We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!” when it comes to major events that we miss the reality: It is somewhat the other way around, isn’t it? We are already managing complex critical systems as reliably as we do so as to prevent their systemwide failure now. Focusing on what could happen by way of possible management to save the planet is not the same as focusing on what will happened if real-time management isn’t as effective in saving critical infrastructures, at least until the next failure ahead.
It’s more than passing odd then that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe we all are not trying hard enough.
II
Consequently, it’s no surprise that those who accused of not “giving whatever it takes to save the planet” find themselves admitting the adverse effects of the climate emergency while focusing on what they know can be managed or have better chances. Consider one such example:
We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.
Note the last sentence: At least it has the merit of recognizing an entailed devastation by stiving to be more democratic. Not for them a “doing whatever it takes” on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and minorities globally, who have no say in their ongoing punishment (see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).
III
So what?
In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.
So wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.
How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if we corporeal bodies had no alternative?
Following the shadow, one comes to the body . . . Hugh of St. Victor
Follow the shadow and you come to the body–or in one religious sense, follow the Old Testament and you come to the Gospels. A modern version of this mysterium is the concept of “policy silhouettes”: These are policies and projects that look full-bodied, but in reality they are shadows cast by really-existing implementers, managers, operators and staff who are, well, out of sight until you find them.
Examples?
–Considering the importance of carbon emissions, CEO total salary should be calculated by deducting a percentage of carbon tax amount linked to total carbon emissions of the company currently. (comment from the online Financial Times)
–My chief difficulty with most remedies to the Ukraine crisis is that they start by boarding a time-machine to correct long-ago events. This gives their solutions a theological air, which address the world as it should have been, not as it is. (https://www.ft.com/content/12cfb5ca-a5d9-4137-a8d4-cf2454d95e8c)
–“We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” But taking immediate and effective control is the last thing governments can do under conditions of the Anthropocene. (https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.754)
–It’s important to remember that even many of the historic left wing forces in the US basically accepted the settler program and many of the early American anarchist and socialist utopian projects, for instance, were quite literally white settler projects that often directly displaced indigenous people — and I don’t mean in the general sense that we all occupy indigenous land or whatever it is people say at the beginning of board meetings nowadays, but in the literal sense of anarchist communes being built on important seasonal sites that were still in use up until that point. (https://illwill.com/new-battlefields)
–The rise of the state, along with the securities it provided, represented progress. So too did the emergence of representative institutions, constitutional government, trial by jury, marriage by choice, the free professions, the choice of a trade, the system of taxation, the institutions of public service, schemes of welfare, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the presumption of innocence – all of which Hegel celebrated in the Philosophy of Right. It would be odd to toss these achievements aside as mere indices of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ‘the dialectic of enlightenment’ or ‘power’ or ‘governmentality’ or ‘logocentrism’ – all of which have been variously condemned by the hermeneutics of suspicion. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2022.2095754)
In October 2022, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) published its flagship report, Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract. Worth reading just for its case material and data, the some 330-paged report concludes with this last paragraph (quoted in full without edits):
Despite a challenging context, solutions exist, many of which have proven their effectiveness in real-world contexts, as demonstrated in this report. Power asymmetries and inequalities are daunting, but there are also countless examples of ways those at the bottom have successfully pushed back and shifted power away from the top. However, policies and strategies that have worked in one country might not be applicable or transferable to different contexts, or they may need to be adapted to national conditions. Importantly, instead of applying blueprints, we have to find and test alternative solutions by tapping into the creativity, imagination and skills of experts, entrepreneurs, political leaders, citizens and holders of traditional knowledge and wisdom. These new policies and institutional reforms need to reflect the values and goals agreed upon in new eco- social contracts, supported by an expanding community of ideas and actors that transcends silos and is collectively committed to a vision for the future grounded in the universal principles of justice, equality and sustainability. (p. 317)
The word, “creativity,” appears in two other places in the report and that with reference to the same group. The word, “imagination,” appears also in two different places, one in a citation and the other pejoratively in: “to manipulate our minds and imaginations”. For its part, “skills” is mentioned more frequently, though here largely within contexts about the need to develop, build and improve skills that aren’t there or poorly distributed.
Not surprisingly then, no one reading this report up to the last paragraph could conclude, I submit, that “countless examples” have been demonstrated to exist for pushing back power through creativity, imagination and skills.
Instead, this report is unremittingly negative and dispiriting, with one challenging statistic after another piled high, and then higher, until leaving a shadowing insurmountability in their wake.
The report’s authors will counter that my characterization is unfair. I’ve not addressed the material referenced in the first sentence: “Despite a challenging context, solutions exist, many of which have proven their effectiveness in real-world contexts, as demonstrated in this report.” I counter by saying these cases demonstrate just how far we are from actually achieving the report’s recommendations.
But my counter won’t do. I have been unfair, in the sense of not recasting what the authors are doing in a way that makes better sense of what the report is doing.
Recasting the problem
A different way to see the report is to shift the genre which serves as its context. The authors’ clearly think of the statistics, cases and policy recommendations as part of the policy report genre. Since the report is in the public domain, however, it’s open to being reinterpreted in many other more useful ways.
For example, my preceding criticisms are moot, if the report is treated first and foremost as a manifesto, also an entirely honorable policy genre:
A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there)
We may quibble about the report being an overly long manifesto or why a UN entity considers itself outside the corridors of power.
But I want to be very clear that by using the report as a manifesto I am not damning with faint praise or slighting it. For the record, manifestos not only have a major role in public life, their importance increases in direct proportion to the digital spam churned out by lobbyists for regulators and policymakers.
Final point
If UNRISD’s Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract is read as a manifesto, then no one looks to a manifesto for the details of implementation. So too here. The report is a loud and clear call for change and is opposed to anything like bearing witness or responding with a ready quietism of despair. Manifestos are always ending where the transformations they call for are to begin.
Here are ten examples from my practice as a policy analyst.
1. Climate emergency parsed through a poem by Jorie Graham
–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). The 17 pages are extraordinary, not just because of pulse driving her lines, but also for what she evokes. In her unfamiliar 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. She takes the certainties and makes something still new.
–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…”
2. Finding value through different genres
–Capitalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, nationalism, atavism: with that line-up and more, who’s got a chance? Isn’t it better to start at the other end and answer: “What really-existing political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?”
No wonder, then, rapid change isn’t ignored and utopians want something more. No wonder poems matter, since poems favor words many people don’t know and new words can be new worlds–including worlds uncolonized by our very own historically-contingent “ism’s.”
3. Global Climate Sprawl
You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet. . .It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.
I suggest that Global Climate Change isn’t just a bad mess; it’s a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it, awful mess of getting it wrong, again and again. To my mind, GCC is a hot mess–both senses of the term–now sprawled all over place and time. It is inextricably, remorselessly part and parcel of “living way too expansively, generously.”
GCC’s the demonstration of a stunningly profligate human nature. You see the sheer sprawl of it all in the epigraph, Philip Roth’s rant from American Pastoral. So too the elder statesman in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous play admits,
The many many mistakes I have made
My whole life through, mistake upon mistake,
The mistaken attempts to correct mistakes
By methods which proved to be equally mistaken.
That missing comma between “many many” demonstrates the excess: After a point, we no longer can pause, with words and thoughts rushing ahead. (That the wildly different Philip Roth and T.S. Eliot are together on this point indicates the very real mess it is.)
That earlier word, sprawl, takes us to a more magnanimous view of what is going on, as in Les Murray’s “The Quality of Sprawl”:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home…
This extravagance and profligacy–the waste–are not ornery contrarianism. For poet, Robert Frost, “waste is another name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage”. If I had my druthers, rename it, “GCS:” Global Climate Sprawl.
4. War
–I finish 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….
The lines, “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 decade—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, however, of very different story, seemingly making 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 was life indeed.
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.”
5. Intertext as the Anthropocene’s long run
I’m first asking you to look and listen to one of my favorites, a short video clip of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andreas Scholl singing the duet, “I embrace you,” from a Handel opera (the English translation can be found at the end of the clip’s Comments):
Antonacci’s performance will resonate for some with the final scene in Sunset Boulevard, where Gloria Swanson, as the actress Norma Desmond, walks down the staircase toward the camera. But intertextuality–that two-way semi-permeability between genres–is also at work. Antonacci brings the opera diva into Swanson’s actress as much as the reverse, and to hell with anachronism and over-the-top.
–Let’s now bring semi-permeable intertextuality closer to public policy and management. Zakia Salime (2022) provides a rich case study of refusal and resistance by Moroccan villagers to nearby silver mining–in her case, parsed through the lens of what she calls a counter-archive:
My purpose is to show how this embodied refusal. . .was productive of a lived counter-archive that documented, recorded and narrated the story of silver mining through the lens of lived experience. . . .Oral poetry (timnadin), short films, petitions, letters and photographs of detainees disrupted the official story of mining ‘as development’ in state officials’ accounts, with a collection of rebellious activities that exposed the devastation of chemical waste, the diversion of underground water, and the resulting dry collective landholdings. Audio-visual material and documents are still available on the movement’s Moroccan Facebook page, on YouTube and circulating on social media platforms. The [village] water protectors performed refusal and produced it as a living record that assembled bodies, poetic testimonials, objects and documents
What, though, when the status quo is itself a counter-archive? Think of all the negative tweets, billions and billions and billions of them. Think of all negative comments on politics, dollars and jerks in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. That is, think of these status quo repositories as a counter-archive of “status-quo critique and dissent.”
–So what?
A genre notion of the status quo as counter-archive means that today’s counter-archive is also to be thought of as semi-permeable and in two-way traffic with other genres. Intertextually, today’s status quo not only looks pretty good, it is pretty good compared to the past times of Genghis Khan (think: history as a benchmark genre) and in comparison to post-apocalypse (think: sci-fi as a benchmark genre).
This raises an interesting possibility: a new kind of long-run that is temporally long because it is presently intertextual, indefinitely forwards and back and across different genres.
For example, if the climate emergency is violence and the Big Polluters are culprits, then violent resistance against them is a form of violence reduction if the resistance succeeds. This means the “violence” and the “resistance” are difficult to evaluate, let alone predict, because the long-run over which they are to unfold is itself a current but changing intertext.
As in: “the varieties of revolution do not know the secrets of the futures, but proceed as the varieties of capitalism do, exploiting every opening that presents itself”–to paraphrase political philosopher, Georges Sorel.
6. “Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left.” Muriel Spark, novelist
I can’t quote them because Heidegger was a Nazi, Pound a Fascist, Sartre a Maoist, Eliot an anti-Semite. I don’t read Foucault because he didn’t care if he infected guys and I don’t read that mystery writer because she was a convicted killer. I don’t go to baseball games because of the players’ strike way back when and I refuse to watch that man’s films because he’s said to have messed with his own kid.
I don’t buy Nike because of the sweatshops, listen to Wagner because he was a Jew-hater, or have a TV because it makes children violent. I can’t eat tofu because of genetically modified soybeans or cheese because of genetically modified bacteria. I don’t listen to Sinatra because he was a nasty little man or Swarzkopf because she was a collaborator. The U.S. government’s been screwed since Johnson and the Great Society (no, since FDR and the welfare state (no, since Lincoln and the Civil War (no, since Jackson and the Trail of Tears (no, since Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase (no, since Washington and his plantation slaves…)))).
I don’t trust Freud because he didn’t understand women, Klein because she couldn’t get along with her daughter, Bettelheim because he’s suppose to have hit kids, or Laing because he too wasn’t nice. I think we were never further away from nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis (only afterwards did Brezhnev insist on nuclear parity). Plus it’s a good thing Japan has lost decades of economic growth or they’d’ve been re-armed by now.
From time to time I’ve wondered if Socrates could go to heaven. Speaking of which, why is Adam painted with a belly button, where in the Bible is the turkey that keeps showing up in those tapestries of Eden and Noah’s Ark, and for that matter why do shadows first show up in early Western art only? Do you really think historical Jesus worried about who licks what where?
Dying means my total annihilation. Too bad for eternity, I say: It doesn’t know what it’s missing. It’s when I’m dead that I become “will always have been.” Still, little gives me quite the exquisite pleasure as knowing my secrets die with me.
Which makes me wonder: Other than the streets, where do squirrels go to die? And whatever happened to pineapple upside-down cake and Saturday drives? I have to wonder, did Wittgenstein read Rabelais: “Utterances are meaningful not by their nature, but by choice”? Can there be anything more mind-numbing than beginning, “In hunting-and-gathering societies. . .”? And just who did say, Freedom is the recognition of necessity (Hegel, Engels, Lenin, who)? E Pluribus Unum: Isn’t that Latin for “Follow the dollar”?
Whatever, every morning I wake up and thank heaven I wasn’t born a minority in this country. If I had a magic wand, I’d solve America’s race problem by giving everybody a master’s degree. I’d make sure they’d all be white, married, professionally employed, and own homes. (BTW, every adult in China should have a car; with all that ingenuity they’d have to come up with a solution to vehicle pollution.)
But then again, I’m quite willing to say that the entire point of human evolution is there hasn’t been any worth speaking of. As for the rest, I suppurate with unease. It’s probably—possibly, plausibly?—wise not to think too much about these things.
7. Consequences and thought experiments
More times than we’d like, formal plans emerge as a by-product of a struggle between contingency and “consequences.” In these cases, people confront not so much discrete events with causal consequences but rather contingencies associated with aftermaths, about neither of which there is much causal understanding.
I
Yet, the ability to identify consequences is core to many professions, including my own, policy analysis. Here in the States it is the spawn of pragmatism (i.e., consequences matter) and rationalism (i.e., the steps in an analysis extend from define the problem through identify the options to predict the consequences of each and chose among the best in terms of predicted outcomes). The difficulty, of course, is predicting consequences.
Thought experiments, so common in philosophy and in contrast, can challenge a problem definition in ways that offer new insights, options and/or problem definitions. A thought experiment searches out other kinds of “consequences,” perhaps more tractable to the cognitive and affective limits of analysis.
This possibility of tractability is why I hate “formal experiments,” i.e., they succeed when they fail (as in “fail to reject the null hypothesis”). For: What if some failed hypotheses were good-enough futures anyway?
II
In my view then, the attempt to identify consequences can be analogous to trying to find the right word.
Many people assume that writing is all about finding the right word. On the other hand, when asked how he seemed always able to choose the right phrase, the poet responded: “Dear Mr. Stein, I do not choose the right word. I get rid of the wrong one. Period. Sincerely yours, A.E. Houseman.” T.S. Eliot makes the same point: “It is supposed that the poet, if anybody, is one engaged in perpetual pursuit of the right word. My own experience would be more accurately described as the attempt to avoid the wrong word. For as to the right word, I am not convinced it is anything but a mirage.”
A thought experiment, in other words, is to search out wrong words, the mirage.
Examples fly to mind. Consider some descriptions for the self-correcting, self-regulating, self-healing efficacy of complex adaptive systems. If fireflies can do it, why can’t humans? If fireflies can self-organize and flash in unison, why can’t humans better coordinate and synchronize their behavior? Presumably so too: If earthworms can do it, why can’t humans? If earthworms can move tons of soil, why can’t humans do the same?
8. “Keep it simple!,” when not sabotaging complexity, cannabilizes it
Not to worry, we’ll scale up later, soothes the techno-managerial elite. Later on, presses the happy-talk, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Anyway, we know how to reduce inequality (just give them money!), overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). So many of these just-do-this suffocate in their fat of “Well, this time is different,” “This time we really don’t have any other choice,” and “This time, you have to believe us, failure is not an option here and now.”
The chief problem with “start simple here and now” is that each scale/level is complex in its own right. The shoreline only looks smooth on the map. “Keep it simple” and “Break it down to essentials” only work, if they work at all, when context complexity is first admitted as helpful. “Which do you find to be simpler,” asks novelist and essayist, William Gass: “The radio that goes on when you turn a single knob, or the one that won’t work because the parts are all lined up on the floor?”
When I hear someone telling us “Keep it simple!” I immediately suspect they’ve lost the plot, like the actor playing Hamlet, who finished the bedroom scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius.
9. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”: I/2
What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manfesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.
But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are premature. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.
II
“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.” Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist
Thomas Carlyle’s mock philosopher, Dr. Teufelsdröckh asks in Sartor Resartus: “Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?” That is: patched together when it comes for purposes of understanding.
III
There is talk of revolution, whispers of reform, and everything seems possible except departure from the norm. Sean O’Brien (“If I May”)
But then again: Consider the same norm–e.g., even cobblers should be happy–but change the point of departure. For example, Japanese adult pornstar, Jin Narumiya, has announced he’s retiring as a porn actor:
Dear Always Supportive People
I am celebrating my 28th birthday today. I have been able to do my best in my activities because of the support of all of you. Thank you so much. As some of you may already know, I have retired from pornoactor. There are three reasons. The first is that as I continued my activities, I lost sight of my own meaning life. I was chased by mysterious pressure, and before I knew it, my mind was empty. I was able to do my best even though I was on the edge of my mentality because I had people who supported me and were looking forward to my work, but I reached my limit and made time to face myself for a while. During this time, I focused on getting in touch with nature, meditating, and recovering my empty mind. Who am I? What is happiness? I faced these questions seriously, and the answer I came up with was retirement. And to take on a new challenge.The second is at work. I saw the reality of working in pornoactor and not being able to expand my work. And all you can do is get naked and have sex. I’ve had people say that to me. This made me feel very frustrated. It also made me very sad. So I wanted to challenge myself in a new field and achieve results, and look back at those who made me feel frustrated. Third, I wanted to live my life in a way that I could love myself more. I want to do what I want to do and make those who are involved with me happy. And I want to create the best life possible.I have been supported by many people in my life. I am helpless on my own. I cannot do anything. So we need your support going forward. I will soon start a new journey. I would like to make this journey exciting together with all of you. Thank you for reading this far. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents for giving birth to me, everyone who has always supported me, and all my friends who support me behind the scenes.
“If it were possible, I would have such priest as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as themselves, . . .noblemen live honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates corruption, &c., but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.” Robert Burton from his The Anatomy of Melancholy.
IV
quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata; . . .verum positura discrepitant res. (Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
In other words, one answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. There must be a sense in which such extensions are forced and since forced, any resonance (no guarantees) is compelling. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead.
10. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”: 2/2
"Who we are is what we can't be talked out of" Adam Phillips
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?” https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12478
Return to an old resource management typology, the two dimensions of which are: (1) fixed resources/mobile resources and (2) fixed management/mobile management.
The frequent example of the mobile resources/mobile management cell has been pastoralist (nomadic/transhumant) herders. Fortunately, the truth of the matter has always been more usefully complicated.
From the standpoint of sustaining biodiversity across wide rangelands, some pastoralist systems are examples of mobile management (e.g., of grazers or browsers) with respect to fixed resources (different patches at different points and times along routes or itineraries). Indeed, fixed on-site biodiversity management may be just too costly to undertake.
II
Now ratchet up the complexity: What had been mobile management must now be fixed; and what had been a fixed resource or asset now must be mobile.
Example: During the COVID lockdown, some pastoralists created informal bush markets at or near their kraals as alternatives to the now-closed formal marketplaces. So too do formal associations of pastoralists participating in distant conference negotiations or near-by problem-solving meetings exemplify a now differently fixed resource exercising now differently-mobile management.
III
So what?
Terms, like “adaptable” and “flexible,” are not granular enough to catch the place-specific improvisational property of “adaptable” and “flexible” in undertaking shifts from fixed to mobile or mobile to fixed.
More formally, being skilled at real-time improvisation is what we also must expect of pastoralists whose chief system control variable is their real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (which can of course include adjusting livestock numbers and water point usage).
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.
Most scholars attending to the material dimensions of politics either tend to focus on the local, looking at particular infrastructures such as a road, a dam, or a power grid, or at the global, often assessing the capitalist reordering of the world, but overseeing or ignoring the international (Salter 2015, xiii). This oversight, we argue, is not accidental, as infrastructures bring to the fore conceptual problems of space, scale, and agency that constitute the international as a distinct lens for academic inquiry, delineating it from the global, national, or local. . . Infrastructures, we argue, have a generative role in constituting the international as a distinct realm of inquiry that is different from the local and the global. However, we also show how the contemporary infrastructural boom blurs the very same distinctions that infrastructures once helped in setting up. . . .
In other words, infrastructures are at the heart of contention between dynamics of crafting the unevenness between societies that constitute the international on the one hand, and contributing to boundary erosions, driven by an expansionist capitalist logic, on the other hand. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/26/4/viae046/7831266
An example?
The astonishing thing about the Chinese Communist Party is that it really doesn’t want to rule the world, nor even to be a second hegemonic pole countering the first one. What they want is to rule China – plus the places they feel they’ve lost, like Hong Kong, Taiwan – and to trade freely with other countries. They would genuinely like a multipolar world, in which they would share power with their trading partners, but the problem is that they have only one way of achieving that, which is to use their tech sector, in concert with big finance, to create something like the Bretton Woods system within the BRICs. This would involve fixed exchange rates, essentially a common currency backed by the yuan. It would be a major project, equivalent to the New Dealers planning the world order in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The rest of BRICs are not ready for it, as we can see from the huge tensions between India and China. Much of the global south is not ready for this kind of multipolarity either. . .But if they don’t start pushing in that direction, then they will be stuck with a bipolar US–Chinese world, with all the risks that this entails. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality?pc=1643
Or in recasted terms: such is the international dilemma of big tech and global finance.
Assume you come across the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:
It’s a fairly easy to question the above. Do we really believe that well-established evidence, even as defined, and high certainty are as tightly coupled? In fact, each dimension can be problematize in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.
But the methodological issue is to compare like to like.
That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the famous Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:
This latter world has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies lapsing eventually into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between majority-rule and compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.
In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more the better by way of finding something usefully tractable.
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and managment.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
6. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing
7. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual
8. What “calling for increased granularity” means
9.Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives (newly added)
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
I
A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement there.
That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed, the author stated, was a country-wide land reform.
Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!
This was my introduction to “solutions” in search of problems they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”
II
Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers your asking:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management
I
Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.
In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions that are already othogonal, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.
Everyone triangulates, ranging from cross-checking of sources to formal use of varied methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of divergent stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are common examples.
Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can actually do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.
II
Return now to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.
Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.
To triangulate asks what, if anything, has persisted or survived in the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that the issue has undergone over time up to the point of analysis. Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple and widely diverse metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
I bolded the preceding because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.
The methdological problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is any misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.
II
Even here, we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition: Just because a tree is shady does not mean each leaf provides shade. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.
The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.
Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often would have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.
III
A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:
Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishes this stuff!”
But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and, most importantly, counter-examples.
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:
Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.
Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.
The goal should remain zero.
It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
Upshot: If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
Consider the following example (my bolding):
Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies canpotentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war couldbe pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict couldbe over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict couldbe unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization couldbe over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potentialcould involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .
States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”
The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to “must” would mean that the article (and like ones) actually began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those could-events and might-be’s.
6. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothing
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and. . .
7. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual
I
For me, the crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?
What are at work are the two blades of a scissors.
One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations. Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.
II
For example, consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by then-that). But if cities also view their respective building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among developers and builders.
That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be obvious.
8. What “calling for increased granularity” means
I
When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction altogether. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for an actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind abstraction from the get-go.
What then does “actionable granularity” mean?
II
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.
Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.
III
One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.
Where so, then there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.
From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or even “‘a case’ in its own right.”
I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.
9. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.
What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer, Arnold Schoenberg.)
Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.
While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
Assume you come across the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:
It’s fairly easy to question the above. Do we really believe, for example, that well-established evidence and high certainty are as tightly coupled and correlated? In fact, each dimension can be problematize in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.
But the methodological issue at stake here is to compare like to like.
That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the famous Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:
This latter world has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies eventually lapsing, it is hypothesized, into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between decisionmaking by majority-rule and compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.
In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more the better by way of finding something more tractable to policy or management.
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives (newly added)
The paragraph I’ve just read is immediately bookended by two quotes:
Just before: “Therefore, rather than being schools of democracy, ACs [associative councils] may be spaces where associative and political elites interact and, therefore, just reproduce existing political inequities (Navarro, 2000). Furthermore, these institutions may have limited impact in growing and diversifying the body of citizens making contributions to public debate (Fraser, 1990).”
Just after: “The professionalised model results from a complex combination of inequalities in associationism and a specific type of participation labour. Analysing the qualitative interviews, regulations and documents was fundamental to understanding the underlying logic of selecting professionals as the main components.”
Now try to guess the gist of the paragraph in between. More of the same? Well, no. Six paragraphs from the article’s end emerges an “and-yet” that had been there from the beginning:
Nevertheless, an alternative interpretation of professionalisation should be considered. The fact that ACs perform so poorly in inclusiveness does not mean that they are not valuable for other purposes, such as voicing a plurality of interests in policymaking (Cohen, 2009). In this respect, participants can act as representatives of associations that, in many cases, promote the needs of oppressed and exploited groups (De Graaf et al., 2015; Wampler, 2007). Suffice it to say, for example, that labour unions or migrants’ associations frequently send lawyers or social workers to ACs to defend their needs and positions. Problems with inclusion should not take away from other purposes, that is, struggles to introduce critical issues and redistribution demands to the state agenda. Other studies have already shown that groups make strategic decisions to achieve better negotiation outcomes in the context of technical debates (Grillos, 2022). Thus, the choice of selecting professionals can be a strategy to improve the capacity of pressure in institutional spaces dominated by experts. (my bold; accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251319065)
Methodological upshot: What the counterfactual is to economic analysis, the and-yet counternarratives are to policy analysis. What
A home of hiddenness, poet Jane Hirshfield writes, “is the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto: wherever in it a person stands, one of the fifteen rocks cannot be seen. The garden reminds us something unknowable is always present in life, just beyond what can be perceived or comprehended – yet as real as any other rock amid the raked gravel.”
And that is one of the paradoxes of hiddenness, at least for a time when it comes to policy and management: If unhidden, it becomes real in another way.
“Nobody knows for sure what is hidden in the depths of the European Treaties as they now stand, hundreds, even thousands of pages depending on the typeface,” notes critic, Wolfgang Streeck: “The only exception is the CJEU [Court of Justice for the European Union], and this is because what it says it finds in there is for all practical purposes what is in there, as the court always has the last word” (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/rusty-charley). Better, of course, to say: . . .” as the court always has the last word, for now.
The tanker hits the dock and the Coast Guard investigates the incident from the vessel and waterway side it regulates. But isn’t there now the “dock-side” as well? Isn’t one response to accidents within the Coast Guard’s anchorage area to render safer the area as an area (its own level of analysis with its visible elements inside and outside)? In fact, how could we now “unknow”–forgetting later is another matter–that the dock would be more reliable if better armored against such incidents?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 