Empowering governance as a cognitive vehicle

Warp and Weft of Future Governance (Part #9)

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There is a weakness to the tapestry metaphor to the extent that it reinforces the current bias in governance towards use of the vision metaphor in articulating future strategy. Tapestries, whatever the beauty of their weaving, are designed to be "looked at" -- however successfully they enable remembrance. As noted above, this is evident in the failure to take account of the forms of intelligence associated with other sensual metaphors (Strategic Challenge of Polysensorial Knowledge: bringing the "elephant" into "focus", 2008; Cyclopean Vision vs Poly-sensual Engagement, 2006). Also as noted, there is the further challenge that they are not designed to facilitate forms of cognitive embodiment potentially essential to governance in the future. Such weavings are not designed to be "donned" through being formed into cognitive clothing adapted for engagement with the elements.

The importance to governance of cultivating strategic "narratives" has effectively been widely recognized -- especially by politically parties, even as the essence of spin. Intimately associated with such narratives are the metaphors which give coherence to them (Metaphoric Revolution: in quest of a manifesto for governance through metaphor, 1988). In this sense sustainable governance may be understood as the challenge of how to ride the sustaining metaphor through which its coherence is recognized and with which people can engage. Metaphors thereby become the vehicle of requisite transdisciplinarity (Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future, 1991). Threats to sustainable governance may even be framed in such terms (The "Dark Riders" of Social Change: a challenge for any Fellowship of the Ring, 2002).

With respect to the integral argument, as an economist and key instigator in the emergence of general systems research, Kenneth Boulding (Ecodynamics; a new theory of societal evolution, 1978) offers the following insight into the relevance of such metaphor:

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.

In any tapestry as envisaged by Gidley, the concern is the strategic identification with a given thread, even that of a recognizable colour. To what degree does a strategy "become the metaphor" -- as with calls to "be the change"? There is a sense in which strongly advocated paths of governance -- as guiding threads of meaning -- are embodied in ways yet to be fruitfully understood. It implies a degree of self-reference. Indeed, whether fruitful or problematic, styles of governance may be understood as their own metaphor -- following the argument of Gregory Bateson that "we are our own metaphor" (as cited by Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor: a personal account of a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation, 1972). The context of this citation reinforces the link to Gidley's exploration of the evolution of consciousness.

Given the emphasis placed above on cognitive exploitation of increasingly complex geometry, strategic "paths" are readily to be understood as linear -- however they are supported by threads of argument. Aside from the possibility of interweaving lines into a tapestry, also intriguing is the cognitive possibility of bending such pathways into "rings" potentially isomorphic with the challenges of navigation and governance of any adaptive cycle. This has been variously argued (Designing Cultural Rosaries and Meaning Malas to Sustain Associations within the Pattern that Connects, 2000; Engaging with Globality through Cognitive Circlets, 2009; Adaptive Hypercycle of Sustainable Psychosocial Self-organization, 2010). Such possibilities may be related to the review of "ring composition" by Anthony Blake (Decoding the Past: ring composition and sacred number) and notably the study by Mary Douglas (Thinking in Circles: an essay in ring composition, 2007).

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