Neither am I religious nor do I understand the words but even so, hope isn’t disappointed here: Zelenka and Laetatus sum, Biber and Missa Salisburgensis, Jomelli’s Requiem, Fux (Costanza e Fortezza), and Foccio’s Missa Solemnis.
When “zero-impact” isn’t no-impact
How might digital nomadism recast a research agenda for pastoralism?
What if we were to reverse the usual comparison and ask: What value, if any, does the topic of digital nomadism have to add our understanding of pastoralist mobility and movements?
In answer, the lens of digital nomadism that I apply is from Emanuele Sciuva’s 2025 article, “Geographies of Digital Nomadism: A research agenda” published in Geography Compass (online at https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70016). In the interests of brevity, we stay with the article’s abstract:
The focus has shifted from just the nomads themselves to also considering the destinations they inhabit and the broader spatial implications of their movement. This review sets out a research agenda based on emerging discussions about the geographies of digital nomadism, organized around four main thematic areas. The first cluster of scholarly works examines how digital nomads are understood at the crossroads of work‐life, leisure and lifestyle mobility perspectives. The second part includes studies that explore how states are crafting migration regulations and programs to attract digital nomads, along with the difficulties that nomads face in navigating these evolving regulatory landscapes. The third cluster of scholarship investigates the intricate interplay between digital nomadism and housing, focussing on the rise of a medium‐term rental market and diverse housing solutions tailored to digital nomads, while cautioning against the potential gentrifying effects of these emerging markets. Finally, the fourth segment of research examines the socio‐economic infrastructural changes arising from the growing presence of digital nomadism within urban settlements.
Right off the bat, there is a focus on livestock grazing and herding itineraries and shifts (see Krätli, 2015) that comes with first and foremost “considering the destinations they inhabit and the broader spatial implications of their movement.” Second, there is the decentering of any notion of “traditional” in the contemporary “work-life, leisure and lifestyle mobility perspectives”. Third, it’s housing and shelter, not (re)settlements per se, that also move center-stage in the analysis, which I take to include the structures–be they rental, squatter, public–lived in by household members sending back key remittances to their livestock-herding members.
Fourth, as for the mix of positive and negative regulations on mobility, regulations seek, in Emanuele Sciuva’s words, “not only to regulate who can or cannot move, enter, or remain in a place but also operate. . .[to incentivize] mobile individuals to self‐discipline according to desired traits like self‐sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticized mobility” That is, when was the last time researchers treated pastoralists as consumers, voters and citizens? Fifth and to stop here, there is also now another primary question: How are pastoralists and their herds changing all manner of local and national infrastructures (e.g., via private investments), not least of which are in urban or peri-urban areas?
Your reading Emanuele Sciuva’s article will show the point-to-point comparison between those nomads and these pastoralists to be imperfect and uneven (e.g., with respect to the internet’s role). But such comparisons are now in my opinion too suggestive by way of policy and management implications to dismiss outright.
Other source
Krätli, S. (2015) Valuing Variability: New Perspectives on Climate Resilient Drylands Development, London: IIED http://pubs.iied.org/10128IIED.html
From this week’s entries: dual power, the organic line in policy and management, and catastrophe averted is no longer the gold standard
I. Catastrophe averted is no longer the gold standard.
It is already recognized that the Trump budget and staff cuts will have catastrophic effects. But most people don’t understand that their chief effect will be jettisoning catastrophe itself as an evaluative standard for government performance. Catastrophe is the risk we have to take, or so we are now told.
Yet millions of real-time professionals have been trained and acculturated to avoid or prevent outright failure in providing critical services. People die when catastrophes happen. In contrast, our national leaders believe “If we don’t risk system failure by cutting costs and staff we’ll never get our global market share”–now both in dollars and in global politics.
What they–and the rest of us–don’t see is the billions of dollars saved each day by professionals who are now being fired from real-time operations in our critical infrastructures, like water, energy and telecommunications. For our national CEO’s, the jettisoned standard was all about playing it safe, and playing it safe is not good enough.
The expression, “playing it safe,” is often used pejoratively in the U.S. Safety-first, Teddy Roosevelt said, will kill America. The problem is that our CEO leaders haven’t told us: Under what conditions is not playing it safe the equivalent to running headlong into fire?
II. The Organic Line in Policy and Management
In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.
This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.” Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)
What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,
There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.
(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
Source. Irene V. Small (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.
III. Dual Power
During those years, the predominant logic among the political and intellectual left was that the state was a machine of oppression of the popular classes. However, what this mechanical conception cannot answer is why the state, a ‘mere instrument of domination’, is paradoxically continually claimed by the struggles of the working classes to inscribe their new rights or to institutionalise many of their social conquests. The response that the popular classes are living a ‘deception’ because they do not understand that the state is merely the machine of their own oppression, or that they are involved in conditions of domination which oblige them to see the world from their position of domination, in order to continue to be dominated, condemns the subaltern classes to a condition of perpetual idiocy which can only be overcome by the work of those who, due to the magic of the holy spirit, possess the ‘truth’ and have not fallen into the clutches of deception: the party, the intellectuals, etc.
Even if true, so what? One answer to that question is “dual power”:
Every form of social dual power arises outside the state and against the state because it is a way of democratising the decision-making and management of some common societal issue. But, at the same time, dual power arises initially to demand something from the state and, if there is no universal irradiation of dual power that allows the state form to be overcome, dual power will seek to enshrine in the (new) state itself the institutionality, the management of the new right, of the new resource or recognition achieved in the collective struggle. At the same time, the state will have to reconstruct its social legitimacy if it manages to incorporate the imprint of dual power in its new legal order, in its institutional reorganisation and in the social composition of its officials. It is a paradoxical relationship. Dual power is the antagonist of the state; but, at the same time, so far, neither can live without the other.
(both quotes from https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/state-counter-power-and-post-fascism-from-poulantzas-to-the-present-interview-with-alvaro-garcia-linera-and-sandro-mezzadra/)
An example: the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on emergency responders and critical infrastructure operators in Oregon and Washington State.
The pandemic had been a clear wake-up call to those we interviewed. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response had been and had to be “unparalleled”. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official.
And what were COVID’s major impacts from the perspective of these informants? First and foremost: the pandemic’s interconnectivities. An experienced emergency management expert put it this way, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.
This was so because the pandemic combined with other emergencies at the same time. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVTD-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate for city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for real-time line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created unexpected issues.
That what had been invisible before had become defined and visible in the pandemic period describes a seeming paradox: Immediate response to a heat dome or winter ice storm can have a logic, clarity and urgency in response: Secure electricity and water first. Yet add after-effects or a different crisis, in this case the pandemic, and some important things turn much less clear at the same time. “It’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling in immediate response, an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner underscored. It’s by no means always certain how response happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official before trying to explain.
What does this have to do with “dual power”? The fact that those left alive after a major disaster often self-organize–especially when the state and its resources are unexpectedly missing-in-action–is a well-known and documented example of social movement as “self-government” and “autonomous.” But: The state must do better the next time we have a pandemic! Less well-known yet just as important are the struggles within the state over who best to take immediate action, those insiders at the rock-face of disaster or those further up in hierarchical chains of command.
If your starting point is “the state is a means of domination,” then that was not what our interviewees saw in the Oregon and Washington State emergencies of the early 2020s.
When one answer is “dual power”
During those years, the predominant logic among the political and intellectual left was that the state was a machine of oppression of the popular classes. However, what this mechanical conception cannot answer is why the state, a ‘mere instrument of domination’, is paradoxically continually claimed by the struggles of the working classes to inscribe their new rights or to institutionalise many of their social conquests. The response that the popular classes are living a ‘deception’ because they do not understand that the state is merely the machine of their own oppression, or that they are involved in conditions of domination which oblige them to see the world from their position of domination, in order to continue to be dominated, condemns the subaltern classes to a condition of perpetual idiocy which can only be overcome by the work of those who, due to the magic of the holy spirit, possess the ‘truth’ and have not fallen into the clutches of deception: the party, the intellectuals, etc.
Even if true, so what? One answer to that question is “dual power”:
Every form of social dual power arises outside the state and against the state because it is a way of democratising the decision-making and management of some common societal issue. But, at the same time, dual power arises initially to demand something from the state and, if there is no universal irradiation of dual power that allows the state form to be overcome, dual power will seek to enshrine in the (new) state itself the institutionality, the management of the new right, of the new resource or recognition achieved in the collective struggle. At the same time, the state will have to reconstruct its social legitimacy if it manages to incorporate the imprint of dual power in its new legal order, in its institutional reorganisation and in the social composition of its officials. It is a paradoxical relationship. Dual power is the antagonist of the state; but, at the same time, so far, neither can live without the other.
(both quotes from https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/state-counter-power-and-post-fascism-from-poulantzas-to-the-present-interview-with-alvaro-garcia-linera-and-sandro-mezzadra/)
An example: the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on emergency responders and critical infrastructure operators in Oregon and Washington State.
The pandemic had been a clear wake-up call to those we interviewed. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response had been and had to be “unparalleled”. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official.
And what were COVID’s major impacts from the perspective of these informants? First and foremost: the pandemic’s interconnectivities. An experienced emergency management expert put it this way, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.
This was so because the pandemic combined with other emergencies at the same time. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVTD-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate for city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for real-time line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created unexpected issues.
That what had been invisible before had become defined and visible in the pandemic period describes a seeming paradox: Immediate response to a heat dome or winter ice storm can have a logic, clarity and urgency in response: Secure electricity and water first. Yet add after-effects or a different crisis, in this case the pandemic, and some important things turn much less clear at the same time. “It’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling in immediate response, an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner underscored. It’s by no means always certain how response happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official before trying to explain.
What does this have to do with “dual power”? The fact that those left alive after a major disaster often self-organize–especially when the state and its resources are unexpectedly missing-in-action–is a well-known and documented example of social movement as “self-government” and “autonomous.” But: The state must do better the next time we have a pandemic! Less well-known yet just as important are the struggles within the state over who best to take immediate action, those insiders at the rock-face of disaster or those further up in hierarchical chains of command.
If your starting point is “the state is a means of domination,” then that was not what our interviewees saw in the Oregon and Washington State emergencies of the early 2020s.
Thirteen examples of the real-time relevance of the humanities to major policy and management (#13 newly added)
^Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
^What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
^Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
^Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
^The entire point of revolt may be revolts
^One very important function of surprise
^Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
^Yes, no, but
^Christopher Ricks and the unthinkable
^Plato is surely right if he asked, “Are we on our way to or from first principles?”
^ Reading polycrisis and wicked policy problems aesthetically
^Jump off or stay onboard? Recasting the shipwreck metaphor for emergency management
^The wider equality across the inequalities of income and wealth
^The importance of “the organic line” in policy and management: an example (newly added)
———————
^Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
I
It turns out that what the Delphic oracle said about Socrates varies by the account given for how Socrates defended himself at his trial for impiety and corrupting the young.
Plato’s famous version has Socrates’ recounting that the oracle pronounced no human being wiser than Socrates. Socrates then goes on to ask, Aren’t there others in fact wiser? In the process, he seeks to underscore his knowledge of his own ignorance.
In contrast, Xenophon (a contemporary of Socrates and Plato) has Socrates saying the Delphic oracle pronounced no one freer, more just, or more prudent than Socrates. Socrates then proceeds by asking and answering nine questions which are meant to lead others to conclude the same.
II
For my part, I like the composite version: wise enough to disagree, free enough to agree.
Though apparently not symmetrically so: Socrates being wise is entailed in Xenophon’s version, whereas being wise in Plato’s version also means knowing you’re ignorant of things. Or prudently put, just how free am I?
III
Not quite, then, the ethics of “Do unto others as you would do unto them.”
Closer instead to: “I am not so arrogant, as to commend mine owne gifts, neither so degenerate, as to beg your toleration” (Robert Jones, 1611).
———————
^What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
The playhouse manuscript, Sir Thomas More, has been called “an immensely complex palimpsest of composition, scribal transcription, rewriting, censorship and further additions that features multiple hands”. One of those hands was Shakespeare–and that has contemporary relevance.
–The authoritative Arden Shakespeare text renders a passage from Shakespeare’s Scene 6 as follows (this being Thomas More speaking to a crowd of insurrectionists opposing Henry VIII):
What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain…
The last two lines had been edited by another of the play’s writers (“Hand C”), deleting the bolded lines Shakespeare had originally written,
Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot.
In, in to your obedience. While even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
What rebel captain….
What has been effaced away by the deletion is, first, the notion that contrition is itself a kind of war and a safer war at that.
–According to the Arden Shakespeare, “The act of contrition might be described as wars because the former rebels would enlist themselves in the struggle of good and evil, and would fight against their own sin of rebellion.” In either case—contrition or rebellion—obedience is required. Actually, nothing was less safe than rebellion whose “discipline is riot”.
What had been scored out, in other words, from Shakespeare’s original passage is the clear accent on contrition and peace over continued upheaval.
–But the absence of contrition by those involved in the formulation and implementation of war policies is precisely what we have seen and are seeing today.
For to prioritize contrition would mean refocusing obedience from battle to a very different struggle in securing peace and security, a mission in which our Ministries of Interior and Defence are notably inferior, be they in Russia, the US, China or elsewhere.
———————
^Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
In a 2002 interview, painter Gerhard Richter was asked if he would paint the 9/11 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. The specific photo 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.”
–Really? 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 coming into being from presently failing states, including—dare we say—parts of the US?
———————
^The entire point of revolt may be revolts
I
For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 18th century German Enlightener, the point is not for the sculptor or painter to portray a crisis at its climax, when visualizing a single moment. Better to choose a moment before or after the apex of destruction, so as to allow the viewers’ imaginations freer rein over what is to come. That way, Lessing argues, the narrative continues in an arc of reflection that is not cut short by any climax’s overpowering intensity:
[S]ince the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated. . .it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot. . .shun[ ] the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.
Instead of picturing Ajax at the height of his rage and slaughter, better he be depicted afterwards in the full realization of what he has done and in the despair leading him to what comes next.
One problem with today’s crisis scenarios is the preoccupation with or fixation on that visualized climax. Obviously, post-apocalypse can be pictured as even deadlier, but the point holds: In today’s catastrophe scenarios, the worst is imagined and imagination stalls there–like shining deer at night–in the glare of it all. Our unrelieved stream of crisis scenarios is itself proof that a prophesied climax can’t do all the talking.
So what?
Any disappointment that one or more revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion–have not culminated into “far-reaching substantive change” is but one scenario. One only, because the climax scenario may not be the most fruitful, suggestive moment to focus on anyway, let alone be overawed by. In this sense, the entire point of revolt is revolts.
II
I want to suggest that revolts also talk in ways that many utopian narratives do not. Really-existing revolts, such as just those listed, have all manner of noise you don’t find utopians focusing on.
Revolts are very much in the present tense, one that in Amy Kornbluh’s words, “compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now. Moreover, present tense often forecloses conclusiveness, judgment, or resolution, lacking hindsight and favoring openness or even nonsensical, unplotted, impressionistic indeterminacy” (https://www.negationmag.com/articles/waxing-affect-anna-kornbluh)
If you will, revolts are their own version of illegible diary entries, allowing multiple interpretation. They are like those recordings of musicians whose grunts and movements are also part and parcel of the performance. Revolts are never comfortable, let alone satisfied, with one reading, performance or future.
Little if any of this surfaces by way of the utopian narrative. Which proves to be as frustrating and punishing as the inmate reading a prison library book only to find its pages have been torn out.
———————
^Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
Eudora Welty, American author, wrote a short story where “bluejays lighted on the rail,” which prompted one reader to reply: “Dear Madam, I enjoyed your stories, but bluejays do not sit on railroad tracks.” On further reflection, Welty conceded that this too had been her own experience. Yet there the bluejays still sit in the Library of America’s definitive edition of Welty’s work.
That’s the view from the inside out; there is also outside-in. We know through photographs that when Picasso was painting Guernica, he had a powerful image of a clenched fist raised high. That image, however, was painted away under what we see today.
To bring to light all these present-but-absent bluejays and absent-but-present clenched fists parallels the challenge of identifying what’s missing in major policy arguments. Clenched fists matter now more than ever, here; rail tracks without those bluejays still matter, there.
Yes, of course, this bringing to light is difficult, but less so than being in the dark might suggest. “Things shine more brightly to an observer who is in the dark,” conceded Diderot, the French Enlightener. A blank canvas, according to artist Gérard Fromanger, is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’.
How different from the reactions of those confronting opaque policy. Let’s sweep the table clear, they say: Wipe the slate clean! As if it’s best to start over by missing what is already there.
———————
^One very important function of surprise
What I’m missing right in front of me is coming to see in the lines from a George Meredith poem,
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
that “horse” and “shore” are anagrams, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my reading? (E.g., as if “ramping hosts of warrior” reversed into a “faint thin line”.)
It’s also coming to see in the Hiroshige print–
that the waves of water and night-light are produced by the underlying grain of the woodblock, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my viewing? (E.g., as if the female image is slipping side-ways out from the grain-waves.)
The vast majority of us, of course, are inexperienced and untrained in reading for anagrams or seeing the technique of kimetsubushi at work. We must instead be distracted to take at least a second look. For the inexperienced, the way to be sidetracked or distracted is by surprise—in this case, the surprise of finding the grain-wave pattern on your own or an oddity in the “ocean’s force” being contra-posed by “horse” to “shore.” Even if afterwards Meredith’s lines remain mediocre and Hiroshige’s print astonishing, the point remains: Overlooking complexity is that simplification taken for granted which robs us of surprises that inform.
Note the most plausible reason for not seeing what is unseen—“Well, the reality is that it’s just not there at all”—turns out to be least plausible when living in a complex world of many components, functions and interconnections. In this world, new connections can and are to be uncovered all the time where not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty are ever present.
———————
^Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
I
In the first decade of the 20th century, sculptor Hendrik Anderson and architect Ernest Hébrard conceived of a World City unprecedented in scale and purpose. They promised a far better way to solve what was wrong with humankind and their designs and plans were eventually published as Creation of a World Centre of Communication.
In the final stages of preparing the volume, Anderson wrote his friend, novelist Henry James, seeking the latter’s help in reviewing and improving the work. James was appalled by the enormity of the project:
. . .[W]hen you write me that you are now lavishing time and money on a colossal ready-made City, I simply cover my head with my mantle and turn my face to the wall, and there, dearest Hendrik, just bitterly weep for you. . .I have practically said these things to you before—though perhaps never in so dreadfully straight and sore a form as today, when this culmination of your madness, to the tune of five hundred millions of tons of weight, simply squeezes it out of me. For that, dearest boy, is the dread Delusion to warn you against—what is called in Medical Science Megalomania (look it up in the dictionary). . .What I am trying to say to you, gentle and dearest Hendrik. . .[is] that you are extemporizing a World-City from top to toe, and employing forty architects to see you through with it. . .Cities are living organisms, that grow from within and by experience and piece by piece. . .and to attempt to plant one down. . .is to—well it’s to go forth into the deadly Desert and talk to the winds.
The language may not be ours, but the crux remains all ours: Cities work only beyond design. More, they work because of their complexity. Betterment works where blueprints for progress and economic growth don’t.
Henry James also provides what may be the first glimpse of the importance Americans were to give to “high reliability” of what can be achieved beyond design, even if he’s not happy with it. He writes in the third person about his experience at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria early in the 20th century,
The amazing hotel-world quickly closes around him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy, operating—and with the proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life….a synonym for civilization. . .[O]ne is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself.
II
His brother, William James, American psychologist and philosopher, had a different take on what made him better off, but resonating with his brother’s letter to Anderson. For William James, “hotel-spirit” went too far:
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake…Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means of satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. . .You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and dark corners….And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage. . .to set the balance straight again.”
I’d like to think that somewhere just ahead of William James’s “set the balance straight” and just before Henry James’s hotel-spirit of “extraordinary complexity and brilliancy” is where you find betterment as good enough.
———————
^Yes, no, but
Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, said of 19th century American writers “they contained both the yes and the no of their culture”. To the contrary, novelist Gore Vidal said: Most Americans cannot tolerate yes and no; it always has to be yes or no. Though here as poet Robert Frost put it in his Notebooks, “yes and no are almost never ideas by themselves”.
How might that be so? “Education begins with the word no, and begins as the self-education that is called repression; this no has to be persuaded to turn into a yes,” Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, tells us, “and this requires another person.” Frost and Phillips are to my mind spot-on: Yes and no don’t go far enough, if they’re treated as ideas so much outside human interaction and contingency.
A character in novelist Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives asks of Mexican term: “If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?” This is difficult to answer because any answer must be difficult if it is to matter:
And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don’t worry, Amadeo, we’ll find Cesarea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north…And I insisted: don’t do it for me. And the one who was asleep…said: we’re not doing it for you, Amadeo, we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren’t they joking?…and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.
Simonel: not really yes and no, but rather not quite one or the other. I’d like to go where the term insists that “yes” and “no” matter only when followed by the qualifying “but. . .” Neither Ja nor Nein, but a “Jein,” a yes-no.
———————
^Christopher Ricks and the unthinkable
The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, points to an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (20210. Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
This notion that humans started by making important what’s unthinkable is suggestive. I work in a field where what is not thinkable is unthinkable. The thought that we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to thinking them through as imaginable hasn’t really occurred to me.
Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then say, by way of comparison, the magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In my experience, we don’t say: As unimaginable disasters are innconceivably catastrophic, we must narrow our thinking to something like a M9 earthquake. We do so in order to frame what we know and don’t know about worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have already happened.
Upshot? Frankly, neither binary, imaginable nor unimaginable (or thinkable/unthinkable), is good enough for the present. The skills we are talking about are those of detailing more or less (un)imaginable.
———————
^Plato is surely right if he asked, “Are we on our way to or from first principles?”
As long as the design of laws, policies and regulations are based in a priori principles (inevitable to my mind) and as long as better practices that emerge across a run of cases cannot be distilled into principles without a paralyzing loss of relevant information for policy, law and regulation (inevitable to my mind), macro-design remains a starting point for reliable behavior in a messy policy world, but never its end.
When it comes to reliability, it is important to note that there is always a gap between macro-principle and better practices, as each reflects different knowledge bases (more deductive in the former, more inductive in the latter). Plato is surely right if he asked as reported, “Are we on our way to or from first principles?”
One example is the difference between the principle of trans-substantivity in US federal civil procedures and the set of evolving common law precedents. Common law has to take the substance of the case into account (in fact, common law is characterized by substance-specific procedures). Trans-substantivity in Federal Civil Procedures, on the other hand, is the principle that a set of procedures apply equally to all cases regardless of the substance. It is not surprising that the macro-principle of trans-substantivity has remained under constant criticism for not taking into account context.
Or to put it the point here the other way around, macro-design for reliability that resists any kind of pressure to be operationally modified in light of the cases at hand is best thought of not as design but as surface pieties so void of content as to be outside any knowledge base for reliability with which humans are acquainted.
———————
^Reading polycrisis and wicked policy problems aesthetically
Bence Nanay, a philosopher, argues that: “Global aesthetics must be able to have a conceptual framework that can talk about any artefact, no matter where and when it was made. This amounts to identifying features that every artefact must needs to have and that are aesthetically relevant” (Nanay 2019, 93).
For present purposes, think of a policy statement or management task as just such an artefact. Does viewing it aesthetically have any relevance for that policy or management? By aesthetically, does the structure of a policy statement or management task tell us anything of relevance above and beyond what the substance of the policy or task tell us? I believe the answer is Yes, if we take Nanay’s point of departure.
For Nanay whose examples are pictorial, the first order distinction is between surface organization and scene organization:
On a very abstract level, there are two different and distinctive modes of pictorial organization, which I call ‘surface organization’ and ‘scene organization’. . . .Surface organization aims to draw attention to how the two-dimensional outline shapes of the depicted objects are placed within the two-dimensional frame. Scene organization, in contrast, aims to draw attention to how the three-dimensional depicted objects are placed in the depicted space. (Ibid 94)
For instance, there is the global aesthetic feature Nanay calls, “occlusion.” To quote again:
In everyday perception, we get a lot of occlusion: we see some objects behind or in front of others. The question is whether occlusion shows up in pictures. Surface organization implies that the picture maker pays attention to whether there is occlusion or not: occlusion in a picture is a feature of how two-dimensional outline shapes of the depicted objects are related to each other on the two-dimensional surface. Some pictures go out of their way to avoid occlusion. Some others pile on occlusions. Both are good indications of surface organization. And we can place pictures on a spectrum between extreme lack of occlusion and extreme seeking out of occlusion. (Ibid 95)
I submit to you that the printed and digital literature on polycrisis and wicked problems picture a massively occluded two-dimensional space for a three-dimensional scene we call global reality. All the problems are piled on within a frame of depiction that allows no empty spaces and no outside to it. Policy advocates, in contrast, depict a very non-occluded two-dimensional space that they take for reality. Here the true singular problems that matter are clearly limned and set apart. The last thing you would call either stark depiction is sublime.
Let me repeat that: If one thinks semiotically (a thing is defined by what it is not), then the most compelling feature of polycrisis and wicked problems is just how diametrically orthogonal they are to anythhing like “sublime.” Which to me is precisely why such terms register aesthetically, whether before or after addressing considerations of representation.
———————
^Jump off or stay onboard? Recasting the shipwreck metaphor for emergency management
“[Lucretius] imagines observing, from the safety of the shore, other people who are at peril on the storm-tossed sea. . .” H. Blumenberg (1997). Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a metaphor for existence. Translated by Steven Rendall, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA
I
Hans Blumenberg, the German historian, underscores that being at sea was not the preferred state of affairs in early Greek and Roman times. That was the purpose of terra firma. Now even terra firma is compared to being anchored while in uneasy waters. In this way, being shipwrecked or falling overboard applies both to being at sea and on land.
Those who don’t drown outright try keeping afloat by grabbing onto whatever is at hand. Try to improvise a raft—or to be tossed up on the shore, itself now a raft of a different sort. If there is any longer term hope it is to render whatever the raft into something more seaworthy.
II
What does this mean practically?
Assume the raft we—that is, the survivors so far—have made for ourselves is a cobbled-together set of re-made critical infrastructures. As when retrofitting bridges and patching up levees are what’s left from prior failures and workarounds.
Why would we now leave this raft—this large-scale water system, this electricity grid—and start over again? Or are we to imagine that jumping overboard now means survival doesn’t also depend on improvising a raft from the debris already there? Clearly, we need different infrastructures, but it is still more reliable and safe infrastructures being sought regardless.
III
So what?
The chief implication is that alternative infrastructures said to make for “calmer conditions” (e.g., micro-grids at smaller scales) nevertheless involve their own adventures and risks.
That educated and informed people regardless stay at sea (as in earthquake zones) even if they can get away tells us something about their—and our—preferences for safety with respect to the known unknowns of where they and we live and work versus safety with respect to unknown-unknowns of doing otherwise.
Which, in case it needs saying, means the shipwreck we see from the safety of the shore is the least objective of them all.
IV
One last point. The “shipwreck metaphor” that interests Blumenberg is actually several. That is, in crises we all are like:
- spectators on the shore looking out to that storm-tossed ship; or
- shipwrecked survivors trying to keep afloat by clasping onto a plank or other debris, only later to be tossed up on a shore, if at all; or
- those who keep rebuilding the ship while at sea, storm after storm, since returning to port is not possible nor is finding any nearby shore.
Note that the significant shift from ship-as-wrecked to survivor-on-their-own. Efforts to restore critical infrastructure services, even if temporarily during immediate emergency response, become a key operational interconnection between the individual as unit of analysis and the infrastructure as a reconstructed unit of analysis. It is that interconnection that is glossed, perhaps often too vaguely, as “building in resilience” as if the next storm is as important as the current one.
———————
^The wider equality across the inequalities of income and wealth
Epimetheus, the twin brother of Prometheus, was assigned the responsibility of distributing among animals, including humans, their respective key traits. Because he lacked foresight (hint, Epimetheus means hindsight and his brother’s name, foresight), by the time he got to humans he had no more traits to distribute. One response to his mistaken distribution was Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humans by way of compensation.
But even with fire, humans were unable to protect themselves from other animal predators, including themselves. Once Zeus heard about the consequent human suffering, he called upon Hermes to bestow upon humans two special qualities: ‘dikē’ and ‘aidōs’, or roughly, righteousness on one hand and shame, modesty and respect on the other. According to Plato,
Hermes asked Zeus in what manner then was he to give men right and respect: ‘Am I to deal them out as the arts have been dealt? That dealing was done in such wise that one man possessing medical art is able to treat many ordinary men, and so with the other craftsmen. Am I to place among men right and respect in this way also, or deal them out to all?’ ‘To all,’ replied Zeus; ‘let all have their share: for cities cannot be formed if only a few have a share of these as of other arts’.
So here is the wager. Yes, income, wealth and genetic traits are widely and unequally distributed across individuals. But feeling righteous about and/or shamed by these traits–be they yours or theirs–is far more evenly shared when individuals have to live and work in the same place. It is the latter more equal distribution that makes the former more unequal distribution always relevant for public policy and management.
———————
^The importance of “the organic line” in policy and management: an example (newly added)
In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.
This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.” Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)
What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,
There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.
(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
Principal sources
Bell, M. (2002). James and the sculptor. The Yale Review 90:4: 18-47
Bolaño, R. (2008). The Savage Detectives. Picador.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
Clark, T.J. (2013). Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton University Press: Princeton & Oxford.
Ferris, W. (2013). A map of minds and imagination: An interview with Eudora Welty. The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) 89(4): 222-238.Flaubert, G. accessed online on August 12 2017 at https://www.scribd.com/doc/187244/Flaubert-Gustave-Dictionary-of-Accepted-Ideas-1954)
French, P. (1980). Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. Carcanet New Press: Manchester, UK.
Frost, R. (2006). The Notebooks of Robert Frost. (R. Faggen, Ed.) The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Gaiger, J. (2017). Transparency and imaginative engagement: Material as medium in Lessing’s Laocoon. In: A. Lifschitz and M. Squire (eds) (2017). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK: 279 – 305
Hall, D. (1979). Remembering Poets. Harper & Row: New York, NY
James, H. (1946). The American Scene: Together With Three Essays from “Portraits of Places”. W.H. Auden (ed.), Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York
James, W. (1900). On Some of Life’s Ideals. Henry Holt and Company: New York, NY
Linderborg, O. (2023). The history of the Socratic Problem. Antigone (accessed online at https://antigonejournal.com/2023/01/history-socratic-problem/)
Linderborg, O. (2024). Tracing the Roots of Social Contract Theories: A Comparative Study of Ancient Greek and Indian Perspectives. Global Intellectual History (accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2024.2411053)
Marcus, D (2010). The past, present, and future of trans-substantivity in Federal Civil Procedure. DePaul Law Review 59 371 (https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol59/iss2/6)
Nanay, B. (2019). Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: UK (see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYUYNPcaX0I)
Phillips, A. (2006). Side Effects. Hamish Hamilton: London.
————- https://www.thebambamblog.com/2012/01/gerhard-richters-september/ & http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/33188/gerhard-richter [at the time of writing, live links]
Ricks, C. (2021). Along Heroic Lines, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK: 19 – 55, 240.
Shatz, A. (2010). Desire was everywhere. London Review of Books, December 16, 9–12.
Sir Thomas More (2011), ed. John Jowett (Arden Shakespeare, third series. Bloomsbury, London)
Small, I.V. (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.
Storr, R. (2010). September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. Tate Publishing, London
Trilling, L. (1957). The Liberal Imagination. Doubleday & Company: Garden City, NY.
Vander Waerdt, P.A. (1993). “Socratic Justice and Self-Sufficiency. The Story of the Delphic Oracle in Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates”. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 11. 1-48
Van Es, B. (2019). Troubles of a glorious breath. TLS (March 22)
Vendler, H. (2015). The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on poets & poetry. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
The importance of “the organic line” in policy and management: an example
In August 2020, with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, a mixed group of Venezuelans and Haitians found themselves in legal limbo. They had effectively become stuck on the Ponte de Amizade that connects and marks the border between the Brazil and Peru. They had initially been permitted to enter Brazil after presenting undertakings approved by the Brazilian Ministry of Health committing them to adhere to all national COVID-19 protocols but were subsequently deported back to the bridge, and purportedly to Peru, by Brazilian Federal Police on the grounds that the border had been closed due to the pandemic. However, Peru, too, had in the meantime closed its border for the same reason, so that the group ended up stuck on the border bridge for several weeks, until a Brazilian court issued an order allowing their (re-)entry into Brazil.
This border bridge is an example of what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in the 1950s, called “the organic line.”
Think of the space between the door and door frame, or between the stone tiles on the floor, or in this case the border between two countries. It’s organic because the line is not straight, but rather the border line expands or narrows between two uneven river banks, while the bridge densifies variably with more or fewer refugees. In this way, the organic line, in the words of Irene Small, “dilates a space of contingency” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRc3CidwSME&t=3945s)
What’s policy-relevant about this? “The line is the path of passing through, movement, collision, edge, attachment, joining, sectioning,” wrote another artist earlier. Or better yet,
There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans. . .What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State.
(Deleuze and Guattari in https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf)
Source. Irene V. Small (2024). The Organic Line: Toward a topology of modernism. Zone Books: New York.
You just want to tell him. . .: Recasting Trump #2
“Good God, man, get a grip! We’re adults here.”
Imputing property values in pastoralist systems as a way of making more visible the tensions under the climate emergency
Major issues affecting the US housing market are the effect of the climate emergency on property values:
As climate disasters hit with greater intensity and frequency, the economic effects will be felt not only as the underlying assets are damaged or destroyed, . . .but also as those experiences, and expectations of similar ones to come, are “priced in” to the judgments of what homes in floodplains, on the storm-exposed coasts, and in the wildland-urban interface are worth. Those homes could become, in effect, economically worthless even before they are physically uninhabitable. This would then put pressure on areas that are, for the time being, environmentally stable, driving up property values to the benefit of some, while creating economic hardships for others. . . .They are left either stuck in place—with assets that are increasingly difficult to insure. . .and potentially financially underwater— or face a decline in the proceeds available to secure housing elsewhere, let alone to build wealth.
(accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article/doi/10.1093/socpro/spae074/7932449, my bolding)
So too you find declinist narratives about pastoralist areas rendered economically worthless under capitalism even before they are rendered physically uninhabitable by the climate emergency.
But of course drylands have noncalcuable use values for pastoralists, whatever is happening to calculated economic values. More, some of these asset values were evident in commercial transactions long before the advent of any capitalism. And in case it needs saying (also see the above link), property values have always been a social construction within and beyond markets and beyond the quantitative, a fact no less true for herders and their resources, including those drylands relied upon.
So too is the climate emergency bringing into better view not just the changes but also the reciprocal tensions when imputing property values, e.g.:
Overall, we show that reciprocal linkages between environmental change and migration clearly exist in the studied rural communities in Ethiopia, which are mediated by various factors occurring at the micro, meso, and macro level (Table 1). These factors cover biophysical, socioeconomic, and institutional aspects. Remarkably, although not surprisingly, our research revealed that most identified factors can act in opposite directions. Hence, they can trigger or accelerate changes, just as they can hamper or slow them down. For example, in northern Ethiopia, unfavorable environmental conditions for agriculture, including increased drought frequency, unreliable rainfall, and advanced land degradation, can increase migration needs and aspirations by undermining the viability of agricultural livelihoods. However, these conditions also tend to lower migration abilities by decreasing agricultural income and hence, financial resources required for migration. Conversely, favorable environmental conditions, such as relatively stable rainfall during the cropping season in “a good year,” can decrease migration needs and aspirations and enable migration via agricultural income (for more details, see below the description of pathways A and B). The precise impact mechanisms significantly depend on a variety of additional mediating factors at the macro, meso, and micro level. . .
(accessed online at https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol28/iss3/art15/)
I want to suggest that, in the case of pastoralist systems, focusing on property (noncalculable use and calculated exchange) values and the tensions their social constructions reveal, balance or evade is a better methodological strategy than appeals to “commodification” or “marketization,” as if the latter terms were differentiation enough.
Alinksy’s rules for radicals applied to pastoralist development
I
Any number of radical proposals have been made for addressing problems of the globe’s rangelands, including: the end of capitalism, the redistribution of livestock, and reparations.
In an important sense, though, these are not be radical enough. I have in mind the “twelve rules for radicals” of the late organizer, Saul Alinsky, two in particular being:
RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
https://sliwainsights.com/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals/
II
By extension, use the logic of capitalism to benefit rangelands and pastoralists, e.g.:
1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO2 emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to more environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.
2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.
3. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities now heavily resident with dryland migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). In this case, a “greening of rangelalnd households” takes place where EU member states support EU-resident migrants, thereby indirectly supporting their dryland households of origin..
The aim, again, is not to dismiss other radical proposals, but to find opportunities to exploit all twelve of Alinsky’s rules for radicals.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 