The violence of policy palimpsests, revisited (updated)

I

Earlier blog entries discussed the key notion of “policy palimpsest” in public policy and management. The upshot is that current statements about complex policy issues are the composites of arguments and narratives that have been overwritten across time. A composite argument rendered off a policy palimpsest reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved—but none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening effacements and erasures. Arguments have been blurred, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes.

A lot follows by way of implications. Here I highlight the violence in all this. Another term for “effacements and erasures” is lacerations, and composite arguments are formatted to hide the still active scaring from suturing together this and that fragment into this or that composite argument. The role of the policy analyst is to surface the scars and what has been excised. It is also to remind us that favored phrases, like “emergence,” should not be assumed to denote the up-thrusting of something organically new but the loss, the profound loss and absence, of what had been there.

II

I recently came across a far better illustration of the palimpsest violence and the analyst’s duty of care than I could provide. It’s from the art historian, Androula Michael, and her analysis of the work of artist, Kara Walker, on slavery. It’s spot-on–this is about surfacing the missing that is still there–and I quote at length (the only edits are deletion of internal endnotes):

Against Erasure: Kara Walker and the Reactivation of Silenced Histories

7  In response to historical erasure and collective forgetting, the task becomes one of reanimating buried memories through the archive — of reactivating traces and layering over the so-called historical truth another reality: that of the absent, the erased, the silences of history. This approach is strikingly visible in Kara Walker’s series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), in which her cut-out silhouettes of Black figures are superimposed onto official historical illustrations. The original volume — richly illustrated with maps, diagrams, portraits, scenes, and texts relating to major events and figures of the Civil War — was part of a broader series of publications and public commemorations aimed at promoting reconciliation between North and South. While its editors claimed to “narrate events just as they occurred” (Guernsey and Alden, n.p.), the narrative systematically omitted a significant portion of the reality. Kara Walker poses the critical question: how is it that African Americans and the lived experience of slavery are so conspicuously absent from this work?

8  On the rare occasions when African Americans are depicted, they appear only through a textual framing that emphasizes, with strategic distance, the federal government’s designation of Black people as “contraband of war,” entirely sidelining their human experiences, subjectivities, and humanity. Kara Walker’s opaque Black silhouettes disrupt the legibility of the original images.

The stark contrast between black and white is visually striking. The scale of the figures — sometimes oversized — imposes the presence of those long excluded from official history. Anonymous yet monumental, they belong to an aesthetics of stereotype: archetypal, distorted, and yet turned against itself. They reactivate the racialized codes of the slaveholding imaginary only to detonate them from within.

9  Their radical blackness acts as both a screen and a mirror, a surface upon which repressed memories are projected. They invade the space, contaminate the image, and haunt the historical scene. These are visual specters: neither fully present nor entirely absent. Figures that evade immediate readability, that unsettle and disorient. Walker summons these ghosts — the erased Black bodies of American history, the forgotten violences, the suppressed narratives. The specter is that figure of the past which returns to haunt the present precisely because it has not been acknowledged, reckoned with, or worked through. In Walker’s work, the absent become visible — but in a form that resists pacification, or any straightforward restitution.

(accessed online at https://journals.openedition.org/angles/9759)

I submit that many composite arguments, including those not related to the world-historical stain of slavery, deserve such treatment.