I don’t know why it took me so long to pick up this book. When a self-professed quasi-anarchist and professor of political science and anthropology at Yale writes on the nature of the State, you know it is going to be engaging. This book does not disappoint. Scott sees the project of state formation as one primarily of ever-increasing legibility. “Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.” According to Scott, there are four main steps involved in state-initiated social engineering: “The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society…. The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of self-confidence about scientific and technical progress…. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive powers to bring these high-modernist designs into being…. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”
Scott’s book uses detailed case studies to examine the process of state formation. The first study is on the formation of scientific forestry in late-eighteenth century Prussia and Saxony. “In state “fiscal forestry”…. the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood…. The forest as habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as economic resource managed efficiently and profitably…. Thus plants that are valued become “crops”, the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valuable animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.” Scientific forestry is the language of progress and classification. The language is that of the engineer. It narrows the scope of vision and gives precision to an imprecise ecosystem. The aim is always to simplify. It eliminates diversity for the sake of codification. “Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored.” The Norway spruce that was elegantly planted in straight lines for mile upon mile thrived in the first generation, living off the old-growth capital that it had replaced. But by the second generation problems had already begun to arise. At first, trees began to die inexplicably. Disease spread rapidly. “Monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are.”
Scott next turns to the imposition of standard measures in post-revolutionary France. Most traditional measures were of human scale- a foot, a stone’s throw, a handful, or within earshot. “There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound.” However, large scale commercial trade, long distance exchange, and, particularly, central government taxation relied on standardization. Much of the tug of war came between the central government and the local aristocracy and Church. When the local nobility was charged with collecting local rents and passing them along to the central authority there was room to wiggle and for slippage. On the plus side, each locality was free to use the measures most applicable to it and reliable for their particular situation. The metric system, in contrast, went hand in hand with the notion of a total French citizenship, removed from local loyalties. Illegibility had allowed for local autonomy.
Scott continues by examining urban development. “The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways- an order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript…., and planning public transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid.” Modernist planning was aided and formed through the aerial perspective. The city was viewed by looking down upon it, instead of from within it. Another area of legibility came in the form of the people themselves. The last name was an institution designed to mark, record, and tax each individual as a unique subject of the State. “In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity and linking him or her to a kin group.” In France, the regime also tried to centralize language and culture. The hub and spoke system of roads and rail was even mimicked by culture, where all forms radiated out from Paris to its surrounds. “The implicit logic…. was to define a hierarchy of cultures, relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the guardian of the language, l’Academie Francaise).” Language was so important because culture invariably was wrapped up within it. French history, literature, and myth were all symbolized through language. The spoken word, particularly, had the power to unite or divide. The gathering of statistics, in and of itself, was an integral process in state formation. “Each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment….. Such facts must lose their particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts…. The grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing or ignoring distinctions that otherwise might be relevant….. There is…. a strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to highly accurate ones.” Modern statecraft was as much about internal colonization as about anything else. The goals were uniformity and order at all cost. All of this data and new classifications, again, shaped the very reality it hoped to classify. Language had the power of aggregating all that was deemed important or necessary and leaving the chaff to the wayside. What was important was what was quantifiable. Or rather what was quantifiable is what became important.
High-modernism was often entwined with scientism. There was the optimistic belief in the linear progress of the world through the study and control of nature. Along with this belief was the modern idea of the beneficent State. History and custom were superstitious relics that should be ignored and discarded. “The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future.” Scott first examines Le Corbusier who was “visually offended by disarray and confusion…. Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency.” Jane Jacobs, in her critique, stressed that aesthetic order is not the same as functional order. In trying to simplify each area of the city to a single function, Le Corbusier instituted a sprawling mess at ground level. What looked like order from a bird’s eye view, created stress and disfunction on the streets, where actual people had to live their daily lives. Jacobs knew that “order is embedded in the logic of daily practice.” The city must be conceptualized as an organic whole where “its interconnections are so complex and dimly understood that planning always risks unknowingly cutting into its living tissue, thereby damaging or killing vital social processes.” The city develops much like a language evolves. It must allow for contingency, continuity, community, and a future that might be radically different than its past, but transformed in a gradual manner, almost imperceptible, except after a spell of time.
Scott next dissects the Bolshevik plan in Russia. Lenin’s “What Is to be Done?” contains a top down plan with the vanguard always teaching the proletariat. However, it is also clearly authoritarian, with no room for questioning and dissent. It resembles a military hierarchy in the fact that the vanguard acts as if a General Staff, while the masses act like an infantry, carrying out orders without input. In effect, it is more commanding than didactic. “Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed.” They have lost all individuality as they have become a class, a mass. Scientism and bureaucracy are the means to the future. “There is, for Lenin, a single, objectively correct, efficient answer to all questions of how to rationally design production or administration.” Furthermore, every single aspect of life had to be controlled to produce the ideal society. “The greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.” Stalin’s final push towards total agricultural collectivization was indeed inefficient and murderous. Destroying the kulaks starved between three and twenty million citizens and more than half of the nation’s livestock ended up being slaughtered. But what the plan lacked in agricultural production, it gained in state control. “The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in the agricultural sector was to take a social and economic terrain singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create institutional forms and production units far better adapted to monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above…. For Trotsky, the sooner what he called “the Russia of icons and cockroaches” was transformed and “urbanized” the better…. The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state grain procurements and reduce the peasants’ ability to withhold grain from the market.” The needs of the Plan superseded the needs of any individual. The peasant became a tool of the State, undifferentiated from a draft animal or even a plow. “As they were under serfdom, they were legally immobilized. An internal passport system was reintroduced to clear the cities of “undesirable and unproductive residents.”” However, in the eyes of the State, the plan was a success. “The state managed to get its hands on enough grain to push rapid industrialization, even while contending with staggering inefficiencies, stagnant yields, and ecological devastation. The state also managed, at great human cost, to eliminate the social basis of organized, public opposition from the rural population.”
Scott sees the idea of state formation as “the displacement of goals toward a strictly quantifiable criteria of performance.” Formation stands contra history and culture as it pushes towards a new scientific age, unhindered by the past. It implements uniformity and simplicity, replacing diversity and particularity. Codified law is static. By its nature, it cannot be varied, dynamic, flexible, or local. “It is far easier for would-be reformers to change the formal structure of an institution than to change its practices.” However, changes, seen initially as improvements, lead to unforeseen consequences. Control of the whole system becomes impossible as changes cascade into further problems which in turn have to be managed from the top down. Managed monoculture inevitably brings about a high risk system. Polyculture, while containing short-term inefficiencies, also contains a hedge against disaster. It allows for contingency and changing patterns both in nature and in society. It can contain unseen order that is not simple and, therefore, not obviously apparent. It is often durable, resistant, and long-term. Scott concludes with a plea for metis. “Broadly understood, metis represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment…. Metis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the practitioner…. Metis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply. In a sense, metis lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge, which can be learned by rote.” It is the set of skills that artists and cooks possess that can not be regurgitated through instruction or in cookbooks. It is often not even vaguely expressible by the actor himself. It is latent knowledge and its only test is practical success. Metis is always practiced only by those with actual skin in the game. It is never theoretical, but only actual. The actors are always consumers of their own knowledge. Michael Oakeshott sums up this accumulation of traditional knowledge, “the big mistake of the rationalist- though it is not inherent in the method- is to assume that ‘tradition,’ or what is better called ‘practical knowledge,’ is rigid, fixed and unchanging- in fact it is ‘preeminently fluid’…. No traditional way of behavior, no traditional skill ever remains fixed. Its history is one of continual change.” Scott, therefore, cautions that the State ought to take small steps, favor reversibility, and plan on eventual surprises. Do not alter the facts to fit the theory, no matter how perfect theory looks on paper. “Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a final codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances.”
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