“Prynne presents a body of work of staggering audacity and authority such that the map of contemporary poetry already begins to look a little different.” Roger Caldwell, TLS

I’m new to Prynne’s poetry and haven’t yet gotten a knack for how to read and interpret the more recent ones. This means I, more than not, don’t have a clue about the author’s intention (which shouldn’t matter anyway, so some say).

Which also means I get to interpret his lines far more in my own terms than others might like. Take the following stanza:

Indefatigable, certainly impracticable, chronic                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    unretractable, spree; indistinguishable                                                                           epiphenomenal dink-di flunk, rhetic;                                                                                   insurmountable,  unaccountable,                                                                                     incommensurate, providentially,                                                                                                          turn up your nose as we suppose,                                                                                     environmentalism, fiddle-de-dee.

Whatever this means to others, to me it’s a clear example of how many advocates for and against environmentalism overstate their case through argument by adjective and adverb.

Or consider a different stanza:

Casting out terror leaves a vacant spot,                                                                                             your care-free jubilation to out-jest                                                                                                     these heart-struck injuries, mimic new disasters;                                                                             they crowd like fresh battalions, eager spies                                                                                     trying our patience, good out-runs the best.

I interpret “casting out terror leaves a vacant spot” to mean that once we lose widespread social dread over large sociotechnical disasters like nuclear plant explosions, we vacate any notion of reliably managing such extremely hazardous systems.

There are, of course, those who celebrate such an eventuality–think of them as eager spies for the other side. But the loss of reliable infrastructures also does injury and harm to many more other people. Indeed, new disasters arise (imagine the effects of a society no longer fearful of jet planes dropping like flies from the air). The new disasters would “crowd like fresh battalions” and “try our patience” by way of increased calls for different policy and management interventions.

But note Prynne’s “good out-runs the best” as a consequence. For many trained in policy analysis, such as myself, the best is the enemy of the good. That is, better to have good enough when the best is not achievable.

The notion that the best is achievable, even in (especially in?) disasters, highlights a state of affairs not often publicized. Namely, disasters are a way to get rid of legacy infrastructures and components that, under other circumstances, one is precluded from doing so because of existing regulation and law. These would be suspended during the emergency.

My readings too far-stretched, you think? For me, Prynne’s words read as if they are the only ones left legible on the surface of a thick, many-layered palimpsest. A lot has been effaced or scored away below. My point here is that those very same words are also left undissolved on policy palimpsests with which I am familiar. I thank the poet for such permeable texts.

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Source.

J.H. Prynne (2024). Poems 2016 – 2024. Bloodaxe Books, UK (pages 508, 536).

Indeed, the concept of wartime itself suggests a processual and extendable temporality, rather than a straightforward binary. This is the case since the division between wartime and peacetime is never as clear cut as any formal cessation of hostilities or signing of a treaty would suggest.

World War I clearly did not end with the Armistice, and neither did it cease with the signing of the Versailles Treaty. For some, the World War has never really ended at all given that its promises of meaningful forms of (particularly racial and gender) equality as recompense for serving one’s country have still failed to materialize. The war had an enormous impact both upon the fabric of the earth and natural resources, while its legacy for the ways such categories as state, democracy, representation and capitalism, have become fixed parts of Euro-American political thinking, has been equally profound.

It might therefore be productive to think about the Anthropocene as a form of ‘deep-war time’, both practically and intellectually. This means considering the Anthropocene as an ongoing battle over what it means to think across both planetary and global perspectives, and across the arc spanning World War I and into the present.

D. Kelly (2022). Wartime for the Planet? Journal of Modern European History (DOI: 10.1177/16118944221113281; excerpted above without embedded footnotes)

Emergencies are one thing, like that for the climate. But not all emergencies are wars.

If the Anthropocene is recast as its own wartime, then how is this war different from all the other wars, namely, as massive engines of unpredictable, unimaginable and ungovernable contingencies?

Why ever would we say “wartime” better captures there being no real boundary between war and peace, when the Anthropocene is also about neither human war nor human peace only?

Undertake a thought experiment: Assume that the politician and the policymaker for the California Delta get exactly what they want. They—we—get that first-ever waterway, the never-before governance structure, and uniquely comprehensive ecosystem planning and management. The dreams of Delta carver and modeler are fulfilled unconditionally. Lasting governance, environmental restoration and water conveyance infrastructure in the Delta have been achieved.

Oops, say again? What’s that lasting mean?

What are the consequences of unprecedented construction, governance and environmental initiatives now here to stay into the foreseeable future? Who pays for establishing path dependencies that really do last, well, indefinitely?

Had we heeded that universal caution—Be careful what you wish for!—then one question to always ask is: Who should be the first to pay for what turn out to be long-lasting (irreversible?) interventions that achieved only what was initially wished for them, regardless of subsequent needs?

The danger in stopping short by organizing around probabilities and consequences of large infrastructure failure is the notion that the two are independent of each other. You don’t realize what you have before you may well be little more than unforeseen contingencies associated with a chaotic afterwards. Its causality is the last thing you understand and your risk management framework misleads you in thinking otherwise. In reality, to equate system uncertainties and unknown-unknowns with systemic risk is the disaster to forestall rather than hasten unintentionally.

Or to put the point in positive terms. When an experienced county emergency manager told us, “Floods are complex events, they have many variables,” it wasn’t helpful to tell him, as some did, that he’d be better off first simplifying those events for the purpose of risk modeling. To assume he needed to first understand the flooding better ignored that he was already managing the complexity there. The complexity sands away any shield of photo-clarity and reveals the contingencies and exigencies in action underneath.

So what? Infrastructure reliability managers are in an important sense like that top-most weathervane made to take lightning strikes outside so to protect the house underneath. More, such protection against dangers is a public good, and is what we expect from leaders, regulators and policymakers.

The idea that current capitalist pathologies arise because the capitalism of markets and productivity has disappeared. The idea that Amazon Inc. should be broken up because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices, as professed by a think tank whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. The idea of Eurocommunist parties that the working class isn’t to be praised but contested by, among others, middle class workers.

Time after time, making human behaviour more predictable for the client of prediction (the manager, the police officer) often means making life and work more unpredictable for the target of prediction (the employee, the urban citizen).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231171053

Meanwhile I’ll be plotting to outwrite it; I want to be the first human being to imitate ChatGPT perfectly.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here?utm_term=6469c17386bac9427580944744a8948a&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email

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

Lessons from post-socialist transformation for social-ecological transformation

The economies of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced two different economic systems and transformations. These experiences are valuable for the social-ecological transformation towards a post-growth society. The central findings of our analysis of these transformation experiences are presented here. . .In our view, it is worthwhile to include these experiences in the degrowth debate.

I. Experience with the economy of shortage shows that low production of goods does not necessarily go hand in hand with positive environmental effects.

In an economy of shortage, there can be a forced equilibrium of adjustment with scarcity and abundance often being at odds with each other: “We had nothing [in the shops], no vegetables, no fruit, just tangerines for the New Year. And then we bought them in advance for a whole month. But imagine what happens to them when they lie around for a month. Half were rotten and had to be thrown away. [Laughs]” (Interview, Narva/Kudruküla, 2019). Accordingly, shortage can even lead directly to waste. For a degrowth economy, this means that a one-sided orientation towards ecological limits on the supply side can lead to inefficient hoarding tendencies with high environmental burdens on the demand side. A sufficiency economy must therefore consider both the supply and the demand side in order to bring about a new equilibrium of adjustment.

II. Experiences with the shortage economy must not be reduced to shortage, because this often devalues the whole body of knowledge and life practices associated with it.

Although practices such as semi-subsistence agriculture can also be seen as a way of coping with shortage and as such provide socio-economic buffers and resilience, they cannot be reduced to mere economic neediness. For this image, whether intentionally or not, leads to a renewed process of marginalisation and devaluation of the knowledge and life practices involved. It is inseparable from the hegemonic discourse of modernisation, according to which only Western standards of living are considered universally desirable. At the same time, the image reproduces the binary opposition of the ‘modern West’ and the ‘catching-up East’, thus preventing socially and ecologically desirable practices from ‘the East’ from gaining the same (global) acceptance and recognition as those from ‘the West’.

III. The distinction between the basic components of a system and its economic effects is central to understanding transformations.

The transformations in Central and Eastern Europe were successful at the macro level because they addressed the fundamental components of the systems: political power, the distribution of property rights and the coordination mechanism. The previously typical behaviour of economic actors and phenomena changed as a result of these fundamental changes. If the degrowth discourse is serious about a social-ecological transformation, and does not (mis)use the term as a synonym for ecological reform, then it is essential to examine how people in Central and Eastern Europe have experienced these changes and to take more account of post-socialist transformation research. . . .

https://www.ipe-berlin.org/fileadmin/institut-ipe/Dokumente/Working_Papers/ipe_working_paper_215.pdf

How many times have we heard something like, “If implemented as planned…,” “If the right structures are in place…,” or “Given market-clearing prices…”? Just like that older version: “Monarchy is the best form of government, provided the monarch possesses virtue and wisdom.”

‘If implemented as planned’, when we know that is the assumption we cannot make. ‘If the right structures are in place.” when we know that “right” is unethical without specifying just what the structures are, often case by case. “Given market-clearing prices,” when we know not only that markets in the real world often do not clear (supply and demand do not equate at a single price) – and even when they do, their “efficiencies” can undermine the very markets that produce those prices.

Admit it: We could as well believe that the surest way to heat the house in winter is by striking a match under the thermometer outside.

I

A good deal has been written arguing that economic efficiency and equality in economic well-being can move in the same direction (e.g., healthier people are more economically productive). The dominant view, however, remains the two are in The Big Tradeoff: more equality means less efficiency.

All this is curious from the perspective of the social sciences: Why would anyone take a movement in efficiency (or equality) to be caused by a movement in the other rather than caused by some intervening variable affecting both efficiency and equality independently?

II

More institutionally-informed economists say they do talk about intervening variables, at least in the form of secure property rights that underpin gains in economic efficiency. Yet those are no more second-order considerations. For when economists talk about the necessity of “secure property rights,” they rarely see any need to underscore a hugely reliable contract law, insurance and title registration infrastructure in place and “always on.”

Could it be, for example, that consumption is less unequally distributed than income precisely because critical infrastructures have been more reliable in the delivery and distribution of goods and services than they have been in the creation and generation of income opportunities for those doing the consuming?

In a very fine article on degrowth strategies in urban areas, “Strategic planning for degrowth: What, who, how,” Federico Salvini of the University of Amsterdam concludes:

The concepts of synergy and regionalization are already familiar in strategic planning theory. They stress that, to trigger strategic processes, it is essential for planners to grasp the existing landscape of prefigurative practices, directly engage with them, connect them through frames of meaningful interaction, and define a common understanding of the territory in which those practices coexist. In this paper, I argued that strategic spatial planning needs to go back to these two foundational processes to be able to address the extreme urgency of today’s social and ecological challenges (i.e., ecological breakdown and its related socio-political implications). Yet, it needs to do so by focusing on those practices that see reduction as imperative. In cities, these practices are increasingly common. Examples include housing cooperatives, ecological social housing, squats, community agriculture, food sovereignty, collective voluntary simplicity, and networks of care, education, and health.

(Accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14730952241258693?__s=5c7iz8sjrdi0asw7ei91&utm_source=drip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Your+Syllabus+This+Week)

Now, I don’t want to make too much of those degrowth “how-to-reduce” practices I’ve bolded in the above.

But aren’t many pastoralists and pastoralists areas still doing the equivalent–and long before degrowth moved to where it needs to be in the global policy agenda?

Let’s start with some of the big questions. How to maintain funding for the welfare system in a non-growing economy? How do we manage the increasing relative costs of welfare? Overcome structural and behavior growth dependencies within the welfare system? Transform the welfare state for the better?

Now the thought experiment. What if we “answered” these questions with an observation that only initially seems far afield and entirely off tangent? Namely: Unfree labor flows and flows of illegal funds, goods, and services are a stable part of the global economy, not an aberration:

Two fields of scholarship, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and that of forced labour in supply chains, rarely intersect.” “In showing that unfree labour is a stable aspect of the contemporary global economy, scholars studying labour in supply chains challenge the idea that forced labour is an ‘aberration’ (Phillips and Mieres, 2014: 245) from the normal functioning of labour markets and that of unfree labour as the opposite of free waged labour.

That is, deregulation, liberalization and privatization not only introduce failure regimes–less stable by definition–where there were none before (e.g., once public entities can now go bankrupt, thereby undermining the welfare state), but also provide more stable markets for all manner of unofficial and illegal items.

“Welfare,” “state” and the “welfare state” have indeed been transformed. Its official non-growing economy is not the only economy of relevance anymore.

So it has always been, though arguably not as marketized globally as now. So what?

The observation would be banal were it not for its major policy implication. If asked, What makes for better planning ahead?, we should answer: Why even ask if you can’t learn better to plan and respond for now and the next steps? Or to put the point from the opposite direction: It’s not insignificant that most miracles are about healing finally.

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Sources.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921001245

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505068211020791

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.13388