I

Please take the time to read the following excerpts from a very fine study by Marty et al (2022) on Maasai pastoralists in contemporary southern Kenya:

As an adaptation process, diversification brings new opportunities for some people, but can also displace risks and bring new exposures for others, acting as ‘a socially stratifying capitalist fix providing new avenues for accumulation and market penetration’, benefiting a small elite (Mikulewicz 2021, 424)’. . . .

Our results also align with recent research evidencing the increased importance of capital relations for grazing access in the context of changing land use across Kajiado (Jeppesen and Hassan 2022), which is likely to further accentuate processes of social differentiation and associated class formation dynamics. . . .

Our findings suggest that diversification tends to promote more individualized and market-based adaptation strategies, but that the drivers and ramifications of increased integration into capitalist production systems and renegotiation of production relations are complex and dynamic. Differentiated engagements with diversification in pastoral areas are not only related to changing material conditions, but also linked to ‘intangible’ dimensions, such as changing norms and values. New social differentiations emerge through the increased emphasis placed on formal education and how knowledge influences one’s position within the community and beyond (e.g. the relation to state or non-governmental actors). At the same time, other entrenched markers of differentiation persist and are crystalized through exclusionary decision-making processes and established roles, perhaps most notably gendered discriminations. The research findings thus underscore the need for climate change adaptation planning in agrarian environments to extend beyond the dominant technical focus (Eriksen, Nightingale, and Eakin 2015), by showing how adaptation processes in pastoral environments are closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations.

Edwige Marty, Renee Bullock, Matthew Cashmore, Todd Crane & Siri Eriksen (2022): Adapting to climate change among transitioning Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya:an intersectional analysis of differentiated abilities to benefit from diversification processes., The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2121918

I’ve left the original references in to indicate that the authors are not alone in their views–which to be clear from the outset I believe to be true as far as they go.

I want however to go further and take up the authors’ own suggestion that the adaptation processes be studied in terms of how they are now “closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations”.

II

Let’s look at the history behind those “socio-political and economic transformations.”

Since there are many historians to choose from, allow me to take the most recent one I’ve read: Capitalism: The story behind the word, by historian of ideas, Michael Sonenscher (2022, Princeton University Press).

I believe he is well-regarded, but that doesn’t matter for what follows: There are plenty of histories of capitalist relations, any number of which usefully complicate the above quotes and indeed compel us to go further.

–Sonenscher starts by underscoring that the development of commercial societies preceded the development of capitalism. More, when the two histories, which do get intertwined later on, are distinguished from the get-go, it becomes altogether clear that commercial societies and capitalist societies were characterized by different features and path dependencies.

Most notably, commercial societies had markets induced by divisions of labor that preceded capitalist class formation. Indeed, terminology introduce after that of “commercial societies”, like “primitive accumulation,” have served to misdirect analysts away from the high degree of economic differentiation on and specialization in those societies–again prior to very introduction of capitalist relations for financing war and debt.

–Hopefully, some readers recognize that this emphasis on trade and markets, along with a division of labor that was differentiated and specialized in terms of trade routes and transactions, also characterized significant pastoralist societies well prior to the commonly narrated version of 18th – 19th century introduction of (Western) capitalism.

III

–So what? So what if these earlier commercial societies had markets and transactions for goods and services?

After all, the point underscored in the above quotes and many like them is that those earlier formations have long been superseded by capitalist relations and their accentuation/extension into what are no longer and must now be considered “former pastoralist societies.”

Really? Are we sure about that?

I can well believe processes the authors describe are going on in Kajiado, elsewhere in East Africa, and elsewhere in Africa and beyond.

What I can’t believe is that pastoralists are colonized everywhere by capitalism. You mean all (or even most?) of these people Wikipedia record are integrated in capitalist relations: “As of 2019, between 200 million and 500 million people globally practised pastoralism, and 75% of all countries had pastoral communities.”

–There are too many different types of livestock production systems, too many regional differences in the impacts of the climate emergency, too many different path dependencies historically and now into the Anthrocpocene to deny the following:

Just as researchers now talk about the varieties of capitalism, there all along were varieties of commercial societies, and among that latter were and still are pastoralist systems with their evolving–that is, with less ruptured than many think–divisions of labor, differentiations and specializations.

–But, again, so what? I have argued that pastoralisms are a global critical infrastructure. I now argue they have been one for a very, very long time in terms of their differentiation and specialization of services and opportunities to advance and change.

Related source

E. Roe (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (available online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/)

–The terms, risk and uncertainty, are used all the time by real-time infrastructure operators without meaning or referring to “expert probability estimates,” be they Bayesian, or based in frequencies, or recast as threats, vulnerabilities and exposure. But the operational usages of risk and uncertainty differ depending on where the operators are in the cycle of infrastructure operations and the standards of effective management at those stages.

For example, control room operators we interviewed (during their normal operations) spoke of the probability of failure being even higher in recovery than during usual times. Had we interviewed them in an actual system failure, their having to energize or re-pressurize line by line would have been described in far more demanding terms of operating in the blind, working on the fly and riding uncertainty.

–Note the phrase, “more demanding;” it is not “the estimated risk of failure in recovery is now numerically higher.”

It is more demanding because the cause-and-effect of normal operations is moot when “operating blind” (their term) in failure. What had been cause-and-effect is now replaced by nonmeasurable uncertainties accompanied by disproportionate impacts, with no presumption that causation (let alone correlation) is any clearer in that conjuncture.

What may have been the high reliability standard of preventing certain disasters from every happening has now been replaced by a requisite variety standard of effective emergency response, that is, then-and-there task demands are matched by then-and-there resource capabilities, even if only temporarily. It is true that there are urgency, clarity and logic in immediate response after failure, but they in no way obviate the need for impromptu improvisations and unpredicted, let alone hitherto unimagined, shifts in human and technical interconnectivities as system failure unfolds.

I

Once we understand that the conventional notion that infrastructures have only two states–normal and failed–is grotesquely underspecified for empirical work, the whole-cycle comparisons of different understandings of infrastructure risk and uncertainty become far more central and rewarding.

Assume a major infrastructure has witnessed systemwide operations that were normal, disrupted, restored back to normal or tripped into outright failure, immediately responded to when failed (e.g., saving lives), followed by restoration of backbone services (electricity, water, telecoms), then into longer term recovery of destroyed assets (involving more and different stakeholders and trade-offs), and afterwards the establishment of a new normal, if there is to be one.

It is my belief that what truly separates the risks and uncertainties of longer-term recovery from risks and uncertainties found in a new normal isn’t that, e.g., the politics and conflicts have altered, but rather when or if infrastructures adopt new standards for their reliability management.

This may (or not) be in the form of different standards seeking to prevent specific types of events from ever happening. We already know that major distributed internet systems, now considered critical, are reliable because they expect components to fail and are better prepared for that and other contingencies. Here each component should be able to fail in order for the system to be reliable, unlike systems where management is geared to ensuring some components never fail.

II

More has to be said, but let me leave you with a worry: namely, those commentators who assume “the new normal” is at best endless attempts at repair, where coping is the order of the day and managing for recovery no longer possible (if only because of management’s unintended consequences and the economics of coping).

From a whole-cycle approach, this reductionism is premature and thus exaggerated. In the first place, how can you have “proper pricing of risk,” if you don’t know the socio-technical system to be managed across its states of operation, the reliability standard to which it is to be managed then and there, and the risks and uncertainties entailed by subscribing to that standard for those systems? In the second place, there are of course no guarantees that the whole cycle will be spanned, but at least its format doesn’t, e.g., miss Dresden-now by stopping time at its 1945 devastation.

–It just isn’t that values about (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that a smothering paste of statistical generalizations or macro-principles cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of all those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.

–So what?

The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties us into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, is to have more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even more into global capitalism or not?

There are, of course, those who insist such is not a binary value choice. Many with bank accounts also work to change the upper reaches of financial capital. But there are also those aiming for the lower-reach specifics: Surely, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.

–Insisting on case-by case looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by a policy narrative that assumes the world is irreducibly colonized by capitalisms and their inequalities.

–I finished reading the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, which discussed a poet I don’t remember reading before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” from World War I and the following lines:

What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger - the perfect drawing of a heart's dream? 
Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? 
Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….

“What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?” reminded me of an anecdote from John Ashbery, the poet, in one of his essays:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s appetite—his form of hunger—did indeed produce the perfect drawing. Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of very different story, seeming to make the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):

Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’

I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, what can be more perfect than the image that emerges, infallibly and unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?

–Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to each question: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living: Somehow together, and find this too is life.

Ashbery records poet, David Schubert, saying of the great Robert Frost: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”

I

“What am I missing when I look at poverty the way I do?,” is for me much like reading a mystery novel twice. The first time I read to find out what happened by way of what is described and evoked. The second time I read to figure out and evaluate what I missed by way of how the mystery was constructed. As Leona Toker put it, the first reading is the reading of a mystery as it unfolds; the second is about the convention(s) at work in making the mystery I read.

This implies poverty should be read at least twice, first as a policy issue and second as any such policy issue involving these rather than those conventions of issue construction: What does policy say? And then: What did we miss by way of saying it this, rather than that, way?

II

Here’s an example. Consider reports by Zimbabwe villagers:

March, 1992
“We are not yet getting food for drought relief”
“there is no body who bring us food”

April
“He has got a problem of starvation he is not working and he has got seven children.”

May
“The problem of water here is sirious so that they need borehole and their cattle are very thin because there is no grass”
“Trees die when they plant them”
“This man is a criple that he needs help, but he is very intelligent that he tries to help himself”
“She is old and she is blind and she is a widow and she does not have anyone to help her with food. No clothes no blankets. They do no have cattle to plough with this year”

June
“At present two girls have left school they are just sitted at home. They can’t get money to pay schoolfees”
“They have no food. She has a family of six children”
“They are starving”
“The cattle are dying”

What was to be done?

That depends on my—your?—two readings. The first reading is the unfolding immediacy of dire times in the village; the second is identifying the conventional responses to what is described, starting from food-for-work projects on to other relief interventions by government, NGOs, and kith and kin. (Think of the project as others have done: It is its own genre, with pre-existing modules for planning, operation, management, auditing and such.)

III

Now, back to the question: What am I missing by way of two readings?

In this case, my second reading of the above quotes came years after the comments were written and conveyed to me. Which means: What am I missing now? The response, please note, cannot be solely a fact-finding response to the obvious other question: What happened to these villagers in 1992 and after? The actual answer would have to include an analysis of how conventions governing “poverty relief” have changed there since then.

I

The Climate Emergency requires extreme measures, including but not limited to global governance for GHG removal and remediation beyond anything the world has ever seen before. Only then, the argument goes, can the long term and the green infrastructure get priority.

To lay my cards on the table, I’m more than willing to believe radical agendas are needed. This is my question, though: What other scenarios would you also expect to find but are very rarely identified in the calls for radical action?

Answers are important because there are already increasing demands for broad-based civil disobedience, sabotage, and violence to stop the Big Polluters. Against this background, why any reticence at all?

II

In answer, I can think of one very worrisome scenario–this too not sufficiently discussed–but easily assembled. To cut to the quick:

A Climate Emergency calls for global climate security. Security is what militaries do—and a well-funded military is one of the few government organizations that routinely does long-term planning and often takes that planning seriously.

And who is most ready to invest in the urgently-needed global-wide green infrastructure? Blackstone and Vanguard and the other asset management titans! Nothing, they say, would be more attractive to them than picking and choosing where to invest their trillions upon trillions in publicly supported infrastructure programs geared to reducing climate risk—because for them climate risk is, well, investment risk.

And who better than the deep-pocket departments of defense and the global asset managers to prototype and fund climate change modeling down to the grid level of the politician’s constituency? The premise here, as a realist put it, is “climate models will start to really matter when the grid scales get to the size of a congressional district.”

Accuracy need be no more be an issue at this small scale than is the continued reliance at the global scale in global climate change models of the RCP 8.5. That is a Pathway trajectory for high emissions many consider not to be realistic but still a good worse-case scenario just in case it really gets bad. Imagine then global asset titans being the first to sponsor “just-in-case-it-really-gets-bad” climate scenarios for marketing to key voting constituencies.

III

Not the radical action scenario climate activism envisions, is it? I’m not saying the above is likelier to happen than other “new governance” scenarios. I am asking you to wonder how this really-existing Climate Emergency can be acted upon via radical action, when radical action is to be undertaken by others orthogonal to the way climate activists want.

It’s one thing to call for radical resistance against the major polluting nations. It’s another thing to lay out how the next wave of environmental activism includes cadres of digital hackers ready to take on, say, Xi Jinping and the CCP. China reportedly is responsible for an estimated one-quarter of annual global GHG emissions, largely due to its massive fleet of coal-fired power stations. Where is the hacktivism ready and able to disable these plants? Or disable the real-time operations of, say, the “Big 3” credit rating agencies (S&P Global, Moody’s and Fitch) for their insanely positive ratings of the economies fueling climate change?

In what world is unprecedented global governance of the consumption and production of nearly 8 billion people easier than, say, mobilizing the Chinese proletariat of some 220 million or disrupting the operations of the Big 3 CRAs, both for the planet’s survival? Answers, I believe, are part of what we should expect to find but are not talked about—except perhaps inside the respective departments of defense and global asset managers.

So, what’s to be done?

IV

I start from the proposition that the radical action above isn’t radical enough. Those agendas stop short and end up exaggerating their cases by leaving out what’s to be pushed further.

An uncontrolled climate change globally exhibits already a large array of local coping and managing responses. We know from research that global climate change is complex, because local activities and responses are so heterogenous and diverse. We also know the large array of local cases form a distribution across which practices could emerge for local transformations, if not for scaling up.

What I am saying is that the agenda for addressing the climate emergency would establish as its benchmark the really-existing diversity of climate responses and related practices (including militancy) already underway. Now, that would be radical! Yes, more is needed by way of other-level policy and management, but the “more” would be evaluated against this benchmark and not some other even more imperfect one.

Principal sources

Afanasiev, V. and C. Di Leone (2021). “01.11 For Planetary Governance: Building Climate Knowledge Infrastructure.” Interview with a lead author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Paul N. Edwards in Strelka Mag (accessed online on January 23, 2022 at https://strelkamag.com/en/article/building-climate-knowledge-infrastructures)

Agnew, H. and R. Wigglesworth (2022). “BlackRock’s Fink rejects accusations of being ‘woke’”. (accessed online on January 23 2022 at https://www.ft.com/content/2ab11b21-9a5c-480a-acd5-097ea0bb1ff3)

Braun, B. and A. Buller (2021). “Titans: Tracing the rise and politics of asset manager capitalism.” (accessed online on January 23 2022 at ttps://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/blackrock-asset-manager-capitalism/ )

Buxton, N. (2021). A Primer on Climate Security: The dangers of militarising the climate crisis. Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. (This is a very informative must-read, if only because it addresses the fateful question: What if global climate change does not lead to global conflicts?)

Davis, M. (2011). “Spring confronts winter.” Editorial. New Left Review 72.

Griffith-Jones, S. and M. Kraemer (2021). “Credit rating agencies and developing economies.” DESA Working Paper No. 175. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York.

Sovacool, B.K. and A. Dunlap (2022). “Anarchy, war, or revolt? Radical perspectives for climate protection, insurgency and civil disobedience in a low-carbon era.” Energy Research & Social Science 86 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102416).

Transnational Institute and Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (2021). Energy Transition or Energy Expansion? New York and Amsterdam.

Wallace-Wells, D. (2021). “Climate Reparations: The case for carbon removal.” (Accessed online on January 23 2022 at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/climate-change-reparations.html)

Highly recommended: “Blow up pipelines? Tadzio Müller and Andreas Malm on what next for the climate movement” https://podcast.dissenspodcast.de/123-climate (listen to the very end; you’ll find it moving)

–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.