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Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions
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Any government must be able to “read” and thus “get a handle on” — hence, “make [[legible]]” — and so ''administrate'' the vast sprawling ''detail'' and myriad of ''interconnections'' between its citizens, lands and resources. It does this by, in its “statey” way, [[Narrative|narratising]] a bafflingly [[complex system]] into a thin, idealistic model: it assigns its citizens permanent identities (in the middle ages, literally, by giving them surnames: now, identity cards and the, er, chips that are shortly to be implanted in our foreheads); it decrees standard weights and measures for all times and places (we may have proceeded by local customs and conventions;<ref>It is said Chinese farmers gauged distance by “the time it takes to boil rice”, which provides a different, and more practical means of comprehending how far away you are</ref> commissions cadastral surveys of the land so it can collect taxes; it records land holdings, registers births, deaths and marriages, imposes conventions of language and legal discourse designs cities and transport networks: in effect, to create a standard grid that could be measured, monitored and understood from the bird’s eye view of city hall. A population that legible is ''manipulable''. | Any government must be able to “read” and thus “get a handle on” — hence, “make [[legible]]” — and so ''administrate'' the vast sprawling ''detail'' and myriad of ''interconnections'' between its citizens, lands and resources. It does this by, in its “statey” way, [[Narrative|narratising]] a bafflingly [[complex system]] into a thin, idealistic model: it assigns its citizens permanent identities (in the middle ages, literally, by giving them surnames: now, identity cards and the, er, chips that are shortly to be implanted in our foreheads); it decrees standard weights and measures for all times and places (we may have proceeded by local customs and conventions;<ref>It is said Chinese farmers gauged distance by “the time it takes to boil rice”, which provides a different, and more practical means of comprehending how far away you are</ref> commissions cadastral surveys of the land so it can collect taxes; it records land holdings, registers births, deaths and marriages, imposes conventions of language and legal discourse designs cities and transport networks: in effect, to create a standard grid that could be measured, monitored and understood from the bird’s eye view of city hall. A population that legible is ''manipulable''. | ||
This cost of this legibility is ''abridgement'': it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn | This cost of this legibility is ''abridgement'': it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn impact how citizens interact with each other and their environment. But, as we know they do. Citizens account for their income to optimise their tax position. When adminstrators levied a window tax — reasoning that the number of windows is proportionate to the size of a building, and therefore a fair [[proxy]] — citizens redesign houses to have as few windows as possible, notwithstanding adverse consequences to the general health of the population. Modern society is shot through with similar arbitrary rules wherever government interacts with its citizenry. Through their combined effect society comes to be ''remade'' to suit the administrator, but not always in ways the administrator might have had in mind. Society is the archetypal system: arbitrarily diverting its natural stocks and flows only creates other feedback loops. | ||
Scott is persuasive that we lose something critical when we simplify in our yen for clear description, which state officials cannot but do. Trying to covert local customs — “a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances — including, of course, power relations” — to unalterable laws loses subtlety and micro-adjustments that these customs | Scott is persuasive that we lose something critical when we simplify in our yen for clear description, which state officials cannot but do. Trying to covert local customs — “a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances — including, of course, power relations” — to unalterable laws loses the subtlety and scope for micro-adjustments that these customs, if left to themselves, continually experience. | ||
In other words, you lose something special when you atomise a [[complex system]]. [[Emergence|Emergent]] properties vanish. It is a poorer, less productive thing. | In other words, you lose something special when you atomise a [[complex system]]. [[Emergence|Emergent]] properties vanish. It is a poorer, less productive thing. | ||