James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”

I recently finished James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

It’s about what happens when central authorities like gov­ern­ments op­ti­mis­tic­ally try to re­fash­ion how people live, in rad­ic­al, fun­da­men­tal ways, and how this fre­quent­ly fails in ways they do not an­ti­ci­pate.

In part, this is because the au­thor­i­ty needs to better un­der­stand the si­tu­a­tion in order to re­fash­ion it. To better un­der­stand it, it needs to be rend­ered more le­gi­ble, which can be done by sim­pli­fy­ing it pas­sive­ly (ig­nor­ing all but cer­tain fea­tures) or ac­tive­ly (by shav­ing away all but cer­tain fea­tures). But each of those approaches has drawbacks: ignoring some features means that you don’t really know or control what’s going on; eliminating those features may end up eliminating vitally important things that keep the system you’re refashioning running. Either way, though, whatever the original motivation for the refashioning, it usually ends up being largely a project of making the situation more legible for the central authority — which is often antithetical to the project of making it better.

I’m reminded of the frequent calls for progress reports and the desperate pleas for “metrics” from management at companies I’ve worked for. You may remember a somewhat similar argument to Scott’s offered by David Graeber in his analysis of bureaucracy in The Utopia of Rules. From my review:

[O]ne of the purposes of bureaucracy is to organize ignorance in such a way that it allows powerful people to maintain their hard-earned stupidity while projecting an air of command and control. “Bureaucratic procedures,” writes Graeber, “which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence.”