Shoring up Fragments: Resisting "Change"

In the dismal gloom of the present historical moment, it's hard not to be ambivalent about change.

Change, itself, has become a commodity; Change Management is an academic discipline. Certified Change Management Professionals implement "strategies and plans that maximize employee adoption and minimize resistance." They work to "drive faster adoption, higher ultimate utilization of and proficiency with the changes that impact employees" ("Change Management"). This makes them sound a bit like overseers in a neoliberal re-education camp, but clearly they are needed since, as the internet confidently asserts, people resist change. Many claim that there is some genetic predisposition for this intransigence, or, more precisely, they claim that "fear of change is evolutionary in humans" ("Fear"). Very many claim this, since that exact phrase yields almost four hundred Google hits, which either says something about the strength of the endorsement or about how "facts" proliferate on the internet. But there may also be other reasons for our fear of change. Anywhere between five and twelve other reasons, depending on which internet list-maker you consult. There is considerable variation among these, but most agree that our reluctance stems from what the listers consider irrational human weaknesses, like the desire for a secure job whose terms of employment aren't constantly shifting, which is apparently something "low performers" want (Torben).

In the world of "disruptive innovation," change, especially technological change, is figured as a necessity: as a Reuter's "Report on Innovative Universities" puts it, "In the fast-changing world of science and technology, if you're not innovating, you're falling behind" (Ewalt). Thus, anyone not subscribing to the Facebook doctrine of Move Fast and Break Things is a weak pathetic creature apt to be swept aside by the relentless tide of history.

To make matters worse, the rate of change, according to Google futurist and business guru Ray Kurzweil, is fated to become "exponential": "We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century," Kurzweil informs us, "it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)." A Google search of this exact statement ("We won't experience 100 years"), in all its defiantly flagrant hyperbole, yields more than ten thousand hits, making it as close to a truth universally acknowledged as … well, as anything really.

In this world of inevitable and ever-increasing change, "transition" colludes in a kind of ideological skulduggery, coating a bitter change in a sweeter, more palatable euphemism. It belongs in that mental universe, over the rainbow, where "problems" melt like lemon drops and become "issues" or "challenges." There ought to be name for this trope. Would it be the Litotes of Human Capital Resource Management? The Meiosis of Institutional Misery? Of course, transition does denote a major transformation, "a passing … from one condition to another" ("Transition"). But it can be used to suggest something more evolutionary: a slow easy slide rather than an abrupt shift: a smooth transition, a gradual change. Thus the need for "strong transition assistance," recommended by the Harvard Business Review, to mitigate the pain of a layoff, to smooth over what is no mere transition at all, because "Sometimes the threat is real: Change … can hurt" (Kanter).

So, to summarize, change is inevitable and potentially painful; its pace, ever-accelerating, and our fears of it, natural. In other words, we are doomed to live in a constant state of increasing distress about something potentially very unpleasant that we are powerless to control. With such a future, and with the present full of ever-diminishing expectations, resistance seems limited to a doomed-to-fail attempt at shoring up whatever fragments we can against the ruins of a grim, inevitable progress.

Against this model of change, I would like to offer a counter example, one less bleakly determinist. In a recent issue of English Studies in Canada, forty scholars were asked to identify "a work, idea, or event of cthe past forty years that has been key to the project of literary, cultural, and theoretical inquiry" (O'Driscoll and Simpson 1). The results, "The Forty on Forty Project...