Pastoralists take stock of their respective and various situations. Situations, to adapt one definition, are experiences undergone by pastoralists in which things that matter to them unfold in real time. Taking stock means appraising how to interpret these experiences for their next steps ahead. Since situations are based in experience and in the uncertainties of ex ante appraisal, few if any of these situations are strictly identical. Each situation poses its own constraints on pastoralist behavior, and in doing so, pose its own situational affordances, as when: “Anything that privileges one line of action over another is a constraint.”

So what?

Well first of all, not all pastoralist situations are crises or crisis narratives: Situations “may preexist the beginning of a narrative, serve as an opening premise, or emerge at any time, and they may or may not come to an end.” It is true, however, that the constraints and affordances of a situation relate to stakes faced by pastoralists, either individually or collectively, i.e.: “situations generally require at least two elements in relation with something at stake. A desert is a setting, but a hiker lost in a desert is a situation.”

Since time is always at stake, situations of having to wait are a continuing problem for pastoralists. The significance of this point requires us to first recognize that immediate situations and inescapable contexts are not the same: “Context is a category of remote understanding; situation is a category of immediate experience. . .” That difference, in turn, is incredibly relevant for really-existing policy and management:

If in some sense a situation, to be a situation, is always at hand, then it is also the case that when a situation gets out of hand, the externality of that out has nothing to do with the position of interpretive mastery that projects an explanatory context. . .Global states of affairs like capitalism or climate change, which remain readily available as contexts, attract the term situation insofar as one wants to emphasize high stakes, urgency, and indeed the ways that they are getting out of hand.

That is to say, it is we–even if not they–who assert that the operative explanatory contexts are climate change and capitalism for the situations undoubtedly experienced by pastoralists around high stakes, urgency and things getting out of hand. This means there is the risk of complacency in reverting to explanation-by-context that must always be avoided in situations specific enough for pastoralists to be at hand. Their waiting is more granular and variable in situations than in the contexts we stipulate for them.

We outsiders may of course want to differentiate their waiting in terms of formal identity categories of age, gender, ethnicity, education or wealth and then “show” how elaborations in situations entail elaborations in these categorical terms. But that too is a formalistic exercise, more like talking about the formal economy than the informal ones right there and now.

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The above is a different take on the relational from my narrative and infrastructural approaches. It’s a riff off and extension of a wonderfully suggestive article (all errors are my own!): M. Frank, K. Pask, and N. Schantz (2024). “Situation: A narrative concept.” Critical Inquiry 50(4): 659 – 676.

I

Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and operationalize. That is: “Under capitalism” means that even in always-late capitalism, we have

laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, bourgeois capitalism, patrimonial capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, cannibal capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, cloud capitalism, surveillance capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, welfare capitalism, compliance capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, woke capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, global capitalism, agrarian capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, cybernetic capitalism, racial capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .

Oh hell, just stop there. Much of this proliferation looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway.

Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to be able to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list—namely the above—without number?

Or from the other direction, some of the terms do seek to denote specific contexts and levels of granularity and commonalities across cases. But, as others do not, what then does being “anti-capitalist” actually mean?

---

2. One answer: Anti-capitalism depends on taking the losers in any such list seriously.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).” But even if true, is the implication that at least some of the capitalisms listed above were “better” then than now?

For example, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad? Didn’t many of our parents and grandparents suffer under conditions of capitalism all along just as we are?

Yet any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of “its” death rattle but of the vitality in morphing through losers after losers after losers? That is, it’s the losers in the above list that first need to be differentiated and tracked.

3. The upshot: Superfluidity of terms in #1 hides a superfluidity of capitalisms’ losers in #2.

So what? According to the Hicks-Kaldor compensation principle, it’s good enough when an economic change means its winners would be better off even if they could compensate the losers of this change. The notion that actual compensation does not need to take place over the course of this history of different losers and losses is now more ludicrous than even imagined initially. To be anti-capitalist is today to be anti anything like Hicks-Kaldor.

We cannot even imagine a happy world in which winners might not be hateful. Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken. (Natalia Ginsburg, 1970, accessed online at https://www.equator.org/articles/our-monstrous-ideas-natalia-ginzburg)

**”Rethinking pastoralists’ development from their perspective of disasters-averted.” Pastoralism 16 (2026): https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.15551

**The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications (Research report for a US National Science Foundation project by Emery Roe & Paul R. Schulman) https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf

**When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

**Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke University Press, 2013) https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30263/1/648154.pdf

**“A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management.” Issues in Science and Technology, August 3 (2021) https://issues.org/national-academy-reliable-infrastructure-management-roe/

**“Fourth of July Democracy: An Epistolary Exchange and a Modest Proposal.” Hedgehog Review (2023) https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/fourth-of-july-democracy

**”A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure,” STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (2020) https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/

**”Control, Manage or Cope? A Politics for Risks, Uncertainties and Unknown-Unknowns.” Chapter 5 in The Politics of Uncertainty: Changes of Transformation (eds. Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling). Routledge, UK. (2020) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/16532

**”Policy Messes and their Management.” Policy Sciences (2016). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11077-016-9258-9

Below is the full abstract from an excellent review of case material on river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada:

Despite millions of dollars being spent annually to restore degraded river ecosystems, there exist relatively few assessments of the ecological effectiveness of projects. An evidence-based synthesis was conducted to describe river restoration activities in Newfoundland and Labrador. The synthesis identified 170 river restoration projects between 1949 and 2020. A practitioner’s survey was conducted on a subset of 91 projects to evaluate ecological success. When the perceived success of managers was compared to an independent assessment of ecological success, 82% of respondents believe the projects to be completely or somewhat successful whereas only 41% of projects were evaluated as ecologically successful through an independent assessment. Only 11% of practitioners’ evaluations used ecological indicators, yet managers of 66% of projects reported improvements in river ecosystems. This contradiction reveals a lack of the application of evidence to support value-based judgments by practitioners. Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted. If we are to improve the science of river restoration, projects must demonstrate evidence of ecological success to qualify as sound restoration. River restoration is a necessary tool to ensure the sustainability of river ecosystems. The assessment conducted in this study suggests that our approach to planning, designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating projects needs to improve. An integrated-systems view that gives attention to stakeholders’ values and scientific information concerning the potential consequences of alternative restoration actions on key ecosystem indicators is required.

Skinner, S. W., A. Addai, S. E. Decker, and M. van Zyll de Jong. 2023. The ecological success of river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada: lessons learned. Ecology and Society 28(3):20. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-14379-280320

My problem is not their main finding: “Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted.”

I don’t know what world the authors or you, the reader, live in. But in my world, a 40% success rate in river restoration projects is huge! I mean, really significant. Indeed, I come from a project implementation background where conjoining, “success” and “ecosystem restoration,” is like waving a red flag in front of a phalanx of critics at the ready to disagree.

His ghastly lack of proper education, his imperfect mastery of the German language, especially of written German, and his complete disregard of logic, were patent. No well thought-out document ever came from his pen, merely vague directions. He fought shy of committing himself. By his order, minutes of conversations were as a rule withheld from the other party. Conferences were bound to break down over his monologues. It was exceedingly difficult to obtain decisions … If made, they were mostly unclear, leaving scope for arbitrary interpretations … and there was no appeal. The “Führer” has decided; to resort to him once more would be blasphemy … No adviser could gain permanent influence. Hitler’s reactions could be skilfully manipulated by “news,” but the explosive effect could not be gauged beforehand. A fairly good memory for facts and figures enabled him to bluff even experts … His violent diction and the tone of his voice intimidated … A smatterer in everything, he was an expert in bluffing. “This last half-hour, while I was resting, I invented a new machine-gun and a contrivance for bridge-building, and composed a piece of music in my head,” he once intimated to a late companion from Landsberg prison, who was duly impressed … He had not the patience to read a lengthy document, but claimed to know Clausewitz by heart. And he often got away with it.

(Erich Kordt, a key foreign affairs official in the Third Reich, quoted in full from an edited 1948 review of Lewis Namier, historian, of Kordt’s Wahn und Wirklichkeit, reprinted in the TLS, November 29, 2019: 38.)

–

—Latest blog entries include

**”‘Theatre’ as a policy optic for recasting the present: aesthetics, accomplishment, excellence“

**”The special problem of prediction in policy analysis and management“

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with a useful schematic, can now 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:

**”Major Read: 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/

**”Major Read: 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: 14 examples (14th example newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/07/major-read-new-method-matters-in-reframing-policy-and-management-14th-example-new/

**”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/

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

**”New Implications of the Framework for Reliability Professionals and Pastoralism-as-Infrastructure (updated)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

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

**”Recasting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in pastoralist systems: the detection of creeping crises” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/18/recasting-traditional-ecological-knowledge-tek-in-pastoralist-systems/

**”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/

**”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/

**”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/

Start with mess

Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.

The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. Since this does not augur well for the future, that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.

But what is post-now?

As everything critical happens in real-time–in this “constant-present”–then post-now is by definition outside now-time. For example, if the mess we are now in is largely the difficulty of predicting the future(s), then post-now has nothing to do with those futures that matter to us in now-time. Post-now isn’t about such anticipations.

So what is post-now? It’s where you cannot not want to be because you have no need to anticipate anything in being alive there. It’s like a report from a distant planet, wholly like ours, except its present has fast-forwarded in a way unimaginable, and predictably so, for us, at least for now.

What then is “predictably unimaginable”?

In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.

Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.

Current practice is we start with the worst-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.

Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to even think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. In this way, we approach a “predictably unimaginable” that is not oxymoronic.

But you have to remember that imagining is not predicting, and both are downstream of the case-specific granularity

–Consider the following example:

Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].

After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.

At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .

Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.

“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.

accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)

This discovery is also part of an on-going installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described in a recent article as:

In The Artificial Island, the work traces a submerged Neolithic site off the coast of Korčula, discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica. The site, originally connected to the mainland by an ancient road, now lies four to five metres beneath the Adriatic Sea, submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval.

accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/

After being primed by the two texts, take another look at the photo. You can see the submerged island, see its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will submerge even more settlements ahead in the climate emergency.

–The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen, now and ahead.

I wager that no reader primed as above asks first: “What about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement?” Or from the other direction, “What about what’s been preserved from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed?”

That is, no one, I wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next here?” I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around these submerged sites? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”

More formally, you may imagine this example entails or otherwise predicts the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am suggesting that really-existing accomplishments that happen next and at that site go to reframe the pertinent issues. People already understand what are case-specific accomplishments in ways that broader progress and success are understood by others only later on.

As everything critical happens in real-time–in this “constant-present”–then post-now is by definition outside now-time. For example, if the mess we are now in largely the difficulty of predicting the future(s), then post-now has nothing to do with those futures that matter to us in now-time. Post-now isn’t about such anticipations.

So what is post-now? It’s where you cannot not want to be because you have no need to anticipate anything in being alive there. It’s like a report from a distant planet, wholly like ours, except its present has fast-forwarded in a way unimaginable for us, at least for now.

Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.

The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. Since this does not augur well for the future, that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.

From a management perspective, a country is overcrowded and overpopulated when its mess and reliability professionals have few ideas about how to keep people residing, employed, and productive there.The Netherlands and Singapore risk becoming (more) overpopulated and overcrowded only when increasing numbers of residents there want greater well-being yet choose to leave, even if they are uncertain as to whether their greater well-being lies somewhere else. They are pushed out, rather than pulled elsewhere. There is a story here, but it is unique and does not have the same ending for everyone. It is a contingent narrative, provisional on how the networks of professionals translate the patterns and scenarios involved for where they are.

I

Theatre is – more than any other artistic medium – a medium of pragmatics. The permanent possibility of mistakes, glitches, and loss of control are not unavoidable flaws but the core of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them is a key strategy for creating a tension that emphasizes its very aliveness. This proximity to the unexpected has conceptional, even philosophical consequences but very concrete reasons: always involving many people, always being collaborative (even though the hierarchies between director, actor, scenographer, technicians etc. might be strong), always trying to create alternative worlds with analogue means, and most of all, always being a medium where the reception of the artwork happens in the very moment it is produced. No photoshopping possible. Theatre refers directly to the shared present, to the time spent together by the artists and spectators. Live arts are always in negotiation. . .

(Florian Malzacher accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00796-x)

Fair enough, but let’s turn the statement inside out. Say in our research we observe situations or events full of glitches and mistakes, involving many people having to negotiate without complete control but pragmatically seeking to realize something major, all in real time right now (as in: “no one can test real-time”). Would we call that theatre, and if so, with what added purchase?

I don’t know about you but I have observed such circumstances in my own research, and if by observer you wish to term me spectator, then fair enough, this too is theatre. But so what? What do we get from seeing such events as “live arts”?

II

Let’s focus on what for me is the most obvious and pressing point: Is there then an aesthetics to the behavior I observe in infrastructure control rooms and field incident command centers when their personnel operate under conditions of systemwide uncertainty and emergency? Certainly, you see virtuosi of skill, timing and improvisation in the midst of scripted and unscripted situations. That’s not news. What is newer, or odder, is to press the question of how to evaluate or judge these “live arts” within the practices of the arts.

As a way into this, Robert Boyers, author and essayist, complicates those two words so important to policy judgments–excellence and accomplishment–from an aesthetics perspective:

In the domain of aesthetics, it seems to me, unless you get down to the nitty-gritty, you are always going to be revolving in an ether that allows for just about any kind of interpretation. Excellence obviously leads us in some contexts to think about accomplishment, right? A term that in the arts, for the most part, most people will no longer resort to. Who wants to be merely an accomplished painter? All sorts of people are accomplished. You can make a good drawing in the studio, and not be regarded by your peers as an artist. When you look at a Soutine painting. . .you’d never think of its excellence as having principally to do with its being highly accomplished. That wouldn’t be what would come to mind. It is of course highly accomplished, but that word itself would seem at once inadequate and misleading.

(accessed online at https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/780-good-taste-bad-taste-no-taste-why-taste)

I for one have spent a lot of time at the nitty-gritty level in arguing why accomplishments (my term) are so important in evaluating the effectiveness (a kind of excellence) of real-time professionals seeking to prevent emergencies or responding to them once they occur. So what else am I to see aesthetically if I shift focus from accomplishment and excellence in these live arts of interest to me?

III

I read Boyers as suggesting an answer: It’s at the granular levels of a really-existing emergency–e.g., “every major forest fire is unique”–that we are more likely to see one (primary) interpretation: This indeed is an emergency requiring immediate and urgent action Now it doesn’t take a genius to focus on one set of implications in treating emergencies as urgent: Saving the forest from burning down, preventing the electricity grid from separating and destroying itself, ensuring the urban water supply from being (further) contaminated by Cryptosporidium or worse–all and more mean saving infrastructures that have been persistently criticized for bias and erasures.

Or to put that charge in the terms offered here: Emergencies, to the extent they reinforce or exploit an aesthetics of erasure and bias, fail the more widely they are seen as misdirection and propaganda. I hope the reader sees how topical this point is in today’s politics.