MeghanIsMe

Stuff of mine I found while looking through Livejournal for my graduation date. Thinking analytically about this kind of stuff is painful and feels futile these days.
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Seeing Like a State; economics and anarchy
I've been reading James Scott's "Seeing Like a State", partly on the suggestion of my undergrad advisor. It, or at least the first two chapters of it, are an overview of how modernist principles of control (largely in the interests of efficient extraction of value, whether from productive resources like forests or from citizenry in the form of monetary value) are applied by the state.
Scott's discussion of the creation of maps as a way to exert control, while not new to me by any means, is interesting to contextualize with my experience with maps while working at the archives at UW-Parkside. There are occasional irregularities in those maps; farms that existed before the original cadastral survey by Hathaway in the late 1830s, or entries in 19th century tax rolls that listed parcel owners as "unknown", yet still showed paid taxes. I see these as hiccups resulting from the early stages of the implementation of this new form of land-tenure. In North America though, it was much easier since the creators of the system were in a position of power that let them simply ignore, and in fact, negate, existing local understandings of land use. ("Clearly this land belongs to us by right of development; the locals [who were in fact managing the land in complex ways] aren't doing anything with it."
Reading Scott has also helped me be more conscious of the idea of maps as analogous to varying theoretical perspectives. Maps, like perspectives, are created to address a particular issue, to form a particular kind of understanding, or to advance a particular agenda. They are useful for understanding a particular set of things for a particular purpose, or even for creating a particular reality. But they are only one approach; multiple approaches much be synthesized to move toward something like a full understanding of an issue. I'm so glad that GIS makes this so much easier than it once was! Still, maps are only as good as the data being analyzed and the creativity of the cartographer. I think you have to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that the data you're working with is all of the data. It never is. If you're careful, it can be enough to be useful, and that's about the best you can hope for.
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Looking at the steps taken by nation-states to impose order makes me think of the same kind of actions taken on both large, international scales, and on small scales such as on the factory floor. Using a language of 'legibility,' Scott argues that the state needs to make its entire territory equally legible. That is, the state must impose a common 'language' of policy and procedure on systems like land tenure, resource valuation, taxation, weights and measures, and so on. Otherwise, the state is unable to extract value from its populace in the most efficient way. Relatedly, 'illegible' systems -local land use practices, local variances in measuring units, confusing systems of non-rectilinear streets- have been a source of resistance to state power.
On a small scale, this takes the form of high modernist attempts to scientifically regulate the practice of workers. Each worker must do the same job in exactly the same way to make the best use of company time. Workers are dehumanized, made into pieces of machinery. This increases production of course, but at the cost of significant quality of life. I would argue that productivity is high enough that this kind of regulation is not ethical; it is not justifiable.
Does that observation extend to the state level? Is it ethical to impose a universal system of land tenure, as has been done to Native Americans or First Nations people in North America, or to the people of formerly colonial nations in Africa or Southeast Asia? What about to a state's own people, as Scott explains was done in France and other European nations during the Enlightenment? And if it is not ethical, how would it be reversed? In the modern era, we've entered a multi-national scale that all states are essentially being forced into participating in. Can a nation remain a viable entity without imposing external standards onto its people? The US has managed to do so with it's tenacious grip on the imperial system, but nearly every other country on Earth has fallen into line with metric.
That's largely a good thing, isn't it? It's a reasonable system that makes trade more efficient and prevents disastrous errors like the Hubble telescope lens. Have we lost anything due to this global standardization? Is it anything like what we lose as languages become extinct? Does it result in less capacity for resistance to externally imposed control like the practices engaged in by the World Bank or the IMF? Certainly abolition of local land-use systems in favor of Western-style ownership of land parcels has resulted in significant land alienation for many people who are victimized by these internationally-legible practices that, to people familiar with local practice, are completely unintelligible.
Though he hasn't discussed this directly in the first one and a half chapters, Scott's writing is making me think about arguments for and against this kind of modernist standardization. I think there's an argument to be made on the scale of a factory that increasingly highly articulated structures of control result in increasing dehumanization of workers. People deserve a certain level of autonomy over their time. Time to take a short break, or chat with a co-worker for instance. The system needs to provide an area that, perhaps paradoxically, exists outside the system. Can this be done on a national or international scale? Are nations locked into a system of control that they can't get out of? And if so, would it even be beneficial to get out of it? Beneficial for whom?
I talked with Danae about those concepts in the kind of wonderful conversation I'm really going to miss having with her on a regular basis. I said that I see an anarchist argument proceeding from these observations. Increasingly articulated control structures become increasingly oppressive. She countered with the idea that a socialist state would still want to have generally the same kind of deep information that Scott is discussing, and that modern capitalist states are compiling. They would just use it differently.
That makes sense to me. But socialist states can be just as dangerous and dehumanizing as capitalist ones; we have a few examples of that to look at. Economically, I believe capitalism is a critically flawed system in terms of our obligation to pursue quality of life for all people. I think much more socialist economic policy would begin to address some of the problems that exist. But aside from capitalism versus socialism, there's another axis here I think, of highly articulated forms of control versus a more laissez-faire approach that allows regional and local autonomy. On that front, I don't really know where a good balance is.