Seeing Like a State
Reflections on James C. Scott’s celebrated critique on high modernism
“Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step — and often several steps — removed from the society they are charged with governing.” (p. 76)
Part I
High modernism was, and continues to be, a matter of faith, as James Scott eloquently argues in “Seeing Like a State.” Rooted in the belief that technical expertise and reasoned knowledge are the solution to modern social problems — regardless of what exactly these may be — the proponents of high modernism consider themselves entitled to speak and act in name of large numbers of people. Often carried out under the guidance of privileged men (and I am using “men” here to refer specifically to the male gender) with access to elitist education and resources, high modernist projects have resulted, as Scott shows, in deep social failures.
The notion of “legibility” as a tactic to monitor society via its oversimplification goes, in my view, straight to the center of high modernist dreams. Through multiple examples, ranging from forest management to the planning of entire cities to the rationale behind the Russian Revolution, Scott shows how the thinking minds responsible for these processes deeply believed in their cause and were dazzled by the possibilities of modern technologies to tame nature and society. A few reflections come to mind after reading the first half of “Seeing Like a State.”
High Modernism is not gone. Even though today it would be difficult to find paradigmatic cases of high modernist projects becoming materialized— such as Hausmann’s Paris and Niemeyer’s Brasilia — the belief in science and technology as the solution for humankind’s problems is perhaps more present now than ever before. The conversations on climate change leave no doubt to it: saving the planet seems to depend on increasingly sophisticated technologies that will reduce our carbon emissions and the like. There is little serious debate (or at least it is almost absent in mainstream channels) about how certain societies should drastically reconsider their ways of relating with each other, with nature, and with the world.
The intensification of bureaucracy is a sign of contemporary forms of state legibility. Administrative procedures everywhere have resulted in the impossibility of one’s anonymity. In the best cases, the bureaucratic apparatus ensures that we all comply with the “social contract” and enjoy the benefits of belonging to the system. In most cases, though, the system is only a safe space for certain privileged people and puts all kinds of barriers to all those different from the cookie-cutter citizen. With hyper-modern technologies, legibility turns into “surveillance” that one cannot escape from.
How history is told by winners (those in positions of power) is the ultimate form of state simplification. In a time of widespread lies, often designed by and spread through the state, what we choose to tell, and how we choose to narrate it, matters. Discourse is as real (or as unreal) as history itself, for it shapes the ways we think of ourselves and others. Giving voice to those historically unheard becomes, then, a huge priority.
That the responses to two of the iconic prayers of high modernism — Le Corbusier and Lenin — came from women is telling. Though Scott only devotes one paragraph to bringing attention to Jacobs’s feminine perspective, the “maternal” reaction to patriarchal projects of this kind is worth exploring in more depth.
Rosa Luxemburg, one of the respondents to these figures, talks specifically about relying on social “improvisations” rather than on expert and rational knowledge if a society wants to succeed in its revolutionary path to change. Believing in the creativity of so-called “experienced amateurs” and not treating people as part of an acritical “mass” is crucial to frame and tackle complex social challenges.
What Scott does not address is the processes of legibility undertaken by private capitalists. Centering his critique on the authoritarian public state, he does not pay enough attention to its connivance with the private sector, making one doubt whether markets are not guided by similar principles of social simplification. Twenty years after the publication of “Seeing Like a State,” in the era of big data and the hegemony of big technological companies, things do not look more hopeful: whereas high modernist projects of the past, despite their failures, were often designed and implemented in the name of a common good and the aspiration towards a “better” society (in the mind of their planners), contemporary hyper-capitalist projects are almost exclusively guided by private profit. Projects of entire new cities like United Arabs Emirates’ Masdar or Saudi Arabia’s The Line are a worrying account of the contemporary tweak of high modernism underpinned by a capitalist logic.
The quote with which I opened this comment on Scott’s first five chapters encapsulates the reason high modernist projects are doomed to fail. Their designers are too detached from reality, this being understood as a complex amalgam of individual and collective lived experiences. If planning is expected to gain weight as a discipline that contributes meaningfully to creating living environments where everyone can thrive and pursue their dreams, then the gap between the planners and the planned needs to disappear. In fact, I wonder whether we should get rid of such distinction.
Part II
If the first part of “Seeing Like a State” has a focus on the urban, the second part turns to the modernization of agriculture. As a millenary human practice that, according to mainstream developmentalist discourses, precedes the more advanced and inevitable stages of industrialization, agriculture is associated by many with the notions of “backwardness” and “underdevelopment.” That is, agriculture is the perfect victim for the high modernist gaze and its practices of simplification and control.
The first surprising connection that James C. Scott brings attention to is the similarity between socialist and capitalist approaches to high modernist agriculture in the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively. In the race to become “core” countries within the capitalist world-system (to use Immanuel Wallerstein’s framework), mass industrialization of agriculture seemed to be crucial to feed substantial amounts of the population at a cheap cost, while offering the image of a highly technologized country. Of course, the authoritarian nature of the Soviet Union gave its government the authority to impose the new model inspired by Taylor’s assembly lane upon an enormous scale in a way unconceivable for the United States — hence the “Capitalist Dreams” in the title of the sixth chapter. The coercive practices of the Soviet government went well beyond agriculture, which ultimately became an effective means to control and command over millions of people spanned over the Union’s large territory.
Processes of Villagization in Tanzania followed a similar logic of “miniaturization,” where entire communities were displaced and forced to live in identical models that had been scaled for humans to fit in, but that ultimately functioned as out-of-scale miniatures incapable of absorbing the complexities and nuances of real human life. The “total development scheme” and the obsession with “streamlining people” and the quantification of success led President Julius Nyerere to treat his citizens as living toys that he could arrange at his (well-intentioned) will. Among the failures, the uprooting of people from their social and cultural contexts stands out, with consequences ranging from inhabitable villages to the complete loss of identity of an entire generation.
More generally, the attempt to “tame nature” and treat it merely as a product at the service of human beings is a behavior that has dominated until today, with large extensions of monocrops covering the landscapes of countries all over the world. To compensate the artificialization of the soil where high modernist agriculture is cultivated, an increasing number of fertilizers are designed and used in a vicious cycle of contamination. Conversations to completely reconsider our relationship with nature and retrieve its intrinsic complexity and biodiversity, while being able to feed human beings, are still today largely out of the conversation.
The prospects to turn over the high modernist mindset must go through the practice of “metis,” a Greek concept Scott introduces to account for a type of embodied knowledge that is different from scientific expertise, but also not exactly equivalent to practical knowledge. Metis is a sort of know-how that balances experienced and abstract knowledge, and which is deeply rooted in local cultural practices. Everyone is in possession of different forms of metis, but this type of knowledge becomes especially present and relevant among people at the margins of society, who regularly must leverage their know-how to overcome daily situations for which there is no planned way out.
Scott advocates turning to metis to come up with incremental processes of social change. However, after 350 pages of detailed analysis and critique of high modernist practices, he only gets bold enough to offer a very succinct list of four recommendations to consider when undertaking such transformation processes: taking small steps, favoring reversibility, planning for surprises, and planning on human inventiveness.
As much as I resonate with those recommendations — which overlap with my own list of recommendations for community planners at the end of my master’s thesis “The Sparking Cycle” — it is not clear to me who Scott is speaking to. While high modernist projects where clearly designed and implemented by public states, the alternative approach to “development planning” outlined by Scott does not seem to have a targeted audience. Is he inviting development agencies to reconsider their approaches? Is he thinking about government officials? Or is the incremental approach to development planning a responsibility of community organizers and lay citizens?
As thorough as Scott’s analysis of high modernism is, his succinct sketch of alternatives can hardly have any practical implications. “Seeing Like a State” is, nonetheless, a brilliant essay that, through its numerous and detailed examples, takes the reader to the mindset behind cold technocratic planning. What each of us decides to make of its lessons is ultimately a matter of metis.
