Space as Metaphor: Beyond Output-Oriented Paradigms (Part II)

by | Jul 12, 2024 | Strategy

Space as Metaphor (2)
Strategic plans are particularly excellent examples of a process with questionable results, especially if stakeholder collaboration is desired (Tiwari & Winters, 2017). The logic behind strategic plans, however, is indicative of the Western paradigm’s contradictory view of the individual as of primary significance, yet also replaceable. The Western worldview rests on the Cartesian assumption that the mind is more important than the body. Though subtle, this assumption supports the ability of many Westerners to engage in disjunctive thinking (Morin, 2014) in order to break down complex problems into proverbial bottom lines that can be mapped through pure reason alone.
There is indeed vital information in our bodies, however, and even in the silence in our physical movements:

The silence is not merely golden; it is replete with meanings. Those meanings in turn testify to a corporeal semiotics, a movement-anchored corporeal semiotics that resounds within us. It resounds within the volume of our being an animate form of life, in all the so-called “systems” that functionally describe us—our respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems, for example—some of which we can and do at times directly experience. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019, p. 37)

There can be no substitute for what we experience in our bodies—and without our bodies, there is no mind. However, our minds also create our bodies, which are cultural representations of how we view our very selves. Indeed, the implication from this study is not that the hero’s journey has no use at all. Nearly 5,000 years of history demonstrate its ubiquity, but its relevance as a mode of transformation is misplaced in a world in desperate need for humans to remember they are part of a collective whole.

Perhaps our ability to share (external and internal) space is predicated on the extent to which we are able to be free of ourselves in order to become ourselves. Imagined without time, space as metaphor enables us to participate in creating, making, cleaning, growing, shrinking, shifting, expanding, and reconfiguring the metaphorical and literal spaces within, outside, and between us.

Whereas many of our discussions as a species revolve around borders and boundaries, space as metaphor removes the implied directionality of such conceptualizations, which inadvertently exacerbate the perceived divide that separates humans from self, one another, Earth, and cosmos. Space as metaphor is empty, yet full of potential, enabling individuals with diverse viewpoints to participate—and be heard—in collective space, a place in which there is still room for the occasional hero.

References
Morin, E. (2014). Complex thinking for a complex world—About reductionism, disjunction and systemism. Systema: Connecting Matter, Life, Culture and Technology, 2(1), 14–22.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2019). The silence of movement: A beginning empirical-phenomenological exposition of the powers of a corporeal semiotics. The American Journal of Semiotics, 35(1/2), 33–54. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs20196550

Tiwari, R., & Winters, J. (2017). The death of strategic plan: Questioning the role of strategic plan in self-initiated projects relying on stakeholder collaboration. International Planning Studies, 22(2), 161–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2016.1220288

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Robert Levey
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