How different genres structure and change public policy: 15 cases (longer version)

NB. A shorter, finalized version can be found in “How genre matters for policy” at https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/22/how-genre-matters-in-policy-longer-article/

---

It’s a truism that narratives dominate public policy and decision-making.

For those of us with a formalist or literary bent, the major conceptual implication is that the narratives are necessarily affected by the different conventions governing the respective genres (the policy memo, scholarly article, manifesto, others) through which the narratives are presented.

Below are ten brief illustrations of how different genre conventions affect, noticeably and importantly, the policy narrative when considered as story with beginning, middle and end or as an argument with premises and conclusion(s).

1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format

2. The genre of wicked policy problems

3. Not marginal or marginalized, but rather: which precarious?

4. Recasting poverty: a Zimbabwean example

5. Catastrophized cascades

6. The genre of policy palimpsest

7. Not-good-enough as an artifact of different genres

8. Analogies without counter-examples are floating signifiers

9. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy

10. The policy relevance of Hamlet‘s Shakespeare (newly added)

11. When poems take us further in the climate emergency: Jorie Graham

12. How being right is a matter of genre

13. Different genres bring different granularities of policy relevance: a case in pastoralist development

Postscript. Never forget the importance of narrative structure in genre: the memo as a case

Post-Postscript. The beginning of style, or the limits of argument by adverb and adjective in public policy and management

1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format

I

Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest as nothing like it had occurred there before. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.

Fair enough, but not enough.

So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is predictably unimaginable to them. The M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. Rather it is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.

II

I however think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:

David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.

III

I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is, “unimaginably catastrophic” is not untrue.

So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something about a catastrophe very desperate indeed.

2. The genre of wicked policy problems

Recast wicked (that is, intractable) problems of policy and managementt as part of a longstanding genre in literature, which enables very different statements and competing positions to be held without them being inconsistent at the same time. Literary and cultural critic, Michael McKeon, helps us here:

Genre provides a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. The ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-“solving” capacities.

In McKeon’s formal terms, “the genre of the novel is a technique to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no particular commitment than that.”

Intractability appeared not only as the novel’s subject matter but also by virtue of the conventions for how these matters to be raised. The content is not only about the intractable, but also its governing context is as historically tangled and conventionalized as that of the English novel.

So what? I am not saying wicked problems are fictitious (even so, there is the well-known truth in fiction). Rather, I am arguing that pinning wicked problems exclusively to their content (e.g., wicked problems are defined by the lack of agreed-upon rules to solve them) misses the fact that the analytic category of wicked problems as such is highly rule-bound (i.e.., by the historical conventions to articulate and discuss such matters, in this case through novelistic means).

Here too, how so?

The answer gets us to the really important part. Return to the scholarly attempt to differentiate “wicked” and “tame” problems into more nuanced categories. Doing so is akin to disaggregating the English novel into romance, historical, gothic and other types. But such a differentiation need not problematize the genre’s conventions. In fact, the governing conventions may become more complex for distinguishing the more complex content, thus reinforcing the genre as a bottled intractability.

If wicked problems are to be better addressed, altogether different conventions and rules—what Wittgenstein called “language games”—will have to be found under which to recast these. . . . well, whatever they are to be called they wouldn’t be termed “intractable,” would they? There’s little understanding, it seems to me, that labeling a policy issue wicked can over-complexify a problem.

In fact, the litmus test that an issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether or not it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. Declaring something a wicked problem can create The Ultimate One-Sided Problem—it’s, well, intractable—for humans who are everything but one-sided. In effect, one-siders of intractability, Anthropocene or not, have taken the generous notion of intractably human and scalped it.

Source

McKeon, M. ([1987] 2002). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

3. Not marginal or marginalized, but rather: which precarious?

I

Pastoralist knowledge, such as that of sub-Saharan herders, is an endangered species, we are told. More than marginalized, the practices are precarious—threatened where not extinct. Not only are the transmitters disappearing (the old-time pastoralists and transhumant nomads), but the forms of transmission—traditional knowledge, oral cultures, parent-to-child herding practices—are also slipping away.

II

If the preceding sounds like a familiar narrative, it has been written to be that way. For this is the view many have of pastoralism. It, after all, accords with many facts, e.g., the declines in young herders and their training/apprenticing.

The narrative needs to be pushed further, though. For governments have added a third type of precarity to the mix of disappearing practices and practitioners, namely: the latter were much less useful, anyway, than official policies and programs.

Why does this matter?

Because marginal and precarious are not the synonyms. Precarious differentiates behavior in ways that all those repetitions of marginal and marginalized do not. For it turns out precarity has more dimensions.

III

How so?

When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the more common refrain is these herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.

Since the study of pastoralism appears to be stuck with the term’s use and abuse, may I suggest a different, more positive dimension of their precarity:

The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .

Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York

Pastoralists, in this sense, continue to illuminate to our advantage what others persist texting as “the margins.”

4. Recasting poverty: a Zimbabwean example

–“What am I missing when I look at poverty the way I do?,” is for me much like reading a mystery novel twice: The first time I read to find out what happened by way of what is described and evoked. The second time I read to figure out and evaluate what I missed by way of how the mystery was constructed. As Leona Toker put it, the first reading is the reading of a mystery as it unfolds; the second is about the convention(s) at work in making the mystery I read.

This implies poverty should be read at least twice, first as a policy issue and second as any such policy issue involving these rather than those conventions of issue construction: What does policy say? And what did we miss by way of saying it this, rather than that, way?

–Here’s an example. Consider reports by Zimbabwe villagers:

March, 1992
“We are not yet getting food for drought relief”
“there is no body who bring us food”

April
“He has got a problem of starvation he is not working and he has got seven children.”

May
“The problem of water here is sirious so that they need borehole and their cattle are very thin because there is no grass”
“Trees die when they plant them”
“This man is a criple that he needs help, but he is very intelligent that he tries to help himself”
“She is old and she is blind and she is a widow and she does not have anyone to help her with food. No clothes no blankets. They do no have cattle to plough with this year”

June
“At present two girls have left school they are just sitted at home. They can’t get money to pay schoolfees”
“They have no food. She has a family of six children”
“They are starving”
“The cattle are dying”

What was to be done?

That depends on my—your?—two readings. The first reading is the unfolding immediacy of dire times in the village; the second is identifying the responses to what is described, starting from food-for-work schemes on to other projects. (Think of the project as others have done: It is its own genre, with pre-existing modules for planning, operation, management, auditing and such.)

Still back to the question: What am I missing by way of two readings? But my second reading of the above quotes came years after the comments were written.

–That is to say, answers are to be found for: What am I missing now? The response, please note, cannot be solely a fact-finding response by way of the obvious other question: What happened to these villagers in 1992 and after?

What is very important for today is: Where are people saying the same or similar things, right now, and what are the new genres for addressing these now recasted forms of poverty?

Source

Toker, L. (1993). Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.

5. Catastrophized cascades

The upshot of what follows: Infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing about infrastructural failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.

I

An infrastructure cascade happens when the failure of one part of the critical infrastructure triggers failure in its other parts as well as in other infrastructures connected with it. The fast propagation of failure can and has led to multiple systems failing over quickly, where “a small mistake can lead to a big failure.” The causal pathways in the chain reaction of interconnected failure are often difficult to identify or monitor, let alone analyze, during the cascade and even afterwards.

For its part, catastrophizing in the sense of “imagining the worst outcome of even the most ordinary event” seems to overlap with this notion of cascade. Here though the imagining in catastrophizing might be written off as exaggerated, worse irrational—the event in question is, well, not as bad as imagined—while infrastructure cascades are real, not imagined.

II

We may want, however, to rethink any weak overlap when it comes to infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing failure across interconnected infrastructures. Consider the insights of Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (2019, The University of Chicago Press).

In analyzing cases of catastrophizing (in Leonardo’s Notebooks, an early work of Kant and Shakespeare’s King Lear, among others), Passannante avoids labeling such thinking as irrational and favors a more nuanced understanding. He identifies from his material four inter-related features to the catastrophizing.

First (no order of priority is implied), catastrophizing probes and reasons from the sensible to the insensible, the perceptible to the imperceptible, the witnessed to the unwitnessed, and the visible to invisible. In this fashion, the probing and reasoning involve ways of seeing and feeling as well.

Second and third, when catastrophizing, an abrupt, precipitous shift or collapse in scale occurs (small scale suddenly shifts to large scale), while there is a distinct temporal elision or compression of the catastrophe’s beginning and end (as if there were no middle duration to the catastrophe being imagined).

Last, the actual catastrophizing while underway feels to the catastrophizer as if the thinking itself were involuntary and had its own automatic logic or necessity that over-rides—“evacuates” is Passannante’s term—the agency and control of the catastrophizer.

III

In this way, the four features of catastrophizing take us much closer to the notion of infrastructure cascades as currently understood.

In catastrophizing as in cascades, there is both that rapid propagation from small to large and that temporal “failing all of a sudden.” In catastrophizing as in cascades, causal connections—in the sense of identifying events with their beginnings, middles and ends—are next to impossible to parse out, given the rapid, often inexplicable, processes at work.

And yes, of course, cascades are real, while catastrophizing is more speculative; but: The catastrophizing feels very, very real to–and out of the direct control of–the catastrophizer as an agent in his or her own right.

In fact, one of the most famous typologies in organization and technology studies sanctions a theory that catastrophizes infrastructure cascades. The typology’s cell of tight coupling and complex interactivity is a Pandora Box of instantaneous changes, invisible processes, and incomprehensible breakdowns involving time, scale and perspective.

This is not a criticism: It may well be that we cannot avoid catastrophizing, if only because of the empirical evidence that sudden cascades have happened in the past.

IV

The four features, however, suggest that one way to mitigate any wholesale catastrophizing of infrastructure cascades is to bring back time and scale into the analysis and modeling of infrastructure cascades.

To do so would be to insist that really-existing infrastructure cascades are not presumptively instantaneous or nearly so. It would be to insist that infrastructure cascades are differentiated in terms of time and scale, unless proven otherwise. That, in fact, is what our research suggests. At the risk of tooting our horn:

V

Let me leave you with another extension inspired by Passannante’s analysis. If infrastructure cascades, when catastrophized, have endings entailed in their beginnings (leaving only attenuated middles or no middles at all to speak of by way of analysis), the catastrophized cascade turns out to be the entailment of “just before” and “immediately after.”

That is, we are to believe we are in a state where disaster avoidance in-between is not possible and disaster response has yet to start but remains unavoidably ahead. We are expected to experience cascade-as-disaster as a presentism too close at hand for us to think about anything else.

But the point remains: Every one experiences time as anfractuous, full of twists and turns on occasion–why else all the interruptions?

6. The genre of policy palimpsest

I

Consider what was a commonplace for years: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism has come to mean total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.”

In reality, that statement was full of effacements from having been overwritten again and again through seriatim debates, vide:

“……totalitarianism        has come to mean…….total control               of politics                  ,citizenry and economics………”

It’s that accented “total control” that drove the initial selection of the phrases around it. Today, after further blurring, it’s much more fashionable to rewrite the composite argument as: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism sought total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.” The “sought” recognizes that, when it comes these forms of totalitarianism, seeking total control did not always mean total control achieved. “Sought” unaccents “total control.”

II

Fair enough, but note that “sought” itself reflects its own effacements in totalitarianism’s palimpsest, with consequences for how time and space are re-rendered.

Consider two quotes from the many in that policy palimpsest, which are missed when it comes to the use of a reduced-form “sought”:

I always thought there must be some more interesting way of interpreting the Soviet Union than simply reversing the value signs in its propaganda. And the thing that first struck me – that should have struck anybody working in the archives of the Soviet bureaucracy – was that the Soviet leaders didn’t know what was happening half the time, were good at throwing hammers at problems but not at solving them, and spent an enormous amount of time fighting about things that often had little to do with ideology and much to do with institutional interests.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n23/sheila-fitzpatrick/a-spy-in-the-archives

The camp, then, was always in motion. This was true for people and goods, and also for the spaces they traversed. Because Auschwitz was one big construction site. It never looked the same, from one day to the next, as buildings were demolished, extended and newly built. As late as September 1944, just months before liberation in January 1945, the Camp SS held a grand ceremony to unveil its big new staff hospital. . .

Inadvertently, [construction] also created spaces for prisoner agency. The more civilian contractors worked on site, the more opportunities for barter and bribes. All the clutter and commotion also made it harder to exercise full control, as blocked sightlines opened the way for illicit activities, from rest to escape. . .

Some scholars see camps like Auschwitz as sites of total SS domination. This was certainly what the perpetrators wanted them to be. But their monumental designs often bore little resemblance to built reality. Priorities changed, again and again, and SS planners were thwarted by supply shortages, bad weather and (most critically) by mass deaths among their slave labour force. In the end, grand visions regularly gave way to quick fixes, resulting in what the historian Paul Jaskot, writing about the architecture of the Holocaust, called the “lack of a rationally planned and controlled space”. Clearly, the popular image of Auschwitz as a straight-line, single-track totalitarian machine is inaccurate.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/being-in-auschwitz-nikolaus-wachsmann/

I am not arguing that the quoted reservations are correct or generalizable or fully understandable (the quotes come to us as already overwritten). I am saying that they fit uncomfortably with popular notions “local resistance,” when the latter is about “taking back control”

III

So what? So what if time and space are in a policy and management world are (re-)rendered sinuous and interstitial, in a word, anfractuous rather than linear like a sentence? It’s a big deal, actually. It means that no single composite argument can galvanize the entire space-and-time of a palimpsest. It means matters of time and space are worth another look with each argument we read off of a major policy.

Why? Because reconsiderations of how time and space play out offers up the prospect of different objectivities and realisms, the very stuff of space and time.

For instance, the preceding entry noted how “catastrophic cascades” are described as having virtually instantaneous transitions from the beginning of a cascade in one infrastructure to its awful conclusion across other infrastructures connected with it. But in the terminology presented here, a catastrophizing cascade isn’t so much a composite argument with a reduced-form middle as it is a highly etiolated palimpsest where infrastructure interactions taking more granular time and space have been blotted out altogether.

7. Not-good-enough as an artifact of different genres

I

I don’t know about you, but I’ve turned into a minimalist when reading articles on major policy issues. If it doesn’t hook me in the first couple of paragraphs, I scroll down to the last paragraph and read backwards on the look-out for the upshot. If I find something, I read backwards for a bit longer and decide if it’s worth returning back to where I first left off.

This is largely a problem of genre. The journalist article starts with the dead or dying victim, when I the reader want to know upfront, not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce the victimhood. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people!

I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Then tell me how we might modify their doing so in order to make it work here as well.

II
There is also that other genre, the academic article on a major policy issue. To be honest, some articles are doing better to get to the upshot(s), at least within the first two or three pages of single-spaced text, i.e., if and when they get to the part, “This article contributes to. . .” Still, too many top-of-the-page Abstracts conclude with, “Finally, implications are drawn for further action.” As if the oasis is somewhere out there in the desert of words ahead.

Tell me what those implications are so I have energy to read the next 20 pages. I’m not asking the authors to simplify. I’m asking them to tell me what they conclude or propose so I, the reader, can decide whether or not their actual analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell me upfront, because I may find I have something better to recommend from their assembly of facts and figures.

III

There is also that Executive Summary you find in some–by no means all–policy-advocacy reports. Many such reports are also doing a better job laying out recommendations upfront so that the readers can decide for themselves whether the rest of the text makes their case.

The problem arises where the rah-rah of advocacy gets in way of the details of how to implement the recommendations. You still find many instances of the already obvious, “We need a more equitable society,” and then full-stop. Not.Good.Enough. These aren’t calls for action but a form of bearing witness, a very different policy genre than the advocacy report.

IV

In fact, many long-form journalism pieces or academic articles come to us posing as two other genres, essays or mysteries. We the readers are meant to see how their thinking unfolds. Or in the case of executive summaries, the values of the advocates are to shine bright above all else. Fair enough for readers knowing they are reading essays or mysteries or a tract. But not good enough for others who want more by way of action.

8. Analogies without counter-examples are floating signifiers

The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.

Trevor Jackson (2023). The new history of old inequality. Past & Present, 259(1): 262–289 (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac009)

I

I have bolded the preceding phrase because its insight is major: We have to search for analogies in the times.

The problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is when the analogy misleads. Jackson, by way of illustrating the point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.

II

The upshot, however, is that, when confronted with an analogy drawn from history, like the Gilded Age, and marshaled to encapsulate and distill present trends, we must press its advocates to go further. They need to identify disaggregated trends (regional, sectoral, rural/urban, other), including cases where these parts are not described by the whole. The burden of proof is on the analogy advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions.

Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology would have it. Broad analogies untethered from granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.

III

A fairly uncontroversial conclusion, I should think, but let’s now make the matter harder for us.

The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, said this:

Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns. 

https://im1776.com/2023/10/04/edward-luttwak-interview/?ref=thebrowser.com&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Now, of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others of course dismiss this outright as racist, adding “Just look where he publishes this stuff!”

But, following on the earlier upshot, the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and examples, including most importantly counter-cases.

9. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy

I

Remember when those orbiting twins of “freedom and necessity” shone brightest on the intellectual horizons? Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the second you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity. Or if you prefer more negative: back to when your blindspots are also strengths.

None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential were nowhere different from each other. None of this would matter if really-existing policy and management were not the way-stations lived in between.

But the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential are, I want to argue, conflated and treated as one and the same in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.

II

Recently, Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, makes the point directly:

Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/mere-belief/?src=longreads

Memoir in this shift ends up, in Tisdale wonderful term, as a “grand reveal.” Of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds to also be positive affordances and enablements as they move to the way-stations in-between.

To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one meaning at the expense of the other meanings allied to. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”

So what? To rewrite a once-popular expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eyewitnessing what is right in front of us.

Other sources

David Caute (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London).

Katharine Jenkins (2023). “Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality” (accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW4-VT_ZTJw)

10. The policy relevance of Hamlet‘s Shakespeare (newly added)

There is no more fundamental way of freeing Hamlet from the constraints of text than by removing words altogether, as ballet of necessity does.

Michelle Assay (2022). “The late- and post-Soviet trials of Hamlet in song, ballet, and opera.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 108(1) 35–52 (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01847678221092791)

The artist as the created; Mona Lisa’s Leonardo, Beatrice’s Dante. Curious concept.

Guy Davenport in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 1963 (Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Edited by Edward M. Burns, 2 volumes (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA; 2018).

If anything, the notion of “Hamlet‘s Shakespeare” looks to be a way of textualizing Shakespeare. Not just his becoming the playwright through writing Hamlet, but also writing his own narrative self by thinking through Hamlet. As if in referring to Satan’s Milton, I am positing how John Milton might have worked out his own personal theology by having to dictate (verbalize) that Satan into Paradise Lost.

If so, then freeing both Hamlet and Shakespeare from the textual is to imagine something altogether different, like those ballets called Hamlet.

Here the upshot is that there are multiple versions, not just necessarily unique performances, of the single play, e.g., Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles, Stephen Mills’ 2000 Hamlet, and the 2015 Hamlet of Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s for the Bolshoi Ballet (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797).

For policy and management to have multiple versions, rather than many unique implementations, is also to imagine policy and management through different genres than those of the textual.

One great example is that of the refusal. There have been those whose rejection to involvement in policy and management, let alone in politics, has been uncompromising: “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight.” This silence and isolation includes refusing to “to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution”(quotes from https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal)

The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say refusal is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the function of silence depends on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is by way of being voiceless. Or better yet: In what ways do you render voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?

The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say refusal is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the function of silence depends on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is by way of being voiceless. Or better yet: In what ways do you render voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?

11. When poems take us further in the climate emergency: Jorie Graham

I

No one can accuse poetJorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, a homeopathic whiff, of optimism–enviro-techno-social-otherwise–in the poetry I’ve read of hers.

Which poses my challenge: Is there some thing, other than loss and dread in her four recent books of poetry, compiled as [To] The Last [Be] Human, that I can rely on or use in my own responding to the climate emergency?

To expect answers from poets is to make an outrageous demand, but that is what I’m doing here.

II

There are two easy ways to finesse my challenge. First, Graham provides instances where she could be wrong (“. . .how you/cannot/comprehend the thing you are meant/to be looking/for”). There is also no reason to believe her readers read her as she seems to imagine, irrespective of thinking there will be no readers if things continue as they are.

But that kind of line of by-pass fall shorts of what Graham is doing here. It’s her sharp scalpel in getting to the point and making it wholly matter that is my focus. To lay my cards out: Graham’s analytic sensibility shines through the poems’ dark prospect, and I want to stay with that sensibility and not her horizon.

III

One from many excerpts reflects this constellated sensibility for me (from the first book, Sea Change):

                                                                         the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever, 
                                                         so that it's not a 
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
                                                         also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
                                                         ground is bursting with
                                                         sunlight, inquire no further it says. . .  (p. 12)

There’s that tumble of words and turns-of-phrase that deepen the rush. Then they bounce off and back from the two hard left-side margins and the right-side enjambment. For someone with my background and training, this is resilience-being-performed.

I see hard walls being repelled from and pushed up to, and sometimes through (as in the hyphen-less “dancefloor”). Not as though it were a hope, but rather as a coiling that toggles between everywhere necessary and never out of sight/site: a resilience for the climate emergency.

IV

A tic in her sensibility is illuminating: her intermix of macro and micro, general and specific, universal and particular, without a gradient in-between. Two examples toward the end of Sea Change illustrate this (here too breaking into her flow):

                                                . . . .It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing and
cleaning-up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000 years of 
the inter-
                                                           glacial period, & the orders & the getting done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you pass, did
you lose the address again. . . (p55)

   . . .The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
                                                        question—how, this sensation called tomorrow and
                                                        tomorrow? Did you look down at
                                                        your hands just now? The dead gods
                                                        are still being
                                                        killed. They don’t appear in
                                                        “appearance.” They turn the page for
                                                        us. The score does not acknowledge
                                                        the turner of
                                                        pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging, in the
                                                        void. . . (p45)

Again—that rush of words, use of margins, turns-of-phrase that cut to a point—but what’s notable to me is there is no middle between future and mind, gods and hands, the emergency and losing an address.

I come from a profession and career where, in contrast, when conditions are complex, we look for the meso-level(s). Patterns and formations emerge for the policy analyst and manager that are not seen at the level of individual cases nor at the level of universalized generalizations. For Graham, the complexity is in that wide-open combinatorics of micro’s and macro’s.

Ironically, this sensibility makes us want to explore the middle further.

Principal source

Jorie Graham (2022). [To] The Last [Be] Human. Introduction by Robert MacFarlane. Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA

12. How being right is a matter of genre (newly added)

In public policy, the wish–so often unfilled, is for the right person at the right time in the right job doing the right thing.

In poetry by contrast, we have Louise Glück’s poem, “Crossroads,”

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—

My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

Given the poem’s theme, the shortening of lines from three to two is so RIGHT!

13. Different genres bring different granularities for policy relevance: a case from pastoralist development (new added)

I

To think of policy and management narratively is to think about narrative structure(s) from the get-go.

It’s not that a policy brief is shorter than the policy report upon which it is based. Things are left out in the former for reasons other than its shorter length. A policy brief and a policy report are different genres, like a novel compared to a play. Their respective styles, voice, conventions, audiences, and even what they take to be details (formally, their granularities) differ significantly. This means that what’s narrated in one but not repeated in another have implications for policy and management.

II

A wonderful example of why and how narrative structure matters for real-time policy and management lies in comparing two fine publications recently released by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University:

One is “Policy Briefing: Community Solutions to Insecurity along the Uganda-Kenya Border” (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/18207/IDS_Policy_Briefing_214.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).

The other is the report from which the policy brief drew, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Pastoralist Researchers on the Uganda/Kenya Border (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18123).

III

The differences in narrators’ voice is made explicit and obvious via the two documents. The policy report has been written by a local research team in a first-person voice, while the policy brief has been edited from the report in the third-person voice. For that matter, the personal and conversational “we” of the report doesn’t appear at all in the brief, and this is not surprising as its editors include those who were listed in the local research team.

IT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD THESE DIFFERENCES ARE NOT A FAILING. It could be that both brief and report had the same point of view, albeit other genre differences remain. What is crucial to note here is that the genre differences pose a huge opportunity for those of us readers who are policy analysts and managers.

That a brief and a report have been written for different audiences, fulfilling different requirements and expectations, would be a banal observation, where it not for one fact: What each genre takes as “the specifics”–to repeat, the respective granularities–are nevertheless both relevant for real-world pastoralist policy and management.

IV

Here’s one illuminating example. At one point in the report, a side comment appears: “An old man asked us where we are coming from, and we told him we had come from the office of herders. That is good, he said.”

This notion of an office of and for herders is picked up later in the report’s section, “What can pastoralists do?”. Note the voice and specifics in following passage:

The stories we have heard from women, men, and young people, have affected all of us. We will call for policies that everyone knows and follows. We’re thinking of an office run by pastoralists, with people from each community — Bokora, Jie, Turkana, Matheniko, Dodoth etc. When there are issues, the people from that place know how the issues are arising. . . .

The office should deal with any issues related to pastoralists, not only raids. The representatives would be like teachers, organising meetings, bringing awareness to people what they should be doing. Giving information to the government and NGOs.

The kraal leaders should form a network. The first to know about drought and animal disease is the herder. The herder reports to kraal leaders. Kraal leaders negotiate resource sharing with other kraal leaders. If they agree, they act. If they need further permissions, they go to the broader pastoralist association. If they need further help, they then can reach to government. Success will come if we all believe that any problem that comes has a solution within us.

“Office” is not mentioned in the policy brief, nor is “kraal,” nor is that “network” of leaders. NOR WOULD I EXPECT TO SEE THIS TYPE AND LEVEL OF GRANULARITY IN A POLICY BRIEF. For my part, I think the proposal of such an office is great idea. I wish I had thought of pastoralists-as-reliability professionals in this way.

But that is not point of this blog entry. Rather, it’s a methodological lesson to be drawn by those who treat narratives seriously in pastoralist development: Actionable granularity is not and cannot be the province of only one genre in policy or management. (Had I recourse to the transcripts of the local research team, I might have picked a more or a differently detailed example.)**

The authors of both the report and the brief are to be commended for making this lesson so evident.

**Another way to put the lesson is that pastoralists are intermedial, that is, composites of multiple media at any point in time and over time. Again, pastoralists, like the rest of us, are never one way only.

Postscript. Never forget the importance of narrative structure in genre: the case of a memo

Graduate students in public policy analysis and management will know the idealized sequence for undertaking a professional policy analysis, e.g., first define the problem, then assemble the evidence, then analyze it so and so on until we make our recommendation. This sequence, or something like it, is cast in the present tense.

My experience is that the idealized steps are markedly not in the present tense, but rather:

Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.

The past gerund, “having completed the analysis,” indicates something finished, a hope that stands in sharp contrast to real-world policies in their persisting incompletion—a very different kind of “present tense.” The gerund also serves to situate analysis within an ongoing context without which there wouldn’t be analysis.

In turn, the prepositional object, “recommendations,” introduces its own promise that our memo, already written as it is, will be dealt with, albeit outside our control but within a context of which we analysts are part. Indeed, the overall thrust of the sequence–past gerund combined with past tense verb but with present and future object–is to make clear that analysts in the present are not (yet) to blame for anything like the real-world incompletion all around us.

Post-Postscript. The beginning of style, or the limits of argument by adverb and adjective in public policy and management

–Paul Claudel, French poet and playwright, wrote in his Journal, “fear of the adjective is the beginning of style”.

–Georges Simenon: “It is said, probably apocryphally, that on completion of yet another novel he would summon his children and shake the typescript vigorously before them, asking, ‘What am I doing, little ones?” to which they would reply ritually, in chorus, ‘You’re getting rid of the adjectives, papa.’”

–“In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Mr. Holbrook said he had the best possible guide: Twain himself. ‘He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and delivering it on a platform,’ he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. ‘You have to leave out a lot of adjectives. The performer is an adjective.’”