I
The philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes in The Big Transcript:
In a story it says: “After he said that he left her, as he had done the day before.” If I am asked whether I understand this sentence, there’s no easy answer. It’s an English sentence and in that respect I understand it. I would know, for instance, how one could use this sentence. I could come up with a context of my own for it. And yet I don’t understand it in the same way I would understand it if I had read the story up to that point. (Cf language-games.) [7e]
Replace “if I had read the story” with “if I had read the policy palimpsest.” The spaces in between the words, “After he said that he left her, as he had done the day before,” are just as important, if not more so, than the words read. The spaces signify all that has been left out, effaced or erased from prior texts used to assemble this composite sentence. Not to see what’s missing is a special kind of failure in understanding what you are reading. That you’d understand the sentence differently or better had you read the story up to that point doesn’t change the fact that the preceding text embeds interstices also to be examined and understood.
How so? Immediately after the above quote, Wittgenstein asks us to think of the sentence as if it were a painting:
What does it mean to understand a painted picture? Here too there is understanding and a failure to understand! And here too ‘understanding’ and ‘failure to understand’ can mean different things. –The picture represents an arrangement of objects in space, but I am incapable of seeing a part of the picture three-dimensionally; rather, in that part I see only patches of the picture. . .[M]aybe I know all of the objects, but – in another sense – don’t understand how they’re arranged. [7e]
So too we understand the words in a composite sentence but fail to understand the three-dimensionality of the palimpsest–its weight and heft layered and interweaved beneath–from which the composite has been patched together.
II
In actuality, each composite sentence is a rearrangement of the palimpsest’s elements-with-effacements from different layers and positions into, literally, the straight lines called sentences. These linear, sequential expressions are, in effect, meshes of interrupted time and space tethered in multiple places to the entire policy palimpsest.
The analogy I have in mind is the way painter, Gerhard Richter, uses the squeegee in his photo-paintings and more recent chromatic work. He smears the surface photo or layers of paint and produces something new, seen for the first time. So too the analyst seeks to smear the composite sentence or argument with an optic–a new method, metaphor, counternarrative–in order to see not just what’s below the surface but also to surface new ways of seeing all this.
III
No palimpsest is inscripted with the last word; no composite from it is indisputable. Each composite is allographic in the sense of having no one authoritative rendering. If a “readymade” is a mass-produced object elected by an artist for display as a work of art, a policy palimpsest is a “readyunmade,” one that is also mass-produced but constantly scored over by all manner of contingencies.
In case it needs saying, sometimes the scoring is visible and the sutures blatant. During his honorary degree ceremony in 1959 at the Czech Charles University, Haile Selassie was addressed as, well, “Comrade Emperor” (which is right up there with Louis-Philippe as “citizen King” in France’s July 1830 Revolution).
For an introduction to “policy palimpsests,” see my “When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene” at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 