a larger set of complementary metaphors.

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