Summary

When I argue for a new Constitutional Convention and the break-up of the United States, I’m still met with disbelief. All manner of, well, insurmountable legal difficulties are referenced. More express the dread: To talk about breaking up the country opens the Pandora Box of horrible knowns and the horribly unknown; we already tried that and look how the US Civil War ended; how could a professional, such as myself, even think this….

My entry point here centers around an exchange of letters between critic, Edmund Wilson, and novelist, John Dos Passos, during the first half of the 1930s. Their interchange focused on the need for radical structural change in the US government and the Constitution. One of Edmund Wilson’s biographers calls the Wilson/Dos Passos correspondence “in its scope and dramatic interest second in American letters only to that of Jefferson and John Adams”. The picture I seek to recast with this interchange from the Republic of Letters is the entrenched institution of this US republic and its fifty states.

It is true this proposal for a new Constitutional Convention fails to consult those experts in constitutional law, economics, and political science. My point is that other minds, like Wilson and Dos Passos, were ignored in considering the case for new constitutional arrangements and the country’s break-up.

The interchange

The correspondence was provoked by Edmund Wilson’s 1931 Appeal to Progressives in the New Republic [NR], parts of which read:

Not only are the people in a capitalist society very often completely ignorant as to what their incomes come from; it is actually sometimes impossible or very difficult for them to find this out. And as long as a fair proportion of the bankers, the manufacturers, the middle men, the merchants and the workers whom their capital and machines keep busy are able to make a little more money than before, no matter how unscrupulously or short-sightedly, we are able, as a nation, to maintain our belief in our prosperity and even in our happiness….

Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history—a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once….

Outdated? Hardly, when the bankers have metastasized into global finance, when our public utilities have been sold off to corporate risk-takers, and when the best news we have is that the rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, wearying of empire, try to make good in the happy-talk of philanthropy what we once demanded and expected of government.

Edmund Wilson’s proposal? “It may be that the whole money-making and -spending psychology has definitely played itself out, and that the Americans would be willing, for the first time now, to put their traditional idealism and their genius for organization behind a radical social experiment.”

Whoa! We’ve tried those Big Experiments! What more do we need than the intervening decades to convince us that the more radical the social experiment, the deadlier the bolt-hole utopia realized?

Wilson’s point still holds, though: “[W]ith the kind of administrations that the country has lately been getting, do not all our progressive proposals, however reasonable or modest, seem utopian?”

Yet it’s easier to dismiss a massive social experiment than it is to ignore the more massive laboratory of modern life created for ourselves. (If utopias fail and if utopia and failure go together, when then does recovery from failed utopianism end and a new normal begin? Answer: There is no normal, when this very big laboratory can’t tell the difference between the experiment and recovery.)

But what then to do in today’s laboratory? Stay with Edmund Wilson and his then-friend, John Dos Passos, and their interchange over the NR manifesto and its follow-on. Dos Passos’s response to the publications, his increasing disillusionment with the machinations of left politics in the early 1930s, and the disagreements between Dos Passos and Wilson help identify a direction for us.

From the Republic of Letters

“Just read your battlecry,” Dos Passos writes a few weeks after Wilson’s 1931 piece appears,

Of course all the [New Republic] can do is stir things up and try to smoke out a few honest men who do know something about industrial life as she is lived…If you can keep up a series like this you really will have started something—though I’m beginning to think that every publication ought to be required by law to print at the bottom of each page:

NB. THIS IS BULLSHIT

. . . .[T]he trouble with all our political economic writing and the reason maybe why it doesnt interest the ordinary guy who hasn’t joined the fraternity of word-addicts is that it is made up right in the office and springs from neither experience nor observation…

True enough, and Wilson eventually circulates a more urgent manifesto. “The present crisis of the world—and specifically the United States—is something more than a mere crisis of politics or economics; and it will not pass with the depression. It is crisis of human culture. What faces us today is the imperative need for new social forms, new values, a new human order.”

What is needed, Wilson feels, has moved beyond experiment to revolution. “Sure I’ll subscribe to it,” Dos Passos writes Wilson in reply to the new battle cry,

—but I don’t think it’ll cause any bankers to jump out of fiftieth story windows—what are you going to do with it?—post it up on billboards? it might go well on toilet paper like [ laxative] advertizing—or is it going to be laid on [President] Hoover’s breakfast table?….Where is it going to be used—?

Wilson ends up forwarding material to Dos Passos from another periodical, New Masses, and Dos Passos writes back in March 1934,

I think it’s very important not to add to this mass of inept rubbish on this subject—what is happening is that the whole Marxian radical movement is in a moment of intense disintegration—all people like us, who have no taste for political leadership or chewing the rag, can do, is to sit on the sidelines and try to put a word in now and then for the underdog or for the cooperative commonwealth or whatever….

The only alternative is passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy or an industrial crisis helped by a collapse in the director’s offices—That would be different from nazi socialism only in this way: that it would be a reaction towards old time Fourth of July democracy….How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.

Late 1934, Dos Passos writes to Wilson about recent events in the Soviet Union, including the murder of Stalin’s intelligence chief,

This business about Kirov looks very very bad to me. In fact it has completely destroyed my benefit-of-the-doubt attitude towards the Stalinists—It seems to be another convolution of the self-destructive tendency that began with the Trotski-Stalin row. From now on events in Russian have no more interest—except as a terrible example—for world socialism—if you take socialism to mean the educative or constructive tendency rather than politics. The thing has gone into its Napoleonic stage and the progressive tendencies in the Soviet Government have definitely gone under before the self-protective tendencies….Meanwhile I think we should be very careful not to damage any latent spores of democracy that there still may be in the local American soil.

These remarks provoke Wilson to respond in early January 1935:

…I don’t think you ought to say, as you do, that a country which is still trying to put socialism into practice has ceased to be politically interesting…One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to people who have hopped on the shootings in Russia as a means of discrediting socialism. Aside from this, you are right, of course, in saying that Americans who are in favor of socialism oughtn’t to try to import the methods of the Russians….

Dos Passos fires back,

[N]o government is in good shape that has to keep on massacring its people. Suppose, when that curious little [Italian] Zangara took a potshot a Franklin D. [Roosevelt], the U.S. Secret Service had massacred a hundred miscellaneous people, some because they were [Italians], others because they were anarchists and others because they had stomach trouble, what would all us reds be saying…What’s the use of losing your “chains” if you get a firing squad instead…Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out—if the coming period of wars and dictatorships give anybody a chance to work anything out….

About Russia I should have said not politically useful rather than politically interesting….By Anglo Saxon Institutions I mean the almost obliterated traditions of trial by jury common law etc—they don’t count for much all the time but they do constitute a habit more or less implanted in Western Europeans outside of Russians….

Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do—and I cant see any reason for giving the impression of trying to induce others to engage in forlorn hopes one wouldn’t go in for oneself.

“Don’t agitate me, comrade, I’m with you,” Wilson countered at the end of that January,

Surely it’s entirely unnecessary to worry about the possibility of a Stalin regime in America. I can’t imagine an American Stalin. You talk as if there were a real choice between Henry Ford on the one hand and [American Communists] on the other; but who outside the Communists themselves has ever seriously entertained the idea that these individuals would every lead a national movement?

“But” responds Dos Passos in February 1935,

it’s not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that’s worrying me, it’s the fact that the Stalinist [Communist Party] seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in—all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made—and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism’s weakness and not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx’s work—but it certainly does influence one’s attitude towards a given political party. I’ve felt all along that the Communists were valuable as agitators as the abolitionist were before the Civil War—but now I ‘m not so happy about it.

Dos Passos then shifts his letter to a point Wilson had made to the effect that Marx belonged to a group of romantics that “came out of a world (before 1848) that was less sick, had much more spirit.” “By the way,” Dos Passos continues,

I don’t agree with you that a hundred years ago was a better time than now—they had a great advantage that everything was technically less cluttered and simpler—but dont you think perhaps in every time the landscape seems somewhat obstructed by human lice for those who view it? We have more information to go on, more technical ability to carry ideas out and ought to produce a whale of a lot of stuff—if I was a European I wouldn’t think so, but here we still have a margin to operate on—

Later that February Wilson writes Dos Passos another letter, the parting shot of which is its own “By the way,”

it is being rumored that you are “rubbing your belly” and saying that “the good old Republican party is good enough for you.” Maybe you ought to make a statement of your present position.

…which Dos Passos does. The month after, he writes Wilson,

I finally consented, against my better judgement, to put my name down on the [leftist] Writers Congress roster. I’m going to try to write them a little preachment about liberty of conscience or freedom of inwit or something of the sort that I hope will queer me with the world savers so thoroughly that they’ll leave me alone for a while. I frankly cant see anything in this middleclass communism of the literati but a racket….People haven’t any right to make a living out of politics—It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.

“It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.” “Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out.” “Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do.” “How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.” That said, at least here in the US, according to Dos Passos, “we still have margin to operate on”.

What margin do we have today?

My proposal

In reply, start with the margin that the framers of the US Constitution saw fit to endorse in Article 5—a new constitutional convention. Oh no, no that won’t work, you say. How would most of our state legislatures or Congressmembers ever agree to hold a Constitutional Convention?

Answer: We hold it for them. We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.

The idea here is this: We have 465 congressional districts, and 465 delegates to a Peoples’ Constitutional Convention sounds about right. Anyone on the voter rolls or adult able to show district residency would be eligible to vote and any voter from the district could run as a convention delegate. Party affiliation or endorsement would, of course, not be required. The candidate with the greatest vote plurality would be the district’s delegate. The cost of this nationwide election and delegate process would be, say, US$1-2 per person, or some $600 million, with another $50 million to hold the actual convention. The US government won’t finance this, and corporate funding would for obvious reasons be ruled out. One can imagine a consortium of individuals, foundations and overseas governments willing to defray what we can’t pay ourselves. (To put these numbers in some kind of perspective, Forbes estimated in 2017 that the net worth of author and large charity giver, J.K. Rowling, was roughly $650 million.)

The charge of the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention: To redraft the US Constitution through a series of amendments.

What a waste of time and money, you interject, since the real government—the states and feds—would just ignore the work of any Peoples’ Constitutional Convention.

Let them. Let them say the peoples’ mandate is illegitimate. Let them ignore a convention that represents no government, no court, no army, and none of the techno-managerial elites, just those elected to come together to hold our government, our courts, our military, and our techno-managerial elites to account. Let them ignore the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention and if they do, we’ll hold a different-premised one, and if that also does not work, we’ll go global and elect a World Parliament and then let them ignore that too. (As some readers may have realized I am adapting and paraphrasing George Monbiot’s proposal in The Age of Consent.)

But Americans could never, never, never support something as utopian—so Fourth of July democracy—as that!

Which takes us back to Edmund Wilson. Late in his life, he published a slim volume, The Cold War and The Income Tax. Pursued by the US Internal Revenue Service for non-payment of taxes and appalled at what his federal tax dollars were going to once paid—namely, the interdigitated grip of war and commerce—Wilson only could muster mordant wit in a way that the early 1930s’ Dos Passos would have appreciated:

I have always thought myself patriotic and have been in the habit in the past of favorably contrasting the United States with Europe and the Soviet Union; but our country has become today a huge blundering power controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit’s aims nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me….

How to get rid of this huge growth, which is no longer a private organization, like one of Theodore Roosevelt’s old trust that could be busted, that is not even a thriving corporation protected by a business administration but an excrescence of government itself which officially drains our resources and which stupidly and insolently threatens our lives?…But now that things have gone so far, is there any chance, short of catastrophe, of dismembering and reassembling this image and constructing a nobler one that answers better to what we pretend to?

Wilson was right, as was Dos Passos before him, and their questions still hold. It’s long past time for 4^th of July democracy to get constitutional. But instead of stopping here, push our thought experiment further.

If corporations are more like fictive people, real people need to become more like fictive corporations. That is, really-existing people with really-existing problems need to organize and destroy corporations claiming to be their equal. Assume the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention, its delegates having met, resolves that the country should break up.

The break-up

Just hold on buddy! Stop right there. Break up the country? No, no, and again no: absolutely not. After all, our current Constitution is a living document. . .

NB. THAT’S BULLSHIT

I do not see how anyone can pretend that the Constitution we now have is a living organism, able to evolve into the reliability mandates we demand of it. “You would have to be an idiot to believe that,” said Justice Scalia, who to my mind was right on this point. When it comes to the legal document that I can vote for with my feet, I want privacy rights guaranteed constitutionally and, puh-leese, none of that bald canard about corporations being fictive, immortal individuals.

Yes, of course, we all must avoid a replay of the mass migration and slaughter that followed the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. As a sign of willingness to compromise, I for one am quite willing to let the wee boys keep beltway Reaganland and its airport; if they want Bozo the Prez as their own, let them; I really don’t care whether the schismatics call another breakaway, Prophetland or Profitland. As for Mexifornia, it’s ok by me. If any one of new entities wants to keep parallel wording of the present Constitution, so be it.

Then what? “It is hard to imagine [this] happening without a certain amount of civil war,” Edmund Wilson admitted, and the last time we tried that…well, need we say more?

Yes we do need to say more, and now is the time to say it. Now as then, the priority is to fund and run any new government with all ingenuity available, and not just in drafting new policies but also in doing things differently.

If our Civil War over southern separatism is a guide to the coming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes. Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments. How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of changes without breaking up the country?

(And those appalled by any appeal to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union–so why is the reverse out of the question?)

Be that as it may, when the-now US breaks up, a cadre of professionals will be needed who keep the government services operating under the new conditions. The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed—are devised.

I can think of no more important a task than that the delegates at the Peoples’ Constitution Convention grapple with and address the logistics involved and ingenuity required in keeping critical services provided in a reliable fashion, doubtless as messy as it will be, as the nation undergoes the Great Scission into differing constitutional arrangements. Even today’s reliability professionals like those needed when the US breaks up are presently imagining the unimaginable, thinking the unthinkable, and balancing imponderables all over the place and in real time.

Yes, there is no room for complacency here. But the next constitutional convention everywhere an unthinkably bad mess? Everywhere then the drip-drip-drip of calamities-on-tap? This unimaginably worst mess is just another carking conceit of decline-and-fall (decline-and-stall).

Principal sources:

The letters are in: Edmund Wilson (1977), Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY and John Dos Passos (1973) The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, Gambit, Inc., Boston, MA. I’ve followed their spelling and grammar throughout, while editing in one case still-offensive ethnic expletives.

Four other key sources are: (1) L. Dabney (2005), Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY; (2) G. Monbiot (2003), The Age of Consent, Flamingo, London: Chapter 4; (3) E. Wilson (1963), The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, Farrar, Straus and Company, New York, NY; and J. Israel (2017), The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848, Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, Chapter 3.

My Confederacy cites are from: (1) W.B. Yearns (1960), The Confederate Congress, University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA; R. Bensel (1990), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK: Chapter 3; P. Van Riper and H. Scheiber (1959), “The Confederate Civil Service,” The Journal of Southern History, 25(4): 448-470; C.R. Lee (1963), The Confederate Constitutions, Greenwood Press Publishers: Westport, CN; and E. Thomas (1979), The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865, Harper & Row: New York, NY.

The proposition I write to support is: “When having less knowledge is key to knowing more.” I want to demonstrate how tomorrow we might get all manner of official regulations right—when today we rethink “regulation” as a category of knowledge. In arguing so, I appeal to the poetry of A.R. Ammons.

Ammons, a great American poet of the last half of the 20^th century, was tenacious in returning again and again to a set of topics he felt he hadn’t gotten quite right. One of the subjects was how knowing less entails “knowing” more. It’s his analytic sensibility in persistent revisiting a topic from tangents affording different insight and nuance that I rely on as an optic to parse my own topic of government regulation.

Policy types typically fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts—and his tenacity meant he wrote a great deal—Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear and telegraph ahead, he is not talking about “ignorance is bliss.”)

For those working in policy and management—and I include myself—how could “the less we know, the more we gain” be the case and what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking difficult issues, in this case, regulation?

***

Start by dispensing with popular meanings of “the less I know, the more I know.” It is easily reversed to “the more I know, the less I really know.” This is the conventional wisdom that “data and information” are not knowledge—in fact the opposite. I also do not pursue another sense of “the less I know, the more I know” that Ammons foregrounds from time to time: the hiving off what we thought we knew creates the stuff from which new knowledge is formed. It is my failing—not Ammons’s—that I cannot see how “from-ruins-and-waste-come-something-altogether-better” applies to the 70,000+ paged IRS code and other volumes of government regulations.

My focus instead is on a very difficult set of insights in some of his poems. Let’s jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:

Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.
(TCP1, 418)

Please reread the poem once more.

Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming whole and continuous. As it were, “loss gain” becomes a single term. You cease to be separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital one. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I. An obvious example others have noted: If obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, and restraining inhibitions are, in their own ways, altogether absorbing forms of self-knowledge, then this is knowledge we need not to know in order to have more to know better.

How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know? Part of Ammons’s answer appears to be getting to the point where you know enough to be naïve again, to be open to the wonder of it all, to give yourself up to the kind of attention that is, if you will, self-reabsorbing. To telegraph ahead once again, naïveté does not center around knowing and not-knowing for Ammons: There’s feeling and living, wishing and dreaming, desire and more, and such are different kinds of “knowing,” as if thinking feels and feeling thinks.

Naïveté here is the adult version of child-like, decidedly not the childish that gutters out early. It is positive, because adult wonder and curiosity are the space for noticing and being alert to more—an orientation that gains from the loss of information. Compare this, however, to what is expected of government regulators: Whatever happens, they must not be uninformed or naïve—in a word, inexperienced—and when they are, shame on them.

The ways in which this wonder and inexperience do matter for regulation means staying with Ammons a bit longer. For him, staying uninformed and open to new experiences is the hard work of an affirming study:

….my empty-headed

contemplation is still where the ideas of permanence
and transience fuse in a single body, ice, for example,
or a leaf: green pushes white up the slope: a maple
leaf gets the wobbles in a light wind and comes loose

half-ready: where what has always happened and what
has never happened before seem for an instant reconciled:
that takes up most of my time and keeps me uninformed:
(TCP1, 497-498)

Being empty-headed is part of knowing enough: having to know less so as to be ready for whatever the next experience you proved to have been half-ready for in hindsight. It’s as if Ammons is asking us to be smart enough to see it’s more than about a knowing doubt and a knowing certainty.

Living is the space for feeling, which is where “knowing,” writ large, belongs: “how can I know I/am not/trying to know my way into feeling/as//feeling/tries to feel its way into knowing,” he asks in “Pray Without Ceasing” (TCP1, 779). This notion of a half-readiness open to new experience and the wonder awaiting is nicely caught in the ending lines of one of my favorites, “Cascadilla Falls”:

Oh
I do
not know where I am going
that I can live my life
by this single creek.
(TCP1, 426)

By the time you surge to those lines, there is so much feeling in that “Oh” you might miss how living takes place beyond not-knowing.” Or better, the line break of “do/not know” intimates that the doing of “not know” is a good part of living that life.

***

Regulation from this viewpoint is never a case of regulators starting with knowledge and assuming what matters for living resides elsewhere. Regulation isn’t about expunging naïveté as inexperience but—in ways not yet clear—cultivating it. What is clear is the starting point, however: Wonder is not dread; naïveté is not ignorance; and no-longer-knowing is not not-knowing.

In this way, Ammons makes a frontal attack on what policy types hold very dear: the notion of usefulness. In his essay, “A poem is a walk,” Ammons defers to a paradox: “Only uselessness is empty enough for the presence of so many uses”. Only uselessness is a sufficiently capacious category to embrace all the uses that come and go with experience and ensuring space for more feeling and living.

What could better capture all the many uses as they shift to the wayside than uselessness, “an emptiness/that is plenitude” (TCP1, 503)? Less and less information, against this backdrop, empties us and thereby makes us—leaves us open—differently. It is, in Ammons’s wonderful turn of phrase, to be “emptied full” (TCP2, 4). To seek more and more knowledge and information and never waste what has already been gotten leads to in Ammons’s acid throwaway, “total comprehension is/a wipe-out” (TCP1, 659). It’s a wipe-out because this totality leaves no room for more. 

Where, then, does this leave us when it comes to “knowing” regulation better?

***

In answer, I ended up going back to Ammons’s “The Eternal City”—“After the explosion or cataclysm, that big/display that does its work but then fails/out with destructions, one is left with the//pieces. . .” (TCP1, 596). These lines resonate with what I had read in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters. He is writing about the sculpture studio of Auguste Rodin:

It is indescribable. Acres of fragments lie there, one beside the other. Nudes the size of my hand and no bigger, but only bits, scarcely one of them whole: often only a piece of arm, a piece of leg just as they go together, and the portion of the body which belongs to them. Here the torso of one figure with the head of another stuck onto it, with the arm of a third. . .as though an unspeakable storm, an unparalleled cataclysm had passed over this work. And yet the closer you look the deeper you feel that it would all be less complete if the separate bodies were complete. Each of these fragments is of such a peculiarly striking unit, so possible by itself, so little in need of completion, that you forget that they are only parts and often parts of different bodies which cling so passionately to one another.

I read the passage—at least one other translation captures the same sense—as suggesting that Rodin’s “cataclysm” incorporated fragments that were, in a sense that matters for our purpose, more complete as separate fragments. So too Ammons’s “cataclysm” in “The Eternal City” refers to pieces that are themselves whole—asynoptic, unassimilable, piece next to piece. Another of Ammons’s lines, “all the way to a finished Fragment,” catches the sense I am after here (TCP1, 366).

By extension, we’d have to believe that official regulations ad seriatim, while appearing a growing shambles, are in fact more complete as the piece-work of individual regulations than they would be were they improvised into something new or part of, in policy-speak, a more integrated body of regulations for use over time.

How could this be?

***

One way ahead, Ammons implies, is to see how the waste of regulation isn’t decline-and-fall, but rather the rearguard action against such declension narratives: an argument for creating room for us to recast decline. Ammons directs our attention, for example, to waste-as-generosity in “The City Limits,”

. . . .when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier. . .
(TCP1, 498)

The “heart moves roomier” not because the pile is any less shite, but because it opens to being more—certainly more than that mortal coil. This is the hot mess of feeling and living expansively, of being somatically sprawled all over the place, now. Regulatory waste in this mode is a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it sight/site to behold, maverick and inciting at the same time.

The hot mess that you can’t keep your eyes—our inner and physical I’s—off and the incitements it offers take us to Ammons’s late, long poem, Garbage (TCP2, 220-306). (Famously, Garbage, for which Ammons won the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry, was inspired by his passing an immense heap of garbage alongside the Florida Interstate.) Mountains and mountains of garbage are “monstrous”; in fact

… a monstrous surrounding of
gathering—the putrid, the castoff, the used,

the mucked up—all arriving for final assessment,
for the toting up in tonnage, the separations

of wet and dry, returnable, and gone for good:
(TCP2, 234)

For Ammons “gone for good” is decidedly ambiguous, begging the question about just to what good has garbage gone for. An answer—and Ammons resists being pinned down to any one answer—lies in the garbage that human beings themselves are:

we’re trash, plenty wondrous: should I want

to say in what the wonder consists: it is a tiny
wriggle of light in the mind that says, “go on”:
(TCP2, 245)

Nothing integrated about this! For: “Go on” to what, in a world where garbage and waste conjure a meaninglessness of things and of our own existence, as we too are trash? In the case of Ammons, the garbage we are and the meaninglessness that poses, like capacious uselessness, offer up the wonder of being more—of meaning possibly—once we leave space for such feelings and experience:

we should be pretty happy with the possibilities

and limits we can play through emergences free
of complexes of the Big Meaning, but is there

really any meaninglessness, isn’t meaninglessness
a funny category, meaninglessness missing

meaning, vacancy still empty, not any sort of
disordering, or miscasting or fraudulence of

irrealities’s shows, just a place not meaning
yet—…
…..
…there is truly only meaning,
only meaning, meanings, so many meanings,

meaninglessness becomes what to make of so many
meanings:…
(TCP2, 277)

That word, “becomes”—that insistence on meaning-less possibility as a “funny category”—is, we see by way of conclusion, core to having room to recast regulation.

***

Richard Howard, himself no mean commentator on Ammons’s poetry, points the way: “How often we need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing—how seldom we can afford to venture beyond the pale into that chromatic fantasy where, as Rilke said (in 1908), ‘begins the revision of categories, where something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly accomplished as something to be completed’”.

The importance of this revising categories of thinking and living is captured in an interchange Ammons had with Zofia Burr. When pressed by Burr, he summed up: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.

Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision as “policymaking” and “regulation.” For that to happen, they’d have to understand just how funny-odd a category regulation is.

Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsionto “get it right the next time around,” there at least be a next time (room) to make it—this revision of categories—better. Ensuring (risking) there is a next time is the way we keep open to—empty for—the feeling and living and participating that, in the process, push conventional notions of regulation to the periphery, changing their milieux, rendering regulation less and less meaningful and thus returning it as a concept and instrument to us re-freshed and re-wondered about; in short: recasted.

Again, how so? Let’s jump into Ammons’s deep-end one last time:

Yield to the tantalizing mechanism:
fall, trusting and centered as a
drive, falling into the poem:
line by line pile entailments on,
arrive willfully in the deepest

fix: then, the thing is done, turn
round in the mazy terror and
question, outsmart the mechanism:
find the glide over-reaching or
dismissing—halter it into

a going concern so the wing
muscles at the neck’s base work
urgency’s compression and
openness breaks out lofting
you beyond all binds and terminals.
(TCP1, 535)

(You may want to re-read the poem one more time. I return to that “deepest//fix” momentarily.)

Ammons commented on this poem, “The Swan Ritual”: “The invention of a poem frequently is how to find a way to resolve the complications that you’ve gotten yourself into. I have a little poem about this that says that the poem begins as life does, takes on complications as novels do, and at some point, stops. Something has to be invented before you can work your way out of it, and that’s what happens at the very center of a poem”.

Ammons touches on the major implication extended here: If rendering any regulation useless takes us closer to reinventing what “regulation” is, so too reinventing “regulation” can render an existing regulation useless. Regulating to reduce risk and inequality or improve economic growth and statecraft is that way we rethink these ends so to make those other means or ends no longer useful.

To rethink (revise, redescribe, rescript, recast, refashion, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to resituate—make room for—the cognitive limits of “knowing” that matter. (Think by way of different examples pastiche in visual art or remixing in dub reggae.) This is to renew, as in re-render, re-know and re-understand. The eye is no longer fixed on where it had settled before, but with a new focal point in sight (this being today’s version of our wager on redemption). That, truly, is the fix we want to be in, “the deepest//fix.” It is where wonder renders dread incomplete, where knowledge is unlearned, where knowledgeable gives way to refreshened inexperience, and, in Ammons’s astonishing lines, “where what has always happened and what/has never happened before seem for an instant reconciled”.

---

Principal sources:

Ammons, A.R. (1996). Set In Motion: Essays, Interviews, & Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr, The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI.

—————— (2017). The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955 – 1977 and Volume 2 1978 – 2005. Edited by Robert M. West with an Introduction by Helen Vendler. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY. [The volumes are referred to in the blog entry as TCP1 and TCP2, respectively.]

Howard, R. (1980). Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. Atheneum: New York, NY. Rilke, R.M. (1988). Selected Letters 1902-1926. Transl. R.F.C. Hull, Quartet Encounters, Quartet Books: London.

Rilke, R.M. (1988). Selected Letters 1902-1926. Transl. R.F.C. Hull, Quartet Encounters, Quartet Books: London.

I

When I started out in rural development in the early 1970s, one challenge was to manage for optimal ignorance: Professionals should manage to the point where what they are learning is not worth knowing. Learning need take them only to where what they don’t know doesn’t add or subtract value for their acting now. Managing for optimal ignorance and its variants got a good deal of press from a range of writers at that time, notably social scientists Warren Ilchmann and Norman Uphoff, the development scholar Robert Chambers, and Peter Berger the sociologist.

The appeal of optimal ignorance waned when I implemented projects that I had helped plan. On those occasions, I’d find myself mulling over what my first boss, the district commissioner, told me when I arrived in rural Botswana: “A piece of advice, my dear boy. Either stay in the kitchen all the time or never go in.” Nothing major gets implemented as planned, and only by staying in implementation (later, management) did I appreciate how little I knew with my formal education in public policy analysis. 

My view is that “optimize” should be banned, as a term, from policymaking and management. Like the dog returning to its vomit, optimality criteria are never satisfied in the imperfection of circumstance. But I didn’t fully understand that until later when I started researching large critical infrastructures, their control rooms and control operators. These large sociotechnical systems are so complex that their managers cannot really “know” what are inevitably unstudied conditions and their real-time inexperience and difficulties are permanent reminders of this. Optimizers with whom I’ve worked, on the other hand, seemed to think it’s better to burn the building down to save the rest of us the trouble of repairing it.

Yes, of course, studying and adapting to unknown unknowns are important and that’s why the idea of “chipping away at ignorance” is not all just hubris. But control room operators are attuned to stay out of unstudied conditions not because some things are not worth knowing but for the opposite reason: No way can these professionals afford to be in prolonged ignorance when the safe and continuous provision of critical services, like water and electricity, is paramount. “[I]f the grid fails and there are blackouts, people die,” one control room executive told us. Control rooms put up with uncertainties they can live with in order to avoid unknown unknowns they can’t or mustn’t tolerate.

II

But you press: What could be more respectful of complexity than managing and learning adaptively? Change course as uncertainties are reduced and more is learned. No one can be against learning, right?

That may be true as far as it goes, but even then it doesn’t go far enough. Here’s a story from my time as an advisor in Kenya. I had oversight responsibilities for a handful of integrated rural development projects in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid districts. One of the worst projects, in my judgment, was fixed around soil and water conservation measures. You asked villagers there what their three most important development priorities were and they’d say: water, water, water. Water for drinking, water for cooking, water for their livestock, water for everything that mattered in their daily lives. Here instead the donor was spending a fortune on ditches and bunds to prevent soil erosion on the hillsides primarily for crop purposes, without any direct increase in water supply for the households.

Unsurprisingly, villagers just wouldn’t “participate” in the project: Food-for-work schemes didn’t work, giving them hoes or such didn’t work, nothing worked. Later on, I tracked down one of the project’s designer and asked: “Why ever was the project designed that way? Absolutely no one there was for soil and water conservation.” It was like he’d been waiting years for someone to ask him that question. He leaned forward, “But who can be against soil and water conservation?”

So too for managing adaptively: Who, really, can be against it? Why, that would be like arguing against norms of rationality, the scientific method or evidence-based policymaking, worse yet trial and error learning.

III

Yet, as with soil and water conservation and other projects, we must ask: managing adaptively for what? And here too, what is often desired is its own version of high reliability water, water, water—reliable water for urban use, for agricultural use, for ecosystem rehabilitation and the environment; for ports, for shipping lanes, for recreation, for hydropower, for…you name it, water is needed for it. And a very great deal of that provision depends on large-scale water supplies, electricity supplies and other infrastructures—which is why I keep coming back to their importance.

Obviously, control room operators of large infrastructures (and not all critical infrastructures have control rooms) are from time to time pushed into the unknown unknowns by contingent events. (In case it needs saying, unknown unknowns have been contingent in the myriad ways past “unobservables” have been, e.g., Epicurean atomism, phlogiston, and aether.) It turns out that to ask really-existing control room operators—“What if the unimaginable happened?”—is not to ask something new or unusual in systemwide control centers. The fact of the matter is that all manner of people all across the world are having to imagine the unimaginable and think the unthinkable, and acting upon that without recourse to faith-based “Innovation will get us out of the mess we’re in.”

But it’s still too easy to confuse being pushed into ignorance unwillingly with a much valorized albeit half-blind trial and error learning that places a premium on “testing” unstudied conditions intentionally. (Not to worry when being “fully creative, imaginative, and inspired” means being bereft of vigilance and self-reflection at the same time!)

For control operators, real time is too important to experiment in when their first error ends up being our final system trial. The last thing we want is our airplane pilots “to embrace failure” mid-flight, notwithstanding all those anodyne business and management articles on the virtues of error, failure and unstudied conditions. Too much of that privileging borders on modern-day priestcraft, miracle-mongering, and the criminal.

I

Certainty has such a strong place in politics not just because it serves as the preferred foundation/platform from which to act, but also because certainty supports and drives the belief that any such choice to act can be superlative, i.e., serve as the best or superior or optimal course of action.

A key part of the challenge of a politics of uncertainty is to insist superior and superlative are still achievable, and not in a diminished sense of the economist’s “second best.” The challenge is to show, with and through examples, where superlative and best are not only really-existing in the midst uncertainty, but also how uncertainty’s superlative and best are better than so many of certainty’s counterparts.

II

Each of us probably has our own examples. Three additional pathways ahead are, I feel, under-acknowledged and deserve further consideration:

• The first is to underscore how certainty can truly mislead, whatever your starting point, as in: Francois Jacob, Nobel Laureate, reflecting that “Our breakthrough was the result of ‘night science’: a stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world that relies on intuition as much as it does on the cold, orderly logic of ‘day science’”. As in: Nothing quite smacks of certainty as do habits, inhibitions and defense mechanisms. As in: We all know of revered ideals that ended in irrelevance. As in: Humans are never fully in the present; we are ourselves now, but reserve other of our intermittent selves for later action. As in: When in doubt, make the puzzle bigger.

• The second pathway is to recognize the impossible is never perforce a bar to action in the face of uncertainty. Here is Richard Falk writing on the critic and Palestinian activist, Edward Said: “To dedicate action to achieve the impossible should never be a matter of optimistic false consciousness. It is rather a recognition that there is no way for the rational mind, in light of present circumstances, to figure out a solution that accords with the postulates of a just peace. Yet at the same time there are present moral and political imperatives of carrying on the struggle to reach such a solution, because the future is unknowable and the present circumstance of occupation, oppression, dispossession, and dispersal intolerable.” The insight, I take it, is that we might well be in a position to do something but not know it until we start trying (a position also associated with economist, A.O. Hirschman)..

• A third way ahead is to insist that uncertainty is real and unavoidable and that this “certainty of uncertainty” looks nothing like the certainties offered up by the political class and deskoid pundits. Lines from one of Norman MacCaig’s poems make the point:

Who owns this landscape? –
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape? –
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?

False questions, for
this landscape is
masterless
and intractable in any terms
that are human.