Ben Kraal

This is the second blog all sticky-tabbed pages.

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is a great book. Scott is deeply interested in the interaction between people and places and what it is that makes people and places work well, play well, and live well together. He argues, convincingly, that an imposition of a simplifying top-down order stifles otherwise well-functioning assemblages of people, places and things. These top-down simplifying orders as imposed by the State in an effort to make a deeply heterogeneous system legible. However, Scott argues, this imposition of a simplified order for legibility’s sake often results in a diminution or destruction of the properties that make a heterogeneous system function.

If Seeing Like a State has a flaw its that, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the argument is set out in the first chapter; subsequent chapters do not really build new layers of complexity in the initial argument. The subsequent chapters are all well worth reading, being interesting accounts of the often arrogant and always foolish imposition of order on otherwise smoothly functioning systems or on the creation of seemingly perfect but overly simplified systems that could not function because of their beautiful simplicity.

Scott says that top-down-order is often (always?) imposed in order to make a complicated situation more manageable and “visible” to those who want to control it. Obviously, sometimes this imposition of order is necessary, but at other times it is heavy-handed and the imposition of order obscures previously rich situations.

Regarding the complexity of cities, Scott says:

A village, city or language is the jointly created, partly unintended product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regulations, they are certain to disrupt the web in ways which they cannot possibly foresee. (p256)

And given the jointly created complexity of cities, creating new cities, for example Brasilia, or Canberra, by the imposition of rules and formal order is misguided at best.

It is possible, of course, to build a new city or a new village, but it will be a “thin” or “shallow” city, and its residents will have to begin (perhaps from known repertoires) to make it work in spite of the rules. (p256, again)

Scott spends a lot of time dissecting many different, and disastrous, impositions of order, or what he calls, with no small amount of disdain, “high modernism”. The individual cases are interesting and absorbing and each is dealt with in great detail, encompassing the political situation, the geographical context and the resultant disaster.

In the penultimate chapter, Scott seems to take a ninety-degree turn and begins to discuss the concept of mētis which, briefly, relates to the idea that some activities are only able to be understood through participation.

One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself. (p313)

Scott’s argument is that all of the richness of living in a city, or the management of a forest, cannot be distilled into algorithmic, simplified, rules but must be experienced.

The necessarily implicit, experiential nature of mētis seems central. (p315)

This is an argument that is familiar to me, through amazing books like Gary Klein’s awesome but little-known Sources of Power and Malcolm Gladwell’s good (but not outstanding) Blink. Scott even gets in the apparently obligatory Red Adair story about expertise acquired in the field on p314 (Klein and Gladwell also mention Adair).

For our purposes, however it [i.e. the concept of mētis] illustrates a rudimentary kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by practice and that all but defies being communicated in written or oral form apart from actual practice. (p315)

Scott says is fond of experientially-learned rules. “Rules of thumb”, in other words.

Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis. (p316)

Anticipating accusations of favouring a return to folk ways as a rejection of top-down order, Scott explains that mētis is essential in the modern world.

Such terms as “indigenous technical knowledge” and “folk wisdom” seem to me to confine this knowledge to “traditional” and “backward” peoples, whereas I want to emphasise how these skills are implicit in the most modern of activities, whether on the factory floor or in a research laboratory. “Local knowledge” and “practical knowledge” are better, but both terms seem too circumscribed and static to capture the constantly changing, dynamic aspect of mētis. (p424, note 8 )

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you might be thinking that Scott possibly has “libertarian” tendencies. Being against the imposition of “some schemes to improve the human condition” would certainly lead you to believe he was generally in favour of unfettered laissez-faire arrangements. Not so:

Proponents of this view (the logic of the market) forget or ignore, I think, the fact the in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labour (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. (p412, note 112)

In the early parts of Seeing Like a State Scott acknowledges that he seems to have more than one point to make and is taking more than one road to get there. Perhaps that is true. However, I found it interesting to see the threads on the same general argument that Klein, Gladwell, and even Winograd and Flores, Lucy Suchman and others have made, all on different topics and all with their grounding in different fields of study.

The argument is that human experience of, and human experiences with technologies, be they tangible like photocopiers, evanescent like cities or ephemeral like ideas about management are so rich and so nuanced by virtue of being human experiences that their complexity cannot be fully captured in rules. And, because of this impossibility of complete description in formal rules, any attempt to create formal rules about rich human experiences almost inevitably leads to impoverished and undesirable technologies.