Summary of Chapter 2: Cities, People, and Language
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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:
- They are interested, utilitarian;
- They are documentary (written, recorded);
- 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));
- They are mostly aggregate facts (allowing for greater impersonality);
- 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]:
- “the creation of common units of measurement or coding”;
- “each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment”;
- “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:
- “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.”
- “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:
- 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;
- 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;
- 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)
