Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

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. 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.

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.

a muscle-bound self-confidence in expansion of production; our growing ability to satisfy human needs and master nature (including human nature) “and above all the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of the word and depends on central state vision to bring about big projects (dams, agricultural progress

There is a belief that the future is somehow solvable and certain: the [[high modernism|high modernist]] disposition therefore is that the certainty of a better future justifies the disruption and short-term adverse side-effects of putting in place a grand plan to get there. The alternative is the iterative, ground-up organic adjustment of people on the ground. This is both far more effective — assuming you have teh right people on the ground — and far scarier for the administrators: they have less control over progress, less of a line of sight over it, less therefore to do, and a harder time justifying the rent they extract (in a government, this is called a “tax”; in a corporate, it is executive [[compensation]]) for providing their administration.

Of course the cost of an ideology that seeks to regularise and unitise is [[diversity]]. Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Every concession to diversity is likely to entail an increase in time and budgetary cost.

That [[diversity and inclusion]] is the ''cause célèbre du jour'' hardly [[Falsification|falsifies]] this observation, especially given the current institutional approach to delivering it, which chimes with this desire for narratising [[legibility]] and [[high-modernism]]: firstly, [[diversity]] inherently ought, you would think, to be  difficult to pin down, its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. Yet, to get a handle on it, organisations must make it ''[[legible]]''. This they do by defining it in a strikingly limited way (by reference to religious, ethnic, sexual and gender identification, but not, say, to education-level, socio-economic background, nationality, political identification, pastime, or life skill). Then they seek to gather ethnic, sexual and gender ''data'' from their staff, so that they can present statistics about their changing diversity. Thus, diversity is homogenised, parameterised and regularised. Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too.

The flaws of hubris in central planning in the high modernist regime

1. the presumptions that planners can make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require.

2. we know a bit more about what constitutes a satisfactory neighbourhood for those who live in it but we still have no idea about how to foster and maintain such a neighbourhood.

Formal order to be explicit is always and in some considerable way parasitic on informal processes which the formal scheme does not recognise without which it couldn't exist and which it alone cannot create or maintain. —see the work to rule.

*Metis

Odyssean cunning.  

Quetelet's playful formula alerts us to a hallmark of most practical knowledge:it is as economical and accurate as it needs to be, no more and no less, for addressing the problem at hand.