Enfield: Legibility and Agency

N.J. Enfield (2026) “Legibility and Agency.” American Anthropologist 128(1):39-51

In this very interesting article Enfield argues that “legibility is foundational to human agency” (39). He casts this as a rebuttal to Scott (1998) which is perhaps not really necessary. His larger point is that legibility is “both agency-increasing and agency-decreasing” (48) depending on social and institutional context.

He begins with an interesting example of Mrkaa boatmen in Laos reading the surfaces of rivers to avoid hazards, and ties this into literature on other culturally and practically situated practices of “reading” water. Such learned skills can be seen as “tuning:”

Whether one is navigating the streams of Mrkaa or the swells of Micronesia, whether one’s readings are direct from nature or mediated by instruments, whether one cites qualitative descriptions of numeric measures, people become tuned to reading the cues around them. This tuning is an adaptation that opens channels for flow, whether it be the flow of attention, reasoning, or response and action. This flow defines the agent’s relation with their environment. The relation is called legibility. (40-1).

Enfield’s beef with Scott is not really about the kind of “High Modern” state [and capitalist] legibility that Scott was critiquing, but more with the way that the term “legibility” is broadly used today in ways derived from Scott’s critique, without including the “high modern” or “state” or “topdown” kind of modifier that would distinguish it from the more general phenomenon which Enfield wants to use the term for: “Beyond this narrow idea of a tool of state control, the mechanism of legibility has far deeper significance for human action and interpretation in social systems” (41), at all scales of human agency and interaction. [And Enfield does, I think, recognize that this contradicts rather the spirit and the polemical intent of Scott’s book, than the explicit content, because Scott in turn includes various caveats regarding local kinds of knowledge and also the nuanced position of local elites (relevant to Enfield’s argument later in this paper).]

Enfield posits two related aspects of agency: 1) flexibility, control over action, planning, anticipation, etc.; and 2) accountability, “comprising others’ evaluations of their actions, and the rights and duties that their actions presuppose, create, and invoke;” in other words, the social and ethical significance made by the social group of the agent’s ability to act.

People use categorization to simplify their environment and their range of responses to it; E makes three points about the relation between agency and categorization (each of which are clearly related to both flexibility and accountability):

1. Categories are “sieves for decision-making and action.”

2. Categorization “sets public coordinates for social agency.”

3. Categorization coordinates “behavior, action, and understanding in groups,” so the interpretations and actions of the group’s members will converge [thus making their actions in turn more legible for the purpose of accountability].

Enfield turns first to first-order legibility, in the relation between an agent and their environment, drawing on Ingold, Gibson, Kockelman, Bourdieu, etc. Legibility is not merely a “property” of the environment: “it cannot be defined without also referring to an agent who reads it” (42) [and a context and purpose for which they are doing so]. “When this relationship achieves an enduring equilibrium for a group of agents, this gives rise to a legibility regime.”

In addition to learned legibility (attuning your attention to found signs in the environment) there is also constructed legibility (attuned to constructed signs produced by tools, instruments, etc.). Enfield also distinguishes first-order legibility regimes as to different “sources:” ancestral, goal derived, expertise derived.

He turns next to second-order legibility, “manipulating the environment to guide others’ action,” and more generally, anticipating the actions and interpretations of said others. As the perceptions and actions of other people are among the things we are most attuned to in any environment, second-order legibility is “foundational to the logic of communication.” Enfield discusses several ways that humans, honeybees, etc. do this; legibility is thus “an organizer of activity” in Lynch’s words (quoted on page 43).

In second-order legibility, we construct signs that organize others’ activities in a mechanism that is fundamental to the agency of social interaction. It builds on first-order legibility (the capacity to read an environment) by reading others’ capacity to read and then heeding that reading in the design of other-oriented action. (43)

[This is thus made possible by the three points E emphasized about categorization, and is also linked to the accountability of the others whose actions we are anticipating.] Enfield summarizes his argument:

Our goal here is to understand legibility as a resource for agency in the broadest sense, and thus to recontextualize a widely held framing of legibility as a modern imposition of large-scale states and technologies. I argue that legibility is inherent to all frameworks for situated action, from mētis to census, and that the legibility-agency relationship is foundational to social coordination and, in turn, to sociocultural institutions.

Enfield now sets about this recontextualization by discussing legibility in a series of social contexts; first off, the reading of signs to establish deviance.

Following the logic of second-order legibility, being socialized in a community means becoming tuned to how others will read your behavior and then being able to adjust as needed. … we create signs of ourselves that heed others’ patterns of assessment and nudge them as needed, but in large part, our self-presentation is a way to avoid attracting attention or response at all.

Thus, beat cops patrolled neighborhoods looking for “suspicious” characters; the trick was to anticipate this legibility regime and not arouse suspicion. Other examples include visitors to Mrkaa houses failing to understand the rules of seating location and thus standing out as outsiders.

Enfield then turns to the “high modernist” legibility famously critiqued by Scott in Seeing Like A State. He notes that

Critiques of high-modernist legibility are not critiques of legibility per se, but of the methods of states as agents of large-scale social order. … The problem is the supplanting of old, functionally evolved legibility regimes with hastily arranged, cartoonishly simple, and inflexibly quantitative new ones. (45)

[Though it is not in fact the hastiness, cartoonishness, or inflexible quantitativeness of such imposed legibility regimes that are central to Scott’s critique, it is rather that legibility regimes with these qualities can nevertheless better serve the State’s interests than locally developed and situated regimes, and so will often be adopted.] E argues further:

High-modernist legibility is not fundamentally different from any dynamic coordination device that sets terms for members of a social group who would wish to understand, influence, and align with each other. Whether it is enabling or constraining depends on who uses it and how.

He follows this with an interesting discussion of semiotic interception, in which signs are “intercepted” or [rearticulated/reterritorialized] to have means other than intended; an example is a king who is tricked into lowering his head on entrance through a low doorway, and thus “bowing” to the owner of the house.

The ever-present possibility of semiotic interception means that, to be agentive, people must anticipate and imagine potential secondary readings of their actions, some with significant consequences. Semiotic interception occurs when we are read in ways we did not foresee or intend. This ignorance of one’s own legibility is a de-agentivising force. It creates conditions for flow piracy in the domain of social action, a key factor in the exertion of political power. (46)

["Flow piracy" is a great term, apparently borrowed from hydraulics? which is unfortunately not returned to or fleshed out, though "pirates" are mentioned again later.]

Two phenomena linked to semiotic interception are preference capture, “when legibility thematizes and exploits an established preference,” and preference installation, “when legibility creates and imposes a new preference.”

The concept of semiotic interception is then expanded on with an account of how witchcraft accusations are used by the relatively powerful to take advantage of the relatively powerless, e.g., by local landowners to seize the property of a widow, by [articulating] an accident or sickness as a sign of witchcraft. Enfield primarily emphasizes how semiotic interception is made use of by the powerful; the question of course arises, isn’t it also used by those with less power, to resist, challenge, or redirect the powerful? It would be interesting to see this explored in greater depth. Enfield’s own examples include the trickster fooling the king, and people under surveillance fooling the police, specifically through semiotic interception.

Turning back to Scott, he takes issue with a passage in which Scott had argued that cadastral maps served the purposes of outsiders, not locals, because locals already “know” whose land is whose:

But if it were true that “everyone knows” whose land is whose, there would be no land disputes at the village level. Of course there are such disputes and they are all too often resolved in favor of the powerful. (48)

We would like to think that no idyllic “meadow by the river” would be sullied by such disputes. But without the publicly warrantable accountability that certain forms of legibility can offer, we are at the mercy of the locally powerful: landowners, resource-holders, lords, big men, et cetera. In these contexts, the words “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river” are the words of a pirate, gangster, or corrupt village chief. Societal structurelessness may seem ideal when juxtaposed against the excesses of an overbearing, malevolent state with its half-empty glass of tyrannical legibility. But structurelessness is also “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.” [quoting Freeman, 1972]

This is a great and valid point, and even opens up some great further potential avenues for exploration (e.g. written constitutions and laws as legibility regimes, in order to make state power and process more transparent/contestable, a la Hammurabi, etc.). But first there seem to be some conceptual mashings-together which need to be cleaned up. First off, it is not clear that for Scott the opposite of State-imposed legibility is some complete lack of legibility; iirc there is a point where he describes complex urban street systems as “legible” to their inhabitants, though not to outsiders. Showing that achieved or learned legibility is not just State-imposed but an aspect of communication in all societies is a great point and a contribution, but it is needlessly limited by being posed as a rebuttal to Scott, who seems likely to have agreed. Second, “structurelessness” here is Freeman’s word, not Scott’s, and she is criticizing informality, not horizontality, per se (cf. Cohen, 2021, 12-13). Scott is not arguing for informality, against formality; he is arguing against centralizing systems of power-through-legibility which in turn leads him to posit the frequent inferiority of such systems in serving the needs of local people, compared to local and traditional systems. Those local systems can be formal or informal, and Scott frequently makes note of the fact that they are not necessarily lacking in exploitation and inequality—they simply will tend to be less exploitative and unequal than State-imposed systems. (For example, Scott’s “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river,” evokes some locally legible agreement or understanding, a “publicly warrantable accountability,” which would not necessarily exclude formal mechanisms for maintaining and enforcing this understanding (I am thinking of the Andean villagers in Rappaport 1990); the fact that someone “holds” the meadow means that someone else is excluded from using it, so we are not talking about an idealized “structureless” commune of some sort). The general lesson that the “weapons of the weak” can often be the weapons of the strong is an important one, and it would be good to see it explored through Enfield’s concepts at greater length, but a polemical stance unhelpfully simplifies what is necessarily a nuanced subject.

Cohen, Yves (2021): “Horizontality in the 2010s: Social Movements, Collective Activities, Social Fabric, and Conviviality”, Mecila Working Paper Series, No. 40, São Paulo: The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, http://dx.doi.org/10.46877/ cohen.2021.40

Freeman, Jo (1972) “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” Berkeley Journal of Sociology. 17: 154-64.

Rappaport, Joanna (1990) The Politics of Memory: Native historical interpretation in the Columbian Andes. Cambridge University Press, New York.

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

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Cities, People, and Language

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ

The chapter starts off with the classic Borges quote on the one-to-one scale map, for which Scott cites (ahem) the fictional author rather than Borges himself (nevertheless he will mention Borges and this same story in a footnote to the next chapter). The focus is on how the state tries to redesign society to make it more governable, primarily through three means: urban design, imposition of permanent surnames, and standardization of language. For the first of these, Scott contrasts the medieval streets of Bruges with the modern grid of Chicago as two opposing ideal-types of urban form:

For those who grew up in its various quarters, Bruges would have been perfectly familiar, perfectly legible. Its very alleys and lanes would have closely approximated the most common daily movements. For a stranger or trader arriving for the first time, however, the town was almost certainly confusing, simply because it lacked a repetitive, abstract logic that would allow a newcomer to orient herself. The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. As a semipermeable membrane, it facilitated communication within the city while remaining stubbornly unfamiliar to those who had not grown up speaking this special geographic dialect. (53-4)

Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. (54)

A key motivation for the mapping of cities was to enable control. City planners looked at cities the way foresters looked at forests; Scott cites the influence of the Roman castra. “Other things being equal, the city laid out according to a simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to administer and to police” (55), with straight, wide streets for the marching of armies. Nevertheless he notes that street grids do not ensure governability: “No amount of formal order can overcome massive countervailing factors such as poverty, crime, social disorganization, or hostility toward officials. As a sign of the illegibility of such areas, the Census Bureau acknowledges that the number of uncounted African-Americans was six times the number of uncounted whites. The undercount is politically volatile since census figures determine the number of congressional seats to which a state is entitled” (369n12).

The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging for pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript (providing he is at the address given), and planning public transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid. (56-7)

Three aspects of geometric order bear emphasis:

1: “The first is that the order in question is most evident, not at street level, but rather from above and from outside.” (57) This is achieved through miniaturization, for instance models of buildings, or of cities. S notes the use of airplanes for the top-down view [cf. Certeau]; today drones, satellites, etc.

2. “A second point about an urban order easily legible from outside is that the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to the order of life as it is experienced by its residents.” (58)

The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and social experience. (58)

[The point here is not that it is unrelated but that there is no necessary or inherent relationship. Obviously, as Scott makes clear later, the formal order impacts and shapes social experience, and is intended to.]

3. “The third notable aspect of homogeneous, geometrical, uniform property is its convenience as a standardized commodity for the market.”

[This point is very relevant to SF history:]

Precisely because they are abstract units detached from any ecological or topographical reality, they resemble a kind of currency which is endlessly amenable to aggregation and fragmentation. … Bureaucratic and commercial logic, in this instance, go hand in hand.”

Plans to completely remake cities rarely come to pass, so most old cities are mixes of Bruges and Chicago (his two examples). He illustrates with the oft-told story of Haussmanization in Paris.

As happens in many authoritarian modernizing schemes, the political tastes of the ruler occasionally trumped purely military and functional concerns. Rectilinear streets may have admirably assisted the mobilization of troops against insurgents, but they were also to be flanked by elegant facades and to terminate in imposing buildings that would impress visitors. Uniform modern buildings along the new boulevards may have represented healthier dwellings, but they were often no more than facades. The zoning regulations were almost exclusively concerned with the visible surfaces of buildings, but behind the facades, builders could build crowded, airless tenements, and many of them did. (62)

The desired legibility is not just architectural [a la Lynch], but social [a la Jameson]:

Legibility, in this case, was achieved by a much more pronounced segregation of the population by class and function. Each fragment of Paris increasingly took on a distinctive character of dress, activity, and wealth—bourgeois shopping district, prosperous residential quarter, industrial suburb, artisan quarter, bohemian quarter. It was a more easily managed and administered city and a more ‘readable’ city because of Haussmann’s heroic simplifications. (62-3)

Poorer residents were displaced to outer suburbs such as Belleville, which become seats of resistance, involved in the Paris Commune as “partly an attempt to reconquer the city … by those exiled to the periphery by Haussmann” (63).

Moving on from urban design, Scott turns to the imposition by the State of permanent surnames (64ff). This was in contrast to local naming practices: “Like the network of alleys in Bruges, the assortment of local weights and measures, and the intricacies of customary land tenure, the complexity of naming has some direct and often quite practical relations to local purposes.” (64)

The adoption of permanent, inherited patronyms went far, but not the whole way. How is a state to associate a name, however unique and unambiguous, with an individual? Like identity cards, social security numbers, and pass systems, names require that the citizenry cooperate by carrying them and producing them on the demand of an official. Cooperation is secured in most modern state systems by making a clear identity a prerequisite for receiving entitlements; in more coercive systems, harsh penalties are exacted for failure to carry identification documents. If, however, there is widespread defiance, individuals will either fail to identify themselves or use false identities. The ultimate identity card, then, is an ineradicable mark on the body: a tattoo, a fingerprint, a DNA ‘signature.’ (371n38)

Campaigns to assign permanent patronyrns have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. (65)

In Han China, surnames were imposed on commoners for tax collection, at the same time stabilizing/creating the patrilineal family as a legal entity. In Europe the traditional system of naming was also overhauled:

An individual’s name was typically his given name, which might well suffice for local identification. If something more were required, a second designation could be added, indicating his occupation (in the English case, smith, baker), his geographical location (hill, edgewood), his father’s given name, or a personal characteristic (short, strong). These secondary designations were not permanent surnames; they did not survive their bearers, unless by chance, say, a baker’s son went into the same trade and was called by the same second designation. (65-6)

He illustrates with the failed Florentine census (catasto) of 1427:

The matter of age, like the matter of landholding, was a vastly different concept in the state’s hands than it was in popular practice. ... In local practice, exact ages were unimportant. Approximate ages and birth order (e.g., oldest son, youngest son) were more useful; in the catasto this is reflected by the tendency to declare ages in units of five or ten years (e.g., thirty-five, forty, forty- five, fifty, and sixty years). For the state, however, exact age was important for several reasons. The age of ‘fiscal adulthood’ as well as liability for conscription was eighteen, and, beyond age sixty, one was no longer responsible for capitation taxes. As one might expect, there was a demographically improbable clustering of declarations just below age eighteen and just above sixty. Like the surname, the designation of age, in the strict, linear, chronological sense, originates as a state project. (372n45)

When making his declaration, a typical Tuscan provided not only his own given name but those of his father and perhaps his grandfather as well, in quasi-biblical fashion (Luigi, son of Giovanni, son of Paolo). Given the limited number of baptismal names and the tendency of many families to repeat names in alternate generations, even this sequence might not suffice for unambiguous identification. The subject might then add his profession, his nickname, or a personal characteristic. (66)

In the final analysis, the Florentine state was inadequate to the administrative feat intended by the catasto. Popular resistance, the noncompliance of many local elites, and the arduousness and cost of the census exercise doomed the project, and officials returned to the earlier fiscal system.

The older method of naming can still be seen in many surnames:

A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear. like a fly caught in amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man’s father was ( Fitz-, 0’-, -sen, -son, -s, Mac-, -vich. At the time of their establishment, last names often had a kind of local logic to them: John who owned a mill became John Miller; John who made cart wheels became John Wheelwright; John who was physically small became John Short. As their male descendants, whatever their occupations or stature, retained the patronyms, the names later assumed an arbitrary cast. (67)

Surnames were imposed with spread of written documents, allowing people to be identified even though the official identifying them or using the document did not know them personally. For individuals and communities, adopting surnames aligned with, and facilitated, interactions with state structures like taxation (record of previous payments) and property (inheritance).

One imagines that for a long time English subjects had in effect two names—their local name and an “official,” fixed patronym. As the frequency of interaction with impersonal administrative structures increased, the official name came to prevail in all but a man’s intimate circle. Those subjects living at a greater distance, both socially and geographically, from the organs of state power, as did the Tuscans, acquired permanent patronyms much later.

For instance, the Scots and Welsh getting surnames later than English. S goes into the interesting example of the Philippines, where Spanish officials created a list of “nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts” (69) which were used to assign surnames. Schools and other officials were ordered to require surname use, so people couldn’t just ignore them.

Surnames were imposed by various European states on Eastern European Jews. Other examples: US immigration, colonies, modernizing states.

Today, of course, there are now many other state-impelled standard designations that have vastly improved the capacity of the state to identify an individual. The creation of birth and death certificates, more specific addresses (that is, more specific than something like ‘John-on-the-hill’), identity cards, passports, social security numbers, photographs, fingerprints, and, most recently, DNA profiles have superseded the rather crude instrument of the permanent surname. But the surname was a first and crucial step toward making individual citizens officially legible, and along with the photograph, it is still the first fact on documents of identity. (71)

[Speaking of crude instruments, it is interesting that signatures are still used, often in very attenuated form (as in the digital scribble I used to sign for a UPS package, which was clearly not expected to be legible or match some “official” signature).]

Scott now turns to the imposition of a standard, official language, as a project of State control, with the particular example of France (drawing heavily on Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchman, among other sources):

The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders. (72)

Where the command of Latin had once defined participation in a wider culture for a small elite, the command of standard French now defined full participation in French culture. The implicit logic of the move was to define a hierarchy of cultures, relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the guardian of the language, l’Académie Française). (73)

This was accompanied by the centralization of travel in France with Paris as a hub; (which became a liability in wartime):

It was aimed at achieving, for the military control of the nation, what Haussmann had achieved in the capital itself. It thus empowered Paris and the state at the expense of the provinces, greatly affected the economics of location, expedited central fiscal and military control, and severed or weakened lateral cultural and economic ties by favoring hierarchical links. At a stroke, it marginalized outlying areas in the way that official French had marginalized local dialects. (76)

Conclusion:

Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.

...complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories. The only way to accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. The invention, elaboration, and deployment of these abstractions represent, as Charles Tilly has shown, an enormous leap in state capacity—a move from tribute and indirect rule to taxation and direct rule. (77)

Direct rule sparked widespread resistance and necessitated negotiations that often limited the center’s power, but for the first time, it allowed state officials direct knowledge of and access to a previously opaque society.

For this biopolitical point S gives the example of the CDC, and the lifesaving capacities this creates.

The techniques devised to enhance the legibility of a society to its rulers have become vastly more sophisticated, but the political motives driving them have changed little. Appropriation, control, and manipulation (in the nonpejorative sense) remain the most prominent.

[By “nonpejorative” S means he is making basically the same point Foucault makes: this state logic is not “good or bad, but dangerous.”]

The interventions it does experience will typically be mediated by local trackers who know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own particular interests. Without this mediation—and often with it—state action is likely to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting its objective.

An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare. As long as the state’s interest is largely confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few conscripts, the state’s ignorance may not be fatal. When, however, the state’s objective requires changing the daily habits (hygiene or health practices) or work performance (quality labor or machine maintenance) of its citizens, such ignorance can well be disabling. A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures. At the same time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format. (78)

A telling illustration is the use of such knowledge by Nazis in the Holocaust. In the case of Amsterdam, the use was made of the legibility created by existing Dutch population and business registries, to which the Nazis “supplied the murderous purpose” [which phenomenon I have elsewhere called the “complicity” of the liberal state].

That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.

Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is synoptic. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like U.S. highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy a quasi- monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, and the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many statelike functions and often mimic its information structure as well. (79)

State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing ‘project of legibility,’ a project that is never fully realized. The data from which such simplifications arise are, to varying degrees, riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, faulty aggregations, fraud, negligence, political distortion, and so on. A project of legibility is immanent in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society, but it is undermined by intra-state rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above all, the resistance of its subjects. (80)

Scott lists five characteristics of state simplifications:

1. They are interested, utilitarian;
2. They are documentary (written, recorded);
3. They are static (S defends this in a footnote: “Even when these facts appear dynamic, they are usually the result of multiple static observations through time that, through a ‘connect the dots’ process, give the appearance of continuous movement. In fact, what actually happened between, say, observation A and observation B remains a mystery, which is glossed over by the convention of merely drawing a straight line between the two data points” (375n79));
4. They are mostly aggregate facts (allowing for greater impersonality);
5. For most purposes, they are standardized for practical purposes.

There are at least three steps to manufacturing facts which are standardized and aggregatable [which could be glossed as coding, counting, and calculation]:

1. “the creation of common units of measurement or coding”;
2. “each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment”;
3. “the creation of wholly new facts by aggregation, following the logic of the new units.”

Combining several metrics of aggregation, one arrives at quite subtle, complex, heretofore unknown truths, including, for example, the distribution of tubercular patients by income and urban location. (81)

Though S calls these “state simplifications,” he does not mean to say by this that they are simple or foolish per se. Rather, the term simplification has here two senses:

1. “First, the knowledge that an official needs must give him or her a synoptic view of the ensemble; it must be cast in terms that are replicable across many cases. In this respect, such facts must lose their particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts.”
2. “Second, in a meaning closely related to the first, the grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing or ignoring distinctions that might otherwise be relevant.”

Taking the example of measuring employment, S devotes a substantial footnote (375n82) to three problems created in the use of statistics:

1. The “hegemony of the categories,” i.e. a complex and diverse world of unique and varying circumstances must be radically simplified to fit [Procrustean] categories;
2. The fact of observation and measurement shapes the response of those being measured, for instance unemployment statistics being exaggerated, because of people working “off the books” to avoid taxation;
3. Those creating the statistics are also interested in the outcomes, and could [“massage”] the data to create desired impressions.

S notes that “accuracy is meaningless if the identical procedure cannot reliably be performed elsewhere” (81). [Though this sort of begs the question of just what “accuracy” would be, if not a feature of some “better,” more precise and exhaustive system of measurement? It is like contrasting any given map to Borges’ perfect (but useless) 1:1 map].

But Scott’s ultimate argument is that the State not only tries to create the map to suit the territory, but also seeks to transform the territory, to better suit the map.

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations. (82)

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizing mission.’ The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

If you wish to have any standing in law, you must have a document that officials accept as evidence of citizenship, be that document a birth certificate, passport, or identity card. The categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance. (83)

 

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)

 

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 18

 

Summary of Chapter 18: The “Middle Layers” of Employment

Braverman turns now from the proletariat to the new “middle class,” which, however, differs from the old petty-bourgeois middle class of pre-monopoly capitalism, in that it lacks independence and access to the means of production (e.g. as oldtime artisans, farmers, etc. had), instead having some characteristics of a working class, in particular being dependent upon capital for employment:

This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. (279)

The stark contract between the old class structure and the modern one is that, before monopoly capital, a large portion of the working population were independent of capital per se, being neither owners nor employees of capitalist enterprises. Today, however, “almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital” (ibid., emphasis original).

However, for the middle class, it is about more than the mere structural fact that they are employees, for this technically holds true also of upper management:

These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally” for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi­fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. (280)

Thus, the shared “form of hired employment” in fact represents two distinct realities: on the one side that of the working class, selling their labor power, and on the other a mechanism by which the ruling class selects representatives from within itself to carry out leadership roles in the corporation.

Then, “between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees,” primarily in terms of relative authority and expertise, as well as “working independence.” These intermediate positions are those held by the new middle class in the corporation.

Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,” even if a small one.

There is a vast hierarchy which blends into management at the top, and the workers at the bottom. This “new middle class” is distinct from the old middle class, again, because they are not outside the capital-labor relationship, but possess a status combining aspects of both sides, though increasingly of the latter, in that, like workers, they are subject to downward pressure on wages from an unemployed reserve army, and their workplaces are periodically subject to “rationalization” in the interests of capital (282). B notes that employment crises in the 20^th century exposed the myth that these middle class workers were independent “professionals:”

... rising rates of unemployment among “professionals” of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves” with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecu­rities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation” and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

Thus, the new “middle class” either is going or will go through the same shifts towards proletarianization as the clerical class discussed earlier in the book. Braverman draws from this the moral that class is not a static “thing” (as presumed by those who want to come up with inherent definitions for classes), but a relationship (283).

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6

Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).