Bateson: Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art

Gregory Bateson (2000 [1967]) “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.” In Steps To An Ecology Of Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago; pp. 128-52.

Summary

“Primitive” art is presumably in the title because this was part of a conference (and later a collected volume) with that title. The arguments in the paper are mostly being made about art in general; also, whatever the term “primitive” art covered in 1967, it doesn’t seem like the contemporary Balinese art which is Bateson’s main focus should count as such.

Bateson starts off by borrowing the concept of “grace” from Aldous Huxley, which apperently refers to a state of innocence, simplicity, and untroubledness which humans have lost, yet which the other animals retain. “I argue that art is a part of man’s quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure” (129).

Different cultures have different kinds or “species” of this grace, and different attitudes toward its approach through art. B introduces his concept of integration as the problem of grace (what other animals have, but which humans lack):

I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called “consciousness” and the other the “unconscious.” For the attainment of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason.

In the conference at which this was presented, Edmund Leach had raised the question, “How is it that the art of one culture can have meaning or validity for critics raised in a different culture?” Bateson’s reply:

My answer would be that, if art is somehow expressive of something like grace or psychic integration, then the success of this expression might well be recognizable across cultural barriers.

Bateson is not interested in “story,” i.e., those aspects of a given artwork which are reducible to words. He asks instead, “What is implicit in style, materials, composition, rhythm, skill, and so on?” (130). The mere fact of representation is not of interest, though how things are represented is: “The code whereby perceived objects or persons (or supernaturals) are transformed into wood or paint is a source of information about the artist and his culture.” His query is thus “not about the meaning of the encoded message but rather about the meaning of the code chosen.” Meaning Bateson defines as “an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and ‘restraint,’” which he then goes on to explain with his famous “slash mark:”

Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain “redundancy” or “pattern” if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a “slash mark,” such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success,what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side. Or, in engineer’s language, the aggregate contains “redundancy.” Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing. (130-1)

[The concept of the slash is obviously very fertile and can be applied in a lot of different circumstances (it sums up nearly precisely what generative “AI” does, in taking a prompt as one side of the slash, and guessing at the other). His examples, it should be noted, all depend not only on whatever is literally present in the first half of the slash (e.g., half a circle), but also on the knowledge of the observer making the prediction (viz., that it is a circle, and what full circles look like). He does not, so far as I see, discuss the effect of just how and where the slash goes – for instance, if we know that amphibians possess bilateral symmetry, then half of a frog sliced lengthwise gives us a very good guess as to what is missing; however, only the front part of an unknown fossil (for example) gives us far less information about what goes in back (cf. a chimaera).]

Bateson then frames his question about art as

[Characteristic, of art object/Characteristics of rest of culture] (132)

Meaning, he will try to infer, from particular characteristics of the work of art, what cultural characteristics it reflects, derives from, or illuminates. Bateson gives another example:

[Characteristics of “It’s raining”/Perception of raindrops]

Meaning, if A says “It’s raining,” B guesses that they will see raindrops if they look out the window. He notes that this requires that B not only understand the language A is using, but have some trust in the veracity of A’s words. Bateson asserts that, even if we trust people who tell us it is raining, we are likely to look out the window to verify their statement; B concludes “we like to test or verify the correctness of our view of our relationship to others.”

This leads to a “nontrivial” point about the “hierarchic structure of all communicational systems,” whereby the first exchange involving raindrops, implies something about the relationship between A and B

[(“It’s raining”/raindrops)/you-me relationship]

[This is an example of Bateson’s concept of metacommunication, which he defined elsewhere; cf. also Austin’s perlocution.]

There are more levels to this hierarchy, in that the message “It’s raining,” due to the [dual patterning] of language, etc., could also be broken into smaller patterned relationships; B notes that the rain, as well, is also patterned. However, the patterning in the verbal expression will not correspond “in any simple way” to the patterning in the raindrops (133), while the visual patterns in a picture of rain would have some correspondence with those of raindrops; he takes this as an illustration of the distinction between “arbitrary” [=symbolic] or digital coding, and iconic coding.

B makes some observations about the different meanings of the word “know” in English, asserting these correspond to different “levels” in his model of communicational hierarchy (133-4). He uses his slash framing in a way that is a bit cryptic. Basically, it takes the form:

[(A/B)/C]

Meaning, that A is to B as A/B is to C, or, more specifically, information contained in A allows us to make an informed prediction about B, and information in A/B allows us to make an informed prediction about C. But he uses a lax shorthand: in the two examples given above, “perception of raindrops” in the first pair, is shortened to “raindrops” in the next; presumably “perception of raindrops” (not just raindrops per se) is what is meant. Then, in illustrating the hierarchy in the statement “I know the way to Cambridge,” he writes:

[(“I know...”/my mind)//the road]

It is not clear if the double slash is just a typo, or means (without any explanation from Bateson) that one or more stages of the hierarchy have been left unrepresented. It is also not clear what “the road” means; actual characteristics of the actual road to Cambridge? Or knowledge about the road? Or the speaker’s beliefs or knowledge about the road? My best guess is that we, as the auditor of the statement “I know the way to Cambridge,” infer from this that the speaker believes they know the way to Cambridge (in one or more of the ways B states that this statement can be interpreted), and from this we infer, or predict, that they really do know the way to Cambridge.

He then gives the example of what could be called complementary knowledge, meaning “knowing” something in a way different from the sense of “having information about it;” the “knowledge” or ability to do something is acquired, not through learning or perceiving, but through adaptation (in the evolutionary sense):

A shark is beautifully shaped for locomotion in water, but the genome of the shark surely does not contain direct information about hydrodynamics. Rather, the genome must be supposed to contain information or instructions which are the complement of hydrodynamics. Not hydrodynamics, but what hydrodynamics requires, has been built up in the shark’s genome. Similarly, a migratory bird perhaps does not know the way to its destination in any of the senses outlined above, but the bird may contain the complementary instructions necessary to cause it to fly right. (134)

This leads to the discussion of knowledge existing at different “levels” of the mind (e.g., conscious, unconscious, motor-memory, etc.). He quotes the saying, “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point,” drawing from it the lesson that “It is this—the complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness—that creates difficulty when we try to discuss art or ritual or mythology.” He then recounts four different ways in which the idea of “levels” of the mind has been discussed:

1. B attributes to the novelist and evolutionary thinker Samuel Butler the idea that the better you “know” something, the less conscious you are of it, meaning that knowledge (as “habit”) “sinks to deeper and deeper levels of the mind” (135). This is “relevant to all art and all skill.”

2. From the work of visual psychologist Adelbert Ames, Jr., B derives the understanding that the processes by which we make sense of what we see are unconscious and “we have no voluntary control” over them.

3. The Freudian view that dreams are metaphors coded in terms of “primary process” (which B will return to).

4. “The Freudian view of the unconscious as the cellar or cupboard to which fearful and painful memories are consigned by a process of repression.”

Freudians, according to Bateson (with reference particularly to this fourth view) see dreams as a product of “secondary” process of “dreamwork,” which translates messages which had been repressed, into metaphors accessible to the conscious mind. B feels rather that “much of early Freudian theory was upside down,” because it assumed that conscious rationality was “normal;” the unconscious was the strange thing that then had to be explained. Bateson avers that this is now reversed: “Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious, e.g., primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing” (135-6).

With this observation, he returns to the subject of art:

These considerations are especially relevant in any attempt to derive a theory of art or poetry. Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic. The computer men who would program the translation of languages sometimes forget this fact about the primary nature of language. To try to construct a machine to translate the art of one culture into the art of another would be equally silly. (136)

He launches an attack on allegory, perhaps in tune with his interest in how style and composition communicate, and his disinterest in the subject of “story:”

Allegory, at best a distasteful sort of art, is an inversion of the normal creative process. Typically an abstract relation, e.g., between truth and justice, is first conceived in rational terms. The relationship is then metaphorized and dolled up to look like a product of primary process. The abstractions are personified and made to participate in a pseudomyth, and so on. Much advertising art is allegorical in this sense, that the creative process is inverted.

Allegorical messaging in art, thus, parallels the Freudian theory of dream-work in being “inverted,” [not unlike Marx’s table?]. Returning to what he now calls four “sorts of unconsciousness” (i.e., what he had previously called four “points of view” from which “levels of the mind” had been discussed), he endorses the first three as necessary, while taking an ambivalent view of the fourth (136-7, here separated for clarity):

1. “Consciousness, for obvious mechanical reasons, must always be limited to a rather small fraction of mental process. If useful at all, it must therefore be husbanded. The unconsciousness associated with habit is an economy both of thought and of consciousness;” he makes a very cybernetic point in a footnote:

Consider the impossibility of constructing a television set which would report upon its screen all the workings of its component parts, including especially those parts concerned in this reporting.

2. “the same is true of the inaccessability of the processes of perception. The conscious organism does not require (for pragmatic purposes) to know how it perceives —only to know what it perceives.”

3. “To suggest that we might operate without a foundation in primary process would be to suggest that the human brain ought to be differently structured.”

4. “Of the four types, only the Freudian cupboard for skeletons is perhaps undesirable and could be obviated. But there may still be advantages in keeping the skeleton off the dining room table.”

Human communication is shot through with messages and metamessages, not just about conscious but also “unconscious materials.” For different kinds of messages, different “orders of truth” are necessary; he implies that it is easier to lie that “the cat is on the mat” when there is no cat, than it is to say “I love you,” when I don’t, because “discourse about relationship is commonly accompanied by a mass of semivoluntary kinesic and autonomic signals [i.e., “metamessages”] which provide a more trustworthy comment on the verbal message” (137).

Similarly with skill, the fact of skill indicates the presence of large unconscious components in the performance.

Thus a work of art can be examined not only for conscious, but for unconscious messages, and it is the latter that Bateson finds more central to the purpose of art:

Art becomes, in this sense, an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, if you prefer it, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind.

He quotes Isadora Duncan, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Meaning that what we need to look for in art, as particular to the cultural purpose of art, is not what could have been simply communicated in prose.

I believe that what Isadora Duncan or any artist is trying to communicate is more like: “This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication.” Or perhaps: “This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious.” (138)

[Note that again, “unconscious” for Bateson does not mean that which has been repressed, but just that which is at a different “level of the mind” than conscious, rational thought.] He also is against the idea that meanings are “translated” from the unconscious to the conscious level; rather, the two levels interact productively and are both necessary:

The artist’s dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting; and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it.

Turning to a focus on “primary process,” Bateson suggests some cultural differences into how the English and the French respectively think of “feelings;” this leads him to discuss the “algorithms of the heart,” which are distinct from the algorithms of language and thus of conscious, verbalized thought, leading to problems of translation. [The idea that such cultural predispositions affect the English and French does not, apparently, apply to Bateson’s own views]. In Freudian terms the first is primary process, while the second is secondary process.

Nobody, to my knowledge, knows anything about secondary process. But it is ordinarily assumed that everybody knows all about it, so I shall not attempt to describe secondary process in any detail, assuming that you know as much about it as I. (139)

He lists ways that Freudians have characterized primary process, based on their interpretions of dreams: it 1) has no negation, 2) lacks tense, 3) lacks linguistic mood, and 4) is metaphorical. Bateson adds the argument that dreams are not about things or persons, but about relationships:

Consciousness talks about things or persons, and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned. In primary process the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them. This is really only another way of saying that the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. A metaphor retains unchanged the relationship which it “illustrates” while substituting other things or persons for the relata. In a simile, the fact that a metaphor is being used is marked by the insertion of the words “as if” or “like.” In primary process (as in art) there are no markers to indicate to the conscious mind that the message material is metaphoric. (139-40)

What kind of “relationships” are concerned is specified a bit more: “The subject matter of dream and other primary-process material is, in fact, relationship in the more narrow sense of relationship between self and other persons or between self and the environment” (140). “Anglo-Saxons” may be uncomfortable with their feelings and emotions being interpreted as “the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms,” but this is the unfortunate effect of “patterns of relationships” being [reified] and thus distorted through the application of names (“love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc.”).

Returning to the subject of primary process, B asserts that its limitations are those of iconic communication, and would be possessed by any system limited to such communication. He discusses the interesting issue of the lack of negation, which “often forces organisms into saying the opposite of what they mean in order to get across the proposition, that they mean the opposite of what they say.”

Animal communication, like dreams, is about relationships. “Even when the cat asks you for milk, she cannot mention the object which she wants (unless it be perceptibly present). She says, ‘Mama, mama,’ and you are supposed from this invocation of dependency to guess that it is milk that she requires” (141).

For humans this relates to all kinds of mental process, such as learned skills, which take place at the level of habit rather than in the conscious mind. There are limits to what kinds of knowledge can be “sunk” in this way:

The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatics of particular instances. (142)

But the “sinking,” though economical, is still done at a price—the price of inaccessibility. Since the level to which things are sunk is characterized by iconic algorithms and metaphor, it becomes difficult for the organism to examine the matrix out of which his conscious conclusions spring.

Bateson argues that consciousness has both quantitative and qualitative limits. The qualitative limits have already been raised with the image of the television which reports all its internal workings on the “screen of consciousness;” to be truly fully conscious, it would then have to generate reports on its reports, and reports on these reports, and so on.

It follows that all organisms must be content with rather little consciousness, and that if consciousness has any useful functions whatever (which has never been demonstrated but is probably true), then economy in consciousness will be of the first importance. No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

This is the economy achieved by habit formation. (143)

The quantitative limits to consciousness have to do with aspects such as nonworking parts (“the TV suffers from a blown tube, or the man from a stroke”), the effects of drugs, etc. He entertainingly dismisses the idea that Van Gogh paints a chair in a certain distorted way because “that is what he sees;” Bateson asserts that if Van Gogh’s vision were in fact that distorted, he would not be able to physically apply paint to the canvas; clearly, he can, so his vision must be working and he is not “painting what he sees.” B’s ultimate point is that “Without skill is no art” (144) – he casts aspersions on Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa, which apparently is not “art” according to Bateson. The emphasis on skill is crucial to his overall argument, as he has established that skill exists at an unconscious level of the mind.

Proceeding with the section titled “The Corrective Nature of Art,” he argues that, since the conscious part of the mind is only a small part of the whole, an emphasis on consciousness distorts our understanding of the whole mind. Here, Bateson implies, his “slash mark” does not apply; the mind is thus unlike an iceberg, in which we can make a good guess from what is visible, as to what is not:

What is serious is the crosscutting of the circuitry of the mind. If, as we must believe, the total mind is an integrated network (of propositions, images, processes, neural pathology, or what have you—according to what scientific language you prefer to use), and if the content of consciousness is only a sampling of different parts and localities in this network; then, inevitably, the conscious view of the network as a whole is a monstrous denial of the integration of that whole. From the cutting of consciousness, what appears above the surface is arcs of circuits instead of either the complete circuits or the larger complete circuits of circuits. (145)

[This seems odd in conjunction with the iceberg contrast Bateson just used. Previously (on page 131), he precisely used the concept of seeing an arc and infering a complete circle; and one can make inference from the work of art to the entire culture precisely again because of their “integration” (though he did not use that precise word before, so far as I can recall). Here he is denying that such a prediction from the part to the whole can be made, specifically because the part will not capture the “integrated,” “cross-cutting” interaction of the whole.] But this falling-short of consciousness is crucial to his argument for the function of art (and of dreams):

What the unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams, and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of mind.

He gives the example of medical science, which focuses on curing specific diseases and conditions, producing in the end a “bag of tricks” to be applied in different circumstances, but no overarching, unifying “wisdom” regarding the human body. This dearth of wisdom leads to unintended consequences: “The ecology and population dynamics of the species has been disrupted; parasites have been made immune to antibiotics; the relationship between mother and neonate has been almost destroyed; and so on.” The moral is

that mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. (146)

Bateson discusses some of the stupidities caused by this unaided consciousness: hatred, DDT, arms races. “That is the sort of world we live in—a world of circuit structures—and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.” From this he gets to his proposed investigation of the function of art:

The question has been: Does the art tell us about what sort of person made it? But if art, as suggested above, has a positive function in maintaining what I called “wisdom,” i.e., in correcting a too purposive view of life and making the view more systemic, then the question to be asked of the given work of art becomes: What sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art? (147)

B asserts there are two linked “behaviors” connected with almost all art: skill, and redundancy or pattern. He analyzes a specific painting by Balinese artist Ida Bagus Djati Sura (who Bateson identifies as a journeyman, rather than a master painter, and thus more illustrative of the rules of the style), which is reproduced as the frontispiece of Steps to an Ecology of Mind (a larger version, with better detail, can be found with the reprint of Bateson’s essay in Morphy and Perkins (2006: 88).

B’s analysis starts with the background pattern of foliage, which is very stylized, though dynamic, and follows a number of rules, particularly the need for successive layers of whitewash (the scene is painted in white on a black background), which form leaves of great subtlety. The foliage then varies in different parts of the painting., creating multiple levels of “redundancy”:

Indeed, the function and necessity of the first-level control is precisely to make the second level possible. The perceiver of the work of art must receive information that the artist can paint a uniform area of leaves because without this information he will not be able to accept as significant the variations in that uniformity. 

Only the violinist who can control the quality of his notes can use variations of that quality for musical purposes. (148)

Moving on to “more complex matters” (149), B makes six points about the composition of the work. First, none of the foliage, bodies, etc. depicted in the work reach to the edge of the page, but instead shade off into a thin black boundary, so that “the picture is framed within its own fade-out,” creating a sense of a scene that is not of this world [a sort of magic-circle effect].

Second, the painting is completely filled, with no empty spaces [aka horror vacui]. Bateson states that from an Occidental viewpoint this appears “fussy;” from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, neurotic.

Third, the lower part of the painting is turbulent and dynamic, while the upper part is serene and stable; this is in contrast, Bateson argues, to Western norms, which expect the lower half to be stable, while the action occurs in the upper half (cf. Kress and Van Leeuven (2006: 186ff) according to whom the top is the “ideal,” and the bottom the “real” in Western art).

Fourth, Bateson takes up the idea that the artwork could have a meaning other than the most literal and obvious one, of a cremation ceremony; such as a sexual metaphor showing phallic penetration, or of a myth reenacted in the guise of the present. For Bateson, such interpretations fall short:

It is probably an error to think of dream, myth, and art as being about any one matter other than relationship. As was mentioned earlier, dream is metaphoric and is not particularly about the relata mentioned in the dream. In the conventional interpretation of dream, another set of relata, often sexual, is substituted for the set in the dream. But perhaps by doing this we only create another dream. There indeed is no a priori reason for supposing that the sexual relata are any more primary or basic than any other set. (150-1)

As with the earlier Isadora Duncan quote about dance, art cannot be reduced to some particular message, because this mistakes the entire purpose of art, as Bateson sees it:

If the picture were only about sex or only about social organization, it would be trivial. It is nontrivial or profound precisely because it is about sex and social organization and cremation, and other things. In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata. (151)

Fifth, Bateson backs up this argument about the unimportance of literal message, by looking at the visual hierarchy of the image; none of the “important” details stand out, and in fact, he argues, all the “relevant” details which mark this as a cremation are as if “whimsically” added, being as [decorative] as the patterned foliage. Sixth, Bateson triumphantly concludes that the actual subject matter of the artwork is the relation between turbulence and serenity, [the entwinedness of the Apollinian and Dionysian] which just happen to take the forms of a cremation, foliage, etc.

In terms of this conclusion, I can now attempt an answer to the question posed above: What sorts of correction, in the direction of systemic wisdom, could be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art? In final analysis, the picture can be seen as an affirmation that to choose either turbulence or serenity as a human purpose would be a vulgar error. The conceiving and creating of the picture must have provided an experience which exposed this error. The unity and integration of the picture assert that neither of these contrasting poles can be chosen to the exclusion of the other, because the poles are mutually dependent. This profound and general truth is simultaneously asserted for the fields of sex, social organization, and death. (151-2)

Way back around 1989 or 1990, some friends and I were discussing our favorite band, the Pixies; an older, cooler guy (with a mohawk, tattoos, way more piercings than us, etc.) overheard us and nodded approval, stating, “They rock the Big One!”

In retrospect, he most likely meant “they rock the big one,” as an emphatic form of “they rock.” However, being young and impressionable, I puzzled over just what the “Big One” was, that the Pixies rocked. Sex? Death? … Social organization? Sex/Death/Social organization? Now, thanks to Bateson, I know that it was all and none of these: the Big One is relation.

Kress, Gunther; and Theo van Leeuwen (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd Edition. Routledge, New York.

Morphy, Howard; and Morgan Perkins, eds. (2006) The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA.

Berry and DeCock, Computational Porosity

David M. Berry, and Christian DeCock (2026) “Computational Porosity: Benjamin, Lācis and Algorithmic Life.” Controversies of AI Society. https://doi.org/10.54337/aau.add.scai-11425

This interesting conference paper which will hopefully be further developed. The authors start off with a sophisticated discussion of Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity, noting it as a product of the encounter between Naples and an exoticizing European gaze which then uses the concept to problematize the assumed arrangement of space in the North and elsewhere. Drawing on Jameson and Adorno, they also note the role the concept played in the development of Benjamin’s thought, particularly his concept of denkbild or “figure of thought.” B and DeC also point out the temporal, not just spatial, interpenetration of porosity. They tie the concept further to the Brechtian concepts (which Benjamin was influenced by) of estrangement (Verfremdung) and refunctioning (Unfunktionierung). [These specific aspects of Benjamin’s thought on porosity are not specifically returned to in the later discussion of computational porosity.]

"We argue that Benjamin and Lācis’s concept of porosity can be used to help understand how computational architectures structure contemporary social relations." (32)

The crucial difference is that computational porosity operates not through stone and concrete but through the material substrate of processors, networks and algorithms that increasingly mediate social existence. This includes the proliferation of enterprise software, algorithmic management systems, and platform-mediated labour that restructure how work is coordinated, controlled, and experienced in organisations.

They deploy the concept of computational porosity two ways:

1. “as a descriptive concept which helps understand how discretisation as a practice within computation is giving way to diffusion techniques”

2. “as a critical concept in the sense given by Benjamin and Lācis who saw it as an alternative to bourgeois ways of organising the lifeworld.”

Just as Naples resisted the rationalised planning of modern cities, computational porosity challenges organizational boundaries and hierarchies. In platform organizations, the distinction between employee and contractor, workplace and home, working time and leisure time becomes increasingly porous. Uber drivers, for instance, exist in a deliberately porous space where they are neither fully independent nor fully employed, where the car becomes simultaneously private property and workplace, where algorithms interpenetrate with human decision-making about when and where to work. (33)

The office diffuses into domestic home spaces and synchronous and asynchronous communication blur together making corporate surveillance and individual autonomy clash through activity monitoring software and flexible scheduling.

... computational systems create fluid boundaries between local and cloud processing, between human and machine cognition, and between private data and public circulation. The physical permeability [Benjamin and Lacis] identified in Naples’ buildings finds its contemporary parallel in the technical permeability of computational systems that allow data and processing to flow across previously distinct spheres and across planetary networks.

When we issue a voice command to ChatGPT or another LLM, the computation flows seamlessly between device, data centre and cloud, creating what appears as a unified interaction but which actually traverses across multiple computational domains. This technical arrangement mirrors the interpenetration of spaces that Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples, though now operating through digital rather than architectural forms. Similarly, the diffusion processes that many AI systems now implement, make all cultural works diffuse and hybrid within the latent spaces of their neural networks, a process Berry (2025) calls diffusionisation. (33-4)

In a footnote:

The idea that porosity is now also an instrumental process, actuated through computational techniques for the diffusionisation of the lifeworld, raises interesting questions about how a practice of resistance can be integrated into the system. However, we want to suggest that porosity, as Benjamin and Lācis deploy it, points to the excess that cannot be captured fully, even when turned into a computational function. Thereby, computational porosity creates unforeseen lines of flight and potentials for resistance in social and political practice.

While computational porosity describes the broader phenomenon of interpenetrating boundaries between human and machine agencies, diffusionisation represents a specific technical manifestation of this porosity within AI systems. Through diffusion models, cultural artefacts are not simply stored or processed but become porous themselves as their features, styles, and meanings blur and intermingle within the latent spaces of neural networks. This technical process of diffusionisation thus intensifies the porosity Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples’ architecture, as it operates not just on the level of infrastructure but on the very substance of cultural production itself. (34)

They describe using Google's “Smart Compose:”

As we compose, our thought processes become intertwined with algorithmic suggestions in ways that go beyond simple automation. The system learns from aggregate patterns of communication across millions of users, creating a kind of collective linguistic porosity where individual expression becomes mediated through statistically derived patterns.

This example thus layers all, or at least many of, the kinds of porosity they talk about (spatial, boundary-blurring, temporal, social, "diffusionist"). They also discuss agential porosity, “where human and machine decision-making become so entangled that attributing responsibility becomes difficult” (35). Through computational porosity, agency is distributed through [the assemblage] of human and non-human, with no clear [figure] in which it can be located. “This computational porosity obscures accountability whilst intensifying control and will create a number of difficulties unless reflexively understood.” They further discuss variations such as playful coding, and “workaround cultures” in which workers try to game the algorithms they are being controlled by.

Just as Neapolitans used architectural porosity to evade official functions and create alternative uses, workers develop tactics to game algorithmic management systems, exploit platform vulnerabilities, or repurpose enterprise software for unintended purposes. For example, call centre workers might share strategies for maximising metrics whilst minimising actual work, Deliveroo riders might use geographic quirks in the algorithm to secure better-paying orders, and remote workers might use mouse or keyboard automation to simulate work activity to evade surveillance software. These practices reveal the porous character of seemingly rigid computational management systems.

However, “The same flexibility that enables worker resistance also enables platforms to externalise costs, avoid employment obligations, and intensify exploitation through the blurring of work and non-work time” (35-6).

However, computational porosity is not merely analogous to architectural porosity. Rather, it represents an intensification and acceleration of the interpenetration of spaces and practices that Benjamin and Lācis observed. Contemporary computational systems do not simply enable movement between defined spheres but actively blur the boundaries between them. When we interact with AI systems or social media platforms, increasingly human and algorithmic agencies are diffused in complex ways. The “theatrical” dimension they identified in Naples’ architecture becomes literalised in computational systems that transform every interaction into a performance that can be captured. (36)

The concept of “explainability,” which Berry advocates in other writings, would create “epistemic porosity, where technical knowledge and democratic oversight must somehow coexist and interpenetrate” [it would be interesting to explore the connections between this concept and "legibility" per Enfield, et al.] Algorithmic management is another example of “temporal porosity” between past hiring decisions (e.g. encoded in training data), present applications, and future workforce composition.” There does not appear to be a set number of ways in which they want to discuss kinds of “porosity,” as they keep adding more, then circling back and revisiting ones discussed previously [perhaps one could argue there is a “porosity” to this mode of discussion.] It would be nice to have a set, clear list or overview paragraph of the forms or relations which computational porosity takes [not, of course, that Benjamin and Lacis bothered with anything of the sort], and how these tie back to their initial discussion of B&L’s porosity.

 [Whereas in my 2019 article I had looked at porosity primarily in terms of the relative openness or closedness of different spaces to interaction with each other, B&DeC seem more interested in how it creates mingled productions, blurred categories, “dissolved boundaries,” and recondite traces of (unevenly) distributed/delegated agency; this concern is likely linked to the project of “explainability” (which they do state in their conclusion); they are more interested in the politics of discursive articulation than in the politics of spatial articulation].

There are also possibilities for resistance: “For example, in adversarial machine learning, researchers and activists can deliberately exploit the porous boundaries of AI systems to reveal their limitations and biases. This recalls Benjamin’s (1930) attention to how Naples’ street urchins used the city’s new underground to subvert the purpose of this technology with playful chaos” (37). Apps like Signal “create deliberate impermeability within otherwise porous systems;” they give other examples workers’ collectives, unions, using apps.

“The European Union’s AI Act and similar regulatory frameworks create new porous spaces between technical systems and collective governance, opening possibilities for workers to contest how algorithms organise their labour” (38). The authors find parallels between use of silicon computing, and the tuff stone of Naples.

Whilst computational systems create new forms of algorithmic governmentality and platform capitalism, their porous character potentially generates possibilities for alternative social arrangements; a “chance to correct the incapacity of peoples to order their relationships to one another in accord with the relationship they possess to nature through their technology” (39, quoting Benjamin)

The key question then becomes how to mobilise computational porosity towards democratic ends. Just as Naples’ citizens used the city’s porous spaces to create autonomous zones and informal economies, we might identify how computational porosity enables new forms of collective organisation and resistance. For instance, the porous boundaries between local and cloud computing could support decentralised infrastructure projects that prioritise community control over corporate profit. The diffusional character of contemporary AI systems might be redirected towards collective knowledge production rather than data extractivism.

The conclusion turns more specifically to the subject of AI:

we can see generative AI’s outputs as a form of involuntary surrealism as they often contain unexpected juxtapositions, distortions, and a Verfremdung-­effect that can either enlighten or mislead, depending on context. Just as the Surrealists collaged disparate elements to jolt consciousness, AI often unwittingly collages fact and fiction.

Large language models, trawling through billions of data points and recombining them, might surface hidden cultural obsessions or biases in strange new forms. Indeed, image generators trained on internet data often produce biased or stereotyped images, spuriously classifying people by race, gender, sexuality, and personality .... When these biases appear blatantly in AI outputs, they can become an estranging mirror held up to society’s prejudices. It makes visible what is often obscured in polished human-made media, the deep-set biases in our collective imaginary. Thus, AI’s remix aesthetic can become a tool for critique, a way to see the “dream wishes” of society laid out unsparingly, much as Benjamin read the arcades of Paris as the dream wishes of the 19th century. (40)

Benjamin had seen that contemporary media and technology could be used for both fascism and freedom. B&DeC note that much current discourse on AI focuses on fears related to “boundary violations” between the human and the simulated. Such anxieties over borders have long been weaponized by fascism, and a better ground for progressive politics is needed. 

The question becomes not just how to maintain boundaries, but how to cultivate forms of porosity that enable flourishing rather than domination. Indeed, porosity functions dialectically in workplace struggles as it simultaneously enables new forms of worker coordination and new modes of managerial control. Workers will need to increasingly engage in collective reverse-engineering of opaque systems, sharing knowledge about how algorithms calculate work, predict demand, or evaluate performance. A critical concept of porosity must therefore resist managerial appropriation by foregrounding questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.

They turn to the question of “explainable forms of life” in the algorithmic age as a political, not just technical, issue. "This requires new institutional arrangements and technical practices that enable collective deliberation about how computational systems shape social life" (41).

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 14

Summary of Chapter 14: The organisation of appearances

Vaneigem’s summary:

The organisation of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A racket. It represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organised appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organises appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (e.g., pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of ‘the drama’ as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonisation of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatise everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts (2). (123)

He begins with a Nkee quote from Ecce Homo: the “ideal world is a lie invented to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth...” V adds, “And it is true that man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood."

All the same, nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity twenty-four hours a day. There are always a few radical thinkers in whom a truthful light shines briefly through the lie of words; and by the same token there are very few alienations which are not shattered every day for an instant, for an hour, for the space of a dream, by subjective refusal. Words are never completely in the thrall of Power, and no one is ever completely unaware of what is destroying him. When these moments of truth are extended they will turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of subjectivity destined to sink the Titanic of the lie. (124)

The bourgeoisie killed God and myth, but the replacement they created, the lie of the ideal, is weak and unsustainable.

Revolution was the bourgeoisie’s finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help it take its leap into oblivion.

Fascism is in a way a consistent response to this hopeless predicament. It is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world down with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but a sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation. Today this mise en scẽne of death chosen and refused lies at the core of the spectacle of incoherence. 

There is, however, an important difference between myth and its fragmented, desanctified avatar, the spectacle, with respect to the way each resists the criticism of facts. The varying importance assumed in unitary systems by artisans, merchants and bankers explains the continual oscillation in these societies between the coherence of myth and the myth of coherence. With the triumph of the bourgeoisie something very different happens: by introducing history into the armoury of appearances, the bourgeois revolution historicises appearance and thus makes the progression from the incoherence of the spectacle to the spectacle of incoherence inevitable. (124-5)

Thus, in the old unitary society there was an oscillation between the “coherence of myth” and the “myth of coherence;” this is replaced in the society of the spectacle with a progression from the “incoherence of the spectacle” to the “spectacle of incoherence.” V explains the first:

In unitary societies, whenever the merchant class, with its disrespect for tradition, threatened to deconsecrate values, the coherence of myth would give way to the myth of coherence. What does this mean? What had formerly been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously reasserted. Loud professions of faith were heard where previously faith was so automatic as to need no stating, and respect for the great had to be preserved through recourse to the principle of absolute monarchy.

Under pressure from the bourgeoisie, this oscillation finally pulls the unitary order apart:

There comes a time when the myth of coherence is so undermined by the criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into a coherent myth. Appearance, that mirror in which men hide their own choices from themselves, shatters into a thousand pieces and falls into the public realm of individual supply and demand. The demise of appearances means the end of hierarchical power, that façade ‘with nothing behind it’.

None of the fragmentary ideologies of the spectacular era can more than momentarily replace this lost hierarchy, so “Eventually the decomposition of the spectacle entails the resort to the spectacle of decomposition” (126).

V now makes a very interesting argument about drama and technology:

The development of the drama as a literary genre cannot but throw light on the question of the organisation of appearances. After all, a play is the simplest form of the organisation of appearances, and a prototype for all more sophisticated forms. As religious plays designed to reveal the mystery of transcendence to men, the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the organisation of appearances of their time. And the process of secularisation of the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management. Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times originated in the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley and other hydraulic devices started out as theatrical paraphernalia; it was only much later that they revolutionised production relations. It is a striking fact that no matter how far we go back in time the domination of the earth and of men seems to depend on techniques which serve the purposes not only of work but also of illusion.

[This connects with the concept of “wonder” in the work of Aristotle, and the inventions of Hero of Alexandria; how unlike Vaneigem to have not included religion with theater and war as origins of illusion, on account of Hero’s hydraulic temple doors... though arguably, this was also “drama.”]

The birth of tragedy was already a narrowing of the arena in which primitive men and gods had held their cosmic dialogue. It meant a distancing, a putting in parentheses, of magical participation. This was now organised in accordance with a refraction of the principles of initiation, and no longer involved the rites themselves. What emerged was a spectaculum, a thing seen, while the gradual relegation of the gods to the role of mere props presaged their eventual eviction from the social scene as a whole.

Tragedy in turn is superseded by drama, and by comedy. In drama, “human society replaced the gods on stage” (127).

The cliché which likens life to a drama seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no discussion. So widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that it does not even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what is 'natural' about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and importance I have really not the slightest desire to know about?

This is not quite the same as being an actor in a play, because that actor retains a self to return to at the end of the performance.

The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what really wants to be. They are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual – even an ‘intimate’ – level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.

V talks about the increased personalization of the lies/spectacle (his example is television but obviously social media is an even better illustration). These do not work through the dissemination of ideas, but rather of gestures, portrayed on the screen and imitated by viewers.

What we have here is a school of gesture, a lesson in dramatic art in which a particular facial expression or motion of the hand supplies thousands of viewers with a supposedly adequate way of expressing particular feelings, wishes, and so on. Thus the still rudimentary technology of the image teaches the individual to model his existential attitudes on the complete portraits of him assembled by the psychosociologists. His most personal tics and idiosyncrasies become the means by which Power integrates him into its schemata. The poverty of everyday life reaches it nadir by being choreographed in this way. Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. (128)

Individuals acting out roles, personalities, mannerisms, etc. which they have consumed through media are thus being “choreographed” by the Spectacle.

We thus see the return of the original conception of theatre, of general participation in the mystery of divinity. But, thanks to technology, this now occurs on a higher level, and by the same token embodies possibilities of transcendence unavailable in ancient times.

As we have seen, the technical reproduction of magical relationships such as religious faith or identification resulted eventually in the dissolution of magic. Coupled with the demise of the great ideologies, this development precipitated the chaos of stereotypes and roles. Hence the new demands placed upon the spectacle. (129)

News stories are just assembled cliches, divided up into stereotypical categories (“Crimes of Passion, Political Affairs, Business Section, From the Police Blotter, Eating Out, etc., etc.”). There is the constant, meaningless juxtaposition of news items (cf. Latour): “The husband who kills his wife’s lover competes for attention with the Pope on his deathbed, and Mick Jagger’s underpants are on a par with Mao’s cap. It’s all one, everything is equivalent to everything else, in the perpetual spectacle of incoherence.” “The spectacle has to be everywhere, so it becomes diluted and self-contradictory.”

The spectacle’s degeneration is in the nature of things, and the dead weight which enforces passivity is bound to lighten. Roles are eroded by the resistance put up by lived experience, and spontaneity will eventually lance the abscess of inauthenticity and pseudo-activity. (130)

Seeing Like a State, Chapter 5

Summary of Chapter 5: The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis

The “plan” is Lenin’s high modernist revolutionism, and the “diagnosis” is the response of two of his critics, Luxemburg and Kollantay. Scott sets up the stakes:

Lenin’s design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full power to see the plan through. And just as Le Corbusier and Lenin shared a broadly comparable high modernism, so Jane Jacobs’s perspective was shared by Rosa Luxemburg and Aleksandra Kollontay, who opposed Lenin’s politics. Jacobs doubted both the possibility and the desirability of the centrally planned city, and Luxemburg and Kollontay doubted the possibility and desirability of a revolution planned from above by the vanguard party. (147)

Scott draws from several key writings which reveal Lenin as a High Modernist. He discusses the idea of the party as a vanguard, and the implications of the term “mass:”

Although the terms became standard in socialist parlance, they are heavy with implications. Nothing better conveys the impression of mere quantity and number without order than the word “masses.” Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling crowd without any cohesion—without a history, without ideas, without a plan of action. Lenin was all too aware, of course, that the working class does have its own history and values, but this history and these values will lead the working class in the wrong direction unless they are replaced by the historical analysis and advanced revolutionary theory of scientific socialism. (150)

Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion of the masses but also must literally do their thinking for them” (151).

This is the core of Lenin’s case against spontaneity. There are only two ideologies: bourgeois and socialist. Given the pervasiveness and historical power of bourgeois ideology, the spontaneous development of the working class will always lead to the triumph of bourgeois ideology. In Lenin’s memorable formulation, ‘the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.’ Social democratic consciousness, in contrast, must come from outside, that is, from the socialist intelligentsia.

Lenin draws on the metaphors of army, classroom, and also factory owners/executives [do we sense the disciplinary archipelago?]; and also architecture:

What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing. (152)

It is surely a great paradox of What Is to Be Done? that Lenin takes a subject—promoting revolution—that is inseparable from popular anger, violence, and the determination of new political ends and transforms it into a discourse on technical specialization, hierarchy, and the efficient and predictable organization of means. Politics miraculously disappears from within the revolutionary ranks and is left to the elite of the vanguard party, much as industrial engineers might discuss, among themselves, how to lay out a factory floor.

Lenin’s revolutionary elite are “professionals,” not unlike those working for capitalist high modernism:

Just as Le Corbusier imagines that the public will acquiesce to the knowledge and calculations of the master architect, so Lenin is confident that a sensible worker will want to place himself under the authority of professional revolutionists. (153)

... the principle behind Lenin’s concerns ... stems from the sharply delineated, functional roles that the party and the working class each played. Class consciousness, in the final analysis, is an objective truth carried solely by the ideologically enlightened who direct the vanguard party. (154)

Lenin also uses a contagion metaphor, as in the party has to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas and practices among the proletariat, which could derail its (i.e., the vanguard’s) plan for revolution.

If we consider the vanguard party, as Lenin did, to be a machine for bringing about the revolution, then we see that the vanguard party’s relation to the working class is not much different from a capitalist entrepreneur’s relation to the working class. The working class is necessary to production; its members must be trained and instructed, and the efficient organization of their work must be left to professional specialists. The ends of the revolutionist and the capitalist are, of course, utterly different, but the problem of means that confronts each is similar and is similarly resolved. (156)

Lenin and Le Corbusier, notwithstanding the great disparity in their training and purpose, shared some basic elements of the high modernist outlook. While the scientific pretensions of each may seem implausible to us, they both believed in the existence of a master science that served as the claim to authority of a small planning elite. (157)

Both, of course, had the improvement of the human condition as their ultimate goal, and both attempted to attain it with methods that were profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian.

The actual revolutions of 1917 did not correspond with the plan Lenin had laid out in What Is to Be Done? “The high-modernist scheme for revolution was no more borne out in practice than were high-modernist plans for Brasilia and Chandigarh borne out in practice.” Obviously, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not bring the revolution about; [to the contrary, they showed up late and derailed it]. “What Lenin did succeed brilliantly in doing was in capturing the revolution once it was an accomplished fact” (158).

What followed in the years until 1921 is best described as the reconquest, now by the fledgling Bolshevik state, of Russia. The reconquest was not simply a civil war against the ‘Whites’; it was also a war against the autonomous forces that had seized local power in the revolution. (159)

The model for the vanguard party depicted so sharply in What Is to Be Done? is an impressive example of executive command and control. Applied to the actual revolutionary process, however, it is a pipe dream, bearing hardly any relation to the facts. Where the model is descriptively accurate, alas, is in the exercise of state authority after the revolutionary seizure of power.

What What Is to Be Done? was in fact used for, was the creation of an official mythology after the fact, based on the glorious leadership of Lenin, etc.

It is perfectly natural for leaders and generals to exaggerate their influence on events; that is the way the world looks from where they sit, and it is rarely in the interest of their subordinates to contradict their picture.

After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience. (160)

This altered story is told in such a way as to give it a sense of inevitability, thus diminishing both the actual contingency of events, and the spontaneous actions that played a large role:

It is exceptionally rare to find any historical account that stresses the contingencies. The very exercise of producing an account of a past event virtually requires an often counterfactual neatness and coherence. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event in which he or she participated will recognize this phenomenon. (390n37)

S next turns to the Lenin of State and Revolution, from 1917. Lenin here echoes the egalitarian positions of the anarchists and of Luxemburg (and Marx, as S also points out), but only strategically, as he wants to undermine the Kerensky regime; nevertheless his “high-modemist convictions still pervade the text” (161). Lenin was a fan of Fordism/Taylorism; he argued that capitalist infrastructure, bureaucracy, and technology simplify administration sufficiently, so that anyone can do it with basic enough training:

the great majority of functions of the old ‘state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced to such simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they would be quite within the reach of every literate person, and it will be possible to perform them for working men’s wages, which circumstance can (and must) strip those functions of every shadow of privilege and every appearance of official grandeur. (Lenin, quoted on p. 162)

The next source is Lenin’s Agrarian Question; more high modernist stuff, celebrating the inevitability of a centralized factory system imposed by capitalism (which is then to be taken over by the revolutionary proletariat). Lenin is a fan of electrification, in the sense of a centralized network that delivered power and efficiency everywhere: “The way that electricity worked was very much the way that Lenin hoped the power of the socialist state would work” (167).

Rosa Luxemburg (168ff) offered a very different view of revolution. “Luxemburg differed most sharply with Lenin in her relative faith in the autonomous creativity of the working class” (168). Luxemburg was nevertheless still a vanguardist, like Lenin:

Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg had what might be called a sociology of the party. That is, it did not occur to them that the intelligentsia of the party might have interests that did not coincide with the workers’ interests, however defined. They were quick to see a sociology of trade-union bureaucracies but not a sociology of the revolutionary Marxist party. (169)

Luxemburg, like Lenin, also used the metaphor of the party as like a factory manager, issuing orders which the worker should follow, because the manager/party sees the big picture, which the worker does not. However, this supremacy is not taken as far as in Lenin’s thought: “For Luxemburg, the party might well be more farsighted than the workers, but it would nevertheless be constantly surprised and taught new lessons by those whom it presumed to lead.” “Eschewing military, engineering, and factory parallels, she wrote more frequently of growth, development, experience, and learning.” Illustrating this is Luxemburg’s view on the role of strikes, standing in contrast to Lenin’s top-down view:

A strike or a revolution was not simply an end toward which tactics and command ought to be directed; the process leading to it was at the same time shaping the character of the proletariat. How the revolution was made mattered as much as whether it was made at all, for the process itself had heavy consequences. (170)

Per Scott, Luxemburg found Lenin’s “hierarchical logic” to be “both utterly unrealistic and morally distasteful.” ... “even if such discipline were conceivable, by imposing it the party would deprive itself of the independent, creative force of a proletariat that was, after all, the subject of the revolution.”

Lenin comes across as a rigid schoolmaster with quite definite lessons to convey—a schoolmaster who senses the unruliness of his pupils and wants desperately to keep them in line for their own good. Luxemburg sees that unruliness as well, but she takes it for a sign of vitality, a potentially valuable resource; she fears that an overly strict schoolmaster will destroy the pupils’ enthusiasm and leave a sullen, dispirited classroom where nothing is really learned. (171)

A footnote provides insight into Luxemburg’s [enlightenment] view of the transformation of proletarian consciousness through political action:

“...[The awakening of revolutionary energy could be effected] only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgment on the part of the masses, which capacity was systematically killed by the social democracy for decades under various pretexts.” (Luxemburg, quoted in 393n79)

The mass strike, then, was not a tactical invention of the vanguard party to be used at the appropriate moment. It was, rather, the "living pulse-beat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving-wheel, . . . the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” (172)

Luxemburg’s understanding of the revolutionary process, curiously enough, provided a better description of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power than did the utopian scenario in What Is to Be Done?

Luxemburg argued that the Bolsheviks’ “dictatorial methods and their mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism” (173).

Thus she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the proletariat—a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective was to create a self-conscious workers’ movement, not just to use the proletariat as instruments.

Luxemburg wrote that the “collective ego of the working class” had to make its own mistakes to “learn the historical dialectic by itself,” not just be led by the vanguard party.

She believed that Lenin and Trotsky had completely corrupted a proper understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To her, it meant rule by the whole proletariat, which required the broadest political freedoms for all workers (though not for enemy classes) so that they could bring their influence and wisdom to bear on the building of socialism. It did not mean, as Lenin and Trotsky assumed, that a small circle of party leaders would exercise dictatorial power merely in the name of the proletariat. (173-4)

L and L had fundamentally opposing understandings of socialism:

Lenin proceeded as if the road to socialism were already mapped out in detail and the task of the party were to use the iron discipline of the party apparatus to make sure that the revolutionary movement kept to that road. Luxemburg, on the contrary, believed that the future of socialism was to be discovered and worked out in a genuine collaboration between workers and their revolutionary state. … The openness that characterized a socialist future was not a shortcoming but rather a sign of its superiority, as a dialectical process, over the cut-and-dried formulas of utopian socialism. (174)

Scott notes how similar her view is to Malatesta’s. Her criticisms of Lenin were very prescient:

Unless the working class as a whole participated in the political process, she added ominously, “socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”

Scott now turns to the writings of Alexandra Kollontay in support of the short-lived Worker’s Opposition within the Bolshevik party; her arguments are similar to those made by Luxemburg; only the working class could create actual communism, it could not be imposed from above by bureaucrats

Her experience of being patronized and condescended to as a representative of the women’s section seems directly tied to her accusation that the party was also treating the workers as infants rather than as autonomous, creative adults. (176)

Summarizing the link between the viewpoints of Lenin and Le Corbusier: “Each of these schemes implies a single, unitary answer discoverable by specialists and hence a command center, which can, or ought to, impose the correct solution” (178). In contrast, Scott finds in Luxemburg’s and Kollontay’s bottom-up visions of revolution the theme of mētis, which will be the ultimate lesson of this book:

Kollontay's point of departure, like Luxemburg’s, is an assumption about what kinds of tasks are the making of revolutions and the creating of new forms of production. For both of them, such tasks are voyages in uncharted waters. There may be some rules of thumb, but there can be no blueprints or battle plans drawn up in advance; the numerous unknowns in the equation make a one-step solution inconceivable. In more technical language, such goals can be approached only by a stochastic process of successive approximations, trial and error, experiment, and learning through experience. The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called mētis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” mētis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances. (177-8)

Course in General Linguistics, Part 2, Chapters 1-3

Summary of Part Two, Synchronic Linguistics: Chapters 1-3

Chapter 1: General Observations

In these three initial chapters Saussure sets up some basic problems facing synchronic linguistics and starts to move toward solutions. In this first chapter he tackles the issue of how to study language synchronically, despite the fact that we know it is constantly changing. Thus he posits for static linguistics the study of the linguistic state:

In practice, a linguistic state occupies not a point in time, but a period of time of varying length, during which the sum total of changes occuring is minimal. It may be ten years, a generation, a century, or even longer. (99)

But since languages are always changing, however minimally, studying a linguistic state amounts in practice to ignoring unimportant changes. (100)

[It must be longer than a “point” in time, because langue has to take form as parole through [speech events] which exist in some kind of relations and contrasts with each other.] It is interesting that he seeks to ground this linguistic state as an actually existing, rather than merely an idealized or posited, “ideal type” condition, because it seems the latter would work just as well for his purposes.]

Chapter 2: Concrete Entities of a Language

Static linguistics aims to study real, “concrete entities,” not mere abstractions, but just how are these to be identified and delimited? “Any linguistic entity exists only in virtue of the association between signal and signification” (10); delineating sections out of a mere sequence of sounds, a solely phonetic transcription, would not suffice: “a sequence of sounds is a linguistic sequence only if it is the bearer of an idea.” [This argument receives a series of footnoted objections from translator Roy Harris, who calls it “an unfortunate way of putting the point”]. Saussure’s point, of course, is that the “concrete entity” has to have that dual quality of signal and signification:

This unified duality has often been compared with that of the human being, comprising body and soul. But the parallel is unsatisfactory. A better one would be with chemical compounds, such as water. Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen; but taken separately neither element has any of the properties of water. (102)

[This is an interesting analogy in that it refuses the potential philosophical dualism of seeing sound and concept as existing in two different realms, one physical and the other abstract or ethereal, like body and “soul”; instead they both exist, like the elements hydrogen and oxygen, in the same reality or realm; reminiscent of D&G seeing concepts, objects, etc. all as “bodies” in the Stoic sense.]

“A linguistic entity is not ultimately defined until it is delimited,” but how is this to be achieved? The definition S gives of the unit is “a segment of sound which is, as distinct from what precedes and follows in the spoken sequence, the signal of a certain concept” (emphases original). He then discusses some practical difficulties of such an approach (102-5).

Chapter 3: Identities, Realities, Values

Given these difficulties of discerning units, how can we ensure that “the fundamental concepts of static linguistics are directly based upon, or even merge with, the concept of a linguistic unit?” (106) [i.e., with the essence of how language actually works]. S explores this with the concepts of synchronic identities, synchronic realities, and synchronic value.

How can we understand the synchronic identity of a word across different spoken instances, when it can change in intonation, contextual meaning, and so on? He compares it to the way we talk about trains, such as “the 8:45 from Geneva” though on different days this is a different train, not the same one; or a city street that has been demolished and rebuilt, yet remains the “same” street. “How is it that a street can be reconstructed entirely and still be the same? Because it is not a purely material structure” (107). Indeed the material parts can all be replaced but that other, non-material part must endure, for the street to maintain its “identity.” The solution is to see the instances of the word, the train, the street, etc. as [tokens]:

Every time I utter the word Messieurs (‘Gentlemen’), I renew its material being; it is a new act of phonation and a new psychological act.

Turning to synchronic reality, S argues that the traditional division of language into parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) is actually problematic and imprecise; he illustrates with the French expression ces gants son bon marché. The blame lies in the old-school, pre-scientific grammarians who invented these concepts:

Linguistics is always working with concepts originally introduced by the grammarians. It is unclear whether or not these concepts really reflect constituent features of linguistic structure. But how can we find out? And if they are illusory, what realities can we put in their place?

The solution is that both synchronic identity and synchronic reality depend ultimately on synchronic value, which the unit possesses by virtue of its place in the overall system of signification, which will be Saussure’s way of tackling static linguistics [thus giving birth to the entire phenomenon of structuralism].

Thus it can be seen that in semiological systems, such as languages, where the elements keep one another in a state of equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules, the notion of identity and value merge.

That is why in the final analysis the notion of value covers units, concrete entities, and realities. (109).

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.