Policy-relevant roles of incompleteness

For many policy practitioners, incompleteness is the stuff of their working lives. At any point, problems remain to be addressed, obstacles surmounted, and goals attained, along with fires to put out, constraints to be lifted, objectives to be met, missions to be fulfilled, and crises to be faced. These policy and management worlds become one in terms of unwanted interruptions, and interruptions make for unfinished business. The only thing not interrupted are disasters, which is why they are so often described as “complete.”

Briefly put, issue incompleteness is the persistence of unfinished business for policymakers, politicians and policy analysts. Granted, interruptions can arise out of complexity and leave us with uncertainty and, of course, tasks do get done of sorts. A few things even turn out better than we could have hoped for. Fires are contained, problems handled, goals addressed, objectives recongized–work does get done. But–and this is the point–our policy worlds are recognizably incomplete and unfinished for all that.

This point has to be pushed further, though. All manner of granularities and context are involved when it comes to managing or coping ahead with the interruptions and unfinished business.

I

There is a sense in which each of our mental models of a complex policy and management issue always unfinished, if it matters to us. By way of example, Jean Cocteau, French litterateur, records the following interchange of composer, Darius Milhaud:

[Milhaud] shows his old housekeeper a very faithful painting of the great square at Aix.
You see, it’s the square at Aix.
Answer: ‘I don’t know.’
What? You don’t recognize the square at Aix?
‘No sir, because I’ve never seen it painted before.’

The rub isn’t how well the painting (or any representation for that matter) depicts that which it is a painting of, but rather that representations problematize recognition itself. Moving toward uncertainty (from the direction of certainty–we’ve seen the square–or from the direction of unstudied conditions–but never before as painted) means not only that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional or messy. We also end up seeing how the incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representation.

Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asks, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or to something or someone altogether different? To ask the latter question is to open up incompletion, where knowledge is unsettled and knowledgeable gives way to inexperience.

II

Is this sense of incompleteness at the micro level the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? George Steiner recounts a childhood experience:

. . .if there are in this obscure province of one small county (diminished Austria) so many coats of arms, each unique, how many must there be in Europe, across the globe? I do not recall what grasp I had, if any, of large numbers. But I do remember that the word ‘millions’ came to me and left me unnerved. How was any human being to see, to master this plurality? Suddenly, it came to me, in some sort of exultant but also appalled revelation, that no inventory, no heraldic encyclopedia, no summa of fabled beasts, inscriptions, chivalric hallmarks, however compendious, could ever be complete.

But what is to be learned from a run of such individual experiences across more diverse people?

As I understand it, this diversity means no single or new representation could ever complete social reality or erase the initial condition that other recastings are both irresistibly forthcoming and inescapably required. Yes, the photograph recasts the way racing horses were portrayed compared to earlier paintings of them; no, the photograph is not the only or exhaustive way to portray racing horses. So for the policy and management worlds.

III

In those worlds, we have the techno-managerial elite still talking like this. “If people acted at the level of rationality presumed in standard economics textbooks, the world’s standard of living would be measurably higher,” assured Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve.

So what if really-existing markets are one of the most diverse and hybridized of social institutions? So what’s wrong with believing that the answer to always-incomplete regulation must be always-incomplete markets?

Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the policy and management realism we–you and I–know and experience.