–I liken one of our complexity challenges to that of reading Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain” as if it were still part of the news (it had been written less than two weeks after the sinking of the Titanic).

So too the challenge of reading the first sequence of poems in Jorie Graham’s Fast (2017, Ecco HarperCollinsPublishers). This is an extraordinary 17 pages, not just because of pulse driving her lines, but also for what she evokes. In her words, “we are in systemcide”.

–To read the sequence—“Ashes,” “Honeycomb,” “Deep Water Trawling,” and five others—is to experience all manner of starts—“I spent a lifetime entering”—and conjoined ends (“I say too early too late”) with nary a middle in between (“Quick. You must make up your/answer as you made up your//question.”)

Because hers is no single story, she sees no need to explain or explicate. By not narrativizing the systemicide into the architecture of beginning, middle and end, she prefers, I think, evoking the experience of now-time as end-time:

action unfolded in no temporality--->anticipation floods us but we/never were able--->not for one instant--->to inhabit time… 

She achieves the elision with long dashes or —>; also series of nouns without commas between; and questions-as-assertions no longer needing question marks (“I know you can/see the purchases, but who is it is purchasing me—>can you please track that…”). Enjambment and lines sliced off by wide spaces also remind us things are not running.

–Her lines push and pull across the small bridges of those dashes and arrows. To read this way is to feel, for me, what French poet and essayist, Paul Valery, described in a 1939 lecture:

Each word, each one of the words that allow us to cross the space of a thought so quickly, and follow the impetus of an idea which rates its own expression, seems like one of those light boards thrown across a ditch or over a mountain crevasse to support the passage of a man in quick motion. But may he pass lightly, without stopping—and especially may he not loiter to dance on the thin board to try its resistance! The frail bridge at once breaks or falls, and all goes down into the depths.

The swiftness with which I cross her bridges is my experience of the rush of crisis. I even feel pulled forward to phrases and lines that I haven’t read yet. Since this is my experience of systems going wrong, it doesn’t matter to me whether Graham is a catastrophizer or not.

–I disagree about the crisis—for me, it has middles with more mess than beginnings and ends—but that in no way diminishes or circumscribes my sense she’s right when it comes to systemcide: “You have to make it not become/waiting…”

See also: Valery P. (1954). “Poetry and abstract Thought. The Zaharoff Lecure for 1939 at Oxford University,” Trans. Charles Guenther, The Kenyon Review 16(2), p. 211

Scene 1

It’s said that Lord Acton despaired over ever finding French, German and British historians who would agreed on an account of the Battle of Waterloo. So too others.

In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal recounts the misadventures of Fabrizio, who makes his way to Waterloo on the eve of the battle. Everything turns chaotic, with confusion around. “A few minutes later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him a ploughed field, the surface of which was moving in a singular fashion. . . .[O]ur hero realized it was shot from guns that was making the earth fly up all around him. . . . ‘But is this the real battle’,” he asks a sergeant”.

Friedrich von Hayek, Nobel economist, picks up the story and asks, “Was the man plowing his field just beyond the extreme wing of Napoleon’s guards part of the Battle of Waterloo?. . .To follow up this kind of question will show at least one thing: that we cannot define a historical fact in terms of spatiotemporal coordinates”. Literary critic, Nicola Chiaromonte, revisits the narrative: “Certainly the Battle of Waterloo that Napoleon saw and directed (or thought he directed) is not the event Fabrizio wanders into. Nor is the explosion of incidents in which Fabrizio finds himself the same event as the mortal engagement of the soldiers who jeer at him. . .The Battle of Waterloo was all of these, separately and together, plus countless other happenings.” And by no means the last one, a more recent Fabrizio, Tod Hackett, runs to watch the chaotic, confused and eventually disastrous filming of the Battle of Waterloo in Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. 

This “Battle of Waterloo” is very much the power that political scientist, James G. March, long ago described as “different parts of the system contribut[ing] to different decisions in different ways at different times”. Of course, it can and should be countered that war and capitalism are their own powerful engines of contingency, but so too it can and should be said of, say, evolution and that irreducible particularity of being.

Scene 2

Contingency is the chief feature of battle and the chief feature of contingency is surprise—not that power defined as the ability of A to get B to do something B would not have done.

To appreciate this point better, puzzle over the power that contingency plays in A getting A to do what A would not have done otherwise. Here is the poet and literary critic, T.S. Eliot:

“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. I have often found that my most interesting or original ideas, when put into words and marshalled in final order, were ideas which I had not been aware of holding. It is ordinarily supposed that a writer knows exactly what he wants to say, before he sits down at his desk; and that his subsequent labours are merely a matter of a better choice of words, a neater turn of phrase, and a more orderly arrangement. Yet I have always discovered that anything I have written—anything at least which pleased me—was a different thing from the composition which I had thought I was going to write.”

Stay with the range of evidence that those “most interesting or original ideas”—those most powerful ideas—are the ones you don’t know until you set them down before you:

• “A writer doesn’t know what his intentions are until he’s done writing,” says poet, Robert Penn Warren. Even when the writing is done, poets “are apt to discover that what they decide to express is not everything their poems say,” writes Anne Stevenson, herself a poet, adding: “Nothing in my experience is more important about the writing of poems than that they should surprise you; that while you are submitting to their rigorous demands of rhythms and sounds they find a way of saying things you never meant to say or never knew you knew.” “I never consider a poem done until a friend has seen it and put that extra glare of light on it,” said poet, C.K. Williams. “It’s a very strange thing—as soon as you give the poem to someone else, even before they read it, it shifts a little, it becomes slightly something else from what you had thought it was, and you begin to look at it in a slightly different way.”

• “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” asks a character of novelist, E.M. Forster. “Therefore, till my work is finished, I never know exactly what result I shall reach, or if I shall arrive at any,” wrote Alex de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill. “I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it,” said political scientist Aaron Wildavsky.

• “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. “You start a painting and it becomes something altogether different. It’s strange how little the artist’s will matters,” adds Picasso (and any number of other artists). In like fashion, “one important reason for making drawings, I imagine, is not to draw a likeness of what one sees, but to find out what it is you see,” adds poet and art critic, James Schuyler.

• Harrison Birtwistle describes his process of composing a piece of music: “I know what it is before I’ve even written it, but in other ways I don’t know at all. As I unravel it, it never turns out to be what you think it’s going to be”. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel novelist, manages to make all this sound commonplace: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing”.

Managing this mess called thinking in these ways becomes the way the pell-mell of distractions and their insights control you. Nor does any of this stop us from ghostwriting our earlier thinking later on.

Scene 3

If your point of departure in thinking about power is that ability of A to influence B to behave otherwise, then the person I am after having learned what I really know or think has enormous power over the person I was before being distracted and surprised by that discovery.

Conversely, there is an enormous powerlessness in not being able to think or know when few if any words or images exist for the purpose—“the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me,” despairs von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos.

But for me, it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about that A making that B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is primarily about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. Nor is it good enough to equate power to complete control.

At least when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated or dispersed by interests, full stop. The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go.

Scene 4

Better to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.

It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett considering being a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” as in war links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.

The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”

---

Re-regulation of banking after a financial crisis adds significant costs to the economy and thus reduces growth, while the pre-crisis light-touch regulation undermines the very financial infrastructure necessary for economic growth.

What were indicators of positive economic growth under lighter-touch regulation—e.g., rapid uptake in home mortgages before 2008—were indicators of regulatory failure later on. Mortgages were a relatively safe asset for banks to own, until they were the source of unimaginable losses.

Overregulation is nowhere better illustrated than in comparing the nearly 2000 pages of Dodd-Frank legislation in response to the last financial crisis and the less than 20 pages of the Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act—but under no circumstances are our regulators to repeat the 1930s! Whatever, those who lobby for simplifying regulation end up making it more complex.

It’s a bad thing for regulation to try to squeeze too much risk and complexity out of banking, especially when fresh risk reduction—less leverage, more capital reserves—is itself too risky a strategy. Regulation discourages risk taking and only with risk taking do we have innovation, except when too much innovation and risk taking are encouraged as in the (re-)deregulated finance sector.

New financial instruments (one still thinks of credit default derivatives) flowed to where they were not regulated, but regulated financial instruments always increase opportunities for perverse arbitrage and loopholes.

Regulators must always have the best information, even when those regulated—the banks and investment firms—haven’t a clue as to their current real-time positions. Regulators will never have the capacity to know the real-time positions of actual firms, except in those cases where firms, like Lehman Brothers, insisted regulators did have the real-time information.

Global business and supply chains are great, except when the firms are too big to fail. Country defaults are horrible, except where they work through being regulated de jure as in Argentina or de facto as in Mexico.

Global markets are a permanent fact of life, but we must never suppose that the drive to regulate them for the better is just as permanent. Markets are best at price discovery, except where market efficiencies are realized because of lack of transparent discovery, as in unregulated dark pools.

In sum, what I’ve learned from the Financial Times is that always-late capitalism is in crisis because of the always-shambolic understanding of regulation.

The upshot: Infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing about infrastructural failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.

–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.

We may want 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.

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 too, 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.

–The four features, however, 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. That, in fact, is what our research suggests. At the risk of tooting our horn:

–Let me leave you with another extension inspired by Passannante’s analysis. If infrastructure cascades, when catastrophized, have endings entailed in their beginnings (leaving only attenuated middles or no middles at all to speak of by way of analysis), the catastrophized cascade turns out to be the entailment of “just before” and “immediately after.”

That is, we are to believe we are in a state where disaster avoidance in-between is not possible and disaster response has yet to start but remains unavoidably ahead. We are expected to experience cascade-as-disaster as a presentism too close at hand for us to think about anything else.

But the point remains: Every one experiences time as anfractuous, full of twists and turns at times–why else all the interruptions? No one always experiences time and scale as an excluded middle; what is unimaginable are real-time operations without duration and depth.

My entry point centers on an exchange of letters between critic, Edmund Wilson, and novelist, John Dos Passos, during the first half of the 1930s. Their interchange focused on the need for radical structural change in the US government and Constitution.

One of Edmund Wilson’s biographers calls the Wilson/Dos Passos correspondence “in its scope and dramatic interest second in American letters only to that of Jefferson and John Adams”. The picture I seek to recast with this interchange from the Republic of Letters is the entrenched institution of this US republic and its fifty states.

A start

The correspondence was provoked by Edmund Wilson’s 1931 Appeal to Progressives in the New Republic [NR], parts of which read:

Not only are the people in a capitalist society very often completely ignorant as to what their incomes come from; it is actually sometimes impossible or very difficult for them to find this out. And as long as a fair proportion of the bankers, the manufacturers, the middle men, the merchants and the workers whom their capital and machines keep busy are able to make a little more money than before, no matter how unscrupulously or short-sightedly, we are able, as a nation, to maintain our belief in our prosperity and even in our happiness….

Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history—a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once….

1931 and outdated? Hardly, when the bankers have metastasized into global finance, when our public utilities have been sold off to corporate risk-takers, and when the best news we have is that the rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, wearying of empire, try to make good in the happy-talk of philanthropy what we once demanded and expected of government.

The interchange

“Just read your battlecry,” Dos Passos writes a few weeks after Wilson’s 1931 piece appears,

Of course all the [New Republic] can do is stir things up and try to smoke out a few honest men who do know something about industrial life as she is lived…If you can keep up a series like this you really will have started something—though I’m beginning to think that every publication ought to be required by law to print at the bottom of each page:

NB. THIS IS BULLSHIT

. . . .[T]he trouble with all our political economic writing and the reason maybe why it doesnt interest the ordinary guy who hasn’t joined the fraternity of word-addicts is that it is made up right in the office and springs from neither experience nor observation…

True enough, and Wilson eventually circulates a more urgent manifesto. “The present crisis of the world—and specifically the United States—is something more than a mere crisis of politics or economics; and it will not pass with the depression. It is crisis of human culture. What faces us today is the imperative need for new social forms, new values, a new human order.”

What is needed, Wilson feels, has moved beyond experiment to revolution. “Sure I’ll subscribe to it,” Dos Passos writes Wilson in reply to the new battle cry,

—but I don’t think it’ll cause any bankers to jump out of fiftieth story windows—what are you going to do with it?—post it up on billboards? it might go well on toilet paper like [a laxative] advertizing—or is it going to be laid on [President] Hoover’s breakfast table?….Where is it going to be used—?

Wilson ends up forwarding material to Dos Passos from another periodical, New Masses, and Dos Passos writes back in March 1934,

I think it’s very important not to add to this mass of inept rubbish on this subject—what is happening is that the whole Marxian radical movement is in a moment of intense disintegration—all people like us, who have no taste for political leadership or chewing the rag, can do, is to sit on the sidelines and try to put a word in now and then for the underdog or for the cooperative commonwealth or whatever….

The only alternative is passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy or an industrial crisis helped by a collapse in the director’s offices—That would be different from nazi socialism only in this way: that it would be a reaction towards old time Fourth of July democracy….How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.

Late 1934, Dos Passos writes to Wilson about recent events in the Soviet Union, including the murder of Stalin’s intelligence chief,

This business about Kirov looks very very bad to me. In fact it has completely destroyed my benefit-of-the-doubt attitude towards the Stalinists—It seems to be another convolution of the self-destructive tendency that began with the Trotski-Stalin row. From now on events in Russian have no more interest—except as a terrible example—for world socialism—if you take socialism to mean the educative or constructive tendency rather than politics. The thing has gone into its Napoleonic stage and the progressive tendencies in the Soviet Government have definitely gone under before the self-protective tendencies….Meanwhile I think we should be very careful not to damage any latent spores of democracy that there still may be in the local American soil.

These remarks provoke Wilson to respond in early January 1935:

…I don’t think you ought to say, as you do, that a country which is still trying to put socialism into practice has ceased to be politically interesting…One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to people who have hopped on the shootings in Russia as a means of discrediting socialism. Aside from this, you are right, of course, in saying that Americans who are in favor of socialism oughtn’t to try to import the methods of the Russians….

Dos Passos fires back,

[N]o government is in good shape that has to keep on massacring its people. Suppose, when that curious little [Italian] Zangara took a potshot a Franklin D. [Roosevelt], the U.S. Secret Service had massacred a hundred miscellaneous people, some because they were [Italians], others because they were anarchists and others because they had stomach trouble, what would all us reds be saying…What’s the use of losing your “chains” if you get a firing squad instead…Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out—if the coming period of wars and dictatorships give anybody a chance to work anything out….

About Russia I should have said not politically useful rather than politically interesting….By Anglo Saxon Institutions I mean the almost obliterated traditions of trial by jury common law etc—they don’t count for much all the time but they do constitute a habit more or less implanted in Western Europeans outside of Russians….

Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do—and I cant see any reason for giving the impression of trying to induce others to engage in forlorn hopes one wouldn’t go in for oneself.

“Don’t agitate me, comrade, I’m with you,” Wilson countered at the end of that January,

Surely it’s entirely unnecessary to worry about the possibility of a Stalin regime in America. I can’t imagine an American Stalin. You talk as if there were a real choice between Henry Ford on the one hand and [American Communists] on the other; but who outside the Communists themselves has ever seriously entertained the idea that these individuals would every lead a national movement?

“But” responds Dos Passos in February 1935,

it’s not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that’s worrying me, it’s the fact that the Stalinist [Communist Party] seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in—all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made—and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism’s weakness and not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx’s work—but it certainly does influence one’s attitude towards a given political party. I’ve felt all along that the Communists were valuable as agitators as the abolitionist were before the Civil War—but now I ‘m not so happy about it.

Dos Passos then shifts his letter to a point Wilson had made to the effect that Marx belonged to a group of romantics that “came out of a world (before 1848) that was less sick, had much more spirit.” “By the way,” Dos Passos continues,

I don’t agree with you that a hundred years ago was a better time than now—they had a great advantage that everything was technically less cluttered and simpler—but dont you think perhaps in every time the landscape seems somewhat obstructed by human lice for those who view it? We have more information to go on, more technical ability to carry ideas out and ought to produce a whale of a lot of stuff—if I was a European I wouldn’t think so, but here we still have a margin to operate on—

Later that February Wilson writes Dos Passos another letter, the parting shot of which is its own “By the way,”

it is being rumored that you are “rubbing your belly” and saying that “the good old Republican party is good enough for you.” Maybe you ought to make a statement of your present position.

. . .which Dos Passos does. The month after, he writes Wilson,

I finally consented, against my better judgement, to put my name down on the [leftist] Writers Congress roster. I’m going to try to write them a little preachment about liberty of conscience or freedom of inwit or something of the sort that I hope will queer me with the world savers so thoroughly that they’ll leave me alone for a while. I frankly cant see anything in this middleclass communism of the literati but a racket….People haven’t any right to make a living out of politics—It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.

“It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.” “Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out.” “Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do.” “How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.” That said, at least here in the US, according to Dos Passos, “we still have margin to operate on”.

What margin do we have today?

My proposal

Start with the margin that the framers of the US Constitution saw fit to endorse in Article 5—a new constitutional convention. Oh no, no that won’t work, you say. How would most of our state legislatures or Congressmembers ever agree to hold a Constitutional Convention?

Answer: We hold it for them. We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.

The idea here is this: We have 465 congressional districts, and 465 delegates to a Peoples’ Constitutional Convention sounds about right. Anyone on the voter rolls or adult able to show district residency would be eligible to vote and any voter from the district could run as a convention delegate. Party affiliation or endorsement would, of course, not be required. The candidate with the greatest vote plurality would be the district’s delegate. The cost of this nationwide election and delegate process would be, say, US$1-2 per person, or some $600 million, with another $50 million to hold the actual convention.

The US government won’t finance this, and corporate funding would for obvious reasons be ruled out. One can imagine a consortium of individuals, foundations and overseas governments willing to defray what we can’t pay ourselves. (To put these numbers in some kind of perspective, Forbes estimated in 2017 that the net worth of author and large charity giver, J.K. Rowling, was roughly $650 million.)

The charge of the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention: To redraft the US Constitution, e.g., through a series of amendments.

What a waste of time and money, you interject, since the real government—the states and feds—would just ignore the work of any Peoples’ Constitutional Convention.

Let them. Let them say the peoples’ mandate is illegitimate. Let them ignore a convention that represents no government, no court, no army, and none of the techno-managerial elites, just those elected to come together to hold our government, our courts, our military, and our techno-managerial elites to account. Let them ignore the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention and if they do, we’ll hold a different-premised one, and if that also does not work, we’ll go global and elect a World Parliament and then let them ignore that too.

Principal sources

The letters are in: Edmund Wilson (1977), Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY and John Dos Passos (1973) The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, Gambit, Inc., Boston, MA. I’ve followed their spelling and grammar throughout, while editing in one case still-offensive ethnic expletives.

Other key sources are: (1) L. Dabney (2005), Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY; and (2) G. Monbiot (2003), The Age of Consent, Flamingo, London: Chapter 4. (As some readers may have twigged, I am adapting and paraphrasing George Monbiot’s proposal in The Age of Consent.)

–In a 2002 interview, painter Gerhard Richter was asked if he would paint the 9/11 aircraft terrorists (as he’d done earlier with Baader-Meinhof members): “Definitely not. This horrific form of global terror is something I cannot fathom”.

“September 11 bothered me more than I expected,” Richter admitted later. By 2005, when an interviewer asked about a small painting appearing to show the World Trade Center’s towers, Richter said: “These here are only failed attempts. I couldn’t get this stereotypical image of the two towers, with the some billowing out of them across the deep blue sky, out of my mind.” He went on to say that the painting in question “couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen”.

–Below is his September, a 2005 photo-painting of the event and relatively small at approximately 28” x 20”:

The image you are seeing was rendered from a photograph showing the south tower of the World Trade Center as it was hit. As to the specific photo, it was, in Richter’s words, “very typical. . .Colorful—red, yellow, fire” “I painted it first in full colour, and then I had to slowly destroy it. . . ”

–“I failed,” he told a friend; the painting “shows my helplessness. In German, my scheitern, failure.”

A failure? Really? What do you think? Is the painting in a failed state?

Look at September again. Do you see the active, living absence of the deep red and yellow that initially tripped Richter up? By extension, do you see the active, living absence of the new democracies to come into being this century from presently failing states, including—dare we say—parts of the US?

Principal sources

https://www.thebambamblog.com/2012/01/gerhard-richters-september/

Storr, R. (2010). September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. Tate Publishing, London

I

“We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us.” Truth told, I’m a bit sour hearing public health experts continue to say this.

So I relish this opportunity to register my own “I told you so!” back at them. “I’m now telling you you’ve been talking to the wrong people all along!”

II

It’s clear that the people who should have been informed about the dangers of a pandemic were not among the people addressed by experts. I have in mind the professionals who operate our real-time critical infrastructures, like water, electricity, telecommunications and transportation. No one told those men and women in the control rooms and out in the field that Covid would wreak such havoc as it did in systems mandated to be so reliable.

From our interviews in Oregon and Washington State, it’s obvious no one predicted the actual, mega-impacts and interruptions that Covid has had on the real-time operations of essential infrastructures, there or beyond. You probably already know essential workers were sent home to work offsite. Arguably less known is the fact that those on-site had to get vaccinated, and some very experienced personnel left as a result. Far less appreciated, Covid put a brake on major infrastructure investment, improvement and management activities. Said one logistic manager of his state’s response, “All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this.”

“Covid was a wake-up call,” we were told again and again by our interviewees, not something you’d expect to hear had the case actually been: “We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us!”

III

So what? We wouldn’t have an economy, we wouldn’t have markets, if it weren’t for electricity, water, telecoms and transportation being reliable. Yet to my knowledge the professionals responsible for real-time operations in the infrastructures were never specifically warned and were never specifically talked to by the pandemic experts.

So: Pandemic experts, the next time around–and yes I agree there will be a next time–it’s you who are going to fail because those who didn’t hear were those you didn’t care to know, let alone talk to.

I

Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, writes the “problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word [happiness] to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based”. He adds: “If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the world ought to be used to indicate this or that. . . “.

Let’s think more of happiness as a mess. “How can that mess be managed better?” is an important policy question then, if only because public policy has something to do with making people happy.

II

Start with the macro-design node for happiness. For years, we have been told that it is a right, or at least the pursuit of happiness is self-evident truth. We’ve also been told that the more income—purchasing power—we have, the happier we will be.

Yet the systemwide patterns recognized, our second node of analysis, consistently fall short of these macro-principles. Vast swathes of the world don’t agree on what that right to happiness means. Data showed that, after a point, more income does not mean we become happier. “People in rich countries are generally happier than people in poor countries. But once basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter are more or less universally met—high gross domestic product does not seem to make societies happier,” John Kay, Financial Times economist, once put it. When a country passes a threshold level of income, the correlation between the happiness of its people and the nation’s aggregate wealth has been weak, studies found. Worse, affluence can make people unhappier. It was reported that in the US as income doubled or more, yet the percentage of people saying they were very happy remained by and large constant.

Nor do localized scenarios of design principles, our third node of analysis, conform to their originating macro-design assumptions. Specific regions of the world are happy in unprincipled ways, it seems, with (1) Latin American countries registering far more subjective happiness than one would have predicted from their economic status and (2) Africans optimistic in the face of documented travails.

This takes us to the last node, the level of individual micro-operator. We were told for years that happiness, like personal utility, was next to impossible to compare with others. Even as social-psychological measures improved for the comparison of interpersonal happiness, strong evidence remained that individuals often are not very good at predicting what will make them happy, or unhappy for that matter.

III

Almost just as worrisome, the temptation has been to jump from pattern recognition to macro-design bypassing all the mess in between.

Since the marginal utility of a dollar is higher from poorer people that for richer, since the gains in happiness are palpably greater among poorer people than losses are among richer people, since more affluence above a point can make people unhappy and since people care a great deal about their relative income, therefore it is better to tax the rich (if simply to contain their unhappy rat race), transfer that money to the poor, and make incomes overall more equal. Many still believe these syllogisms.

IV

I’d rather first know just what those in the middle of these four nodes are doing about sorting out this happiness mess. Who reliably translates the systemwide patterns and localized scenarios into what we can call happiness or provide those services that lead to that happiness?

Typically, the initial answer is our network of family, friends, partners—those immediate social relationships that matter for personal happiness.

Less typically mentioned is the networked wraparound of large infrastructures for water, electricity, transportation and telecommunications, without which society-wide happiness would be even more of a gamble.

Who would have thought that, as these wraparound services wither in the name of hollowing out the state, individual happiness reduces to the techno-speak of being one’s own full-time “infrastructure” manager!

The term, “ecosystem,” comes to us through A.G. Tansley’s 1935 article, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms.” He has been criticized for his role in colonial British ecology, but here Tansley has salience for two other reasons.

–First, ecosystems for Tansley make no sense without taking humans and their interactions with the landscape into account. “We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called ‘natural’ entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided us by the activities of man. Such a course is not scientifically sound, because scientific analysis must penetrate beneath the forms of the ‘natural’ entities, and it is not practically useful because ecology must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity,” he wrote.

This might seem to be pushing at an open door today, but Tansley deployed a discourse quite different than his contemporaries, the U.S. ecologists. Theirs were just-so stories about “climax communities” evolving on their own—if and only if devoid of human beings mucking things up. Two commentators on Tansley’s work (Laura Cameron and John Forrester) argue that his “principal contributions were, in contradistinction to American ecology, to emphasize the systemic interrelations of human activity and botanical phenomena—he sees no real difference between those ecosystems which are natural and those which are ‘anthropogenic’ (nature ‘produced by man’, as he glossed in 1923).”

–Tansley is, however, important to us for another reason. Not only was he a founder of the British Ecological Society (precursor to ecological societies in many countries) and the Nature Conservancy, he was also well-known and respected member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, having been analyzed by Freud for nine months in 1922 and 1924. For Tansley, humans and their desires (“energy”) were and are never far away from ecosystems in a profound way.

We see few if any ecologists today take human desires as nothing less than The Enemy. Such, I’d like to think, would have appalled a Tansley who took desire and ecosystem to be inseparable. He’d be the last person, I suspect, surprised or shocked by large critical infrastructures, created to satisfy desires and wants, as having environmental impacts, bad and good.

Principal source

John Forrester and Laura Cameron (2017). Freud in Cambridge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. This is a massively informative volume and its footnotes alone are an entire education.

I dislike being herded into certainty.
                  Louise Glück, Nobel poet

My argument is that if disasters averted by pastoralists (and farmers, for that matter) were more identified and differentiated, we’d better understand how short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.

To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Instead, we are repeatedly told that what matters more are the disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.

Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster-averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.

The implications for pastoralist development end up being major—not least when it comes to “pastoralist elites.” But let’s start closer to the beginning.

***

–A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation practices in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and being excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed was a country-wide land reform.

Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!

–Reference to the pernicious, when not totalizing effects of marketization, privatization, commodification, financialization, globalization, and like (e.g., monetization, mechanization, marginalization. . .racism, colonialism, militarism, imperialism. . .) appear from beginning to end in development publications, and never more so—it seems to me—than in paragraphs that detail case-specific complexities one would have thought worked against generalizing processes across cases.

Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other such processes matter. The same for modernization, late capitalism and global environmental destruction.

BUT they matter when detailed and differentiated in terms of their being “with respect to.”

Just what is marketization with respect to in your case at hand? Smallstock? Mechanized deliveries? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or environmental conditions? Where so, the under-acknowledged methodological issue moves center-stage: How do the broader processes summarized as “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?

Or back to where I was that day: “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?,” I should have asked.

***

–This leads to my main speculation: Claiming that over-arching explanations are empirical generalizations made across complex cases too often voids the case-specific diversity of responses and emerging practices of importance for policy and management.

Why? Because appeals to processes or state conditions generalized as “marketization,” “commodification,” “precarity” and the like run the risk of diminishing the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.

But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios show how these broad processes are chronic and how they preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.

–Here’s an example of what I am trying to get at. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” a research finding from his work in Georgia:

A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.

Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that

my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .

I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core of my argument here.

***

–But, so what?

I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. I confess, this made me smile. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”

So my question: What happens when some of the poor pastoralists of then are better off now? Is there a point at which better-off pastoralists are no longer poor enough for the researcher’s concern?

More formally as above: “Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to criticism of elites?” This is important because an over-arching development aim of the first-generation ASAL programs was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.

My answer now would focus on the disasters averted over time by the now-elites compared to those who remained poor in the same period. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they (and others with them) averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed or coped the ways they did. Practices underlying their intentions, choices and actions are what interest me.

Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, my focus on disasters-averted holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.

Principal source

Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.