Seeing Like a State

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is an investigation into the world of high modernism and an analysis of the consequences of high modernism. The main point of the book is the concept of legibility, as the state, represented as a system of administrators and managers, need to exert control over its population and its system. This is very much exemplified by the concept of forestry and the Prussian method of chopping down diverse forests for monoculture.

🎨 Impressions

It was an interesting book. I think the concept of legibility is very important to understand, and this is one of the things that is quite interesting to expand discussions around. How does this legibility affect the world we live in? I think the legibility concept, combined with a lack of understanding of entropy, is a very bad and catastrophic way of organizing society. It is also important to understand that informal processes and practical knowledge are quite important forces in society today, and we need to work more to create opportunities for these forces to thrive instead of suppressing them.

✍️ My Top Quotes

I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society-the transformative state simplifications described above.
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature
The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability
The term metis, which descends from classical Greek and denotes the knowledge that can come only from practical experience, serves as a useful portmanteau word for what I have in mind.
The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine.
Monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are.
A good part of the politics of measurement sprang from what a contemporary economist might call the "stickiness" of feudal rents. Noble and clerical claimants often found it difficult to increase feudal dues directly; the levels set for various charges were the result of long struggle, and even a small increase above the customary level was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition. Adjusting the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the same end. The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller baskets.
Kula estimates that the size of the bushel (boisseau) used to collect the main feudal rent (taille) increased by one-third between 1674 and 1716 as part of what was called the reaction feodale.
Some arrangements called for the grain to be heaped, some for a "halfheap," and still others for it to be leveled or "striked" (ras). These were not trivial matters. A feudal lord could increase his rents by 25 percent by insisting on receiving wheat and rye in heaped bushels.
Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the "metrical revolution" possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.
The capital has its order, the village its customs). -Javanese proverb
The Norwegian large farm (gard) posed similar problems. Each household held rights to a given proportion of the value (skyld) of the farm, not to the plot of land; none of the joint owners could call a specific part of the farm his own.
Surveyors, one recent Swedish study found, made the fields more geometrically regular than they in fact were. Ignoring small jogs and squiggles made their job easier and did not materially affect the outcome.
This initiative may well have been the origin of the term "laobaixing," meaning, literally, "the old one hundred surnames," which in modern China has come to mean "the common people."
A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear, like a fly caught in amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man's father was ( Fitz-, 0'-, -sen, -son, -s, Mac-, -vich).
Imagine the dilemma of a tithe or capitation-tax collector faced with a male population, 90 percent of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William, Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry).
"There can be no clearer expression of imperialist sentiment, a white man's burden of Francophony, whose first conquests were to be right at home."
Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step-and often several steps-removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture. Thus the foresters' charts and tables, despite their synoptic power to distill many individual facts into a larger pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant to) the real forest in its full diversity
There is, as Theodore Porter notes in his study of mechanical objectivity, a "strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to highly accurate ones," since accuracy is meaningless if the identical procedure cannot reliably be performed elsewhere.
The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage.
Categories that organize people's daily experience precisely because
The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission." The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.
Literature on administrative coordination, concludes, "central coordinating schemes do work effectively under conditions where the task environment is known and unchanging, where it can be treated as a closed system."" The more static, standardized, and uniform a population or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amenable it is to the techniques of state officials.
State officials can often make their categories stick and impose their simplifications, because the state, of all institutions, is best equipped to insist on treating people according to its schemata. Thus categories that may have begun as the artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census takers, judges, or police officers can end by becoming categories that organize people's daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that exper- ience.
Believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. "High modernism" seems an appropriate term for this aspiration.'
If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of highmodernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.4 They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.
But here it is important to note that many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society. One can identify a highmodernist utopianism of the right, of which Nazism is surely the diagnostic example.' The massive social engineering under apartheid in South Africa, the modernization plans of the Shah of Iran, villagization in Vietnam, and huge late-colonial development schemes (for example, the Gezira scheme in the Sudan) could be considered under this rubric.'
As Oscar Wilde remarked, "A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing."
High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied-usually through the state-in every field of human activity."
The troubling features of high modernism derive, for the most part, from its claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment.
Strong versions of high modernism, such as those heed by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions. At its most radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero.
The point of liberal political economy was not only that a free market protected property and created wealth but also that the economy was far too complex for it ever to be managed in detail by a hierarchical administration.'
Such institutions have thwarted the most draconian features of high-modernist schemes in roughly the same way that publicity and mobilized opposition in open societies, as Amartya Sen has argued, have prevented famines. Rulers, he notes, do not go hungry, and they are unlikely to learn about and respond readily to curb famine unless their institutional position provides strong incentives. The freedoms of speech, of assembly, and of the press ensure that widespread hunger will be publicized, while the freedoms of assembly and elections in representative institutions ensure that it is in the interest of elected officials' self-preservation to prevent famine when they can.
While astoundingly high construction costs may explain why none of these projects was ever adopted, Le Corbusier's refusal to make any appeal to local pride in an existing city cannot have helped his case.
Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. Part of his scorn was, as we shall see, on functional and scientific grounds; a city that was to become efficient and healthful would indeed have had to demolish much of what it had inherited. But another source of his scorn was aesthetic. He was visually offended by disarray and confusion.
The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's victims. - This was a profound statement.
The plaza is best seen, as are many of Le Corbusier's plans, from the air
In the end, by 1980, 75 percent of the population of Brasilia lived in settlements that had never been anticipated, while the planned city had reached less than half of its projected population of 557,000. The foothold the poor gained in Brasilia was not just a result of the beneficence of Kubitschek and his wife, Dona Sara. Political structure played a key role as well. Squatters were able to mobilize, protest, and be heard by virtue of a reasonably competitive political system.
It was this failure of the general urban planning models that so preoccupied Jacobs. The planners' conception of a city accorded neither with the actual economic and social functions of an urban area nor with the (not unrelated) individual needs of its inhabitants. Their most fundamental error was their entirely aesthetic view of order. This error drove them to the further error of rigidly segregating functions. In their eyes, mixed uses of real estate-say, stores intermingled with apartments, small workshops, restaurants, and public buildings-created a kind of visual disorder and confusion. The great advantage of one single-use-one shopping area and one residential area was that it made possible the monofunctional uniformity and visual regimentation that they sought.
They treated systems of complex order as if they could be simplified by numerical techniques, regarding shopping, for example, as a purely mathematical issue involving square footage for shopping space and traffic management as an issue of moving a certain number of vehicles in a given time along a certain number of streets of a given width.
An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place.
The matter of transportation becomes, for Le Corbusier and others, the single problem of how to transport people (usually in automobiles) as quickly and economically as possible. The activity of shopping becomes a question of providing adequate floor space and access for a certain quantity of shoppers and goods. Even the category of entertainment was split up into specified activities and segregated into playgrounds, athletic fields, theaters, and so on.
One modern solution to the forester's dilemma was to borrow a management technique called optimum control theory, whereby the sustained timber yield could be successfully predicted by few observations and a parsimonious formula. It goes without saying that optimum control theory was simplest where more variables could be turned into constants. Thus a singlespecies, same-age forest planted in straight lines on a flat plain with consistent soil and moisture profiles yielded simpler and more accu rate optimum control formulas
Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult to design, build, and control.
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Also a very, very good statement.
We know enough by now to be exceptionally skeptical about forecasting from current trends in fertility rates, urban migration, or the structure of employment and income. Such predictions have often been wildly wrong.
Communism was modernity's most devout, vigorous and gallant champion.... It was under communist ... auspices that the audacious dream of modernity, freed from obstacles by the merciless and omnipotent state, was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature. -Zygmunt Bauman, "Living Without an Alternative
Lenin, if we judge him from his major writings, was a convinced high modernist. The broad lines of his thought were quite consistent; whether he was writing about revolution, industrial planning, agricultural organization, or administration, he focused on a unitary scientific answer that was known to a trained intelligentsia and that ought to be followed.
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.
Like its successor, the radio, the newspaper is a medium better suited to sending messages than to receiving them.
As Hannah Arendt succinctly put it, "The Bolsheviks found power lying in the street, and picked it up"
In a chillingly Orwellian passage-a warning, perhaps, to anarchist or lumpen elements who might resist its logic-Lenin indicates how remorseless the system will be: "Escape from this national accounting will inevitably become increasingly difficult ... and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are men of practical life, not sentimental intellectuals and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of social life in common will have become a habit."
Marx, who frequently used it as a way of saying that the handloom gives you feudalism and the power loom gives you capitalism.
By placing power within reach of an entire people, the state could eliminate what Marx termed the "idiocy of rural life."
Much of the attraction of electricity for Lenin had to do with its perfection, its mathematical precision. Man's work and even the work of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the operation of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain, precise, and continuous.
The ultracentrism advocated by Lenin is permeated in its very essence by the sterile spirit of a nightwatchman (Nachtwachtergeist) rather than by a positive and creative spirit. He concentrated mostly on controlling the party, not on fertilizing it, on narrowing it down, not developing it, on regimenting and not unifying it."
"Every independent thought or initiative is treated as a 'heresy,' as a violation of party discipline, as an attempt to infringe on the prerogatives of the center, which must 'foresee' everything and 'decree' everything and anything." The harm done came not just from the fact that the specialists and bureaucrats were more likely to make bad decisions. The attitude had two other consequences. First, it reflected a "distrust towards the creative abilities of the workers," which was unworthy of the "professed ideals of our party." Second, and most important, it smothered the morale and creative spirit of the working class.
Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society vaccinating a population, producing goods, mobilizing labor, taxing people and their property, conducting literacy campaigns, conscripting soldiers, enforcing sanitation standards, catching criminals, start universal schooling requires the invention of units that are visible.
Consider, for a moment, the patterns in such urban settlements as Bruges or the medina of an old Middle Eastern city touched on earlier. Each city, each quarter, each neighborhood is unique; it is the historical vector sum of millions of designs and activities. While its form and function surely have a logic, that logic is not derived from any single, overall plan. Its complexity defies easy mapping. Any map, moreover, would be spatially and temporally limited.
If the state's goals are minimal, it may not need to know much about the society. Just as a woodsman who takes only an occasional load of firewood from a large forest need have no detailed knowledge of that forest, so a state whose demands are confined to grabbing a few carts of grain and the odd conscript may not require a very accurate or detailed map of the society.
If, however, the state is ambitious-if it wants to extract as much grain and manpower as it can, short of provoking a famine or a rebellion, if it wants to create a literate, skilled, and healthy population, if it wants everyone to speak the same language or worship the same god-then it will have to become both far more knowledgeable and far more intrusive.
The economics of movement, other things being equal, tend to produce recurring geographical patterns of market location, crop specialization, and administrative structure.4
In certain vital respects, Soviet high modernism is not a sharp break from Russian absolutism. Ernest Gellner has argued that of the two facets of the Enlightenment-the one asserting the sovereignty of the individual and his interests, the other commending the rational authority of experts-it was the second that spoke to rulers who wanted their "backward" states to catch up.
Nearly everything they planned was on a monumental scale, from cities and individual buildings (the Palace of Soviets) to construction projects (the White Sea Canal) and, later, the great industrial projects of the first Five Year Plan (Magnitogorsk), not to mention collectivization. Sheila Fitzpatrick has appropriately called this passion for sheer size "giganto- mania."
New "revolutionary" funeral and marriage ceremonies were invented amidst much fanfare, and a ritual of "Octobering" was encouraged as an alternative to baptism
The "new man"-the Bolshevik specialist, engineer, or functionarycame to represent a new code of social ethics, which was sometimes simply called kultura. In keeping with the cult of technology and science, kultura emphasized punctuality, cleanliness, businesslike directness, polite modesty, and good, but never showy, manners.'
Russians tended to be envious of the level of capitalization, particularly in mechanization, of American farms while the Americans were envious of the political scope of Soviet planning.
Proclaiming that farming was about 90 percent engineering and only 10 percent agriculture, Campbell set about standardizing as much of his operation as possible.
Although the corporation struggled on until Campbell's death in 1966, it provided no evidence that industrial farms were superior to family farms in efficiency and profitability. The advantages industrial farms did have over smaller producers were of another kind. Their very size gave them an edge in access to credit, political influence (relevant to taxes, support payments, and the avoidance of foreclosure), and marketing muscle.
The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in the agricultural sector was to take a social and economic terrain singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create institutional forms and production units far better adapted to monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above.
The deaths from the hunger and epidemics of 1921-22 nearly equaled the toll claimed by World War I and the civil war combined.
There had been some hope that a gradually expanding collective sector in the 1920s could provide as much as one-third of the country's grain needs. Instead, the collectivized sector (both the state farms and the collective farms), which absorbed 10 percent of the labor force, produced a dismal 2.2 percent of gross farm production.
Scholars who agree on little else are in accord on this point: the overriding purpose of collectivization was to ensure the seizure of grain.
"The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state grain procurements and reduce the peasants' ability to withhold grain from the market. This purpose was obvious to peasants from the start, since the collectivization drive of the winter of 1929-30 was the culmination of more than two years of bitter struggle between the peasants and the state over grain procurements."
Semiotically, we cannot understand this modernist vision of agriculture as an isolated ideological fragment. It is always seen as the negation of the existing rural world. A kolkhoz is meant to replace a mir or village, machines to replace horse-drawn plows and hand labor, proletarian workers to replace peasants, scientific agriculture to replace folk tradition and superstition, education to replace ignorance and malokulturnyi, and abundance to replace bare subsistence.
Underlying the whole plan, of course, was the assumption that the great collective farms would operate like factories in a centralized economy, in this case fulfilling state orders for grain and other agricultural products. As if to drive the point home, the state confiscated roughly 63 percent of the entire harvest in 1931.
From a central planner's perspective, one great advantage of collectivization is that the state acquired control over how much of each crop was sown.
We catch a glimpse of the disasters from the Great Purges of 1936-37, when a certain amount of peasant criticism of kolkhoz officials was briefly encouraged in order to detect "wreckers."
For the kolkhozniki, however, meeting the quota might mean starvation. Indeed, the great famine of 1933-34 can only be called a collectivization and procurement famine. Those who were tempted to make trouble risked running afoul of a more grisly quota: the one for kulaks and enemies of the state.
The peasants began to say that the acronym for the All-Union Communist Party-vKP-stood for vtoroe krepostnoe pravo, or "second serfdom.
The parallel was not a mere figure of speech; the resemblances to serfdom were remarkable. The kolkhoz members were required to work on the state's land at least half-time for wages, in cash or kind, that were derisory. They depended largely on their own small private plots to grow the food they needed (other than grain), although they had little free time to cultivate their gardens. The quantity to be delivered and price paid for kolkhoz produce was set by the state. The kolkhozniki owed annual corvee labor dues for roadwork and cartage. They were obliged to hand over quotas of milk, meat, eggs, and so on from their private plots. The collective's officials, like feudal masters, were wont to use kolkhoz labor for their private sidelines and had, in practice if not in law, the arbitrary power to insult, beat, or deport the peasants. As they were under serfdom, they were legally immobilized.
What must strike even a casual student of collectivization, however, is how it largely failed in each of its highmodernist aims, despite huge investments in machinery, infrastructure, and agronomic research. Its successes, paradoxically, were in the domain of traditional statecraft.
The most legible educational system would resemble Hippolyte Taine's description of French education in the nineteenth century, when "the Minister of Education could pride himself, just by looking at his watch, which page of Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at that exact moment.""
The ujamaa village campaign in Tanzania from 1973 to 1976 was a massive attempt to permanently settle most of the country's population in villages, of which the layouts, housing designs, and local economies were planned, partly or wholly, by officials of the central government.
High-modernist plans tend to "travel" as an abbreviated visual image of efficiency that is less a scientific proposition to be tested than a quasi-religious faith in a visual sign or representation of order.
As Jacobs suggested, they may substitute an apparent visual order for the real thing. The fact that they look right becomes more important than whether they work; or, better put, the assumption is that if the arrangement looks right, it will also, ipso facto, function well.
Administrative convenience, not ecological considerations, governed the selection of sites; they were often far from fuelwood and water, and their population often exceeded the carrying capacity of the land.
Authoritarian social engineering is apt to display the full range of standard bureaucratic pathologies. The transformations it wishes to effect cannot generally be brought about without applying force or without treating nature and human subjects as if they were functions in a few administrative routines.
The failure of ujamaa villages was almost guaranteed by the highmodernist hubris of planners and specialists who believed that they alone knew how to organize a more satisfactory, rational, and productive life for their citizens.
Ideas cannot digest reality. -Jean-Paul Sartre
"A national language is a dialect with an army."
The planned city, the planned village, and the planned language (not to mention the command economy) are, we have emphasized, likely to be thin cities, villages, and languages. They are thin in the sense that they cannot reasonably plan for anything more than a few schematic aspects of the inexhaustibly complex activities that characterize "thick" cities and villages.
When you begin making decisions and cutting it up rules and names appear And once names appear, you should know when to stop. -Tao-to-ching
*Cultivation is simplification. Even the most cursory forms of agriculture typically produce a floral landscape that is less diverse than an unmanaged landscape. *
The variety of landraces is significant in another sense. All modern crops of any economic significance are the product of landraces. Until about 1930 all scientific crop breeding was essentially a process of selection from among the existing landraces. Landraces and their wild progenitors and "escapes" represent the "germ plasm" or seed-stock capital upon which modern agriculture is based. In other words, as James Boyce has put it, modern varieties and traditional agriculture are complements, not substitutes."
"Genetic variability," as Jack Ralph Kloppenberg notes, "is the enemy of mechanization
"Machines are not made to harvest crops," noted two proponents of phytoengiering. "In reality, crops must be designed to be harvested by machine."
The development of the "supermarket tomato" by G. C. (Jack) Hanna at the University of California at Davis in the late 1940s and 1950s is an early and diagnostic case.16 Spurred by the wartime shortage of field labor, researchers set about inventing a mechanical harvester and breeding the tomato that would accommodate it.
Corn accounts for one-third of the total market for herbicides and one-quarter of the market for insecticides
Nothing better illustrates the myopic credo of high-modernist agriculture, originating in temperate zones and brought to the tropics, than its nearly unshakable faith in the superiority of monoculture over the practice of polyculture found in much of the Third World.
The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner. -Confucius
"There is a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental. Then you presume that the other things you don't understand are details. The assumption is that there are a small number of principles that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state this is the truly analytic notion-and somehow you put these together in some more complicated ways when you want to solve more dirty problems. If you can
One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behavior.
Believe that this uncritical, and hence unscientific, trust in the artifacts and techniques of what became codified as scientific agriculture was responsible for its failures. The logical companion to complete faith in a quasi-industrial model of high modernist agriculture was an often explicit contempt for the practices of actual cultivators and what might be learned from them. Whereas a scientific spirit would have counseled skepticism and dispassionate inquiry into these practices, modern agriculture, as a blind faith, preached scorn and summary dismissal.
In a work-to rule action (the French call it greve du zele), employees begin doing their jobs by meticulously observing every one of the rules and regulations and performing only the duties stated in their job descriptions. The result, fully intended in this case, is that the work grinds to a halt, or at least to a snail's pace. The workers achieve the practical effect of a walkout while remaining on the job and following their instructions to the letter. Their action also illustrates pointedly how actual work processes depend more heavily on informal understandings and improvisations than upon formal work rules. In the long work-to-rule action against Caterpillar, the large equipment manufacturer, for example, workers reverted to following the inefficient procedures specified by the engineers, knowing they would cost the company valuable time and quality, rather than continuing the more expeditious practices they had long ago devised on the job.'
On a much bigger, higher-stakes canvas, war diplomacy and politics more generally are metis-laden skills. The successful practitioner, in each case, tries to shape the behavior of partners and opponents to his own ends. Unlike the sailor, who can adjust to the wind and the waves but not influence them directly, the general and the politician are in constant interaction with their counterparts, each of whom is trying to outfox the other.
We might reasonably think of situated, local knowledge as being partisan knowledge as opposed to generic knowledge. That is, the holder of such knowledge typically has a passionate interest in a particular outcome. An insurer of commercial shipping for a large, highly capitalized maritime firm can afford to rely on probability distributions for accidents. But for a sailor or captain hoping for a safe voyage, it is the outcome of the single event, a single trip, that matters. Metis is the ability and experience necessary to influence the outcome-to improve the odds-in a particular instance.
According to Anil Gupta, roughly three-quarters of the modern pharmacopoeia are derivatives of traditionally known medicines.
Metis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain
A staple of early medical training, I have been told, is the story of a physician who, at the turn of the century, had a spectacularly high success rate in diagnosing syphilis in its early stages. Laboratory tests confirmed his diagnoses, but he himself did not know precisely what it was that he detected in the physical exams that led him to his conclusions. Intrigued by his success, hospital administrators asked two other doctors to closely observe his examination of patients over several weeks and to see if they could spot what he was picking up. At long last, they and the doctor realized that he was unconsciously registering the patients' slight eye tremor. The eye tremor then became a universally recognized symptom of syphilis.
Chinese recipes, it has always amused me, often contain the following instruction: "Heat the oil until it is almost smoking." The recipes assume that the cook has made enough mistakes to know what oil looks like just before it begins smoking.
This brings us squarely to two of the great ironies of metis. The first is that metis is not democratically distributed. Not only does it depend on a touch or a knack that may not be common, but access to the experience and practice necessary for its acquisition may be restricted. Artisan guilds, gifted craftsmen, certain classes, religious fraternities, entire communities, and men in general often treat some forms of knowledge as a monopoly they are reluctant to share. Better stated, the availability of such knowledge to others depends greatly on the social structure of the society and the advantages that a monopoly in some forms of knowledge can confer." In this respect metis is not unitary, and we should perhaps speak of metises, recognizing its nonhomo- geneity. The second irony is that, however plastic and receptive metis is, some forms of it seem to depend on key elements of preindustrial life for their elaboration and transmission. Communities that are marginal to markets and to the state are likely to retain a high degree of metis;
As Stephen Marglin's early work has convincingly shown, capitalist profit requires not only efficiency but the combination of efficiency and control.
They said ... that he was so devoted to Pure Science ... that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. -Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
As Pascal wrote, the great failure of rationalism is "not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize any other."
Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all his senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go. -E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
The great high-modernist episodes that we have examined qualify as tragedies in at least two respects. First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition-a desire with a fatal flaw.
That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis.
The mistake of our ancestors was to think that they were "the last number," but since numbers are infinite, they could not be the last number. -Eugene Zamiatin,
This circular, however, noted that many new, essential elements of proper nutrition had been discovered in the past two decades and that many more elements will presumably be identified by researchers in the decades ahead. Therefore, on the basis of what they did not know, the writers of this piece recommended that one's diet be as varied as possible, on the prudent assumption that it would contain many of these yet unidentified essentials.
Stephen Marglin has put their problem succinctly: If "the only certainty about the future is that the future is uncertain, if the only sure thing is that we are in for surprises, then no amount of planning, no amount of prescription, can deal with the contingencies that the future will reveal."'
The quantitative technologies used to investigate social and economic life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their image. -Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers
One of Le Corbusier's plans, for example, called for the segregation of factory workers and their families in barracks along the major transportation arteries. It was a theoretically efficient solution to transportation and production problems. If it had been imposed, the result would have been a dispiriting environment of regimented work and residence without any of the animation of town life.
Everything is said to be under the leadership of the Party. No one is in charge of the crab or the fish, but they are all alive. -Vietnamese villager, Xuan Huy village