Seeing Like A State, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Authoritarian High Modernism

This chapter introduces the concept of “High Modernism” which will be explored through subsequent chapters.

All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. (87)

Yet they not only summarize facts, they transform them in portraying them; not just description, but prescription:

The state has no monopoly on utilitarian simplifications. What the state does at least aspire to, though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful institution in society: the state. (87-8)

This had to wait until the mid-19^th to 20^th century, when state power grew to match its ambitions. “I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements” (88). These are:

1. “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society”. S terms this high modernism (after Harvey), an ideology shared by both right and [statist] left.

2. “the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” (88-9)

3. “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”

The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias. (89)

S sees Nazism as a reactionary form of Modernism. He discusses “progressive” variants of High Modernism:

Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

A section on “the discovery of society” (90ff) details the role of the social sciences; S quotes Condorcet on the “moral sciences,” which are to be modeled after the physical sciences.

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. (91)

The development of statistics:

The existing social order, which had been more or less taken by earlier states as a given, reproducing itself under the watchful eye of the state, was for the first time the subject of active management. It was possible to conceive of an artificial, engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident, but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria. (92)

There is a link between class control, and colonialism, in this project:

It is important to recognize that, among Western powers, virtually all the initiatives associated with the “civilizing missions” of colonialism were preceded by comparable programs to assimilate and civilize their own lower-class populations, both rural and urban. The difference, perhaps, is that in the colonial setting officials had greater coercive power over an objectified and alien population, thus allowing for greater feats of social engineering. (378n19)

The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian. In place of multiple sources of invention and change, there was a single planning authority; in place of the plasticity and autonomy of existing social life, there was a fixed social order in which positions were designated. (93)

In the 20^th century, industrial warfare and the response to the Depression both required a more thorough mobilization of society; as did the rebuilding of post-war states. Beyond this, both revolutionary and colonial societies exerted special concentrated power [meeting the three criteria listed above].

The “birth” of 20^th-Century High Modernism can be located in post-WWI Germany, under Walter Rathenau, who was motivated in part by his belief in productivism:

For many specialists, a narrow and materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a scientific control of the entire labor process. (98)

Productivism had two lineages: 1) Taylorism; 2) the European school of “energetics.” S quotes Rabinbach (from the Human Motor book) on the point that productivism is “politically promiscuous,” embraced by both left and right (99). Productivism is a technological fix for class struggle; for capitalists, enabling control of worker; for the statist left, the elimination of capitalist management:

For much of the left, productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum solution, or ‘best practice,’ for any problem in the organization of work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism in the interest, presumably, of all.

Scott lists Thorstein Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, and Ayn Rand as all very different expounders of this ideology.

The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass destruction. (100)

Lenin was impressed with Rathenau’s example, and with Taylorism:

A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin. (101)

S ends with three sources of resistance to “the authoritarian temptations of twentieth-century high modernism” in liberal democracies:

1. The “existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.” Scott notes that such private spheres have been much eroded, but the idea that there is a proper outside to the control of the state still forms a limit.

2. The “private sector in liberal political economy;” this is thought to be outside the capacity of the state to recreate or master, and thus limits the state’s “economic sovereignty” [quoting from The Foucault Effect].

3: Most importantly, democratic institutions and liberal freedoms; “the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt” (102), and thus limit the power of elites and bureaucrats.

Smooth City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Smooth Structures

This chapter goes into more detailed discussion of the Reestraat and the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central in London, in order to illustrate the structures or “mechanisms” that produce and reproduce the “perfection” of the smooth city.

It is important to understand that the smooth city does not appear out of thin air, but is the result of all kinds of power structures, political impulses, planning processes, and design choices. (29)

One of these mechanisms is private ownership of land, and investment in redevelopment; this is tied to certain forms of state control and promotion, and results in a lack of certain [democratic mechanisms] to challenge planning and use. Together, local government and private property-holders exert a “matrix of control” (49), policing the use of space, and excluding undesirable or un-“smooth” populations, as well as unapproved practices such as loitering, putting up flyers, graffiti, etc. Boer emphasizes the role of privately-owned parks as a sort of pseudo-public space, where cryptic rules are enforced by private security guards. The generally unspoken but inferred scripts of acceptable and expected behavior in the smooth city are sometimes, in “awkward cases,” spelled out, as in a sign in King’s Cross Central commanding passersby to “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” (52). “Smart city” policing, screening, and scripting dramatically reduce the unpredictability of encounters in the smooth city, as do the rise of delivery and e-hailing apps, which replace the chance of encounter with algorithmic manipulation, turning the smooth city into essentially the opposite of what the city has always been, and the opposite of what most urban enthusiasts and critics have tended to celebrate. However, this may very well appear “perfect” to those who can afford it, and who can follow the script.

B has some interesting passages on the way the smooth city interacts with history and place, through a sort of recasting and hollowing out – place names are preserved, as often are historic façades while the interiors are gutted and redesigned. [I was recently in just such a building in downtown Phoenix, across the street from the Footprint Center, the wind-rippled tile “skin” of which is a rare, actually beautiful (and presumably ecologically beneficial) example of contemporary architecture. Yet, much like with King’s Cross Central, a former industrial zone has been gutted and repurposed, to create a safe, smooth space for the “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” set.] With an eye for material detail, B discusses the acid-cleaning of historical bricks, the replacement of older glass panels with up-to-date glass, and the transformation of Amsterdam streetscapes with new materials according to the rules of the “Puccini method” (24). He concludes with a discussion of how the production, maintenance, and replication of the smooth city is embedded in flows of capital, and how it relies on non-smooth or less-smooth spaces in which it exists in a hierarchy. Examples of these are the peripheral neighborhoods to which those displaced by gentrification have had to relocate; from these neighborhoods come the daily flux of workers who maintain, clean, and labor in the smooth city, and yet are excluded from local politics and decision making. This is true also on a global scale:

The complicated-looking intercom on the gasholder apartment building in King’s Cross Central was assembled in a factory near Shenzhen a few years ago, and will be disassembled by kids in the open wastelands near Accra a few years from now. (57)

The chapter also includes an inset of several pages of collages, using images presumably from the street spaces described, which highlight the attraction and repulsion exerted by the perfected/alienated space of the smooth city.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Of the Refrain.

This key chapter explores the concept of the “refrain,” though Emma Ingala argues, persuasively, that this would be better translated as ritornello (Ingala 2018). Ingala also points out that 1837 is the date of Schumann’s Études symphoniques (and Schumann fittingly reappears throughout the text, as a refrain/ritornello...). The image is Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, very apt because it captures many of the chapter’s themes visually, and because Klee’s writings on art are one of the key interlocuting texts.

The chapter begins with three “aspects” of the refrain: a child whistling in the dark, a circle drawn to organize a space, and a crack opening for a venturing forth. In my initial notes (from who knows when) I labeled these as skip, (which “jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos” (311)), circle, and crack. Ingala terms them “in the dark,” “at home,” and “towards the world.” The central theme is how order is organized to protect against chaos, yet there needs also to be an opening to chaos, to prevent going to far into rigidity and death.

Every milieu is a refrain, “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component” (313). With the example of living things, they delineate four kinds of milieus (exterior, interior, intermediary, and annexed) which exist in relation to it:

Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions.

They then discuss this in term of their concept of transduction/transcoding, clearly based in part on Simondon’s transduction, though expanded in the Deleuzo-Guattarian manner. Whereas S’s transduction, as far as I can tell, connects technical elements through subsequent historical stages of technology, or from one ensemble to another, for D&G, is

the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.

They insist on the difference between rhythm (good) and meter (bad); while the latter is mere repetition, the former is repetition with difference. This is also why, per Ingala, ritornello is a better translation into English (of French ritournelle), than “refrain.” While the latter invokes the repeated chorus of a song, the former is a recurring variation on a theme. So, it would be more like a chorus with at least some of the words changed each time, or a repeated phrase that takes on different meanings in new contexts? Because (as Ingala explains clearly), a home needs to protect against the chaos outside, but also be open to it, or else it becomes a prison. So, there is a structure that delineates a distinct space/time, but must be open and not fully predictable in content, etc. “Meter is dogmatic, rhythm is critical...”

A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the “critical solution of the antinomy.” (314)

(This last is a reference to Kant.) The relation between refrains and territory/territorialization is then explored, through art, territorial motifs, and literature. “Professional refrains,” aka merchant’s cries, are interrogated as a key type. They give a general definition of refrain, which intentionally does not privilege sound:

we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes

(there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). (323)

A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization (something that “has-the-value-of” home). (326)

They classify four types of refrain: 1) territorializing; 2) territorializing refrains that play a certain function in an assemblage 3) the same, in variation with each other, as in nursery rhymes sung differently in different neighborhoods; 4) “refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization: ‘Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won't look back’” (327).

Having drawn extensively on ethological accounts of bird songs, etc., they make an interesting argument for the advantage ethologists have over ethnologists, namely that “they did not fall into the structural danger of dividing an undivided ‘terrain’ into forms of kinship, politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the integrality of a certain undivided ‘terrain’” (328). To an extent it is, specifically, the structuralist ethnology of the mid-Twentieth century which they are criticizing, but more generally they could be making a case for not separating out the animal from the human as different realms to be understood separately (I have in the margin, “cf. Kropotkin,” no doubt for his insistence that anarchists can learn from the study of the natural world). D&G are also criticizing ethologists who rely on concepts like inhibition and release, or instinct, because these are also reductionist and are essentially giving up said advantage. In a larger sense, this is also a reflection of their deeper theme, the non-division of the world into separate realms that operate differently and are understood with different sciences; part of D&G’s agenda is to create one set of concepts and terminology which can discuss ethology, ethnology, economics, geology, linguistics, chemistry, etc. ... And so here, in counter to “instinct,” they proffer their own concepts of rhizomaticity, and “behavioral-biological ‘machinics.’”

They summarize the chapter so far:

We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded, trans-coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to interassemblages, to the opening of assemblages along lines of deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing, Cosmos. (337)

They outline a theory of the stages of classicism, romanticism, and modernism, which bear affinity to the previously mentioned aspects of in-the-dark, at-home, and towards-the-world (and like these, they do not constitute an “evolution” (346)). In my review of the previous chapter I made the error of thinking the refrain/ritornello would play a similar role in music to that of the face in visual art; nevertheless, it is still apt that modernism (in art and music) is about resisting the sort of too-rigid refrain in the second aspect, that risks falling back into fascism or death; and this is the importance of the third, Modernist stage, with its openness to the “Cosmos,” aka the plane of consistency [though fascism is a modernist disease].

They now again classify types of refrains (347):

1) “milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers the other (the piano and the violin)”;

2) “natal refrains, refrains of the territory, where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth, according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby, the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.)”;

3) “folk and popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people, according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultaneously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German, Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.)”;

4) “molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the Cosmos refrain.”

5) “For the Cosmos itself is a refrain,”

6) “and the ear also (everything that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain).”

(Though possibly 4, 5, and 6 were all intended as one type?) After mentioning ears (but not, alas, pursuing the idea of the labyrinth), they reject the “privileging of the ear;” as Ingala stresses, this chapter is not about music, in the sense that music is only one form in which refrains/ritornellos manifest. Nevertheless they end the chapter with a discussion of “the potential fascism of music” (348), and of types of refrains involved in music, and return finally to the importance of Schumann, whose name returns as a closing refrain.

Ingala, Emma (2018) “Of the Refrain (The Ritornello)” in Somers-Hall and Bell, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Isolation

The chapter is bookended by two quotes in Spanish, the first from the poem Reportaje by Jose Hierro, and the last from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

Vaneigem’s chapter summary:

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And the only resistance to the illusions of the permitted painkillers come from the collective desire to destroy isolation (1). Impersonal relationships are the no-man’s-land of isolation. By producing isolation, contemporary social organisation signs its own death sentence (2). (38)

He presents the [spectacle] through the parable of a cage with an open door, but which no one leaves:

For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real, which was simply an irresistible instinct to act so that things should have importance. Only if things had some importance could one breathe, and suffer.

[It would be interesting to explore Vanegeim’s usage of “the Real” here, with that of Baudrillard, Lacan, Zizek, etc.; however, he never returns to it.]

Public transportation in the [carceral archipelago]:

On public transport, which throws them against one another with statistical indifference, people assume an unbearable expression of mixed disillusion, pride and contempt – an expression much like the natural effect of death on a toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communica­tion makes everyone the policeman of his own encounters. The instincts of flight and aggression trail the knights of wage-labour, who must now rely on subways and suburban trains for their pitiful wanderings. (39)

We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together. Certainly the seeds of an authentic collective life are lying dormant within the illusion itself - there is no illusion without a real basis - but real community remains to be created.

Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything suddenly becomes near and far, as if by magic. (40)

[Plotinus, of course, meant something completely different, that beings all can be grasped distinctly, but are derived from the One. Nevertheless, the shared appeal to a deeper, more-real, yet hidden reality, is, imho, among situationalism’s chief limitations.]

Much as with the previous chapter on humiliation (and with which this forms part of a series of four chapters), V celebrates everyday, petty forms of resistance, as well as more desperate and destructive measures, as signs of potential of a deeper, more authentic revolutionary urge. For instance, he gives the example of a drunk smashing a bottle in a bar; no one responds to the spirit of insurrection underlying this:

People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation, however weak and clumsy it may be, always bears an authentic communication, an adequate personal message.

On love, similarly:

Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve – passionately enough to offer our love the magnificent bed of a revolution. (41)

He quotes approvingly a sixteen-year-old murderer who gave boredom as his motive:

Anyone who has felt the drive to self-destruction welling up inside him knows with what weary negligence he might one day happen to kill the organisers of his boredom. (42-3)

After all, if an individual refuses both to adapt to the violence of world and to embrace the violence of the unadapted, what can he do? If he doesn't raise his desire to achieve unity with the world and with himself to level of coherent theory and practice, the vast silence of society’s open spaces will erect the palace of solipsist madness around him.