Decay?

So many Debbie Downers out there. No sooner than the author says societal decay can be overgeneralized, we’re off and running with how capitalism leads to decay and more decay in every nook and cranny of the life-world. More, this decay is over-determined. If it weren’t capitalism, it’d be because of our earthly bodies. That such thinking deoxygenates the effectiveness of policy and management should not be surprising.

What to do? If we don’t like the language game of decay, Wittgenstein tells us: Get another one. Which is what many do with talk of renewal and such. Others, in contrast, insist that terms like decay and renewal need to be jettisoned in favor of different cosmologies (that is, altogether different life-worlds). But whether appealing to different language games or different cosmologies, we again are placing ourselves at a distance from current understandings of policy relevance in the hope that whatever the ensuing change it’s a big-T transformation rendering current disputes moot.

The problem with big-T transformations, however, is that the stories we tell to achieve these ends are always in excess of those ends. We also tell stories to stabilize and underwrite conditions under which to achieve Transformation. Indeed, relations, social and otherwise, may need to be (re)woven or repaired via stories we tell if we are to be transformative. As one author put, something like “resocialization through narrative” is sought more so–or at least before–big-T transformations.

The reparative function of the stories we tell our people is not much discussed–especially as it implies that the policy narratives used to underwrite decisionmaking in the face of uncertainty, complexity, conflict and unfinished business are also reparative in ways under-acknowledged. It’s repair under unpredictable conditions–not decay as the certainty that can’t be changed–that is the object of analysis when policy and management relevancies are at issue in real time.