The painter Gérard Fromanger recorded that a blank canvas is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’. If, as painter František Kupka felt, “to abstract is to eliminate,” then stripping away the layers of black-on-black is akin to abstracting blankness. One implication: There is nothing more abstract in the art of change than “wiping the table clean.”

The critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

“Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.” Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

This notion that humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive. That we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to making them imaginable didn’t really to me.

Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say, at least in my experience: As there are disasters indescribably catastrophic, we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to think about them. That way we frame what we think we know and don’t about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened here.

So what? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.

Below I cut and paste from an email sent to me yesterday by Scott Humphrey, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region. It proposes an intervention that, I believe deserves wider distribution and application not just to marine infrastructures but to the real-time operations centers of other critical infrastructures as well.

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Several months ago, I did this webinar for a maritime security audience. The webinar describes the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk concept. I’ve also presented at several conferences.

Here’s a link to the video webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWOZtFDPZTI&t=3s

In lieu of watching the whole video, here’s a summary of the  Extreme Climate Resilience Desk SFMX video.

The concept focuses on creating a “Climate Resilience Desk” at the Marine Exchange of San Francisco to better anticipate and manage climate-related system shocks in maritime operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:

1.  Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
2.  Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
3.  Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
4.  Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
5.  Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
6.  Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
7.  Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.

The proposed Climate Resilience Desk, through comprehensive data analysis and stakeholder cooperation, aims to transform how climate-related risks are managed, ensuring more resilient maritime and regional operations.

F. Scott Humphrey

Executive Director, Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region
Chairperson, Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region

Office 415.441.5045   Mobile 510.393.6856

Web www.sfmx.org   Email ScottH@sfmx.org

10 Commodore Drive, Emeryville, CA 94608

We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.

Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)

After such bloodless abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.

The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.

All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”

So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”

And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”

A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”

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Source. T. Schlechtriemen (2023). “Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2281233)

I

You’ve done all that research on livestock herders. You’ve collected so much information to better government policy and management. You know all the critiques of big-D development. But no one is acting on your findings and insights.

What do you do now and instead, whoever is listening or not? One answer: try curating publics as a part of your work.

I am suggesting that pastoralist practices–really-existing practices–can be curated so as to create new publics or, better yet, counter-publics. Success is defined as illustrating them, singly and together, in ways that stick in the minds of these publics, regardless of the dominant development narratives already there.

II

For example, enter the first of several rooms in our exhibition, “Rethinking Pastoralism Today.” On the wall there, you find pictured with a sidebar and attribution:

Source: S. Bose (2023). Photovoice With Pastoralists: A Practical Guidebook. PASTRES, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and the European University Institute in Florence. Reproduced with permission and accessed online at https://pastres.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/photovoice-guide-digital.pdf (Photo by Malicha, used with permission of the ERC PASTRES project)

You read the side-bar again, and then see the caption given by the curator in this thought experiment: LIKE SO MUCH IN LIFE (YOURS INCLUDED), PASTORALISM IS NOT ONE WAY ONLY. That sticks, and for how much time depends on you.

III

What makes this kind of curatorial practice such a useful entry point is that even the most radical exhibitions guided by progressive politics have to finds ways to work within the conventional “white cube” constraints of rooms, floors and walls upon which to hang rectangles or display against.

By extension, the most radical development recastings also have to be in productive tension with current ways of seeing things.

–Take another illustration hanging on the walls of this exhibition, that of the policy cycle:

Source: https://catalyst.harvard.edu/community-engagement/policy-research/unknown-61015f3cbb252-61015f57f388a-610bf6bb39406-610bf6ca02c07-610bf6d25a626/

But you, like every other member of the public to this exhibition, are your own curator in the sense of having to ask: What’s missing here in this graphic? When it comes to really-existing policies, programs and projects, “a simplified” just doesn’t hack it. You know each stage is bedeviled by details and contingencies. Indeed, once other viewers make the same complaint, you’ve established a very effective critique of anything like a “normal cycle.”

The upshot? Here too the viewing publics understand there is no one way to exhibit project performance. The stages sequence together differently for viewers who see different details and have different criteria for whether what works or not, what fails or not. Curators who exhibit to illustrate more continuity than is there might be better thought of as exhibiting their own confirmation bias.

IV

So what?

By way of an answer, consider the following quote, seemingly unrelated and without any representation, written on a wall in the last room of this exhibition:

I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, and steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.

R. Bürgisser (2023), Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace, European
Commission, Seville, JRC130830 (accessed online at https://retobuergisser.com/publication/ecjrc_policy/ECJRC_policy.pdf)

By this point you’ve seen all the representations in the preceding rooms of pastoralists who are being displaced from their herding sites, in these cases by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, and the like.

But the free-standing quote presses you think further: What are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?

You look around the room to find an answer. What do you see? Nothing is what you see. With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies are hanging anywhere or standing in place.

That too sticks in your mind as you exit.

V

But what comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities, or the emphatic acknowledgement of someone else’s suffering, as an achievement in and of itself?

Irit Rogoff quoted in Claire Louise Staunton (2022). The Post-Political Curator: Critical Curatorial Practice in De-Politicised Enclosures. PhD Dissertation. Royal College of Art, London (accessed on line at https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/5278/1/06.02.23_Post-correction%20Thesis%20FULL.pdf)

In answer, what comes after are efforts to curating publics for what we–and they as their own curators–recast as small-d “development.”

I

Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own.

What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.

II

In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, infrastructural or otherwise beforehand, let alone as the disaster unfolds. If there is electricity or tap water afterwards, it is intermittent. Hospitals remain few or too far. In these situations, the only thing between you and death is you. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.

Self-organizing groups, however, is also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in high-income countries. Increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff and emergency managers,

I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect.

A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established. Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads.

III

So what?

Two photographs show people organizing themselves to remove the rubble outside. If I’m right, the function served in each could differ significantly, depending on role that reliable critical infrastructures have had up to the disaster. It’s important to know that this picture, and not that other, is of removing rubble from the only road to the water treatment plant, for example.

Why is that important?

These days we’re told it’s important to dismantle capitalism. Well, major disasters dismantle physical infrastructures all over the place. And yet the infrastructures are always treated as part of capitalism writ large and modernities writ small.

If capitalism has colonized crisis into every nook and cranny of the world, it’s hardly useful then in explaining the presence or absence of the institutional niche just mentioned. You’re better advised to look to complex adaptive systems theory, rather than current power theories, for insights into real-time responses and their immediate aftermath.

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For more on the limitations of theories of power (direct, indirect, dispersed), please see Part III of When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene). See also section II.28 of the Guide discussing other examples of “thinking infrastructurally”.

“What if the rise of China,” [Jerry] Zee poignantly asks, “were to be approached literally, through the rise of China into the air?” Amidst official and popular accounts of China’s authoritarian ruling, Zee’s Continent in Dust is a striking example of how to write about China and Chinese politics otherwise. The book focuses on how weather events—specifically, those involving dust, aerosols, and particulate matter—are sites for political breakdown and emergence, revealing that the Chinese political system is anything but static.

Zee opens the book with a story of a resettled ex-herder family, whose herds have allegedly overgrazed pastures in inner Mongolia. This, in turn, has resulted in the spread of dust storms, or “wind-sand” (feng sha 风沙).2 Controlling the dust flow has become a state priority, and so these ex-herders have adapted: having left behind their old jobs, they now drive civil servants across fragile dunes, airdrop seeds, and stabilize sand. These state-contracted environmental engineering jobs, however, are only “semipredictable,” leaving the ex-herders caught in “a state of constantly frustrated anticipation.”

Still, how does this offer new insight into China at large? Because, by following the dust, Zee reveals that the plight of these ex-herders is not because of the popularly accepted idea of “a neoliberalization of the socialist state.” Instead, the wind-sand shows how bureaucrats view ex-herders as both a source of “social instability” in rural frontiers and as an on-demand workforce that can furnish state sand-control programs. In other words, ex-herders represent China’s “experiment in governing,” swept in an atmosphere of “windfall opportunities for work and cash,” a departure from the declining pastoral economy. This story is not about the rise of neoliberal China but, instead, the “delicately maintained condition of quietude” deemed harmonious and stable enough for the Chinese state.3

https://www.publicbooks.org/protean-environment-and-political-possibilities/

Hands-on work is necessary to cultivate the awareness that architecture cannot be contained within the plot of land.

The way I came to this awareness was cleaning the facades of buildings with my own two hands. This work constitutes the ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, which I began in 2008. These artworks emerged from the intersection of architecture and experimental preservation. I wanted to preserve the dust that would normally be thrown out, because it seemed to me, intuitively at first, that this dust contained important information about architecture’s environmental footprint. This dust, which you can see deposited as dark stains on facades, comes in large measure from the boilers of buildings, as well as electric power plants and traffic. The smoke produced as a byproduct when we heat, cool, and electrify buildings is as much a condition of possibility for architecture as concrete or steel. The airborne particles we call smoke or dust are therefore an architectural material. Yet smoke cannot be contained inside the plot of land. To manipulate this material requires new ways of caring for architecture that encompass this larger territory. It invites us to imagine how to care for the atmosphere as an airborne built environment.

https://placesjournal.org/article/repairing-architecture-schools/

What if the built environments of the many different pastoralists include all manner of dust from herding livestock, cooking in the compound, lorries rushing down dirt roads, the ongoing drought, intermittent sand storms and the sudden dust-devils? What if architectural schools are moving from a pedagogy of new construction (think: development) to repair and renovation of the already built? What do these new generations of faculty and students offer by way of advice to really-existing pastoralists today?

One answer from the last citation: “It is important, also, to listen and learn from communities who inhabit the buildings and environments that need repair, because they know best what is broken.” To put it another way, only in a some versions of particulate matter is dust broken.

According to human reason, guided only by the light of nature, these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care, which torments the minds of many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in useful things.

Thomas Morton (1637) writing about his experience with Native Americans in his book, The New English Canaan. This was the first book the Puritans banned in America.

It is little recorded that some early English colonists to America either ran away to live with Native Americans or refused to return from captivity when given the chance. One writer put it that these reluctant colonists enjoyed the “most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail upon us”. Famously, an early French Jesuit found Native American customs “afforded me illumination the more easily to understand and explain several matters found in ancient authors”.

Just imagine the entire lot of colonists ran away to live with Native Americans, once realizing both that better practices had already been found and that colonization was altogether a ghastly prospect by comparison. Now that’s a counterfactual!

Sources

Axtell, J. (1985). The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press: New York.

Connolly, C. (2023). “How America’s first banned book survived and became an anti-authoritarian i” (accessed online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-americas-first-banned-book-survived-and-became-an-anti-authoritarian-icon-180982971).

Knox, B. (1993). The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

A recent version of The New English Canaan in which the epigraph appears can be found at https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/new-english-canaan-part-i

I

The danger in stopping short by organizing around failure probabilities and consequences sundered from each other (the defining topoi of “risk”) is the illusion of control via risk management. Stranded at your cognitive limits, you don’t realize what you have before you are little more than contingencies associated with aftermaths. If you think otherwise, acting as if you had causal understanding means having to ride uncertainty when you think you’re managing risks.

It’s worth asking then what would risk management look like if we started from our cognitive limits rather than assume we manage risk because our certitudes no longer hold. This means having to take seriously our cognitive limits and biases.

For example, the Fundamental Attribution Error has been defined as: The failure to recognize and explain human behavior by reference to situations in which the person finds himself or herself. If so, are appeals to an absolute priority of universal human rights over the irreducible particularities of being an example of mistaken attribution? Or is one human right to commit that error?

II

Spreading risk in investment focuses on whether or not risks are allocated across a diverse portfolio so as to minimize losses or instead is concentrated in one type of investment or risk. This strategy is taken to be a positive if the risks and/or types of investment are uncorrelated.

Even then spreading risk does not automatically make for less uncertainty. Why? Because risk is a very old, very overwritten policy palimpsest in the public and private sectors. A paragraph like the immediately preceding reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved. But none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening the layers, effacements, and erasures about risk and its management.

That is, words and concepts are grabbed and patched together from different contexts and times in this palimpsest, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes:

. . . . .risks spread out……….to minimize losses or instead…………concentrated. . . uncorrlated

Now, that too is “spreading risk”! Albeit considerably less positive.

I

It’s long recorded that control room operators in key critical infrastructures prevent, often daily and unbeknownst to the public, major accidents and failures. Because these do not occur, are not recorded as savings to the public weal.

This track record of saves matters when justifying proposals for wholesale replacement or upgrading of these systems because failures or accidents do happen from time to time. As if the latter costs are considered reason enough to jettison the system without regard, however, to the losses in savings incurred in the jettisoning.

II

Not starting with the saves is far more than a methods problem. It takes us to the entire notion of “problem” as a starting point for major policy and management.

In my profession, policy analysis, asking “What’s the problem?” is the first step in an analyzing an issue.

As reasonable as that may sound, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that preventing something from becoming a problem is therefore a major part of that analysis and policymaking as well. This applies to reliability professionals wherever they are, from pastoralists to control room operators. Nor is this anything like news. “Is not the best policymaker the one who makes changes before the problem emerges?”

Source

Martin Reuss (1988). “The Myth and Reality of Policy History”. The Public Historian 10(1): 41 – 49 (p. 42).