1.
There is a sense in which we—not least of which our mental models of policy and management issues—are indefinitely interrupted and left unfinished. 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 representation depicts that which it is represented, but rather that representations interrupt recognition itself. Moving from this incompletion toward uncertainty and risk means not just that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional and messy. We as well see how the permanent incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representations. Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asked, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or, for that matter, to something or someone (in)completely different?
Is this incompletion the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we each never body forth as representative or in total? The resulting complexity means no single or new representation could ever erase the initial condition that other recastings are forthcoming and 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 too when it comes to reality and policy.
2.
A child asks, When does the weather begin? Even answering delays completion in the sense that this answer completes only that question. Which is to raise another question: What is in between openly incomplete and narrow completion? “Rehearsals”? How so? If the recent COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t sufficient to institute basic income policies, what crisis is? Think of all that was lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made in the pandemic. Which implies: We were only rehearsing policies on the fly then, and now. Of course we want to believe that rehearsals are learning experiences. But, while many masquerade learning as defined outcomes—it’s performance night!—learning still looks much like incomplete rehearsing.
To put it differently, those in public policy are rightly chary of calls that begin “We are at a crossroads” and move right into just-do-this blueprints. Policies pretending to be manifestos are like sticking theory into a novel: The latter was equivalent for Proust to leaving the price tag on a gift. It devalues the object it pretends to valorize. So too for policy analysis. Gone are days when we felt comfortable with discussions tagged, “Elementary economics demonstrates that. . .”
3.
What to do? In one sense, incompletion offers up the prospect of new policy and management narratives being assembled from the ones occluded, effaced, erased or altogether missing from what has become the heavy palimpsest of a complex policy.
There’s the view that public policy is like a mailbox from which we send important messages and in which we receive a lot of junk mail. Have you noticed, though, just how mismatched free-standing mailboxes are compared to the structures that stand behind them? So, we have misleading mailboxes in front of misleading facades to a range of insides whose good and bad messes no one can really see outside-in. Contrary to the illusion of policies as mailboxes, the policies we send and receive scarcely reflect all the busy, domestic life of the palimpsests they have become. This means, among other things, it should not be surprising that generalizations about power are better understood as only text on the surface of these palimpsests whose granularities, while overwritten, are still there to be rediscovered.
But then how to see these granularities, including missing ones? Today’s frequent answer: interdisciplinarity. Certainly, it’s common enough to argue that analyses and accounts of policy and management be presented not just from one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but also from many–including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more. Any less would be too simple, if only because each discipline brings with it many of those multiple interpretations mentioned earlier.
4.
Yet what gets missed in the mashup of hyphens—”from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”—is that the hyphen itself is more than a matter of sentence grammar. You may remember Polonius’s speech from Hamlet to the effect: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”? While the hyphens in that passage are the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness, never let it be supposed Interdisciplinary accounts are long-winded!
But long-windedness is inevitable when there is no closure rule. It’s not just that a complex and difficult policy issue can be seen, and thus analyzed, from different directions. “Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates”. Well ok, but why stop there? It’s that policy and issue are themselves open to multiple interpretation. “Sonata, what do you want of me?,” the philosopher Rousseau repeats. So too we ask, not of each intractability, but instead: Wicked problems together, what do you want of us?
5.
Example? If economics is about satisfaction, then the fact that people are satisfied in terms of happiness after reaching a certain level of income means that economics doesn’t apply in this way to those with even higher incomes, right? The extent to which they remain unsatisfied irrespective of income has more to do with, say, psychology and politics or more, right? If so, then it seems to me that almost anything but economics can explain these times when, e.g., saving Europe is reduced to saving the euro; when what were once broad economic stabilization policies are now this or that financial stabilization mechanism; when it makes “perfect sense” to use credit default swaps to determine entire countries are riskier than some corporations; and when economists defend “competitiveness” as cost-slashing, whatever that timeless economic theory says about labor productivity setting wage rates.
Even here, though, there is wicked, and then there is wicked. Just how do we study people in that far-off future who have yet to be born? I mean, think about that. Just how is extrapolating that far off our/their basic human needs—and from many different disciplines and interpretations—to happen? Or, if that’s too challenging, just stay here and now, with our choices over existing methods and categories. Our problems are rooted in race?, I ask. No, they are rooted in class, you answer. “No”? As race and class each have its own social science, it’s long looked like a methodological choice between the two. But we know who the losers are either way: Not me! “Statistics,” as poet Robert Frost puts it in his Notebooks, “are the way I have to look at everybody but myself.” That’s me, up on that perch above it all looking down. After all, up there when is talking to oneself ever long-windedness?
6.
Experts on their respective perches tell “us” that the majority of people don’t see how bad conditions really are, but they do; that their minority really has no power, only others of low and mean cunning down there have; and that it’s too late to expect the rest below to give the minority up here a serious hearing, but never too late for the up-here minority to be serious about anything and everything. “We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” But taking immediate and effective control globally is the last thing governments can do under conditions of the Anthropocene, right?
And, give me a break, control? Even advocates of dismantling capitalism want those otherwise reviled “mechanisms of control” to be claimed and exercised throughout. While involving truly urgent issues, this is about as likely to happen as seeing a blue rose in the Sahara. (We might as well try extracting sunbeams from cucumbers as in Gulliver’s Travels.) “Currently, the effectiveness of the regulation of platforms is debatable because platform infrastructures are constantly evolving and regulators have little insight in and control over how this happens.” Now that sounds closer to what’s happening in the 2025 I know, incomplete as it necessarily is.
7.
Where does all this leave us? The actual challenge remains, in a slight paraphrase of one critic, that of “demonstrating how to think with the past’s inadvertent posterity in the moment it tries to build an unknowable here-to-come that we have hitherto been used to viewing primarily through hindsight.” Which I take to underscore just how much a prejudice this “reliance on hindsight” is in a world of incompletion, contingency and difficulty.
Sources
Alff, D. (2017). The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660 – 1730. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, PA.
Frost, R. (2006). The Notebooks of Robert Frost. (R. Faggen, Ed.) The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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