Performative governance: Difference between revisions

“Performative” is a voguish word, and if the learned author thinks she’s discovered something new — that administrators manage [[second-order derivative]]s and [[Proxy|proxies]] of their political problems rather than engaging in the political problems themselves — she would do herself a favour by reading {{author|James C. Scott}}, {{author|Jane Jacobs}}, {{author|W. Edwards Deming}} and others who have been articulating these ideas for seventy or more years — but ''since'' its fashionable, and since it ''is'' bang-on the money, let’s go with it.

With — perhaps — a spin. You perform governance, generally, by approximating it: creating crude, two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations of a four-dimensional<ref>Yes: ''four'', and I don’t even need to exceed Euclidean geometry to get there: governance propositions mutate over ''time''.</ref>reality which is genuinely ineffable: with social systems there is never the necessary information, nor boundaries, for any simplistic representation to work.  

Modern administration is not performative in the sense of being ''fictional'', but irresponsibly ''lazy'':  the [[modernist]] disposition is to see calamity as a function of low-level human foible: as ''operator error''. If the errors, inconstancies and misapprehensions of human frailty could only be excised, then orderly good governance would surely follow. Thus; administrators are never to blame: it’s the [[meatware]]. But then, why pay the big bucks to middle managers? Administration is easy: you just have to weed out the bad apples. If you don’t you’ve failed; if you do, your administrative role is reduced to one of [[human resources]].<ref>Thinks: ''waaaaaaaait a minute.''</ref>