"Who we are is what we can't be talked out of" Adam Phillips
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?”
1. Climate emergency parsed through a poem by Jorie Graham
–I liken one of our complexity challenges to that of reading Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain” as if it were still part of the news (it had been written less than two weeks after the sinking of the Titanic).
So too the challenge of reading the first sequence of poems in Jorie Graham’s Fast (2017, Ecco HarperCollinsPublishers). The 17 pages are extraordinary, not just because of pulse driving her lines, but also for what she evokes. In her unfamiliar words, “we are in systemcide”.
–To read the sequence—“Ashes,” “Honeycomb,” “Deep Water Trawling,” and five others—is to experience all manner of starts—“I spent a lifetime entering”—and conjoined ends (“I say too early too late”) with nary a middle in between (“Quick. You must make up your/answer as you made up your//question.”)
Because hers is no single story, she sees no need to explain or explicate. By not narrativizing the systemcide into the architecture of beginning, middle and end, she prefers, I think, evoking the experience of now-time as end-time:
action unfolded in no temporality--->anticipation floods us but we/never were able--->not for one instant--->to inhabit time…
She achieves the elision with long dashes or —>; also series of nouns without commas between; and questions-as-assertions no longer needing question marks (“I know you can/see the purchases, but who is it is purchasing me—>can you please track that…”). Enjambment and lines sliced off by wide spaces also remind us things are not running.
–Her lines push and pull across the small bridges of those dashes and arrows. To read this way is to feel, for me, what French poet and essayist, Paul Valery, described in a 1939 lecture:
Each word, each one of the words that allow us to cross the space of a thought so quickly, and follow the impetus of an idea which rates its own expression, seems like one of those light boards thrown across a ditch or over a mountain crevasse to support the passage of a man in quick motion. But may he pass lightly, without stopping—and especially may he not loiter to dance on the thin board to try its resistance! The frail bridge at once breaks or falls, and all goes down into the depths.
The swiftness with which I cross her bridges is my experience of the rush of crisis. I even feel pulled forward to phrases and lines that I haven’t read yet. Since this is my experience of systems going wrong, it doesn’t matter to me whether Graham is a catastrophizer or not. She takes the certainties and makes something still new.
–I disagree about the crisis—for me, it has middles with more the mess of contingencies and aftermath than beginnings and ends—but that in no way diminishes or circumscribes my sense she’s right when it comes to systemcide: “You have to make it not become/waiting…”
2. Global Climate Sprawl
You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet. . .It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.
I suggest that Global Climate Change isn’t just a bad mess; it’s a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it, awful mess of getting it wrong, again and again. To my mind, GCC is a hot mess–both senses of the term–now sprawled all over place and time. It is inextricably, remorselessly part and parcel of “living way too expansively, generously.”
GCC’s the demonstration of a stunningly profligate human nature. You see the sheer sprawl of it all in the epigraph, Philip Roth’s rant from American Pastoral. So too the elder statesman in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous play admits,
The many many mistakes I have made
My whole life through, mistake upon mistake,
The mistaken attempts to correct mistakes
By methods which proved to be equally mistaken.
That missing comma between “many many” demonstrates the excess: After a point, we no longer can pause, with words and thoughts rushing ahead. (That the wildly different Philip Roth and T.S. Eliot are together on this point indicates the very real mess it is.)
That earlier word, sprawl, takes us to a more magnanimous view of what is going on, as in Les Murray’s “The Quality of Sprawl”:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home…
This extravagance and profligacy–the waste–are not ornery contrarianism. For poet, Robert Frost, “waste is another name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage”. If I had my druthers, rename it, “GCS:” Global Climate Sprawl.
3. Power is where it belongs in opera
The last link below is to a very accomplished production of the opera, Il Giustino, by Antonio Vivaldi. There’s lots of stuff about this power of this opera, e.g. from online sources:
Il Giustino relates the appearance of the goddess Fortune to the peasant Giustino, his rise to leadership of the Byzantine army and the defeat of a Scythian army under Vitaliano, and the jealousy of the emperor Anastasio, who suspects Giustino of having designs on his wife Arianna and on the throne itself. misunderstandings straightened out for a peasant to be proclaimed emperor? https://operavision.eu/performance/il-giustino
Love, eroticism, jealousy and intrigue, war and violence, lust for power, tests of courage and great visions: Antonio Vivaldi’s »Il Giustino« offers an action-packed and emotionally charged stage spectacle about the young farmer Giustino’s rise to the apex of Roman politics. https://www.staatsoper-berlin.de/en/veranstaltungen/il-giustino.11043/
As the opera is long, those who can afford 20 minutes to get a sense of what’s on store try from 1:08.20 minutes – 1:28.16 minutes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cur90vb_5ko&list=RDcur90vb_5ko&start_radio=1 (for those who seek intelligible English subtitles, go to Settings, then Auto-Generate, and click on “English”)
4. War
–I finish reading the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, which discussed a poet I don’t remember reading before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” from World War I and the following lines:
What did they expect of our toil and extreme Hunger - the perfect drawing of a heart's dream? Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection, Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger, When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….
The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminded me of an anecdote from John Ashbery, the poet, in an essay of his:
Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s decade—his form of hunger—did indeed produce the perfect drawing. Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me, however, of very different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):
Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’
I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, what can be more perfect than the image that emerges, infallibly and unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?
–Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to each question. War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living: Somehow together, and find this too was life.
Ashbery records poet, David Schubert, saying of the great Robert Frost: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”
5. An intertextual long run
I’m first asking you to look and listen to one of my favorites, a short video clip of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andreas Scholl singing the duet, “I embrace you,” from a Handel opera (the English translation can be found at the end of the clip’s Comments):
Antonacci’s performance will resonate for some with the final scene in Sunset Boulevard, where Gloria Swanson, as the actress Norma Desmond, walks down the staircase toward the camera. But intertextuality–that two-way semi-permeability between genres–is also at work. Antonacci brings the opera diva into Swanson’s actress as much as the reverse, and to hell with anachronism and over-the-top.
–Let’s now bring semi-permeable intertextuality closer to public policy and management. Zakia Salime (2022) provides a rich case study of refusal and resistance by Moroccan villagers to nearby silver mining–in her case, parsed through the lens of what she calls a counter-archive:
My purpose is to show how this embodied refusal. . .was productive of a lived counter-archive that documented, recorded and narrated the story of silver mining through the lens of lived experience. . . .Oral poetry (timnadin), short films, petitions, letters and photographs of detainees disrupted the official story of mining ‘as development’ in state officials’ accounts, with a collection of rebellious activities that exposed the devastation of chemical waste, the diversion of underground water, and the resulting dry collective landholdings. Audio-visual material and documents are still available on the movement’s Moroccan Facebook page, on YouTube and circulating on social media platforms. The [village] water protectors performed refusal and produced it as a living record that assembled bodies, poetic testimonials, objects and documents
What, though, when the status quo is itself a counter-archive? Think of all the negative tweets, billions and billions and billions of them. Think of all negative comments on politics, dollars and jerks in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. That is, think of these status quo repositories as a counter-archive of “status-quo critique and dissent.”
–So what? Consider now the status quo as archives and counter-archives across multiple media that can be thought of as semi-permeable and in two-way traffic over time and space.
This raises an interesting possibility: a new kind of long-run that is temporally long because it is presently intertextual, indefinitely forwards and back and across different genres. As in: “the varieties of revolution do not know the secrets of the futures, but proceed as the varieties of capitalism do, exploiting every opening that presents itself”–to paraphrase political philosopher, Georges Sorel–who, importantly for the point here, could not know all secrets of the past either.
6. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”
I
What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manifesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.
But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are always immanent. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.
What to do? One answer is in Lucretius:
quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata; . . .verum positura discrepitant res. (Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
That is, an answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead. An example is found in II that follows.
II
"Who we are is what we can't be talked out of" Adam Phillips
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?” https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12478
7. Colonial violence, domestic violence: an example of how genre, juxtaposition and intertext matter.
1. “The Canto of the Colonial Soldier” (sung in English with French subtitles). From the opera, Shell Shock, by Nicholas Lens (libretto by Nick Cave) from 3.25 minutes to 10.00 minutes in the following link:
2. “IT” (Scene XI) from the opera, Innocence, by Kaija Saariaho (multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barrière of the original Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen) from 44.25 minutes to 49.33 minutes in the following link.
This particular scene is about a mass school killing, sung by the students and in different languages. You will want to read the English translation before watching the clip.
Saariaho stipulates that the Shooter should not appear on stage at any time, while the Colonial Soldier is the first shooter to be heard in Lens’s work.
Paramilitary officers stationed down Mount Alebban kept the [Moroccan] villagers in check, documenting every move up and down the mount by protestors and clandestine visitors. Signs and banners were drawn on walls and floors at the camp, and sculpted on rocks, producing the [camp] as a site of resistance and refusal: ‘We refuse the depletion of our resources’, ‘we refuse‘ to bow’, ‘this is our land’, ‘we have rights’, ‘we are not leaving’. . .
To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726
And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical beginning
[Maurice] Blanchot contributed a short text entitled “The Refusal.” “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight”. . . Blanchot refused. He said no. A “firm, unwavering, strict” no. Blanchot not only rejected de Gaulle, but politics in general. It was what he later described as “a total critique,” directed against the techno-political order of politics and the state. . . .
Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .
[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)
Huh?A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal
This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. . . .
The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:
Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter? Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave. Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar). Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Syria. We want to live in a people’s democracy. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Italy.
. . . even though theories of liberal deliberative democracy either historicize or imagine people connecting with an abstracted concept of the public through the affordances of literacy, capitalism, and technological advancement, the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)
Another way of looking at this
It’s those different worldviews in “What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews” that call to mind the cultural theory of the late Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas.
For them and their students, different worldviews consist of four basic cultures: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist. Each is defined by where people locate themselves in terms of the degree of social constraints and prescriptions they face (‘‘grid’’, high and low; strong or weak) and the degree of group cohesion with which they act (‘‘group’’, high and low; strong or weak).
“Each way of life needs each of its rivals, either to make up for its deficiencies, or to exploit, or to define itself against” Were high group/low grid egalitarians to eliminate low-group/low grid individualists, for instance, “their lack of a target to be against would remove the justification for their strong [high] group boundary and thus undermine their way of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 4). Or to take the meeting participants in the Tunisian case: While in conventional-culture terms they are all Muslims, they could be redescribed as differing in basic worldviews, some being more individualist (the principal questioner) or hierarchical (the facilitators) than others.
What is of interest to us here, though, is that shared tangency among the four cultures where they meet together in the two-by-two typology. “For a few individuals there is a fifth possible way of life, one in which the individual withdraws from coercive or manipulative social involvement altogether. This is the way of life of the hermit, who escapes social control by refusing to control others or to be controlled by others…” (Ibid, 7). While the terms, “withdraws” and “refusing,” capture what we have been discussing, that term, “hermit,” misleads. Those at the meeting know enough about their neighbors different worldviews to know what to withdraw from and refuse to talk about. They’ve already reached the point of knowing when worldviews are incommensurable. (If you think that latter point is depressing, keep in mind that one major reason why Wildavsky, a senior US political scientist, took such an interest in cultural theory was because it kept alive the notion of pluralism.)
So what?
Sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.
The opposite of tolerance as just defined isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.
What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia and other cases.
In its most policy-relevant sense, this kind of caring centers on maintenance and repair of the public sphere. It is knowing enough about others to know that saying to them, “Good God, man, get a grip; we’re adults here,” gets you nowhere, while knowing all the time that these ensuing areas of non-discussion leave the remaining public sphere in need of constant repair. Some might call this repair arising from refusal, tact (see Russell 2018, 1 – 11).
It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us (Stevenson 2017, 106). We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another.
(Other sources:
Russell, D. (2018). Tact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.)
Maybe you’ve heard of this innovation in economic development, but I hadn’t until I read:
China’s “Taobao Villages” offer compelling counterevidence that digital financial services, when combined with comprehensive support ecosystems, can fundamentally transform rural economies. From a modest beginning in 2009 with just three pilot villages, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially. By 2022, it had encompassed 7,780 rural communities across 28 Chinese provinces (Chu et al. 2023; Komatsu and Suzuki 2025). These villages, officially defined as localities where at least 10% of households engage in e-commerce and generate combined annual revenues exceeding RMB 10 million, produced over RMB 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 180 billion) in sales by 2021 (Qi, Zheng, and Guo 2019; Lin and Tao 2024; Wang 2022). Their evolution from isolated agricultural communities into dynamic participants in global supply chains represents a profound transformation in their economic landscape. https://www.cigionline.org/publications/from-rural-villages-to-global-markets-policy-lessons-from-chinas-taobao-villages-for-digital-finance/
“Wow,” I thought. The numbers are impressive. A “profound transformation” is what we’re looking for. But then there’s the “global supply chains” reference. Critics of international capital aren’t going to like that.
My suspicions were reinforced as I read further. At the heart of the policy brief is this description of the key innovation:
Central to the Taobao ecosystem’s ability to drive inclusive growth is its alternative approach to finance, which transforms behavioural data into a new form of collateral. This innovation has unlocked access to credit for millions of entrepreneurs who were previously considered “unbankable” by the traditional financial system.
The engine of this transformation is MYbank, a digital bank launched by Ant Group in 2015. MYbank operates on a fully automated “3-1-0” lending model: loan applications are completed online in 3 minutes, an approval decision is rendered in 1 second, and the entire process involves 0 human intervention (Chataing and Kushnir 2018; Huang et al. 2020). The core innovation lies in how MYbank assesses creditworthiness. Instead of relying on physical collateral or formal credit histories, its proprietary algorithms analyze a multidimensional array of real-time behavioural data generated within the Alibaba ecosystem. This includes transaction volumes, customer satisfaction ratings, payment patterns, and supply chain relationships. This data-rich environment enables the system to create a highly accurate and dynamic picture of a small business’s health and repayment capacity. Therefore, a merchant’s digital reputation and transaction history become a form of “digital collateral.”
The impact of this model has been profound. By the end of 2023, MYbank had served over 53 million small and micro-enterprises (Business Wire 2024). The average loan size, approximately RMB 72,000 (USD 10,000), is tailored specifically to the working capital needs of these micro-enterprises (Luo 2019).
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the model’s effectiveness is its ability to de-risk a population that conventional banks deemed too risky to serve. MYbank has consistently maintained a non-performing loan (NPL) ratio of around 1 – 2%. This performance is significantly better than the NPL ratios often associated with traditional SME lending, which have historically been much higher in China (Business Wire 2020). This success reveals a fundamental truth: rural SMEs were not inherently “unbankable”; they were simply “undatafiable” by the old financial system. The problem was not the borrowers’ creditworthiness but the lenders’ inability to see it. The Taobao model effectively created a new asset class (reputational capital) and, in doing so, solved one of the most intractable problems in development finance.
Oops, don’t the brief’s authors know about the universal criticism of platform capitalism, of financialization, assetization and datification, all of which is worse than the old-time Fordist commodification. . . Talk about embedding poor people into international capital!
But then I take a deep breath and look to the invariably missing piece in these critiques–the granularity of agency, the particularity of being.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone researching these transactions years from now. You know like the researchers who find that money loaned is not all debt, that this provides resources for building and keeping social networks, that some people who get credit are very creative about what they do with these multi-valent resources, that financialization, assetization and datafication are not one-way only, that more than 7,500 communities over 25 provinces are not a homogenous population, and that big numbers like these have wide distributions and variation that has to be explained precisely because they matter for really-existing policy and management.
Suggested reading: C. Velasco and J. Willis (2024). “Saving, inheritance and future-making in 1940s Kenya.” Past & Present 267(1): 211–241. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae013
In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, political writer and social theorist William Davies bemoans the fact that:
To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century
Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve worked on issues and jobs in development where the driving ethos included “circumvent the world of academia altogether”.
Well, yes, of course, that’s true, but thinking it through shows how usefully more complex the actual points are.
Following an earthquake or major fire, infrastructure may well be rebuilt to better, current standards. Yes, it would have been more cost-effective to have done so beforehand, but that “would” is a very deceptive “would.”
The intervening variable is the well-documented prevention cycle, where preventative budgets increase only after a major disaster but thereafter taper off as the initial hype declines (Heerma van Voss 2023). I take this to mean that the counterfactual–the really-existing next best alternative–to just before the next disaster isn’t undertaking the otherwise delayed mitigation but rather experiencing different versions of the already-existing path dependency of tapered-off budgets.
If the latter is true, then the real issue of cost-effectiveness centers on undertaking the mitigation as soon as possible after the disaster, e.g., starting in immediate response and initial service restoration. Why? Because, pace the prevention cycle, more funds are likely to be available earlier rather than later.
Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as a complex infrastructure in its own right and globally so, an sharper contrast emerges: While governments seek to modernize their economies and societies by ridding themselves of longstanding pastoralist systems, global infrastructure equity firms and infrastructure debt funds at the same time are assetizing and securitizing more and more local, regional and national infrastructures for financial returns.
Now, of course, the treatment of livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks or rangeland as assets has been an undeniable feature of pastoralism. But the question here is: “Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures?” My answer: not entirely, and significantly so.
Start with the fact that the current literature on infrastructure financialization focuses on how schools, health facilities, police and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.
Why then are persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, stationary health facilities, and large livestock projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization.
Or to put the point from a different, more positive direction: By viewing pastoralism as infrastructure, do we invoke a longer-term at work than would be the case, were its assets rendered turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in markets and finance? In this view, the benchmark to compare pastoralist systems aren’t those fabled optimizations of livestock ranches and dairy businesses but rather the fully asssetized “co-living community dwelling sector” with its individual beds to rent and shared work spaces to contract.
Inter-infrastructural cascades may be more granular with respect to duration and open to management than assumed in formal modeling and some planning. Certainly, interviewees in our recent research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest described major emergencies as more punctuated than as single headlong rush of disasters.
Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen and were observed in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina and, later, in northern Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Yet cascade models by and large assume an unmanaged, near-immediate escalation in failure probabilities and consequences across interconnected systems. Really-existing infrastructures, like water, electricity and telecommunications, are however managed. Individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operations to failure across systems can be a punctuated duration.
This means there is a granularity in both space and time between infrastructures in which reliability management can make a difference in the probability of failure of an individual infrastructure and failure across infrastructures. To put the point from the opposite direction, some of the recorded near misses and close calls demonstrate that operators have the time, albeit sometimes just in time, to prevent (significantly more) knock-on effects from initial disruptions or outright failures.
This means that any assumption that infrastructures are not managed in failure is highly misleading. In many cases neither infrastructure control rooms nor their reliability contributions disappear during or after a large system failure. This also means disaster response actually begins in the infrastructures.
It begins before the formal activation of the emergency management infrastructure with its Incident Command System (ICS), such as incident management teams (IMTs) and emergency operations centers (EOCs). “When the M9 hits,” said a city water distribution manager, “my group, we’re going to be the first in. . .We’re the first responders for the water system. I may even have to call someone who lives nearby and tell them to drive up to our major water tank and close the shut-off valve.”
Sources: The above is a slightly edited consolidated extract from:
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf).
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2016). Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. Stanford Business Books: Stanford CA.
To be clear: hope is not optimism. Hope makes no forecasts at all. Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene. Yet one thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: if we succumb to the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost. https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-true-left-is-not-woke/
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. https://www.academia.edu/17856043/Edward_Said_s_Legacy_and_the_Palestinian_Struggle_by_Richard_Falk
While philosopher Susan Neiman and international law expert Richard Falk, respectively, are talking about very different issues, the two quotes agree that optimism just doesn’t cut it for some cases. Hope is called for because those issues resist rational decision-making; but at that very moment basic morality still requires our response to change things. Consequently, hope as a basic moral response comes to the fore.
I’m not sure I agree. I see the point about a blind-eye optimism. But I am not sure that the limits of rational understanding mean you have exhausted all other ways to redefine the issue for decision-making purposes. I mean, this is a planet of 8+ billion people. Indeed, I associate “hope” with these efforts to redefine “the facts on the ground,” if only because those facts are so heterogeneous. That there are no guarantees any such redefinitions work is also what I associate with hope.
But what does this mean, practically? My examples of hope are existing, already out there counternarratives to dominant issue definitions. To be clear, the four below are not optimistic. But neither are they obscene to consider in dire times when others insist we have not choice, morally, but to do x, y, and z.
1. The counternarrative few want to admit: The role of imagination is not to come up with a better future, but create contingencies for futures
A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. As early as 1985, Habermas voiced the concern that utopian energies were exhausted (Habermas 1985), and variations of this sentiment are often echoed in reference to the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. . . .
Against this backdrop, I propose the following starting definition of the role of imagination in critical theory: It is presented as a capacity that, at once, cannot be cut off from the social order (i.e., it is potentially ideological or delusional) while being often referred to as an element within the human psychodynamic that leaves open the possibility for transcending the social order. . . .
To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.
Which however means. . .
Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .
If there truly were a totality of the social order that inscribed itself perfectly into the psyche of every individual, not only would emancipatory change be impossible, but any form of change at all would be precluded— an evidently absurd notion. I rather think that attributing the possibility of change (i.e., contingencies in the social order) to an individual capacity implies that there are no social processes on the horizon for a critical theory to cling to (such as theorems like the diminishing rate of profit, etc.). In a sense, this way of thinking about imagination suggests that a better future is possible against all odds.
2. “So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die so I can be sustainable
To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]
The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).
Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end matters:
Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .
It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely. https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton
Once again, really-existing sustainability looks more like increasing those opportunities to response to unpredictable (read: Anthropocene) change without killing more than ourselves in the process.
3. Breaking up the United States
If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming 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.
Am I recommending all that? No.
What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference 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?)
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 and on the fly—are devised.
4. A counternarrative of “refusal” for rethinking social tolerance and the politics of care
Refusal as a political new beginning
Paramilitary officers stationed down Mount Alebban kept the [Moroccan] villagers in check, documenting every move up and down the mount by protestors and clandestine visitors. Signs and banners were drawn on walls and floors at the camp, and sculpted on rocks, producing the [camp] as a site of resistance and refusal: ‘We refuse the depletion of our resources’, ‘we refuse‘ to bow’, ‘this is our land’, ‘we have rights’, ‘we are not leaving’. . .
To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726
And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical beginning
[Maurice] Blanchot contributed a short text entitled “The Refusal.” “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight”. . . Blanchot refused. He said no. A “firm, unwavering, strict” no. Blanchot not only rejected de Gaulle, but politics in general. It was what he later described as “a total critique,” directed against the techno-political order of politics and the state. . . .
Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .
[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)
Huh?A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal
This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. . . .
The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:
Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter? Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave. Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar). Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Syria. We want to live in a people’s democracy. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Italy.
. . . even though theories of liberal deliberative democracy either historicize or imagine people connecting with an abstracted concept of the public through the affordances of literacy, capitalism, and technological advancement, the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)
Another way of looking at this
It’s those different worldviews in “What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews” that call to mind the cultural theory of the late Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas.
For them and their students, different worldviews consist of four basic cultures: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist. Each is defined by where people locate themselves in terms of the degree of social constraints and prescriptions they face (‘‘grid’’, high and low; strong or weak) and the degree of group cohesion with which they act (‘‘group’’, high and low; strong or weak).
“Each way of life needs each of its rivals, either to make up for its deficiencies, or to exploit, or to define itself against” Were high group/low grid egalitarians to eliminate low-group/low grid individualists, for instance, “their lack of a target to be against would remove the justification for their strong [high] group boundary and thus undermine their way of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 4). Or to take the meeting participants in the Tunisian case: While in conventional-culture terms they are all Muslims, they could be redescribed as differing in basic worldviews, some being more individualist (the principal questioner) or hierarchical (the facilitators) than others.
What is of interest to us here, though, is that shared tangency among the four cultures where they meet together in the two-by-two typology. “For a few individuals there is a fifth possible way of life, one in which the individual withdraws from coercive or manipulative social involvement altogether. This is the way of life of the hermit, who escapes social control by refusing to control others or to be controlled by others…” (Ibid, 7). While the terms, “withdraws” and “refusing,” capture what we have been discussing, that term, “hermit,” misleads. Those at the meeting know enough about their neighbors different worldviews to know what to withdraw from and refuse to talk about. They’ve already reached the point of knowing when worldviews are incommensurable. (If you think that latter point is depressing, keep in mind that one major reason why Wildavsky, a senior US political scientist, took such an interest in cultural theory was because it kept alive the notion of pluralism.)
So what?
Sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.
The opposite of tolerance as just defined isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.
What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia and other cases.
In its most policy-relevant sense, this kind of caring centers on maintenance and repair of the public sphere. It is knowing enough about others to know that saying to them, “Good God, man, get a grip; we’re adults here,” gets you nowhere, while knowing all the time that these ensuing areas of non-discussion leave the remaining public sphere in need of constant repair. Some might call this repair arising from refusal, tact (see Russell 2018, 1 – 11).
It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us (Stevenson 2017, 106). We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another.
(Other sources:
Russell, D. (2018). Tact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 