Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: Separation

Vaneigem’s summary:

Privative appropriation, the basis of social organisation, keeps individuals separated from themselves and from others. Artificial unitary paradises seek to conceal this separation by co-opting more or less successfully people’s prematurely shattered dreams of unity. To no avail. People may be forced to swing back and forth across the narrow gap between the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of destroying, but this very oscillation suffices to bring Power to its knees. (117)

Like the related primitive accumulation in classical Marxism, privative appropriation plays a foundational role in creating the social order of “separation,” whereby resources are appropriated away from the [commons] into the private hands of individuals, castes, classes, which at the same time atomizes and alienates individuals away from the sense of social unity which, as the Situationalists consistently argue, we all truly long for. Separation, to be maintained, thus has to be dissimulated, and the rebellion against it in search of unity needs to be coöpted and diverted into maintaining separation.

“What is God? The guarantor and quintessence of the myth used to justify the domination of man by man.” V follows this with a dense theory of how the tripartite nature of the Christian god corresponds to soul, spirit, and body, leading into a master/servant dialectic.

God is a harmony of lies, an ideal form uniting the slave’s voluntary sacrifice (Christ), the consenting sacrifice of the master (the Father; the slave as the master’s son), and the indissoluble link between them (the Holy Ghost). The same model underlies the ideal picture of man as a divine, whole and mythic creature: a body subordinated to a guiding spirit working for the greater glory of the soul— the soul being the all-embracing synthesis. (119)

“We thus have a type of relationship in which two terms take their meaning from an absolute principle, from an obscure and inaccessible norm of unchallengeable transcendence (God, blood, holiness, grace, etc).” However, in today’s world ruled by the bourgeoisie, this has been reduced to “a vague nostalgia for warmth of the unitary myth and a set of cold and flavourless abstractions: body and spirit, being and consciousness, individual and society, private and public, general and particular, etc, etc.”

The old aristocratic orders were “unitary regimes” which supplanted the natural human wish for unity with myths and abstractions; this has become fragmented under the bourgeoisie (as they overthrew the old myths and abstractions but replaced them with inferior ones), which only makes the drive for unity more urgently felt.

By laying bare the economic and social foundations of separation, the bourgeoisie supplied the arms which will serve to end separation once and for all. And the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie and of all hierarchical power. … This mission can only be accomplished by the new proletariat, which must forcibly wrest the third force (spontaneous creation, poetry) from the gods, and keep it alive in the everyday life of all.

V traces the history of dualism in science, theology, and philosophy as part of the bourgeois overthrow of the previous unitary order and the emergence of capitalism, which is a dualist order, lacking a transcendent third (and thus more bare-faced and unstable).

The spirit of feudal lordship had found an adequate justification in a certain transcendence. But a capitalist God is an absurdity. Whereas lordship called for a trinitarian system, capitalist exploitation is dualistic. Moreover, it cannot be dissociated from the material nature of economic relationships. (120)

The mystical authority of the feudal lord was very different from that instituted by the bourgeoisie. For the lord did not simply change his role and become a factory boss: once the mysterious superiority of blood and lineage is abolished, nothing is left but a mechanics of exploitation and a race for profit which have no justification but themselves. Boss and worker are separated not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by quantitative distinctions of money and power. Indeed, what makes capitalist exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between ‘equals.’ All the same, the bourgeoisie’s work of destruction—though quite unintentionally, of course—reveals the justification for every revolution. (120-1)

Commodification adds individual fantasies to the collective ones, but these are unsatisfying, and thus lead to a stronger desire for real unity:

Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms—ideologies, illusions of social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people—we are offered a whole range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man’s—land between the permissible and the forbidden: individualised ideology, obsession, monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions, drugs and other highs (alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change, of rarefied sensations, etc). All these pursuits allow us to lose ourselves completely while preserving the impression of self-realisation, but the corrosiveness of such activities stems above all from their partial quality. The passion for play is no longer alienating if the person who gives himself up to it seeks play in the whole of life—in love, in thought, in the construction of situations. In the same way, the wish to kill is no longer megalomania if it is combined with revolutionary consciousness. (121)

The urge to destroy the current order may be expressed negatively, leading only to self-destruction, or, “should a revolutionary consciousness prevail,” with positive liberation.

The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man. (122)

Seeing Like a State, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

This chapter joins into the eternally popular and rewarding practice of bashing Le Corbusier, followed by an appreciation of the work of Jane Jacobs. Visits to Brasília and Chandigarh illustrate the failings of High Modernist city planning. Scott begins with an opening quote from Mumford about Baroque planning not being amenable to change, and so having to be done at one stroke by an despotic ruler. Scott applies the criticism to “the embodiment of high-modernist urban design,” Le Corbusier (103). Most of his plans were never built, because “they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster.” When such planned cities were built, they required autocratic state power, just as Mumford predicted.Scott notes:

These urban planners backed by state power are rather like tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure. (146)

If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. (104)

Though some of Le Corbusier’s early creations are actually quite decent, the LeC we are taking issue with is the author of La ville radieuse. “Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s plans were self-consciously immodest.”

No compromise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculptural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great distance.

None of the plans makes any reference to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, betray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all.

Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. (106)

Scott notes the romance of the modernist architect and the airplane, illustrated with a lengthy quote from Le C on the “bird’s-eye view” (381n7).

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities.

Le C had a deep dislike of complexity; he believed that that straight lines and right angles are more rational and “geometric” than organic or rounded forms, but as Scott points out, this is not true. Scott describes Le C’s infamous concept of the “death of the street,” which is linked to the fetishization of zoning, per which each district of the city to have one and only one function.

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. (110)

If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is eminently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, providing aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods.

In the case of the places that people call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater violence to human practice.

...what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely ‘food preparation.’ But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations requires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value. The logic of Le Corbusier’s doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible. (111)

Le C’s first “principle of urbanism” was “The Plan: Dictator.” “He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles.” Le C’s city is to be “monocephalic.”

The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a single brain directs its activity—from the factory’s office and from the city’s business center. The hierarchy doesn’t stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. (112)

Scott compares this view to Plato’s in The Laws (382n28). He also notes the resonance with the career of Walter Christaller, the inventor of central place theory, whose “search for the autocrat who will give him the power to realize his vision” led him to court first the Nazis, then the German Communist Party, in “a classic case of the attempt to impose what had begun as a simplified analytical description of the economics of location” (382-3n29).

Le C’s had a typical high modernist faith in “universal scientific truths”; his vision of the Plan as despot has resonances with modern technofetishism.

The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery. (113)

Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible.

Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed universal scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public, once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat, lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would create, in time, a clientele worthy of the scientific architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would ‘freely’ choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them. (114)

An extended discussion of Brasília (117ff) serves as an example of the design and failings of the High Modernist city. Though not designed by Le C himself, its planners were clearly inspired by his thinking, and there is also a handy book which Scott draws on extensivly (James Holston, (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília . Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Brasília is in several ways “the negation or transcendance of Brazil” and its culture.

Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city. (120)

The goal was to replace the public squares and crowded “corridor” streets of traditional Brazilian cities:

the square, as a confluence of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston aptly calls a ‘public visiting room.’ As a public room, the square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to use it for their mutual purposes. The square or the busy street attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an animated scene—a scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters can take place simultaneously... It goes without saying that the street or the public square, under the right circumstances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and riots directed against the state. (120-1)

Scott inserts a relevant quote from Le C: “Cafes and places of recreation will no longer be the fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris. We must kill the street” (385n60). The massive central square of Brasília is not at all like the human-scale public squares of the past:

If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one’s friend, there would be nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of Brasília. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries. (121)

The functional division of the city means everyone must drive everywhere, from home, to work, to commercial centers, etc.

One striking result of Brasília’s cityscape is that virtually all the public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafes, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier’s city plans. But that space tends to be ‘dead’ space, as in the Plaza of the Three Powers.

[This is readily confirmed with Google streetview; looking around the wide open spaces in the middle of Brasília, the only people I could find in any of the parks were three guys maintaining shrubbery]

There were definite advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be circumvented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an emancipating vision here. The best and most current architectural knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. (125)

Virtually all the needs of Brasília's future residents were reflected in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract, schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier’s plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see, miscarry in comparable respects.

it is almost as if the founders of Brasília, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. (126)

Residents complain of brasilite, aka Brasília-itis.

The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment—an environment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.

Holston asked a class of nine-year- old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of ‘home.’ Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof. (127)

The disorienting quality of Brasília is exacerbated by architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like rationality and legibility to those working in administration and urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city.

Scott turns to some of the unplanned elements which in the end shaped Brasília otherwise than it had been planned; particularly the role of the army of “candango” workers/squatters who built the city, who organize and get political power. In the end there are both rich and poor unplanned Brasílias, alongside the planned areas.

The unplanned Brasílias—that of the rich and that of the poor—were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasília at the margins. The two Brasílias were not just different; they were symbiotic. (130)

This is because it was the political necessities of building Brasília in an autocratic manner, that, ironically, required some influence to be ceded to these competing power bases.

How successful was Brasília as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real Brasília, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasília in the planning documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political calculation.

Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, treated on pages 130-2, reveals essentially all the same problems. The rest of the chapter focuses on the trenchant critique of high modernist planning offered by Jane Jacobs (132ff). In contrast to Le C, Jacobs gives a bottom-up view starting from the street level experience of pedestrians; she will “argue from close daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes from above” (140).

A formative insight in Jacobs’s argument is that there is no necessary correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and regularity? (133)

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level.

Scott characterizes Jacobs as a “functionalist” in contrast to Le C’s aesthetic approach. Jacobs writes on the true sources of social order, e.g., “eyes on the street.” S adds in a footnote:

It is important to specify that Jacobs’s point about ‘eyes on the street’ assumes a rudimentary level of community feeling. If the eyes on the street are hostile to some or all members of the community, as Talja Potters has reminded me, public security is not enhanced. (386n85)

[To this could be added the question, of course, security for whom? There might be some “functionalist” assumptions about “order” to be unpacked here].

The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe; all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the neighborhood provide willing, informed surveillance. (135)

People in Jacobs’ city are on “sidewalk terms” with each other (136). S notes in a footnote how many of Jacobs’ examples involve “the fast-disappearing and much maligned petite bourgeoisie” (386n86) [a clue to one of Scott’s differences from Marxism].

The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.

The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else. There are no formal public or voluntary organizations of urban order here—no police, no private guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily practice. What’s more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. (136)

Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural) are Jacobs’s watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. (136-7)

What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to pedestrians and commerce. Buildings should ideally be of greatly varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these conditions, not surprisingly, violates one or more of the working assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use districts, long streets, and architectural uniformity. (137)

“The very jumble of activities, buildings, and people—the apparent disorder that offended the aesthetic eye of the planner—was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic vitality.” Scott adds what he considers a “larger argument” to Jacobs’ case for cross-use and diversity:

Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial ‘bets’ (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable. (138)

Scott avers that Jacobs contributes a “woman’s eye,” more attentive and insightful than male colleagues of the time, allowing “her realization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and satisfactions” (139). She characterizes “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy” (139ff). A note explores links between Jacobs and anarchist precursors such as Goodman:

The echoes of such influential anarchist thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin reverberate in this passage. I do not know whether Jacobs intended these resonances, which may have come from the work of Paul Goodman. But what is missing is a recognition that, in the absence of state-based urban planning, large commercial and speculative interests are transforming the urban landscape every day. The effect of her argument is to ‘naturalize’ the unplanned city by treating it as the consequence of thousands of small and notionally equal acts. (387n99)

Scott discusses how urban planning parallels “optimum control theory” in forest planning, providing an example of planning for a shopping center’s catchment zone. “Rigid, single-use zoning is, then, not just an aesthetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies” (141).

If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail. (142)

The historic diversity of the city—the source of its value and magnetism—is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable small acts bearing no discernible overall intention.

He quotes Jacobs to the above effect, and adds:

Le Corbusier would have agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and inefficiencies of the unplanned city.

They each have influenced different schools of thought in urban planning:

Whereas Le Corbusier’s planner is concerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in moving people from point to point, Jacobs’s planner consciously makes room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human activities that constitute the vitality of the ‘lived city.’ (143)

Jacobs is also more aware of other urban processes: ecology, market effects, gentrification.

The nature of the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.

Scott approves of Jacobs’ (and later de Certeau’s) analogy of urban change with linguistic change, then in a footnote takes issue with Hayek’s similar claim to the self-organization of markets:

The problem that I see with this analogy is that the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with ‘spontaneous social order,’ but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the nineteenth century, as Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown. Hayek’s description of the development of common law is, I believe, somewhat closer to the mark. In any event, city, market, and common law are all creators of historical power relations that are neither ‘natural’ nor creative of ‘spontaneous social order.’ In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market. (388n106)

Like planned languages, planned cities need to be let loose to the transformative power of users: “Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities” (144).

He discusses Jacobs’ laudable and prescient opposition to slum clearance, then notes more recent criticisms of Jacobs, but insists that “she has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning” (145). These flaws are, 1) “the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require;” 2) the complex ways in which healthy neighborhoods and communities form cannot be reducible to formulae.

Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 12

Summary of Chapter 12: Sacrifice

This chapter begins a new section, titled “The impossibility of realisation: power as sum of seductions,” which V summarizes:

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: for a cause that mutilates them {twelve}; for an imaginary unity that fragments them {thirteen}; for an appearance that reifies them {fourteen}; for roles that wrest them from authentic life (fifteen}; for a time whose passage defines and confines them {sixteen}. (105)

This chapter will thus be on “the cause that mutilates.” V’s summary (107):

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing – not even the option of death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of masochism wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary self -sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: the appeal to art, the appeal to human feelings and the appeal to the present (2).

“Where people are not broken – and broken in – by force and fraud, they are seduced.” The seduction of the current consumerist world (and its parallel in the State-socialist world, at the time V was writing), is familiar from earlier chapters. The way that myth and sacrifice operate in the current bourgeois world is a sort of debasement of their aristocratic predecessors (cf. Chapter 8).

the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and fragmenting it. It does not abolish it, however, because if it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit – and hence to exist. The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. (108)

Throughout this book V has been discussing “privative appropriation” (l’appropriation privative), and only now has it occured to me to wonder how this relates to the more common phrase “primitive accumulation.” V defines privative appropriation elsewhere (Vaneigem 2009) as “the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over socioeconomic survival whose form remains complex — from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, all the way to the ‘pure’ exercise of power over people (hierarchy).”

He mocks the pro-Soviet, statist left as also demanding “sacrifice.” Fanatics across the political spectrum sacrifice themselves to a Cause, which is really an aesthetics of death.

For aesthetics is carnival paralysed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life. (109)

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. (110)

Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. (111)

Thus for V, any of these specific causes or goals is a “thing,” a limitation to which individuals are called to sacrifice themselves; the real aim of revolution in his eyes is this reawakening of the “carnival spirit.”

The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution.

The ‘road to socialism’ consists in this: as people become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art. (112)

He traces how art changed from ancient, to bourgeois times, and its role in recuperating struggle into the service of the status quo.

The function of the spectacle in ideology, art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. (113)

New art movements are subject to planned obsolescence, such that the “dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces.” V is critical of attempts to resist this manufacturing a new aesthetic out of everyday life via “Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators,” as these do not truly challenge the spectacle. He considers the potentials, and failures, of surrealism, but notes that the “present state of affairs tends to favour situationist agitation” (115).

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one. (115)

The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive.

We never really give ourselves over completely to what we are doing, except perhaps in orgasm. Our present is grounded in what we are going to do later and in what we have just done, with the result that it always bears the stamp of unpleasure. In collective as well as in individual history, the cult of the past and the cult of the future are equally reactionary. Everything which has to be built has to be built in the present. (116)

I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: ‘Act as though there were no tomorrow.’

Vaneigem, Raoul (2009 [1963]) “Basic Banalities.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-basic-banalities

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 10

Summary of Chapter 10: Down Quantity Street

Insert the words dill pickle into every sentence of every summary.

V’s Summary:

Economic imperatives seek to impose the standardised measuring system of the market on the whole of human activity. Very large quantities take the place of the qualitative, but even quantity is rationed and economised. Myth is based on quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an atomisation into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid destroying one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative negativity of popu1ar refusal (1). The quantitative and the linear are indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the co-ordinates of survival: a succession of interchangeable instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of Power (2). (88)

Everything is being subsumed under quantifying logic. V discusses figures such as Don Juan and the idler, as half-ass forms of resistance – this is the attraction of large quantity: feasting, overconsumption, as the only available stand-in for quality in this system. My first thought on reading this was that he could have done a lot more with this insight a la consumption in general, as a drive to overconsume, accumulate pointlessly, in a sort of derailed potlatch. Cf. a recent BBC story about Elon Musk forcing Tesla investors to give him some ridiculous sum of additional money; the reporters openly wondered, does he really think he needs more money? And in general the pointless, psychotic quest for accumulation of wealth over all over ends, which characterizes Silicon Valley culture and poisons all it produces.

However, Vaneigem’s next point shows why he didn’t go down this path; his argument is that “even quantity is rationed” (89): the bourgeoisie have refused the Gift (and so also Potlatch, Bataille’s general economy, etc.). That belonged to the old order of Myth; this has been replaced by the order of Ideology corresponding to capitalism and the modern State. Modern politics has moved from the Big Lie of the Nazis to countless lies, which overwhelm (e.g., the countless, confusing diversity of products for purchase) yet the system sows the seeds of its own destruction by producing trauma and inhibition in consumers”

Boredom breeds the irresistible rejection of uniformity, a refusal that can break out at any moment. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Watts (for a start) have shown that the tiniest of pretexts can fire the oil spread on troubled waters. Think of the vast quantity of lies that can be wiped out by one act of revolutionary poetry! From Villa to Lumumba, from Stockholm to Watts, qualitative agitation, the agitation that radicalises the masses because it springs from the radicalism of the masses, is redefining the frontiers of submission and degradation. (91)

The bourgeois world-order destroyed the old pyramidal hierarchy of the “unitary regimes” of the past, claiming to free the individual. But

The dismantling of the pyramid, far from destroying the inhuman cement, only pulverises it. We see tiny individual beings becoming absolute: little ‘citizens’ released by social atomisation. The inflated imagination of egocentricity creates a universe on the model of one point, a point just the same as thousands of other points, grains of sand, all free, equal and fraternal, scurrying here and there like so many ants when their nest is broken open.

The old order was unified around the omnipresence/omniscience of God; V expresses doubts whether “cybernetians” could replace him.

Quantification implies linearity. The qualitative is plurivalent, the quantitative univocal. Life quantified becomes a measured route march towards death. The radiant ascent of the soul towards heaven is replaced by inane speculations about the future. Moments of time no longer radiate, as they did in the cyclical time of earlier societies; time is a thread stretching from birth to death, from memories of the past to expectations of the future, on which an eternity of survival strings out a row of instants and hybrid presents nibbled away by what is past and what is yet to come. The feeling of living in symbiosis with cosmic forces – the sense of the simultaneous – revealed joys to our forefathers which our passing presence in the world is hard put to it to provide. What remains of such a joy? Only vertigo, giddy transience, the effort of keeping up with the times. You must move with the times – the motto of those who make a profit if you do. (92)

Not to beat a dead horse, but that last line sums up the AI hype pumped out manically by an industry desperate to achieve profitability at any (social) cost (exhibit A, investor Marc Andreesen attacking the Pope’s fairly tepid calls for “morality” in AI, because any and all slowdowns in investment must be resisted).

V does not seek a restoration of the old cyclical time, centered on the “divine animal,” but a corrected version, centered on “man.” [though how is “man” not every bit as much a wheel in the head, as V is at pains to demonstrate that the “individual” is, in the current order?] In any event, “Man is not now the centre of time, he is merely a point in it.” The reduction of everything to points in an endless and pointless sequence has hollowed out all meaning and made life into a superficial acting out of roles, actions, stereotypes. Once again, as V repeatedly stresses, the exhaustion and disaffection created by this system, and even our hapless attempts to create meaning within it, are the key to its eventual overturning:

What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. A totality that is lived, and without the experience of ‘time passing.’ The feeling of ‘time passing’ is simply the feeling of growing old. And yet, since one must survive in order to live, virtual moments, possibilities, are necessarily rooted in that time. When we try to federate moments, to bring out the pleasure in them, to release their promise of life, we are already learning how to construct ‘situations’. (93)

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 1

 

Summary of Chapter 1: Nature and Space

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation. (11)

This chapter is an exploration of the historical application of the above premise, particularly through the development of scientific forestry, tax reform, the imposition of standard measurements, and cadastral mapping; with the ensuing suffering, abuse, and centralization of power associated with this practical “myopia.” This history also shows the complicity of the modern, centralizing state with the emergence of markets and capitalism. “The logic of the state-managed forest science was virtually identical with the logic of commercial exploitation” (15). Scott adds in a footnote:

I was tempted to add that, with regard to the use of forests, the view of the state might be longer and broader than that of private firms, which can, and have, plundered old-growth forests and then sold their acreage or surrendered it for back taxes (e.g., the “cutover” in the Upper Midwest of the United States at the turn of the century). The difficulty is that in cases of war or a fiscal crisis, the state often takes an equally shortsighted view. (360n12)

This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the immanent logic of its techniques. It was not and could not ever be realized in practice. Both nature and the human factor intervened. The existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease conspired to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Also, given the insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, people living nearby typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and kindling, make charcoal, and use the forest in other ways that prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully realized. Although, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs. (19)

The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had afforded.

In contrast to most crops, which rotate at a rate of only a year or so, forests take about 80 years to rotate, so each rotation involves the careers of several generations of foresters. At Scott's time of writing many of these forests were only at the end of their third rotation. The first rotation produced promising results, but by the second rotation the negative ecological consequences became clear. These include damage to soil, erosion, loss of nutrients, and increase of pests created by the pest-favorable conditions of monocropping

The “virtual ecology” of so-called “forest hygiene” was an attempt to work around the problem with artificial solutions (such as installing boxes for owls, to make up for the lack of hollow trees), while retaining the core of the problem, which is the monocropping.

The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razor-sharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it. (21)

Such dangers can only partly be checked by the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. Given the fragility of the simplified production forest, the massive outside intervention that was required to establish it—we might call it the administrators' forest—is increasingly necessary in order to sustain it as well. (22)

The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and revenue.

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose.

Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding that were adequate to these tasks. (23)

He turns to the example of taxation in authoritarian France. The relative blindness of the premodern state meant that much detail about actual landholdings, etc. in the countryside were in fact unknown to the state, because the state dealt through intermediaries such as local elites. The state embarks on a process of transforming the dense and multi-layered feudal order into a transparent nation of individual citizen-taxpayers; the analogy Scott is making with scientific forestry nevertheless breaks down (he points out) because trees are different from humans:

The trees themselves, however, were not political actors, whereas the taxable subjects of the crown most certainly were. They signaled their dissatisfaction by flight, by various forms of quiet resistance and evasion, and, in extremis, by outright revolt. A reliable format for taxation of subjects thus depended not just on discovering what their economic conditions were but also on trying to judge what exactions they would vigorously resist. (24)

Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were “illegible” to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand.

And yet this “shorthand” would then be treated as, and transform, reality. Drawing on the work of Witold Kula in Measures and Men, Scott turns to the encounter between the rationalizing state and local, non-state forms of measurement. Both state and non-state measurement practices are shaped by the purposes for which they are used, but these being very different purposes, very different “immanent logics” result:

Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request. In the part of Malaysia with which I am most familiar, if one were to ask “How far is it to the next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” The answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how much time it will take to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or riding a bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes—until recently, wristwatches were rare—but in units that are locally meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local rice. Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be “Half as much as to cook a chicken.” The reply refers back to a standard that everyone is expected to know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local, inasmuch as regional differences in, say, the type of rice eaten or the preferred way of cooking chicken will give different results. (25)

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. (26)

Modern abstract measures of land by surface area—so many hectares or acres—are singularly uninformative figures to a family that proposes to make its living from these acres. Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.

Farms, for example, are described not in terms of acreage but as a “farm of one cow,” “farm of two cows” etc; “three morgens (day’s work) of land,” etc.

The measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual, and historically specific....Directly apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.

Yet non-state measuring practices, on their part, were not somehow “objective” in contrast to state measurement, they were also shaped by power relations, reflecting the interests of different classes and subject positions; there was always a “politics of measurement.”

Perhaps the stickiest of all measures before the nineteenth century was the price of bread. As the most vital subsistence good of premodern times, it served as a kind of cost-of-living index, and its cost was the subject of deeply held popular customs about its relationship to the typical urban wage. Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to provoke a riot by directly violating the “just price,” managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour. (29)

[This is relevant also to the history of steam beer, as the price was sticky (stuck at five cents) and the glass size was apparently also sometimes fixed; also to the history of adulteration and the insistence on purity as a form of moral economy.]

Local forms of measurement were responsive to local circumstances and always malleable, which meant they each had their own, divergent, histories and political contexts.

The king’s ministers were confronted, in effect, with a patchwork of local measurement codes, each of which had to be cracked. It was as if each district spoke its own dialect, one that was unintelligible to outsiders and at the same time liable to change without notice.

This made it very difficult for the early modern state to monitor food supply, a crucial issue. Absolutist rulers sought conformity of rules and measures in their realms, but this was resisted by local elites to whom the existing system reserved some power. “The very particularity of local feudal practices and their impenetrability to would-be centralizers helped to underwrite the autonomy of local spheres of power.” (30)

Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the “metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.

The impersonality of long-distance trade, and mass production, favored metricalization:

Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its reliable uniformity. (30-1)

For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress.

This would also, of course, make taxation easier. Scott discusses the Encyclopedists and the ideal of an unmarked French citizen, in a unified nation in which all are equal. “In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center.” (32)

There was of course resistance; toise sticks for local measurements were confiscated and replaced with meter sticks, but the people marked the old lengths on them.

Scott turns to the subject of land tenure reform by states, with a Javanese proverb: “The capital has its order, the village its customs” (33). He provides a detailed example of how use rights to common lands and resources could have been distributed in a hypothetical Southeast Asian village (33-4), a key element of which is plasticity:

To describe the usual practices in this fashion, as if they were laws, is itself a distortion. Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances-including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice. (34-5)

The law could never reproduce such a plastic, adaptive system:

Imagine a lawgiver whose only concern was to respect land practices. Imagine, in other words, a written system of positive law that attempted to represent this complex skein of property relations and land tenure. The mind fairly boggles at the clauses, sub-clauses, and sub-sub-clauses that would be required to reduce these practices to a set of regulations that an administrator might understand, never mind enforce. And even if the practices could be codified, the resulting code would necessarily sacrifice much of their plasticity and subtle adaptability. The circumstances that might provoke a new adaptation are too numerous to foresee, let alone specify, in a regulatory code. That code would in effect freeze a living process. (35)

And what of the next village, and the village after that? Our hypothetical code-giver, however devilishly clever and conscientious, would find that the code devised to fit one set of local practices would not travel well. Each village, with its own particular history, ecology, cropping patterns, kinship alignments, and economic activity, would require a substantially new set of regulations. At the limit, there would be at least as many legal codes as there were communities.

(He later gives example of postrevolutionary France attempt at a code rural, which fails for precisely these reasons). This is only a nightmare from the perspective of administrators seeking a single, universal code legible to their purposes of administration; to the villagers living with such traditional practices, they are perfectly legible. “Indeed, the very concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.” [And this is perhaps another aspect of the radicality of a proposal like ‘bolo’bolo: that it creates a situation of ungovernable local diversity].

To promote control over land the state creates and imposes the abstract individual subject as property-holder:

The historical solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the heroic simplification of individual freehold tenure. Land is owned by a legal individual who possesses wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is represented by a uniform deed of title enforced through the judicial and police institutions of the state. Just as the flora of the forest were reduced to Normalbäume, so the complex tenure arrangements of customary practice are reduced to freehold. (36)

The individual “taxpayer” becomes a legible unit imposed on the existing diversity, in the same way as the “normal” tree of the forest had been in scientific forestry. [Another reason for the importance of the concept of the Unique as a counter to the universalizing aspects of right-articulated individualism]. Nevertheless the project of course encounters various difficulties of local complexity and resistance by local elites,

It was claimed, although the evidence is not convincing, that common property was less productive than freehold property. The state’s case against communal forms of land tenure, however, was based on the correct observation that it was fiscally illegible and hence fiscally less productive. [emphasis added]

The state’s project of legibilization/rationalization worked in the service of [primitive accumulation]:

As long as common property was abundant and had essentially no fiscal value, the illegibility of its tenure was no problem. But the moment it became scarce (when “nature” became “natural resources”), it became the subject of property rights in law, whether of the state or of the citizens. The history of property in this sense has meant the inexorable incorporation of what were once thought of as free gifts of nature: forests, game, wasteland, prairie, subsurface minerals, water and watercourses, air rights (rights to the air above buildings or surface area), breathable air, and even genetic sequences, into a property regime.

“It is worth noting that, like the modern tax system, the modern credit system requires a legible property regime for its functioning” (366n79). The “objectivity” of the new system is achieved through abstraction and universality:

The value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality. In principle, at least, the same objective standard can be applied throughout the nation, regardless of local context, to produce a complete and unambiguous map of all landed property. The completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness. Taken alone, it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left blank—unspecified—since it is not germane to the map plotting itself. (44)

The complicity of the state and the regime of privatized property:

Before comprehensive cadastral surveys, some land was open to all and belonged to no one, though social arrangements might regulate its use. With the first cadastral map, such land was generally designated as state land. All land was accounted for; everything not owned privately became the property of the state. (367n82)

Such maps are for outsiders, as locals would not need them; thus they are tied to marketization of land.

The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is always moving, and in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence. (46)

He gives the example of the ridiculous door and window tax, which caused peasants to remove all windows from their dwellings, with health consequences that lasted a century. In colonial contexts, cadastral mapping created a shift in power relations, as traditional systems rooted in local knowledge and memory were replaced with written codes in languages only accessible to foreign officials and intermediaries.

The gulf between land tenure facts on paper and facts on the ground is probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in more tranquil times, there will always be a shadow land-tenure system lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land-records office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. (49)

A strong civil society could hold off or resist cadastral mapping, so colonies often preceded the conquering nation in being mapped. He gives several examples of neat grid maps being imposed from a distance over land unsuited to it as part of commodification; (not mentioned, but very relevant, is the example of California, and San Francisco in particular).

A final paragraph foreshadows the subject of the next chapter:

Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The nineteenth-century Prussian state, for example, was very much interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants but not in their religions or races; what mattered to the state was keeping track of possible draft dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of military age. The state's increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world. (52)

Seeing Like A State, Introduction

 

James C. Scott (1998) Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Summary of Introduction

Scott lays out his agenda, which is to describe exactly what is advertised in the book’s subtitle. He lists four elements involved in every such disaster; all four must be present (4): 

1. “the administrative ordering of nature and society”

2. “a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

High modernism was about ‘interests’ as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities), because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials. (4-5)

3. “an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being” (5); and

4. “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build."

But given these four factors, the question remains, why did the projects fail?

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. (6)

The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

Much of this book can be read as a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order. I stress the word "imperialism" here because I am emphatically not making a blanket case against either bureaucratic planning or high-modernist ideology. I am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.

At this level, I am making a case for the resilience of both social and natural diversity and a strong case about the limits, in principle, of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order. One could, I think, successfully turn this argument against a certain kind of reductive social science. Having already taken on more than I could chew, I leave this additional detour to others, with my blessing. (7)

He cites inspiration from Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and Proudhon for his particular mutualist-inflected understanding of mētis, then distances himself by defending against two potential charges, the first being romanticism regarding traditional, local knowledge.

The second charge is that my argument is an anarchist case against the state itself. The state, as I make abundantly clear, is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being. Short of that draconian but all too common situation, we are left to weigh judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their costs. 

He makes clear that capitalism is every bit as complicit in this as the state:

large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety. (8)

Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.

 

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 8

Summary of Chapter 8: Exchange and Gift

V’s summary:

Both the nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving transcends the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to be overthrown and transcended in the long revolution (1). History is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation, and also, paradoxically, the continuous strengthening of a movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation. The historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is based on magic. This magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. The extreme quantification of exchange reduces man to an object. From this rock bottom a new type of human relationship, involving neither exchange nor sacrifice, can be born (2). (75)

Vaneigem begins with the recurrent theme, of the present social order as an interregnum between two revolutions, a “no-man’s land” in history waiting for its culmination and transcendence:

The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious interregnum between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the anarchic order of future classless societies. The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange is the uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy pleasure of giving oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged, from the pleasure of giving through self-love, which the new generations of proletarians are little by little beginning to discover.

This is also true where (at V’s time of writing) the “shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red flag” (76). The bourgeoisie does of course play an important, though temporary, role in this history:

to give the devil his due, it is through the historical presence and mediation of the bourgeoisie that such a future becomes accessible to the proletariat. Is it not thanks to the technical progress and the productive forces developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position to realise, through the scientifically worked-out project of a new society, its egalitarian visions, its dreams of omnipotence and its desire to live without dead time?

Social organisation – hierarchical since it is based on privative appropriation – gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use; it creates between itself and mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the mystery of nature. (77)

From this point of view history is just the transformation of natural alienation into social alienation: a process of disalienation transformed into a process of social alienation, a movement of liberation producing new chains. Eventually, though, the will for human liberation will launch a direct attack on the whole collection of paralysing mechanisms, that is, on the social organisation based on privative appropriation. This is the movement of disalienation which will at once undo history and realise it in new modes of life.

The bourgeoisie’s accession to power signals man’s victory over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical social organisation, born out of the struggle against hunger, sickness and material distress, loses its justification, and is obliged to take full responsibility for the malaise of industrial civilisations.

The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of man in his historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy. (78)

The old feudal elites justified their rule in terms of myth and sacrifice, though this in reality meant “mythical power for those who sacrifice themselves in reality, real power for those who sacrifice themselves in myth.” (79)

The sacrifice-gift, the potlatch – the game of exchange or loser-take-all, in which the size of the sacrifice determined the prestige of the giver – obviously had no place in a rationalised trading economy. Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it re-emerged in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonised everyday life and turned this too into a market.

Strictly quantified, first by money and then by what might be called ‘sociometric units of power’, exchange pollutes all our relationships, feelings and thoughts. Where exchange dominates, only things are left, a world plugged into the organisation charts of cybernetic power: the world of reification. Yet this world is also, paradoxically, the jumping-off point for a total reconstruction of life and thought. A rock bottom on which we can really start to build. (80)

V posits also a final stage, or possibly an alternate non-revolutionary future, of “cybernetic democracy:”

The sacrifice of the masters is followed by the last stage in the history of sacrifice: the sacrifice of specialists. In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a cybernetic programme whose hyper-rationality of exchange is destined to abolish sacrifice – and man along with it. The day pure exchange comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robot citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice is no more part of the programme of machines than it is of a quite opposite project, the project of the whole human being. (81)

The order of exchange will fall apart, and be replaced by that of the pure gift:

We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful potlatches the affluent society will see – whether it likes it or no – when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewellery simply for the pleasure of giving them away, offers a glimpse of what the will to live has in store for consumer society.

We will have to renew our acquaintance with feudal imperfection, not in order to perfect it, but in order to transcend it. We will have to rediscover the harmony of unitary society while freeing it from the phantom of divinity and from hierarchy sanctified. The new innocence is not so far removed from the ordeals and judgements of God: the inequality of blood is closer to the equality of free individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois equality. The cramped style of the nobility was only a crude sketch of the grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves. Yet it was a style of life nonetheless – a world away from the wretched forms of mere survival which ravage the individual’s existence in our time. (81-2)

 

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 3

Summary of Part 3 Chapter 3: Technical and Philosophical Thought

In this chapter Simondon lays out his prognostications for how a presumably emerging or soon to emerge “philosophical thought” will characterize, or help bring about, the passage from our current split world toward a world which renews the unity or wholeness or whatever, which had characterized the original, magical world. He goes through the different kinds of thought which characterize our stage in world history – technical, religious, and aesthetic – showing how they fail to reach the desired outcome, and yet all include aspects which need to be included in the coming philosophical thought. Technics “grasps” us and our world below the level of unity, and social and political thought (which are the “functional analog of religions” (223) (and which he later specifies as national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet Communism (231)) grasp us from above the level of unity (224).

but these two representations are not enough, because the human world can be grasped in its unity only at the neutral point; technics pluralize it, and political thought integrates it into a higher unity, that of the totality of humanity in its coming-into-being, where it loses its real unity in the same way that the individual loses its unity within a group.

Aesthetic thought “grasps” reality at the “neutral point” between these, and philosophical thought will as well; but it will have to go beyond the merely representational level which aesthetic thought is stuck at, it will also require an “aesthetics of aesthetics,” putting the different stages of aesthetic thought into relation.

S goes through the limitations of current technical thought: it focuses on technical objects instead of seeing at the needed level, of the concrete technical individual (226). Instead of focusing on discipline-specific understanding, it will be necessary to understand the similarity (or identity?) of schemas at the intersection of multiple sciences and practical domains (227). Philosophical thought will need to grasp the “polytechnic — both natural and human — universe” (228); though the term “network” (réseau) goes a way towards this, it is too imprecise, S argues, in that it “does not account for the particular regimes of causality and conditioning that exist in these networks, and that functionally attach them to the human world and to the natural world, as a concrete mediation between these two worlds.” [But “réticulation” totally nails it? This might be related to his critique of cybernetics as too focused in homeostasis, and too readily positing what S considers false equivalences between different kinds of system.]

The introduction of adequate representations of technical objects into culture would result in the key-points of technical networks becoming real terms of reference for the ensemble of human groups, whereas they currently are only key terms for those who understand them, which is to say for the technicians of each specialty; for other men, they only have a practical value, and correspond to very confused concepts; technical ensembles introduce themselves into the world as if they had no natural or human right of belonging, while a mountain or promontory, which have less concrete regulatory power than some technical ensembles, are known by all men of a region and belong to the representation of the world.

[I have to admit I have not been tracking to what extent Simondon’s concepts of “key points” (points clés) and “high points” (hauts lieux) correspond; this passage makes me think they do.] Anyway this sentence sums up “what is wrong with people and society today” in S’s view, and this is the situation which the coming philosophical thought will correct. S notes the different experiences of the human individual toward tools and networks:

one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct a network of one’s own: one can only connect to a network, adapt to it, participate in it; the network dominates and frames [enserre] the action of the individual, it even dominates each technical ensemble. (229)

S goes into a very interesting discussion of the human experience of the technical and natural world in terms of respect and the sacred. To non-technically aware people, big things like a harbor, a freeway interchange, or the aforementioned mountain peak, command respect; but the technical networks of which they are not aware of, do not command such respect. He describes an occasion in which the clock of the Paris Observatory was thrown off to some fractional degree (less than could cause any practical disruption at large) by “the tumultuous visit of science students passing by it on their way to the catacombs,” and the scandal this caused among the scientists who were attuned to this clock’s importance, and thus hold it in respect. S points out that humanities students would not have even thought to profane the workings of the clock, since they would not understand it to be sacred; likewise, a classroom experiment in disrupting a similar clock would not be scandalous, because such a clock does not hold the same sacred, key-point position in a crucial network. So, a future, better society in which we all had better technical understanding, would also be one in which we were more respectful of such networks and their “key-points.”

Turning to social-political thought, S lists its three main forms in the mid-20^th century (national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet communism), and how these are each related to technology (e.g., Soviet communism “gains self-awareness through the use of tractors, the foundation of factories” (231):

the distribution and integration of key-points of social and political thought in the world at least partially coincides with the distribution and integration of the technical key-points, and ... this coinciding becomes all the more perfect as technics becomes increasingly integrated within the universe, in the form of fixed ensembles, attached to one another, constraining [enserrant] human individuals into the links they determine.

Part of what S is doing through this chapter is noting the deficiencies of each of the existing forms of thought, and also the promising aspects which philosophical thought can draw on, when it unifies or transcends them or whatever. Technical and religious (including social-political) thoughts separate the world, when what is needed is to grasp its continuity (233). Part of the solution is the development of what S has elsewhere in the book called “technical culture” (cf. Combes 2013: 57ff.):

it is culture, considered as a lived totality, that must incorporate the technical ensembles by knowing their nature, in order to be able to regulate human life according to these technical ensembles. Culture must remain above all technics, but it must incorporate into its content the knowledge and intuition of genuine technical schemas. Culture is that through which man regulates his relation with the world and with himself; and yet if culture were not to incorporate technology, it would contain an opaque zone and wouldn’t be able to contribute its regulative normativity to the coupling of man and the world. For in this coupling of man and the world, which is that of technical ensembles, there are schemas of activity and conditioning that can be clearly thought only by virtue of concepts defined by a reflexive but direct study. Culture must be contemporary with technics. Culture must reshape itself [se reformer] and must once again take up its content stage by stage. (234)

Per S, contemporary culture fails in this regard because it lags behind technology, understanding it through concepts and ethics which were suitable for earlier stages of history, but are now no longer sufficient. [Though of course, what S does not appear to consider is why this should be the case other than the extent to which “nobody has figured it out yet.” He does not consider what role such “opaque zones” [aka black-boxing] plays in contemporary political and social structures; how, for instance, the fact that users have only an opaque idea of the workings of social media, AI, and so on, is not a bug but a feature from the viewpoint of those who control platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.] Nevertheless, with such sociopolitical context added in, S’s vision has some resonance with thinkers like Bookchin or even Ruskin, who advocate a society whose technology is accessible to, and understood by, all members at large. Ruskin, however, would be susceptible to Simondon’s next argument, which is that

the confusion of technical realities with utensils is a cultural stereotype, founded on the normative notion of utility that is at once valorizing and devaluing. But this notion of utensil and of utility is inadequate to the effective and actual role of technical ensembles within the human world; it thus cannot be regulative in an effective way. (234-5)

S is here specifically arguing against Heidegger, but this also argues against Ruskin’s dream of a return to a day of independent artisans with their utensil-bound technical imagination, inadequate, per S, for the present and future of technical ensembles. The way for humans to learn how to understand technical ensembles is for them to experience, directly, certain situations:

In the same way one used to consider journeys as a means for acquiring culture, because they constituted a mode of placing man into a situation, one should also consider the technical experiences of being placed into a situation with respect to an ensemble, with effective responsibility, as having cultural value. To put it another way, every human being should to a certain extent take part in technical ensembles, that is, take on a responsibility, a definite task with respect to such an ensemble and be connected with a network of universal technics. Furthermore, individual man should not simply experience a single kind of technical ensemble, but rather a plurality of them, just as a traveler will have to encounter several peoples, and experience their mores.

Thus, a future philosophically-informed technical culture would encourage its members to experience a diversity of such situations. Interestingly, S then continues in a manner reminiscent of a famous passage from Marx:

However, this kind of experience must be conceived more as a way of experiencing the situating of each type of technics and ensemble of technics, than as an effort to participate in the condition of man in each of the technics: for in each technics there are technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers, and to the extent that conditions are strictly social, they can be rather analogous, at each level, in the different technics. It is the particular situating in the technical network that must be experienced, insofar as it places man in the presence of and within a series of actions and processes that he does not direct alone, but in which he participates. (235-6)

The resonant, oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

… in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1978: 160)

Marx then continues, emphasizing why such a range of experience should resist the recreation of what he calls “partial identities:”

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors of historical development up till now. (ad loc.)

The mere idealism of Simondon’s warning to avoid falling into the limited, socially determined perspectives of “technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers,” and so on (cf. his similar argument back in the Introduction) can perhaps here be supplemented with something like Marx’s materialist account of how this involves overcoming exploitation and alienation (cf. the discussion of alienation in the summary of Part 2, Chapter 2). It is also worth noting that Simondon’s earlier argument privileging a particular social-scientific position of the “mechanologist” now appears to have dissolved into a more general argument for a sort of society in which individuals learn such a perspective through their regular course of experience; and in what sort of society would this be more likely, than one in which agency, access to, and responsibility for technical (etc.) organization was evenly distributed? [Daniel Colson, most notably, has found numerous resonances with anarchism in Simondon’s otherwise “largely apolitical” work (Colson 2019: 13).]

The philosopher/mechanologist retains an important role, which is similar to that of the artist in contemporary society:

The philosopher, comparable in this role to the artist, can help in raising awareness of the situation within the technical ensemble, by reflecting it within himself and by expressing it; but, again just as the artist, all he can do is be the one who solicits an intuition in others, once a definite sensitivity has been awakened and allows the grasping of the sense of a real experience. (236)

Again, this has to be more than what is possible today with art, which is, essentially, [aestheticizing]:

All the prestigious color photographs of sparks, of fumes, all the recordings of noise, sounds, or images, generally remain a use [exploitation] of technical reality and not a revelation of this reality. Technical reality must be thought, and even be known through participation in its schemas of action; aesthetic feeling can emerge, but only after this intervention of real intuition and participation and not as a fruit of a mere spectacle: every technical spectacle remains puerile and incomplete if it is not preceded by the integration into the technical ensemble.

“Intuition” and “participation” are among Simondon’s consistent offerings for how to get past the divisions he charts, between the technical and religious, the practical and theoretical, the inductive and the deductive, the a priori and the a posteriori. Religion, “being the paradigm of deductive thought” (240), is responsible for a division between Being (as primary) and Knowledge (as secondary), which has detrimentally influenced non-religious ways of thinking as well. [This may not be what he is referring to, but what springs to mind is the interminable 20^th century epistemological debate, taking a form similar to: S can be said to “know” p if:

1: p is true.

2. S believes that p is true.

3. S has “valid reasons” for believing that p is true.

The subsequent debate then hinges over how precisely to word proposition 3 (and/or 4, etc.), without recognizing that propositions 1 and 2 have set up an insuperable Cartesian binary, namely that which Simondon is here criticizing.]

Besides the “participation” in situations which was discussed above, Simondon’s other important answer for how to get past these binaries is intuition, which he derives from Bergson. Intuition is distinct from both “idea” (inductive) and “concept” (deductive):

Now, it is not entirely correct to identify intuition with the idea; knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble.

Note that this also gets us past the limited perspectives focusing solely on element or totality. The new, philosophical intuition will follow on from, but surpass, the earlier stages of magical and aesthetic intuition (244). It will not grasp technical objects (and their users, ensembles, collectivities, etc.) as stable objects but genetically, in becoming. The essence will be going beyond previous, limited and divided ways of thinking, to grasp technicity through an understanding of concretization (thus establishing the importance of the rest of the book to this goal):

this conditioning of the technical object’s genesis are indeed effectively translated by a particular type of the technical object’s coming-into-being, what we have called the concretization of the technical object. The process of this concretization can be directly apprehended by the examination of a certain number of examples of technical objects. But the sense of this concretization, which is an inherence in the object of a technicity that is not entirely contained in it, can be understood only by philosophical thought following the genesis of the technical and non-technical modes of the relation between ... man and the world. Whence the use in this study of a genetic method applied first to technical objects and then to the study of the situation and role of technical thought in the whole [l'ensemble] of thought. (245-6)

Colson, Daniel (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Tr. by Jesse Cohn. Autonomedia, New York.

Combes, Muriel (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marx, Karl (1978) “The German Ideology: Part I” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: WW Norton.