Postmodernism in Economic Geography: Metaphor and the Construction of Alterity

From the premise that economic geography is shot through with metaphors, it is argued that there is very little difference in the way modernist and postmodernist economic geographers semantically approach metaphor within their discipline. This argument is illustrated by examining within economic geography the use both of ‘big’ metaphors, such as the gravity model, and of ‘little’ metaphors such as those that pepper individual pieces of writing. Although there are few semantic differences with respect to metaphor use between the two groups, there are pragmatic differences; that is, in the way metaphors are used to create community, and its obverse, otherness or alterity. In their quest to develop foolproof methods that could be applied by everyone, modernist geographers proposed a democratic view. In contrast, for postmodernist economic geographers understanding the world requires an act of transcendence; this view is Homeric or heroic, wherein the world is divided into those who possess the depth of sensitivity to grasp complexity, and those who cannot and are thus merely ‘other’.