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 even greater decay in the life-world. More, decay is over-determined. If not capitalism, it still comes with these earthly bodies and infrastructures of ours. That such thinking deoxygenates policy and management should not be surprising.
What to do? If we don’t like the language game around decay, Wittgenstein tells us: Get another one. Which is what many do with talk of renewal and such. Others insist that terms like decay, renewal and infrastructures 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 place ourselves further 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 is that the stories we tell to achieve these ends are always in excess of the ends. That is, relations, social and otherwise, need to be (re)woven or repaired via stories we tell if we are to be transformative. As one author put it, something like “resocialization through narrative” is sought more so than–or at least before–big-T transformation.
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. (For example, metanarratives that demonstrate how conflicting positions can hold at the same time are first and foremost reparative.) 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 matter now and in the next steps ahead.
Sources.
On decay, see: N.M. Küttel (2026). “From extraction to afterlife: toward a political materialism of urban ruins.” Urban Geography (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2026.2676282)
On “resocialization through narrative” see: A. Gefen (2024 [2017]) Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Tegan Raleigh, Volume 28 of Culture & Conflict, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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