Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

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 Another cost of the [[high modernist]] ideology that seeks to regularise and unitise is ''[[diversity]]'' in the things so regularised. That [[diversity and inclusion]] is the ''cause célèbre du jour'', in the public and private sectors, hardly [[Falsification|falsifies]] this observation. It just sharpens the irony, since the typical approach to ''delivering'' diversity chimes with this desire for narratising [[legibility]] and [[high-modernism]].
-[[Diversity]] ought, you’d think, to be ''hard to pin down'', its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. So, to get a handle it, organisations must make [[diversity]] ''[[legible]]''. They do this by defining it in a strikingly limited and homogenous way. They gather ''data'' from their staff on that limited metric — to make it more [[legible]], so that the organisation can propagate statistics about its “improving” [[diversity]]. Thus, “[[diversity]]” as the administration knows it is a formalised, homogenised, parameterised and regularised ''[[proxy]]'' of [[diversity]], and no attention is paid to how this diversity affects the organisation (compared with the [[illegible]], but actual [[diversity]] it replaced) at all, much less how the benefit of cleaving to this [[diversity]] [[proxy]] affects the behaviour of people in the organisation.
+[[Diversity]] ought, you’d think, to be ''hard to pin down'', its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. Diversity is the very benefit that accrues from the range of our differences; the interplay of our unique perspectives.
+But, to get a handle it, organisations must make [[diversity]] ''[[legible]]''. They do this by defining it in a strikingly limited and homogenous way. They gather ''data'' from their staff on that limited metric — to make it more [[legible]], so that the organisation can propagate statistics about its “improving” [[diversity]]. Thus, “[[diversity]]” as the administration knows it is a formalised, homogenised, parameterised and regularised ''[[proxy]]'' of [[diversity]], and no attention is paid to how this diversity affects the organisation (compared with the [[illegible]], but actual [[diversity]] it replaced) at all, much less how the benefit of cleaving to this [[diversity]] [[proxy]] affects the behaviour of people in the organisation.
 Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too. But the point is clear: if imposed proxies can prompt the wealthy to restructure their tax affairs and French peasants to fill in their windows, so can it prompt staff in an organisation to behave in similarly counterproductive ways. There is an argument that whole segments of the infrastructure have developed for precisely that reason. [[Legal]] included.