I. Catastrophe averted is no longer the gold standard.
It is already recognized that the Trump budget and staff cuts will have catastrophic effects. But most people don’t understand that their chief effect will be jettisoning catastrophe itself as an evaluative standard for government performance. Catastrophe is the risk we have to take, or so we are now told.
Yet millions of real-time professionals have been trained and acculturated to avoid or prevent outright failure in providing critical services. People die when catastrophes happen. In contrast, our national leaders believe “If we don’t risk system failure by cutting costs and staff we’ll never get our global market share”–now both in dollars and in global politics.
What they–and the rest of us–don’t see is the billions of dollars saved each day by professionals who are now being fired from real-time operations in our critical infrastructures, like water, energy and telecommunications. For our national CEO’s, the jettisoned standard was all about playing it safe, and playing it safe is not good enough.
The expression, “playing it safe,” is often used pejoratively in the U.S. Safety-first, Teddy Roosevelt said, will kill America. The problem is that our CEO leaders haven’t told us: Under what conditions is not playing it safe the equivalent to running headlong into fire?
II. The Organic Line in Policy and Management
In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.
This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.” Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)
What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,
There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.
(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
Source. Irene V. Small (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.
III. Dual Power
During those years, the predominant logic among the political and intellectual left was that the state was a machine of oppression of the popular classes. However, what this mechanical conception cannot answer is why the state, a ‘mere instrument of domination’, is paradoxically continually claimed by the struggles of the working classes to inscribe their new rights or to institutionalise many of their social conquests. The response that the popular classes are living a ‘deception’ because they do not understand that the state is merely the machine of their own oppression, or that they are involved in conditions of domination which oblige them to see the world from their position of domination, in order to continue to be dominated, condemns the subaltern classes to a condition of perpetual idiocy which can only be overcome by the work of those who, due to the magic of the holy spirit, possess the ‘truth’ and have not fallen into the clutches of deception: the party, the intellectuals, etc.
Even if true, so what? One answer to that question is “dual power”:
Every form of social dual power arises outside the state and against the state because it is a way of democratising the decision-making and management of some common societal issue. But, at the same time, dual power arises initially to demand something from the state and, if there is no universal irradiation of dual power that allows the state form to be overcome, dual power will seek to enshrine in the (new) state itself the institutionality, the management of the new right, of the new resource or recognition achieved in the collective struggle. At the same time, the state will have to reconstruct its social legitimacy if it manages to incorporate the imprint of dual power in its new legal order, in its institutional reorganisation and in the social composition of its officials. It is a paradoxical relationship. Dual power is the antagonist of the state; but, at the same time, so far, neither can live without the other.
(both quotes from https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/state-counter-power-and-post-fascism-from-poulantzas-to-the-present-interview-with-alvaro-garcia-linera-and-sandro-mezzadra/)
An example: the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on emergency responders and critical infrastructure operators in Oregon and Washington State.
The pandemic had been a clear wake-up call to those we interviewed. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response had been and had to be “unparalleled”. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official.
And what were COVID’s major impacts from the perspective of these informants? First and foremost: the pandemic’s interconnectivities. An experienced emergency management expert put it this way, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.
This was so because the pandemic combined with other emergencies at the same time. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVTD-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate for city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for real-time line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created unexpected issues.
That what had been invisible before had become defined and visible in the pandemic period describes a seeming paradox: Immediate response to a heat dome or winter ice storm can have a logic, clarity and urgency in response: Secure electricity and water first. Yet add after-effects or a different crisis, in this case the pandemic, and some important things turn much less clear at the same time. “It’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling in immediate response, an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner underscored. It’s by no means always certain how response happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official before trying to explain.
What does this have to do with “dual power”? The fact that those left alive after a major disaster often self-organize–especially when the state and its resources are unexpectedly missing-in-action–is a well-known and documented example of social movement as “self-government” and “autonomous.” But: The state must do better the next time we have a pandemic! Less well-known yet just as important are the struggles within the state over who best to take immediate action, those insiders at the rock-face of disaster or those further up in hierarchical chains of command.
If your starting point is “the state is a means of domination,” then that was not what our interviewees saw in the Oregon and Washington State emergencies of the early 2020s.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 