#seeing like a state

[thefugitivesaint]

Someone whose work I greatly appreciated and would suggest you (oh dear reader) seek out and read. In simplest terms, Scott explored the avenues in which people resisted and evaded authority and hierarchical systems of control. A good part of his scholarship involved trying to understand peasantry, one the largest "classes" in the world. Coupled to that was the study of subsistence economies and how people involved in those economies work around impositions made by State actors (and non-state actors). This led to a larger exploration of the above mentioned resistance and the various forms that this resistance took around the world. He also explored the relationship between State and non-state peoples. "What I learned is that centralised revolutionary movements have almost always resulted in a State that was more oppressive then the ones they aimed to replace. In other words, when the revolution becomes the State, it becomes my enemy again. That is why it matters greatly which methods are used in order to achieve power. .... "I am the enemy of hierarchical movements of opposition because I think they replicate State structures in their own organisation."

If you would like some suggestions that offer a peak into Scott's scholarship interests (which are similar to my own), here's some videos for you to peruse (if you have the time): 1. A Short Account of the Deep History of State Evasion 2. Beyond the Pale: The Earliest Agrarian States and “their Barbarians” 3. The Art of Not Being Governed 4. The Domestication of Fire, Animals, Grains and…….Us (Later) Edit: Some revelations concerning Scott's involvement with the CIA in the early 1960s in their anti-Communist activities has come out after his recent death that complicates his legacy as a "radical scholar". Take that for what you will. I haven't been able to find a great deal of detail about that involvement and the revelations here aren't exactly new but people have decided to highlight that relationship in the wake of Scott's passing as a way to discredit or cast a shadow over his later anti-statist research. I just wanted to note this. (Even Later) Edit: The Oral History Center at UC Berkeley released a documentary on Scott called In A Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott. Just in case you wanted more Scott related material.

[urists]

Seeing like a state liveblog time.

It’s the first time I’ve read it, tho I am passingly familiar with it via osmosis. Curious how much more depth I’ll find in it

[quasi-normalcy]

Technocracy is so funny because it's just like, "You know those physics/engineering major types who don't actually understand your field but are convinced that they do and that you're getting it wrong? Yeah, well they're in charge now. Yeah, they seem to think that your farm should be run like an assembly line, you know; neat rows, rote processes, Taylorist management...Yeah, they think that your claims that it won't work are just because you're a superstitious peasant. Anyways, best get picking." And then there's a famine.

[fatehbaz]

[S]and has acquired a conspicuous profile in contemporary urbanization over the past two decades. [...] [S]and but also gravel and crushed rock, are the fastest-growing category of extracted material. Their extraction has increased six-fold in the Asia-Pacific region over the last two decades. Singapore, a city-state in Southeast Asia the size of New York City and half the size of London, is the largest per capita importer of sand in the world. The city-state’s urbanization and never-ending construction [...] is partly responsible for its considerable appetite for sand, but this use pales in comparison to the amount it requires for its land reclamation project, which has seen the city-state expand its territory from 585 square kilometers in 1959 to 724 in 2022. Singapore’s construction of territory, and the sand it has imported from all over Southeast Asia to resource its geophysical projection of sovereignty, invites us to consider the implications of urbanization’s enrollment of greater and greater volumes of sediment, and the geopolitics of the global sand crisis. [...]

As sediment flows and locks into place, it expresses characteristics of all three states of matter, depositing and eroding [...]. A geomorphological errantry, sediment is always on the move [...]. In its multiplicity, sand becomes a kind of narrator for those elements [...]. In its modulation [...], sediment sutures together landscapes that are neither solid nor fluid, but the porous interplay [...].

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Between 2006 and 2016, Singapore, with a population of less than six million, was the top importer of sand in the world four times. Land reclamation there truly began with colonization by the British East India Company, with Boat Quay in 1822, when three hundred or so convict laborers who were paid pittances chopped down hills and cut up stones to embank a swamp, lest it remain fallow. When Singapore became an independent city-state in 1965, reclamation projects initially cut down hills for fill material, flattening the interior and exterior of the main island alike. [...] As these projects grew more expansive and the city-state’s demand for sand intensified, Malaysia and then Indonesia banned sand exports to Singapore [...]. This [resulting] price spike shook the city-state to its core, prompting the opening of a series of construction sand stockpiles [...]. The government began purchasing sand through its web of contractors and subcontractors from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar. [...]

The securitization of sand in multiple stockpiles in Singapore eerily mirrors what happened in the extractive sandscapes of its origin: similarly sized dunes bloomed along the banks of mangroves in Koh Kong, Cambodia, like a dream herniating into reality, an invasive species of landscape bursting at the seam where the land met the water, still haunting riverbeds years after the dredging stopped. [...]

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[T]he fantasy of reclaimed land through dubiously sourced rudiments of city-statecraft. [...] This kind of work is normally kept out of sight behind physical partitions as well as the labyrinthine contractual involutions of procurement arrangements, until it is seamlessly assumed by the whole, consumed by land as a homogenous legal entity [...] [B]ehind the mask, another mask. [...] [T]he sand barges and ships enter the maritime waters of Singapore from [...] legally undisclosable sources of its origin.

The eponymous proclamation [...] is the legal mechanism by which a piece of reclaimed land is “proclaimed” as state land proper by the president. A reclamation can only become state land by the text of a proclamation, a eucharistic procedure which purifies the land of its ambiguous sedimentary origin. Prior to that it is foreshore or seabed, but once it has been proclaimed, “thereupon that land shall immediately vest in the State freed and discharged from all public and private rights [...] over the foreshore or the sea-bed before the same were so reclaimed.” [...]

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The limit to seeing like a state is that the state has a way of doing things that it can’t see, and of refusing to register that which does not meet its threshold of intelligibility.

It blinds itself through the loophole, the nondisclosure agreement, the handshake and its subtle para-political fission. [...]

Singapore’s continued economic prosperity depends on the speculative projection of its territory through unequal economic exchange, disguising it through fabulations of sovereign ingenuity like the Gardens by the Bay. [...]

[There is an] asymmetry between its curated artifice and the remote terraqueous landscapes this curation predates upon, unsettling the ground on which the city-state projects its most delirious fictions of sovereignty [...].

But those very spaces of nondescript hinterland are the logistical and industrial engines which make the Gardens possible. [...]

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[T]he sheer colonial and postcolonial history of geographic expansion and environmental transformation implies that there are still further worlds to extract for reproducing the global city. Urban form rewired by geo-economic fortune and political repression subversively enroll land and labor into its globe-spanning machinery: it needs to keep on expanding to stay ahead of whatever anticipated global economic movement will buoy it in the future. [...] The transmutation of Singapore’s development trajectory is not historical, but contemporary: Singapore is the global city as a centripetal conjugator of space-time, funneling either term through supply chains that pass through it to produce territory as a plasticity [...].

The calamity it visited on the population of Koh Sralao was first pioneered all over Singapore and its outlying islands in the name of necessity, modernization, and the nation, displacing Orang Laut and Orang Pulau communities, who faced a choice to either abandon their maritime ways or resettle further afield in Malaysia or Indonesia. Many of Singapore’s southern islands were grafted together and erased by land reclamation, with Jurong Island in particular becoming an agglomeration of eighteen different islands, their Malay names now lost, sunk together into the catacombs of a dedicated petrochemical refining and storage complex.

Instead of being haunted by the sediment it has reclaimed its land with, and the rhythms and ecologies this sediment subtended, the global city and its subcontracted tendrils haunt those vestiges of maritime and riverine life bound by sediment like a vengeful ghost, compelled to repeat its actions, and to forget them in the projection of another tabula rasa.

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All text above by: William Jamieson. “Extracting Sovereignty: Land Reclamation in Southeast Asia and the Emergence of the Global Sand Crisis.” e-flux Journal Issue #137. June 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[sukimas]

people who are concerned about open borders are not necessarily fundamentally cartoon villains. some people do in fact lose jobs because people can pay undocumented immigrants below minimum wage. reasonable concern to an extent. however.

it would just straight up go away if you gave anyone who crossed the border at a checkpoint a green card (with the usual stipulations of biometrics, such as seen in most passports). no strings attached. make it a class D federal felony to employ someone without documenting that you've employed them. make it a class C federal misdemeanor to be employed without the registration of your employment. this therefore provides a small disincentive to undercut the labor market as an employee, but a much greater disincentive to exploit the labor market as an employer. this allows citizens and immigrants both to exist on equal ground in the job market.

green cards should not be revoked under any circumstances unless a federal felony is committed and convicted, and under no circumstances if the person came to the country seeking asylum or has legal dependents living in the country. my reasoning for the former is that the U.S. prison system is life-ruining and it is kinder in a great number of cases to allow someone to have another chance elsewhere than to stick them in federal penitentiary for over a year.

this post is about the U.S. but i would say similar forms are workable for policy in other nations as well.

[johnbierce]

Obligatory recommendation for Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott! It's a whole book about why assholes like Sauron mistake rectangles for rationality!

(Am I comparing Le Corbusier to Sauron? YES. Yes I am. Apologies to Sauron.)

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[dudedidujust]

The daily planet runs a front page article calling superman the light of mankind

Cue the batfam launching a counter campaign in support of Signal,  the real Light of Mankind.

It starts as a joke but quickly derails into an all out war.

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

he needs him by his side

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 2, Part B "Conceptual Machineries of Universe Maintenance"

I. Despite possible appearances to the contrary, a symbolic universe is (must be) a theoretical construct that strengthens social links between institutions. It originates in subjective reflection, which is then socially objectivated, driven by a recognition that a given institutional order is in some way "problematic" or incoherent. However, once established, a symbolic universe may be "naively" inhabited i.e. uncritically taken-for-granted by its participants.

II. A symbolic universe, once established, can become the subject of systematic reflection; the symbolic universe being a "first-order" legitimation, these reflections become "second-order" legitimations.

III. It is useful to try and assess the degree of sophistication of these legitimations similarly to how (and why) we analyzed this previously for institutions themselves because, though difficult, it illuminates the taken-for-grantedness of the symbolic universe.

IV. Legitimation of symbolic universes has similar motives to institutional legitimation, and is undertaken when the symbolic universe has become problematic in some way. It is inherent to the nature of symbolic universes that this is always possible and often actually occurring.

V. One intrinsic problem is with intergenerational transmission of the symbolic universe, which is never completely successful, particularly because the symbolic universe is less apprehensible as a "reality" i.e. it is entirely "theoretical"/abstract.

VI. This problem is self-reinforcing: "deviant"/discrepant "versions" of the symbolic universe can be transmitted/objectivated - heresies, both a theoretical AND a practical threat to "true order."

VII. Heresy is a key impetus to systematic elaboration of a symbolic universe, as practitioners must articulate the "true faith" in order to be able to target the deviations. "The tradition itself is pushed beyond its original form in new conceptualizations" - legitimated, but also modified, such as the introduction of the "Holy Trinity" in early Christian doctrine.

VIII. Another key impetus is the "collision of histories" - societies with different origins interacting for the first time. This can be more severe than heresy due to the potential completeness of the divergence in symbolic universes so colliding.

IX. In particular, the existence of an entirely different tradition demonstrates the contingency of one's own.

X. The "conceptual machineries of universe maintenance" must be understood as part of the society within which they are "operated;" the success of these machineries is related to the power of the operators. "The historical outcome of the clash of the gods was determined by those who wielded the better weapons, rather than those who had the better arguments… He who has a better stick has a better chance of imposing his definitions of reality."

XI. Conceptual machineries of symbolic universe maintenance always entail "the systematization of … legitimations which were already present in a more naive mode."

XII. Historically conspicuous conceptual machineries are mythology, theology, philosophy, and science. Mythology is the most archaic, "a conception of reality that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces."

XIII. Mythology is naive to the extent that inconsistent mythological traditions can exist side by side without theoretical integration in many cases.

XIV. Mythology is also naive in that "specialist" knowledge is not far from general experiential knowledge. Specialists may make acquiring this knowledge and "joining the brotherhood" difficult, however.

XV. Theology is born out of a drive to systematize mythologies and identify/articulate a "canonical" mythos. Mythological thought operates in a continuous human/divine world; theological thought takes the human and divine worlds as separate, and bridges/mediates between them. Because of this gap, theological knowledge is intrinsically less apprehensible and therefore more difficult to acquire; this is in turn means a theology among elites/adepts can coexist with a "naive"/common mythology among the masses, with both serving the same symbolic universe.

XVI. Theology is paradigmatic for later philosophic/scientific structures for universe maintenance in this "elite capture"/separation from everyday experience; science is (so far) the ultimate development of this pattern, with a body of knowledge so abstract that many cannot grasp it even in part.

XVII. The structures discussed above appear in many combinations/modes and are likely not exhaustive. Two maintenance activities are worth discussing further: therapy and nihilation.

XVIII. "Therapy [represents] the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay 'within' the institutional definitions of reality." Because all symbolic universes face the danger of deviance, "therapy" in this sense must be universal, and therefore any symbolic universe must include a body of knowledge that comprehends a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls."

XIX. [A discussion of a hypothetical example of therapeutic need: a "stubbornly heterosexual" member of an "institutionally homosexual" military.]

XX. The conceptual machinery of therapy depends on the subjective acceptance of its aims by both target/deviant AND the therapeutic practitioner(s). Successful therapy "resocializes the deviant into the objective reality of the symbolic universe of the society."

XXI. As therapy keeps the in-group in, nihilation keeps the outside out. Nihilation is an inverse of legitimation: legitimation says "what's in this symbolic universe is real", nihilation says "what is outside of this symbolic universe does not exist." That on which therapy cannot be practiced is not important.

XXII. Nihilation also involves the attempt to account for all deviant definitions of reality in terms of one's own symbolic universe, the better to liquidate them entirely. There must therefore be a translation from the "outside" conceptualization into familiar language, which in itself is an affirmation of one's own symbolic universe: "They do not understand reality; what they think is reality is not really reality, but it is something else, and we understand this and they do not."

XXIII. Therapy/nihilation are inherent in a symbolic universe and appear as soon as it is crystallized. Nothing can be allowed to remain outside the scope of the symbolic universe.

re: V - Platonic forms, in some sense? The symbolic universe is never directly perceptible, just its here-and-now shadow (the cave!)

re: VII - My concept of "bureacratic accumulation" through "crisis" is a version of this specific to an institution. Also: this is hella dialectical!

re: IX - for which a common response is the attempted annihilation of the competing symbolic universe and the people that maintain it (as I quickly realized was discussed in literally the next paragraph)

re: XI - Big idea here: implication is that response to crises cannot be truly "de novo" but rather must be drawn from some existing tendencies in a society. Thus, crisis response benefits from pluralism; uniformity of thought is an intellectual monoculture subject to the same risks as a biological one, like the Prussian planned forests referenced in "Seeing like a State", or the Cavendish banana

re: XV - see Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" for one argument about what might trigger a transition from mythology to theology. Might also be a connection here to the "axial age" argument from Karl Jaspers in "The Origin and Goal of History."

re: XVI - There are (at least) two interesting phenomena which I think are strongly related to the near-universal incomprehensibility of scientific modes of symbolic universe maintenance:

Scientific "heretics" are very hard to root out: fraudsters and hucksters can be incomprehensible as a camouflage tactic, very difficult for most folks to tell the difference between a true scientific justification and evocatively-worded bullshit

Conspiracy theorists: "since so much technocratic work is both a) mostly out of sight and b) extremely influential in how the world works, what if there were groups that were a) ENTIRELY hidden (except for we brave few who managed to find evidence of their machinations) and b) WHOLLY influential (except for we brave few who have learned their tricks and how to avoid them)?"

re: XIX - Reminded here of the end of Aldermans' "The Power" - an assumed implicit matriarchal frame at end of book

re: XX - Winston Smith loved Big Brother once O'Brien got through with him. Therapeutic success!

re: XXII - Connections here to "Imagined Communities" and "Seeing like a State" again: efface a colonized culture through definitions of what is bureaucratically "legible." Haven't finished "Tools for Conviviality" yet, but strongly feel there's another very important connection between the "language" of material goods and tools that the society makes available to its members and nihilation processes: what is available to you is what you should be consuming, and you should not be consuming what is not made to be easily acquired

[chloesimaginationthings]

Vanessa is having a normal time in the FNAF 2 movie

[thejaymo]

The Origins of Modern Bureaucracy | 2414

Where did modern bureaucracy come from? Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, the Father of the Military Academy, or the ‘man who made West Point

[damianito]

Gorgus dangerous woman ♡

|COMMISSIONS OPEN!!|

[pokimoko]

Asexual bird? Please

How about two asexual birds?

[kalwithatrenchcoat]

Such good o'l fellow friends to one another. They are both endearing.

[forecast0ctopus]

i get it now these guys are cool