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This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reading, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes, JC, I am. Now, [[get your coat]].”</ref> — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t. | This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reading, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes, JC, I am. Now, [[get your coat]].”</ref> — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t. | ||
{{br|Seeing Like a State}} is a ''tour de force'' — I can’t believe I actually said that in a book review, but there it is — against the will to bureaucracy, and takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician governorship can, in specific circumstances, lead to utter disaster. | {{br|Seeing Like a State}} is a ''tour de force'' — I can’t believe I actually said that in a book review, but there it is — against the will to bureaucracy, and takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician governorship can, in specific circumstances, lead to utter disaster. While the examples Scott cites in his book are legion one could, and some do, criticise Scott for an anecdotal approach: he has curated examples that best fit his thesis, and it therefore suffers from [[confirmation bias]]. That may be true, but I don’t think it matters, for Scott’s thesis, when set out, is so ''familiar'', so ''plausible'' and its exhortations so consistent with other theories in adjacent fields,<ref>{{Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} thjeory; [[Systems Theory]] as expounded by {{author|Donella H Meadows}}, {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}’s {{br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}} that it is hard to be bothered by his lack of empirical rigour. Data is not its value: its [[narrrative]] is its value. Scott is providing a counter-narrative to modern statist (and corporate) orthodoxy, and that in itself is valuable and enlightening. | ||
In any case, bureaucratic disaster is not inevitable, but the same four conditions are present wherever we find it: A will to bend nature to the administrator’s agenda; a [[high modernism|“high modernist” ideology]]; an authoritarian state with machinery to impose its ideological vision, and a subjugated citizenry (or staff) without the means (or inclination) to resist. | |||
''All'' of these qualities feature in the modern multinational corporation, in this old bugger’s humble opinion. {{br|Seeing Like a State}} is worth a close read. | |||
===[[Legibility]]: the administrative ordering of nature and society === | ===[[Legibility]]: the administrative ordering of nature and society === | ||
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, | 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 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 were; 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 abridgment: it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn permanently impact how citizens interact with each other and their environment. So, society came to be ''remade'' to suit the administrator. Thus, a reflexive feedback loop. | This cost of this legibility is abridgment: it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn permanently impact how citizens interact with each other and their environment. So, society came to be ''remade'' to suit the administrator. Thus, a reflexive feedback loop. | ||