Kirk Boyle

Metaphors That Destroy Us: Projections of the Financial Crisis

The current financial crisis has doubled as a crisis of representation. As major financial firms collapsed, mortgages foreclosed, 401(k)s shrank, and jobs disappeared, economists, politicians, and members of the media deployed a battery of metaphors to secure a meaning for what threatened to be not just an economic catastrophe but an unintelligible economic catastrophe. The economy has been compared to a broken car, a sinking ship, a compromised retaining wall, and a cardiac arrest patient that/who required a jump-start, bail out, shore up, or jolt to function like normal. John D. Casnig, author of the blog the Metaphor Observatory, explains that we use figurative language to represent the financial crisis “because nobody can understand it….Metaphor is used when we can’t understand something in its own context” (qtd. in Phillips 2008: unpaginated).

Perhaps nothing reveals our inability to understand the context of the present financial crisis more than the invocation of natural disaster metaphors. Exemplary of this ignorance is former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s declaration that the financial crisis is a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami.” In this paper, I critically examine the implications of explaining a crisis of capitalism in terms of a natural disaster. Drawing from linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that the projection of natural disaster metaphors onto the financial crisis tells us more about the projectors than the actual crisis. At the same time, I claim that the naturalization of a financial crisis imparts a fundamental truth about the dialectical nature of the capitalist world-economy: its uncanny ability to create both wealth and catastrophe. I conclude with a few speculative remarks on how Hollywood will likely project the financial crisis in the disaster film genre.

Kirk Boyle is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently working on his dissertation, “The Catastrophic Real: Late Capitalism and Other Naturalized Disasters,” which explores the political implications of theoretical and cultural representations of natural disasters in the postmodern age of late capitalism. His articles have appeared in Film-Philosophy, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, and The Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. He teaches courses in literature and composition at the University of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky University, and
Thomas More College.