While this blog entry centers on one subset of the many varied camps and audiences “doing development,” what follows doesn’t aim to undermine the other values and principles. The climate emergency has to be mitigated, income inequality and wealth must be reduced, wars are to be stopped, and much more needs to be done. My argument is that, if you are looking for accomplishments in these areas, start with repair and maintenance of what now has been left.
My bête noire are the controlists inside and outside development who endanger us as much as do the wider economic and political forces they cannot control. The controlists I’m talking about believe that the inputs to complex sociotechnical processes can be specified and stabilized, that processes to transform inputs into outputs can also be identified and activated as required, and that the outputs produced are in turn the best possible with low and stable variability as well. But it doesn’t work that way.
Controlists are found across the political spectrum from left to right and in the middle; they are found at the top of hierarchies and at the bottom and in between. They are embedded in professions that matter for public policy and management (not just engineers or economists, but designer-ecologists for example). Their cumulative effect is that what used to be singled out as “government blunders” are far more widespread and non-denominational these days.
None of what follows, however, will stop controlists from asserting rights as our techno-managerial elites. They will continue to give directions because the latter are “evidence-based,” or because they know that incentives and behavioral nudges work, or better yet, they say they know that getting the institutions or the price right means the right behavior follows. All this is so, even when it’s blisteringly obvious we’re in unchartered times.
I’m interested in how to manage better in spite of the controlists, while nevertheless facing the wider forces that no longer can be controlled (if they ever were). My audience here are those working in Anthropocene who recognize not only are we being harmed by the wider forces under no one’s control, controlists are inflicting further injury through their blunders in insisting otherwise. What we know, instead, is that development carries on by better means.
How so? Because manage when you can’t control and you cope even when you can’t manage. Managing means maneuvering across processes to transform inputs you can’t control into outputs that you still can use for your livelihoods. Coping means planning the next steps ahead for outputs over which can no longer managing as reliably as you’d like. You do this because, right now when it matters in real time, you cannot control inputs, processes and outputs any more than you can cut clouds in half. And if things can’t be managed better now, why ever believe the promises of evergreen controlists to manage, well, far better?
My argument, in brief
My audience is, in short, those who want to manage better what is left behind by controlists and the forces they cannot and could not control. From this point on I call this domain of interest, development as repair and maintenance. This is the subset of development audiences who are focused on repairing what we can and want to maintain.
Controlists will of course see this as suboptimal, or anti-utopian, or the quietism of despair. Again, we won’t convince them otherwise. We have instead to rely on our own experiences and the increasing numbers around us.
Many of us have come to realize the centrality of repair and maintenance in development from different directions, no one of which is all that new. Some remember the recurrent cost crises of governments in the 80s and later. Others see the deteriorated facilities and critical infrastructures on the ground. Still others shutter in the face of the overhang of commitments relative to resources (think welfare-state pensions) and wonder how to square that and other such circles. There is also recognition that “doing development” in light of these changes is a decidedly “developed” world problem as well. More contributing factors could be itemized but the realization remain the same: “Doing development” is unavoidably about repairing and maintaining the infrastructures that make us a “we.” It’s also about other aspirations, but we know that development is unavoidably about repair and maintenance throughout.
How the latter happens is the subject of the next section. That discussion is followed by an example of how development-as-repair-and-maintenance recasts a controlist-dominated green finance and humanitarian aid (namely, the setting of thresholds and triggers for resourcing). The blog ends with a short conclusion on further policy and management implications.
What is development as repair & maintenance?
Let me start where you, the readers, are. Like me, you’ve attended presentations where we’re told of the enormous losses to be incurred if we did not make huge capital investments for a better society and economy. At a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, I was told that:
**The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–so as to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
**Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion to locally adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
**We should expect much more sea-level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap in Antarctica and Greenland.
It’s not surprising that the actual mitigation interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work demands posed by the bulleted challenges. And so too before and elsewhere. I remember a meeting half a century ago about water point development in Machakos Kenya. The good news that day was that after overcoming implementation difficulties, construction was underway for the planned water supply! The bad news was that even if everything was constructed as planned, the project wouldn’t cover even the population increase in new water users over the plan period.
So, how can we talk about repair and maintenance when capital development needs are so massive? It’s been my experience–I stand to be corrected–that none of these estimated losses take into account the losses already prevented from occurring by operators and managers who avoid supply failures from that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment. (No guarantees!)
Why are these uncalculated millions and millions in savings important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae? Because it is from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations proposed by controlists for climate restoration and recovery. It is from other pools of real-time reliability professionals in healthcare, education and social protection that any master strategies for poverty and inequality and the transformation of society will be modified necessarily on the fly and necessarily in the face of unpredictable/uncontrollable contingencies.
Three very important implications for policy and management follow, I believe. First, these considerations turn the notion of “capital investments” on its head. We necessarily shift to ongoing operations as a source of innovative change. Ongoing maintenance and repair lead the inevitable re-design and modification practices for the built infrastructure in real time.
Second, the focus on real time has the advantages of highlighting the important roles of both contingency and the long term in all this. Maintenance and repair (M&R) is very often an official stage of infrastructure operations precisely because of the time it takes for the infrastructure to be implemented and then operated as constructed and managed. Consequently, the infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to unpredictable or uncontrollable contingencies along the way that have to be responded to during routine and nonroutine M&R.
Third, and the most important for our purposes, those savings and innovative responses in preventing infrastructure failures from happening are better understood and appreciated as investments in an infrastructure-based economy and society. I argue that actually-existing operations–often most visible in the real time activities of those charged with maintenance and repair–are the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of societal infrastructures faced with uncertainties from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and inadvertently produced by controlists with their policy macro-designs, promised markets, and fool-proof technologies.
If one considers these three implications together, then terms like “short-run,” “adaptive” and “flexible” are frequently not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specific–that is, often improvisational–properties of maintenance and repair under real-time urgencies. Obviously, the livestock watering borehole in Botswana’s Western Ngwaketse and the Contra Costa Country water supply in the San Francisco Bay region differ in kind and degree. But what does not differ is the importance of both as investments in their respective local and regional economies. And by “investments” I mean precisely as just discussed in terms of the real-time operations via repair and maintenance of foundational infrastructures.
So what? A too-brief example of thresholds and triggers in green finance and humanitarian aid
Green finance includes financial risk assessments of the impacts of the climate emergency on economic investments along with the activation of different thresholds and triggers for varied financial instruments, including green bonds and catastrophe bonds/insurance. Central banks are becoming more and more involved in green finance. The establishment and use of thresholds–which if breached, trigger different, at times financial responses–also extend to humanitarian aid and emergency response, whether or not related to the climate emergency.
I want to focus on the use of these thresholds and triggers from the repair and maintenance perspective just offered. I was recently involved in workshop, where one of the participants summarized for me:
I was trying to highlight how a whole institutionalised paraphernalia has evolved in the humanitarian/development space of late focused on early warning, anticipatory action, parametric insurance, early financing, all governed by models, and so creating ‘science-based’ triggers for response etc. It’s becoming more and more significant as climate finance is channelled through these mechanisms, in part a consequence of reduced field capacities/experiences in agencies/governments (in part a consequence of aid cuts that fall on people first). . . .
The problem of course is that this whole financialised ‘technostructure’ as you term it acts to exclude those very people we call high reliability professionals and all the tacit, informal, storytelling and improvisation that goes on that continuously prevents disasters and responds to them in real time.
We know that the models fail (the triggers are based on risk based calculus and don’t embrace uncertainty, in fact they can’t by definition) and so the responses too often are inappropriate, late, inadequate and so on, while at the same time the networks that keep the systems running, governing on the go etc. become deskilled and ignored, making matters worse.
These concerns are very pertinent from the high reliability literature’s reliability-matters test: Would the threshold/trigger, if activated, reduce the task volatility (the unpredictability and/or uncontrollability of the task environment) that real-time operators face? Even if not, does activation of the threshold/trigger increase their options to respond to existing task volatility? Now something that does both is a real investment in economy, society and polity!
So yes, given the ubiquity of humanitarian aid, there clearly must be situations where thresholds/triggers increase task environment volatility for field staff, reduce their front-line options, or do both (see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251318268 for one among many examples). I would, however, feel more confident in drawing a conclusion if situations where the threshold/trigger is or has been a positive resource were also identified (even if, especially if unintended). In either case, other things are also at play. The broader issue isn’t so much the planner/regulator’s Who is going to implement my major controls? as it is the infrastructure operators’ What are my major real-time failure scenarios?
Speaking personally, I can no more object a priori to an innovation like formal thresholds/triggers than I would say herders cease to be pastoralists when adopt cellphones and modern crop insurance. That reindeer herding by some Sami also relies on helicopters for round-ups in no way argues, at least for me, that pastoralism and its improvisations have disappeared. The issue for me is whether the threshold/trigger is a single resource that has multiple uses for operators in the field–or could be made to have multiple uses through more investigation or in different contexts of ongoing operations. So too when it comes specifically to the kinds of repair and maintenance operations discussed here and even more generally. “The examples are legion,” writes Graham and Thrift in an early major article on the centrality of maintenance and repair to economies, adding
maintenance and repair can itself be a vital source of variation, improvisation and innovation. Repair and maintenance does not have to mean exact restoration. Think only of the bodged job, which still allows something to continue functioning but probably at a lower level; the upgrade, which allows something to take on new features which keep it contemporary; the cannibalization and recycling of materials, which allows at least one recombined object to carry on, formed from the bones of its fellows; or the complete rebuild, which allows some- thing to continue in near pristine condition. And what starts out as repair may soon become improvement, innovation, even growth. . .
Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of global challenges, including but not limited to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by respective central banks and new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.
What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures without which you would not economies, societies and polities. Nor have you seen in the subsequent investments in science, technology and engineering anything like the comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability operations of backbone (actually foundational) critical infrastructures, like water, energy and transportation. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would be for more context-rich practices and research to enhance infrastructure maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof for scaling up to better practices across different cases. (For efforts to protect and extend already-existing pockets of reliability management, please see the calls for a National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management and state government Commissions for Inter-Infrastructure Resilience).
If I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of critical infrastructures as the resilience of an economy, society and polity that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure repair and maintenance–and their endogenous innovations–move center-stage in ways not yet appreciated by those politicians, policymakers and private sector decisionmakers who still operate as if control is to be found and once found, it is theirs.
VI. CONCLUSION: DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM Surveillance capitalism is not just a business model. It is a system, geopolitical, institutional, and epistemic. It is held together by regulation (or lack of), trade rules, policy, and narratives. It is reinforced by governments, especially the United States, and advanced through international institutions that shape how the digital economy works and who it serves. It is legitimized by expert networks and sanitized through language that turns extraction into efficiency and concentration of power into innovation.
Artificial intelligence has made this system even more powerful. AI technologies—especially predictive models, automated decision systems, and generative tools feed on the data extraction pipelines that surveillance capitalism built. AI provides a new layer of legitimacy framed as progress, innovation, or national competitiveness, even as it deepens asymmetries of power and concentration of market and control. The surveillance capitalist order now markets itself as an AI revolution.
This system did not emerge by accident. It was built through policy frameworks, trade negotiations, legal exemptions, deregulation, development finance, and decades of strategic inaction. And because it was built, it can be dismantled. But dismantling surveillance capitalism will take more than new laws or one-off reforms. It will require structural change of how data is governed, how power is held to account, and how knowledge itself is produced and deployed in policymaking.
This paper has taken a bird’s-eye view of that system. It has traced the foundations of surveillance capitalism, not just to Big Tech companies, but to the governments, international institutions, and expert and academic infrastructures that sustain it. It has argued that surveillance capitalism is not just a market problem, but a governance problem. A democracy problem. A global problem.
The road forward will not be easy. Many actors across sectors, government, academia, and civil society continue to benefit from the system as it is. But cracks are showing. Resistance is growing. What’s needed now is not just critique, but coordination. Not just opposition, but alternatives.
If surveillance capitalism is to be replaced, we must be ready to build something better in its place: a model of digital governance that serves people and the environment, protects rights, promotes the public good, and treats democratic control as a tool.
It’s a truism that narratives dominate public policy and management. No more so than in the promise of there being beginnings, middles and ends to this other in medias res realism of complex, uncertain, interrupted and conflicted.
But narrative structures have far more widespread impacts than those associated with conventional beginning/middle/end storylines. There’s always been, by way of example, argument by adjective and adverb. The story goes that Georges Simenon, having finished the typescript of one more novel, would call his children into the room and wave it before them, asking: “What am I doing, little ones?,” to which they would respond, ‘You’re getting rid of the adjectives, papa.” Oh, were that true for the policy advocates writing today!
There is also changing the argument (and its realism) by changing the genre. More formally, consider the importance of differences in narrative structure between a policy brief and a policy report. It’s not just that a policy brief is shorter than the report upon which it is based. Things are left out in the former for reasons other than its shorter length.
A policy brief and a policy report are different genres, like a novel and a play. Their respective styles, voice, conventions, audiences, and even what they take to be details (formally, their granularities) differ substantively.
This means that what’s narrated in one but not repeated in another have implications for policy and management. Indeed, that a brief and a report have been written for different audiences, fulfilling different requirements and expectations, would be a banal observation, where it not for this: While any two genres differ, what each genre takes as “the specifics”–to repeat, the respective granularities–are nevertheless both relevant for real-world policy and management activities.
II
So what?
More generally, in order to say something new about a difficult policy issue or see it afresh, change the genre within which you think and write about it. The academic article, a short blog, the format of a play, an “I-believe” manifesto and not just those memos and briefs–all and more have their own conventions. To take a major “intractable” policy issue you’ve read about in one medium and then focus the dense dark beam of altogether unfamiliar conventions over it, is to see what is left to glimmer there by way of ambiguities.
I now want to delve into how other differences in genre matter for specific policy and management. I’m particularly interested in how different genres pose specifics that are, more obviously than not, actionable with respect to policy and management.
I turn now to sixteen examples of what I mean and their “So what?” implications.
1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic” as a genre limitation of the interview format
2. The genre of wicked policy problems
3. Catastrophized cascades
4. The genre of policy palimpsest
5. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
6. Journalism, academic articles and my profession, policy analysis
7. The formulaic radicalism of academic articles in search of policy relevance
8. An infinite regress for the purposes of “So what?” explains nothing
9. How being right is a matter of genre
10. The journal article as manifesto: a Horn of Africa example
11. The petition as a major but under-recognized policy genre
12. Surprising genre in policy analysis
13. Mixing Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher Bollas: complicating typologies (newly added)
14. Rescuing the case study (newly added)
15. Mestizaje, Or: ChatGPTs (newly added)
16. Colonial violence & domestic terror: another example of how genre renders center-stage (newly added)
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1. “It will be unimaginably catastrophic” as a genre limitation of the interview format
I
Our interviewees have been insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest as nothing like it had occurred there before. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.
Fair enough, but not enough.
So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is predictably unimaginable to them. The M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. Rather it is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.
II
I however think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.
American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is, “unimaginably catastrophic” is not untrue, while however without having to specify how true. Such is the statement’s recourse to argument by adverb.
So what?
“Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”—this, here, being something about a catastrophe “desperately very” indeed.
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2. The genre of wicked policy problems
Recast wicked (that is, intractable) problems of policy and management as part of a longstanding genre in literature, which enables very different statements and competing positions to be held without them being inconsistent at the same time. Literary and cultural critic, Michael McKeon, helps us to do so:
Genre provides a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. The ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-“solving” capacities.
In McKeon’s formal terms, “the genre of the novel is a technique to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no particular commitment than that.”
Intractability appeared not only as the novel’s subject matter but also by virtue of the conventions for how these matters to be raised. The content is not only about the intractable, but also its governing context is as historically tangled and conventionalized as that of the English novel.
So what?
I am not saying wicked problems are fictitious (even so, there is the well-known truth in fiction). Rather, I am arguing that pinning wicked problems exclusively to their content (e.g., wicked problems are defined by the lack of agreed-upon rules to solve them) misses the fact that the analytic category of wicked problems as such is highly rule-bound (i.e.., by the historical conventions to articulate and discuss such matters, in this case through novelistic means).
How so? Return to the scholarly attempt to differentiate “wicked” and “tame” problems into more nuanced categories. Doing so is akin to disaggregating the English novel into romance, historical, gothic and other types. But such a differentiation need not problematize the genre’s conventions. In fact, the governing conventions may become more complex for distinguishing the more complex content, thus reinforcing the genre as a bottled intractability.
If wicked problems are to be better addressed, altogether different conventions and rules—what Wittgenstein called “language games”—will have to be found under which to recast these. . . . well, whatever they are to be called they wouldn’t be termed “intractable, full stop,” would they? Declaring something a wicked problem creates The Ultimate One-Sided Problem—it’s, well, intractable—for humans who are everything but one-sided.
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3. Catastrophized cascades
The upshot of what follows: Infrastructure cascades and the genre of catastrophizing about large system failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.
I
An infrastructure cascade happens when the failure of one part of the critical infrastructure triggers failure in its other parts as well as in other infrastructures connected with it. The fast propagation of failure can and has led to multiple systems failing over quickly, where “a small mistake can lead to a big failure.” The causal pathways in the chain reaction of interconnected failure are often difficult to identify or monitor, let alone analyze, during the cascade and even afterwards.
For its part, catastrophizing in the sense of “imagining the worst outcome of even the most ordinary event” seems to overlap with this notion of cascade. Here though the imagining in catastrophizing might be written off as exaggerated, worse irrational—the event in question is, well, not as bad as imagined—while infrastructure cascades are real, not imagined.
II
We may want, however, to rethink any weak overlap when it comes to infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing failure across interconnected infrastructures. Consider the insights of Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (2019, The University of Chicago Press).
In analyzing cases of catastrophizing (in Leonardo’s Notebooks, an early work of Kant and Shakespeare’s King Lear, among others), Passannante avoids labeling such thinking as irrational and favors a more nuanced understanding. He identifies from his material four inter-related features to the catastrophizing.
First (no order of priority is implied), catastrophizing probes and reasons from the sensible to the insensible, the perceptible to the imperceptible, the witnessed to the unwitnessed, and the visible to invisible. In this fashion, the probing and reasoning involve ways of seeing and feeling as well.
Second and third, when catastrophizing, an abrupt, precipitous shift or collapse in scale occurs (small scale suddenly shifts to large scale), while there is a distinct temporal elision or compression of the catastrophe’s beginning and end (as if there were no middle duration to the catastrophe being imagined).
Last, the actual catastrophizing while underway feels to the catastrophizer as if the thinking itself were involuntary and had its own automatic logic or necessity that over-rides—“evacuates” is Passannante’s term—the agency and control of the catastrophizer.
III
In this way, the four features of catastrophizing take us much closer to the notion of infrastructure cascades as currently understood.
In catastrophizing as in cascades, there is both that rapid propagation from small to large and that temporal “failing all of a sudden.” In catastrophizing as in cascades, causal connections—in the sense of identifying events with their beginnings, middles and ends—are next to impossible to parse out, given the rapid, often inexplicable, processes at work.
And yes, of course, cascades are real, while catastrophizing is more speculative; but: The catastrophizing feels very, very real to–and out of the direct control of–the catastrophizer as an agent in his or her own right.
In fact, one of the most famous typologies in organization and technology studies sanctions a theory that catastrophizes infrastructure cascades. The typology’s cell of tight coupling and complex interactivity is a Pandora Box of instantaneous changes, invisible processes, and incomprehensible breakdowns involving time, scale and perspective.
This is not a criticism: It may well be that we cannot avoid catastrophizing, if only because of the empirical evidence that sudden cascades have happened in the past.
IV
So what?
The four features suggest that one way to mitigate any wholesale catastrophizing of infrastructure cascades is to bring back time and scale into the analysis and modeling of infrastructure cascades.
To do so would be to insist that really-existing infrastructure cascades are not presumptively instantaneous or nearly so. It would be to insist that infrastructure cascades are differentiated in terms of time and scale, unless proven otherwise.
Allow me to end with an extended quote from our own research:
One clear objective of recent network of networks modeling has been finding out which nodes and connections, when deleted, bring the network or sets of networks to collapse. Were only one more node to fail, the network would suddenly collapse completely, it is often argued…
But ‘suddenly’ is not all that frequent at the [interconnected infrastructure] level. In fact, not failing suddenly is what we expect to find in managed interconnected systems, in which an infrastructure element can fail without the infrastructure as a whole failing or disrupting the normal operations of other infrastructures depending on that system. Infrastructures instantaneously failing one after another is not what actually happens in many so-called cascades, and we would not expect such near simultaneity from our framework of analysis.
Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen….Yet individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operation to failure across systems can also take time. Discrete stages of disruption frequently occur when system performance can still be retrievable before the trajectory of failure becomes inevitable.
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman, Risk and Reliability, 2016, Stanford University Press,
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4. The genre of policy palimpsest
I
The notion of “policy palimpsest” arose early on in policy studies, but never gained much traction. Its upshot is that current statements about complex policy issues are the composites of arguments and narratives that have been overwritten across time. Any composite argument rendered off a policy palimpsest reads sensibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved—but none of the previous inscriptions or points are pane-clear and whole through the layers, effacements, and erasures. Arguments have been blurred, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes.
By way of example, consider what was a longstanding commonplace: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism has come to mean total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.”
In reality, that statement was full of effacements from having been overwritten again and again through seriatim debates, vide:
“……totalitarianism has come to mean…….total control of politics ,citizenry and economics………”
It’s that accented “total control” that drove the initial selection of the phrases around it. Today, after further blurring, it’s more fashionable to rewrite the composite argument as: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism sought total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.” The “sought” recognizes that, when it comes these forms of totalitarianism, seeking total control did not always mean total control achieved. “Sought” unaccents “total control.”
II
Fair enough, but note that “sought” itself reflects its own effacements in totalitarianism’s palimpsest, with consequences for how time and space are re-rendered.
Consider two quotes from the many in that policy palimpsest, which are missed when it comes to the use of a reduced-form “sought”:
I always thought there must be some more interesting way of interpreting the Soviet Union than simply reversing the value signs in its propaganda. And the thing that first struck me – that should have struck anybody working in the archives of the Soviet bureaucracy – was that the Soviet leaders didn’t know what was happening half the time, were good at throwing hammers at problems but not at solving them, and spent an enormous amount of time fighting about things that often had little to do with ideology and much to do with institutional interests.
The camp, then, was always in motion. This was true for people and goods, and also for the spaces they traversed. Because Auschwitz was one big construction site. It never looked the same, from one day to the next, as buildings were demolished, extended and newly built. As late as September 1944, just months before liberation in January 1945, the Camp SS held a grand ceremony to unveil its big new staff hospital. . .
Inadvertently, [construction] also created spaces for prisoner agency. The more civilian contractors worked on site, the more opportunities for barter and bribes. All the clutter and commotion also made it harder to exercise full control, as blocked sightlines opened the way for illicit activities, from rest to escape. . .
Some scholars see camps like Auschwitz as sites of total SS domination. This was certainly what the perpetrators wanted them to be. But their monumental designs often bore little resemblance to built reality. Priorities changed, again and again, and SS planners were thwarted by supply shortages, bad weather and (most critically) by mass deaths among their slave labour force. In the end, grand visions regularly gave way to quick fixes, resulting in what the historian Paul Jaskot, writing about the architecture of the Holocaust, called the “lack of a rationally planned and controlled space”. Clearly, the popular image of Auschwitz as a straight-line, single-track totalitarian machine is inaccurate.
I am not arguing that the quoted reservations are correct or generalizable or fully understandable (the quotes come to us as already overwritten). I am saying that they fit uncomfortably with popular notions “local resistance,” when the latter is about “taking back control”
III
So what?
So what if time and space are in a policy and management world are (re-)rendered sinuous and interstitial, in a word, anfractuous rather than linear like a sentence? It’s a big deal, actually.
It means that no single composite argument can galvanize the entire space-and-time of a palimpsest. It means matters of time and space are always worth another look with each argument we read off of a major policy.
For instance, the preceding entry noted how “catastrophic cascades” are described as having virtually instantaneous transitions from the beginning of a cascade in one infrastructure to its awful conclusion across other infrastructures connected with it. But in the terminology presented here, a catastrophizing cascade isn’t so much a composite argument with a reduced-form middle as it is a highly etiolated palimpsest where infrastructure interactions taking more granular time and space have been blotted out altogether.
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5. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
Some of you may remember when the orbiting twins of “freedom and necessity” shone bright and high in the intellectual firmament. Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the second you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity.
None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential were nowhere the same. But the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential are, I want to argue, conflated and treated as one and the same in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.
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Recently, Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, makes the point directly:
Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.
Memoir in this shift ends up, in Tisdale wonderful term, as a “grand reveal.” Of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds also to be affordances and enablements.
To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one meaning at the expense of the others. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”
So what?
To rewrite a once-popular expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eye-witnessing what is right in front of us. One thinks of George Orwell’s point: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
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6. Journalism, academic articles and my profession, policy analysis
When it comes to the policy relevance of journalism and my profession, policy analysis, it’s been a matter of genre differences for as long as I can remember.
The journalist article starts with the victim, when policy professionals want to know upfront not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce said victimhood. For my part, I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people, after all!
And to be clear about the “So what?“. No need for academic articles to lead with: “We are currently living in an age of multiple closely interconnected and intensifying crises. There is growing awareness that questions of diversity and representation matter in scholarship. Conservation is at a crossroads. Numbers occupy a central place in global governance.”
Rather, tell us upfront something we don’t know and their implications, in order that different types of readers for policy relevance have energy to scan the rest. We’re not asking the authors to simplify. We’re asking them to tell us what they conclude or propose so we, these different readers, can decide whether or not their analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell us upfront because we may find we have something better to recommend—including different media for putting them.
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7. The formulaic radicalism of academic articles in search of policy relevance
A third problem is Formulaic radicalism. This is an attempt to project a veneer of political and intellectual dissidence while ultimately relying on highly established tropes which often lead to unsurprising conclusions. Contemporary research is generally formulaic but [critical management studies, CMS] adds the critical flavour. It often does so by giving phenomena – no matter how benign – a negative framing.
Studying ‘resistance’ gives a progressive, even heroic flavour to a topic. One way CMS researchers do formulaic radicalism is by using conventional formats but include some markers of radicalism. The author may seek to express radical and critical ideas while complying with ‘mainstream’ conventions. Such a move can help to indicate that a study is clearly positioned in an academic subfield, guided by an authoritative framework, and informed by a detailed review of the literature.
Next the research outlines a planned design, a careful data management strategy (sometimes using data sorting programs and codification), and a minor section of ‘safe’ reflexivity. The authors summarize findings, outlines how they add to the literature (and sometimes the author-ity [sic]) and offers a brief conclusion (not saying too much outside the chosen and mainly predictable path). The form should matter less than the content, but this highly domesticated form tends to weaken the impact of the substantive content. The norm of presenting a number of abstracted, short interview statements does not always help to reveal any particularly novel insights.
In the text, there are frequent nods to critical aims such as exploring power, supporting emancipation, recognizing resistance, or generating reflexivity. However, the formulaic presentation of findings often undermines this [“So what?”] and leads to modest insights.
8. An infinite regress for the purposes of “So what?” explains nothing
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . . and. . .
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9. How being right is a matter of genre
In public policy, the wish–so often unfilled–is for the right person at the right time in the right job doing the right thing.
In poetry by contrast, we have Louise Glück’s poem, “Crossroads,”
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives but never in its choices, its intensities. Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent: forgive its brutality. As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss, it is you I will miss.
Given the poem’s theme, the shortening of lines from three to two is so RIGHT! Here the answer to question, “So what by way of ‘right’?” is the answer, “What else but these last two?”
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10. The journal article as manifesto: a Horn of Africa example
To be clear: I agree with the manifesto below. But that agreement is not because it’s published as a formal journal article. Instead, I believe it because, as a manifesto, it demands change now in terms I understand and appreciate historically.
Since my argument depends on the definition of “manifesto” I use, here’s mine:
Always layered and paradoxical, [a manifesto] comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries— something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. . .This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.
In 2023, Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton published, “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” in the peer-reviewed Review of African Political Economy (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679). To its credit, the Review publishes “radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change.” And what a breadth of fresh air this article is.
First, its tone is direct, its language unequivocally materialist in the great manner of yesterday, its focus is on the marginalized, and how could we not want change after reading this?
We present in outline an historically and empirically grounded explanation for the post-colonial destruction of the nation states of Somalia and Sudan. This is combined with a forecast that the political de-development of the Horn, and of the Sahel more generally, is spreading south into East and Central Africa as capitalism’s food frontier, in the form of a moving lawless zone of resource extraction. It is destroying livelihoods and exhausting nature. Our starting point is Marx’s argument that the historical growth and the continuing development of capitalism is facilitated through what he called ‘primitive accumulation’. With regard to the current situation in the Horn, there is a sorry historical resonance with the violent proto-capitalist land clearances that took place from the sixteenth century onward in England, Ireland and Scotland and then in North America. While today, as in Darfur, this may be classified as genocide, the principal purpose of land clearances is to convert socially tilled soils and water resources used for autonomous subsistence into pastures for intensive commercial livestock production, which now in Somalia and Sudan amounts to nothing short of ‘ecological strip mining’.
To repeat, how could you (we) not want radical change when reading further:
. . .we argue that the trade is intimately connected with the deepening social, economic and ecological crisis of agro-pastoralism in the region and the way that livestock value is now realised. Underlying the empirical data is the intensification of an environmentally destructive mode of militarised livestock production that, primarily involving sheep, is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained by raw violence and strengthened by United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi investment in Red Sea port infrastructure, the Horn and the Gulf are locked into a deadly destruction–consumption embrace.
More, there is a singular cause and it is clear: “This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.” Nor is there anything really complex about this:
The depth and cruel nature of the changes in Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral economies cannot reasonably be attributed only to environmental change, scarcity-based inter-ethnic conflict, or avaricious generals per se. To lend these arguments weight, some hold that they combine to produce a ‘complex’ emergency. The only complexity, however, is the contortions necessary to fashion a parallel universe that usefully conceals the rapacity of capitalism. Particularly cynical is the claim, for example, that Somalia’s long-history of de-development is the result of climate-change-induced drought. It is no accident that the same international powers and agencies fronting this claim have, for decades, been active players in the Horn’s de-development.
You cannot imagine how much I want to believe these words! And I take that to be a good measure of just how effective a manifesto this manifesto is, at least for someone like myself.
So what? Manifestos are their own public genre, whatever the publication venue. This is not a policy memo whose second sentence after the problem statement is the answer to: What’s to be done and how? But then we would never look to manifestos for the devil in the details, would we?
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11.The petition as a major but under-recognized policy genre
Furthermore, the petitions held within the NRC [Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission] archive highlight the agency of Ghanaians within this process. Far from ideas about good governance being enforced on Ghana from abroad through the implementation of a truth commission, the petitions submitted to the NRC demonstrated that many Ghanaians had developed ideas of what constituted a good and bad citizen based on their own lived experiences. The NRC archive represents a vast and rich collection not just of Ghanaian experiences of human rights abuses in the postcolonial era, but of attempts to produce and reproduce a moral economy which counteracted those abuses. These petitions, when viewed as a genre, outlined a consistent and coherent perspective on what good and bad citizens do.
We forget at our peril that new policy narratives–in this case about citizenship–can be assembled from under-acknowledged policy genres–in this case petitions to truth commissions. So what? Well, for one thing, such a petition becomes a very public practice to decommodify already-commodified consumers and voters.
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12. Surprising genre in policy analysis
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Many people would probably think that writing down what they already think is an important part of any policy analysis. It’s a commonplace among many different types of authors, however, that they don’t know what they think until they actually write it down.
“My writings, in prose and verse, may or may not have surprised other people; but I know that they always, on first sight, surprise myself,” writes T.S. Eliot. Chimes in political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, “I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it’. “Writing is thinking; writing is a form of thought,” the journalist William Langewiesche said, adding “It’s difficult for me to believe that real thought is possible without writing.” “You never know what you’re filming until later”, remarks a narrator in Chris Marker’s 1977 film Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge. A well-known curator admits, “But then, often when I sit down to write the catalogue text, I discover that it’s actually about something else”. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel novelist, manages to make all this sound quite known: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing”.
So too I argue for policy analysts writing up their analyses. But a caveat is needed: Analyses come via many different genres, and not all are conducive to surprising oneself with respect to what one really thinks given the evidence now in front of them.
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Such is the point made by contemporary art critic, Sean Tatol, in a recent edited panel exchange: “When I’m writing, I’m in the process of writing down my thoughts either to formulate something that I haven’t thought of before or to come to a conclusion that’s a surprise to me. That sense of development in thought is, I think, to me the most gratifying. But I think in terms of my short-form reviews that happens very seldom.”
Policy analysts as well have their short-form versions. But one cannot generalize here. The email may well be more surprising for analytical purposes than that article. Two policy briefs, one by a policy advocate who already knows the answer before touching fingers to keyboard, and the other by the policy analyst who holds off rewriting until seeing what they’ve first typed, are quite different matters.
So what you ask? The answer returns us to the starting point of this blog entry: The more genres that the policy analyst has access to and is adept in, the more likely that catalyst of analytic surprise is to be found.
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13. Mixing Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher Bollas: complicating typologies (newly added)
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Consider the familiar two-by-two typology that produces known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. In this sequence, we may think all the bases are covered. Now throw in an apparently related term, but from a different field entirely, namely: the “unthought known” of Christopher Bollas, a concept as well known in psychoanalysis. Mix two genres–Rumsfeld’s fourfold typology and Bollas’s psychoanalytic insight–and you realize the initial distinctions are more complicated.
Known-unknowns are said to be risks that we are aware of, but we don’t fully understand. For example, we may know that there is always a risk of a new competitor entering the market or political arena, but we don’t know how likely this is or what impact it would have on competition or politics. Unknown-knowns are said to be things you’re not aware of but do understand. For example, you know gender bias, but didn’t know it was actually happening in the competitive process of interest to you.
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The unthought known, however, is a kind of knowing that you have not thought about. It is unconscious and often associated with trauma, rendering the unthought known, “unconsciously compelling,” as Bollas puts it. For instance, you know you’re (un)safe without even having to think about it.
How so? Return again to competition and the economic literature on all manner of non-conscious herding behavior, bandwagon effects and market contagion under conditions of deep uncertainty and rapid imitation. Here economic meltdowns, burst financial bubbles and scapegoating give birth to new market rules and wraparound structures, safer for some but not for others.
These phenomena may seem like unknown knowns–we know herding behavior when we see it!–but one must wonder if they are understood psychoanalytically or mimetically as described and formulated.
Unthought knowns, I submit, remain highly policy-relevant, even if the concept doesn’t fit squarely in with known knowns, unknown unknowns, known unknowns, and unknown knowns.
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14. Rescuing the case study (newly added)
Malena López Bremme and Salvador Santino Regilme present a fabulous case study of the Syrian refugee crisis in their “Climate Change, Ecocide, and the Rise of Environmental Refugees: The Case of Syria” (2025, Political Studies, accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251382404?utm_source=researchgate). Starting on article’s page 8, their case study is detailed, wide-ranging and, as far as I can determined, conclusive:
This case study identifies Syria’s prolonged dictatorship as a period characterized by ecological risks and mismanagement, culminating in protracted war and forced displacement. It explores the climate-conflict hypothesis related to environmental migration, interconnected through a complex chain of water scarcity, drought, governmental neglect, agricultural failure, socioeconomic decline, political oppression, rural-urban competition, internal displacement, civil unrest, and the involvement of regional and global actors. (my bold)
where the hypothesis in question was:
Rather than treating environmental stress as a direct trigger of violence, [the article] theorizes vulnerability as co-produced— arising from the interaction of climate-induced degradation, authoritarian governance, institutional neglect, and deep-rooted socioeconomic inequalities. In the Syrian case, prolonged drought was not a singular cause but one element in a relational and contingent configuration of crisis. Syria thus exemplifies how environmental stress becomes politically explosive under specific governance failures and international conditions. (terms highlighted in the article)
Co-produced, relational and contingent indeed make for complex chains of causality. I strongly encourage the reader interested in the topic of climate refugees to read this article, particularly pp. 8 – 16.
What I find more questionable is the chief policy implication drawn, namely: “the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.”
One can well agree with the authors that the case illustrates what can happen with “sovereign abandonment—a mode of power where state inaction or deliberate neglect leads to death and displacement.”
But, even where true, the chief policy implication isn’t then: global governance is required. Rather, the immediate implication is: Don’t abandon sovereignty elsewhere if only because the Syrian case study establishes a counterfactual demonstrably worse. The necessity of protecting positive forms of national sovereignty–humane, non-ecocidal–is not, I think, what the authors are recommending.
So what? One would be hard-pressed to say that novels–which when they work are their own form of case studies–argue for global governance. Or more positively, perhaps the latter is now the function of science fiction and the increasing calls to incorporate speculative fiction into policy formulation.
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15. Mestizaje, Or: ChatGPTs (newly added)
I’m reading an article on LatamGPT, the development of a Latin American version of ChatGPT:
When researchers from the LatamGPT project asked ChatGPT for a 500-character description of Latin American culture, the response was polite but revealing: “Latin American culture is a vibrant amalgam of Indigenous roots, African influences, and European heritage. It is characterized by its rich diversity in music, dance, and cuisine, reflected in festivals like Carnival and the Flower Fair.” While the formulation may seem inclusive, what it reveals is a superficial and standardized understanding of a region marked by the imperial overseas conquest and colonization, through which a mestizaje of exceptional density and complexity took place—rarely found elsewhere in the world—whose tensions, memories, and ways of life far exceed any tourist postcard or folkloric representation. In its stylistic correctness, the response betrays the limits of an AI trained from outside the experience it aims to describe.
Sounds right, but what does “mestizaje” mean, you and I ask? The article further along produces the synonym, “hybridization”, but nothing formal.
So I google: “mestizaje meaning.” Oops, the first thing that pops up is the AI-generated:
Mestizaje is a term for the mixing of different racial and cultural groups, historically referring to the blending of Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also including the later addition of African, Asian, and other ancestries. Beyond just race, it encompasses the fusion of languages, customs, and religions that occurred during and after Spanish colonization, and the term is still used today to describe mixed-ancestry identities and cultural exchange. It is a complex concept that is sometimes critiqued for oversimplifying identity, but it remains a significant part of many national identities in the Americas.
Well, this covers some of what the article’s authors describe, but then again, there’s that use of the contentious term, race. . .
So I end up searching further down the search results and find:
“Mestizaje,” which is associated with the word “mixed,” can be understood as the product of mixing two distinct cultures—that is, Spanish and Indigenous American. While it is etymologically connected to the French métis (a person of mixed ancestry, similar to mestiza/o in Spanish) and métissage (the cultural process that leads to this) and to the Portuguese mestiço (a person of mixed ancestry), it is an unstable signifier that has different meanings depending on its context. Referring to the biological and cultural mixing of European and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, mestizaje can be understood as the effect caused by the impact of colonization. In North America, the closest approximation to “mestizaje” is the word métis, indicating a person of mixed aboriginal and European ancestry. For example, in western Canada the term is used in reference to people of Caucasian and Native Indian ancestry. However, both métissage and métis are used primarily in Francophone culture and literature. English, on the other hand, has no equivalent for “mestizaje,” although in theory, it has been identified as synonymous with cultural hybridization or hybridity, as both represent the space-in-between (Anzaldúa 1987; Bhabha 1994; García Canclini 1995).
Kind of Eurocentric, but, hey, it gets us back to “hybridization”, the synonym in the original article. Still, there’s nothing explicit about cuisine (as in the article’s quoted passage), and what about that bit about mestizaje being “an unstable signifier”?
I have no problem with mestizaje being complex, but I wonder what any GPT prompt-and-response can say about the term’s continuing significance as an unstable signifier?
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16.Colonial violence & domestic terror: another example of how genre renders center-stage (newly added)
–Start with “The Canto of the Colonial Soldier” (sung in English). From the opera, Shell Shock, by Nicholas Lens (libretto by Nick Cave) from 3.25 minutes to 10.00 minutes in the following link:
–Then listen to “IT” (Scene XI) from the opera, Innocence, by Kaija Saariaho (multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barrière of the original Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen) from 44.25 minutes to 49.33 minutes in the following link.
This particular scene is about a mass school killing, sung by the students and in different languages. You will want to read the English translation below before watching the clip.
–Saariaho stipulates that the Shooter should not appear on stage. The Colonial Soldier is, in contrast, the first shooter heard in Lens’s work. So what?
The opening words in Hamlet are “Who’s there?” Indeed: at center-stage, and how.
–Start with “The Canto of the Colonial Soldier” (sung in English). From the opera, Shell Shock, by Nicholas Lens (libretto by Nick Cave) from 3.25 minutes to 10.00 minutes in the following link:
–Then listen to “IT” (Scene XI) from the opera, Innocence, by Kaija Saariaho (multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barrière of the original Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen) from 44.25 minutes to 49.33 minutes in the following link.
This particular scene is about a mass school killing, sung by the students and in different languages. You will want to read the English translation below before watching the clip.
–Saariaho stipulates that the Shooter should not appear on stage. The Colonial Soldier is, in contrast, the first shooter heard in Lens’s work. So what?
The opening words in Hamlet are “Who’s there?” Indeed: at center-stage, and how.
This photograph shows what were formerly residential lots now abandoned and empty in a part of Detroit, Michigan:
According to a major expert, these instances require us “to think about innovative and productive ways to manage and transform vacancy for long-term sustainability” not only in Detroit but in like now peri-urban areas (Dr. Toni Griffin, Professor in the Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design commenting on the presentation, “Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit,” accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umqU1xj5yPA).
I agree and take this opportunity to recast what you see in that picture in equally policy relevant ways for low-density grasslands in parts of Africa.
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The poet, A.R. Ammons, also talks about the empty lot (TCP1, 28) and vacant land (TCP1, 49), and vacancy for him can indeed be complete emptiness (TCP2, 277). But many other times, vacancy is–as empty lots and vacant land–a bounded set full of properties (in multiple senses of that word). Here is an extract from his poem, Unsaid:
. . . . . .
To revert to social science terms, those gathered “boundaried vacancies” are both inlined and outlined. The above photo outlines only what we see at that time. What’s missing are the multiple inlined versions: not just the biophysical activities out of sight at that time and place, but the dense socio-economic relations that crisscross the space and the times we don’t see.
For all I know, there could be tents there at another time of year; or a craft and arts fair; or new construction to start the day after. Property is still being held, memories have been recorded; invisible expectations remain active for and about the photographed. The painter Gérard Fromanger noted that a blank canvas is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me.” So too is the photo far more dense and opaque than what you see or can see.
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So what? Just what does this mean for “the management of vacancy,” be it in peri-urban Detroit or the low-density rangelands of East or Southern Africa?
It means we have to think more densely, more granularly, than photographic reality could ever permit.
For example, what if the former settler ranches now subject to the mixed (arable, horticultural, animal) uses found in contemporary East and Southern Africa are in fact the result of that having “to think about innovative and productive ways to manage and transform vacancy for longer-term sustainability”?
In Detroit, we see by and large white urban farmers moving into these depopulated neighborhoods. In Africa examples, the racial demographics are largely reversed, but the analogy remains its strongest: Just as this urban farming has been mistakenly criticized as failed gentrification (the first wave of Detroit urban farmers never saw themselves as gentrifiers), so too arable and agro-pastoral farmers are mistakenly criticized for falling short of a livestock ranching thought to be more suitable by governments and their experts. Yet what to do with the finding that neither gentrification nor ranching, as ideal types, were ever part of the mixed-use practices on the ground?
More important (at least for me) the policy implications differ depending on the benchmark against which to assess really-existing variety on the ground. Is it any wonder that “gentrification”, like “dryland livestock ranching”, have no agreed-upon definitions? (Academics are still debating the causes and consequences of gentrification here in the US.) Is it any wonder then that both concepts are never so fiercely argued over as when they’re offered up as “solutions”?
But still: What to do? Here I think Ammons nails our collective starting point: It’s only that what is missing cannot be missed if spoken out.
Source
Ammons, A.R. (2017). The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955 – 1977 and Volume 2 1978 – 2005. Edited by Robert M. West with an Introduction by Helen Vendler. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY. (The poem, Unsaid, can be found in TCP1, 54 – 55.)
The proposition
I write to support is: “When having less knowledge is key to knowing more.” I
want to demonstrate how tomorrow we might get all manner of official
regulations right—when today we rethink “regulation” as a category of
knowledge. In arguing so, I appeal to the poetry of A.R. Ammons.
Ammons, a great American poet of the last half of the 20th century, was tenacious in returning again and again to a set of topics he felt he hadn’t gotten quite right. One of the subjects was how knowing less entails “knowing” more. It’s his analytic sensibility in persistent revisiting a topic from tangents affording different insight and nuance that I rely on as an optic to parse my own topic of government regulation.
Policy types typically fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts—and his tenacity meant he wrote a great deal—Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear and telegraph ahead, he is not talking about “ignorance is bliss.”)
For those working in policy and management—and I include myself—how could “the less we know, the more we gain” be the case and what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking difficult issues, in this case, regulation?
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Start by
dispensing with popular meanings of “the less I know, the more I know.” It is
easily reversed to “the more I know, the less I really know.” This is the conventional wisdom that “data and
information” are not knowledge—in fact the opposite. I also do not pursue
another sense of “the less I know, the more I know” that Ammons foregrounds
from time to time: the hiving off what we thought we knew creates the stuff
from which new knowledge is formed. It is my failing—not Ammons’s—that I cannot
see how “from-ruins-and-waste-come-something-altogether-better” applies to the
70,000+ paged IRS code and other volumes of government regulations.
My focus instead is on a very difficult set of insights in some of his poems. Let’s jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:
Losing information he rose gaining view till at total loss gain was extreme: extreme & invisible: the eye seeing nothing lost its separation: self-song (that is a mere motion) fanned out into failing swirls slowed & became continuum. (TCP1, 418)
Please reread
the poem once more.
Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming whole and continuous. As it were, “loss gain” becomes a single term. You cease to be separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital one. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I. An obvious example others have noted: If obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, and restraining inhibitions are, in their own ways, altogether absorbing forms of self-knowledge, then this is knowledge we need not to know in order to have more to know better.
How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know? Part of Ammons’s answer appears to be getting to the point where you know enough to be naïve again, to be open to the wonder of it all, to give yourself up to the kind of attention that is, if you will, self-reabsorbing. To telegraph ahead once again, naïveté does not center around knowing and not-knowing for Ammons: There’s feeling and living, wishing and dreaming, desire and more, and such are different kinds of “knowing,” as if thinking feels and feeling thinks.
Naïveté here is the adult version of child-like, decidedly not the childish that gutters out early. It is positive, because adult wonder and curiosity are the space for noticing and being alert to more—an orientation that gains from the loss of information. Compare this, however, to what is expected of government regulators: Whatever happens, they must not be uninformed or naïve—in a word, inexperienced—and when they are, shame on them.
The ways in which this wonder and inexperience do matter for regulation means staying with Ammons a bit longer. For him, staying uninformed and open to new experiences is the hard work of an affirming study:
….my empty-headed
contemplation is still where the ideas of permanence and transience fuse in a single body, ice, for example, or a leaf: green pushes white up the slope: a maple leaf gets the wobbles in a light wind and comes loose
half-ready: where what has always happened and what has never happened before seem for an instant reconciled: that takes up most of my time and keeps me uninformed: (TCP1, 497-498)
Being empty-headed is part of knowing enough: having to know less so as to be ready for whatever the next experience you proved to have been half-ready for in hindsight. It’s as if Ammons is asking us to be smart enough to see it’s more than about a knowing doubt and a knowing certainty.
Living is the space for feeling, which is where “knowing,” writ large, belongs: “how can I know I/am not/trying to know my way into feeling/as//feeling/tries to feel its way into knowing,” he asks in “Pray Without Ceasing” (TCP1, 779). This notion of a half-readiness open to new experience and the wonder awaiting is nicely caught in the ending lines of one of my favorites, “Cascadilla Falls”:
Oh I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek. (TCP1, 426)
By the
time you surge to those lines, there is so much feeling in that “Oh” you might
miss how living takes place beyond not-knowing.” Or better, the line break of
“do/not know” intimates that the doing
of “not know” is a good part of living that life.
***
Regulation from this viewpoint is never a case of regulators starting with knowledge and assuming what matters for living resides elsewhere. Regulation isn’t about expunging naïveté as inexperience but—in ways not yet clear—cultivating it. What is clear is the starting point, however: Wonder is not dread; naïveté is not ignorance; and no-longer-knowing is not not-knowing.
In this way, Ammons makes a frontal attack on what policy types hold very dear: the notion of usefulness. In his essay, “A poem is a walk,” Ammons defers to a paradox: “Only uselessness is empty enough for the presence of so many uses”. Only uselessness is a sufficiently capacious category to embrace all the uses that come and go with experience and ensuring space for more feeling and living.
What could better capture all the many uses as they shift to the wayside than uselessness, “an emptiness/that is plenitude” (TCP1, 503)? Less and less information, against this backdrop, empties us and thereby makes us—leaves us open—differently. It is, in Ammons’s wonderful turn of phrase, to be “emptied full” (TCP2, 4). To seek more and more knowledge and information and never waste what has already been gotten leads to in Ammons’s acid throwaway, “total comprehension is/a wipe-out” (TCP1, 659). It’s a wipe-out because this totality leaves no room for more.
Where,
then, does this leave us when it comes to “knowing” regulation better?
***
In answer, I ended up going back to Ammons’s “The Eternal City”—“After the explosion or cataclysm, that big/display that does its work but then fails/out with destructions, one is left with the//pieces. . .” (TCP1, 596). These lines resonate with what I had read in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters. He is writing about the sculpture studio of Auguste Rodin:
It is indescribable. Acres of fragments lie there, one beside the other. Nudes the size of my hand and no bigger, but only bits, scarcely one of them whole: often only a piece of arm, a piece of leg just as they go together, and the portion of the body which belongs to them. Here the torso of one figure with the head of another stuck onto it, with the arm of a third. . .as though an unspeakable storm, an unparalleled cataclysm had passed over this work. And yet the closer you look the deeper you feel that it would all be less complete if the separate bodies were complete. Each of these fragments is of such a peculiarly striking unit, so possible by itself, so little in need of completion, that you forget that they are only parts and often parts of different bodies which cling so passionately to one another.
I read the passage—at least one other translation captures the same sense—as suggesting that Rodin’s “cataclysm” incorporated fragments that were, in a sense that matters for our purpose, more complete as separate fragments. So too Ammons’s “cataclysm” in “The Eternal City” refers to pieces that are themselves whole—asynoptic, unassimilable, piece next to piece. Another of Ammons’s lines, “all the way to a finished Fragment,” catches the sense I am after here (TCP1, 366).
By extension, we’d have to believe that official regulations ad seriatim, while appearing a growing shambles, are in fact more complete as the piece-work of individual regulations than they would be were they improvised into something new or part of, in policy-speak, a more integrated body of regulations for use over time.
How could
this be?
***
One way ahead, Ammons implies, is to see how the waste of regulation isn’t decline-and-fall, but rather the rearguard action against such declension narratives: an argument for creating room for us to recast decline. Ammons directs our attention, for example, to waste-as-generosity in “The City Limits,”
. . . .when you consider the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen, each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then the heart moves roomier. . . (TCP1, 498)
The “heart moves roomier” not because the pile is any less shite, but because it opens to being more—certainly more than that mortal coil. This is the hot mess of feeling and living expansively, of being somatically sprawled all over the place, now. Regulatory waste in this mode is a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it sight/site to behold, maverick and inciting at the same time.
The hot mess that you can’t keep your eyes—our inner and physical I’s—off and the incitements it offers take us to Ammons’s late, long poem, Garbage (TCP2, 220-306). (Famously, Garbage, for which Ammons won the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry, was inspired by his passing an immense heap of garbage alongside the Florida Interstate.) Mountains and mountains of garbage are “monstrous”; in fact
… a monstrous surrounding of gathering—the putrid, the castoff, the used,
the mucked up—all arriving for final assessment, for the toting up in tonnage, the separations
of wet and dry, returnable, and gone for good: (TCP2, 234)
For Ammons “gone for good” is decidedly ambiguous, begging the question about just to what good has garbage gone for. An answer—and Ammons resists being pinned down to any one answer—lies in the garbage that human beings themselves are:
we’re trash, plenty wondrous: should I want
to say in what the wonder consists: it is a tiny wriggle of light in the mind that says, “go on”: (TCP2, 245)
Nothing integrated about this! For: “Go on” to what, in a world where garbage and waste conjure a meaninglessness of things and of our own existence, as we too are trash? In the case of Ammons, the garbage we are and the meaninglessness that poses, like capacious uselessness, offer up the wonder of being more—of meaning possibly—once we leave space for such feelings and experience:
we should be pretty happy with the possibilities
and limits we can play through emergences free of complexes of the Big Meaning, but is there
really any meaninglessness, isn’t meaninglessness a funny category, meaninglessness missing
meaning, vacancy still empty, not any sort of disordering, or miscasting or fraudulence of
irrealities’s shows, just a place not meaning yet—… ….. …there is truly only meaning, only meaning, meanings, so many meanings,
meaninglessness becomes what to make of so many meanings:… (TCP2, 277)
That word, “becomes”—that insistence on meaning-less possibility as a “funny category”—is, we see by way of conclusion, core to having room to recast regulation.
***
Richard
Howard, himself no mean commentator on Ammons’s poetry, points the way: “How
often we need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing—how
seldom we can afford to venture beyond the pale into that chromatic fantasy
where, as Rilke said (in 1908), ‘begins the revision of categories, where
something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly
accomplished as something to be completed’”.
The importance of this revising categories of thinking and living is captured in an interchange Ammons had with Zofia Burr. When pressed by Burr, he summed up: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.
Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision as “policymaking” and “regulation.” For that to happen, they’d have to understand just how funny-odd a category regulation is.
Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsionto “get it right the next time around,” there at least be a next time (room) to make it—this revision of categories—better. Ensuring (risking) there is a next time is the way we keep open to—empty for—the feeling and living and participating that, in the process, push conventional notions of regulation to the periphery, changing their milieux, rendering regulation less and less meaningful and thus returning it as a concept and instrument to us re-freshed and re-wondered about; in short: recasted.
Again, how so? Let’s jump into Ammons’s deep-end one last time:
Yield to the tantalizing mechanism: fall, trusting and centered as a drive, falling into the poem: line by line pile entailments on, arrive willfully in the deepest
fix: then, the thing is done, turn round in the mazy terror and question, outsmart the mechanism: find the glide over-reaching or dismissing—halter it into
a going concern so the wing muscles at the neck’s base work urgency’s compression and openness breaks out lofting you beyond all binds and terminals. (TCP1, 535)
(You
may want to re-read the poem one more time. I return to that “deepest//fix”
momentarily.)
Ammons
commented on this poem, “The Swan Ritual”: “The invention of a poem frequently
is how to find a way to resolve the complications that you’ve gotten yourself
into. I have a little poem about this that says that the poem begins as life
does, takes on complications as novels do, and at some point, stops. Something
has to be invented before you can work your way out of it, and that’s what
happens at the very center of a poem”.
Ammons touches on the major implication extended here: If rendering any regulation useless takes us closer to reinventing what “regulation” is, so too reinventing “regulation” can render an existing regulation useless. Regulating to reduce risk and inequality or improve economic growth and statecraft is that way we rethink these ends so to make those other means or ends no longer useful.
To rethink (revise, redescribe, rescript, recast, refashion, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to resituate—make room for—the cognitive limits of “knowing” that matter. (Think by way of different examples pastiche in visual art or remixing in dub reggae.) This is to renew, as in re-render, re-know and re-understand. The eye is no longer fixed on where it had settled before, but with a new focal point in sight (this being today’s version of our wager on redemption). That, truly, is the fix we want to be in, “the deepest//fix.” It is where wonder renders dread incomplete, where knowledge is unlearned, where knowledgeable gives way to refreshened inexperience, and, in Ammons’s astonishing lines, “where what has always happened and what/has never happened before seem for an instant reconciled”.
Principal sources:
Ammons,
A.R. (1996). Set In Motion: Essays,
Interviews, & Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr, The University of Michigan
Press: Ann Arbor, MI.
—————— (2017). The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955 – 1977 and Volume 21978 – 2005. Edited by Robert M. West with an Introduction by Helen Vendler. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY. [The volumes are referred to in the blog entry as TCP1 and TCP2, respectively.]
Howard, R. (1980). Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. Atheneum: New York, NY. Rilke, R.M. (1988). Selected Letters 1902-1926. Transl. R.F.C. Hull, Quartet Encounters, Quartet Books: London.
This article has challenged the conventional wisdom on labor markets, advancing the following propositions: (1) There is no such thing as a labor market that is not socially and politically constructed. (2) All real-world labor markets reflect specific balances of power. (3) The balances of power reflect not only the abundance or scarcity of market (exit) opportunities but a wide range of political and social factors. (4) Therefore, laws and regulations to shift those balances do not constitute “interventions” into free markets. (5) Such laws and regulations are not necessarily inefficient or undesirable, and they do not require a particular justification based on market failures.
Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures. Without the latter, there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services. There is a point at which high reliability and trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water.
One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time. The safe and continuous provision of a critical service, even during (specially during) turbulent times, cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents and be paid to you instead of the service. It’s the service that is needed and real time, from this perspective, is an impassable obstacle to cashing out.
Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the markets transactions would be such you’d never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying. Economics is more often stated only so; high reliability more often demonstrated, or not.
Malena López Bremme and Salvador Santino Regilme present a fabulous case study of the Syrian refugee crisis in their “Climate Change, Ecocide, and the Rise of Environmental Refugees: The Case of Syria” (2025, Political Studies, accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251382404?utm_source=researchgate).
Starting on article’s page 8, their case study is detailed, wide-ranging and, as far as I can determined, conclusive:
This case study identifies Syria’s prolonged dictatorship as a period characterized by ecological risks and mismanagement, culminating in protracted war and forced displacement. It explores the climate-conflict hypothesis related to environmental migration, interconnected through a complex chain of water scarcity, drought, governmental neglect, agricultural failure, socioeconomic decline, political oppression, rural-urban competition, internal displacement, civil unrest, and the involvement of regional and global actors. (my bold)
where the hypothesis in question was:
Rather than treating environmental stress as a direct trigger of violence, [the article] theorizes vulnerability as co-produced— arising from the interaction of climate-induced degradation, authoritarian governance, institutional neglect, and deep-rooted socioeconomic inequalities. In the Syrian case, prolonged drought was not a singular cause but one element in a relational and contingent configuration of crisis. Syria thus exemplifies how environmental stress becomes politically explosive under specific governance failures and international conditions. (terms highlighted in the article)
Co-produced, relational and contingent indeed make for complex networks of causality. I strongly encourage the reader interested in the topic of climate refugees to read pp. 8 – 16 of this article.
What I find questionable is the chief policy implication: “the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.”
II
One can well agree with the authors that the case illustrates what can happen with “sovereign abandonment—a mode of power where state inaction or deliberate neglect leads to death and displacement.” But, even where true, the chief policy implication isn’t then: global governance is required. Rather, the immediate implication is: Don’t abandon sovereignty elsewhere if only because the Syrian case study establishes a counterfactual demonstrably worse.
But the necessity of protecting positive forms of national sovereignty–humane, non-ecocidal–is not, I think, what the authors are recommending.
So what? One would be hard-pressed to say that novels–which when they work are their own form of case studies–argue for global governance. Or more positively, perhaps the latter is now the function of science fiction and the increasing calls to incorporate speculative fiction into policy formulation.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 