I

It’s not news that robust communications are pivotal in establishing and ensuring situational awareness and a common operating picture in major emergencies.

For us though, communications are robust when they enable and enact the shifts in interconnectivity configurations so as to match real-time capabilities to dynamic emergency demands.

The willingness and ability to revert to and use different communication technologies in order to shift configurations of sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivities is, we believe, under-acknowledged when it comes to disaster demands and responses.[1]

II

Please note the phrase, “robust.” It does not privilege or prioritize one type of interconnectivity—like face-to-face or voice-to-voice reciprocal interactions in field improvisations—over other types.

One cannot, for example, overstress the importance to enhancing both requisite variety and positive redundancy via activation of serial dependencies in shifting to contact trees and notification protocols in an emergency. “Like if I email you, and you don’t reply, I’ll call you, right? Or if I call you and you don’t pick up, I’ll text you,” a state resilience officer told us, adding: “Like if there’s an emergency happens, I call Chris. If Chris doesn’t answer. I call Coop. If Coop doesn’t answer, I call Abby. If Abby doesn’t answer, I call the governor directly. . .”

III

So what?

The way people communicate in an emergency constitutes the way they connect, and this co-constituted communication/interconnectivity, which makes things happen, means that different configurations of interconnectivity are often tied to different communications mechanisms and technologies. Otherwise you would not have sufficient requisite variety to match dynamic demands with real-time response capabilities.

[1] For more on these different types of interconnectivity configurations in pastoralist setting, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/when-interconnections-are-the-center-of-analysis-and-management-the-case-of-pastoralist-systems-and-interconnected-infrastructures-upon-which-they-depend/

April 29 2024

I

War is a hugely overwritten policy palimpsest, where all manner of arguments are glued together from the shards that have pushed through from the sedimented layers of argumentation underneath.

For our purposes here, it’s better to state this point from the other direction and in the form of a question: What has been obscured or effaced about war in the process of this overwriting? How might their resurfacing change current understandings?

This would seem an insurmountable challenge. How do you restore erasures? One answer lies in the really-existing complexity of the war palimpsest itself. Find optics with which to recast the composite arguments being glued together today.

The kinds of complexity I am interested in offer the great virtue of having no one, singly necessary and sufficient starting point. The test of the efficacy is, do an optic’s insights stick?

What follows is a example of one set of such optics. Thereafter, I discuss how this reframes one such war, the current Israel/Palestine conflict. My over-riding interest is to say something useful about Rafah and the looming offensive.

II

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….

I’d come across a World War I poet I hadn’t read before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” and the above passage..

The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminds me of an anecdote of John Ashbery, the poet:

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 desiring—his hungering—after a dream in the end produced the perfect drawing. In contrast, Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of a 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 infallible image that emerges, 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 both questions: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living–“Somehow together, and find this was life indeed. . .” Since when isn’t war a kind of life?, Gurney seems to ask us.

III

The notion that war is also about the irreducible particularity of living–more formally, the irreducible particularity of sudden contingency and human agency in response–would be banal, were it not for its massive erasure from today’s policy palimpsest of war.

I don’t know about you, but what I find said about Palestine/Israel compiles and stitches together every kind of statement–policy, moral, journalistic, etcetera–except those about the human complexities, individual and collective, in war that are already recorded in many novels, including some mediocre ones.

So what? Are we to wait for the inevitably nuanced novels of October 7, and even if we did, who believes they will have any impact on really-existing policy?

No, we needn’t wait.

IV

Human agency and contingency serve a much more important function than in service to novels. They are in fact a permanent–and as such, inevitable–counternarrative to existing forms of ruling policy and management. They erode anything like the authoritative statement said to hold here, now and regardless.They are, I believe, the key global counternarrative to policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised agency and contingency out of their macro-design narratives and scenarios.

Don’t confuse contingencies and agency for a grand narrative about human survival and persistence. Nor is the fact that humans respond to exogenous surprises and shocks in endogenously surprising and shocking ways a different grand narrative–in this case about there being different kinds of oppressors and oppressed or there being oppressors (oppressed) on some dimensions while oppressed (oppressors) on others. The counternarrative complications for policy and management go beyond that of any insider/outsider pluralism–actually beyond any creed and -ism.

V

How so?

Here we have a global counternarrative that humans insist on human agency even if (precisely because) their formal and informal authorities deny intervening contingencies entail doing otherwise. This entails Palestinians being in variable tension with Hamas. This entails IDF personnel being in variable tension with Israeli politicians and publics. This means that going no further than the terms Palestinians, Hamas, IDF, Israeli and like is unhelpful, probably harmful. Why? Because the analytic priority follows from the global context that the counternarrative imposes on all forms of authority.

This means that what happens in Rafah is global precisely because the granular levels at which really-existing practices of resistance and negotiation evolve there are among the practices that drive modifications of this planet-wide counternarrative. How could Rafah not be a global issue for any person whose living is war and whose war is living?

Note in conclusion that the preceding is not some a priori universal but rather decidedly empirical generalization.

I

Artists paint over their works all the time. It’s so common that art historians and conservators have a word for it: pentimento. None of these earlier compositions was an Easter egg deposited in the painting for later researchers to discover. The original X-ray images were certainly valuable in that they offered insights into artists’ working methods. But to me, what these programs are doing isn’t exactly newsworthy from the perspective of art history. (https://theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hijacking-art-history-170691)

War is a hugely overwritten policy palimpsest, where all manner of arguments are glued together from the shards that remain encrusted on its surface or have pushed through from the sedimented layers of argumentation underneath.

For our purposes here, it’s better to state this point from the other direction and in the form of a question: What has been obscured or effaced about war in the process of this overwriting? How might their resurfacing change current understandings?

This would seem an insurmountable challenge. How do you restore erasures? One answer lies in the really-existing complexity of the war palimpsest itself. Find optics with which to recast the currently visible composite arguments.

The kinds of complexity I am interested in offer the great virtue of having no one, singly necessary and sufficient starting point. The test of the efficacy is does an optic’s insights stick. From this perspective, any such insights are Easter Eggs in the overwritten palimpsest of war.

What follows is one set of such optics. Then I discuss how this reframes one such war, the current Israel/Palestine conflict

II

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….

I’d come across a World War I poet I hadn’t read before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” and the above passage..

The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminds me of an anecdote of John Ashbery, the poet:

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 desiring—his hungering—after a dream in the end produced the perfect drawing. In contrast, Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of a 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 infallible image that emerges, 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 both questions: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living–“Somehow together, and find this was life indeed. . .” Since when isn’t war a kind of life?, Gurney seems to ask us.

III

The notion that war is also about the irreducible particularity of living–more formally, the irreducible particularity of sudden contingency and human agency in response–would be banal, were it not for its massive erasure from today’s policy palimpsest of war.

I don’t know about you, but what I find said about Palestine/Israel compiles and stitches together every kind of statement–policy, moral, journalistic, etcetera–except those about the human complexities, individual and collective, in war that are already recorded in many novels, including some mediocre ones.

So what? Are we to wait for the inevitably nuanced novels of October 7, and even if we did, who believes they will have any impact on really-existing policy?

No, we needn’t wait.

IV

Human agency and contingency serve a much more important function than in service to novels. They are in fact a permanent–and as such, inevitable–counternarrative to existing forms of ruling policy and management. They erode anything like the authoritative statement said to hold here and now, regardless. They are, I believe, the key global counternarrative to policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised agency and contingency out of their governing narratives and scenarios.

Don’t confuse contingencies and agency for a grand narrative about human survival and persistence. Nor is the fact that humans respond to exogenous surprises and shocks in endogenously surprising and shocking ways a different grand narrative–in this case about there being different kinds of oppressors and oppressed or there being oppressors (oppressed) on some dimensions while oppressed (oppressors) on others. The counternarrative complications for policy and management go beyond that of any insider/outsider pluralism–actually beyond any creed and -ism.

V

How so?

Here we have a global counternarrative that humans insist on having agency even if (precisely because) their formal and informal authorities deny intervening contingencies entail doing otherwise. This entails Palestinians being in variable tension with Hamas. This entails IDF personnel being in variable tension with Israeli politicians and publics. This means that going no further than the terms Palestinians, Hamas, IDF, Israeli and like is unhelpful (if not harmful). Why? Because the analytic priority follows from the global context that the counternarrative imposes on all forms of authority, now and anywhere.

This means that what happens in Rafah is global precisely because the granular levels at which really-existing practices of resistance and negotiation evolve there are what drive modifications of this planet-wide counternarrative. How could Rafah not be a global issue for any person whose living is war and whose war is living?

–At that time: Which way Africa? Kenyatta or Nyerere? At this time: Which way development? Xi or Modi?

–“Which political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?” Great question, but still: systematically misleading. As in: Do the conditions and practices need to be stable enough for the expression of fallibility or do their very uncertainties undermine fallibility as some kind of stable concept?

–Much of migration talk is about rights without accounting for any absence of emerging better practices across a run of very different migration cases, worldwide.

–If anything is universally ethical, it is to experiment globally only after having canvassed actually-existing practices and ways to modify them.

–Read something like, “Getting the Social Cost of Carbon Right,” and having to ask: Are these people barking mad?

–Xi should abolish the hukou system, expand PRC’s social safety net, enable workers’ organizations to fight for higher wages, distribute dividends from state-owned enterprises to the people, invest more in environmental protection, tax the rich, reign in imaginaries like tianxia, and, well you know the rest . .

No, counter the realists. Instead we should pray that China: doesn’t support a strong yuan, imports high inflation from elsewhere, suffers an even worse demographic crisis, witnesses the world’s largest real-estate collapse and experiences the uprising of the planet’s biggest proletariat. And, oh yes, the West should liberate Taiwan from China like the free-world coalition liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s Iraq.

The painter Gérard Fromanger recorded that a blank canvas is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’. If, as painter František Kupka felt, “to abstract is to eliminate,” then stripping away the layers of black-on-black is akin to abstracting blankness. One implication: There is nothing more abstract in the art of change than “wiping the table clean.”

The critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates 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 (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

This notion that humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive. That we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to making them imaginable didn’t really to me.

Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say, at least in my experience: As there are disasters indescribably catastrophic, we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to think about them. That way we frame what we think we know and don’t about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened here.

So what? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.

Below I cut and paste from an email sent to me yesterday by Scott Humphrey, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region. It proposes an intervention that, I believe deserves wider distribution and application not just to marine infrastructures but to the real-time operations centers of other critical infrastructures as well.

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Several months ago, I did this webinar for a maritime security audience. The webinar describes the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk concept. I’ve also presented at several conferences.

Here’s a link to the video webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWOZtFDPZTI&t=3s

In lieu of watching the whole video, here’s a summary of the  Extreme Climate Resilience Desk SFMX video.

The concept focuses on creating a “Climate Resilience Desk” at the Marine Exchange of San Francisco to better anticipate and manage climate-related system shocks in maritime operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:

1.  Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
2.  Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
3.  Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
4.  Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
5.  Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
6.  Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
7.  Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.

The proposed Climate Resilience Desk, through comprehensive data analysis and stakeholder cooperation, aims to transform how climate-related risks are managed, ensuring more resilient maritime and regional operations.

F. Scott Humphrey

Executive Director, Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region
Chairperson, Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region

Office 415.441.5045   Mobile 510.393.6856

Web www.sfmx.org   Email ScottH@sfmx.org

10 Commodore Drive, Emeryville, CA 94608

We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.

Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)

After such bloodless abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.

The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.

All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”

So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”

And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”

A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”

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Source. T. Schlechtriemen (2023). “Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2281233)

I

You’ve done all that research on livestock herders. You’ve collected so much information to better government policy and management. You know all the critiques of big-D development. But no one is acting on your findings and insights.

What do you do now and instead, whoever is listening or not? One answer: try curating publics as a part of your work.

I am suggesting that pastoralist practices–really-existing practices–can be curated so as to create new publics or, better yet, counter-publics. Success is defined as illustrating them, singly and together, in ways that stick in the minds of these publics, regardless of the dominant development narratives already there.

II

For example, enter the first of several rooms in our exhibition, “Rethinking Pastoralism Today.” On the wall there, you find pictured with a sidebar and attribution:

Source: S. Bose (2023). Photovoice With Pastoralists: A Practical Guidebook. PASTRES, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and the European University Institute in Florence. Reproduced with permission and accessed online at https://pastres.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/photovoice-guide-digital.pdf (Photo by Malicha, used with permission of the ERC PASTRES project)

You read the side-bar again, and then see the caption given by the curator in this thought experiment: LIKE SO MUCH IN LIFE (YOURS INCLUDED), PASTORALISM IS NOT ONE WAY ONLY. That sticks, and for how much time depends on you.

III

What makes this kind of curatorial practice such a useful entry point is that even the most radical exhibitions guided by progressive politics have to finds ways to work within the conventional “white cube” constraints of rooms, floors and walls upon which to hang rectangles or display against.

By extension, the most radical development recastings also have to be in productive tension with current ways of seeing things.

–Take another illustration hanging on the walls of this exhibition, that of the policy cycle:

Source: https://catalyst.harvard.edu/community-engagement/policy-research/unknown-61015f3cbb252-61015f57f388a-610bf6bb39406-610bf6ca02c07-610bf6d25a626/

But you, like every other member of the public to this exhibition, are your own curator in the sense of having to ask: What’s missing here in this graphic? When it comes to really-existing policies, programs and projects, “a simplified” just doesn’t hack it. You know each stage is bedeviled by details and contingencies. Indeed, once other viewers make the same complaint, you’ve established a very effective critique of anything like a “normal cycle.”

The upshot? Here too the viewing publics understand there is no one way to exhibit project performance. The stages sequence together differently for viewers who see different details and have different criteria for whether what works or not, what fails or not. Curators who exhibit to illustrate more continuity than is there might be better thought of as exhibiting their own confirmation bias.

IV

So what?

By way of an answer, consider the following quote, seemingly unrelated and without any representation, written on a wall in the last room of this exhibition:

I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, and steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.

R. Bürgisser (2023), Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace, European
Commission, Seville, JRC130830 (accessed online at https://retobuergisser.com/publication/ecjrc_policy/ECJRC_policy.pdf)

By this point you’ve seen all the representations in the preceding rooms of pastoralists who are being displaced from their herding sites, in these cases by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, and the like.

But the free-standing quote presses you think further: What are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?

You look around the room to find an answer. What do you see? Nothing is what you see. With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies are hanging anywhere or standing in place.

That too sticks in your mind as you exit.

V

But what comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities, or the emphatic acknowledgement of someone else’s suffering, as an achievement in and of itself?

Irit Rogoff quoted in Claire Louise Staunton (2022). The Post-Political Curator: Critical Curatorial Practice in De-Politicised Enclosures. PhD Dissertation. Royal College of Art, London (accessed on line at https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/5278/1/06.02.23_Post-correction%20Thesis%20FULL.pdf)

In answer, what comes after are efforts to curating publics for what we–and they as their own curators–recast as small-d “development.”

I

Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own.

What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.

II

In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, infrastructural or otherwise beforehand, let alone as the disaster unfolds. If there is electricity or tap water afterwards, it is intermittent. Hospitals remain few or too far. In these situations, the only thing between you and death is you. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.

Self-organizing groups, however, is also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in high-income countries. Increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff and emergency managers,

I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect.

A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established. Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads.

III

So what?

Two photographs show people organizing themselves to remove the rubble outside. If I’m right, the function served in each could differ significantly, depending on role that reliable critical infrastructures have had up to the disaster. It’s important to know that this picture, and not that other, is of removing rubble from the only road to the water treatment plant, for example.

Why is that important?

These days we’re told it’s important to dismantle capitalism. Well, major disasters dismantle physical infrastructures all over the place. And yet the infrastructures are always treated as part of capitalism writ large and modernities writ small.

If capitalism has colonized crisis into every nook and cranny of the world, it’s hardly useful then in explaining the presence or absence of the institutional niche just mentioned. You’re better advised to look to complex adaptive systems theory, rather than current power theories, for insights into real-time responses and their immediate aftermath.

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For more on the limitations of theories of power (direct, indirect, dispersed), please see Part III of When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene). See also section II.28 of the Guide discussing other examples of “thinking infrastructurally”.