Yes, of course, refusal as a political new beginning

To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726

And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical

[Maurice] Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .

[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)

Huh? A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal

The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:

“Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him).
Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter?
Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave.
Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar).
Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country.”

. . . the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)

So what?

The preceding underlining sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.

The opposite of tolerance isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.

What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia or other cases for that matter.

It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us, and in response we invert by refusing anything like closure on the matter through our seriatim crisis scenarios. We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another. No wonder “repair” looms large in all this.

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Other sources:

Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.

1. It’s no news that policy analysts can and do confront not so much discrete events with discrete consequences as unpredictable contingencies coupled (loosely?) with uncontrollable aftermaths, about which there is little causal understanding. One mighty obstacle to identifying root causes of any event is the inability to uncover what counterfactual accidents and disasters had been avoided by those contingencies that happened instead. These conditions mean appeals to anything like prolonged stability in the midst of collectively-evident turbulence should be read symptomatically, namely, as escapism.

But not all escapes are escapism. An example helps.

2. The Precautionary Principle insists on avoiding positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The immediate question arises: Where does the control come from to achieve the avoidance of contingencies and/or aftermaths? You can legislate the Principle, but that doesn’t mean you can control its implementation. To think otherwise is escapist.

And anyway, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoiding or otherwise responding to the dreaded events? Here disaster-averted is one you’ve escaped (that is, avoided).

3. So what? The next step is to historicize and particularize all this.

It was once common to understand socio-political polarization and fragmentation in both negative and positive senses. Yes, fragmentation can represent negative segmentation of authority, but it can also reflect positive functional specialization. Yes, polarization can represent the inability to speak with one voice, but it can also reflect transparency of issues and keeping trade-offs public. Yes, conflict can be bad, but conflict can also be good. . .and so on down the list of putative negatives in American society that in specific contexts, situations and events can be net-positive. 

But “on net” makes little sense in static terms of pros versus cons. “On net” has become fuzzier because of complexities that are inescapable when context, situation and event cannot account for or assimilate all that matters for policy and management in real time. But this complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. With that recognition comes no workaround for the improvisation–and revisions–ahead. Is it any wonder that “repair” looms large in all this?

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NB. For a different recasting of many of these points, see Adam Phillips (2026). “Escapism,” chapter 2 in The Life You Want, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

I

Thornton lowered his voice. “You see, dearest, it’s been a sea-change since you abandoned the humanities and went off to that professional school. You wouldn’t believe the committees the chancellor puts me on! Of course my lips are sealed. Sealed, sealed, sealed. Ask no more, Peter. Don’t even try!”

“Thornton, this is not going to be your wicked and droll, is it?” Peter said.

“Moi? Everything I’m about to say is entirely fair Though not everything made it into my final report to the chancellor,” added Thornton.

II

“I have to start with the background. One of the first things the new chancellor did was to establish the All Campus Organizing Council. All-COC, which I regret to say it is not, has many mandates, but you need only know it fosters all manner of taskforces. I chaired what is called the interdisciplinary team, of whose acronym I also need say no more. It was milked for an interdisciplinary seminar in that department, a cross-disciplinary conference in another department, a trans-disciplinary workshop off campus. 

“Now, from time to time it was my sore duty to attend the events we sponsor. Some did betray a whisper of humor, but most devolved into a discussion about ethics–you just know a field is going nowhere, when the only thing they end up discussing is ethics! 

“Well, here I am at a seminar in the College of Agriculture, Resources and the Environment. That’s CARE to you. Peter, dear, you must remember it? CARE has produced the stay-soft (all-mush) peach, the BetterLife™ (Bet-her-life!) household insect sprays, and the workerless irrigation technologies (or WITless to its critics). If you believe the reports, a dollar of its research leads to a $2.50 return in agricultural productivity, blah blah market share blah blah. 

“What this research actually means, of course, is the immiseration of farmworkers, the erasure of the family farm, and the concentration of productive wealth into multinationals. Yes, yes, the litany. However, small blessings being what they are, the press sniffed some of what was going on, the mediaship went into its brownian motion, the legislature rumbled, a court case was settled out of court, and, lo, CARE found itself more caring.

“One consequence was my team was asked to come through the front-door and sponsor the Dean’s Seminar Series, ‘What are natural resources?’ The idea was a simple one, as you might expect. Whatever, I find myself at a seminar titled ‘What are natural resources? The perspective of a humane biotechnologist.” No joke; the boredom was palpable. Four people in the room. Finally, I asked the most perfectly obvious question, absolutely no malice intended Peter, so I put forward, with the obligatory outsider preamble of not being a scientist, “What about agricultural biotechnology is natural?” I mean, it is thelr title! So the presenter looks at me, pauses for that longest moment, and says: “But, what’s more natural than a gene!”

“Well, let me tell you Peter you needn’t be a slave to history for one’s eyes to widen, I am feeling very good about myself these days, and just when I’m thinking about having myself cloned, these Mengeles-in-waiting are talking as if they’re ready to take away the very molecules that make me interesting. Well, I mean, really. I knew then these people needed watching.

III

“So, when out of nowhere, the chancellor asks me to chair the very hush-hush committee on the scandals involving the CARE’s new dean, I accepted with alacrity. 

I now must introduce the College’s dean to you, Dean Trumplethinskin. You may have met him when you were there, Peter. He was just a senior faculty member then, one of those kinds of business school types you’re supposed to get used to. He has always had a deplorable reputation for being abrasive in social gatherings and lacking skills for polite company. ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ he’d say by way of motivating people.”

Peter snapped his fingers. “Of course! My God, not the Trumplethinskin?’ Thornton nodded grimly, adding for good measure: “He’s at a colleague’s party, she hands him his drink, he barely sips, his face goes sour, she asks what’s wrong, he says, ‘This drink is like screwing in a canoe–fuckin near water,’ and then turns away.”

Thornton continued, “Trumplethinskin was recruited to our campus’s league of nations as the first incumbent of the Walter P. Grapefruit Chair in Anti-Communist Political Economy. It turns out he also arrives just as the start of the CARE’s reorganization wars. The old dean tried to create a Department of Social Studies by merging the College’s Department of Agricultural Economics with College units on park and nutritional sociology. It was Trumplethinskin’s abrasiveness that saved their day. ‘You can’t do that!,’ he shouted. ‘They’re economists, for Christ’s sake, not social scientists! When was the last time any of them were published in Mathematica?’ 

“The reorganization wars left a bad taste. Trumplethinskin’s predecessor fast became the most reviled man in CARE. Muffled screams for ‘evolution, not revolution’ were heard. Faculty meetings would find social scientists hectoring insecticide faculty, ‘Well, at least our research doesn’t kill farmworkers.’ CARE was not a happy place. The old dean retreated to his office. He retired. ‘I leave for the best job in the world,’ he said at his going-away party: ‘I’m going to be a former dean!’

“During all this Trumplethinskin relished less and less the eyrie of his departmental chair. He had reached a stage where it was time to move on, do something to make more money, not more articles on the role of hotel schools in agriculture. What better, then, than the deanship? 

IV

“The search for the new dean was speedy. The other candidates were a cultural historian, whose book, The Social Construction of Nature, was well-received by her two colleagues; a bioengineer, who didn’t own a biotech company and thus had no respect among his peers; and a well-known political scientist who always thought it best to conclude, rather than start, his publications with some variant of ‘We’re still not asking the right questions. . .’ Frankly Trumplethinskin could have crowned himself dean.

“The new Dean’s first task was to take ‘reorganization’ to new depths. He drove though the privatization of the CARE’s agricultural extension service into an online digital platform, weCARE2.edu. He hired a consultant from his own outside firm who recommends that, yes the new Department of Life Sciences should remain, but should be decentralized into autonomous divisions that ‘more matched the unique distribution of faculty expertise, core competencies and disciplinary fields,’ namely, the original private sector focus on insecticides, agricultural technology, industrial forestry, and farm management.

This de=reorganization is then implemented, which meant–of course!–the Dean’s office had also to become a profit center. Which–of course!–made Trumplethinskin far too reckless. Which in turn led to the scandals I ended up investigating. . .”

Thornton paused, took another sip, and actually looked forward to what came next.

No sooner than the author says societal decay can be overgeneralized, we’re off and running with how capitalism leads to even greater decay in the life-world. More, it’s all over-determined. If not capitalism, decay is carried in these earthly bodies and infrastructures of ours. That such thinking deoxygenates policy and management should not be surprising.

What to do? If we don’t like the language game around decay, Wittgenstein tells us: Get another one. Which is what many do with talk of renewal and such. Others insist that terms like decay, renewal and infrastructures need to be jettisoned in favor of different cosmologies (altogether different life-worlds). But whether appealing to different language games or different cosmologies, we again place ourselves further from understandings of policy relevance in the hope that whatever the ensuing change it’s a big-T transformation rendering current disputes moot.

The problem with big-T transformations is that relations, social and otherwise, need to be (re)woven or repaired via stories we tell if we are then to be transformative. As one author put it, something like “resocialization through narrative” is sought more so than–or at least before–big-T transformation.

The reparative function of the stories we tell our people is not much discussed. For example, metanarratives that demonstrate how conflicting positions can hold at the same time are first and foremost reparative. It’s repair under unpredictable conditions–rather than decay as the certainty that can’t be changed–that is the object of analysis when policy and management relevancies matter now and in the next steps ahead.

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Sources.

On decay, see: N.M. Küttel (2026). “From extraction to afterlife: toward a political materialism of urban ruins.” Urban Geography (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2026.2676282)

On “resocialization through narrative” see: A. Gefen (2024 [2017]) Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Tegan Raleigh, Volume 28 of Culture & Conflict, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

—Latest blog entries include

**”Not societal values, not collective beliefs, not personal attitudes, but really-existing practices of people“

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—When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with schematic, can be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

This working paper updates many blog entries prior to its June 2023 publication. Those interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/07/03/major-read-sourcing-new-ideas-from-the-humanities-fine-arts-and-other-media-for-complex-policy-analysis-and-management/

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]: https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/27/seventeen-short-examples-on-how-differences-in-genre-affect-the-structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-last-newly-added/

**”Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Ten examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID and more” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/31/major-read-instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity-t/

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management (recently added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/15/major-read-new-method-matters-in-reframing-policy-and-management-recently-added/

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/23/emerging-counternarratives-on-migrants-border-controls-digital-networks-remittances-child-labor-covids-impact-africa-and-europe-and-global-neoliberalism-newly-added/

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/10/17/the-future-in-hro-studies-the-example-of-networked-reliability-as-a-form-of-reliability-seeking/

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/07/25/major-read-the-siloing-of-approaches-to-discourse-and-narrative-analyses-in-public-policy/

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/08/21/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-resent/

**””Learning discrepantly” for policy & management (updated and expanded)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/08/major-read-learning-discrepantly/

**”I understand why others feel compelled to defend the humanities and arts. But their direct relevance for public policy and management has always been obvious.” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/01/21/i-understand-why-others-feel-compelled-to-defend-the-humanities-and-arts-but-their-direct-relevance-for-public-policy-and-management-has-always-been-obvious/

**”The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/09/the-centrality-of-restoration-resilience-across-interconnected-critical-infrastructures-for-emergency-management-a-framework-and-key-implications-research-report-f/

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”If not corpse-pastoralism, then what are we seeing? Four other suggestions and key upshot for re-seeing what we thought we knew.” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/17/if-not-corpse-pastoralism-then-what-four-other-suggestions-and-key-upshot-for-re-seeing-what-we-thought-we-knew/

**”Time to think more radically: three new policy narratives extremely different from current positions in pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/05/01/time-to-think-more-radically-three-policy-narratives-for-pastoralist-development-that-are-extremely-different-from-current-positions/

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/16/a-reliability-seeking-economics-in-pastoralist-development/

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/20/new-extensions-of-the-framework-for-pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-a-critical-infrastructure/

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/12/four-briefer-points-of-policy-relevance-for-pastoralists-and-herders/

—Key blog entries on updating Narrative Policy Analysis are:

**”Updating NARRATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS (1994)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/10/14/updating-narrative-policy-analysis-1994/

**”Narrative policy analysis: then, now and ahead” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/04/narrative-policy-analysis-then-now-and-ahead/

**”The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/07/16/the-policy-relevance-of-michel-riffaterre-and-algirdas-j-greimas-the-example-of-global-climate-change/

^Today’s policy relevance of poets A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham, Robert Lowell and J.H. Prynne

^What Les Murray has to say about Global Climate Sprawl

^Shakespeare’s missing lines are even more contemporary today

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Why the difference matters between ultimate and proximate causes: an example

The [anti-baboon poisoning] campaign’s collateral damage is clearest in the compensation record. In March 1953, for example, two Fulani herders received £50 after losing eighteen cattle and six sheep that drank from a poisoned water hole. Officials marked contaminated sites and instructed Native Authorities to notify village heads and Fulani chiefs, but these precautions were unevenly effective, especially given pastoral mobility and the uneven circulation of information. When doubts arose about whether herders had been adequately warned, token compensation was sometimes paid in the interest of preserving local relations, revealing both the administrative limits and political sensitivities of the campaign.

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6898438)

Of course, colonialism caused this wrongful campaign. But it is also true that the campaign was first proven wrong by Fulani practices, and importantly so.

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Another example of why proximate practices, rather than values ultimately, matter

If we follow a practice-focused reading of PB [participatory budgeting] that recognizes the heterogeneity of competing ideas, in-depth case analysis may well suggest that the broader outcomes of participation do not always depend exclusively on institutional design, as PB evolves through a process of contestation and negotiation. Retrospectively, the inclusion of the more participatory second tier in Angola’s PB was certainly crucial, but it would have been difficult for the central government to predict the growing calls for bottom-up participation that have emerged, and continue to emerge, from the complex interactions of different actors and from the very practice of PB on the ground.

Daniel Tjarks (2026). “Participatory Budgeting in Autocracies: Conflicting Logics, Unintended Consequences and Contentious Participation in Angola’s Orçamento Participativo“. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.70132)

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Resistance? No, defense.

A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:

As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)

Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.

Just as we must distrust speculative metaphysics, so too we distrust discussions at these levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a run of different events, situations and contexts (cases). That’s why really-existing practices are the starting point of analysis. What is called resistance of state-imposed agendas here might well be better understood, for policy and management purposes, defense of still-evolving practices there.

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Some limits of global analytic tip

I’m hardly the first to have been struck by the analytic tip in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be dealt with at the local, regional and even national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed first and foremost globally (think “global warming”). What I was unprepared for was how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the tip proceeded.

Let me give an example from the field of Infrastructure Studies. To be clear, I agree with every word in the following:

Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.

The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)

To me, this passage represents hard-won insights over years of research, namely: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.

But then comes the irresistible updraft in the article’s next sentence:

These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Well, yes, that’s true of course, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis? Indeed, how do actual operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels?

The article, like so many others, is off and running to the international, global and now planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s analytic tip after all–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further, especially as variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management.

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Societal and infrastructural decay, and their practical limits for policy relevance

No sooner than the author says societal decay can be overgeneralized, we’re off and running with how capitalism leads to even greater decay in the life-world. Worse, the decay is over-determined. If not capitalism, it still comes with these earthly bodies and and our all-too-earthly infrastructures. That such thinking deoxygenates policy and management should not be surprising.

What to do? If we don’t like the language game around decay, Wittgenstein tells us: Get another one. Which is what many try to do with talk of “renewal” and such. Others insist that terms like decay, renewal and infrastructures need to be jettisoned in favor of different cosmologies (that is, different life-worlds). But whether appealing to different language games or different cosmologies, we again place ourselves further from current practices in the hope that whatever the ensuing change it’s a big-T transformation rendering these practices and allied disputes moot.

The problem with big-T transformations is that the stories we tell to achieve these ends always highlight a missing part of these stories. Relations, social and otherwise, need to be repaired, if not rewoven, via stories we tell if we are to be transformative. It’s the reparative practices of narrative under unpredictable conditions–not under decay as a certainty–that is the object of analysis when policy and management relevancies matter now and in the next steps ahead.

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

Gante, M. (2025). “Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics” Constellations, pp. 1 – 10 (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009)

Well, yes of course, the marginalized should have more power.

But then if you think about it, there are the marginalized, and then there are the marginalized. Even economists in the midst of the 2008 Global Finance Crisis complained, “But no one ever listens to us. . .”

No, the marginalized being identified are that subset of subaltern, the poor, the intersectional, in a word, the peripheralized. But even so, why then aren’t we also talking about, say, the scholars, poets, artists? Scholars are routinely described as marginal and poor and, accordingly, there’s the intersectional permutations to give voice to, like subaltern scholars or scholarly subalterns. Just because–precisely because?–their accomplishments aren’t recorded, they too must have existed given the billions of people who preceded and now surround us.

The marginalized are, in other words, very heterogeneous, so it isn’t like consensus with respect to policy and management can be expected. That would be a banal observation, if it weren’t for the immediate implications drawn are said to be political: Dissensus calls for democracy or republics or authoritarian regimes, or some such. Why ever the first implication of highly differentiated marginals is political is not clear to me, however. I could just as well say that the historical variety of novels, plays and other fictions are a much clearer expression of that material heterogeneity, leaving the follow-on political implications for others to draw.

Nor could you say the expression, “to give voice to,” is political through and through. To my mind, the heterogeneity we are talking about is because human agency is first ontological (think initially of “cognitive biases with respect to thinking counterfactually”) and then over-time political-social-economic-historical-scientific-technological-cultural-and hyphenated further and contingently for the inevitable improvisations along the way.

Yes, all islands are unique, even if (but still) they connect under water.

I

These days, it’s the most natural thing in meetings about this or that disaster scenario to ask up-front what are the risks with respect to each scenario. Starting this way, we think the real methodological problems are in better calculating the risks rather than in determining when the question itself is systematically misleading, both conceptually and practically.

Say you work in an urbanized marine domain of ships and container transport, ports, navigation ways, major bridges, anchorage areas, intermodal transportation hubs, underwater hazardous liquid pipelines, dredging vessels, environmental regulations, and more. Your starting point in contrast is the unavoidable fact that the marine domain consists of interconnected critical infrastructures, some more tightly coupled than others, physically or temporally, . 

Which means you already understand that instead of starting with all manner of possible disaster scenarios related to say, a tsunami and then ask How to respond? How to prepare?, you start from the fact that these across-infrastructure connectivities generate many different disaster scenarios that more than one infrastructure has to worry about, should a tsunami of that order come their way. You end up with disaster scenarios, not start with them. (My wager is that if you started out with interconnectivities pre-disaster and during temporary disruptions, you’d have a more cost-effective understanding of shifts and configurations during and after disaster.)

Modelers, like most of the informed public, are asking you which disaster scenarios should matter more by way of action–be it better emergency preparedness or immediate emergency response. But they don’t understand the interconnected marine domain the way you and your domain colleagues do. They want you to prevent disaster scenarios before they unfold, while your starting point–the interconnected marine domain–clearly implies having to improve the across-infrastructure (across domain) resilience to respond to the inevitable surprises thrown at the domain, even during pre-disaster times, let alone during the tsunami or afterwards.

What do you say to them?

III

I’m no expert on public speaking, but I’m pretty sure something like the below needs to be better translated:

“It’s so natural to think we need to start with risk scenarios, like what is the risk to the marine domain of a mid-bad tsunami. But let’s start with what we know about immediate emergency response, be it to this or that disaster. Efforts to restore critical infrastructure services during immediate emergency response (e.g., through placement of mobile telecommunication towers) almost always entail real-time improvisation and workarounds, within or across the infrastructures involved. Indeed, they may become the only key real-time interconnection between the systems during those times. This in turns puts a high priority on pre-disaster efforts to improve the joint restoration and recovery resilience across those interconnected critical infrastructures.

What does this mean practically? It means capitalizing on existing opportunities beyond the official emergency management structures and plans at the local, regional, state and federal levels there. The aim is to leverage existing initiatives that have already “seen the light, ” for example, vessel traffic services, marine exchanges, and harbor safety committees. The priority in focusing on those who actively acknowledge the centrality of interconnectivities is made all the more visible because these remain early days in thinking through emergency management in terms of infrastructural connectivities.

The core competency called for in more effective modeling, table-tops, real-time control room desks and the like is in the area of inter-infrastructural connectivities. These professionals are targeted because they already work outside their infrastructural or sectoral siloes. . .”

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For further details, please see these brief links:

Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!

The single most important place to start adding value in emergency preparedness is. . .

Infrastructures are more vulnerable when their latent interconnectivities are not managed ahead before an emergency

The public good of “stabilization” in immediate emergency response and initial service restoration

How starting analyses of risk coupled with resilience lead to the real-time mismanagement in the operations of critical infrastructures